After her death by cancer Philip Lambton had gone to Liverpool, and before long he had shown signs of the ‘breaking out’ that the neighbour had predicted. The natural inclination of his congregation was to make their vicar into a much-petted son, for they were almost all female and over fifty. But Philip Lambton had shown a surprising tenacity in wriggling out of their blameless maternal embraces. In fact, he had begun to frequent coffee-bars and discotheques, and soon he was even wearing strange gear, riding a motor-bike around at high speed, and was heard to utter a weird jargon which was part genuine teenage argot, part a cod language fed to him by his new companions to see how far his gullibility would take him. In fact, he gradually delivered himself body and soul to the local exponents of pop culture, and he did it in the full glare of local publicity in which he did not detect the undertones of ridicule, though everyone else did. The new freedom, however, turned out to be not so very different from the old servitude.
‘They just walk over him,’ said a fellow clergyman who had tried to give him advice, but had found him too besotted by youth and publicity to listen. ‘They borrow from him, swear at him, work him over, and still he comes back for more. I keep thinking he’ll have to break out, but he never does.’
Stewart Phipps was a very different figure. Born to a London suburban family of civil servants, one with no strong religious affiliations, he had been little loved by his fellow grammar-school boys, on account of his harsh, fluent tongue. Even the teachers were very wary of his withering retorts, especially as he was indubitably bright. He passed his ‘O’ levels with flying colours, and everyone said it was just what they expected. They all added that they hoped it wouldn’t go to his head.
And then something happened that his teachers were familiar enough with but which was extremely disconcerting and wounding to the boy himself. Mentally, he did not continue to expand. He had ‘reached his top’. Of course the situation did not present itself quite like that to Phipps himself, but even he could not fail to notice that lesser, despised boys overtook him, boys he had browbeaten and withered. Even before he took his ‘O’ levels he had thought long and seriously about Oxbridge, had wavered between the two, had done some elementary research into the colleges and thought seriously which of them he would aim at. But when the time came he failed to get into either university.
His temper was not softened by disappointment. On the contrary, his scorn was still as readily on tap, but it was less effective, less feared, because it seemed to his fellows that it now had no solid basis in intellectual supremacy. Stewart Phipps had been deposed. A life of subordination and mediocrity seemed to yawn before his eyes. He decided to go into the Church.
It wasn’t a quick decision. He had been interested in religion for some time, for its ritual had appealed to some suppressed sense of drama in him, and he grasped at anything that could seem to mark him off from ‘the rest’. Stewart Phipps’s religion was always of the sort that excluded others, and sought for reasons to exclude still more. Once the decision was made, the Church was embraced whole-heartedly. It was the mid-sixties: left-wing radicalism was in the air. This too, in its most excluding version, was crushed to Stewart Phipps’s lean, crusading breast. There was little room left for other enthusiasms, but he picked up a little wife and children around this time. Since no one to speak of went any longer to his church, what gossip the local Blackburn police had been able to pick up was from his neighbours — a hymn of hate which centred on his treatment of his dependants.
‘He treats them like dirt beneath his feet,’ said the next-door neighbour. ‘It’s not what I call Christianity, I know that. Shouts at her, sneers at her — well, go and look at her. She hasn’t got an ounce of life left in her, and she was a pretty little thing before they married. Works her to death, that’s what he does. And the little girls — well! he hardly says hello to them in the mornings, and it’s my belief they hate him, young as they are.’
Two different types. Two murderers? Divorcing consideration of them from the fact of their ordination, Croft felt that both were possibilities, given the right circumstances. What was lacking was any idea why the encounter with Brother Dominic might have provided ‘the right circumstances’.
The other two British clergy were less contemporary types. Ernest Clayton, who Croft had noticed early in his investigations and had found interesting to interview, had been twenty years in his little Lincolnshire parish, and was well-known and liked. This had not stopped church attendance declining, dribble by dribble. ‘Of course, he made efforts, early on,’ said one of his church wardens, ‘but he seemed to lose heart. What can you do, after all? It’s the same all over, isn’t it?’ He was on good terms with his daughters — two of them grown up and married, and one of them living in the nearest big town — but his wife was not altogether popular in the village. ‘She’s a real lady,’ said one of the little congregation, ‘and you don’t see many of those these days. Still, it doesn’t do, if you haven’t got the means to keep it up. No good being snooty if your shoes let in water.’ Croft guessed that Mrs Clayton had accustomed herself less easily than her husband to the reduced status of a clergyman’s family in modern Britain.
The Bishop of Peckham, widowed, cosseted by his housekeeper, fond of his stomach and fond of his little joke, had at this stage of his earthly pilgrimage very little private life: his routine centred on his writing, his television appearances, his episcopal duties. He was popular with his staff, who put it over him in little things, thieved from him in lesser, forgivable ways, and kept the more unpleasant aspects of life — reporters, gushing women, quarrelsome clergymen and telephoning maniacs — out of his hair and away from his notice. They had nothing unpleasant to say about him, and clearly had no difficulty in managing him. Snoop as they might, the police of Peckham had been unable to pick up any unsavoury gossip about him: no undue interest in the members of confirmation classes, of either sex; no hanging around public lavatories; no sudden urges to clean up Soho. His daring was of an entirely theological kind.
