“She’s a control freak, then?”
“Yes, or was then. And this got into her other personal relationships. There were a string of these, and George said either Jean gained the control that she yearned for and then over time lost interest—”
“Why? No challenge any longer?”
“Something like that, I should think. Or else she was unsuccessful, the partner didn’t want a role as an underling, and she moved on.”
“I see.” Collins thought for a moment. “Did Mr. Wilson know much about Jean’s career in the church?”
“No, not a great deal, though he sometimes read about her in the paper. Crossley takes the Halifax Guardian. I expect if he’d seen the Huddersfield paper regularly he’d have seen the name a lot more often. She’s currently a sort of roving stand-in around the Yorkshire parishes, and is tipped for a seat or place in general synod or convocation or some such body. Sorry to be vague, but I was brought up to be vague about religion. And I don’t think the C of E means any more to George than it does to me. He just has a general sense that she’s done pretty well and is highly thought of.”
“Well,” said Collins, getting up, “a good name is always worth hanging on to, and a lot of good names conceal a shadow life of one kind or another. Look at politicians. Sometimes churches are like politicians: they have a great deal of covering up to do—or feel that they have to. In some cases I feel the high-ups ought to be charged with conspiracy. I’m thinking about concealing abuse against children by clergymen. But that’s beside the point. It still seems as if we’re a long way from a motive for murder.”
Eve and Rani got up.
“I’ve got her coming to talk to me, by the way,” Collins said, leading the way out. “Ackley’s fetching her up.”
“Who? Jean Mannering?” asked Eve.
“The same. I got her on her mobile and she’s coming over from Bradford.”
They came out of a corridor, on to a wide, airy landing with a view down to the ground floor just below. As they all idled along, talking about Evelyn Southwell, a door opened below them and coming through and aiming for the interview rooms, Eve saw a young detective, obviously newish and eager to please or make some impression of a positive kind. With him was a woman in a gray skirt and a god collar over shirt and dark stockings. She was talking politely and relaxedly but in low tones, and Eve caught only a few words.
“I do get many more people saying how much they welcome women to positions of influence in the church than I hear from people who curse the day it happened. But then I suppose I would . . .”
The last word faded as they walked toward swing doors and out of hearing. Eve swung around and looked at Superintendent Collins. He nodded his head.
“That’s her,” he said.
“But it’s not,” said Eve. “That woman is definitely not Jean Mannering.”
CHAPTER 14
The Worshipper
The woman who now disappeared from their sight had been confident, unfazed by her surroundings and very attractive. She had made an entrance like an actress, and she had conducted polite and intelligent conversation with the rookie policeman with admirable interest and concern for him. She was everything that an actress turned vicar should be.
Eve turned to Superintendent Collins. He looked irritated, but also keen to get to the bottom of things.
“I must go and talk to her,” he muttered. Rani and Eve looked at each other, turned, went downstairs, then out to Rani’s car in silence—companionable, thoughtful silence.
They had been driving four or five miles on the road to Crossley when Eve broke the silence. She said to Rani:
“Would you be willing to drive me to Huddersfield?”
“Yes,” said Rani without a moment’s hesitation, changing course at the next convenient turnoff and driving with his usual confident insouciance. “I won’t ask what you’re intending to do.”
“No, don’t. And don’t stay with me, or too near me. I don’t want to be responsible for getting you officially rebuked, or to hold back your career in any way. What a beginning that would be for us! Just keep well away.”
“We’ll think about that when we arrive. You haven’t told me yet where we are going.”
“It’s a suburb called Heckford, a couple of miles from the center. The house is 23 Portland Gardens. Leave me around a corner maybe, or a fair way away.”
“I know the street,” said Rani. “We had a gang bust-up near there that looked like a domestic but blew up into something big. I’ll keep well away from the house.”
“I wonder what they are doing,” agonized Eve. “What she is telling them . . . I like your Superintendent Collins. I think he will understand what is happening.”
As they neared Huddersfield, Eve said: “I keep seeing the doorbells. Naylor, Dougall and Mannering. Top to bottom. I wonder if she’ll be in . . .”
When they got to Portland Gardens, Rani peered at the numbers, and when they had decreased to the fifties he turned up into a side street and parked the car.
“You could go down the parallel street at the back,” he said, pointing. “See—there where that man is turning off. You might be seen from the kitchen window, but it’s better than being seen from a great distance. Go down two blocks and then take the road back to Portland Gardens. And be careful.”
In spite of her declared determination not to involve Rani, Eve was comforted by his evident understanding of what she was about to do, and how she had worked out the situation.
“Of course I will,” she said, getting out of the car. “I don’t think she will pose a threat.”
“But remember she’s a—” But the car door shut and she was gone. Rani shook his head, but felt that he did not need to remind Eve of what she was.
