Into the Blue

by Robert Goddard

She frowned with irritation, then seemed to decide against contesting the point. ‘You’d better come through, then.’

  Harry ventured along the hall. Through an open door to his right he made brief eye-contact with a sullen little boy who was lying on the floor staring at a comic, surrounded by model racing cars. By the time Harry reached the kitchen, the girl had taken the place of her mother in rapt contemplation of whatever was gushing so ferociously on the other side of the room. Mrs Waghorne, meanwhile, had gone ahead of him down a side-passage and was peering round the edge of a door, whispering explanations to someone on the other side.

  ‘You’ve got a visitor.’

  ‘Who is it?’ a tired voice responded.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask?’

  ‘No,’ snapped Mrs Waghorne. ‘Do you realize what state the kitchen’s in?’

  ‘Hasn’t Clatworthy been yet?’

  ‘Of course he hasn’t. When did he ever— Oh!’ She suddenly became aware of Harry close behind her. ‘There you are!’

  ‘Sorry if I made you jump. The name’s Barnett. Harry Barnett.’

  ‘Don’t know the name,’ came the languid reply, floating over Mrs Waghorne’s shoulder. ‘Not a parishioner. Probably better off seeing one of the churchwardens.’

  Mrs Waghorne smiled tightly. ‘Could you explain the nature of your business, Mr Barnett?’

  Shock tactics seemed the only hope. ‘I’d like to speak to your husband about the Mallender sisters. Clare and Heather.’

  At this, Mrs Waghorne’s self-control dissolved. The dark cloud of some unstilled suspicion crossed her face. She threw the door wide open and stalked past Harry towards the kitchen, muttering ‘He’s all yours’ as she went.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said Harry, confronting the rector across the thickly rugged width of his study. As he spoke, he became aware of funereal music seeping from unseen loudspeakers, the high and mournful voices of a disembodied choir. Near the stereophonic eye of this plangent dirge sat the Rector of Flaxford, wreathed in cigarette smoke behind a broad and paper-scattered desk, one eyelid flickering faintly as he stared un-smilingly at Harry, curly grey-shot hair falling across his forehead, sagging jaw dark with stubble, a voluminous mohair cardigan draped over clerical shirt and collar. ‘Reverend Waghorne?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I come in?’

  ‘You better had, I think.’

  Once he had closed the door behind him, Harry joined the rector in his sealed world of tobacco and burial anthems, cut off from the mayhem of plumbing and parenthood. He moved to a chair indicated by his host’s cigarette-waving hand and heard his own voice sink to a respectful murmur. ‘I saw your name at the church. I was hoping to speak to you about—’

  ‘Clare and Heather Mallender.’ The rector nodded. ‘So I heard.’

  ‘You’re acquainted with them, then?’

  ‘Not as closely as my wife seems to think.’ A weary smile. ‘But, yes, you could say I was acquainted with them.’

  ‘You read of Heather’s disappearance last month?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I’m contacting anybody who might know something that could explain what’s become of her.’

  ‘You think I know something?’

  ‘Possibly. Heather visited you here on Sunday the eighteenth of September, didn’t she?’

  The rector’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. ‘Yes, she did, but how—’

  ‘She wanted to know if you’d met her late sister here in Flaxford on the twenty-second of May last year and, if so, whether you could explain her visit to the parish.’

  The rector’s eyebrows remained on high. His lower lip slid out slowly to join them in a signal of amazement. ‘Are you a policeman?’ he said after a moment’s deliberation.

  ‘No.’

  ‘A private detective then, hired by the Mallender family?’

  ‘No. Just a friend of Heather’s who’s trying to find her.’

  The rector’s features relaxed. ‘And what did you say your name was?’

  ‘Barnett.’

  ‘Should I know it?’

  ‘I was the last person to see Heather prior to her disappearance. ‘

  ‘That’s it, of course.’ The rector tossed back an encroaching strand of hair. ‘The depraved villain of the piece, according to the tabloid press. You don’t look your part, Mr Barnett.’

  ‘That’s because it’s not my part.’

