Death of a Chancellor lfp-4

by David Dickinson

  ‘Quite so,’ said the Dean, looking at his watch. ‘Perhaps you could enlighten us, Lord Powerscourt, on the relevance of the battlefield conditions of the Boer War in South Africa to a dead man in Compton, found on a spit in the Vicars Hall?’

  ‘Forgive me, Dean. I’m just coming to the point.’ Powerscourt smiled diplomatically at the Dean, now turning over to a fresh page in his notebook. ‘When you tell the young man about the spit, I suggest that you have the doctor with you. I suggest that the doctor gives the goriest account he can of what had happened to the body. There is no need to go into details now, Dr Williams, but it must have been absolutely frightful. I suggest that you try to make the man literally sick, if you can. That way I think you will find, oddly enough, that the coverage of the last hours of Arthur Rudd is both more limited and more restrained than it might otherwise be. If you let these reporters imagine things, their imaginations run riot. If they have to confront the horrible truth, it sobers them up no end.’

  The Dean looked at the clock above his fireplace. ‘My lord Bishop, gentlemen, please forgive me. I shall give Lord Powerscourt’s recommendations the most serious consideration. But now I am due to conduct the service of Holy Communion in fifteen minutes. Deaths, plague, wars, invasion threats have not succeeded in halting the divine offices of our cathedral in almost a thousand years. One more death shall not succeed either.’

  The Dean departed to change into more appropriate clothing. Powerscourt wondered if only suggestions emanating from the Dean in person were capable of instant acceptance. Dr Williams hurried off to his corpse, Powerscourt following behind. The Chief Constable left to brief his officers. Only the Bishop remained in the Dean’s drawing room. His eyes were fixed on the fire. His lips moved slowly. He remained there a long time. Outside the snow was still falling.

  Later that morning the streets of Compton were all white, the snow turning into slush in places. Anne Herbert was negotiating her way from the butcher’s to the grocer’s where she needed to purchase some more tea. Patrick particularly liked their new breakfast blend, she remembered. Then she heard a shout from across the street.

  ‘Anne! Anne!’ said the voice. She wondered if she shouldn’t be addressed in a public place as Mrs Herbert but she doubted if the voice would take any notice.

  ‘Anne,’ said the voice again, sliding to a stop beside her. ‘Are you managing all right in all this snow? Can I carry anything for you?’ The weather, Anne thought, had wrought a sharp improvement in Patrick Butler’s manners. She couldn’t remember him offering to carry anything for her before.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you, Patrick,’ she said, smiling at the young man. His face was slightly red and he looked ever so young as he stood before her in his new suit. Anne had supervised its purchase in Compton’s only decent tailor the week before. Patrick had said he was hopeless about clothes.

  ‘You must come with me at once, Anne. It’s very important.’ Anne thought these were most unusual circumstances in which to discuss elopement.

  ‘Where are we going, Patrick? I haven’t got all morning to gallivant round Compton with you in the snow.’

  ‘You must come to my office. I’d take you for coffee but we might be overheard. I’ve got something very exciting to tell you.’

  Anne Herbert had been once before to the local offices of the Grafton Mercury. In spite of all the best efforts of Patrick Butler, the place had looked a most appalling mess to her. She had thought of the extreme tidiness of her father the stationmaster’s little office where everything was always in its proper place and dust was banished almost as soon as it appeared. It wasn’t that men couldn’t keep places tidy, she had decided. Some of them just didn’t want to.

  ‘It’s not going to take long, is it, Patrick?’ said Anne as they set off down Northgate towards the paper’s headquarters.

  ‘Not very long,’ said Patrick, looking as excited as Anne had ever seen him. ‘Do you think you might slip? Would you like to take my arm?’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you.’

  One or two of the citizens of Compton smiled knowingly to themselves as the young couple went past, Patrick Butler talking excitedly, Anne Herbert passing the occasional comment. They were well known now as young lovers. The more romantic of those in the know predicted Easter bonnets and an Easter wedding.

