A Death in the Parish, page 8
This changed when he became friends with Neil Vanloo. His new friend loved sport, played sport with the athlete’s unselfconscious grace, radiated a strength and freshness that Daniel found so exhilarating he sometimes wanted to sniff him to be energised by his vapour. Something restless but hidden within him was beginning to stir, seeking to make itself known, a version of himself that he had so neglected it had become a pale stranger. What was it? Masculinity, he thought. Now in his late forties, he knew, in the indistinct but unignorable way of knowing that comes in middle age, that a stranger was turning to face him.
At the same time Neil, fifteen years younger, had discovered in Daniel a guide to the mysteries of worlds he wanted to know but could not yet enter – music, art, architecture – and, even more important, someone who could open up the half-forgotten landscape of his childhood. He had grown up in the Moravian Brethren, a church of exiled Protestants from Bohemia, some exiled as far from home as Oldham, where the Vanloos had settled, part of a community still shaped by the belief that it existed on earth to live the life of heaven – communally, around the chapel and the Men’s Institute, the football club and cricket club, the dramatic and musical societies, which he loved and which were his whole world until adolescence had provoked rebellion and inevitably departure. To leave the church was to close its door behind you, but we never leave anything entirely, and in his thirties Neil had started to want to look behind that closed door again.
So Daniel and Neil’s friendship surprised everyone. Audrey, notable for lacking introspection, was exceptionally clear-eyed when it came to extrospection, and said once, ‘I saw that nice policeman of yours again today. He’s here so often you’d think Champton was Dock Green.’ Their friendship surprised them also, for their affinity was not at first clear, but it was profound, and as each became more sharply focused to the other, so they grew more sharply focused to themselves.
The shrill sound of the referee’s whistle cut through the surrounding din and the symmetry of the two teams facing each other across the jewel-green pitch instantly broke. Daniel’s grasp of football was unformed and unorthodox. He liked the set plays, the patterns, the display of a team’s colours, which he once described, to Neil’s undisguised delight, as being like ‘the Montagues and Capulets in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet’. And he loved the way the pattern deformed and reformed as a team’s tactics began to show, and the skill with which the players shaped those patterns by playing the ball, and the way each movement shifted the next movement and the movement after that. While his grasp of technical matters was growing, he had not yet acquired a share of the tribal loyalty that others felt for their teams. Neil was for Stow City today, really for Chorley FC above all others in football, and Rochdale above all others in rugby, but Daniel was by nature uncomfortable with passionate commitments to the powers of this world. This meant that he rarely understood, and never reacted to, advantageous or disadvantageous play for either side. He delighted in skill, whether to his team’s benefit or detriment, and this was what caused the trouble that afternoon.
Neil had seats in the heart of the Stow supporters’ section, for it would not occur to him to sit anywhere but in the middle of the action. Here, among the loyalists, every kick of a Stow player was legitimate and sporting, and every kick of an opposing player a dastardly foul or pathetically incompetent. This determination of merit or demerit by allegiance alone was completely unintelligible to Daniel. He was put out to hear the referee described ungallantly as ‘the bastard in the black’ for decisions that seemed to him to be Solomonic in their magnificent detachment, and one man sitting behind them was so ungenerous in his attitude to a free kick given against Stow, after an obvious foul, that Daniel turned to give him a reproachful look. The man looked back at him and nudged a lad to his side, who also looked at him with a sort of questioning hostility.
Daniel turned round again to see if Neil had noticed, but he had not, so engrossed was he in the game. It was at Neil’s suggestion that he had prepared for this game by watching Match of the Day on the television, much to his mother’s derisive scorn. She thought it ‘barbaric, like watching adolescent boys bursting their spots’, and demanded in a quid pro quo a budget of programmes she wanted to watch, mostly gardening, cookery and Sale of the Century, live from Norwich every Sunday until ITV unaccountably took it off. Her dislike of football surprised him a little, for she adored watching the sports she liked: cricket, hockey, the ITV wrestling on a Saturday afternoon – ‘COME ON, HAYSTACKS, FLATTEN HIM’ – and above all Wimbledon, into which she would settle like Queen Victoria into her reign, untroubled by interruption, let alone dissent. In that long fortnight the television, normally not permitted during hours of daylight, was relentlessly on, and he would from time to time bring his mother smoked salmon sandwiches and strawberries and cream, a diet which so stretched the household budget for June and July that he had started to dilute the Pimm’s to an all-but-spiritless pop. Audrey, meanwhile, became so engaged with the tournament that she would start shouting at the television in the second round, mostly at Boris Becker, whom she particularly disliked for his blond eyelashes, for being too good too young and for ‘looking like that Nazi postman from The Sound of Music’.
Daniel was once visiting the Logan Botanic Garden in Scotland and had there fallen into conversation with a woman his mother’s age about an echium, ‘Pride of Madeira’, that surprisingly flourishes in the balmy microclimate of the Rhins of Galloway. He discovered the woman had been at school with his mother, in their dourly Presbyterian boarding school of granite and Gregory’s Powder. ‘We were in the same house!’ she said. What did she remember of her? She thought a bit, and then said, ‘Mostly that she was unusually violent.’
