The Discourtesy of Death

by William Brodrick

  ‘Mystifying,’ said Anselm, quietly, in the conference room at Martlesham.

  ‘You can say that again.’ DI Randall went to get more coffee. Back at the table, he ate another biscuit, crunching it with a surprising level of aggression. ‘He was a really organised bloke, everything in its place, all the boxes ticked, never late for a tax return and yet we couldn’t find any record for the insulin – coming in or going out. There’s none missing. Which doesn’t add up to much, because he could have got it from …’

  Anselm nodded, reaching for the milk, but he’d drifted off, involuntarily. He’d seen Doctor Ingleby – Bryan now – raising his glass of wine in the Chapter House. He’d seen the mystery in his eyes.

  Where was the truth, Bryan? On your lips or on the paper?

  After a sandwich from the canteen, DI Randall drove Anselm to the house off the Barking Road. He stayed outside, keen to smoke. Technically he’d given up the week before but he’d found a packet in the glove box that morning. Waste not, and all that. He’d smoke the lot, one after the other.

  Anselm clipped the door shut behind him. The house was chilly now and silent. All the atmospheric warmth had gone, even from the cherry-red carpet. The painting of the elephants, once rousing, seemed banal, a predictable tribute to an endangered species. The life in the building had seeped away. Anselm went straight to the study. He pressed play, turned the volume down and sat on the chair facing the roll-top desk. Callas began quietly:

  ‘Deh! Non volerli vittime del mio fatale errore …’

  Anselm listened, gazing around the room. He opened a drawer and shut it again. He reached for the pipe but then thought better of it.

  ‘What am I doing here?’ he said, quietly. ‘What do I hope to find?’

  Only the truth. I want to understand our meal together. Because afterwards you made me your messenger.

  Just then, a movement caught his eye. DI Randall had struck a match in the garden. As he looked through the window, Anselm’s eyes fell upon the blue shed with the yellow door and the windows blocked by drawn yellow curtains. Bryan had spent his last afternoon out there, doing spring’s work in autumn. All of a sudden Anselm was standing by a royal-blue Sunbeam Singer Chamois and he heard, once again, that bemused voice:

  ‘I’ve spent almost forty years in medical practice … in the surgery … at patients’ houses … at the hospice. And do you know, after all that, what’s best and true of me lies in a garden shed. Odd, isn’t it?’

  The shed door was unlocked.

  Inside, Anselm saw a rake, a hoe, a spade, bags of compost – everything you’d expect – neatly organised for the coming season. But what gripped his attention was the chair – one of the collapsible canvas chairs that Bryan had brought to Leiston Abbey. The other was leaning against the back wall beside the table. A sheaf of papers and a pencil had been left on the seat. Picking them up, Anselm sat down and began reading by the light of the open door.

  Bryan had been reading various oaths, ancient and modern, written to frame the ethical standards that govern medical practice. He’d compiled them into a bundle and stapled it together. Certain phrases had been marked with the pencil.

  The first text was the ancient Hippocratic Oath, considered by Anselm on the day he’d begun his investigation, convinced that Jennifer Henderson had been murdered. Bryan had underlined: ‘I will give no deadly drug to any, though it be asked of me …’

  Anselm turned the page.

  This was the Prayer of Maimonides. Bryan had isolated one sentence: ‘Thou hast chosen me to watch over the life and health of thy creatures.’

  Next came the World Medical Association Declaration of Geneva, as revised in May 2006. Bryan had marked ‘I solemnly pledge to consecrate my life to the service of humanity’ and, lower down, ‘I will maintain the utmost respect for human life.’

  Anselm turned to the last page, the Oath of Lasagna, written in 1964. Bryan had underlined a short paragraph: ‘Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play God.’

  Anselm rose and opened the yellow curtains. Sunlight spilled into the cosy room, brightening the tools neatly lined along one wall, the bags of nourishing compost and a few clay tubs. He looked over to the house and thought: So this is the answer to the riddle. After forty years of medical practice, you brought the best of yourself over here. You left it on a chair for me to find.

