The dean scowled. ‘It is better to marry than to burn.’
It was hard not to feel that the conversation was deteriorating. Worse followed shortly when the effects of alcohol removed whatever control Davage normally kept on his malice. ‘How do you feel about being the only straight in a chapter of queers?’
‘What did you say?’
‘You know about us. But it must have been a shock to come back from Bible-thumping country to find lesbians affirming in the cathedral.’
The dean stood up slowly. ‘Have I heard you correctly? Are you telling me that those women worshipping idolatrously were also sexual abominations before God.’
‘’Fraid so,’ tittered Davage. ‘What you hit on there was a coming-out ceremony of the Wolpurtstone coven. And a pretty ghastly bunch they were too. I saw them coming out of the cathedral.’ He shook his head. ‘What an ugly crew.’ He waved his glass in Alice’s direction. ‘I can’t understand, I simply can’t understand, Alice, why you don’t leave those dreary, dumpy, frumpy dykes and hang out with lipstick lesbians.’
He leaned forward confidingly. ‘Why don’t you just find yourself a little church in London and make it a really chic centre for lesbians who know how to dress?’
The dean’s attention had now been completely distracted from the sight of his wife patting the cheek of the increasingly miserable Pooley; he stormed over to Alice.
‘Is this true? Were these women perverts?’
‘They were lesbians, yes,’ she said quietly.
‘And are you one of their abominable number and therefore hateful in the eyes of the Lord?’
She remained silent.
‘Answer me, woman. I insist on knowing if you are a degenerate.’
She looked him straight between the eyes. ‘I refuse to answer such a question.’
The baroness came in cheerfully. ‘Come now, Dean. I don’t think you’re right there. I was looking up the Old Testament only the other day to check on that fellow often quoted these days for his denunciation of homosexuals…What’s his name?’
‘Leviticus,’ said the bishop.
‘Well, I’ve scrutinized Leviticus thoroughly and he says absolutely nothing about lesbians. Now he’s chock-a-block with prohibitions of a sexual kind—blokes are forbidden to do it with mothers, aunts, step-granddaughters, men and animals among others. His list of no-noes is as thorough as anyone could reasonably expect, but lesbians do not appear. So what’s the problem?’
The dean ignored him. ‘Answer me, woman.’
The bishop stood up. ‘Dean, please. Canon Wolpurtstone is a guest in my house. She should be treated with courtesy.’
‘She is a member of my chapter. I must know the answer to this question. Are you or are you not that abomination—a woman who lies with women?’
She remained silent. The baroness jumped up. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dean, don’t you realize the girl is as straight as the next man. She’s doing her Lillian Hellman before Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist Senate committee—refusing to distance herself from her friends. Don’t you realize she pretends to be a lezzie because she thinks they’re victims and therefore she feels she must support and identify with them. An honest girl like that would tell you if she was one. The fact that she doesn’t, means she isn’t. Have you got that?’
The dean’s bad temper magically disappeared. He patted Alice on the top of the head. ‘That’s a good wee girl,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to hear you’re not an abomination.’ He sat down again.
‘A little more punch, Dean?’
‘Why not?’
The port however was working its potency on Davage and unleashing further stores of mischief. He leaned forward. ‘Have you had a chance to peek at Reggie Roper’s memorial since you returned?’
The cloud chased the sun from the dean’s features. ‘Is it finished?’
‘It certainly is. And I can tell you it lives up to all expectations. Pop down to the bottom of your garden, lift up the tarpaulin and you’ll get a treat. It’s just as Reggie wanted it.’
The dean began to glower. ‘We should get rid of it.’
‘Come on, Dean. Reggie paid you handsomely for tolerating his little whim. Think of all the lolly you got to spend on the cathedral.’
The word lolly distracted Tilly Cooper from further pressing her attentions on Pooley. ‘Oh, yes. The lolly. And how wonderfully we will spend it on behalf of Jesus. Soon we will have the disco system, the strobe lighting, the pool for total immersion.’
