Death of a Chancellor

by David Dickinson

  ‘And the Spaniards over at the Precentor’s house, Peter? What about them?’

  Old Peter scratched his leg. Maybe it was the bad one, Powerscourt thought.

  ‘Them Spaniards are a lovely couple, my lord. He’s strong as an ox, that Francisco. They say he was a great wrestler in his young days. And Isabella is as sweet a person as you could hope to meet. I heard the other day that she’s expecting their first child but they haven’t said anything about it.’

  ‘And do all these foreigners belong to the Anglican faith?’

  ‘They do not, my lord.’ Old Peter spat into his fire. ‘There’s a little Catholic chapel down by the station. That’s where most of them go. I don’t think Francisco goes very often.’ Old Peter brushed a couple of locks of hair away from his face. ‘I expect you’ll be wanting to know if I think any of these people round the Close could be the murderer, my lord.’

  ‘Do you?’ said Powerscourt, rather taken aback until he remembered that the Grafton Mercury had trumpeted his arrival to find the killer all over the county. The latest issue of the paper was lying on the floor beside him.

  ‘It’s a funny thing, Lord Powerscourt. Every day in that building over there,’ he nodded behind his shoulder to the cathedral, ‘every day in there they celebrate a murder, if you like, the killing of their God by the Romans, and a pretty terrible killing it was too, stuck up there on that cross for hours and hours drinking foreign vinegar. If you live with that week in week out it mightn’t be too difficult to contemplate a killing or two of your own.’

  ‘Anybody in particular?’ asked Powerscourt, marvelling at the twisted theology of this ninety-year-old.

  ‘All of them,’ said Old Peter, puffing contentedly at his pipe.

  Shortly after three o’clock Powerscourt presented himself at the choirmaster’s front door. Vaughan Wyndham was a tall harassed-looking man with black hair turning to silver at the sides.

  ‘Please forgive me for being unable to meet with you yesterday afternoon,’ said Powerscourt, accepting a seat by the window looking out over Cathedral Green. ‘I hope that now is not too inconvenient. I shall be brief. All I want to know is what you can tell me of Arthur Rudd, the late vicar choral.’

  ‘First class voice,’ Wyndham replied. ‘I should say he would have been a credit to any choir in the country.’ Wyndham spoke fast, with the air of one who wanted to finish the interview as speedily as possible.

  ‘Please forgive me, it wasn’t his voice I was thinking of, more of any personal problems he might have had.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Vaughan Wyndham rather brutally, ‘that what you really want to know is if I can think of any reason why somebody might want to kill him.’

  Powerscourt nodded. ‘Rudd wasn’t married,’ Wyndham went on, ‘he wasn’t, as far as I know, emotionally involved with anybody in Cathedral Close. When people live in very close proximity like the Compton choir, they very quickly learn everybody else’s business, as you can imagine. He didn’t have any expensive tastes. He didn’t drink very much or you could have told it in his voice. But there was one thing about the late Arthur Rudd that always worried his colleagues.’

  Wyndham paused suddenly, worried perhaps that he might have said too much.

  ‘I do hope you will feel able to tell me what it was,’ Powerscourt said, quietly but firmly. ‘I’m sure you know that I am investigating the death on the Bishop’s instructions. And I don’t have to remind you that anything you say will be treated in the strictest confidence.’

  The choirmaster was peering intently out of his window towards the great buttresses on the eastern side of the cathedral. ‘Debt,’ he said finally. ‘Arthur Rudd was permanently, chronically in debt.’

  ‘Debts to whom?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Debts to other members of the choir, other members of the Chapter and the wider cathedral community?’

  ‘Not any more,’ said Vaughan Wyndham bitterly. Powerscourt wondered suddenly if he too had a large debt outstanding with the late Arthur Rudd. ‘Nobody here around the Close would lend him any more. They’d all been burnt once too often. Sorry, Lord Powerscourt, I hadn’t realized quite how offensive that was until I’d said it.’

