The Good Priest by Gillian Galbraith Page A

possibly. The ache in his jaw was thumping away, moving up through his cheekbone and into his already tender left temple.
    Satan, intuitively aware of his master’s trauma, sat on his knee, providing comfort with his heavy, warm presence. In the silence, the sound of his purr was as loud as a chainsaw. The telephone rang and he picked it up.
    â€˜Vincent?’
    â€˜Hugh!’ he replied, thrilled to hear his friend’s voice.
    â€˜Good to …’
    The line went dead.
    â€˜Hugh, for Christ’s sake, get a sodding mobile!’ he shouted down the receiver, before slamming it back onto its stand. The intense disappointment made him clench his teeth until he felt a fragment of his forcibly dislodged tooth crumble between them. Drink would wash it away.
    Screwing up his face in anticipation of the unpleasant flavour, he forced himself to take another swig, quickly gulping the whisky down. Once it had gone, his tongue, with unerring accuracy, returned to explore the crater where his missing lower incisor had once been. It felt vast. As he probed its pulpy surface again, his mind involuntarily flashed back to the exact second when the man’s boot made contact with his jaw. Feeling the kick afresh he instinctively put his hands in front of his face to ward off another blow. In his mind, the blows continued to land, with the shocking sound of the thud made by leather on flesh and bone. Unconsciously, he moved his lower jaw from left to right, right to left, checking that it had not been dislocated. Sickened by a sudden gush of salty bloodinto his mouth, he rose and began to walk up and down the room, trying to distract himself, jerk his brain out of its obsessive loop. Twice, and unaware that he was doing so, he poked himself in the chest as Mark Houston’s meaty hand had done, as if by repeating the action he would disarm it, rob it of its obnoxious significance. His pacing stopped only when the sound of the doorbell roused him, returned him to the present. Having peered through the dusty spyhole, he unlocked the front door to allow Father Bernard, the Dean, into his house.
    The Dean stood in the vestibule, twirling his black umbrella from side to side, allowing the rain to drain from its gilded point onto the wooden floor by his feet. A satisfactory pool having accumulated, he removed his black Homburg from his head and tossed it like a deck quoit onto the nearby hook.
    â€˜How are you, Vincent?’ he said, shepherding him with a stick-thin arm round his back into his own sitting-room as if he was elderly and confused and in need of guidance. Seconds after his entry, and effortlessly, he had taken over the territory, his authority exercised so lightly as to be almost imperceptible. Obeying him seemed natural.
    The disparity in size between the two men might, in other circumstances, have been comic. From his six-foot-six vantage point, the Dean literally looked down on the parish priest, as he did on most of humanity. It was difficult not to condescend from such a height and it, together with the way he carried himself, inspired confidence. A surprising number of people, reverting to some childhoodpattern, found themselves deferring to Bernard Hume as to a benign parent. Steering the diminutive Father Vincent towards his own armchair, he gestured for him to sit down before planting himself by the fireplace and muttering, as if to himself, ‘Awful. It all sounds quite awful.’
    And then, looking into his colleague’s eyes properly for the first time, he added in an almost exaggerated tone of concern, ‘And your face – what on earth has happened to your face, Vincent?’
    â€˜Would you like a drink, a whisky?’ Father Vincent asked, embarrassed by the whistle in his voice, pointing to the bottle by his chair.
    â€˜Mmm … what is it? An eighteen-year-old, eh? My, my, that’s a generous offer,’ the Dean replied, picking up the bottle and bringing it to