Murder in a Cathedral

by Ruth Dudley Edwards

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Amiss. ‘You can ask them to leave. But to the best of my knowledge, you can’t use force on anyone, even in your own home, if they’ve come in peacefully. It’ll be a matter for the police.’

  Alice interjected with a timorous squeak. ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘Yes, Canon,’ said the bishop encouragingly. ‘You have some light to shed on this matter?’

  ‘The shamans had been living on private land for a few weeks and I know they’d had an eviction order served on them a week ago. Tengri—.’

  ‘Who is Tengri?’ snarled Davage.

  ‘Their spiritual and temporal leader. He’s the one with the beard and the necklace of hooves and trotters and things.’

  ‘You know these invaders? They’re friends of yours? Perhaps you invited them here.’

  Alice’s recognition of the hostility in Davage’s voice made her voice quaver slightly. ‘I know them and I’m friends with some of the children. But I didn’t ask them here. I wouldn’t have done such a thing.’

  ‘You were saying, Canon Wolpurtstone,’ said the bishop encouragingly. ‘About the eviction order.’

  ‘Tengri mentioned it yesterday and said the local police only implemented these orders when they had to. When there are children involved, they get such bad publicity when there are pitched battles and damaged property that they avoid confrontation as much as possible.’

  ‘What does that mean for us?’ asked Fedden-Jones.

  ‘That for the moment, at least, persuasion is our only course. It would take days to go through the legal route, and even then…’

  Flubert groaned. ‘I can just imagine the headlines!’

  ‘CLERGY BANISH NEEDY?’ offered Amiss.

  The bishop was looking increasingly woebegone. ‘I have a lot of sympathy with Canon Wolpurtstone’s point of view. I keep thinking of Jesus saying, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” And yet, and yet…’ He wrung his hands.

  ‘Bishop,’ whispered Alice. ‘May I just say…?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I don’t think you should get upset because you believe the shamans shouldn’t be here. I know I said that maybe we should welcome them, but we can’t really. It’s not fair to the people who use the church or even to anyone living here.’ She hesitated. ‘They make an awful lot of noise and they won’t do the grass any good. I think we should try to persuade them to move somewhere else. Maybe to one of our fields on the other side of the river.’

  ‘A good idea,’ said Davage. ‘At least as a halfway measure. Isn’t Chancellor’s Meadow fallow at present?’

  The gathering agreed it was and that this was a sound move.

  ‘Excellent, excellent,’ said the bishop. ‘Now since this is a cathedral matter, may I leave it to you, Canon Trustrum, as the senior canon here, to deal with the negotiations.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Trustrum. ‘It should be Canon Davage’s job—he’s treasurer.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Alice hesitantly. ‘Tengri can be violent. I think it would be better if there was a delegation.’

  ‘I appreciate that warning, Canon,’ said Davage grimly. ‘I would be grateful for some able-bodied accomplices. Preferably His Lordship and Robert. Sebastian seems disinclined to be involved, Dominic has to catch a train and we’d better not put Jeremy’s hands at risk.’

  Amiss and the bishop nodded.

  ‘I’ll go too,’ said Alice. ‘At least they know me.’

  As Davage began to object, the bishop smiled at her. ‘Thank you, Canon. Very well, shall we proceed now? And let us remember that a soft answer turneth away wrath.’

  Amiss noticed that Alice looked rather unconvinced.

  ***

  ‘It was awful.’

  ‘I wish I’d been there to deal with them,’ said the baroness.

  ‘And how precisely would you have done that?’

  ‘Thrown them out bodily, if they refused to go.’

  ‘No doubt you would, Jack, but then you’re a pugilist, not a bishop.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Alice performed the introductions sweetly, but when Tengri, the shit in charge, leered at her and said he’d be happy to get off the lawn if he could get onto her, she disappeared and went to talk to some of the children and keep them away from the aggro. Davage then addressed Tengri quite reasonably, but when told to sod off, he became apoplectic. David dear-me’d a few times and asked that matters be conducted in a civilized manner, which led Tengri to explain graphically that he had little use for civilization and that what was camping on the lawn was a group representing a high and ancient civilization beyond the understanding of a shower of fat, greedy clerics. At this stage Davage shrieked that he would get the police and Tengri grinned unpleasantly and wished him luck.

