Theodora prayed the blessing in spite of all, to wind up the spell of the liturgy.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Broken Peace
The day after the murder the path from St Sylvan’s to the village of Rest was crowded. A police van and a couple of private cars had already passed Theodora as she made her way towards the village after breakfast. So that was the end of the peace and solitude of the place. It didn’t feel like a Monday morning. It didn’t feel like anything. She had slept shortly and badly. What was happening at this place? This holy place? Say the biretta and skull incident were linked to last night’s appearance of the cope at the chapel door, and both to the murder of Ruth Swallow. What message was being sent and by whom and to whom? Both biretta and cope belonged to Father Augustine Bellaire. Would the biretta’s place under the skull suggest that Father Augustine was being connected with death, the nail that the death was deserved? But that was idiotic. The man had died with his boots on at a ripe old age. All deaths of that kind were deserved. They have no menace or tragedy in them. Theodora was not a solver of crosswords, she didn’t care to be taunted with clues. The thing that was clear was that the only way to restore St Sylvan’s to its peaceful state was to find out who killed Ruth and why, and who played silly beggars with skulls and copes.
Theodora dodged round a couple of sheep straying down the middle of the path who seemed not to know where they were but were bent on eating as much as they could before being returned to the rest of their kind. Just one more sign of chaos and stupidity, thought Theodora testily, as they went through the rigmarole of being terrified at the approach of a human being and bolting another twenty yards down the lane. There were no hypotheses she could frame until she knew much more about Ruth. The best source of that information would be her aunt, Mrs Turk of the village shop. She would also need to know about the history of St Sylvan’s as a pilgrimage centre. She’d seek help there from Canon Beagle, he looked sane enough, and perhaps Lavinia Strong, Mrs Clutton Brock. About Mr Clutton Brock she would have to penetrate Mrs C.B.’s immense reserve to get any information there.
Then, of course, there was Guy. Why on earth had the lad disappeared? He must realise that he would be needed for inquiries and would be caught in due course. Would he have killed Ruth? Whyever should he want to? She rather wished she’d been more forthcoming to Inspector Bottomley. There was information she could do with which only the police would have. When precisely had Ruth been killed and had it been the head wound or had she drowned? What about Tom Bough? What did the police think about him?
Theodora stepped down into the dimly lit space of the village shop. There wasn’t much room and what there was was further confined by a couple of nets of spinach and open sacks of potatoes and beans. From one of the latter, as Theodora stumbled against it, there rose a huge black shape which changed slowly into an affronted cat. It glared for a moment and then sat down again folding its feet deliberately beneath itself and taking up its stance as though waiting to be entertained.
Theodora looked around. The window, which did not display goods for sale, was nearly at floor-level and kept out the light by being papered with advertisements for teas of a make with which Theodora was unfamiliar, though whether by virtue of their age or their northern provenance, she could not tell. This arrangement left the upper part of the room in darkness. She had entered with bent head and wondered if she dare stretch up. A thin pipe ran out of the back of the shop and ended in the gauze bulb of a gas mantle. It was not, however, lit. Dangling from a beam not too far above her was a string of onions and a swatch of bacon. The place smelt strongly of spices, apples and cat. To her left, however, unexpected in this 1900s interior, she noticed wedged up into the corner, a useful-looking full wine rack. Of the proprietor there was no sign. As she had entered a bell quivered on a spring but this had produced neither noise nor occupant. Theodora waited. The cat waited. Then a voice, ‘They do say that the chemicals used to decaffeinate coffee are more harmful to us than the caffeine in the original liquor.’
Theodora peered into the shadows whence came the voice. Slowly as her eyes got used to the dimness she made out an immense shape which she had at first taken to be part of the furniture. The voice from the shape was soft, modulated, with a northern accent but somehow cultivated. The shape leaned forward over the counter and said quietly, ‘Would it be Miss Braithwaite, in deacons’ orders, from St Sylvan’s?’
‘Yes,’ said Theodora. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘Rosanna Turk,’ said the bulk and an enormous arm extended itself across the counter. Theodora met a firm grip.
‘I’m so very sorry about Ruth,’ said Theodora.’
