Putting his little suitcase down for a moment, Ernest Clayton looked around for the last time at the rough stone walls, and the sheep grazing out on the moors. ‘It’s a lovely place,’ he said. ‘I can understand your wanting to stay here.’
Father Anselm smiled in his remote way. ‘Recent events have certainly cured me of any desire to leave,’ he said. ‘I shall stay here quite happily until I die.’
Ernest Clayton threw a sideways glance in his direction, and then decided to approach a subject that had been troubling him.
‘I remember your saying when you spoke of Father Jerome,’ he said, ‘how you complemented each other — he other-worldly, spiritual; you the organizer. That seems an ideal arrangement. I wonder whether you and Brother Dominic were not, perhaps, too much . . . alike. That’s a point which might be worth thinking about when you give any recommendations as to your successor.’
There was no freezing-over of Father Anselm’s face. ‘That’s a very good point,’ he said. ‘It’s something I’ll bear in mind.’
They had reached the gate. They turned and shook hands silently, expressing no formal regrets at the parting, then Father Anselm opened the gate, bowed the Reverend Clayton out, and shut the gate, softly but firmly.
There was by now no great crowd of reporters around the outside of the gate. They had been told of the ruse by which the delegates had escaped their gentle attentions, and they had made a great fuss about ethics, but eventually they had gone off, their tempers ranging from the disgruntled to the bloody-minded, to dip their pens in vitriol and write pieces that went as far as they dared in the direction of murky suggestion and unsubstantiated slur. Only one was left — a dogged little man who made it a principle not to believe a hundred per cent of what he was told, and who had noticed that when all the reporters had charged off in the direction of beer and sandwiches there was still one car left by the gate. The emergence of Ernest Clayton seemed like a reward for his perseverance.
‘Have you any statement about the murder?’ he asked breathlessly. ‘Can you tell our readers what’s been going on in there? Would you like to deny some of the rumours?’
‘I know nothing about rumours, and I don’t see how anything at all reliable could have got out of the Community,’ said Ernest Clayton, getting into his car. ‘It’s not been quite the sort of week I anticipated, of course, but in my profession one learns not to be surprised by anything.’
And he drove off, while the reporter began composing a story for the Sunday Grub which began ‘ “Nothing can surprise me now,” said a middle-aged vicar as he emerged dazed and shattered from behind the heavily bolted doors of the murder monastery.’
Driving away over the stupendous purple vulgarity of the moors, and driving resolutely past any would-be hitch-hikers, Ernest Clayton felt more at peace than he had done for a long time. It had been a difficult decision to make, to go along with the Bishop, and it could well be that it had not been the right decision — but at any rate it was not the safe, predictable decision. They had chanced their arm, and that in itself was exhilarating. Given the chance again, he hoped he would have the courage to accept Father Anselm’s second alternative, and be satisfied with his resignation without sticking out for an ostentatious cleansing of the Augean stables.
Ernest Clayton creased his forehead slightly as he tried to remember the exact wording of Father Anselm’s promise to resign.
It was some miles farther down the road before Ernest Clayton began seriously to doubt whether Father Anselm had made any such promise at all.
• • •
At the door of the little study which had served as a centre of the murder investigation, Inspector Croft, watched in the background by Sergeant Forsyte, took his leave of Father Anselm. It was odd, but he felt almost apologetic.
‘I think it’s very likely,’ he said, ‘that we shan’t need to bother you again at all. I hope things will be cleared up in a few days, and I don’t at the moment foresee the need for any more work actually within St Botolph’s. Of course, there will be an inquest, and eventually there may be a trial . . .’
‘Naturally, naturally,’ murmured Father Anselm.
‘Meanwhile I hope that things will be able to get back to normal reasonably quickly.’
‘I hope so. The symposia always cause some disruption to routine, and of course much more so this time.’
‘Of course. It must have been a shattering thing to happen, as far as all of you were concerned. Do you in fact find that it is a good idea to combine these symposia with the sort of life you lead here for the rest of the year?’
‘No — on the whole I don’t,’ said Father Anselm firmly. ‘I have had my doubts for some time, and I feel sure that after this the Church authorities will raise no objection if from now on we quietly let them lapse.’
‘I’m sure that’s wise,’ said Croft. And then, speaking as one who saw too much of ‘the world’ and its dingiest side, he added: ‘Because I’m sure it is the calm of the life you lead here, left to yourselves, that is really valuable. In your way you seem to me to do very remarkable work. I hope you’ll keep it up.’
‘I intend to,’ said Father Anselm, bowing gravely.
‘Sly old fox, that,’ said Sergeant Forsyte, as they both withdrew from the presence.
‘You really are unpleasantly cynical sometimes, Forsyte,’ said Inspector Croft, irritated.
• • •
In ‘White Gables’, Chislehurst, at half past six in the evening, the telephone rang. James Grimwade, just back from the City, in which he was Something, went on calmly chewing his evening meal, but his wife got up to answer it, rather reluctantly: James didn’t indulge much in conversation when he got back from the office, but she did like to sit there and see that he got a good meal into him.
She was gone a long while, but James Grimwade, chomping his way through a mixed grill and the Evening News, did not notice, or make any attempt to catch what she was saying when her voice floated back from the hall. Eventually she came back into the dining-room, with a very puzzled expression on her face.
‘That was funny,’ she said.
‘What was?’ grunted James.
‘That. It was the police. They’re coming here.’
‘Eh?’ said James, starting forward out of his lethargy.
‘Nothing to do with us,’ said his wife soothingly. ‘It was about that au pair girl we had — I’d almost forgotten her. You remember, the Norwegian.’
