A Ghost at the Door

by Michael Dobbs

  Propane isn’t itself poisonous but when it burns it produces carbon monoxide, which most certainly is. Gentle, painless, deadly. By the time it had killed Fat Finn his murderer was already miles away.

  It took some while before Harry felt up to returning to what lay inside. He gazed up to the sky as though trying to drag its light back into his life, then took one step inside. He needed no more.

  On the floor of the cramped kitchen was a body, although it was difficult to recognise it as such. The soles of the shoes that pointed towards him gave the first clue. The stench was hideous. The buzzing sound Harry had heard from outside was caused by a swarm of engorged flies that circled like a storm system above the body, and on it. They had called him Fat Finn but the body now seemed shrivelled within his clothes, had leaked away in hideous stains, and even though Harry knew his facial features there was no way to tell that this was Findlay Francis. The rats had seen to that.

  Once more Harry returned outside, grabbing for the clean air. He crossed to the two women and found Abby silently weeping, her cheeks smeared with tears. She knew.

  ‘Abby, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Can I . . .?’

  ‘No.’ He said it firmly, perhaps too much so.

  She looked up at him, her damp eyes pleading. ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know. A heart attack, perhaps.’

  ‘Like your father?’

  Her question had an edge that struck him like a bull-whip, unleashing thoughts he had been trying to suppress. Of all the members of the clique of old friends who had died, Johnnie had been the only one who’d had the dignity of dying from natural causes. Or had he? Harry stood blinking, as though fighting a storm.

  ‘Abby, forgive me, I hate to ask you this, but I have to. Was there any chance your father was somehow . . . depressed?’ He searched for the word, trying to soften the blow. There was no need:she was entirely up to pace.

  ‘Killed himself?’ She shook her head doggedly. ‘He was scared, not suicidal. Anyway, do suicides bother to lock the door?’

  ‘That’s a very good point.’ She had kicked something in his mind, got his ear burning. ‘Give me a moment.’ With considerable reluctance he returned to the kitchen door. The stench was less virulent, diluted with fresh air, but the vampire flies still swarmed and circled. He inspected the inside of the battered door. The key wasn’t in its lock, nor had it spilled to the floor. And every instinct told him he wouldn’t find it in Findlay’s pockets, not that he had any desire to check. Which meant the door had been locked from the outside. He remembered the empty gas tank. There was no room to move around the body so with great care he stepped over it in order to get to the gas rings. He tried the taps. Both were open. No, not a heart attack, then. And not suicide, not if the door had been locked from the outside.

  He stepped back out into the summer light and fresh air, wondering if the sweet sickly smell of Death would ever leave him. All his adult life Death had had a habit of tracking him down, even when he wasn’t looking for it, even to the depths of the West Dorset countryside on a day that was glorious with life. He led Abby and Jemma round to the front of the cottage, where they found a grassy knoll surrounded by daisies and overlooking the hillside and distant sea. He put his arm around Abby’s shoulder. ‘You OK?’

  The tears were gone, her cheeks brushed dry by the breeze. ‘I told you that I knew we’d never find him, not alive. But I do need to know the truth. You haven’t told me.’

  ‘Somebody tried to make it look like suicide but I think you were right. He didn’t kill himself. He was murdered.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Same reason as the others. He knew too much.’

  ‘They were all murdered?’

  ‘It wasn’t just Delicious. Al-Masri certainly. Susannah Ranelagh probably. Who knows about Christine Leclerc? Her death was certainly violent enough. Your father. And right now I’m even beginning to wonder about my own.’

  ‘It was a heart attack,’ Jemma prompted.

  ‘I’m wondering about that,’ he replied.

  ‘All members of the croquet club,’ Jemma said.

  ‘And then there were two,’ Abby added.

  ‘Not for much longer. Not at this rate,’ Harry suggested.

  ‘The bishop and that strange woman. Who on earth is she?’ Jemma asked.

  ‘I haven’t even a glimmer of an idea.’

