Death in Holy Orders

by P. D. James

  Dalgliesh had met Crampton only briefly and had felt in his presence no more than a mild resentment at an unexpected and not particularly congenial guest. But now he felt as strong an anger as he had ever experienced at a murder scene. He found himself echoing words which were familiar although their precise source eluded him: “Who hath done this thing?” He would discover the answer, and when he did, this time he would also find the proof, this time he would not close the file knowing the identity of the culprit, the motive and the means, but powerless to make an arrest. The burden of that past failure was still heavy upon him but with this case it would at last be lifted.

  Ayling was still prowling cautiously round the body, never lifting his eyes from it, as if he had encountered some interesting but unusual phenomenon and was uncertain how it might react to scrutiny. Then he squatted by the head, sniffed delicately at the wound, and said, “Who is he?”

  “I’m sorry. I hadn’t realized that you hadn’t been told. Archdeacon Crampton. He’s a recently-appointed trustee of this college and arrived Saturday morning.”

  “Someone didn’t like him, unless he surprised an intruder and this wasn’t personal. Is there anything worth stealing?”

  “The altar-piece is valuable but would be difficult to remove. There’s no evidence that anyone has tried. There’s valuable silver in the sacristy safe. The safe hasn’t been tampered with.”

  Ayling said, “And the candlesticks are still here. Brass though -hardly worth stealing. Not much doubt about the weapon or the cause of death. A blow to the right of the cranium above the ear made by a heavy implement with a sharp edge. I don’t know whether the first blow killed him, but it would certainly have felled him. Then the assailant struck again. Something like frenzy in the attack, I’d say.”

  He straightened up, then lifted the unbloodied candlestick with his gloved hand.

  “Heavy. It’d take some strength. A woman could do it or an older man if they used both hands. Needed a bit of an eye though and he’s not going to stand there with his back obligingly turned to a stranger or to anyone he didn’t trust come to that. How did he get in, Crampton I mean?”

  Dalgliesh realized that here he had a pathologist not over concerned about the precise extent of his responsibilities.

  “As far as I know he hadn’t a key. He was either let in by someone already here or he found the door open. The Doom has been vandalized. He could have been enticed in.”

  “That looks like an inside job. Cuts down on the number of your suspects very conveniently. When was he found?”

  “At five-thirty. I was here about four minutes later. Judging by the appearance of the blood and the beginning of rigor in the side of the face I guessed that he had been dead about five hours.”

  “I’ll take his temperature but I doubt I can be more accurate. He died about midnight, give or take an hour.”

  Dalgliesh asked, “What about the blood? Would there have been much spurting?”

  “Not with the first blow. You know how it is with head wounds on this site. You get bleeding into the cranial cavity. But he didn’t stick at one blow, did he? For the second and subsequent strikes you’d get spurting. Could be more of a spatter than a strong stream. Depends how close he was to the victim when he struck the subsequent blows. If the assailant were right-handed I’d expect the right arm to be bloodied, perhaps even the chest.” He added, “He’d expect that, of course. Could have come in his shirt and rolled up his sleeves. Could have worn a T-shirt, better still been naked. It’s been known.”

  Dalgliesh had heard nothing he hadn’t thought out for himself. He said, “Wouldn’t the victim have found that a little surprising?”

  Ayling ignored the interruption.

  “He’d have to be quick though. He couldn’t rely on the victim turning away from him for more than a second or two. Not much time to roll up a sleeve, get hold of a candlestick from where he’d placed it ready.”

  “Where do you suppose that was?”

  “Inside the box pew? A bit too far, perhaps. Why not just stand it up behind the pillar. He’d only need to hide one stick, of course. He could fetch the other from the altar afterwards to set up his little tableau. I wonder why he bothered to do that. Somehow I can’t see it as an act of reverence.”

