‘My cousin lives in Belleshire, or did. She’s moved to Bournemouth, which I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole, but she’s happy there. Likes the climate, I suppose. But Mr Nesbitt was the chief constable when she was there, and she says he was held in very high regard.’
‘Mr Nesbitt is a policeman?’ asked Mrs Stevens, her voice almost squeaking.
‘Not anymore. He’s been retired for several years now.’ I had finally recovered my wits. ‘And yes, he and I are trying to make sense of Dean Brading’s death, but not from the police point of view. Alan is a member of the Crown Appointments Commission, searching for a new Bishop of Sherebury. He is deeply distressed by the death of one of the candidates, as are we all.’
‘And my cousin has heard about you, too,’ Mrs Rudge went on. ‘You’ve been mixed up in murders.’
Mrs Stevens’ eyes grew even wider.
‘I have indeed. Only as an investigator, I hasten to say. It turns out I’m good at talking to people and putting two and two together, and that’s why I’m here, to help Alan understand why Dean Brading died. Now, Mrs Stevens, if you’d rather I found another place to stay, I’ll quite understand. I love your house and I’d be sorry to leave, but if you think I’m … I don’t know … a dangerous guest, or apt to steal the towels, or something, I’ll go.’
It hung in the balance for a moment, then my hostess sighed. ‘No. I took to you and your husband when I first saw you, and I fancy myself a good judge of people. Goodness knows I’ve seen enough of them in and out of my house these past few years. And though I was no friend of the dean, if a parson can be murdered in his own church, nobody’s safe. Whoever did it needs to be caught. Stay as long as you like, Mrs Martin.’
‘That’s very good of you, Mrs Stevens. But I do wish you’d call me Dorothy.’
‘And we’re Ruth and Martha,’ said Mrs Rudge. ‘We may be old, but we’re not old trouts. And I’ll have another piece of cake, Ruth, if you wouldn’t mind.’
That cleared the air, and my conscience as well. I don’t like lying, even though I can do it fluently when necessary. And I had begun to think of these women as friends. When Ruth had poured me another cup of tea, and I had reluctantly turned down another piece of cake, I got down to business. ‘We have decided,’ I said, ‘those of us who are trying to figure out this business of Dean Brading, we’ve decided that we need to know as much as possible about his background. My husband and a few friends are looking into other places where he lived and worked, and I chose to come here. I wish you two would tell me anything you can remember about him. Not just things that might bear on his death, I don’t mean, but any little tidbits you can think of.’
I hesitated for a moment and then plunged ahead. ‘You see, I’ve read a lot of mystery fiction in a long life, starting years ago with Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, and right on into P. D. James and the other contemporary writers. And though their books are fiction, they have a lot of wise insights into human psychology and behaviour. One thing that Hercule Poirot used to say strikes me as profoundly true, and that is that the secret of a murder lies in the character and personality of the victim. Not a street crime, not the drug addict who kills anyone he can find for money. That sort of thing is brutal and horrible, but there’s nothing mysterious about it, and the police usually track down the villain in a matter of hours.
‘A crime like this, though, directed against a particular person, for reasons unknown – in this kind of crime, the more you know about the victim, the more likely you are to understand the murderer. And that makes it easier to find him, or her. So tell me what you can, and, as Lord Peter Wimsey said on one occasion, forget all about Christian charity for the moment.’
That brought a laugh from both of them. ‘Well,’ said Ruth, ‘I hope I won’t offend you, Martha. I know he was your vicar and all, but I personally couldn’t abide the man. This isn’t all that big a place, you know, and I keep my ear to the ground, and I could tell you a thing or two about Andrew Brading.’
‘I wish you would,’ I said. ‘Gossip, rumour – you never know what may help.’
Martha looked a little shocked, but sat back to listen critically.
‘You know he had a wife.’
It wasn’t a question, but I nodded. ‘And no children, I believe?’
‘He didn’t like children. I’ve heard there were almost no young people going to the cathedral anymore, because the feeling was that children were definitely not welcome at services.’
