‘No. Look, don’t lose heart,’ Spruce was animated. ‘Riddable admits he returned to the Deanery. Wouldn’t those two servants, vergers, Nick and the Knight fellow, still have been there? Nick Squires says he left at twelve-fifteen and Knight says he went off at twelve-thirty. Whether they saw Riddable will depend on how public he made his appearance. Presumably they’d both have been in the kitchen basement.’
Mules nodded. ‘They might have heard something of the dean – Riddable conversation. Riddable isn’t one to keep his voice down.’
‘We’ll check it,’ said Spruce, ‘the minute we’ve finished at the Hollow. Now what happened next? Say they quarrelled about the article for whatever reason. His son, the little one, now says he went back to the Precentory on the stroke of twelve-thirty. The girl, his daughter then saw the dean go from the Deanery via the Janus to the cathedral. The boy then says he saw the dean come out again and that a man and a woman were about in the close at the same time.’
‘Proper little spy. The lad.’
‘And not too reliable. Doesn’t care for his dad.’
‘Join the crowd.’ Mules permitted himself a grin, switched the indicator left and turned for the Hollow.
‘Let’s take him and his sister at their face value. The canon gets back to the Precentory at twelve-thirty at which point the dean’s still alive. Why did he go to the cathedral at that time of night and who are the man and the woman following him as he comes out?’
‘The boy said “the archaeologist who dug up the Janus,” something like that.’
‘So you reckon it was Fresh? That means there are two witnesses to Fresh being in the area at about the right time.’
‘And the woman?’
‘Millhaven? Or Fresh’s woman? Parish. Mrs Stella Parish.’
The car swung through the Hollow’s gates, slowed to a crawl to let a couple of Khaki Campbells sway across the track, and pulled up in front of the Nissen hut.
The first thing which struck Spruce about Fresh’s room was that it contained a dozen possible murder weapons. There were saddlers’ knives, gem cutters’ knives, taxidermists’ knives, carpenters’ knives, all neat and clean and glittering with freshly sharpened edges.
‘Oliver’s out with Kevin, Inspector. ‘They’re doing the fences by the cutting. He’ll be in for tea in ten minutes. I expect you’ll want to wait. Perhaps you’d care for some tea?’
Mrs Parish seemed to Spruce to be perfectly composed. She fondled the ears of the lurcher bitch and included them all in her hospitality.
‘Could you spare us a moment first, Mrs Parish? It would help us if we could get one or two things absolutely straight.’
‘I’ve nothing really to add to what I told your sergeant before.’ However she drew up chairs for them all near the boiler in the centre of the room.
‘The night the dean was killed. You said in your statement, Mr Fresh came back from Quecourt at about one-thirty. How does he travel? Has he got a car?’
‘He goes everywhere by bike. He feels cars aren’t environmentally friendly.’ She paused briefly then went on. ‘I don’t drive myself now. Oliver came back from the cathedral at about nine. He’d stayed to put the Janus to bed, as he put it. I think he said something about expecting Dunch, Sir Lionel Dunch, the archaeologist, to meet him at the Janus, but he hadn’t done so. Dunch was going to the dean’s party. Oliver, of course, was not. When he got back he had a meal and then went straight out to Quecourt to see Mr Moulsham about queens for next year. Bees. Mr Moulsham is a national authority. Perhaps you know him?’
Spruce regretted he didn’t have that pleasure but Sergeant Mules had taken his statement.
‘Couldn’t he have rung Moulsham?’ Spruce inquired.
‘We aren’t on the phone here, Inspector.’
Spruce evinced astonishment. ‘But your many visitors?’
‘If they want to come they must take the trouble to make a reconnaissance. We aren’t a raree show. We have a way of life to offer. They must come and sample it.’
‘Then they too can get wet to the skin,’ Fresh said stamping through the door from the kitchen part of the hut. ‘Good afternoon to you both.’ His large satyr smile took them all in. It held nothing, Spruce thought, except excellent health, a quiet conscience and good will. Fresh filled the room with his presence. He continued taking off waterproofs and stepping out of boots. Everything had a place. Stella had not moved at his entry. If anything she relaxed and contemplated him as a delighted spectator. The lurcher wove in and out of his legs trying her best to unbalance him.
