Such Men Are Dangerous by Stephen Benatar

Author:Stephen Benatar
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497693883
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

30

Simon, having spent a highly unsatisfactory day in and around York, parked his car outside the school at a few minutes to four in order to collect the boys. He had told Dawn he would do this—for whether they were going to be reviled, lionized, or only mildly pestered, it wouldn’t be pleasant for them to have to walk home in the usual way and he’d been worried about it long before Geraldine Coe had phoned him, on his return from the Heaths, casually to offer payment for a taxi morning and afternoon. This evening he meant to organize a rota of willing car-drivers from amongst his congregation but he had never felt so keenly the absence of a curate. (Several times he had requested one; though always, he supposed, in far too relaxed a fashion.) Tony, of course, gave invaluable assistance, yet a youth leader had neither the time nor the training to take care of all the parish work currently at risk of being neglected. Simon had already called on his brother ministers in the area, discussed with them what was happening, listened to their advice and asked for their help; but apart from such things as burial services—which ideally had to be conducted by someone who’d been on friendly terms with the deceased—and visits to the bereaved which also couldn’t be left to total strangers, there was still a number of people (like Sharon Turner, Mrs Beecham, Dick Evans, Molly Simpson, the list had at least a dozen names on it) whom he knew he couldn’t just abandon, no matter how much aid he had at his disposal. Yet to every problem, he told himself now, there had to be a solution. He bit his lip, then tried to concentrate upon the job in hand.

The phalanx of pressmen and television reporters assembled both at the front door of the school and near another entrance—one which the children used—was sizeable but not as great as Simon in his heightened state of expectancy had feared it might be. He got out of his car intending to go straight to the headmaster’s office, outside whose door he had arranged to meet the boys, but he had overlooked the fact he himself might be recognized.

“It’s the Reverend Simon Madison, isn’t it, vicar of St Matthew’s?”

Immediately, cameras were being trained on him, a microphone being held up. Later he’d be surprised at how little thrusting there had been, at the unity of their restraint and the logical sequence of their questioning: half a dozen voices co-operating singly or in concert to produce the next, most obvious point.

“Vicar, what do you feel about the alleged appearance of an angel in Scunthorpe?”

“I feel sure it took place.”

“Sure? Isn’t that a strong word in the circumstances?”

“No.”

“But how can you be sure?”

“My sense of conviction, arrived at after prayer.”

“Yet mightn’t that have been wishful thinking?”

“No. It isn’t what I wished for.”

“But as a vicar of the Church of England it’s certainly what you’d want?”

“If my own conviction could guarantee that of everyone else then naturally it would be different.

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