7 - Death of a Dean

by Hazel Holt

  “So?”

  “So it’s all most peculiar. A couple of months ago Francis wrote to Bernard Mortimer and said that he was withdrawing his affairs.”

  “Goodness!” I exclaimed. “Did he say why?”

  “No explanation at all.”

  “So who are his solicitors now?” David asked. “I suppose I ought to get in touch with them about—well, about things.”

  “No one knows,” Michael said. “Francis simply asked for all the documents relating to his affairs to be sent to him at the deanery. Since then, not a whisper of him going to anyone else, which is very odd indeed, because usually these things get about—especially when there are unusual circumstances.”

  “How extraordinary!” I waved ineffectually at a couple of midges that were hovering around my head. “So what do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think and Dick Wisbech can’t imagine, either. Vastly intriguing!”

  “Perhaps it’s something to do with Adrian,” I suggested. “You know, him being an accountant.”

  “Accountants, my dear Mama,” Michael said condescendingly, “are quite different from solicitors. Since both your husband and your son were solicitors I do feel you should have known that.”

  “Idiot! No, what I meant was that perhaps Francis was engaged in some sort of business that he didn’t want his solicitors to know about. I mean, they might be acting for him in financial matters, agreements or something—I’m not sure how these things are worked out. Tax, perhaps—I know your father used to have to deal with some tax things for his clients—anyway, perhaps there was something not quite, well, ethical. Francis might have wanted Adrian to wangle things for him somehow.”

  Michael put his fingertips together in a formal, judicial manner. “It’s possible. Though Adrian’s pretty wet. I wouldn’t think he’d be bright enough for any sort of fiddle.”

  “But Francis was,” David said, “and he could have guided the wretched Adrian along the paths of unrighteousness.”

  “I wonder?” Michael looked thoughtful. “But even so, I don’t see how all this has anything to do with Francis’s murder.”

  “It might, somehow, give Adrian a motive,” I said. “He might have rebelled against what his father was doing. No, that’s no good. The trouble is I don’t really know much about Adrian. He’s such a nonperson, if you know what I mean. Do we know anyone who knows him?”

  “Actually, Philip was at school with him,” Michael said. “I’ll see what he makes of him.”

  “Meanwhile,” I urged, “see if you can find out anything else on the legal and financial front. I don’t see at the moment how it all fits in, but something as odd as this business with his solicitor must have some bearing on Francis’s murder.”

  I had a bad night. For no apparent reason. Usually I sleep like a log, zonking straight out, my book often slipping from my hand and the light still on. Every so often, though, I just can’t get off. I toss and turn, try to remember all the relaxation exercises I did in my antenatal classes before Michael was born, turn the light on and read for a bit, even, occasionally, count imaginary sheep. But in the end I always have to reconcile myself to lying there, letting my thoughts roam at will, wide awake.

  Not surprisingly, I suppose, I thought about Francis and who might have murdered him. For all that I had gone on about anyone being in a position to kill Francis now we knew Monica hadn’t been on guard, I still felt, in my heart, that the murderer was most likely to have been one of the family. I knew it wasn’t David so that left Joan, Mary and Adrian. Mary had a very strong motive. She was desperate to break away from her father’s powerful influence and she needed money to put into the stables. Actually, I was pretty sure it wasn’t simply a business arrangement that she wished for with Fay. And that, of course, was another reason for wanting her father dead. There was no way he would have countenanced that sort of relationship, there would have been dreadful scenes, and Joan as well as Mary would have been the subject of Francis’s wrath. I shuddered even to think of it!

  There was no doubt, too, that Mary actively hated her father. As far as I could see, there had never been any expression of love in that family and Mary, a sensitive and basically affectionate girl, had been starved of any sort of loving relationship, since I knew that Francis, as well as never showing affection himself, had always frowned on any overt display of emotion between Joan and the children. I remember once we had all been on a picnic (I can’t remember the unlikely circumstances that brought us together for such an event) when Michael, Mary and Adrian were all small. The children had gone off on their own (led by Michael since the other two would never have thought of such an independent action) and were playing by a stream in a nearby field. Suddenly we heard Mary shrieking and they all three rushed up to us. Mary and Adrian clung to Joan and Michael nearly knocked Peter over as he clutched him in terror. “There was a bull!” Michael cried. “He chased us!”

