Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle

by H. Mel Malton

  I leaned back, closed my eyes and let the music wash over me, feeling the Sprog sort of stretch out in her cramped quarters, maybe putting her ear to the wall to hear better. At some point, I thought, I would have to think about the God thing in relation to the being-a-parent thing. That would be tricky, especially if I’d given her a taste for it early, by plopping her abruptly, in her seventh month of existence, slap bang next to a choir singing heavenly music in a church as old as time.

  With my luck, she’d come out insisting on being baptized or something. Still, it was too late now. The choir finished their hymn, and the readings began. I suspended my carefully constructed disbelief and settled down to enjoy myself.

  Sixteen

  Any stress or trauma a mother experiences during her baby’s gestation is automatically translated through her heart’s code and body chemistry to her unborn child, and to her unborn child’s heart codes and body chemistry. A shock response occurs when a life threatening danger is perceived by the reptilian brain, and the survival tools of fight and flight are insufficient to insure survival.

  -From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide

  The Cathedral crypt at Canterbury is a marvel, and if you think a crypt is a stuffy basement, you’d be in for a surprise if you visited this one. It was vast and cool and deliciously echoey, mysterious and secret. The ceilings were surprisingly high and the lighting was discreet, so that there were shadows and dark corners, but you weren’t in danger of whanging your nose up against a pillar. They keep a lot of the church treasure down there, too, in glass cases—ancient jewelled chalices and magnificent ciboria (it’s a thing for the wafers) and candlesticks and complicated thingummies for incense. After the service, I had wandered down past the Thomas Becket shrine, which was surrounded by a Japanese tour group, three people deep. I planned to return when it was a little more accessible. The passageway led down into the crypt, and I went, expecting, as I said, a dank basement. Off to the left, there were a couple of tiny chapels hewn into the stone, and being in a sort of contemplative and possibly even religious frame of mind, I sat in one for a bit, probably looking quite prayerful to the one or two people who walked past. I gazed at the miniature altar, above which stood a statue of a saint in a little alcove, next to a glowing red candle. I was surprised at how Popish the Cathedral was—as far as I could make out, the Anglican tradition was as RC as anything I’d grown up with, and it made me feel strangely comfortable and at home, though I never would have admitted that to Aunt Susan. (At least, not sober.)

  I could hear the advancing twitter and mutter of the tour group, so figured they had finished hogging the shrine and were now in the crypt. I didn’t want to get stuck in the middle of them. I’d had enough of crowds, so I left my chapel pew and noticed a little wooden door at the far end of the narrow room, in the shadows. Being a nosy so-and-so, I tried the handle and found it unlocked. Ignoring the sign that suggested “Authorized Persons Only” were allowed to use the door, I opened it, stepped through and found myself in a narrow stone passageway, with stairs leading up and a light at the end. I was completely alone for the first time since early that morning and again felt that amazing sense of being cocooned in history. Above me, I knew, the cathedral tower soared to a height of 575-odd feet, where gargoyles glowered, carved by stonemasons hundred of years ago. The men who laid the walls beside me, stone-on-stone, lived and breathed and spat and hiccoughed like real people, bruised their fingers on the stone, left their sweat upon each one. I touched the walls as I climbed, wondering what it would be like to have extrasensory powers, to touch the stone and know, somehow, who else had touched them.

  The stairway ended with a low, filigreed iron gate, heavy and thankfully unlocked. It squeaked as I opened it, and I found myself in a kind of courtyard, quite empty. It was like being in a monastery—I half-expected to see a hooded figure in a monk’s habit, walking along its covered length, or sitting with a book of psalms in the square patch of brown grass in the centre. I suppose it was the cloisters, mentioned in the brochure, and I was amazed that there was nobody else there, that I was granted a private viewing. As I emerged and shut the squeaking wrought iron gate behind me, I heard a scurrying in a far corner, as if someone were just exiting, stage left. I caught the impression of a bald head and a dark garment—my imaginary monk, perhaps, tonsured and interrupted at his prayers. In the distance I could see some ruined stone work, the remains of an earlier version of the Cathedral, maybe. The age of everything felt suddenly heavy and dark, as if I shouldn’t be there, that there was some danger that I hadn’t anticipated. A moment later, I stumbled upon the baby.

