A Vicar, Crucified

by Simon Parke

  ‘Perhaps that’s why I’m so happy here,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been attracted to failure; so much more interesting than success.’

  ‘That’s what all failures say. That’s why they’re failures.’

  ***

  They’d conducted preliminary interviews with all six suspects; the seventh, Clare, was still missing. Peter was enjoying the history but Tamsin wanted to get on.

  ‘I’ll tell you the dark past of Stormhaven one day,’ he said. ‘Show you how desperate people behave.’

  ‘I think we’ve just seen how desperate people behave. I mean, how many crucifixions does it take to make you notice the present? Or do you only experience life that’s over 500 years old?’

  ‘I am seduced by history, but thankfully you’ve shaken me from my slumbers.’

  ‘And by the way, I trust you won’t bring your lust for failure into the investigation. Once it’s all over, worship at its shrine by all means, but until then - .’

  ‘Failure is at the heart of every murder, Tamsin.’

  Peter was suddenly struck by a truth but one too elusive to be grasped and held.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Failure is at the heart of every murder.’

  ‘You’ve said that.’

  ‘Only the failing kill, an interesting thought. Only those scalded in their search for the sacred and now running from their pain kill people.’

  Tamsin sipped her wine while glancing through her notes.

  ‘Cod psychology is only distantly related to police work, Uncle.’

  Abbot Peter smiled, and, sensing her discomfort, focused on the day.

  ‘When I reflect back on the interviews,’ he said, ‘I think mainly of the large number of lies.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Tamsin lifted her eyes from her notes.

  ‘During the interviews, a lot of untruth was being peddled out. I’m used to misinformation as a priest and counsellor but I didn’t realise the police got quite so much of the dark stuff as well.’

  ‘All the time. So I’m glad your lie detector’s working.’

  ‘Oh, discerning evasion is easy. It’s the truth that struggles to emerge.’

  ‘So which particular porkies jumped out at you today?’

  ‘Five spring obviously to mind.’

  Tamsin was surprised by his precision.

  ‘There’s nothing so satisfying as a list. So let’s hear it, Uncle.’

  ‘Sally said she had no reason to be angry with Anton. Malcolm Flight said he left the church after the meeting. The Bishop said he drove Clare home. Betty says that the reason for her late night walk was to get some air and Ginger said that he was catching up on some paperwork in church this morning. All lies.’

  Peter had Tamsin’s attention.

  ‘The counsel for the defence might ask for evidence,’ she said.

  ‘I know from both Mrs Pipe and Clare how badly Sally took her rejection by Anton.’

  ‘They told you that?’

  ‘They did, yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s what people do, they tell me things. They won’t tell a soul, but they will tell an Abbot.’

  ‘Malcolm Flight? An honourable man in my book. Dull obviously and a bit of a freak, as Anton said, but honourable.’

  ‘Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. But he was in the church late.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure I heard him. He dropped his keys, you see, or at least I think he did. More particularly, the oil is still wet from his painting and he was in the shop all day yesterday. He must have worked on it after the meeting.’

  ‘Not bad. But the Bishop lying about taking Clare home? Why on earth would a Bishop do that?’

  ‘I don’t know why. Perhaps he has a messy life too? For the moment I’m merely saying it isn’t true.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Jennifer saw him driving alone in his car.’

  ‘Perhaps he’d already dropped her off.’

  ‘He was still two miles short of her home. And it was raining.’

  ‘Perhaps the wonderful Jennifer is telling a lie. She seems to be the only one who hasn’t told one yet.’

  ‘She could be. She lies as well as the next person, probably better. All we can say is she hasn’t been caught out yet.’

  ‘And Betty?’

  ‘I met her on the seafront when I was walking home much later. She appeared from behind the beach huts and was a picture of fury. Whatever it was that took her out last night it wasn’t the desire for a little air. You had to have good reason to be out in that storm.’

  ‘Which just leaves Ginger’s early morning attendance at church. Don’t tell me: you were out for a run at half past five and you met him carrying a hammer and a bag of nails.’

  ‘More flies are caught with honey than vinegar.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Are you merciless with everyone?’

  ‘Mercy is not one of my weaknesses.’

  ‘It could, as I say, distance you from truth.’

  ‘It could also help me nail the murderer.’

  ‘And how appropriate that will be: the crucifier nailed. A toast to justice.’

  ‘To justice.’

  They clinked glasses of red wine.

  ‘So why do you think Ginger was lying?’

  ‘No evidence as such. He simply doesn’t do paperwork. It would be like me taking parenting classes. And of course he never rises before ten o’clock. No youth worker gets up before ten o’clock, he told me so himself; until today, when the vicar happens to be murdered. And Sally happens to be doing a morning shift as well.’

  Tamsin seemed invigorated by these dark observations.

  ‘It’s always good to get the initial lies out into the open. It feels like we’re lifting the stone a little, peering underneath and witnessing a mass panic of the creepy-crawlies. But it does at least seem certain that he died of a heart attack between midnight and 2.00 a.m. this morning.’