There was a pause then Mrs Turk said, ‘“I have discussed, we are but dust, and die we must.” But,’ she added, ‘I look for retribution.’ She half-rose out of her seat, fixed her eye on Theodora and said, ‘St Sylvan’s had much to answer for.’
Theodora thought, there’s no point in beating about the bush with banalities which Mrs Turk would scorn. ‘I was wondering’, she said, ‘if you could help.’
‘The bacon’s good,’ said her hostess. ‘It will not exude large quantities of water when fried. It has been properly cured by Mr Rowbottom of Broadcourt Home Farm, whose family have done it for six generations. The cheese is better,’ she went on. ‘I have the same factor as Fortnum’s for cheddar. They approve my conditions for keeping it. It is strange, do you not think, Miss Braithwaite, that appreciation of fine foods and wines (my own selection is not negligible) –’ she waved a hand at the rack – ‘on the part of the newly rich, outstrips their knowledge of the culture and values, the literature, upon which these products were originally based?’
‘I’ve never thought about the connections between food and literary values,’ said Theodora with honesty. ‘I think I may have been brought up to suppose high thinking went with plain living.’
‘There’s plain and there’s junk; as in food, so in morals. My poor niece now …’
‘Your brother’s child?’ Theodora hazarded. It was time, she felt, to get down to brass tacks.
‘I shall tell you all you need to know. But first we need refreshment.’ Mrs Turk consulted her watch. It was a delicate gold piece pinned on her chest like a medal. Her double chins made consultation something of a dramatic gesture. She had to lower her shoulders and extend her neck upwards, then bend her head from the poll like a well-made horse. With surprising fleetness of foot, Mrs Turk stepped backwards into the shadows and opened a matchwood door behind her. Theodora had a brief vision of a parlour complete with rag rug, china dogs and a mantelshelf clock. She waited. There was a sound of thunder and a juddering of pipes, then the high whirring of a coffee grinder and a smell of fresh coffee. A few moments later Mrs Turk put down a tray with a Rockingham coffee pot and two matching cups on it.
‘Draw up,’ she invited Theodora. ‘Turf Rodney off. She’s much too possessive about those beans.’
Theodora looked the cat in the eye and thought she wouldn’t care to mix it with Rodney, whatever its sex. Instead she pulled up a small wooden chair of the sort sometimes found beside tennis courts for linesmen.
The coffee was full and rich.
‘Packed with caffeine,’ said Mrs Turk.
‘I need to know about Ruth, Tom Bough and St Sylvan’s.’ Theodora set out her agenda. ‘I have a feeling her death is more connected with the place than with anything else.’
‘My niece is the daughter of my only sister, Naomi. Of that there is no doubt. About her father, however, there is less certitude. You may think’, she leaned over her coffee cup towards Theodora, ‘such a question is nihiliflocci.’
Theodora had to admit to herself that that had not been her thought.
‘But I assure you,’ Mrs Turk went on, ‘in a community of this size and composition, it mattered out of all proportion who one’s father was. And thirty years ago yet more. Of course, the Swallows, my father’s family, were an old St Sylvan’s
family. We were farriers here since the Civil War. So Naomi and I were people with a place. It was, therefore, a disaster for her when she became pregnant without first having taken the precaution of marriage.’
‘When would this be?’ Theodora enquired.
‘Ruth was thirty. Not far, I would judge, from your own years. Naomi conceived in the summer of 1962 whilst helping with the domestic arrangement of St Sylvan’s for its annual feast day.’
‘Did she not divulge the father’s name?’ Theodora realised she was picking up Mrs Turk’s diction.
‘We were very close as sisters. I was the elder by only two years. We kept little from each other but this she would not tell me. Whether she told anyone else, I do not know. She was extremely distressed. She had wanted children. The domestic life appealed to her as it does to many women,’ Mrs Turk extended her broad forgiveness to those of her sex who were so mistaken as to pursue such a line, ‘but not quite in the way it happened.’
‘What happened?’
‘My sister had the child away from home, itself a departure from the custom of our family, in hospital in Bradford. Then she died the following year.’
