It wasn’t our Kevin, cos I helped the police and the undertakers get him down, when the police had finished poking around. But he was our Kev’s age, and blond. They knew his name by that time, because his parents had reported him missing two hours previous; missing in the middle of the night in his pyjamas. His name was Tom Charnock, and he lived in a house in Cathedral Close, because he was the son, the only son, of one of the stipendiary canons of the cathedral.
I knew by then what had happened. I’d worked it out. Why the tower had let go of our Kevin. It had found another victim, a lot nearer.
I was questioned by a detective-sergeant called Hughie Allardyce. A tough cookie once, but getting fat and past it. There were stains on the lapels of his brown pin-striped suit, and egg on his tie. But he was still sharp, and nasty with it.
‘All right,’ he said, when I’d sat down. ‘I’ve rung the hospital and you’ve got an alibi. At the relevant time, you were snoring in a hospital corridor with your mouth open, and nurses passing all the time. And the hospital’s four miles from the cathedral, the buses had stopped running, and your car was hemmed into the car-park by the night staff’s cars. Just as bloody well for you. But you’ve still got a few questions to answer, haven’t you, Mr Clarke? Like what the hell the tower door was doing unlocked, and what you were doing up there the previous night, yelling your bloody head off and waking up the whole district?’
I shook my head, trying to clear it, and decided to answer the simpler question first.
‘We locked up as usual two nights ago, after work. Took the key back to Taffy Evans. He’ll tell you.’
‘He told me you handed in the key. He didn’t see you lock the door.’
‘My mate Billy saw me lock the door. He was with me.’
‘Aye, so he says. But mates stick together, tell the same story, don’t they? Maybe you were in a hurry, careless. The door was unlocked when you got back to it, late that night. Or else how did you get in? Or have you got your own key?’
‘What would I want with my own key? And I locked it, I tell you. I’m careful about things like that.’
‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist. The day after your goings-on had aroused the whole Close, the Dean went with Taffy Evans and saw to the door himself personally.’
I shook my head to clear it again. It wasn’t making sense.
‘So why was it unlocked again, the next night, so that poor little bugger Tom Charnock could get up there?’ he said.
I could still only shake my head in bewilderment.
‘Because there’s a fault in the lock, Mr Clarke. It seems to lock, and then, after a couple of minutes, something gives inside, and it swings a bit open again. I’ve seen it happen.’
‘So why bother me about it?’
‘Well, there was no complaints about the door unlocking itself again before you went up there to see to the spire. Damage it, did you? Not let on, in case you had to pay for it?’
‘Don’t talk wet. I carry plenty of insurance . . .’
‘Maybe you wanted to keep your no-claims bonus? Anyway, I’ve had a locksmith to look at it. He says fair wear and tear.’
‘So?’
‘So you didn’t notice it was going wrong – the lock? Not before the night you went up there looking for your lad . . .’
‘It was unlocked that night. But it was locked when we got there this morning . . .’
We stared at each other.
‘If it was locked this morning, how did the lad get up there last night? How could he have fallen off the tower?’
‘It was locked all right this morning. Ask Billy.’
‘Do you know what you’re saying? If it was locked this morning, that’s half-way to proof of a murder.’
‘Aye,’ I said, with deep feeling. ‘Aye.’
‘And I’ve been talking to your wife. I know what happened about your lad . . .’
‘That’s all she needs, after what she’s been through the last two days . . .’
‘We’ve got our job to do . . . seems to me what happened to your lad is what happened to this Tommy Charnock. Exactly the same. Sleep-walking in the middle of the night. Or snatched from his bed. Found by the cathedral. Your lad was heading for the door of the south-west tower when my lads picked him up. And maybe the door was already unlocked by then . . .’
‘Your lads saw nobody with him . . .’
