Idol Bones

by D M Greenwood

  Nick sat back on his heels. The vestry was empty. The early afternoon light seeped through the one high round window. He wondered what to do. The idea of destroying evidence went against the whole of his scholarly instinct. In a shaky world where few cared for truth and there wasn’t, he’d found, much to hang on to, he saw the historian’s task as one not merely of seeking out information but also guarding it, preserving and making it accessible. If he had a temperamental weakness he recognised that it lay in his delight in making patterns out of bits and pieces of information. A rearrangement of a couple of potsherds, a bit of broken epigraphy and a disputed reference to a solar eclipse in Thucydides and the whole of pre-Christian chronology could come tumbling down. He loved the fragility of such scholarly constructs. But when it came to a matter which touched him deeply he was surprised to find how reluctant he was to fit the pieces together.

  There was the question of the Church or more particularly Bow St Aelfric cathedral. He knew very well that in a sense the cathedral had made him. It had been his first and his fullest intimation of a world alternative to the one his father inhabited up on the Peterborough bypass. He remembered the first time he’d set eyes on the building. He must have been about eight. It had been soon after his mother’s death. His father had brought him down to the city and they’d walked into the close through the Archgate one perfect June evening. The silence closed in on them, the double towers rose up one behind the other with the sun catching the west end. The choir had been walking across from the school to sing Evensong. He’d taken it all in, beauty, order, antiquity, and decided that that was how he’d live. And so, so far, it had proved. Their next-door neighbour had given him singing lessons. He’d got a choral scholarship, passed effortlessly through the choir school and later the adjacent grammar school. The cathedral gave him a complete world, totally satisfying to both sense and intellect. His concentration had been strengthened by the musical discipline, his senses daily satisfied by the textures and colours of an inexhaustible building. That building and the life within it had steadied and anchored his sensitivities which might otherwise have destroyed him.

  He felt no call to the priesthood. His notion of God was that He was undoubtedly there, but might not be as concerned with men as men thought He was. Perhaps He was even morally neutral, not necessarily what we think Him to be. We could have got Him wrong, Nick the historian began to feel, as he read his history and observed his world. Certainly the antics of those who professed to know Him best engendered no confidence. Nevertheless, Nick’s love, his real gratitude, for the place, the institution and what it stood for, made him hesitate now to put it in jeopardy. He looked at the tape machine. All that he was most attached to seemed threatened by it. But it was evidence.

  Far above him he heard the door into the vestry passage from the cathedral bang shut. Swiftly he ejected the tape and stuffed it into a carton, then, together with the large leather-bound volume, he wrapped it in his pullover and crammed them into his holdall. The door swung open and Tristram stood on the threshold. Nick’s face cleared into a beautiful smile. ‘I thought Dennis was doing Evensong.’

  ‘He wants a change. I’ll do Evensong. Can you do Eucharist tomorrow?’ ‘Fine. How about Compline?’

  ‘Cancelled.’

  ‘You can’t, can you, on your own authority?’

  ‘Not mine, the chapter’s. Or at least Canon Riddable’s I suspect.’ ‘Ho, ho. A return to the lax old ways. Now the dean’s dead we shall be

  racing through an abbreviated form of the Eucharist and calling it a day. What has Riddable got against religion would you say?’ ‘I think it makes him feel uneasy. Confronts him with realities he’d rather not acknowledge.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Death,’ said Tristram grimly. ‘And repentance perhaps.’

  Mrs Perfect in the diocesan office pressed ‘print’ and watched the A 11 continuous begin to roll from the machine. She reached into her drawer, brought out a tube of Polos and refreshed herself after her labours. The office had been bedlam all day, well, all week really, if you came to think of it. Thank God for Friday.

