‘Aunt, look, I really am awfully sorry but I do need this help, this information.’ Theodora fumbled for more change and rammed an unwilling fifty-pence piece into the aperture. ‘A man’s freedom may depend on it.’
Really she thought, I’m being melodramatic. How do I know that? ‘I’ve been ringing Broadbent and Helliwell all day, well twice, and I can’t get through to anyone senior enough to deal with what I want and St Sylvan’s isn’t on the phone, so I have to keep making a special trek down to the village and I really can’t keep on like this.’ Theodora was aware she sounded desperate, which she was.
‘What do you want?’ Miss Rathbone’s tone suggested she scented a challenge. She was good at challenges, getting information out of recalcitrant sources was a speciality of hers. She’d spent twenty years running hospitals in the colonies, before returning to Harrogate to sit on the bench, various school governing bodies, the parish council, anything, really, which one could sit on. A managing woman, Hugh called her with distaste, though he acknowledged her worth.
‘I need to know the contents of Canon Ben Tussock’s last, it must be his last, will.’
‘Poor Ben. I knew him for over thirty years. I know some people found him bogus but he could be great fun.’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure he could. The point is, though, I need to know about the terms of his will, his last …’
‘Why?’
‘The contents ought to concern the disposition of money and property with regard to the foundation of St Sylvan’s as against his relations,’ said Theodora carefully. ‘I gather there were at least two wills, an early one which, I think, the Church authorities are working on and a later one. It may provide a motive for murder …’
‘Leave it with me,’ said the voice authoritatively. ‘I know Gerald Broadbent quite well. We sit on the same parish council. Now, I really must go. I can see my builder sitting in his van. Don’t worry, love. I’ll get back to you.’
Theodora put down the phone and heard the last of her change clank through the system. She felt a surge of relief before it occurred to her to wonder how her godmother would do that, given the lack of telephone communication with St Sylvan’s.
Canon Beagle shut the door of the vestry behind him and carefully manoeuvred his chair into place beside the press. The vestry was rather larger than one might have supposed, he reflected. Didn’t like to be cramped when he was vesting, didn’t Augustine. Give the deerhounds room. Canon Beagle glanced at his watch. Half an hour to supper and no one likely to disturb him. He’d checked on all of them. Bootle (pity the chap hadn’t kept his noon appointment with him, he looked reliable but you could never tell these days) was still with the Bishop. The Clutton Brock female was practising in her room. Theodora had just got back from the village and gone into the kitchen. Victor Clutton Brock had strode off towards the village. Very unfit man. Mrs Lemming was up at the pool sketching away as though her life depended on it.
It was a long time since he’d been in here, he reflected. The light from the single roundel picked out the brass cross on top of the press. On the wall were a couple of photographs. One showed the old farmhouse before it had been extended by the guest-house. Must have been taken just before the war. Very pleasant it looked too. Pity people had to improve things. The other photograph showed a group of people strung out, looking rather conscious, as people asked to pose do. At one end was Tussock with his famous smile dressed for summer in a linen suit but with a clerical collar. At the other end was Bellaire in a soutane, every stiff button visible. He must have spent a fortune on dress, poor fellow.
In between were ranged a number of others. Canon Beagle adjusted his glasses and peered closer. ‘Yes, there we all were,’ he murmured. He gazed at his middle-aged self. I must have been about fifty. He looked into his confident and, as men would say (and women too, he admitted), handsome features. He passed a hand over his face and felt his tongue round his teeth. Decayed a bit since then. Though still pretty fit and fighting, he told himself. In the photograph his hand rested on the chair of a seated figure, a woman. Who would that be? Lavinia Strong, of course. Pretty she’d been then and smiling, almost with confidence, towards the camera. Life, or anyway life with Victor, had pushed her inwards, Canon Beagle thought. And next to her was Victor, little Victor with a good growth of fair floppy hair. Lost a lot of that. Beside him was another woman. Ruth, no, not Ruth of course, her mother Naomi Swallow. Handsomer than her daughter but a clear resemblance. Then a couple of men very young and fresh and innocent, just as Augustine liked them. Finally, he could make out in the background the unsmiling face of a servant who looked familiar too. Then it came to him. Bough. Tom Bough. No, Bob Bough, it must be, the father. Underneath the photograph were printed the words: Dedication of Chapel Windows, St Sylvan’s Day, 25 July 1962.