She turned off out of his view and walked down the street parallel to Portland Gardens. After two blocks she turned into another connecting road and made her way back to the Gardens that had no gardens. She threw a quick look around her, remembered number 23, then walked up to it, through the gate and up toward the three doorbells. She stood before them for a moment, then rang the lowest one. She listened, and was sure the ringing was in the ground-floor flat. Then she heard footsteps coming downstairs, and the front door opened.
“Oh, Miss McNabb.”
There was not a great deal of surprise in the tone.
“Yes. Can I come in?”
“Well, I don’t . . . Yes, yes of course. Mind the stairs. The carpet is getting rather frayed.”
She led the way up, and Eve could not see her face. When she opened the door to the flat and let her in she did not gesture to the chairs as she had before, but just stood with her back against the door, her face questioning.
“You wanted to speak to me?”
Eve looked around her, slowly.
“Yes . . . I wondered which flat you would take me to. I suppose you can hear the bell ringing downstairs from here.”
“I don’t see what—”
“I think you probably know that Jean Mannering is currently at the police headquarters in Leeds, being questioned about the murder of Evelyn Southwell. That does alter the situation, doesn’t it, Miss Dougall?”
The face began to crumble. Then she walked unsteadily across the room and sank into an armchair. The first words she spoke seemed to Eve quite irrelevant, except that she was putting off talking.
“I couldn’t take you downstairs, not the first time, or now. It’s full of photographs of Jean in her parts with the drama groups she’s acted with. Wonderful photographs: Judith Bliss in Hay Fever; Nora in A Doll’s House; Mrs. Danvers; Miss Jean Brodie. Also one with the archbishop of Canterbury. You would have realized that was Jean, and I wasn’t her.”
“Yes, I would.”
“It all began with such an innocent mistake . . . Well, not even a mistake really, except that Jean is so . . .” She turned and looked at Eve, a penetrating look, as if willing her to believe. “We’ve been together—or not exactly together, but
spiritually so—for a long time now, but we’re still in love. I love her quite as much as when we first realized we had something special between us. Long ago. It was soon after Jean came back up north. She was leading the chorus of women in Murder in the Cathedral. I was one of them. I’ve always been a Christian. It has made sense of my life, made me understand why God made me so different. His purpose through me. Jean was so different from me, but yet the same. We seemed just made for each other. And we were.”
The last was said fiercely. Eve, mindful of her duties as a possible police employee, said: “I think you should be saying this at the station.” Miss Dougall looked at her, disconcerted, fearful.
“Do we have to? Now?”
Eve looked at her in the most schoolmistressy manner she knew of, inherited from her mother.
“You realize that Jean is being interrogated as a suspect for Mrs. Southwell’s murder. It will be very frightening for her.”
“Yes . . . Though nothing frightens Jean . . . Can I put a coat on?”
While she fetched a coat from the hall, Eve rang the duty sergeant at Millgarth.
“Will you tell Superintendent Collins that I’m coming in with Miss Dougall, Jean Mannering’s partner. And will you ring DC Rani on his mobile and tell him to fetch me. He knows where.”
Miss Dougall came back in, looking quite composed now in a coat of pinky beige, and they went slowly down the stairs.
“I suppose I won’t see the old place for a long time,” she said. “We’ve been so happy here. Together but not together. The church would not have been at all pleased. It was all like a game, a lovely children’s game!”
She moved down the narrow stairs with the confidence of long use of them. As she continued forward through the front door, Eve thought there was something queenly about her, and then changed her mind: it was something actressy. Perhaps the stage techniques of her lover had somewhat rubbed off on her. Then she remembered that the church often attracted people by its ceremonial, its costumes, its pageantry.
Rani drove up as they went through the gate, and Eve put Miss Dougall in the back and then herself slipped in the other side. As Rani drove off she took up the conversation from where they had left it.
“You haven’t told me how Miss Mannering became interested in religion. Was it acting in the play that led her to the church?”
“Oh yes, partly,” said Dougie brightly. “And partly me. And partly the fact that women were taking a tremendous step forward in the church at that time. It was so splendid to talk about it, wonder whether Jean could be a part of it!”
“Those must have been exciting times for you. So Jean wanted to be part of that movement, did she?”
“Oh yes, she did! She was just finishing an Open University course at the time, and she got time off work to study the theological and historical part of the requirements for ordination. She said it was just to have ‘another string to my bow,’ but I always hoped it would be more than that, and thank God it caught her imagination. It was awfully exciting, for me as well as for her.”
“You never thought of entering the priesthood yourself?”
She shook her head vigorously.
“Oh no. I don’t have the brains. My mother always told me I wasn’t likely to go far in anything that needed brains, and she was right. I could deal with people’s practical problems—I was a social worker, so I’d spent my whole life doing that—but spiritual ones I couldn’t begin to advise them about. Jean could, and I found it wonderful playing a small part in what happened. Of course it meant changes in our lives . . .”
“Had you been living together?”
