Murder in a Cathedral (23 page)

Plutarch gave a mighty stretch and lay full-length in front of the bishop, who continued to stroke her absent-mindedly throughout the rest of his sermon.

‘Plutarch indeed reminds us that respect for tradition needs to be tempered with reason and an openness to necessary change. There are many advantages in our English slowness and doggedness – not least that we have had perhaps the most stable society in the world during this past millennium.

‘But there are deficiencies too, of which we need to be aware. We come under severe criticism for failing to adjust quickly enough to the new pressures of a multi-cultural society, to young people who are little adults before they’re teenagers, to the technological pressures which are turning the world of work and leisure upside down and to the desperation of the underclass in parts of our great cities.

‘Those young, energetic, evangelical clergy who take near-empty churches and turn them into a cross between a disco and a revivalist meeting are laughed at by many, but the Church of England needs those people too, for without such experiment there can be no renewal.

‘Until the day I die I will be a lover of the King James Bible. I think we will do our children a great disservice if we impoverish them by denying them the chance of absorbing the wonderful language of the seventeenth century. I will not pretend I enjoy what seems to me the banality of later translations, but nor will I condemn them out of hand. It is better to bring the word of God and the hope of Christianity to people in simple language than not to bring it at all. Similarly, great religious music brings me enormous joy, but that does not mean I believe that popular music must be banned from the house of God.’

He tickled Plutarch behind an ear. Her amplified purr echoed around the cathedral and raised a general smile.

‘My friends, today we pray for the soul of Canon Jeremy Flubert and for those of his colleagues who may be worried and distressed. I ask of you further that when you read of silliness and sin among the priests of your church, when you want to condemn them as old fogies or deride them as trendies, try to remember that they are just people. All a clerical collar says about anyone is that its wearer wanted to dedicate his fallible self to the service of his God.

‘I leave you with a question from the Old Testament, from the book of Micah, who lived in the eighth century BC. Micah is known as a minor prophet, but I think him major, for he summed up in one simple question what to me is the essence of our religion – an essence which I believe is at the core of the Church of England. “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” ’

‘Not a dry eye in the house,’ reported Amiss to the baroness. ‘I don’t think anything will make me believe in God, but as a result of that sermon I will pay my dues to the Church of England in future. David may be a rotten bishop when it comes to management or politics, but he’s the sort of man who gets Christianity a good name.’

‘H’m! That sermon sounds dangerously radical to me.’

‘I have never known anyone as reactionary as you. You’re regressing so fast you’ll be back up Eve’s fanny before you’ve finished.’

‘And what’s so bad about that? I’d rather be in Eve’s fanny than in the European Union any day of the week. Now what else is happening?’

‘The hospital won’t let the cops talk to Cecil or the dean until late afternoon, so Ellis doesn’t expect to be back before seven. David’s stuck at a lunch with local dignitaries followed by tea with the bishop-next-door, so I’m going to chat up Trustrum and Fedden-Jones, console Alice and cook for tonight.’

‘Include me in for dinner.’

‘What about duty?’

‘I’ll have done what I have to. What’ll we be having to eat?’

‘Spam fritters, unless I can persuade Plutarch to catch us a toothsome rat.’

Fedden-Jones’s answering machine explained that he was spending the day with friends in the country but would return on Sunday evening. Trustrum was so rattled that he invited Amiss to call on him at 12.30 for a glass of sherry. As he poured it, he said in a doom-laden voice, ‘We’ve never had a burglary before.’

‘Unless you count what happened in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Let’s look on the bright side. Things are better this time.’

‘I’m not so sure about that. One concussed dean, one injured treasurer, one dead precentor and the loss of our valuable artefacts would have been a good haul even for the Lord Protector himself.’

Wintry wit gave way to gloom. ‘The stolen goods might be retrieved, I suppose, but the chandelier is gone forever.’

‘Presumably a craftsman can be found to duplicate it.’

‘But it won’t be the same. Don’t you understand? It’ll be a reproduction.’

‘I daresay people won’t notice.’

‘I will notice. I will notice and I will mind. More sherry? I don’t usually have a second glass – even on Sunday – but I will make an exception in this case.’

