Murder in a Cathedral (27 page)

‘It’s all right for you,’ said Pooley, as he waited for an answer, ‘you don’t have to confide to a senior officer that a dead, gay canon wanted to sin with you on a tiger-skin rug.’

Chapter 21

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Amiss entered the kitchen to find the baroness and the bishop lying on the floor tending to Plutarch, who was lying on a bed of cushions. They were taking it in turns to finger-feed her with jellied beef consommé while crooning at her encouragingly.

‘I swear I heard one of you say “Coochy, coochy, coo”.’

‘So what?’ said the baroness stoutly. ‘If you were recovering from being strangled, you might want to be coochy-coochy-cooed.’

‘One of Plutarch’s few virtues in the days before she became the Pamela Anderson of the feline world was that she rarely attracted outpourings of sentimental drivel.’

‘Bugger off. She’s a brave girl, and a clever girl, and we don’t care who hears us say it, do we, David?’

‘Certainly not. Without her, it would have been impossible to prove that that awful man was in the cathedral that morning.’

‘I admit I would hate to have been the copper trying to construct a case based purely around the Myrtle business.’ Amiss inspected Plutarch and patted her gingerly. ‘How’s she looking?’

‘Definite improvement.’ The baroness emitted an agonized yowl that caused the bishop and Amiss to jump and even Plutarch to quiver and held out her index finger for inspection. ‘Look at this. She bit me. Isn’t that encouraging?’

‘Biting the hand that feeds her? That’s my girl. Definitely the old Plutarch.’

‘What do you think, David?’ asked the baroness. ‘Is she on course to try mashed-up salmon this evening?’

‘We can try her with a little. We’ve got more consommé in reserve.’

‘Fine,’ said Amiss. ‘I’ll buy a tin later on.’

The baroness exuded outrage. ‘A tin? A tin? I’m not having that heroine fed with tinned salmon. It must be not just fresh, but wild.’

‘As you wish. As long as you buy and cook it. Now, I’ve got good news. Ellis has just reported that Bev has ratted on Tilly so they’re off to clap her in irons. He expects to be able to tell us all at dinner.’

The baroness scrambled to her feet. ‘Excellent. We’ll have a proper celebration. You can make it, can’t you, David?’

The bishop looked depressed. ‘I can’t. When I get home from the Intra-Church Symposium, I’ll only have time to change and go straight out to the Lord Lieutenant’s banquet.’

‘Sod the Lord Lieutenant. Robert, ring him up and say David has urgent family business tonight.’

Amiss looked enquiringly at the bishop. ‘Oh dear, oh dear. I don’t know what to do.’

Amiss stood up. ‘Then do what Jack tells you. I’ll go and ring the old boy’s secretary now.’

‘I love this,’ said Pooley unexpectedly, as he sat back in his armchair and accepted a glass of champagne. ‘All my childhood I fantasized about being the Great Detective explaining to his awe-struck admirers how he had solved the case.’

‘But you didn’t,’ pointed out the baroness. ‘Robert did.’

‘Oh, come on, Jack,’ expostulated Amiss. ‘It was a team effort. Even you made a contribution – although I still haven’t worked out if it was negative or positive.’

‘And there was Plutarch. And poor Cecil,’ proffered the bishop.

‘A fine team,’ said Pooley. He put the tips of his fingers together. ‘I wonder, Watson, if you have ever observed that—’

‘Ellis, stop farting about and get on and tell us what happened today.’

Reluctantly, Pooley reverted to his everyday efficient persona. ‘Beverley Johns and Tilly Cooper have been charged with the murders of Norman Cooper and Cecil Davage.’

‘Not Jeremy?’

‘No. I’m afraid he committed suicide, Robert. Tilly had the note all right; she’d kept it in case she was ever under suspicion for murdering him.’

‘How did she get it, for heaven’s sake?’

‘She visited Trustrum after talking to Hubert and took a short cut through the cathedral when she left him. Flubert was already dead, so she looked for a note and found it on the organ.’

‘Took some nerve.’

‘Clearly she’s got plenty of that.’

‘What did Jeremy say?’

‘That he hoped that by killing himself so dramatically, he would wreck the dean’s plans to destroy a great musical tradition and expose his wife’s ruthlessness and immorality in trying to win consent through blackmailing him with a twenty-year-old conviction.

