The Body Under the Bridge

by Paul McCuster

  As they walked to the door, Benson asked, “If she doesn’t know anything about the book, what do we do? We can’t ask to ransack the house, can we?”

  “We can try,” Father Gilbert said. He smiled at Benson.

  Lynn Challoner opened the door before they had a chance to knock. After a friendly exchange, Father Gilbert explained what they needed.

  “A book? You mean, like a ledger of some sort?” she asked.

  “A book, a packet of papers… we’re not sure. Anything to do with something called the Woodrich Society.”

  “The Woodrich Society?” She looked surprised. “A detective came just an hour ago and asked about that.”

  “What detective?”

  “Walters.”

  “Wilton?”

  “That’s it. I was concerned about having the police asking to look through my father’s things. My father was a good man, law-abiding, straight as an arrow. But Detective Wilton assured me that he didn’t believe my father had done anything wrong, but that the material might help with another case.”

  “Were you able to help him?”

  “That’s the remarkable thing. Yesterday I was looking through a cupboard that had china and cutlery in it. Under a stack of linens I found a box – the size of a big photo album. It had ‘Woodrich’ written on it. It was filled with old papers. I didn’t pay much attention to it. Just one of those things I thought I’d look at later.”

  “Do you have it now?”

  She shook her head. “I gave it to Detective Wilton.”

  “He’s nothing if not thorough,” Father Gilbert said and shot a look at Father Benson.

  “Trustworthy, I hope. Especially since we’re cousins,” she said.

  “How are you cousins?” Father Gilbert asked.

  “I could never explain it. You’d have to ask him. But I’m supposed to meet up with his great-aunt. She’s something of a family historian, I’ve heard.”

  “Margaret Clarke,” Father Gilbert said. “We know her.”

  * * *

  Margaret Clarke wasn’t at home. And attempts to reach DI Alex Wilton went nowhere. Father Gilbert tried to figure out why Wilton was interested in the Woodrich book, or how he knew where to find it. A family connection to the Challoners was a surprise – and worrisome. Margaret Clarke hadn’t told them everything at their little tea together, just as Mary Aston suspected.

  With little else to do, they decided to return to Scott’s. Later they would try to corner Wilton to find out how and when he got onto the historical side of this case.

  Father Gilbert’s mobile phone rang and he snatched it up, thinking it might be Wilton. Instead, Mrs Mayhew’s voice was in his ear.

  “I assume the two of you have forgotten your priestly duties,” she was saying.

  “What have we forgotten?” Father Gilbert asked.

  “The hospital visitations,” she said, then prompted with: “Joe Mumford?”

  Father Gilbert frowned. “Joe Mumford,” he said out loud for Father Benson’s sake. Joe Mumford, ten years old, stage-four cancer.

  “I’ll go,” Benson said. He looked anguished. “I saw him at church last Sunday and promised I’d come by. We both have an interest in online games.”

  Small drops of rain hit the windscreen. Dark clouds were rolling in from the south. Whatever was coming looked ominous.

  “I’ll drop you at Scott’s,” Benson said.

  “Father Benson will take care of it,” Father Gilbert said to Mrs Mayhew.

  “I do hope you’ll stop with playing detectives and think about the church again,” she said sharply.

  Father Gilbert didn’t know how to tell her that he was thinking about the church. But if she knew what he was thinking, she might resign. He thanked her and ended the call.

  “It was a dark and stormy night,” Benson said. “Cue the thunder. Cue the shot of the full moon pushing through the clouds.”

  Father Gilbert nodded. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing might show up after all.

  CHAPTER 36

  Father Gilbert was dropped off behind Scott’s bookshop. The rain was cold. Getting in and out of the Mini seemed more arduous than usual combined with a headache.

  As the Mini pulled away, Father Gilbert was about to climb the stairs when he was framed in the beams of white headlights. A white car in the car park faced him. The beams flashed. He thought it was David Todd’s. Retreating under Scott’s balcony to keep from getting soaked, he looked to see who was trying to get his attention. The windscreen was covered by the falling rain. He couldn’t make out who was inside.