  Finding Dalgliesh unresponsive, he said, “I’ll take his temperature and see if that helps to fix the time of death but I doubt whether I can put it closer than your original estimate. I’ll be able to tell you more when I’ve had him on the table.”

  Dalgliesh didn’t wait to watch this first violation of the body’s privacy, but walked slowly up and down the central aisle until, looking back, he saw that Ayling had finished and had got to his feet.

  Together they returned to the sacristy. As the pathologist took off his working gown and zipped himself into his leathers, Dalgliesh said, “Would you care for some coffee? I dare say it could be arranged.”

  “No thanks. Pressure of time and they won’t want to see me. I should be able to do the PM tomorrow morning and I’ll ring you, although I’m not expecting any surprises. The coroner will want the forensics done. He’s careful like that. So will you, of course. I suppose I could use the Met lab if Huntingdon is busy. You won’t want him moved until the photographer and SO COs have finished but give me a ring when you’re ready. I expect the people here will be glad to see the last of him.”

  When Mark Ayling was ready to go, Dalgliesh locked the sacristy door and reset the alarm. For some reason he found difficult to define he was reluctant to take his companion through the house again.

  He said, “We can leave by the gate onto the headland. It’ll save you being waylaid.”

  They skirted the courtyard on the path of trodden grass. Across the scrubland Dalgliesh could see lights in the three occupied cottages. They looked like the lonely outposts of some beleaguered garrison. There was a light, too, in St. Matthew’s Cottage and he guessed that Mrs. Pilbeam, probably with duster and vacuum cleaner, was making sure that it was clean and ready for occupation by the police. He thought again of Margaret Munroe and of that lonely dying which could have been so opportune, and there came to him a conviction that was as powerful as it was apparently irrational: that the three deaths were connected. The apparent suicide, the certified natural death, the brutal murder there was a cord which connected them. Its strength might be tenuous and its path convoluted, but when he had traced it, it would lead him to the heart of the mystery.

  In the front courtyard he waited until Ayling had mounted and roared away. He was turning to go back inside the house when he caught sight of the sidelights of a car. It had just turned from the approach road and was coming fast along the path. Within seconds he had identified Piers Tarrant’s Alfa Romeo. The first two members of his team had arrived.

  The call came through to Detective Inspector Piers Tarrant at six-fifteen. Within ten minutes he was ready to leave. He had been instructed to call for Kate Miskin on the way and reflected that this was unlikely to cause delay; Kate’s flat on the Thames just beyond Wapping was on the route out of London he proposed to take. Detective Sergeant Robbins lived on the Essex border and would drive his own car to the scene. With luck, Piers hoped to overtake him. He let himself out of his flat and into the early Sunday morning quiet of the deserted streets. He collected his Alfa Romeo from the garage space which was his by courtesy of the City of London Police, slung his murder bag in the back, and set off eastward on the same route along which Dalgliesh had travelled two days before.

  Kate was waiting for him at the entrance to the block where she had a flat overlooking the river. He had never been invited inside and nor had she ever seen the interior of his flat in the City. The river with its ever-changing light and shade, its dark surging tides and busy commercial life was her passion as the City was his. His flat comprised only three rooms above a delicatessen in a back street near St. Paul’s Cathedral. The camaraderie of the Met and his sexual life had no part in this private world. Noth
ing in the flat was superfluous and everything was carefully chosen and as expensive as he could afford. The City, its churches and alleys, its cobbled passages and seldom-visited courts, was both a hobby and a relief from his professional world. Like Kate, he was fascinated by the river, but as part of the City’s life and history. He cycled each day to work and used his car only when he left London but, when he drove, it had to be a car he was happy to own.

  Kate buckled herself into the seat beside him after a brief greeting and for the first few miles didn’t speak, but he could sense her excitement as he knew she sensed his. He liked her and he respected her, but their professional relationship wasn’t without its occasional small jags of resentment, irritation or competition. But this was something they shared, this surge of adrenalin at the beginning of a murder inquiry. He had sometimes wondered whether this almost visceral thrill wasn’t uncomfortably close to blood-lust; certainly it held something of a blood sport.

