Day of Vengeance

by Jeanne M. Dams

  ‘Yes, we worship many idols. But that is scarcely the only way in which we defile ourselves. We daily break the Commandments. How many of us fail to honour the Sabbath? How many of us commit adultery, and worse? How many of us steal, and covet that which is our neighbour’s, and bear false witness?

  ‘And there is at least one among us who has broken the sixth Commandment: Thou shalt do no murder!’

  His voice had changed. The thin whine had given way to a raspy sort of shout, unnerving in the extreme. His eyes, too, behind their rather sinister spectacles, seemed to grow darker, and to transfix everyone in the pews, individually. I found it difficult to look away, to escape his glare.

  Here was mesmerism of a very different sort from that practised by Lovelace. Here was no lulling with honeyed words and spellbinding voice. If Lovelace was a snake-oil salesman, this man was the snake, a cobra, paralyzing his victim with his eyes.

  I managed to wrench my attention away from those terrible eyes and ventured a quick glance at the people around me. I wished we weren’t sitting so far to the front. I could see only the people to my sides, and not many of them, since I didn’t want to turn my head and be rudely obvious about my scrutiny. The few faces I could see were perfectly blank, which was annoying. I wanted some reaction, some look of shock, at least.

  You wanted, I told myself severely, to have someone stand and sob out a confession. Idiot!

  I had missed a few words of the sermon, if that was what you could call the diatribe that continued from the pulpit, but that irritating, oddly compelling voice drew me back.

  ‘… the perils that await the sinner! And it is not the murderer alone who will face the torments of Hell. Those of you who know who he is, who know and have told no one, are as guilty as the man who struck the blow, who struck down the dean, here in his own church, adding blasphemy and sacrilege to murder! Examine your own consciences, and if you know anything that might help bring this vile murderer to justice, you must speak!’

  The church was so quiet that I could hear, from the organist’s bench behind a screen, the faint rustle of a page of music being turned. The noise ceased instantly. The congregation seemed to stop breathing. Time itself seemed to stop.

  Then from the back came the fretful cry of a hungry baby, and the spell broke. The man in the pulpit looked quite humanly annoyed for a moment, and then said, ‘You cannot escape God’s justice. Repent before it is too late. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.’

  The organist played the opening chords of a final hymn, one I didn’t know, and the congregation dutifully sang petitions that God would keep us from ‘ill sights’ and ‘vanities’. Then the canon pronounced a blessing, and the organist began a slow, melancholy postlude. Under cover of the music, I whispered to Alan, ‘Whew! What on earth is that man doing in the Church of England? He’s a Calvinist through and through. Life is real, life is earnest, and you have to watch your step every minute or God will strike you with lightning.’

  ‘He’s apparently following in the late dean’s footsteps. Let’s hurry a bit, love. If this rigid establishment bends enough to offer coffee after the service, it would be a good chance to talk to people.’

  This time our position at the front was to our advantage. We had an excellent view of the congregation as they filed out. There were no black faces, or brown or tan, nothing but white. There were very few young faces. The family with the baby scuttled out, and I wondered if they, too, were visiting and regretting it.

  No one greeted us as visitors. No one spoke to us at all, in fact, but Alan smiled benignly at a middle-aged woman who looked approachable. ‘I hope you don’t mind, madam, but might there be a café nearby where my wife and I could get some coffee? We’re just visiting in Chelton and don’t know our way about.’

  ‘Well, as to coffee, there’s a tea shop in the High Street that might serve coffee, though I’m not certain of that. I never drink it, myself.’

  ‘Our church at home serves coffee in the parish hall after the main Sunday service,’ I said hesitantly. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  ‘We don’t do that. Not coffee.’

  ‘Tea, perhaps?’ I persisted.

  ‘Fruit punch. Mostly water.’

  ‘Oh, that sounds perfect!’ I said with enough counterfeit enthusiasm to make her, I was sure, doubt my sanity. ‘Where should we go? That is, if visitors are welcome.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ I’ve heard more enthusiasm from a child thanking its maiden aunt for a pair of hand-knit socks. ‘Out that door and round to the right. It’s the old youth centre.’