She beamed at everyone, but the dean was unresponsive. ‘It may be that we have been tempted by Satan. I must go home to pray. Come, woman.’ He grabbed Tilly’s hand and hauled her protesting from the sofa, muttered a few words of gratitude for the hospitality and without looking at any of his canons dragged his wife from the room.
The bishop returned from seeing them out to find the room plunged in despair.
‘What is strobe lighting?’ asked Trustrum.
‘Flashing coloured lights as used in taverns where the young dance. You must have seen them on television,’ said Davage wearily. ‘Oh, sorry, I forgot. You don’t have one. What Mrs Cooper seems to want is to have the cathedral full of dancing coloured lights which whirl around the whole area, while a modern sound system produces the sound of thump-thump music at about a thousand decibels—all in the name of Jesus, you understand.’
‘She said something about a pool.’
‘I expect higher authority may be able to block that, but I doubt if they can do anything about the lighting and the music.’
‘Can’t we stop it, Cecil?’
‘You can try, Dominic. I’m afraid I doubt if we’ll be able to prevail.’ Davage stood up, staggered and then recovered himself. ‘Excuse me, My Lord. Thank you and goodbye to you all.’
Fedden-Jones and Trustrum followed soon after.
‘What a strange evening,’ said Alice.
‘With that mixture it’s bound to be,’ said the baroness robustly. ‘You poor girl, what a ghastly lot of colleagues you’ve got.’
‘In your place,’ said the bishop, ‘I have to say I would feel like looking for another job.’
‘Another job! Oh, Bishop!’
‘David, please.’
‘David, I’m only here because your predecessor made me take the canonry. Please, please, will you find me somewhere else to go? Somewhere I can be useful.’
The bishop took her hand. ‘My poor girl. You should not be here against your will. Talk to me about it tomorrow.’
She gave him a stunning smile. Pooley stood up. ‘Let me walk you home.’
***
‘Why are you blaming me?’ The baroness stubbed out her cigar.
‘You are being a little unfair, Robert,’ said the bishop, visibly fighting the sleepiness brought on by champagne, claret and port. ‘Jack has been a wonderful hostess. It’s just a little unfortunate that Cecil Davage was so tactless, Dean Cooper so irascible, Fedden-Jones so distressed and—’
‘And Tilly so trollopy.’ The baroness drank some more brandy.
‘You tell her why it’s her fault, Ellis. I’m too drunk.’
‘Robert may be a little overstating it, Jack. But I have to say that it was perhaps a little unscrupulous of you to slip alcohol to teetotallers.’
‘Bollocks. What did you think I was doing, hauling all that punch-making paraphernalia from Cambridge, if it wasn’t with a view to getting the dean drunk? Besides, I never told anyone it was nonalcoholic: that would have been dishonest. I merely described it as the punch for the nondrinkers.’
‘What was in it?’ asked Amiss.
‘Pimms, obviously. Vodka-based Pimms because it doesn’t taste, beefed up with more vodka, since on its own Pimms is a very mimsy drink.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Oh, yes, and I suppose it did get a certain extra kick from the alcoholic lemonade.’
‘Sweet Jesus,’ said Amiss. ‘That can only be described as a drink that packed—as it were—a treble punch.’
/> ‘He’s a big man. He’d need a treble punch.’
‘What were those lines of Mark Twain?’ asked Amiss dreamily. ‘“Never play poker with a man called Doc.”’
‘“Never eat at a place called Mom’s,”’ offered the baroness.
‘To which I would add, “Never touch a punch called Granny’s.” Oh, yes, and that vital piece of advice I was given at St Martha’s, “Never shag a neurotic.”’
Pooley came in rather impatiently. ‘But why did you lace the punch, Jack? What were you trying to achieve?’
‘Sometimes I think you two shouldn’t drink: it appears to affect your wits. I told you the purpose of this dinner was catalytic. Your investigations were stuck in a groove, and when you’re stuck in a groove, the only thing to do is to bring in a rotovator to agitate everything and see what is churned up.
‘Instead of bitching, you should be thanking me for having been the means of uncovering useful new information and some fruitful lines of investigation.’
Pooley—who always drank like a gentleman—poured himself a glass of water. ‘She’s right, Robert. I have to admit that some things are clear that weren’t before.’
