The Sinking Admiral

by The Detection Club

  ‘I don’t read a lot of detective fiction,’ said Ben. He yawned again.

  ‘As for thriller writers,’ Ianthe continued, ‘who do they direct all of the violence against? Which characters – or should I say which sex – will be beaten black and blue for the titillation of the reading public?’

  Ben rubbed his eyes. Of course, what Ianthe was saying was true. There was a lot of very violent stuff out there these days. Didn’t somebody recently say that she wouldn’t review any more crime fiction with extreme violence against women? Quite right too. But Ianthe’s voice was fading into the general hum of conversation. Ben nodded to show that he was still listening.

  ‘What’s worst of all,’ Ianthe was saying, ‘is the way crime writers include in their books all sorts of obscure references to the genre – Chandler and his Mean Streets, say – and expect everyone to pick them up.’

  Ben nodded again. They did that.

  Then, suddenly and without any warning, it was all kicking off. A panel in the wainscoting, just below the Decalogue, moved slightly, then fell into the aisle with a crash. A Chinese gentleman emerged and smiled benignly at the congregation.

  ‘Good grief! A secret passage!’ Ben exclaimed aloud.

  Then, a little further down the same wall, another panel broke into two and fell away. An identical Chinese gentleman appeared from a second passage.

  ‘Bloody hell – twins!’ said Ben. ‘I certainly wasn’t prepared for that.’

  The second twin smiled. ‘We came,’ he said, ‘because we had a strange and unaccountable premonition that something was afoot.’ With a flourish, he took a small bottle out of his pocket.

  I know what that is, thought Ben. It’s a lethal but previously unknown poison. And I know exactly why he’s done that, because of the thing his brother has just shown me – a vital clue that I’ll keep to myself for the moment. Still, my intuition tells me…

  Greta Knox was however already on her feet.

  ‘Enough!’ Knox said. ‘There are rules that have to be followed in cases like this. This is not playing fair with anyone. You two have absolutely no business here. Out, both of you!’

  ‘It was the policeman who did it!’ one the twins shouted at the congregation. ‘But it’s a policeman you haven’t encountered yet!’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Knox.

  Taking the two gentlemen by the arm she hustled them to the back of the church. There was a loud creaking sound as the door opened, and some footsteps, then Victoria Whitechurch said something in a loud voice.

  ‘Ouch!’ exclaimed Ben. ‘What the…’

  ‘Sorry,’ whispered Amy. ‘You said to prod you hard in the ribs if you fell asleep. You were actually snoring.’

  ‘Was I?’ His headache was worse than ever.

  ‘Yes,’ she hissed. Then stopped and looked over her shoulder.

  ‘And the very worst thing,’ Ianthe continued, on the other side of Ben, ‘is when something weird happens in the book and the writer passes it off as a dream or something stupid like…’

  Then she too fell silent.

  ‘I am the resurrection and the life sayeth the Lord,’ Victoria intoned from the back of the church. ‘He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’

  The organ was playing some tune that Ben found vaguely familiar. Handel? Bach? No, it was ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’, at a deadly slow tempo. Fitz’s choice, no doubt, stipulated in that will of his. If he was looking down on them, he would have had a smile on his face.

  ‘Did I miss anything?’ whispered Ben. ‘When I was… not paying attention for a moment.’

  ‘You were dead to the world,’ said Amy. ‘Head slumped forward, eyes shut. Another couple of minutes and they’d have buried you too. And you did miss something interesting. Greta Knox left…’

  ‘Yes, with the Chinese twins…’

  ‘Sorry? We’re back to blathering again,’ said Amy.

  ‘No twins?’

  ‘No twins that I saw.’

  ‘Deadly but unknown poison?’

  ‘Oh yes, masses of that.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Ben. Greta simply ran out of the church just when the vicar came in…’

  Amy stopped speaking, even in a whisper. Victoria Whitechurch and the pall-bearers, in their slow march down the aisle, had drawn level with their pew. As she walked slowly past them, Victoria frowned her disapproval. Both Amy and Ben assumed an undeserved look of innocence.

