by Duncan James
***
In England, they would have held a Coroner’s inquest, but this was Scotland. Jo wasn’t quite sure what was going on.
The police had made an extensive investigation first, but had decided that there would be no prosecution, as there was no motive and nobody to prosecute. Jo couldn’t have done it, and in any case, one of the villagers had seen her, through his binoculars, sitting in the passenger seat of the car outside the church at the relevant time. Not that he had ventured to visit the church, of course, to see at first hand if she was all right. That was the one day of the year when none of the villagers went near the place.
So the Procurator Fiscal – a sort of Crown Prosecution Service, Jo had concluded - had decided that there should be a Fatal Accident Inquiry, to be carried out by the local Sheriff. There was no jury, and there would be no verdict, but the Sheriff had not only to decide the cause of death, but also to make a ‘determination’ as to whether there were any reasonable precautions that could have been taken to avoid the death or to prevent a similar death in the future.
He had talked to Jo, who had described the reason for their visit, and he had also taken medical evidence.
That was when he decided to summon the Minister of Inch Church as well.
The Minister was distraught by the whole affair. The Ensign, he had said, was very much a part of local life. It was always pointed out to visitors, it was there on Remembrance Sunday, and even the local Sea Scouts in Stranraer had named their hut, rather pretentiously, HMS Rodney. The Minister admitted that strange things had happened in his church in the past, although nothing like this, of course. Nobody from the village would ever set foot anywhere near the church on one particular day of the year – the day, indeed, of Charles Toogood’s death.
It was May 27th - the anniversary of the sinking of the Bismarck. Usually, the church was shut on that day, but this year neither the Minister nor any of the elders had locked it.
The Minister also had to admit that the installation of the Ensign was, according to the records, quite unofficial. The General Assembly in Edinburgh had never been asked for permission to house it in the Church, and, if they had been, it was his view that permission would not have been granted. Which was why he was totally opposed to the Sheriff’s suggestion that he might consider conducting some sort of exorcism service. Edinburgh would need to be told about that.
“Anyway,” asked the Minister of the Sheriff, “what is there to exorcise?”
“Don’t ask me,” replied the frustrated Sheriff. “I know about Scottish law and I know about salmon fishing, but not much else. You are a man of the cloth and as you admit, there is something very odd about your Kirk.”
The man paused.
“The surgeon who conducted the post mortem thinks so, too,” he added.
“Do you mean that the poor Mr. Toogood didn’t simply die of a heart attack?” asked the Minister.
“He didn’t ‘simply’ die at all, according to the autopsy,” replied the Sheriff.
“What, then?” asked the Minister.
The Sheriff shook his head in disbelief.
“There is some strange and powerful force at work in the Kirk at Inch,” replied the man.
“The Will of God works in strange ways, to be sure,” commented the Minister.
“This is not God’s hand at work, I’ll be bound,” said the Sheriff.
“I shall decide that, when you tell me the cause of the poor soul’s death,” said the Minister, tetchily.
“Try this then,” said the Sheriff. “The man’s lungs were full of oily sea water. Charles Toogood drowned.”
The Minister crossed himself, and muttered something about ‘the sins of the fathers’.
***
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Duncan James was an RAF pilot before eventually reaching the higher levels of the British Civil Service, in a career that included top-level posts at home and abroad with the Defence Ministry, and work with the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard.
A life-long and compulsive writer, he has produced everything from Government statements, Ministerial briefing papers, media announcements and reference books. As a public affairs consultant and freelance author, he was a prolific writer of magazine articles on a wide variety of subjects, as well as short stories and three novels.