Shadow Doctor: The Past Awaits (Shadow Doctor Series)

Further Exploits of the Shadow Doctor

Adrian Plass

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781473675285
• Print ISBN:
  9781473675254

Mysteries are there to be solved. Aren't they? Jack has been working with the Shadow Doctor for a little while now. He thinks he might just be getting to grips with the Doc's unusual approach to helping with people's deep problems. Then, visiting the highly respected leader of a large Christian organisation, Jack sees his friend go on the attack. However, the encounter reveals secrets about the Doc's past that are beyond anything Jack could have imagined.
Perturbed, he makes a list of all his unanswered questions. Where does the Shadow Doctor's unusual name come from? Why is he so stubbornly reluctant to speak about faith in terms that normal churchgoers would understand? Why is Jack not allowed to simply enjoy a moment when God really seems to have spoken through him? And will the Doc finally describe the life-changing experience mentioned by Jack's gran in the letter she wrote to him shortly before her death? Most all, Jack is desperate to pin down just what the Shadow Doctor actually thinks and feels about God.And there is one more issue that Jack feels particularly keenly. How will Doc respond to hearing that, having met a young lady named Aelwen, Jack is deeply in love for the very first time?

1

Stalking the lion

‘Today, Jack, I am planning to stalk a lion.’

Jack Merton stared. The bizarre announcement had come out of nowhere as the two men were enjoying their beloved morning coffee. After two months of close contact with the Shadow Doctor, he had become a little more comfortable with the older man’s obstinate insistence on cloaking simple ideas in cryptic metaphor. Two problems remained. One was his experience of a few alarming occasions when it had transpired that typically bizarre statements were neither cryptic nor metaphorical. The other was a growing awareness that his very singular colleague was unwilling or unable to allow short cuts to the solid centre of his thinking, if and when it existed. Doc loved cryptic crosswords. Jack was hopeless at them.

‘Stalking a lion? Are you serious?’

‘Serious? Actually, I’ve been stalking this beast for some time. Today, my idea is to get right inside the creature’s den.’

Jack sighed. It could mean anything. Doc seemed to believe (with Oscar Wilde, apparently) that a concept or a plan, or even a person, lost layers of essential quality and identity by being encased in something as banal as a name or a simple explanation. For Jack, it was a relief to have reassuringly clear labels stuck on almost anything.

Jack sipped his coffee; a moment in which to lean back before returning his mug with exaggerated care to the kitchen table. He looked up.

So, when you say you’re planning to stalk a lion, are you talking about something that’s – you know, flesh and blood? And hair?’

‘Absolutely, Jack! Oh, yes. Breathing, walking, occasionally roaring, made of real flesh and real blood. Quite famous hair.’

‘Dangerous?’

‘Can be. Has been. Could be again.’

‘With a mane?’

‘With a mane? Of course, with a mane! A lion wouldn’t be a lion without a mane, would it?’

‘Actually, it would if it was a female. Only males have manes, don’t they?’

‘Correct. Thank you, Mister Attenborough. Well, the one that I am going to stalk is quite definitely male, and I know for a fact that this individual, masculine lion has an impressive mane, and can be extremely fierce. However, I shall do my best to battle with the creature, and if I manage to overcome it . . .’

Doc paused. A note of gravity and reserve entered his deep, gentle voice as he continued.

‘If I manage to overcome it, there is a slim chance that I may be able to discover some sweetness buzzing around in the remains.’

Jack floated, resisting a temptation to drop a nice safe anchor in the biblical connection that the other man seemed to be making. Experience suggested that observations of that kind would not be welcomed. Mentally, he set aside the question that he really wanted to ask, the one about why the Shadow Doctor appeared to be excluding him from this latest expedition, whatever it turned out to be. Apart from anything else, Doc had hitherto happily expressed a preference for being a passenger in his big silver X-Trail, and Jack loved to be behind the wheel.

‘So, excuse my ignorance, but do you have to go to Africa or India or somewhere in the Orient to sort this animal out?’

‘No, none of those, unfortunately. I have to go to Eastbourne.’

‘Eastbourne?’

‘Yes, Eastbourne.’

‘Eastbourne!’

Doc placed his elbows on the kitchen table and rested his chin on interlinked fingers.

‘Jack, although it would make life much simpler, if marginally less interesting, we really can’t sit in the middle of a forest in Sussex saying “Eastbourne” to each other for the rest of our lives.’ He raised his hands in parallel, ready to chop down and package his plans to make them comprehensible. ‘The lion that I intend to hunt is in Eastbourne. That is where I am going. It’s about thirty miles from Wadhurst to Eastbourne.’ He glanced at his wrist. ‘I shall leave straight after lunch.’

Eastbourne. As far as Jack was concerned, Eastbourne groaned and glittered with memories. Recent ones abounded suddenly now. It was the place where Jack’s gran, Alice Merton, had spent the last years of her life in a small flat near the seafront after the death of her beloved husband, William. Jack and Alice had adored each other, and loved spending time together, but the same persistent elephant had been stubbornly present in any and every room in which they met. The pachyderm was easily identified. It was Jack’s Christianity.

