Chapter Forty-One

‘It's you!' he hissed. ‘A godless creature come here to tell lies and make trouble!'

Reaching in, he grabbed her upper arm and yanked at it, his face twisted in fury. ‘Out harlot! Out of God's house!'

His bony grip, the shock of her bodily space being invaded, pitched her right back to SkAR's dressing room, the powerlessness she had felt. By instinct, she braced her feet against the doorway, but he just pulled harder.

‘Father!' Approaching footsteps and a woman's voice.

The priest tightened his grip, then suddenly released it, which sent her crashing back into the side of the confession box.

Cassie took a moment to try to calm her breathing before coming out. The voice belonged to Chrysanthi, who was clad in her usual dowdy gear – a shapeless beige raincoat and a tweedy skirt that reached just below her knees, the least flattering length.

‘Cassandra,' she said flatly. ‘What are you doing here?'

‘I need to talk to you,' said Cassie.

A look passed between Chrysanthi and the priest and then, turning to Cassie, he raised his long index finger up to her face like he was issuing a curse. ‘Those who bear false witness in the sight of God will meet a reckoning.'

Still trembling, Cassie watched him sweep away up the side-aisle. She rubbed her upper arm, which would bear the bruise marks of his bony fingers – like stigmata . Recalling that he'd denied a woman communion because he suspected her of using contraception, it struck her that, for all their outward differences, that old bastard and SkAR were fundamentally the same: they both saw woman as objects to be controlled in whatever way men decided.

They took a seat in the pew next to the box and Cassie said, ‘To be honest, I was just curious, you know, to see what confessing would feel like after all these years. I didn't mean any disrespect.'

‘What is it you want?' Chrysanthi asked, eyeing Cassie through narrowed eyes.

‘Look, I met someone who knew Sophia. I think he told her things about Cyprus and something about her family history – that is yours, or George's.' Cassie was watching her face carefully. ‘Something that upset her?'

‘I have no idea what that could be,' said Chrysanthi, smoothing her skirt over her knees. She would have made a good poker player – but was that a look of alarm that had briefly flared in her eyes?

‘Did you know she was thinking of going to Cyprus, to do some family research?' Pure conjecture, but she wanted to see Chrysanthi's reaction.

‘She never said anything to me about it.' But the way she dropped her gaze told another story.

So Bronte really had planned a trip to investigate her family's history. Had she quizzed her mother about Alexander's death? Cassie remembered the lyric in her song ‘Skeleton': ‘You feed me, always feed me, but what you feed me is lies'.

‘I wondered if it might have had something to do with Alexander?' Cassie went on. ‘When did he start having health problems?'

‘Why would you ask me that?' Chrysanthi's face twisted in grief, but her eyes remained watchful.

Cassie realised there was something different about her – despite her anxiety over the questioning she was sitting a little taller today. She seemed oddly .?.?. at peace for a woman who had just buried her daughter. Was it simply the comfort that Cassie knew the funeral rites could bring those left behind? Or some twisted sense of liberation in having rid herself of motherhood?

‘It was terrible luck having two children with serious health conditions, wasn't it?'

Putting her hands into her coat pockets, Chrysanthi turned her whole body away from Cassie, and started intoning something to herself in Greek. Staring at her back, Cassie picked up the word hamartia again. Meaning sin, or sin offering.

Sacrifice.

‘When was Alexander diagnosed with beta thalassemia?' Cassie pressed. ‘Was that while you were still in Cyprus?'

Chrysanthi had her head down, still murmuring to herself in Greek. Then she appeared to make a sort of tugging movement before half turning back to Cassie, her face pale as death.

Cassie flinched to see Chrysanthi's expression. It reminded her of avenging Furies of Greek myth. Pitiless. Implacable.

‘It wasn't bad luck ,' she said. ‘It was a punishment for sin.'

Only then did Cassie see that Chrysanthi was holding something. Something metallic that winked as it caught the light.

Oh Christ. She shrank back along the narrow pew, trying to scramble to her feet.

Then the harsh clatter of metal on stone. Looking down, Cassie saw a bright crimson sash unspooling across the flagstones, pooling in the mortar joints. Still her brain struggled to catch up, until she saw the steady trickle of blood falling from the fingertips of Chrysanthi's other hand.

‘Sins of the blood can never be washed away,' she said, with a terrible smile, before slipping off the pew in slow motion onto the floor.

Fuck fuck fuck !

Bending over Chrysanthi, Cassie pulled up her sleeve to reveal a long gaping gash from inside her forearm down to her wrist.

No !

Part of her brain went into analytical mode, assessing the damage. It was the worst kind of wrist slash – longitudinal cuts, two of them, each around ten centimetres long. Going by the pulsing flow, Chrysanthi had laid open her radial artery in more than one place.

Cassie used her fingers to apply pressure to quell the bleeding. But the wounds were just too long. As she staunched one leak another would appear, like a grisly version of whack-a-mole. Within seconds her fingers were slippery and useless.

‘Father!!' she shouted, her panicked voice echoing in that cavernous space.

The pool of crimson on the flagstones had already grown alarmingly large. Just like the cartoon speech bubble of Bronte's blood on the towpath. Hypovolemic shock, followed by cardiac arrest was a matter of minutes away.

Father Michaelides came flapping up the aisle like a giant bat, exclaiming in Greek. Over his robes he now wore a long blue scarf, decorated with gold circles and crosses. Without a word, Cassie yanked it off his neck and in a few swift moves made a tourniquet round Chrysanthi's upper arm and tightened it as much as she could.

The blood flow slowed – but not enough.

‘Help me!' she shouted at the priest.

Together they hauled on the scarf to tighten the knot.