Suddenly everyone around him, and Neil too, stood up and erupted into a wordless cry, which sounded a bit like the ‘OWZAT’ that rose above the cricket club on Saturday afternoons in the summer. It sounded to him like ‘YA-BAAUW!’ But what could it mean? The ref made a gesture like the hokey cokey, and play, which had halted, resumed, and with another cry – this time of unambiguously angry disappointment – everyone sat down.
‘What just happened?’ he asked Neil.
‘Handball. Didn’t you see it?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘It happened very quickly and it’s raining. Easily missed.’
Although Daniel was incapable of seeing a handball even when it occurred directly in front of him, and the offside rule was as opaque to him as the Schleswig–Holstein question to Chopper Harris, he was beginning to discern in the dynamics of the game how advantage went one way, then the next, and was starting to recognise players not from their extraordinary haircuts and hot-pant shorts, but from their style of play, their movement across the pitch.
That movement was halted again by the sound of the whistle. A cry of outrage rose again from the seats around him, intensifying when the ref gave a decision about a brutal tackle against Stow. It led to Stratton scoring a goal and Daniel was the only person who stood up among the Stow supporters to applaud.
‘Bravo!’ he shouted. ‘Bravo!’
It did not help that he was wearing a red, white and blue striped tie, which his mother had bought for him in the belief that it was suitably sportif. These were the colours of the opposing side, at a grudge match, with tempers high and circumspection narrowed. Daniel did not even notice that he alone was standing and applauding, and it was only when Neil took his arm that he realised anything was wrong.
‘Daniel,’ he said, ‘I would … you might want to sit down.’
But before he could, the indignant man sitting behind him said, ‘Bravo? It’s not the last night of the fucking Proms.’
Daniel turned. ‘I beg your pardon?’
The man said, ‘I beg your pardon, fuck off. What are you doing here anyway? Fuck off to your own end.’
The lad sitting next to him said ‘fuck off’ too to add emphasis.
It was the tenderness of his years – he must have been in his early twenties – that provoked Daniel, and he said, ‘I have no end. And I can sit where I like.’
Another man on the other side of the indignant fan said, ‘All right, all right, let’s just leave it.’
By now a few other heads were turned towards Daniel. ‘There is no need’, he said to the indignant man, ‘to be offensive’ – a turn of phrase that made him more indignant rather than less.
‘Fuck off, prof,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t be here.’
‘I have a ticket. And what business is it of yours?’
Daniel went to sit down but the lad, in a gesture of bravado, slapped the back of his head, not hard, but contemptuously.
Neil stood up. He held up a finger and said, quietly but audibly, ‘Enough.’
‘You can’t tell me what to do,’ said the young man.
‘I’m not telling you what to do,’ said Neil. ‘I said that’s enough. You decide what you’re going to do.’
‘Fuck off,’ said the older man, ‘and take Prof Plum with you.’
‘I said enough.’
The man squared up to him and the young man pushed his chest forward and stood on the balls of his feet in a way that was intended to be menacing, thought Daniel, but actually made him think of the Dance of the Cygnets in Swan Lake.
‘Are you trying to be funny?’ said Neil.
The older man raised his hand, but Neil took his wrist. ‘Don’t be naughty. Sit down.’
People around them were turning to watch.
‘You can’t tell me what to do, you prick. And get your hand—’
But with that Neil shifted his weight forward and forced the man’s hand back so he started to sit down whether he wanted to or not. There was a professionalism about it that impressed not only the man, but his friends too. ‘All right, all right …’ he said with a tone of wounded righteousness.
The younger man shrank a little, taking a cue from the older, but as he sat down he gave Daniel a cold look.
‘Thank you, gents,’ said Neil. ‘Enjoy the rest of the match,’ and in one of the mysterious switches in current that flows through crowds, the tension slackened. Everyone sat down and attention returned to the pitch.
Daniel said, ‘Neil, I think that was my fault.’
‘Don’t worry about it. We’re all friends now.’
‘I don’t understand the rules.’
‘Rituals, Dan, it’s more your field than mine. You’ll get the hang of it.’
And then a police officer in uniform was at the end of their row. The men who a minute ago had been menacing pretended not to notice.
‘Oh, good Lord,’ said Daniel, ‘what have I done now?’
‘DS Vanloo?’
Neil was already out of his seat. They stood in the gangway in a tense conference. Neil came back to his seat. He was terse.
‘I’ve got to go, Daniel.’
‘Why? What’s happened?’
‘Um, you might want to make your way over to Upper Badsaddle.’
‘Neil …’
But he had gone.
It was beginning to get dark by the time Daniel finally got out of the car park at Ellington Road. Leaving the stadium had been awkward enough. Without Neil, he’d suddenly felt exposed to the hostility of the people in the row behind. He’d politely paused on the steps to let them out. The older one nodded grudgingly, but the younger one gave him a cold look again, as if he were leaving a marker for a future settling of a score. Daniel did not flinch and the boy looked away.