  The car moved out of its space and pulled up alongside him. The driver’s window slid down. Mary Aston beckoned him. “Get in! Please!”

  Father Gilbert moved towards her. “What are you doing? The police are looking for you.”

  “I know, I know! Get in!”

  The urgency in her voice and the panic on her face were so unlike anything he’d heard or seen from her before that he went to the passenger side to get in. He hadn’t fully closed the door when she pulled away, the tyres screeching against the wet tarmac.

  “If you’re trying to keep a low profile, you’re doing a pretty poor job,” Father Gilbert said.

  Her hair was pulled back, highlighting her face. She looked drawn. Her lips were pressed into a straight line. Her eyes had lost their luminosity.

  “Is this David Todd’s car?”

  “He lent it to me.” She fumbled with a lever until the windscreen wipers came on. At the High Street, she turned right – heading away from the town.

  “When did he lend it to you?”

  “I don’t remember. The other day.” She shook her head impatiently. “I didn’t like the hire car the police gave me.”

  “Where are we going?” Father Gilbert asked.

  “Stop asking so many questions!” she shouted. “I’m scared. I’ve been hiding ever since Sanders was murdered.”

  “The police found your fingerprints at the mausoleum.”

  She swore indelicately. Her hands kneaded the steering wheel like a lump of dough.

  “If you turn left up ahead, we can double-back to the police station,” Father Gilbert said.

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “What do I think? You said you were going to meet with DS Sanders and you did.”

  “I met him at the police station to talk about Lord Haysham. DI Wilton was there.”

  “Then how did you get from the police station to the mausoleum?”

  “Sanders walked me to my car. He said he had his own suspicions about where the sword might be, but wanted to check further.”

  “He said this when DI Wilton wasn’t around?”

  “He didn’t trust Wilton,” she said, then took another turn a little too fast. Father Gilbert put his hand on the dashboard to brace himself. Another driver slammed on his car horn.

  “You don’t have to drive so fast,” he said. “Especially since you don’t know where you’re going.”

  “Do you want to drive?” she demanded.

  “Finish your story,” he said and kept his eyes on her. If he watched the road, he would succumb to an anxiety attack.

  “Sanders phoned me later,” she said.

  “For a date?”

  She ignored him. “He’d been looking at the police records from 1938. Mrs Mayhew from the church called to ask about the skeleton from the church cellar. That led us to the Doyle mausoleum.”

  “Why ‘us’? What made you two such fast friends?”

  She shrugged. “He fancied me.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “You don’t.”

  “Is flirting a defence mechanism or a contrivance?”

  “It’s a survival technique.”

  “Okay, so you charmed your way into Sanders’ confidences and he phoned you about the Doyle mausoleum.”

  “I met him there.”

  “This car wasn’t in the car park. Reverend Singh didn’t mention you.”r />
  “I parked along the road on the other end of the graveyard. There’s a gate there. It was unlocked. No one saw me enter.”

  “Why did you park there?”

  “Instinct. I wasn’t sure about being seen there with him. That may have saved my life.”

  “Go on.”

  “I met Sanders at the mausoleum and—”

  “How did you know where the mausoleum was?”

  “Are you going to listen or interrogate me?” she said in a shrill voice.

  “I want to believe you, so I’m trying to fill in the gaps.”

  “After what happened at the Challoner mausoleum, I went online and downloaded whatever layouts I could find of cemeteries in the area. All Souls’ had a detailed map. The Doyles’ mausoleum was on it.”

  “Fair enough,” Father Gilbert said.

  “When Sanders and I arrived at the mausoleum, the grave had already been broken into. I was put out, to say the least. We were discussing who might have got there before us when…” She paused.

