Blood Brotherhood

by Robert Barnard

  One member had already gone, somewhat under a cloud. The Bishop of Mitabezi had been spirited away during the night, while the press were making themselves odious throughout the saloon bars of Hickley. He had gone in a chauffeur-driven Daimler provided by Church House, and he was even now waiting in the lounge at Heathrow to be wafted back to his own diocese. He stood near the exit gate talking genially to the High Commissioner of his country, looking large, impressive and confident. But he was not talked about by those who remained at St Botolph’s. All of them (except Simeon Fleishman) were very liberal in their outlook on race, and deplored discrimination in any shape or form, but they all in practice accepted the idea that different standards had to be adopted with darker skins, and that acts of barbarism or tyranny were best passed over in silence if they happened outside Indo-European boundaries. So the Bishop’s surreptitious departure passed without comment, and everyone spoke about almost anything else. Except the hacked-up body of Brother Dominic, which they all had dreamed about these last few nights, some in particularly vivid detail.

  Randi Paulsen and Simeon Fleishman exchanged addresses under the trees at the edge of the lawn. Both, unusually, intended to make use of them. Randi plotted extracting money from her church for a lecture tour of Norwegian communities in the States, with ‘Woman’s Role in the Church Today’ as her subject. She knew that any project with ‘Woman’s Role’ in the title could be sure of a grant from some worthy organization or other in her own country.

  And it will be so nice to stay with a united Christian family, she said to herself, bestowing her smile like maundy money all over Simeon Fleishman. One does admire a man who has kept the essential things of religion so completely in perspective!

  Simeon Fleishman had heard that Norway was expensive, and intended keeping all his contacts there polished bright as a new pin. I wonder if she could put us all up, he said to himself.

  ‘To think that all the good that could have come out of this symposium,’ he was saying, ‘should have been marred.’ (He buttonholed Philip Lambton.) ‘I was just saying to our friend here how truly tragic to think of all the good that could have come out . . .’

  He lumbered on, spreading clichés before him like stepping-stones and then shifting his bulk carefully from one to the other. Philip Lambton was almost dancing with impatience to get away. His young middle-aged body had lightened perceptibly as the time of departure approached, and now that Expectation sat in the air his whole being was athrill to return to a world of motor-bikes and big sound and leather-clad chicks, bearing his Experience, a real murder, to lay as an offering beside their gang knifings and roughings-up. It was as much as he could do to give Simeon Fleishman the seven and a half minutes required to drive the heavy vehicle of his thought to its predictable destination.

  The Bishop and Ernest Clayton, as so often before, were talking on the moors. The Bishop had taken Clayton up once more, now that their difficulties had all been apparently solved, and it seemed as if he felt the need to justify his conduct in the whole affair, as if he felt he had been weak, yet couldn’t leave anyone else with the impression he had been weak. He enlarged with some eloquence on the consequences of the heroic decision they had taken yesterday, to do nothing at all about the state of affairs at the Community of St Botolph’s:

  ‘I think we can be confident,’ he said, ‘that the situation will right itself quite naturally in the course of events, and then I think we will be able to congratulate ourselves on not taking a precipitate step which would have caused unlimited scandal, harmed many, many people quite unnecessarily, and brought on the Church . . .’

  He’s done the right deed for the wrong reason, thought Ernest Clayton to himself.

  Stewart Phipps said few goodbyes, and those reluctantly. He had formed no bonds in his week at St Botolph’s. He never did form bonds. He watched the rest say their farewells with an open sneer on his face, skulking round the outskirts of the lawn, spying on his shadow in the sun, and wondering what issues of public importance had accumulated while he had been away, shut up in this ridiculous place, away from the news-mincers of the BBC, away from petitions and protest marches, away from the stirring calls to arms in the letter columns of Tribune.