  ‘Ran out?’ hissed Ben, as soon as the coffin had passed them. ‘Why?’

  ‘How on earth am I supposed to know that? She didn’t stop and explain it all to me.’

  ‘Too emotional for her?’

  ‘Too something or other. You don’t leave a funeral just before the coffin arrives unless you are pretty desperate.’

  ‘Needed a pee?’

  ‘A pee? You do know how to raise the tone of a funeral, don’t you?’

  ‘Do I? Look, you could go after her and I’ll stay here to watch the congregation.’

  ‘You could go after her just as the service is starting, if it will make any difference to your ratings. I’ll stay here and pay my respects to Fitz, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Yes, sorry, I…’

  Ben looked up. Victoria was now staring directly at him from her vantage point of the pulpit. He picked up his prayer book and studied it carefully.

  ‘We have come here today,’ said Victoria, ‘to remember before God our dear brother Geoffrey, and to give thanks for his life.’

  ‘Unless you’ve got other plans, Ben,’ Amy muttered.

  In the address that followed shortly after, Victoria did not actually say that Fitz was the dimwit who tried to screw up the phone mast deal to save the church. She was far too professional for that. Nor did she say that if death hadn’t intervened, the roof would continue to leak until the church was demolished, or turned into chic flats for weekenders. But somehow she managed to get the message across. It was, in a sense, a class act, but most of the mourners would have failed to notice, their attention being almost entirely on Stan and his camera as it roved around the church. Ben hoped that Stan had caught something earlier – perhaps including Greta’s flight. Once or twice, when he managed to scan the congregation himself, he noticed that Bob Christie was casting his own glances towards the door, as if expecting Greta to return. Nobody else had budged from their seats, but Ben had a strange feeling that somebody was missing from the church. Who should have been there but was not?

  ‘Somebody’s gone AWOL,’ he said to Amy. ‘There’s somebody who hasn’t shown up.’

  Another cough from the pulpit suggested that he had again been too loud. He hoped Stan hadn’t picked it up too – well, they could always edit that out. ‘Psalm 39,’ Victoria announced. ‘“I said, I will take heed to my ways: that I offend not in my tongue.”’ She looked at Ben as if the Psalmist might have had him in mind when he wrote those words.

  ‘Don’t take it personally,’ Amy whispered. ‘It’s standard. And you may like to turn your prayer book the right way up.’

  ‘“I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle,”’ Victoria continued, still looking at Ben, ‘“while the ungodly is in my sight. I held my tongue, and spake nothing: I kept silence, yea, even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.”’

  ‘Do you think that’s some sort of clue?’ hissed Ben. ‘She’s saying she knows who the killer is, but can’t reveal it.’

  ‘In that case it was King David who knew who killed Fitz,’ said Amy.

  ‘King David?’

  ‘He wrote most of the psalms. You don’t go to church much, do you?’

  ‘I was baptised once. Not recently though.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s one of the psalms they use for baptism.’

  There was another look of disapproval from on high.

  ‘“For I am a stranger with thee: and a
sojourner, as all my fathers were,”’ continued Victoria. ‘“O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence, and be no more seen.”’

  Ben gave Amy a significant look, but Amy shook her head. There was no coded message there. Still, some of those words rang true. How many of them were strangers and sojourners in the village? How many had come, one way or another, to gather their strength from this bleak stretch of coast?

  ‘Did you see which bit they’re going to bury him in?’ asked Ben.

  They were now trooping out of the church into the damp air of the churchyard. The rain had mercifully ceased, but the grass squelched underfoot. Amy zipped up her Barbour. ‘If you think I went for a wander around just before the service, you’re in for a disappointment, Ben. It was pouring. Like everyone else I just made a run for the door. I think we’re going over to the far side – by the sea. It’s a nice spot. I wouldn’t mind being buried there myself when my time comes.’

  Ben pulled a face. He had no plans to be buried anywhere. ‘Where exactly?’

