Trouble in the Town Hall

by Jeanne M. Dams

  “You could do with new windows, couldn’t you?”

  “I certainly could. Much as I love those tiny old diamond panes, they don’t keep the weather out anymore. But new ones would have to look just like the old ones. This is a listed building, you see.”

  He rolled his eyes skyward. “Oh, yes, endless regulations, and a positive prejudice against nice, weathertight, plastic windows. Can’t be helped, but it’s a pity, all the same. However. Shall we see if there’s anything left of that roof of yours, eh?”

  I led him to the upstairs hall, where generous new leaks had appeared. We spent a few minutes racing between kitchen and landing with most of my collection of pots and pans, the extent of my problem having made itself dramatically apparent.

  When we’d taken care of the immediate emergency, Mr. Benson asked me to show him the attic access, and disappeared. I listened apprehensively to bumps and thumps for a good half hour before he climbed down, as dirty as a chimney sweep and almost as wet as if he’d been outside.

  Once he’d cleaned up a bit and settled back in the parlor, Mr. Benson shook his head mournfully.

  “Bad news, I’m afraid. You need a new roof, from the timbers out. Oh, ta, don’t mind if I do—no, no, that’s quite enough. There’s no point in repairing it, the whole lot is going to go soon. Now, I can put down a tarpaulin for you as soon as the rain stops, and order in the tiles—”

  “Slates,” I said. “You may not have had the chance to look when you came in—the rain started just then. But it’s a slate roof. And of course—”

  “—it must remain slate to please the nosy-parker authorities,” he finished, and sighed. “Cost you a packet, that will, take longer, too. Blasted nuisance, these regulations. But I’ll keep a sharp eye on costs for you, Mrs. Martin. You may trust me for that.” He rose.

  “Actually, it’s my landlord who’ll be paying for it, but I’m sure he’ll appreciate your care. How soon do you think you could get me an estimate?”

  “Now, don’t you worry about a thing, my dear,” he said expansively. “I’ll have it for you just as soon as the rain stops and I can get my men up top to measure. We’ll do you a good job. And then we can take a look at those windows.”

  “Yes, and the other things I want done as well. Mr. Benson, you’ve taken a load off my mind.”

  We shook hands on it (carefully, on my part), and I spent the evening happily planning the details of my kitchen.

  8

  ALAN CALLED JUST as I was ready for bed.

  “Sorry, did I wake you? I’ve been in town all day, but I’ve only just got back to the office and found your message, and I’m off again tomorrow for the next few days.”

  “No, I’m glad you called, though it wasn’t all that important.” The rain pattered against the windows cozily, and plinked into various pots and buckets, not so cozily. “I do have some news, though. I’ve found someone to work on my roof! And maybe draw up plans for the rest of the work as well.”

  “That is good news, indeed!” His weary voice relaxed into warmth. “What shall we do to celebrate?”

  “Come for dinner,” I said promptly. “We can roam all over the house and gloat about how nice it’s going to be. When will you be back?”

  “Late Sunday. Would Monday be convenient for you?”

  “Fine. Sevenish—or whenever you can make it.”

  “I’ll put you on the schedule for seven on the dot as an unbreakable obligation,” he said firmly. “Rank ought to carry some privileges.”

  I fell into a peaceful sleep despite the ragged percussion section still operating in the upstairs hall.

  The next couple of days, however, were disappointing. On Friday I awoke to brilliant sunshine and went off to the bookshop confidently expecting to see a tarp on my roof when I got home. All morning I glanced out the window whenever I got a chance, which wasn’t often. Clarice still wasn’t back, and this time Mrs. Williamson hadn’t been able to find a replacement, so I was left to cope alone with the crowds of tourists brought out by the beautiful weather.

  There was still no tarp when I got home, so I called Benson and got his answering machine. It was nearly six when he called back, sounding harried.

  “So sorry, Mrs. Martin. Three of my men didn’t turn up for work today, and I was hard put to finish a job we had in hand. They’re an unreliable lot, some of these local lads. But the weather is expected to hold fine now for a few days, and we’ll be out straightaway on Monday morning. And I promise you, if it rains, I’ll lay your tarpaulin myself!”