  Mary was still sobbing and Adrian, huddled close to his mother, was white with fear. Peter and I reassured Michael as best we could and comforted him, but Francis snapped at Joan, who had Mary in her arms, “Put the child down at once, Joan! Mary, Adrian, how dare you make such an exhibition of yourselves! Stop that ridiculous noise immediately! Do you have no notion of how to behave!”

  “But Francis,” I protested, “they’ve had a dreadful fright, poor little things! Chased by a bull!”

  “It is highly unlikely that it was a bull,” Francis said coldly. “It was more probably a cow. And, even if it had been, that is no excuse for such unbridled behavior.”

  I seem to remember we went home after that. I could hardly bring myself to speak to Francis and I told Peter fiercely that I thought it would be an absolute miracle if those two poor children ever grew up to be normal human beings with such a background. And I wondered now if they had. What warped emotions were hidden behind the facades of Mary’s sullenness and Adrian’s bleak passivity?

  Adrian, certainly, was an unknown quantity. Since he’d grown up I don’t believe I’d ever seen him except in his father’s company, and then he was simply a cipher, speaking only when he was spoken to, looking at his father to see how he should react to any topic that might arise. Goodness knows what he was like on his own or with his friends—if, indeed, he had any friends. It seemed unlikely. He’d certainly reacted very strongly to his father’s death, completely collapsing, perhaps because the prop he’d leaned upon all his life had been suddenly taken away from him.

  I know Joan worried about him, even before the present crisis, and I’m sure he never talked to her. It seemed unlikely that he talked to anyone. But—a sudden thought struck me—perhaps Adrian had another life, kept secret from his family, especially his father. Perhaps there was something in that life that might have made it necessary for him to kill his father. I wondered if there was any way I could find out. Certainly he wouldn’t confide in me. Perhaps Michael might be able to discover from Philip if there was more to Adrian than met the eye. And then there was Joan. I must say I found it hard to think about Joan without impatience. How any woman, especially in this day and age, could have put up with the sort of treatment she had from Francis was beyond my comprehension! Of course she’d been brought up by that horrible father to have an incredibly low opinion of herself, but still! I suppose I might just have to acknowledge that she was such a born doormat that she could accept the way Francis constantly denigrated all her opinions and activities, put her down in public, and generally treated her with contempt. What, as a mother myself, I couldn’t understand was the way she allowed Francis to ruin the children’s lives. I could see how she fretted for Mary and worried over Adrian, but even from the very earliest days of her marriage, before the pattern of Francis’s treatment of them all had been set, she had (as far as I could tell) never protested at his behavior toward them, never even interceded on their behalf.

  I thought how furious and frustrated I would have felt, how anyone would, for that matter, and how s
he must have bottled up her resentment for all those years. It wouldn’t be surprising if something inside her had finally snapped and she had decided to free them all from the sort of slavery they had lived in for so long. Tomorrow I would talk to her, see if I could find out what she had been doing on the day that Francis died.

  I was more wide awake than ever. I sat up in bed, put on the light and picked up my copy of North and South again. I read doggedly on for some time and gradually, soothed by the solid and familiar world of Mrs. Gaskell, I felt my lids grow heavy and slept at last.

  Chapter 14

  When I’d phoned Joan to see if she’d be in the following morning she reminded me that it was market day, so I left the car in the main car park and, having pointed David in the direction of the police station, made my way through the busy streets toward the cathedral close. I love street markets and am sad that so many nowadays consist merely of stalls of cheap clothing and cut-price household goods. Culminster market, though, I’m glad to say, retains much of its original charm and you can buy fresh vegetables with the red soil still clinging to them, local cheeses, lardy bread and the sort of heavenly fudge that you can positively feel destroying your teeth and bumping up your cholesterol level!