‘I’m afraid that’s true,’ said Martha reluctantly. ‘I’ve been attending the cathedral nearly all my life, and there were quite a number of young people years ago, before Dean Brading came. There were children’s sermons now and again, and outings for them, and even a youth choir of children from the community. But Dean Brading has – had – a very different style. He wanted the services to be quiet and reverent, with everything just so. It upset him when children made noise, and do what you will, babies will cry, and toddlers will get restless. Of course, he didn’t take all the services, and some of the canons were more tolerant, but one was never quite sure when the dean would be officiating, so the young couples stopped attending. I thought it a great pity, though there were those who agreed with the dean about the disruptions.’
I nodded. ‘When we were here before, I said some things I probably shouldn’t have about attendance dropping off. It sounds as though I might have been right about that, though.’
‘It’s true enough, but I don’t know that you can lay that at the feet of the dean. There aren’t nearly as many people going to church these days as when I was a girl.’
‘It was the war,’ said Ruth. ‘When bombs were falling everywhere and everyone thought they might meet their Maker any minute, they took care to be on good terms with Him. Not that I remember the war, mind you, but my mum told me about the air raids and all, and the younger kids from London being billeted with country families. And even afterwards, there was so little food. One can understand why most people went to church then. They had to find hope somewhere. Nowadays we have it too easy. We don’t need religion anymore.’
I disagreed with that, but I kept my peace. We had established a rather fragile pact of understanding, and I didn’t want to shatter it.
Martha spoke up, though. ‘Oh, you know I can’t agree, Ruth. It isn’t just the hope and peace you can find at church, the rituals and the sermons and that – it’s the community. The church used to be the centre of community life. Now the centre, if we have one, is – I don’t know – the shopping mall, I suppose. And I think we’ve lost something.’
We were getting off the track. ‘It seemed to me, when I visited, that the cathedral community was rather fragile, with some large cracks in it. Was I wrong?’
Ruth cackled. ‘You’ve been talking to Archie Pringle!’
I nearly choked on a sip of tea. ‘Archie?’ I asked when I could speak again.
‘Oh, he never uses it,’ said Ruth, filling my cup with hot tea. ‘I’ll stake a fiver his wife calls him Colonel. I call him Archie whenever we run into each other, just to watch that ramrod back get even stiffer.’
Martha smiled tolerantly. ‘He does look like a caricature, doesn’t he? And acts like one, too, at times. But there’s good in Archie. He truly loves the cathedral and its traditions, and tries to preserve them against a rising tide of change.’
‘I take it he was a strong supporter of Dean Brading,’ I said, trying to steer the conversation back toward my goals.
‘The strongest, at least at first. He’s quite well off, and he’s donated a good bit to the cathedral.’
‘Pots of it,’ said Ruth. ‘Archie’s problem is that he’s stuck in the nineteenth century, if not the one before that. And Martha won’t tell you, because she’s so good-natured she’d see the good in the devil himself, but Archie Pringle is the main reason the cathedral is dying. He can’t – or won’t – see that his way is not everybody’s way. He agreed with Dean Brading in every detail, and t
hat’s just not the way a church can function in this day and age.’
‘Now, Ruth.’ Martha’s voice was verging on annoyed. ‘You haven’t been to church in years, dear. Archie has changed. He truly loves the cathedral. In any case, I’m not sure you know what should and shouldn’t be done there.’
‘What you really mean is that I’ve no right to set myself up as judge. And you’re right, but you’ve forgotten that I know quite a few people, and I’ve heard quite a lot of talk from people who’ve left the cathedral because they couldn’t abide the dean.’
‘Why not?’ I got in before Martha could protest.
‘In a word, he was stuffy. Oh, there are quite a few more words. Self-righteous, domineering, stern, unforgiving – but stuffy sums it up.’
‘Was there any attempt to have him – gosh, I don’t know the word. Impeached? Deposed?’
‘He was neither an American president nor a monarch,’ said Ruth tartly. ‘I suppose the dean of a cathedral can be removed, but I have no idea how.’
