The Chorister at the Abbey

by Lis Howell

  But Edwin had too much to say to be stunned by her new looks for long. He told her about the contents of Morris Little’s emails, and how Morris had been going to meet Wanda Wisley on the night he had died.

  ‘Good heavens! And she never mentioned it?’

  ‘Not a word. Rather strange, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes and no. Dr Wisley’s got a reputation amongst administrators for disappearing when anything tedious needs to be done. Maybe she forgot about him.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Edwin said. ‘But there’s this crazy business of the psalter. You saw a psalter. Tom Firth saw a psalter. But there was no psalter when the police came back.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that. It must have been the Frosts or one of their gang who came back and took it.’

  ‘We’ve discussed this before.’ Edwin sounded edgy. ‘The Frosts wouldn’t know one end of a book from another.’

  ‘That’s a bit sweeping? How do you know?’

  Edwin looked at her. Then he looked down at his half pint of real ale and Alex realized the conversation had ground to a halt. No, worse – it had crashed into some invisible barrier she hadn’t seen. What on earth was the problem?

  Why was Edwin Armstrong so sensitive about the Frost brothers?

  At the same moment, only half a mile away in the middle of Norbridge, David Johnstone looked at Reg Prout over his gin and tonic. He saw a middle-aged man slurping greedily, and that pleased him. Prout was a respectable local functionary who worked for the council in the Environmental Health Department. But it seemed as if he might like his little luxuries.

  Johnstone had met him through the golf club, but until now their contact had been purely social and Prout had been rather in awe of him. Good. That could be very helpful, Johnstone thought with satisfaction. They were in the Norbridge Arms, the town’s best hotel with a plush bar. It was used by the Rotary Club and the Lions, and was a well-known meeting place for Norbridge businessmen. David Johnstone had organized quite a few liaisons there over the years – one or two of them taking place upstairs in the bedrooms.

  ‘Dixon will be along in a minute,’ he said brusquely. David Johnstone had scant respect for most of his associates, including the ferrety Brian Dixon, but both Dixon and Reg Prout were going to be useful. And in addition, Dixon was under obligation to him, which always helped.

  On cue, Brian Dixon came sidling into the bar, wrapped in a huge sheepskin coat, his tweed cap in his hand. A small man with stringy brown hair that was too long, he looked like a superior rodent.

  ‘Greetings, David and Reg.’ He smiled weakly at them. His thin, upper-class voice contrasted with the well-upholstered David Johnstone’s rich confident local twang.

  ‘‘Ow do, Brian my lad. A Jameson’s as ever?’

  Dixon nodded nervously, and Johnstone turned to the bar. It was useful, in one phrase, to remind Brian Dixon of their several encounters at the Norbridge Arms. They had been joined on occasion by two ladies, whose services had been paid for on Johnstone’s account. This had always been preceded by Dixon glugging down a fair amount of Irish whiskey.

  Dixon was typical of a class of older local gent – landed family, various sources of income, minor public school – but of the generation and class where, if you were not academic enough for Oxford, you were sent home to manage a business of some sort. In Dixon’s case, he had become general manager of one of the smaller textile mills in Norbridge, which had closed down. He and his wife lived in a nice Georgian gem of a farmhouse on the road between Norbridge and Tarnfield. They still had money, but much of it was spent on a son who’d been to an even more minor public school and been equally undistinguished. The boy was now working in Manchester and borrowing from his father to finance his own family. Money was tightish for the Dixons.

  Good, David Johnstone thought again.

  ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘let’s sit down, over in the corner.’

  He led his two cronies to a dark booth fitted with a rounded banquette and a low heavy coffee table. It was divided off from the bar with dark wood and etched glass screens. There was an air of conspiracy about it. Johnstone thought that the atmosphere would help.

  ‘As you know, I’ve got my eye on a neat little development idea. I suspect no one’s come up with it before, because it’s in Fellside, and with all due respect to your wife’s family seat, Reg, Fellside isn’t exactly Windermere, is it?’

