Vow of Obedience

by Veronica Black

  Going into the narrow hall Sister Joan smelt the unmistakable scent of grief. Impossible to analyse it but, if pressed, she might have said it was compounded of over-stewed tea, human perspiration and salt tears.

  The front room, curtains drawn against curious sightseers and lamps switched on, was crammed with people drinking tea and conversing in low voices. As they hesitated a youngish woman, her eyes swollen with crying, her expression a strange mixture of grief and importance, confronted them, words spilling over.

  ‘From the convent? Oh, how very kind. Val would have loved these. She was ever so fond of flowers and these are just – people are really being very kind.’

  ‘Mrs Pendon? This is Sister David and I’m Sister Joan. We came to express our very deep sympathy on behalf of our community, and to ask if there is anything at all we can do?’

  ‘Father Malone has been here, arranging for the requiem and all that,’ Mrs Pendon said breathlessly. ‘You will stop for a cup of tea? Someone made cake.’ She looked around vaguely.

  Tragedy, Sister Joan thought, could be covered up with little things – the cup of tea, the kind neighbour, the sense that, for a short while, one was somehow at the centre of a drama. Mrs Pendon’s mourning for her murdered child was undoubtedly deep and painful, but for the moment she laid social ritual round the wound like a bandage.

  Someone thrust a cup of tea into her hand and someone else took the dahlias from Sister David. A man with a red face pumped her hand, raising his voice to inform her that he was Valerie’s uncle and that he didn’t know what the country was coming to. Sister David had been manoeuvred into an armchair and was being assured that she was the poorer for not having known Valerie. Sister Joan left her to cope and headed for the comparative peace of the upstairs landing at the top of the open-plan stairs.

  The inside of this late Victorian house had been ripped out to please modern convenience. The wood of the staircase was shiny with varnish and some kind of stick figure made out of steel decorated a small table on the landing where she stood.

  She put down the barely tasted cup of tea and prepared to descend again whenever she could see a gap in the milling heads below. A door on the landing opened and a tall, tired looking man stood on the threshold.

  ‘Mr Pendon?’ She didn’t know by what instinct she divined it was him.

  ‘You’re from the convent?’

  ‘The one on the moors. Sister Joan of the Daughters of Compassion.’

  ‘Compassion?’ He repeated the word drearily, not shaking hands. ‘Not much of that about these days. Ghouls coming to gloat, to thank their stars that their kids are safely tucked up in bed, reporters wanting a quote from the bereaved parents – my wife copes better than I do.’

  ‘I came with another Sister, just to leave flowers and condolences,’ Sister Joan said. ‘We didn’t want to intrude but there is rather a crush down there.’

  ‘Ghouls,’ he said again.

  ‘Surely not,’ she ventured. ‘In times of trouble friends do gather round.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ He roused himself with an evident effort. ‘I’ve been sitting in her room, trying to work out how it might have happened. Trying to work out why neither of us guessed she meant to leave. You can come in if you like.’

  He stood aside to allow her to pass into the bedroom. It was a room longer than it was wide but still not large or imposing, with the frieze of an old nursery pattern still round the walls and a blue carpet that looked new. The white curtains were drawn and the overhead light glared from a white shade. The furniture was of varnished pine, scratched in places. There were two bunk beds against one wall, the upper one containing a row of stuffed animals and a large doll in a frilly dress.

  The kidney-shaped dressing-table had a frill round it, hiding the drawers beneath, and there was a double wardrobe taking up most of the rest of the space. On the walls at each side of the door small brackets held brightly coloured statuettes of the Christ Child and St Teresa of Lisieux. There was another small plaster figure on the bedside table – the Blessed Virgin with Souvenir of Lourdes on its base.

  ‘We went there last year,’ Mr Pendon said. ‘Just before Sandra – that’s our elder girl – got married. Very nice it was too. Commercial, of course, but then people like to buy souvenirs, don’t they? They used to share this room, but we started doing it up a bit after Sandra got married.’

  ‘Does she live near?’

  ‘She went up north, her and Ronnie – her husband. We’re expecting them tonight. He’s in electrics.’

