The Abbot of Stockbridge

by Philip McCutchan

  The Abbot of Stockbridge

  Philip McCutchan

  © Philip McCutchan, 1992

  Philip McCutchan has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1992 by Hodder and Stoughton Limited.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  SIX

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  One

  It had been raining steadily for a matter of weeks; mostly the kind of penetrating rain that North Yorkshire people knew too well. The sort that could get inside the clothing almost within seconds. Very wet, very cold. The ground sogged, the rivers ran fast, the waterfalls — Hardraw Force and the three falls of Aysgarth in Wensleydale — thundered in fury and sent spray high into the air to form a heavy mist in the vicinity. The stone-walled fields were thick, clinging mud; the miserable fellside sheep found what shelter they could in the lee of the wind-breaks and the fell farmers cursed their lot.

  It had been a similar story over the other side, at the western end of the B6255, the road that ran from Hawes, beneath the Ribblehead viaduct on the Leeds to Carlisle railway, to Ingleton not far from the village of Clapham. The path that ran steeply from Clapham up to the great pothole of Gaping Ghyll, a climb of some three miles to the extinct waterfall that lay as a difficult barrier to be conquered before the final rocky stretch to Gaping Ghyll itself, was treacherously slippery. During the apparently unending rain, the climbers, walkers and potholers stayed away. There was in any case too much water in the cave system of Ingleborough for safety, and the flood warnings had been out for some weeks past.

  But at last the rain went away; the sun shone, the land began the long process of drying out. The walkers returned; a few hardy persons returned to the steep path, past the man-made lake lying to the right of the upward track.

  The first two, a man and his wife, rested in a derelict structure to the left of the track, about half way along towards the entry to Ingleborough cave. A crumbling building of stone, crammed against the rock background, earth covering its broken roof, a building whose original purpose was now long forgotten. It formed a shelter against the wind; inside were stone seats, welcome to a middle-aged couple.

  But the woman was for some reason uneasy.

  “I don’t like it,” she said. She gave a shiver. “It’s … eerie. Don’t you feel it, John?”

  “No,” he said, and laughed. The laugh had a dead sound, as though stifled by a hand, the woman thought fancifully.

  She said, shivering again, “It’s … oh, I don’t know … as if someone was watching.” She repeated, “I don’t like it, John. Let’s move on.”

  “If it worries you that much,” he said. Getting to his feet he took a look around the walls and roof. Then he gave a sudden exclamation, his gaze seeming riveted to a part of the roof that was sending down spurts of earth and a few small pieces of rock. Once again he laughed, but shakily this time. “Watching,” he said. “You could be right.”

  “What is it, John?”

  He said, “I could swear it’s an eye. Right in —” He broke off as more of the roof came down. “Out!” he said in a high voice. He seized hold of his wife and pushed her outside. They had just cleared the structure when the roof came down behind them, bringing mud and rock and general debris. And something else, as they saw when they looked back.

  A body. A body long dead, with a single eye that stared from its socket, as if balefully, from the debris. Not, perhaps, so long dead; there was flesh, though very putrid, and there was that eye. The body was dressed in what the man believed was a monk’s habit, brown in colour beneath the mud, and there were the remains of a girdle.

  *

  The call had come down to the Foreign Office security section from the boss himself, Hedge, sounding agitated. Detective Chief Superintendent Shard was wanted immediately. “If not sooner,” Hedge’s secretary added tongue-in-cheek. They all knew Hedge. Shard dropped everything and went up. He found Hedge in a tizzy, which was not unusual.

  “What is it, Hedge?”

  Hedge’s plump body shook a little: Shard’s question had been a shade peremptory, he thought, and it was not a policeman’s place to be peremptory. However, he let it pass. He said, “The police in Skipton. That’s in North Yorkshire, I understand.”

  “Yes, Hedge.”

  “A walking couple. They found a body. Not in Skipton. Near a place called Ingleborough. I don’t know if you know it —”

  “I do, as it happens. What sort of body, Hedge?”

