The Monk, page 9
‘For him or you?’ asked Ottey.
‘Oh, for him. Definitely for him,’ the priest replied.
The room went silent. Stephen was well aware that Cross hadn’t said anything since he’d arrived.
‘Is everything all right, George?’ Stephen asked.
‘I don’t know how to answer that question, because things are so obviously not. You should talk to DS Ottey. That’s why she’s here,’ Cross explained.
‘George, why don’t you forget for a moment that you’re my friend and that you’re upset by what’s happened to my brother. Concentrate on what you’re so obviously good at and treat me like any other victim’s sibling. I’m going to make us some tea while you think about that,’ said Stephen getting up to boil the kettle.
Cross thought about what he’d said for a moment and then shifted gear mentally and looked up.
‘You said your brother wanted to go to a seminary,’ he began. ‘Why didn’t he go? What happened?’
‘Well, university happened, I think. He went up to Cambridge to read Divinity and then something changed.’
‘Did he discover women?’ Cross asked.
‘Alex was gay, George. But I think he discovered men there, yes.’
‘Was there anyone in particular?’ asked Ottey.
‘Not that I’m aware of. I always thought it was a crisis of faith that led to him swapping subjects. That maybe studying it academically changed his view of religion. Whatever it was, his eyes were opened up to a whole new world he hadn’t seen before, and he liked what he saw. He switched course after a year and read mathematics, which was something he’d always loved,’ said Stephen.
‘But then he became a banker. That’s quite a change of direction,’ said Ottey.
‘It was,’ he replied.
‘Did he have a plan? An endgame?’ asked Cross.
‘No,’ laughed Stephen. ‘He was never much of a planner. He just went with the flow. He became extraordinarily good at making money. Bought a flat and the obligatory Porsche, upgraded later to a black Ferrari. Spent like money was no object. Holidays, clothes.’
‘And then he suddenly stopped,’ said Cross.
‘Yes.’
‘In 2008.’
‘Yes.’
Cross thought for a moment then said, ‘Was it before the crash of 2008 or after it?’
‘Before, but he knew it was coming,’ Stephen said.
‘Maybe that was why,’ offered Ottey.
‘I don’t think so. He was a star player at the bank. I think he would’ve come through unscathed.’
‘This was Cubitt’s?’ asked Cross.
‘That’s right. One of the old family ones. Really exclusive, Alex used to brag. You had to have a lot of money just to open an account there. Founded in the seventeen hundreds. Same family was still running it.’
‘So he was making a lot of money, owned a flat—’
‘Paid cash,’ Stephen interrupted.
‘—then suddenly stopped?’ Cross asked.
‘Did a three sixty on a sixpenny piece, as my mother used to say,’ Stephen replied.
‘That’s one heck of a road to Damascus moment,’ Ottey commented.
‘Isn’t it just?’ said Stephen.
‘It’s nothing of the kind. Something happened. He did something or someone else did something which made him leave,’ said Cross, thinking out loud.
‘Are you saying he was running away from something? Was hiding?’ asked Stephen.
‘Not necessarily,’ Cross replied.
‘He could’ve just had an epiphany,’ Ottey suggested.
‘Oh, I’m as sure that is the case as I am equally sure something happened to trigger it. It sounds like he was a logical man. He was a mathematician, after all,’ Cross went on.
‘Who, by the sound of it, was also quite impulsive. Expensive car, lavish spending,’ Ottey added.
‘How, or why, he ended up becoming a monk is surely neither here nor there when it comes to his being murdered,’ said Stephen.
‘That is possible,’ Cross conceded. ‘But it’s just as possible that it might be part of a train of events that led to his death.’
Stephen put the teapot and cups and saucers on the table. Cross leapt up.
‘We have no time for this. We need to leave,’ he stated baldly.
‘We’re not going anywhere, George. Sit down,’ said Ottey calmly.
‘We have to get on, DS Ottey,’ he remonstrated.