  ‘There isn’t very much one can say under these circumstances,’ Sister Joan said awkwardly. ‘I don’t know if you’ve been told but I was the one who found Valerie. I used to teach at the Moor School and I rode over to see if I needed anything from the classroom last evening. She looked – she didn’t look frightened, Mr Pendon. She must have died very quickly.’

  ‘In a wedding dress. We can’t make it out,’ he said helplessly. ‘Why did she run off in the middle of the night in a wedding dress?’

  ‘Are there any suitcases or holdalls missing?’ she asked.

  ‘I checked on the cases. Nothing’s missing. She could have put her nightclothes in a big carrier bag, I suppose? Truth is, Sister, that I can’t seem to think straight since the police came. She was such a good, quiet girl. It’s true, honestly. I know every parent says that under these circumstances, but Valerie never caused us any problems. She was a bit too shy if you know what I mean. Not many friends.’

  ‘No boy-friends?’

  ‘I’d swear to it. No boy-friends at all. She wasn’t interested, Sister.’

  Sister Joan begged leave to doubt that but kept silent. Every father in this situation said the same thing: ‘She was a good, quiet girl. Never took any notice of boys’.

  ‘I won’t rest until they get him,’ Mr Pendon said, suddenly and savagely. ‘I won’t rest until they’ve got him. He must be a maniac. You’d have to be a maniac to kill a girl of sixteen. He must be sick in the head.’

  ‘And very wicked,’ Sister Joan said sombrely. ‘Sometimes I think that wickedness is a kind of madness. I’ll pray for Valerie, Mr Pendon.’

  The brief burst of feeling had passed and he sounded drained and weary.

  ‘Thank you kindly, Sister. I’m sure the wife and I are very grateful.’

  He had reached up and taken down one of the stuffed animals, holding it, stroking it while his eyes gazed into a bleak emptiness. Sister Joan left him there, went back on to the landing, drank her too sweet, cooling tea with a slight grimace, and went down the stairs again as Father Malone arrived.

  ‘Thank God, but Mrs O’Hare is tons better today,’ he informed her. ‘You’ve spoken to the family?’

  ‘Briefly. There isn’t much one can say.’

  ‘And the poor things will still be in shock, of course. It was good of you to come, Sister.’

  ‘You must have known Valerie,’ she murmured.

  ‘She was a regular communicant.’ His face was heavy with distress. ‘Girls these days are not like they used to be, Sister. All late nights and heavy make-up, but Valerie wasn’t like that. She was young for her age, Sister. Young and innocent. She was a nice girl.’

  A nice Catholic girl who went regularly to Holy Communion, who collected stuffed animals and bought religious statuettes during a family visit to Lourdes. A good girl who took no interest in boys. A girl who had risen from her bunk bed in the middle of the night and put on a wedding dress and sneaked out to meet her killer.

  ‘Was she still at school?’ she asked.

  ‘She left at the end of the summer term with two good O levels, English and Art. She hadn’t made up her mind exactly what she was going to do. I think that she might have been very good with small children. A tragic waste, Sister.’

  ‘Good morning, Father Malone.’ Sister David, blinking up through her spectacles, had joined them. ‘Are we ready to go, Sister Joan?’

  ‘Yes, we ought to get back. Goodbye, Father. Mrs P
endon, goodbye.’ She would have said more but Mrs Pendon whisked by with a tray, still intent on bandaging her wound with tea and bustle.

  There were still people hanging about in the street. The two nuns walked with bent heads and downcast eyes, shielded by their grey habits and white veils. Sister David dived into the car and fastened her seat belt.

  ‘What a sad, sad thing,’ she said tremulously.

  ‘Yes.’ Sister Joan started the car and drove thoughtfully down the street.

  Sad and squalid and unnecessary, she thought, and wrong.

  ‘There’s that nice police detective,’ Sister David said, perking up slightly. They were just passing the police station and Sister Joan slowed to a crawl as Detective Sergeant Mill signalled to them.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, Sisters, but I do have a few questions,’ he said.

  ‘We ought to get back for lunch,’ Sister David said worriedly.