  ‘“Take you weeks,” he added, “the speed they move in Westonbury. That’s what that git Farmer Scott discovered and why on the quiet he paid us handsomely to fuck off.” He then excused himself on the grounds that it was time to roll another joint—though he thoughtfully said that, if we’d like to wait, we were welcome to a quick drag.

  ‘On our way back to the palace, tails well between legs, and the sound of triumphant drumming coming from our conqueror’s quarters, Davage had a momentary hope that a drugs bust would solve the problem. But, of course, all that would mean would be that a couple of them would be bailed; it wouldn’t actually get them off the land. And the bad publicity remains a difficulty.’

  ‘Do you mean you’re just going to leave them to mess up the place?’

  ‘I’m not that pusillanimous, Jack. But it occurred to me—and my colleagues agreed—that when the dean comes back on Friday refreshed from his religious adventure in the States, it will make a challenging task for him. We will take no further steps except to register our complaint with the police.’

  ‘You’re hoping he’ll foul up and be fatally undermined?’

  ‘What an unworthy thought! I would in fact prefer that he win. But this way, at least we win either way.’

  ‘I’d still have preferred you all to wade in and throw the blighters out by force majeure. But full marks for constructive cowardice, which can, I admit, often be a better course than blind courage.’

  She rang off before Amiss could tell her about the lesbians.

  ***

  The next few days were miserable for the inhabitants of the close. Tengri was clearly determined from the beginning to show who was boss. He took every opportunity to demonstrate contempt for his unwilling hosts, particularly delighting in drumming at maximum volume at daybreak, for he and his community rose with the sun and like crowing cocks ensured that those around them awoke too. Evensong coincided with another drumming session, during which the entire community danced badly but vigorously and intermittently broke into loud chanting. A polite request from Trustrum to keep the noise down during services was met with shouts of rude laughter.

  The children were encouraged to regard the whole of the close as their play area. When Amiss entered the cathedral on his morning visit he frequently found two or three toddlers playing naked in the nave. And when one of the vergers attempted to remove the children from the cathedral, he incurred screaming abuse and threats from their mothers to report him for sexual molestation.

  As twilight approached, Tengri and his women liked to sit on the steps of their trailers smoking pot and drinking some home-made alcoholic concoction, the effects of which were variously apparent in raucous laughter or loud quarrelling. Tengri’s lewd remarks and lubricious glances were so blatant that even Alice—the only person in the close inclined to put out a hand of friendship—was repelled and, like everyone else, avoided the encampment as far as possible.

  From the first day, the inhabitants of the close began to use the back entrances to their houses and to the cathedral itself. The only exception was Plutarch, who refused to be browbeaten. On the morning of the invasion, Amiss glanced out the window as she walked past the green and saw Tengri aim
ing a kick at her. He was about to run out and protest when he saw that Plutarch had the matter in hand. She launched herself at her assailant viciously, and left him a couple of minutes later scratched and winded. Amiss gave her chopped sirloin as a reward.

  ***

  The shamans were tucked up in their beds on Thursday night when the lesbian witches’ service took place. Lurking in the chantry opposite—from which he had an excellent view of the lady chapel—Amiss was torn between horror at the general naffness of the proceedings and sympathy for what Alice Wolpurtstone was trying to achieve. Horror triumphed. Because so intimate, the ceremony proved to be far more embarrassing than even the Rev. Bev’s evangelical service.

  Alice had confided to Amiss that the form of service was not of her choosing. She had hoped to introduce some material from the Psalms, but the entire Bible had been banned for ideological reasons, being patriarchal and unsound on witches. In the end there was little she could do except provide the location for the ceremony and veto a few blood-curdling anti-male passages. The only Christian prayers allowed were adapted from a prayer book for gays and lesbians.

