Father Ambrose let his spectacles fall on top of the evening paper. Four women had been strangled now and still he sat here worrying about them. Praying too, he admitted, but he would have done that anyway. The picture in the evening paper showed a young woman smiling into a camera. The headline had shouted out her crime, and his. Poor child, he thought, to have stooped so low. The journalist had painted a life of drugs and deprivation. Father Ambrose could imagine what that might have been like. One of his parishes had been in the inner city, long ago, before they’d torn down the sagging tenements and given people decent homes. He’d been party to some terrible confessions in those days, he remembered.
It was the flowers that had first bothered the priest. Red carnations slipped between the praying hands of a killer’s victims. There had been a shiver of unease to begin with until memories came flooding back, memories of other hands that had selected the choicest blooms. A vivid picture of a body in a coffin came back to him, the flower like a gash of blood against the whiteness of the shroud. The hands that had placed those flowers had been clasped in prayer each day, right by his side. Until the scandal that had shocked them all.
Father Ambrose picked up the paper with shaking hands. He knew what he must do. All along he had known it, but he’d suppressed that event over the years until it had almost ceased to exist. Now he had to face the truth.