Amendment of Life

by Catherine Aird

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘What you are going to be looking for is lying somewhere in the famous Aumerle maze,’ said the Superintendent, adding, quite unabashed, ‘Didn’t I say?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Sloan said expressionlessly. ‘You didn’t say.’

  ‘Well, it is, and I don’t want you and your Sergeant spending all morning playing about in there either.’

  ‘I’m afraid, sir,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan with an even more marked lack of enthusiasm, ‘that I’ll have to take young Crosby with me today instead.’ Detective Constable Crosby, inexperienced and inept, was not a useful man to have at his side – or anyone else’s – on a case. ‘Sergeant Gelven rang in sick first thing this morning. He’s not going to be well enough to be on duty at all this week.’

  ‘That’s the worst of Monday mornings,’ pronounced Leeyes elliptically. ‘They come after Saturday nights.’

  But it wasn’t the worst of this Monday morning.

  By any means.

  * * *

  There was one place in the County of Calleshire where Monday was definitely not the busiest day of the week and that was the Bishop’s Palace at Calleford.

  ‘Your egg’s done, Bertie,’ a woman’s voice called up the stairs. ‘Don’t let it get cold.’

  ‘Coming.’ His Grace, the Bishop of Calleford, the Right Reverend Bertram Wallingford, always made sure that Monday was kept as a day of rest by the simple device of remaining in his pyjamas and dressing gown as long as he could, and staying in bed as late as his wife would let him.

  ‘I’m putting the toast in now,’ said the same voice a few minutes later, more firmly this time.

  ‘I’m on my way.’ A moment later a dishevelled figure arrived at the table and sat down heavily, fingering an unshaven chin.

  Mary Wallingford regarded her husband with despair. ‘It’s just as well you’ve already got preferment in the Church, Bertie. If anyone in the diocese saw you now they’d say you’d never make a curate, let alone get a bishopric.’

  ‘They would if I were non-stipendiary,’ he said realistically. ‘In my opinion you can get away with murder in the Church of England if you don’t need paying.’

  ‘And,’ she said, undeflected, ‘if any of the women’s groups in Calleshire which I give my talks to ever caught sight of you in that deplorable dressing gown, they’d drum me out immediately.’

  Unabashed, the Bishop looked down at what had once been a brown-and-white checked pattern. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Old age,’ she said crisply.

  ‘People live longer these days,’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t dressing gowns?’

  ‘You shall have a new one for Christmas.’

  ‘That sounds more like a threat than a promise.’ He gave a great yawn and stretched his arms upwards. ‘That was a very good meal last night, Mary. One of your best.’

  ‘You can’t beat a good beef casserole,’ said the Bishop’s wife, well versed in dishes that could wait upon the end of Evensong (with sermon). ‘And a plum tart afterwards.’

  ‘It did Malby a power of good, anyway,’ said the Bishop, running his hands through his tousled grey hair. ‘Poor fellow. He does so look forward to your Sunday evening suppers now.’

  ‘It must be very lonely at the Deanery these days,’ said Mary Wallingford. ‘Not having a wife to come home to any more…’

  ‘And to share your worries with,’ finished Bertie Wallingford simply. He had made a practice throughout their marriage of pouring out his own troubles – or nearly all of them – to his wife as soon as he stepped back over his own threshold. He gave this fact, and her, all the credit for his not having succumbed early – like many better men in the Church – to a coronary thrombosis.

  ‘I thought deans didn’t have any worries,’ she said, tongue-in-cheek, ‘and that only bishops and archdeacons did … or have I got that wrong?’

  ‘Malby’s got worries,’ said the Bishop earnestly. ‘Big ones.’

  ‘Not the Church Commissioners again, I hope?’

  He shook his head. ‘There’s been a sudden outbreak of prowlers in the Close, for one thing. The security people don’t seem able to do anything about them – it’s not as if the Minster is enclosed—’

  ‘A precinct would be safer,’ she agreed, echoing, had she known it, many an early medieval builder.

  ‘And then…’. He paused.

  ‘And then?’ she prompted him.

  ‘And then, first thing the other morning one of the gardeners found some odd things outside Canon Willoughby’s front door.’

  ‘How odd, exactly, these things?’ she queried.

