Amendment of Life

by Catherine Aird

  ‘Plenty of dark corners there,’ contributed Crosby.

  ‘I’ll say,’ Collins agreed warmly. ‘It’s quite creepy in the Close after dark, I can tell you, but as I say they wanted the work doing like yesterday.’

  ‘See anyone?’ asked Sloan casually.

  ‘The men on the gate – oh, and the Dean and the Bishop went by after Evensong. They were going over to the Bishop’s Palace.’

  ‘And they didn’t say anything about six days shalt thou labour?’ asked Detective Inspector Sloan, well-brought-up son of a church-going mother.

  ‘They didn’t speak to me at all,’ responded Collins. ‘They were talking to each other as they went by. I’m surprised, though, that they didn’t stop outside Canon Shorthouse’s house in the Close.’

  ‘For why?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby, already bored.

  ‘There were some funny noises coming from his garden,’ said Collins.

  ‘Funny as in peculiar?’ asked the Constable.

  ‘Myself, I could have sworn it was a goat bleating,’ said Collins with a light laugh, ‘but then I decided I must be imagining things and got on with the job.’

  ‘Which you finished when?’ At this point in the investigation it wasn’t easy to see where a goat called Aries came in. If it did. But Aries had gone missing at much the same time as Margaret Collins and, like Margaret Collins, it had gone missing between Berebury and Calleford. The goat, though, was still alive and well. It, too, would have to be followed up …

  ‘I didn’t quite finish the work,’ said Collins, ‘but I decided I’d had enough for one day. I reckoned I’d earned a drink and I thought I’d better pack up before they closed.’ He lifted his hand with his first sign of animation. ‘Don’t worry, Inspector. I took the van home first and walked to our local at Nether Hoystings.’

  ‘The Dog and Duck,’ put in Crosby.

  ‘And I didn’t have a drink until I got there,’ said David Collins firmly, ‘and I walked home afterwards.’

  ‘Very wise, sir,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan. This man was obviously no different from the generality of the population in thinking that drinking and driving – or just driving – was the only activity that really engaged police attention. It wasn’t, and he made a mental note to send Crosby to check on the appearance at the Dog and Duck of a tired pedestrian the night before.

  Collins sunk his head down between his hands again and groaned. ‘And all the time I thought Margaret was safe in the hospital with James.’

  A favourite quotation of Sloan’s mother was something about being safe in the arms of Jesus instead, but this didn’t seem the moment to say so.

  Detective Constable Crosby clearly experienced no such delicate feelings. ‘And all the time she was dead,’ he said egregiously.

  * * *

  ‘There was undoubtedly a goat in Canon Shorthouse’s garden, Inspector,’ the Bishop of Calleford assured him. ‘I’m afraid how it got there, though, is a complete mystery to us all.’

  ‘And why,’ chimed in the Clerk of Works defensively. Barry Wright was accustomed to taking the blame for all material defects in the Minster and Close and thought the presence of the goat might well be considered one of them.

  ‘The Canon is, as it happens, the “Deliverance from Evil” specialist for the diocese in the matter of exorcisms and so forth,’ the Bishop informed them, ‘although he is presently away.’

  Detective Constable Crosby gave a strangled snort. ‘I thought that was what we did down at the station,’ he said under his breath. ‘Delivered people from evil.’

  ‘Which’, continued the Bishop serenely, ‘may be relevant.’

  Barry Wright hastened to agree with this. Spiritual matters were not included in his remit.

  ‘And the goat has always had – er – an especial significance historically with evil,’ went on the Bishop. ‘It is usually associated with lust—’

  ‘It was a billy goat,’ put in Detective Constable Crosby from the sidelines, more audibly this time.

  ‘A young British Alpine or goatling,’ murmured the Bishop, ‘so Alison Kirk from the Edsway Animal Sanctuary tells me.’

  ‘There aren’t any Alps in Britain…’, began Crosby truculently.

  ‘There were these other things, too, beside the goat,’ said Barry Wright, still anxious to pass the buck. ‘Bones and diagrams on doorsteps.’ In his opinion, the reluctance of ordained clergy to call things by their proper names led to a lot of confusion. He’d always thought proper words in proper places were what education was all about.