Canon Beagle sat back in his chair. That was the last time he’d been here. It seemed like yesterday. What had he done with his life in between? The clock in the tower struck the quarter. He shook himself. Better get cracking. But still he hesitated. One half of him had waited thirty years to be sure. The other half felt he did not at any price want to know. He reminded himself why he had come, why he had made this immense physical and emotional effort, made, in fact, a pilgrimage, if not to set at rest an old misery, to die knowing rather than in ignorance, even if knowledge were painful. Then, of course, there would be the pleasure of discovering if he were right, both about the hiding-place and about the stratagems, the dealings moral and ecclesiastical which had orchestrated events.
He surveyed the press. It had three drawers. He eased the first open. The shallowest of the three, it contained a box of matches, three candles, a packet of communion wafers and a tube of cough lozenges. He slammed it shut and tried the second. A clean surplice and a red stole of the season. Must be Angus’s. How about the last one? Bit like a fairytale, the third choice is the important one. He moved his chair back a little to give himself more space. His hips were aching and he felt the sweat gathering on his brow. It was the deepest of the drawers. Carefully he balanced its weight on the handles and pulled. It stuck fast. Hell’s teeth, surely it wasn’t locked? He looked carefully at the wood. No sign of a lock. He relaxed his shoulders and wrists and gently tried again. It slid out sweetly.
There, lying neat and compact, close to view was the cope, red and green, white and gold. Green chestnut-leaf foliage with red fruit wound from collar to hem and, yes, just as he had remembered them, two deer-hounds extravagantly elongated, embroidered in white silk, leaped at – what were they leaping at? Gently he turned the folds over and saw they were leaping towards the golden head of an antlered deer which, when the garment was worn, must have been displayed full across the back. Canon Beagle sucked his teeth. Some ingenuity would be needed to get Christian symbolism out of that lot. Still, it was a fine design, wonderfully executed – ‘To the glory of God, let us hope,’ Canon Beagle murmured.
It brought back that festal Eucharist of thirty years ago more vividly than anything else could. That was when the fight between Tussock and Bellaire had come to a head. He couldn’t have been paying much attention to things or else he would have remembered the design. But then he’d had a lot on his mind and the main focus of everyone’s attention had been the windows. He’d never been back. First there’d been China, then Tussock had really taken over and there’d been less point, what with one thing and another. Would he have the courage for the next step? Come on, Henry, he exhorted himself, in the tones of his grandfather who had been a missionary bishop in Africa when they still had cannibals, faint-heartedness has never been your way. He leaned forward and drew the cope from its place. It was heavy, heavier than he had ever worn; all that gold thread. He noticed some repair-work had been carefully and skilfully done to the collar. Now where would the old devil have …? With a quick movement he threw the collar and the upper part of the cope over the top of the press and edged his chair toward, shutting the drawer with his legs. Then sw
iftly he felt along the line of the shoulders. They were slightly padded. He turned them inside out. The lining was of white silk which stopped just below the shoulder line and was continued with stiff cotton. He slipped his thumb up under the seam and, lo and behold, there was a pocket and on the other side, a matching one. Damn his hands for being so swollen, the joints arthritic. He fumbled first with the right side and then with the left. Carefully he edged out the packages of papers which had laid in each since 1962.
‘Look here,’ said Inspector Bottomley to Theodora, ‘are you telling me that Ben Tussock made a will leaving everything to his daughter and if she should die within a year of him, to his grandson provided he should be accepted for Anglican orders and if he isn’t or if he dies within a similar time span, then everything goes to the St Sylvan’s Trust for the perpetuation of the pilgrimage centre?’