  It had been thrown into a corner, and for one very nasty moment, I thought it was real. It was Alma’s agitprop baby-on-a-stick, and it had been sliced from nave to chops, its stuffing strewn here and there like dandelion fluff. I willed my heart to stop beating so fast and tried to calm down the Sprog, who all at once was drumming at my innards with her little feet. I crouched to get a better look, patting my tum and muttering sweet nothings at her, or at myself. Whoever had done the deed had almost beheaded the puppet, cutting it at the neck and obviously thrusting a hand inside to get at the stuffing. It was grotesque—the chubby baby face was all caved in, its smile a kind of rictus, its brains splattered. I remembered suddenly the tug-of-war between Alma and her Right-to-Life opponent, the “Let them live!” chant, and the film clip of the riot police in Karachi. I felt faint and had to put my head between my knees for a long moment.

  If I had been a different kind of person, I might have screamed, I suppose, but I didn’t. However, I didn’t want anybody else to find the puppet as I had. Some elderly monk, perhaps, stumbling on it and having a coronary. I gathered up the pieces, trying to stuff the wayward batting back into the head (which was unpleasant) and picking the thing up in my arms like a corpse. My fingers were trembling like Rosie does when she’s scolded. I figured someone had wrestled the baby away from Alma sometime during the demonstration—likely the woman she was doing the tug-of-war with. She would probably be looking for it. I gazed around me, searching for an exit sign, but there was none to be seen. I didn’t know where the exit was, and I was afraid, the tingly feeling of touching the past having been replaced by a cold, clammy present.

  I listened. Silence, like a tangible thing, except for the dripping of some water off the cathedral roof in an alcove, where there was a sign saying “Caution, falling masonry.” I walked rapidly through the cloister, my footsteps echoing in a frantic little staccato, like a radio play soundtrack, and eventually I found a door, which I hoped would lead me back into the main body of the church. Another stone passageway, this time not filling me with the delight of history, but instead making me feel as if the veil of time between the now and that day back in 1170 when Becket was murdered was very thin indeed.

  I emerged into chaos. There were dozens of people, giving off the kind of panic-energy that you can almost smell when there’s been an accident. They were milling around and craning to get a look at something. I had emerged a few metres west of the door I’d taken to go outside, so the Becket shrine was to my left.

  “Stand back, there, stand back,” a strong, authoritative voice was saying. I didn’t stand back—I pressed forward, the murdered baby puppet lolling in my arms. A woman beside me gasped at it and moved away from me. “Aaaaow, Arthur, lookit thaat,” she said.

  When I got to the front of the crowd, I could see the Becket shrine, dramatically lit by several well-placed spotlights. A still, huddled figure was crumpled at its base. I could see a head with brown hair, one arm flung out. I thought I saw blood. I knew at once it was Alma.

  That was probably when I screamed her name. At least I think I did, because I got a lot of attention, very quickly. The man telling people to keep back was a priest, a proper one with a cassock, cinched at the waist by a thick leather belt, a priest’s collar at his neck, a very handsome man whose distress had not made him lose one inch of his stature. He exuded control and comp
etence.

  “Do you know this woman?” he said to me, coming forward at once and taking my arm urgently.

  “Oh, God, is she dead? Have you checked?” This was kind of dumb, but you never know. I rushed in close, stepping around the blood, which was pooling in an indentation in the stone floor where, presumably, King Henry and millions of others had knelt in prayer.

  “Yes, I’m horribly afraid she is dead, my dear.” He tried to pull me away. “She’s hit her head on the stone, I think. We mustn’t move her, you know.”

  “But she’s pregnant,” I said. “We have to do something to save the baby.” Her body was curled in on itself, and she could easily have been mistaken for, well, just a rather large woman, rather than a pregnant one.