‘They didn’t actually see anybody. But then they were looking at your lad, parading about minus his pyjama bottoms. Doesn’t mean there was nobody with him, who did a bolt when they saw our car . . . anyway . . .’ He looked at me very hard and said,
‘That night. Your missus wakened you out of your beauty sleep. And you knew exactly where to look for your lad. You went straight to the tower and straight up it, yelling for him. How do you account for that, Mr Clarke? How did you know where to look? Out of all the world, in the middle of the night?’
‘I’d had him up there with me . . .’
‘That same day?’
‘No, a few days before . . .’
‘Not good enough, Mr Clarke. You knew.’
I might have told him everything; but I knew how far I’d get, with a cynical little bugger like that.
‘There’s nowt more I can tell you.’
‘Well, I can’t make you tell me. And there’s nothing I can hold you on. But there’s something very nasty going on here, Mr Clarke, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it. Something kinky. I gather your lad’s just getting over a nervous breakdown, can’t remember anything. Keep in touch, Mr Clarke. Don’t go running off to the Costa Brava for three months’ holiday without letting me know, will you? Right, push off. I’m busy.’
I got up to go; I’d reached the door when he said, almost to himself,
‘There’s a trade in little lads these days. One time, it was only the little girls you had to worry over.’
I didn’t know then how right he was.
The next morning, Billy and I went back to work on the tower. I mean, you have to, don’t you? A Boeing 747 crashes and kills three hundred, but the other 747s go on flying; the day after a coach-crash which has killed ten grannies, the road is full of coachloads of grannies again. The world has to go on.
The only difference was, the cathedral green had more than its usual scatter of spectators watching us. There was nearly a hundred, that morning, and more as the day wore on. Ghouls! But it didn’t make no difference to us. We had a job to do. Mind you, a high place where somebody has died is pretty bad; but I’d done it before, when one of my own lads came off a big chimney. He didn’t check the top of the chimney properly before he started work on it; had a row with his missis before he left home that morning. Three bricks gave way – rotten mortar hidden by the soot – while he was standing on them. We helped get his body down off the factory roof, then got on with the job he hadn’t finished.
Aye, it felt pretty black that morning, wi’ the blood-splashes still on the nave roof because some bloody coward of a verger or mason hadn’t had the guts to face them and scrub them away wi’ a broom. But we ignored them, like we ignored the gargoyle. I got the rest of the rotten stone chipped out of the spire. Only we was extra careful; of the rope-sling, and of the wedges that were holding the ladders in place.
Mid-morning, we hears a shout from the parapet.
‘Halloah! All right to come up?’
‘Jesus,’ says Billy.
‘No,’ I said, peering down. ‘Only the Reverend Morris.’
‘You’d think he’d have more sense, wi’ his big gut. He’ll break his bloody neck . . .’
‘He’s on his way,’ I said. ‘Coming up fast. I can’t stop him. If he wants to be a bloody hero . . .’
‘Give him a hand. I don’t want the job of scraping him off the nave roof. What you think he wants?’
‘Playing Sherlock Holmes, maybe. The scene of the crime.’
Morris made his own way, without any help, though I had to advise him about getting off
the ladder on to the platform. He had to change from the outside of the ladder to the inside, and that got him in a right sweat; he hadn’t reckoned on having to do that. He was shaking as he stood upright; both his hands gripped the top handrail as hard as I’ve ever seen it gripped. But he pretended to look round him, and sniff the morning breeze appreciatively and admire the wide view.
‘All the kingdoms of the earth, and the glory thereof.’
‘Aye, you don’t get a bad view. What can we do for you?’
If he expected us to be impressed, he was wrong. To us it was no more than crossing a street; less dangerous, in fact.
‘I’ve found out a bit more about this tower.’
‘Oh, aye?’ I tried very hard not to sound impressed.
‘I won’t tell you here though. There’s things in books I want to show you. Suppose we say in the museum at one o’clock?’
‘Fair enough.’
He looked down the tower at the ground. A thing I don’t particularly advise the nervous to do. It seemed to me his hands gripped the rail tighter still. Sooner I got him off the better. I didn’t want him getting the shakes on us; he’d be a hell of a job to get down, if he did.
