Murder at the National Cathedral (20 page)

Leighton smiled to himself at the tension among the four men. How typically American, he thought, to spend so much time defending their positions, justifying their existence, and never fully cooperating to get the job done. True, enough of that went on in British intelligence, but those incidents somehow seemed to be resolved earlier in the game, had less impact upon final solutions. He took out a long, thin brown cigarillo. “Mind if I smoke?”

They did, but all shook their heads no.

Leighton lighted the cigar with an elegant flourish and
savored its taste. “Well,” he said pleasantly, a smile on his lined, ruddy face, “where do we begin?”

Admiral Zachary answered the question. “Let’s start with Clarissa Morgan. What is her condition?”

“Splendid,” Leighton said. “Miss Morgan is quite well, I assure you.”

“I’m not particularly interested in her health,” said Zachary.

“No, I expect not,” Leighton said.

“What went wrong?” Kapit asked.

Leighton arched his sizable eyebrows. “What went wrong?” He said to Wilson, his CIA friend, “I think I covered that subject in my conversation with you last night.”

“Which doesn’t answer the question,” Zachary said, making no attempt to hide his annoyance.

“Let me assure you that Miss Morgan is quite secure, and will no longer play an active role in this matter.”

“Not good enough,” Malvese said.

Bob Wilson stepped in. “Brett, let me try to summarize the concerns of the others. Reverend Singletary was murdered here in Washington at the National Cathedral. Your Clarissa Morgan accompanied him from London the day he was killed. Your people have acknowledged that. Now, it is our understanding that she returned to London and attempted to blackmail the Church of England. That seems to be highly irregular behavior for someone in your employ.”

Leighton laughed softly and drew on his cigarillo. “As I said moments ago, Miss Morgan is secure. No longer in our employ but in our care.”

“Meaning what?” Kapit asked.

“Meaning that we are in the process of resolving her indiscretions and making sure that her impetuous and unprofessional, to say nothing of greedy, behavior will not be repeated. We view her as purely a local personnel problem. No concern of yours.”

Malvese’s laugh was not born of merriment. “No concern
of ours, you say? Infiltrating Word of Peace was a joint project, as I understand it. We gave our okay at State because it was presented as a—how was it put?—a ‘benign’ covert exercise designed only to gather information. There are now two dead priests, and a woman operative from British intelligence holding up the Church of England for money. Benign? Damned malignant if you ask me.”

Leighton was tempted to say he
hadn’t
asked the combative little representative from the State Department. He allowed the urge to pass and asked Admiral Zachary, “Did your examination of Reverend Singletary’s videotapes provide you with what we hoped it would?”

“No.”

“Pity. I had the utmost faith in our source of information regarding this matter.”

“Miss Morgan?” Zachary asked.

“Among others. We know that certain tapes, which looked like ordinary commercially recorded cassettes, were given to Reverend Singletary by his friend Reverend Priestly, late of the British Navy. Late of everything, I suppose. Now I get the impression that either they’ve disappeared or you’ve found them and nothing incriminating was on them.”

“How do you get that impression?”

“By the look on your faces and by what is not being said.” His voice took on a sudden lilt, and he smiled at Admiral Zachary.

“No offense, Mr. Leighton,” Kapit said, “but your information may be as unreliable as your agent. We know that Singletary and Priestly exchanged sensitive information when they were together in that joint naval exercise, and we also know that the contact continued for a period of time after that. We do not, however, have any hard evidence that it was a sustained involvement over the course of years. We’ve exhausted every resource we have to trace the videotapes you claim were in Reverend Singletary’s possession.
He had many—but not the ones for which we were looking.”

“Which doesn’t necessarily mean, Mr. Kapit, that they weren’t in his possession. Perhaps there is something you’ve overlooked.”

The admiral shook his head. “No, Mr. Leighton, I have to go along with Kapit.”