  They sat lost in the maze of sorrows and surmise. Overhead a pair of buzzards circled languidly on a light sea wind and in a distant meadow a roe deer grazed the lush grass.

  ‘We should call the police,’ Jemma said eventually.

  Harry reached into his pocket to retrieve his phone. ‘Well I’ll be . . .’ he breathed as the screen came to life.

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘Our bloody bishop. He’s just resurfaced, sent me a message. Wants to see me.’

  ‘And we don’t believe in coincidence, do we?’ Jemma said.

  ‘He’s got to be involved. In one way, or the other,’ Abby suggested. ‘Be careful, Harry.’

  ‘Or be a bloody fool,’ he muttered.

  ‘Sorry, Abby, Harry here doesn’t do careful,’ Jemma added ruefully.

  He reached for Abby’s hand. ‘Abby, I want to ask you a very great favour. I don’t know how I dare but . . .’

  ‘You don’t want to call the police, do you?’

  ‘No, not just yet. I’m out on bail on suspicion of one murder and if I’m found at the scene of another, Chief Inspector Edwards will take a distinct personal pleasure in burying me so deep it’ll take an Act of Parliament to get me released. Returning to the scene of the crime, he’ll say. And, unreconstructed idiot that I am, I’ve even left my prints on the gas taps for him. Our bishop friend wants to see me. Let me at least find out what he’s up to before we do anything.’

  ‘You think it’s him?’

  ‘The odds are getting shorter.’

  ‘But if it’s him . . .’ Abby didn’t want to finish the thought.

  ‘I’m on my guard. I’ll draw him out. Take the risk. I owe it to you and your father.’

  ‘Your own father, too, remember.’

  ‘Old Bishop Randy wants to see me tonight. Shall we head back to London?’

  Abby didn’t respond immediately. From somewhere nearby a newly fledged seabird was calling, a lonely, plaintive cry that mingled with the sound of the waves falling on the distant shingle. The mackerel sea melted into a sky of finest blue silk woven through with clouds of English lace. Somewhere out there, in the infinity that lay beyond the horizon, were the fading echoes of her father. She wanted to capture them while she still might. ‘I think this was where he sat, right here. Where he was happy,’ she whispered. ‘Let me have a few minutes here with him, will you?’

  Jemma kissed her, then walked hand in hand with Harry to the car waiting for them on the road below.

  It didn’t matter a mouldy fig that they hadn’t called the police. With the app on his mobile phone in front of him Edwards had been spying on their every move, every twist and turn of the wheel through West Dorset, where they slowed, where they stayed. He knew Harry: the bugger was mental, didn’t know when to stop, couldn’t help himself. Edwards was certain that whatever he was up to would be connected with the case; Harry Jones didn’t take holidays. Yet there was a puzzle. For more than an hour Harry had stopped at the side of some rural road by the sea and none of the maps that the chief inspector had to hand or could summon up from the Internet suggested there was anything at that spot. But something had to be there, something that had drawn his man to a very specific spot on the map and kept him there for some while.

  Edwards waited until the Volvo had reached the motorway and was on its way back to London, then he called a colleague in the local Dorset constabulary, a fellow officer he’d met on a homicide investigators’ course at the National Crime Faculty in Bramshill. Not an official request but one that was off the radar, not logged, no paperwork. ‘Just my old copper’s nose twitching, De
rek,’ he explained. ‘Can you kick a couple of your layabouts and get them to give their eyes some exercise?’

  ‘What are you looking for, exactly, Hughie?’

  ‘No idea. But this is a murder investigation.’

  ‘Casting a few flies?’

  ‘Something tells me this is good fishing weather, Derek.’

  Hughie Edwards liked fishing. It taught him patience, not a natural side of his makeup, and he needed to be patient just a little longer. Harry was still the only suspect, the only one he was after. He’d soon have the bastard in his net.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Shades of confusion, and enough of them on the trip back to London to raise a sweat and a muttered curse inside the Volvo. Abby hadn’t returned with them, saying she wanted to spend a little more time along the soaring coastline her father had loved – not near the cottage, of course, although for one so free with tears she displayed an emotional core of oak. She’d known her father was gone, she’d said, so it was time to celebrate what he had rather than to mourn what she had lost. Yet there were fresh tears when she kissed them goodbye.

