by Charles Todd
“It’s a matter of setting the Bishop’s mind at rest. He’s worried about the death of one of his people. Catholic priest, murdered in some backwater of Norfolk called Osterley.”
“A priest?” Rutledge repeated, surprised. In the eyes of the law, killing a clergyman was no more heinous a crime than killing a shop girl or a fishmonger. The penalty was the same—hanging by the neck until dead. But in the eyes of society, a man of the Cloth was protected by his calling, set apart. Inviolate.
Hamish reminded him that priests had once been burned at the stake. But that was another day and time. With no bearing on 1919.
Bowles was shaking his head. “We lost our way in the War, you know.” It was one of his favorite themes. “No good ever comes of change. Women doing men’s work—it isn’t natural! The lower classes getting above themselves. I shouldn’t wonder if we’ll see worse before we’re done. Society breaking down, Bolshevism on the loose. Now a priest’s dead.”
He peered at the sheet of paper in his hand. “Struck down with his own altar crucifix in St. Anne’s rectory, to be precise. The local police haven’t caught the villain yet. The priest walked in on a thief, apparently. It’s probable he could have recognized the man, and was murdered for that reason. The police are looking at that as the primary motive, for now. Still—we may have a madman in our midst, who’s to say differently? Little wonder this Bishop wants reassurance that we’re doing all we can.”
“What was the thief after?” Rutledge interjected. There were more likely choices for breaking and entering than a church office or rectory. A poor box and a priest’s pockets were notoriously bare. Madman indeed!
“A paltry sum collected at the church harvest festival, I’m told, which means everyone at the festival, in the village, and in the countryside for miles around knew there must be money in the rectory.”
“That broadens the inquiry considerably,” Rutledge agreed. “Did the priest have a housekeeper? How did an intruder get past her?”
“She’d already gone home for the day. And the priest himself should have been in the church to hear Confession, but had put up a notice there saying he was away at a deathbed and might not be back in time. Clear sailing, the thief must have thought. But Father James came home and went up to his study, and the intruder panicked. A shame, but there it is. It could happen to any householder.”
It could—and often did.
“Word has come down from the Chief Constable in Norfolk that it’s politic to send an officer,” Bowles said. “You’re to show the Yard’s concern and have a look at the evidence. Speak with this Bishop or one of his people, assure him that the local police know what they’re about, and once he’s satisfied that everything possible is being done, come back to London. From what I hear of the local man, Blevins, he’s competent and has a good reputation for using his head. Shouldn’t take you more than a few days. And October in the Broads is usually fine.”
Rutledge remembered that it was often wet, but said nothing.
Hamish said, “It’s no’ a holiday, mind. Watch your back! You canna’ trust the man. He doesna’ want you in London.”
“It’s more likely a diversion,” Rutledge answered silently, “to take pressure off Blevins. While everyone is watching me, he’ll be free to get the job done.”
Hamish grunted, “Have ye forgotten Scotland already?”
Bowles was saying, “Leave now, and you’ll be there tonight. Anything I ought to know regarding those, before you go?” He gestured to the files spread across Rutledge’s desk. “Parker can deal with them.”
“No, I’m finished with this lot. In fact, I was about to hand them over to Sergeant Williams. He’ll know which are to be filed and which distributed to the officer in charge of the investigation.”
“I’ll send Williams up to collect them. There’s a train at half past ten, you can make it if you hurry!” Bowles smiled in encouragement. Rutledge was reminded of crocodiles. The same cold yellow eyes.
“Very well.” He stood up, took the pages Bowles handed him, tucked them under his good arm, and went to open the door. “I’ll report by telephone, shall I?”
“No need. It’s a courtesy visit; you won’t be getting involved.”
The doctor, taking the bandages off Rutledge’s chest for the last time, looked at the wound, poked and probed at it—making the patient wince—and then nodded in satisfaction.
“You were damned lucky,” Dr. Fleming said, “that no deep infection set in. Still, it won’t hurt to have a small plaster over it. A matter of prevention. How do you feel?”
