Evil Intent (3 page)

The first message was from Frances Cherry. ‘I just wanted to know how your first Sunday went,’ her friend said. ‘And I need to have a word with you about the Deanery Chapter meeting. Give me a ring in the morning, if you have a chance. I’ll be at home until late morning.’

The second was from Peter. ‘Good to see you this afternoon, Sis,’ he said. Odd, thought Callie – not for the first time – that the person who had been responsible for her nickname never called her anything but Sis. ‘Hope I wasn’t too much of a wet blanket. Give me a ring whenever. And by the way, you’re better off without what’s-his-name, in my humble opinion. I never did think he was good enough for you.’

Callie supposed that was meant to make her feel better. Holding her breath, she pressed the button to listen to the final message. She exhaled slowly as she realised that the male voice wasn’t Adam’s. ‘This is Mark,’ it said, then paused. ‘You know – Mark, Marco, from the Venice flight. You gave me the tip about Mr Hawkins and his wife, and I thought you’d like to know what’s been happening. Here’s my number.’

Callie wrote it down, with an unexpected flutter in her chest.

Unlike Callie, whose vocation had come to her late, Frances Cherry had always wanted to be a priest. Her father was a priest; she had grown up steeped in church life, a child of the vicarage. From earliest days, her favourite games involved not dolls and tea parties but playing at
celebrating
Mass. Carefully she would lay out her ‘altar’ on a little table,
meticulously
placing the elements. As an only child, she rarely had a live ‘
congregation
’, making do with a variety of dolls, but that didn’t seem to matter. With great solemnity she would say the words of consecration, lifting her plastic chalice of Ribena in reverent elevation.

To his credit, her father never told her that she couldn’t be a priest, that the Church had not yet caught up with her sense of vocation. It was years before she discovered the horrible truth: women could not be priests.

‘But it’s not fair!’ she raged.

‘You can serve God in many other ways,’ her mother tried to soothe her. ‘You can marry a priest, like I did. Or you could be a Deaconess.’

In the end, Frances did both.

She was accepted for training as a Deaconess, and went to theological college. It seemed to compound the injustice that she was educated
alongside
men who would one day be priests, receiving exactly the same training as they did. Those were difficult years for her.

But it was there that she met the man who would be her husband: Graham Cherry. Unlike some of the other ordinands, he never dismissed her strong sense of vocation. ‘The Church will see the light one day, Fran,’ he would say to her. ‘Just hang in there.’ That didn’t make it any easier to bear on the day, a few weeks before their wedding, when a bishop laid hands on Graham Cherry and made him a deacon. And a year later, when he was priested, it was even worse for Frances. She was happy for him, of course, and shared in his joy, but she felt as though she would forever be locked out of the only club she had ever wanted to join.

Frances, by then, was working as a hospital chaplain. It was one of the few fields of ministry which was available to her as a woman, since she could administer communion to hospital patients using elements which
had been consecrated by a man. She enjoyed the job, and found that she had a real gift for working with the sick, the dying, and their families.

Within a year of their marriage, though, Frances discovered that she had achieved perhaps the one thing her husband was incapable of: she was
carrying
a child. The baby hadn’t been planned, but when it happened, they were both delighted. Frances continued working until virtually the last moment, and went back to her job a few months after Heather’s birth.

She told herself that she should be the most content of all women: she was a wife and mother, she had a rewarding job at which she excelled. Yet still, deep in her soul, she knew that something was missing. She felt it most strongly each Sunday morning as Graham elevated the chalice and said the words of consecration, but the ache was with her always, gnawing at her contentment.

Needless to say, when the Movement for the Ordination of Women arrived, Frances was ready to be enlisted for the battle.

That was where she had first met Leo Jackson, now the Area Dean of Bayswater. He was one of the handful of brave men whose sense of justice and equality had put him in the forefront of the fight. Then he’d been a young vicar, working in a deprived area of London. He’d felt so strongly about the cause that he had campaigned for a seat on General Synod, and won. His vote had counted, that day in November of 1992.

Frances recognised Leo’s voice as soon as she picked up the phone. Leo didn’t just talk, he boomed. And his West Indian lilt seemed to get stronger through the years, rather than diminishing.

‘Frannie, my love!’ he shouted down the phone. ‘How are you, my pet?’

She held the receiver a foot away from her ear, smiling. ‘Doing very well, Leo. And you?’

‘Couldn’t be better!’ He paused, lowering his voice a notch. ‘Listen, Frannie. I want to ask you to do me a favour.’