  ‘Sister Joan will probably be the one who can be of most assistance. We can give you a ride home in a police car, Sister David.’

  Sister David, her nose twitching nervously, was crushed by masculine dominance.

  ‘I’ll tell Mother Dorothy you were delayed, Sister,’ she offered, getting out of the car and ducking into the waiting police car. ‘What is Sister Teresa supposed to make for lunch?’

  ‘It’s chilly today so it had better be soup. I’ll try not to be long.’

  Turning to precede Detective Sergeant Mill into the police station she surprised a twinkle in his eye.

  ‘Is anything amusing you?’ she enquired.

  ‘I didn’t realize that you were the cook,’ he said.

  ‘Now that the school has closed down I’m taking over the duties of the lay sister since we don’t have one at the moment, but I don’t actually do the cooking. Our novice, Sister Teresa, does that.’

  ‘And you tell her to make soup.’ He held open his office door.

  ‘For your information,’ she said, betrayed into retaliation, ‘I’m now the one who goes round at five in the morning and wakes everybody up.’

  ‘For breakfast?’

  ‘For private devotions in the chapel and then mass. We have breakfast at seven-thirty.’

  ‘Not bacon and eggs.’ He was teasing her now. Realizing it, she forced herself to chill a little.

  ‘You must know by now that in our order we’re vegetarian though we do eat fish. Breakfast is cereal, fruit and coffee, eaten standing. What other questions did you want to ask me?’

  ‘What did you find out at the Pendons?’

  ‘I went there to offer flowers and condolences on behalf of the order. I didn’t understand I was there in the capacity of detective.’

  ‘You are in a bad mood,’ he observed mildly.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She flushed, biting her lip. ‘It’s only that I’ve just returned from a spiritual retreat and landed, somehow or other, in the middle of a murder merely because I was stupid enough to want to take a look at the school. I live under obedience in a semi-enclosed order, and having to think about a dreadful crime – most women would find that disconcerting. I didn’t mean to be rude, however. No, I didn’t find out very much. There were crowds of relatives and friends there, drinking tea and keeping Mrs Pendon mercifully busy. I did see Valerie’s bedroom.’

  ‘I hoped you might,’ he put in.

  ‘Why? You must have seen it too.’

  ‘I’m not a Catholic female, Sister,’ he said. ‘I’ve always believed that if you want to find a killer you need to know a lot about the victim. Nothing happens by chance in my opinion. If we build up the picture of the victim then we can draw in the killer who murdered them. Even in apparently random killings there’s always the tie that links the two. What impression of Valerie Pendon did you get?’

  ‘From her bedroom?’ Sister Joan frowned down at her clasped hands, marshalling her thoughts. ‘The room was left over from her childhood,’ she said at last. ‘She’d shared it with her older sister until – Sandra, yes Sandra got married last year. Her father told me they’d started doing the room out, redecorating and so on. They hadn’t got very far and the room itself, the stuffed animals, the coloured statuettes – they belonged to a younger girl, one about fourteen perhaps. That might have been Valerie’s own choice or it might have been the way her parents saw her, as the innocent child they wanted to hold on to.’

  ‘She was a virgin,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Girls can have boy-friends and be interested in the opposite sex without losing their virginity even nowadays,’ Sister Joan countered. ‘And we’re talking about a Catholic girl from a family of practising Catholics. Emotionally immature possibly. Not an overt rebel. These are simply my personal impressions, Detective Sergeant Mill, and they might be completely wrong. She obviously went out to meet a man, clad in a wedding dress which suggests that she at least meant to go through a form of marriage with him. Perhaps he was someone of whom she knew her parents would disapprove.’

  ‘We might find a diary. Girls still keep diaries sometimes.’

  ‘Sometimes.’ Sister Joan hesitated, then went on, ‘It doesn’t seem likely to me that she’d carry on a love affair, plan to run off, buy a wedding dress, all without arousing the slightest suspicion in her parents’ minds and then take the risk of keeping a diary about it – unless she wanted subconsciously to be stopped. Again I might be wrong.’

