Murdering Ministers

by Alan Beechey

  “But not quite,” laughed Barry Foison. “And you are available, Patience.”

  Piltdown smiled without meeting anybody’s gaze. “I’m not sure being a Diaconalist minister’s wife is an attractive prospect for today’s young women. But someday I’ll get around to it.”

  “He’s waiting for me to get older,” Tina asserted, which provoked more laughter.

  “We never see you with a girlfriend, either, for that matter,” Joan Quarterboy said to Barry Foison. The smile faded from Foison’s face again, and he pretended to be fascinated with the pattern on his plate. The front door slammed, and a middle-aged man in a blazer and sheepskin-lined car coat came into view.

  “Ah, Dougie, good,” Piltdown announced. “Now we can say grace.”

  Dougie Dock hovered in the doorway and the church members bowed their heads as Piltdown delivered a brief prayer. Oliver did his best to hide the large bite he had already taken from his roll.

  “I know I’m popular, but there’s no need to give thanks every time I arrive,” Dock caroled. He was of medium height and had a thin face, decorated with heavy-framed spectacles and very blue jowls and chin. The lank black hair that still remained on the sides of his head was brushed backwards and hung over his collar. His remark received a mixed reaction from the audience, from deprecating tuts to polite chuckles, but nobody laughed longer than Dock himself. Piltdown introduced Oliver and Ben.

  “Ooh, hell-oo,” Dock crooned, with a peculiar singsong tone to the second syllable. He executed a theatrical half-bow where he stood, then picked his way across the room to shake hands with Ben and then Oliver.

  “And while I’m over here,” he continued, in a nasal voice the swept good-humoredly into the falsetto range, “I must grab a kiss from the youngest dolly-bird in the room.” He leaned over Elsie Potiphar and planted his lips on her cheek. Joan Quarterboy laughed indulgently and nudged Oliver.

  “Now don’t you go getting jealous, Cedric,” Dock said with a wink, stepping away, but managing to nudge Oliver from the other side as he passed. Potiphar grunted amiably, and some of the others laughed again. Only Oliver heard Elsie Potiphar mutter the word “Prick!” vehemently under her breath. Dock tugged playfully at Tina’s pigtail as he passed. She cried “Ow!” with unnecessary vigor and scowled at him, but he just grinned and took an unoccupied chair beside the door.

  “Did I understand you’re writing an article about us, Oliver?” Dock asked. “You ought to come to the church’s annual business meeting on Friday and see what goes on behind the scenes.”

  “Yes, thank you, Mr. Dock—”

  Dock held up an admonitory hand. “Please, I’m Dougie to everyone. Jesus used his first name, and if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for me, eh?” He chortled for some time at the remark. “Besides, if you call me ‘Dock,’ people might think I really am one.”

  “What?” asked Ben.

  “A doctor. Or one of the seven dwarfs, eh, Tina?” Dock laughed again and pulled at the girl’s pigtail. She moved out of range sullenly. “So you’ll come on Friday then. Oliver?”

  “Actually no,” Oliver replied carefully. “I have a prior engagement. My uncle’s drama group is performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

  “Ooh, I say, are you going to see your uncle’s Bottom?” Dock interrupted emphatically and subsided into guffaws of laughter, without taking his gaze from Oliver’s face. Tina spluttered, some of the others laughed aloud, and to his irritation, Oliver noticed that even Sam and Joan Quarterboy were smiling faintly, although shaking their heads.

  “I don’t know how I think of them,” cried Dock as he wiped his eyes, complimenting himself quickly in case nobody else did. Oliver, feeling the amused eyes of Ben and Paul Piltdown on him, bent forward and took another mouthful of fish paste roll.

