Murder at the Monastery, page 13
part #3 of A Canon Clement Mystery Series
‘Would you like tea?’
Daniel made a pot and found some milk in the fridge. ‘Toast?’
‘Yes, please,’ they both said.
‘I thought they’d make their own bread,’ said Mrs Corbett. ‘You don’t expect Mothers Pride in a monastery.’
‘Father’s Pride,’ said Mr Corbett; ‘they could call it Father’s Pride,’ and he smiled at his joke.
‘We used to make our own bread,’ said Daniel. ‘When I was a novice here, but that was twenty-five years ago.’
‘You were a novice here, Father?’
‘Yes, I was Brother Crispin then. I’m Father Daniel now. Daniel Clement, rector of Champton in the diocese of Stow.’
‘I thought I recognised you,’ said Mr Corbett. ‘You’ve been in all the papers. Because of the murder.’
‘The murders,’ said Mrs Corbett. ‘How awful for you.’
‘Yes,’ said Daniel. ‘I’m very sorry for your loss. I only talked to Bede – to Adrian a couple of times, but I found him very engaging.’
‘He’s an amazing lad,’ said Mr Corbett. ‘I don’t know where he gets it from.’
The fact of his son’s death had not yet altered the tenses of his sentences. And then it did. ‘He’s . . . he was very bright. Mind like a dynamo. We used to have to put on the wireless when we put him to bed when he was little or he’d never go to sleep. And then always reading. Grammar school, scholarship to Oxford . . .’ He ran out of words as the realisation that the future promised for his talented son would not arrive. ‘We are so proud of him.’
The toaster dinged and two slices jumped up like startled rabbits. Daniel put them on a plate and pulled up a chair at the little table with the vinyl tablecloth where he had seated the grieving Corbetts.
‘I don’t know that I can eat anything,’ said Mrs Corbett.
‘You must try, love,’ said Mr Corbett and started spreading the slices with butter from the foil-wrapped pats. ‘You can never . . . get it all on the knife, can you?’ he said, and Daniel noticed that his hands were trembling.
The door swung open with the force used when the opener thinks the room is empty. It was Colin. He looked surprised. ‘Are you using the toaster?’
‘Evidently.’
‘Only the controls are very sensitive, and I’ve set it precisely.’
‘We haven’t touched them,’ said Mr Corbett defensively.
‘Nothing worse than toast that’s underdone or overdone. Damp or burnt.’
‘Good morning, Colin,’ said Daniel. ‘This is Mr and Mrs Corbett. This is Colin . . .’
‘Morning. Will you be long?’
‘Long?’
‘I usually get a clear run at the kitchenette after Matins.’ He gave the forced smile of someone trying to be polite, but not too hard.
‘Aren’t you staying in the monastery, Colin?’
‘Yes, but I usually have my breakfast here. It’s a bit early for me over there.’
‘Mr and Mrs Corbett are staying here. In the guest house. They are Bede’s parents.’
‘Oh, I see. I am sorry for your loss.’
‘Thank you.’
‘He had the makings of a fine scholar.’
Nobody said anything.
‘But take as long as you want,’ Colin said eventually.
He hesitated. For a moment Daniel thought he would lean against the counter and wait there. Then he gave the faintest shrug and left.
‘That tea should be brewed by now,’ said Daniel. ‘How do you like it?’
‘Milk and two for me, just milk for Joyce.’
Daniel made the tea in mismatched mugs, and they sat for a moment in silence as Mr Corbett ate a slice of toast and Mrs Corbett left hers uneaten and they all sipped their tea.
‘He could have been a don, Father,’ said Mr Corbett, ‘but then . . . vocation, you know?’
‘Dons were originally monks,’ said Daniel, ‘and anyone who’s been a fellow of an Oxford college would feel at home in a monastery.’
‘Were you at Oxford?’
‘I was an undergraduate in London, then Oxford for theological college. Then Leeds for my PhD, when I was here. I didn’t finish it, actually.’
