A Taste for Death

by P. D. James

  Massingham had been a policeman too long to be easily moved. Some offences, cruelty to children or animals, violent crime against the vulnerable old, could still produce a flare of spectacular Massingham temper, which had resulted in more than one of his forebears facing a duel or a court-martial. But even this he had learned to discipline. But now, viewing with angry eyes this childish room with its pathetic neatness, its evidence of small self-sufficiency, the single jar of flowers which he guessed the boy himself had arranged, he was seized with an impotent anger against the drunken slut next door. He said:

  “Did you steal these things, Darren?”

  Darren didn’t reply, then he nodded.

  “Matey, you’re in trouble.”

  The boy sat on the edge of the bed. Two tears rolled down his cheeks, followed by sniffs and heaves of the narrow chest. Suddenly he shouted:

  “I ain’t going to one of them council homes, I ain’t! I ain’t!”

  “Stop crying,” said Massingham urgently, hating the tears, wanting to get away. Christ, why had AD let him in for this? What was he supposed to be, a childminder? Torn between pity, anger and his impatience to be back on his proper job, he said more roughly:

  “Stop crying!”

  There must have been something urgent in his voice. Darren’s gulps were immediately checked, although the tears flowed on. Massingham said more gently:

  “Who said anything about a home? Look, I’m going to ring the Juvenile Bureau. Someone will come to look after you. It will probably be a WPC, you’ll like her.”

  Darren’s face expressed an immediate and lively scepticism which in other circumstances Massingham would have found amusing. The boy looked up and asked:

  “Why can’t I go ’ome with Miss Wharton?”

  Why not, indeed, thought Massingham. The poor little bugger seemed to be attached to her. Two waifs supporting each other. He said:

  “I don’t really think that’s on. Wait here, I’ll be back.”

  He looked at his watch. He would have to stay, of course, until the WPC arrived, but she shouldn’t be too long and at least AD would have an answer to his question. He knew now what had been worrying Darren, what he had been concealing. One small mystery, at least, was solved. AD could relax and get on with the enquiry. And so, with luck, could he.

  eleven

  Even Father Barnes’s predecessor, Father Kendrick, hadn’t been able to do much with St. Matthew’s vicarage. It occupied the corner of St. Matthew’s Court, an undistinguished three-storey, red brick block of flats bordering the Harrow Road. After the war, the Church Commissioners had finally decided that the existing huge Victorian house was unmanageable and uneconomic, and had sold the site to a developer on the understanding that a maisonette on the ground and first floors should be made over, in perpetuity, to house the parish priest. It was the only maisonette in the block but was otherwise indistinguishable from the flats, with their mean windows and small, badly proportioned rooms. At first the flats had been let to carefully chosen tenants and an attempt made to preserve the modest amenities: the square of lawn bordering the road, the two rose beds, the hanging windowboxes on each of the balconies. But the block, like most of its kind, had had a chequered history. The first property company had gone into liquidation, and the building had been sold to a second and then a third. The rents were raised, to general dissatisfaction, but were still inadequate to cover the maintenance costs of a poorly constructed building, and there were the usual acrimonious disputes between the tenants and the landlords. Only the church maisonette was well maintained, its two storeys of white windows an incongruous badge of respectability amid the peeling paint and disintegrating windowboxes.

  The original tenants had been replaced by the transients of the city, the peripatetic young, sharing three to a room; unmarried mothers on social security; foreign students—a racial mix which, like some human kaleidoscope, was continually being shaken into new and brighter colours. Those few who did attend church found a congenial home with Father Donovan at St. Anthony’s with its steel bands, carnival processions, and general inter-racial bonhomie. None of them ever knocked on Father Barnes’s door. They saw, with watchful and expressionless eyes, his almost furtive comings and goings. But he was as much an anachronism at St. Matthew’s Court as was the church he represented.