Two apparently good and well-adjusted men. Murderers? Well, Clayton looked as if he had the intelligence and the will. But what circumstances would be strong enough to make him kill? The Bishop had the intelligence, but surely not the will. It suddenly struck Croft as slightly comic that he should be considering a bishop as a possible murderer: the whole set-up led one into such bizarre speculations. Or was it so bizarre? It was a cliché of popular criminology that many murderers looked like bishops. That was why the first great disappointment of an English adolescent was usually the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s. And Croft had known plenty of murderers who not only looked but for ninety per cent of the time behaved like bishops. Was the Bishop of Peckham a ninety-per-cent bishop?
He was interrupted in his speculations by Sergeant Forsyte, who came in hot and bothered.
‘I think you’d better come and look at this,’ he said. ‘It might be nothing, but I’ve sent for the technical boys.’
Croft followed Forsyte through the dim corridors, across the Great Hall, and out into the twilight. In the centre of the kitchen garden, only a few yards from the main door, he saw a cluster of his own men, and went over to it.
‘What is it?’ he asked, and the policemen fanned out to let him come in closer.
They were standing round an ancient incinerator, of sturdy local iron-work, looking as old as the buildings themselves, and hidden from the general gaze behind a row of green beans. It was capacious, and obviously used to destroy garden rubbish. The fire had been doused, however, and now the door was held open by one of the police boffins. He beckoned Croft over.
‘See here,’ he said. Croft bent down close. Caught in the hinge of the door were several long strands of material, making up a little rectangle. As far as could be seen the material, which was brown, was stained and discoloured in some way.
‘That’s what your man was wearing, I’d say, wouldn’t you?’ said the boffin.
‘A monk’s
habit?’ said Croft.
‘Looks like it, doesn’t it? That should make things simpler for you, shouldn’t it?’
• • •
Ernest Clayton was a good sleeper. He lived a contented life, his job presented him with few problems that could not be sloughed off at the end of the day, and his digestion was good, never having been ruined by the sort of food and drink which were well beyond his income. He slept, if not the sleep of the just, at least the sleep of the temperate.
But tonight he did not sleep. When he did doze off, it was fitful and troubled, and soon he was awake again, staring at the ceiling, making patterns of the shadow cast by the moon over his room, and trying to sort out his suspicions and see clearly his moral duties. All these considerations seemed to point in different directions.
One thing had become clear to him since his interview with Father Anselm that morning: his suspicions of that gentleman rested on laughably slight foundations. To that extent Anselm’s points had gone home. On the other hand, suspicious of him he still was.
The simplest solution would be to go to the police. After all, it was undeniable that on the night of the murder, there was among the brothers an outsider, whose presence had not been declared to the police, and who had since left. He had no doubt that Detective-Inspector Croft would be more than interested to learn this.
On the other hand, he had hoped to be a little further than this when he presented the results of his investigations to the police. He had to admit to himself that since the Bishop had told him of the murder there had been gaining living space in his mind this image of himself handing the answer on a plate to the police, or at the very least asking the illuminating question that everybody else had forgotten to ask.
And then there was his loyalty to his church. Despondent though he was about the future of his religion, pessimistic though he was about the state of his church and (especially) the quality of its leadership, nevertheless it was to this church he had given his life, and this church that had provided him with his livelihood. It was undoubtedly true that if there was something untoward going on at St Botolph’s it would be best for the Church if the matter were investigated by the Church. It wasn’t only the Bishop of Peckham who felt that. But what sort of investigation would the Church undertake, and would its main aim be the fearless eliciting of the whole truth? Ernest Clayton wanted to think so, but he couldn’t quite do so. He felt twinges of loyalty, conflicts of judgement. He also felt hot and sticky.
Finally he got up. His bed clung to him and oppressed him, as did the smallness of his room. He walked up and down, still going around in the same intellectual circles. Today he had been worsted by Father Anselm, well and truly. How was he to turn the tables? As he walked and thought, the first light of dawn began to creep in by the window of his room.
In the middle of his walk he heard a sound. It was very slight, and came, he judged, from the wall under his window, but farther along. Strange: there was no door in that wall, yet this had sounded like a door swinging open. The door to the main hall was round the corner, and surely too far away for him to hear.
He crept to the window and gently pushed aside the grey-green folk-weave curtain. He still could not see what had made the noise, but he could see two robed figures, walking away from the main building, past the barn whose side was visible to Ernest Clayton, and away towards the boundary wall. They walked steadily and determinedly—not hurrying, yet nearly so. When they reached the wall the taller of the two cupped his hands to make a stirrup, and the other, bundling his habit about him rather awkwardly, stepped into it, scrambled on to the top of the wall, and dropped over on to the ground on the other side.