  Bente Frøystad said a happy farewell to everyone. What passed for friendliness was happiness at getting away, but it did. She got caught by Simeon Fleishman (‘I was just saying to your fellow-countrywoman how truly tragic . . .’) and, squirm as she might, she could not get out of giving him her address. However, when she had written it out for him she explained it was the address of a student hostel, and she had the satisfaction of seeing him crumple it discreetly in his heavy fist after he had left her for someone else. Otherwise she smiled around, frank, open and untroubled, and she was one of those whom almost everyone said goodbye to with a degree of regret.

  ‘Well, this was a turn-up for the book, wasn’t it?’ she said, with a good attempt at cockney, when she got to Ernest Clayton. ‘Wasn’t quite the time of prayer, meditation and meaningful discussion that we were banking on, was it?’

  ‘I’m not sure the thing was ever destined to be a great success,’ said Ernest Clayton. ‘Even before the murder we did seem a rather ill-assorted little bunch, I thought.’

  ‘That was my impression,’ said Bente. ‘But isn’t that always the case when clergymen and such like get together?’

  ‘Well, it is very often so, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. You know, I often look around my fellow students, and think: what are you going to be like in a few years’ time? Are you going to be like so-and-so, and so-and-so? — our teachers at college, you know, and some of the big noises in the Church. And you know they are! And then I think: and I’ve got to mingle with you for the rest of my life!’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then I think: Have I chosen the right profession?’

  She was obviously serious, but Ernest Clayton was saved from having to give advice by Father Anselm, who emerged from the door of the great hall and stood for a moment surveying them all. In his ordinary brown robe he looked gaunt, impressive, and a little forbidding, just as Ernest Clayton remembered him on the day they had arrived. Then, followed by Brother Hamish, he came forward and went around from delegate to delegate, saying his farewells. Exactly like end of term, thought Ernest Clayton. And Father Anselm, like any good headmaster, was trying to disguise the fact that he hadn’t actually liked many of the boys very much. When he had done the rounds, he turned towards the Bishop, who nodded his head with a mischievous little smile.

  ‘Half past eleven. Time to be off,’ said Father Anselm. They all turned towards the main gate and began to shuffle in that direction, somewhat apprehensive at the thought of the reporters.

  ‘No, this way,’ called Brother Hamish, and he led the way through the kitchen garden and across to the moors, his watery eyes gleaming, and his cunning face twisted into a smile. They all stepped out after him, and as they neared the wall they noticed a step-ladder leaning against it on their side.

  The Bishop of Peckham was almost beside himself with boyish pleasure. ‘Isn’t it a good idea?’ he said to all and sundry. ‘I thought of it myself!’ He was very good at executing this sort of notion.

  On the far side of the wall, on a rough track a couple of hundred yards aways, stood three undistinguished-looking cars. Propped against the wall stood the bicycle of Stewart Phipps. ‘Quickly now,’ said the Bishop, and one by one they popped over the wall and hurried over to the cars. In a couple of minutes they were all on their various ways, pedalling or being driven to their various destinations, or to railway stations whence they would be further sorted for delivery by rail, sea and air to their various portions of the globe.

  Outside the main gate the reporters stood around. They sweated, undid another button on their shirts, and looked at their watches.

  The only member of the symposium not to make his exit in this way was Ernest Clayton. His car was outside the main g
ate, so anything surreptitious in the way of departure was impossible for him. Father Anselm, generous in victory, had tried to spare him the wrath of the reporters, and had invited him to stay to lunch before he drove back to Lincolnshire, and he had gladly accepted. He watched the three cars and the little figure pedalling savagely disappear in different directions over the moors, and then turned to go for the last time into the Community of St Botolph’s.

  • • •

  The shabby little suitcase was packed. The dirty underwear was rolled up in a plastic bag, the flannel and toothbrush and shaving gear were in the toilet bag and tucked into the corner. There was nothing to do now but eat lunch, be friendly to Father Anselm, then brave the reporters and drive off, back to Lincolnshire and the humdrum daily round. Meanwhile he could go out into the sun until lunch-time.