  He had been escorted back to the vicarage by a plainclothes officer, not the one who had been working most closely with Commander Dalgliesh, but an older man, broad-shouldered, stolid, reassuringly calm, who had spoken to him in a soft country accent which he couldn’t recognize but was most certainly not local. He said he was from the Harrow Road Station but had only recently been transferred there from West End Central. He waited while Father Barnes unlocked the front door, then followed him in and offered to make a cup of tea, the British specific against disaster, grief and shock. If he was surprised by the grubbiness of the ill-equipped vicarage kitchen he concealed it. He had made tea in worse places. When Father Barnes reiterated that he was perfectly all right and that Mrs. McBride who did for him was due at ten thirty, he didn’t persist. Before he left he handed Father Barnes a card with a number on it.

  “That’s the number Commander Dalgliesh said you were to ring if you need anything. If you’re worried like. Or if anything new occurs to you. Just give a ring. It’ll be no trouble. And when the press come bothering, just tell them as little as you need. No speculating. No use in speculating, is there? Just tell it how it was. A lady from your congregation and a boy found the bodies and the boy fetched you. Better not give any names unless you have to. You saw that they were dead and rang for the police. No need to say more. That’s all there is to it.”

  The statement, stupendous in its over-simplification, opened a new abyss before Father Barnes’s horrified eyes. He had forgotten about the press. How soon would they arrive? Would they want to take photographs? Ought he to call an emergency meeting of the PCC? What would the bishop say? Ought he to ring the archdeacon at once and leave it to him? Yes, that would be the best plan. The archdeacon would know what ought to be done. The archdeacon was capable of coping with the press, the bishop, the police and the Parochial Church Council. Even so, he feared that St. Matthew’s was fated to be the centre of a dreadful attention.

  He always went to Mass fasting and, for the first time that morning, he was aware of feeling weak, even paradoxically a little sick. He sank down onto one of the two wooden chairs at the kitchen table and looked rather helplessly at the card with its seven clearly written digits, then glanced round as if seeking inspiration where to put it for safekeeping. Finally, he dug in his cassock pocket for his wallet and slipped it in with his bank card and single credit card. He let his eyes roam round the kitchen, seeing it as that pleasant policeman must have seen it, in all its sad decrepitude. The plate from which he had eaten his hamburgers and frozen green beans, which had been last night’s supper, still unrinsed in the sink; the splatter of grease marks above the ancient gas stove; the viscous mess of grime gumming the narrow gap between stove and cupboard; the soiled and smelly teacloth hanging from its hook at the side of the sink; last year’s calendar askew on its nail; the two open shelves jammed with a conglomeration of half-used cereal packets, jars of stale jam, cracked mugs, packets of detergent; the cheap, unstable table with its two chairs, their backs grubby from numerous clutching hands; the linoleum curling at the wall where it had become unstuck; the general air of discomfort, uncaring, negligence, dirt. And the rest of the flat wasn’t much better. Mrs. McBride took no pride in it because there was nothing to take a pride in. She didn’t care because he didn’t. Like him, she had probably ceased to notice the slow accretion of dirt over their lives.

  After thirty years of marriage to Tom McBride, Beryl McBride sounded more Irish than did her husband. Sometimes, indeed, Father Barnes suspected that the brogue was less acquired than assumed, a music hall stereotype of Irishness adopted either out of marital togetherness or from some less recognizable need.
He had noticed that in rare moments of stress she was apt to revert to her original Cockney. She was employed by the parish for twelve hours a week and her nominal duties were to come in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, clean the flat, wash and spin-dry any linen or articles in the soiled-linen basket, and prepare and leave for him a simple lunch on a tray. On the other weekdays and at weekends, Father Barnes was expected to look after himself. There had never been a job description. Mrs. McBride and the current incumbent were expected to work out a mutually agreed arrangement of hours and duties.

