It was a modern council estate, neat little houses fitted together like a puzzle, built in the same gray as the older houses in the town.

The door was answered by a young man with very short hair and haunted eyes. He was wearing slacks and a shirt, neither of which fitted him terribly well. He welcomed them and brought them into the kitchen, insisted on serving them tea in a steel pot, and a plate of Happy Shopper custard creams. Father Sholtham was upstairs and would be down in a minute. He knew they were there.

They were left alone.

After a short while they heard steps on the stairs, the shuffle of slippered feet. The feet paused outside the open door. Father Gabriel Sholtham walked in and introduced himself.

Morrow stood up to meet him, introduced herself and Harris and shook his hand. She looked down: his hands were big and soft and she saw a blue swelling on the back of his right hand where he must have knocked something incredibly hard.

He had a square face, big features, the sort of face that in a healthier man would have commanded trust and obedience, a police face. But he wouldn’t look at either of them and kept his eyes cast down to the worktop, pouring himself a black tea from the pot, adding in two sugars as they explained that they had come up from Glasgow.

He wore a gray jumper over a gray T-shirt, black trousers and blue slippers. The slippers were telling a story. They were suede and speckled with dried drips and splashes. Morrow didn’t want to speculate what they were splashes of.

He pulled a third seat up to the table and sat down.

“We’re the officers investigating Sarah Erroll’s death,” said Morrow. “We understand that you have some information about that.”

He winked at his tea as he stirred it, a micro-tic. She didn’t know if it was a needle-pin pain through the eye from his hangover or the mention of the name. When he spoke his voice was a low rumble, west coast with a trace of Irish. What he said sounded very considered, as if he was giving evidence in court.

“I read about it in the newspaper. I talked about it. I was foolish. I’ve wasted your time, making you come here. I’m sorry.”

“I see,” said Morrow. She didn’t know how stern to take it. He seemed very brittle. “That’s not enough, Father, because you know things about that girl’s death that weren’t in the papers.”

He knew that already. He sipped his tea noisily, taking care not to look up at them.

“So,” she said softly, “you’ve either been part of her murder or you know someone who has.”

He glanced towards her, looked away quickly, hiding in his tea. “Maybe I am part of the crime,” he said. A deep sadness flared in his eyes and he drank hot tea to shove it back down.

“Part of the crime?”

“Yes,” he told his mug of tea.

It was interesting. Morrow had a talent for spotting lies and liars. She knew how to trap someone who was pretending to tell the truth, ask for details and then ask again later when they’d forgotten what they said, confront them with the inconsistency. She knew how to spot a suggestible person, someone who lied and didn’t know they were lying, ask outlandish questions, see if they agreed they’d shot Kennedy. But this man was attempting a different kind of deception. He was taking a theological approach to it, treading very carefully, he was tiptoeing around a big fat bloody lie and was willing to be charged with murder rather than give it up. She felt that he’d tell the truth if she asked him but the question would have to be the right one.

“What did you do?” Her voice was very soft, hangover-respectful. “Father, what did you do?”

He frowned and shook his head.

“What ‘part of the crime’ did you do?”

He hadn’t prepared an answer for that question. “I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s go through it: did you break into her house?”

“No.”

“Did you creep through her house and go up to her old nursery room?”

“No.” His voice was flat but his eyes skittered around the table, trying to map the angles to the questions, work out where the ambush would come from.

“Did you then find her asleep in her bed after a long day’s traveling and wake her and frighten her?”

“No, I didn’t do that either.”

“Did you chase her downstairs until she fell on the steps?”

“No.”

“Did you stand over her and bring the heel of your foot down over and over again on her face?”

“No.”

“Did you use your body weight to break her nose, stamping so hard that her eyes burst—”

He was weeping and whispering, “No, didn’t do those things. No.”

She let him cry. Harris clasped his hands tightly together on the table. She handed Father Sholtham a hankie. He took it and thanked her and wiped his nose. She started again.

“OK: did you drive the people who did it away from her house?”

“I can’t drive, I lost my license…”

“They’d just brutally murdered an innocent woman. I don’t imagine they’d be stopping to check your license.” She took a custard cream and bit it. Chewing it, she kept her face to him, innocent. “Did you drive the people—”

“No. I didn’t drive them. I wasn’t—I was in hospital when it happened. Having my teeth out.”

“Did you leave the hospital at any time during the day of—”

“No. I had eight teeth taken out. They gave me a general anesthetic. It was day surgery and I got out at eight that night.”

“Where did you go then?”

“Back to the parish house. I was still living there…then.”

She bit her biscuit again, chewed again, watched him wiping his face. He pushed the tissue so hard into his eye that it was compressed as small as a mint.

“Can I ask about the drink?”

He nodded.

“You’ve had a problem before?”

“I have.” He seemed more deeply and sincerely ashamed of that than implicating himself in a murder. His voice had dropped to a whisper and he looked almost too sad to move his mouth.

“But you haven’t drunk for a good long while?”

“That’s right. Good long while.”

“How long?”

“Eight and a half years.”

“It’s a dark place, isn’t it?”

He looked her in the eye, searching for sympathy and found none. Disappointed, he went back to examining the table top.

“When did you start again?”

“Few days ago.”

“How many days ago?”

He tried to answer but couldn’t work it out. “What day is it?”

“Thursday.”

She could see him working backwards. “It started on Tuesday, I think.”

“The day after Sarah was killed?”

“Was it? I lifted the drink because I’d had surgery…they gave me opiates…I was confused.”

He knew the excuse for drinking was bullshit and he knew it was the day after Sarah was killed. Morrow gave him a reproachful look and he dropped his eyes in shame.

