Blood Brotherhood

by Robert Barnard

  Turning, he swirled towards the chapel, where he knelt for some time in prayer.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE MORNING AFTER

  IT WAS PLAIN to Ernest Clayton as soon as he sat down to breakfast that something was wrong. He, unusually, was late, but the Bishop also had only just arrived. He sat hunched over his plate, his eyes paunchy and haunted. He was making hardly a pretence of eating, and was spending his time crumbling his bread on to his plate.

  And he was not reacting at all to Randi Paulsen, who was in chirpy, spread-the-word-good-people mood. She was expounding at great length to Stewart Phipps (in a state of proletarian depression, and eating avidly to keep his mind off it) the special problems created by the large seagoing population of Norway.

  ‘Of course we have missions in all the major centres of the world, with resident chaplains, and a truly cosy atmosphere. I myself have helped to select some of the Christian reading-matter we make available to the men who come there, which has been a great joy. But so many of them are rootless young men, without families to go to when they return to Norway, or cut off from them by some sad misunderstanding or other, and the temptations for these young men when they get to the shore ports are really terrible. Sometimes they are drunk for days. I suppose with so many large ports in Britain your church must face the same problem?’

  Stewart Phipps said ‘Urg’, or possibly ‘Mng’ — at any rate he made a noise somewhere between an assent and a protest.

  ‘Naturally the people mainly concerned with the problem are the social welfare people in our church,’ pursued Randi regardless, squeezing a smile out to others in the vicinity to bring them in on the monologue. ‘We’re just beginning a determined campaign to make sure that these men should be offered a real alternative to drink and . . . worse . . . when they are on shore. We’re recruiting families with a really Christian atmosphere in the home to offer hospitality and even accommodation to these poor boys, and make them feel part of one big Christian family. We’re launching the campaign very shortly, and we’re using the slogan “Bring a Sailor Home for Christ”.’

  It was at this point that there should have issued from the Bishop of Peckham’s place an ecstatic gurgle, a cockerel chortle, a delirious whinny. No such sound emerged. The Bishop went on crumbling his wholemeal bread and looking at his plate. It was then that Ernest Clayton knew there was something wrong.

  He was not to be long in finding out what. A minute or two later Father Anselm stalked across the floor of the Great Hall towards High Table, and placed himself imposingly at the end of the dais. Unlike the Bishop his appearance gave to the casual observer no sign of his nightlong ordeal. Such things, his manner seemed to proclaim, were all in a night’s work at St Botolph’s.

  ‘I’m afraid I have terrible news for you,’ he said, without fuss or preliminaries, in a low but impressive voice. ‘During the night there has been a murder — of my assistant Brother Dominic, whom you all knew.’ He paused and let his eye roam around the faces turned towards him. ‘The police are already here and working on the case. For the moment we are in their hands. I suggest that you cancel the discussions arranged for today and make yourselves available to the police if and when you should be called on.’

  He let his fine, unfathomable eyes dwell on them and on their reactions of incredulity, horror and distaste for a few seconds more, and then turned to go. But he had not entirely quelled them. He was prevented by Simeon P. Fleishman.

  ‘Are you telling us there’s been a murder?’ he asked, his voice rising with incredulity. ‘He-arre?’

  ‘That is so,’ said Father Anselm.

  ‘But the police can’t want to interview us,’ pursued Fleishman. ‘We’re strangers here. We hardly knew the . . . young man. For heaven’s sake, we’re all clergymen.’

  ‘I wouldn’t wish to anticipate the Inspector’s wishes,’ said Father Anselm. ‘It is to him that you must put such points. I merely suggest you make yourselves available to him if and when necessary.’

  Ignoring further expostulations and questions, he strode down from the dais and towards the brothers breakfasting at the other end of the hall. Here, once again, he addressed them earnestly, but at greater length. He kept his voice so low that nothing could be heard by the delegates at High Table.

