A VOW OF POVERTY an utterly gripping crime mystery

by Veronica Black

  Sister Joan sat down at once reaching for the skeins of wool and giving Sister David the chance of a game. It wasn’t an entirely selfless choice since while winding the wool she could allow her thoughts to roam and Sister Martha was unlikely to distract her with chatter.

  There was a pattern running through recent events, beginning with her telling Luther that she’d been deputed to clear out the storerooms. Luther had chattered about it and someone — Mr Monam? had listened and acted very fast, having the circular printed and thrusting it through the convent door, registering with the telephone answering service and getting the estimate into the filing cabinet. Mr Monam then worked very swiftly and Mr Monam didn’t want to be seen. She spread out her hands for a second skein of wool and thought about the footprints, the photograph with its chilling words scrawled across the back, Jane Sinclair’s desire to meet her. The meeting had never happened because Miss Sinclair had received a telephone call that had sent her to the office earlier than usual, and someone had killed her there. Yes, of course! The man who had telephoned had broken into the office and then rung up, saying what? — ‘Miss Sinclair? This is the police. Can you come to the office at once. There’s been a break-in here and we require you to check if anything’s been taken. No, don’t mention it to anyone. We’re already following a lead’ — something like that anyway! And Jane Sinclair had hurried off to the office and met her killer. She would have seen the broken lock and gone in unsuspectingly. It had to have been Mr Monam, whoever Mr Monam was. Jane Sinclair had never met him. He could have impersonated a plain-clothes officer, asked her to check the contents of the filing cabinet, stepped up behind her and—

  The bell rang to signify the end of recreation. Sister Martha was putting the balls of newly wound wool into a bag, Sister David putting away the Scrabble board, the others rising, the light hum of conversation stilled.

  They filed down to the chapel for the recitation of the rosary and the blessing that heralded the grand silence. She set aside further contemplation on the problem and let her thoughts and her fingers travel through the beads and the traditional prayers, her mind quietening as it always did.

  Mother Dorothy with Sister David at her side stood ready to sprinkle each sister with holy water and utter the final blessing of the day. Sister Gabrielle had remained in her place, obviously preparing to keep her vigil and get the penance over with.

  Sister Joan knelt, crossed herself and went out into the hall. Sister Teresa and Sister Marie were tying on their cloaks ready for the walk through the grounds to the postulancy where they now slept; Sister Hilaria joined them with Bernadette tagging at her heels, The others were mounting the staircase to their separate cells.

  Sister Joan began her rounds. The windows had to be checked, the doors bolted, Alice coaxed into her basket, the stable door bolted. Lilith omitted her usual whinny and tossed her head irritably, evidently blaming Sister Joan for letting her loose on a main road with terrifying vehicles roaring past. The night was very still, the mist now blanket thick.

  Sister Perpetua, a blanket over her arm, nodded towards the chapel wing. Yes, of course! Old Sister Gabrielle would appreciate a blanket while she was doing her penance in the cold chapel. Sister Joan took the blanket and went back down the corridor.

  Sister Gabrielle sat in her place with the sanctuary lamp haloing her head. Eighty-six years old and as tough as well-seasoned leather, Sister Joan thought affectionately as she proffered the blanket, at the same time pointing to her watch and shaking her head slightly. It wanted nearly two hours to midnight before Sister Gabrielle’s vigil was due to begin. The old lady nodded, grinned and allowed the blanket to be tucked round her. Evidently she’d decided to stay where she was.

  Sister Joan went back down the corridor, slid the bolt into place on the connecting door, and hesitated. Sister Gabrielle couldn’t spend the night locked up in the chapel wing! She might require the toilet or feel ill. On the other hand it wasn’t wise to leave the connecting door unlocked. Mother Dorothy hadn’t thought of that when she’d trotted out the penance.

  Of course Mother Dorothy had thought of it! She had simply assumed that Sister Joan, being the one who locked up, would use her initiative and keep vigil as well. Sister Joan sent a brief yearning thought towards her empty bed and went back into the chapel. Unfortunately Sister Gabrielle was equally strong minded, frowning ferociously when she beheld the younger nun and making shooing signals with her hand. She clearly didn’t relish being considered too old to stay alone in the chapel. Sister Joan made an apologetic gesture and headed for the library. At least she could take a look at the old photograph album to while away the time.

