Death in Holy Orders (40 page)

He settled down to read, but the peace around him found no echo within. What was it, he wondered, about this place which made him feel that his life was under judgement? He thought about the long years of self-imposed solitude since his wife’s death. Hadn’t he used his job to avoid the commitment of love, to keep inviolate more than that high uncluttered flat above the Thames which, when he returned to it at night, looked exactly the same as it had when he left it in the morning? To be a detached observer of life was not without dignity; to have a job
which preserved your own privacy while providing you with the excuse—indeed, the duty—to invade the privacy of others had its advantages for a writer. But wasn’t there something ignoble about it? If you stood apart long enough, weren’t you in danger of stifling, perhaps even losing, that quickening spirit which the priests here would call the soul? Six lines of verse came into his mind and he took a page of paper, ripped it in half and wrote them down:

After a second he scribbled beneath it “With apologies to Marvell.” He thought back to the days when his poetry had come as easily as had this light, ironic verse. Now it was a more cerebral, a more calculated, choice and arrangement of words. Was there anything in his life that was spontaneous?

He told himself that this introspection was becoming morbid. To shake it off he had to get out of St. Anselm’s. What he needed before bed was a brisk walk. He closed the door to Jerome, passed Ambrose, from which no lights were visible behind the tightly drawn curtains, and, unlocking the iron gate, turned resolutely south, making his way towards the sea.

I
t was Miss Arbuthnot who had decreed that there should be no locks on the doors of the ordinands’ rooms. Emma wondered what she had feared they might do if not always at risk of interruption. Had there been, perhaps, an unacknowledged fear of sexuality? Perhaps as a consequence, no locks had been fitted in the visitors’ sets. The locked iron gate by the church gave all the night-time security considered necessary; behind that elegantly designed barrier what was there to fear? Because there was no tradition of locks and bolts, none were available in college to be fitted, and Pilbeam had been too busy all day to go to Lowestoft to buy them, even if he could have found a shop open on a Sunday. Father Sebastian had asked Emma whether she would be more comfortable in the main building. Emma, unwilling to betray nervousness, had assured the Warden that she would be perfectly all right. Father Sebastian hadn’t asked her again, and when she returned to the set after Compline to discover that locks hadn’t been fitted, she was too proud to seek him out, confess her fear and say that she had changed her mind.

She undressed and put on her dressing-gown, then settled down at her laptop and resolutely tried to work. But she was too tired. Thoughts and words came in a jumble overlaid by the events of the day. It had been late in the morning before Robbins had sought her out and asked her to come to the interview room. There Dalgliesh, with Inspector Miskin on his left, had taken her briefly through the events of the previous night. Emma had explained how she had been woken by the wind and had heard the clear note of the bell. She couldn’t explain why she had put on her dressing-gown and gone down to investigate. It now
seemed rash and stupid. She thought she must have been half asleep, or perhaps the single chime heard through the wind had woken a semi-conscious memory of the insistent bells of childhood and adolescence, a call to be sharply obeyed, not questioned.

But she had been fully awake when she had pushed open the church door and seen between the pillars the brightly lit
Doom
and the two figures, the one prone and the other collapsed over him in an attitude of pity or despair. Dalgliesh hadn’t asked her to describe the scene in detail. Why should he? she thought. He’d been there. He didn’t express sympathy or concern for what she had gone through, but then, it wasn’t she who was bereaved. The questions were clear and simple. It wasn’t, she thought, that he had been trying to spare her; if there had been anything he wanted to know, he would have asked, whatever her distress. When Sergeant Robbins had first shown her into the interview room and Commander Dalgliesh had risen from his chair and invited her to sit, she had told herself: I’m not facing the man who wrote
A Case to Answer and Other Poems
, I’m facing a policeman. In this they could never be allies. There were people she loved and wanted to protect; he had no allegiance except to the truth. And at the end had come the question she had dreaded.

“Did Father Martin speak when you went up to him?”

She had paused before replying. “Yes, just a few words.”

“What were they, Dr. Lavenham?”

She didn’t reply. She wouldn’t lie, but even to recall the words now seemed an act of treachery.