  Where, in any case, the breakfasters were in a state of considerable shock. Randi Paulsen hazarded the opinion that the news was ‘dreadful’ and ‘quite shocking’. The others were not able to dissent from this view, though Bente Frøystad seemed to bite back a sharp comment. Once Brother Dominic had been sung to his rest on wings of cliché they all got down to discussing the effects on themselves.

  ‘To my mind the sooner we wind up the whole damn symposium and get out of here, the better,’ said Simeon Fleishman, whose linguistic patterns seemed to be changing under the pressure of this novel experience. ‘Being mixed up in something like this is poison — the mud sticks around you like a bad smell.’

  There seemed to be pretty general agreement with this, though no one else was willing to put the matter in such worldly terms.

  ‘Certainly any discussions would inevitably seem a bit beside the point at the moment,’ said Ernest Clayton, his eyes straying to the other end of the hall where Father Anselm was still addressing the brothers, who were looking at him intently. ‘I suppose that the best we can hope for is that — ’

  He was interrupted — and so, at the other end of the hall, was Father Anselm, the set of whose body exuded displeasure—by the figure of Chief Inspector Plunkett. His walk as he entered the Great Hall had something of the quality of a goose-step — cocky and aggressive. He sited himself in the open space between High Table and the other eaters, and he said in a voice just that much louder than necessary: ‘Right!’ His favourite word certainly succeeded in getting him everybody’s attention, though Father Anselm gave him the sort of look a German music lover gives someone who says that Faust is his favourite opera. In the silence that followed, Plunkett let his rodent’s eyes travel slowly and suspiciously round to every corner of the hall. As he intended, everyone who was not quailing before, quailed now. As he brought his attention back to more immediate prospects, his mouth twisted into an unpleasant expression of contempt.

  ‘Right,’ he said again. ‘I gather you all know what happened last night. Eh? Murder. Right. Now, I’ll want to talk to you — ’ here he turned to the party at High Table — ‘one after another. In alphabetical order. Before that I’ve got an interesting conversation lined up with — ’ here he paused to make quite certain that none of the breakfasters at High Table was black — ‘with another of your group. Then I’ll send for you. OK?’

  They all nodded miserably. Satisfied with having thoroughly intimidated them, Plunkett turned towards the mass of robed and cowled figures at the other end of the hall, and his voice, already too loud and harsh for such an environment, now seemed to have been subjected to a further twist of the volume-control knob. It was almost as if he knew that such a volume, and such a tone, were unheard of within the precincts of the Community, and that he was enjoying himself. There was a mute gesture from one of the older brothers — actually Brother Jonathan — and there were anguished looks on the faces of some of the others, who resembled nothing so much as deaf men who had suddenly recovered their hearing during a performance of the 1812 Overture.

  ‘Now! You lot!’ said Chief Inspector Plunkett. ‘So far as I can see, I may not need to talk to you at all. But you never know what we might uncover. I’ll expect you to be available.’ Turning towards the door, he paused for a moment, and then said: ‘So don’t go away!’

  With which fatuous command he bustled out of the hall, followed by Sergeant Forsyte. The euphoric expression on the face of the latter could be accounted for by the fact that he was treasuring up every detail of his chief’s conduct for retailing to higher authority before many days were out. And he was expecting by then to have such a store — such a store.

  • • •
>
  The Bishop of Mitabezi was a pitiful sight, and not a pretty one. He had been released from his strait-jacket of bedclothes (the knots of which had been tied so effectively by Father Anselm that Sergeant Forsyte struggled with them for quite ten minutes), and now he lay on the stripped bed. The first things that met the eye were his hands and robe caked with dried blood. Hardly less remarkable was his expression, which was woebegone and hideously ashamed. He didn’t know where to put his face while he was being untied. Unfortunately it was almost impossible, in the tiny room, to put it anywhere where it could not see Chief Inspector Plunkett, who was sitting on a chair drawn up beside the bed, and regarding the discomfited Bishop with an expression on his face so close to a sneer that it was the very last thing to restore the poor man’s self-respect.

  When he was untied Plunkett allowed him a minute or two to inspect his blood-stained hands and robe, regarding him sardonically from a chair the while. Then he said: ‘And now, perhaps, you’d like to tell me what you’ve been doing? Eh?’

