He sat on the floor with his back against the white enamel bath, his head leaning back, his mouth slightly open. The mark across the bridge of his nose had paled and faded but the livid bruises on his throat were dark stains against the bloodless skin.
‘I have to get out of here.’
She didn’t realize she had spoken aloud until she saw in the mirror over the bath that her lips were moving and there was the sound of spoken words in her ears.
Backing out with infinite care, her cloak catching momentarily on the banisters as she turned, she wrenched it free and ran down the stairs and out through the front door. Some part of her expected the garden to be empty but Lilith was still grazing peacefully at the end of her tether.
Her fingers felt stiff and clumsy as she undid the rein and clambered up to the saddle. Then she was riding out on to the road again, urging Lilith down the darkening alley, turning on to the shop-bordered street that led into the main part of town.
The one or two people strolling along the pavement turned startled faces as she cantered past. At the police station the lights had been turned on and the illuminated blue sign over the entrance glowed reassuringly.
‘Sister Joan, is something wrong up at the convent?’
Constable Petrie who was on desk duty looked up in concern as she ran in.
‘There’s a body in the house behind the old town hall,’ Sister Joan said and sat down abruptly on the only available chair.
Constable Petrie was still in his twenties but had already attained the poker face of the traditional copper. Now his professional calm was distinctly ruffled.
‘A body?’ he said. ‘Sister, are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure! His name is Jeb. I don’t think he mentioned his second name. He’s in the bathroom.’
‘I’ll ring Detective Sergeant Mill. Excuse me, Sister.’
He retreated to the back of the space behind the desk, lifted the telephone, dialled and spoke rapidly. Sister Joan put her head briefly between her knees and fought an unpleasant wave of dizziness.
‘I’ll get you a cup of tea, Sister. Would you like to wait in the office? It’s more private there. I’m looking after the shop by myself so to speak. You don’t expect murder on a Sunday, do you?’
She went into the office and sat down, forcing herself to breathe deeply and evenly. She had seen violent death before but nothing in the world would ever accustom her to the experience or obliterate the sick, helpless rage which swept through her when she observed a human life cut short before due time.
‘Here you are, Sister! Drink it while it’s hot.’ He put the mug down on the table. ‘Detective Sergeant Mill will be here directly. He went home for a couple of hours to snatch a meal. We’re still investigating the death of Jane Sinclair as you know.’
Odd, she thought irrelevantly, sipping the hot, syrupy brew. Alan Mill had a house and a wife and two children and she had never even enquired where he lived. She had never seen his wife or met his boys. Her contact with him was purely professional. Had it been any other way she would have had to withdraw. Helping the police was one thing. Personal friendships were something else.
‘Has anything further come to light?’
‘Not much, Sister. The poor girl seems to have lived a very quiet life. Nothing in her past to suggest she ever made a single enemy. Of course we’ll get whoever did it. I don’t suppose you noticed—?’
‘The boy had been strangled,’ Sister Joan said.
‘Like Jane Sinclair.’ His face quickly concealed shock. ‘Oh dear, I hope we don’t have a serial killer on our hands.’
Sister Joan was silent, privately doubting it. Jane Sinclair had been killed for a very specific reason, she was sure, as had Jeb. What those reasons were and how they were connected would give them the name of the murderer.
‘Would you like me to ring the convent and let them know you might be a bit late back?’ Constable Petrie was asking.
‘That would be very kind of you, Constable.’
Being late was becoming a besetting fault, she thought wryly. Certainly Mother Dorothy would expect a fuller explanation of what was going on than she had so far received and when she’d heard it — Sister Joan privately thanked her stars that it wasn’t possible to be relegated to the status of postulant!
A car drew up outside, brakes squealing slightly, and Detective Sergeant Mill strode past the office window. The set of his jaw looked grim. Sister Joan finished her tea and stood up.
‘Petrie tells me you’ve found a body, Sister!’