  ‘Whose is?’ The rector leaned forward to stub out his cigarette in an ashtray. Then he scrabbled through the papers in front of him, found the cigarette packet and matchbox, waved them at Harry, took his shake of the head for a refusal and set to lighting one for himself. Meanwhile, Harry’s eye was drawn to the sheet of paper nearest him, headed in handwritten capitals ‘FOURTH SUNDAY IN ADVENT’. Beneath this were several lines of script heavily crossed through, then the same single word, also in capitals, on the next five lines. ‘SHEEP’. ‘Just as well you’re not from the bishop,’ said the rector, catching the direction of his gaze. ‘What exactly do you want of me, Mr Barnett?’

  ‘Information, that’s all.’

  ‘Not a perpetual smile? Not a shoulder to cry on? Not a consoling text?’ A blue haze of smoke was spreading round the Reverend Waghorne as he spoke, adding its acrid scent to the bitterness of his words. ‘Maybe I can oblige you, then.’

  ‘I’d like to know what you told Heather when she came here on the eighteenth of September.’

  ‘It was certainly a Sunday in September. As to the date, I’ll have to take your word for it.’ The rector took a reminiscent puff at his cigarette; his gaze seemed to drift out of focus. ‘It was during the few hours of peace I enjoy between morning service and evensong. If you can call it peace. Not that I minded speaking to her, since she was a lamb from somebody else’s flock.’ He smiled. ‘A lamb, not a sheep. I entertained her to tea in this very room. As you appear to know, she wanted confirmation that her late sister had been in Flaxford on the twenty-second of May last year and thought I might be able to supply it. She had gleaned the date from the visitors’ book in the church. As did you, I take it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps I ought to take a razor to the relevant page.’ Another rueful smile. ‘Or to something else. It was all guesswork on Heather’s part, so she told me. She had reason to believe Clare had visited Hurstdown shortly before her death and had left in some form of distress. She thought she might have gone to a nearby church and prayed for guidance. Flaxford fitted the bill and there was Clare’s signature in the visitors’ book to confirm it. Then it occurred to her that Clare might have turned to a priest for help with what was troubling her. Hence, the visit here.’

  An interval followed, filled only by the doleful voices of recorded choristers. Suddenly, a violent thumping started somewhere deep in the fabric of the house. This protest from the recalcitrant piping seemed to revive the Reverend Waghorne’s powers of recollection. He resumed, in a sadder vein than before.

  ‘Heather guessed right, Mr Barnett. Sisterly instinct, I suppose. One Friday aftemoon in the spring of last year – the twenty-second of May – I encountered a young woman at the church. She said her name was Clare Mallender and asked if could offer her some confidential advice over a moral dilemma which she faced. She did not want me to hear her confession, you understand, or to absolve her of her sins, merely to listen to her problem and suggest a solution. Naturally, I agreed to her request. We went into the vestry and she explained her difficulty. I responded with what I thought a happy combination of the constructive and the sympathetic. Then she left. Nine days later I heard on the radio that she was dead.’

  ‘You told Heather this?’

  ‘Yes. She pressed me to say what Clare’s problem was. I resisted on the grounds that neither Clare’s death nor the fact that Heather was her sister entitled me to abuse the trust she’d placed in me. But Heather swiftly persuaded me to change my mind.’

  ‘How?’
<
br />   ‘By pointing out that Clare had misled me. She had given me to understand, you see, that she was a total stranger in the locality and knew nobody hereabouts. That was what enabled me to offer her completely disinterested advice. I never thought, not for a single moment—’

  ‘That she was intimately acquainted with a member of the teaching staff at Hurstdown Abbey?’

  The Reverend Waghorne blanched visibly. ‘You know?’

  ‘Yes. Jack Cornelius. History master. Rugby coach. Tutor in Ancient Greek.’

  ‘I have never met Mr Cornelius. I do not wish to. It’s simply not fair. Clare should have warned me.’ The rector rose abruptly, strode to the window, leaned one elbow on the sash-rail and glared back at Harry. ‘For all the efforts made over the centuries to destroy them, Mr Barnett, the monastic orders continue to thrive, proof, it seems, against the frailties that rack us lesser mortals. Up there’ – he gestured vaguely in the direction of Hurstdown Abbey – ‘they offer smug confirmation that nothing, absolutely nothing, will ever loosen their …’ He broke off. ‘Excuse me. This is irrelevant. Jack Cornelius is no monk. That, you might say, is just the problem.’