‘Another fifteen minutes won’t make any difference. We are not leaving Stephen on his own right now,’ Ottey explained.
‘Why not? We’ve told him the news. Now we need to get back to work.’
‘You go, I’m staying,’ she replied.
‘But I haven’t got my bike,’ Cross protested childishly.
Stephen could see he was becoming quite agitated. ‘Josie, go. I’ll be fine,’ he said.
‘Nonsense. Call a taxi, George. I’m going to have my tea and talk to Stephen about his brother,’ said Ottey, firmly. ‘This is why you asked me to come, remember? Because you don’t know how to behave in a situation like this, as you are now amply demonstrating.’
Cross was in a pickle as he realised she had a point. This was precisely the type of situation he’d asked her to come along and ensure didn’t happen. But he had a desperate need to go and solve this crime. Now.
‘George, why don’t you go and play the organ?’ Stephen suggested.
‘I’m on duty. I can’t do that. I have to work.’
‘You’ve told me you often have your best thoughts about your work when playing the organ. That it clears your head,’ Stephen pointed out.
‘Which basically means you’re still working,’ Ottey said, which seemed to reassure him.
And so Stephen sat and talked about his brother with Ottey as the sound of Mozart and Bach came through the wall from the church.
‘It’s like having an unreasonable teenager as a work partner sometimes,’ said Ottey.
‘He has a good soul.’
As the conversation progressed, so the sense of loss seemed to bear down like a heavy mantel on the shoulders of the priest. Ottey found it strange in these situations, where someone hadn’t seen a friend or relative for a lengthy period of time, how the knowledge of their death was still devastating. Maybe in a different way from if they’d still been present in their lives, but still shocking. She wondered if it was tinged with feelings of guilt. Certainly regret, she thought.
When they’d finished their tea, Ottey told Stephen they would probably need to speak to him again about his brother. They walked into the church. Cross saw them in the rear-view mirror he’d attached to the organ, so the organist could see the priest during services, and stopped playing. He thought his friend looked a little older, a little greyer than when they’d arrived. He then reflected how often it was they had this effect on people.
They said their goodbyes and as the two detectives walked down the aisle out of the church, the priest walked up to the altar and knelt before it. Cross thought God had a lot of explaining to do to his bereft friend. As he looked at him kneeling, looking vulnerable and a little shrunken, Cross realised he might not be able to comfort people in this situation, whether he knew them or not – it just wasn’t in his ken – but what he unquestionably could do was find out the person responsible for their grief. He wouldn’t stop until he’d found this killer and had him put away.
14
George arrived at his father’s flat later that night for their regular weekly meal. It was always the same. A Chinese takeaway that George picked up from the same establishment, Xiao Bao’s, every week. They often sat in silence as they ate and normally watched the TV quiz show Countdown which Raymond had recorded for them. But of late they had spent the entire evening in silence, without the TV on. Which they did again on this particular night. George hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. He hadn’t picked up that his father seemed out of sorts. Wasn’t himself. George just sat there thinking about the case.
When he’d eaten he would wait until his father had finished, clear up their plates and the takeaway containers, then do the washing up. He would wash the plastic containers as well as the plates. Raymond liked to keep them for storing odds and ends in. Like screws, nuts and bolts and other necessary detritus he deemed essential for a satisfactory existence. Raymond had been something of a hoarder in the past, before an intervention by his son. An inveterate collector of basically anything he could see a potential future use for, which was fundamentally anything, plastic containers had been one of the main culprits in his collection. So they had come to an agreement, after the cull of Raymond’s hoard a couple of years before, about the keeping of plastic containers. George would wash them every week after dinner. Initially, George proposed that if the cupboard still had the three empty containers from the previous week in it, the new, clean, containers would be put straight into the recycling. But there had been some negotiation about this, as Raymond had pointed out that there might come a time when he needed, say, six, seven or even eight containers, all at the same time. George’s approach would mean that he’d only ever have a maximum of three at his disposal. So, they compromised: a stockpile of ten was permitted; anything above that would trigger the recycling. There had been a tricky moment one week, when George realised there were more containers in the cupboard than there should have been, from the week before. It turned out his father had been getting them out of the recycling, once Cross had left and putting them back in the cupboard. This had led to what Cross later described to Ottey as an ‘intervention’. He could see that Raymond’s hoarding instincts were rising to the surface once again and he had to nip them in the bud. It was an awkward conversation he said, which led her to think, perhaps uncharitably, that weren’t most of his conversations with people awkward? She tried to explain that an intervention normally involved more than just the one person intervening, but he wouldn’t have it.
