A Perfectly Good Man

by Patrick Gale

  There was a muffled exclamation from someone in the audience.

  ‘Was there evidence of how this drug and the testing kit had been obtained?’

  ‘There were small parcels in the rubbish bin corresponding to both. The Nembutal had come from Mexico and the testing kit from somewhere in the UK.’

  The ambulance driver was called next and simply confirmed that he had attended Mr Barnes’s address on the day in question and found him dead at the scene. Shortly afterwards Mrs Barnes had arrived and confirmed the identity of the deceased. Given the circumstances, he had taken the body to await a post-mortem.

  When the coroner summoned Barnaby to the table, her clerk slid the Bible towards him for the oath.

  As he placed his hand on it and began to repeat the words after her, it struck him what a very odd thing it was still to ask men and women to swear on a book with which most of them were now unfamiliar. Even amongst nominal Christians, it would surely have been more potent, more binding, to be asked to swear on a child’s life, and yet those same people would have flinched if asked to take an unbeliever’s oath instead. It was a navy blue Bible, small, spotless and, almost certainly, he reflected, doomed never to be opened.

  Asked to describe his relation to the deceased, Barnaby swallowed and opted for a sin of omission rather than an outright lie.

  ‘Lenny was one of my parishioners, although not a regular attender at church. He came to me for confirmation in his teens and attended for a little under a year after that. I’d known him all his life as he lived nearby and went to the village school.’

  He wished witnesses could simply face the coroner and turn their backs on the others in the room. He was conscious of the effort it took not to glance at Nuala.

  ‘How did you come to be with him on the day in question?’

  He glanced instead at Dot. She was regarding him with what he privately thought of as her sermon face: attentive and solemn but slightly too anxious to be flattering.

  ‘He asked me there. He rang me at home the day before. We agreed I would call in at twelve, which was the earliest convenient time for both of us.’

  ‘Did he say why he wanted to see you?’

  ‘No. And I didn’t ask. I never ask. Parishioners often say they want to see me for one reason, then discover once I’m there that they actually need to talk about something else entirely.’

  ‘So you just go.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You knew nothing about Lenny’s suicide plans?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  A man at the back of the hall shouted, ‘Liar!’ and a small commotion flared up. Barnaby could not prevent himself glancing back and fleetingly caught Nuala staring at him. He looked hurriedly forward again.

  The two weeks since the suicide and Barnaby’s arrest had been horrible and seen Pendeen in turmoil. As was often the way with a young death, Lenny’s was labelled a tragedy, with that glib overstatement that brooked no correction, and public response had been correspondingly fulsome, with a spontaneous shrine set up on the railings of the village school. So many flowers and photographs and cards were left that there was soon no room to attach anything else to the railings and a kind of tide of them enveloped the pavement as well so that pedestrians were obliged to cut out into the road to pass by. Lenny in death stood for all youth, so that children too young ever to have known him were encouraged to add to the offerings. Candles were left, and nightlights and the scene after dark took on more than ever the aspect of a site of holy significance, with solemn-faced boys and girls keeping vigil there, reading the messages, photographing the flowers and flickering lights with their mobile phones. Some wept openly. Some hugged their friends. Occasionally, as Barnaby passed, there would be music there, from a phone or guitar or just unaccompanied voices. His daughter, Carrie, told him there was a similar scene in Penzance. The old ladies in Lenny’s block rarely saw such excitement and were tending cut flowers, trimming candles and even occasionally serving refreshments like so many practical nuns in attendance at the tomb of a saint.

  Meanwhile Barnaby had been demonized in the local then the national press as the Vicar of Death, who had done nothing to help a young man dying. One tabloid even suggested he had brought along the means of Lenny’s suicide. The press’s worst was swiftly done and it soon lost interest in what seemed a story without future. But the local effects of what was printed rumbled on. Human excrement had been left on their doorstep and rubbed on the door handles of both churches and, after a nasty moment where a petrol-soaked rag was pushed through the letter box, setting fire to the thick old curtain that had always hung there, Dot had set up a continental-style external mail box and nailed the letter box shut with a length of plank. Luckily they had still been downstairs when the fire was started and had put it out with an extinguisher Barnaby had not known they possessed. The taint of burnt cloth still haunted the house days later.