‘Or unclear that were clear before,’ proffered Amiss, amazed at his own grip on the proceedings.
‘I’ll take these in chronological order, as they emerged.’ Pooley put up his thumb. ‘One, Davage and Trustrum appear to be resentful allies of the dean.’
‘No, no, hold it,’ said the baroness. ‘The first important thing to emerge was that Alice is not a lesbian.’
‘It’s not germane to the investigation.’
‘Everything is germane to the investigation. Mind you, I could have told you that anyway. She was wholly resistant to my sexual signals. And believe me’—she smirked—‘I usually find nice, well-brought-up dykes melt when exposed to my rough-hewn charms. Anyway, it’s now official.’ She laughed. ‘What a good moment that was!’
The bishop looked distressed. ‘I was very worried there for Alice.’
‘She’s a lot tougher than she looks.’
‘Two,’ said Pooley firmly. ‘As I said, Davage and Trustrum are going along with the dean and seem prepared to sell Fedden-Jones down the river for undisclosed reasons.’
‘Three,’ came in the baroness. ‘Tilly Cooper has the hots for you, Ellis.’
‘Four,’ said Pooley, clearly anxious to move on, ‘we know that Mrs Cooper is more of an ends than a means person, unlike her husband.’
‘Five,’ said the baroness, ‘we now understand much more about the dean’s conversion to fundamentalism. He is in sexual thrall to that little tart.’
Amiss, who was almost asleep, perked up. ‘Is it common to screw people to bring them to Jesus?’
‘A good question. An even better one is how common it is to screw them in the interests of justice. How about it, Ellis? Shouldn’t you do your duty and see what pillow talk you can get out of Tilly?’
‘I’d really rather not dwell on such a distasteful notion, if you don’t mind, Jack. And now, I’m going to bed. Come on, Robert.’ He raised his voice. ‘What about you, David?’
The bishop awoke from his snooze. ‘Oh, sorry. Sorry. Would anyone mind if I went to bed?’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s after one o’clock and I’ll have to be alert tomorrow. Even if I pass up the running, I’ll need to be up by seven-thirty. It is Sunday, after all.’ He stretched. ‘Thank you all for your wonderful work. My goodness, I’m tired.’
The baroness drained her glass and shook her head sadly. ‘Puritans, puritans. I’m surrounded by puritans. Very well, then. Off you all go. I’ll follow in a moment, when I’ve checked on Plutarch. Poor old girl. The only other Cavalier in the palace and you keep her consigned to the kitchen all evening. I will take her to bed with me in lieu of anything better.’
Amiss kissed her on the cheek. ‘Just don’t tell Leviticus.’
Chapter 17
‘Emergency meeting.’
Amiss emerged from a dream of great confusion—which featured inter alia the dean dressed in crusaders’ chain mail declaring to a congregation of confused Mohammedans that they must convert to lesbianism—to find Pooley standing over him looking agitated. ‘Wha…wha…what emergency?’
‘I’ll explain everything in the kitchen. Come on. Hurry up.’
The inhabitants of the palace—in various states of dishabille—assembled in the kitchen blearily and irritably to find to their horror that it was only just six o’clock.
‘This had better be serious, young Ellis,’ said the baroness. ‘I may be an early riser, but I draw the line at being dragged out of bed at cockcrow on a Sunday morning when I’ve been carousing into the early hours.’
Pooley looked at her grimly. ‘It’s serious, all right, Jack, though not as serious as it might have been. No thanks to you.’
The baroness looked at him warily.
‘Stop being minatory, Ellis, will you?’ begged Amiss feebly. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’
‘We almost had two more deaths—both drink-related.’
‘Who?’
‘What?’
‘How?’
Pooley raised his hand to quell the agitated questions. It struck Amiss that he closely resembled a scoutmaster who had just taken over an unruly troop. ‘Let me take this in sequence.
‘I had a call fifteen minutes ago from Superintendent Godson. Tilly Cooper called the police about five to say she had woken up and realized the dean had gone out last night and not returned. A patrol car came round and found Cecil Davage lying unconscious in the cathedral with a broken arm in the midst of the debris of one of the chandeliers, which he seems to have lowered from the beam. There was a big box of matches by his side, so our working assumption is that he was intending to light the candles.’
