Theodora looked at the portrait of the Archimandrite Georgios XII in black and white. It showed the same features as the one in Bernhardt Truegrave’s book. It was not the face she had seen on the TV on Monday night.
‘So one thing is certain. The chap who appeared at the signing meeting and on TV isn’t the Archimandrite. Our chap is younger and the true one is older for a start.’
‘I thought there was something odd about him when I saw him with Papworth,’ Theodora agreed. ‘He shouldn’t have crossed his legs.’
‘What?’
‘When he was interviewed with Papworth, the false Archimandrite crossed his legs. Orthodox clergy wearing cassocks don’t do that. It’s regarded as indecorous, even insulting.’
‘That so?’ Tom liked esoteric knowledge.
‘And you think your corpse was the true Archimandrite?’
‘He fits both pictures nicely.’
‘So what was he doing outside the conference hall?’
‘Waiting for the conference to begin.’ Tom was complacent.
‘But he was dead.’ Theodora was irritated. ‘And the reception party would have gone down to welcome him. He couldn’t just have slipped in without anyone knowing. Ashwood would have noticed.’
‘Just so. They did go down to welcome him, or at least Truegrave did.’ Tom filled Theodora in on Kevin’s intelligence. ‘Myfannwy’s account fits that and so does my seeing them, Clutch and Teape that is, drift up the staircase at around two forty-five. Say it worked something like this. Truegrave collects the true Archimandrite from Kevin in reception about ten to one. Perhaps Truegrave wanted a little talk about political matters before the main party arrived. Then Truegrave walks him down to the conference room and the chap pegs out.’
Theodora was intrigued. ‘And while Truegrave went to get his colleagues, you came along and wrapped him in a carpet. Then what happened?’
‘Nasty moment for Truegrave et al. Instigated a search and luckily stumbled over him just where you’d expect to find him, among the builders’ rubble, in the room next to the conference hall.’
‘What about boots?’ Theodora was firm.
‘I rather wonder if he wasn’t using his hollow heels to carry one or two little items of value out of the country.’
Theodora sighed. ‘Canon Teape collects ecclesiastical silver.’
‘That so? Not a poor man’s hobby.’
‘So Gilbert said. In fact, it would make sense if the conversation I overheard Gilbert having on the phone the other morning was with Teape. That would explain why he had boots made for him with hollow heels.’
‘Always useful. I shall follow the custom myself when I can afford to have my boots made.’ Tom was clearly cruising towards home. ‘On the other hand it does look as though they’re all three in on this matter. Teape for his silver, Truegrave for his Eastern Europe empire and Clutch …’
‘Clutch for the politics. HM Government and all that,’ Theodora completed the picture. ‘Did you know that Truegrave was married to Anona Trice?’ she asked, seemingly at a tangent.
‘That so? How did you find out?’
‘Oenone got it from Geoffrey. I wondered, because at their dinner party last night Gilbert made a thing of not wanting it revealed. Client confidentiality and all that.’
‘What does she look like?’
‘Big head, small body, cap of red-gold short hair.’
‘I think I’ve seen her in the Place library,’ Tom said.
‘Doing what?’
‘Don’t know but she was up the catwalk in the area where her husband’s book is. Do you think she’s mixed up in this?’
Theodora shook her head. ‘She’s very keen to draw her husband back to her. She plays a game, half chess, half magic, in order to bring it about. I suppose she wasn’t here on Monday when they were shifting the body about?’
‘She’s not in Ashwood’s book, though that doesn’t mean much.’
‘I suppose it’s not really very likely. However, what did they do with the body when they found it?’
‘It might still have been in the basement area when we looked for it on Monday night, in a wheely bin, minus a boot.’
‘And where is it now?’ Theodora wanted to keep Tom down to earth.
‘In the freezer?’
Theodora shuddered. ‘Why?’
‘They can’t pass the false Archimandrite off as the true one in Azbarnah because he’s known there. So they’ll have to produce a body and acknowledge the death, but try and make out he died after he’d done the concordat signing. Then they’ll need to put in someone as Archimandrite who will keep to the terms of the concordat. Truegrave will be busy.’
