Better the Devil You Know

by James Whitworth

  “And you suddenly realised that your career and all your ambitions were hanging in the balance. Jocasta couldn’t be allowed to speak, could she? She had to be silenced.”

  A chilled quiet had descended on the chapel. Everyone was thinking about those few words and everything they implied. She had to be silenced.

  Martin looked up and met Miller’s gaze. He looked completely shattered; a broken man. “Yes,” he said simply. “That’s what happened.”

  Miller nodded his head to acknowledge the confession.

  Riddle, taking this as a sign, took a step forward. “Martin Charles, I am arresting you for the murder of Jocasta Heath…”

  At this moment, Miller held up his hand. “No, Riddle.”

  “No?” Riddle said. “Why not?” He had just spent the last ten minutes listening to Miller explain the reason Jocasta Heath was murdered. Why the hell weren’t they arresting Martin Charles?

  “You’re forgetting that Mr. Charles has an alibi. He wasn’t even in the country at the time.”

  Riddle hadn’t forgotten. But Miller had made such a strong case that he had assumed he knew something that Riddle didn’t.

  “But you’ve just said…”

  Miller smiled sadly. “I know,” he said. “And everything I said stands. I believe Jocasta found out about the affair. She felt betrayed and let down. She went to confide in someone. And that person couldn’t let Martin’s career flounder. It wasn’t premeditated, just as the murder of Samantha Thompson wasn’t planned. But those two killings are intrinsically linked.”

  “But if Martin Charles wasn’t the killer,” Riddle said, “who was?”

  Miller paused as he gazed around the room.

  “You killed Jocasta Heath and you killed Samantha Thompson, didn’t you?”

  There was a moment of silence and then the vicar let out an anguished cry. “God forgive me,” he said.

  Chapter 20

  Riddle thought for a moment he had misunderstood. Then when the vicar had started to sob, he began to realise that he had not misheard. “The vicar?” he said.

  “Yes,” Miller said.

  “But why? Why on earth would he kill two women he barely knew?” Riddle asked, although he was slowly beginning to understand.

  “To protect his brother,” Miller said.

  “His brother?” Newbold said, confusion written across her features.

  “Let me explain,” Miller said. “Four and a half years ago, during the summer, Martin Charles had just come to the end of what would be his last full academic year at the university where Jocasta Heath was one of his most gifted students. She had been eager to succeed and that meant that she saw a lot of her tutor.”

  Miller paused and looked at Martin. He nodded. “She really was exceptional,” he said. “It’s rare for a student to ask for further reading during the long summer vacation, but Jocasta did just that. I offered to drop some books off at her house and that’s where I met Martha.”

  “And how soon did the affair begin?” Miller asked.

  “Almost immediately,” Martin said. “It’s funny now, looking back, but at the time it seemed so natural. I know it was wrong. I knew it was wrong back then, but there just seemed to be a sense of inevitability about it.”

  Riddle looked at the vicar. He was sitting with his head buried in his hands. What had he done?

  “And the affair continued through the summer?” Miller asked, although he already knew the answer.

  “Until Jocasta found out,” Martin said. His face darkening with the memory.

  “Imagine what that must have been like,” Miller said. “Her mother who had always instilled the importance of faith and the tutor who she had thought was interested in her because of her ability.”

  “But I was,” Martin said.

  “Perhaps you were, perhaps you weren’t,” Miller said. “It doesn’t matter. What’s important is what Jocasta thought. And my guess was that she was shocked, upset, and felt betrayed. The bedrock her faith had been built on – her mother – was suddenly exposed as a hypocrite. At least that was what she would have thought. So what did she do then? She went to the only person she thought she could trust. The chapel’s vicar.”

  Luke Moore looked up for the first time in minutes. His skin was deadly pale and his eyes were bloodshot and haunted. His lips moved, either because he was about to speak or in a silent prayer. But in the end, he remained silent.

  “When she arrived at the chapel she told you what happened, didn’t she?” Miller said, turning to face the vicar. He was far from certain of what exactly had happened, but he had put together a solid theory and so far he had not been contradicted.

  The vicar cleared his throat and when he spoke his voice was quiet and cracked. “She told me everything,” he said. “She asked me how God could let her mother and Martin act in such a way. Didn’t he know that it would tear her family apart?”

  “But it wasn’t her family you were thinking about, was it?” Miller asked.

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Newbold said. “But I don’t understand. Are you saying that the vicar and Martin are brothers? But they have different surnames.”

  Martin Charles stood up and walked to the window that overlooked the graveyard. “Our mother was quite unconventional,” he said. “When I was born I got my father’s surname as you would expect, but a few months before Luke was born our father was killed in a motor accident. My mother suddenly worried that her family name would die out, so she reverted to her maiden name and so when Luke was born he became a Moore.”