  ‘I don’t think there’s anybody in the office,’ said Patrick, as they began the tortuous ascent of the stairs. ‘Peter’s gone off to look into a flock of sheep said to be stuck in a snowdrift up in the hills and George is in court.’

  Anne gazed in despair at the chaos that was Patrick’s office. She was just about to ask why they didn’t employ somebody to clean up for them when Patrick was off.

  ‘Anne,’ he said, closing the door firmly behind them and speaking very quietly, ‘something terrible has happened up at the cathedral. Have you heard anything on the Close?’

  ‘How do you know, Patrick? It all looked perfectly fine to me when I left. There were quite a lot of policemen wandering about but that’s not unusual.’

  ‘There are policemen all over the place, Anne. You can’t get into Vicars Close at all. It’s been sealed off. Oh, it’s all very quietly done, there aren’t lines of men across the street, but if you try to go up there a police officer pops out from somewhere and tells you the road is closed. They won’t say why. Orders is all you can get out of them. I’ve just been there.’

  ‘What do you think has happened, Patrick? Do you think some of the houses are going to fall down?’

  ‘Those little houses, Anne, have been there for hundreds of years. I think I read somewhere that it’s the oldest inhabited street in Europe. I think it’s something terrible. And there’s more. You remember that man Powerscourt, the one who’s an investigator? He’s wandering round the place, chatting to the odd person, looking as though he’s thinking very hard. And there’s one other thing. I have received an invitation to call upon the Dean at four o’clock this afternoon. What do you make of that?’

  ‘Didn’t you ask the Dean to write an article about the celebrations? Something to do with medieval abbots? Isn’t it going to be about that, Patrick?’

  ‘Medieval abbots be damned,’ said Patrick Butler, ‘this is more than that, I’m sure, much more. Look, I’d better get back and see where else is being closed down. Can I escort you home through the snow?’

  Anne Herbert declined. But she did negotiate her way to the grocer’s where she bought a pound of Patrick’s favourite tea. Something told her she would be making the first cup later on that day.

  Lord Francis Powerscourt spent much of the day wandering around the cathedral and its precincts. Normally he would have been fascinated by the building and its long history. But today it was as though he had a film or a glaze over his eyes. The flying buttresses and the chantry chapels, the medieval stained glass and the Angel Choir, the spandrels and the scissor arches, the presbytery and the misericords all left him cold. He wondered all day if there was a link between the death of John Eustace and the murder of Arthur Rudd. He still thought it possible that Eustace had committed suicide with the gun making some terrible marks on his face so he was hurried to his coffin with no relatives allowed to see him. But if he had been murdered, then surely money was the motive. Eustace had so much of it. Powerscourt entertained dark suspicions of Mrs Cockburn. Suppose she had forged that will six or seven months ago when Mr Archibald Matlock had witnessed the signature of a man who did not speak, the entire ceremony over in three minutes. Suppose she waited until the memory of that ceremony would have faded. Then she has her brother killed and claims the money, ignorant of the two other wills in existence. But why, in that case, should she employ Powerscourt at all? Why did she need to establish that her brother was murdered? That could not have any bearing on the wills.

  But suppose the two deaths were linked, suppose the cathedral and the Close, so innocent-looking as they lay wreathed in the pure embrace of the snow, held the key to the deaths?

/>   He wandered into the ancient chapter house where the abbot and the monks held their business meetings centuries before. Sitting on one of the stone seats he imagined he could hear one of those robed Benedictines start the occasion by reading a chapter from the Bible. It was that custom that gave the chapter house its name. Something obscure from the Old Testament, he felt, some tale from long ago of the sufferings of the Children of Israel out of the Book of Nehemiah or Hosea. Why would anybody want to kill a member of the vicars choral whose only crime was to sing for their supper?