He came in without greeting.
‘Good afternoon, Detective Sergeant Mill. Yes, in the empty house behind the old town hall.’
‘Right! We’ll talk on the way. Did you know the victim?’
‘Not really. His name’s Jeb. When I first went to Nightingale Court to make some enquiries about the man who’d put the circular through the door the petrol was siphoned out of my van. When I came out he was hanging about. He offered to keep an eye on the van while I went to the nearest garage to get a can of petrol.’
‘For a consideration, I daresay?’
They were at the car and he held open the door for her.
‘Of course. I think he’d got a nice little racket going actually. But there was no harm in him. He didn’t deserve—’
She bit her lip staring through the window at the street as the lights came on, mitigating the early darkness.
‘Petrie’s rounding up the doctor and the photographer,’ Detective Sergeant Mill told her. ‘I wanted to have a preliminary look with a material witness.’
‘Me,’ she said, in a small voice.
‘Let’s hope we haven’t got a serial killer on the loose.’ He echoed Constable Petrie’s sentiments gloomily.
They had turned into the alley. Now wasn’t the time to begin long explanations, she decided.
‘What was the boy doing here, I wonder?’
At the broken gate he paused to stare at the ivy-clad façade.
‘He was squatting here,’ Sister Joan said. ‘I brought Lilith out for a ride and met a couple of teenage girls who knew him slightly.’
‘You were looking for him?’
‘I was hoping I might run into him,’ she admitted.
‘Well, you seem to have done. This place belongs to the council now, I suppose, though they haven’t paid much attention to it. Of course Grant Tarquin hardly ever lived there.’
‘This was Grant Tarquin’s property?’
‘Didn’t you know?’ He glanced at her.
‘I knew he built himself a house when his father died after the old gentleman sold the family estate to our order. I assumed he left the district.’
‘He did but he came back occasionally, paid his council tax and water rates and so on, and there’s no law says a man has to live in his own house. Mind you don’t touch anything, Sister — though I daresay you already did.’
‘Only the light switches and door handles. He’s upstairs in the bathroom. Do you mind if I stay down here?’
‘No, of course not.’
He took the stairs two at a time. She stood in the hall, listening to his footsteps on the bare boards above, the snapping on of lights. Curiously the lights only threw into greater prominence the emptiness of the place.
‘Sister Joan, will you come up here for a moment?’ Detective Sergeant Mill had reappeared on the landing.
Reluctantly she ascended the stairs. Two pairs of eyes were more efficient than one when there might be clues to notice, but it wasn’t pleasant to have to push aside shock and pity and look objectively at someone who had died violently.
The bathroom was empty, basin and floor shining in a way she was certain they hadn’t shone before.
‘Your body seems to have walked,’ the detective said.
‘That’s not possible! He was here, sitting on the floor with his back against the bath and his head back. I saw the marks on his throat.’
The detective gave her a cons
idering look and nodded.
‘Yes, of course he was here,’ he said. ‘I’ve never known you to start hallucinating. The point is that there’s nobody here now. You’re sure he was dead and not just playing a rather cruel joke on you?’
‘That makes no sense. He didn’t know that I was looking for him.’
‘Then someone moved him.’
‘And wiped the floor and the basin afterwards,’ she pointed out. ‘I don’t think they were this clean before.’
‘Someone was in the house?’
‘I don’t know. I looked into the rooms but I didn’t search them thoroughly. It’s possible, I suppose. They’d have had time while I went to the police station and Constable Petrie telephoned you.’
‘It might be on the premises still. Sister, there’s nothing you can do here for the moment. I’ll get a squad car to run you back to the convent.’
‘I can ride Lilith,’ she began.
‘Not unescorted you won’t,’ he said grimly. ‘Until we find this joker you’ll make sure you stay where there’s company. That’s an order, Sister!’