‘Ask away,’ Frances invited; there was little she wouldn’t do for Leo Jackson.

‘This Clergy Chapter meeting tomorrow. I know it’s short notice, pet, and I know that you don’t usually come to Clergy Chapter, but I’d like for you to deacon for me at the Mass before the meeting.’

‘Well,’ said Frances. ‘You know why I don’t usually come.’

‘Oh, THEM,’ he exploded. ‘They’re not worth worrying about.’

They might not be worth worrying about, Frances reflected, but they could certainly make life quite unpleasant for her.

‘They’ll be very upset if I deacon the Eucharist. They might walk out.’

‘Let them walk. It’s at
my
church, and I can have any deacon I want!’ He added, ‘They wouldn’t come at all if we weren’t having a speaker they’re interested in.’

‘Something about silver?’ Frances remembered.

‘Yes. Just up their street. Silver, vestments, all that sort of poncy stuff that they love. Tat. They wouldn’t miss it for anything.’

‘Well…‘said Frances again. ‘I was planning to come, actually. As moral support for Callie Anson.’

‘Brian Stanford’s new curate.’

‘That’s right. She’s a good friend of mine, and I don’t think it’s fair to let her walk into that lion’s den on her own.’

‘Good for you, pet.’

Frances hesitated a moment before going on. ‘And there’s another
reason
why she needs moral support, Leo. A more personal reason. She was planning to marry Adam Masters.’

‘Richard Grant’s new curate at Christ Church,’ Leo said at once. ‘Yes, I knew that.’

‘But he dumped her, just a few weeks ago. Right before their ordination. Apparently he met some girl on his parish placement, and that was the end of his engagement to Callie.’

‘Oh, God.’ Leo’s reaction was heartfelt. ‘Poor kid. And he’ll be at the meeting.’

‘I expect he will. So I thought I’d go along with her and hold her hand, so to speak.’

‘Good woman.’ Leo paused. ‘And you’ll deacon for me, then?’

‘All right,’ she capitulated. ‘As you say, if they don’t like it, they can walk.’

Callie made a bit of time in the morning to return her phone messages. She wanted to hear what Mark – or Marco, as she thought of him – had to tell
her, but she was strangely nervous about talking to him. Buying time, she rang Frances first; the number was engaged. Even though her brother’s message hadn’t indicated an urgent need to speak to her, she tried him next. He answered after a number of rings, grumbling at her for ringing so early in the morning. Apart from that, he seemed to have regained his
equilibrium
and was his usual bouncy, optimistic self. So much, she thought, for his broken heart over the perfidious Jason.

On her next try, she reached Frances.

‘You must have felt the vibes,’ Frances said. ‘I was just talking about you.’

‘Who to?’

‘The Area Dean. Leo. I was telling him that I was planning to break a long-standing habit of avoiding Clergy Chapter to give you a bit of moral support.’

Adam, Callie thought. Frances must know how she was dreading the prospect of seeing him. ‘I really appreciate that.’

‘I thought I ought to prepare you for what is likely to be a fairly unpleasant experience,’ Frances added.

‘Well, I did figure out that Adam would probably be there.’

Frances gave a mirthless laugh. ‘It’s not just Adam I’m talking about. There may very well be some people there who think you’re an
abomination,
and won’t hesitate to tell you so.’

‘An abomination?’ Callie was shocked at the word, and at the depth of feeling in Frances’ voice. ‘But they don’t even know me!’

‘Nothing personal, mind you,’ Frances assured her. ‘But you’re one of those hateful creatures who have destroyed their Church. Someone who thinks she can be a priest, even though they know better.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Callie had never encountered any overt hostility to her new vocation; at theological college she had been affirmed in it, and though she knew there were people out there who weren’t so positive, she was unprepared for anything like what Frances was talking about. ‘I thought that all the people who were against the ordination of women had left the Church of England. Had gone off to be Roman Catholics or Orthodox or something.’

‘Oh, would that it were so. The Church is still ordaining young men who don’t believe that women can be priests. Insane, or what?’ Again
Frances laughed. ‘At any rate, I didn’t mean to alarm you, just warn you. And they might not be there anyway.’

‘But who
are
they?’ Callie asked. ‘What do they look like, so I’ll know to steer clear of them?’

‘By their shirts ye shall know them,’ intoned Frances solemnly. ‘Avoid the men in black.’

Callie echoed her words, thinking of the film. ‘Men in Black?’

‘The blacker their shirts, the higher their Churchmanship.’