  I wandered happily among the stalls, set up in the shadow of the great cathedral as they must have been since medieval times, my shopping bag heavy with goodies. I paused at a stall piled high with balls and cones of wool, something I can never resist. The house is full of bags containing pieces of half-finished knitting. Not because I lack the application, but because there comes a time in the life of every attempted garment when it becomes too heavy to hold up in the air above the large, recumbent Siamese cat occupying his usual place in the evenings on my lap.

  Nevertheless I found myself purchasing a quantity of clerical gray (the description coming readily to mind in these surroundings) wool to make a pullover for Michael and some very dashing cyclamen boucle from which I proposed to fashion a similar garment for myself.

  The gray wool somehow reminded me of old Canon Burgess, perhaps because he had always worn a hand-knitted gray woollen cardigan, presumably not the same one all his life, but each identical in its grayness and shapelessness and presumably made for him by Evelyn. She had never married, but like so many of her generation kept house for her also unmarried brother. They were an eccentric pair, he absorbed in pastoral duties and, like Trollope’s Septimus Harding, passionate about church music; she, even in her younger days, vague and absentminded, never quite in touch with the modern world, a characteristic made worse these days by increasing deafness. Still, she had managed to look after her brother in his recent illness and allowed him the privilege of dying with dignity in his own home. I knew Evelyn was one of the few people Joan felt at ease with. I suppose it was because Evelyn made no demands on her and, given her own inadequacies, never made her feel useless or incompetent. Still, it was good of Joan to have spent so many hours sitting in a sickroom, especially toward the end, when the invalid, sedated against the pain, was incapable of conversation. I was walking across the cathedral green now, and a thought came to me with such suddenness and such force that I felt obliged to sit down on the low stone wall that led to the entrance to the west cloisters.

  With startling clarity, things fell into place. It had always been a puzzle how Francis’s murderer had come by the means of killing him, morphine not being readily available to the general public, but I suddenly had a picture of Canon Burgess, sleeping perhaps, certainly unaware for most of the time what was going on around him. It was highly likely that he had been given morphine to alleviate the final stages of his illness and the picture in my mind now extended to include Joan abstracting some of the drug when Evelyn was out of the room. It would have been quite easy, especially since Evelyn was vague and confused and probably wouldn’t have realized that any was missing. The three classic headings—means, the morphine; motive, years of misery with Francis and a belated wish to help her children; opportunity, Joan had the best opportunity of all, since she had made the sandwiches and taken them and the cake and (most important) the indigestion mixture across to the cathedral herself—they were all complete.

  Having, as it were, established my case, I became aware that I was on my way to visit the person I was now certain was the murderer. She was also an old friend and, quite honestly, in spite of a natural reluctance to countenance the taking of human life, I couldn’t find it in my heart, given the circumstances, to blame her. But it was certainly an awkward situation. Should I confront her with my suspicions?

  I was now at the entrance to the deanery and the temptation to turn around and simply go away was very strong, but Joan, as ever on the lookout at the drawing-room window, was waving, so I reluctantly mounted the steps and went inside.

  “It is nice to see you, Sheila,” she said warmly. “Do come up.”

  While Joan poured the coffee we made general conversation and then she said, “Did you say that David was at the police station?”

  “Yes,” I replied, “the inspector wanted another word with him.”

  “Poor David, I’m so sorry he’s having all this trouble.”

  “Well,” I said, watching her carefully as I spoke, “he is their number one suspect. I mean, he was actually there when Francis ate or drank whatever it was that killed him.”

  Joan looked distressed. “But surely they don’t think ...”

  “They’ve got to suspect someone,” I went on. “The poison didn’t get there by itself, someone must have put it there.”

  “But still ...”

