Smile and be a Villain

by Jeanne M. Dams

  ‘Would you like to know the rest of what we’ve learned about Abercrombie, or would it disturb you too much?’

  ‘More than his thefts from his parish? Wasn’t that enough?’ She sounded bitter, and then sighed. ‘I’m working on trying to forgive the man. Mr Lewison says I must. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever attempted. I’m not at all sure I can do it.’

  Alan looked at me. I nodded. ‘I think it may help you to know, Alice, that Abercrombie was probably not in full control of his actions. I believe that he was a sociopath, a man with no moral scruples, no conscience. When I was working in the police, we occasionally came across such criminals. They were almost always charming people, at least charming when they wanted to be. They could also be vicious, but it was an odd sort of viciousness, with no anger or spite involved, simply a cold determination to have their own way. We don’t know what forces combine to create such individuals, though psychiatrists have their theories. What we do know is that, once a person has fallen into such a mould, his actions follow patterns as rigid as any laboratory rate in a maze, and he becomes less and less able to deviate from those patterns. Further, he can see nothing wrong with his actions.’

  ‘You’re saying he no longer has free will?’ Alice sounded frightened, as well she might.

  ‘My dear woman, I’m not a theologian. All I can tell you is what I have observed. I do believe that at some point the sociopath’s mind and spirit have been so warped by circumstances that he can no longer make what we would call the “right” choices, only the expedient ones, expedient for him, that is. If that is a loss of free will, then yes, he has lost it.’

  ‘Mr Lewison said he was in a hell of his own making.’

  I cleared my throat. ‘When Dr Faustus asks Mephistopheles why he is out of hell, Marlowe has him reply, “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.” I’m not great at theology, either, but it seems to me that all of us can make our own hells. The thing is, most of us can avoid drawing everyone else in with us, and if we really want to, we can get out. I think what Alan is saying is that maybe Abercrombie couldn’t get out.’

  ‘And couldn’t help wreaking hell on everyone he met?’ The bitterness was back in her voice. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t accept that. And yet I have to try to forgive him for what he did to Aleta!’

  ‘It wasn’t just Aleta,’ I said. I didn’t know if I was doing more harm than good, but this tormented woman deserved the truth. ‘He not only stole a great deal of money from his church in Ohio, and lied about it; he also refused to come to the bedside of a woman who was fighting to save her pregnancy. She lost the baby and can never have another, and her husband has left her because of it. Abercrombie showed no compunction over the matter, seemed not to think he had done anything wrong.’

  ‘Then,’ Alan went on, ‘when things became dangerous for him in the States, he came to Alderney and began systematically defrauding the parish church. We can’t prove it, but we believe he stole funds from the jumble sale and collected money for choir folders he never intended to order. Tiny amounts of money, senseless thefts, particularly—’ he leaned forward – ‘particularly since he had inherited something over a million pounds from a parishioner.’

  ‘I think that’s enough,’ said Phil, standing. He didn’t look happy with us. ‘Alice needs to rest.’

  ‘No, Phil, it’s all right.’ She drank a little more water. ‘There really was no end to it, was there?’

  ‘But there’s an end to it now,’ I said. ‘Not to the damage he did, not to the lives he damaged forever. But he’ll never hurt anyone again, and I firmly believe that he’ll see justice in the end.’

  ‘And yet I’m asked to forgive him.’

  ‘Yes. For your own sake, not his. He’s beyond caring.’ I took her hand. ‘Look, Alice, I know it isn’t easy. It’s almost impossible. But think of it this way. As long as you don’t forgive him, your hatred of him will fester. Someone said it’s like giving a person permission to live in your head, rent-free, and mess it up forever. If you can manage to off-load that terrible infestation, you’ll be the better for it.’

  She fell silent, her eyes closed. Alan and I stood up to leave.

  ‘No, don’t go,’ she said at last. ‘I was thinking, not sleeping. I must know. Do you still think someone pushed him down that hill?’