The early morning light was still very dim, but Ernest Clayton was quite clear about what he saw next. First a brown monk’s habit was thrown over the wall, and caught by the tall figure still inside. Then there was to be seen, scurrying away over the moors, a figure in jeans and white tee-shirt, fixing a ruck-sack clumsily on to his shoulders as he ran along. By this time the other figure, plainly intent on regaining the main building as quickly as possible, was in the shadow of the big barn. As he neared the main building, however, the morning light enabled the Reverend Clayton to be quite sure about his identity.
It was Father Anselm, and he had been escorting from the grounds of St Botolph’s the corrupted cherub.
CHAPTER XV
FATHER CONFESSOR
THE WALL BENEATH the guest wing looked solid enough. The whole of St Botolph’s bespoke Edwardian substantiality, transmuted into religious terms. Viewed from a distance there was no sign of skimping or faking in that one wall.
But when Ernest Clayton came closer, jaded but eager in the hot morning sun, he saw that — symbolic of St Botolph’s as a whole? — all was not quite as it seemed. At one point towards the end of the wing, surrounded by tomato beds and an unlikely place for a casual visitor to stray in, the inquisitive eye could detect a regular rift in the brick, forming the shape of a small door. The conclusion seemed inevitable: the brick at this point must in fact be merely a thin imitation of the brick in the rest of the wall, and must swing open to admit people, or to allow the exit of people, who did not wish to use the main door.
To which room, or from which room? The geography of the inside of the building was difficult, particularly at this point, where the main hall had degenerated first into the little rooms where they had met on the first night for drinks, and then into the maze of corridors, bedrooms and discussion rooms. Ernest Clayton crinkled his brow. It could not be into Father Anselm’s study — that was farther along. Could it be Brother Dominic’s bedroom? Or perhaps the next bedroom along the corridor, which he knew to be Father Anselm’s.
He turned, and found Father Anselm watching him.
There was nothing to do now but to have it out with him. He walked slowly towards the barn where Father Anselm was standing. From a distance he resembled a statue, quite immovable. Closer up Ernest Clayton wondered whether he was not more than a little taken aback.
‘You have found our priest-hole, I see,’ said Father Anselm, with a somewhat shaky urbanity.
‘Is that what you call it?’ said Ernest Clayton. ‘Used these days for priests of pop culture, I believe?’
There was a pause. Ernest Clayton suspected this blow was not unanticipated. Finally Father Anselm nodded his head.
‘I see. I rather thought I must have been detected.’ Something of his old grimness of manner returned. ‘You were spying on me last night,’ he said, sourly accusing.
‘I was looking out of my window,’ said Ernest Clayton, with the calm that comes from knowing one holds high trumps.
‘I see,’ said Anselm deliberately. He turned his eyes towards the purple waves of moorland, stretching to the far walls and beyond, as if he were surveying his past life before bidding farewell to it forever. ‘I think perhaps the time has come to take you into my confidence.’
‘You mean to start telling the truth, I suppose,’ said the Reverend Clayton. ‘Is there any point? Clearly I must go to the police. You can save your explanation for them.’
‘You imply that I have been lying,’ said Father Anselm, who was certainly showing no signs of shame. ‘I think you might regret that. At worst I have been — shall we say a trifle Jesuitical? I have never believed it wise to blurt out the whole truth, on every occasion. I have done no worse than occasionally withholding the full explanation from you and the Bishop.’
‘Nonsense. You said the young man had left.’
‘You said he had left. I refrained from correcting you. But it is foolish to quarrel about quibbles of that sort. I think you and the Bishop would be wise to hear the whole story and judge for yourselves. Shall we say in the conference room, in an hour’s time?’
Father Anselm’s air was brisk and confident. Ernest Clayton felt sorely torn. The involvement of the Bishop was clearly a clever ploy on Father Anselm’s part: he was confident he would prove putty in his hands. On the other hand, it
was not altogether an unfair ploy: he himself had been careful to involve the Bishop earlier when making his accusations, to add weight (or at any rate status) to his mission. And then, Father Anselm’s apparent confidence did affect Clayton. It led him to consider the possibility that, far from solving the murder, he might merely make a fool of himself to the police. There is nothing more ridiculous than the amateur detective who fancies himself Sherlock Holmes and turns out to be Watson.
And then, most potent of all was the itch of curiosity: Ernest Clayton did desperately want to know the truth about St Botolph’s.
‘I agree,’ he said. ‘In an hour’s time.’
• • •
It was odd, thought Croft, that the least vivid report he received was the collection of data on the victim. He had from the beginning decided that the late Brother Dominic was probably asking to be murdered, and it was his experience that in such cases the personality of the dead person was usually much more interesting than the personality of the murderer (as a bad smell is more interesting than a deodorizing spray). But if this was the whole truth about Brother Dominic, or Denis Crowther, it was a very dull truth indeed: nothing came off the page to enable him to pin down the nature of the man.
Blood Brotherhood Page 15