  I had to be satisfied with that, and it was true that the weather stayed beautiful—which actually added to my troubles, since my weeds reacted to sun and warmth by growing several inches a day. The cats, for whatever reason, had a two-day attack of the crazies, that unexplainable burst of hyperactivity known and feared by cat owners everywhere. And to top it all off, Jane, who would have commiserated with me, was down with a summer cold.

  So I made chicken soup, left it (by gruff command) on her back doorstep, and fretted alone. By Sunday I was more than ready for the calming influence of the Church.

  Sherebury Cathedral is a marvel of late-medieval architecture, designed in the fifteenth century for but one purpose: to lift the spirit to God. Five hundred years later it still works its miracles. Even my worst moods can’t stand up to the soaring arches of carved stone, the brilliant stained glass, the quiet but intense drama of the Eucharist, and some of the finest liturgical music in England. At the end of the service, feeling exalted, I joined the line for coffee and buns in the parish hall, still humming the last hymn under my breath.

  “You sound cheerful, Dorothy.” Margaret Allenby, the dean’s wife, stood at my elbow.

  “I am—now. It hasn’t been a very good week, but the service this morning was a great restorative.”

  “I’ll tell Kenneth, he’ll be pleased. Are you really feeling yourself again, after such a frightful shock?”

  Jungle drums again. “Oh, I’m fine. The one who worries me is Clarice Pettifer. I saw they were both in church this morning, but she looked like death—did you notice? White and shaking, and her eyes all red. She hasn’t been to work at the bookshop since it happened, you know. I wonder if the dean should have someone call on her?”

  “Call on whom?” The dean came up to us, beaming, a tray in his hands. “I saw you two languishing back there and fetched us all some sustenance. Shall we try to find a place to sit?”

  The parish hall has been adapted from the old scriptorium, the lone survivor, besides the church itself and the chapter house, of the medieval monastery that flourished on the site until the days of Henry VIII. The building, filled with the light the monks needed for their exacting work of copying and illuminating sacred texts, is otherwise ill-adapted to the needs of a large and busy twentieth-century parish, being full of stone pillars that obstruct traffic and interfere with furniture arrangement. We squeezed with difficulty into a corner, negotiating treacherous folding chairs, and the dean warily set the tray of coffee and buns down on the tippy table.

  “Call on whom, Mrs. Martin?” he asked again, raising his voice. All those pillars and the stone surfaces of walls and arched roof create echoes that make normal speech impossible.

  “Clarice Pettifer.” I repeated my story. “I’m very concerned about her, but I hesitate to go over there again. If I happened to run into Mr. Pettifer, it’d probably make things worse—we hiss and spit at each other. Figuratively speaking,” I added hastily, and the dean found it necessary to cough into his handkerchief.

  “Anyway, Mrs. Finch—do you know Mrs. Finch?”

  “Since we were children,” said Margaret, who was Sherebury born and bred. “She’s chapel, all her family always were, but her mother was one of the cathedral cleaners and used to bring little Ada along. I was a bit older, and we used to play together. Now she’s taken over the family stand, comes in one day a week to do the brass. She does a lovely job, but I do try not to get talking with her
, at least if I’m in a hurry—”

  “Because you’d be listening till Christmas,” I said, laughing with her. “I know. Anyway, she’s been looking after Clarice from time to time, but I think Clarice needs to talk to someone who’ll let her get a word in edgewise. Something’s bothering her, and I can’t figure out what.”

  “I’m glad you told me,” said the dean. “I can’t do it myself, I’ve no time. Sometimes I wish I’d never taken on an administrative post; it leaves me so little energy for any real pastoral work. But I’ll speak to Canon Richards; he knows her quite well, I believe. The Pettifers are not at all regular churchgoers, of course, but she’s a very loyal volunteer.”

