The Body Under the Bridge

by Paul McCuster

  “He could have been dragged behind a neighbour’s house.”

  “Those houses are fifty yards away, maybe more. The obvious conclusion is that he hit me, took the ring, and ran off.” Father Gilbert rubbed his eyes. The pain was receding. “Or…”

  “Or?”

  “He was under some kind of demonic influence.”

  “We should tell the police.”

  “We should,” said Father Gilbert. “And do we tell them about the shadow-man?”

  Benson pressed his lips together and didn’t answer.

  Father Gilbert’s mobile phone rang. He fumbled retrieving it from his pocket and, with more fumbling, pushed the button. “This is Father Gilbert,” he said.

  “Gilbert? Macaulay here.”

  “Yes, Chief Constable?”

  “Have you any idea where Mary Aston is?”

  “I haven’t spoken to her today. Why?”

  “We got a partial of one of her fingerprints from a marble marker in the Doyle mausoleum.” The Chief Constable sounded annoyed. “It was just above the crypt that had been broken into.”

  “So Mary was there with Sanders.” He glanced at Benson. Benson shook his head, disappointed.

  “What about David Todd?” Macaulay asked. “Have you seen him?”

  Father Gilbert touched the knot on his head. “Funny you should ask.”

  CHAPTER 35

  The two priests carried the file boxes up to Adrian Scott’s flat.

  Father Gilbert’s mood had soured on the drive over, in spite of a stop at the chemist’s for painkillers.

  Macaulay believed the entire trip to Todd’s house had been a set-up. Todd and an accomplice staged the whole thing. Why? To confuse, maybe to give credence to Todd’s assertions that he was being stalked – or for the malicious fun of it. He was surprised that Father Gilbert had been duped so easily.

  “Why did you let him stay at your house?” Macaulay asked by way of accusation.

  “Compassion,” Father Gilbert replied. “He’s part of my flock.”

  Father Gilbert could imagine Macaulay shaking his head in pure disapproval.

  “What about the mystery man?”

  “How should I know?” Macaulay asked. “Probably an accomplice we haven’t met yet. Or maybe he didn’t exist at all.”

  “The over-workings of an overactive spiritual imagination?” Father Gilbert asked.

  “Your words, not mine.” Macaulay hung up.

  And then there was Mary. After Macaulay’s phone call, Father Gilbert realized he had still harboured some hope that she hadn’t been at the Doyles’ mausoleum. But the fingerprint placed her there, meaning she had witnessed the murder of Sanders, or had committed it.

  Adrian Scott was leaning over a long library table, nearly unseen in a corner. It had been covered with books earlier, Father Gilbert remembered. Now it was covered with Haysham’s documents. The old trunk sat open and empty on the floor next to it.

  “I hope you’re having a better day than I am,” Father Gilbert said with more than a tinge of self-pity. He dropped the file box next to the trunk. Benson did the same.

  “David Todd gave you these boxes?” Scott said as he straightened up, putting his hands on his hips as if his back ached.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Father Gilbert said. “We have them. That’s enough for now. I need a bag of ice for my head.”

  Scott waved a hand towards the kitchen. “Ice is in the freezer. And the kettle’s on. Help yourselves.”

  “I’ll do the honours,” Benson said.

  Father Gilbert was grateful. He didn’t fancy going near a kettle after his mad-appliance experience at Todd’s. He scooted a cat off an easy chair, the fabric stained and threadbare, and sat down. He put his head back and closed his eyes.

  “Macaulay has put the entire constabulary on the watch for Todd and Mary Aston,” Benson said from the kitchen area.

  “Why Mary Aston?” Scott asked.

  Benson explained about the Doyle mausoleum.

  Afterward, Scott asked, “Why do you suppose the police have Mary Aston’s fingerprints in their database? Has she been in trouble with the law before?”

  Father Gilbert kept still, but said, “Routine procedure for someone assisting the police. She’d have gone through a security check.”

  “So she had a clean record, or they wouldn’t have hired her,” Benson said.

  “Right.”