Leaving the car park, without the assistance of Neil and with hundreds of disappointed Stow fans disinclined to offer any obliging courtesies at all, was a trial. In the end two stewards told him to wait until the crush had dwindled. ‘I can’t wait, it’s an emergency,’ he said.
‘You’re not going anywhere, mate, not for a while.’
‘I’m a priest. I have an urgent pastoral matter in my parish.’
‘Then I suggest you pray, sir,’ said the other.
Daniel had already prayed to counter the apprehension rising within him, for he knew what Neil looked like when a suspicious death was called in; and for Muriel Hawkins, whom he suspected had been cheated of the death that was nearly upon her; and for forgiveness, for not having seen sooner or understood earlier how gravely dangerous the Manor House at Upper Badsaddle had become.
The Land Rover lurched and stopped and started again and lurched again, for impatience was driving him, but the car had no sense of urgency and he kept stalling like a learner on his first lesson. ‘Come on, come ON!’ he snapped, but they were moving so slowly they would have been overtaken by the Vatnajökull glacier.
Eventually the traffic thinned, and the edge of the city was reached, the main roads out lit with the horrible orange light of sodium lamps. The rain had stopped, but it was now dark and cold, and as he chugged to the roundabout over the still-busy motorway, Daniel noticed that the road ahead, on the other side of the roundabout, was empty. This was the road that took him home and, while not quite putting his foot down, he went as fast as he dared the fifteen miles to Braunstonbury and the Badsaddles turning.
What would he find when he got there? He felt for a moment what he always felt before arriving at the worst day of someone else’s life. He needed to prepare, to arm himself against another’s anguish, to concentrate on the upturned world that person had just been forced to occupy. So he would pause in Reception at Intensive Care, or on the corner before the house with too many cars outside and too many flowers in the window, and ask for grace and clarity. He would ring on the bell or walk through a door into a hospital side room and see confirmed in the faces of those gathered the unspeakable, unthinkable fact of the death of the person they loved. The vicar’s here …
He saw a distant flicker of blue light through the trees that fringed the road as he approached and drove along Upper Badsaddle’s main street. Light from opened curtains fell across the front gardens as he passed. The vicar’s here …
A car was parked awkwardly, half on and off the verge, very near to the opening to the Manor House. It looked peculiar, a perfectly ordinary little saloon but with marks of grandeur – a grille like a Rolls-Royce and a two-tone livery – which made Daniel think of stone lions on bungalow gateposts; there was a figure sitting in the driver’s seat, who turned away in the lights from the Land Rover, perhaps because the headlights were dazzling, or perhaps because they did not want to be seen. Daniel slowed down as he went past and looked in but could make out only an outline of shadowy grey. He turned up the drive to the Manor House, its windows lit up, and there were people silhouetted in what he realised was Mrs Hawkins’s bedroom window. But there was only one car, unmarked, parked in front of the house. He supposed the ambulance had been and gone, but where were the SOCOs – scene of crime officers – the tape, where was the constable on the door? They should be here by now. The inconsequential thought occurred to him that perhaps they had all been at the football too.
The door to the Manor House opened and a figure, lit from behind so Daniel could not see who it was, stood on the threshold.
‘Hello, Reverend Daniel. You remember me?’
It was Roy Tailby.
‘Mr Tailby. I do.’
‘You’ve heard the news?’
‘Why else would I be here?’
Mr Tailby nodded. ‘You had better come in.’ He stood to the side and gestured rather quaintly with his spare hand.
Daniel hesitated. ‘Mr Tailby, I don’t understand. Why are you answering the door? Where are the police?’
‘Attending the crime. And who else would be answering the door?’
‘So a crime has been committed?’
‘It looks like it, yes.’
‘Are you aware of what you have just said?’
‘Uh?’
A voice came down from the landing. ‘Roy, who is it?’
‘It’s Reverend Daniel.’
There was a pause. ‘I’m coming down.’
‘Are you going to stand there all night, Reverend?’
Daniel felt for a moment like a virgin answering the door of her chamber to a vampire. He did not want to do Roy Tailby’s bidding; it would relinquish to him a status he did not deserve and yield to a manipulativeness that was so sinister it seemed almost to colour the air around him. What actually did surround him was the smell of Old Spice, a dapper note on the nose for a dapper man in slacks and moccasins decorated with leathery tassels that looked like flaring tulips, and a cardigan that appeared to be made out of the carpet from a Berni Inn. Jean appeared at his side.
‘Such awful news, Reverend Daniel. We’re all stunned. Come upstairs.’
‘I would like to see whoever’s in charge.’
‘Muriel?’
‘Mrs Hawkins? No, of course not. Where’s Detective Sergeant Vanloo?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But he came directly here from Stow – I was with him. He told me to come too.’
Jean looked puzzled. ‘I expect he’s at the old airfield.’
‘Why would he be there?’
‘Because there’s been a murder. That’s what people are saying. But he’ll be able to tell you about that.’
Roy then looked puzzled. ‘But why would you arrange to meet him here?’
Realisation began to dawn. Daniel looked down, then up again, and said, ‘Is Mrs Hawkins all right?’
‘She’s fine. Dora just took up her tea. She’s with her now. Faithful as a little dog, that one.’
