Father Calvin had only been a parish priest at St Winefride’s for two months before he was summoned to sit in the stout leather chair kept for errant priests in the administrative office at the Archdiocese of Liverpool.
As he stood waiting for Monsignor David Wickham, the diocese’s vicar general, he thought about the last two weeks and the visit to his small rectory house by the police. Thank God his housekeeper hadn’t been there to see them take his computer. He had nothing to hide, or at least nothing that couldn’t be truthfully explained.
He hadn’t imagined that volunteering for the hospital chaplaincy would be the hardest of his parish duties. On his first day at the Belutha Park hospital, he was asked to help pacify the hysterical mother of a 15-year-old boy who was comatose from hallucinogenic drugs. The sight of the boy as he blessed him shocked Calvin: the wide-open eyes with their dilated pupils and jaw drooping. His brief experience at the hospital had given him a respect for the medical staff. To begin with, he felt a noble solidarity, as if they were all partners in the saving of bodies, lives and souls.
That changed when he met Dr Klein, a good-looking man in his thirties with crisply ironed white shirts and a reputation for his research papers. Calvin had just anointed a confused and debilitated man in his seventies with Parkinson’s. Klein, followed by a group of younger nurses, stopped to look at him as if asking where he might have seen him before.
The doctor dropped his gaze to the priest’s lanyard then sounded out “Father – Calvin – Baines” slowly. “I’m sure you and some of the patients and their families all think what you do serves a useful purpose”, he said. “What you call ‘an emergency service’. But this isn’t a religious playground. It’s a hospital.”
“Thanks for that, doctor,” said the priest.
“You’re welcome,” said Dr Klein as he left with his small retinue, some of them laughing.
Wounded and distracted, the priest’s concentration shifted. The other reason why he had joined the hospital chaplain rota was to look for a young nurse – a Catholic – with a scar on her throat. He didn’t even know her name. He had seen the scar once in the parish confessional where she had said, “she had seen things at work that weren’t right”. Still, he knew he couldn’t break the confidence of the “black box” and ask her what she meant. Within two months, he had conducted two parish funerals, including the parish flower lady. Neither was especially old or ill.
At the Friday soup lunch after one funeral, he was approached by Ralph, the son of Ray Parker, who had died in controversial circumstances before his arrival. There had been a public inquest which Calvin had attended after a leak to the press that the doctor involved had been Dr Klein. The family was first told the cause of death was a rare blood cancer. The coroner’s report apparently didn’t match up. This led to a small action group meeting at Ray’s widow’s house on Ash Wednesday to share their experiences and talk about forming a Facebook group. Father Calvin was invited.
Someone from each family told their story. As they spoke, Calvin wished he hadn’t given up whisky for Lent. Although he didn’t follow all the medical talk – diamorphine, nozinan, cyclizine, haloperidol and midazolam, drips and syringe drivers – he had an instinct that these people weren’t overdramatising. Harold Shipman’s nickname at the hospital where he worked had been The Good Doctor.
Ralph spoke about how he wished to contact a nurse at the hospital – all he could recall was a red tissue scar on the bottom of her throat, who had said to him, as they took his father’s body away, that there was “more” to his father’s death. Ralph said he thought she might have been called Edith, but he wasn’t sure.
Calvin had read GK Chesterton’s Father Brown stories but had never expected to turn priest detective. He felt ridiculous trying to track down a nurse he had only met once to ask her about the death of a patient months ago. If they were found, the medical notes could incriminate a very senior doctor.
Calvin believed in following his conscience. What happened next was on a Friday in the middle of Lent, and Calvin was fasting on just water. He had once attended a Day of Recollection where he was told it was a sin not to drink water. But Calvin knew he was young and strong enough to fast hard. He had planned an early night when a message came from the hospital, urgently asking him to attend to a dying patient. He put on his overcoat and picked up a small case containing prayer books, oils and the viaticum, the dying man’s bread for the journey. It was visiting time when he arrived at the hospital, and the car park was full, so he had to leave his Peugeot a few streets away.
By the time he got to the ward, the patient was dead. He noticed the woman sitting at the end of a bed was staring at him.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Can you get my mother out of here?” said the woman. “I don’t want her here.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not a doctor…”
“I can see that. You’re a vicar or a priest. But you’re a man too, aren’t you? Can’t you do anything around here?”
She introduced herself as Tanya. She was in her late thirties, with golden hair knotted and unkempt; she looked worn. There was a small silver cross around her neck. “All of last week mum’s been crying out in the night. ‘Give me a drink. I need something to drink.’ Then they gave her a drink, but they wouldn’t help her to drink it. Only sedatives.”
“My mother,” she began again, “came in here with a urinary tract infection which should have cleared up with antibiotics.
“A week ago, they tell me she’s got sepsis and that she’s probably going to die. They start taking down her tubes, saying she don’t need ’em no more. So I say, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I wouldn’t let them do that, take ’em down. And guess what? She doesn’t die from multiple organ failure. She just lies there, day after day.