  “That’s a relief,” Benson said. “At least we haven’t been hanging out with a known serial killer.”

  “That you know of,” Scott said.

  Father Gilbert lifted his head and asked Scott, “Have you had better success than I have?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have.”

  Father Benson walked in with a small towel and handed it to Father Gilbert. It was wrapped around cubes of ice. The priest nodded and pressed the towel against the knot on his head. A sharp pain shot through his eyes. He endured it.

  “I’ll explain when we’re settled,” Scott said.

  Benson went back to the kitchen, then returned a moment later carrying a tray with three mugs of tea. He handed them around. Then he found another chair and made himself comfortable.

  Father Gilbert sipped the tea. He leaned forward, slouching in a way his headmaster would never have allowed. He felt the weight of the day on his shoulders – but mostly on his head.

  Scott took centre stage and held up a tattered leather messenger bag. The stitching around the edges had snapped in places. The laces to secure the flap were frayed. “This belonged to Samuel Haysham. It was stuffed with financial records and other transactions for the shipbuilding business – and sundry other enterprises.”

  “And?” Father Gilbert asked.

  “There was a substantial yearly payout to Joshua Todd,” Scott said. “More than enough to keep the Todds from poverty. It might explain how the two families maintained some semblance of a relationship, if not actual friendship.”

  Father Gilbert slowly shook his head. It was bewildering that the Todds harboured such hatred and animosity when it seemed as if the Hayshams had made an attempt to help them.

  Scott patted the leather pouch. “Tucked away in the back of this collection was an envelope with a letter inside. It’s several pages long.”

  Father Gilbert groaned. “I can’t read it right now. You’ll have to summarize.”

  Scott smiled. “Samuel Haysham’s penmanship wasn’t very good anyway.” He picked up the letter from the table. “We don’t know to whom it was written. But there are references in the letter that cause me to think it was a business acquaintance. Samuel was trying to recruit him.”

  “Into business?”

  “Into the Woodrich Society.”

  “Proselytizing,” Father Gilbert said.

  “Very quietly,” Scott said. “They must have had a meal together and, at some point later, this gentleman asked for more details about the group. This is Samuel’s reply.”

  “If it was supposed to be a big secret, why would he write a letter about it?” Benson asked.

  “Haysham addresses that in the opening paragraph. He was bedridden due to a recurrence of what he called his ‘American affliction’. He didn’t want to delay his acquaintance’s decision about joining the Society, so he drafted this explanation. To ensure its safety, he gave a servant verbal instructions about where to deliver the letter, to wait while it was read, and then to bring the letter back again. The last paragraph indicates that Haysham intended to destroy the letter once it came back. For some reason, he didn’t. It wound up in this packet.”

  “Does it detail the Society?” Father Gilbert asked. He was sitting up straighter now.

  “Samuel Haysham’s account boils down to this,” Scott said, taking on the tone of a lecturer. “He was a commissioned officer in the King’s army and went to America to fight in the War of Independence. He had always been a sickly man and his time stationed in Massachusetts exacerbated the worst of his
health. He was seriously ill with a fever and a Dr Josiah Woodrich arrived to treat him. After conventional medicines failed, Dr Woodrich transported Samuel to his home near Salem.”

  Father Gilbert opened his mouth to ask.

  “Yes, that Salem,” Scott said. “One night, Dr Woodrich brought in some companions who practised spells of witchcraft on Samuel. His fever was gone the next day. Samuel was astonished and wanted to know more about Dr Woodrich and his friends and their practices.”

  “Are the friends named?” Father Gilbert asked.

  “No.” Scott gulped some tea, cleared his throat, and said, “At this point in the letter, Samuel begins to rant a bit about power and glory, and one could easily get the impression that he suffered mental as well as physical illness.”

  Father Gilbert thought of the cases he’d encountered where the quest for power – especially supernatural power – often led to madness.

  “Regardless of all the noble phrases he used, it’s obvious that Samuel was drawn into Woodrich’s secret group and learned a lot about black magic and black masses. He brought all that knowledge with him back to Stonebridge, with the determination to start a society here.”