  ‘Actually,’ said Reg ponderously, patting his bald head nervously, ‘my wife’s family is from Workhaven. They only moved to Fellside when my father-in-law fell ill and needed a bungalow, after he retired. My mother-in-law lived there for a few years, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, it mebbe helps that there’s no great sentimental affection for the place on your wife’s part. But your sister-in-law lives there now, right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Reg tried to sound decisive but he shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘The point is, Reggie lad, that the disused quarry would make a great site for a leisure pool and the old convent site would be perfect for holiday flats. Use the façade but have it completely ripped out and modernized behind. No one seems to know why the convent’s just been left to go to rack and ruin. What’s the story on that, Brian?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Brian Dixon squirmed too. He was pleased to be included, but there was something about David Johnstone which put a chap on the spot. At least he knew all about this and could answer as required. ‘As you know, my wife Millie is second cousin to Jimmy Cleaverthorpe. It was one of Jimmy’s great-great-aunts or something who wanted to start a convent.’

  ‘I didn’t know the Cleaverthorpes were left-footers?’ said Reg Prout in surprise.

  ‘No, no.’ Brian Dixon shook his head. ‘Not RCs. These were Church of England nuns.’

  Reg looked surprised and patted his bald head again, but Johnstone burped and said deeply, ‘Go on, man.’

  ‘So when the old man, the first great Lord Cleaverthorpe, realized his cherished eldest daughter wanted to take the veil – and not the seven veils, I assure you . . .’ Dixon squirmed in a ratty way and waited for a laugh, but there was none. ‘Sorry. Anyway, the old man bought land for her and built a house for her and her companions. He’d been a bit of a dirty old sod in his time and local gossip still says there are bastard Cleaverthorpes in Fellside. But his eldest girl was a bit of a saint and he respected that. She said she would pray for a building, and her father answered her prayers. But he never gave her any title deeds. Of course he didn’t need to if it was on his own land. The story goes that despite his love for his daughter, old Cleaverthorpe didn’t agree with women owning property, and sorted it out with some sort of male representative when he was on his deathbed. Then the Cleaverthorpe nun died suddenly of something she caught in Chapterhouse . . .’

  ‘What was she doing there?’ asked Reg.

  ‘Saving fallen women or so the story goes.’ Brian took a deep sip of his whiskey. ‘Anyway, the nuns just stayed on there for another century on the assumption it was theirs. No one challenged them and now no one seems sure who the place belongs to. They all died out about fifteen years ago. So it’s been boarded up since.’

  ‘And Jimmy Cleaverthorpe can’t sell it?’

  ‘Not till the ownership is sorted out. I think the last Mother Superior believed it was theirs and tried to leave it to the Church. But they can’t sell it either,’ Dixon said.

  ‘But of course it’s supposed to be a local historic monument,’ Reg Prout butted in, trying to be helpful. ‘The chapel is supposed to be beautiful. That chap Morris Little had a meeting with the council about it. He wanted it listed. Of course, then he died.’

  Johnstone sipped his drink reflectively. ‘But what would happen, Reg, if there was, say, a problem with the septic tank? Or if the fabric was going to collapse? After all, that fool Freddie from the Chorus managed to demolish half the wall being chased by a herd of cattle!’

  ‘But that was just an accident, David, it could have happened anywh
ere.’

  David looked at Reg Prout and laughed evilly. ‘Accidents do happen, Reg. Say the place was a health and safety hazard? Especially to the bungalow next door. Do you follow me?’

  Reg gulped. ‘Well, the Environmental Health Department would have something to say about it, I suppose.’

  ‘So they would, Reg, so they would!’ Johnstone patted him on the back. ‘I think a visit to the convent might be called for. Who knows what alarming structural or drainage problems we might find! And then the council might have to be brought in, don’t you think? And they might have to act quickly and get it sold off, for the sake of public health!’

  Reg Prout was looking very uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know, David.’

  ‘Oh yes, you do!’ Johnstone leant forward and tapped him gently on the knee. ‘Oh yes, you do, Reg. I think I might take a trip up to the convent and see just how much prayer it needs to keep it standing. Or to have it knocked down!’

