SENTINEL: an exciting British detective crime thriller

by JOHN STANLEY

  ‘Who said anything about council officers? Who will rid me of this turbulent priest and all that?’

  ‘You saying someone thought they were doing the council a favour?’ asked Radford.

  ‘There’s plenty of hangers-on at City Hall looking to feather their own nests and everyone knows no priest, no campaign. James has more energy than the rest of us put together.’

  ‘I imagine he has,’ said Radford. ‘So any idea who might have done this then?’

  ‘You had better keep my name out of this. My wife, she’s not been well, and if word gets out that I have been talking to you...’

  ‘This stays between us,’ said Radford.

  ‘Neil Garvin. I think it was Neil Garvin.’

  Gaines looked at his inspector. A light bulb moment.

  ‘OK,’ said the sergeant grudgingly, ‘maybe you are on to something but not about the council.’

  ‘I’ve heard the name,’ said Radford, looking at Gaines. ‘Bit of a bad lad.’

  ‘Local Labour Party enforcer,’ nodded Gaines. ‘Keeps order when things get lively in public meetings and, how shall we say it, delivers messages for them?’

  ‘You know him well by the sounds of it,’ said the inspector.

  ‘Been after him for a long time. Lifted him for assault after he lamped some young Conservative during a protest march a few years back. Garvin stamped on his glasses – trouble is, they were still on his face. Kid decided not to press charges. I tried to get Garvin for witness intimidation, heard he’d been round the kid’s house, threatening his mother, slashing tyres, but your predecessor wouldn’t back me and nothing happened.’

  ‘There’s a surprise,’ murmured Radford. ‘Political interference?’

  ‘I imagine so. A card-carrying Labour man was the old DCI. Probably carried it with him into prison. It’s the danger of getting too close.’

  Radford did not reply. You don‘t need to tell me, Gainesy boy. And you can’t even begin to imagine how close I am to Jason de Vere. One mistake ….from either of us.

  ‘What’s more,’ continued Gaines, warming to his theme, ‘you can imagine my surprise when a few checks revealed that Garvin was actually on the payroll of the council. Cemeteries Department. Someone’s idea of a sick joke. No one had seen him put in a shift, that’s for sure.’ He looked down at the blood. ‘I didn’t make the connection because Garvin has been keeping a low profile.’

  ‘Still a nasty piece of work, though,’ said Roberts.

  ‘And how come you know a low life like Neil Garvin?’ asked Gaines. ‘Not in the Men’s Fellowship, surely?’

  Roberts sighed. ‘When my nephew was eighteen, he was in the Labour Party until he said something that they disagreed with. Garvin came round to the house the next night, him and Des Cranmer, and broke his arm. Slammed it in the front door.’

  ‘So how come you think he attacked the vicar?’ asked Radford.

  ‘Because as I was walking into the church, just before I found him, I saw two men on the far side of the wasteland. I think one of them was Garvin.’

  ‘And the other?’

  ‘I imagine it was Des Cranmer. They’re always together. I’d swear on the first one being Garvin, though.’

  ‘Ah, but would you swear in a court?’ asked the inspector, glancing at the Bible, lying near the pool of blood. ‘On the Holy Book?’

  ‘Didn’t do the reverend much good did it?’ said Roberts.

  ‘I guess not,’ said Radford, turning as the forensics team arrived, then looking down at the Bible again. ‘Tell me, why would anyone highlight that passage?’

  ‘I assumed it was for his sermon,’ said the old man. ‘James had this thing about corruption.’

  ‘Aye, maybe so.’ Radford started walking towards the door, nodding at the forensics officers. ‘Come on, Sergeant. Once we’ve checked in on the vicar it sounds like we need to have a chat with our Mr Garvin. Maybe you’ll get the bastard this time.’

  ‘Looking forward to it already,’ said Gaines.

  But something in his voice suggested that he was not.

  When the detectives emerged into the rain, they exchanged a few brief words with the uniformed officer standing guard over the front door. A young man clutching a notebook was waiting at the bottom of the steps, next to a girl with a camera.

