She dabbed at her eyes again, then looked up at Father Gilbert. “I can’t believe David Todd would do such a thing. I know the two men disagreed, but to resort to murder…”
“Did Lord Haysham have other enemies – anyone else who might want to harm him?” Father Gilbert asked. He thought, from her vantage point as the church secretary, she’d know more than he would.
“In my experience, men of wealth and power always generate an unreasonable resentment in some people. And there are enough sick-minded people out there who’d take violent action,” she said.
Father Gilbert was about to re-ask the question, hoping she might think of someone specific, when he saw her expression change. Her eyes went cold as they saw something behind him. Or someone.
Father Benson saw the same thing and turned to see what had triggered the change.
Father Gilbert smelled the perfume and knew the reason.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Mary Aston said. She stepped into Father Gilbert’s line of sight.
Father Benson stood up. “Good morning.”
“May we help you?” Mrs Mayhew asked in a frosty tone.
Mary kept her eyes on Father Gilbert. “I’d like to talk to you – privately.”
Father Gilbert waved a hand towards his office. “Of course. Come in.”
With a stone-like stare, Mrs Mayhew watched as Father Gilbert allowed Mary to pass through. Father Benson gave him a cautionary nod.
The instant he closed the door, Mary fell into his arms and buried her face in his chest. Her sobs were quiet and her shoulders gently shook.
He put his arms up in a gesture of comfort, but didn’t draw her close.
“I can’t believe the news about Lord Haysham,” she said when she had composed herself. She stepped away from him and moved to the chair. A tissue appeared from nowhere. She touched it to her cheeks and nose. “Who would do such a thing?”
“The police suspect David Todd.”
She spun around. “No!” then “He wouldn’t!” then “Would he?”
“You know him better than I do.”
“Why do you think that?” she asked.
He shrugged. “An impression I picked up somewhere.”
She sat down and wrapped her arms around her handbag. She looked small somehow, almost vulnerable. “We were close because of my investigation.”
“The Woodrich Set brought you together?” Father Gilbert asked. A sharp look. “You could say that.”
“The police will want to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“Where’ve you been for the past day?”
“In London.”
“Can you prove that?”
She looked concerned. “Do they consider me a suspect, as well?”
He leaned against his desk. “Should they?”
She frowned at him. “For a priest, you have a strange way of comforting people.”
“Are you here for comfort?” He knew he sounded ill-tempered. He wasn’t sure why he was being so hard on her.
“Do you suspect me of something?” she asked.
“Did you visit Clive Challoner after you left me?”
“At that hour? No. Why?”
“He died of a heart attack that night.”
A shadow moved across her face. “That’s why no one answered my calls.”
“There was a pentagram scratched in the wood just next to his front door,” he said.
She stood up. Her face was a picture of indignation. “You think there’s a connection to me because I had that pentagram on my computer?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
Her cheeks turned red and her nostrils flared. An unattractive look for some women, but not her. She really was a magnificent creature. “I’m capable of a lot of things, Father, but inducing heart attacks isn’t on my list of talents.”
He was unmoved by her indignation. “Do you know of anyone who might follow you around in a red car?”
“I have several acquaintances with red cars. Red cars are common enough.” Her perfectly formed eyebrows lifted. “I’m being followed?”
“When you left my house the other night.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I tried to ring you.”
“My mobile is useless,” she said. She opened her handbag and dropped the tissue in. She exhaled loudly, exasperated. “I’m obviously on your list of suspects, so it’s probably best that I go. I’ll grieve somewhere else.”
Her peevishness annoyed him. Even if her emotions were real, they seemed like a tool she was using to play him.
When he didn’t respond, she made as if to go past him to the door. For all the room she had in which to move, she steered very close to him. She was giving him a last chance.
“Wait.” He lightly touched her arm. “I don’t like the feeling of being played. I’m not sure who to trust.”
Her expression softened. “There are ways to earn trust.”
Father Gilbert understood her meaning, then removed his hand and took a step back. Was she sincere or was it an instinctive form of manipulation? He didn’t want to find out. Moving away from her, he said, “Clive Challoner’s daughter mentioned a vault.”
The significance registered in her eyes. “What vault?”
“It’s in a mausoleum at the Sussex Memorial Gardens near Southaven.”
“Did she say anything about the sword?”
“She didn’t know anything about it.”
“Maybe it’s there. Maybe it was put there for some reason.” She slung her handbag onto her shoulder. “I want to see the vault.”
“We’ll see the vault,” Father Gilbert said.
CHAPTER 22
As it turned out, the young woman in the Memorial Gardens office didn’t care that Father Gilbert was a priest or why he was there. She had the look of a goth girl, a pale face set off by dyed jet-black hair, heavy black eyeliner, and a diamond stud in her nose. She politely showed them a map of the grounds and where the mausoleum was located. The phone rang and she turned away.
The cemetery was vast, with a maze of stone paths stretching out to different sections. The tombstones ranged from modest squares and rectangles to long slabs and ornate sculptures of angels and crosses. Many of the markers seemed to have their own personal style, as if it was the last chance for the dead to look unique rather than as they really were: dust and bone.