‘He saw no point in staying alive when his choice was either to watch the ruin of everything he had spent his life building up, or to be humiliated by the press for yielding many years previously to an overwhelming temptation.’

Amiss gazed miserably at the carpet.

‘There was a message for you, Robert. After sending his thanks and blessings to his colleagues and friends, he asked that his new and valued friend, Robert Amiss, should be given as a memento the armchair which he liked so much and in which he had sat so companionably.’

Amiss looked up. ‘That makes me feel both better and worse. Press on, and take my mind off Jeremy.’

‘The Rev. Bev and Tilly each accuse the other of being the prime mover. What seems beyond dispute is there was terrific sexual chemistry between them. Tilly was a bank clerk when she met Cooper. She says she married him on the rebound and regretted it shortly afterwards, especially when she realized he was a manic-depressive – though according to Johns she was to turn that to her advantage by controlling Cooper’s drug intake: when it suited her, she replaced with placebos the lithium that kept him relatively stable.’

The baroness snorted. ‘I bet it’s balls about marrying him on the rebound. A bit of clerical rough would have been right up that little tart’s street. And she’d have enjoyed making him a slave. Tough on him that the attraction wore off.’

‘Johns arrived at their church as curate within a couple of months of the wedding. He’s half American and had spent some months in the Deep South with an evangelical church picking up ideas which Tilly found intoxicating. Their affair began almost immediately. He says that, like Cooper, he was sexually in thrall to Tilly.’

‘Hah,’ interjected the baroness, ‘I told you so.’

‘She seems to have led them both by the nose…’

‘Surely you’re getting your organs mixed up?’

‘Shut up, Jack. She persuaded Cooper to swallow the whole born-again agenda and let Johns do what he liked. So Cooper’s church, which had been doing well because of his genuine and effective evangelical efforts, turned into a wildly successful rave centre and more and more Cooper confined himself to pastoral work and presiding over low-profile services.’

The bishop looked confused. ‘Was this woman a genuine believer or a hypocrite?’

‘Both. She wouldn’t be the first moral inadequate who confused the razzmatazz of born-againery with the substance – for a time, anyway. However, if the Rev. Bev is to be believed, Jesus didn’t have a look-in once she decided she wanted to marry Bev and get rich by setting up their own church in the Bible Belt. This made it necessary to get rid of Cooper: born-agains don’t like divorced preachers.’

The bishop looked anguished. ‘Surely Johns resisted this?’

‘He claims he did at first. He went on about Eve giving Adam the fruit of the forbidden tree.’

The bishop shook his head. The oldest excuse of men: “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” I fear I have little sympathy with that line of defence.’

‘Money was the problem. Tilly took out as much life insurance on Cooper as she dared – about a hundred and fifty thousand pounds – and while she was looking out for possibilities of getting more, there was a stay of execution on her husband. When he was offered the deanery she encouraged him to take it in the hope there would be rich pickings. Specifically, she was hoping there would be some way of getting her hands on some of Reggie Roper’s legacy. She was very peeved when she realized that was not going to be possible. According to Bev, through sheer temper, she then made an attempt to kill the dean.’

‘The highly polished pulpit steps?’

‘Precisely, Jack. Well spotted.’

‘She and Bev then reverted to plan A, which was to stir up the canons to such an extent that one of them would either murder the dean or be given the blame when the lovers did the deed. According to Johns, Tilly had donned a disguise and paid a private eye to dig up whatever dirt there was on the chapter.

‘They also turned their attention to the treasury and decided to rob it at a propitious moment. Meantime, the Coopers went off on their long-awaited visit to Born-Again Land and Tilly came back mad with lust for the power and money acquired by successful preachers. She decided to bring forward the murders of the dean and Davage, who had been selected as the most obvious fall guy.

‘Last Saturday, Tilly tipped off Johns that the coast would be clear. He broke into Davage’s house and took his huge bunch of keys, which are numbered by case and which included a key clearly marked “alarm”. The police would have known that simply by hanging around the cathedral for a few days any professional burglar could have cased the joint, spotted Davage with the keys and even seen him disable the alarm, so no suspicion could legitimately fall on any insider.’

Amiss looked sadly around his friends. ‘I’m afraid Cecil was right when he said he was careless.’