  “But I thought the Woodrich family were faithful Catholics,” Father Benson said.

  “Obviously not all of them.”

  “How do the medallion, sword, and ring fit into it all?” asked Father Gilbert.

  “Dr Woodrich claimed that the ‘three treasures’, as he called them, were powerful tools. When Samuel learned that his cousin, the Bishop, had possession of them, he was determined to get them somehow. I’m speculating that Samuel secured a position for Joshua Todd to do the work in the Bishop’s house in order to negotiate a purchase – or steal the items.”

  Father Gilbert suspected the latter.

  “You won’t be happy with this,” Scott said. “For a few years, the Woodrich Society centred their black masses and rites around the medallion, sword, and ring. At St Mark’s.”

  Father Gilbert expected it, but was still distressed to hear it confirmed. “Was the vicar in on it?”

  Scott shrugged. “I don’t know that they could have met in the church without the vicar’s cooperation. He was either a member of the Society or was given an incentive to look the other way while they met.”

  “I don’t know much about black masses,” Benson admitted. “Just how bad did they get?”

  Father Gilbert looked into his mug. The tea was gone. The bottom was stained black from years of tea leaves. “If they were true black masses, then they must have been bad.”

  “Orgies of sex or violence or both,” Scott said with the happiness of a man all too pleased with knowing the answer. “In the letter, Samuel gets fairly graphic about the sex. Willing and unwilling virgins, servants, the occasional animal. No doubt he thought it would entice his candidate more.”

  Benson shuddered. “How bad was the violence? Did they beat one another with whips – or what?”

  “Their normal black mass included self-abuse, or abuse of one another. Whips, rods, cat-o’-nine-tails, that sort of thing. An exceptional black mass, usually during a full moon, included the spilling of blood from a victim. The victim was a sacrifice to please Satan’s appetite for ‘new’ blood.”

  “Is it a full moon tonight?” Benson asked, with a worried look.

  “So the blood came from non-members,” Father Gilbert said. He thought of the accounts he’d read in the ecclesiastical report.

  Scott nodded. “It was all a grotesque mockery of the Catholic Mass. It’s commonly known that one of the reasons churches had to lock up the bread, wine, and even holy water was to keep them out of the hands of the Satanists.”

  “They want consecrated items for their black masses, to make them more powerful,” Father Gilbert added.

  “Even the participants were a distortion of Catholic roles in the liturgy,” Scott said. “You had the equivalent of a bishop or priest as the main celebrants, along with acolytes and servers.”

  “They did all this at St Mark’s – in our church?” Benson asked Father Gilbert.

  Father Gilbert nodded sadly.

  “Should I verbally resign now or give you written notice tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow,” Father Gilbert said. “I’ll give it to the Bishop with mine.”

  “There is one important role to consider,” Scott said. “The Society had a rather typical structure for any society, with a chosen leader and a secretary and officers—”

  “Tea and scones with the Ladies’ Auxiliary at the Guildhall? Subcommittee meetings and budget reports?” Father Gilbert asked.

  Benson laughed. Scott gave Father Gilbert an indulgent smile. “This Society had an enforcer. What Samuel called an ‘Avenging Angel’.”

  “Galling that they used the word ‘angel’, isn’t it?” Benson said.

  “Satan was a fallen angel, you’ll recall,” Scott retorted.

  “What did this enforcer do?” Father Gilbert asked.

  “It was the job of the ‘Avenging Angel’ to make sure the laws and very existence of the Society were maintained by its members. On pain of death.”

  Serve or die, Father Gilbert thought.

  “Samuel makes it perfectly clear to his candidate what he’d be committing to, so there’d be no misunderstandings later.”

  “Does this mean that no member could ever leave the Society?” asked Benson.

  “Oh, it’s worse than that,” Scott said. “Not only were the members committed, but their families as well.”

  Benson was on his feet. “Their wives? Their children?”

  “The members took a blood oath, committing not only themselves, but their sons and their sons’ sons to the Society.”