‘Yes,’ said Theodora. She had to admit she was proud of her godmother. Miss Rathbone had rung the post office early that Wednesday morning, twenty-four hours after receiving her commission. She’d got, of course, Mrs Turk. Theodora did rather wonder what those two formidable women had said to each other. Mrs Turk had rung Angus at Rest Vicarage and Angus had waited till after breakfast to say there was a message from her godmother. Would Theodora ring her but not before eleven because she had the builders in?
Theodora had listened carefully to Miss Rathbone’s information and then decided that Inspector Bottomley was the proper person to have it. She resigned herself to putting yet more money into the telephone box and felt she would pretty well own the machine before the retreat was finished. They’d arranged to meet at two p.m. beside the well. Their ideas of time coincided. At five to two each of them had pushed their way through the bushes and scrambled between the rocks to the terrace. They had elected to sit on the bench usually occupied by Mrs Clutton Brock. It was slightly shaded by the huge ilex. The perfect round circle of water lay quiet and untroubled below them. As Theodora looked out she wondered if it was from here that the stone which had ended Ruth’s life and been hurled.
‘Tussock made two wills. The first left everything to his wife. Pretty noble since she’d given it to him in the first place. Marriage settlements like that ought not to be allowed. Then when Muriel developed Alzheimer’s he remade the will.’
‘What sort of sums are we talking about?’ asked the Inspector.
‘Three-quarters of a million at the very least.’
‘Worth killing for.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And the daughter?’ The Inspector pressed on.
‘Is named in the will as Ruth Swallow.’
‘No explanations?’
‘No explanations, no excuses, no mention even of the mother’s name, nothing, apparently.’
‘Cool customer. And him a clergyman.’
‘Yes,’ said Theodora bleakly. She wasn’t going to discuss the sins of the flesh with an outsider.
‘How would this work out as a motive for killing her?’
‘Well it would rank at least as high as her carrying a child, which we have no reason to think the father did not want.’
‘Cui bono?’ asked Inspector Bottomley. She liked the phrase.
‘Ruth first, then Guy, then the foundation of St Sylvan.’
‘So Guy has to be a suspect. He’d benefit considerably. And that being so, I really do need to get hold of him.’ Inspector Bottomley didn’t like to admit that she was both surprised and worried by the police’s inability to lay hands on him. The lad marched around with an orange tent and a yellow mountain bike. By all the probabilities he ought to be within a twenty-mile radius of the centre, in territory most of which was forest. It should have been a piece of cake. Still, she wasn’t going to share her professional worries with an outsider.
‘It’s an odd condition,’ she pressed on, ‘Guy to be a priest before he could inherit.’
‘I suppose the thinking would be family first, St Sylvan’s next. And if the family were to be a priest then he might well want to carry on funding the foundation.’
‘But for the foundation to be sure of benefiting, Ruth had to be dead within a twelvemonth.’
‘Yes. Though, in fact, if he’d bothered to know Ruth, I think he would have found that she loved the place so much she might well have devoted any resources she inherited to keeping it going.’
‘But if he didn’t know her he couldn’t guarantee that.’
‘No, I suppose not.’ Theodora felt a surge of anger at Canon Tussock. How could he not have acknowledged his own daughter during her life? How could he not have wanted to know her? To know her quality, to have an authoritative hand in forming and enhancing it, in seeing it had proper scope? What was he thinking of? His own reputation presumably.
‘Who would know of the terms of the will?’
‘There’s no reason to suppose that Ruth did, but Guy did.’
‘Haven’t the lawyers been a bit slow off the mark? I mean since she was the first legatee, shouldn’t they have informed her?’
‘I gather from my godmother that the senior partner died a few days after Canon Tussock, so there might have been a delay. Guy, on the other hand, had made inquiries and had been told he inherited if Canon Tussock’s daughter died within a twelvemonth. The solicitors say Guy assumed the old man was wandering since he knew of no daughter.’
‘So his assumption would be he would get the lot.’
‘Unless he didn’t become a priest or …’
‘Unless he died too before the year’s end.’
‘Right. And I think from that phone call I had from him he’s hiding because he thinks someone who would like the money to go to the foundation has it in mind to kill him to make sure of it.’
