Chapter and Hearse

by Catherine Aird

  ‘And for parking in odd places,’ contributed Leeyes.

  Sloan hesitated. ‘But I still don’t see where you come in, sir.’

  ‘I think,’ the Superintendent grunted, ‘that my wife may have had a hand in it.’

  ‘Ah…’ Sloan made a non-committal sound deep down in his throat.

  ‘Only,’ put in Leeyes with haste, ‘because she was trying to be helpful, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ agreed Sloan guardedly. By all accounts, the Superintendent’s wife was a force to be reckoned with. Both at home and away, so to speak.

  ‘You see, Sloan,’ said the Superintendent, waving a hand, ‘she’s one of Mr Carstairs’s flock – that’s what you call it, isn’t it?’

  ‘A member of his congregation,’ translated Sloan.

  ‘That’s it, Sloan, exactly. Mrs Leeyes attends St Leonard’s Church every Sunday without fail.’

  ‘And?’ Sloan still couldn’t see yet where all this was getting them.

  ‘And,’ said Leeyes hollowly, ‘she went and volunteered me to take part in one of their Lent debates at the church.’

  Sloan smothered a promising remark about it being very good for the Superintendent’s sins. This was only partly because his superior officer had never been known to admit to having transgressed in any way. Self-preservation came into it too. He said instead, ‘I think I’m beginning to get the picture, sir.’

  ‘I knew you would,’ Leeyes said, seizing on this and pushing the sheet of paper on his desk over in Sloan’s direction. ‘Look. It’s all here on this.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan picked the paper up and read it. It was a letter from the Reverend Christopher Carstairs, Vicar of St Leonard’s Church, Berebury, saying how much they were all looking forward to the participation of Police Superintendent Leeyes in an active debate with Matthew Steele at the church as part of their Lent Awareness Programme and enclosing a copy of a poster advertising it.

  The Superintendent pointed a stubby finger at this. ‘Have you got to the bottom line yet, Sloan?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Sloan, hoping his lips hadn’t been visibly twitching as he read that the subject of the debate was ‘Original Sin’. ‘I see what you mean now, sir.’

  ‘But have you got to the very bottom, Sloan?’

  Sloan ran his eye further down the poster until it lit upon the debate’s subtitle: ‘Would You Adam and Eve It?’ This example of Cockney rhyming slang was displayed in eye-catching capital letters.

  ‘What do you think of that, Sloan, eh?’

  ‘Very trendy, sir.’

  The Superintendent nodded dispiritedly. ‘That’s what I thought too.’

  ‘And you, sir, I take it,’ murmured Sloan, ‘will be there to put forward one view…’ He scanned the rest of the letter, struggling not to let his voice quaver.

  ‘That’s part of the trouble.’

  ‘And –’ Sloan took a very firm hold too of his facial expression, reducing it to the deadpan rigidity required of a public servant on distasteful duty – ‘sir, have I got this right? Matthew Steele will be taking the opposite one.’

  ‘Exactly, Sloan.’

  ‘For or against original sin existing?’

  ‘That’s what it’s all about,’ said Leeyes tightly.

  ‘Did you get to choose which, sir?’ enquired Sloan diplomatically.

  ‘The Vicar,’ ground out Leeyes between clenched teeth, ‘decided that I would want to take the orthodox police view.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right, then, sir, isn’t it?’ said Sloan.

  ‘No, it isn’t!’ howled Leeyes.

  ‘Sir?’ Sloan decided he really should have paid more attention at his Sunday School classes. He hadn’t known at the time, of course, that he was going to be a policeman.

  ‘I’ve got to argue that man is equally ready to do either good or evil and has the freedom of will to choose between the two,’ said the Superintendent.

  ‘Ye-es,’ said Sloan uncertainly. ‘Well…’

  ‘And Matthew Steele,’ snarled Leeyes, ‘gets to take the Vicar’s personal theological stance. He’s even given him a text.’ He looked down. ‘Romans chapter 7, verse 19: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”’ He snorted. ‘I ask you, Matthew Steele!’

  ‘That must be a first,’ said Sloan sourly.

  ‘It means that he’s going to be able to argue that he doesn’t have any choice whether he commits crimes…’

  ‘Now I’ve heard everything,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘It’s a new way of a villain saying he’s got right on his side, sir,’ observed Sloan after a moment’s thought.