Rutledge, looking down at the raised, raw scar in the matted hair on his chest, replied, “I can breathe without discomfort.” He flexed his arm. It felt like a soggy rag. “I doubt I could take on a child of six in a brawl.”
Fleming chuckled. “Nor should you. But that arm will be like new, once you begin using it. Never fear! Just don’t overdo it for the first few days—don’t carry anything heavy or push at anything that doesn’t want to budge. Again, a matter of prevention. I have found in twenty years of treating patients that Nature is a good doctor, too, given half a chance. The problem is, we seldom give her credit and therefore come to regret it.”
It was, Rutledge knew, one of Fleming’s favorite homilies. “I’m off to Norwich. Which shouldn’t be strenuous.”
“Cheating the ratepayer, are you? I’d take the train if I were you. Less demanding on the chest muscles than driving.”
But Rutledge left London in his own motorcar, his claustrophobia still rampant. It was not possible for him to sit in a compartment jammed hip and knee into other travelers. The compulsion to stand and scream for air would be as violent as it was unreasonable.
By the time he reached Norwich, his chest muscles were in open rebellion, Mother Nature urging them on. Hamish, worse than Dr. Fleming at pointing out Rutledge’s shortcomings, reminded him that he had made the drive against advice.
As a compromise, Rutledge found a small hotel on the outskirts of town and stayed the night there, not prepared to face the traffic of Norwich at the end of the day.
Hamish, who had alternately raged at him and baited him for miles of the way, was as tired as he was: The familiar voice was silent over dinner.
Rutledge slept hard from fatigue. Hamish never followed him into sleep—the voice in his head lived in the waking mind, a bitter and hourly reminder of the bloody offensive in 1916 on the Somme, where so many men had died not by the hundreds or thousands but by the tens of thousands, their lives thrown away in wave after desperate wave of futile attacks. Where he himself had been buried in mud and saved from suffocation by the body pressing down on him. He’d been told over and over again that Corporal Hamish MacLeod had saved his life. But the blood caked like a second skin all over his face and hands had come from the English firing squad and the coup de grâce Rutledge had had to deliver personally in the instant before a direct hit had blown the salient to bits. Hamish hadn’t died from German fire, and Rutledge had been too shaken, too lost in the depths of shell shock to set the record straight: that Corporal MacLeod had been shot for refusing a direct order on the battlefield the night before that final dawn assault.
The tangled skeins of truth and official reports had left Rutledge with silence, with memory, with a waking haunting that had nothing to do with ghosts. Only with the broken mind of a man who had been sent straight back into battle before he’d had any rest, or come to terms with his own deep sense of guilt for having to choose between one man’s life and the morale of the equally exhausted and dispirited soldiers who hadn’t refused the order to climb out of the trenches and fight again. And three years later, he still had not exorcised that guilt.
It had become too deeply rooted in blood and bone and sinew, like a second self.
Rutledge had tried over and over again to die during the last two years of the War, putting himself in the way of danger, courting the unholy bombardments that splintered the earth, daring the hidden machine-
gun nests that raked No Man’s Land with lethal fire. Like a lover embracing a bloody mistress he had sought out any peril—and had come through unscathed.
To find himself again and again hailed as a hero, because he seemed to have no fear of dying.
It had been the bitterest irony.
CHAPTER 3
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, RUTLEDGE FOUND HIS way through the busy streets of Norwich to the address he’d been given by Chief Superintendent Bowles. It was a small house near the new Catholic church, far older than the building in whose shadow it stood, and with a small garden behind it. A gloomy house, upright and Victorian, with sharp eaves that seemed to pierce the low clouds. Rutledge walked up to the door in a misting rain that enveloped the earth like a shroud. On a small wooden board, faded gold letters spelled out Diocesan Office. Lifting the door knocker, a great brass ring that fell with a doomsday clamor, he turned to look at the street behind him. A half dozen men were waist-deep in a broken sewer, digging shovels full of stinking mud out of the pit. Urchins gaped down into the hole, fascinated, while passersby held handkerchiefs to their noses against the rank odor. A pair of women huddled together on the corner exchanging news, the hems of their black skirts even blacker with the run-off of the umbrellas they clutched over their hats. A man walking a dog moved swiftly, hurrying it along as it stopped to sniff in the gutters.