‘I read about that the other day,’ said Martha. ‘With all the problems the Church has been having lately, there’s been discussion of it in the news, and someone wrote that the only way to remove a cathedral dean is to find him legally guilty of immorality. And say what you will about Dean Brading, no one could ever have imagined him immoral.’
That disappointed me, of course. ‘His relationship with his wife was good, then? You said they had no children.’
‘There was never any talk about them,’ said Ruth, almost reluctantly, I thought.
‘She came to church every Sunday,’ said Martha. ‘Sat in a front pew, so I never saw her face, at least not during the service.’
‘Did you gain any impression of her? As a regular attendee at the cathedral, you must have chatted with her from time to time.’
‘She isn’t the chatty sort, and even before the dean’s death, the gatherings after church were sparse. I don’t think I’ve ever exchanged more than a few words with her. She is … very correct.’
Sounds as cold and forbidding as her husband, I thought. Didn’t spoil two couples, my mother would have said. I changed tack. ‘Do you have any idea of how the dean felt about being considered for our diocese?’
‘I never spoke to him after he was shortlisted, but he knew he was being considered, of course, and I got the impression, from some things he said in sermons, that he liked the idea. He thought he could bring Sherebury back to its traditions, its foundations, and do away with what he considered popish practices.’ She made a little face, and her hands seemed to disavow the dean’s sentiments.
‘That, of course, would have been one way to get him out of Chelton,’ said Ruth. ‘Kick him upstairs.’
‘There was another way,’ I said. The remark lay amongst the tea things like a stone.
TWENTY-FOUR
I accompanied Martha Rudge to the door as she was leaving. Ruth was dealing with the tea tray, and Martha said in a low voice, ‘There are some things I didn’t want to talk about in front of Ruth. It doesn’t do to air dirty church linen in front of a non-believer. Are you staying long in Chelton?’
‘A few days.’
‘Then could you come to lunch tomorrow? I live quite near the cathedral.’
‘I’d love to,’ I said, and meant it. I hadn’t yet gathered nearly enough information. We agreed that she’d ring me near noon.
I made a brief foray to a nearby Sainsbury’s, one of the small ones, and laid in a supply of cheese and biscuits and fruit, and, after a quick call to Alan, spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in my room, making lists.
Alan may laugh at me, but lists can be a big help, even without counting the feeling of accomplishment derived from simply having made one. They do force me to organize my thoughts, and that leads to organizing my actions.
I had brought my notes from our discussion back at home, and started from there.
‘Suspects.’ Well, I had learned that Brading’s wife was apparently on good terms with her husband. I left her on the list anyway. Appearances can be deceiving, and I intended to pump Martha a little more on the subject of possible infidelity on the part of one party or the other. Other relatives, if any, also needed to be discussed, and certainly I wanted to know a lot more about the congregation. I wasn’t ready to cross the Colonel off the list yet, either. If he truly loved the cathedral, and Brading was damaging the cathedral, might he have thought Brading should go? And there might be, among the former congregants, some who hated Brading enough to kill him.
So that list read: Mrs Brading, Other Family, Former Congregants, and Archie Pringle. I thought of Archie Bunker, and snickered. Actually, with his extreme conservatism and outmoded ideas, the Colonel was not unlike his namesake. How he would hate the comparison!
The next list, ‘Facts about the Murder’, had been filled in fairly well at our discussion. I didn’t yet know exactly where the body had been found, though, and surely Martha could tell me. Could show me, perhaps, if the cathedral was still open. That was another thing I needed to know, come to think of it. Had it been open all day, every day, when the dean was alive? If so, the murderer might have been lying in wait for his or her victim. If not, then it was quite possible that the dean let him or her in, which implied that he knew his killer or, at the least, found the person non-threatening.
Now. ‘Facts about Brading’. I thought I might be able to scrap the idea of an affair. If neither Ruth nor Martha had heard even a hint of such a thing, and if they were as good at gossip as dear Jane, then there had been no affair. Drat. Sexual jealousy is such a powerful motive. But there are other sorts of jealousy. Any time anyone covets something possessed by someone else, there’s jealousy and a motive to violence. God got it right, I thought irrelevantly (and probably irreverently), when he gave Moses only the ten forbidden actions. Those ten led to all the others.