  Father Gilbert watched her as her lower lip trembled. She pressed one hand over the other on the steering wheel and stabbed her fingernails into her flesh.

  He tried a gentler tone. “What happened?”

  “A man in a dark cloak or hood or – I don’t know – came out of the corner of the mausoleum. It was like he spilled out from the shadows.”

  Father Gilbert thought of the figure in the woods behind Todd’s house, the same figure described by Father Benson. He didn’t know what to say.

  She misinterpreted his silence. “I know. It sounds crazy. I’m not superstitious, but I thought it was a ghost.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I couldn’t see his face. It was in darkness, like he was wearing a cowl. But I realized later that he was darkness. As if he stepped out of the shadows, but brought the shadows with him.”

  Another car horn. Father Gilbert looked and saw that she’d driven through a red light.

  “I don’t care if you believe it,” she said, her voice growing shrill again. “Three days ago I wouldn’t have believed it either. In my entire career of dealing with antiques and relics and artefacts and the most bizarre legends ever made up, I’ve never experienced anything like this.”

  “All right. So, this thing came up…”

  “It was holding the Woodrich sword.” She was breathless. “Poor Sanders! He didn’t know what he was dealing with. He stepped forward and said, ‘Stop, I’m a police officer,’ but that thing came at him, holding the sword up like a sentry. And then, faster than any man could move, it turned the sword and ran him through.”

  She was silent. Apparently the memory had stolen her words.

  With squealing tyres, she steered to the left and into the car park of a pub. She drove to a far corner, empty of cars, and slammed on the brakes. It was all Father Gilbert could do not to fly into the dashboard.

  “What are you doing?” Father Gilbert exclaimed.

  She pulled on the handbrake and put her head down on the steering wheel. The wipers rubbed at the rain on the windscreen, smearing the view of a fence and an open field beyond.

  Taking a deep breath, she said, “I was a coward. I screamed and ran.”

  “What else could you have done?” Father Gilbert asked. If her story was true, running was her only option.

  “The cemetery was empty. And it was dark, like night,” she said.

  “The murder happened in daytime,” Father Gilbert said.

  “I know, but the light was… changed. The sky and colours were like early evening. I swear. It was like a dream.” She paused, then gathered herself up again. “He – it – chased me.”

  “He ran?”

  “He moved. Glided across the grass. Thank God I had parked where I did. The road was on the other side of a wood, at the edge of the cemetery. It wasn’t very far from the mausoleum at all. I tore my clothes on a branch. But I was able to get to my car.”

  She looked around her, as if the car itself was some sort of guardian angel that had protected her.

  “And then?”

  “I saw him – it, whatever – standing among the trees as I drove off. It watched me as I drove away.” She put a hand to her mouth and fought back a sob.

  He thought about reaching over to her. His pastoral instinct said to give her a comforting hug, human contact to bring her back to the present and out of that nightmare. Instead he clasped his hands in his lap. He didn’t trust her. He was afraid she might exploit the moment. If nothing else, he didn’t want to be seen hugging a woman in a car sitting on the vacant end of a car park with the windows fogged up.

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?” Father Gilbert asked.

  “I was afraid to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re in on it.”

  “In on what?”

  “The Woodrich Society.”

  He eyed her. “How do you know about that?”

  “From London. I went up to investigate the Woodrich family. I read about its connections to the families around Stonebridge. I found an expert at the British Museum who explained it all to me.” She reached down to the floor and pulled up her handbag. “I’ve got his card somewhere.”

  “Show me later,” Father Gilbert said. “What did he tell you?”

  She continued to dig in her handbag, then brought out a sheaf of papers. Father Gilbert saw typed pages, handwritten notations, and drawings. “For one thing, the sword, ring, and medallion weren’t really a gift from Thomas Cromwell to Jeremy Woodrich.”

  “What were they?”