‘Why not?’
‘I realised my future lay elsewhere.’
‘Why? Sorry, I don’t mean to pry . . .’
‘I loved it here. It was to me what it was to Bede, to Adrian, I think. I saw myself in him.’
‘But you left.’
‘Yes, I came to realise – actually, Father Aelred came to realise first – that God had other plans.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I think he saw that I was really made for parish ministry. It took me a bit longer to see it. I was so set on coming here.’
‘So was Adrian. I remember when he came back from his first retreat here he couldn’t stop talking about it. It was like when we took him to Disneyland.’
Disneyland, thought Daniel; he had sometimes thought Ravenspurn was like Disneyland, not that he had ever been to Disneyland – a place where fantasy became reality. Those who believed in this life said they were living in anticipation of heaven; but if you did not, wouldn’t it look like that? Those who did live it, and were made for it, were not fantasists but realists, because they cannot live any other way. The thought flashed through Daniel’s mind of Pluto catching and killing Donald Duck in an outbreak of cartoon violence.
‘We were churchgoers, Father,’ said Mrs Corbett, ‘but not very religious. Adrian went to Sunday School, and he loved the Bible stories and at school he sang in the choir. And then he wanted to go to St Saviour’s, very High Church, because they had a choir. So we took him and the minute he went through the door he knew it was for him. Smells and bells and everything. I found it a bit much at first, but we got used to it and then we got to love it. Adrian started as a server – he was boat boy—’
‘That’s how I started too,’ said Daniel, remembering the anxiety of being tiny and dressed in a cassock and cotta, a tiny white sort of poncho, and having to follow the thurifer around carrying the brass incense holder, shaped like a little boat on a stand, with a hinged lid and a spoon. He had to open the lid and hold it very steadily when the thurifer needed to spoon out the fat grains of incense inside and pile them on the coals in the thurible so they would suddenly catch and start to burn, and scented smoke would billow out and make his eyes sting and his throat catch if he wasn’t careful. The first job you get as a junior server, he thought, was really an introduction to the impracticalities of proper ceremonial, where nothing was designed with utility in mind and a child was required to stand in proximity to red-hot coals and smoke.
‘. . . and then he went up the ladder, you see. He became a torch bearer, and an acolyte and then assistant thurifer and assistant crucifer . . . and he did Divinity at school and loved it . . .’
‘But history was his best subject,’ said Mr Corbett, taking over from his wife, ‘and he was so clever he got a scholarship to Oxford, because he wanted to go to Magdalen for the music and Pusey House was just down the road, so it was seamless, really. Off he went to college and on Sundays – and most days – he went to worship at Pusey House. It was a perfect fit, really.’
It would have been a perfect fit, thought Daniel, for when he had been at Cuddesdon, the theological college just outside the city and the nearest thing the Church of England had to Sandhurst, he would go to Mass sometimes at Pusey House just to get a fix of proper Anglo-Catholic religion. There the True Faith was maintained, there in quasi-monastic discipline the rites and ceremonies of the Church were properly celebrated, buttressed with sound learning thanks to its library, and detached from the world, which flowed up and down St Giles’. Standing outside, facing that world, was a sign saying ‘Pusey House Chapel, open to members of the University’. That was either an invitation or a barrier, and although Daniel was a member of the university he remembered pausing at the door and asking himself if he wanted to worship in a church that opened its doors only to such an exclusive clientele. He went in, and was beguiled, and worshipped, and loved it, and joined dozens of others like himself and Bede, but never forgot that feeling on the threshold. Years later, he discovered it had formed into something solid within him, and was why he was not in a cloister but a parish.
‘Do you know it?’
‘I’m sorry?’ said Daniel.
‘Pusey House?’
‘Yes, I do, I used to worship there too.’ He blushed, not at the memory of the extravagances of his piety and worship when he was a student, but at having lost his concentration when he should have been paying attention to bereaved parents.