  ‘What was it Clare Mallender wanted your advice about?’

  ‘Telling Heather the answer to that question was a mistake, Mr Barnett. A burden shared was, in this case, a burden doubled. Believe you me, I’ve no intention of trebling it.’

  ‘All I’m trying to do is find Heather. To help her.’

  ‘Meaning I’m not?’

  ‘I didn’t say so.’

  ‘Do you really think any of this has any connection with her disappearance?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes.’

  The Reverend Waghorne did not reply at once. He looked out through the grimey window into the dank garden on which dusk seemed already to be settling. ‘In the midst of life we are in death’, the choristers intoned. ‘Of whom may we seek for succour?’ He pressed two fingers to his left eyelid to still its fluttering, then sighed deeply. ‘Have it your own way,’ he murmured. ‘Clare Mallender was the last straw so far as my camel’s back of a priestly vocation was concerned. The very last.’ He lumbered back to the desk and slumped down in his chair. ‘Her problem was commonplace enough, Mr Barnett. She was pregnant.’

  Of course. Clare pregnant. Not by her employer, her former fiancé or any of her no doubt numerous admirers in London, but by the man whose photograph she carried with her and had been seen staring at six days before she sought the Rector of Flaxford’s unbiased advice. She had driven away from Hurstdown Abbey on 22 May 1987 – perhaps after some quarrel with Cornelius, perhaps after telling him for the first time that she was carrying his child – and called in desperation at Flaxford Church, there to bare her soul and her secret to the wavering Reverend Waghorne. But why? Had Cornelius refused to do the decent thing, urged abortion on her, denied responsibility? What had he done that could only be whispered in a clerical stranger’s ear?

  ‘She told me she was pregnant and I assumed the usual things. That the father was a married man. That she was agonizing over whether to have an abortion. That she could not face her parents with the news. None of which was the problem, as it turned out. The father was willing to stand by her, she was determined to go through with the pregnancy and she had already told her parents how she was placed.’

  Already told. So Charlie and Marjorie Mallender knew. Probably Roy as well. And Heather? If so, she would surely not have needed Waghorne to confirm it. ‘What was the problem, then?’

  The rector let out a long, slow breath. ‘Clare had just discovered that the man by whom she was pregnant was irredeemably homosexual. He was prepared to marry her but was incapable of loving her. As she was incapable of loving him, now his true nature was apparent to her.’

  That was it, of course. Jack Cornelius, attractive to women but attracted to men, surrounded by monks and schoolboys, prepared to marry Clare if she insisted but repellant to her once she knew what she should have known all along. ‘What advice did you offer?’

  ‘The usual. Pious claptrap about the growing bond of parental love. Solve the problem together. Make a go of it for the sake of the unborn child. Trust in God.’ The Reverend Waghorne smiled. ‘What did you expect? What did she expect? When I’d finished my recital of predictable platitudes, she looked at me as if she’d turned to an old and respected teacher for guidance and found he’d descended into senility since last they’d met. She left without another word. And nine days later was dead.’

  The wheel turns. The wheel of chance. Or of something else. A push in the dark. A severed cable. A bomb on the water. A mountaintop meeting. There was more to it, surely, more to it than Waghorne could guess – but not than he could tell.

  ‘I had no idea, Mr Barnett, not the least notion, that the man Clare was referring to taught at Hurstdown Abbey. Not till Heather came here and told me did I realize that Jack Cornelius was responsible for Clare’s dilemma.’ He stabbed out his cigarette with excessive force. ‘I did try to meet him. Just once. The day I heard of Heather’s disappearance. It seemed to make the knowledge of what she’d told me insupportable. I wanted to shrug off my troubles onto his shoulders, I supposed, to make him suffer for the inadequacy of the advice I’d given. My wife tried to stop me, but to no avail: I was determined to confront him. I stormed up to the school that morning and demanded to see him. But he wasn’t there. Away, they told me, on compassionate leave or somesuch. Away, at any rate. Had been for a week. Due back the following day. But by then—’

  ‘What did you say?’ There it was. The final chink in the armour. And the light flooding through was as clear and cold as on the summit of Profitis Ilias. ‘He’d been away for a week?’