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself,’ said Powerscourt, his mind racing. Supposing Arthur Rudd had refused so often to repay a debt to one particular member of the choir, would that have been reason enough to kill him? To burn his body on a spit in the Vicars Hall? ‘If Rudd couldn’t borrow money here in this community, where did he go? Somebody else in Compton? Somewhere further afield? And did anybody know why he borrowed all this money? Surely there must have been a reason.’

  ‘If he did have a reason,’ said Wyndham, beginning to collect the music he needed for Evensong, ‘he never told us. And I don’t think he could have been borrowing money here in Compton. He must have gone further afield, Exeter perhaps, maybe even Bristol. And now, perhaps we could finish our conversation on the way to the cathedral, if you will forgive me.’

  Powerscourt watched Vaughan Wyndham as he walked up the nave towards the choir, plucking at his red cassock as he went. Debt, he thought. Could you be killed for not paying your debts? The one certain fact about Arthur Rudd was that he was no longer in a position to pay off any debts in this world. But suppose he owed some unscrupulous lender a very large sum indeed. Would that lender have him killed pour encourager les autres, to act as a dreadful warning to others under obligation to the same lender? Pay up, or you’ll end up like Arthur Rudd, dead and roasted in Vicars Close.

  ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God.’ Lady Lucy was walking up and down the drawing room of Fairfield Park the following afternoon, practising the Messiah. ‘Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished . . .’ She motioned her husband to silence as he tiptoed quietly into the room. ‘The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’ Lady Lucy had joined the Compton Choir which gave occasional recitals in the city. The backbone, of course, was the Cathedral Choir itself, complete with choirboys. Lady Lucy believed she might be able to get close to them as they worked their way through Handel’s masterpiece. The opening performance was less than three weeks away, in the Church of St Nicholas in Compton on the Wednesday and Thursday before Easter.

  ‘Every valley shall be exalted,’ Lady Lucy sang on, her soprano voice rising through the octaves. ‘We haven’t done the next bit yet, Francis, so you don’t have to put up with any more. I’d better do some more work on the score. Oh, I forgot to mention that William McKenzie is here. He’ll be down in a moment.’

  Powerscourt had written to McKenzie the morning after the attack in the cathedral, requesting his immediate presence in Compton. McKenzie had served with Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald in India and was famed for his ability to track man or beast without being detected. Powerscourt had collected his large black book from Anne Herbert’s house as she was preparing tea for Patrick Butler. Powerscourt had declined an offer to join them, thinking that Patrick Butler could find worse places and worse times to propose marriage to his beloved. He saw that Anne had done her work very thoroughly. There were pages and pages of lists of the inhabitants of the Cathedral Close. She had helpfully added the date at which each person had first arrived when she knew it. Powerscourt noted that most of the members of the clergy had been there for less than ten years. He suspected that was unusual. He no longer intended to ask anybody connected with the cathedral anything about the place if he could help it.

  A slight cough announced the entry of William McKenzie. As usual he seemed to have entered the room without going through any of the doors.

  ‘William,’ said Powerscourt, pumping the Scotsman’s hand up and down, ‘how very good to see you. You are most welcome. And, I fear, most necessary.’ He told his colleague about the strange deaths in Compton, Chancellor Eustace passing away in mysterious circumstances, Arthur Rudd murdered and roasted on his spit
in the kitchen of Vicars Hall, the attempt on Powerscourt’s own life a few days before with the falling masonry.

  ‘Do you have any suspects, my lord?’ asked McKenzie, who knew from experience that Powerscourt would probably be running two or three theories through his brain at any given moment.

  ‘That’s the problem, William,’ Powerscourt laughed. ‘Sometimes I suspect all of them. Then I suspect none of them. It’s so hard to imagine the deans and canons of an English cathedral engaged in murder. Now then, this is what I want you to do.’

  McKenzie whipped a small notebook out of his pocket and began making notes.