  There was a long silence, during which the Bishop of Mitabezi could be heard swallowing convulsively. At last he said: ‘I don’t . . . exactly . . . remember. But I think I must have . . . killed something.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ said Plunkett, with an intonation which said, ‘Go on — and the rest.’

  ‘I think it may have been a . . . lamb,’ said the Bishop. ‘Could that be what . . . this is?’ He held up his black-brown hands and looked at them with an expression of guilt that would have been comical to someone with a sense of humour. Chief Inspector Plunkett did not relax the expression of twisted contempt that was now suffusing his face.

  ‘A lamb was found,’ he said. Then he leant forward, and went on, his voice rising in pitch and volume: ‘Found with its throat cut, and a great long slit down its belly. That was you, was it?’

  The Bishop sighed, a luxurious moan in the bass clef. ‘I’m afraid it must have been. I felt it coming on. Earlier in the day. When we visited the farm and saw all the animals. I . . . felt it. Perhaps I should have said something. But how could I? What would people have said?’

  ‘Blood-lust,’ said Chief Inspector Plunkett, his voice cracking with excitement. From the way his tongue sped round his mouth, moistening parched lips, it seemed like a blatant case of the pot and the kettle. The Bishop looked down, ashamed.

  ‘It was the night of the seventh moon. We had a tradition in our tribe . . . All the young men . . . A sort of initiation. Of course I renounced all such things when I became a Christian. All of us did. And yet, somehow . . .’

  Plunkett was not willing to leave the i’s undotted. ‘You get overcome by the thirst for blood,’ he said, his voice still dangerously excited.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the Bishop. ‘I suppose so. The killing was always done by a tribal warrior. In . . . what you would call a trance. I have never been a warrior, but I fear I must have gone into such a trance last night.’

  ‘It’s happened before?’

  ‘Yes, once. It didn’t get out, of course. And in my own country it would not have been considered . . . so extraordinary. But here . . .’

  ‘And you remember nothing?’

  ‘No, nothing,’ said the Bishop, hanging his head.

  ‘Not killing the lamb?’

  ‘No.’

  Inspector Plunkett leaned forward. ‘Not killing Denis Crowther, known here as Brother Dominic?’

  The Bishop started, and looked him straight in the eye for the first time. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘This . . . Brother Dominic. Last night he was butchered. Carved up. Have you forgotten that too?’

  The Bishop of Mitabezi drew himself up. He had at his command a very considerable dignity of manner, and a great deal of it returned to him now. His fleshy but impressive body stiffened against the wall, and he looked hard and direct at Chief Inspector Plunkett.

  ‘You forget that I am a Christian,’ he said.

  • • •

  The Bishop of Peckham, in the period of waiting for Chief Inspector Plunkett to interview him, loafed around the buildings and grounds of St Botolph’s, a picture of misery and uncertainty. Several people tried to speak to him, but they got little more than grunts in reply. He went into the chapel and prayed for a while, but while his words flew up his thoughts remained below. To be more specific, he was disturbed by the presence of Simeon Fleishman, apparently also offering up supplications to his non-denominational creator, but in fact letting his eyes dart everywhere around the magnificently austere chapel. So the Bishop gained singularly little peace of mind from the exercise, and resumed his loafing, his eyes also, gaunt from lack of sleep and haunted by the sights of last night, roving everywhere in search of comfort and reassurance.

  Finally it was Ernest Clayton who took pity on him. He had an old-fashioned belief in the healing power of nature, and in the notion of ‘getting things off your chest’. He took the Bishop by the arm and said: ‘Come on — let’s go for a walk on the moors.’

  The Bishop let himself be taken with only the mildest of protests: ‘You don’t think the Inspector will want me? He said alphabetical order, didn’t he? Do you think I will be F for Forde or P for Peckham?’

  ‘Whichever you are,’ said Clayton, ‘there’ll be time for you to have a walk. I should be first — at least, after Father Anselm, if he hasn’t talked to him yet. But I don’t imagine there’ll be any harm done if we get out of alphabetical order. We’ll stay within the grounds, and the walk will do us both good.’