  ‘It is your oath. Your sacred oath. And you did not break it.’

  DI Randall was lighting another cigarette. ‘You told me the truth and you gave everyone else a fiction.’

  So what did that mean, thought Anselm, stepping outside, thumbs hooked into his belt.

  It meant a great deal.

  It meant that Timothy had murdered his mother. He’d never know it, of course, but that was the truth about her last night. Jenny had told him her hopes and expectations and he hadn’t believed her. He’d come downstairs with his Spiderman pillow and done what he thought was best. Now, because of Doctor Ingleby’s confession, Timothy would think, at best, that a doctor had ended his mother’s life; at worst, if his father initiated him into the unpleasant world of big truths, he’d think that the doctor had made a mistake. But the awful distance between the two was something that would never directly concern Timothy … he’d had a close shave there.

  It meant that Bryan Ingleby’s reputation would be tarnished for some and destroyed for others – people he’d admired and served. In a way, that didn’t count. What mattered most was that Bryan would be remembered for having done something he would never do; for believing what he did not in fact believe; for having crossed the line between compassion and mercy outside the law; for having played God.

  There were other, practical consequences that Bryan would have found distressing, too. The Grange Hospice would censure him in strong terms – terms he might have drafted himself, in other circumstances. And they would almost certainly decline his bequest. But he’d prepared for that eventuality: there was nothing else he could do. So the animals would benefit.

  ‘So why did you shoulder the cost, Bryan? Why take the responsibility?’

  Anselm turned from the covered vegetable patch, where he’d halted, to look back at the little hut that held the oldest and most revered oaths known to civilisation.

  ‘You did it for Timothy,’ said Anselm. ‘You saved him from a lifetime’s complications. You made him your patient when there was no doctor who could help him, of mind or body. With that paternal smile of yours, you picked up the consequences of Peter and Jenny’s grappling, their frightened attempt to deal with paralysis and terminal illness. You chose death to give a second chance to the grandson you’d never had.’

  It was Abbey Road all over again. The world would see a very different picture indeed.

  53

  On the day that Anselm had nearly been shot the Prior had asked him if he wanted to have a chat about things. He was referring, in fact, to a Gilbertine tradition. The practice had trickled over from France as une ouverture du cœur, literally an ‘opening of the heart’, but the Larkwood community, seeking a brief translation, came to call it ‘a chat’. At the time of the Prior’s suggestion, Anselm had said no. The time has to be right – a moment arrived at by a kind of inner gestation – and he hadn’t felt ready. But he did now; now that he understood the meaning of Bryan Ingleby’s death. And so, having first thrown the Exit Mask in the bin as a preliminary to his own catharsis, Anselm arranged to meet the Prior for a walk through the woods, along a track that climbed up the nearest thing in Suffolk to a mountain.

  In certain respects it was a very important meeting. Not least because it followed the conclusion of Anselm’s first case since the Prior had released him from the cloister to bring Larkwood’s flickering light into the market place. Not least, also, because the Prior himself would have to make a fairly significant decision if the case itself
was to be laid quietly to rest.

  As soon as Anselm and the Prior left the open air and entered the seclusion of the woods, Anselm began to lay out the history of the Henderson and Goodwin families. He spoke methodically and without commentary. When he’d finished, he went straight to the heart of his concerns. Perhaps it was that brief foray into the world of Professor Bannon, but the law in relation to killing was high on Anselm’s agenda.

  ‘When I last saw Mitch, he argued that there should be a law for Jenny’s kind of situation. That if she’d been allowed to take her own life, then her tragedy and that of Timothy would never have happened. There’d have been a system with fail-safes. She’d have filled in all the forms. Doctors would have assessed her state of mind. There’d have been a private interview. And there would have been no room for confusion. But the matter doesn’t end there. It begins.’

  The Prior gave a nod, his glasses catching the green light that filtered through the trees.

  ‘Because Mitch’s law, in other circumstances, would allow a less caring family to manoeuvre someone into accepting a death that they didn’t want, and no one would ever know.’