  I managed not to raise my eyes to heaven, but it was a near thing. ‘Thank you so much,’ I gushed.

  ‘You won’t like it,’ she muttered before turning away.

  ‘Chelton hospitality,’ I said as we turned toward the disgusting erstwhile youth centre.

  ‘All in the day’s work, my dear,’ said Alan. ‘A detective’s lot is not a happy one.’

  ‘’Appy one,’ I echoed, at the bottom of my range.

  A single trestle table had been set up in the cavernous room. Dust was everywhere. Apparently, the cathedral authorities saw no need to keep the place in order for one function every Sunday morning. I could see their point. Possibly ten people were in the room, two of them fussing about the table, which held a few very small plastic cups and a litre bottle of something luridly pink. There were no decorations. There were chairs, but they were all stacked neatly against the wall.

  I thought longingly of Sherebury’s parish hall, jammed with people of a Sunday morning, crowded, noisy, with bad coffee and stale buns and love overflowing. Alan and I should be there right now. Instead, we were strangers in a strange land.

  Conversation had stopped abruptly when we entered the room. A man stepped up to us. ‘May I help you?’ His hair was an even iron grey, his face set in lines of bad temper. His eyes were as sharp as the crease in his trousers, and his inflection made it clear that his subtext was ‘You’re in the wrong place. Go away.’ He reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t quite place him.

  ‘Why, yes,’ said Alan. ‘We were told we might find a bit of refreshment here. We’ve just been to Matins.’

  ‘Oh. Well. Well, yes, certainly. Mrs Rudge, these people would like some punch.’

  The smile I had pasted on my face was beginning to hurt. I turned it on Mrs Rudge, she of the pink apron presiding behind the punch table.

  And wonder of wonders, my smile was returned, with interest. ‘How nice of you to come and join us,’ she said warmly. ‘And this is your husband? We’re delighted to have you here to worship with us. Are you just visiting us, or were you thinking of joining us?’

  ‘Mrs Rudge, please!’ It was the man with the sharp eyes. ‘This is hardly the time.’ He came over to the table. ‘You may not know that our dean was murdered only a few days ago.’

  ‘Yes, our hostess mentioned it.’ Alan’s tone was a shade or two south of icy. ‘Mrs Stevens, at Lynncroft.’

  ‘And, of course,’ I chimed in, ‘the sermon today …’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sharp-Eyes. ‘So you will see that we’re hardly in a position to entertain visitors just now.’

  I almost shivered. Raise the drawbridge, lower the portcullis, and prepare to repel invaders.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Rudge stoutly. ‘Visitors are always welcome, particularly now in our time of trouble. You know quite well—’

  ‘That may be, Mrs Rudge, but this is a time of mourning for Chelton Cathedral. We’ve not even been able to bury poor Dean Brading. The police are being scandalously slow about releasing his body, much less identifying his killer. So I’m sure you can see, sir, why we are not yet quite on dress parade.’

  That did it. I knew who he reminded me of, and it was a type, not an individual. This man was, or had been, an officer in some branch of the military. His upright stance, his habit of command, his spit-and-polish grooming – all told the story.

  Was he, like s
ome military men I’d known, not terribly intelligent outside his narrow sphere of expertise? I decided to test him.

  ‘Oh, I do understand, Mr …?’

  ‘Pringle,’ he said unwillingly. ‘Colonel Pringle.’

  ‘Dorothy Martin,’ I said, extending a hand, which he couldn’t very well not shake. ‘And my husband, Alan Nesbitt.’

  His mouth took a firm set when I pronounced the two different surnames, but he said nothing.

  ‘It’s lovely to meet you,’ I cooed on, ‘and I do think it’s so brave of you all to try to keep things running normally in the face of such a disaster. Your congregation has dwindled, and probably your income. I’m sure you all must be terribly worried about what’s going to happen to the cathedral.’