  I let Alan answer that. ‘I would have to say,’ he said after some deliberation, ‘that we’re not at all certain what we think. It’s all too obvious that the man went through life making enemies, some of them here on Alderney. It would have been easy for one of them, perhaps one we don’t know about yet, to have come across him on that hill and given a push without much forethought. I can see no way that such actions could ever be proven, lacking an eyewitness – and presumably if such a witness existed, he or she would have come forward by now.’

  ‘Suppose that it happened. Would you want to prove it, given the character of the devil he killed?’

  ‘Yes, Alice, I would. I would feel every sympathy for the murderer, but I would want to bring him to justice. We, as individuals, are not allowed to make life-and-death decisions. Justice is a matter for the courts, and ultimately for God. If any man starts deciding that this murder or that robbery or that sexual assault was justified, we’re not far from anarchy – or, to put it another way, from hell.’

  ‘Judges and juries make mistakes.’

  ‘They do. The system isn’t perfect. That’s one reason why the death penalty was abolished in the United Kingdom, and most of Europe, years ago.’

  ‘If someone killed that man, and he’s discovered and tried and sentenced to life imprisonment – a living hell – your cherished system is no better than the man it would call the victim.’

  ‘Don’t forget that there are other possible verdicts, other possible sentences.’

  She gestured away the argument, looking suddenly very tired and much older than her years.

  I stood. ‘We must go, Alice. I’m sorry we’ve troubled you. Get some rest.’

  Phil walked us – marched us – to the door and went outside with us. ‘If this is your idea of comforting the afflicted,’ he began in furious tones, ‘you needn’t come back.’

  I turned to him, suddenly sick of the whole thing. ‘Phil, she has to talk about it. She has to get it out of her system. It isn’t easy conversation, or pleasant, but sometimes things need to be said. You say you love her. You’re not doing her any favours by trying to wrap her in cotton wool. Reality is what it is, and she’s beginning to realize that she must face it.’

  We got in the car and drove away. Without a word, Alan headed for the harbour. We drove until we reached a deserted beach, and then we got out and sat on a bench and watched the waves and the gulls and let the wind blow through our minds until they were clean.

  I did a lot of thinking for the next couple of hours. ‘Alan,’ I said after we’d picked at our lunches, ‘when is our return flight? I forget. Saturday or Sunday?’

  ‘Monday morning, actually. I thought I’d give us a full two weeks of holiday. It hasn’t been quite like that, has it?’

  ‘Not quite. Did you have anything in particular you wanted to do this afternoon?’

  ‘No plans. You?’

  ‘I hope you won’t mind, but I’d like to spend some time by myself. I need to get my head on straight.’

  He stared at it. ‘Looks all right to me,’ he said with a grin. Then he kissed my cheek. ‘I do understand what you mean. Take all the time you need, and go wherever you like. Just be sensible about it, and be sure your phone is handy. I don’t want to have to rescue you off any cliffs.’

  ‘No cliffs, I promise. Thank you for understanding.’

  In fact, I was headed for the church, hoping it would be deserted and quiet. I had some serious thinking to do, and I do that best in an atmosphere of peace.

  One of the many things I love about small English churches is that they’re left open much of the time. In the dim reaches of the past, they were all left o
pen, all the time, partly so people could come in and pray any time, partly because the medieval tradition of sanctuary still prevailed, if no longer in law, at least in the hearts and minds of many Christians. As society has changed, and violence has become ever more common, most town churches have conceded the necessity for locks and keys, but some of the villages still keep to the old ways. And as the lady at the Visitor Centre had said, Alderney was very like an English village.

  What a blessing.

  The church was dark and cool, and deserted. I slipped into a pew on the Gospel side, well away from the south door. For a few minutes I just sat and tried to quiet my thoughts. There were decisions to be made, decisions that could affect a number of people. When I’d achieved at least a transient calm, I knelt to pray, somewhat incoherently.

  I had been on my knees for some little time, and had reached some conclusions, when a sound brought me scuttling back into the pew. Why is it that one feels foolish when interrupted at private prayer?