  “An insult, more than anything. Cromwell was a rabid reformer who wanted a complete break from the Roman Catholic Church. Though Woodrich had recanted his Catholicism, he used his influence to keep some semblance of its practice alive in the emerging English Church. Cromwell despised Woodrich and gave him the Set, knowing that it was offensive, maybe even diabolical.”

  “What made it diabolical?”

  She handed him a pen-and-ink drawing of an upside-down crucifix, like the one he’d seen on the medallion. “This, as a start. That image was meant to desecrate one of Rome’s most venerated symbols.”

  “I suspected as much.”

  She handed him another page, this one with a rough copy of a photo. It was the symbols of the peacock and plumage. “Pride and vanity, which Cromwell ascribed to the Pope—”

  “Also a description of Satan himself,” Father Gilbert added.

  “He thought the Pope was the Antichrist, the son of Satan.” She pulled out another sheet. “The inscription about ‘Lord of All’ was also a snide reference to the Pope, or Satan. Even the ruby in the centre was meant to look like an evil eye. The ring also has a ruby and the inscription engraved around it. The whole Set was meant to be blasphemous – as nasty an insult as Cromwell could have given Woodrich.”

  “Did Cromwell create the Set or did it exist before him?”

  “It definitely existed before him,” she said.

  “What better way for Cromwell to attack Woodrich than to give him something that might hurt him physically and spiritually?”

  A lorry drove past, rumbling and spraying loudly.

  Father Gilbert asked, “Did Woodrich know what Cromwell was doing?”

  “Probably not. He was not an astute man,” she said. “But he must’ve known it was an insult.”

  “Then why did he keep it?”

  “Woodrich intended to show the Set to the King, to prove what a vile man Cromwell was. But events moved too quickly. The monarchy changed, the tug of war between Catholic and Protestant went on for years. The Woodrich family saw a rise and fall in their fortunes. One of the Woodriches took the Set to America in the seventeenth century. You know about the Salem Witch Trials? It may have played a part in the witchcraft there.”

  “But there were no real witches.”

  She looked at him with something akin to pity. “There were witches. Sarah Woodrich became one of th
em. And she probably enticed her brother Daniel into it. Between the two of them, the seeds of the Woodrich Society were planted. And it was during this time that they discovered the Set had power.”

  “By ‘power’, you mean the alleged curse.”

  “They’re one and the same to me,” she said.

  Father Gilbert wasn’t decided on how much to tell her about the accounts in the Haysham material. Letting her talk seemed like the best option.

  She glanced over at him. “I don’t have the details, but one of the Woodriches made contact with Samuel Haysham somehow. He introduced Haysham to the Society and Haysham brought it back here.”

  “What do you know about Haysham’s version of the Society?”

  “What little I got from David Todd’s archives,” she said.

  “The ones in the attic.”

  “Yes.”

  “Todd gave me the impression that he didn’t know much, apart from family legends.”

  “Then he was being deceptive.” She smiled scornfully as if she remembered something she wouldn’t repeat. “The Society was engaged in all kinds of weird occultism. Black masses, orgies, probably murder. And then there was this thing called an Avenging Angel.”

  “An enforcer for the group,” Father Gilbert said.

  She nodded. “That’s the part that frightened me the most. That’s what I thought had killed Sanders and had come after me. I was sure it would kill me.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  She reached over and took his hand. “Thank God,” she said.

  Thank God. He hoped she meant it.

  “But the Woodrich Set is almost assembled again,” she said.

  “We know the medallion exists, and you saw the sword. But where is the ring?” He wondered if she knew where it was.

  She looked at him, surprised. Her hand came away from his. “David Todd has the ring. He’s had it all along. That’s why he’s been so afraid. He’s expected to take his place back in the Society because the ring has been with his family for years. It’s at his house.”

  “You saw it there?” Father Gilbert asked.

  “I didn’t see it, but I know that’s another reason he was panicked. He’d had the ring, but never thought of it as anything other than some old family heirloom. It’s buried somewhere in the house. He didn’t know where, he said. He was lying.”