  ‘Today,’ said Powerscourt, ‘is Wednesday. Tomorrow therefore is Thursday. And on Thursdays the Archdeacon of Compton, man by the name of Beaumont, Nicholas Beaumont, goes on a mysterious journey very early in the morning from the railway station in the town. He always comes back the same day. You can recognize the Archdeacon quite easily, William. He is well over six foot tall and about as thin as a well-fed skeleton. He normally carries a large black bag on these journeys. Nobody knows where he goes on these Thursday expeditions. I think it’s time we found out.’

  ‘Do the locals have any theories about his destination, my lord? Locals usually do, in my experience.’

  ‘I think the most popular theories have to do with women, William. The Archdeacon, like almost his brothers in Christ up at the minster, is not married. The respectable view is that he keeps a wife somewhere. The less respectable view is that he goes to visit the prostitutes of Exeter.’

  In his youth McKenzie had belonged to a rather extreme Presbyterian sect in his native Scotland. Powerscourt saw an embarrassed look cross his colleague’s face as he wrote that down in his book.

  ‘Francis! Francis! Where the hell are you? I’ve got news!’ Johnny Fitzgerald was clutching a bottle of Fairfield Park’s finest armagnac and an enormous tumbler.

  ‘William,’ said Johnny, ‘I needn’t ask if you’ll be joining me in a glass of this nectar but I’m well pleased to see you.’ With that, he sat down beside the teetotal McKenzie and poured himself a very large tumbler of Auch’s finest.

  ‘What news, Johnny?’ Powerscourt smiled at his friend. It was almost like being back in the North-West Frontier with the two of them here.

  ‘Wednesday is half-day in Compton,’ he began, ‘so the two gentlemen who work for Wallace the undertaker repair to the Stonemason’s Arms rather earlier than usual. And it so happened that the landlord has this very day taken delivery of a new beer from just outside the county border. Not only new, but strong, almost lethal, in fact.’

  ‘Did you by any chance know that this fresh draught of ale was coming, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘Funny you should ask that, Francis. I did, as a matter of fact. You see, I had recommended this ferocious brew to the landlord a week before. I said I would recompense him personally if it didn’t sell well.’

  ‘Is it selling well, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘Just hold your horses there, Francis. The reason I advanced the cause of Fox’s Extra Strong was this. Willie Dodds and George Chandler, old man Wallace the undertaker’s two assistants, always drink five or six pints of beer in a session. By that stage they’re almost ready to be indiscreet but they remember to clam up. After five or six pints they plod off to their homes or their burrows or wherever they live. I reckoned I could have poured the normal stuff in the Stonemason’s Arms down them until the last trump sounded and they still wouldn’t say anything. Hence the magic ingredient, the Fox’s Extra Strong.’

  ‘And would I be right in assuming, Johnny, that the vulpine concoction did the trick?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘Francis, it was wonderful, just wonderful to watch the stuff in action. After three pints they were more drunk than they usually were after five or six of the other brew. I struck at the beginning of pint five because I wasn’t sure they’d be able to speak at all if they managed to get to the end of number six.’

  Fitzgerald refilled his tumbler with another generous helping of armagnac. ‘This is the story, Francis. I’ll spare you their means of telling it as that grew increasingly incoherent. The two of them never had any dealings with the body of John Eustace. Normally they do all the lifting, all the carrying around, that sort of thing. They thought old man Wallace must have had somebody to help him, probably the doctor. They say Wallace is so old now he could hardly lift a copy of The Times. The only time they had any dealings with the body was after it was sealed inside its coffin. That is almost unheard of, but there’s worse to come. At some point when the coffin was being put on the bier, I think, my informants were pretty groggy by this stage, almost at the end of pint five, it slipped. When they picked it up again they heard something rattling about inside.’

  There was a pause, eventually broken by Powerscourt asking if the two men had any idea what it was.

  ‘I think they knew perfectly well,’ said Johnny, ‘but this was the one thing they weren’t prepared to tell me, even after a barrel of Fox’s Extra Strong.’

