is police tape hanging in the lifeless air between poles that have been weighted on the ground. Police tape has been sealed along the framework. I try to pull it away without damaging it.

Among the keys that Schroder brought back to me is the one

Bruce Alderman left me. I look at the key and I look at the lock, and even though they don’t look like they’re going to match up, I still try jamming them together. It’s useless. It could be for one of the other doors. I pull a lock-pick set from my pocket, hold a Maglite in my mouth, and go about working at the lock, nervous that the guy parked out front is going to pick this exact moment to come looking around. It turns out to be a simple enough

pin-and-tumbler mechanism made more complicated than it ought

to be by the cold and my nerves. It takes me almost ten minutes to make my way inside. The air is cold, the black void ahead of me unwelcoming, and when I close the door behind me all I have is my Maglite to keep whatever demons are in here at bay

Before taking a step, I remove my jacket and shoes to avoid

contaminating the scene with mud and water. I’ve entered the

church in the corridor: to the left is the chapel and to the right Father Julian’s office. There is a basin of what I assume is holy water standing waist high next to me. The torch cuts a small arc through the inky darkness but is swallowed up when I point it at the far wall of the chapel — I’m sure it’s all but impossible to see it from outside. I run my hand along the top of the front pew where I sat last time I was here talking to Father Julian. It was when I was looking for Bruce Alderman. The following day I came back

and we sat in his office and I was looking for Sidney Alderman.

I turn off the torch and stand in the darkness. There is something here, I’m sure of it. Something dark. Perhaps the church itself is angry. Bad things have happened here. Sins have been confessed — have sins also been committed? The bricks and the mortar and the stained glassed windows have every right to be angry. They’ve absorbed a lot of what’s been said and seen over the years, and now that the keeper of secrets has gone all that sorrow and pain is starting to seep out.

I turn the torch back on and start looking around the chapel,

not searching for anything in particular. The only eyes watching me are those of the icons pinned on or hanging from the walls, created in coloured glass and woven fabrics and tapestries. Jesus feeding the poor. Jesus turning water into wine. Jesus dying for our sins. Did Father Julian die for his sins? For mine?

There are a few evidence markers placed variously around the

floor. Whatever they indicated has been photographed, picked up and gone. There are no blood splatters. No muddy footprints.

The other night, did Father Julian’s killer make his way into the church using the same means? Did he come through the front

door, allowed entrance by the priest? Through a side door? Did he come at night, or had he been here all day?

Did they know each other?

I rest my jacket and shoes behind the first pew and head down

to Father Julian’s office. It’s a tangle of books and papers and clutter strewn around the room — not from any type of struggle, but as though he was trying to find something in a hurry. Or

perhaps the police were, and this is the aftermath of their search.

This is the kind of thing I miss most about being in the force: losing the opportunity to see the crime scene in its original form.

There are more evidence markers, yellow plastic discs with black numbers printed on them. Fingerprint powder, small plastic bags, plastic vials, cotton swabs. Somebody must be figuring the maid will take care of it all.

I roll Father Julian’s chair away from his desk and sit down

behind it, then splay my hands on the table. I can’t feel the grain of the wood because I’m wearing latex gloves, but the desk feels solid, cold, as though it could last a thousand years. A sudden memory of my family comes to me. I’m at the beach with Bridget and Emily. We’re building a sand castle; my daughter’s face is full of smiles and freckles, her blonde hair shoved out at sharp angles by the Elmo cap pulled down over her head. The edges of the

ocean are moving forward, the water reaching the moat we have

dug, the walls of the castle only minutes away from falling into the sea.

‘It’s okay, Daddy’ my daughter says, and she stops digging,

understanding the futile nature of what she is trying to save. ‘We can always come back next weekend. We got forever more days to build another one.’

I take my hands away from the desk, and the memory

disappears. I don’t try chasing it.

I open the desk drawers one at a time, but all of them are

empty I pull them out completely and check underneath them S— again, there’s nothing there. I put them back and start flicking through the books on Father Julian’s desk, hoping something

might fall out from between the pages. Nothing does. No doubt

somebody else has done this already. I search under the desk, but there’s nothing.

I make my way around the room, unsure of what I’m looking

for. I open Bibles and books, novels and how-to guides, flicking through them but finding nothing. It doesn’t look like Father

Julian was the one who made this mess. The Father Julian I

knew never would have allowed his office to get like this. There are holes in the plaster walls obviously formed by fists. There are other holes down lower, kick marks made by somebody becoming

increasingly frustrated. Draughts of cold air come through them.

The books pulled from the shelves have been torn down and

tossed on the ground, discarded into piles. Some of the pages

and covers have been ripped away. Did whoever did this find what he was looking for?

I step out of the office, and carry on through to the rectory.

The beam on my torch is getting weaker, and I have the feeling that if the torch goes out completely the demons surrounding me will get a firm hold. Jesus looks down, probably in judgement, maybe wondering what in the hell a guy like me is doing in a

place like this. Well, Jesus, I’m trying to make compensation. “I’m trying to repent. That’s what you want, right?

I stop the torch on the floor where the dead priest lay while

I stood outside two nights ago worrying about being caught.

I crouch down by the edge of the chalk outline that shows the

Position in which he was found. The carpet beneath the chalk

head is almost black with dried blood. I close my eyes and think about the series of photographs that Schroder and Landry showed ne. Father Julian was lying on his back, his head twisted to the side. Closer photos showed gashes in the back of his head from the impact of the hammer. I don’t know how many times he was

hit, but it was more than once. Perhaps the first blow killed him.

At the very least it would have dropped him to his knees. I figure he ended up dead face down, but was rolled onto his back. I try to imagine the thirty seconds before that. Did Julian know his killer was there — if so, why would he turn his back on him?

The tongue had to have been cut out after he was dead. It’s

not the kind of thing you can do to a man unless you’ve got

him bound, and even then it’d be a struggle. The photographs

didn’t show any evidence of that, nor of any defensive wounds on Julian’s hands. I look up and point the torch at the ceiling. There are lines of blood up there, cast off from the swinging hammer.

I stand up. Father Julian’s tongue wasn’t cut out to frame me: that’s why it wasn’t dumped in my house with the hammer. It was cut out not as a message but from anger. Father Julian wouldn’t tell his killer something he needed to know. That made him angry.