‘I’m just going down to get some stone, Reverend,’ I said. ‘You can follow me down. I’ll see your feet is set right.’
‘The Lord shall lead your feet, into the paths of righteousness,’ he said. But he was pale now, and a sheen of sweat had broken out on his forehead, though the wind up there was cool.
I led off, without further argument, and he came after me. I think I got him down to the parapet just in time. He was shaking like a great jelly by the time we got there. What the hell had he come up for, if he’d got no head for heights?
‘I’d lay off heights in future,’ I said. ‘Some people feel at home there, some don’t.’
‘I’m at home anywhere, in the hands of God,’ he said, a bit snappily.
I just thought, what do you have to pretend for? It’s dangerous. You could get somebody else killed. What kind of God is it that makes you do things like that? But I didn’t say anything; just, ‘See you at one o’clock then.’
In the museum, he was his old self again: hand on my shoulder, booming voice. He had these huge calf-bound books out, thicker than a stone lintel and nearly as heavy. They were written in Latin that was double Dutch to me; great black handwriting with fancy letters. He’d marked the places and he read out the Latin. Something about aedificarunt or something. He read them out because he enjoyed the sound of his own voice.
‘Yeah,’ I said, when he’d finished. ‘Well?’
‘Well what it means is that after the tower fell, they had three more shots at rebuilding it, in 1314, 1385 and 1414. And none of them got beyond roof-top height. Each one fell down. The foundations gave way. They weren’t very good at foundations, I’m afraid, in the old days. Like at Winchester, where they built the cathedral on wooden piles driven down into a swamp. And when the wood began to rot . . .’
‘I know the story,’ I said. ‘The Diver of Winchester.’ That diver was one of my heroes. He spent a year down in the crypt of Winchester, underwater in his Victorian diving-suit, replacing the rotting piles with underwater concrete. The water in the crypt was black; he couldn’t see more than a yard in front of him. And the water was full of decay from the rotting corpses in the churchyard. If he’d cut his bare hand while he was working, on an old nail sticking out or something, that would’ve been the end of him; a horrible death from blood-poisoning. But he saved the cathedral. I could never have done it; at least if you die up high, you die quick in a fall through clean air. I admire people who can do what I can’t.
‘To the greater glory of God,’ said the Reverend Morris.
‘Maybe he was just a pro,’ said I.
He gave me a nasty look.
‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘the problem under the south-west tower was different. The old masons called it “the serpent in the sand”.’
‘Serpent in the sand?’ I said. ‘You mean, a bit like the Loch Ness monster?’
Another nasty look. ‘Not quite. The whole cathedral is built on sand, you see. This is Cheshire. Half the buildings in Cheshire are built on sand. With rock-salt underneath that.’
‘I know that. I’ve seen the sand quarries at Sandiway. And the salt-mine at Winsford. I was born here . . .’
‘Sand and salt are safe enough, till you get underground water running through them, washing them away. That was the serpent in the sand – an underground spring welling up. When the old masons dug down after the tower fell, they found the remains of old water channels and caverns with smooth sides. They thought they were made by what they called the serpent in the sand. The springs came and went with the years, nobody could control them . . .’
‘Salt subsidence,’ I said, ‘just salt subsidence.’ But it made me feel uneasy just the same. What had happened once could happen again. I didn’t much fancy working up that tower with water eating at the foundations, for all I knew, at this very minute. The sooner we were finished with the job, the better.
He must’ve caught the look of worry on my face. He laid a great meaty paw on my arm again. ‘Don’t worry, Joe,’ he said. ‘That tower’s stood for nearly five hundred years now. The architects have got all kinds of little devices that give warnings . . .’
I’d seen them. Little bits of glass fastened across cracks in the masonry, that break when the building shifts on its foundations. But it’s a bit late to take to your heels, when you’re up on the spire and a piece of glass cracks below . . . you could be the filling in a masonry sandwich. Pressed beef, cooked bloody. But I wouldn’t let him see I was worried, or he’d offer to pray for me at any moment, and I didn’t want that. If I finished the job safe, it wouldn’t be up to my common-sense any more. It’d be up to his prayers, and then I’d feel obligated and once you’re obligated, anything can follow.