  ‘It’s what defence counsel are always on about,’ said Leeyes grimly. ‘The Vicar, you see, says that in the beginning – that is, when all this business about original sin first cropped up…’

  ‘In the Garden of Eden?’ suggested Sloan helpfully.

  ‘No, no, Sloan. The Vicar says it was in AD four hundred and something when there was a famous dialogue on the subject with a man called Pelagius.’

  ‘Pelagius?’ Sloan sat up. ‘Wait a minute, sir, wait a minute…’

  ‘An English monk who got done for heresy when he went to Rome,’ sniffed Leeyes. ‘Makes a change that, for a God-botherer, doesn’t it? Going from England to Rome.’

  ‘The traffic’s usually all the other way,’ conceded Sloan. He frowned. ‘But I do remember learning something about a man called Pelagius at school.’

  ‘More than I ever did,’ said Leeyes robustly.

  ‘And a bishop called Germanus…’

  ‘You’ve always had a police memory for names, Sloan,’ admitted Leeyes grudgingly.

  ‘In Religious Education, it was.’ Detective Inspector Sloan metaphorically scratched his head. ‘The teacher thought verses might stick in our minds better than talk.’

  ‘And did they?’ asked Superintendent Leeyes, never one to beat about the bush.

  ‘I know it was someone called Hilaire Belloc who wrote them,’* said Sloan obliquely, giving himself time to think, ‘because we all thought Hilaire was a funny name for a man.’ The class comic, he remembered, had famously gone on a bit about it being very ‘hilarious’. They’d all laughed uproariously at this, prolonged amusement being one of the tried and tested ways of cutting down teaching time.

  ‘French, I expect, a name like that,’ said Leeyes dismissively.

  Sloan shut his eyes and concentrated hard. ‘I don’t know if I can remember the poem now.’

  ‘Try,’ commanded Leeyes.

  ‘“Pelagius lived in Kardanoel,”’ quoted the Detective Inspector, quondam schoolboy,

  ‘“And taught a doctrine there,

  How whether you went to Heaven or Hell,

  It was your own affair.”

  ‘I don’t know where Kardanoel is, sir,’ added Sloan, aware that this was unimportant. If it wasn’t in ‘F’ Division in the county of Calleshire, the Superintendent didn’t care.

  ‘What matters more,’ said Leeyes grandly, ‘is that the Vicar of St Leonard’s has asked me to argue the toss with Matthew Steele of all people.’

  ‘On the side of law and order, though,’ offered Sloan by way of comfort.

  ‘Naturally,’ snapped Leeyes.

  Greatly daring, Sloan went on, ‘Against there being original sin, though, sir.’ His own old Station Sergeant had believed that original sin was always there, lurking in the woodwork, so to speak. Their tutor at the police training college, on the other hand, had made them write down a quotation from someone called Clive Kluckholm: ‘Nature provides potentialities which culture neglects or elaborates.’ He wasn’t sure if he understood that either.

  Leeyes looked pained. ‘It’s not as easy as that, Sloan.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Sloan hadn’t thought for one moment that it would be. Outside of the Ten Commandments, theology was never that simple.

  ‘The Vicar – are you sure the Vicar’s straigh
t up, Sloan?’

  ‘Quite sure, sir … except that he believes the best of everyone.’ This, he appreciated, was a considerable failing in the Superintendent’s book.

  ‘The Vicar tells me that Steele is going to argue that he is as he is – he called him Common Man – because of there being such a thing as original sin … it being in the genes and all that.’

  ‘I can see that he might want to argue that way,’ said Sloan moderately.

  ‘And that the world therefore has him as it made him.’

  ‘Then all I can say,’ said Sloan warmly, ‘is that the world didn’t make a very good job of him.’

  ‘What I want to know,’ said Leeyes belligerently, ‘is how come Matthew Steele gets to argue on the side of the angels and I don’t?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ suggested Sloan, one at least of his Sunday School lessons coming back to him, ‘the Vicar did it on the principle that there is more joy in Heaven over one sinner who has repented than over ninety-nine who haven’t sinned.’ He was going to get Steele for leading the Tilson Street job if it was the last thing he did, debate or no debate. In his canon, hitting young women bank clerks over the head with baseball bats was just not on.