  More shouting followed. The coroner waited for the fuss to abate on its own, then said she would clear the room of everyone but the required witnesses if there were any further interruptions.

  ‘How did he seem to you when you arrived?’ she asked.

  ‘Cheerful. He had just been for a walk in the sunshine. I mean—’

  ‘We know what you meant.’

  ‘He had just taken himself out in the sunshine in his chair, along the front. I got there a little before him and he seemed calm and relaxed.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘We went inside together and talked and it was then he told me he couldn’t go on, that he couldn’t see the point of going on. I argued with him. I think I reminded him how many people loved or admired him. I certainly suggested his despair would pass. He …’ Remembering the scene, the dazzlingly sunny little room, the blare of bands and thump of drummers from the distant parade and Lenny’s deep, soft voice and the quiet triumph with which he had suddenly said, ‘Not long now,’ Barnaby became dizzy and had to grip the back of the chair in front of him.

  ‘There’s no need to stand,’ the coroner said. ‘You’re not on trial. Please. Sit. Here,’ and she reached, with unwitting irony, to pour him a tumbler of water.

  ‘Go on when you’re ready,’ she said. ‘What happened next?’

  ‘I thought it was simply water in his glass,’ he said, ‘Until he suddenly drained it and pulled a face – I think it was bitter – and then he said … he said not long now. He told me he’d be dead within five minutes.’

  ‘So you rang for an ambulance.’

  ‘Not immediately.’

  There were gasps. He tried not to think about Dot watching him from one end of the front row, or Nuala and her sister from the other.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I believed him when he said there was no time and I saw he truly wished to end his life and … I believe he had a right to.’

  ‘So, let me get this right for the record, Mr Johnson. Knowing Lenny Barnes to be dying, you did nothing to help him?’

  ‘No. I helped him.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By prayer. He asked me to pray for him. And I realized that was why he wanted me to be there at the end. For prayer. I administered Extreme Unction.’

  ‘Could you explain?’

  ‘I anointed him with chrism – holy oil – from this.’ He held up his little oil bottle for her to see.

  ‘You happened to have that with you although you didn’t know his intentions?’

  ‘I have it with me at all times, as I do my communion set. I never know when it might be needed. I am a priest, not a paramedic or a doctor. I have few skills. I’ve been on a first aid at work course – everyone on our parish team has – but I’m not confident I could give CPR correctly. But I do know I can pray for a dying man’s eternal soul and I am confident that prayer will offer comfort to the dying and will be heard with kindness by God.’

  The room was utterly quiet now except for seagulls briefly squabbling on one of its high-up windowsills and the crystalline pa
tter of computer keys as the clerk took rapid notes on his laptop. It seemed to Barnaby that the space was shrinking about him until it was unbearably full of people breathing and listening and waiting. He made himself take another sip of water because nerves were making his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth. He looked up and found the coroner’s face turned full upon him. She no longer looked like a sympathetic royal.

  ‘He lost consciousness before I reached the end of the prayer, I think,’ he continued. ‘He slipped sideways in his chair.’

  ‘Please go on,’ she said.

  ‘Lenny had written letters to his mother and fiancée. I’d promised I’d see they were delivered and I was anxious that should happen and that they shouldn’t be taken by the police.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it was his dying wish and they were private letters, not evidence. So I rang Mrs Barnes. She wasn’t answering, unfortunately, so I had to leave a message.’

  Without thinking he let his eyes stray to Nuala as he spoke, and found her staring back at him, her eyes stricken. He looked back at the coroner and her face of judgement.