  It was where she had left it. She pulled it out, switched on the overhead light over the desk and sat down. Sister David’s notes on the booklet she was writing lay in a transparent folder on the desk top.

  Jeanne d’Arc was a poor girl save in things of the spirit. All she had apart from the clothes she had borrowed and the armour that was made for her were two rings her family had given her, and the sword that the Archangel Michael had left for her to find.

  Sister Joan slid the folder into the door and opened the photograph album. Something in it, she was certain, had attracted Jane Sinclair’s attention, caused her to seek that meeting at the coffee shop.

  The photographs were sepia-coloured, the ones in the first pages faded almost to white so that it was hard to distinguish features. There were small groups of people seated on stools with others standing behind. Caps and aprons were much in evidence. Several photographs were of small children, standing stiffly on large chairs, wearing sailor-collared tunics and long curls. They could’ve been boys or girls, she thought, turning the pages slowly. Here a young man in a striped blazer with his hair parted in the middle held a tennis racquet awkwardly, while a young woman with her hair rolled up into an elaborate fringe looked at him apprehensively as if she wasn’t sure whether he was going to hit the ball or her. In the background a potted palm looked entirely out of place.

  Later photographs were more sharply defined and slightly less posed. Here and there a hand was blurred as the sitter had moved impatiently. One showed a young girl who had her back half turned to reveal a bustled skirt and was smiling over her shoulder. There were captions under some of the pictures but the ink had faded and the light in the library wasn’t strong enough to decipher them. She turned the pages more slowly, stopping abruptly as a face leapt out at her.

  Smiling, arrogant, dark brows winged above dark eyes, Grant Tarquin gazed out at her. No, it couldn’t be the Grant Tarquin who had died the previous year. It had to be his father or grandfather. The open-necked shirt with the cravat tucked in at the throat could have been worn at any period.

  Was this what Jane Sinclair had seen? Why should it have aroused her interest? Sister Joan closed the book. There was no evidence that Jane Sinclair’s desire to meet her had had anything at all to do with the album anyway! She hadn’t mentioned it. She’d mentioned Grant Tarquin and the cemetery and resurrection.

  From down in the chapel there came a sudden inarticulate cry. She sprang up and ran down the spiral staircase into the chapel, her heart in her mouth. One glance told her that Sister Gabrielle wasn’t in her seat. Only the blanket trailed from the carved end of the pew.

  ‘Sister!’ Raising her voice, she rushed into the corridor. The outside door at the end was open, the cold white mist drifting in like snow.

  ‘Missed him!’

  Sister Gabrielle appeared like a wraith in the doorway, her walking stick raised.

  ‘Sister Gabrielle, are you all right?’ Sister Joan hurried to offer her arm which was impatiently shaken off.

  ‘Shut the door, child!’ Sister Gabrielle said briskly. ‘I’m perfectly all right. The young lad will have a bad headache in the morning though. I caught him full on the bridge of his nose. Probably broke it!’

  ‘I’m bolting the outer door,’ Sister Joan said firmly. ‘Nobody will want to come and pray here to
night in this fog and, if they do, they’ll just have to knock, that’s all! Sister, you’d better come through to the kitchen and I’ll make you some tea. Do you need a doctor?’

  ‘Of course I don’t need a doctor,’ Sister Gabrielle said. ‘A cup of tea with a slug of brandy in it would be welcome though.’

  ‘Shall I call Mother Dorothy? We’ve broken the grand silence.’

  ‘Which in emergency is permitted. Leave Mother Dorothy to her rest. I’ll have that tea.’

  They went through into the main part of the house, Sister Joan bolting the connecting door. She was rewarded with a snort from the older nun.

  ‘The horse,’ said Sister Gabrielle, ‘has bolted. Come along, and don’t disturb Sister Mary Concepta. She’ll only fuss and flap.’

  They went softly past the infirmary door into the kitchen. Alice slept peacefully, serenely unaware that she was supposed to be a guard dog.

  ‘Sit down, Sister. I’ll make the tea,’ Sister Joan said.

  ‘Make one for yourself,’ Sister Gabrielle said, lowering herself with a grunt into her chair. ‘You look pale as milk, girl!’