  “The ambulance has just been called. Paramedics are on the way,” he said.

  “Did you tell them she was pregnant? Sometimes a baby can survive beyond the death of the mother,” I said. I was crouching at her side, reaching for her distended belly, feeling for a kick, a sign that the other life inside her might have a chance. She was still warm. There was no movement under my hand, though. Her pregnant belly felt relaxed, soft, like a balloon that was losing air. I had to do something, but I didn’t know what. Crying seemed to be a reasonable option, so I began that at once.

  “Yes, we gathered that she was with child,” he said, very gently. “The medical people will do all they can, you know.” My own Sprog shifted in sympathy. A clerical person came forward just then with a dark cloth, which he draped over Alma’s still figure as my priest friend helped me to my feet.

  “Are you a relation of hers?” he said. I shook my head, unable to speak yet. “I wondered, you see, because you look remarkably alike.”

  “I only met her yesterday,” I said.

  “We just found her a few minutes ago,” he said. Behind us, some junior priesty people were clearing the crowd back. “We’ll have to ask you all to stay,” one of them was saying. “Just until the police come.”

  The priest with me suddenly produced a cellphone from his belt. He punched a number and whispered to the person at the other end to seal all the exits.

  Goodness, I thought, in a wry aside, swallowing my sobs. Bet they didn’t teach him that stuff at theological school.

  “Her name’s Alma Barrow,” I said to him when he’d finished. “She lives in Birmingham and was involved in the Right-to-Life march this morning. As a pro-choice person.” It seemed important to let him know that—that she wasn’t one of the fanatics. He made a kind of tssk sound with his mouth, as if he’d known these people would be trouble.

  “And what’s that you’ve got there?” he said, pointing to the puppet, which I had stuck under my left arm like a forgotten parcel. I explained what it was, and where I’d found it.

  “It would have incensed some of the Right-to-Lifers, maybe,” I said, clutching the ruined puppet close, “but not enough for them to do murder—to whack her on the head, eh? But they should question all those rally people first. Where the hell are the ambulance people?” He winced at the “hell” but let it pass.

  “Now come and sit down, won’t you—away from this. Look, they’re just coming now, and the police are here, too.” The paramedics assessed the situation as quickly as the priest had promised, realizing a baby’s life might possibly be saved. There was a brief argument with the police, probably because Alma’s body was very likely part of a crime scene, but the paramedics won. As they were putting her onto a stretcher, the dark cloth covering her slipped aside, and I had a brief look at her face. Her eyes were wide open, staring in shock, and the blood from a terrible gash on her temple made crimson tracks down her face. Had someone whacked her on the head before stealing her baby puppet? Where was the stick the baby had been carried on? Maybe it had just been a struggle, and she had fallen forward and cracked her head open on the step. Could that kill you? Perhaps it could, especially if you were pregnant and, well, delicate. Whatever had happened, intentional murder or an accident, Alma was dead, and it was too horrible to take in.

  She had spilled her blood in exactly the same spot that Becket had, and I wondered if it had been at the behest of some Right-to-Life leader, suggesting that someone rid the demonstration of this turbulent woman. My priest friend muttered to a colleague just after they took her away that they would have to resanctify the place before the day was done. His words flipped me out more than seeing her gashed head. Where was God in all that? And would He come back again, after they’d scrubbed the place and maybe lit some candles?

  I was lucky, as it turned out, to have found the baby puppet and to have stumbled in on the scene when I did. I was one of the first people questioned, which meant I was also one of the first people released. I had studied the crowd of people who were sitting obediently in the pews in the main body of the Cathedral, as instructed. It would take the police a long time, I figured, to sort out who was who and what was what. I watched them being separated into two groups—the Right-to-Lifers, who all wore fluorescent pink “Let them Live!” badges, and the tourists, who didn’t. I didn’t see the tug-of-war lady, but I confess I put the coppers onto her, thinking that she might be able to shed some light on what had happened.