  He hesitated. ‘If you must know—’

  ‘Of course I must know, Bertie,’ Mary Wallingford interrupted him impatiently. ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘What I think you might call signs of uncanonical practices.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘A sheep’s head.’ He dropped his gaze. ‘And some burnt feathers and other things.’

  ‘Ah,’ she nodded. ‘I thought Malby was rather quiet last night.’

  ‘He told me not to worry you.’

  ‘That was nice of him.’

  ‘So’, hurried on the Bishop, ‘the Chapter has asked that firm in Berebury which has been so efficient with the Minster floodlighting…’

  ‘Double Felix, Ltd.’ Her lips twitched. ‘Such a clever name – and neat, too, having those “two cats rampant” as their logo. That’s really brilliant.’

  ‘Them,’ said the Bishop, hitting his egg with a spoon. ‘Malby told the Clerk of Works to get them in as a matter of urgency. They’ve been putting up some more security lights in any especially dark corners in the Close.’

  ‘Good,’ said Mary. ‘You never know what’s going to happen next when people start to get funny ideas about the Church.’

  ‘Well, you needn’t worry now because Double Felix are working on it flat out. I know that because Malby and I saw their head-wallah – David somebody … I forget his name—’

  ‘Collins,’ she supplied.

  ‘That’s right – him – still at it in the slype yesterday evening when we came across here for supper after the service.’

  ‘I expect David Collins is quite glad to get out of the house just now,’ said the Bishop’s wife sympathetically. ‘Work is a very present help in time of trouble. It can sometimes take your mind off other things.’

  ‘Of course.’ The Bishop bowed his head. ‘I was forgetting about his little boy’s illness. He’s not any worse, is he?’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard,’ said his wife, ‘but it’s a nasty operation for a young child, losing an eye like that, and you never know with that sort of cancer, do you?’

  ‘We’ve a lot to be thankful for,’ he said humbly. ‘How do you come to know all this about the Collins family?’

  ‘Margaret – that’s his wife – comes in from Nether Hoystings to our pre-school nursery with the boy.’ Being the treasurer of this was just one of Mary Wallingford’s many voluntary jobs. ‘She’s quite a striking-looking woman in a rather sultry way, but always very pleasant to talk to. They’re both shattered about the eye naturally. He’s an only child, too.’

  The Bishop nodded. ‘I can understand the man throwing himself into his work—’

  ‘Even if it’s in the slype after hours on a Sunday?’ Mary Wallingford shivered. ‘I’ve never liked the place. Nasty, narrow and dark…’

  ‘Well, at least it’s not going to be dark for long.’ Bertie Wallingford started to cut his buttered toast into nursery-sized ‘soldiers’. ‘But I’m afraid’, he added drily, ‘even the Dean can’t do anything about the slype being so narrow – he’d have to move the Chapter House first.’

  ‘And yet, Bertie,’ his wife gave him a teasing smile, tongue well in cheek, ‘you’re always saying that compared with bishops, deans have all the power in the world.’

  ‘And even with Malby Coton’s very considerable autonomy, he can’t shift the Minster
transept either.’ The Bishop reached for the salt. ‘And as for the slype being nasty…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s not as nasty as having a sheep’s head on your doorstep.’ He turned his head. ‘Is that the doorbell?’

  ‘It’ll be the postman.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ he said.

  ‘Not in that dressing gown, you won’t,’ said Mary Wallingford vigorously. ‘It’ll be enough to turn him from Christianity.’

  ‘I expect the man’s an agnostic anyway. Nearly everyone seems to be these days.’

  ‘To atheism, then,’ she said, rising to her feet. ‘I’m going anyway.’

  She was back in an instant, her face white, her hand shaking a little. ‘Oh, Bertie, do come … it was the postman. But there’s a dead rabbit lying on the doorstep as well—’

  ‘Dropped by a fox, I expect, my dear,’ he said suppressing another, less welcome thought. ‘They’re urban creatures these days.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, no, Bertie, it wasn’t a fox. It’s got a rusty old wire twisted round its neck, poor thing. Besides, there’s a collection of little bones on the path inside some chalk lines.’ She gulped. ‘And something somewhere’s making a very funny noise.’

