Crusaders Read online

  CRUSADERS

  A Novel

  RICHARD T. KELLY

  For Trevor, Kathleen and David

  Since every man is a microcosm, in whose heart may be read all that sends armies marching, I must admit I am no better.

  I. F. STONE, 1956

  The intriguing thing about Pilate is the degree to which he tried to do the good thing rather than the bad. He commands our moral attention not because he was a bad man, but because he was so nearly a good man.

  TONY BLAIR, MP, EASTER SUNDAY 1996

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The tale told in these pages takes place in the recent past and across the north-east of England, amid some real and recognisable cities and towns. But the reader is advised that there is no ward in the west of Newcastle by the name of Hoxheath, nor is there a parliamentary constituency called Tyneside West. There is no Grey Theological College in Cambridge, nor an Excelsior Working Men’s Club in Sunderland, nor a nightclub called Teflon on Newcastle’s Quayside – and so on. That said, a good many place names in the book are taken from life, as are certain personages. The mixture is intended only to lend credence to the fictional characters and predicaments described herein.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUE: St Cuthbert’s Day: Sunday, 20 March 1978

  BOOK ONE: THE REVEREND GORE

  I The Outset: Thursday, 12 September 1996

  II Facts of Life

  III The Host: Monday, 16 September 1996

  IV The Right Analysis: 1983–1984

  V Tyneside Classical: Monday, 23 September 1996

  VI Multiple Deprivations: 12 April 1988

  VII Wise Counsel: Wednesday, 25 September 1996

  VIII Apostles: 18 September 1992

  IX Principles: Friday, 27 September 1996

  X In Green Pasture: 1995–1996

  XI The Gunnery: Saturday, 28 September 1996

  BOOK TWO: BIG STEVE

  I Size and Authority

  II Duty Calls: Sunday, 29 September 1996

  III Iron and Juice: 1979–1983

  IV The Focus Group: Tuesday, 1 October 1996

  V Fair Trading: 1986–1989

  VI Outreach: Thursday, 3 October 1996

  VII The Regulator: 1992–1996

  VIII Incorruptible: Friday, 4 October 1996

  BOOK THREE: THE CHURCH OF ST LUKE’S

  I The Inaugural: Sunday, 13 October 1996

  II Clever Devils: Wednesday, 16 October 1996

  III Stevie Coulson is Busy: Saturday, 19 October 1996

  IV Among the Young Men: Sunday, 20 October 1996

  V The Mysteries: Saturday, 26 October 1996

  VI An Encroachment: Saturday, 26 October 1996

  VII A Proposition: Sunday, 27 October 1996

  VIII The Tribune: Sunday, 27 October 1996

  BOOK FOUR: DR PALLISTER, MP

  I War Stories

  II Hearts and Minds: Sunday, 10 November 1996

  III By Hand or by Brain: 1982–1989

  IV Tallies: Wednesday, 13 November 1996

  V The Proconsul of Geordieland: 1989–1996

  VI Comrades: Thursday, 14 November 1996

  BOOK FIVE: MELINDA

  I Vendetta: Thursday, 14 November 1996

  II The Night Caller: Friday, 15 November 1996

  III Economies: Friday, 15 November 1996

  IV Kinship: Saturday, 16 November 1996

  V Absentees: Sunday, 17 November 1996

  VI Simon Barlow is Busy: Monday, 18 November 1996

  BOOK SIX: JUDGEMENTS

  I Charity: Saturday, 23 November 1996

  II Conspiracy: Sunday, 24 November 1996

  III Red Lights: Sunday, 24 November 1996

  IV Reckonings: Sunday, 24 November 1996

  V The Record

  EPILOGUE: Wednesday, 16 April 1997

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  St Cuthbert’s Day: Sunday, 20 March 1978

  He had set himself a mission and felt beholden to it. He told Audrey as much when she came in her coat to the threshold of his room, asking would he join her for morning service at St Aidan’s. He wasn’t impervious to her plea, and the skies were looking doomy, but he had determined for this day that he would climb up to the Monument.