  ‘From the evening paper,’ explained the uniform to Radford. ‘Keeps demanding to see you.’

  ‘DCI Radford,’ said the reporter, beginning to walk up the steps, ‘we heard that the vicar had been attacked. Care to comment? Can you confirm what has happened?’

  ‘No,’ said Radford, walking down the steps and brushing past the journalist then looking back at the uniform. ‘Make sure no one gets in, Constable. Particularly these two. Last thing we want is the press poking round in there.’

  ‘Hang on,’ protested the reporter, ‘the church is a public place. House of God and all that.’

  Radford turned round at the bottom of the steps.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you can get permission from God, that’s fine. He’s probably got a duty press officer. In the meantime, sunny Jim, St Mark’s belongs to me.’

  And he strode off down the street, followed by Michael Gaines.

  In the wood-panelled office at City Hall, Jason de Vere was a worried man as he stared at his ringing desk phone. He did not need to pick it up. He knew who it was. Knew what they were going to say. Just didn’t want to hear it. Jason de Vere had had a bad feeling about this all along, had always felt that he was being dragged into something that could only end one way, and he hated the sense that he had become a hostage to fortune. On such mistakes were careers ruined and Jason de Vere had come too far to destroy everything with one silly slip-up. Particularly since it was a mistake that could end up with him in prison.

  Eventually, as the phone kept ringing, he sighed and picked the receiver up.

  ‘De Vere,’ he said. He listened for a few moments. ‘Damn-it, man, I thought the idea was that he was not to be badly hurt. Just roughed up. What kind of a fucking excuse is that? What? I don’t care what Cranmer did…’

  After listening for a few more moments, the council leader slammed down the receiver.

  ‘Damn,’ he murmured. ‘Damn, damn, damn.’

  Jason de Vere knew trouble when he saw it and this felt like trouble. Big trouble. The council leader sat in silence for a few moments, inwardly cursing the predicament in which he found himself. Jason de Vere had not made many mistakes during his years as leader of the council, having assumed the role when a naïve Liberal Democrat administration unsuited to ruling was trounced in the polls. The cause of their downfall was a public backlash orchestrated by a skilled Labour smear campaign which honed in on a series of high-profile court cases proving the link between weak councillors, crooked businessmen paying for council contracts and corrupt police officers.

  The strategy was a huge risk for de Vere because Labour politicians had been mixed up in corrupt practices as well, some local politicians putting aside party differences to work together when the zeros started flashing before their eyes as the developers moved into the city. In the end, councillors from both parties were jailed but de Vere argued that he represented a new start, sweeping aside old Labour with its corrupt ways. Opponents found the suave lawyer a slick and ruthless operator and a difficult opponent. He did not fit the image of a bully boy Leyton Labour man. The politician was tall and slim with close-cropped black hair, a neatly clipped beard. The face was sharp and angular, the eyes slightly narrowed, the nose long and sharp, the lips thin, always with just the merest hint of a knowing smile. The black suit was immaculately pressed.

  It had taken de Vere a lot of time to win enough trust to mount his coup and he was not the type of man to let it slip away now, so he fished his mobile phone from his jacket pocket and found the name he was seeking. Danny Radford.

  ‘Time to call in a favour,’ he murmured.

  De Vere’s finger hovered over the button then he
shook his head and slipped the phone back in his pocket. This one required more thought; one mistake from either of them and both were finished.

  The Reverend Charles Garfield was sitting behind his desk at the diocesan offices, sipping appreciatively at a glass of whisky, enjoying the way the liquid glinted in the light cast by the table lamp. He sighed with satisfaction. All in all, it had been a good day. A thought struck him and he picked up the desk phone and dialled a number.

  ‘Hello, yes,’ he said in his most concerned voice, the one he used at funerals, ‘this is the Reverend Charles Garfield, chaplain to Bishop Joseph. One of our clergyman was regrettably attacked earlier this afternoon and I wondered if I could check how he is? Yes, by all means put me through to the ward.’ He waited for a few moments. ‘Yes, hello, Sister? Yes, I am. Is he? Oh, dear, that’s terrible. I do not wish to appear too pessimistic but will he live? No, I entirely understand, I’ll try later. Hopefully, you will have some better news for me.’