There was a reason, on Raymond’s part, for this silence during these weekly visits. George was never one to initiate conversation in a social situation such as this. So Raymond normally fulfilled that role when it was just the two of them. But currently Raymond was in something of an emotional downward spiral which he couldn’t seem to climb out of. That George’s mother Christine had recently re-entered his son’s life wasn’t a problem for Raymond. If anything, he was glad of it. Glad to have another person in George’s tiny social circle, who cared for him and would look out for him. It was the unearthing of the past which had affected Raymond. George’s discovery of his mother’s real reason for leaving them had rendered Raymond emotionally conflicted. Over the years he’d kept this from George, letting him believe that she’d left for her own reasons, whatever those were. He felt awful guilt about that now. The fact that George had had to find it out for himself, when it would have been a lot easier and certainly more honest just to have told him about it, made it all the worse for Raymond.
He’d always known that George would find out one day. It was in his nature to find things out. Raymond had imagined that when it did happen, he himself would feel an immense sense of relief. Because the truth would finally be out in the open. But it hadn’t turned out that way. He’d been left with an appallingly empty feeling. It was as if he’d led his entire life living a lie, both with his son and the memory of his partner Ron. He had failed them both and this left him feeling abjectly remorseful. It was a nauseating realisation which he just didn’t seem able to shake off. His silence wasn’t out of embarrassment, but he felt he just didn’t know what to say to his son at the moment. This was despite the fact that things seemed to have worked out well. His son had accepted it all without a moment’s hesitation. What disappointed Raymond, disgusted him almost, was the fact that even when Christine had left it for him to tell George, he still couldn’t do it. She’d had the grace not to out him to his son, but leave it for him. However, when George had asked, he’d just shrugged it off. It was the shabby behaviour of a coward and he couldn’t move beyond it. When it came down to it, he hadn’t had the courage. How much courage exactly was needed? he kept asking himself. But it had left him feeling that he didn’t like himself much and certainly had no self-respect.
George had no knowledge that his father was sitting opposite him thinking these things and feeling this way. It also didn’t occur to him to tell him that the victim in the case he was working was Stephen’s brother. Something Raymond would undoubtedly have liked to know. He just did the washing up and counted the takeaway containers in the cupboard. Six. Well below the ‘statutory’ limit. He put that night’s clean containers in the cupboard and left.
15
‘Alice? Do you have a moment?’ asked Ottey.
Alice walked into Cross’s office. Ottey indicated that she should take a seat.
‘How was Stephen?’ Mackenzie began by asking.
‘Obviously a little thrown and upset, but he’s fine,’ Ottey replied.
‘Did he have any thoughts?’
‘You’d have to be more specific,’ replied Cross.
‘About what might have happened?’ she replied, regretting this speculative enquiry instantly.
Ottey came to her rescue. ‘So, what have you got, Alice?’
‘Not a whole heck of a lot. So, guests at the abbey. Not a huge number, four in the last year. Numbers still haven’t picked up since Covid. The first was a young man called Dan Summers. A very serious and devout young man thinking of taking solemn vows and becoming a monk. He stayed for a month and came to the conclusion that maybe it wasn’t for him. He’s now thinking of going into the priesthood instead.