  The same forms would be filled in. The same doctors would give the same opinions. And the private interview would yield nothing to contradict any previously stated intentions. There’d be no confusion. And someone’s life would end, wrongly.

  ‘Vulnerable people could be subjected to a kind of moral terrorism … urged to die for a good cause. And Mitch’s law would not be able to protect them … because, in truth, we can’t investigate a person’s consent. We can’t penetrate the full mystery of someone else’s mind. And that’s the nub.’

  Which brought Anselm back to his starting point. How could Jenny have been protected?

  The answer was devastatingly simple. It was moral education. The careful nurturing of conscience by principle and prohibition.

  ‘The real problem was Timothy’s moral outlook. There was no hinterland of ifs and buts. He’d seen nothing wrong with what he’d done.’

  He’d only begun to glimpse the gravity of his action once his grandmother had turned frosty; once his father had thrown a brick through a window. Wouldn’t a commandment or two have helped? Even if they were only viewed as ancient wisdom, literature from a nomadic people trying to cross the desert? He’d needed something. All at once a hot, corpulent presence entered Anselm’s mind, and he was compelled to pay tribute to its sagacity.

  ‘I wonder if Bede understood the heart of the problem. He said that dreadful things happen when people lose a simple sense of right and wrong. Or, I might add, if they never had it in the first place.’

  The Prior, until now silent but attentive – his function to listen not speak – felt compelled to raise a concern.

  ‘Speaking of Bede,’ he said, confidentially. ‘I’m worried about him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s losing his grip on reality. He swears blind he saw you with a pistol and silencer. All I could say was that at least we wouldn’t hear anything.’

  Anselm cleared his throat. ‘We have a decision to make; or perhaps you do.’

  This was a delicate matter and one of the reasons for the walk in the woods.

  On entering the foothills (about a mile back), the Prior had learned that Michael and Emma Goodwin were guilty of conspiracy to murder Peter Henderson; that Michael Goodwin was also guilty of attempting to murder a monk, along with Néall Ó Mórdha, now a prominent Sinn Fein activist; and that there were unquestionably other, miscellaneous offences (like the unlawful killing of a dog) which would, in time, find themselves onto any indictment should the details ever be reported to Olivia Manning. The question was whether to say nothing. For the sake of … peace. Timothy’s peace. A family’s peace.

  ‘Where is the gun?’ asked the Prior, after a long pause.

  He appreciated its significance: forensically and symbolically.

  ‘Decommissioned.’

  ‘Permanently?’

  ‘Beyond reach.’

  ‘We’ll not try and get it back, then.’

  Like detective superintendents and generals, priors can make swift, controversial decisions. The matter was closed.

  They walked on, getting steadily higher, the monastery sinking into the valley below. But Anselm picked up the subject, because he’d been moved by Michael Goodwin’s struggle to do what was right. The young Army officer had tried to square his conscience with the demands of extreme circumstances; he’d thought the voices of the dead – brutalised, unforgettable voices – were more important than his own. The situation was in direct contrast to that of Timothy. Far from lacking a moral sense, he’d been a man of acute sensibility.

  ‘He went to Belfast a man of peace but he became a terrorist,’ said Anselm. ‘He tried to kill someone without the moral protection of the law. He was desperate, because he’d heard and seen desperate things. He felt he had to do something drastic, because the circumstances were drastic. And so he stepped over the line … to cut short the suffering. But the only way he could pull the trigger was to ignore the same voice that would have stopped Timothy reaching for his pillow. The quiet voice of contradiction. And it’s only because he’d run away from himself that he could ever have entertained killing Peter Henderson.’

  There are rules, Anselm. You can’t just forget them and run. They make the world go round. They stop an archivist killing a beekeeper.

  Bede seemed to have come running up the incline, panting and important, but Anselm ignored him and said: ‘Which is one of the reasons that Ernest shot Albert, I suppose.’

  The Prior had halted. His glasses flashed again.

  ‘Albert?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Anselm. ‘The poor guy’s foot was trapped. He couldn’t escape. He couldn’t speak.’