Eight
Riding back to the convent, with the headlamps of the police car trailing her, she felt not safer but like a mischievous child being chased by a truant officer. In this case the officer was the stolid desk sergeant whose name she couldn’t remember and who, to judge by the alacrity he turned at the gates and sped back the way he had come, had little liking for either convents or nuns on horseback.
She stabled Lilith, hurried upstairs to remove her jeans, and came down into the main hall to find Mother Dorothy talking to Detective Sergeant Mill.
‘I’m being told you are being an invaluable help to the police,’ the former said in a tone of unexpected amiability. ‘I will not, of course, ask for any details at this stage, but Detective Sergeant Mill has a few questions to ask you. You have twenty minutes before benediction, Sister. You may use my parlour.’
‘Thank you, Mother Prioress,’ Sister Joan said.
‘I’ll have Sister Teresa bring you some tea since you’ve missed yours, Sister,’ Mother Dorothy said, heroically refraining from adding the word “again”. ‘Did you make any headway with your preparations for the reading next week?’
‘A great deal, Mother. Sister David has been very helpful,’ Sister Joan said. When she and Detective Sergeant Mill were seated in the parlour with the tea, carried in by a Sister Teresa obviously bursting with curiosity, on the desk between them, he opened his notebook, unscrewed his pen, and lifting a dark eyebrow at her asked, ‘What reading would that be, Sister?’
‘At supper we take it in turns, week and week about, to read aloud from an improving book,’ she explained. ‘Next week’s my turn.’
‘At the risk of being snubbed,’ he said amused, ‘which improving book are you going to entertain the community with?’
‘The story of my own patron saint, using extracts from various biographies and the text of her trial.’
‘Well, at least you have something in common,’ he said. ‘You both ride around on horses—’
‘Sticking our noses into what doesn’t concern us. I know.’
‘I was going to say setting the world to rights. However, let’s not digress. The body you reported seems to have disappeared.’
‘Aren’t you looking for it?’
‘On a foggy Sunday afternoon with only a skeleton staff on duty we’ve sufficient on hand with investigating into the murder of Jane Sinclair,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. We’ve locked up the house and left a man on duty there and tomorrow morning we’ll start looking for the lad. That means knocking on doors, finding out about him — he doesn’t seem to have any kind of criminal record, by the bye — and hopefully he’ll turn up safe and sound or the converse. What I’d like to know from you is how you got involved in all this. Why were you looking for Jeb?’
‘To ask him why he broke into the chapel last night.’
‘What!’ His glance sharpened. ‘You didn’t mention that before!’
‘You didn’t ask me. Detective Inspector, please keep your voice down. Nobody except Sister Gabrielle and I know that anyone did break in. We judged it better not to tell Mother Dorothy because she’s got enough on her mind at the moment with trying to balance the books.’
‘You and Sister Gabrielle were in the chapel when Jeb broke in?’
‘Sister Gabrielle was. She had a vigil to keep there. I was up in the library, starting my Jeanne d’Arc preparations. I heard a muffled cry and ran down into the chapel. Sister Gabrielle told me a lad had crept in and she hit him across the nose with her walking stick and then followed him when he ran out.’
‘How did she know it was Jeb?’
‘She didn’t, but this afternoon I took Lilith for a ride into town and met a couple of girls — one was called Patsy — and we fell into conversation. They were walking home together because they were nervous about the murder — they live next door to each other in Cemetery Road. One of them, I forget which, said it wasn’t safe to go out these days, that they’d seen a boy they knew with a black eye and a cut on his nose earlier on hanging around, that his name was Jeb and he lived in a squat behind the old town hall.’
‘I wish some of my men had your talent for gleaning information!’ he said. ‘I take it you knew this Jeb?’
‘I’d met a Jeb,’ she said carefully, ‘when I went to the office in Nightingale Court to find out what I could about the circular that was pushed through my door, and when I came out someone had siphoned off all the petrol in the van. Then this boy turned up and offered to look after the van while I went to the garage — I told you all that.’