  He had seen it from afar, perplexedly at first, for there seemed no earthly reason why a Greek temple sat foursquare atop a wooded hillside over Sunderland. His mother, the amateur historian, spoke vaguely of some civic debt to ‘Radical Jack’, Earl of Durham back in the days when the northern cities were granted Members of Parliament. Altogether John approved of the symbolic aura, and wished to associate himself with it. He had plotted a course through those woods guarding the hill’s upper reaches, an awkward style of approach, likely to ensure solitude.

  That morning he donned his anorak and cycled ten miles north by A-roads, wary of cars that zipped by, blaring their tetchy horns. Keening easterly he passed through drab stretches of industrial estate before hazarding upon a long tree-lined path. Freewheeling down its slope he could see the great grey Monument, perhaps two miles distant, gravid blue-black clouds massed and settled above. He crossed the Wear by a footbridge, chained his bike to a bench by the Old Fellows pub, and trudged up a winding road that levelled out between wide fenced fields. Sedentary horses studied the intruder, then snorted and galloped away. John felt light rain on his face as his target steadily enlarged. Finding his way barred to the enclosure below the wood he took a circuitous road left, and climbed over a stile onto a grassy incline where the ground grew steep and moist underfoot – he began to feel embers of heat in his cheeks, exertion in his calves. But on and up he trudged, and soon he was stepping through a kissing gate into the cool gloom of Penshaw Wood.

  Foliage made a dense canopy as he hastened along the trail. The sudden shrouded sense of hush, the deadened ash-greyness of surrounding trees, unsettled him somewhat – these and the silence, disturbed only by birdcalls and sounds of scampering in the undergrowth. A shadow lengthened in his mind. Somehow he was certain that another was present, dogging his steps – beside or behind him, in or out of the trees. He shook his head the better to clear it of such claptrap, for already through the treetops he could glimpse the apex of the temple’s lofty pediment.

  Then he made out something up ahead of him, wet and dank and crumpled in a pile next to a muddy puddle. Warily drawing near, he peered down. It was an anorak, dark blue, akin to that he wore himself, but smaller – as would fit a child – and slathered in muck. The protective coat, so roughly discarded, seemed the very evidence of something ugly, some misdeed. He spun and looked all about him in the gloom, feeling a hard pulse behind his ribs. No, he was too much alone here. His composure splintered. He began to jog, then to run.

  The trail wound on interminably, indifferent to his escape; until some light seeped through the trees where a passage was seemingly dug out, and he scrambled up this boggy track – breaking out onto a hillside carpeted by high bright-yellow rapeseed, stretching for half of a mile under moody skies and a cordon of telegraph posts.

  Recovering his breath, he stepped over a stile in a wire fence and made the trek up a stony path, his eyes now fixed on journey’s end. It was taller than a dozen men, surely a hundred feet long, its porticos in a square of four-by-seven – a colossal achievement, as if transplanted from Periclean Athens. At closer quarters he saw the difference, the darkness – for those columns were blackened by coat upon coat of industrial cinder, made indelible by decades. In dismay he saw some crude scrapings into the stone, clearly the work of knives or chis
els – ‘I Lishman 1955’, ‘S P Evans 1972’, ‘Donk’, ‘Jass’, ‘Nipper’, ‘Buns’, their claims on posterity more recent than Radical Jack’s.

  He hoisted himself up onto the broad stone base and paced the perimeter of the atrium. There was no roof, and rain had puddled between the uneven cobblestones. The aura was that of some queer semi-derelict outdoor theatre, amid a blasted heath, under a bleak sky, a place fit to offer Greek tragedy to uncomprehending locals. Or Shakespeare, perhaps – Julius Caesar? But there was a kind of grandeur here, no question: he would dare to call it a transcendency.

  His spirits reviving, John turned around on his heels, surveying the panoramic views. But to the north the Wear Valley was not – he decided – so very much to write home about: naught but the industrial stacks and housing sprawls of Washington. Southward, Chester-le-Street and Houghton-le-Spring yawned out for drear miles, to no greater effect on the imagination.