The silence lengthened, then he said, “Dr. Lavenham, you saw the body. You saw what had been done to the Archdeacon. He was a tall, strong man. Father Martin is nearly eighty years old and becoming feeble. The brass candlestick, if it proves to be the weapon, would take some strength to wield. Do you really believe Father Martin could have done it?”

She had cried out vehemently, “Of course not! He’s incapable of cruelty. He’s kind and loving and good, the best man I know. I never thought that. No one could.”

Commander Dalgliesh had said quietly, “Then why do you suppose I do?”

He asked the question again. Emma looked him in the eyes. “He said, ‘Oh God, what have we done, what have we done?’ ”

“And what do you suppose—thinking about it later—he meant by that?”

She had thought about it later. They had not been words to forget. Nothing about that scene would ever be forgotten. She kept her eyes on her interrogator.

“I think he meant that the Archdeacon would still be alive if he hadn’t come to St. Anselm’s. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been murdered if his killer hadn’t known how strongly he was disliked here. That dislike could have contributed to his death. The college can’t be guiltless.”

“Yes,” he had said more gently, “that’s what Father Martin has told me he meant.”

She looked at her watch. It was twenty past eleven. Knowing that it would be impossible to work, she went up to her bed. Because the set of rooms was at the end of the row, the bedroom had two windows, one of which looked out over the south wall of the church. She drew the curtains before getting into bed and tried resolutely to forget the unlocked door. She shut her eyes, only to find images of death bubbling like blood on her retina, reality made more terrible by imagination. She saw again the viscous pool of spilt blood, but now there lay above it like grey vomit a spatter of his brains. The grotesque images of the damned and grinning devils jerked into life and animated their obscene gestures. When she opened her eyes in the hope of banishing horror, the darkness of the bedroom pressed upon her. Even the air smelt of death.

She got out of bed and, unlatching the window facing the scrubland, pushed it open. There came a blessed rush of air, and she gazed out over the vast silence and a sky pricked with stars.

She went back to bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. Her legs were juddering with tiredness, but fear was stronger than exhaustion. At last she got up and went downstairs. To watch in darkness that unlocked door was less traumatic than to imagine it opening slowly; to be in the sitting-room was better than lying helpless, waiting to hear those purposeful footsteps on the stairs. She wondered whether to ram a chair under the door handle, but couldn’t bring herself to an action that seemed both
demeaning and ineffectual. She despised herself for cowardice, telling herself that no one intended her harm. But then the images of cracked bones came back into her mind. Someone on the headland, perhaps someone in the college, had taken a brass candlestick and smashed the Archdeacon’s skull, striking again and again in a frenzy of blood-lust and hatred. Could that have been the action of someone sane? Was anyone at St. Anselm’s safe?

It was then that she heard the rasp of the iron gate opening, the click as it was shut. Footsteps were passing. They were confident but quiet, there was nothing furtive about this tread. Carefully she opened her door and glanced out, her heart thumping. Commander Dalgliesh was opening the door of Jerome. She must have made some sound, because he turned and came over to her and she opened the door to him. The relief of seeing him, of seeing any human being, was overwhelming. She knew that it must show in her face.

He said, “Are you all right?”

She managed a smile. “Not very at present, but I shall be. I was finding it difficult to sleep.”

He said, “I thought you would have moved to the main house. Didn’t Father Sebastian suggest it?”

“He did offer, but I thought I’d be all right here.”

He looked across at the church. He said, “This isn’t a good set for you. Would you like to change with me? I think you’d find it more comfortable.”

She found it difficult to conceal her relief. “But wouldn’t that be a bother?”

“Not in the slightest. We could move most of our things tomorrow. All you need now are bedclothes. I’m afraid your under-sheet may not fit my bed. Mine’s a double.”

She said, “Shall we just change our pillows and duvets?”

“Good idea.”

Carrying them into Jerome, she saw that he had already brought his own pillows and duvet downstairs and had laid them on one of the armchairs. Beside them was a canvas-and-leather grip. Perhaps he had put together the things he needed for the night and next day.