  ‘I didn’t go into details,’ he told her, ‘but I said it was bad, that she should ask a friend to drive her. Then I asked a neighbour I had spoken to earlier – Kitty Arnold – to hang onto the letters until Mrs Barnes arrived. Then I dialled 999 and called for police and an ambulance.’

  ‘And you gave yourself up for arrest?’

  ‘I knew the circumstances were ambiguous. I thought it more honest to be arrested and trust in justice than just to slip away. I knew that as an attender of the suicide I might be thought to have assisted it.’

  ‘And as we have seen,’ the coroner said, with a severe glance at the public seats, ‘that is precisely what some people have chosen to believe. However your honesty in the case was respected and the Crown Prosecution Service decided on the Monday following that there was no case to be made against you and the charge of assisted suicide was dropped. Thank you, Mr Johnson. That will be all.’

  She waited, consulting her notes, while Barnaby returned to his seat. ‘Mrs Barnes,’ she then said. ‘There’s no need to come up here as my question to you is very brief. Did you receive this letter from your son?’ There was no answer. ‘Mrs Barnes?’

  ‘Yes.’ Nuala’s voice sounded high and strained, not like herself at all.

  ‘I know this is very hard for you, therefore I’ll word my sentence so a simple yes or no answer will be all you need give. Did the letter Lenny wrote you make it clear he intended to commit suicide?’

  ‘I never read it.’

  ‘You never read your son’s letter?’

  There was a clatter as Nuala stood up, dropping a bag her sister hurried to pick up for her. ‘I was so angry. I burnt it. I never read it. I’m sorry.’ Nuala ran out through the swing doors and her sister jumped up with an apologetic glance at the coroner and followed her out.

  The coroner checked that the clerk had noted Mrs Barnes’s brief testimony, then called for Amy to come up. Derek Hawker came forward instead and Barnaby was struck by the change in him. As a rule Amy’s father was maddeningly secure, arrogantly masculine. One of nature’s PE teachers, he was just the sort of man to relish being asked to stand up on his own and read the Intercessions. As he had a quiet word with the coroner, however, and handed over a letter, he seemed both nervous and diminished.

  ‘Ms Hawker is too upset to address me directly but she has asked her father to submit the letter she received from Lenny Barnes and is content that this be read out,’ the coroner said. She unfolded the letter and read it through in frowning silence before looking over her glasses at Amy. ‘You’re happy for me to read this out?’ Presumably Amy nodded. The coroner cleared her throat. Dear Amy, she read. By the time you read this. Well. You know what the end of this sentence is going to be. I can’t cope any more. Everybody is so kind but it’s not enough. I said when I broke up with you that I couldn’t have you spend your life with only half the man you thought you were marrying. It wouldn’t have been right and I stick by that. But please understand when I say that without you and without my legs, life isn’t worth my while. I love you and hope you’ll move on. Be happy with someone else, someone you deserve and who deserves you. For the record, I did this all on my own, with nobody’s help. I’m getting in Father Barnaby as a witness so there’s no misunderstanding afterwards. All my love. Len. She folded the letter back into its envelope and handed it back to Mr Hawker. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  She thanked the witnesses and composed her thoughts for a moment before standing to address the room. Her verdict was death by suicide and that Lenny’s body should be immediately released to his family.

  Two days later was a Sunday, the third since Lenny’s death. Barnaby rose early as usual. He took Dot her tea then drafted a short sermon on the three resurrections that prefigured Christ’s own – those of Lazarus, Jairus’s daughter and the only son of the widow from Nain – and went on to write rather challengingly about mourning and how, along with married love, coping with loss was one of life’s fundamentals for which Christ left no helpful pattern. He may have wept with his friends at Lazarus’s tomb, but he negated that grief with a miraculous resurrection, as though death were no more than a misunderstanding and their grief a failure of faith. And Barnaby quoted Dorothy Sayers’s account of Lazarus describing life after death as being the moment of glimpsing the ‘beautiful and terrible’ front of the tapestry while the living must content themselves with seeing only the tangle of knotted threads at its rear.