  The traffic noise from the motorway below was muffled by elevation and the rising wind. A strange depleted feeling stole over John, one he had grown to recognise and regret but to which he could give no name. It was a kind of sadness, banal to the taste, and yet it masked an ache like hunger. He wanted something, while knowing the want to be insatiable, unrequitable. There was something out there in the world, never to be his.

  He hunkered down at the foot of a column and took his diary from his anorak pouch, thinking he might scribble awhile, as had become his wont. His universe was described therein, and he felt its miserable limits keenly. He was much too proud of his opinions, he knew – the effort he invested in them, the degree to which he fancied they set him apart from his peers.

  ‘Shyness too is a vanity of man,’ he murmured into his chest, and, liking the sound of that, he uncapped his pen and inked with care onto the rain-specked page.

  ‘Divvint be shy,’ said a voice from above.

  John snapped his head toward the sound and found the speaker standing but a few feet away across the cobblestones. He was short and squat, clownishly overweight, clad in a black mackintosh. Moon-faced and pasty, his cheeks were unshaven, his black hair plastered over his brow.

  John was mortified. The wind had blown him so deep into self-absorption he had assumed total solitude. And yet this lump of a man had clambered soundlessly up onto the Monument’s base.

  ‘Sorry,’ John stammered.

  ‘Divvint be sorry.’

  The man’s eyes were small and dark, his slight smile unwelcome.

  ‘Were you looking for us?’

  ‘Sorry? No.’

  ‘Aw. Thought you might be looking for us.’

  The man’s fists had been sunk into his mackintosh pockets, but now he pulled out a chubby paw and gestured in the air.

  ‘It’s some thing this is here, eh? Some thing.’

  Pushing his diary back into his anorak, John lifted himself from the cobblestone floor, not taking his gaze off this loon, the swell of whose pale belly sagged, voluptuous, between his unkempt pullover and beltline.

  ‘Y’knaa what this stone is? Do y’knaa? It’s grit-stone, this. Grit-stone. They call it God’s own rock, them that knaa.’

  John was on his feet, but cornered. He was taller, but the loon heavier – did that mean stronger? Or slower?

  ‘Y’knaa how I knaa that, but? The stone? Cos it’s me job. It was me job, any road.’

  ‘Yeah?’ John risked a few glances about him, in directions he might flee.

  ‘Aye. And do y’knaa how they got them stones shifted up here? Do y’knaa that?’

  John shook his head, thinking, Walk away? Jog? Run?

  ‘They were carried by angels. Archangels, like. Michael, and Raphael. And Urial, and Gabriel. And Lucifer. The most bee-yoo-tiful.’

  The loon appeared most proud in his wisdom. Panic was throbbing anew in John’s chest.

  ‘I divvint believe in God, me, y’knaa? I’ll tell you what, but, I’m so sure about the other. The other, aye. Cos I’ve seen him, that one. Seen him, in the corner. Do y’knaa him? His name, like? You want to. Shall I tell ya? Shall I? Come here, you.’

  When the loon stepped toward him John felt the blood move his body, and he turned and leapt the five or six feet from the base onto the grass below, pitching face-forward. He scrabbled upright, his knees and ankles shouting in pain, forcing himself to run – and in that moment he heard the garrulous bark of a dog, then a terrier was bounding up and over the crest of the hill before him.

  A human head-and-shoulders surfaced behind – a redhead female, some heavy-coated wifey. The woman looked at John and then, uneasily, beyond him, while her dog gambolled hither and thither at her feet. John strode unsteadily toward her.

  ‘Are y’alright, pet?’

  ‘I’m champion, thanks.’

  He hastened past her, down the slope and onto Hill Lane, the pathway into safer, sparser woods from whence the woman and her dog must have come. Ten yards onward, his composure restored, he chanced a look behind him. But there was not a soul in sight, only the blackened Monument, inscrutable once more.

  Book One

  THE REVEREND GORE

  Chapter I

  THE OUTSET

  Thursday, 12 September 1996

  ‘Can you help me, boss? Please?’