  ‘The pentagram was outside my own door, Inspector,’ said the Bishop, ‘and it’s just as symbolic in its way as the dead animal I found there, too.’

  ‘When was the goat put in the Canon’s garden?’ asked Detective Inspector Sloan, sticking firmly to the mundane.

  ‘Ah, there you have me, Inspector,’ admitted the Bishop. ‘Perhaps our Clerk of Works here can help.’

  ‘He can’t,’ said Barry Wright flatly, ‘and neither can Security.’ Personally he doubted whether Security would have noticed a herd of elephants tramping through the Close after the night shift came on and, lazy beggars that they were, he didn’t for one moment suppose that they would have done anything about it if they had. ‘All I can say is that there’s no question of the goat having strayed into Canon Shorthouse’s garden. It was tethered to a tree.’

  ‘And hungry,’ said the Right Reverend Bertram Wallingford a trifle plaintively.

  In his time Detective Inspector Sloan had of necessity become acquainted with an array of recondite subjects. The feeding pattern of goats was not one of them.

  Yet.

  ‘David Collins tells me he heard the goat bleating’, he said to Bertram Wallingford, ‘and that you passed him in the early evening.’

  ‘Indeed we did, Inspector. The Dean and I saw him working over by the slype as we came out of the Minster after Evensong and went over to my house for supper.’

  ‘And how long have these – er – odd articles been appearing in the Close?’ asked Sloan.

  The Bishop and the Clerk of Works exchanged glances. ‘About a week,’ said the Bishop.

  Barry Wright nodded in agreement. ‘The first lot were there last Monday morning,’ he said. ‘That’s when we called in Double Felix.’

  ‘Why them?’ asked Sloan. The firm of Double Felix seemed to pop up everywhere.

  ‘They’re quite well known in their line of business,’ the Clerk of Works informed him. ‘That’s why we get them in.’

  ‘They did the lighting for the Minster nativity play,’ said the Bishop at the same moment.

  ‘And repaired it when the donkey knocked over the crib and fused the lot,’ said Barry Wright, who had had to beat off a spirited attempt by the play’s producer to charge the work to the Clerk of Works’ maintenance budget.

  ‘Tell me, Inspector,’ said the Bishop, ‘do you hold out any hope of being able to catch the perpetrators of these desecrations in the Close?’

  Detective Inspector Sloan, who thought he had a more serious crime on his hands than desecration, fell back on a time-honoured response. ‘Too soon to say, I’m afraid, your Grace. Much too soon.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  In the nature of things members of the police force are more often the harbingers of bad news than good. The lady at Pear Tree Farm – Mrs Penelope Fellowes – therefore welcomed Detective Constable Crosby with a controlled wariness. He had found her in a field behind the farm, leading a handful of young male goats out to their paddock.

  ‘Hello, there,’ she called out when she spotted him arriving. ‘I’m over here if you want me.’

  Crosby advanced with a certain amount of caution towards a middle-aged woman dressed in a very odd assortment of clothes indeed.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she reassured him, pointing to the goats. ‘They’re only young males. They don’t do any harm,’ she paused and amended this, ‘except perhaps to young females – female goats, I me
an. Goats mature early, you know.’

  Crosby said he didn’t know.

  ‘Can’t leave ’em together after ten weeks,’ she said. ‘They’re precocious creatures, goats.’ She shut the gate of the paddock and turned to face him. ‘So what’s the news then?’

  ‘Your missing goat has been found,’ he said. ‘He’s safe and well.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ she said, visibly relieved. ‘Where was he?’

  ‘In the Minster Close at Calleford,’ said Detective Constable Crosby.

  Mrs Fellowes gave a hearty laugh. ‘I suppose then I should say “Thank God” for that too, eh?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ said the Constable seriously, ‘though I understand the Bishop found it.’

  ‘Good for him,’ said Mrs Fellows. ‘I must be sure to thank him. Very important, that. Wasn’t it Rudyard Kipling who wrote, “Be polite but not friendly to Bishops”?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure, madam.’ All that Crosby knew about Kipling was that he had written a poem called ‘If’, which nobody he knew had ever been able to live up to.