  Chapter Three

  Offices are places where Monday mornings are never popular. Almost as soon as she had arrived at work, Sharon Gibbons, secretary to the rising firm of Double Felix Ltd, Lighting Specialists, of Chapel Street, Berebury, brought a load of files into the partners’ room and placed them firmly on Eric Paterson’s desk.

  ‘Hey, Sharon, steady on,’ Paterson protested, flipping open the file on the top of the pile. ‘These aren’t all mine.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Eric,’ apologized David Collins, the other half of Double Felix Ltd, who was sitting at the desk opposite. He grimaced. ‘I’m afraid they’re mostly mine.’

  The two partners could not have been more different. Eric Paterson was an unkempt, shambling figure, never seemingly stressed, while David Collins, his dark-haired, intense partner, was much thinner, more precise and perpetually wound up. The combination of the two opposites worked well and Double Felix Ltd had as much highly specialized lighting work on its hands as it could cope with.

  ‘And it’s not Sharon’s fault, Eric,’ continued David Collins, poised to leave his desk. He gave Sharon a swift glance of sympathy. ‘I’ve got to get off up to the hospital in half a tick. Mr Beaumont, the oncology consultant, wants a word with Margaret and me about little James this morning.’

  ‘It’s only routine, though, David, isn’t it?’ asked his business partner uneasily.

  ‘Just a follow-up, they called it,’ responded David Collins, ‘although they did keep James in over the weekend. They said not to worry,’ he gave a wan smile, ‘but I must say that that’s always a bit difficult in the circumstances and Margaret gets very wound up.’

  ‘Naturally,’ put in Sharon.

  ‘Doctors always say not to worry,’ growled the other man, ‘even though they know you won’t believe them. Not an ounce of imagination, the medical profession. Mind you,’ Paterson added, ‘I’m sure it’s very different when it’s one of them who’s ill.’

  ‘I daresay you’re right,’ said David Collins, nodding. ‘Actually, Margaret stayed overnight at the hospital with James because he gets quite het up when he has to go back in there—’

  ‘You can’t blame him, can you?’ interposed Sharon, all motherly sympathy. ‘Poor little chap.’

  ‘Anyway, I’ll be back as soon as we’ve seen the oncologist,’ said Collins, making for the door. ‘It shouldn’t take long and then I’ll just nip over to the Minster and finish off what I didn’t get done last night.’

  Sharon Gibbons waited until David Collins had gone before she said, ‘You can tell he was worried really, can’t you, Eric? He always tugs at that tall tuft of hair that sticks up over his forehead when he’s got something on his mind. I’ve noticed.’

  ‘Does he?’ said Eric Paterson, his mind elsewhere. His own hair was always all over the place, though he doubted if their secretary ever noticed that.

  ‘Sorry, Eric, all the same, about giving you all the files,’ Sharon said unrepentantly, waving a hand at the pile of them she’d put on his desk.

  ‘I’m sure,’ grunted the partner, knowing what she said to be untrue.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to take a look at them this morning…’ Sharon Gibbons had never doubted that Monday was the most difficult day of the week and there was nothing on the agenda for today likely to make her change her mind. ‘… we’d better be on the safe side.’

  Eric Paterson grunted again and picked up the next file down the heap.

  Experienced secretary that she was, Sharon kept silent. She knew only too well that tensions left unresolved on Friday afternoons could ripen into open warfare by Monday morning. Not that Eric Paterson went in for tension much. Not him.

  He picked up the third file.

  Sharon also knew that problems which have lain untouched in in-trays all weekend have not thus mysteriously solved themselves: and that they tend, instead, to rise up again even as the worker, not helped by a weekend of brooding on the subject, pulls up the chair to the desk. The members of the firm of Double Felix Ltd were no exception to this general rule and Sharon Gibbons was busy.

  ‘But these are all David’s files,’ insisted Eric Paterson, looking up from the next one down the stack. ‘Every one of them.’

  ‘David, if you remember,’ Sharon said, unmoved, ‘went over to Aumerle Court yesterday afternoon to look at the maze and was working until late last night over at Calleford Minster, quite apart from having to go off to the hospital this morning.’