  Harry insisted on driving even though his shoulder ached, an inevitable after-effect of knocking down locked doors and half-strangling local farmers. The muscles were out of condition. Yet no sooner had they passed the Fleet service area than the brake-lights of the Friday-night traffic in front of them lit up like a Californian rock concert. They sat and tried to be patient, seeking distraction. Jemma was wearing shorts that exposed almost all of her thighs, which stretched out provocatively. Harry had been studying them.

  ‘You’re staring,’ she said.

  ‘Any chance?’

  ‘Not with that lorry driver hanging out of his window to get a better look.’

  ‘Then I’ll cut the swine up first chance I get.’

  But the opportunity never came. The delay dragged on, their whimsical humour evaporated and Harry kept glancing at the car clock, checking it against his father’s wristwatch, which lied and said he had a few minutes more. Was it fate? He was on his way to what he sensed would be one of the most profound confrontations of his life, yet he was stuck in the most impenetrable traffic jam. Fuck coincidence.

  The patrol car was sent out from the station at Dorchester. The two young police officers, one a newly qualified constable and the other a female probationer, went first to the Gathering Storm. Yes, Mr Jones had been there, even signed his name in the register, although Mrs Butt admitted to being surprised when she’d been told that was his real name. She was a professional sceptic when it came to any man who booked in with two women and kept the floorboards creaking half the night. And, as if that hadn’t been enough to arouse her suspicions, there’d been some sort of trouble in the toilets with a couple of the locals. Nasty sort, that Mr Jones.

  With the directions supplied by Chief Inspector Edwards the two constables then found the lay-by just beyond the blasted tree, where the lush summer grass bore the signs of having been crushed by a parked car. The overgrown track up the hillside also showed the marks of where someone had recently passed back and forth. The officers followed the trail that led to the thick woodland on the skyline above.

  Their progress on the motorway was so poor they turned off at Farnborough. ‘I’ll jump on a train,’ Harry had said. ‘Might just make it in time.’ He’d left Jemma in the Volvo to continue the struggle into London.

  And he made it in time, with minutes to spare and sweat on his brow from the stewing pot of the Underground. Wickham’s message had said they should meet at St Stephen’s in Walbrook. Harry scrambled up the stairs of Bank station and into an evening already grown dark. During the day these pavements were packed with workers from every corner of the financial world but now most of them had disappeared off to their homes or into the wine bars and pubs. It was a reasonable bet that Harry and the bishop wouldn’t be disturbed, not in a church.

  Amid the medieval clutter of streets and alleyways that still left its mark on the City of London, St Stephen’s was like blossom on a bare branch. The Walbrook, on which it stood, was one of the old streams that had flowed through and now under the streets of London. Hemmed in and squeezed on all sides, the church had been burned, ransacked and bombed, its exterior still bearing the scars of endless repairs, yet from its ruins grew a rose of extraordinary beauty. Christopher Wren had rebuilt it after the Great Fire, conjuring up a domed structure that he used as a template for his later construction of the cathedral of St Paul’s a few hundred yards to the west. Three hundred years later another genius, the sculptor Henry Moore, had been summoned to add yet another transcending touch. He had taken a slab of raw travertine marble from the quarry where Michelangelo had taken his own material and from it had created a great circular altar, which now sat beneath Wren’s soaring dome and had become the reborn heart of this old church. It was there, at the altar and in a pool of light that reflected off the white marble, that Harry found the bishop. Wickham was kneeling, his old back bent, his forehead resting against the smooth cream-grey marble, deep in prayer.

  Edwards was still tracking the icon on his tracker screen with the remorselessness of a cat pursuing its dinner when his colleague from West Dorset called.