No one took notice of the caller at the rectory. Rain was a great separator.
Hamish, whose fierce Covenanter ancestors had taught him well, was skittish about entering this den of popery and idolatry. Rutledge, amused, assured him that his soul was in no danger.
“How can you be sae sure, when the Church of England is hardly better than this lot?”
The door was opened by a housekeeper whose hair, graying at the temples, was auburn, and whose face, flecked with freckles, had a touch of Irish in it. The woman looked him up and down as he gave her his name, and asked, “Are you ill, then?”
He smiled. “Official business.”
“All the same, you look as if you could do with a cup of tea! And the poor man hasn’t had his, either, writing reports all the morning! Come in, then.”
She took his hat and coat, clicked her tongue at the dark patches of rain across the coat’s shoulders, and spread it carefully over a chair to dry. Then she led the way down a passage to a room at the far end. To Hamish’s considerable relief, there were no niches filled with bleeding saints in the passage, nor a pervasive odor of incense. Except for a single small crucifix above the narrow entry, there was no sign that the occupants of this den had designs on anyone’s soul.
Opening a door into a gracious room at the back of the house, the housekeeper stood aside to let Rutledge enter. Beyond the windows the rain fell softly on a garden already drab and colorless, and dripped from a small pear tree. A tall secretary desk, the doors in the upper half standing open and the front piled with papers, stood against the far wall, and there was a table and comfortable chairs set to catch the light spilling in the windows. A man in simple priest’s garb sat there, staring out at the wet flower beds, a book open in his lap. He looked up as the housekeeper gave Rutledge’s name with a flourish.
Hardly a den of iniquity, Rutledge silently pointed out to Hamish. This was more the study of a scholarly man, a place for retreat and thought.
Hamish reserved his opinion.
Setting his book aside and standing, the man crossed the room and held out his hand. “From London, are you? That’s a fair journey! Bryony, some tea for the two of us.”
She cast a quick, smiling look at Rutledge and said, “The kettle is already on the boil.” The door closed silently behind her.
“I’m Monsignor Holston,” the tall, thin man continued. He had an aesthetic face and the eyes of a policeman— intent, knowing. The long nose, bearing a pince-nez, was aristocratic and gave the face character if not beauty. But the grip of his calloused hand was firm, strong. He offered Rutledge one of the chairs by the table, and returned to his own to mark his place in the book, close it, and set it aside. “I’m instructed to speak to you on Bishop Cunningham’s behalf. He was called away on pressing diocesan business. Scotland Yard. Well, I’m pleased to see you, I must say. This matter of Father James’s death has been worrying. What can you tell me?”
Rutledge smiled. “It’s more a matter of what you can tell me. I’ve come to listen.”
“Ah. Yes. Well, let’s not wait for our tea, then.” Monsignor Holston ran his fingers along the edge of the leather corners of the blotter. “It’s very straightforward, what the police propose must have happened. The local people took one look at the scene—at the desk broken open, most particularly—and declared that Father James had surprised a man intent on stealing funds collected at the bazaar a fortnight previously. Certainly the money was missing.” He realized how formal his words sounded, as if he were quoting directly from the police record, and made an effort to continue in a more natural tone. “Father James was usually in the church at that hour, you see, hearing Confessions, and should have been in the confessional, not his study. It must have been quite a shock to the intruder to hear him coming up the stairs! According to Inspector Blevins, the man panicked, seized the crucifix from Father James’s altar, and struck him down before fleeing. That’s all the police can tell me with any certainty.” The priest stopped, and the blue eyes studied Rutledge’s face. There was a wariness in them.