  Twelve hours a week had been an adequate, even generous allocation of time when young Father Kendrick had been priest-in-charge. He was married to the prototype of an ideal parson’s wife, a capable and buxom physiotherapist, well able to run her part-time hospital job and the parish simultaneously and to pound Mrs. McBride into shape as vigorously as, no doubt, she did her patients. No one, of course, had expected Father Kendrick to stay. He had only been a stop-gap, to fill in after Father Collins’s twenty-five-year ministry until the appointment of a permanent successor, if there was to be a successor. St. Matthew’s, as the archdeacon was never tired of pointing out, was surplus to the Church’s pastoral ministry in inner London. With two other Anglican churches within a three-mile radius, both with vigorous young clergy and enough parochial organizations to provide serious competition for the social services department, St. Matthew’s, with its small and ageing population, was an uncomfortable reminder of the declining authority of the Established Church in the inner cities. But as the archdeacon said, “Your people are remarkably loyal. It’s a pity they aren’t also rich. The parish is a drain on resources, no doubt about it. But we can hardly sell it. The building is supposed to be of some importance, architecturally. I can never see it myself. That extraordinary campanile. Hardly English, is it? One isn’t, after all, on the Venetian Lido, whatever the architect thought.” For the archdeacon, who had, in fact, never seen the Venetian Lido, had been reared in the Close at Salisbury and, making some allowance for scale, had known from childhood exactly what a church should look like.

  Before Father Kendrick had set off for his new city parish—racial mix, boys’ club, mothers’ union, young people’s fellowship; the proper challenge for a mildly high church, ambitious young priest with one eye on a mitre—he had had a brief word about Beryl McBride

  “Frankly, she terrifies me. I keep well out of her way. But Susan seems able to manage her. Better have a word with her about the domestic arrangements. I wish Mrs. McBride had taken her husband’s religion instead of his accent. That way St. Anthony’s would have had the benefit of her cooking. I did hint to Father Donovan that here was a brand ready for plucking, but Michael knows when to leave well alone. Now, if you can seduce his housekeeper, Mrs. Kelly, into Anglicanism, you’ll be in clover.”

  Susan Kendrick, expertly wrapping china in newspaper and ankle-deep in shavings from her packing cases, had been briskly informative but hardly more reassuring.

  “She needs watching. Her plain cooking is quite good, although the repertoire is a bit limited. But she isn’t so dependable when it comes to housework. You need to begin as you mean to go on. If you set the right standards and she knows that she can’t fool you, you’ll be all right. She’s been here a long time, of course, from Father Collins’s days. She wouldn’t be easy to dislodge. And she’s a very loyal member of the congregation. St. Matthew’s seems to suit her for some reason. As I said, just begin as you mean to go on. Oh, and watch the sherry. There’s no real dishonesty. You can leave anything out, money, your watch, food. It’s just that she likes the odd nip. Better offer her one occasionally. That way there’s less temptation. You can hardly lock the stuff up.”

  “No, of course not,” he had said. “No, I quite see that.”

  But it had been Mrs. McBride who had started as she meant to go on. It had been hopeless from the start. He still recalled, with a flush of shame, that first, all-important interview. He had sat in front of her, in the square little room which was used as a study, as if he were the suppliant, and had seen her sharp little eyes, black as currants, move round the room, noting the gaps in the shelves where Father Kendrick’s leatherbound volumes had been stacked, the meagre rug in front of the gas fire, his few prints stacked against the wall. And that wasn’t all she had taken in. She had had him summed up, all right. She had seen his timidity, his ignorance of housekeeping, his lack of authority as a man or a priest. And he suspected that she had known more intimate secrets. His virginity, his half-shameful fear of her close, warm-smelling, overwhelming fe-maleness, his social insecurity, born in that small, terraced house near the river at Ely, where he had lived with his widowed mother, nurtured by the desperate contrivings, the small deceptions of respectable poverty, the deprivation that was so much more humiliating than the real poverty of the inner cities. He could imagine the words in which she would later report to her husband.

  “He’s not really a gentleman, not like Father Kendrick. You can see that. Father Kendrick’s father was a bishop, after all, and Mrs. Kendrick is the niece of Lady Nichols, when all’s said and done. There’s no knowing where this one comes from.” Sometimes he suspected that she had even known how diminished was his remaining store of faith, that it was this essential lack and not his general inadequacy which was at the core of her disdain.