  The Prior’s face had settled into a mask of pale dismay. He’d made a monumental mistake in licensing Anselm’s work beyond the monastery walls. He shared the fault.

  ‘And Ernest shot him in cold blood, while Albert waved his arms around like mad. But everything worked out well in the end because, would you believe it—’

  ‘Ernest?’

  ‘He meant well, honestly …’

  Anselm moved away, smiling to himself, waiting for his Prior to catch up.

  The two monks had reached the low summit, giving an elevated view over the fields below. The Prior swished at conkers with a stick, brooding about the Titanic, while Anselm looked towards Larkwood. He could see the bell tower, the glistening cloister, the sleeping orchards, and the grove of poplars that hid the graves and his beehives. He was still thinking about law and morality. Because Bryan Ingleby had tried to find a way between the two.

  ‘Timothy committed a grave wrong,’ said Anselm. ‘He doesn’t know it, but he killed his mother against her will. And Doctor Ingleby has assumed all the responsibility.’

  The Prior came to Anselm’s side, placing both of his hands on the top of his stick.

  ‘And we had this meal,’ said Anselm. ‘He wanted to know if Jenny had changed her mind. Because if she had done, it would change the quality of what he was about to do. It’s as though he wanted to be absolutely sure about the exact offence that Timothy had committed, so that he knew what he was about to pick up.’

  ‘But he gave you the truth,’ observed the Prior, astutely.

  ‘Yes, he did,’ replied Anselm. ‘He knew that the result would be controversy, attracting both denunciation and respect, but it would all arise from a total misreading of his actions … because he hadn’t done it. And he wanted at least one person to know who he was, who he’d been and what he’d really done for Timothy.’

  You silenced me, too, thought Anselm. With that promise not to repeat what you were about to say, except, if I wished, to my Prior. Because you knew I’d be deeply troubled by the cold territory you’d decided to enter: the use of a lie as a means to an end; the assumption of responsibility in someone else’s stead. You’d thought it all out, hadn’t you
?

  ‘He picked up all the weight,’ murmured Anselm. ‘Mine included.’

  During the slow and gentle descent, the Prior took issue with Albert thanking God for the stutter. Apparently, Professor Bannon had left that aspect of the problem unexplored, so the Prior thought he might fill the gap. As they stepped out of the woods into the sunshine, the Prior, however, suddenly changed the subject. He stopped, frowned and looked at Anselm.

  ‘I’ve just realised something,’ he said, not very happy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I gave you this job so that you could solve crimes … and all you’ve done is conceal them.’ He looked at Anselm, bewildered at the turn of events. ‘Your first case has been solved on a basis that couldn’t be further from the truth and you didn’t even discover who it was that wrote to me in the first place. That’s an incredible achievement.’

  The two monks nodded slowly at one another, resuming their measured return to Larkwood as strangely humbled men.

  Epilogue

  Mitch invited Anselm to tea. But not, it transpired, on the wherry. When Anselm arrived at the boat, he was taken on a short walk, past the Spinning Mule and along the lane that led to the Gate House cottage, the former outpost of a wool merchant’s modest estate.

  Mitch opened the front door without knocking and ushered Anselm along a corridor into a compact, sunlit room with French windows. They were open and the mild afternoon air seemed to swim in and out, bringing the scent of autumn from the garden. There were two people in the room: a stout square-faced elderly man sitting in an armchair, his legs covered by a green tartan blanket. A table on wheels had been rolled over his legs. He was doing a monumental jigsaw. A rural scene by Gainsborough. He looked over his glasses, smiled and swore violently … distress suddenly sweeping over his face, a hand raised to his mouth, wondering if he’d done something wrong.

  ‘It’s all right, Dad,’ said Mitch, with a calming hand.

  ‘He can’t help it,’ said the second person in the room, a somewhat frail, stooped woman in shapeless clothes whom Anselm had seen only once before, waving at Mitch through a window. ‘He had a stroke, long ago when Mitch was a boy. Never got his speech back, just a few words. He swears like a trooper and he doesn’t know he’s doing it, do you, love?’