The ground was a sodden cushion from the earlier rain. The sun hadn’t emerged with enough force to dry anything. They reached the mausoleum – a plain grey stone structure with an arched roof and a matching archway above a black iron gate, straight out of a Hammer horror film. They stepped across a puddle in front of a single step to the gate. Father Gilbert grabbed the latch to the gate and pulled. It opened on rusty hinges.
“How clichéd,” Mary said.
Father Gilbert led the way into a damp room. The ceiling was probably seven feet high. The cement floor was uneven. The walls contained columns of square markers, four in each column, lopsided and tilted, as if each new coffin was slotted in however it might fit best. Everything was shrouded in a bleak grey light, with black shadows sprayed here and there like paint. Father Gilbert half-expected Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee to step out. He wished he’d brought a torch.
“I shudder to think of the condition of that sword if they put it in here,” Mary said. “What were they thinking? How could they not know its value?”
“If they thought it was cursed, they may have hoped the grave would eat it up.”
“Superstition.” Mary drifted to one wall.
“It was enough to drive Rachel Ainsley to demand that the vestry remove that sword from her house,” Father Gilbert said as he moved to look at another wall. “Albert Challoner took her seriously enough to agree.”
“Do vergers usually believe in curses?” she asked.
Father Gilbert tried to come up with a glib response and failed.
At a glance, he saw that th
e dates on the various markers in front of him went back to the early eighteenth century. Each vault was sealed up tight. If the sword had been placed in one of these chambers, he’d have a hard time knowing which one.
They moved along the walls, stepping past the many other family remains represented there.
“Here’s Albert Challoner,” Mary said, her voice a damp echo. “He died in 1947.”
Father Gilbert joined her to look. Albert’s final resting place was second down from the roof of the mausoleum. The bottom of the marker was partially obscured by a thick moss that had spread over a large portion of that column of markers.
“I assume they didn’t put the sword with him,” she said. “It must be with someone who’d died prior to or in 1938.”
“Or in an empty chamber,” Father Gilbert suggested. “If it’s here at all.”
“How do we get past this moss?” she asked.
He looked around for anything hard and found a jagged piece of concrete. He used it to scrape downwards from Albert Challoner’s name. The moss came away in smeared chunks – and a section fell away to reveal a symbol ornately engraved into the lower part of the marker. A pentagram.
“That’s interesting,” Mary exclaimed.
Father Gilbert stepped back to look at the symbol. “So it is.”
“Like I told you, a pentagram doesn’t always suggest Satanism.” She reached up to touch the symbol. “Maybe Albert was a Freemason.”
“Maybe.” Father Gilbert was annoyed by the ambiguity of the symbol. But his instinct told him that it was there for no holy purpose.
Mary coughed slightly. “It’s too oppressive in here. I’ve got to get some air.” She moved back to the gate.
Father Gilbert continued to scrape at the moss until he’d cleared the remaining markers. The Challoners had deaths in 1901, 1910, three in 1919 from the Spanish Flu, and another in 1924. He scrutinized the area around the crypt from 1924, but couldn’t find a way to get inside any of them without a sledgehammer.
A shadow moved across the wall. He turned, assuming Mary had returned. No one was there. He held still, listening. He heard a low rumble, as if a hard, strong wind moved through the unseen parts of the mausoleum. Craning his neck, he looked through the open doorway. The scattered trees within eyesight were perfectly still.
He turned back to the wall of vaults. The Challoners in repose. His eyes drifted to a column of names and dates from the nineteenth century. One name caught his eye. He moved closer. The craftsmanship on the marker looked newer than the others.
Richard Doyle Challoner
In The Arms of His Lord
14th December, 1872 – 3rd August, 1889
“Doyle,” Father Gilbert said softly.
* * *
Father Gilbert emerged from the mausoleum and closed the gate behind him. “We can’t do anything more without the family’s permission.”
“Or without a pneumatic drill.” Mary stood a few feet away, gazing pensively at the cemetery. She puffed on a cigarette.
“You smoke?”
“Only on occasion,” she said, then added, “You would have seen one of those occasions for yourself if you weren’t such a prude.”
He looked away.
She tossed the cigarette down. It hissed in the wet grass. She stamped it out. “It was silly to hope that we could open one of the vaults like a file drawer and find the sword just lying there.”
“Clive Challoner will be buried here in a few days. We might get permission from the family then.”
She sighed. “It’s not here.”
“How do you know?”
“I can feel it.” She nudged the smashed cigarette with the toe of her shoe. “Call it intuition.”
“Did your intuition also tell you that there’s a relationship between the Challoner and Doyle families?”
She turned to him. “What relationship?”
He told her about the marker for Richard Doyle Challoner.
“Don’t all of these local families have a shared gene pool?” she asked with a smirk.
Father Gilbert shrugged. “The connection may mean nothing, or…”
Mary wrapped her arms around herself as if suppressing a shiver. “Can we go? I’m going to be late for another appointment.”