‘And where does the false Archimandrite come from?’
‘Well, if you remember, he was late. Kept Canon Clutch’s cucumber sandwiches cooling. My bet is that Truegrave was told to find a substitute.’
‘One of his young men stacked in the flat under the flight path for Terminal Two at Heathrow,’ Theodora contributed.
‘Eh?’
‘He entertains a lot of young men from Azbarnah from the University of Vorasi. But why not just announce that the true Archimandrite had had a heart attack and abandon the party?’
‘Depends what was hanging on the signing. HM Government and all that. We all have our reasons for not admitting to death,’ Tom said soberly. ‘I wasn’t going to jeopardise my career. Canon Clutch et al weren’t going to put the Church of England’s – well, Ecclesia Place’s – credibility at risk with the Foreign Office. If they thought that the Archimandrite’s death would put an end to the concordat signing, perhaps indeed to the concordat itself, especially if the whole thing depended heavily on Truegrave’s special relationship with the family of the Archimandrite, they might be moved to extreme measures.’
‘It’s all speculative,’ Theodora said. ‘On the other hand you have a body, no doubt about that. You also have a false Archimandrite and there has to be some explanation for that. If you’re right about the Foreign Office-Ecclesia Place link, it could just be. Frankly,’ she added, ‘I’d believe anything of the FO. I had a cousin there who would stoop to anything.’
‘Cousin?’
‘He was my father’s elder brother’s wife’s youngest nephew.’
‘Do you know him well enough to tap into?’ Tom was urgent. ‘I mean we really do need some confirmation of the FO-Ecclesia Place link re Azbarnah.’
Theodora considered how well she knew Julian Morely-Trump. ‘I could try. I haven’t seen him since I was fourteen. Meanwhile …’
‘Meanwhile I think we should have a go at internal evidence.’
Theodora put the rest of the cold coffee inside her. Together they made their way down back alleys and side passages, meeting and parting from the river as history dictated, in the direction of the more respectable quarter of Ecclesia Place.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Computer
‘How about keys?’
‘Did a deal with young Kevin. He isn’t paid until Friday.’
Theodora wasn’t sure she approved. But it made it easier to move around Ecclesia Place in the dark than the last time they’d come. Tom headed off from the entrance hall up the main staircase, jangling his prizes.
‘The trouble is that there’s no communication between the different branches of the Place’s administration. Each department has its own hardware and software. I’ve counted seven makes of hardware and there’s probably double that of software packages. Every time you want to run a disk on a machine other than your own you’ve got a major conversion job on hand.’
Theodora listened with half an ear. The parish had run to an Amstrad. It looked a bit old-fashioned, made a noise when printing but was otherwise un-temperamental. She knew no one who would want to borrow it.
‘They still write memos to each other, if they communicate at all.’ Tom was scornful. ‘They could put the day’s notices straight on
to the computer link and then of course they could connect it to phones, including mobiles. Save an enormous amount of secretarial time.’
‘Why don’t they then?’ They rounded a corridor and plunged back into the grid system which Theodora always found so confusing.
‘I’ve given it some thought.’ Tom was judicious. ‘The Church doesn’t actually value knowledge which it hasn’t itself discovered. So management and communications skills, social and psychological sciences, even finance and law are all seen as either irrelevant or a threat. Of course it makes life easier in a way, instead of listening and learning you can just pontificate. It’s a very eccentric culture.’
Theodora, who knew far more than Tom about the impermeable, ignorant smugness of senior clergy, thought he’d been rather bright to come to this conclusion so quickly. She, after all, had the advantage of inheritance.
‘Do you know,’ Tom went on, fumbling for keys to the door marked ‘Eastern European Affairs – Canon E. B. Truegrave’, ‘I’ve sat in a room full of lawyers, some of whom we’ve been paying, and listened to Clutch tell them what the law is. No wonder they smile at us.’ The door swung open and Tom switched on the light.