A lesser man than Spruce would have asked to see Fresh on his own. But in Spruce’s experience the more relaxed people were, the less they feared you, the more they were going to tell you. It wasn’t a policy officially approved amongst the senior members of the force but it had served Spruce well in the past. If Stella wanted to stay while he went over the ground again then he wasn’t going to make a fuss.
‘How well did you know the late dean, Mr Fresh?’ Spruce’s tone was relaxed, interested, conversational. They could have been discussing a mutual acquaintance of whom they both regretted the passing.
‘I first met him when he came down about six weeks ago, before his installation. He was walking round the cathedral. Of course deans do tend to feel they own cathedrals. Responsibility without ownership is a difficult notion for them to grasp. It’s bound up with power. Knowing that you alone know what is best for people is corrupting. Sometimes you can pass it off as vision. Other times it looks like coercion or hubris.You know about hubris, Inspector?’
‘You meet a lot of it in the criminal world.’ Spruce was not at all put out. ‘How did hubris take Dean Stream?’
‘He wanted to reorder the building without any regard for its age or purpose. Modern glass doors at the west end are not what the fourteenthcentury masons who put up that porch had in mind. It would have done nothing to enhance the feeling you should get as you enter the shadow of the cathedral. It ought to feel like birth, the beginning of a journey. Entering a cathedral is a pilgrimage from the setting sun in the west to the rising sun in the east, from dark to light, from death to birth. It’s not like, it ought not to be like, entering any other building.’
‘Did he take your point?’
Fresh grinned. ‘Not in the least. His understanding was clouded by his importance and my unimportance. He did not allow my words to rest in his mind for a single moment.’
Spruce caught a glimpse of what Fresh might have been like in an earlier age: a Fox or a Bunyan trying to get the established church to listen to the people instead of telling them all the time. He would not have been surprised if Fresh had quoted scripture.
‘The eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf shall hear. But only at the end of time, Inspector.’ Spruce nodded at Fresh’s words.
‘Would what the dean wanted to do have evoked strong feeling amongst the other members of the chapter, Mr Fresh?’
‘Ah well, that I couldn’t say. I’m not privy to their counsels. I doubt if anyone would kill for aesthetic reasons nowadays, in our society, would you say, Inspector?’ Fresh might have been laughing at him, Spruce couldn’t tell.
‘Someone did kill the dean. Would you have any ideas who might want to do that?’
Fresh glanced at Stella. ‘Perhaps it was a voice from his past. Have you thought of that?’
Spruce who was aware how very little of any use the police had been able to find out about the dean’s dull past was rather caught by this.
‘Do you know anything of his past, Mr Fresh?’
‘I? No, not I.’
‘What about his plans for the future?’ Spruce sharpened the offensive. ‘I understand the chapter were keen to use this land to build offices on. What are your feelings about that?’
‘Sufficient unto the day.’
‘Meaning?’
‘If he wants this land to put up offices that no one needs to finance his wrecking of the cathedral, w
e shall not make it easy for him but in the end, we know the world. The law is on his side. We shall move on and start again. That is precisely our strength. That is precisely what we have to offer the world. Like plants through cracks in concrete we shall shoot up again.’
Spruce reckoned he’d got what he wanted. There was ample evidence of motive for killing if he ever needed to prove it. He felt able to move on.
‘The night of the murder, Shrove Tuesday. You went to Quecourt to see about bees after supper, about nine p.m?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then what?’
‘In the end I returned to sleep here.’
‘In the end?’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘You were seen outside the Archgate at about midnight that-night.’
‘Yes. That’s possible.’
‘You didn’t mention it in your previous statement.’
‘I didn’t want to raise your hopes, Inspector. I had nothing so far as I know to do with the murder of the dean.’
‘What were you doing there?’
‘I went back to see to Janus.’