  I was interviewed by a British policeman [name tag: Detective Constable Potts], who walked me through my meeting with Alma the day before, my seeing her at the march, my discovery of the dismembered baby (to which he seemed gratifyingly to attach as much importance as I did, taking the thing into custody) and my subsequent emergence into the fray. He was impossibly young, I thought. With extremely fair hair and freckles across his nose.

  “You say the shrine was full of tourists before you went into the cloisters?” he said.

  “Yes, I didn’t want to go there while there were lots of people,” I said inanely.

  “We’re just trying to get the times down. There aren’t many people here, except for that Japanese tour group, the demonstrators and the people who attended Matins,” he said.

  “I was at Matins,” I said.

  “So you’ve said. And the tour group was there when you went down into the crypt?”

  “Yes. I spent about twenty minutes down there, and then the tour group came down to where I was in the chapel place, so I deked out to the cloisters through a little door.”

  “Deked?”

  “It’s a hockey term. Sorry. I meant, you know, snuck. Sneaked.”

  “A little door? Can you show me?”

  I led Potts along the route I had taken, down through the passageway into the crypt, past the Church silver bits, into the little chapel, where I’d lit a candle (yes, I know, but heck) for my parents, and then back through the little door marked “Authorized Persons only.”

  “We mustn’t go through there,” Potts said, suddenly all young and awkward, as if he were still at the private school from which, judging by his accent, he had only just graduated. (That would be a public school, according to Brent Miller’s British lexicon).

  “Well, I know it says you can’t go though there, but I did, and there weren’t any alarms or anything,” I said. He followed me through, albeit reluctantly. The iron gate squeaked again, ominously this time, I thought. Which reminded me of the scurrying figure in the corner of the courtyard who had left as I came out. I told Potts about that. I showed him where I’d found the baby puppet. It seemed much less scary and mysterious now that I had a solid policeman at my side. We found the place easily—there were still bits of fluff left, baby’s brains, I called them, which really shocked Constable Potts, whose eyes widened for a fraction of a second. His next question was icy and professional.

  “And you were here how long, madam?”

  “I don’t know. Not more than ten minutes, I guess.” We traced my steps back inside, and on the way, I suddenly remembered that there had been no sign of Alma’s pamphlets, unless they were underneath her body. Had the murderer taken them away and hidden them? Were they considered that controversial? Was reproductive politics tha
t serious? Still, there were abortion providers who had been shot to death, even in placid and serene Canada, so I supposed the issue was—serious, that is.

  “She was giving out pamphlets during the march,” I told Potts. “If there weren’t any at the scene, maybe the murderer took them with him—or her.”

  “We don’t know that it’s murder, you know, madam,” he said, in a cautionary way. “Your friend may very well have fainted for some reason and hit her head on the stone. We’ll have to wait and see what the medical people say.”

  “If it wasn’t murder, who stole the baby and dismembered it, then? A Japanese tourist?” I said.

  “I’m just cautioning you not to go about using the word murder,” he said. “We don’t need this matter all mucked up with the tabloids turning up, publishing screaming headlines. I must ask you to keep quiet about all this.” He took down my personal information in his little notebook: where I was staying, how long I’d be in Canterbury and so on.

  “I bet the case will be zipped up nice and neatly with ‘death by misadventure’ written on it,” I said.

  “You’ve been reading too many Miss Marple books,” D.C. Potts said, favouring me with a little indulgent smile. “Look, I know you’ve had a dreadful shock, which is not good for a woman in your condition. Go back to your B&B and have a little lie-down, and if you think of any other details, give us a ring, all right?” I nodded, feeling patronized and trying not to let my temper get the better of me. I headed for the exit, but he stopped me with a final word.

  “And we’d appreciate it if you would stay in the area for a few days. Keep us informed of your whereabouts and let us know when you’re planning to return to Canada.” Wonderful. Even when I was in a distant country, far from Kuskawa and my life there, I hadn’t kicked the habit of stumbling upon dead bodies. It was never my choice, you understand, it just seemed to happen. And this time, I was on my own, a stranger in a strange land.