Evil Intent (9 page)

‘I told you. I’m the sacristan, and…’

‘That’s not what I meant.’ he tried to formulate the question so it
didn’t
sound too insulting. ‘Most young people these days don’t go to church. Let alone get involved in doing a job like that, when it means you have to be here every day. Is it your parents? Do they make you come?’

For the first time, she laughed, a single musical peal of amusement. ‘My parents stopped trying to tell me what to do a very long time ago.’

‘Then why…’

She gave him a searching look. ‘Do you really want to know? Is it relevant?’

Neville realised that he did really want to know. ‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘And no, I don’t suppose it’s relevant. But humour me.’

Willow seemed to ponder for a moment, choosing her words. ‘I
suppose
it was Leo,’ she stated. ‘The vicar. Don’t get me wrong. I love
everything
about this place – the beauty of the building, and the drama of the worship. It all speaks to me in a very powerful way. But I don’t suppose I would have come – and stayed – if it wasn’t for Leo.’

‘Tell me about Leo.’

Again she paused. ‘Leo … well, from the first time I met him, I could tell that he was special. A man of great faith…and so much more. I mean, he’s not just interested in the Church, like so many clergy. Don’t get me wrong – he takes the Church very seriously. But it’s in the context of the world we live in. And our responsibility to our world.’

Poor kid, thought Neville. She was talking about him in the present tense, as though he were still alive, and not lying in that little room
surrounded
by police. Even though she’d seen it herself, she hadn’t quite taken it on board yet. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

‘Social issues. Justice. Equality for all men and women, regardless of colour or nationality or religion or sexual preference.’ Her voice was
passionate.
‘The environment. The homeless. Asylum seekers. The Third World. There are so many things he’s interested in. And he does something about it, as well. He doesn’t just sit on his backside and talk about it, like lots of people do. He campaigns. He writes letters. He uses his influence in the Church – on General Synod – to speak out publicly. Lots of people resent him for that, of course,’ she added.

At that, Neville’s brain suddenly revved up into first gear: if people resented him, that meant he had enemies. Enemies meant motives for
murder.
‘What sort of people?’ he asked.

Willow shrugged. ‘Oh, the sort of people you’d expect. The old guard here at St John’s. It’s a very wealthy parish, you know. Conservative. Establishment. People who don’t like rocking the boat.’

Neville thought about the woman with the flowers, and could imagine
that she’d not been a great fan of the dynamic, social activist Leo. But he couldn’t quite picture her committing murder over it. Though Willow Tree had said that he’d been strangled with a stole…

‘But there are lots of people like me here, as well,’ Willow went on. ‘Younger people who care about the things that matter. Leo’s brought us all on board. We come from all over London, not just from this parish. And it’s because of Leo.’

He sounded like the sort of man who aroused strong feeling. ‘He must have meant a great deal to you. I can see why it was so upsetting for you to find him like that,’ Neville said sympathetically. ‘I’m sure he’ll be greatly missed.’

Willow turned and stared at him, her eyes wide. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Well, now that he’s dead —’

‘But Leo’s not dead!’

Neville felt as if the ground had shifted beneath him, as if he had been pitched into a surreal world where the rules did not apply. Perhaps, he thought, she was comforting herself with some theological malarky about the dead being alive in Jesus. That’s what old Father Flynn had said at his granddad’s funeral. ‘In the vestry. You said you could tell he was dead,’ he said patiently.

Her face cracked into a smile. ‘Oh, you thought that was Leo in there!’ Willow laughed with relief. ‘That’s not Leo, Inspector Stewart. It’s Father Jonah.’

Callie was to preach her first sermon at All Saints on Sunday, so on Wednesday morning she settled down at her desk to try to put a few ideas together. She was determined that her first sermon would be a good one; it would set the tone for her curacy. The congregation would judge her on it, and more importantly, so would Brian. It was important to her that she impress Brian, right from the start.

At theological college she had discovered that she was rather good at preaching. Her years in the Civil Service had accustomed her to organising her thoughts into logical points and synthesising material from different
sources into a cohesive whole, and that had stood her in good stead when it came to preaching. She liked to write sermons the old-fashioned way, sketching out ideas on a legal pad; when she had a good sense of what she wanted to say, she would commit the words to her computer and get them into final shape on the screen.