‘Yes, please,’ said Amiss, for whom the hair of the dog was proving very effective.

Trustrum resumed his seat. ‘Mind you, I have got one piece of amusement out of all this tragedy. Just as I thought, all those fancy burglar alarms were a waste of money. I said we should keep our security men and was told I was out of date. Machines, apparently, were much more effective than people: electronics would do the job.’

‘Is it a very sophisticated system?’

‘It is certainly expensive and elaborate and no doubt difficult for an ordinary burglar to deal with, but anyone reasonably skilled in his profession who had access to the keys would, I imagine, have little trouble. In any case, Cecil must have turned the main system off when he went in to do whatever he went in to do. Perhaps the burglars forced him to switch off the treasury system as well. Who knows?’

He took a sip and sat up straight. ‘But let us not mourn or speculate further on these distressing events. I have to say that I drew comfort from our bishop. I had not expected such a performance from him. I wonder if such a sermon might have caused the dean to have had a change of heart. Perhaps his accident will have the same effect; such happenings concentrate the mind.’

‘Just before I go, Sebastian – curious about one thing. Why are you backing the dean over making the Rev. Bev a canon?’

Trustrum looked at his clock. ‘Good heavens, I see it’s just coming up to one. I’m so sorry, Robert, but you must forgive me. It is time to attend to my lunch and listen to
The World this Weekend
.’

Lunch was at Alice’s house, where Amiss had never been before. She was hospitable and the place was cosy but it had an air of transience.

‘I’ve never had my own home,’ she explained. ‘I’ve moved about too much since I left my parents. It would have been inappropriate to have anything nice in the place where I worked as a team vicar, and when I got here and realized what I was in for, I didn’t have the heart to put much effort into making it my own, so most of my possessions are still at my old home.’

‘I don’t have any possessions at my parents’ house, but I seem to have acquired singularly few.’

Alice smiled. ‘But I do have some decent cooking equipment, there’s a cheese soufflé in the oven and the salad is ready. Now would you like some white wine?’

‘At what stage in your life did you become such a marvellous cook? That posset you made yesterday was wonderful.’

‘This is not something I normally tell people, but I spent six months at a cookery school. It was the price I paid for being financed at university.’

‘So far it’s one I’m glad you paid. Think of it. It might have been flower arranging.’

‘Don’t mention that, please. I had a compulsory month of that in the summer after my O levels, when my parents were hoping I’d come to my senses and go to finishing school instead of staying on to do A levels. I hated every moment of it. I don’t like torturing flowers.’

‘Talk about poor little rich girl.’

She laughed. ‘I shouldn’t whinge. My parents are kind to me. They’re just dull and unimaginative in a county kind of way.’

‘Shades of what the bishop was talking about this morning.’

‘Absolutely. He got the virtues and vices of where I come from just right. It was a wonderful sermon. Now sit down at the table and I’ll fetch lunch.’

Agreeing that there was little point in speculating on the disasters of the night, they spent most of their time during the excellent lunch chewing over the dean and his wife.

‘I don’t like her one bit,’ said Alice. ‘She was just trying to make the dean jealous last night. Poor man, he’s in a funny state. Do you think he’s a manic-depressive?’

‘I haven’t seen enough of the dean to get any kind of grip on his personality, but I have to say his ups and downs seem pretty helter-skelterish. Tilly at least is usually predictable: cloying, boring and ultimately, I think, poisonous. I wonder what the dean was like before he met her.’

‘Nice,’ said Alice, unexpectedly. ‘That was one of the reasons why I had some optimism about coming here. Didn’t I tell you? A friend of mine worked with him in Grimsby and said he was kind and hard-working. Puritanical and rather easily shocked, yes, but conservative, not fundamentalist. Being born-again seems to have done all the damage.’

‘And being married again. I suppose the two are connected.’

‘Oh, I think they must be. Sally liked his first wife. She said she was sensible, jolly and more broad-minded than he was. I don’t know if he was converted by this awful Tilly or by his curate.’

‘My impression is that both of them were bowled over by the Rev. Bev. Understandably, I suppose. When I saw him in action he was ghastly, but impressively ghastly. And the poor old dean seems to be susceptible and guilt-ridden and precisely the kind of person who falls for that kind of bullshit.’