  ‘Apparently so. I can’t remember—’

  ‘Think, man, think! How long had he been absent? Precisely how long?’

  Shock at Harry’s vehemence was written on the Reverend Waghorne’s face. ‘Well, let me see,’ he said slowly. ‘I spoke to a secretary. She said, as I recall, that he’d been away for a week. No. That he’d been given a week’s leave. Some personal emergency or other. And that he was expected to be back in school next day. Tuesday, that is. I went there on the Monday morning, when the press first reported Heather’s disappearance.’

  A week’s special leave, expiring on Tuesday 15 November. Commencing, therefore, on Tuesday 8 November. And certainly embracing Friday 11 November. The evidence was clinching. Jack Cornelius had been absent from Hurstdown Abbey, whereabouts unknown, on the day of Heather’s disappearance.

  ‘Is that what you wanted to know, Mr Barnett?’

  ’Yes. That’s what I wanted to know.’

  34

  THERE WAS NO doubt in Harry’s mind as he nursed the car back to Swindon that he had at last seized truth by the tail. Jack Cornelius was in some way implicated in Heather’s disappearance; she had learned too much for her own good about his relationship with her sister; his were the threats she had detected on Rhodes and fate-fully ignored. As for Dr Kingdom, his presence in Lindos on 6 November was a red herring. Perhaps, as Dysart had surmised, he had merely been satisfying himself as to Heather’s well-being. At all events, Harry was certain Zohra’s enquiries would prove Kingdom had been dutifully occupied elsewhere on the day of their visit to Profitis Ilias – unlike Jack Cornelius.

  He reached Swindon still wrestling with the conundrum of what to do next. Logic suggested he should confront Charlie Mallender with what he knew, but a carload of grim-faced policemen were still fresh enough in his memory to deter him. Perhaps the time had come for Dysart to raise matters on an official level. Either way, Harry had little attention to spare for his mother’s account of a troubled day.

  ‘At my age, I should be ex-directory.’

  ‘Why’s that, Mother?’

  ‘Well, it’d stop these weirdoes getting my number, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Heavy breathers, you mean?’

  ‘Oh, nothing so straightforward. Six times that dratted phone�
�s rung today if it’s rung once. I’ve picked it up, said hello, there’s been a pause, I’ve repeated myself, then they’ve just hung up.’

  ‘Annoying for you. ‘

  ‘All I can say, Harold, is that you might look a little more concemed about it.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Phone the one person who did speak.’ She thrust a note into his hand. ‘A very well-mannered gentleman named Kingdom. He wants you to call him back.’

  Harry gaped at the note. Why Kingdom should have telephoned him he could not imagine. It was almost as if he knew what Harry had discovered. To make matters more impenetrable still, the number he had given was not the number of his Marylebone consulting rooms. Harry felt absurdly nervous as he began dialling.

  ‘940 2406.’

  ‘Dr Kingdom?’

  ‘Ah, Mr Barnett. Thanks for calling. How are you?’

  ‘All right, but—’

  ‘I wanted to apologize for what happened last week. I’ve thought about it since and really I can find no excuse for such unprofessional conduct. You were fully justified in becoming angry with me.’

  ‘Well, that’s—’

  ‘The fact is, I think our misunderstanding may have prevented a very useful exchange of information and opinion. As you pointed out, Heather’s safety should be our first concern. We should be cooperating, not bickering.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose we—’

  ‘Could we meet and discuss the situation? You may be assured there’ll be no repetition of last week’s unpleasantness.’

  ‘Well, all right.’

  ‘I’m working at home at the moment. Perhaps we could meet here rather than at my consulting rooms. A change of scene might be beneficial, don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, I suppose it might be.’

  ‘Would tomorrow suit you?’

  ‘Er, yes.’

  ‘Good. Tell you what. I live just round the corner from Kew Gardens. Heather often used to meet me there rather than travel to Marylebone. Why don’t we meet at the main gate at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning?’

  Before Harry could do more than utter a bare agreement, Kingdom was gone. As he slowly put the telephone down, puzzling over what the man’s motives might be, it instantly rang. As he picked it up his first thought was of his mother’s anonymous callers. ‘Yes?’ he said cautiously.