  They walked out of the Great Hall, the Bishop flinching at the sight of the door-handle, with its blood and fingerprint powder, through the kitchen garden and out on to the moors. Conversation did not flourish at first, and the Bishop did little more than punctuate Clayton’s observations with such responses as ‘appalling’, ‘dreadful thing’, ‘shocking’, and so on. But when eventually they got out into the open, and trod the narrow path through the purple heather, Clayton finally said: ‘Would you like to tell me all about it?’

  The Bishop took a deep breath, as if it was the first of really fresh air for hours, and said: ‘Yes, I would. I must tell someone, or — goodness me! — I shall burst!’

  And so it all came out. The being woken in the small hours. Father Anselm’s overbearing manner, and the nightmare trip to view the bloody remains of Brother Dominic. Then the horror piling on horror, as in a Eurovision Song Contest: the Bishop of Mitabezi’s ghastly chant and blood-dripping hands, the call to the police, and the final discovery of the slaughtered lamb. Out here in the open, with the grouse fluttering plumply from clump to clump, the story gained an added air of improbability, of a trumpery piece of gothic horror. If it had not been for the police, and the bloody door-handle, the Bishop might have expected Ernest Clayton to tell him that it was all a nightmare, and that he must have eaten something at dinner that disagreed with him.

  But at the end of the recital Clayton merely shook his head: ‘Absolutely fantastic,’ he said. ‘It seems to me quite admirable that you kept your head.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure that I did,’ said the Bishop mournfully. Then he perked up a little. ‘But perhaps I seemed to behave worse than I did only in comparison with Father Anselm. There’s a nerve of steel, goodness me, yes! It was as though nothing could surprise him. He took it all without a moment’s flinching or hesitation.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ernest Clayton.

  ‘But I — couldn’t,’ said the Bishop of Peckham. But again, he brightened up. ‘Still, when all is said and done, I didn’t absolutely misbehave. I didn’t funk.’

  ‘I expect there are plenty of us who would have done just that,’ said the Reverend Clayton encouragingly. ‘One never knows in advance how one is going to behave in a totally unexpected situation. One thing puzzles me a little: I don’t see why Father Anselm decided to involve you at all.’

  ‘Well, he felt he had to consult me, you see — since I am the unofficial leader of the symposium.’

  ‘Ye
s — I can see that Brother Dominic was a member of the symposium, or at any rate, that he was attending the sessions. But first and foremost after all, he was a member of the Community. And as far as I can see this is mainly a Community affair. Some grudge or personal tension that had built up. Quite dreadful, of course, in a religious order — but still, not unnatural, in the circumstances: it is just this sort of set-up where things get out of proportion.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that,’ said the Bishop. ‘You see, the main block of the buildings is locked off at night from the wing where the rest of the Community sleeps. Brother Dominic and Father Anselm sleep in the main part, but otherwise there’s only the guest-rooms upstairs. You can see why I had to be involved — the murderer must be one of our party, either the poor Bishop of Mitabezi, or one of the others. That’s why he called me in.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ernest Clayton again, in a voice even more studiously non-committal.

  ‘Of course, it could have been Father Anselm,’ said the Bishop. ‘I think he sleeps more or less next door. But as he said — in that austere way of his . . . rather terrifying, really — as he said, as far as he is concerned, it must be one of us.’

  ‘Yes, I take the point,’ said Ernest Clayton cautiously. He turned over in his mind the various possible reasons for Father Anselm having drawn the Bishop into the affair. Then he decided to come a little further into the open.

  ‘Did Father Anselm explain how he came to go to Brother Dominic’s cell in the middle of the night?’ he asked.

  The Bishop opened his mouth in a spontaneous gesture of surprise. ‘Goodness me, I never thought of that. You mean, how did he come to find the body at all? But it’s hardly something I could have asked him straight out, is it?’

  ‘It’s something someone should ask him,’ said Clayton. ‘I hope my first impressions of that policeman were wrong.’