‘Just getting it absolutely clear.’ He made a note, put away pen and notebook, sat up straight, and said, ‘This is off the record, Sister. Why did you ride Lilith down into the town a second day in succession?’
‘I wanted to have another look in the cemetery,’ she said.
‘Why this sudden interest in graves? You’re not usually so morbid.’
‘Because I wanted to make sure that Grant Tarquin is really dead.’
‘Why on earth should you think he isn’t?’ he demanded, in astonishment.
‘Because I found the photograph of his grandfather — or great grandfather, with “We have a secret, the Devil and I”, written on it, up in the storeroom,’ she said levelly. ‘And then I found footprints in the dust up there, half prints as if someone had been tiptoeing up and down the aisles. It was Sister David who remarked that devil worshippers went on tiptoe in consecrated ground, and, of course, this entire building has been, in a sense, consecrated. And then I couldn’t find out who’d had the circular printed and put it through the door, and then Jane Sinclair telephoned me and said something about the cemetery so I rode Lilith down there and found the same footprints — I think you’ll find Jeb’s body there, in the old chapel in the cemetery!’
‘Sister, if I were to put this in an official statement I’d be on traffic duty before you could blink!’ he exclaimed. ‘Devil worshippers, dead men or their grandfathers wandering about pushing circulars through doors — it’s quite crazy, you know.’
‘I don’t think people do come out of their graves, of course I don’t,’ she said, ‘but Grant Tarquin had a bad reputation when he was alive. He resented the fact that his father sold this estate so cheaply to our order, and he went off leaving the house he’d built for himself empty. Is there proof that he really is dead? Jeb was found dead in his house after all.’
‘Jeb wasn’t found dead.’
‘By me,’ she said, her blue eyes level on his face.
‘You think someone took the body — the alleged body — to the old cemetery. Why?’
‘There were half footprints round the tombs in the little chapel of rest there,’ she said, ‘and while I was looking at Grant Tarquin’s grave someone cut Lilith’s rein and left me stranded. And before you say anything, no, I don’t think Grant Tarquin or any of his forbears have risen from the dead,
but I’d like to be sure it was Grant Tarquin they buried!’
‘I haven’t the slightest hope of getting an exhumation order and nor have I the slightest intention of applying for one,’ he said.
‘But you’ll look in the old cemetery?’
‘On my way home, and when I don’t find anyone I’ll continue on my way and spend the night watching television. Grant Tarquin is dead, Sister. Believe me.’
‘As you say.’ Rising with him, going ahead to open the door, she asked, ‘Will Sister Gabrielle get into trouble? She was only defending herself.’
‘I think we can leave Sister Gabrielle out of it.’ His mouth relaxed into a smile. ‘She’s a formidable old girl, isn’t she? There isn’t anything worth stealing up in the storerooms, is there?’
‘I doubt it. There are rolls of moth-eaten silk and brocade, some broken chairs, piles of old newspapers, books with the covers torn off — there might be something that can be recycled but that’s all. Old Sir Robert Tarquin was generous enough to let our order have the estate very cheaply but I really don’t think he’d have left the family jewels up in the storerooms.’
‘I think you’re right. You know Alice should have given warning that a stranger was in the vicinity. She’s proving a dead loss as a guard dog.’
‘She’s very young,’ Sister Joan said. ‘Give her time.’
As they came into the hall the ringing of the bell for benediction interrupted them.
‘I’ll be off then.’ He moved to the door.
‘You’re welcome to stay and join us.’
‘No thanks. I’ve another chapel to visit. Good evening to you, Sister.’
Frowning a little she closed the front door behind him and tagged into chapel behind Sister Martha.
She was on her way out of chapel when the telephone rang. A glance at Mother Dorothy, who nodded, and she sped into the kitchen passage to answer it.
A VOW OF POVERTY an utterly gripping crime mystery Page 11