  Amiss could tell that she regretted impulsively inviting him to observe the proceedings, but he headed off any change of mind by telling her how much he was looking forward to seeing how such an imaginative experiment in ecumenism could work.

  As he watched from his discreet vantage point, Amiss witnessed the arrival of the dozen or so heterogeneously clad participants. Being temperamentally opposed to the uniform mentality, he applauded spirits so free that they thought apposite a range of clothing from boiler suits to floating white drapery and layers of dangling beads. Several had exotic hair colouring, most had substantial earrings and all of them sported trailing bits of greenery on their heads. Alice was wearing a cassock and looked pretty.

  Incense burners pumped out a piny smell as the group formed a circle and Alice switched off the light. There was a long chant which yielded only a few comprehensible words, including ‘witch,’ ‘circle,’ ‘magic,’ ‘matriarchy,’ and ‘moon’ and then a candle was lit and shone on a book from which someone read a passage about women emerging from desert into garden, darkness into light and denial into affirmation. That led to a lot more chanting, followed by each woman declaring in turn: ‘I name myself lesbian and witch. Blessed be the goddesses who made us so.’

  At this juncture, the congregation lit their candles from the central flame. A large woman in dungarees threw flower heads vigorously over everyone, a dirge about strength and outness and womanness was sung, an incomprehensible speech was made about sexuality being the seat of relationality and then a wistful woman in muslin began the lengthy prayers to her goddess for those living, dying, fearing and loving in closets. Amiss almost choked as she finished with, ‘Oh Goddess, may closets go the way of the Berlin Wall. Alleluia! Amen.’ To celebrate this conclusion, she announced a song by k.d. lang relating to sisterness, which was relayed from a small ghetto blaster and lost in the bad acoustics of the tiny chapel.

  As a serious young woman with cropped hair began reading a muddled passage about personhood and sexual consumerism, Amiss acknowledged to himself that at heart he was English in the same way as the baroness: the notion of trumpeting one’s sexuality in public was anathema.

  Waves of words and phrases he hated—‘alienation,’ ‘empowerment,’ ‘mutuality,’ ‘healing hurts,’ and ‘sacred possibilities’—crashed down on him, and as he cringed he became enraged at the notion that expressing one’s sexual preference could be transformed into some kind of sacrament. Dammit, he reflected, whither now? Surely, logically, we move on to church ceremonies for bisexuals. He allowed himself briefly to fantasize about an appropriate service for the baroness and Mary Lou Denslow (‘Oh God, who loves both male and female, we give thee thanks for empowering us to put it about all over the place’). What about emerging transvestites and postoperative transsexuals? Why not a ceremony for the loss of one’s virginity or for healing the hurt of an unsuccessful one-night stand? And while considering ceremonies of loss, what about appendectomies and hysterectomies—not to speak of amputations?

  Thought through and developed properly, he decided, such innovations could give the Church of England a new lease of life: ‘Rites of Passage plc’ could quickly come to rival counselling as the great growth industry of the 1990s. As he reached this inspiring conclusion and wondered how the bishop would feel about it, the rest of the congregation was commencing a rousing poem about the virtues of intragender love. At that moment, a large figure crashed through the entrance to the lady chapel and in a familiar Belfast accent screamed, ‘Mariolatry, you agents of Satan.’

  ‘No, no, Dean,’ said Alice bravely. ‘What we are worshipping here is love.’ He glared at her, looked around at the circle of women holding hands, rushed over and grabbed the multifaced portrait of Mary, raised it up high and brought it crashing down over Alice’s head. Pausing only to tear savagely at the gold-and-blue canopy and bring it down all over the company, he strode away, his footsteps ringing in the deserted nave.

  ***

  Amiss’s respect for Alice Wolpurtstone increased markedly in the moments after the exit of the dean, for in the true tradition of the British aristocracy the stiff upper lip came into play. As she and the witches emerged from under the canopy, she calmed and soothed them even as she disentangled herself from her canvas necklace. After a momentary dither, Amiss decided to leave her to her companions. It would, after all, be the height of male arrogance to think that a lesbian with a dozen sisters in attendance was in need of consolation from a man—and a man whom the coven weren’t even aware was present.