  He could hardly have looked more taken aback if one of the chairs had begun to carry on a conversation with him. He was still trying to figure out whether I was being insolent or deliberately aggravating, or simply as stupid as he assumed all women were, when Mrs Rudge spoke up. ‘There, now! Isn’t that what I’ve been saying? We need to encourage people to come to the cathedral, make them feel welcome, make it a happy place, if it’s not to fall down about our ears.’

  ‘You’re quite right, Mrs Rudge, and I’m sorry indeed to have to tell you we’re just visiting. We live in Belleshire, quite a long ways away. But I do so agree with you. A church must welcome everyone, rich, poor, young, old.’ I stopped short of saying, ‘Black, white, gay, straight.’ I didn’t want to give the poor colonel apoplexy. ‘Not only, of course, because that is our Christian duty, but because the church requires donations to keep its doors open.’

  Well, that opened a bit of conversation, men arguing with other men, women being catty with other women, agreement with one point of view or the other. Alan took advantage of it to listen, and now and then make a point himself. I was torn between concentrating on Mrs Rudge and cornering the colonel, but I decided I could almost certainly talk to Mrs Rudge later. She would respond favourably, I was sure, to an offer of tea that afternoon. If I didn’t snaffle the colonel now, on the other hand, my opportunity was gone.

  ‘So, Colonel, where are you serving now?’

  ‘I am retired, madam.’

  ‘Really! I wouldn’t have thought – that is, the retirement age here must be much lower than in the States. I’m sure you can tell I’m American by birth.’

  He thawed a degree or two at the blatant flattery, but said nothing.

  ‘I wonder.’ I lowered my voice a bit. ‘This business of the dean. You’re probably one of the most observant people in the congregation. Have you any idea at all who might have done such a terrible thing? Surely it couldn’t have been one of the parishioners, no matter what was said this morning in the sermon.’

  Was that laying it on too thick? The colonel hesitated for a moment, opened his mouth and shut it again, and finally said, ‘I have no idea, madam. No idea at all.’

  NINETEEN

  ‘He was lying,’ I said to Alan when we had escaped and were walking Watson. ‘I’m absolutely sure of it. He knows, or he thinks he does.’

  ‘Apparently he isn’t terrified of hell-fire, then.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he thinks that sort of thing applies to lesser mortals, not to him. He, after all, is a colonel. St Peter will salute Colonel Pringle as he approaches the pearly gates, and personally escort him inside. That’s if he ever dies at all, which he may think unlikely.’

  ‘Now, Dorothy. Aren’t you being a bit hard on the man? You only met him once.’

  ‘It doesn’t take me long to size someone up. You know that. It’s one of the advantages of age. I’ve known a lot of people in my life, and they do have a tendency to run in types. But you’re right, of course. I admit it. Mea culpa! I’m too quick to pass judgement, which, in any case, we’re not supposed to do at all. Sorry.’ My apology was directed to Alan, to Colonel Pringle, and to God, who knew exactly how repentant I actually was. ‘What did you think of him, then? And the rest of them?’

  ‘Pringle seems to be a leading layman of the cathedral. He’s a worried man. As you pointed out, attendance is sparse. That bodes ill for the finances of the place. It costs an immense amount to keep a medieval building from falling down, let alone to serve its community. I did mention to you, I think, that, with all his faults, Dean Brading did manage to balance his budget every year.’

  ‘I can’t imagine how, with so few attendees.’

  ‘Perhaps there were many more when he was in charge. Would you have chosen to go to the cathedral this morning, if you had known the canon was presiding?’

  ‘Not if I knew anything about the canon. I take your point. Even so, even if the dean did draw a much bigger crowd, it’s hard to see how he made ends meet. Unless there are a few extremely wealthy families who keep the place going.’

  ‘You notice, of course,’ said Alan, ‘that corners have been cut whenever possible. The church has no expensive furnishings, and I’m not sure that’s entirely due to the dean’s ascetic outlook on life. Even the Prayer Books and hymnals are falling apart, and surely those could have been replaced without offending anyone’s Low Church views.’