“Straightforward, yes,” Rutledge agreed. “But you—or your Bishop—apparently weren’t satisfied. Why? Is there more to the story than the police have learned? Or is it something to do with the circumstances in which he was found?”
“Sadly, no, we have no information about the crime itself.” Monsignor Holston smiled wryly. “Except that if it was robbery, it was unnecessary. Father James was a very caring priest. He’d have helped the man; he wouldn’t have turned him away. Or turned him in, for that matter. What’s frightening is—” He broke off and then added, “I spoke to the Bishop myself after I’d been summoned to Osterley by the police. I tried to explain what it was about the crime that troubled me.” He adjusted his glasses, as if to see his way more clearly through his own feelings. “I stood looking down at the body, and it’s true, the shock unsettled me. It was such a waste—a terrible, unspeakable waste! But my reaction went beyond that. I felt something that was primeval. Fear, if you will.”
Hamish stirred.
Rutledge said, “If he was a friend, that’s a fairly common reaction, Monsignor. Of a life squandered, and a certain anxiety because death has struck so near.” He paused. “Father James had died unshriven. Perhaps unconsciously, that weighed heavily. It would be natural for you to be concerned.”
“Yes, I’d take that into account. Of course I would. But it was more than that. God knows I’ve attended my share of deathbeds. Like a physician, I’m able to separate my emotions into tidy cubbyholes, in order to function. But not this time.” He looked down at his hands. “I grant you that to a poor man the sum collected at the bazaar must have seemed enormous. The blows, Inspector Blevins told me, were struck in rapid succession. A frenzy, if you will. A terrified man, caught out unexpectedly, might well have reacted in that fashion, hating what he was doing but driven to shield himself. And yet somehow I can’t accept that. If he had come openly—”
“There may have been reasons why the intruder couldn’t come openly. Or perhaps he’d convinced himself that theft was the easier way. That he couldn’t keep his promise to repay—or see that he worked out the money in time or kind.”
“Yes, I grant you that. But consider two things. The intruder must have known the pattern of Father James’s usual movements. Otherwise, why choose that time of day? And he must have known that the study was upstairs, and that that was where the money was being kept. He didn’t ransack the rest of the house. He went directly to the study! And surely the first place he’d have searched— the most logical choice—was a desk drawer. The money was in there. Why tear the room
apart, if he’d got what he came for? In my opinion, if the thief had been more careful opening that drawer and had slipped away before Father James came back from hearing Confession, surely no one would have been able to say with any certainty just when the money went missing!”
“Logic seldom enters into it. A man robbing a house is usually in a hurry and not eager to be caught. If he’d just killed in a fit of panic, he might have wanted to make it seem he’d expected a better haul. To point a finger away from the fact that he was desperate enough for the little he’d found in the desk.”
Hamish said, “Ye ken yon priest’s been busy worrying ow’r it. Gnawing at it like a dog with a bone.”
Monsignor Holston was shaking his head. “I am trained to think about religious issues. When I apply the same logic to this murder, I find—questions. Not solutions.”
“No murder is simple,” Rutledge told him. “But if I understand what you are telling me, Father James must have been killed by one of his own parishioners. It’s not a pretty possibility, though a likely one. And surely the police have considered it.”
A shadow of relief passed over the priest’s face. He said, “I’m afraid that several other things point in that direction as well, which I felt the Bishop had to be told. Father James wore an antique gold medal of Saint James on a chain, a gift from his family when he was ordained. The candlesticks from his private altar might have fetched a goodly sum, as would the altar crucifix that was used as the weapon. They were old, at a guess they’d belonged to the priests of St. Anne’s since the early 1700s. Why should a thief pass up such tempting opportunities? If he’s in desperate need and has already committed murder? What’s another minute taken to stuff a crucifix in a pocket or candlesticks under one’s coat?” An eyebrow lifted quizzically, as if inviting Rutledge to prove him wrong.
“Perhaps because the thief was afraid they were objects far easier to trace than a small handful of bills or coins.”