But this morning she was finding it very hard going. Unsurprisingly, she hadn’t slept very well, and now her thoughts kept wandering to the events of the previous night. Two images continued to rise to the surface of her mind: the astonished and angry face of Father Jonah, dripping with wine, and the astonished and disbelieving face of Adam.

Callie kept an open mind on the subject of love at first sight: though she had never experienced it herself, she knew people who insisted it had happened to them. Nonetheless she was certain that it was impossible to fall out of love in an instant. Love was a habit, a mind-set, a pattern of thinking that would surely take time to change. But last night, at the moment when Adam stared at her, she felt she had taken the first step away from loving him. For an instant, looking into those startled brown eyes, she had seen him in a very different light – not the Adam she had loved for over two years, but a stranger, and not a very attractive one at that.
Self-assured,
self-absorbed. Selfish, even. Blinkered, seeing the world as he wanted it to be rather than how it really was. Lacking in imagination, humour, empathy. Perhaps, she thought with a sense of shock, not even
terribly
bright.

The memory was disturbing yet exciting in its implications, and she intermittently probed it in the way a tongue continues to return to a sore tooth. There was hope: in a month, in six months, in a year – who knew how long? – a time would come when she no longer loved Adam. Not even a little bit.

When the phone rang, it was with a feeling of guilty relief that she
abandoned
her sermon to answer it.

‘Listen, Callie,’ said Frances. ‘I want to apologise for last night.’

‘Apologise? To me? Whatever for?’

‘For abandoning you,’ her friend said. ‘I was supposed to be there as moral support, right? But I ran out on you, and left you to…whatever.
Adam. Those neanderthal men in black. All the things I was supposed to be protecting you from.’

‘But you were standing up for me!’ Callie protested. ‘When Father Jonah said those horrible things.’

‘He just made me so furious,’ Frances said with asperity. ‘On your behalf, and…well, for all of us women. I can’t remember ever feeling so angry – honestly, Callie, I could have killed the smug bastard.’

‘You got home okay?’ Callie asked. ‘I was a bit concerned.’

‘Leo was an absolute star. He took me outside and gave me time to calm down and blow off steam. Then he walked me all the way home. Fortunately,’ Frances added, ‘Graham was out at a meeting. So I poured myself a stiff drink and went straight to bed.’

‘Are you feeling better now?’

‘In the cold light of day, I know I shouldn’t have done it,’ she admitted. ‘But given the same circumstances, I’d probably do it again.’

‘Who,’ asked Neville Stewart, baffled, ‘is Father Jonah? Or should I say,
was
Father Jonah?’

Willow Tree glanced towards the altar of the chapel. ‘A priest at
another
church. I think it was St Mary the Virgin, Marble Arch.’

‘And do you have any idea what he might have been doing here?’

‘There was a meeting here last night, in the church hall. Deanery Clergy Chapter, it’s called,’ she explained. ‘For all the clergy in this area. It was mostly a social sort of thing, with a speaker and refreshments.’

‘And it’s likely that this Father Jonah was at the meeting?’

She turned to face him and spoke with the sort of directness Neville was beginning to admire her for: if only, he thought, all witnesses could be so co-operative and precise. ‘I know for a fact he was. I was here myself, for at least part of the evening. Leo had asked me if I’d serve the coffee. When the speaker started, I tidied up the kitchen and went home.’

‘So you definitely saw this Father Jonah last night,’ he stated, then added, as another thought struck him, ‘and you could give me a list of the other people who were here, as well?’

‘I can’t really be much help to you there, I’m afraid. They were from all
different churches. A few of them I recognised, but I didn’t know them all.’

‘You did know Father Jonah?’ he pressed her.

She shrugged. ‘Not really – I couldn’t even tell you his surname. He was hard to miss, though. African. Leo’s black, but Father Jonah was…well, he was
really
black, if you know what I mean. The darkest skin I’ve ever seen.’

A racially motivated crime, then? Neville reflected. Not impossible, even in a church.

‘Leo’s the one who could give you a list,’ Willow volunteered. ‘He’s the Area Dean. He knows everybody.’