  “Apparently a monk.”

  “Ah. Have any monks been reported missing?”

  Hedge shifted angrily. “I really don’t know — yet. In any case there aren’t any monks in Yorkshire now, just ruined abbeys. Fountains, Jervaulx, Rievaulx, Bolton Abbey …” Henry VIII had ironed them all out centuries before. A skeleton could linger, but Hedge had used the word body.

  Shard said, “There’s always Stonyhurst and Ampleforth, isn’t there?”

  “Oh, really, Shard, they’re schools. Those sort of monks don’t get murdered and — and then carried right across Yorkshire!”

  “If you say so, Hedge. But what’s the connection with the FO, for heaven’s sake? I’d have thought the Archbishop of York —”

  “Oh, kindly don’t be flippant, Shard. This —”

  “All right, Hedge. The civil police, then?”

  “They do in fact wish to handle it themselves. For certain reasons I do not wish that.”

  “How did it come to be reported to us in the first place, Hedge?” Hedge didn’t answer straight away; that fact aroused curiosity in Shard’s mind. Hedge had said the call had come from the police in Skipton. The fact of contacting the FO didn’t tie in with them wanting to handle the business themselves. As always, Hedge was being devious, but why? Shard pressed: would Hedge please explain a little further?

  Hedge wriggled in his chair. “I had a call from the Commissioner.”

  “Not Skipton?”

  “Not directly Skipton, no. I’m sorry, but I’m unable at this moment to be more precise.” Hedge was wriggling like a fish on a hook but his mouth had set obstinately and Shard knew from past experience that he wasn’t going to be given anything further on the point until Hedge was ready to impart. Hedge went on rather fast. “It’s believed the body was put where it was found a matter of some months ago — they aren’t being very precise yet — they’re still waiting for a full report from forensic. The discovery was made late yesterday afternoon. A body that came down from the roof of a sort of cave that collapsed. I gather there’s been a lot of rain in the north for a long time now. I suppose the body would have been loosened.” Hedge paused, and wiped at his fat cheeks with a silk handkerchief. When he went on again there was a grudge in his voice as though the information was coming out painfully. “There is something else, Shard. It may be relevant but I really don’t know.”

  “Go on, Hedge.”

  “There was a — a sort of medallion came down with the body.” He went on, after a pause, with obvious reluctance. “It bore two letters, JR. Inside a circle. Round the perimeter of the circle a word, peculier. Peculier with an e, not an a.” Hedge looked stonily across the opulence of his office. “And kindly refrain from making a silly pun out of that, Shard.”

  There was a little mor
e: Skipton police, or some of them, were on drinking terms with the products of Theakston’s Brewery, one of these products being a strong ale called Old Peculier. This they had reported, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Hedge thought, and they had offered a suggestion: Theakston’s Brewery was in the small town of Masham, half way between Ripon and Leyburn. Shard knew Masham from odd nights spent in the King’s Head Hotel. He knew something else: in the absence of any other evidence the body was being taken as that of a monk, and Shard had once been told by a man he’d met in the King’s Head, a man who was drinking Old Peculier with much enjoyment, that historically a peculiar (admittedly with an “a”) was an ecclesiastical district or church that was not amenable to the ordinary ecclesiastical authority, examples being the chapels royal, St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and St Peter’s, Westminster. At one time there had been more than three hundred such peculiars in England. Might Jervaulx have been one of them? And the ruins of Jervaulx Abbey were not so far from Masham.

  Some sort of connection? Very vague; but anything was worth consideration. Hedge agreed.

  “So what do you want me to do, Hedge?” Shard asked.

  “Go to Yorkshire, Shard. Find out what you can about that body. Liaise with the local police, but keep a low profile. And keep me informed.”

  “So that you can inform the Under-Secretary, Hedge?”

