Appointed to Die (17 page)

It was a wet, miserable afternoon, unseasonably dark already by five. Early October was not prime tourist season in Malbury – if indeed there were a prime tourist season in Malbury – but it was a popular time of year for walkers in the Shropshire hills. A few of them were in the cathedral that afternoon, seeking shelter from the weather; they sat in sodden clumps in the Quire, water dripping from their wet anoraks. Several of the women from the Close were there as well: Evelyn Marsden, who usually attended, Olivia Ashleigh, finished with her day's work for the Bishop, and Rowena Hunt, who had spent the afternoon at the Friends of the Cathedral's information stall in the south aisle. Jeremy Bartlett, another habitual attender, was there, as was the American Todd Randall, and just before the choir procession came in, Pat Willoughby slipped into a stall seat, shaking the droplets from her headscarf.

Throughout the service the Dean sat impassively in his stall, the most elaborately carved on the
decani
side of the Quire. No one dared look at him for long, but everyone (save the alien walkers) was aware of his presence. There was an intensity about his stillness – concentrated, concentrating – as though he were waiting for something.

The service lasted no longer than usual, but to Jeremy, sitting on the
cantoris
side where his view of the Dean was unimpaired, it seemed to go on for an age. The opening psalm set for the day, number eighteen, was a long one; its ‘hail-stones and coals of fire' gave the organist much scope for facial contortion and manual gesticulation. The Dean, Jeremy observed, remained unnaturally still, watchful, the whiteness of his knuckles the only indication of some strong emotion.

Arthur Brydges-ffrench, on the other hand, was visibly moved. When the choir sang, ‘He shall deliver me from my strongest enemy, and from them which hate me: for they are too mighty for me', he glanced in the direction of the Dean, chewing on his lower lip. And when he read the Old Testament lesson, hunching his tall frame forlornly over the lectern, the lugubrious words of Job Chapter 10 took on new pathos.

‘My soul is weary of my life; I will leave my complaint upon myself; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul,' read the Subdean. His voice shook, and as he continued the occasional tear trickled down his cheek. ‘I will say unto God, Do not condemn me; shew me wherefore thou contendest with me. Is it good unto thee that thou shouldest oppress, that thou shouldest despise the work of thine hands, and shine upon the counsel of the wicked?' His passion mounted as he read, but the final verses he finished almost on a sigh, very quietly. ‘Are not my days few? Cease then, and let me alone, that I may take comfort a little, before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death . . .'

Still the Dean did not move.

The choir's anthem was a short one: ‘O Taste and See' by Vaughan Williams. The young treble who sang the opening solo made a valiant job of it, his voice quavering ever so slightly, and when it was over Ivor Jones beamed; as he moved back to his seat he went so far as to ruffle the boy's fair hair affectionately in passing.

Stuart Latimer started, controlling himself with an effort, Jeremy observed. For the rest of the service – the prayers and the final hymn – his eyes remained fixed on the organist, burning with some strong emotion. He stood as the choir procession trailed out, then remained standing, distanced somehow from the rest of the congregation, as people said their final private prayers and began collecting their things.

It was when Ivor Jones returned to the Quire to retrieve his music from its stand that the Dean finally moved. His movement was sudden, unexpected; he hurtled down to the music stand and clamped his hand over the music. ‘Just a moment,' he said forcefully and loudly, his voice echoing from the vaulted ceiling.

Everyone stopped, all motion frozen, as the scene was enacted before them in the centre of the Quire.

‘What is the matter?' asked Ivor Jones, as yet unalarmed.

‘I saw what you did, and I know what you are.' The Dean's voice was controlled, and not particularly loud, yet it carried perfectly in the acoustic marvel of the Quire. ‘I cannot allow such behaviour in my cathedral. You are dismissed, Mr Jones. Immediately. Please leave now, and do not return.'

The organist's face registered complete bafflement, nothing more. ‘What are you talking about, Dean?'

‘I am talking about the way you . . . fondled . . . that boy. In public, in God's holy place! I've seen the way you've looked at them all, the gestures you've used. I was warned about you, and I've been watching you. But I'm telling you, Mr Jones, I will not have paedophiles employed in this cathedral! Such things may have been overlooked in the past – might even have been encouraged, for all I know! – but I will not stand for it!'