Leo. He’d assumed that Leo was the murder victim; now, having been proved wrong about that, Neville demanded, ‘Where
is
Leo? Why isn’t he here?’

She had a ready answer, at least for the second question. ‘On Wednesday morning he always has a meeting with the Archdeacon. That’s why the Mass isn’t until noon on a Wednesday.’ Willow consulted her watch. ‘It’s twenty to twelve. He should be arriving at any minute.’

As if on cue, Leo erupted into the stillness of the chapel. Leo was, Neville discerned instantly, the sort of man who not only dominated a room – he filled it with his presence.

‘Willow!’ roared Leo, manifestly agitated. ‘There you are. Thank God. What the hell is going on here? There’s tape around the church. I can’t get into the vestry. There are people everywhere – police, and people in white space suits. No one will tell me anything. What in God’s name is going on?’

‘Did you manage to avoid Adam?’ Frances wanted to know.

Callie sighed. ‘Actually, no. He caught up with me after you left. Said he wanted to invite me to supper on Saturday night.’

‘He’s having second thoughts, then? He wants to patch things up?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’ Callie made an attempt at mimicking Adam’s voice. ‘“Pippa makes a great curry.”’

‘Oh, no,’ Frances groaned. ‘Not that “I hope the two of you will be great friends” crap.’

‘That’s exactly what it was.’

‘I hope you told him where to go. In no uncertain terms.’

‘I told him,’ Callie said, ‘that I had a date on Saturday night.’ Once again she remembered the look on his face when she’d said it.

‘Oooh, good one, Callie. Brilliant. If you’d like to make your
confession,
I’ll give you absolution for that little porky. It was entirely justified in the circumstances.’

‘But it wasn’t a porky. It was true,’ Callie stated, feeling a flush move up from her neck towards her face. She was glad that Frances couldn’t see her at that moment, blushing like a schoolgirl.

Once Leo was apprised of the situation, and had calmed down sufficiently to be coherent, Neville told Willow Tree that she could go. ‘I know where to reach you if I have any further questions,’ he said to her, and when she’d gone he turned to Leo. ‘If I could have a few words with you, then, Mr… err… Reverend… err… Father…’ Or should it be Vicar? he wondered. The titles of the Anglican clergy were a mystery to him. The girl had said he was Area Dean. Did that mean he had some special honorific title, like ‘Your Deanship’? With the RCs you knew where you stood: it was ‘Father’, and that was the the end of it. Why did the Anglicans have to make things so complicated?

‘Leo. Just Leo’s fine.’

‘Guv – there you are.’ A London-accented voice announced the arrival in the chapel of his sergeant, Sid Cowley. ‘I’ve been looking for you. The pathologist wants a word.’

‘Good.’ Neville moved towards the chapel entrance, out of Leo’s earshot, to where the pathologist waited for him. He went straight to the point. ‘What can you tell me?’

The pathologist heaved the sigh of a man who had heard that question many times before. ‘I guessed you’d want to know. Cause of death:
strangulation,
without a doubt.’ He sighed again and rolled his eyes. ‘And I
suppose
you want some idea of time of death as well.’

‘It would be helpful.’ Neville tried to keep any hint of sarcasm from his voice; his experience with this man told him that it wouldn’t get him
anywhere.

‘As you well know, I won’t be able to give a precise time till I have him
in the lab – if then. But I’d say last night. Before midnight.’

‘Thank you.’

The pathologist nodded in acknowledgement. ‘Oh, and he died where we found him. He wasn’t moved after death.’ He turned and moved away, adding over his shoulder, ‘He’s all yours. For the moment. But the sooner you let me have him, the sooner I’ll be able to tell you more.’

It was Neville’s turn to sigh. ‘I suppose it’s time for me to go and make the acquaintance of Father Jonah,’ he said as much to himself as to DS Cowley. ‘Just what I’ve been looking forward to.’

Then he remembered Leo, behind him in the chapel.

Leo was standing in front of the altar, facing the chapel entrance; he was still, not moving a muscle, but it was the stillness of a coiled spring. ‘I have a Mass here in a few minutes,’ he said. ‘People will be expecting it.’

This threw Neville: was the man seriously proposing to hold a service while a man lay dead in his vestry?