Spruce noticed the lack of the definite article. The man was speaking of the statue as though it were a person.
‘How do you mean “see to” him, it?’
‘The temperature was dropping. It had been wet. I feared for the action of the weather on the newly exposed metal. I also wanted to see Sir Lionel Dunch to talk about Janus’s future.’
‘Did you see Sir Lionel?’
‘No. He’d gone. The young verger, Nick Squires, who was keeping the gate, told me the bishop suffragan had given him a lift back to Quecourt. I think everyone had gone by that time. Nick was twirling his keys on his ring in a meaningful manner.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I tried to get Nick to let me in to see to Janus. He played with the idea but in the end proved incorruptible. He seemed to think it was late and he’d have to let me out again, which would be inconvenient. He was courteous but regretful. So I took up my bike and came home. I arrived back about twelve-thirty.’ He looked at Stella who nodded.
‘The cathedral clock had just struck,’ she offered.
‘Struck once?’ Spruce inquired wearily.
‘That’s right.’
‘How long does it take to get from the cathedral to the Hollow?’
‘By bike? It depends on the traffic but at that time of night and at my pace, half an hour.’
There was nothing more, Spruce realised, he was going to get from this sane man. He had no fears, apparently, and no vanities. Spruce gazed at him with something like envy. ‘If anything further should occur to you …’ he ventured.
‘I shall of course contact you.’ Fresh smiled up at him. Two minutes later Mules edged the Ford gingerly over the ruts toward the main road. ‘We’re no forrader,’ he said. ‘Gold could have doubled back. Riddable could have slipped out again. We’ve only Fresh’s word for it that he came home when he said he did. That woman’s very keen on him. She’d certainly lie to protect him.’
Spruce nodded. ‘The fact that he didn’t have a key, or didn’t officially have one, doesn’t seem to me to be an impediment to a man like him. He’s resourceful. He certainly works in metal, he could have made a copy at some time.’
‘What next then?’
‘Like I said,’ Spruce peered through the rain spattered windscreen, ‘the vergers need looking into.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Dies Irae
Theodora gazed into the blank eye sockets of the ram’s skull. It stood on Sir Lionel Dunch’s table next to a ring of keys. They looked, Theodora thought, like emblems in a seventeenth-century painting.
Sir Lionel leaned across to her and displayed the full horror of his teeth. She thought he was going to pat her knee and so swung her legs out of range. He contented himself with saying with great intimacy, ‘I expect you’d like some tea.’
‘Lovely,’ she murmured with relief. The room in the manor looked out over formal gardens. Statuary rose out of untrimmed topiary. The gravel paths receding into the distance were weedy. The weather had momentarily cleared. The sun shone. The glass doors on to the terrace were propped open with a bronze statuette of a hussar on camelback about eighteen inches high. It was a beautiful thing in a room full of beautiful things. Cases of coins stretched up one wall. On the other hung a collection of weapons. Theodora could spot Danish, Celtic and mediaeval French work. It was, however, the wall behind the desk which caught her attention. It was covered with bones, animal and human, arranged in patterns of circles and squares. The use of these examples of mortality for decoration struck Theodora as some sort of perversion to which she could put no name.
Sir Lionel busied himself with a silver spirit stove and kettle at the other end of the room. ‘I see you admire my memento mori.’
‘Unique, surely?’
‘Possibly, though there is an account of something rather similar in a Venetian palazzo circa 1670 mentioned in Giovanni Sestini’s Antiqua Classica. We’re more squeamish nowadays. I expect there are laws against it. “Health and Safety at Work” like as not. I don’t have to bother about that. I have no staff. The collection was started by my grandfather in a more robust age. My father added to it and I have put in the odd femur as they cropped up.’
‘You’ve dug all over the world, Sir Lionel,’Theodora steered him towards what she hoped would be safer ground. ‘I read with great pleasure your Digging Away.’