  The beggarman, pained and unclean, stood between John Gore and where he needed to be – the concourse of London King’s Cross, antechamber of the gateway to the north. The unbidden presence posed a question greater than he knew, one that Gore would rather have sidestepped on this bright and brisk morning, this day of all days.

  As a rule he didn’t fret unduly about whether one’s good money should be doled out on request to the needy or distressed. His settled view – albeit the composite of a hundred different thoughts down the years – distilled into something quite simple. Yes, by such charity one soul was assisted, if only for the day; but why should the one be so favoured, when legions elsewhere were suffering the same or worse? Where was the social gain in a sole transaction? On the horns of this dilemma Gore was inclined to hang on to his so-called spare change, and if it betrayed an economy of pity – well, he forgave himself that much.

  At this very moment, however, he was damnably late for a train. And so it was a small matter to fish a few coins from his pocket and be done.

  As he rummaged, Gore threw glances all about him, anywhere but at the beggarman – his skin dry as a lizard, baseball hat tugged low, bomber jacket and jeans coated in dust as if he had crawled free from a collapsed building.

  Finally he proffered a pound and some lesser bits, glancing to the platform clock above their heads. He had four minutes and seventeen seconds until his train pulled out of London. And yet, still, an urgent thought occurred.

  ‘You’re not going to buy alcohol, are you?’

  ‘Fucking too right I will, boss, I’m an alcoholic.’

  The beggarman’s alarming grin was full of pale recessive gums. Gore’s fist closed on the coins. The clock was running – four minutes and nine, eight, seven.

  ‘C’mon boss.’ Plaintive anew. ‘Offies aren’t open, are they? I just wanna sandwich, cup of tea. Something, please.’

  Pointless, Gore knew, to stage an inquest. He dropped the coins into the outstretched hand, nodded to stall the man’s clearly well-rehearsed abasement, and hastened his steps for platform 7, a heavy travel-bag in each fist, his coal-black topcoat flapping at his ankles.

  ‘God bless, eh, boss? God bless!’

  He shot a glance back over his shoulder to see the beggarman grinning scarily again, miming the tilting of some imaginary drinking receptacle to his lips, gulping down imaginary mouthfuls, and finally – Bravo, thought Gore – tossing the imaginary beaker aside to wipe his mouth with a grimy sleeve.

  Doors slammed all down the deep-blue carriages of the Great North Eastern train, those not travelling waving their fellows goodbye. Gore kept moving, seeing only First Class insignia in every window, until he gave up and clambered aboard at the next open ve
stibule. Slipping down the aisle of a deserted carriage, noting its comfortable seating and places set for tea or coffee, he marvelled anew as to why he had been such a mule in asking his employers to stump up no more than the Standard Class fare. His own ingrained nature, so wearily familiar to him: he refused – he would always say – to set himself above others; wished, indeed, to live as though the option didn’t exist. But then here he stood, at the outset of a major endeavour – maybe his life’s work. Did he not deserve the simple courtesy, the teapot fetched to table, the individually wrapped biscuit?

  A partition door fizzed open onto a Standard compartment thick with restless bodies and low din. Bulging suitcases and sports bags were being hoisted overhead, rowdy children entreated to sit, brown-paper bags full of burgers and milkshakes ferried from hand to hand across the aisle. Ahead of him were a pack of six big men sporting black-and-white striped football shirts, trying to insert themselves into parallel four-seat berths. One of these gents, his scalp clean-shaven, strained his shirt with an expanse of belly so luxurious he might have been carrying twins. Gore motioned as to squeeze by, and found the lads blearily acquiescent.

  He stowed his bags and counted his way down the aisle, seat number to seat number, until he came to his anointed place: 32 Facing. There, already installed and staring up at him, was a rotund teenager in a lime-green tracksuit, his broad face ruddy and belligerent. Beside him, a much smaller and leaner accomplice in a red model of the same tracksuit peered out from under a black baseball cap, drumming his fingers on the tabletop.

  ‘Excuse me, boys,’ Gore offered, extending his ticket, earning only a harder glare.

  ‘C’mon, lads,’ he tried afresh. ‘I think you’ll find that’s my seat.’