Leighton sighed and sat back, crossed one long tweed-clad leg over the other. He didn’t buy what they were telling him, not in the least, but if he was annoyed, it was more a matter of their transparent denials than of the tapes themselves. “Well,” he said, “the reality seems to be that the videotapes passed by Reverend Priestly to his cause-driven friend, the Reverend Singletary, have been lost, have disappeared, have perhaps been recorded over with some of your American … sitcoms. Singletary was to have used them to thwart American military plans, perhaps, since the cause of peace, or the poor, or the environment always seems to go with an antimilitary stance. And they were to be transmitted to others in the Word of Peace organization. Does that really matter? The technology represented on those tapes has little relevance to today’s sophisticated weaponry. Antiquated equipment, already compromised, already replaced, videotaped by amateurs like Priestly. That’s all that was on those tapes. Of course, we thought it worthwhile to recover them once Reverend Singletary died, but they are no longer important to us—or to you, I might add. Just a matter of tidying up loose ends.”

Leighton’s CIA friend smiled. The Englishman had a way of politely speaking down to whomever he was with, regardless of their rank or position. Most impressive was that those same people listened.

Leighton surveyed the faces at the table before continuing, “It would have been nice to have the tapes, but they would have had considerably more value when Reverend Singletary was alive, helped to keep him in line. The question
now is how his death compromises our effectiveness within this bloody so-called peace movement.”

“It seems the loss of Priestly would pose a bigger problem in that regard,” Kapit said.

“Not really. Priestly was a decent chap who served his purpose in a peripheral way. He did, after all, introduce Miss Morgan to Reverend Singletary as instructed. A regular Cupid. He was, you see, our man.” Leighton stubbed out his cigarillo.

“And strictly another personnel problem you resolved locally,” Kapit said.

Leighton didn’t respond. Immediately. Then he said, “We did not.”

“Where is this going?” State’s Louis Malvese asked. “That’s what I need to know.”

Leighton shrugged. “I thought you might answer that,” he said.

When no one did, he added, “Tell me about this Mackensie Smith.”

“What about him?” Wilson asked.

“He seems quite in the midst of the muck, wouldn’t you say?”

Kapit said, “Mackensie Smith is a former criminal attorney who chucked his practice after his wife and son were killed in an auto accident. He later joined the faculty of George Washington University’s law school.”

“He certainly doesn’t act as I would expect a professor to act. He found Priestly’s body. He was at the hotel in the Cotswolds checking on Singletary’s every move. He’s friendly with a solicitor in London named Jeffrey Woodcock, who numbers among his clients the Church of England. Woodcock gave this Smith Clarissa Morgan’s number and asked him to call her, which he did. Why?”

No one had an answer.

“She called us immediately, and we followed up. Seems Smith claimed to be on his honeymoon. Not a bad cover.”

“He was married in August at the National Cathedral by Reverend Singletary,” Kapit said. “They were friendly.”

“Did he meet with the Morgan woman?” Wilson asked.

“No. He was on his way into the country for a few days. She told him they’d meet when he returned.”

“But they didn’t.”

“Of course not. By the time he returned to London with his bride, Miss Morgan had vacated her premises.”

“And gone where?”

“To a secure place.”

“The Cotswolds?” Kapit asked.

Leighton’s only reply was a tiny smile.

There was a period of silence at the table, broken when Louis Malvese said, “I must have one direct answer, Mr. Leighton.”

“Yes?”

“It seems we are not to meddle in your local personnel problems.”

“That view is certainly appreciated, Mr. Malvese.”

“But what about
our
local personnel problems?”

“Specifically?”

“Reverend Paul Singletary.”

“Your question?”

“Did you, or anyone in MI5, have anything to do with his death?”

Leighton lighted another long, thin brown cigarillo. He used the smoke as though it had some medicinal power to clear his thoughts and to help formulate an answer. He looked across the table at Malvese and said through the blue haze rising from the cigarillo’s end, “We all had something to do with the demise of Reverend Paul Singletary, at least spiritually. Did we terminate the reverend? No. Did someone from his precious Word of Peace organization? We rather think so.”

“Clarissa Morgan?” Bob Wilson asked.

“No,” said Leighton. “She wasn’t involved in the peace
movement aside from keeping us abreast of its activities through Singletary.”

“She accompanied him to Washington, was here when he was killed.”

“So were you, I assume.”

“But I didn’t kill him,” Wilson said.

“Did your agency?” Leighton asked.

“The CIA? Brett, come on.”

Leighton’s amused expression caused Wilson to sit back and smile. Nothing absurd about termination on either side of the Atlantic.