  In the Crown and Thistle at the same moment, Edwin looked up slowly and then looked away, but Alex refused to be embarrassed. If she had said something wrong it was inadvertent.

  ‘Edwin, what have I said? It’s unfair of you to pull up the conversational drawbridge.’

  He shifted on his bar stool. But she didn’t give up. She waited.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ he said eventually.

  ‘Know what? Something about the Frosts?’ She moved her eye-line until Edwin was forced to return her gaze.

  He saw in front of him a big but surprisingly pretty dark-haired woman with intelligent features, head slightly on one side, and a questioning look.

  In a small town all news was high octane. But maybe his story had run out of gas. He wasn’t the only person in the world – or in Norbridge, for that matter – to have been dumped. Maybe Alex genuinely didn’t know all about it. It was only his pride which made him reticent to tell her.

  But Alex had swallowed hers, and occasionally mentioned her past with rueful humour. Perhaps he could do the same. Or at least he could just tell her the basics. No details or emotional trappings, no melodrama.

  ‘I was involved with the Frosts’ elder sister for a while.’

  ‘Oh, really? So did she share the family’s interesting reputation?’

  Alex smiled at him. She was surprised but not shocked. She waited for him to continue.

  ‘No, Marilyn was lovely,’ Edwin said after a pause. ‘Not like the rest. She was the eldest by a long way, with a different father. Her education was non-existent but she had brains. And the sisters helped her. So she enrolled at the college to do music.’

  ‘And you were her teacher?’

  ‘Yes. Dangerous of course. She was nineteen and I was thirty. When we realized how things were going, she left the college. She was over eighteen. It was unwise perhaps, but there was never a scandal.’

  ‘Did everyone know?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ He remembered how impossible it had been to hide their happiness. ‘There was some talk, and some nastiness. But we planned to get married.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  He paused for longer. ‘She discovered life outside Norbridge, so we split up. She’s in Derby now. We’re still friends.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  Alex could tell there was more to the story, but Edwin looked drained.

  She shrugged. ‘Well, as I’ve told you before, I was ditched too. But in my case we weren’t friends afterwards. I hated my husband and still do. I could kill him, I really could. He left me for a woman in his office. Someone he didn’t have anything in common with, except . . .’

  ‘Except?’ he prompted, genuinely intrigued.

  ‘We were childless. He couldn’t have kids. It was okay because I loved him so much. I assumed he adored me too. But then he came home and told me . . .’

  She found it hard to say. Edwin waited. ‘He’d had a one-night stand with her at a Christmas party. She got pregnant. It was a fluke but the child was definitely his. I went off the rails with jealousy. I’d been sooo understanding about his low sperm count. And now bingo! Hole in one, as they say. He was leaving me. And he was so bloody thrilled! That was almost the worst of it. He thought that because I loved him, I should be delighted about the baby too. The selfishness of men! I went mad, literally I think. I behaved desperately badly.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I followed him to her house more than once, and ranted at both of them. I lashed out at him and scratched him on his face. I screamed whole nights away. At first I tried sex with someone else, but that didn’t work, so I got madder and madder and eventually I got pissed and crashed the car and ended up in hospital and lost my licence. I was out of my mind for over a year. It’s only through good luck that I didn’t murder McFay and his girlfriend. Both of them. And I just couldn’t be near them and our so-called friends when the baby was born.’

  ‘So you came back to Norbridge.’

  ‘Yes, I did. But not before I’d fallen out with everyone we’d known. You see, they all seemed to be on his side. People are so sentimental about babies. But I behaved appallingly.’

  ‘You were in shock. I sympathize.’

  ‘You do?’ Alex’s eyes widened.

  ‘I wish I’d done something like that. I withdrew and went cold to everyone, even Lynn, who was out of her mind with worry about me. I stopped eating. You took your anger out, I bottled mine up. But it was the same thing. Jealousy – which is evil, but so very understandable. I know exactly what you mean.’ It took the Psalms to tell me that justified anger should be expressed, he thought. You let the sun go down on it as much by repressing it as by feeding it.

  Alex tried to laugh. ‘We’re a right pair, aren’t we! Fire and ice.’