  Just after he had replaced the receiver, trying not to smile, his desk phone rang.

  ‘Garfield,’ said the chaplain, picking up the receiver. He listened for a few moments then said, ‘It’s too late to start panicking now, it’s done. Besides, from what I hear he is very ill. He’ll not be dropping anyone in it. Just stay calm and play the innocent if anyone asks awkward questions. The police? Don’t you worry about the police.’

  He replaced the receiver and took another sip of whisky. His phone rang again. Garfield sighed and picked it up. No rest for the wicked, he thought.

  Hello,’ said the voice at the other end, ‘my name is Sergeant Michael Gaines. I wonder if I can speak to you about what happened to Reverend James Rowland earlier today?’

  ‘Yes, certainly. It’s an awful thing,’ said the chaplain, swilling the whisky in his glass. ‘I have only just heard. Who on earth would do such a thing?’

  ‘I was rather hoping you could tell me that, Mr Garfield.’

  ‘Me? Well, I am only a humble chaplain but I will do my best. What do you want to know?’

  Chapter four

  ‘It would seem,’ said the chaplain cheerfully as he walked into the bishop’s dimly-lit study a few minutes later, clutching a piece of paper, ‘that our risen Lord has a finely attuned sense of humour. Our thorny little problem may be about to go away.’

  The bishop looked up from his desk and surveyed him bleakly.

  ‘I very much doubt that, Charles,’ he said. ‘Not unless you have killed James Rowland.’

  ‘Strange that you should say that,’ replied the chaplain, enjoying the bishop’s alarmed expression, ‘because I have just come off the telephone from a detective sergeant by the name of Gaines. It would appear that our errant vicar’s unique capacity for making enemies has led someone to beat his brains out. In his own church, no less.’

  The bishop stared at him in disbelief. ‘Is he alright?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, whoever did it struck him forcibly a number of times with what our doughty sergeant described as a blunt instrument. They are never particularly creative when talking about these things, are they, our friends in the constabulary? I always have visions of someone committing an assault with a mandolin.’

  The bishop closed his eyes. There were times when Charles Garfield’s view on life was distinctly disturbing.

  ‘The sergeant wanted to know if we could think of anyone who might wish to harm Rowland,’ continued the chaplain. ‘A somewhat obvious question but I suppose he had to ask it.’

  ‘And what did you say?’ asked the bishop sharply, opening his eyes.

  ‘That there was a queue.’

  ‘You didn’t tell him about the missing money, did you?’

  ‘I resisted the temptation but they will have to question everyone in the congregation and who knows if one of them has twigged what he has been up to? And when the police find out, we will be given a clear run to sell the place to our friend Hankin.’

  ‘You’re a hard man, Charles,’ said the bishop. ‘A hard man.’

  ‘I prefer to use the word pragmatic, your Grace. Oh, don’t look like that, was our Lord not a somewhat pragmatic individual? A man who got things done instead of spouting platitudes? Turning over the moneylenders’ tables in the temple, that sort of thing.’ Garfield smiled inwardly. He knew that his occasional biblical references did not fool the bishop. ‘No, I am merely following in his hallowed footsteps.’

  The bishop gave him a sour look. Many words could be used to describe the Reverend Charles Garfield but hallowed was certainly not one of them. A roguish former antiques dealer who had gone bust after a discontinued trading standards prosecution, he had stunned his friends by announcing that he felt called to serve God and had applied to become a vicar.

  Garfield’s conversion was hailed by many in the city’s evangelical circles as evidence of the power of the Lord to transform lives, but the bishop had not been one of them. Nevertheless, despite his scepticism, he had found the chaplain’s pragmatism useful in many situations and had turned to him more and more, hence the decision to forcibly retire the previous chaplain and replace him with the worldly Garfield. There were times when the bishop had doubted the wisdom of the decision and now a thought assailed him and his expression changed to suspicion.

  ‘I take it we knew nothing about this assault?’ he asked. ‘I mean, before it happened?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You know what I mean, Charles.’