‘So who …?’
‘There was no one else but me. My husband had departed for more delectable pastures after three years of our union. I had not been blessed with children, so I had no objection. It seemed to me I might have the pleasure of childrearing without the physical and mental pain of birth. Certainly I had the pleasure of educating Ruth. She is,’ Mrs Turk stopped and frowned, ‘she could have been a good scholar.’ Mrs Turk used the old-fashioned word. ‘She was well grounded in English and French literature. She was mathematically competent.’ Mrs Turk stopped and fixed her eye on Theodora. ‘Have you the learned tongues?’ she enquired.
It was rare, Theodora realised for anyone to actually value such knowledge nowadays. ‘Yes, a smattering,’ said Theodora who had a first in classical mods.
‘You are to be envied. Such riches,’ said Mrs Turk. ‘I have had to teach myself, which is laborious and lays one open to shaming lacuna and mistakes.’ She cocked an eye at Theodora. Theodora had not detected any mistakes anywhere in Mrs Turk’s eloquent discourse and she didn’t in any case judge people’s moral worth by that means.
‘What about Ruth?’ Theodora pressed her.
‘Ruth. As is often the case with parenthood, I believe, she took against her teachers and wanted nothing more than to follow the domestic life. I thought if one were going to do nothing but cook, then at least she should be trained for it. But she wouldn’t. She started a course in Bradford. Then when Humphrey Broad had his last stroke, she came back and went to Broadcourt to nurse him. When he died – I do not think there was any causal connection – she took on the domestic management of St Sylvan’s. An utter waste. As it had been with her mother before her.’
‘She seemed to me,’ Theodora said, ‘to have made a complete, integrated, almost religious life out of it. There was something nunlike about her. She grew much of what she cooked and what she cooked was of its kind excellent. And after all if she was happy …’
Mrs Turk snorted. ‘There are noble sources of happiness and banausic ones. She would be happy taking the whole day making a cherry pie, taking the stones out, cooking the pastry. She did everything so slowly. I can’t say how irritating I found it.’
‘Was she going to settle down and marry Tom Bough?’
‘I believe that was her, if not his, intention.’
‘Was he not for settling?’
‘Oh, he’s a good enough man is Bough. There’ve always been Boughs at Rest.’ Mrs Turk seemed to estimate moral worth in terms of residence. ‘It’s just that he’s fifteen years older than she. Literature is littered with the folly accruing from such arrangements.’
‘And her death?’ Theodora pressed her. ‘How might that be related?’
‘I always thought her wish to return to St Sylvan’s was au fond a wish to find out who her father was.’
‘Did she care that much?’
‘She liked the idea of a family, brothers, cousins, that sort of thing. She wasn’t mystical, blood bonds and all that, just, well, just domestic.’
Theodora considered. ‘Wouldn’t there have been records of who visited St Sylvan’s at the time of Naomi’s affair? Couldn’t Ruth, if she’d really wanted to, have found out, eliminated the possibilities?’
‘I don’t know whether Bellaire was the sort of man who kept records. He always struck me as rather wilful, just an autocrat who happened to have taken up religion, not a religious man who happened to be autocratic. But perhaps I am wrong. I am not myself croyante.’
‘But if Ruth was that keen? If she’d started asking around about her father, and if she had found out and that knowledge was inconvenient for someone?’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Turk. She sounded suddenly tired and dispirited. The élan, the bravura had gone. ‘Yes, I think she may have found out who her father was. I don’t know how. But she came down to see me on the Friday night, the night before the new set of pilgrims, of whom, I suppose you are one, arrived on Saturday. She said, “I think I’ve got some relations coming on Saturday. Some of my dad’s people.’
‘She mentioned no names?’
‘None. She was as close as ever her mother was.’
‘It’s a beginning,’ said Theodora. ‘It’s better than nothing.’ It’s better, she thought, than the police have managed. ‘Did she say anything else?’
‘Just one more thing. When I asked her who she thought was coming, she said, ‘“I am the mower Damon known Through all the meadows I have mown.”’
Mrs Turk turned her eye on Theodora. ‘Now what would you make of that?’