  ***

  It was close to ten o’clock when Ben’s Lamborghini hurtled away from the curb in front of the church and the sudden G forces caused Oliver to rediscover prayer. They had spent the bulk of the evening in the clutches of Dougie Dock, who had produced a large wallet of color prints from a summertime trip to Canada and proceeded to give them an illustrated lecture without once asking Ben’s professional opinion as to why half the pictures seemed to be studies of his camera’s flash, reflected in the window of a moving tour bus. Dock broke off only once to show a card trick to Tina, provoking loud mutters from Cedric Potiphar about “the Devil’s picture-book” and quieter grunts of “Get a life” from Elsie, although Oliver could not be sure whom she was referring to. The magic trick failed because Tina apparently took the wrong card. Unlike most children, she did not ask the conjuror to do it again.

  At last, Oliver’s social torture ended, and the visitors collected their coats and vanished into the night, but not before Dock had produced a fifty-pence piece from behind his ear twice.

  “What did you make of them?” Oliver asked as they sped along the Westway toward their home in Holland Park. Ben hesitated, pretending to concentrate on an unnecessary gear change.

  “Pleasant,” he said eventually. “Hospitable. Devout. Sincere. Virtuous, I’m sure.”

  “Dull?”

  “Er…possibly.”

  “Yes,” Oliver agreed. “They certainly seem to have chosen a dull way to spend a London Sunday: badly sung hymns in a chilly church, hard pews, and a fifteen-minute sermon, followed by fish paste sandwiches. It was a bit like stepping though a time warp and finding yourself back in the seventies.”

  “The fifties,” Ben murmured caustically.

  “I wish Geoffrey hadn’t got us into this. They’re decent, ordinary people. There’s nothing there for Finsbury the Ferret to make fun of.”

  Ben thought for a moment. “What about this Nigel Tapster?” he asked. “They all seem to think he’s trouble, with the possible exception of your friend Paul. Speaking in tongues, exorcizing evil spirits—no wonder young Tina Quarterboy wanted to be part of Tapster’s private club. Casting out demons is a bit more entertaining than Dougie Dock’s tired conjuring tricks. Finsbury could go to town on that stuff.”

  The Tapsters left as foul a taste in Oliver’s mouth as three cups of Piltdown’s cut-price tea. But Ben had a point. Could “Finsbury the Ferret Meets the Exorcist of Plumley” suit Celestial City’s needs?

  Oliver looked out over West London and sighed. He might have shown more interest if he’d known that Nigel Tapster would be dead within a week and he’d already encountered the murderer.

  Chapter Two

  Save Us All from Satan’s Power

  Thursday, December 18

  Detective Superintendent Timothy Mallard was worried, for the wrong reason.

  There were plenty of right reasons. For one thing, he was sitting on the receiving end of an oversized desk in the office of his boss’s boss, Assistant Commissioner Weed. Out of onomastic necessity, Weed had spent at least fifty percent of his professional life cultivating a personal style so instantly forbidding that, as a protective reflex, the brains of his inferiors had learned to repress any conscious association between the AC’s unfortunate surname and its common botanical meaning. As a result, many a chief inspector in Weed’s area had found his or her sleep disturbed by dreams of menacing six-foot dandelions.

  But when Mallard had discovered, shortly after joining the police force some thirty-five years earlier, that he did not possess the innate ability to intimidate, he had resolved that he was not going to let himself be intimidated by anyone not actually in possession of a weapon that goes bang. Young Weed held no terrors for him, despite the AC’s best efforts over the years. Mallard did not even have the native fear of authority, which left his nephew-by-marriage Oliver tongue-tied in the presence of a peaked cap.

  Nor was Mallard worried about the following evening’s opening night of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He was immune to stage fright (although the audience for the Theydon Bois Th
espians’ Christmas productions rarely outnumbered the cast), he was confident of his lines, and he had even bought into the director’s interpretation of the play.

  Humfry Fingerhood’s late-summer production of Macbeth had been a surprising triumph with local playgoers, largely because the director’s emphasis on bare flesh and copious blood had unwittingly turned a tragedy into a comedy. Humfry now seemed determined to reverse the process with the Dream. He had ditched the horror movie setting he’d used for the previous play, to the disappointment of the more satirical Thespians, who thought A Midsummer Night’s Scream would make a good sequel to Dracbeth. To their initial disappointment, the three large women who had stripped to the buff as Macbeth’s witches had all been asked to keep their clothes on to play Titania’s fairies, and Humfry had limited his trademark nudity to the quartet of young lovers, who would enter the forest in the stiff unyielding costume of the late Victorians and then gradually shed their celluloid collars, waistcoats, petticoats, corsets, and other clothing, as appropriate to their gender. Finally, the lovers would symbolize their early morning awareness of Truth at the beginning of Act Five by skinny-dipping in the orchestra pit.