  But he did not want to go out into the sun. He alone of the delegates — the suspects — was left, and now the other faces were out of sight he wanted to sit down and think, quite abstractly, about this murder. Without the human element to intrude, he had an odd idea that the outlines might be clearer.

  Ernest Clayton sat down on the bed.

  The accepted pattern seemed to be this: Brother Dominic had run a service catering for unusual sexual tastes; one of his clients, coming by chance to St Botolph’s, had recognized him and been recognized; fearing blackmail, he or she had murdered him.

  He sat back against the wall and contemplated this pattern. It was neat. And yet . . . He remembered the Bishop of Peckham on the moors the next day, his face sagging at the memory, describing the body: ‘Dreadful,’ he kept saying, seeming nearly to retch with renewed horror. ‘He must have been quite frenzied, quite crazed!’ Why had the murderer not been neater, calmer, cleaner?

  Change the pattern a little, and say that the murderer had been blackmailed, that Brother Dominic had already begun to put the pressure on. Did that make the pattern more satisfying? Yes, a little. And yet — in a matter of days, how little pressure could have been applied! But the Bishop had said, ‘frenzied . . . crazed.’ As a result of months or years of screw-turning, this might be possible. But could a blackmailer work his victim up to such homicidal passion in a mere couple of days?

  Look at the pattern again. A slaughtered lamb; a slaughtered brother. Various irrelevant matter presented itself to his mind: Isaiah — ‘like a lamb to the slaughter’. Brother Dominic must have lain there like a sacrificial victim. ‘All we like sheep have gone astray.’ One of us most horribly astray. He pulled his sermon-making brain back to the present, and to the pattern: the lamb and the brother.

  And no connection between them? None whatsoever?

  That was what they had been ignoring. That was what, sitting back in abstract contemplation, it seemed impossible to swallow. On one and the same night the Bishop of Mitabezi goes out and butchers a lamb, and on the same night, quite independently, one of the delegates creeps down and disembowels Brother Dominic. It was incredible. The coincidence was just too great. They had been so staggered by the horror of the Bishop’s action, and perhaps also by the desire politely to ignore it as a temporary aberration, that they had numbed their minds to the fact that these two things could not be entirely unrelated.

  But what was the consequence of relating the two things? That they had been too hasty in dismissing the Bishop of Mitabezi as a suspect? The Bishop of Peckham had been very sure that the trance was genuine, but could it have been self-induced after the murder of Dominic? Or what if one of the brothers, or Father Anselm, out on the moors illegally at night should have seen poor Mitabezi at work on the lamb, and taken advantage of it? Or what if one of the delegates had?

  Ernest Clayton got up and looked out of his window. The ritual slaughter had taken place at the far corner of the barn, round the front — at the point farthest away from Ernest Clayton’s window: he had himself inspected the pool of blood seeping into the earth at that point. From his own window the front of the barn could not be seen — the barn was built at a 45° angle to the guest wing, and he could see only the side and the back. That would mean that only the rooms at the other end of the corridor could possibly get a view of the front of the barn — at most the last three rooms. The room at the far end was Randi Paulsen’s, but he felt sure she could be ignored: he had heard the sound of her drawing her wardrobe across the door as he went to the lavatory on the night of the murder. She could hardly have risked pulling it back in the middle of the night. The next two along were Stewart Phipps and Bente Frøystad. Further than that he felt sure he need not go: the next rooms would certainly not get a view of the front of the barn.

  Was this the answer: that one of these was meditating something — what? revenge? ‘vigorous counter-measures’? — and that he or she saw the Bishop at work and decided to seize the opportunity? Accepting this as a hypothesis, he tried to follow it through. Donning a monk’s habit (Clayton had heard of the discovery — but where on earth had the murderer got it from? There was none in his room) he or she had crept down the stairs and done the deed. Intending further action to incriminate the Bishop of Mitabezi indisputably in the murder, the killer had first gone out to burn the incriminating habit in the incinerator. He or she had then been prevented from further action by the discovery of the body and the presence of Father Anselm and the Bishop of Peckham around the scene of the crime. The murderer had then been forced to wait outside until — when? — probably until the Bishop and Anselm had discovered the lamb by the barn, or until they had gone to the gate to let in the police. Then he or she had scuttled into the building and gone to their room. The intention of incriminating the Bishop of Mitabezi had thus badly misfired, due to the premature finding of the body and the calling of the police.