  ‘I think you’re probably right,’ he said. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Nothing I can recall. She was a regular churchgoer, had been on holiday to Lourdes with her family last year, had two good O levels; her father said she hadn’t made up her mind yet what to do but he thought she would have been good with children.’

  ‘In other words a thoroughly blameless, decent girl who, for some reason we’ve yet to fathom, decided to turn her life upside down and run off with someone. Yes, that’s the picture we’re building up ourselves.’

  ‘There were no suitcases or holdalls missing,’ she remembered. ‘I made a point of asking. She could have taken her nightclothes in a carrier bag.’

  ‘She was probably killed within an hour or two of her leaving home.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘We don’t exactly, but she’d been dead long enough for rigor mortis to wear off. She might have been held somewhere for a day or two, of course, but it’s not likely. There hadn’t been the smallest sign of a struggle.’

  ‘And she wasn’t killed in the school?’

  ‘Almost certainly not. She was killed somewhere else and then put in the school after that area had been searched. There was a routine search on the moors after she was reported missing so her body was kept somewhere until it was fairly safe to move it.’

  ‘The door was unlocked when I went there.’

  ‘A couple of our men searched the school and found the front door unlocked too. They left it as it was. I assume it had been unlocked by whoever was there last.’

  ‘Not guilty,’ Sister Joan said promptly. ‘We usually did lock up during termtime but after the children had taken their things home there wasn’t much left for anyone to bother stealing. This isn’t an inner city area with lots of petty crime.’

  ‘I agree. Crime, when it comes, tends to be big,’ he said wryly. ‘You didn’t know the girl?’

  ‘Valerie? No, not at all. She never was a pupil of mine and she would have attended the parish church. Father Malone says she was a quiet, good girl.’

  ‘Yes. He told us that too. Well, it looks as if you have no further involvement in the case.’ His tone was faintly regretful. ‘You found the body and that means you might be called for the inquest though the coroner might be satisfied with a statement. After that it won’t directly concern you. You can go back to ringing bells and ordering soup. Surely soup isn’t all you get for lunch?’

  ‘We get bread, water and fruit with it. They don’t starve us in the order, you know.’

  ‘But they don’t encourage you to indulge either, do they? Every
mouthful subject to discipline.’

  ‘Which frees us to concentrate on the important things, like prayer and meditation, but you might not appreciate how vital those things are.’

  ‘I reckon I don’t.’ He made a sudden restless movement among the papers on his desk. ‘Would you believe I tried praying about my marriage once? It didn’t make a blind bit of difference.’

  ‘Then I’m sorry, but perhaps it’s too soon to tell.’

  ‘Perhaps. I’ll reserve judgement. And I’ve two fine boys.’

  ‘And I have to drive back to the convent. Sister Teresa makes very tasty soup.’ She had risen, holding out her hand with a frank smile that precluded any intimate revelations.

  ‘Thank you for your help, Sister. I’ll see you to the car.’ He was equally formal.

  ‘There’s no need. Surely you have work to do?’

  ‘Plenty, and if I do find five minutes to relax Sergeant Barratt, our new broom in Bodmin, is here with suggestions as to how a conscientious police officer can fill an idle hour.’

  ‘You don’t like him?’

  ‘He’s keen,’ he said wryly. ‘Spends two-thirds of his life here since he arrived. You met his wife.’

  ‘After you pressured her into giving me a lift. She seems very pleasant, a bit out of things but then they’ve only just moved here, haven’t they?’

  ‘A couple of weeks ago. Barratt was in Birmingham but he was transferred here to a rural area because the powers that be reckoned his chances of promotion would be enhanced or words to that effect. Ours not to reason why. I wish he wasn’t quite so enthusiastic, makes me feel I ought to be getting ready to queue up for a cheap bus pass or something. Give my regards to Mother Prioress – wait.’

  On the verge of opening the car door for her he stopped, straightening up, as Sergeant Barratt strode down the road. Though he was in plain clothes he looked as smart as if he were ready for an inspection parade. Sister Joan took in the classic profile, the wide shoulders, the light blue eyes that swept over her as if she wasn’t a real person at all.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Mill, something’s come up.’ He spoke respectfully but briskly.