  There was never any joy in arguing with Sister Gabrielle. Sister Joan put the smaller kettle on and measured tea into the pot, took down mugs, added sugar and a dash of brandy.

  ‘What happened, Sister Gabrielle?’ she asked when they were seated at opposite sides of the table with their steaming drinks.

  ‘I decided to stay behind in the chapel and keep vigil all night,’ Sister Gabrielle said. ‘More convenient than going out and coming back in at midnight. I was trying to pass my time in profitable thoughts, wondering if there was any way I could add to the convent’s income instead of being a burden.’

  ‘You couldn’t be a burden,’ Sister Joan began.

  ‘Don’t be sentimental, girl!’ Sister Gabrielle scowled at her. ‘Of course I’m a burden and so is Mary Concepta. We have the right to be a burden for heaven’s sake! But the recession’s hit everybody and we don’t contribute anything practical any longer. And we both need feeding at regular intervals and heat. At our age you need a bit of warmth. Anyway I was racking my brains and getting nowhere when someone came into the chapel. Well, I was suspicious at once.’

  ‘Why?’ Sister Joan asked.

  ‘Because he crept in so quietly,’ Sister Gabrielle said. ‘Oh, people are generally quiet when they come into a church, but there’s a quietness that doesn’t want to disturb and a quietness that doesn’t want to be noticed. And on such a night who’d be coming all the way up here to pray in our chapel when they could pray in the church down town? So I was suspicious.’

  ‘Did he attack you?’

  ‘He didn’t even see me at first,’ Sister Gabrielle said with satisfaction. ‘He came in and looked round, like someone who’s never been in a church before. He didn’t genuflect to the altar either so he wasn’t a Catholic. And then he started creeping up the aisle.’

  ‘On tiptoe?’

  ‘No, just creeping along. He had rubber-soled tennis shoes on. Very dirty and wet through, and a long gaberdine mackintosh with the collar turned up and one of those knitted bobble caps pulled over his head. Anyway he suddenly saw me and as I stood up he made a lunge and I whacked him across the bridge of his nose. He gave a kind of muffled yell and then turned and went back into the passage. He was a bit dazed, I think, because I caught up with him at the door and gave him another whack. It only glanced off his arm, and then he ran off into the fog. And then you came along.’

  ‘You should have called me,’ Sister Joan reproached.

  ‘If the day ever comes when I can’t handle a silly young lad then I’ll fold my hands and turn up my toes,’ Sister Gabrielle said scornfully.

  ‘We ought to telephone the police.’

  ‘Now what good would it do to disturb them late at night when nothing was taken and the lad’s long gone?’ the other demanded reasonably. ‘No, you can mention it to your detective friend when you see him next, but there’s no point in upsetting everybody at this hour. And Mother Dorothy has enough on her mind, trying to figure out a way to keep a roof over our heads without fretting about intruders. That was a good cup of tea, Sister. You’re a terrible cook but you do brew a decent cup of tea or coffee. I’d best get back into chapel.’

  ‘You’re surely not going to do your penance now!’ Sister Joan exclaimed.

  ‘It’s got to be done sooner or later. Better sooner. And you will take yourself off to bed! Nobody is going to get into the chapel again tonight, not with the outer door bolted. I’ll unlock it first thing in the morning when I’m done praying. Now don’t argue with me!’

  ‘I wouldn’t dare,’ Sister Joan said with an unwilling grin.

  ‘Right then!’ Sister Gabrielle rose heavily. ‘We’ll stop chattering now. The emergency is over and we’ve no licence to gossip. Goodnight, Sister.’

  ‘Goodnight, Sister Gabrielle.’

  Sister Joan remained at the table, her hands cupped round her cooling mug. She felt too wrought up to sleep, her senses tuned to a finer pitch than usual. With the outer door locked Sister Gabrielle would be free from intrusion, but somewhere out there in the cold, white, clinging mist was the intruder whom Sister Gabrielle had set about with her walking stick. A lad, she had termed him. That didn’t sound like Grant Tarquin. Neither could she picture Grant Tarquin in a long gaberdine and a bobble hat.

