“What’s the story with the garrotted guy they brought in today?” She asked the question before he’d had a chance to eat the first mouthful and the meal in front of him morphed into an atrocity, juice running red under his blade. Corstorphine drew a breath, his appetite completely gone.

“Sorry, I’m not able to talk about work.” He stared blankly at his plate, willing the recent sight and smell of Oscar’s body to leave his vision.

“No, of course. Silly of me to ask – it’s just word gets around the hospital of anything like this. Left the ambulance crew a bit shaken, to be honest, and we talk these things over between ourselves.” She looked apologetic. “Helps to talk, makes it easier for us all to cope when something bad happens.”

“That’s alright. Sometimes the job throws up stuff that’s hard to deal with.” He cut the steak into a mouth-sized portion. “You just get used to it, I guess.” The steak tasted good as he dealt with the day’s trauma in his own way, consigning it to that part of his memory marked Private. With work marked off-limits, the rest of the conversation dealt with inconsequential topics as they discovered a shared interest in nature.

“Would you like to meet again?” She asked the question over coffee, once he’d relented and agreed to share the bill.

“That would be nice. Aye – I’d like that” Corstorphine felt the ground moving under his feet as if some giant continental plate had shifted. Every other blind date he’d been on had ended with the woman making hurried excuses, never to be seen again. They left the table, Corstorphine for once actually helping a woman on with her coat instead of proving an impediment to the process and exited into the night.

“Good! Good night then, James.” She leaned forward, head demurely turned to one side to present a cheek.

“Goodnight, Jenny.” He waited until she entered the waiting taxi before walking in a daze to his car. His wife sat next to him on the journey home, a quiet smile sitting on her invisible lips.

V
SUNDAY 09:15

The minister of St Cuthbert’s made his daily pilgrimage from the manse, shuffling along a well-trodden path through an overgrown graveyard to the church. Each step brought with it a sharp stab of pain in his lower back muscles and he silently invoked the Lord’s Prayer until he reached the medieval church porch. A pair of ornate Gothic doors opened easily against his touch and he tilted his head in obsequience towards the far altar before entering the cool, darkened interior. Half in hope he glanced around the church in search of any parishioners but was unsurprised to find he was alone. Fresh flowers adorned the window recesses, a mix of wildflowers and roses adding a splash of colour to an interior that had otherwise been drained of joy over the centuries.

His flock was diminishing year in, year out as the grim reaper took a steady toll of the aged. Any new young faces that made an inquisitive appearance over the year were soon put off by the unwelcoming stares of his congregants and instead often made their way to one of the evangelical churches that had sprung up in the most ungodly of places. The local cinema hosted one of these gatherings of bright-eyed born-again Christians, playing guitars and singing along to the bouncing ball as the words scrolled on the silver screen in the upstairs studio. On the ground floor, without anyone finding this at all unusual, bingo devotees sat in equal glassy-eyed reverence as balls dropped out of a machine and the numbers were intoned with an intensity of meaning as powerful as the words spoken upstairs.