  ‘And has he repented,’ enquired Leeyes with real interest, ‘since we’re sure he’s sinned?’

  ‘Not that I know of, sir.’

  ‘But the Vicar’s still going to let him have his twopenn’orth on the subject.’ Leeyes sighed. ‘And I’ve been landed with having to argue the other way – for there being no such thing as original sin.’

  ‘Only free will,’ said Sloan thoughtfully.

  ‘I don’t like it, Sloan. Not one little bit.’

  ‘It’s only for the sake of argument, sir. Don’t forget that.’

  ‘It’s all very well, Sloan, but I don’t believe that people such as Steele can stay on the straight and narrow if they just put their minds to it, but this old monk Pelagius did.’

  Since the view of most magistrates and all the do-gooders Sloan had ever known was that all malefactors and most recidivists could do just that, the detective inspector nodded not unsympathetically. ‘The Devil’s got the best tune there, all right.’

  ‘And Steele’s a proper limb of Satan to match,’ the Superintendent came back smartly.

  ‘I’m not sure you should be bringing Satan into this, sir.’

  ‘Enemy territory, eh?’ said Leeyes unexpectedly. ‘You could be right.’

  ‘Confusing the issue was what I had meant,’ murmured Sloan.

  ‘What I want, Sloan, are solid arguments,’ said Leeyes, not listening.

  ‘Did the Vicar give you any to be going on with?’ asked Sloan, playing for time.

  ‘No.’ Superintendent Leeyes consulted a tattered notebook which, from the look of its cover, hadn’t been produced in evidence since he had last been walking the beat. ‘But he did warn me about one of their clever old churchwardens who likes catching speakers out with a trick question.’

  ‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ said Sloan sententiously.

  Leeyes squinted down at his notebook. ‘Something to do with St Thomas Aquinas and the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin. That mean anything to you, Sloan?’

  Sloan struggled with his memory. ‘I think it’s as many as want to, sir, seeing as angels don’t take up any room.’

  ‘So where’s the trick, then?’ asked Leeyes suspiciously.

  ‘If you were to say a specific number, sir, it would have meant that you didn’t know that angels were – er – I think it’s called “non-corporeal”’.

  ‘I never thought they weren’t,’ said Leeyes indignantly. ‘And I’ve never thought Steele was an angel either.’

  ‘Nor me, sir,’ said Sloan. The bank robbers had worn Mickey Mouse headpieces and carried something that might at first sight have been charity collecting boxes on poles but weren’t. ‘The Vicar might, of course.’

  ‘Oh, and the Vicar said,’ went on Leeyes, suddenly recollecting something else, ‘to leave the Manichaeans and St Augustine out of it, because another couple of his parishioners were going to debate the struggle between Good and Evil the week after us.’

  ‘Pity, that,’ said Sloan reflectively. ‘I should have said that that was much more our line of country than whether or not what you made of yourself is your own affair or in-built. After all, sir, we’re part of the good versus evil struggle here, aren’t we?’

  ‘We’re here to uphold the law, Sloan,’ declared Leeyes heavily, ‘and that’s all. And we know, don’t we, which side Steele would be on in that one. How much did they get away with at Tilson Street?’

  ‘Best part of half a million pounds in used small-denomination notes – they made the staff give them the safe keys or else.’ It was the ‘or else’ that had lifted the Calleshire and Counties Bank job out of the ordinary ruck of robberies and made Sloan so determined to catch the perpetrators. ‘And a load of boxes from their safe deposit, although no one knows what’s in them.’

  Leeyes grunted. ‘Ill-gotten gains, I expect.’

  ‘Take a bit of stashing away, that lot, sir. But none of it’s at Steele’s house or his yard, because we got a warrant and had a look-see.’

  Superintendent Leeyes jerked his head. ‘We’ll get the whole crew somehow.’

  ‘Yes, sir. In time.’ They weren’t talking about a nice ethical and theoretical discussion now. This was proper police business, not about scoring debating points for the edification of the converted.

  ‘Sooner or later one of the gang will slip up,’ he forecast.

  ‘Like Adam and Eve,’ ventured Sloan.

  ‘That’s what the ACC thinks too.’ Leeyes waved the poster in his hand. ‘I happened to mention this debate to him, in case there was any comeback…’

  ‘One can’t be too careful.’