  “I know. I think Mr. Pettifer comes mostly to be seen and do a little politicking, and brings her along for window dressing. It didn’t work very well this morning, I shouldn’t think. They were barely speaking to each other, from the way it looked.”

  Someone was trying to get the dean’s attention, waving and inching toward us, smiling as he excused his way through the crowd.

  “Mr. Dean—” I gestured and he turned, trying without success to push his chair back.

  “Ah, Lord Mayor! I’m sorry, I don’t seem able to stand up at the moment. However—do you know Mrs. Martin?”

  “Daniel Clarke,” he said in reply, shaking my hand. “Delighted to meet you, Mrs. Martin.”

  I’d never seen the Lord Mayor up close before. Without the trappings of his office, it was somehow even more obvious that he was a man to be reckoned with. I noticed the very keen eye, the alert tilt to the head—oh, yes, this man had earned his office.

  “I’m so sorry, Kenneth, I know this isn’t the time or place, but with the festival less than a week off there are a few details I do need to check, and I’ll be away for a few days, so if you don’t mind—”

  “Yes, of course,” said the dean. “We’ll have to go elsewhere, if we’re to hear ourselves think. If you’ll excuse us, ladies—oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. Wellington, I didn’t mean to back right into you—”

  The dean finally pushed himself out of the tight corner and led the Lord Mayor away, while Margaret and I finished our coffee.

  “They’re two of a kind, those two,” she said with a fondly exasperated sigh. “Kenneth should leave the details of the music festival to the canons responsible, but he can never feel that anything is really properly done unless he’s seen to it himself. And Daniel Clarke is exactly like him. Small wonder neither of them ever finds time for a holiday.”

  “He’s a conscientious mayor, then?”

  “Oh, yes, I should think so. Of course Kenneth and I try to stay away from town politics, but one can’t help hearing things.”

  Indeed. I suppressed a grin.

  “And people do say he’s hardworking, and incorruptible. Which of course makes him unpopular in some quarters.”

  “I didn’t think there was such a thing anymore as an incorruptible politician.”

  “We-ell, Daniel isn’t exactly a politician. At least, he is in a sense, of course. He’s been on the City Council for a donkey’s age, and they finally elected him head—which gives him the title Lord Mayor, you know. But his primary interest, I think, really is the welfare of the town, rather than his own ambitions. His people have lived here for generations, time out of mind—he’s actually connected with the Lynleys, through his great-great-grandmother, or something like that. You know the Lynleys?”

  “Not personally,” I said with an attempt at a straight face. “They’ve all been dead for a hundred years or so, haven’t they? But of course I know who they were, more or less. Richest people in town, endowed everything in sight, and so on.”

  “There’s more to it than that, actually.” As people were beginning to go home, the noise level was dropping so that Margaret and I could talk in some comfort. “In a sense, the Lynleys and their extended family built Sherebury. They put up a lot of the money for the abbey—the first abbey, the one that burned down in the fifteenth century, you know, and then again the present one.”

  I nodded. The cathedral in use today had been begun in 1415 to replace the eleventh-century Cistercian abbey, destroyed by fire in 1402. With blinding speed, in abbey-building terms, the church was completed in 1504. One short transept leading from the choir to the cloisters had survived the fire, and the monks had been just about ready to tear it down and rebuild it to match the rest, when the dissolution of the abbeys intervened. For over a hundred years the abbey buildings had languished, houses had been built on the grounds (mine among them), and decay had set in, until the political climate changed and the old abbey was repaired and designated a cathedral.

  Margaret was still talking about the Lynleys. “Several of them were abbots over the centuries, and later, deans, when it was made a cathedral. One was even a bishop, not a very effective one, early in Victoria’s reign, I think that was. And, of course, the family laid out the street plan as the city began to outgrow its walls. I could go on, but the point is the Lynleys have been a power in Sherebury for—oh, nearly a thousand years, I suppose. Daniel actually lives in Lynley Hall, though he had to buy it; it had been out of the family for a generation or two. So one can see why he has a protective interest in the town.”