It was a scene of chaos. Books, papers, computer disks and glasses of lemon tea lay over the floor. A photograph in a silver frame of a man in nineteenth-century military uniform with whiskers and a sword had had its glass broken. On the wall a Russian two-barred cross hung but hung crooked. A couple of icons on either side had been displaced and were similarly awry.
They both surveyed the scene in silence.
‘Someone’s done it over,’ Tom said finally.
‘Who, and looking for what?’ Theodora felt the assault on possessions as though they had been her own. She sensed hatred and unreason behind the mess.
‘Not just a look, is it? More a destroy.’
Theodora sniffed the air. It was stale with a slight tang of black tobacco but also some sweeter smell she’d met recently. Was it aftershave or scent? Then she remembered. ‘Whoever did this may have done me and taken the cross.’
Tom looked at the mess. Then he went to the computer and turned it on. There was a flash from the screen and then nothing. He tried again. ‘Either coincidence or they’ve sabotaged it. How do you destroy a memory?’
‘I spend so much time trying not to on the parish one at Geoffrey’s, I really don’t know. What’s the way round?’
‘We’d better try the other computers.’
‘Teape’s in the library,’ Theodora offered.
‘Let’s try Clutch’s first.’
In Myfannwy’s bijou office all was to hand. Tom seated himself before the computer and switched on. Theodora was reminded of someone about to play an organ.
‘There’s a fortune to be made by the man who can invent a software package to persuade the clergy to use software packages,’ Tom remarked. ‘Perhaps I am that man,’ he mused contentedly.
‘Catch twenty-two,’ Theodora snubbed him – she’d had enough of her ignorance being exposed for one night. ‘They’d have to try before they’d be convinced, and if they’re willing to try they’re already convinced.’
‘The thing is to find if there are files hidden away which could refer to the Azbarnah affair.’ Tom was intent only on his task.
‘Would Canon Clutch give any information to Mrs Gwynether?’
‘Oh yes. He assumes everyone is utterly stupid and that they never make any inferences from the information he gives them. It’s part of his feeling that he can make words mean what he wants them to mean – that he can form the world by describing it.’
‘That’s a theological way of defining God,’ Theodora smiled, and pushed him a box of disks to help him in his game.
‘So my Methodist mentors always told me.’
Theodora felt herself rebuked. Why had she supposed that Tom had no religious background? After all, one would need some impulse to enter the service of the Church as a layman.
Tom fiddled from software to software through Microsoft to WordPerfect to Ami Pro. The everyday files were easy to penetrate. Mrs Gwynether had a penchant for whimsy: ‘mite’ housed expenses claims; ‘talents’, petty cash; ‘Samaritan’ located Overseas Mission; and a quick scroll through ‘Jeremiah’ revealed it was concerned with long-term financial forecasts. Tom slipped in disk after disk moving through old agenda and lots of letters to important people that Canon Clutch apparently could not bear to delete. Some were quite short, accepting or refusing invitations to the great and the good. Five recent ones within the last year bore an address at the Foreign Office to someone called Morely-Trump, Permanent Under Secretary.
Theodora stopped Tom. ‘Hang on a moment, that’s my FO relation. Can we check out what he’s doing with Clutch?’
Slowly Tom scrolled through the letters. ‘They seem to have spent a lot of time at somewhere called “Holdings” in Hampshire. Three weekends in a row this summer.’
‘It’s a large, cold Victorian house entirely surrounded by watercress,’ Theodora supplied. ‘M-T inherited it from the other side of the family. I only went once. It’s a pity we don’t know what was discussed there. I can’t honestly imagine M-T inviting someone like Clutch just for his charms.’
‘Perhaps a case of religious conversion?’ Tom was not serious.
‘M-T is a Roman Catholic.’ Theodora was austere.
‘We really could do with a briefing paper or a memorandum to give us a narrative link,’ Tom said, darting round the directories. ‘Pity they don’t use Apple Macs, they’re so much more intuitive.’
Theodora loved his language. She gazed over his shoulder as the command came up: ‘Password required.’