  She sometimes wondered why she worked for the Church. They paid badly, the holidays were mean, they didn’t provide even luncheon vouchers. The amount of work was formidable since by any normal standards they were understaffed. The cathedral clergy themselves were mostly disorganised, peremptory and, Mrs Perfect, a regular Times Crossword woman, reflected, poor spellers. What kept her in place, she had to admit, was pity. She felt a surge of protectiveness whenever one or other of them displayed their failings. If she could, she’d have liked to take them back home with her, enclose them in proper family affection and send them out again into the world new made over, to do better. Failing that, she corrected their spelling and syntax and was unfailingly kind to them all.

  Towards their office equipment, however, Mrs Perfect had no such generous feeling. She had worked for Plessey in their smart warehouse beyond the Hollow and knew what good equipment was. The cathedral’s stuff was awful. They were always buying models of things which had just gone out of production and which didn’t fit with each other. They had four different sorts of typeface, five if you counted that thing from the verger’s office. Her eye swung towards the ancient Remington which stood beside the other three office machines. The young man from Autotype was working his way along them. He looked about twelve and a half and had an earring in his left ear. Still, he seemed to know what he was doing.

  She looked out of the window and rubbed it with her sleeve to get a clearer view of the close. The rain which had made shopping in the lunch hour such a burden had ceased and pale spring sun warmed the stone. It was only her fancy, of course, but it seemed to her that day by day, every day since its discovery, the Janus had risen a little bit higher out of its vault. It stood now presiding over the close. It seemed not at all abashed by its Christian surroundings. It held court at all hours of the day to a changing group of admirers. Some of them stayed for long periods. Yesterday, Sir Lionel Dunch had brought a party of archaeologists and antiquarians round. He had stood with his foot on the plinth and lectured them. School parties were frequent, there were a couple of watercolourists and small compact posses of Japanese. Local and national TV crews had come and gone.

  The chapter, what remained of it, she knew were beginning to hate him. They were much more concerned about the Janus than they were about finding the dean’s murderer. Even now Canon Riddable and Archdeacon Gold were discussing what to do about him. The door between her office and the archdeacon’s was imperfectly closed. Every now and again when the exchange got heated their remarks became audible.

  ‘If we let Dunch have it,’ said the archdeacon, ‘we shan’t get a penny for it.’

  ‘So what?’ Riddable’s hectoring tone was easier to hear than the archdeacon’s.

  They sounded like a couple of middle managers at Plessey, Mrs Perfect decided. In a crisis, neither of them had much in the way of language or moral discernment to see them through.

  ‘We’ve simply got to get the odd bob together.’The archdeacon sounded desperate.

  He was carrying on as though it was his personal fortune which was at stake. As though he might have to sell the XJ, Mrs Perfect thought. And how would that look to all those financial politicians like Brian Brace, whom he so much admired?

  ‘The important thing is to get it off the premises,’ Riddable was pressing on. ‘Do you realise what it’s doing?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It’s attracting worship.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I found a couple of little cards stuck on it this morning asking for its help.’

  ‘What sort of help?’ The archdeacon was stung to curiosity.

  Mrs Perfect could hear Canon Riddable flushing. ‘In sexual matters,’ he mumbled with distaste.

  ‘Pretty traditional,’ the archdeacon replied liberally.‘I seem to remember from Pompeii …’

  ‘I don’t
care a damn about Pompeii. This is England. I want it out. Do you understand?’ Mrs Perfect heard the sound of a table being slapped. Riddable was at it again. She sensed the frustration lying at the heart of his ill-conditioned nature.

  ‘Well, I suppose we could get it out of the close. But I don’t want to pay for storage.’

  ‘Get it out,’ Riddable paused between each word.

  ‘All right, all right. I’ll have a word with Dunch or Fresh and see if they can help.’

  ‘You do that,’ Riddable’s tone was suddenly comradely. The change was breathtaking. ‘I’m sure I can leave it in your very capable hands, Archie.’ Anyone would have thought he was the senior of the two. There was a scraping of chairs. Mrs Perfect moved from the window back to her desk. She picked up the phone and gazed at the ceiling as Riddable came out and swept towards the door.