“She isn’t bloody well dying and she never had sepsis. I’m getting her out of here, you just watch.”
Calvin nodded. “Why don’t you go to the head of the hospital?” he said.
He began to pull away but she held his hand, squeezing it. “You need to take in what’s happening around here. Do something, Father.”
He should have turned to the ward exit at that point and gone home. But he saw a sign on a door that said “Staff Only”. It was late, the hospital was quiet, and there was nobody around. What if he could find Ray Parker’s medical records? No CCTV cameras. The door was locked and a small sign said “Records Office”. It was a simple Yale lock, badly screwed on. He thumped the edges of the jamb for a weakness and finally pressed his right foot at the base of the door. Then he kicked the door and tried to force the lock. After pushing with all his weight, the door broke open.
“What are you doing?” said a voice.
Calvin turned sharply as he saw a young nurse in navy blue scrubs clutching a stack of files to her chest. Another nurse following her looked on aghast.
Then he saw it. The scar on her neck, the same raised and jagged pink tissue that he had seen in the confessional.
“Sorry, I’m looking for the way out. I thought this was the door to the stairwell.” Then, with a hapless smile: “It’s been a long day.”
The two nurses stood to one side as he barged past and retreated down the stairs. He had been caught.
The day he was summoned to the vicar general’s office was the Wednesday of the Easter octave. He took Easter Monday off, walking along the river, lush with wood anemones and the smell of wild garlic, trying not to think about his meeting. He kept thinking about the nurse. What had she said?
Calvin planned to tell his superior the same story he had told the police, that he was disorientated by fasting on the night and had pushed the door out of frustration at not being able to find his way out.
A woman in her fifties stuck her head out of an office to tell Calvin the Monsignor was ready to see him. He entered and saw a clean-shaven, balding middle-aged man at a desk, peering at him over spectacles that looked too small for his big head.
“Good morning, Father Calvin. Sit down,” said the priest, straightening the papers that he had been examining.
“Unfortunately, the bishops have been called away on business so I’ve been asked to deputise in your case. They want it sorted out now. So, let’s begin. How long have you been at St Winefride’s, about two months?”
“Yes, that’s right, yes.”
“So why did you try to break down a secure hospital door?”
Wickham listened in silence until Calvin finished.
“In my job, Father, sometimes people lie to me,” he said. “It’s what you expect them to do when they’ve been up to no good. The spirit of Judas, it manifests itself in so many different ways, you know – yet lying is the constant.”
The two men looked at each other.
“Do you know what I used to be before I became a priest, Father?” he asked. “A solicitor, and I dealt with a lot of criminal cases. There was one man I’ll never forget. He came to me for help. The police arrested him on suspicion of molesting a nine-year-old girl. He was a well-heeled professional, nice house, wife, kids of his own, the lot.”
“I was invited to the police station where he was being questioned one morning and I expected to be out by lunchtime. But the police kept me there, asking me to tell them ‘just one more time’ why I thought my client was innocent. They did this about four or five times and by half past four they had me screaming at them.
“Finally, at about six o’clock, the senior detective said to me, ‘We’re going to let you go now, but we want you to see this first.’ Then he showed me this video of my client sexually abusing the girl. It was horrible. My client had made it himself. The cops sat there laughing at me.
“So, I’ve learned my lesson. No one is going to make a fool out of me like that again.”
He stared at Calvin.
“What did you do before your ‘vocation’?”
“I taught art history to the sixth form at a monastery.”
‘Klimt, I suppose, was on your syllabus. The police told me they found Klimt’s painting of ‘Judith’ downloaded. Your laptop belongs to the diocese. She’s half-naked in that painting.”
“I was doing research into the biblical figure of Judith.”
“Your case doesn’t involve sexual misconduct. At least I’m happy to accept that at present. But if you have been downloading illicit images, that kind of thing, we will know about it because you can be sure the police will find it now they have your computer.”
“I swear, Father, I have never in my life looked at pornography,” said Calvin.
“That’s not why you’re here,” said Monsignor Wickham. “If you were being investigated for that sort of thing, you’d have been out of the presbytery by now.”
Calvin shook his head.
“I think you are young, doctrinaire and conservative. What do you call it… radically orthodox? What even is that? And what was this, some sort of pro-life thing? What have you done, blundered into a hospital, like some kind of Don Quixote?”
The Monsignor understood him better than the police.
“Leave all this kind of thing to the laity. We’re here to make Jesus Christ present to the world. There’s no room for vigilante priests.”
He looked Calvin up and down.
“Solitude drives many men mad, you know, but we thought we saw maturity in you. It looks like we were wrong.”
“We’re going to let the police do their job and then we will decide what to do with you. But let me tell you now. Acting out of ‘conscience’ does not excuse crime.”
The two men stared at each other; then Monsignor Wickham said: “For now, you are suspended.”
<em>This article first appeared in the Easter 2022 issue of the </em>Catholic Herald<em>. <strong><a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/">Subscribe today.</a></strong></em>