  Tamsin took a further sip of wine, and then added: ‘Though more pressing than Anton’s time of death is the question of when rigor mortis set in with Bernard Silsbury.’

  ‘Who’s he?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Our pathologist.’

  ‘Ah. Proving a little slow, is he?’

  ‘Slow? How will anyone know when he dies?’

  Peter looked out to sea. ‘He’ll know a peace he doesn’t know now. People like you wind him up.’

  ‘You mean people like me who are trying to solve a murder?’

  ‘From our brief acquaintance, he’s a master in the passiveaggressive arts. And in his fight with you, time of death is his greatest weapon. He knows you want it and knows it is he who must deliver it. Most humans are unworthy of power.’

  ‘Well, his power is limited in this instance. I don’t think his final report will hold any surprises for us. Rigor mortis sets in around three hours after death.’

  ‘Starting with the eyelids, I believe?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘One of my monks at St James was a former pathologist in Milton Keynes.’

  ‘Moving on...’

  ‘Clive was his name,’ continued Peter. ‘Nice man. He decided to start his life again, and with his savings, opened a shoe shop in Cyprus.’

  ‘As you do.’

  ‘But he soon realised that he knew nothing about shoes, and cared even less, after which he made the short move across the water to Egypt and became Brother Clive.’

  ‘So it wasn’t a general calling to shoes but a particular calling to sandals.’

  The Abbot smiled.

  ‘He never lost his fascination with rigor
mortis, though, often describing how it worked its way down through the body.’

  ‘That must have made for some fun nights at the monastery.’

  ‘And of course complete after twelve hours, as I remember, by which time it’s reached the lower extremities, going into reverse after about thirty-six hours.’

  ‘And Anton’s was nowhere near complete at 9.00 a.m. this morning. It had reached down to his torso but no further, so around 2.00 a.m. sounds right.’

  ‘Clive always said that time of death was one of the most crucial parts of the pathologist’s work but also one of the most difficult to get right, with so many variables in the equation. “There’s a thin line between science and mystery”, he’d say.’

  ‘I don’t need the mystic Clive to tell me that no pathologist can give a definitive time of death after a quick look at the body.’

  ‘Yet that’s exactly what you asked for today.’

  ‘Well, you always try, don’t you?’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘I just wish Bernard could at least give the impression that he wants the case solved, that we’re on the same side, that in fact I’m the good guy here, not the murderer, and that giving me this information won’t help me cover my tracks and escape to the Costa del Crime shortly after.’

  ‘So are you one of the good guys, Tamsin?’

  Thirty Four

  And now Clare was remembering her uncle. He’d sometimes come to stay in the summer and take her to church on Sundays. Most of Clare’s friends hated being taken to church - ‘It’s so boring!’ - but Clare? She loved it. It was safe, no one hit her there and it was quite the highlight of her week.

  And once, after her uncle had left for another year, she decided to go to church by herself. So aged ten, she escaped the house on Sunday morning and took herself to morning worship. She managed it for a couple of weeks before her father found out. After that, he locked her in her bedroom on Sundays. He wasn’t having a daughter of his growing up with any of that nonsense in her head. And then he went back to his saxophone.

  Since those days, church had always been an act of rebellion for Clare, a cry of independence from those so careless of her childhood. And perhaps there was a god, she’d sometimes sensed that, particularly at midnight mass on Christmas Eve with the candles burning, the choir singing and expectation in the air. But for the abandoned girl, god or no god, the place of safety was enough, the feelings of relief still running through her adult bones, free of the horror that was her home.

  She’d never quite got free, though. Do you ever get free? She’d never - and this saddened her - quite discovered the intimacy destroyed by her mother. She would have liked a relationship, someone to love, someone to love her but she seemed to frighten people away, the invisible wall around her; and those she didn’t frighten, she’d push away herself, repulse, kill them with cold in case they came close.

  No one close, never again, no one to be given that power over her, that crucifying power, and through it all she’d done well, she’d come far, she should be proud; not on medication, not in care, she’d done well, so well, still reaching out, there was such glory in her, she sensed that glory now, such beautiful colours in her, such eternal origins, way before her mother, way before her father, such a coming home and had she ever been so happy? Reaching out, her hand free now, happy, free air...

  Thirty Five

  Abbot Peter poured her a little more wine. Tamsin allowed herself just half a glass, aware of her drive home.

  ‘I may have to stay the night,’ she said.

  ‘Well, that’s possible,’ replied Peter with all the enthusiasm his reluctance could muster.

  ‘It’s all been very sudden, you see. Last week I was living in Arundel.’

  ‘Very posh.’

  ‘And now suddenly I’m here in less than congenial police digs while things are sorted.’

  ‘I do have a spare bed,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘The room’s not in mint condition but offers partial sea views and is a convenient eight minute walk from the station.’