Theodora felt it was some sort of test. ‘A metaphor for death or for sexual conquest.’
‘Take it whichever way you like,’ said Mrs Turk.
At nine-thirty on Tuesday morning in the library now doubling as the incident room and filled with the desired computer, phones and filing cabinets – Inspector Bottomley and Sergeant Luff pored over the doctor’s report, the ballistic expert’s report, their case notes and the statements of all relevant parties. They’d interviewed the aunt, Mrs Turk. She had told them no more than they already knew. At tenthirty Inspector Bottomley had Tom Bough in again and at ten-fifty she invited him to accompany them to Wormald police station to help them with their inquiries. He’d not helped himself. He’d been truculent, monosyllabic, turning his head away from each of them in turn like a horse refusing a jump. Luff had been through the records. Yes, he’d done eighteen months for GBH. It had been fifteen years ago. He’d been no more than a lad and in drink at the time. Frederika offered the medical report which showed Ruth was due to have a child. Was it his child? He bloody well hoped so. He’d stopped, realising there would be no child. No Ruth. He’d shut his mouth then and would say no more.
Inspector Bottomley told Luff she didn’t like the look of the case at all. She badly wanted to question Guy and she wanted the travellers’ van found – and what was Luff doing about it? Luff admitted both seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. Inspector Bottomley made disapproving noises. But in the absence of both and given the balance of probabilities, she felt she could do no other than follow her training. Luff had been quietly delighted. It was his first proper murder and if it was that easy he didn’t doubt he’d make Detective Sergeant by the New Year. He had nous enough to keep his thoughts to himself.
‘What do you want me to do, Inspector?’ he asked to keep his superior in countenance.
‘Stay on here and get this lot cleared up. Give the press that statement I prepared and keep them happy and ignorant. I’m going down to Wormald with Bough and if I don’t get what I want, I’ll be back tonight and I want to find it all nice and quiet and shipshape here. This place isn’t meant for noise and flashbulbs.’
The guest-house was, by its own standards, pandemonium. Canon Beagle bowled his chair dow
n the corridor scattering youthful police and reporters to left and right. Those who had known him in his younger days would have recognised a fly-half of international standard making for the three-quarter line. His eye glowed red. He uttered not a word. He knew what he was after. He made for the library at a good pace. Outside he braked and accosted a surprised policeman by saying, ‘Can I have a go on your machine?’
‘Eh?’ said the startled constable.
‘Your machine. Your portable phone.’
‘Well, er, I …’ This was outside the youth’s experience.
‘I need to get hold of Angus, Mr Bootle. He’s at his vicarage. Wise man. It’s not that I couldn’t do it, make the journey. But I need him now.’
‘If it’s important, sir, could I help you?’ He was a country youth and had not learned to be disobliging.
‘It is important but I don’t think you can help, Officer. It’s a pastoral matter,’ he explained. ‘The Church.’ He touched his collar.
‘Ah.’ The constable hesitated. He wasn’t sure whether he should be impressed or not. He didn’t really know terribly much about the Church. It hadn’t impinged on him much before this interesting débâcle.
‘Look, show me how it works,’ Canon Beagle invited. It was an inspiration. Who can resist showing off knowledge?
‘You just …’ said the constable.
‘Marvellous. Thanks very much,’ said Canon Beagle and clicked Angus’s number.
‘Hello, Bootle?’ Canon Beagle made no concessions to modern familiarity. ‘About that skull business.’ He glanced at the constable who was hovering. ‘I think I should have a word. Can you come up? After your sick communions? Right. I’ll be by the well.’ He glanced at the policeman. ‘More private. Dinky little beasts, aren’t they? Thanks awfully, Officer.’
The constable looked as though he thought he ought to say a word but couldn’t think which one. The Canon swivelled round him and made for the well. There was a lot of white tape round it but no actual policemen. Canon Beagle held up the tape with one hand and bowled his chair through with the other. He made the terrace and posted himself in the shade of the ilex. The sun still shone. That made three days in succession. It was warmer than it had a right to be in Yorkshire at any time of year.
Every Deadly Sin Page 11