  As he followed the dean and slipped silently out of the north side door, his mind was full of questions. Had everyone got it wrong or had the dean returned early? Had he been tipped off about the ceremony? If so, by whom? Had he gone madder in the States? And if he got that exercised about a little sideshow in the cathedral, what the hell was going to be his reaction to Tengri and his acolytes?

  ***

  As he began to walk the long way home around the back of the cathedral, an idea occurred to Amiss that made him stop and think hard. If the dean was only just back, could it be that he didn’t yet know about the shamans? If so, should be not be briefed? To be introduced to them by their daybreak drumming might lead him in his present mood to run completely amok.

  Amiss imagined what that might involve and he found himself smiling. Perhaps a berserk dean was exactly what the shamans needed. But would a briefed berserk dean not be in a stronger position than one jetlagged and sleepy in the early morning who could not know without investigation that the drummers were not simply overenthusiastic seekers after God?

  He leaned against the cathedral wall, looking up at the new moon and trying to decide where his duty lay. On the one hand was the dean—a frightful fundamentalist bigot who had just perpetrated a humiliating assault on a good woman. On the other was Tengri, who had so far routed the forces of decency with contemptuous ease.

  Put like that, Amiss decided, there was no contest. He turned, retraced his steps and entered the deanery garden by the side gate.

  The clock tower was just striking 9:00 when Tilly Cooper opened the door. Her bland, pretty face was becomingly tanned and even the return from the cathedral of a raving husband did not appear to have rattled her serenity. She greeted him warmly.

  ‘Why, Robert, bless you for calling to welcome us home.’

  ‘I saw the light and thought I’d drop by for a moment. I would have waited for the morning, but there’s something I should tell the dean.’

  ‘Come in, do.’ She led him into the hall and closed the front door.

  ‘Are you just back?’

  ‘Hey, yes. We’re ahead of ourselves. We’d always wanted to come back today but hadn’t been able to get the flights, but I just prayed hard, and Jesus fixed it. So here we are, fresh and eager to get going on God’s work.’

  ‘Excellent, excellent.
Now you’ll be tired, so I won’t hold you up. Is it possible to have a quick word with the dean on a matter of some urgency?’

  ‘Sure, sure. Follow me.’

  She took him into a room whose wonderful Georgian proportions, high ceiling and splendid French windows were constructed for elegant furniture and elegant people. Dean Roper’s furniture had already been dispatched to various appreciative legatees; in its place was an array of spartan and unattractive chairs and sofas.

  ‘I’ll go and find my husband. May I give you anything? Water? Juice, if we’ve got any?’

  ‘How kind, but no thanks.’

  Tilly went off singing in a low voice about being a twinkle in God’s eye, and returned within a couple of minutes escorting her husband, whose tan was overlaid with a red flush. Though he managed a controlled and polite welcome, the dean was clearly struggling to contain his feelings. Amiss gave him a few more minutes to simmer down by asking inane questions about flights and what sort of a break they’d had and had there been any time for a holiday before their studies. As he might have expected, he elicited from Tilly the information that studying Jesus was in itself a rest for mind and body and that no happier month could have been spent anywhere than in the loving companionship in worship experienced at the Bible college.

  ‘And I don’t want to boast, Robert, but I have to tell you something happened that’s made me very proud.’

  He tried to look keenly interested.

  ‘I preached for the first time. I preached—and I think I can say I’ve found my vocation. Norm was not the only one kind enough to tell me I showed real promise.’

  Husbandly pride was restoring the dean’s good humour. ‘I’m very proud of my wee wife,’ he announced. ‘She has a God-given gift. I can tell you that at times she moved that congregation to tears. And at the end they applauded as if she was Billy Graham himself.’ He nodded portentously. ‘And you’ll be getting your chance to hear her in the cathedral just as soon as there’s a vacant slot in the schedule.’

  ‘I look forward to that very much.’