‘Maybe “innocent” is a better word,’ said the bishop. ‘One cannot always be on the watchout for venality amongst one’s fellows. One question, if I may, Ellis. Did the wretched man attack the dean that night?’

‘He says no and Tilly says yes, which leads me to suppose that she did.’

‘But she was as pissed as a newt.’

‘Not really, Robert. I’m sure that performance with me had as much to do with her strategy of keeping the dean jealous as to alcohol-related indiscretion.’

The baroness snorted. ‘I was watching. Your trouble, Ellis, is that you’re too modest.’

‘At all events, she wasn’t as pissed as the dean. Remember, he was a genuine teetotaller, while she was a fake. Johns says she drank plenty on the quiet – and had developed a taste for cocaine. My guess is that she wound up the dean to go and attack the memorial in the hope that he would injure himself and bleed to death, that when he didn’t return she investigated and found him passed out from his exertions and that she hit him on the back of the head with the axe and left him there for a few hours hoping he’d die. Acting the concerned wife, she raised the alarm early in the morning. But that’s academic, since she arranged for Johns to kill him a couple of days later.’

‘How did they get the dean to go up the north tower at night?’

‘Not difficult if a friend who has come to visit you, and whom you’re trying to persuade to become a member of your chapter, expresses a desire to see Westonbury in the moonlight from the top of the tower. Up went Cooper and Johns, over the edge went Cooper and down came Johns. Unfortunately for him, when he was almost at the bottom of the stairs, Plutarch came bounding up.’

Amiss laughed. ‘Sorry, but it is grimly comic if you consider the state of mind of the two as they collided. In one corner we have an unusually hungry Plutarch, who had just spotted that the door separating her from the kestrel’s store of goodies was open, salivating at the thought of what might await her at the top of the stairs. In the other we have a murderer hastening to kill a second brother in Christ and get the hell out of Westonbury. I’m surprised they both came out alive.’

‘Johns’s face and hands are in a very, very nasty mess and two of his earrings had been pulled out, leaving nasty wounds. Plutarch is unquestionably not a cat one would wish to meet on a narrow, dark staircase.’

The baroness wrinkled her forehead. ‘Why didn’t the idiot throw her in the river to hide the evidence?’

‘I suspect he wasn’t thinking very clearly by then. Must have been close to blind panic. And in great pain. Remember he was an amateur at burglary and murder and probably lacked your criminal instincts.

‘He fetched the equipment he needed from his car and stashed it in St Dumbert’s Chapel, went to Davage’s house, made him write his suicide note – presumably by threatening to hurt him – and took him over to the cathedral where he fed him whisky laced heavily with sleeping tablets. He insists Davage became unconscious as soon as he got to the chapel. Johns tied him to a chair with several rounds of cotton thread, which is as effective as string or rope but can be guaranteed not to survive a fire, put Davage’s fingerprints on the petrol can, doused him with its contents, set fire to him and ran for home.’

‘Was Tilly not involved?’

‘Apparently not. She persuaded him it would be too risky for her to leave the deanery, since she was so instantly recognizable.’

‘I suppose it was quite clever of them to work out such a foolproof method,’ said the baroness grudgingly.

Pooley shook his head. ‘Not foolproof at all. I won’t go into details or I’ll put David and Robert off dinner, but even when a body is incinerated to the extent that Davage’s was, the contents of the stomach are preserved. A bit like a potato that you cook in a fire. That’s how we knew he was much too heavily drugged to have been able to do the deed himself.’

‘That’s quite enough, Ellis. We take your word for it.’

‘So the pathologist reported that he must have been unconscious when the fire started.’

Very hesitantly, the bishop leaned towards Pooley. ‘I don’t want to be materialistic, Ellis, but is there any trace of those of our treasures that are still missing?’

‘I think we’ve recovered the lot. Johns was so badly marked he didn’t want to go out, and he had not had a chance before then to find a hiding place or a reliable fence. The top of his wardrobe is crammed full of rings, reliquaries and other odds and ends.’

‘Thank God.’

‘Happy ending, then,’ said the baroness, standing up.

‘Except for Jeremy, the dean, Cecil, Tilly and the Rev. Bev,’ said Amiss.

‘And nearly Plutarch,’ added the bishop.