‘There was a man in his forties, Jeremy McBride, but he seems to have given a fake name as he’s a digital ghost. His marriage was breaking up. He was hitting the bottle and he stayed for what he called a bit of peace and quiet.
‘Then there was someone called Robbie Weald. An altar boy as a teenager, he’d been having an extra stressful time at work recently, and wanted to get back in touch with his Catholic faith. He worked with Brother Dominic and the books, as well as the bees, which has led to him getting a couple of hives himself. He’s very grateful to Dominic for introducing him to the world of bees.’
‘You’ve spoken with him?’ asked Cross.
‘Yes, he’s still an occasional guest. He liked Dominic a lot and found his counsel a “lifesaver”, as he put it. Lastly there’s a guy, a young entrepreneur with a successful tech start-up of some sort. To be honest with you, I still haven’t a clue what his company does, even though he explained it to me for over an hour. But he’s made a shitload of money and took four of his young employees there for a retreat. “To discover their priorities in life.” He said he’d asked Dominic for a spiritual boot camp. Dominic was a “cool dude”, apparently. The week went so well they were in discussions about offering it as a service to other companies, and make it a money-maker for the abbey. Get a load of this. At the end of the week, they went paintballing and persuaded a very reluctant Dominic to go with them. He really didn’t want to, obviously, being a monk et cetera, there was so much wrong with the idea. But here’s the killer.’ She grimaced at the clumsiness of her choice of words before continuing. ‘Dominic won without firing a single shot. Zak – that’s the entrepreneur – thought it was the coolest thing ever. “Totally Zen.” The single most meaningful thing they’d learned all week. Except that he hadn’t worked out what it actually meant yet.’
‘So, nothing there?’ asked Ottey.
‘Well not exactly nothing, but maybe not exactly something,’ she replied, eliciting a sigh from Cross. ‘Okay, well, a possible red flag. One of Zak’s team, called Snip – yes, I know – kept getting high. He became argumentative and aggressive. Zak offered to send him home, but Dominic said it wasn’t necessary. Then in the middle of the night he broke into the church, dressed up in one of the priest’s robes and started ringing the bell. None of Zak’s team got up. It was Dominic who went in and apparently “sorted him out”.’
‘Sorted him out?’ asked Cross.
‘Well, no one saw it happen, but that’s how Zak described it. Next morning Snip was sporting a black eye when Zak bundled him off in a cab.’
‘Dominic hit him?’ asked Ottey.
‘It would seem so, although he denied it. But Zak said Dominic was smiling when he denied it,’ replied Mackenzie, laughing. ‘You’ve got to admire the guy.’
‘I imagine Snip got cut from Zak’s workforce,’ quipped Cross, clearly pleased with himself.
‘Oh George, please,’ said Ottey which made Mackenzie laugh, adding further insult to Cross’s injured pride that his joke hadn’t even gleaned a smirk.
‘Snip did lose his job,’ Mackenzie added.
‘Motive for murder?’ asked Ottey.
‘Torture and murder,’ Mackenzie said.
‘Hmm. Where does he live?’ Ottey asked.
‘London.’
‘Let’s get someone up there to go talk to him,’ Ottey finished by saying.
‘Anything else?’ asked Cross.
‘No.’
‘Emails?’ asked Cross.
‘Likewise, nothing. No clues, as far as I can see. There was Queenbeegate. The theft of a few Eustace queens that Dominic was breeding, but I think you know all about that. Peter Mercer was the culprit. But after Dominic forgave him he actually came to help with the bees and has taken over since Dominic’s death. They even rescued a swarm from a local school together the week before he died. There was also an email about a valuation Dominic made on an old religious book. But nothing that screamed murder,’ she said.
‘If you honestly think you’re going to solve cases because something screams murder, you’re going to be very disappointed,’ Cross observed. ‘Dig deeper into the book dispute,’ he instructed.
‘Okay. But that’s basically it. I’ve sent you the contact details for Ursula Mead,’ Mackenzie said.
Ottey looked puzzled.