  ‘I may be pragmatic but that does not extend to the hiring of hit-men.’ Garfield put on his best expression of innocence and tried to look offended. ‘I mean, what do you take me for?’

  The bishop looked at him, uncomfortably aware that he did not believe his chaplain. In the end, though, he did what he always did.

  ‘That was uncalled for,’ he said. ‘I apologise.’

  ‘I should think so,’ replied Garfield.

  Ah, he thought, the delights of working with the naïve.

  The Reverend Rowland was drifting in and out of consciousness when Radford and Gaines walked into the side room at the general hospital, having nodded at the plain-clothes officer standing guard at the door.

  ‘Five minutes, no more,’ cautioned the nurse who showed them in. ‘He may yet have to undergo surgery to reduce some of the swelling on his brain and we do not want him stressed any more than is necessary.’

  ‘How is he?’ asked the inspector.

  ‘Better than he was when they brought him in. I’m not sure if he will be able to speak to you for long, though. He’s not really with it.’

  ‘Never was,’ muttered Gaines, earning himself a sharp look from Radford and a sour one from the nurse.

  The inspector sat down on the chair next to the bed, not initially speaking but waiting for the nurse to check the vicar’s charts then leave the room. The inspector used the time to survey the features of the battered and bruised vicar who lay with his eyes closed, his breathing shallow and laboured. Danny Radford had seen enough assault victims in his career to know that this one could go either way. Which was why the inspector needed to talk to him now. This would be as tricky an inquiry as could be imagined and he would need all the help he could get. The last thing he wanted was his prime witness dying on him.

  For his part, Gaines stood at the window and stared down the four storeys into the street before letting his gaze roam upwards across the roofs of the Victorian terraced houses and in through the windows of the illuminated city centre office blocks with their office staff working late, hunched over their computers. Gaines gave a slight smile as he saw a white-shirted man, alone in his office, tie at half-mast, kick what appeared to be a scrunched up ball of paper towards a waste bin then punch the air when it struck home. Some sixth sense made the man turn round and look up to see the watching sergeant across the street. The man grinned and waved and Gaines smiled and waved back, surprising himself with his cheery response.

  Straining his neck, the sergeant looked further round to his
right where he could just make out the scar where the houses surrounding the church had been torn down, creating a livid gash in the landscape barely visible in the gathering gloom. Gaines frowned; Radford had often talked angrily about the injustice of the decision and the sergeant, who had not previously cared, had found himself infected with the inspector’s fury at the way the people’s voices had been ignored. It had been a powerful example of the effect that Danny Radford could have. The thought was also a reminder for Gaines of why they were there and the sergeant turned back into the room and surveyed the clergyman gloomily.

  He had encountered the vicar just the once, following an attempted burglary at the church when he had found him relentlessly optimistic and determined to forgive the perpetrators. Gaines did not like optimistic people, relentless or not, particularly when they appeared determined to forgive miscreants. Now, as he stood and watched the vicar dispassionately, the sergeant did not hold out much hope of an illuminating conversation.

  ‘How are you feeling, Reverend?’ said Radford to the vicar, whose right eye was swollen, his nose misshapen and who had a bandage round his forehead, ‘because you look like shit.’

  ‘I’ve been better,’ mumbled the clergyman, opening his good eye. ‘And thank you for your kind words, Inspector. You should have been a vicar with that bedside manner.’

  ‘They tell us that you’re a lucky man.’

  ‘Not sure it feels like that,’ murmured the vicar.

  ‘No, I’m sure it doesn’t.’ Radford picked up the chart hanging on the edge of the bed and read the top page. ‘Broken nose, internal bleeding and four cracked ribs. Apparently, one of your assailants ground his shoe so hard into your face that it was even possible to make out a partial footprint. Perhaps we should get forensics to take some prints. You up to being covered in plaster of Paris?’

  The vicar gave him a look.

  ‘Someone really has got it in for you, haven’t they?’ continued Radford, hanging the chart up again. ‘Care to tell us who that might be?’

  ‘There were two of them.’