‘Of course.’ Callie realised what Frances was talking about: the coded messages given out by clerical shirts. By and large, she knew,
Anglo-Catholic
clergy almost always wore black, mimicking the Roman Catholics, whilst those of a more Evangelical bent might wear pastels, bright colours or even stripes, and middle-of-the-roaders often favoured grey or pale blue. And then there were the clerical collars, from the narrow Roman bands worn by the High to the broad expanses of white at the necks of Evangelicals. ‘By their shirts ye shall know them’ was indeed an apt observation. ‘I’ll watch out for the black shirts,’ Callie promised.

Frances added, ‘I have to say, though, that the Evangelicals probably won’t like you much, either.’

Callie sighed. ‘Because of the Headship thing, you mean.’

‘That’s right,’ affirmed Frances. ‘Women having authority over men is a big no-no for them. They have real problems with women priests for that reason. But they’ll be much nicer to your face than the other lot will,’ she added. ‘They’ll be all smiley and nice, and you’ll never know what they
really
think of you.’

‘I’m not even a priest yet,’ Callie protested. ‘I’m just a lowly deacon. I don’t have authority over
anyone
.’

‘True. And for that reason the Evangelicals might just about let you get away with it.’

Again Callie sighed, wondering what she’d let herself in for. ‘I can see why you avoid Clergy Chapter,’ she said. ‘That sounds like the safest thing to do.’

And that, she thought, was even without the question of Adam.

It was mid-morning before Callie rang Marco Lombardi. She had a clear picture of him in her mind as she picked up the phone: the curly black hair, the warm brown eyes, the smile. On their one meeting, when he’d sat next to her on the plane from Venice, she’d found him attractive in personality as well as in appearance. He had drawn her out, encouraged her to talk, made her feel like an interesting person. There was something about him, about the way he’d smiled at her …

But she was being silly, she told herself firmly. He had been displaying good manners, no more than that. He would have been the same with
anyone
. He hadn’t singled her out; he had found himself with her as a
seatmate,
and had made the best of the situation.

And besides, it was way too soon to be thinking about anything like that.

With renewed determination she punched in the number he’d given her.

‘Marco?’ she said when a male voice answered.

His response was immediate. ‘Callie. Thanks for ringing.’

‘How did you know it was me?’

He laughed: the warm, deep laugh she remembered. ‘No one but my parents ever calls me Marco. And you certainly aren’t my mother.’

‘Oh,’ she said, gulping. ‘Shall I call you Mark, then?’

‘Not at all. I like it,’ he assured her. ‘It reminds me of Venice.’

Venice. For an instant Callie was there, walking along the Grand Canal…

‘Speaking of Venice,’ he went on, ‘I thought you’d want to know what’s happened with your Mr Hawkins.’

‘Hardly
my
Mr Hawkins,’ she laughed. ‘But of course I want to know.’

‘The body. It was his wife, all right – it’s been positively identified. And the paperwork is underway for him to be extradited back to Italy.’

‘So he
did
kill her,’ Callie said, satisfaction in her voice.

‘At this point, I don’t think there’s anything more than circumstantial evidence that he did, but I’m sure that my Italian colleagues will put that to rights.’

Callie wasn’t sure whether that was meant to be ironic or not; she
didn’t
know Marco Lombardi well enough to tell. ‘What about the woman?’ she asked. ‘Gabriella? Will she be extradited as well?’

‘No need for that,’ he assured her. ‘She’s already back in Italy. Deported. Don’t forget, she entered the country illegally, on someone else’s passport. HM Immigration don’t fool around with that sort of thing – as soon as they nabbed her, she was on the next plane back.’

‘Well. That’s that, then.’

‘I wanted to thank you for your part in it,’ Marco said. ‘Without your keen eye, they might very well have got away with it.’

Callie felt satisfied, yet oddly deflated. ‘Well, thanks for letting me know.’

‘Not at all.’

There was a pause as Callie tried to think what to say next. She
considered
‘see you around’, but realised it was unlikely that their paths ever would cross again.

Marco finally spoke into the silence. ‘Callie,’ he said, tentatively. ‘I was wondering whether you might like to go out some time. For a meal, or something.’

Her heart thudded. ‘You mean…like a date?’

‘Not if you don’t want to think of it like that,’ he said. ‘It can be just on a friendly basis, if you’d prefer.’

‘Yes, I’d like that,’ she assured him. ‘I don’t mind what we call it, but I’d like to see you.’

‘How about Saturday evening? I’m off duty.’

Callie laughed. ‘Well, I’m
on
duty on Sunday morning, but as long as it’s not too late …’