  ‘But how in heaven’s name did Aries get there of all places?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, madam,’ said Crosby truthfully. ‘We wondered if you could tell us.’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Fellowes frankly, shaking her head. ‘I can’t even begin to think why poor Aries should have been abducted, poor thing, let alone taken to Calleford.’

  ‘When did you miss him, madam?’ The Detective Constable got out his notebook in the approved style.

  ‘Not until this morning. He was there all right with the others when they all went back into their house for their afternoon feed yesterday and I’m pretty sure he was around when I gave the kids their evening bottles at half-past seven, although I couldn’t swear to it…’ She gave the Constable a curious look. ‘Will there be anything to swear to, officer?’

  ‘Too soon to say, madam,’ he responded evasively.

  ‘But he definitely wasn’t there when I opened up this morning just after seven o’clock.’

  ‘One goat looks very like another,’ ventured Crosby unwisely. ‘Could you have been mistaken?’

  ‘No, Constable, I could not,’ she came back frostily. ‘You know your criminals and I know my goats.’ She pushed a stray wisp of windswept hair back off her forehead. ‘I had a good hunt for him after I’d done the milking and when I couldn’t find him I rang my neighbours and asked them to have a look. And then I rang the police.’

  ‘So,’ said Crosby, ‘he – Aries, I mean – could have gone—’

  ‘Been taken,’ she interrupted him swiftly.

  ‘Been taken any time after half-past seven yesterday evening?’

  ‘True. But why on earth should he have been? As goats go, he’s not even especially valuable, although’, she added loyally, ‘he’s a fine chap and I’m very fond of him.’

  ‘There is some suggestion of black magic at the Minster, madam…’

  Mrs Fellowes threw back her head and roared with laughter. ‘Oh, poor Aries … not that … he would be quite affronted at the very idea. My goats know I always think of them when I sing the Benedicite.’

  ‘Beg pardon, madam?’ Notebooks, Crosby decided, were all very well in their way, but not if you weren’t quite sure what to write down in them. Or how to spell it.

  Mrs Fellowes opened her mouth and sang in a surprisingly pure voice, ‘“O all ye Beasts and Cattle, bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify him for ever.”’

  Detective Constable Crosby was on his way out through the gate before he remembered to turn round and call back, ‘Aries is over at the Edsway Animal Sanctuary.’ He hoped the goat lady had heard him, but he didn’t stay to make sure.

  * * *

  If he had been being driven by anyone else, Detective Inspector Sloan would have used the travelling time between the police station and Aumerle Court for quiet cogitation. Quiet cogitation, alas, was never possible when Detective Constable Crosby was at the wheel.

  ‘For reasons which do not concern us now, Crosby,’ he said acidly, as the car caromed round a corner at what Sloan thought a quite unnecessary pace, ‘it’s only brides who need to be got to specific places on time. Not detectives engaged on a murder enquiry who could do with a little spare thinking time.’

  ‘Not much to think about, though, is there, sir?’ said Crosby, in no whit put out.

  ‘I see. You’ve solved the case, have you?’

  ‘The husband,’ said the Constable simply.

  ‘And may I ask why, since he seems to be the only person in sight with a cast-iron alibi for the hours of darkness before the postern gate was locked?’

  ‘That’s why,’ said Crosby illogically.

  ‘That’s all very fine and large,’ said Sloan trenchantly, ‘but a little hard evidence wouldn’t come amiss.’ Nor, in his view, would another word with Miss Daphne Pedlinge, which was why they were heading for Aumerle Court now at a ridiculous speed.

  ‘The Super is always saying that most murderers are widowers’, said Crosby, putting his foot down practically to the floorboard, ‘because they’ve killed their wives.’

  ‘All right, then,’ sighed Sloan, caught as ever between the unthinking and the unknowing, but not ignoring the Superintendent’s mantra either, ‘tell me how the husband did it. And why,’ he added, although this didn’t seem the moment to lecture Crosby on the legal irrelevance of motive, murder once being done.

  ‘With mirrors, I expect,’ grinned the Detective Constable, overtaking the startled rider of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a man not accustomed in the normal course of events to travelling behind other vehicles. ‘As to why, I couldn’t say, sir, not being married myself.’

