Blood Brotherhood (23 page)

I
T WAS
S
ATURDAY
morning, and Inspector Croft sat in Father Anselm's study, away from the sun, and away from the sight of other human beings. It ought to have concentrated the mind wonderfully, no doubt, being thus shut in in the gloom and forced to focus his thoughts on the case and nothing but the case. But he found it difficult. He would have liked, in fact, to have had a window in the room — a high window whence he might look down on the brothers and the delegates on their last day and see how they were behaving themselves, watch their reactions and the interplay of their characters. For in spite of all the reports and the digging into backgrounds, he felt he knew very little about them.

He could have kept them together longer, of course, but on consideration he had felt he had to let them go. There was very little in the way of solid evidence to connect them rather than the resident brothers with the murder. Their jobs made it unlikely they would stage a sudden disappearance, and Father Anselm's anxiety to have the women within his walls not one minute longer than necessary was, though unstated, patently obvious.

Croft, in spite of his determination that no one was to be implicitly trusted, whatever his position, was nevertheless impressed by Father Anselm: a man of strong will, great capacity. He was impressed too by Anselm's conviction that the murderer was one of the outsiders, though intellectually he could find little to back up that belief. He was impressed by his superb belief in himself. Now that the symposium was breaking up the Community could return to normal, and he could continue his investigations in the
dingy familiarity of his own office. Meanwhile the delegates had been given the news of their release from Babylonian captivity, and he wondered how they were taking the news.

As he sat there in the dimly-lit room, with only the crucifix for decoration, he mused on the case and tried to find a shape in it. The pieces in the puzzle shifted around in his mind, coalesced, moved apart and began to form new patterns. What were the pieces? A pathetic, mothered clergyman childishly avid for publicity; a black bishop with one foot in Christianity and the other in a tribal world so strange as to be almost beyond the power of a Westerner to penetrate; a fishing knife; a bitter, rabble-rousing vicar with no rabble to rouse; a leaden American with a sharp financial nose; a blood-stained habit; two Norwegians, totally different in character, both of whom had had lengthy stays in Britain in the past; a sacrificial lamb; an intellectually agile bishop who went flabby in moments of crisis, and seemed to depend heavily on an obscure vicar apparently his intellectual inferior; a shifty-looking brother with restless eyes . . .

The body of Brother Dominic, savagely butchered, his bedclothes thick with his own blood . . .

Two of the pieces started dancing together, and making little patterns of their own, patterns which set up in Croft's mind an insistent series of question-marks.

He wished again he could look at the delegates preparing to leave, and at the brothers preparing to see the last of them.

• • •

It was half past ten, and all the delegates had eaten a healthy and hearty breakfast and done their packing. Now they were strolling together for the last time in the sun of another brilliant day, watched from a distance by many of the brothers, drab, uniform, inscrutable. The mood of the delegates had changed once again on the news of their release: now they felt like schoolchildren soon to break up after a rather difficult term. Considering the butchery
that had taken place within the walls during their stay there, they were all remarkably spry. Even jolly. The press, clustered around the main door like Neapolitan beggars, had been told that the delegates would be leaving at eleven-thirty. Until then the delegates in question talked, joked and swapped addresses for all the world as if they wanted more to do with each other.

One member had already gone, somewhat under a cloud. The Bishop of Mitabezi had been spirited away during the night, while the press were making themselves odious throughout the saloon bars of Hickley. He had gone in a chauffeur-driven Daimler provided by Church House, and he was even now waiting in the lounge at Heathrow to be wafted back to his own diocese. He stood near the exit gate talking genially to the High Commissioner of his country, looking large, impressive and confident. But he was not talked about by those who remained at St Botolph's. All of them (except Simeon Fleishman) were very liberal in their outlook on race, and deplored discrimination in any shape or form, but they all in practice accepted the idea that different standards had to be adopted with darker skins, and that acts of barbarism or tyranny were best passed over in silence if they happened outside Indo-European boundaries. So the Bishop's surreptitious departure passed without comment, and everyone spoke about almost anything else. Except the hacked-up body of Brother Dominic, which they all had dreamed about these last few nights, some in particularly vivid detail.