  (The pit’s regular occupant, a pasty-faced voyeur who played the piano for the Thespians, had been looking forward to this coup de théâtre until he discovered that in “a statement about ageism and homophobia in modern society,” Humfry had cast four overweight middle-aged men as the lovers. The pianist had not been seen since last night’s dress rehearsal. Nobody missed him.)

  Mercifully, Humfry’s only instruction to Mallard was to “play it straight.” This had puzzled Mallard at first, who had always innocently assumed that the “Pyramus and Thisbe” play-within-a-play was a farcical send-up of amateur dramatics. But he deferred to Humfry and had found what he believed to be the key to this unorthodox approach. His only niggling concern was fitting himself into his costume, which had come from a job lot of surplus costumes donated by the Royal Shakespeare Company, from a time when the RSC clearly stressed S&M. He was conscious that the lace-up trousers he had chosen were meant for a much slimmer man and had quietly added a tin of talcum powder to his makeup box.

  Not that Mallard was carrying any surplus weight on his tall, thin frame. Growing older was yet another thing he refused to worry about. His health was much better than it should have been, given the stressful hours he put in each day as a Scotland Yard detective, followed inevitably by a long, wearying commute home because of his insistence on spending every night with his wife, Phoebe. Despite his thick, white hair, he managed to look younger than his age, perhaps because his lined face was partly obscured by nondescript spectacles and a slightly disreputable moustache.

  He was mentally prepared for the passage of time, too. Mallard had spent a very high proportion of his adult life doing the two things he enjoyed most, which were solving crime and loving his spouse, and he felt this track record would spare him from regrets on this side of the grave and from judgment on the other.

  So it was odd that a man with no fear of intimidation, public display, or mortality should be apprehensive of a buff folder, lying closed on Weed’s enormous desk. Mallard knew what it was and he feared it.

  Weed cleared his throat and glared at Mallard, his small eyes as dark and round as bullet-holes under dense, black eyebrows like a pair of crows’ wings. His mouth opened, a sudden gash appearing in his face, and the tip of his tongue probed around the edges of this entrance, as if feeling for lips that weren’t there. Mallard, who knew Weed well by now, returned the smile.

  “Well, Tim,” Weed began, in his faint Yorkshire accent, “look what I have here.”

  “What is it?” Mallard replied cautiously. Weed picked up the folder.

  “It’s your personnel file, Superintendent. And from the look of it, I’d say it’s been out of circulation for some time.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. The most recent date in it is 1976.”

  “How strange,” said Mallard, not casually enough. He crossed his legs, still not casually enough, and failed to ask the question Weed was expecting.

  “It turned up out of the blue during a routine audit the other day,” Weed persevered. “We found it inside the criminal record of one Vic Pilchard, currently serving five years for video piracy in Holloway.”

  “Holloway is a women’s prison.”

  “I didn’t say your file was the only mix-up in this case,” Weed admitted, looking slightly uncomfortable. “Frankly, we were wondering why Pilchard hadn’t applied for parole. But do you have any idea where your file was before Pilchard’s conviction? Or how a senior Scotland Yard detective’s personal information found its way into the National Identification Bureau in the first place?”

  “I couldn’t begin to guess.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you could.” Weed glowered, sensing that the formality of Mallard’s answers, as well as his fidgeting, masked some deeper concern. Mallard attempted to deflect the conversation.

