‘Come!’ Brother William instructed Cross from the confines of the bookbindery. Cross walked in. William was busy working on a small volume on his workbench.
‘Good morning, Sergeant.’
Cross made no answer as he agreed with this statement. He moved further into the workshop to get a closer view of what the young monk was up to.
‘It’s a collection of someone’s mother’s cookery recipes which we’ve bound. Anne, that’s the customer, wants to give it to her daughter who apparently loves to cook,’ William told him.
‘A kind of culinary heirloom,’ Cross volunteered.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ William answered.
‘Isn’t leather a little impractical for a kitchen?’ Cross asked, pointing at the red cover.
‘It’s artificial leather. A sort of vinyl, I think. Here,’ he said, handing Cross a piece.
‘So it is.’
He then looked a little more closely at what William was up to. He’d cut a small panel out of the cardboard cover and placed a lock of hair in it. He then replaced the cardboard and sealed it up. He saw Cross looking intently, not wanting to interrupt his concentration, as he carefully attached a piece of marbled lining paper over the top of it. It was completely invisible.
‘It’s a lock of the grandmother’s hair. Anne wants her to be a part of the book. Her daughter will always be in touch with her grandmother whenever she cooks from the book, even though she doesn’t know it,’ he said.
‘The daughter won’t know?’
‘No. It’s Anne’s secret. Her private memorial, if you like.’
‘Do people often do this?’ asked Cross.
‘Occasionally, but not often. Some people like to use them as personal time capsules. A surprise if anyone ever came across them. Some put in letters about themselves.’
Cross heard a noise coming from the back room.
‘Is there someone else here?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Just Robbie,’ replied William.
The man in question then appeared with two mugs of tea.
‘Sergeant. I didn’t hear you come in. Can I make you a cup of tea?’
‘No,’ came the reply.
‘Robbie’s on another weekend retreat with us. Bit like you.’
‘Except that I’m not on a retreat. I’m merely fixing the organ,’ Cross corrected him.
‘True, well, Robbie’s here for the good of his soul and is a handy source of free labour for me. He can help us with the organ.’
They took the leather folds and corners up to the church and spent the rest of the morning repairing the reservoir. By mid-afternoon, having been interrupted only by a blissfully silent and delicious light lunch, they’d finished. Cross realised he was going to miss the food at the abbey. It was simple but so fresh, like nothing he’d eaten anywhere else. It was all about the produce from their garden. They sat on the steps of the side door to the church, Brother William and Robbie drinking more tea. Cross was drinking some of their fresh apple juice. He’d become obsessed with it and drank it at every available opportunity.
‘Why do you come here?’ Cross asked Robbie.
‘Um,’ he said, thinking out loud. ‘Well, this is only my second actual stay. But I like the tranquillity, the peace it affords me. It’s like a spiritual cleanse.’
‘Are you religious?’ Cross went on.
‘Of course. Are you not?’
‘No,’ replied Cross.
‘I think in another life I could have been a monk,’ Robbie said.
‘Why not this one?’ asked Cross.
‘I don’t know. Good question. Too much to leave behind, perhaps. Mind you, having said that, now I think about it, there isn’t that much to give up,’ said Robbie.
‘Do you get many people around Robbie’s age taking solemn vows?’ Cross asked William.
‘One or two. Yes,’ he replied.
‘What appeals to you about the monastic life exactly, Robbie?’ asked Cross.
‘It’s just so far removed from the modern world and all its problems. I like the order of it. The same routine every day. The offices of day at exactly the same time. The silence at meals. I get the sense you like order too,’ he replied.
‘I like order and I like the order of things here. I’m not so enthusiastic about that order being imposed on me by others. I like my own sense of order. But I can see the attraction,’ said Cross.
‘Do you have family?’ asked Robbie.
‘I do,’ Cross replied.
‘Consisting of?’
‘My father… and more recently my mother.’
‘That sounds intriguing,’ said Robbie trying to encourage him to elaborate.
‘It is.’
‘Well, are you going to share it with us?’ asked Robbie.
‘I am not.’
There was an awkward pause which William thought it incumbent on him, as host, to fill.
‘Do you have family, Robbie?’ he asked.
‘I do,’ he said sorrowfully. ‘But I messed it up. Big time. Now they’re just a source of aching regret.’
‘Are your parents still alive?’
‘My father is. My mother died decades ago.’
‘And you’re not close to your father?’
‘You could say that. We don’t speak. Well, none of my family speak to me is the truth of it. Not my father, my ex-wife, my children.’