  “How did you know?” Newbold asked.

  “I didn’t know,” Miller said. “But something had been nagging away at me. One question just kept coming back to me. If Jocasta had gone to see someone, who would she see? The vicar was the obvious choice, but what motive could he have for killing her? There just didn’t seem any reason. Finally, all I could think of was some connection to Martin. I just worked backwards from there.”

  “But that still doesn’t explain why the vicar would kill Jocasta,” Riddle said. He had found himself quite liking the vicar and if he was honest with himself, he was finding it hard to make the transition.

  The temperature was dropping even further in the chapel and through the frosted windows Miller could see the snow falling heavily across the headland. “Jocasta would have been upset,” Miller said, “but more than that she would have been angry. Two of the adults she trusted most in the world – and importantly, two of the adults who she felt embodied all that was good about her faith – had betrayed her. She was young, idealistic and she wanted revenge.”

  Newbold was frowning. She could picture Jocasta confiding in the vicar, but she was still struggling to understand Miller’s reasoning.

  “You mean she was going to attack Martin…” The thought of the petite Jocasta assaulting the vicar’s brother seemed ridiculous.

  “Not physically attack him,” Miller said. “She wanted to really hurt him and the way to do that was harm his reputation. In fact, not just harm it, but destroy it.”

  For the first time since Miller’s revelation, Luke Moore seemed to be focused on what was being said. Turning to look at his brother, his eyes were full of pleading, but Martin could not meet his gaze.

  “She said she was going to go to the university and tell them what he had done,” the vicar said.

  “Really?” Riddle asked. “But from their point of view he hadn’t done anything wrong. He was having an affair with the mother of a student, not the student herself.”

  The vicar smiled bitterly. “I made the mistake of telling her just that,” he said.

  “Mistake?” Riddle asked.

  “If I had said nothing, she may have been satisfied and vented her anger at the university. I doubt anything else would have happened. Martin’s career wouldn’t have been affected.”

  “But you did say something else?” Riddle asked. He had a growing sense of what had happened and part of him
wasn’t sure he wanted to know more.

  “Yes,” the vicar said slowly. “I think she realised I was right so she said that she would go to the press. She knew that they wouldn’t be bothered if any rules had been broken, they would see the attraction of a story that would not just paint Christianity in a poor light, but would essentially end Martin’s career.”

  “And your brother’s career was so important to you?” Miller asked, rubbing his head.

  “You have to understand,” the vicar said, “we had a very poor childhood. We both worked our way up supported by our mother who had to do two jobs to get us through university. The workload killed her. How could I allow all that sacrifice to be for nothing?”

  Riddle was incredulous. “So you think murder is acceptable in those circumstances?”

  The vicar was shaking his head, staring at the floor.

  “Of course not,” he said. “But I wasn’t thinking straight. It all happened so quickly.”

  “Tell us exactly what did happen,” Miller said.

  The vicar let out a long, pained sigh. “She was becoming hysterical. She wanted to inflict the maximum amount of damage. I tried to reason with her, but she was becoming more and more agitated. Finally she turned to leave, I tried to stop her but she tripped on the fireguard. She fell and banged her head. I panicked.”

  Miller was nodding his head. Everything the vicar was saying backed up the evidence and the theory he had formed, although he wished to hell that it didn’t. A chill ran through his body as he prepared to ask his next question.

  “What did you do with the body?”

  The vicar didn’t respond at once. He looked around the chapel as if hoping for a way out, but the only exit was blocked. Then his shoulders sagged as if the final vestiges of fight had left him.

  “The chapel had builders in at the time, they were installing the disabled access ramp at the back. The work involved bricking up an alcove. It was half completed…”

  “Oh my God,” Newbold said. She put her hand to her mouth. “You bricked her up?”

  “She was dead,” the vicar said. “I blessed her.”

  “What?” Riddle almost shouted. He could take no more of this. “You bricked her body up? Jesus Christ.”

  The vicar winced. “Yes.”

  Miller closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “But it gets worse, sergeant. Much worse.”

  Riddle looked confused, then his confusion turned to a dawning realisation that spread a look of utter horror across his face. “Oh, God. She wasn’t dead was she?”

  Chapter 21

  For a few moments Miller’s words had silenced the room. Finally, Miller continued. “One of the things that puzzled Doctor Powell and myself was why the fingernails of the body found at the foot of the cliff were so worn. I asked Powell to get them analysed. There were stone particles underneath them which match the brickwork used in the chapel works.”

  Newbold could not believe what she was hearing. “She tried to claw her way out,” he said, his mind full of terrible images of Jocasta Heath’s final hours.

