‘THE KNIFE, unfortunately, tells us nothing,’ said Detective-Inspector Croft regretfully to Sergeant Forsyte, looking down at the sturdy, razor-sharp instrument that had been discovered through Inspector Plunkett’s zeal. ‘They are a standard type, and can be bought anywhere — including Norway, no doubt.’
‘Where did it come from? Had they anything of the sort in the Community?’ asked Forsyte.
‘Father Anselm says that none of the monks fished. He says he has never seen anything of the sort around.’
‘You don’t believe him?’ asked Forsyte, unsure whether he had caught a note of scepticism in Croft’s voice.
‘It’s not our business to believe people, unless there’s some evidence to back up what they say,’ said Croft, ‘even if they wear flowing robes and swing rosaries. For what it’s worth, I certainly find Anselm enormously impressive. But I believe in paying less attention to impressions, and more to facts. One thing that puzzles me about the set-up of the murder is what the murderer wore, and that’s what I’m thinking about as of now.’
‘What he wore?’
‘There was blood, plenty of it. Some of it must have got on the murderer. Think of how the thing was done: it couldn’t have been easy, even if Brother Dominic was sleeping, which presumably he was. I’d guess whoever it was held something over his mouth while he slit him open — not easy, as I say, and needing a fair amount of strength, whether natural or summoned up for the occasion from some kind of frenzy of hatred or whatever. Now, he was bound to get blood on him, whoever it was. What was he wearing, and where is it?’
‘Nothing’s been found in the search,’ said Forsyte.
‘No. But searching a huge area like this and not quite knowing what you are after is a nightmare game. I wonder if they’re looking in the right places. It seems to me the two alternatives were to clean it or to destroy it, whatever it was. I want particular attention paid to the laundry, and to any stoves or fires there may be.’
‘I’ll get the message through to the boys,’ said Sergeant Forsyte. ‘Anything else?’
‘No. I’m going through all this background stuff. Just keep an eye on the delegates — overhear anything you can. It’s them I’m interested in at the moment.’
‘They’re not talking much these days,’ said Sergeant Forsyte, ‘not when I’m near, anyway. While Plunkett was around I think they regarded me as a possible ally against him— ’
‘Rightly, I hope?’ said Croft.
‘ — for the credit of the force,’ continued Sergeant Forsyte imperturbably. ‘But since then they’ve rather fallen apart, there being nothing to unite against, and I think they’re all getting suspicious of each other, and of me too.’
‘All to the good,’ said Croft. ‘A flaming row among them could be really interesting. Couldn’t you ask them some really knotty theological questions, now, just to get them going?’
‘I’ve never been greatly interested in religion, sir, not since the war,’ said Forsyte gravely. ‘But if you yourself would care to suggest a query I would do my best to make it sound convincing.’
Left to himself Croft sat back and studied the reports on the various delegates to the St Botolph’s symposium. The reports in so far gave him little specific help, however revealing they might be of the state of the delegates’ various churches. The saddest figure seemed to be Philip Lambton. He had been brought up in Lancaster by a widowed mother of strong will and ferocious gentility. Mrs Lambton was a tireless organizer of bazaars, secretary and one-time president of the Mothers’ Union, feared bully of the local clergy, and one who kept her name before the Bishop by a series of long epistles on matters theological, organizational and frankly scandalous. Over-protected and over-driven, Philip had drifted through the most interesting decades of life in a state of severe atrophy of the will. He was ferociously bullied at school, gently bullied at university, mildly ridiculed in his first curacy. Through it all his devotion to his domineering mother had remained un-dimmed. ‘I thought he’d have to break out somehow,’ said a neighbour, who had had no love for the late Mrs Lambton, ‘but he never did.’
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.