  ‘Hughie, you might have given me a little more warning,’ he complained.

  ‘What the hell d’you mean?’

  ‘I’ve got a probationer who wants to quit and a constable who’s still wiping the sick from his sleeve.’

  ‘What did they find?’

  ‘A stiff. Elderly. Male. Not in very tasty condition.’

  ‘Another? Damn his hide, he’s making a collection.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My suspect.’

  ‘I can’t yet confirm that it’s suspicious.’

  ‘Of course it’s bloody suspicious or why didn’t he report it?’

  ‘Certainly messy. Could take a while to confirm the cause of death.’

  ‘No matter. It’s enough. The slippery sod’s mine.’

  The bishop, on his knees, was wearing a rich purple cassock with a silver rosary around his neck. The pool of light that adorned the central altar emphasized the bareness of his scalp and gave the scene a medieval, monastic quality. His hands were clasped in front of him, high, and so hard the fingers were like ivory. He seemed startled, hadn’t heard Harry’s footsteps, turned suddenly, eyes swimming in agitation.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Harry found himself apologizing – for what? He’d been invited, summoned.

  ‘No, Harry, I’m the one who owes the apology,’ Wickham said, rising from his knees. His ornate crucifix swung from the rosary around his neck; he held it, put it to his lips. ‘I haven’t been entirely forthright with you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Time to settle things.’ He turned once more to place his fingers on the polished surface of the altar, running them across its smooth planes, almost sensuous, like a keyboard. ‘Do you like this, Harry? Some loathe it, mock it as nothing better than a chunk of old Camembert. Philistines!’ He shook his head in incredulity. ‘Yet there are those of us who see it as a reminder of our origins, like the rock where Abraham came to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Do you fear God, Harry?’

  ‘He’s never been around much when I needed him.’

  ‘This altar caused the most enormous fuss when it was first placed here. So many narrow minds. You know, Moore spent five years coming to this church, sitting quietly, soaking in the atmosphere, catching the changing light, the echoes of the place. And the result is . . .’ His moist lips hovered, searching for the words. ‘A gift fit for God himself.’

  ‘A sacrificial stone?’

  The bishop turned sharply in annoyance. Harry seemed intent on provoking him once again.

  ‘I found Findlay Francis a few hours ago. Or what was left of him.’

  The bishop’s face twitched, the flash of ill temper that had filled it as quickly transformed to anguish. ‘I did not know. Poor, poor Finn,’ he whispered, the words struggl
ing to find their way past lips that had suddenly grown parched in pain.

  ‘You must at least have suspected.’

  Wickham shook his head again. ‘You think me capable of such things?’

  ‘You steal from the Church, that’s pretty obvious. There are other parts of your private life that might pose a few problems, too, if they were thrown open to the daylight.’

  ‘Enough!’ The bishop’s anger echoed around the empty corners of St Stephen’s. ‘Do you know how many churches I have saved from closure? How many letters of gratitude fill my desk from charities that would otherwise have folded? How many vicars who have given their lives selflessly to God whom I have saved from an old age of grinding misery? I . . . I . . .’ He was pounding his chest histrionically, boastfully, his amethyst ring sparkling in the light like an angry eye. ‘I, Randall Wickham, have raised more money for the Church than perhaps any man alive.’

  ‘And poured quite a chunk of it into your own vices. You know, Bishop, when you go and join the Almighty, the curators of every museum in the country will be tearing each other’s arms off to be the first through your door.’

  ‘You know nothing!’

  ‘Then try me.’

  Wickham stared as if explanation were beneath his dignity, then relented. ‘It was my first visit to Russia, when it was still run by Communists and God-deniers, long before the Wall came down. I met an old Orthodox priest in a suburb of St Petersburg. He was dressed in rags and thin as a winter tree. He found me praying in his church and handed me an icon, begged me to keep it, preserve it. He told me that if it stayed with him it would soon be lost for ever. They were such desperate days. So I brought it back home. The piece turned out to be of very considerable value.’