  He considered this new pattern: did it stand up? Yes, as an outline it did. But only so far, no further, for it took no account of motive, or the murderer’s state of mind. The latter could be guessed at from the condition of the victim’s body: it was a safe conjecture that after the murder he or she was hardly in a psychological state to carry any plan through coolly.

  But who? Ernest Clayton got up, and went into the corridor. There could surely be no objection to his going into the rooms of his fellow delegates, now that they had removed themselves and their belongings from St Botolph’s. He walked up the dark corridor towards the stairs, and with an odd mixture of resolution and reluctance he pulled open the third door from the end. The sun, flooding through the window, blinded him for a moment, but when he had blinked he saw in a flash that from this room you could not see the front of the barn. Suddenly he felt very happy. He had not wanted to think Bente Frøystad capable of murder.

  He went on, less reluctantly, to Stewart Phipps’s room. But here again the drenching sunlight instantly told him he was wrong. It was just not quite possible to see round to the front of the barn. Only if the Bishop of Mitabezi had stood some distance away from the building could Stewart Phipps have seen what he was doing, and this the pool of blood by the barn made certain had not been the case. Ernest Clayton felt well through him a great wave of disappointment: for this knocked his theory on the head. For the life of him he couldn’t think up any way Randi Paulsen could alone have shifted that wardrobe silently from across her door.

  He strolled nevertheless into her room. From here, yes, one could get a perfectly adequate view of the front of the barn, and the blood-stained corner whence the little lamb had been despatched to find out who made him. And yet — it was impossible!

  ‘It’s the only one you can see the barn from,’ said a voice from the door. Ernest Clayton, hackles rising, spun round from the window. It was Inspector Croft.

  ‘So I see,’ said Clayton. Then, with an unmistakable tinge of disappointment in his voice, he said: ‘You had the same idea, did you?’

  ‘Yes, but only a few minutes before you,’ said Croft kindly.

  ‘There’s no reason to feel disappointed on my part,’ said Clayton with a wry smile, ‘since the idea was such a du
d.’

  ‘And why a dud?’

  ‘Oh — perhaps you hadn’t heard,’ said Ernest Clayton, rather keen to prove his powers of deduction. ‘Miss Paulsen was terribly upset at finding there were no locks on the door, and we had to push this wardrobe in so she could be protected from our rapacious intentions. I suppose she could have faked things by pulling it in some other direction, rather than across the door, but I must say I was on my way to the bathroom at the time, and I went past the door: I feel pretty sure she wasn’t faking it, and I’m quite sure she couldn’t have shifted it silently later.’

  Croft paused with an actor’s sense of effect.

  ‘There was no need for her to fake it, or move it later at night,’ he said. ‘You are ignoring one thing.’ He went to the door and pushed it open. ‘The doors open outward here. She had only to leave a small gap, small enough to squeeze herself out of, and then there would be no need to move the wardrobe again.’

  He allowed time for Ernest Clayton to swear silently to himself before throwing open the door of the wardrobe. Piled high on two of the shelves Ernest Clayton saw the brown habits of the monks of St Botolph’s.

  ‘And that’s what she used to keep the blood off her,’ said Croft.

  CHAPTER XVII

  GOING

  LUNCH OVER, Ernest Clayton fetched his suitcase, and together he and Father Anselm strolled out of the Great Hall and across the lawns towards the main gate. Just as at table, with others present, they had talked about anything but the murder, so as they continued out in the sunlight neither seemed particularly anxious to approach the subject both had most in mind.