The bishop went pale. ‘He might have burned the cathedral down, the state he was in.’
Pooley held his hand up, this time reminding Amiss disloyally of a particularly autocratic traffic cop. ‘They sent for an ambulance and reinforcements, and when Davage had been taken away they searched further afield for the dean. He was discovered unconscious beside the Roper memorial, which he seems to have been attacking with an axe. In the course of his exertions he apparently hit his head and concussed himself.
‘He in turn was taken to hospital; the police and ambulance men are sanguine about both.’
Pooley surveyed them sombrely. ‘And that’s not all. I’m sorry to have to tell you, David, but the treasury’s been burgled.’
The bishop had been looking miserable enough, but this news caused his face to twist in misery. ‘Not the Great Staff?’
Pooley nodded. ‘The most valuable croziers as well, I’m afraid. And all the rings and reliquaries.’
‘Bugger,’ said the baroness. ‘But surely that means little Davage was a victim of burglars rather than being the cause of his own misfortunes?’
‘It may be. But then why was he in the cathedral in the middle of the night? And what was going on with the chandelier?’
‘Maybe…’
‘Sorry, Robert. You’ll have to excuse me. There’s a car waiting outside to take me to the superintendent. I wouldn’t have woken you so early if I hadn’t had to leave the house.’
Amiss threw himself into a chair as the door shut behind Pooley. ‘Shit!’
‘Oops,’ said the baroness. ‘I’m feeling a bit guilty. Maybe I shouldn’t have added the vodka. But it seemed such a good idea at the time.’
The bishop put his arm around her. ‘You mustn’t worry, Jack. Your intentions were of the best as always and we all make mistakes.’
‘Besides,’ added Amiss, ‘whatever happened to Cecil isn’t your fault. He, at least, knew what he was drinking.’
The bishop looked solemn. ‘We must thank God that both these poor people look like recovering. Perhaps these unfortunate events will have the effect of bringing dean and chapter closer together. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and get ready.’
Amiss got up to follow him. ‘I hand it to you, Jack. When you say catalyst you sure mean catalyst.’ He looked back at her. She was sitting at the kitchen table with her chin on her fist; her hair was dishevelled, her flannelette nightie slightly awry and she bore a dejected expression. He felt sorry for her. ‘Don’t get too upset about it.’
‘Upset? I’m not upset. I was just trying to think of some way of getting out of having to go back to St Martha’s today. I hate to miss the fun.’ She stood up and sighed. ‘It’s no good. Duty calls. I’ve a crowd of ravening scholars coming to lunch and I have to preside. You and Ellis are going to have to get on with things today on your own.’
Amiss—who was feeling decidedly seedy—only just restrained himself from giving her a swift kick as she bounded past him.
***
Called on by Canon Trustrum at an hour’s notice to preach in place of the dean, the bishop was inspired. With no time to draft, redraft, worry or haver, he spoke simply and from his kindly heart. Whereas the dean had been threatening to give a sermon about the wickedness of despair, the bishop took as his text the last verse of 1 Corinthians 13: ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.’
He began with a moving tribute to Jeremy Flubert, whom he told the congregation bluntly had either been murdered or had committed suicide in the house of God. ‘Whether terrible violence was done to our brother, or for some reason he yielded to despair, we do not know—and may never know. But we do know as a congregation that we owe him our prayers and our gratitude for what he gave us selflessly through his passion for music.
‘It can be difficult for many of us to understand those amongst us who are single-minded in their vocations. For Canon Flubert, as Joseph Addison put it, music was “the greatest good that mortals know,/And all of heaven we have below.” For it was through music that he expressed himself as a man and as a priest. And which of us is to say that was wrong? Did not his gifts and his dedication bring priceless inspiration and solace to us all? Great music raises us to another plane. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote that “The music soars within the little lark,/And the lark soars.” Music soared within Jeremy Flubert, and he brought us closer to God when he expressed it. May he rest in peace.’
Murder in a Cathedral Page 17