“With anyone I know?” Father Gilbert asked.
“DS Sanders. Maybe he suspects me, too.” She shot him a sharp look, then walked away.
* * *
Mrs Mayhew frowned at Father Gilbert from her desk.
“Is there something wrong?” he asked.
She opened her mouth as if to reply, then closed it again. He knew she wanted to say something about Mary Aston. She was bursting to say something.
Instead, she adjusted the pens in the cup-like holder as if they were flowers in a vase. “Father Benson would like to see you,” she eventually said.
Father Benson’s office was little more than a closet with a metal desk, chairs, and bookshelves. The bookshelves were empty. Three unpacked boxes sat against the windowless wall.
“You left with Mary Aston,” he said as he stood up behind his desk.
“That’s correct.”
“She also showed up at your house and you went to the pub together.”
Better that than my bedroom, Father Gilbert almost said, but nodded instead.
“This morning you met her in your office, whereupon you closed the door.”
“Also correct,” Father Gilbert said.
“Then you left with her for over an hour.”
“Correct again,” Father Gilbert said. Rather than feeling annoyed or defensive, he was impressed that the young priest had the courage to speak up so directly.
“Isn’t that rather reckless?”
“Is it?” He knew it was reckless, but wanted to see just how far Father Benson would go.
“She’s a beautiful woman.” Father Benson’s cheeks flushed – not from anger, but embarrassment. “You know how often priests are accused of sexual harassment. If Mary decided to make a case against you, if she showed up somewhere right now with her hair messed up and her dress dishevelled and streaks of tears on her cheeks and suggested that you’d made unwanted advances, the evidence would be rather damning.”
Father Gilbert stood for a moment, waiting to see if there was anything else the priest wanted to say. Benson held his ground, waiting. Father Gilbert inclined his head. “Point taken.”
Benson nodded, then sat down again as if exhausted from the effort of being so honest. “I’m sorry. I hope that wasn’t over the top.”
“Not at all,” Father Gilbert said, sitting down in the visitor’s chair. The metal creaked. Not only did it creak, but it was hard and uncomfortable. “You are right to speak up. Perhaps you should chaperone us from now on.”
Benson offered a non-committal chuckle, as if he wasn’t sure whether Father Gilbert was joking or not. Father Gilbert wasn’t sure himself.
“Mary and I drove to the Challoner mausoleum,” Father Gilbert said. “We didn’t find a sword. But, curiously, there was an engraving of a pentagram on Albert Challoner’s marker.”
“Another one.”
Father Gilbert shifted in the chair. “I also found the marker for a young man named Richard Doyle Challoner.”
“There’s a relationship between the two families?” Benson asked.
“He died in early August, 1889.”
Benson shook his head. “Is that significant?”
“That’s the date on the letter from Francis Todd. The one addressed to D,” Father Gilbert said.
“D for Doyle?”
It made sense. Father Gilbert drummed his fingers lightly on the chair arms. “We may be going about this the wrong way. We’re looking for the sword. Maybe we should be looking for the skeleton.”
* * *
In the reception area, Father Gilbert said, “Mrs Mayhew, will you go through the archives again to see if you can find any reference to that skeleton found in 1938?”
“What became of it.”
Mrs Mayhew wrote a note on her desk pad. “I would be surprised to find that information in our archives. I suppose the police will have files about it. The skeleton was removed by them, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. Find out whatever you can, please.”
“Of course.”
“Oh – and phone Detective Sanders with anything you discover,” he added. “He’s looking into it from the police side.”
“All right.”
“Come on,” Father Gilbert said to Benson, “we have just enough time to find that letter at David Todd’s house before the noon service.”
Benson returned to his office to grab his car keys.
Father Gilbert leaned on Mrs Mayhew’s desk. “I know Mary Aston’s not to be trusted,” he said softly.
“It’s not merely about trust, Father,” Mrs Mayhew said. “I believe that woman is dangerous.”
CHAPTER 23
David Todd’s house was at the far end of a narrow lane bordered on both sides by walls of trees. Though the sun had broken through the clouds, the woods seemed particularly dark, even ominous. Father Benson had to weave the car left and right to avoid ruts in the road. It made Father Gilbert feel nauseous.
“What happened when you talked to David Todd?” Father Benson asked.
Father Gilbert summarized the experience, including Todd’s psychotic behaviour. He left out the part about the video camera.
“What do you make of it?” Benson asked.
“He’s in a battle,” Father Gilbert said.
“With insanity?”
“With evil.”
Benson glanced at him. “We’re all in a battle with evil, aren’t we?”
“We’re fighting our fallen nature and the evil that wants to exploit it. I suspect he’s fighting something more overt – a specific force of evil.”
“You’re going to have to explain that to me.” Benson dodged another rut. “I don’t know what you believe about evil. I suppose we should have talked about it before I took this job.”
Father Gilbert conceded the oversight with a chuckle. “Do you know why I left Scotland Yard to become a priest?”
The Body Under the Bridge Page 16