  Father Gilbert felt as if a cold hand had been placed on his shoulder. He leaned back in the chair. It groaned at him. Everything he’d heard and seen over the past couple of days raced through his mind.

  “So that’s the curse. It’s not the sword or the medallion or the ring. It’s the promise to do whatever the Society wanted,” Benson said. “Is that why Joshua Todd was murdered? Did he try to get out of the Society, and Samuel Haysham killed him for it?”

  Scott flipped through the pages of the letter. “I don’t think Samuel was the Avenging Angel. This letter indicates it was someone else.”

  “Maybe they had a rotation schedule,” Father Gilbert said sourly.

  Scott put the letter down on the table again. “Frankly, I think Samuel himself was intimidated by their Avenging Angel.”

  “Who was it?”

  Scott shook his head. “He doesn’t say.”

  “At least we have a possible framework for what’s happening now.” Father Gilbert wasn’t comforted by the idea, but it was better than what he’d had – which was very little.

  “But who are the players?” Benson asked. He was pacing. “David Todd claims to be scared out of his wits and Lord Haysham is dead. Colin Doyle may have killed himself to keep from joining in.”

  “There’s always Jack Doyle,” Scott said. “He’s nasty enough to keep a Society like this going.”

  “He had a solid alibi for Haysham’s death,” Father Gilbert replied.

  “Why did the police ask him for an alibi? Was he a suspect?” Scott asked.

  “He had business dealings with Lord Haysham. And there was the connection with his son working on Haysham’s property and receiving money from David Todd.” Father Gilbert looked at his curate and the bookshop owner. “Do we really think Jack Doyle would have pushed the Society on his son?”

  “Loyalty over affection,” Scott said.

  “Jack Doyle may not have expected Colin to commit suicide rather than join the club,” Benson offered. “Or maybe he blamed Todd for Colin’s death. Maybe he was writing the threatening notes.”

  Possibilities ricocheted around Father Gilbert’s mind. What if Colin Doyle wasn’t hired by David Todd to spy on Haysham because of the development scheme, but to watch out for the med
allion? Todd knew somehow that the medallion had been lost there two centuries ago.

  Benson continued to pace, wringing his hands. “What about the Challoners? Was Clive’s heart attack connected to the resurrection of the Society?”

  “Clive had no male children,” Father Gilbert said.

  “Maybe they’ve modernized,” Scott said glibly. “Feminism has come to the covens.”

  Father Gilbert felt frustrated. He believed the answers were there somewhere, perhaps right in front of them – maybe in the boxes from Todd.

  Scott was also looking at the boxes. They seemed to be thinking the same thing. He nodded at Father Gilbert and took the lids off the two boxes.

  “What about that ‘Chronicle’ or whatever that document was called?” Benson asked.

  “It’s not in Haysham’s belongings,” Scott said. He began to rifle through Todd’s file boxes. “It could be in here. But I would imagine a book of that nature being rather large. I’m not seeing any books or ledgers…”

  Father Gilbert shoved to the edge of his seat. “The Chronicle was the book that went missing from the diocesan library. It was the piece of evidence that led the ecclesiastical court to its decision.”

  “And so it would, if it was a detailed report of the Society’s activities,” Scott said.

  “It was signed out by Albert Challoner in 1938.” Father Gilbert looked at Scott. “Was he part of the Society?”

  “I don’t know,” Scott replied. “The Challoners once worked for Samuel Haysham – and had connections to that family, along with the Doyles, off and on for years. He might have participated in the Society. Though he wasn’t a wealthy man. Certainly not in their class.”

  Father Gilbert frowned. How could they find out? Clive Challoner was dead and his daughter seemed oblivious. “Whether he was or he wasn’t, Albert Challoner was the last to have that book. It could be somewhere in Clive Challoner’s house, and Lynn Challoner would never know it.”

  * * *

  Father Gilbert got Lynn Challoner’s phone number from Mrs Mayhew. He reached her on her mobile phone and asked her to meet them at her father’s house. She was puzzled, but agreed. They arrived within half an hour.