The Coldest Blood

The priest nodded, classing himself effortlessly as a victim too. He retrieved another cigarette and Dryden recalled the priests of his childhood and the acrid stench of nicotine; the jaundiced fingers.

‘Just over two hundred in 1970,’ said Martin. ‘That was the centenary. It had been there, or thereabouts, for years. There was a great need, you see – especially amongst the urban poor. Our boys came from many places, sent by their churches.’

‘And the priests?’

‘Numbers? It varied. When I was principal we never managed more than a dozen. Class sizes were on the large side – but then the education was on the poor side.’

They laughed, and the space echoed like an empty room.

‘I will deny this conversation, Mr Dryden – if anything ever appears.’

Dryden nodded. ‘It won’t.’

Martin stiffened, a palm at the base of his spine. ‘There was never any sexual abuse – you do know that? The allegations all refer to what – these days – can only be described as inappropriate attempts at imposing discipline.’

‘That’s a plus point, is it? A badge of honour? It’s certainly a novel brand image. St Vincent’s – we beat them but we never fuck them.’

Dryden was pleased he’d said it. Martin coloured, the birthmark almost disappearing, the hand holding the cigarette vibrating slightly. Dryden felt he’d reclaimed a little bit of his own childhood, if nobody else’s.

The priest produced a set of keys and wrestled briefly with a large padlock on the corrugated-iron sheet covering the front door. He swung it back, almost violently, as if airing the place, and then unlocked the door behind, which was studded with nails in mock medieval grandeur. Then he was gone, swallowed by the shadows, without looking back.

By the time Dryden had edged over the threshold the priest had thrown open a shutter, the light revealing in the gloom of the entrance hall an ugly ironwork candelabra suffocated in cobwebs.

‘I was thirty-one when I arrived here as principal in 1970,’ said Martin, shivering despite himself. ‘I think the diocese knew something was wrong and I was supposed to put things straight. The outsider. And that’s how they treated me.’

Dryden climbed halfway up the stairs to look back down on the priest, noticing the neat natural tonsure of scalp surrounded by the short, oiled hair. The floor was cold stone in a chessboard black and white design. Despite the dereliction two smells still tussled for supremacy, both remembered from Dryden’s childhood: beeswax polish and rotting carpet. The walls too were horribly reminiscent: split by a dado rail between purple below and lemon yellow above.

‘The winter of 1970,’ said Martin, lost now in his own memories.

Dryden nodded, climbing further despite the creaking wood. A bird fluttered somewhere in a loft and some leaves around an open fireplace blew themselves into a tiny whirlwind. On the landing a threadbare carpet ran off into the darkness in both directions: ahead a large stained-glass window looked out into the rear courtyard. Martin overtook him, turned left, and opened a door into one of the rear wings. It was a dormitory, and here the windows were without curtains or blinds and largely intact, bathing the long gallery in a flat, institutional light. Bedsteads had stood here in two lines against both walls, the linoleum still bearing faded stripes where the sunlight had fallen between them.

Martin stood, his large frame twisted slightly. ‘I didn’t know,’ he bowed his head. ‘Not for many years. The teachers had mostly been here for a lifetime – the youngest for twenty years. Several had been boys here. It had been a brutal place, and I often think the only real mark of their guilt was that they felt they had to hide it from me.’

‘You don’t mind if I find that hard to believe,’ said Dryden, walking the length of the empty room to a shoulder-height wooden partition. Beyond was another bare room, the floor tiled this time, and the walls showing the scars of a row of urinals. ‘It’s medieval,’ he said to no one.

‘Yes,’ said Martin. ‘Yes, it was. There were four dormitories – each a separate school house. Leo, Pius, John, and Paul. A priest ruled each – tiny kingdoms, really. The tradition, I was informed, was that the principal was expected to enter only at the invitation of the priest in charge. I never challenged it. I was expected to live apart, to preserve the authority of the office.’

‘Where?’ said Dryden, running a hand along the ice-cold tiles.

‘In one of the forward wings. There’s a flat. The rest of the staff lived in the other – except those with house responsibilities who lived here.’ He nodded to a single door in the far wall. Dryden tried the handle but it was locked; he rattled it, listening to the echo.

They retraced their steps to the hallway outside, down the half-lit stairs to the tiled lobby and into what had been an office to the side of the main doors.