It was breakfast time at Champton and Bernard was sitting alone in the old servants’ hall with a cup of coffee and a bowl of Alpen, which he thought good for his health, for it reminded him of the sawdust-like supplement he had been given in the war as a defence against the malnourishment caused by rationing. The door swung open and Audrey swung in.
‘Good morning, Bernard!’ she said.
‘Good morning, dear lady,’ he replied, thrown for a moment by the interruption and the brio of his guest. ‘I hope you slept well? And the puppies?’ He looked hopefully at the floor, but scampering came there none.
‘With Mrs Shorely,’ said Audrey, ‘who has not only – very kindly – offered to mind them this morning so I can meet the decorators at the rectory, but also offered to boil me an egg.’
Bernard’s defensive instinct rose. ‘Decorators?’
‘Decorators, and the insurance man from Ecclesiastical to assess what needs replacing. And what’s covered.’
Bernard shuffled towards the sideboard and poured her a cup from the ugly stainless-steel coffee pot on the hot plate.
‘Your coffee, Audrey. But why enjoin battle?’
‘Oh, you know how it is with insurers. The cover, so comprehensive when they sell it to you, turns out to be anything but comprehensive when you need to claim.’
‘But I’m sure they won’t quibble over arson. And water damage.’
‘That’s what I intend to find out,’ she said. ‘And if there are points we quibble over, at least I know there is the estate to turn to.’
‘Well,’ said Bernard, ‘I feel sure that your insurers will make more than ample provision—’
‘It is so very reassuring, Bernard, to know that you take your responsibilities as patron seriously, as so many de Floures before you also have. And that you will not see your rector and his widowed mother live in squalor . . . sounds like something from a Victorian novel, doesn’t it?’
Audrey’s eyes, he thought later, glittered as she said this.
‘And to know we can rely on your very generous hospitality in our hour, or days, or weeks, of need . . .’
Jean Shorely appeared in the doorway with two brown boiled eggs in a double eggcup and two slices of toast on a plate. ‘Four minutes and thirty seconds, Mrs Clement, give or take. Anything more, m’lord?’
‘No, thank you, Mrs Shorely.’
As Mrs Shorely retreated, Audrey took the crown clean off the first of the eggs with one swing of her knife – what an efficient headsman she would have made, thought Bernard – and looked inside. ‘Give or take . . .’ she said.
After breakfast Daniel was sitting at the desk in his plain little room in the guest house. He was trying to think about Bede, trying to sort the details – some in focus, others blurred – that would tell him how and why he had died. Normally this took little effort; his natural gift for observation and the propellant of curiosity would produce hypotheses, or rather scenarios, that would run in his imagination until counterarguments or lack of evidence stalled them. Eventually the scenarios would fail until one or two remained. He could feel it physically when the details began to fit together – a feeling of pressure in his sinuses. He sometimes wondered if this was what was meant by scenting victory.
But now there was nothing. It was as if his thoughts had stalled. The story of Bede’s death was not as straightforward as the version he knew would soon be official. There was too much shadow, too much flicker, obscuring and blurring what had happened, and too much anxiety swirling round the community to allow so neat and swiftly confected a story to stand. He also knew there was little point in challenging it unless he had a better version to offer, and he did not. How could he come up with a better version when all he could think about was Neil, in the self-inflicted torture of unrequited love? Unrequited love. That was for governesses in Victorian novels, and it usually came right, or they walked into a lake.
It was not going to come right. He was not going to walk into a lake. He was going to do what he had done before, return to the life he was called to, without distraction, or indulgence. And that would start now.