  After they had left Docklands behind them, Kate said, “All right, put me in the picture. You read theology at Oxford. You must know something about this place.”

  The fact that he had once read theology at Oxford was one of the few things about him she did know, and it had never ceased to intrigue her. Sometimes he could imagine that she believed he had gained some special insight or esoteric knowledge which gave him an advantage when it came to the consideration of motive and the infinite vicissitudes of the human heart. She would occasionally say, “What use is theology? Tell me that. You chose to spend three years on it. I mean, you must have felt you would gain something from it, something useful or important.” He doubted whether she had believed him when he had said that choosing theology had given him a better chance of a place at Oxford than opting for the history which he would have preferred. He didn’t tell her, either, what it was he had chiefly gained: a fascination with the complexity of the intellectual bastions which men could construct to withstand the tides of disbelief. His own disbelief had remained unshaken but he had never regretted those three years.

  Now he said, “I know something about St. Anselm’s, but not a lot. I had a friend who went on there after his degree, but we lost touch. I’ve seen photographs of the place. It’s an immense Victorian mansion on one of the bleakest parts of the East Coast. There are a number of myths which have grown up around it. Like most myths they’re probably partly true. It’s High Church Prayer Book Catholic maybe -I’m not really sure with some fancy Roman additions strong on theology, opposed to practically everything that’s happened in Anglicanism in the last fifty years, and you haven’t a chance of getting in without a first-class degree. But I’m told the food is very good.”

  Kate said, “I doubt we’ll get the chance to eat it. So it’s elitist, the college?”

  “You could say that, but then so is Manchester United.”

  “Did you think of going there ?”

  “No, because I didn’t read theology with a view to going into the Church. Anyway, they wouldn’t have had me. I didn’t get a good enough degree. The Warden tends to be particular. He’s an authority on Richard Hooker. All right, don’t ask, he was a sixteenth-century divine. You can take it from me that anyone who has written the definitive work on Hooker is no intellectual slouch. We could have trouble with The Revd Dr. Sebastian Morell.”

  “And the victim? Did AD say anything about him?”

  “Only that he’s an Archdeacon Crampton and was found dead in the church.”

  “And what’s an archdeacon?”

  “A kind of Rottweiler of the Church. He or it can be a she looks after Church property, inducts parish priests. Archdeacons have charge of a number of parishes and visit them once a year. The spiritual equivalent of HM Inspector of Constabulary.”

  Kate said, “So it’s going to be one of those self-contained cases with all the suspects under one roof and us having to pussyfoot around to avoid private calls to the Commissioner or complaints from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Why us anyway?”

  “AD didn’t talk for long. You know how he is. Anyway, he wanted us to get on the road. Apparently a DI from Suffolk was a visitor in the college last night. The Chief Constable apparently agrees that it would be inadvisable for them to take the case.”

  Kate didn’t question further, but Piers had the strong impression that she resented that he had taken the first call. She was, in fact, senior to him in terms of service although she had never made an issue of it. He wondered whether he should point out that AD had saved time by ringing him first since he had the faster car and would be driving, but decided against it.

  As he expected, they overtook Robbins on the Colchester bypass. Piers knew that, had Kate been driving, they would have slackened speed to enable the team to arrive together. His response was to wave at Robbins and press down his foot on the accelerator.

  Kate had put her head back and appeared to be dozing. Glancing at the strong good-looking face, he thought about their relationship. It had changed in the last two years since the publication of the Macpherson Report. Although he knew little about her life, he did know that she was illegitimate and had been brought up by a grandmother in the bleakest of inner-city areas and at the top of a high-rise building. Blacks had been her neighbours and her friends at school. To be told that she was a member of a Force where racism was institutionalized had filled her with a passionate resentment which he now realized had changed her whole attitude to her job. Politically far more sophisticated than she, and more cynical, he had tried to inject some calm into their heated discussions.