  ‘So you think Pringle’s worried about money?’

  ‘Money and reputation. He doesn’t want a scandal, and if it does turn out that someone in the church community killed the dean, there’s a scandal of gigantic proportions.’

  ‘I wonder if it was the actual murder, or the possible scandal, that was really worrying the canon this morning. Alan, that sermon! I was reminded of Jonathan Edwards.’

  ‘And who’s he when he’s at home?’

  ‘He was a prominent preacher in America in, I think, the mid 1700s. One of his famous sermons was “Sinners in the hands of an angry God”. He likened them to spiders hanging by a slender thread over the raging flames of Hell. It must have been terrifying to listen to him, and I was terrified this morning listening to the canon.’

  ‘That was rather the idea, wasn’t it? Frighten someone into confessing? And it didn’t work.’

  ‘Alan, you know a lot about how people’s minds work, especially criminal minds. Did it not work because someone refused to be intimidated, or because the murderer was not, in fact, in the church?’

  ‘For what it’s worth, which isn’t much, I think the murderer was not there. There was great tension, but not, to my mind, the unbearable fear and guilt of a murderer. I could be completely wrong, especially because we may not be dealing with a “criminal mind”. We have to be careful about that term. There is a mindset common to habitual criminals, I’ll agree, and it’s fairly easy to spot: the combination of sly cunning with an utterly self-centred outlook on life. You see it in teenage louts all the way up to career criminals. It is simply not possible for such people to understand that anyone else’s interests have any value, so when anything or anyone gets in their way, it’s just too bad for the obstacle.

  ‘But I’m not sure we’re dealing here with a “criminal” in that sense. I think it likely that the dean was killed by an ordinary person who felt he had some overwhelming reason to want the man dead. And if that person was a member of the cathedral, I think he – or she, of course – would either stop attending church at all or, if he attended, would be forced by his conscience to confess. That’s the other reason I believe he was not in the church this morning.’

  I came to a stop while I digested that. Watson looked back at me and whined. This was unusual behaviour, and he wanted to know what was going on. A human going for a walk with a dog is expected to keep walking.

  ‘Then we need to know more about Brading. So we’ll have some idea who would have wanted him dead.’

  ‘That’s why we’re here, love.’

  We walked on in silence for a bit, while I reviewed what we did know about the man. He was married; it was his wife who had raised the alarm when he didn’t come home. Hmm. ‘Does anybody know what kind of terms he and his wife were on?’

  ‘That’s one of the things I
hope you’ll try to find out this afternoon at that tea you set up with Mrs Rudge. According to the official police report, they were the most devoted of couples.’

  ‘Yes, well, we know what people tell the police, and what they don’t. What about children?’

  ‘No children.’

  ‘And I don’t suppose there’s any convenient hint of a scandal in his background – drugs, sex, anything like that?’

  ‘The police will have looked into all that very thoroughly, Dorothy. For that matter, so did the commission before naming him to the shortlist.’

  ‘Drat. Yes, of course. Was that your stomach growling, or is Watson upset about something?’

  ‘I confess, it was I. Let’s take our lovely boy back for some water and a nap, and find ourselves a thumping good Sunday lunch. We’ve had no real food all day.’

  ‘And I’ve walked too far in Sunday shoes. Onward and upward!’

  We were not fated to enjoy that Sunday lunch. When we got back to Lynncroft, Alan checked his phone, which he had turned off while we were in church. He looked up, all traces of animation wiped from his face.

  ‘We’ll have to go back, Dorothy. They’ve found Lovelace.’

  Looking at his face, I knew there was more.

  ‘He’s dead. Apparently by his own hand.’

  We packed rapidly. I asked Mrs Stevens to phone Mrs Rudge and explain, and we were off.

  Hunger drove us, a few miles down the road, to a motorway café where we had a quick and rather nasty meal. Watson even turned up his nose at the leftovers. On the road again, I said, ‘All right. What happened? Did they tell you? Who phoned, by the way?’