  Edwin looked at her steadily. ‘Maybe we are,’ he said seriously.

  Alex grabbed her empty glass and stood up. ‘I’m going to have another cranberry juice, though I’d love a scotch,’ she said to hide her embarrassment. ‘Now our confession session is over, we should go back to discussing Morris Little, because you still haven’t explained why being in love with their big sister means that you think the Frosts are innocent.’

  ‘I’m not in love with her,’ Edwin said to Alex’s back. ‘Not now.’

  She came back with a pint for him and juice for herself. Edwin started talking straight away. ‘Marilyn knows what the boys are like. It’s been one petty crime after another. They both had ASBOs and Jason had been charged with a drugs offence, though it was dropped. To be honest, I didn’t contact her about it because . . . well, because contacting her is difficult. But a few days ago she called me. All she said was that she would be allowed to visit them. And that she didn’t believe that they’d done it.’

  ‘And allied with the mystery of the psalter, the assignation with Wanda, and the power cut, it made you wonder?’

  ‘Yes! Say someone else met Morris, beat him on the head, then waited during the power cut, and came back when you and Tom were off the scene?’

  ‘But the Frosts’ fingerprints are on the wood, aren’t they?’

  ‘Does that mean anything?’

  ‘And they’ve boasted about causing the power cut, haven’t they?’

  ‘But maybe that was a coincidence?’

  ‘So who else would have wanted to kill Morris Little?’

  ‘That,’ said Edwin slowly, ‘is the easiest question to answer. Almost everyone in Norbridge hated Morris. Including me.’ He paused. ‘Look at this. I only found it yesterday when I went through Morris’s emails.’ Edwin fished in his pocket and Alex looked down at the printout he produced.

  A moment later, lifting her eyes from the page, she said, ‘My God! I’ll get both of us a scotch after all.’

  26

  All mine enemies whisper together against me; even against me do they imagine this evil. Psalm 41:7

  ‘This is an all right spot!’

  Poppy Strickland eased her large round firm bottom a little closer to Tom Firth’s agonizingly
thin thighs. They were sitting together in the Mitre Lounge, a dark offshoot of the Norbridge Arms, where the town’s youth gathered, faces illuminated by the glowing stained glass window effect of bright beeping game machines. Tom couldn’t help jigging his shoulders softly along to the rap. He looked a particularly livid yellow while Poppy flashed scarlet and blue alternately. Both sucked a commercial cocktail of chemicals through plastic straws with the look of suckling babies, lulled by the thudding beat of the music.

  Poppy’s lush lips parted to reveal very white teeth and, just before she spoke, Tom had congratulated himself, yet again, on getting off with her – if that was what had happened. He wasn’t quite sure. Poppy was not a great talker. After a fumbling clinch outside the cinema complex in Newcastle when he visited her, she had just said ‘All right’ when he suggested meeting the next time she was home from university.

  Then he’d had a brainwave. His mum’s birthday was coming up. If Poppy was coming home for half-term, he could ask her to help him choose something for his mother. The scheme was a winner. It was safe, cosy, and made him look like a nice guy. And he would have time to think up their next outing, and maybe take things a little further. Predictably, when he’d asked her, Poppy had just said ‘All right.’

  They’d met at eleven o’clock that morning, and trawled Marks and Spencer, H. Samuel and Waterstone’s before choosing a set of Cumbrian Heather Bath Accessories from McCrea’s. The gift safely out of the way, Tom had made for the trendy atmosphere of the Mitre Lounge and was now wondering what to suggest next.

  ‘Yes, it’s all right here,’ Poppy repeated. Then she said brusquely: ‘Have you seen Chloe?’

  Was this an innocent question, or was she becoming a bit proprietorial? Tom was rather chuffed at the thought.

  ‘No,’ he said emphatically, but then he wondered if the truth might be a better option. After all, he had no idea whether the two girls were in touch. ‘Well, actually, she’s been coming to Chorus practices with her mum. Have you seen her yourself?’ he added, suddenly suspicious. He was a bit nervous about where Poppy’s loyalties lay.