  She had demanded, “Given this report, would you join the Met if you were black?”

  “No, but nor would I if I were white. But I have joined and I don’t see why Macpherson should drive me out of my job.”

  He knew where he wanted that job to take him, to a senior post in the anti-terrorist branch. That was where the opportunities now lay. In the mean time he was happy where he was, in a prestigious squad with a demanding boss he respected and enough excitement and variety to keep boredom at bay.

  Kate said, “Is that what they wanted then? To discourage blacks from joining and drive out decent non-racist officers ?”

  “For God’s sake, Kate, let it rest. You’re getting to be a bore.”

  “The report says that an act is racist if the victim perceives it as such. I perceive this report as racist racist against me as a white officer. So where do I go to complain?”

  “You could try the race relations people, but I doubt you’ll get any joy. Speak to AD about it.”

  He didn’t know whether she had, but at least she was still in the job. But he knew that he worked now with a different Kate. She was still conscientious, still hard-working, still dedicated to the task in hand. She would never let the team down. But something had gone; the belief that policing was a personal vocation as well as a public service and that you owed it more than hard work and dedication. He used to find this personal commitment in her over-romantic and naive; now he realized how much he missed it. At least, he told himself, the Macpherson Report had destroyed for ever her over-deferential respect for the Bench.

  By eight-thirty they were passing through the village of Wrentham, still wrapped in an early morning calm which seemed the more peaceful because hedges and trees showed the dilapidations of a night’s storm which had hardly touched London. Kate quickened into awareness to consult her map and watch for the Ballard’s Mere turning. Piers slackened speed.

  He said, “AD said it would be easy to miss. Look out for a large decaying ash on the right and a couple of flint cottages opposite.”

  The ash, with its heavy cladding of ivy was unmissable, but as they turned into the road which was little more than a lane, one glance showed clearly what had happened. A large bough of the tree had been torn from the trunk and now lay along the grass verge looking in the growing light as bleached and smooth as a bone. From it sprouted dead branches like gnarled fingers. The main trunk showed the great wound where the branch ha
d been torn away and the road, now passable, was still strewn with the debris of the fall: curls of ivy, twigs and a scatter of green and yellow leaves.

  There were lights in the windows of both cottages. Piers drew to the side and hooted. Within seconds the figure of a stout middle-aged woman came down the garden path. She had a pleasant wind-tanned face under an unruly bush of hair and wore a brightly-flowered overall over what looked like layers of wool. Kate opened the window.

  Piers leaned across and said, “Good morning. You’ve had a spot of trouble here.”

  “Come down she did at ten o’clock, right on the hour. It were the storm, you see. A real blow we had last night. Lucky we heard the fall not that you could miss it for the noise she made. My husband was afraid there’d be an accident so he put out red warning lights both sides. Then, come morning, my Brian and Mr. Daniels from next door got the tractor and pulled her off the road. Not that many folk come this way except to visit the fathers and the students at the college. Still, we thought better not wait for the council to move it.”

  Kate asked, “When did you clear the road, Mrs… ?”

  “Finch. Mrs. Finch. At half-past six. It were still dark, but Brian wanted to get it done before they was off to work.”

  Kate said, “Lucky for us. It was very kind of you, thank you. So no one could have got past by car in either direction between ten o’clock last night and half-past six this morning?”

  “That’s right, miss. There’s only been a gentleman on a motorcycle going to the college, no doubt. There’s nowhere else to go on this road. He’s not back yet.”

  “And no one else has driven past?”

  “Not that I saw, and I usually do see, the kitchen being at the front.”

  They thanked her again, said their goodbyes, and moved off. Glancing back, Kate could see Mrs. Finch watching them for a few seconds before re-latching the gate and waddling off up the garden path.