Both men were short, practically of a height, and they stared at each other eye to eye. But suddenly Ivor Jones seemed to dwindle in stature, to shrink inside himself. His face paled; his mouth opened in a horrified, soundless ‘O'. For an instant that stretched into an eternity, no one – neither the participants in the drama, nor its audience – moved. Then, with a strangled cry, the organist fled.

They all reproached themselves afterwards, of course. They should have said something, should have spoken up for the man. But everyone had been too shocked, too embarrassed; they hadn't even talked about it amongst themselves until the next day. And who could have known that Ivor Jones would take it so hard? Who could have known that he would bolt to the sanctuary of his solitary house in the Close, write an impassioned letter affirming his innocence, and then swallow the contents of an entire bottle of sleeping tablets?

Act II

CHAPTER 15

    
For when thou art angry all our days are gone: we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.

Psalm 90.9

When Lucy and David arrived in the Cathedral Close the next afternoon, they were unprepared for what awaited them. They saw no one: the stillness was surreal and complete, as though plague or nuclear holocaust had wiped out all of its inhabitants. John Kingsley opened his door to them with a grave expression, and the kiss he gave his daughter was abstracted, almost perfunctory.

‘Daddy, whatever is the matter?' Lucy pulled away from him and scanned his face anxiously.

‘Lucy dear, I'm afraid that something terrible has happened.'

‘The Dean,' she blurted, thinking to herself: Something has happened to the Dean. David was right.

John Kingsley looked surprised. ‘Oh, no. Not him.' He led them into the sitting room. ‘Tea?' he offered automatically.

‘Yes, please. But what's happened, Daddy? Do tell us.'

Tea forgotten, the Canon sank into his chair. ‘It's the organist, Ivor Jones. He's dead. His daily found him this morning.'

‘Good Lord.' David leaned forward, speaking for the first time. ‘But . . . what? How did it happen?'

Swallowing painfully, John Kingsley turned to him. ‘He . . . killed himself. A bottle of sleeping tablets.'

‘Oh.' There was a moment of silence as the news sank in.

When John Kingsley spoke again, it was so quietly that for a moment they were not sure they'd heard him correctly. ‘I blame myself.'

‘What did you say, Daddy?' Lucy frowned.

‘I blame myself,' he repeated, taking off his spectacles and rubbing the bridge of his nose. ‘Oh, my dears, I should have done something. I should have spoken up. Perhaps he'd still be alive if . . .'

‘Whatever are you talking about?' In her concern, she spoke more sharply than she'd meant to; her father flinched.

Starting from the beginning, he related to them the story of the previous afternoon, sparing none of the painful details. ‘So you see, my dears, we were all to blame – all of us who were there, and said nothing. We all allowed it to happen – we allowed him to be . . . hounded to death!'

‘But that's monstrous!' David, agitated, would have said more, but Lucy intervened.

‘Of course you mustn't blame yourself, Daddy,' she asserted. ‘There's only one person to blame, and that's the Dean. How could you have known what would happen?'

Her father sighed and shook his head. ‘I should have known. And that's not really the point – I should have done something in any case. I should have gone round to see him later . . .'

‘But what's going to happen
now
?' David demanded. ‘What is the Dean going to do about it?'

Removing his spectacles again, the Canon said quietly, ‘I know it's unchristian of me to say this, but . . . Stuart Latimer is not a nice man.'

‘Not a nice man?' exclaimed David. ‘Good Lord! That's the understatement of the year. He's an absolute . . .'

‘He is not a nice man,' John Kingsley repeated with slightly more emphasis. ‘He is a bully and a tyrant.' He told them, then, about the Chapter meeting, and the way that Canon Brydges-ffrench had been reduced to tears by the Dean's deliberate cruelty. ‘I'm not sure what he means to do with this cathedral,' he concluded, ‘but I am fairly sure that none of us is going to like it.'

The doorbell rang; Lucy answered it to find Pat Willoughby on the front step. ‘Lucy! I'm glad you're here,' Pat said. ‘I've come to have a word with your father. Is there a cup of tea going, or do I need to make some?'

‘We were going to have some, but we never got round to it. David and I haven't been here long.' Lucy stood back gratefully as the older woman took over with typical brisk efficiency, going straight to the kitchen and filling the kettle.

John Kingsley rose from his chair as Pat carried the tray into the sitting room. ‘Pat! You should have let me do that.'

‘Nonsense, John. Sit down and I'll pour you a cup.'