  ‘Miss Braithwaite? Mrs Perfect here, cathedral office. I have two messages for you. A Mr,’ she looked at the note, ‘Markewicz rang and said the date you wanted was the tenth. That’s right. And the second message … Canon Millhaven would be glad if you could call on her at six-thirty today. Oh and Miss Braithwaite, there’s a parcel come for you. Yes. Yes of course I’ll do that. We close at five-thirty but I can leave it on the table in the outer office for you if you like.’

  Spruce ate the last of his luncheon kebab and dried his hands finger by finger on a very clean white handkerchief. Mules belied his tranquil demeanour by making a series of racing changes to circumvent the dawdling afternoon traffic on the outskirts of Bow. They hit the roadworks and slowed down again.

  ‘When I was a boy, they never carried on like this. There were no building sites and the roads stayed down.’

  Mules looked at him as though at a fractious child. ‘It’ll pass, sir, never you worry.’

  Spruce began to sort out his thoughts. First there was the matter of motive. The difficulty was that different contexts produce different sorts of motives. Gamblers, drug traffickers and fraudulent accountants were stirred to kill by different things. What would move the clergy to commit murder?

  Spruce glanced at Mules’s lugubrious profile. ‘What would you commit murder for, Mules? Money, reputation, revenge?’

  ‘I might have a go for revenge,’ Mules ventured. ‘People ought to pay their debts.’

  ‘But not money?’

  ‘That’d just be greedy, wouldn’t it, sir? Not a justifiable act.’ ‘So you think the dean died for a justifiable reason?’

  ‘He was laid out very carefully, wasn’t he. So whoever killed him may have thought he was justified. Less a murder, more an execution.’

  ‘How about Archdeacon Gold? It looks as though he’s had a hand in the till.’ Spruce tried it out on his sergeant by way of experiment.

  ‘He’s buddy-buddy with the Council, both finance and planning. Which, of course, he needs to be if he’s going to get the Hollow development through.’

  ‘He’s also got an expensive taste in cars.’

  ‘An XJ and a little MG tourer. He’s also got a power boat up the coast at Narborough.’ Mules gestured with his right hand towards the rain-soaked horizon.

  Spruce looked at his sergeant with admiration. ‘How come you know that?’

  ‘I have dabbled in that line myself,’ Mules was modest.

  ‘Do we know whether the dean knew about the archdeacon’s activities with the finances?’

  ‘We can’t be sure, but the evidence was stashed in his safe as though for use.’

  ‘Would Gold kill to stop it being revealed that he was a thief?’

  Spruce shook his head. ‘Not a matter of public revelation but as archdeacon he stood to lose a heck of a lot. Miss Braithwaite says the Church wouldn’t prosecute but they’d certainly remove him. He’d not be employable as an archdeacon.’

  ‘A small country living?’ Mules accelerated with pleasure at the thought.

  ‘He’d feel the change from being fêted by the local politicians. Have to sell the XJ maybe. The question is,’ Spruce pressed on, ‘could he have done it in the time?’

  ‘I checked the timing with him again. He went back to Brace’s flat at the far end of Watergate. That’s ten minutes walking, five by car, from the cathedral. They all went by car. Each in his own.’

  ‘Where do they start from exactly? The cars weren’t taken into the close, as I understand it.’

  ‘There’s no parking of anything in the close. The vergers bring their bicycles in but they shouldn’t and they tend to conceal them in the choir school basement, according to Nick Squires. On the night of the murder all the guests had to leave their cars in the magistrates’ court car park to the north of the cathedral. The clergy regularly have places reserved for them there. It’s no distance. Brace says they were at his flat by twelve-ten. They drank whisky till about twelve-forty. Then Gold said he’d better not drive so Brace invited him to stay the night. Gold rang his wife to let her know. She agreed he rang about ten to one.’

  ‘Then what?’ Spruce turned to look at his colleague’s profile as he went smoothly through the gears and marshalled his facts.

  ‘Brace says he and Gold turned in. Brace admits that Gold could have got out of the flat at any time and come back in without anyone noticing. There are no staff and it would only be a matter of leaving the door on the latch. But on the other hand he says he heard nothing and Gold says he slept straightaway. My impression was that Brace was tight and he was implying that Gold was too.’

