A heavy spray fell over his head and inundated his coat, thick storm clouds unleashing rain over the city and driving Rob to a nearby gap between buildings where he could wait it out. One of the rare times he went out of the flat, wearing his collar no less, and he had to forget to bring an umbrella.
The sack of groceries became heavier as it collected drops flung down from the sky. Rob gripped it more tightly in the crook of his arm and leaned against a brick wall, knowing he should pray for a boon -wanting to pray for a boon, but failing to find words to start.
His confusion didn't last, as a woman passed into his field of vision. She huddled into her collar and hastened in the direction of the market he had recently departed from, so caught up in wanting to get out of the wet that she didn't notice the man coming at her from the alley.
"Have you got a minute?" Rob reached out with his free hand to tug at the woman's elbow. It was covered by a thin rayon sleeve, hardly the type of wrap for inclement weather. Her slacks and open-toed mules were little better. She stood to get a good soaking staying out much longer, a thought process that showed in her face as it turned at the sound of Rob's voice.
"A minute for what?"
With savage strength coming from some undiscovered part of himself, he pulled the woman into the alley and demanded her purse. "It's all I want," he said at a fair shout to be heard over the downpour. Water gurgled and splashed around their feet like a thin river.
It wasn't common that men with grocery bags in one arm yanked hapless victims off the street. By some uncanny intuition, the woman knew he couldn't hold her and yanked free of his one-handed grip, tearing her sleeve in the process.
"What're y'doing, having a laugh?" she said. "Y're Father Barclay, aren't you, or I'm daft. I'm one of y'r bloody parishioners, father, aren't I? Siobhan Clarke, if y'don't remember."
He hadn't looked at her face but even in the gloom Rob knew the features.
"What do y'need with my purse, I already gave on Sunday..." But a look of comprehension crept into her eyes and settled around the woman's mouth in tight creases.
Quick as that there was thunder. Siobhan Clarke -Ms Clarke to her secondary students- went down in a pool of yellow light, torn sleeve and all, a gray stream forming almost at once around her prone body.
A clatter of footsteps sounded behind him, and a man's voice came out of the darkness.
"Did you hear a noise?" it asked. "Like a gun or som'thing?"
Rob shook his head, not bothering to look up. The passerby, apparently satisfied, moved away down the road and left him standing in the alley. Near the brick wall lay the still form. Above it a wisp of acrid smoke lingered, emanating from a hole where moments before there had been none, edges seeming to smolder from the bullet's impact.
The depleted uranium shell from Rob's pistol had gone clean through the brick and missed its target entirely. The woman had fainted dead away but was unharmed in anything other than her wits.
A frayed ruin that had been his pocket showed the gun in Rob's hand, the smell of melted fabric filling his nose and mouth with such a toxic fume that he stopped breathing altogether, as if the shot had curled around in the air and struck him instead, stopping his heart.
TO BE CONTINUED
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