  He saw at once that he had touched a raw spot. Hedge started and his pastry-like cheeks took on a flush. “At the present time, this has nothing to do with the Under-secretary. It will be between you and me alone. Do you understand?”

  Shard said, “No. But if you’re giving me the order —”

  “I am, Shard. You will kindly obey it to the best of your ability.”

  Shard asked one more question. “Have you any ideas as to what the JR stands for, Hedge?”

  The answer was immediate. “Of course I haven’t, none at all.” For some reason Shard found himself disbelieving that acid assurance.

  *

  Shard, as it happened, was not particularly busy and any work outstanding could be left to his number two. He rang Beth and said he was going north on what sounded like a wild goose chase. “Or wild Hedge chase,” he added. He didn’t know when he would be back; he never did. Beth was well used by now to being a policeman’s wife. If he looked like being away longer than just overnight he would ring from Yorkshire; and then it would be a pound to a penny mother-in-law would be round. Mrs Micklem, who telephoned her daughter at least once a day, never missed an opportunity.

  Shard drove the Volvo out of the parking lot and headed for the M1. The Volvo was new and he liked the feel of it. Shard, always ready to take necessary risks in the course of duty, never took unnecessary ones, and in his view Volvos were the safest car on the road, cocooned as they were in their steel frames.

  Late that afternoon he crossed the River Ure outside Ripon and headed through the town for the Leyburn road. The King’s Head in Masham would be a convenient and comfortable base, at least until things developed.

  If ever they did. A dead monk with a curious medallion adjacent above Ingleborough still had no apparent Foreign Office connection that he could see.

  After checking in to the King’s Head, Shard drove on the short distance to the ruins of Jervaulx.

  *

  In London’s Tottenham Court Road a short man with a fag-end drooping from his lower lip pushed open a door at the side of a greengrocer’s shop, went in and climbed a steep staircase, uncarpeted, that rose from the end of a long passage that smelled of leaky gas jets and boiling cabbage. At the top of the stairs he banged on a door that had a frosted glass panel. The door was opened after half a minute. It was opened by a woman, youngish but haggard and with blonde hair in need of a stylist. She wore jeans and a tank top, the latter strained to its limit over very large breasts.

  “Hooky in?” the man asked.

  “Hasn’t been in all day. Went out just after breakfast.”

  “Went where, darling?”

  She bridled. “Don’t you bloody darling me, shortarse. I don’t know where he went, do I? Last thing he ever tells me. What you want with him?”

  “Just let me come in,” the man said. “This is important.” He pushed past the woman; the door was shut behind him. Even so, he spoke in a whisper. “I got word that Brother Beamish has come to light. Some nosey bloody walkers, up Ingleborough. I got to let Hooky know, right?”

  *

  Shard put the Volvo into the car park across the Leyburn road from the ruined abbey. The ground was still muddy; chickens and small, neat bantams pecked, surprisingly a couple of peacocks strutted, eyeing the car and himself with interest. There was a police car parked; Shard was perhaps not the only one to whom Jervaulx had occurred, though it was possible the patrol car had other business. Shard crossed the road, climbed over a stile into the grounds of Jervaulx, once a thriving Cistercian abbey, founded, so Shard had read, in 1156. Now a muddy path led through a herd of cows to a derelict gate that banged behind him, pulled shut by a counter-balancing weight attached to a length of wire. Just inside the gate was a kind of shed with a table, and on the table was informative literature and an appeal to the honesty of visitors to place coins in a slot. Shard, who had a feeling for ancient monuments and their preservation, put a pound coin in the slot. It dropped with a small thud, no clink of other coins. Honesty was not quite what honesty had been once.

  There was not a lot left of the abbey: there were signs warning of possible falling masonry, which certainly looked a risk to anyone who walked beneath the towers and arches. But the place was well kept, no weeds, though the grass was long. The ruined walls were in many places covered brilliantly in purple aubretia.