“Oh yes. And we changed that. Jean said she saw nothing wrong in it, but it would be a terrible distraction if the newspapers got on to it. The church could probably tolerate the situation, she said, if they swallowed hard, but it would divert attention from important things and make her work much more difficult. So thereafter we lived close to each other but not with each other. I didn’t find it sad. It was more exciting—as I said, like a game.”
“The present situation seems ideal,” said Eve.
“Yes, it is,” said Dougie, turning to her with a quite charming smile. “The top flat is usually let to a student. They have very little interest in anyone but themselves. They always know that we’re close, and any message for Jean can be given to me. I retired from social work two years ago.”
“And Jean’s ‘calling’—is that the word?—has been a great success, people say.”
“Oh, it has. First in her parish, then in the new troubleshooter role. She’s much loved, I can tell you that. So often she’s asked, when she’s sorted out a parish and got things on to an even keel, if she couldn’t take it on, but she’s always said the change from parish to parish suits her, and she wouldn’t give it up for the world. There’s a very good chance of her being elected to general synod.”
Miss Dougall said this last very proudly, as if it were an assured place in the heavenly choir. Eve thought she detected signs of mania in the voice, and in the eyes, but thought she had probably known too few really religious people.
“And all this time the business of getting rid of my father has been hanging over her.”
Dougie shot Eve a glance.
“You know about it? It’s been hanging over both of us.”
“When did you learn of it?”
“Oh, while she was studying for the priesthood. She said she wanted to make a clean breast of it. But in fact she told me very little then. How did you learn about it?”
“I talked about it with my father in Australia.”
“Your father? So at least he’s—”
“Not dead? No, he’s not dead.”
“Jean heard the general talk, and assumed he was dead. She has always been afraid he committed suicide. Small things can have such terrifyingly large consequences. It was a silly thing to do, and quite out of character for Jean. She went and removed the . . . the stuff herself from your house.”
“After my father had flown to Australia.”
“Yes, but . . . Oh, she was so ashamed of herself! She only told me the full details recently.”
“I think she should be ashamed. Tell me how it came about. How she says it came about.”
She was looked at as if she had suggested something dirty.
“Oh, Jean never tells me a lie. If she says it, it’s true. She was desperate to get rid of John from May’s life. She says he was an irrelevance. May could never settle down into a single-sex relationship because John was always around. He had become a fixture in her life, Jean felt, without May any longer feeling any love for him. But he was the father of her child—you—and unless he was somehow got rid of, May would never get the full pleasure of their love for each other.”
“If May felt that love in the same way.”
“Oh, Jean was quite sure she did, and could in an even greater way.”
“And the weekend when they were both away, May and John, presented Jean with a wonderful opportunity.”
“Exactly. She felt she had to use it. She had the run of your house from the Friday morning, when your mother left for her conference in Birmingham. Jean was to feed the cat.”
“McGonagall. I remember him from much later. He lived to be a highly respected elder-statesman cat.”
“So she got together a collection of . . . stuff . . . I find this highly distasteful—”
“How did she get it together?”
“Oh, there was no problem about that, I can assure you. Pictures of young girls appeal to both sexes, in fact. Elements in both sexes, I should say. It’s something I intensely dislike. Jean does too.”
Ho ho, Eve thought.
“Anyway she stowed the porno magazines in a wardrobe in the spare bedroom and that was all that needed doing, apart from ringing your father in his hotel and getting him on the plane, with the ticket she had booked, which was being held for him at Heathrow.”
“Wasn’t she just a bit apprehe
nsive that he’d laugh at the whole business?”
“Oh she was. It was touch and go.”
“What would she have done if he had?”
“Jean assured me she would never have rung the police in earnest. She would just have gone and removed the pornography.”
Hardly worth putting it there in the first place, Eve thought. This from Jean Mannering, who never told her partner a lie. She left a brief silence.
“But in fact my father caved in to the whole blackmailing scheme.”
“Yes. You use unkind words, but Jean was convinced he almost welcomed her ultimatum. She thinks that it solved a problem he had been wrestling with but was undecided about. The situation with Jean and your mother cannot have been good for his vanity.”
“Leave his vanity out of it. My father has as little vanity as any man I know.” Eve’s tone had become tart. “The situation was quite simply bad for everyone. And Jean was quite wrong about my mother’s feeling for her as things turned out, wasn’t she?”
“Yes,” said Miss Dougall reluctantly.
“Tell me about the phone call.”
“Well, Jean had been talking that evening at the Sapphonics club. They had an early evening lecture, then dancing, fun and games, or whatever. After the talk, which was on women in business, she went and phoned your father twice before she got through. The Sapphonics had a little office in the Co-op Social Club building where the meetings were held, and she used that, since she was on the committee. First your father couldn’t believe his ears, then he swore at her, then he said the police wouldn’t be interested, which wasn’t true.”
“No. The police are still very interested in Internet child pornography,” said Rani from the front seat. “And even more so if that’s possible when the child model is obviously being abused in some way, which is often the case.”
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