‘Beats me how it’s still standing,’ I said.
‘I can show you the man who made it stand,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’ And he led me out into the cloister and then into the south aisle of the cathedral, with his hand on my shoulder. I was under spiritual arrest again.
The south aisle was dark; the pillars heavy and thick, Norman. The Norman windows were tiny. And full of stained glass. Mostly Victorian. I rather like Victorian glass, it’s a good laugh wi’ all those solemn, bearded faces and fat, floating saints in Roman togas. It tries so hard, and it’s about as scary as a kid’s comic book.
But there’s some medieval glass as well. Muncaster has some of the best medieval glass left in this country, cos Oliver Cromwell didn’t pass that way much. And you see some funny things in medieval glass. I don’t think the medieval people were quite right in the head, half mad wi’ the Black Death and starvation. And religion. Burning people at the stake for religion an’ all that. Makes me glad that the Church is failing now, wi’ dropping congregations and a dithering archbishop who doesn’t know what he believes except he don’t like Thatcherism and neither do I. When the Church had power, it went on like a wild beast. Like them Muslim Fundamentalists still do.
‘There he is,’ says the Reverend Morris, swinging me round suddenly and pointing.
It was medieval glass all right. A crucifixion, small, but very nasty, all blood an’ nails an’ crown of thorns. Wi’ people standing on each side. And on the right-hand side, a monk in black and white, wi’ a tiny little cathedral in the crook of his arm, an’ the cathedral had three spires, just like Muncaster.
‘John of Salisbury,’ announced the Reverend Morris. ‘Last Abbot of Muncaster Abbey, before it was dissolved under Henry the Eighth. He knew trouble was coming; he was a man in a hurry for his God. He built the last tower, and it stands to this day.’
‘Not a well-liked man, then,’ I said.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Someone’s chucked a brick through his face.’
Where his face had once been, there was just a round pat
ch of yellowy glass.
‘Still, he’s trampling down Satan under his feet,’ said the Reverend Morris, pointing again. And indeed, under the figure of John of Salisbury was a crouched-up figure with a large face of incredible ugliness.
I went cold all over. The hairs rose on the back of my neck. Couldn’t he see it?
That diabolical face of incredible ugliness was the same face as the face on the gargoyle of the south-west tower, give or take five hundred years of weathering and a lot of lichen.
And what’s more, it wasn’t a devil. In its too-small hands it held, very tiny, a mason’s punch-chisel in one, and a mason’s hammer in the other. And what would Satan be doin’ with a punch and hammer?
‘That’s him,’ I said. ‘That’s him up the tower.’ It just burst out of me, I couldn’t stop it. There’s times when you see a face, and you knows there’s going to be trouble.
The Reverend Morris looked where my finger was pointing. He looked a long time before he said, ‘Don’t be silly, Joe. That stained glass would have been made in some workshop hundreds of miles away. The stained-glass men weren’t living locally, like the masons. That window might even have been made in France or the Netherlands, to order, and shipped over years later. This is just a devil, a run of the mill devil.’
‘A devil wi’ a cold chisel and a mallet in his hands?’ I said. ‘I never heard of that afore. I’ll tell you what you want to look for in those grand big books of yours, Reverend Morris. You want to look up the man that really built the tower for your John of Salisbury – the feller that sweated and schemed an’ got his hands dirty. Not just the feller who gave the orders an’ raised the money by trampling on the faces of the poor.’
He went on looking at that face, and so did I. In silence. He even reached up and touched the glass. Gave a little shiver. The shiver seemed to change his mind.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said.
And there we left it.
We were starting to cement-in the new blocks on the steeple by the time our Kevin came out of hospital. They had no more reason to hold him; they could find nowt wrong wi’ him. And he seemed quite normal as we drove him home. Looking forward to playing football wi’ his mates an’ getting back to school.
The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral Page 5