‘Hah! Now, what would she use?’
‘Azbarnah or bits of it?’
Tom typed all possible bits of Azbarnah. Nothing happened. Over the next ten minutes they tried ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Church’, ‘Truegrave’, ‘Archimandrite’ and, in desperation, ‘Irradium’.
Then Theodora said, ‘How about “Genesis”?’
Up came the directory with files entitled ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’. They contained a log of Ecclesia Place responses to overtures from the Turannidi family over four years. They were political and financial in tone. Religion did not figure. They could have been negotiating land and commodities deals. The correspondence was meticulously dated and referenced.
Theodora let out a sigh. ‘So that’s it. Your supposition was absolutely right. The Foreign Office is simply using the Church of England to do its political will.’
Tom was jubilant. ‘So, ho ho.’ He cared less about the purity of the Church than she did, Theodora realised.
‘How about “Exodus”?’ she suggested.
The subfile was ‘Moses and Aaron’. This was slightly better news as far as Theodora was concerned. It went into some detail about the ways in which the Church of England would support financially the restoration of church buildings and the training of priests in Vorasi seminary over the next seven years, together with an amount of one million pounds sterling to be given in four parts over the next four years for ‘the furtherance of the Azbarnah Church’s mission’. At the end was a list of guaranteed assets which looked to Tom remarkably like the list of objects that he’d seen that afternoon displayed at the Galaxy Gallery.
‘Thirty pieces of silver,’ said Theodora bitterly.
Tom leaned back in his chair and pushed his arms out behind him, triumph and tiredness combined.
‘You know, there’s nothing actually criminal in all this,’ Theodora said.
‘No. But one, we now have a reason why the concordat is so very important. And two, the Church of England as a whole might not exactly want its funds spent in this way just because the Government would like to get its hands on some cheap basic materials.’
‘The idea is that the Church as a whole shouldn’t know too much about it. All the concordat talks about as far as I can see is cooperation, unspecifie
d, and intercommunion.’
‘I thought we couldn’t intercommunicate with Orthodoxy since we went for women priests.’ Tom liked to get details straight.
‘I get the feeling Azbarnah Orthodoxy goes its own way and if the Church of England’s money is available, our doctrinal errors aren’t going to stand in the way.’
‘Greedy Church meets greedy Government,’ Tom said.
‘Nothing to choose between them.’ Theodora was angry. ‘Really, what a set of crooks they all are.’
‘Yes,’ Tom agreed, ‘and we could still do with a body.’
‘It needs to be properly mourned,’ Theodora agreed. ‘And I’d quite like to show the powers that be that the concordat wasn’t properly signed and give the Diet an opportunity to debate the full facts so they can see just what they’re putting their hand to and for whose benefit.’
‘I’d like to know whether or not it was killed, murdered, or whether it had a heart attack.’ Tom pursued his own interest. ‘It’s difficult to know what to do with this lot.’ He gestured to the flickering light of the computer screen. ‘If the FO wants the deal and Clutch does get the Diet to approve it and if Truegrave can get his way with the Orthodox hierarchy and families out in Azbarnah and if we can’t prove foul play, we’re really rather stymied.’
‘Archie Douglas,’ said Theodora. ‘The media shall be our salvation.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Boat
The rocking of the boat on the tide reminded Maggie of her dream of Eden. There were rivers in Eden, she seemed to recall.
‘Couldn’t live far from water, could you, boy?’ She rested on her oars and addressed the empty seat in the stern. The nephew had grown older in the course of the week. He’d got more conversable. He was beginning to resemble that nice lad with the hogged mane who worked at the Place and gave her a civil time of day when they passed each other.
The current began to pluck at the craft. Just past midnight, Maggie reckoned the tide told her, and still flooding for another hour. The boat was wooden and heavy. It had been built of seasoned oak round about the turn of the century and well maintained year after year. She smelt the fresh smell of the latest coat of pitch on the gunwales. She didn’t hold with these light plastic container things, so flimsy the current could spin them round.
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