  I had other feelings when I saw who had come into the church.

  Robin didn’t see me at first. He walked up to the chancel, bowed to the altar and began doing something in the book racks of the pews. Organizing choir music, I supposed.

  He wasn’t paying any attention to me. He had turned on the lights in the chancel, leaving the rest of the church in relative darkness. I could slip out.

  I stood. The wood of the pew creaked loudly, and I dropped my purse.

  Robin looked back, shading his eyes with his hand. I nodded and started on my way, then changed my mind. I walked up the aisle.

  ‘You startled me, Mrs Martin. I thought I was alone in the church.’

  ‘And I thought I was, until I heard you come in.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Alan and I had a long talk this morning with Alice Small.’

  ‘Oh?’ He wasn’t going to help at all.

  ‘We told her your story – Mr Guillot’s story – about the woman who lost her child. We told her about the thefts from Abercrombie’s church in Ohio, and the possible thefts from the church here. We told her something you may not know, about the large inheritance Abercrombie had from a parishioner.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We told her all this because she’s trying hard to learn to forgive the man.’

  Robin’s jaw worked. He said, ‘You told her all this, thinking it might help her to forgive him? Madam, I must question your sanity.’

  ‘Yes, I thought you’d say that. But you see, it makes his actions with respect to her tragedy less personal. Alan thinks he was a sociopath, unable for some time now to take his life in a different direction.’

  Robin was the sort of man who wouldn’t sit while a woman was standing. I sat down creakily in one of the choir pews, and went on. ‘Each new success in some criminal endeavour, you see, would feed his enormous ego. He would begin to feel invincible. When his actions hurt other people, it simply didn’t matter, so long as he remained untouched.’

  ‘You’re making excuses for him?’

  ‘Not excuses, but a possible explanation. If we can understand why he did the things he did, it may perhaps make it marginally easier to forgive. And Alice needs to forgive, Robin. So does Mr Guillot. Hatred is corrosive.’

  ‘And yet you are, I think, intending to continue a search for a murderer, if there is one. That hardly smacks of forgiveness.’

  ‘Forgiveness is a personal thing, an individual thing. The law is the law, a community thing. There is a difference.’

  ‘A philosophical one, perhaps.’

  ‘And a practical one. When an individual decides to make himself judge and jury, civilization crumbles.’

  ‘So – what are you saying? What are you asking of me?’

  ‘I believe that no amount of conversation is going to uncover a murderer, if, as you say, there is one. I believe that a community meeting, the comparing of notes, is the only way we will ever know the truth. I’m going to ask Mr Lewison to call such a meeting, and I want you to ask Mr Guillot to attend.’

  ‘And exactly what do you hope to accomplish by such a meeting, which will undoubtedly turn into a melee?’

  ‘I hope it will not. That’s why I hope we can hold it here in the church. As for what I hope to accomplish, I said before: I want to know the truth.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Mr Lewison was dubious about the idea, to say the least.

  ‘This is not my parish, Mrs Martin. These are only temporarily my parishioners. Great harm has already been done to them by that unscrupulous cleric. This – this public baring of souls could damage the congregation profoundly, perhaps irreparably.’

  ‘I know you’ll want to consult the vicar, and possibly your bishop. But consider, sir. Eventually the truth will be known, at least the truth about all of Abercrombie’s wickedness. Wouldn’t more harm be done by rumours and innuendo? This way people would get the truth, unfiltered by wishful thinking. I liken this to the tearing off of a Band-Aid – a plaster, I mean. You can do it excruciatingly slowly and prolong the pain, or you can rip it off, which hurts more, but only for a moment. And we might learn enough to put to rest once and for all the question of how the man met his death.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’ He paused, looking miserable. ‘I will think and pray about this, Mrs Martin, and I will consult the vicar if I can find him. He and his family are in the Greek islands somewhere, and I’m not sure he can be reached at all. When would you like to have the meeting?’

  ‘We’re leaving for home Monday morning. The sooner the better.’

  ‘Yes. I will phone you.’