  ‘And seeing how he was a college man and would understand.’

  ‘Ah…’ The Assistant Chief Constable had had a classical education and had a reputation for being able to put a scholarly slant on most police problems.

  ‘He said that we are all sons of Adam…’

  ‘Especially Matthew Steele,’ said Sloan.

  ‘And daughters of Adam too, I suppose,’ said Leeyes, who much disliked the recent rise in female convictions. ‘The ACC did say, though, to watch out for Steele talking digitis evidenter traiectis.’ The Superintendent grimaced. ‘Taking the mickey, that’s what he was doing. As usual.’

  ‘He’s always a great one for the Latin, the ACC.’

  ‘I had to ask him what it meant,’ admitted Leeyes unwillingly.

  Detective Inspector Sloan decided against saying anything to this. He had his pension to think of Besides, the ACC was the only person at Berebury police station capable of cutting the Superintendent down to size.

  ‘I suppose I ought to have guessed,’ sniffed Leeyes.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I don’t know where he went to school…’

  ‘Eton.’

  ‘It means that when you keep your fingers crossed you don’t mean to keep a promise.’

  Sloan said that he knew that even though he hadn’t been to Eton.

  ‘But it’s only if people can’t see that they’re crossed that it’s not cricket.’

  Sloan said that he knew that too, but that he didn’t think Matthew Steele or his associates played any of their little games according to the rules of cricket. ‘Poker, more like.’

  ‘The ACC also mentioned something about some people called the Prelapsarians as well,’ went on Leeyes, adding shamelessly, ‘but I didn’t quite catch what he said. Mean anything to you?’

  ‘No, sir. ’Fraid not.’ He brightened. ‘But I do know a joke about the Garden of Eden and evidence which might be useful.’ All they needed to arrest Matthew Steele was evidence. The bank robbers hadn’t left a shred of it behind at Tilson Street. They’d worn gloves as well as Mickey Mouse masks and had touched nothing in passing. Their getaway car had been stolen minutes before
the robbery and left abandoned minutes afterwards. Of the money and the safe-deposit boxes, there was no sign at all.

  ‘Let’s be having it, then, Sloan,’ said Leeyes sourly. ‘You never know what’ll come in handy when you’re on your feet. Especially a joke.’

  ‘It goes like this, sir. God said to Adam, “Adam, did you eat that there apple?” and Adam said, “No, God.”’

  ‘I’ve just worked it out,’ Leeyes interrupted him. ‘Prelapsarian must mean before the Fall of Man.’

  ‘Quite so, sir. Anyway, then God said to Eve, “Eve, did you eat that there apple?” and Eve said, “No, God.”’

  ‘Have a word with the serpent, after that, did he?’ enquired Leeyes. ‘If you ask me, that’s when the trouble started.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Sloan drew breath and heroically carried on. He was going to finish his story, come what may. ‘So God said, “What about them two cores, then?”’

  ‘And I take it what you haven’t got at Tilson Street, Sloan, are any cores?’

  ‘Not a thing, sir,’ said Sloan bitterly. ‘Not a single scrap of anything that the Crown Prosecution Service would call reliable evidence.’

  ‘Or even what we would call evidence,’ said Leeyes magisterially, having no very high opinion of the CPS. ‘That matters too.’

  ‘I know, sir,’ murmured Sloan.

  ‘What about the bank’s security cameras?’

  ‘One Mickey Mouse looks very like another.’

  ‘And in the meantime,’ he snorted, ‘the Vicar wants me to debate original sin with Matthew Steele…’

  ‘The Vicar doesn’t know it’s in the meantime,’ pointed out Sloan. ‘Doesn’t even know he’s got a record, I dare say. He’s probably just chosen Steele because he’s been around doing some building work in the church and because he’s got a good debating manner.’

  ‘Plausible is what I would call it…’

  ‘That’s what the Judge said too, when we got him last time.’ Sloan paused. ‘I suppose he thinks that appearing in public against you would be a bit of a lark.’

  ‘Unless the Vicar has fed him some nonsense about sanctuary.’

  ‘If you ask me, sir, what it does is confirm either that Steele is as cocky as ever and doesn’t think we’re going to make a charge stick or that for some reason he doesn’t want to upset the Vicar. Or both.’