  “Her death would have been terrible,” Miller said. “The thirst would have been unbearable and then madness would have set in. Finally her heart would have given out.”

  “But why didn’t anyone hear her scream?” Newbold asked.

  “The chapel was closed over the summer,” Miller said. The company carrying out the work had gone into liquidation. The vicar was pretty certain no one would discover the body.”

  Martin Charles put his head in his hands. He was sobbing. “I didn’t know – I didn’t know.”

  “When did you tell your brother?” Miller asked.

  “Martin called me when they discovered the body in the graveyard. I had to tell him then. I couldn’t live with it any longer.”

  “So why kill Samantha Thompson?” Riddle asked, although he already suspected he knew the answer.

  “The subsidence,” the vicar said. “The surveyors had said we needed to put in extra supports and that the alcove would need to be opened up. So after the service I unbricked the wall and was pulling the body out when she came in.”

  “Samantha was on her way home,” Miller said. “Her neighbour heard her footsteps pass the cottage, stop and then go back towards the chapel. We’ll never know for sure, but I would guess that she saw something and went to investigate.”

  “She saw everything,” the vicar said. “I lashed out with the poker and she went down. I checked her pulse, but she was definitely dead.”

  “So why the hell did you lay her body out on the tombstone?” Riddle asked, spitting the words out.

  Miller gave his sergeant a warning look. “The vicar wanted to distract the police and what better way to move suspicion from the church than to make us think the murder was carried out by Satanists or Pagans?”

  “So Samantha was just unlucky?” Riddle said, aware at how inadequate the word was. “But we have a witness that places the vicar on Henrietta Street emptying his bins.”

  “Remember what the witness said? He was crashing about in his back yard. He was drawing attention to himself, Riddle. He wanted to be seen. As soon as he was certain that he had been spotted, he made his way back to the chapel. He then carried Jocasta’s body to the cliff edge and rolled it off. He was unlucky that it hit that small strip of sand. Otherwise it could have drifted miles out to sea.”

  Riddle was shaking his head. “And he was the person who hit me on the head on the 199 steps?”

  “He was trying to get back to his house with the poker that he killed Samantha with. He didn’t want to throw it from the cliff as we could have found it. He ran back to the chapel and to disguise the fact he had been running, he jumped in the shower and…”

  “…And he answered the door to us in a towel,” Riddle said.

  “Two people dead,” Miller said. “All to protect his brother.”

  “I didn’t want to kill anyone,” the vicar said. Suddenly his teeth were bared and he snarled at the detectives. “But all that work, all that sacrifice was going to be wasted. What would you have done?”

  Miller looked the vicar directly in the eyes. “I would have followed the faith you purport to believe in and tried to help the girl. But you didn’t, did you?”

  The vicar slumped back onto the pew, all his anger and fight finally extinguished. “God help me,” he said.

  “I very much hope he won’t,” Miller said.

  Epilogue

  It was New Year’s Eve. Miller was sitting in the living room of Paul and Maria Riddle’s house.

  “Five minutes to midnight,” Maria said, emerging from the kitchen carrying a tray of fully charged Champagne flutes.

  Riddle took a drink and sat down next to Miller as Maria turned on the television set.

  “At least he has admitted everything,” Riddle said, guessing what had been on Miller’s mind.

  “He could hardly do otherwise,” Miller said. He was in no mind to think better of the vicar for his full statement.

  “He’ll go away for a very long time,” Riddle said.

  “True,” Miller said. “But that doesn’t bring Jocasta or Samantha back, does it? Nor does it offer any real solace for Jocasta’s parents or Samantha’s family. All those lives ruined because he wanted to protect his brother. What kind of Christianity is that?”

  Riddle shrugged. He was no fan of organised religion, but he knew that the vicar’s actions had little to do with protecting his faith and a lot to do with more prosaic matters. “It wasn’t just his brother’s job, was it? He was due to take up a very cushy role in London.”

  “True,” Miller said. “But it was all in vain.”

  Martin Charles had resigned from his job and his career in the church was over. He had left Whitby and had not been seen for the next few days. Then on the 29th December his body had been found in his car. He had killed himself.

  “It’s almost midnight,” Maria said, her face full of concern for Miller. “A new year, a new
start. Who knows what the year will bring.”

  Miller stood up as Maria topped up their glasses and the chimes of Big Ben filled the room.

  “Who knows?” Miller repeated as the glasses chinked and Maria kissed her husband.

  Miller looked out of the window in the direction of Whitby and its east cliff. He then turned to the window on the other side of the room that faced south towards the moors and many miles beyond, the city of Sheffield.

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