He got up, left the silent loneliness of his room behind him, and went to the common room. He was reading the paper when the hebdomadary, Brother Sebastian, came by. ‘There’s a letter for you, Father,’ he said, dropping onto the coffee table an envelope of pale-blue Basildon Bond, addressed to him in familiar writing and the royal-blue Quink the writer invariably used. Daniel left it there while he read the paper, which was full of speculation about events in East Germany reaching a crisis. There had been a huge demonstration in Alexanderplatz a couple of days before and no one had been shot, and there had been a change of leader, and if he were not so distracted by the letter on the table in front of him, he might have dared to hope that change of a kind and an order unthinkable for forty years was coming. But he could not read about epoch-defining events until he had read the rather more parochial contents of the letter in front of him, so he abandoned The Times, which was immediately taken, almost snatched, by one of the older monks whom he had not seen hovering, and opened the envelope.
Inside was a sheet of his own notepaper, but Champton Rectory and the address had been crossed out. Underneath, in capitals, Audrey had written CHAMPTON HOUSE and added in subscript, ‘Badsaddle 264’.
Dearest Dan,
I think this will probably get to you because I think you are at Ravenspurn. I think this because I can’t think of anywhere you would more likely run away to. And you have run away, I think?
I don’t know why – but you must know, dearest Dan, that there is nothing you need run away from as far as I am concerned.
Will you let me know you are all right?
And when you will come home?
I think Bernard would also like to know when you are coming home.
Your loving mummy
xxx00xxx
P.S. I have a marvellous project underway, but you need not concern yourself with it.
P.P.S. It is this: I am rather pestering Bernard. I have breakfast with him and I sit up late with him in the library, not because I want to – I would rather be in bed – but because the more disagreeable he finds my presence in the house (and he’s far too polite to avoid me), the quicker he’ll be to cough up for repairs to the rectory if the insurance doesn’t cover it.
P.P.P.S. I know you won’t like this but you are NOT GOOD at this sort of thing and I am, and you’re not here anyway.
P.P.P.P.S. The Sedum spectabile is still out, just – amazing!
Irrepressible Audrey, he thought, who says what needs to be said in a dozen brief lines and what should not be said in stream-of-consciousness postscripts. He wondered what he should do. Reply by letter? Or telephone? He did not know if he would be able to manage a conversation on the telephone. Perhaps a message for Mrs Shorely to pass on?
There was a gentle cough. Aelred was standing just behind him.
‘I hope I am not disturbing you, only Sergeant Bainbridge is in the parlour and would like to talk to you.’
Daniel followed Aelred into the cloister. ‘What does he want?’
‘I don’t know exactly. How are the Corbetts by the way?’
‘Exhausted. I gave them breakfast. I think they are sleeping now.’
‘I hope they are. The infirmarian gave them some of Father Chad’s Mogadons.’
‘Is he meant to do that?’ Daniel asked.
‘He’s responsible for the care of the sick, so I should say so,’ said Aelred.
‘But it’s prescription only, isn’t it?’
‘It’s not chemotherapy, Daniel.’
Aelred walked on ahead of him, to avoid any more conversation on this topic.
In the parlour Sergeant Bainbridge, in uniform, awaited. The fire was lit and he sat in front of it warming himself with a cup of tea and a plate of cheap biscuits.
‘Canon Clement,’ he said, and half stood as a gesture of respect rather than the full monty.
Daniel nodded – ‘Sergeant Bainbridge’ – and sat down opposite.
‘Would you like something, Daniel?’ asked Aelred, more as a nod in the general direction of Darjeeling rather than a firm offer.
‘No, thanks. You wanted to see me, Sergeant?’
‘To put your mind at rest, Father,’ said the policeman. ‘Father Aelred mentioned that you have concerns about Brother Bede’s death?’
‘I have many concerns about his death – who wouldn’t? – but a question rather than a concern.’
‘Go on,’ said Bainbridge.
‘Why are you so quick to attribute it to accident?’
The policeman’s face set slightly. Daniel had seen the same with Neil when he was talking to ‘concerned citizens’.
‘It’s the scenario that fits the known facts.’
‘Are you sure?’ said Daniel.
‘No,’ Bainbridge replied curtly.
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘We can never be sure, can we? But we play the odds, Father. It looks more like an accident than anything else, and until someone has a good reason to question that, we are unlikely to commit more resources.’