He obeyed, and after greeting David she dispensed tea all around. Pat was behaving much as she always did, Lucy observed, but she seemed to have acquired a few extra lines on her face in just a week, and her grey knot of hair was a bit more dishevelled than usual. Now she tucked a few stray strands in, absent-mindedly, as she came to the point of her visit. ‘It's a terrible business, this.'

‘I feel so guilty, Pat,' John Kingsley confessed. ‘I should have done something.'

‘Nonsense, John,' she repeated robustly. ‘We were
all
there, we all heard it. If you're guilty, we
all
are.' But her eyes were suspiciously misty as she spoke. ‘Anyway, I don't know what anyone could have done. Ivor Jones was an odd, secretive little man. None of us really knew him. He always kept himself to himself, never really mixed with the rest of the Close.'

‘Maybe
that
was our fault, too. Maybe we never made him welcome,' the Canon suggested.

‘You must stop blaming yourself,' insisted Pat. ‘We all know who's to blame – I need not mention his name.' Her face took on a harder look at the thought of the Dean. ‘That man has a great deal to answer for. None of it was true, you know,' she added.

‘The . . . allegations?' asked David the solicitor. ‘The things the Dean said?'

‘That's right.' She hesitated a moment, then revealed, ‘Inspector Drewitt has been to see George. He showed him, in confidence, the suicide note.'

John Kingsley's face creased with pain. ‘Can you tell us what it said?'

‘I probably shouldn't, but I will,' she decided. ‘He categorically denied everything that the Dean accused him of. And I believe him,' she added. ‘He also said that he didn't want his funeral at the cathedral, where “that man” would have anything to do with it. The ignominy – the stigma. He just couldn't cope with it.'

‘The poor man,' Lucy whispered, near tears. ‘How he must have suffered.'

‘Mike Drewitt told George something else,' Pat went on briskly, perceiving that John Kingsley was about to break down. ‘It seems that he knew Ivor Jones rather better than the rest of us.'

David raised his eyebrows at this intriguing statement. ‘How so?'

‘Apparently he'd had the odd pint of beer with him, at the Monk's Head. After Evensong, occasionally, when the Inspector had been ringing. It appears that the two men found that they had something in common – wife trouble.'

‘Ivor Jones has a wife?' gaped Lucy. ‘Did you know that?'

‘
Had
a wife. And no, none of us knew it. No one but Mike Drewitt, that is. He was ashamed, I think. She'd left him before he came here. And he'd told the inspector that before that she'd . . . well, you can imagine. Run around with other men, that sort of thing. And apparently she had a drink problem as well. I don't know if you've met Mike Drewitt's wife Val . . .'

‘Yes,' Lucy remembered. ‘I met her once, or at least saw her. She wasn't . . . what I'd expected.'

‘No,' Pat agreed bluntly. ‘I think he must have said something to Ivor Jones about her, about Val, and after the organist had had one too many pints, he spilled out his own problems.'

‘The poor man,' Lucy repeated. ‘It was . . . unconscionable . . . of the Dean to say anything without checking out the facts first. Can't anything be done?'

‘Ah, well. That remains to be seen.' Pat refilled David's tea cup. ‘I've just taken George to the station. He's caught the 3.32 to London – he's going to Lambeth Palace.'

David leaned forward. ‘He's going to see the Archbishop about it?'

‘Yes, first thing in the morning – he phoned ahead for an appointment. And on Monday he's going to see the Prime Minister's Appointments Secretary, and possibly the PM as well. I don't know if they can do anything, but it's worth a try. After all, they got us into this mess.'

‘George will be away all weekend?' asked Canon Kingsley. ‘Won't there be things to . . . see to?'

‘Actually, John, that's one reason I'm here,' Pat admitted. ‘George asked me to see you. He would have come himself, of course, but he had to rush to catch the train.'

The Canon sighed. ‘What does he want me to do?'

‘Well, first I must tell you that George spoke to the Dean before he went. The Dean rang him, in fact. To say that he doesn't want any fuss made in the cathedral over all this.'

‘What?' David was indignant. ‘He has a lot of nerve.'

Pat smiled grimly. ‘You can say that again. Anyway, George thought that it would be . . . appropriate . . . to do something, especially as there won't be a funeral at the cathedral.'

‘Did he tell the Dean that?' John Kingsley asked.