  The motorcyclist was not the only person to be surprised that afternoon. In the Long Gallery, talking earnestly to Miss Daphne Pedlinge, was a thickset young man with tow-coloured hair whom she introduced as ‘M’great-nephew, Bevis.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan advanced with interest. ‘And we thought you were still in London…’

  ‘I thought I’d better come down,’ he said briefly.

  ‘Ah,’ Sloan nodded. The old lady had been quick off the mark, all right. ‘A word with you, if we may, would be very helpful at this juncture, sir.’

  He found himself being regarded with a calculating look by a man whose appearance was a faint echo of that of Miss Pedlinge with overtones of the rugby field. ‘You, too, Inspector? I’ve just been grilled by my great-aunt.’

  ‘Take no notice, Inspector,’ snorted Daphne Pedlinge, all animation. ‘Bevis here doesn’t even know the meaning of the word. He’d have been no good under proper interrogation, I can tell you.’

  ‘I say—’ protested Bevis.

  ‘Wouldn’t have lasted five minutes without giving way,’ pronounced the old lady. ‘The young don’t have any stamina these days.’

  That was another of Superintendent Leeyes’s mantras, too, but Sloan did not echo it now: in his experience what the young always did have was an ample supply of passion, if sometimes misguided. He wasn’t sure, though, whether whoever had killed Mrs Margaret Collins had been exercising passion – coldblooded calculation, more like. Getting her to take an overdose, manoeuvring a comatose woman to the centre of the maze in the dark – after Miss Pedlinge had turned her attention to her tea, anyway – and making an unobserved withdrawal bespoke of much careful planning to him.

  But passion could have come into the equation, too. So, it seemed to him, could Bevis and Amanda Pedlinge – that lady could well be playing for high stakes in the matter of a matrimonial settlement.

  ‘So,’ said Sloan, ‘what exactly did Miss Pedlinge extract from you, sir, if I might ask?’

  Bevis Pedlinge ran his hand through his hair and said ruefully, ‘The fact that I was in the maze yesterday afternoon with Jeremy Prosser and David Collins, although I still don’t see—’

  ‘And was there any reason why you shouldn’t have been?’ enquir
ed Sloan silkily. The possibility that any two – or even three – of the men had been acting in concert was something else that he mustn’t overlook. A chant to do with the starting of horse races drifted unbidden into his mind. How did it go? ‘One to make ready, And two to prepare; good luck to the rider and away goes the mare…’ Had Margaret Collins been the mare?

  ‘Not a reason exactly…’ Bevis Pedlinge was squirming under his great-aunt’s gaze.

  ‘They were plotting against me,’ said a voice from the wheelchair. ‘All of them – to say nothing about acting against my express wishes.’ She stopped and added with icy precision, ‘Against my wishes clearly expressed, too.’

  ‘But Aunt Daphne—’

  ‘Aumerle Court isn’t going to be turned into a theme park while I’m alive, Inspector…’

  Detective Inspector Sloan had heard artificial arguments before – some staged entirely for his benefit. He waited until this one had been played out before him: this, after all, was not an official questioning under caution.

  ‘But Aunt Daphne—’

  ‘By my great-nephew or Captain Prosser, more gate money or not. I have told them before that that was my last word on the subject.’ She twisted the wheelchair until she was staring out of the window again. ‘Amateur dramatics with sound and light at Aumerle Court indeed! Whatever next?’

  ‘Perhaps’, Sloan invited him, ‘you would care to tell us exactly what you did do in the maze.’ His concern was with whoever had arranged the making ‘away with the mare’, not the takings of Aumerle Court.

  ‘Help with the measuring up for the lighting,’ said Bevis Pedlinge shortly. ‘Since my aunt chooses to keep the plan of the maze under lock and key we had to do it all by hand, so to speak, so that Double Felix could get on with working out the circuits for the performance.’

  ‘And after that?’

  Bevis Pedlinge’s face took on a dull red flush, which belied the casual way in which he said, ‘I visited a friend in the hospital at Berebury and then I went home.’

  ‘Which ward?’