  “But this doesn’t seem to have affected my career,” he stammered. “I mean, I have had a promotion or two since 1976. I was a detective sergeant then, I recall, working for Chief Detective Inspector Cadwallader. Cadwallader the Cad, we called him, although he was actually quite a gentle man, and devoted to his family. His wife was once a Wopsie; they met on a case—”

  “Yes, most interesting,” Weed interrupted, as aware as Mallard that his own career with the Yard did not go back half as far. “Naturally, you haven’t been the Invisible Policeman since 1976, and your computer records are all up-to-date. But that’s the odd thing.”

  Weed opened the folder and shuffled some of the loose pages. Mallard tensed.

  “I did a quick check against these old application forms and data sheets, just out of curiosity, and it seems there are certain…discrepancies.”

  Now for it. Mallard swallowed noisily. Weed’s face darkened in a clear attempt to be conciliatory.

  “Tim, the computer thinks you’re five years younger than you really are. You’re overdue for retirement.”

  Mallard allowed no expression to cross his features.

  “Well, that’s nice to know,” he began amicably, “but I’m not sure I’m ready to hang up the handcuffs just yet. Maybe in a year or two. I’d like to see young DS Strongitharm make it to inspector first.”

  Weed leaned forward and assumed an expression that had once made a burly detective inspector lose control of his bladder in the same chair. “I’m not sure you understand me, Tim. We knew you were well past the recommended retirement age for police officers. At your level, and with your experience, we have the discretion to ignore that. But what this means is you’re older the mandatory retirement age of fifty-five, and no amount of discretion can keep you here once you pass that point.”

  “Rules are made to be broken,” Mallard suggested hypocritically, since he had always held that the remark belonged with the collection of ready-made expressions that only stupid people used to account for anything that happened, such as “There are more things in heaven and earth” and “God moves in a mysterious way” and “A bad dress rehearsal means a good opening night.” Five actors had said that one, like a mantra, the night before.

  “Not this rule.” Weed sat back and adopted what he thought was a sympathetic look, although on the receiving end, it looked as if the AC was signaling lack of responsibility for a fart. “But surely, Tim, retirement’s something you’d be looking forward to? I can’t think how someone like you, who came of age working for the great detectives—men like Cherrill and Beveridge and Cadwallader—could stomach the way the Yard works these days. It’s been a bloody long time since a Scotland Yard superintendent’s name was a household word, front page news, and all that. Today, investigators depend so much on the scientists.”

  “We always have,” Mallard growled.

  “What I mean is, it’s all computeri
zed, decentralized. Every area, every region has its own murder experts right there on the ground.”

  “Maybe, but while there’s still a need for a Murder Squad, no matter how diminished, I’d like to be part of it, even if I’m the last one in the frame.”

  Weed shuddered. “Now there you go, Tim. ‘Murder Squad.’ How many times do I have to tell you, it’s supposed to be Serious Crimes. You’re the last of a dying breed, Superintendent.”

  “All the more reason for some conservation,” Mallard replied darkly. Weed wagged a finger at him.

  “Now, now, Tim, I know why you’re putting up a fight, I know what you’re thinking.”

  Mallard found that hard to believe, since it involved an intimate knowledge of fourteenth-century Huguenot torture methods. “You do?”

  “Oh yes. You think that since it’s an official mistake, we should cut you some slack. And you’d be right. We can still be flexible. So there’s no need to worry.”

  “No?”

  “No, we’ll up your pension to take account of the payments you’ve already missed.”

  Mallard did not answer. He stared out of Weed’s window at the gray London roofscape. Yes, he expected to retire someday, sometime in the next few years; he and Phoebe had already planned the round-the-world cruise they would take before selling their Theydon Bois house and buying that rundown farmhouse in Dorset, which he would painstakingly renovate while first writing his memoirs and then rewriting them in a series of soft-boiled police procedurals. But was that supposed to happen so soon?

  “So here’s what I want you to do,” Weed was saying. “There’s only a couple of weeks before the end of the year, and I know you and DS Strongitharm don’t have a case at the moment. I’m giving you some additional paid leave, starting tomorrow. You could probably use it with Christmas coming. Why don’t you take the time to think about the situation, and then we can start you on your pension in January.”