  “Indeed,” I said thoughtfully. One could also see why he might be distressed about Pettifer’s plans for the Town Hall. A man who liked to take matters into his own hands—I wished I’d noticed his hands while he stood next to me. I was going to have to find an excuse, somehow, to get better acquainted with the Lord Mayor.

  ALAN’S DRIVER DELIVERED him right on time Monday evening.

  “Good, you’re being driven, that means you can have a drink or two. When’s he coming back to take you home?”

  “I’m not going home,” he said with a grimace that turned to a laugh when he saw my face. “No, I don’t mean what you think I mean. I have to go back to the office to clear a huge stack of paperwork. So I can’t drink much, or I’ll fall asleep at my desk.”

  “Well, we’ll start with something good, then,” I murmured, very busy pouring Jack Daniel’s into brandy snifters. I was glad I could excuse myself to the kitchen for a little last-minute soufflé preparation; it gave me time to recover from the ridiculous blush.

  Alan and I had agreed, without ever saying a word, that we were not of the generation that fall into bed before knowing each other’s full name. The circles we move in actually tend to the old-fashioned practice of waiting until marriage vows have been exchanged. Still, there was enough serious attraction between us that we’d given the matter some thought. At least I had, which was the reason for the blush. But, unsure as I was about the nature of our relationship, I wasn’t anything like ready for it to take that kind of turn, so I was profoundly glad, when I got back to the parlor, that Alan had forgotten the subject.

  “Do you want to tell me about your house first, or shall I make my report?” he asked, settling himself in my squashiest chair with Emmy on his lap.

  “Report?”

  “On the Town Hall body.”

  “Oh, yes, please!”

  He smiled. “You sound exactly like a well-brought-up child about to be given a present.”

  “It’s the way I feel. You’re not always so forthcoming about crime, when I’m involved. I’m thrilled!”

  “I’m not sure I’ve anything very thrilling to tell you, but for a start, we’ve identified the body. HOLMES tracked him down for us.”

  I giggled, as I always do when the acronym for the police computer system is mentioned. Who would ever suspect the British police of a sense of humor? Emmy looked up, offended until she decided I wasn’t laughing at her.

  “And what did Sherlock discover?”

  “Not a lot more than a name, actually. The man’s fingerprints were easy to identify, because he had a minor criminal record—joyriding, assault, petty larceny, that sort of thing. His name is Jack Jenkins, he was twenty-three years old, and he lived in Sheffield.”

  “She
ffield! That’s a long way away. What was he doing in a little backwater like Sherebury?”

  “That, of course, is one of the things Morrison is eager to discover.” He scratched under the cat’s chin and her purr filled the room with organ music. “There’s the obvious connection, of course.”

  I shook my head. “I may be dense, but . . .”

  “Pettifer. He’s from Sheffield, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t. I didn’t even know he wasn’t a Sherebury native. But Alan, that sounds serious!”

  “Not really. It may mean nothing at all. Sheffield is a very large city indeed. Just because two people were born there doesn’t mean they know one another. The crew are working on Jenkins’s connections in Sheffield, but his associates don’t like talking to the police, and apparently he had very little family. Just his mother, so far as anyone has said, and she seems to be out of town. Something may turn up there, in time. The curious thing, though, is that Pettifer isn’t the only one in the case with a Sheffield background.”

  “You’re going to make me ask, aren’t you?”

  He lifted his glass and drained it. “I’m not being coy, really. It’s only that it seems like lèse-majesté even to mention the name of Barbara Dean in connection with a suspected murder.”

  I choked on my bourbon. When I had finished snorting and could speak again, I shook my head and croaked, “Oh, Alan! Surely not. I admit I’d thought of her, but only because she was at that meeting and is opposed to Pettifer. Really, I’d almost as soon believe the Queen had something to do with all this. You don’t actually think—”

  “I don’t think anything at this stage, and neither does Morrison. He’s gathering information, that’s all. Do you want to hear the results of the autopsy?”

  I thought of my lovely dinner, nearly ready in the kitchen. “How gory is it?”