  ‘Of course the murderer may not have been there at 2.00 a.m.,’ said Tamsin, ignoring the estate agent’s pitch. ‘In fact my strong guess is that they weren’t. No one hangs around the scene of the crime longer than is necessary.’

  ‘A bit careless, in a way then.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘As we know, crucifixion doesn’t kill by itself. Not in the short term, at least. Those who were crucified with Jesus had their legs broken to hasten their end. It meant they were no longer able to lift themselves to breathe and died of asphyxiation. Without the legs being broken, they’d have to die of other causes and that often took time.’

  ‘I missed the lecture on crucifixion at training college. You’ll have to explain.’

  Peter gave Tamsin a brief lesson in Roman execution.

  ‘One thing is for sure,’ he concluded. ‘You don’t die in three hours on the cross, unless unusual circumstances intervene. It does make you wonder what we are looking at here.’

  ‘Perhaps the murderer or murderers didn’t want him to die,’ she said. ‘Perhaps they just wanted to teach Anton a lesson. Perhaps they are as surprised as we are to wake up this morning and discover he’s actually dead. What they wanted was not death but the drawnout pain, the lonely hours and the eventual humiliation of discovery. The vicar crucified and naked for all the world to see, with his epitaph scribbled on the dog collar: ‘Should have done better.’

  ‘Possible. If that was the case, his assailant could not let themselves be recognised.’

  ‘There was a lot of blood. They would have needed protective clothing which could double as a disguise.’

  Abbot Peter pondered.

  ‘Any news of the house searches?’

  ‘They’ve produced nothing.’

  Tamsin said this as though someone had failed; as though anyone half-competent would have found something.

  ‘Somewhere nearby,’ she said slowly, ‘there’s protective gear covered in blood, a decent hammer, some big nails, roles of tape, gloves, a knife and a good supply of chloroform.’

  ‘But we haven’t found them yet.’

  ‘No, and until we do, we have problems. I think I’ll stay, if that’s okay. This is very strong wine.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I think I’ll take you up on your offer and stay.’

  ‘Ah, right,’ he said.

  Had it been an offer? For Peter, it had been more of a polite remark. Nothing was more precious to him than his solitude and Tamsin, like the Norman Conquest, was a serious invasion. Hospitality for the Abbot was making people feel at home when he wished they were.

  ‘I don’t have any spare sheets, I’m afraid, so you must have mine,’ he said, slowly opening the doors of his heart. ‘They’ve only been on a week.’

  ‘I don’t want your sheets.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘No, but I do. It wouldn’t be hygienic. Do you have a sleeping bag?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I have a spare toothbrush, hardly used. But something tells me you won’t want that either.’

  ***

  It was an odd ‘Good night’.

  Ever-resourceful, Tamsin had turned a spare tablecloth into a sheet, double folded the single blanket and placed on that a back cover from a chair in the front room. From the same chair came a cushion, now a working pillow. It was a sort of warmth, as she lay listening to the cold sea falling on the shore, advancing to the high point. She had at least shared the Abbot’s toothpaste, putting some on her finger, rubbing her teeth and swilling round. Tomorrow she would return to her police digs and bring some sheets of her own. Or perhaps she’d buy them if Stormhaven rose to a department store, which, on reflection, seemed optimistic. But r
eally there was little point in a spare bed without sheets, unless her uncle wished it permanently spare. Perhaps he did? Most of his possessions seemed to have been gathered from the shore line and it would be some time before one of his beachcomber friends found clean bed linen snagged on one of the groynes.

  And the house rules which her uncle had laid down? She could live with those.

  ‘I just ask two things,’ he’d said as she’d busied herself with the practicalities of her stay.

  ‘House rules?’

  ‘Sounds rather grand, but if you like, yes. Good fences make good neighbours and all that.’

  ‘Agreed. So what are they?’

  ‘We take our shoes off at the front door.’

  ‘Slippers or socks from thereon in?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Fair enough. And the other rule?’

  ‘My study remains out of bounds.’

  ‘Why, what goes on in there?’

  ‘I do.’

  She’d found this rule slightly offensive but was coming to terms with it slowly. Peter had offered no further explanation, which established it as something non-negotiable and somehow outside the remit of any subsequent discussion.

  As for St Michael’s, tomorrow she’d have to decide whether the planned Christmas Fayre could go ahead at the weekend. It was only two days away and much preparation had gone into it. Sally was in favour of it proceeding and really, there were no policing reasons why it couldn’t. Perhaps there were pastoral reasons but pastoral reasons were not her concern. There was a murderer listening to these same waves tonight. That was her concern. And out there somewhere was Clare. Could she too hear the waves? Hopefully.

  Tamsin was sound asleep by the time the brick crashed through the window about half a mile away. It was the front window of Jennifer Gold’s house, head of the local primary school and church warden of St Michael’s Church where the vicar had recently been crucified. The brick had a message attached and the message was this:

  ‘We know it was you.’

  Thirty Six

  ‘Is there far to go?’ asked Gurdjieff, feeling both the heat and the climb.