She watched him for a moment, and he felt her watching him, sipped his tea, smacking his lips at the bitterness of it. Clearly a man shackled by conscience, he was protecting someone. She didn’t know why he would do that and she was finding it annoying.

She tapped her fingertip on the table and said, “You wait here.” She stood up and motioned for Harris to follow her.

They went out through the hall. The young man who had let them in was coming through the living room and waved, trying to catch their eye, wanted a chat but Morrow shut the front door after themselves. They went back to the car and got in.

“He’s lying to protect someone,” she said, “I think it’s another priest.”

“No,” said Harris, certain. “Someone’s confessed to him, he’s drunk, blurted it out and now he’s trying to save his soul by taking the blame.”

“How would you know that?”

Harris smiled. “I’m a Pape.”

She didn’t know what to say. It was easy to get these things wrong and she had a poor enough track record with tact. “Well…good for you.”

Harris laughed because it was a ridiculous thing to say and he could see how hard she was trying.

She held her hands up. “I don’t know what to say, I didn’t know.”

“Aye, well,” he said awkwardly. He didn’t know what to say either.

“Good for you,” she said again. “So…how does it work? He has to take the blame because someone confessed to him?”

“No. He’s sworn never to repeat what people tell him in confession. But he’s done that now and it’s a terrible sin, breaking that. Cardinal. He’s trying to make up for that by martyring himself.”

“Is it not a defense that he was steaming?”

“When was being steaming ever a defense?”

They looked back at the house and saw Father Sholtham standing at the kitchen window, watching them in the car.

“No, but it’s mitigating, isn’t it?”

“Not for something like that.”

“So, Mr. Pape, what do we do now?”

Harris reached back for his seat belt. “Find out who confessed.”

Morrow looked back as they drove away, saw Sholtham watching them drive off: a big sad man in a picture window that came up to his knees. His hands hung at his sides, loose, fingers curled limp, waiting for judgment to be made upon him.

The parish house was altogether finer than the council house. Sitting next to the chapel in a city center street, it echoed the needle spire in its narrow pointed windows and the sharp point of the door. The stone didn’t match though. The chapel was made of the native gray stone and the little house next to it was red with blond tracery around the windows.

“You ever talk to Leonard?” she asked as they got out of the car.

“Sometimes.”

“What do you think of her?”

“Nice. Smart.” He didn’t mention her sexuality and Morrow liked that. “She knows her buildings and antiques.” Morrow fell into step next to him and waited to cross the busy street. “She’s smart.”

The front door had two steps up to it, steep, loiter-proof. Harris reached up and rang the bell. It sounded like a death announcement.

“Think she’s a prospect for promotion?”

Harris didn’t want to answer. “Suppose.”

“Bannerman’ll be suspended on suspicion and we’ll need someone to step up and take the DS position,” she said, referring to the conversation at the petrol station. “I want you, but, you know…”

They watched the door.

Harris cleared his throat, “I get more…you know, with overtime.”

“Yeah.” They heard someone coming down a stone corridor towards them. “You worried about starting a coup when there’s no one to take over?”

“How d’you mean?”

“Well, I’ll be off on maternity. We need a DS. That…calls thing.” The lock scraped back behind the door. “They’ll ship someone in. Don’t know what they’ll be like, do you? Creating a power vacuum.”

Harris smiled. “That’s word for word what Leonard said. She said that’s what happened when Napoleon came to power.”

He was just passing on an interesting comment of Leonard’s, but he’d admitted to talking to other officers about Safecall. That made it a campaign. They looked at each other.

“So, you admit it’s a coup?” she said.

Harris looked frightened.

The door opened. “Can I help you?” A tiny, elderly woman with a rayon blouse and unflattering pleated skirt looked out at them.

“Strathclyde Police,” said Morrow. “We’d like a word about Father Sholtham.”

The housekeeper was delighted to give up every detail she had on Father Sholtham’s movements the day after Sarah’s murder. She was very angry with him, though she seemed like someone who woke up angry anyway. She kept asking them what would make a man of faith drink like that? Why would he do that? Make himself ridiculous, like that?

A sober Father Sholtham had breakfast and took morning mass next door at eight. He didn’t take confessions after mass, they weren’t until five p.m., and he began to drink that morning. She noticed he was acting strange but he said he had flu. He left to attend a meeting at a nearby school and she thought he had flu. He seemed unsteady. He had lunch at the school. Then he came home and did some praying in his room. He hadn’t taken any phone calls, she knew because the phone was in the hall. Morrow was keen to get the details of the teatime confessions but the woman kept talking about the prayer in his room, maybe that had sparked him off, why would someone drink like that, to hurt themselves—Morrow cut her off.

“Who was at confession?”

“Father Haggerty.”

“Is that all?”

“No,” Harris interrupted, “she means who gave a confession to Father Sholtham?”

“No one,” said the woman. “No one did. Father Haggerty took the confessions.”

“Father Sholtham didn’t?”

“No. He was scheduled to take confessions at five p.m., but he went out for a walk and when he came back it was obvious he was very drunk. Didn’t have flu at all. He’d lied earlier. Father Haggerty found him changing for confessions and brought him here. We put him to bed. He’s been drunk ever since.”

They couldn’t get a list of names out of her for the people who had been at mass the morning before he drank. She only came in at nine and although she often attended mass in the morning before work she hadn’t that morning.

When they got outside Harris told her that there would be a core group of people who went to morning mass every day and they could ask them if anyone had taken the priest aside afterwards or spoken to Sholtham at length.

It was only as a long shot that they went to the school.