He accepted some more wine gratefully. ‘It must have been a nasty shock for you to discover what he’d turned into.’

‘It was. Everything made me miserable here. But I have to admit that despite all the terrible things that have happened, I’m much happier at the moment than I’ve ever been in Westonbury – mainly thanks to you. And now I’ve had those awful confrontations with the dean, I don’t feel afraid any more.’

They chatted companionably about both their options for the future until, seeing him wilting slightly, she told him he should go home and have a nap. It was at that moment, seeing her pretty face full of motherly concern, that Amiss was attacked by one of his matchmaking impulses. This nice woman should be happy with a suitable man, he thought. What a shame she was stuck in Westonbury. And then inspiration struck. Of course, Alice and Ellis. What a marvellous pair they would make.

‘Come to dinner tonight, Alice. It’ll just be David, Ellis and Jack and very informal. I know they’d all be delighted to have you.’

She looked hesitant. ‘Surely I’d be intruding. I can’t come to dinner twice in one weekend.’

‘This is hardly a typical weekend. Come on, say yes.’

‘It’s very kind of you. Yes, I’d be grateful for company. It’s been a pretty harrowing week. What time?’

‘I don’t know yet. It may be latish. I’ll ring when we’re ready for you.’

As he kissed her goodbye he thought how nice she smelled and how soft her skin was. For a moment, he envied Pooley.

Chapter 18

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The palace residents were sitting round the kitchen having an apéritif.

‘I’m starving.’

‘Sorry, Jack. We can’t start until Alice arrives and I won’t ring her until we’ve debriefed Ellis.’

‘OK, then, Ellis. What gives?’

Pooley shook his head energetically. ‘God, I’m tired.’

‘That’s reassuring,’ said Amiss. ‘I hate being surrounded by superpersons.’

The bishop smiled. ‘Then you’ll be pleased to hear that I’m exhausted. Sorry, Ellis. Don’t let me interrupt you.’

‘I’ll give you the bare bones of what I’ve found out. According to Tilly Cooper, the dean went home angry, she was tired and went to bed and left him brooding in the drawing room. She didn’t notice he was gone until she woke up this morning just before five and found his side of the bed empty. She looked for him around the house and then raised the alarm.’

‘So she’d passed out from the effects of Jack’s punch,’ suggested Amiss.

Pooley nodded. ‘She was too genteel to say so, but I suspect it may be the case.’

The baroness snorted. ‘Must be. You’d have to be unconscious not to notice if somebody the dean’s size was or wasn’t in bed with you.’

‘The dean couldn’t remember anything that had happened to him since the end of dinner last night. I probed delicately and ascertained that he had no memory even of his attack on Alice. He was completely bewildered and very worried about this until I put him out of his misery by telling him that the person who made the punch hadn’t realized it was for teetotallers. He was too dazed to question that.’

‘Hope he stays that way for your sake, Jack. We wouldn’t want him to denounce you from the altar.’

‘I’d quite enjoy that!’

‘It looks as though having decided to take a Cromwellian approach to the Roper memorial, the dean fetched an axe from the shed, charged down the garden, wrenched off the tarpaulin and set about the edifice randomly. He managed to behead one of the winged youths, knock Roper’s nose off and do serious damage to St Sebastian before raising the axe too high and hitting himself with it on the back of the head.’

The baroness jumped up, clasped her hands together as if grasping an axe and made sweeping movements up and down. ‘It’s possible, I suppose, but quite difficult. Though I admit I can’t imagine how one wields an axe when plastered.’ She sat down. ‘You’re sure nobody hit him from behind?’

‘It’s not impossible, of course. But there’s hair and blood on the back of the axe.’

‘Does it correspond with the size of the wound?’ asked Amiss.

‘We don’t know. It’s not like when you’ve got a corpse and can have a postmortem. He’d been patched up in the hospital and the wound cleaned and trimmed and sewn up by the time Godson and I came along. The plain-clothes police had no reasons to think there were any suspicious circumstances, so they didn’t take the precaution of photographing the wound.’