  ‘So he was,’ Eric admitted easily. ‘I’d forgotten how determined he was to get on with that church job this weekend. He’s a better man than I am, I must say,’ he added, knowing that Sharon would have a hard job not agreeing with him aloud.

  ‘That’s David for you all over,’ said Sharon tactfully. She much preferred David Collins, the younger, more active partner, and his pale determined look. ‘He said to me that he was keen to get the Minster work over and done with as soon as he could so that he could get cracking on some other jobs that have been piling up.’

  ‘Which they have,’ he reminded her, ‘in quite a big way.’

  ‘Have a heart, Eric,’ she said. ‘You can’t expect David to concentrate on his work while his son’s been so ill. It wouldn’t be natural.’

  ‘Work’s work,’ said her employer implacably.

  ‘I know, I know,’ she sighed, ‘and it’s all got to be done somehow.’

  ‘And you can give him this file straight away when he does get back,’ said David’s partner, tossing a thick green bundle over on to the other desk. ‘It’s the Aumerle Court project, Heaven help us all. Thank God it’s one of his.’

  ‘I don’t know’, Sharon went on as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘how nearly David finished the Minster job yesterday evening. But the Clerk of Works has been on the phone already this morning. They want him back there, very pronto, like always.’

  ‘You’d better tell David as soon as he comes in, then,’ Paterson grinned, adding, ‘and they’ll both have to wait anyway until he does come back to the office since mobile phones aren’t allowed at either the Minster or the hospital. Not quite the forces of God and Mammon, but nearly.’ He twirled his pencil. ‘Perhaps we should say God and the hospital. Comes to same thing, doesn’t it? The doctors over there all think they’re God—’

  ‘It’s their Canon Willoughby at the Minster,’ she interrupted him. ‘He wants some extra security lighting installed outside his house in the Close, now, if not sooner.’

  Eric Paterson scratched his chin. ‘More trouble there?’

  ‘Something cabbalistic written in charcoal on his doorstep is what they told us,’ said Sharon. ‘I’m not sure if the old boy knows what it means—’

  ‘But if he does, he’s not saying,’ finished Paterson for h
er.

  ‘But whatever it is, they don’t like it there in the Close.’

  ‘There’s a lot of things they don’t like in the Close,’ said Eric Paterson, absently leafing through the file. ‘Hey, Sharon, you’re slipping. This next letter here is in the wrong place.’

  Sharon Gibbons stiffened. ‘What letter? Where? Show me.’

  ‘This one. Here, in the Minster file.’ Paterson was regarding it with fine detachment. ‘About circuits.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know how that got in there, I’m sure,’ she said defensively. ‘That’s not the Aumerle Court file.’

  ‘No, it’s the Minster one, as I said, but here’s a rough plan of Aumerle Court and another stroppy diatribe from that toy soldier over at Staple St James—’

  ‘Captain Prosser,’ said Sharon, identifying the gentleman in question without difficulty like the good secretary she was. She sniffed. ‘I don’t know when the Captain thinks David is going to get over to Aumerle Court while he’s as busy as he is.’

  ‘Yesterday, from the tone of his letter,’ said Paterson, quite relaxed, ‘if not the day before. Ring him – no, write, that’ll take longer to get there, which will annoy him – and tell him that we’ll come when we can and not a minute before. I don’t like Double Felix being leaned on by the likes of him.’

  ‘Their son-et-lumière performances are due to be put on quite soon,’ murmured Sharon with apparent disinterest. ‘The end of the month, I think it’s supposed to be. David was saying that the actual date’s something to do with when it’s going to be dark enough in the evening, which’, she added obliquely, ‘it will be before long. He was trying to find time to get over there.’

  ‘Oh, all right, then,’ Paterson said, still unperturbed. ‘Put this one on David’s desk and I’ll talk to him about it as soon as I set eyes on him.’ He locked his fingers behind his head and leaned back lazily in his swivel chair. ‘The rest of all this paperwork you can take away and go through while I sit and think about object waves meeting reference waves and cabbages and kings.’

  Sharon Gibbons said nothing, but she could not resist a reproving glance at the clock.

  ‘Unless you’d like to bring me some coffee instead,’ he said, seeing this and grinning. ‘After all, one of us has to have our work priorities right.’