  ‘What do you think it was, Johnny?’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘Well, he was a sort of holy man,’ said Johnny. ‘He might have had one of those great big bibles buried with him. Something to read in there until the second coming.’

  Powerscourt looked doubtful. ‘I don’t think it was a bible, Johnny,’ he said with a slight shudder even though the room was warm from the fire.

  ‘What do you think it was, Francis?’ said Johnny.

  ‘God forgive me if I’m wrong,’ said Powerscourt sadly. ‘I think it may have been his head.’

  The police called for Powerscourt just after six the next morning. Chief Inspector Yates, the young constable informed him, wished to see Powerscourt in the Compton police station at once. Johnny Fitzgerald was muttering to himself as he mounted his horse about the lack of civilization in country parts, and how the police force should be prohibited by law from calling people out before they had eaten their breakfast. Powerscourt was trying to remember the names of all the inhabitants of the Cathedral Close from his black book as he rode along the silent lanes. He managed to reach fifty-three, suspecting there were a whole lot of people whose names began with M he had left out. He thought they were at the top of the fourth page on the left.

  It was a clear night with an hour or more to go before the dawn. There was a cold wind blowing from the west.

  ‘Francis,’ said Johnny, ‘what do you think is waiting for us at the police station? Apart from the Chief Inspector, that is.’

  ‘Very good of you to turn out at this hour, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I thought you’d be asleep for hours yet.’

  Johnny Fitzgerald did not say, although he felt certain his friend knew, that Lady Lucy had made him promise to stick to Powerscourt like a limpet after the attempt on his life.

  ‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘look on the bright side. They may have apprehended the murderer. The police have been keeping a very close watch all over the Cathedral Close since Arthur Rudd was found.’

  ‘You don’t believe that, Francis, do you? If they had, the police boy up ahead would have told us.’

  Chief Inspector Yates was waiting for them in a room at the back of the police station. There was a large table in the centre with a blanket covering a cylindrical object in the middle. Chief Inspector Yates despatched his young constable to bring some fresh tea.

  ‘Not sure I would like the lad to see this, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I used to play cricket with his father.’ He pulled back the blanket to reveal a human leg, much bloodied at the top, wearing what must have once been dark grey trousers and a single black boot. Powerscourt inspected the break carefully, wondering what sort of instrument must have been used to cut it off from the body.

  ‘We found this less than an hour ago,’ he said, covering the leg up once more. ‘A railway worker on his way to the station alerted his next-door neighbour who is a sergeant here in this police station. Dr Williams is on his w
ay.’

  ‘This is terrible, Chief Inspector,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I presume there are as yet no sightings of the rest of the body?’

  ‘I have put out word for all my officers to report here as soon as possible,’ said the Chief Inspector. ‘At the moment there’s only me and the young man on duty. The Sergeant is on watch at the front desk in case the rest of the corpse should be found.’

  ‘I think, Chief Inspector, that it’s possible the rest of the body may not be in Compton. It may be in one of the neighbouring villages,’ said Powerscourt, not quite certain why he had made this particular statement.

  ‘I think I’ll go and have a look around,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, feeling that Powerscourt was perfectly safe in police custody. ‘Do you have another of these blankets?’

  ‘Blankets, Lord Fitzgerald? It’s not that cold, surely. I’m sure we could find a police cape for you if you need one.’ The Chief Inspector sounded rather disapproving.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Johnny, smiling at the policeman, ‘it’s not for me. It’s just that if I found anything I’d like to be able to wrap it up. We don’t want any old ladies terrified out of their minds if they see most of a dead body being carried along in full view of the citizens back to the police station.’

  Dr Williams passed Johnny Fitzgerald on his way in. He lifted the blanket and inspected the top of the leg very carefully. ‘Do you know, Chief Inspector, that I came to Compton from the East End of London because I wanted a quiet life. You have more dreadful murders in these parts than they do in Whitechapel. I will arrange to have this leg moved to the morgue later this morning. In the meantime I suggest you keep the room as cold as possible.’