  His most recent library book had been a Barbara Pym. He had read with envious disbelief the gentle and ironic story of a village parish where the curates were entertained, fed and generally spoilt by the female members of the congregation. Mrs. McBride, he thought, would soon put a stop to anything like that at St. Matthew’s. Indeed, she had put a stop to it. During his first week, Mrs. Jordan had visited him with a homemade fruitcake. She had seen it on the table on her Wednesday visit and had said:

  “One of Ethel Jordan’s, is it? You want to watch her, Father, an unmarried priest like you.” The words had hung on the air, heavy with innuendo, and an act of simple kindness had been spoiled. Eating the cake, he had felt it like tasteless dough in his mouth, every mouthful an act of shared indecency.

  She arrived on time. Whatever her other negligences, Mrs. McBride was a stickler for punctuality. He heard her key in the door and a minute later she was in the kitchen. She didn’t seem surprised to see him sitting there still in his cloak and obviously only just returned from Mass, and he knew at once that she had been told about the murders. He watched while she carefully removed her headscarf to reveal the upswept waves of unnaturally dark hair, hung up her coat in the hall cupboard, donned her overall from its hook behind the kitchen door, took off her outdoor shoes and eased her feet into her house slippers. It wasn’t until she had put on the kettle for their morning coffee that she spoke.

  “Well, here’s a nice thing for the parish, Father. Two of ’em dead, so Billy Crawford was saying in the newsagent’s. And one of ’em old Harry Mack.”

  “I’m afraid so, Mrs. McBride. One of them was Harry.”

  “And who would the other be? Or aren’t the police knowing yet?”

  “I think we’ll have to wait until they notify the next of kin before they release that information.”

  “But you saw him, Father. Wasn’t it with your own eyes now? And were you not recognizing him?”

  “You really mustn’t ask me that, Mrs. McBride. We must wait for the police.”

  “And who’d be wantin’ to kill Harry? Sure, he wouldn’t be killed for anything he had on him, the poor soul. It wasn’t suicide, was it, Father? One of those suicide pacts? Or do the police think Harry did it?”

  “They don’t know what happened yet. We really ought not to speculate.”

  “Well, I don’t believe it. Harry Mack’s no murderer. As well believe that the other chap, the one you’re keeping so quiet about, the one you’re not telling about, did in Harry. Harry was a nasty, thieving, foul-mouthed old devil, God rest him, but he was harmless enough. The police have no call to be pinning it on Harry.”


  “I’m sure they won’t try to. It could have been anyone, someone who broke in to steal. Or someone Sir Paul Berowne himself let in. Anyone. The door of the vestry was open when Miss Wharton arrived this morning.”

  He turned towards the stove so that she shouldn’t see the flush of shame and dismay that he had let slip Berowne’s name. And she hadn’t missed it, not she. And why had he told her about that unlocked door? Was he trying to reassure her, or himself? But what did it matter? The details would be out soon enough and it would look odd if he were too reticent, odd and suspicious. But why suspicious? Surely no one, not even Mrs. McBride, was going to suspect him. He recognized, with a familiar confusion of self-disgust and hopelessness, that he was telling more than he ought in his usual attempt to propitiate her, to get her on his side. It had never worked and it wouldn’t now. She didn’t pick up the name Berowne although he knew that it was safely stowed in her mind. Sitting across from her, he saw the triumph in her cunning little eyes, heard in her voice the note of ghoulish relish.

  “Bloody murder, is it then? That’s a nice thing for the parish. You’ll be needing to get the church fumigated, Father.”

  “Fumigated?”

  “Well, sprinkled with holy water, that sort of thing. Maybe my Tom had better to speak to Father Donovan. He could let us have some from St. Anthony’s.”

  “We have our own holy water, Mrs. McBride.”

  “In a case like this, you can’t take chances. Better get some from Father Donovan. Be on the safe side. My Tom can bring it along after Mass on Sunday. Here’s your coffee, Father. I’ve made it extra strong. You’ve had a nasty shock and that’s the truth of it.”