  Shard had little idea what he was looking for — his plan had really been just to try to get the feel of the place, get the feel of a one-time monk’s environment, look at the ruins of refectories and cells and so on and see what if any thoughts that might produce. Such was the ruinous state, however, that he doubted that any thoughts at all would come.

  Something else did.

  From around a buttress the familiar chequered cap appeared, on the head of a police sergeant.

  Shard said, “Good afternoon. Is this —”

  “Tourist, are you?” the sergeant interrupted, and gave Shard the feeling that he was about to be requested to move on. “If so —”

  “Not a tourist.” Shard brought out his FO identification. “Detective Chief Superintendent Shard, FO security.”

  “Sorry, sir,” the sergeant said. “Would you be looking for Chief Inspector Matthews?”

  “From?”

  “Come over from Skipton, sir.”

  “In that case yes, I am.” This was a stroke of luck; Shard had intended driving over to Skipton next morning; this chance meeting could save him the journey. He followed the sergeant round the buttress. A tall man in plain clothes was walking about moodily, poking at bits of ruin as though stones might speak and reveal all. This was Chief Inspector Matthews; Shard introduced himself.

  “I know the name, Mr Shard. I was told … though what the heck this has to do with your bunch I don’t know. Can you throw any light?”

  Shard grinned. “None at all. I’m as much in the dark as you, Chief Inspector.”

  “But you reacted to the Peculier?”

  “Yes. What’s the view in Skipton?”

  Matthews shrugged. “Very open. Murder, or misadventure could be. Slipped and went down a hole … a mini pothole. Scarcely suicide.” He laughed grimly. “I could think of better ways. No, murder’s the most likely, of course —”

  “Wounds, any signs?”

  “Not according to forensic, Mr Shard.”

  “H’m. No identification yet, I suppose?”

  “No. All places where monks hang out have been or will be contacted, result nil so far. No-one’s missed a monk. You’d think they would, wouldn’t you? Close communities and all that. Monks aren’t two a penny. Not these days.”

&nbs
p; Shard nodded. “What brought you here, Chief Inspector? Same as me — get the feel of monasteries? Or was it purely the Peculier?”

  “The Peculier,” Matthews said. “Masham — you know?”

  “Yes, I do. Though at this moment I don’t know a damn thing else. Can’t even begin to reconstruct a scenario. A monk is murdered and the body buried in ground overhanging a stone base as I understand it, and the grave collapses owing to the heavy rainfall and the body scares the life out of a couple of walkers.”

  “And the medallion. That must have got missed by the killers. Or even dropped by them.”

  “Yes, the medallion.”

  Shard didn’t add that he believed the medallion to be the reason Hedge was involving himself, the reason, too, why Hedge had been in such an obvious tizzy that morning. There was, in Shard’s view, more surrounding Hedge than had so far met the eye. Looking back, it had been as though Hedge was expecting him, Shard, to protect him in some unspecified way. Or if not quite that, then to act as some kind of buffer.

  But why? If Shard was right, the reason why should emerge before long. If there was anything clandestine behind Hedge, Hedge would panic sooner or later. Sooner rather than later; Hedge had never been made of very stern stuff.

  Shard walked around with the chief inspector from Skipton. Matthews had the medallion in a Cellophane envelope; he showed it to Shard. It told him nothing beyond the little he knew already. His imagination peopled Jervaulx, the old abbey in its heyday, one of the most important places in the North Riding — along with Middleham Castle just up the road towards Leyburn from which in the days of Warwick the King-Maker the whole of England had been ruled. He saw the assembled, habited monks at prayer in what was now an open, grassy space; he saw them with bowed heads, walking the cloisters in meditation. He saw the tonsured heads …

  “Was the body tonsured? The head?”

  “Yes. What does that prove, Mr Shard?”

  “Nothing, I suppose. It occurred to me that the monk effect could be a red herring. A body got up to look like a monk … but of course even a fake would have been tonsured for realism. All the same, it just might help if forensic could say whether the tonsuring had been done recently or a long while ago. Even if it had been done after death.”