‘He told the Dean that he wanted some mention made – some sort of commemoration – at tomorrow morning's eight o'clock service. The Dean said that it must be kept completely simple. No choir, no bells, nothing to draw attention to it. And as we all know,' she said with ill-concealed bitterness, ‘the Dean is in charge.'

‘What does George want me to do?' Canon Kingsley repeated.

Pat observed him keenly. ‘You'll be taking the service as usual, won't you? George said that you'd know what to do. He's relying on you, John – to do the right thing, he said.'

After Pat had gone, John Kingsley turned a troubled face to his daughter, sitting with David on the sofa. ‘Lucy dear, I don't know what to do,' he confessed.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Surely you're not going to let the Dean intimidate you?' David demanded indignantly. ‘He has no right!'

‘Oh, no, not that.' The Canon smiled, a manifestation of his gentle strength. ‘No, I don't care what the Dean says. But don't you see? The man committed suicide.' He took off his spectacles; his eyes were misted with tears. ‘I just don't know what to do tomorrow, what to say. I was brought up to consider suicide a sin – an unforgivable sin.' He rubbed his eyes; impulsively Lucy reached out and put a comforting hand on his knee. ‘But now, my dears . . . I just don't know. I think . . .' he hesitated. ‘I think that, really, the only sin is . . . not trusting God.'

CHAPTER 16

    
My song shall be of mercy and judgement: unto thee, O Lord, will I sing.

Psalm 101.1

For Lucy it was the kind of night in which it seems at the time as if one is not sleeping at all, hut in retrospect is filled with bizarre, half-remembered dreams. She had not known Ivor Jones well: she had only met him once or twice, and on those occasions he had not made a great impression on her. She remembered him only as a silent presence, a small, dark, taciturn Welshman; the information Pat had imparted about his wayward wife cast only a small amount of illumination, making him scarcely less a cipher in death than he had been in life. But the futility and the injustice of his death had struck her as forcibly as it had the others in the Close, and her father's anguished feelings of guilt disturbed her deeply. Again and again through the restless night she wished that she could go to David, and find comfort in his arms. But she was stopped by the realisation that her father's sleep was probably as troubled as hers, and he would surely hear.

Towards dawn, though, her door opened silently, and a dressing-gowned David appeared beside her.

‘Ssh!' she whispered as he squeezed next to her in the single bed. ‘My father will hear.'

‘He's downstairs already. He's been pacing in his study for nearly an hour. My room's above the study, and I could hear him.'

‘Oh!' Lucy sat up. ‘I must go to him, then. He needs me. I should make him some tea, or some breakfast.'

‘Not so fast, Lucy love.' He sat up as well and put his arms around her. ‘Stay here with me just a minute more.
I
need you, too.'

Sighing, she laid her head on his shoulder. ‘We need each other,' she amended.

‘As I keep saying.' He stroked her sleep-tousled curls; with her hair framing her face in a rosy halo, and dressed in a high-necked, long-sleeved nightdress of virginal white eyelet, she looked absurdly, heartbreakingly young. ‘Marry me, Lucy?' It was half a demand, half a query, but said with the hopeless air of one who did not expect an affirmative reply.

He didn't receive one; neither did he receive an outright refusal. She shook her head negatively, but all she said was, ‘Just hold me, David.'

A short while later, sombrely dressed, they sat in the kitchen, drinking tea. John Kingsley had gone off to the cathedral at about seven o'clock, too upset to talk to them, too upset to do anything but sit in the Quire and think about what he would say in his sermon. A rack of toast sat between them on the table, untouched. Lucy had made it, mostly just to keep busy; David always fasted before Communion, and in any case neither of them felt like eating.

‘We both knew that something . . . unpleasant . . . was bound to happen,' said Lucy. ‘But did you ever think that it would happen so soon? Within the week?'

‘No.' He rubbed his eyes wearily and sipped his tea.

She attempted a wan smile. ‘Well, at least it's over now. Maybe things will settle down.'

‘I wish I believed that.' David sighed. ‘No, Lucy. It's not over. This wasn't the end – it was just the beginning. The Dean's not going anywhere, and as long as he's here . . .'

‘Then you don't think . . . the Archbishop of Canterbury won't be able to do anything?'

David shook his head, putting his mug down none too gently. ‘He can't intervene. It's too late for that.' Rising, he added, ‘Come on, Lucy. It's half past seven – let's go over to the cathedral. I can't bear sitting around here any longer.'