A half hour later, Admiral Zachary asked, “Ready for lunch?”

“Famished,” said Leighton.

“Good. Please follow me. We’ve arranged for a nice spread.”

She sat in a small, sparsely furnished room in a row house near Battersea Park—fittingly, some would have said, the site of the world’s most ambitious and successful home for stray animals. Across the Thames was the Royal Hospital.

“Time to go,” said the young man. He had been assigned to her when she was brought there the previous night. “The call came.”

“What if I won’t go?” she asked, a defiant smile on her lips.

“I don’t think that would be wise, Miss Morgan.”

“Wise? What do you know of wisdom?”

“Please, just come with us. Don’t cause trouble.”

“I wouldn’t think of it,” she said. “Got a fag?”

“Later. Come on. My patience is running thin.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked him.

“I do.”

“Are you in love with her?”

“Come on. Let’s go.”

“I loved him very much. Can you understand that?”

“Who?”

“Reverend Singletary.”

“Reverend?”

“Yes. He was handsome and intelligent and good. I loved him. He’s dead.”

“Oh. Sorry. Please.”

“Your Mr. Leighton with all his proper reserve and sense of duty doesn’t understand that.”

He said nothing, just stood and waited for her to rise from the cot.

“I was supposed to betray him. Then I fell in love. A nasty complication for your Mr. Leighton and his kind. Are you his kind?”

He reached for her.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, her voice more of a snarl, sufficiently threatening to cause him to withdraw his hand.

He tried a more ingratiating approach. “No great reason to complain, you know. The islands are very beautiful. I plan to go there on my honeymoon.”

“Do you? How sweet. I detest heat. My skin is sensitive. I break out in a rash whenever it is hot.”

“Miss Morgan, you’re causing
me
to break out in a rash.…”

“What if I won’t go? What if I tell you and your Mr. Leighton to go straight to hell?”

“Miss Morgan, I—”

“Will I be done away with? Will I be ‘terminated’ like poor Reverend Priestly?” Her laugh was blatantly bitter. “How lies multiply, like stray cats. Will you beat my head in with a candlestick holder to make it appear that there truly is a madman roaming the globe in search of skulls to crush? What fools we’ve turned out to be.” Now she smiled sweetly at him. “Do you enjoy being involved with fools? Did you join up, as I did, thinking you were about to be initiated into a brain trust out to save the British Empire? Poor thing, and so young.”

He’d had enough. He left the room and returned with two other men.

Clarissa laughed. “Need help, do you? Well, no need. I shall retire to the British Virgin Islands with grace and a sense of relief. I shall consult the best dermatologist I can find there and ask him for a proper cream for my rash.” She stood, straightened the folds of her skirt. “I hope you and your bride suffer a terminal case of heat rash on your honeymoon.”

A car was parked in front of the house. As her young guardian of the past few hours opened the door for her, she said, “And please tell your Mr. Brett Leighton and his MI5 that I think he and it are bloody bastards, and I hope they all rot in hell.”

Forecast: Rain Through the Weekend—of Course

Smith was early for his noontime meeting with Bishop St. James, and used the time to wander in the cathedral. There were a number of tour groups being led by Visitors’ Services volunteers. Smith couldn’t help but smile at the wonderment on the faces of the children being guided through the massive, imposing cathedral. Then he was sobered. Were they aware of the murder that had taken place there? He hoped not. He’d read in a sidebar story that ran with the continuing coverage of the Singletary murder that requests for cathedral tours had increased since the killing. How unfortunate, yet how human, was the tendency of people to be drawn to violence and sorrow. And scandal. Ford’s Theater. Chappaquiddick Bridge. Maybe it wasn’t the enjoyment of bad things. Maybe it was more a matter of affirming that things were still okay for those who hadn’t suffered. Probably not, was the conclusion Smith invariably came to, but it always made him feel better to rationalize away the alternatives.

He stopped at the Good Shepherd Chapel and stood alone in the center of the small room, looking through the window at the gently flowing Garth Fountain. That the peace of such a sanctuary should be violated by murder was deplorable. There were places where violence was not only commonplace, it was expected. To walk through Washington’s inner city was to be constantly on guard. But for violence to happen here, in a space reserved for contemplation and prayer?