  He went to a choir rehearsal where he could observe the late Arthur Rudd’s colleagues in action. He learnt something of the strange world they inhabited, how fifteenth-century vicars choral were notorious for drunkenness and womanizing, how in some cathedrals they had formed themselves into guild associations so powerful that they could not be sacked and were entitled to generous pensions. In some places, he was told, reformers had taken up to fifty years to root out the corrupt practices of the past. But of a motive for the death of Arthur Rudd, he learnt nothing. He did learn that there were at least four ways into the kitchen of the Vicars Hall and that none of them were locked at night. Was the burning of the body some obscure biblical reference? Was it some terrible practical joke carried out when the victim was already dead?

  He went over and over again to stare at the names on the choir stalls, the names not only of the officials of Compton Minster but of the parishes which had once been part of the diocese and whose income may have helped to build and maintain it. Perhaps they held the answer. He was hypnotized by the names. Grantham Australis, Powerscourt read. Yetminster Prima. Winterbourne Earl. Teynton Regis. Hurstbourne and Burbage. Fordington and Writhlington. If Rudd was already dead, why take the trouble to burn him as well? Was it the same person who strangled him and put his body on the spit, turning round and round in front of the flames? Or two different people? Yetminster Secunda. Minor Pars Altaris. Chardstock. Netherbury in Ecclesia. Weird figures from the Middle Ages were striding out of Powerscourt’s imagination now and taking their seats in the choir. Grimston. Grantham Borealis. Coombe and Harnham. Chisenbury and Chute. Was John Eustace a friend of Arthur Rudd? Was there a feud running through the Close? Wilsford and Woodford. Lyme and Halstock. Ruscomb. Bedminster and Redcliffe. There were no answers. Powerscourt suddenly remembered that Mrs Augusta Cockburn was due to return the following day to Fairfield Park. The second meeting about the wills with Oliver Drake the lawyer was only a couple of days away. The names on the choir stalls pursued Powerscourt as he walked down the nave towards the Cathedral Green outside. They were like a code whose meaning he could not decipher. Shipton. Netheravon. Bishopstone. Gillingham Minor. Beminster Secunda.

  8

  At a quarter to five on the same afternoon Anne Herbert was sitting in the little drawing room of her house on the edge of the Cathedral Close. Her children had gone to make a snowman in their friends’ garden four doors away. The snow had stopped but a wind had risen, blowing flakes of snow in random fashion all over Compton. Anne was wondering if she could afford a new sofa. The boys seemed to have worn her present one out completely bouncing up and down and performing somersaults. Maybe it would be simpler, she thought, just to have this one re-covered. A new sofa would be subject to the same level of assault and battery as the present one.

  From time to time she found her eye wandering towards the hall and the front door. And it was not her two boys she was thinking of. Patrick Butler had been due to see the Dean at four o’clock that afternoon. She remembered the time distinctly. The Deanery was two minutes’ walk away at most. And the Dean, she knew only too well, prided himself on the rapid despatch of business. The entire transaction of Anne Herbert being transferred from her humble rectory after her husband died into this little house, more like a cottage than a house, had been carried out by the Dean in less than five minutes.

  Maybe she should put the kettle on again and make some fresh tea. That would make him come, some of the breakfast blend she had bought in the grocer’s that morning. Five to five now, she checked the clock in the kitchen. There was still no sign of Patrick Butler.

  Three pots of tea had been made and then thrown out before there was a knock on her door. A pale, distraught-looking editor of the Grafton Mercury presented himself and requested refreshment at twenty past five. Anne did not believe he could have been with the Dean all that time.

  ‘Patrick,’ she said, ‘are you all right? You look very pale. You don’t look at all well to me. Hadn’t you better go home and lie down?’

  Patrick did not like to tell her that the two rooms he rented on the top floor of an old house on the outskirts of the city were usually even more untidy than his office. ‘I’ll be fine in a moment, Anne,’ he said. ‘I just need a moment or two in peace to compose myself.’