Once, Jack had plucked up courage to ask his gran why she never showed any positive response to the things he said about his faith. Her devastating reply had been that, however hard she listened, she couldn’t really hear him saying anything. In a letter written to Jack shortly before she died, Alice had apologised humbly for her lack of courage in avoiding every opportunity to tackle the issue after that. Ironically, it was shortly after his gran’s death that Jack had finally begun to face the hollowness within himself that she had seen so clearly.

In that same letter, Alice had talked about an extraordinary meeting with a man who described himself as ‘The Shadow Doctor’. The encounter had rescued her from an abyss of hopelessness, and, she added, something else had happened that she would tell him about when they met. Alice was gone by the time Jack got to read her long, final letter to him, but she had included the phone number of a person who would be able to connect him with Doc, the Shadow Doctor. If by any chance we don’t get to meet again, she had said in a postscript, ask Doc, and he will tell you what happened to me.

With great fear and apprehension, and following a long, emotional splurge of a telephone call, Jack finally arranged to meet the Shadow Doctor at his cottage in a remote part of the Sussex countryside near Wadhurst. His experience on that wild and stormy night was surprising, to say the least. He seemed to have found a safe place to say dangerous things. The freedom was intoxicating, but he was shocked to find himself eventually agreeing, a few weeks later, to enter a living, working partnership with a man who conducted his faith, if faith it was, in a way that was almost unrecognisable. Jack had spent his Christian life in settings where, for the most part, nothing shocked, and spontaneity was carefully controlled.

The two men were very different, and there had already been battles, but Jack was hanging on to a belief that both of them had taken decisive steps into the no-man’s-land between each other’s heavily defended lines. Hopefully, the future lay somewhere out there where the mud was thick, and the bullets flew, and a good friend was what you needed most. That was the plan, but every panel within the mosaic of that plan seemed to be completely different, except to the extent that most of them were unpredictable, and, on almost every occasion, Jack had been allowed little or no involvement in their genesis or development.

Today was a good example. What was the plan? Where were the lions in Eastbourne? Why was his so-called colleague intending to travel alone? He thought of a question.

‘What kind of weapon will you be using against this fierce creature?’

Swinging an arm, Doc pointed lazily to a rectangular object standing against the wall beneath the bow window. It was neatly wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.

‘Over there – that’s my weapon, Jack.’

Jack stared.

‘Is it – it looks as if it might be a picture.’

‘Good guess, that’s exactly what it is. A painting. A copy of a painting.’

‘You’re going after a lion, armed with a picture.’

‘Correct.’

‘Is the picture – loaded?’

The Shadow Doctor smiled grimly. ‘Oh yes! Fully loaded and ready to fire. I just have to make sure that my aim is dead straight.’

‘Why can’t I come with you?’

Doc appeared to be studying a small remnant of the biscuit he had been enjoying with his coffee. Jack raised his voice slightly.

‘Do you mean that you’re planning to do this stalking thing on your own?’

‘Tell me, Jack, is this a genuine Choco Leibniz biscuit, or is it another miracle replica from the place in Tunbridge Wells that does a palatable single malt for a few quid?’

‘Miracle replica. Why am I not coming with you? Why have you not mentioned this before?’

The Shadow Doctor popped the fragment into his mouth and dusted his hands together industriously before replying.

‘Actually – I have mentioned it before, but not quite in the same terms.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You recall that icy night on your first visit when you followed me into the forest? When we were back in the cottage later, I went right over the top with promises about things I’d tell you if and when you agreed to come and work with me. Remember?’

‘Do I remember? I think about it all the time. I’ll never forget it.’

He instructed himself silently. Tell him. Tell him the thing that made all the difference.

‘I remember you telling me your wife’s name.’

It had been an unforgettable moment. The two men were sitting before the open door of an oven on that freezing cold night in the early hours of the morning. The Shadow Doctor had spoken reluctantly but openly for the first time about his wife, telling Jack that she had died of a brain tumour fifteen years earlier. This unaccustomed openness seemed to be presented as a sort of hostage, perhaps a deposit of good faith in return for a decision about joining Doc in his attempts to help people struggling with a bewildering variety of problems. Although Jack had not realised it until much later, the question he asked in response to this act of vulnerability was probably a sign of his need to be sure that the man he was facing would not always be in charge of selecting the stretching points in their relationship.

‘What was your wife’s name?’

That had been his question, or words to that effect, and, to Jack’s alarm, the Shadow Doctor had reacted physically and abruptly, almost as though someone had leaned forward and slapped his face. But he did answer the question.

‘Her name was Miriam. My wife’s name was Miriam.’

A strange moment. Electric. Significant...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Also by Adrian Plass from Hodder & Stoughton
• Title Page
• Imprint Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Stalking the lion
• 2 The trouble with Sammy
• 3 In the lion’s den
• 4 The small person inside
• 5 Laughing with Miriam
• 6 The myth of Sisyphus
• 7 Victor Morton
• 8 The list
• 9 Getting ready for Martha
• 10 Sign of the times
• 11 Meeting Martha
• 12 Martha’s story
• 13 The road less travelled
• 14 The top of the mountain
• 15 A clue
• 16 Green Pastures
• 17 Elsie
• 18 Aelwen
• 19 Two questions
• 20 Conflict in the car park
• 21 An absence of colour
• 22 Flush it again, Sam
• 23 What happened to Alice?
• 24 A fondness for God
• 25 Understanding blue
• 26 Dying to live
• 27 The bottom line
• Endmatter page 1