Going over to the cupboard, he said, “The college has provided
the usual innocuous drinks for us, and there’s half a pint of milk in the fridge. Would you like cocoa or Ovaltine? Or, if you prefer, I’ve a bottle of claret.”

“I’d like some wine, please.”

He shifted the duvet for her and she sat down. He took a bottle, a corkscrew and two tumblers from the small cupboard.

“Obviously the college doesn’t expect its guests to be drinking wine. We have the choice of tumblers or mugs.”

“A tumbler is fine. But it means opening a new bottle.”

“The best time to open it, when it’s needed.”

She was surprised how much at ease she felt with him. That’s all I needed, she told herself, someone else to be here. They didn’t talk for long, only until a single glass of wine had been finished. They drank slowly. He spoke of coming to the college as a boy, of the fathers, their cassocks hitched up, bowling to him on a pitch behind the west gate; cycling into Lowestoft to buy fish; the pleasure of solitary reading in the library at night. He asked about the syllabus for her class at St. Anselm’s, how she chose the poets to study, what kind of response she got from the ordinands. The murder wasn’t mentioned. Their talk wasn’t desultory but neither was it forced. She liked the sound of his voice. She had the sensation that part of her mind was detached, floating above them and being soothed by this low male and female contrapuntal sound.

When she got up and said good night, he rose at once and said with a formality he hadn’t so far shown, “I shall be spending the night in this armchair unless you object. If Inspector Miskin had been here I’d have asked her to stay. As she isn’t, I’ll take her place—unless you’d rather I didn’t.”

She recognized that he was trying to make it easy for her, that he didn’t want to impose, but that he knew how much she dreaded being alone. She said, “But won’t that be a terrible nuisance? You’ll have an uncomfortable night.”

“I shall be very comfortable. I’m used to sleeping in armchairs.”

The bedroom in Jerome was almost identical to the one next door. The bedside lamp was switched on and she saw that he had not taken his books. He had been reading—or surely it must have been rereading—
Beowulf
. There was an old and
faded Penguin paperback, David Cecil’s
Early Victorian Novelists
, with a photograph of the writer, looking ridiculously young, and on the back the price in old money. So, like her, she thought, he enjoyed picking up books in second-hand shops. The third book was
Mansfield Park
. She wondered whether to take them down to him, but was reluctant to intrude now that they had said their good nights.

It was strange to be lying on his sheet. She hoped that he didn’t despise her for her cowardice. The relief of knowing that he was downstairs was immense. She closed her eyes on darkness, not on the dancing images of death, and in minutes she was asleep.

She awoke after a dreamless night and saw from her watch that it was seven o’clock. The set was very quiet, and when she went downstairs she saw that he had already left, taking the duvet and pillow with him. He had opened the window, as if anxious that not even the faintest trace of his breath should remain. She knew that he would tell no one where he had spent the night.

R
uby Pilbeam needed no alarm clock. For eighteen years she had woken, winter and summer, at six o’clock. She did so on Monday morning, stretching out her hand to switch on the bedside light. Immediately Reg stirred, pushed back the bedclothes and began to edge out of the bed. There came to Ruby the warm smell of his body, bringing as always its familiar comfort. She wondered if he had been asleep or just lying still, waiting for her to move. Neither had slept except for brief periods of restless half-slumber, and at three o’clock they had got up and gone down to the kitchen to drink tea and wait for the morning. Then exhaustion had mercifully taken over from shock and horror, and at four o’clock they had gone back to bed. They had then slept fitfully, but they had slept.

Both had been busy all Sunday, and only the ceaseless purposeful activity had given that dreadful day any semblance of normality. Last night, huddled together at the kitchen table, they had talked about the murder, whispering as if those small comfortable rooms of St. Mark’s Cottage were crammed with secret listeners. The talk had been guarded, with suspicions unvoiced, broken sentences and periods of unhappy silence. Even to say that it was absurd to suggest that anyone at St. Anselm’s could be the murderer was to associate place and deed in treasonable proximity; to speak a name even in exoneration was to admit the thought that someone resident in college could have perpetrated such evil.