‘It’s possible,’ Inspector Bottomley ruminated. ‘On the other hand that could just be a ploy to put us off if he had actually killed Ruth. Did Ruth never find out who her father was?’
‘Mrs Turk said that Ruth did know. She came and saw her the night before our party arrived and told her that some of her father’s relations were coming for the week.’
‘How do you reckon she’d found out, if the lawyers hadn’t told her?’
Theodora grinned. ‘Come and see how the religious mind works.’
Together they scrambled down through the rocks and made their way to the chapel. It was light and silent. The sanctuary lamp was an unobtrusive red blob in the distance. Theodora led Inspector Bottomley down the tiny aisle and stopped at the chancel steps. The east window was of plain glass so that it let in the morning sun. The two windows to the north and south, however, were of coloured glass. Theodora pointed to the south window. It showed Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane at the moment of Judas’s betrayal. The figure of Judas leaned towards Christ. One hand reached to embrace Him, the other was held behind him. In that hand was a skull. But it was the face of Judas which attracted the Inspector’s attention. The face was unmistakably the face in the portrait in the hall of the guesthouse, the face of Augustine Bellaire.
Inspector Bottomley gazed at it for a moment. ‘I take it Tussock commissioned that one?’
‘Yes. You can see the name of the donor at the bottom left-hand corner. However, if you turn round you can see Bellaire’s revenge.’
Inspector Bottomley revolved to gaze at the northern light. The artist had executed a picture of an ancient male figure in a meadow of corn. He was leaning on a scythe and beside him was an eggtimer. Peering round the egg-timer was the smiling face of a ram. The face of the male figure and the face of the ram resembled each other and both bore some likeness to Ben Tussock.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Inspector Bottomley.
‘Father time, Death the Reaper, or as I think Ruth understood it, “I am the mower Damon known Through all the meadows I have mown.”’
‘Keep going.’
‘The figure of the mower has a double significance. It could be taken as an allusion both to death and to mowing a
s sexual conquest.’
‘And that, coupled with the ram, leaves us in no doubt as to Augustine Bellaire’s notion of what Canon Tussock’s habits were.’
‘Right.’
‘Didn’t care for each other?’
‘Right.’
‘Bit public, quarrelling in glass.’
‘Religious polemic: a particularly bitter genre.’
‘When did you work this lot out?’
Theodora blushed. ‘I came in here to meditate on the afternoon of the murder. I sat in the chancel. It sort of stared out at me after a bit.’
Inspector Bottomley nodded. She turned away from the windows and sat down in a pew. ‘Now let’s work this lot out,’ she said. ‘Tussock calls Augustine Bellaire a Judas. Why?’
Theodora filled her in on Bob Bough’s sentiments about Father Augustine. ‘Betrayal of what are usually taken to be central Christian sexual values.’
‘And Bellaire calls Tussock a reaper and a ram because he knew about Ruth or rather her mother Naomi. How does this help us?’
‘Either someone thought the Tussock money ought to go to the foundation or perhaps one of Bellaire’s lads is doing a bit of revenge on the Tussock family. Or perhaps both of those motives combined. You do see, don’t you,’ Theodora leaned forward and fixed a serious eye on the Inspector, ‘it opens up the whole area of motive quite considerably.’
‘You don’t think Tom Bough did it, then?’
‘Oh, come on. If Tom wanted to kill his woman he might beat her up or throttle her in a mad hig. But he’s not the sort to hang about and then heave a rock at her from a distance.’
‘I see what you mean. Have you done this sort of thing before?’
‘Well, I did know a dean who got his throat cut when I was doing a placement at Bow St Aelfric, and then there was a residentiary canon out at Medwich who got his neck broken quite deservedly.’
‘Yes, OK, I get your point. Do you get paid for it?’
Theodora was scandalised. She let the tasteless remark lie between them for a moment and then resumed. ‘What worries me is the method of killing Ruth. It has religious, well biblical, overtones. Stoning is the sort of thing which happens to people who are ritually or morally unclean. It’s a way of killing without, literally without, getting your hands dirty. So as a killer you stay pure whilst dispatching the impure.’
Every Deadly Sin Page 14