‘How kind of you to say so, my dear. Yes, I’ve dug in a great many places.’ Sir Lionel returned to his chair and leaned over the back of it. He eyed Theodora as though she might be a likely site. The kettle began to sing and interrupted whatever more he might have had in mind. He limped off to make the tea.
Theodora wondered how she was going to get what she wanted out of Sir Lionel. She’d hacked out to Quecourt by the afternoon bus to see the bishop suffragan. Bishops made her nervous. She’d known them from her earliest years; suffragan, diocesan, colonial, south Indian, Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic had all been regularly entertained at her father’s house. She must have handed tea and biscuits to scores of them. But she still felt a slight irrational apprehension when she had to deal with them in the line of duty. Nevertheless she had got what she needed in the way of information from Bishop Clement with no difficulty at all. He had shown her the typescript of ‘A View from a Pew’. As soon as she saw the typeface, childhood memories had flooded back. It was undoubtedly the product of an ancient Remington. There was just such a machine in the vergers’ office. It would make perfect sense if one of the vergers had been responsible for the articles. Dennis she discounted on grounds of age, literacy and loyalty. That left Knight or Squires. She did not think she would have much difficulty, armed with the evidence, of finding out which it was. The bishop had said, after some thought, ‘I’d like to know, if you find out but unless you feel it relates to poor Vincent’s death, it may, as you suggest, be more tactful to let it go. Provided of course it doesn’t happen again.’ Theodora had been amused at so arbitrary a denial of free speech from so gentle a man.
She had walked the couple of hundred yards across the village green from the bishop’s house to Sir Lionel’s rather grander establishment wondering whether indeed the articles did have anything to do with Dean Stream’s death. She wondered too quite how she was going to account for herself to Sir Lionel. She had no worries about being received. When she had rung at lunchtime to ask if she might see him for a moment, Sir Lionel had been warm in his invitation. But now she was here, how could she put the questions she needed to if her suspicions were to be verified?
‘Will you have gleanings from the Janus dig?’ she ventured.
Dunch wove his way down the long room, a tarnished silver tray in his arthritic hands. He lowered it carefully to the table before answering.
‘I hope, of course, for far more than gleanings. By right the whole thing is mine.’
Theodora
raised an eyebrow.
‘I mean moral right. My father’s activity in the 1922 – 3 season really made the present find possible. If the dean and chapter had had any sense, they’d have let him dig on then. As it is, I shall expect them to pass the Janus over to me. My collection,’ he waved towards the garden, ‘is the only possible home for him. He wouldn’t feel happy anywhere else. I have just the site for him between two lovely little satyrs beside the low pond at the end of the terrace. He’ll be able to see his own reflexion in the water.’
He swung round to Theodora. ‘He sings, you know.’
Theodora was startled.
‘If you set him up right, when the wind passes through one mouth and out the other, there’s a metal stop which acts like a primitive megaphone.’
‘Rather eerie.’
‘Only to the unsympathetic ear,’ Sir Lionel said severely.
‘Oh quite.’ Theodora felt herself rebuked.
‘Are the dean and chapter,’ Theodora corrected herself, ‘is the chapter going to let you have him, would you say?’
With trembling hand Dunch poured a thin stream of pale gold lapsang into an imari tea bowl and handed it to her. His fingers met hers in the exchange and the contact seemed to enliven him.
‘The archdeacon has been in touch. I had quite a hopeful conversation with him actually just before you came.Entre nous,’ he took the opportunity the phrase afforded him, of leaning closer towards her, ‘I think they find him a bit of an embarrassment. The pure pagan power of him,’ – he licked his lips – ‘knocks them out.’
Theodora decided she might as well go to the heart of the matter before the old man had a stroke or worse befell her.
‘The other night,’ she began, ‘the party, the night the dean was killed.’
Dunch was not put off by this change from sex to death. In his seventeenth-century imagination he probably made the closest connexion between the two. His eye kindled.
‘Go on, my dear,’ he murmured encouragingly.
‘Am I right in thinking you stayed on after the party for a while?’ She knew very well he’d told Spruce he’d come home with Bishop Clement. She waited.
Idol Bones Page 16