  “And David did have a motive, a very strong one—money. It really must seem obvious to them.”

  Joan became very agitated. “But surely you don’t think...”

  “Oh no,” I said, “I know David didn’t kill Francis.”

  Joan was silent for a moment. She sat quite still, her eyes fixed beseechingly on me. Then she burst out, “Oh, it’s all so dreadful! I don’t think I can bear it!”

  “Joan, what do you mean?”

  She made a great effort and seemed to pull herself together. “I’m so worried about the children. Mary’s so—I don’t know, so different, hard and unsympathetic—not to me, don’t think that—but saying such things about her father! And Adrian, he’s so odd, withdrawn and peculiar. He doesn’t say a word all through supper and then, immediately afterward, he goes straight to his room. And, Sheila, I’ve heard him in there crying, really sobbing, and I don’t know what to do!”

  She was standing up now, clasping her hands convulsively together. Her lips were compressed and she shook her head from side to side in agitation.

  “Oh, Joan, my dear, I’m so sorry,” I said helplessly. “I know it’s been difficult for you all these years, but now you can lead your own life at last, make your own decisions ...”

  She shook her head again, more vehemently.

  “You don’t understand," she cried, “you don’t know what it’s like for me to know that he’s gone, that I’ll never see him again! Oh Francis, Francis!”

  She sank down onto the sofa and gave way to a fit of violent sobbing. After a while she burst out, “None of you understand—Mary’s the same, I don’t want things to be different, I just want him back. I love him so much, I’ve always loved him—he’s been my life, all I’ve ever wanted! I don’t think I can bear to go on without him!”

  For a moment I stared at her in amazement, unable to take in what she was saying. For years we had all taken it for granted that Joan was the miserable downtrodden wife, longing to escape from a tyrannical husband. The simple fact that she was in love with him had never occurred to us. I crossed over to the sofa and sat beside her.

  “My dear,” I said gently, “I’m sorry, I’ve been crass and insensitive. Do forgive me.”

  Her sobbing quietened and she grasped my hand.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I know you were trying to be kind ....” She made an effort to collect herself. “I know yo
u all found Francis difficult—he was, but that’s because he had such high standards—for himself as well as for other people. He was such a splendid man, Sheila!”

  I made some vague murmur of what I hoped she would take as assent. Joan took a handkerchief from the pocket of her cardigan and wiped her eyes. “When we first met and he seemed to be taking an interest in me I couldn’t believe my luck! He was so brilliant and so handsome he could have married anybody! And, even then—well, I wasn’t anything to write home about! I wasn’t pretty or very bright—it seemed like a fairy tale!”

  She looked at me, her eyes red and swollen with weeping, her face sallow without makeup, but, apart from the lines etched by age and anxiety, I could still see the young girl I had known many years ago, plain, eager to please, vulnerable.

  “Yes, he was handsome, wasn’t he—more so than David, really.”

  “He could have had anyone,” she repeated. Then, looking at me with a rueful smile, she went on, “Of course I know he married me for the money and what my father could do for him. I wasn’t naive enough, even then, to think that there could be any other reason. But I didn’t care. I was grateful that there was something I could give him that he wanted and I tried to be a good wife to him and do all I could to help his career.”

  “You did so much!”

  “I wasn’t very good at things and I know he used to get impatient .... The children, too, he wanted so much for them, he had such plans. We were all such a disappointment to him—it was so unfair, we never lived up to his standards.”

  “You mustn’t think that!” I protested.

  “But I do—all the time. My life is so empty now, there’s nothing left to live for!”

  “Joan, please! You mustn’t talk like that. You’ve got so much in your life—the children need you!”

  “They don’t, really. Well, perhaps Adrian does just now—though I don’t seem able to get through to him at all. Of course I love them, but it’s not the same.” She laughed bitterly, without mirth. “Francis was the only thing that gave my life meaning. Even when he was angry or impatient—even...” She looked down, not meeting my eye. “Even when he went after someone else ....”