  But Grant Tarquin was dead. He had died, unmarried and unmourned, more than a year before. She had stood by his grave that same afternoon. And Jane Sinclair was dead too. Strangled before she could confide her worries to a sympathetic ear.

  She rose, rinsed the cups and gave Alice a last pat before she went upstairs. Only the dimmed lights burned on the upper landing. On the left a narrow passage divided rooms that had been divided into cells with two bathrooms at the end. She went into her own cell and switched on the light, an extravagance she would have to confess the following week. Sisters coming late to bed for whatever reason were supposed to undress in the dark. At this moment, however, she needed to look round her small domain, fill her eyes with its comfortable familiarity.

  The room was ten feet square, its walls whitewashed with only a small, wooden cross on one of them. A small window with wooden shutters that lay flat against the inner wall at each side had a plain white blind which when raised allowed a view over the stable yard. An iron-framed bed held a thin mattress, grey blankets and a large pillow. A shelf on one wall held her missal, her spiritual diary, a life of her patron saint. The bare bulb in the ceiling shed lustre on the bowl and jug on the floor with her toothbrush and toothpaste. The bathrooms were for the twice weekly bath with the water only heated for nuns over the age of sixty. More than twenty years to go, she thought, with an amused twitch of the lips. Her outer garments hung on hooks and a locker with two drawers held her underwear and had on its plain deal surface a plain glass jar with some late sprays of heather in it.

  ‘You’ll never stand the life!’ Jacob had mocked when she had finally told him that she couldn’t become a Jew and marry him. ‘All right, so don’t marry me! But don’t fool yourself into celibacy either. Go off and marry someone else but don’t deny the rest of your life in a quest for martyrdom!’

  Darling Jacob with his keen, dark Semitic face and incisive wit corroding into bitterness because he was as trapped in his own culture as she was in hers. It had been hard in the beginning. Even now she found traces of Jacob in many of the men she met — in Detective Sergeant Mill, in the brief acquaintanceship she had had with Grant Tarquin.

  Grant Tarquin. He was dead and his forebears were dead, but someone had tiptoed round the tombs in the old chapel, tiptoed up and down the aisles between the piled boxes in the storerooms. And someone had written that sentence across the back of the photograph hidden in the roll of moth-eaten brocade. ‘We have a secret, the Devil and I.’

  Against such sentiments the cell was a defence, a reminder that purity and order could still prevail. She began to
undress, removing fob watch and narrow belt to which her rosary was attached, unpinning the neat white scapular which confined the grey bodice of her ankle-length habit, unpinning the short white veil and letting her crop of blue-black curls spring free. Under the habit she was still wearing her jeans, having forgotten to remove them. Another fault, she reflected, and grimaced.

  The light out she slid between the rough blankets, wishing for the thousandth time that nuns were permitted to wear pyjamas and bed socks. The long, straight, Victorian nightgown catapulted her into a previous century just as the rule itself kept alive a medieval routine. Past and present were inextricably combined.

  The past lay in the storerooms. She had known that from the beginning. Someone was anxious to find something there before she did. But who? And what was hidden? The second question was easier to answer than the first. Clearly something of great value had been left there among all the rubbish, the flotsam and jetsam of more than 200 years. Something small, she guessed, lying flat on her back and staring up at the ceiling. Jewellery? Wouldn’t jewellery have been removed before the estate was sold? A manuscript of some kind? The Tarquins were an old family. The Sir Richard Tarquine whose tomb was in the old chapel in the cemetery had fought in the Hundred Years’ War, and died peacefully in his own bed. All the Tarquins slept peacefully now, scattered through the burying ground. None of them walked above ground. Yet when she slept at last she dreamed of Grant Tarquin tiptoeing through the silent house.

  Seven

  Sunday was an oasis at the beginning of the week. There was a tranquillity that ran like a thread through the day, binding hour to hour. After the prayers and the high Mass of the morning there was leisure — to study privately, to walk in the garden, to read and write letters and do all the things for which the rest of the week held no space. This morning it was Father Malone who officiated at Mass, his homely Irish brogue investing the words with Celtic charm, the frayed hem of his cassock visible under the Advent surplice. The Host on the High Altar and the statue on the Lady Altar had been covered with purple to await the blaze of glory that was Christmas.