  ‘You can’t see it yet. It’s a bit hidden away behind those bushes.’

  ‘I’ve just thought who wasn’t there,’ said Ben. ‘It was Griffiths Bentley. You don’t think he’s done a runner? I always thought he was the most likely murderer. I mean, that’s what Willie Sayers was implying on Sunday, wasn’t he? Anyway, Bentley was doing all that fiddling around, helping Fitz change his will. I bet he’s on a healthy tickle from that.’

  ‘But why should that make him want to murder the old boy?’ asked Amy.

  ‘My instinct tells me that he drowned Fitz,’ said Ben. ‘I’ve never trusted solicitors – all they have to do is pass some fairly easy exams when they’re in their twenties, and for the rest of their lives charge people exorbitant fees for services they wouldn’t require if solicitors hadn’t invented them. Mark my words – Griffiths Bentley killed Fitz. That’s what happened. You heard it from me first.’

  Amy shrugged. Stan was ahead of them, walking backwards, camera focussed on the coffin as it covered the last few yards it would ever travel. Ropes were positioned by the grave, ready to lower it. The sexton pulled back the tarpaulin that had protected his recent digging from the rain. As the coffin reached the graveside, Stan panned left to take in the sea and its choppy grey waves, then downwards into the grave itself. Then he swore and almost dropped the camera.

  Ben, his hangover forgotten and sensing excellent footage, rushed to his side, closely followed by a frowning Amy. Victoria too stepped quickly across from the coffin, her surplice billowing in the wind. All four stared down together into the muddy depths. There were two or three inches of water at the bottom of the hole, but that was not what had caused Stan to cease filming so abruptly. The words ‘parts of this programme may be disturbing for some viewers’ flashed into Ben’s mind.

  Looking back up at them, his eyes wide open but unseeing, was the grey and indisputably dead face of Griffiths Bentley.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ‘Are you all right now?’ asked Alice.

  Greta gave a final determined wipe to her eyes and nose and said she was. She had rushed back to the house from St Mary’s and was still crying when Alice returned from her afternoon Mother and Baby Clinic.

  ‘I should have been in the church with you, Greta.’

  ‘You were needed in the surgery.’

  ‘Yes, but someone could have covered for me. I should have realised what a strain it would have been for you. I was insensitive.’

  ‘No one could ever call you that,’ Greta said. ‘You’re the nearest thing to a mindreader I’ve ever met, and much too kind for your own good.’

  ‘I should have been there,’ Alice insisted.

  Greta looked at her partner, and, as so often happened, gratitude flooded through her. To have found someone so caring, so understanding, was more than she had ever dared hope for. Someone with whom she could share everything. Almost everything. Not for the first time, Greta felt a tug of guilt about the one secret that she had never felt strong enough to share with Alice.

  ‘No, I was just stupid,’ she said. ‘I should have known that at some point the reality of Fitz’s death would get to me. And when I saw his coffin being brought down the aisle…’

  Once again tears threatened.

  ‘You’ll get over it.’ Alice’s tone was as dry as ever, but her hand on Greta’s shoulder expressed all the support that had never failed in their life together.

  Steadied, Greta turned to face her, adding: ‘What I don’t understand – if this stuff about the will and the money is true – is how he found out.’

  Alice nodded, looking even more like a wise owl than usual. Her brown eyes were sharp with intelligence, but her mouth was soft. The dark, heavy rims of her glasses gave her a wholly misleading air of severity.

  ‘Who did know?’

  ‘At the time? My mother, our GP – your predecessor but two – and the nun who ran the mother-and-baby home.’

  ‘Was it awful?’ Alice asked, taking off her glasses to clean the lenses on her scarf. Without their protection, her wit and vulnerability were both as clear as neat vodka. ‘The home, I mean.’