  Anne was certain he must be ill now. Very ill. Possibly in need of urgent medical attention. Maybe she should take him to the hospital. For the one thing Patrick Butler had never done in all the months she had known him was to ask for time to compose himself. The composing and the being Patrick were, in Anne’s experience, totally incompatible. He was the most restless, the most energetic, the most mercurial person she had ever known. Composed he was not.

  ‘Tell me what happened, Patrick,’ she said, ‘only when you’re ready.’

  By now he was lying back on the sofa. He smiled wanly at her.

  ‘Forgive me, Anne, I’ll be back to normal in a moment.’

  ‘Biscuits, Patrick? Even a drop of brandy?’ She remembered her friend’s warnings about the dangers of drink and journalism and ignored them.

  A large gulp of cognac began to restore his powers of speech. ‘Let me tell it all to you from the beginning, Anne. It’s a terrible story.’

  He sat up again on the sofa and polished off a couple of biscuits in quick succession.

  ‘At four o’clock this afternoon, as requested, I checked into the Deanery. The Dean was in a very sombre and serious mood. You know that air he usually has, of wanting to get you out of the door as fast as possible because he has another meeting to go to, well, he wasn’t like that at all.’

  Anne Herbert wondered if the snow was bringing personality changes all over Compton. First her Patrick, then the Dean. Maybe the Bishop would be singing bawdy songs in the public houses of the city before the day was done.

  ‘This is all very unpleasant, Anne,’ Patrick went on, looking very serious, ‘and it gets worse as it goes on, much worse. You must stop me if I start to upset you.’

  Anne Herbert nodded. Privately she thought women were much less squeamish than men. Just think of childbirth, after all, she said to herself. But this was not the time for such a discussion.

  ‘At a quarter to five this morning,’ Patrick checked the time in his notebook, ‘one of the porters found a body in the kitchen of the Vicars Hall. The man’s name was Rudd. They think he might have been strangled. He was one of the senior vicars choral, with three or four years’ experience in Compton. He was in his middle thirties.’

  Patrick suddenly realized that he must sound as if he was giving evidence in court or reading one of his own compositions in the Grafton Mercury.

  ‘Sorry for sounding so cold, Anne. I’ve been trying to write the story in my head ever since.’

  ‘The poor man,’ said Anne. ‘Did he have a wife and children?’

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ said Patrick, looking once more at his notebook. ‘But that’s not all. Somebody put him on a spit and roasted the body for most of the night in front of that huge fire they have in the Vicars Hall kitchen.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ said Anne Herbert. She put her face in her hands and said the Lord’s Prayer. She couldn’t think of anything else.

  ‘That would all be bad enough.’ Patrick was leaning forward now. ‘The Dean said he was anxious that I and our readers should know as much as possible about what had happened. He said he didn’t want to hide anything from me. He had a doctor with him, that cha
p Williams. I’ve known him for a while, he’s a very sound and reliable fellow. It was he who was responsible for looking after the dead man, the death certificate, all that sort of thing. He took me to the morgue in the hospital where Rudd’s body was laid out. They hadn’t cleaned him up yet.’

  Patrick Butler stopped. He wondered if he should say anything more.

  ‘You see, Anne, it’s a strange thing. I’ve never seen a dead body before. Reporters often have to write about dead bodies killed in fires or train crashes or accidents, but they never actually see them. When you start on a newspaper you have to go to magistrates’ courts, you have to go to football matches, you have to write about society weddings. You have to write about all sorts of strange things you have seen. But the one thing you’re not used to seeing is a dead body. Nor,’ he paused briefly, ‘a body that has been roasted all night on a great spit in front of a roaring fire.’

  ‘I don’t think I want to hear any more details, Patrick, if you don’t mind. I’ve heard too much already. I’m feeling rather sick.’

  Patrick was turning pale again. He was thinking of the terrible scene in the mortuary, what had happened to Arthur Rudd’s eyes, what had happened to his skin, what had happened to the hair and the skull, the eruptions that had burst forth from the poor man’s intestines. He hoped he would be able to forget it. He took another large gulp of his brandy.