  Carrie had elected to experience her first Quaker meeting that morning with her new friends so he and Dot drove up alone. The church car park was full and the lane up to it crammed with cars as well, so Dot ended up dropping him off at the church door and driving back to park on the main road.

  The robing servers were in a state of high excitement about the crowd and it was the youngest, most computer-savvy of them who explained. Barnaby’s testimony at the inquest had been recorded on somebody’s smart phone and uploaded to the Internet where it had already been viewed and copied thousands of times. Someone else who had been there, the lay leader of an evangelical church that met in an old warehouse in Penzance, a man Barnaby would have assumed would despise him as comparatively establishment and traditional, had started a Facebook Group called We Love Father Barnaby’s Power of Prayer.

  ‘I checked before I came up here,’ the server said, ‘And you’ve already got over four thousand likes. Four thousand!’ Barnaby had no idea what she meant.

  The congregation was the biggest of his career. When he finished his sermon, to which the size of crowd had inspired him to add an improvised sentence or two, there was applause which completely drowned out his request for God’s blessing on it. The sign of peace lasted a good ten minutes. The collection plate was so full that notes drifted off it onto the altar as he held it aloft. They almost ran out of communion wafers, and had to break them into halves and then quarters to eke them out.

  In any other circumstances it would have been an answer to prayers: a country-parish equivalent to the feeding of the five thousand. By the time he had shaken the last worshipper’s hand, however, his face ached.

  He was resolved to call the archdeacon’s office the next morning and apply to leave his post and retire as soon as was conveniently possible.

  MODEST CARLSSON AT 39

  Modest Carlsson had his life, if not his soul, saved in Portsmouth. He had come there on a bleak sort of whim and stayed there through despair. Modest Carlsson was not his real name, naturally. He was raised as Maurice Carver, but the name change had become necessary. And he used to be an English teacher, not a second-hand-book dealer. His life had been balanced, law abiding and uneventful: youth, university, teacher-training college, marriage, daughter.

  But then into his sixth-form class had sauntered a girl, whose name he could no longer even bring his mind to shape. Blue-eyed, tawny-haired, extravagantly flirtatious, sh
e had led him on. Even the judge, a woman, suggested as much in her summing-up. The girl had slowly unbuttoned her shirt as he talked to the class, stroked her cleavage with a pencil as he approached her desk, the same pencil she slowly chewed, staring at him, when lost for what to write during a test. She stood so close to him that he could smell the spearmint on her breath, catch the sugary, fruit bowl wafts of shampoo from her hair. It was often said in the common room that if this girl spent even half the attention on her studies that she lavished on that tumble of hair of hers, she would have made Oxbridge material. She was clever but fatally lazy. Something in her background had sapped her self-confidence too, which was perhaps why she set about ensnaring a teacher when she could have taken her pick from the boy-men of the school who followed her every slouching move and hung on her every mumbled word.

  Up to this point her behaviour towards him was nothing out of the ordinary. Adolescence was about discovering and flexing one’s power over others, or learning to compensate for the lack of it and, as the only adults in range, teachers were natural targets against which that strength could be pitted. Plenty of boys and girls in every class in her year were clumsily flirting with teachers or, usually with more finesse, seeking out their weaknesses and mocking them. Unbeknownst to the pupils, the teachers held regular meetings at which such attacks were aired, even laughed over, and their dangerous potential disarmed by exposure. But then she went further than her peers by starting to write him notes, which she slipped in with her homework. Notes and occasionally photographs. And instead of showing his unsuspecting wife or battle-weary colleagues so as to maintain the moral high ground, he foolishly kept them to himself then, more foolishly still, responded in kind.

  Before long they had an assignation. She slipped into his car outside a supermarket several blocks from the school and he drove her out to a notorious beauty spot car park where, among the lovers’ litter, she suddenly changed her mind and her successful seduction of him became his violent rape of her.