‘Your children? That must be painful,’ observed William.
Robbie nodded in a way that indicated that while he agreed with the expressed sentiment, this conversation was now at an end.
They turned towards the abbey house as they heard Brother Jude call out to Cross. The monk was pushing Father Wolfson in his wheelchair up the path towards them.
‘Detective Sergeant Cross!’ the old monk hailed him cheerfully, his dentures bobbing up and down with enthusiasm.
‘Father Wolfson,’ Cross replied.
‘It’s so wonderful you’ve taken all this time to restore our organ. We have missed it so.’
‘It was an entirely selfish act,’ Cross replied.
‘Nonsense. That might well be what you’re telling yourself but we both know it’s entirely untrue. How much more is there to be done?’
‘Well, Brother William has just repaired the reservoir, so everything is now airtight. Tomorrow I’ll fix the trackers, but I think the organ can do with regulating,’ Cross replied.
‘What is that exactly?’
‘The organ needs tuning, but its tonal quality will also need calibrating. It would be a good opportunity to get its speech, sustained tone and volume tailored to the acoustic characteristics of the church. It’s a skill I’m lacking in, but I know some people who will come and do it.’
‘Presumably for a fee?’ the old monk asked.
‘I’ll see what can be done,’ Cross replied. He intended paying for this himself but didn’t want it to be an issue. From a selfish point of view, he’d never seen anyone regulate an organ before, so at least he’d get that experience out of it.
‘You asked the father abbot and Father Magnus if Brother Dominic had brought anything with him when he entered the abbey. I couldn’t think of anything at first but then I remembered that he did bring a small Victorian painting of the Virgin Mary,’ said Father Wolfson.
‘I see,’ replied Cross, waiting for more.
‘We hung it in the church.’
‘Is it a valuable piece?’
‘No, not really. We had it valued for insurance purposes, like everything else in the church. I looked it up and it was valued at between five and seven hundred pounds,’ the monk replied.
‘I see. Where is it? I’d like to have a look at it,’ said Cross.
‘Well, that’s the odd thing, George. It’s gone. It appears to be missing.’
‘Do you know when it went missing?’ asked Cross.
‘No. It wasn’t till I remembered his bringing it that I thought to have another look. But if you follow us you’ll see it’s no longer there.’
They went into the church.
Father Wolfson indicated a space on the wall by the lectern. There was the faintest of outlines where a picture must have been hanging for some time. The nail it had hung from was still in the wall.
Cross was staying the night at the abbey. After dinner the monks tended to gather in the sitting room for an hour’s recreation where they would talk and read. Cross joined them and asked them if they could recall the last time they had noticed Brother Dominic’s Victorian painting.
‘I dust the Stations of the Cross and other paintings in the church on the last Monday of every month,’ said Brother Jude. I dusted that painting on Monday the twenty-seventh, I think it was.’
‘Four days before Brother Dominic went missing,’ Cross realised out loud.
‘Yes indeed,’ Jude replied sadly.
*
‘Do you think the painting has something to do with Dominic?’ said a voice behind him as he was walking to his guest room later. It was Robbie.
‘I don’t know. It does seem a bit of coincidence,’ replied Cross.
‘Well, it either puts paid to my theory of Murphy being the killer or, it’s exactly that. Just a coincidence,’ said Robbie.
‘There haven’t been any thefts from the abbey in over fifty years. So why now?’ said Cross.
‘Good point,’ conceded Robbie, shaking his head. ‘I find this all so upsetting. I can’t believe it’s happened.’
To Cross’s way of thinking, the missing painting had to be relevant. But why a painting of such little worth by an obscure Victorian painter should be, he was unsure. But now it was missing, and they had a window of time in which this could have happened, to examine. There were several opportunities, the most obvious being when the abbey gates were left open. This was on Sundays for the parish services. He ruled out the Sundays he’d been there working on the organ, as he’d gone straight back into the church immediately after the service ended, thereby denying anyone an opportunity to slip in and steal it. He narrowed it down to the Sunday after Dominic had gone missing, which was Palm Sunday. There’d also been a multiple christening of five babies from different families that day. The congregation was boosted by family members and godparents. People always took dozens of photographs on occasions like this so he would action Mackenzie when he got back to work to liaise with the abbey and see if people would send in all their photographs and videos for them to study.
The next day before he left, he signed the abbey guest book again. He flicked through the pages at all the names and saw Robbie’s signature. Robbie Weald.
He realised he’d seen that name recently.