  ‘So unless Gold was faking and unless he was a very smart runner, he’d have all on to slip out of Brace’s and sprint down to the cathedral to kill the dean by ten past one.’

  ‘He is a runner, actually. I’ve seen him jogging.’

  ‘But look,’ Spruce said reasonably, ‘the dean was killed just outside the cathedral. How would the archdeacon know he was going over to the cathedral at that time? I mean for all he knew he might have had to break into the Deanery.’

  ‘He might have made an appointment with the dean earlier in the evening,’ Mules was equally reasonable.

  ‘“Meet me behind the cathedral, Dean, at one p.m. after your party and I’ll kill you,” doesn’t sound convincing, does it?’

  ‘No,’ Mules admitted, ‘but it’s not impossible. However,’ he paused for effect and to avoid a clutch of JCBs doing a square dance round the earth works, ‘however, the archdeacon did add one further bit of information second time round. He says he saw Fresh outside the cathedral gate as he was leaving.’

  ‘Fresh, eh? Was he sure?’

  ‘Pretty sure.’

  ‘So what was Fresh doing outside the Archgate at midnight? And why did he not mention it in his first statement to us? He hasn’t got a key to the close gate has he?’

  ‘Not so far as anyone knows.’

  ‘Right. We’ll press him on that as well as on the other thing. Now, how about the weapon?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Mules was regretful.

  ‘It’s bloody annoying we haven’t found one. That’s another thing that makes me feel this killing was planned.’ Spruce ruminated. By now the car had entered the road which ran beside the railway track skirting the Hollow. ‘Most murderers do tend to want to get rid as soon as possible. Only a very deliberate murderer takes elaborate pains to conceal the weapon.’

  ‘What did Doctor Gibbon say it might have been?’

  ‘Anything from a lino cutter to a razor.’

  ‘We could get a warrant and search the archdeacon’s dustbin?’ Mules didn’t sound that keen.

  ‘Forget it. I’ve already had the superintendent telling me what the chief constable told him about my methods. We’d need much more to go on than the archdeacon’s sprinting ability and an unproven capacity for living beyond his means.’ But even as he said this Spruce knew that if it had been any other context, if, that is to say, they hadn’t been clergymen, he’d have had a search warrant and been over the archdeacon’s stuff long ago.

  ‘How about Riddable?’ Mules asked since
they were clearly going through the main suspects.

  Spruce sighed. ‘I’m tempted to dismiss him as just a buffoon. But he’s certainly violent in language if nothing else, and Miss Braithwaite says Nick Squires told her he used to beat up boys when he taught in the school.’

  ‘Some deserve it,’ said Mules stoically. ‘And it’s a long haul from disciplining schoolboys to cutting your dean’s throat.’

  ‘He had a motive.’

  ‘That article business you told me about, trying to publish something he hadn’t written, wasn’t it? What would he lose if the dean did know about it?’

  ‘Face.’

  ‘That’s not much.’

  ‘To a man of Riddable’s type,’ Spruce said, ‘that’s probably the most important thing in life. We come back to my initial point about different contexts bringing out different motives.’

  ‘So what do you make of the timing for him?’

  ‘He left the dean soon after midnight and walked his wife across the close. Ten minutes later he went back across the close to see the dean. You heard what he said about wanting to put him right on service times.’

  Mules turned his unbelieving face towards Spruce, momentarily abandoning his careful circumnavigation of the potholes.

  ‘Yes, well. We neither of us believed him at the time and it doesn’t gain anything in the retelling, I grant you.’

  ‘So what did he go to see the dean about?’

  ‘His article?’

  ‘It must have been pressing to slip back at that time. However, let’s suppose it was the article. Why should it suddenly become pressing?’

  ‘May be,’ Spruce conjectured, ‘he needed to be in print and the dean’s veto prevented that.’

  ‘It’s too complicated for me,’ Mules complained.