So, what are some of the other motives created by jealousy? A lust for power was certainly one. That led directly to the other candidates for our mitre. There was no doubt that Lovelace had lusted for power. I wanted to explore that much further. There might, of course, be someone at Chelton Cathedral – one of the canons – who wanted Brading’s job. If he was afraid Brading wouldn’t be named as Sherebury’s bishop, then might he have taken the other way to make sure the dean needed to be replaced? I made a note: who wanted to be dean of Chelton? Or, as a corollary, who dearly loved someone who wanted to be the dean? Love has prompted murder before now, and not always from the sex angle.
I mentally went through the other deadly sins. Greed seemed an unlikely motive. The clergy aren’t at all well paid. Although some of the bishops do get to live in gorgeous historic palaces, and the deans in ancient deaneries, I couldn’t imagine that anyone would kill to occupy such inconvenient homes. Gorgeous they may be, but the plumbing is frantically unreliable.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, on the other hand, is paid reasonably well. And, of course, that was what Lovelace was aiming for. His motives were becoming stronger and stronger.
Pride. Well, that was at the root of all evil, wasn’t it? I couldn’t see how it applied specifically to this case, though, except in relation to ambition.
Sloth was a terrible burden, but a lazy person doesn’t often hit someone on the head. Too much trouble. Anger, though … there was a real killer. I groaned over my mental pun. Who was so angry with Brading, who hated him so much as to incite murder? Had he done something frightful to one of the cathedral staff or congregation, or someone in his family, something perceived as unforgiveable?
I made copious notes, and then looked at what I’d written. There was plenty of food for thought there, but my instinct told me that anger and/or hatred was the most likely motive. It fit the crime. A cold-blooded murderer plans a crime. An intelligent one plans it so well that he may never get caught. It’s the man or woman in the grip of sudden uncontrollable rage who hits someone over the head in a place where the victim is bound to be found, w
here traces of the murderer’s presence will lead to certain conviction.
But only, I reminded myself with a sigh, if the person matching those traces can be identified.
I made myself a last cup of tea and went to bed.
I went down to breakfast with no very clear idea of what I would do with my morning. There were so many possible avenues to explore that I hardly knew where to begin, and I kept reminding myself that my time was not unlimited.
Ruth brought in my breakfast, enough cholesterol to keep my arteries clogged for the rest of my (shortened) life. It was delicious. I ate every bite and was just wondering if there was more coffee when Ruth came in with a fresh cafetière. ‘You’ll want to let it steep for a minute or two, dear. I just put in the water. And would you mind if I shared a cup with you?’
‘I’d love it,’ I said, and mused about the odd situation a B and B hostess finds herself in. An employee of sorts in her own house, asking permission of her guests to sit down in her own dining room.
‘There! I knew you weren’t the haughty sort.’ She pulled out a chair. ‘The fact is, I wanted to talk to you for a bit. I didn’t like to say so in front of Martha, but that Dean Brading was Not Liked in Chelton.’
I could hear the capital letters, and inwardly I rejoiced. This was just what I needed. Aloud, I said, ‘Really? Why not?’
‘He put people’s backs up. He was always right, you see. Anyone who disagreed with him was simply wrong, and he never minded telling them so. Oh, he battled with everyone. He had a run-in with the mayor over a car park. The mayor wanted to tear down that frightful youth centre, which hasn’t been used in donkey’s years except for a handful of people on Sunday morning. He was going to build a car park for churchgoers to use on Sundays, and shoppers on weekdays. He was prepared to find the money for it, and he thought the dean would be delighted. I think that coffee’s ready now, dear. Would you like me to pour it out?’
I shoved my cup over. ‘I’d have thought that was a wonderful idea. The parking around the cathedral is pretty sparse, as far as I could see, and you’re right: the youth centre is a sinfully ugly building. The dean didn’t like the mayor’s proposal?’
Day of Vengeance Page 21