  Alan wasn’t easy to convince, either. ‘Dorothy, I have to say this smacks of your favourite brand of reading material. Poirot assembles all the suspects and re-enacts the crime for them, in his own slanted fashion, and someone either confesses or tries to run away, amounting to the same thing in the end. A policeman shudders at the thought, and I’ll be very surprised if Lewison allows it.’

  ‘But there are big differences,’ I insisted. ‘For one thing, Poirot always knew who the criminal was. The big showdown was just to get a confession. In this case, we don’t even know whether there was a crime.

  ‘But more importantly, this thing needs to get out in the open. I told Mr Lewison it was like ripping off a Band-Aid, but actually it’s more like lancing a boil. Painful and ugly, but necessary. The poison has to be released.’

  I couldn’t keep my mind on anything for the rest of the day. We went out to dinner. I couldn’t tell you where, or what we ate. We watched something on television and then I tried to read, but gave up and went to a bed that gave me no rest.

  My phone rang at eight the next morning. Bleary-eyed, I punched buttons just before it stopped ringing.

  ‘I agree, Mrs Martin. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning in the nave. I will set volunteers to work calling the parish, and posters will be distributed all over town. And may God have mercy.’

  ‘Amen,’ I whispered.

  Now that we were committed to the meeting, I developed a bad case of cold feet. ‘So much could go wrong,’ I said as I drank cup after cup of coffee and tried to eat a little breakfast. ‘I was out of my mind to think such a thing was a good idea.’

  ‘Good idea or not, it’s on the books. You’ve often said, love, that there’s no point in worrying unless you can change something. You can’t change this; you can only prepare for it. And you know you don’t think well on an empty stomach. If you don’t eat more than that piece of toast, you’ll have a caffeine high that won’t let you do anything sensible.’

  I ate the rest of the toast and a little cereal before I gave up. ‘It’s no use, Alan. There’s a whole day to kill before this thing, and I can’t think about anything else. I need something to do, and a good walk isn’t going to be enough. Walking leaves you too much time to think.’

  ‘Well, let’s see. Daytime television is a waste of time. Some of those good books we bought?’

  ‘I can’t concentrate.’

  ‘We’ve v
isited the library and the museum. How about one of the forts? I believe the Cambridge Battery is open to the public.’

  ‘Just now I don’t care about forts, or much of anything else about the history here. I’m concerned about the future. The very near future.’

  ‘Well, then, I believe there’s a weekday Eucharist at St Anne’s at ten thirty.’

  ‘Someone would want to talk to us, and I’ll bet we wouldn’t want to hear what they had to say.’

  ‘You never know. Some will welcome this chance to air their feelings and ideas. Anyway, we could stroll in late and leave early. We’d be harder to buttonhole that way. And a little dose of liturgy wouldn’t hurt us.’

  I was reluctantly persuaded. The church was the very last place I wanted to be, but the alternative was sitting around the lounge stewing, and Alan had a point about the liturgy.

  We had an hour to kill. Alan read the papers and continued with a book he’d begun. I paced and fretted.

  We were successful in slipping quietly in to the church after the service had begun. The tiny congregation was seated in the chapel at the end of the south aisle; we took our seats in a nearby pew hidden behind a pillar. We couldn’t see, but we could hear the service and follow along silently, secure in the knowledge that no one knew we were there.

  The words were those of the old Book of Common Prayer, words I knew so well I didn’t need to read them. They were comforting, so comforting that when the congregation went forward to receive Communion, I almost joined them. Common sense prevailed, however. Even if I didn’t meet overt hostility, I would certainly disturb the communicants, and that didn’t seem a proper thing to do.

  We slipped out before the benediction, still unseen, and beat it back to Belle Isle before anyone on the street recognized us.

  ‘That was a good idea, Alan,’ I said when we had achieved the haven of our room. ‘I feel much better. And I have in fact had an idea.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Alan.

  ‘All right, I admit that some of my ideas have been … well, not entirely productive. But this one will be, I think.’