  ‘Absolutely not. Nothing like those Magdalen laundries in Ireland. Very nice and discreet, attached to a convent in Hertfordshire. My nuns were Anglicans, and intelligent, and they looked after their old girls.’ Greta laughed at her memories. ‘They had a home for drug-addicts, too: mainly amphetamine-dependent from too many slimming pills, they always said. But I expect it was worse. Anyway, that was never my problem. But they told me on the day I left school that old girls always had priority at both homes, so I knew where to go when…’

  She didn’t need to say any more. Alice said, ‘Yes, of course.’ Then paused before continuing. ‘Listen: I know we never talk about the tricky past, but I have to ask, just this once. Do you regret what you did?’

  Greta stood up so that she could put both hands on Alice’s arms. ‘Never. Absolutely never. Of course I think about him sometimes. Who wouldn’t? And when I see a particularly fine specimen of a man in his early thirties, I wonder. But no. If I hadn’t done what I did, I’d never have been able to go to college and get my A levels, get into Oxford, achieve my first in maths, or meet you. Because of that decision, I… well, I found myself and my life. No, darling, I’ve never regretted it.’

  ‘Good.’ Alice looked at her watch. ‘Come on, we’d better get to the pub for the funeral baked meats. If we don’t, my patients and your pupils are going to think there really is something nefarious behind his intention to leave you his fortune.’

  ‘As if there could be a fortune! Poor old Fitz never had any spare cash. But I still wish I knew who’d told him.’

  ‘The child himself?’

  ‘How could he know? When I agreed to have him adopted, I decided to have “father unknown” on the birth certificate. It didn’t seem fair to Fitz not to tell him about the baby, but then to name him as the father.’

  ‘And your mother wouldn’t have told anyone?’

  ‘Neither she nor the doctor – if he was anything like you.’ Greta had never minded that Alice told her nothing about any of her patients. They were both safer that way because, in spite of being a rational mathematician, Greta’s own instincts had always been to tell. She’d never liked secrets, and had had to fight herself ferociously to keep her own from everyone except Alice. Only she had ever seemed trustworthy enough to be told about the baby Greta had had when she’d been two weeks short of her seventeenth birthday – or about the identity of his father.

  ‘So, someone in the house, then. It must have been. I know your mother never had what used to be called servants, but did anyone clean for her?’

  Greta felt a surge of anger as she made the connection. ‘Bloody Tracy’s grandmother! I never thought. God knows why not. Perhaps it runs in the family.’

  ‘What does?’

  Close to the window a seagull shrieked with all the coarse violenc
e of a bullying thug.

  ‘Blackmail.’

  They set out for the Admiral Byng. Ancient trees hung over the footpath, their branches now whipped this way and that by the usual icy wind from the Urals. The pub was less than half a mile away, and they let their heads droop and set their shoulders as they walked into the wind in silence, both thinking of Tracy.

  What a good thing the police had come to the funeral to pay their respects. In the chaos in the churchyard following the macabre discovery in the freshly dug grave, DI Cole knew at once that the crowning moment of his detective career had arrived. He stepped forward and the man known as The Lump was transformed into King Cole, authoritative, assertive, impossible to challenge. For years he had been assigned to the dullest and most dispiriting cases that came the way of Suffolk CID, most of them suicides. All the juicy murder enquiries were handed to other detectives. And during the last investigation he’d been delegated to do on his own, he’d suffered the indignity of having had Scotland Yard brought in to find the solution. Cole would never understand why his talents weren’t recognised by the high-ups. It had reached the point when he was programmed to think every dead body he investigated must be another suicide.

  This one had to be a murder.

  Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

  ‘Stand aside, all of you.’

  Heads turned. Even the heads of the pall-bearers tried to turn, and the coffin lurched dangerously to one side.

  ‘You, too, Vicar. This is no longer a burial service, it’s a crime scene.’ With a flourish, Cole pulled back the hood of his black plastic mac, rather like Robin Hood at the moment he revealed he was the Earl of Huntingdon. To the undertaker, he said, ‘You’ll have to return the deceased – the one in the coffin, I mean – to your premises for the time being. The funeral will be resumed at a later date.’