‘The lovely Randi?’ said James, licking his tongue around his greasy mouth. ‘How could I ever forget? The anticipation aroused by the name! The disappointment of the sight of her at the front door! Is she back putting the damper on some other household?’
‘No. You remember that time when she went missing for the night, and came back home the next day all hysterical, and swearing she’d been raped?’
‘Oh, I remember. Swore she’d been raped but wouldn’t go to the police. Don’t tell me she’s gone along and told them now! She’s been a while about it!’
‘Don’t be silly, Jim. It wasn’t like that at all. They were asking me whether anything odd or out of the ordinary happened while she was with us, and I racked my brains and couldn’t think of anything. Then suddenly I remembered this, and told them.’
‘I don’t know that you should have done that,’ said James Grimwade. ‘After all, it was only her imagination.’
‘Well, we don’t know that, do we?’
‘Oh, come on! Wouldn’t go to the police — what does it look like, eh?’
‘Well, of course that’s what we thought at the time. But often they won’t go to the police. There’ve been lots of articles about rape recently on the women’s pages — it’s the in subject — and they all say that.’
‘I don’t believe a word of it. She just wanted attention, but wasn’t willing to make it official. She’d been seeing too many X films — all the films about that time had subjects like that, and her story sounded just as if she’d l
ifted it from one of them.’
‘Randi didn’t go to the cinema. She wouldn’t even take the children to the revival of The Sound of Music. Anyway, what was the story? I forget the details. Wasn’t it some young man she said she’d met at the SPCK Bookshop, or something?’
‘That’s it. They’d met there the week before and arranged to meet for coffee. And the story was that he drugged her and took her off somewhere and — wait a bit: didn’t she say that it wasn’t him that raped her but someone else?’
‘That’s right — I remember now. It did sound a bit fantastic, I must admit. On the other hand, Jim, you’ve got to admit that she did seem in a terrible state. It took us ages to piece the story together, I remember.’
‘But why on earth should it come up again now, for heaven’s sake?’
‘Goodness knows. But there’s a police inspector coming here to ask questions about it. Flying down from the North of England.’
‘Good God,’ said James Grimwade. ‘We’d better sit down over coffee and remember some of the details.’
• • •
For some the journey home was almost over. Philip Lambton was in a train nearing Liverpool, where he would find his rectory taken over by a gang of his young friends, complete with their pot, their bikes and their amplifying equipment. Rapture! Stewart Phipps was drawing up outside his front gate, sweaty and nasty after the ride, and within minutes he would find the note on the kitchen table — for the week’s rest and spiritual relaxation in congenial surroundings which his bishop had charitably recommended Stewart Phipps to take had served to show his wife just how blissful life could be without him. Simeon Fleishman sat in his hotel in the Arab quarter of London and wondered whether to take advantage of a temporary improvement in the position of sterling against the dollar and cash in all his remaining travellers’ cheques.
The Bishop of Peckham, tucked into his taxi and enjoying his first trouble-free sleep for nearly a week, was in a confused dream of enthronement on the highest spire of Canterbury Cathedral, of addresses to the nation which The Times would say brought wit and learning back into the Established Church after an absence of three hundred years, and of avuncular bonhomie at Anglican garden-parties with overseas bishops. With a start he jerked himself awake. No. Not overseas bishops.
And on a crowded train to Newcastle, with the glories of Durham Cathedral shrouded in the mist of a hot day glowing in the distance, the two delegates from Norway were nearing the end of the first stage of their journey home. Randi Paulsen had spent most of the trip working out what she would say to her parishioners when she reached Svartøy: ‘A most unpleasant experience in every way,’ she would say. ‘I wouldn’t have dreamed it possible. I think it better not to talk about it all.’
Now she was wondering whether she dared sink off into a little sleep. Sleep had been very difficult recently. When it had come — and how she had prayed for it to come! — it had been hag-ridden sleep, and always before dawn there had crept upon her this new nightmare of the man struggling on the bed as the knife —
She put the thought from her energetically, looked with polite interest at the landscape, and then, overcome with tiredness, let her head drop back against the seat.
But when sleep had possessed her for no more than a few minutes there came upon her not that new nightmare, but the old one, where she was half awake and half asleep, and trying desperately to wake, to do something, to resist, but feeling a great weight of numbness pulling her down, and knowing that people were around her, near her, touching her, and struggling to open her eyes, to scream, and feeling a shape, a person, a man, with his face close to hers, on her, seeing beyond him — the other face, that fair-haired young face, and knowing he was holding her down, and then trying to scream, trying so hard to scream, and nothing coming, and feeling —
In her sleep she let out a scream of fear and nausea, and jerked herself awake. She felt instinctively for the knife she had kept with her since — and then remembered. Had she really screamed? Out loud? She looked around the carriage, at Bente Frøystad and the solid Northern families beginning their holidays; she looked into their eyes and scanned them for signs that she had given herself away. Then, seeing nothing, she relaxed the iron rigidity of her shoulders one iota, and smiled around the compartment her terrible forgiving smile.
About the Author
Robert Barnard (1936-2013) was awarded the Malice Domestic Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Nero Wolfe Award, as well as the Agatha and Macavity awards. An eight-time Edgar nominee, he was a member of Britain’s distinguished Detection Club, and, in May 2003, he received the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement in mystery writing. His most recent novel, Charitable Body, was published by Scribner in 2012.
We hope you enjoyed reading this Scribner eBook.
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Copyright © Robert Barnard 1977
www.SimonandSchuster.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electric or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
All the characters and events portrayed in this story are fictitious.
First published in the United States of America in 1978 by the Walker Publishing Company, Inc.
ISBN: 0-8027-5387-6
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3396-8 (eBook)
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