Randi Paulsen and Simeon Fleishman exchanged addresses under the trees at the edge of the lawn. Both, unusually, intended to make use of them. Randi plotted extracting money from her church for a lecture tour of Norwegian communities in the States, with ‘Woman's Role in the Church Today' as her subject. She knew that any project with ‘Woman's Role' in the title could be sure of a grant from some worthy organization or other in her own country.

And it will be so nice to stay with a united Christian family, she said to herself, bestowing her smile like maundy money all over Simeon Fleishman. One does admire a man who has kept the
essential
things of religion so completely in perspective!

Simeon Fleishman had heard that Norway was expensive, and intended keeping all his contacts there polished bright as a new pin. I wonder if she could put us all up, he said to himself.

‘To think that all the good that could have come out of this symposium,' he was saying, ‘should have been marred.' (He buttonholed Philip Lambton.) ‘I was just saying to our friend here how truly tragic to think of all the good that could have come out . . .'

He lumbered on, spreading clichés before him like stepping-stones and then shifting his bulk carefully from one to the other. Philip Lambton was almost dancing with impatience to get away. His young middle-aged body had lightened perceptibly as the time of departure approached, and now that Expectation sat in the air his whole being was athrill to return to a world of motor-bikes and big sound and leather-clad chicks, bearing his Experience, a real murder, to lay as an offering beside their gang knifings and roughings-up. It was as much as he could do to give Simeon Fleishman the seven and a half minutes required to drive the heavy vehicle of his thought to its predictable destination.

The Bishop and Ernest Clayton, as so often before, were talking on the moors. The Bishop had taken Clayton up once more, now that their difficulties had all been apparently solved, and it seemed as if he felt the need to justify his conduct in the whole affair, as if he felt he had been weak, yet couldn't leave anyone else with the impression he had been weak. He enlarged with some eloquence on the consequences of the heroic decision they had taken yesterday, to do nothing at all about the state of affairs at the Community of St Botolph's:

‘I think we can be confident,' he said, ‘that the situation will right itself quite naturally in the course of events, and then I think we will be able to congratulate ourselves on not taking a precipitate step which would have caused unlimited scandal, harmed many, many people quite unnecessarily, and brought on the Church . . .'

He's done the right deed for the wrong reason, thought Ernest Clayton to himself.

Stewart Phipps said few goodbyes, and those reluctantly. He had formed no bonds in his week at St Botolph's. He never did form bonds. He watched the rest say their farewells with an open sneer on his face, skulking round the outskirts of the lawn, spying on his shadow in the sun, and wondering what issues of public importance had accumulated while he had been away, shut up in this ridiculous place, away from the news-mincers of the BBC, away from petitions and protest marches, away from the stirring calls to arms in the letter columns of
Tribune.

Bente Frøystad said a happy farewell to everyone. What passed for friendliness was happiness at getting away, but it did. She got caught by Simeon Fleishman (‘I was just saying to your fellow-countrywoman how truly tragic . . .') and, squirm as she might, she could not get out of giving him her address. However, when she had written it out for him she explained it was the address of a student hostel, and she had the satisfaction of seeing him crumple it discreetly in his heavy fist after he had left her for someone else. Otherwise she smiled around, frank, open and untroubled, and she was one of those whom almost everyone said goodbye to with a degree of regret.

‘Well, this was a turn-up for the book, wasn't it?' she said, with a good attempt at cockney, when she got to Ernest Clayton. ‘Wasn't quite the time of prayer, meditation and meaningful discussion that we were banking on, was it?'

‘I'm not sure the thing was ever destined to be a great success,' said Ernest Clayton. ‘Even before the murder we
did seem a rather ill-assorted little bunch, I thought.'

‘That was my impression,' said Bente. ‘But isn't that always the case when clergymen and such like get together?'

‘Well, it is very often so, I'm afraid.'

‘That's what I thought. You know, I often look around my fellow students, and think: what are you going to be like in a few years' time? Are you going to be like so-and-so, and so-and-so? — our teachers at college, you know, and some of the big noises in the Church. And you know they are! And then I think: and I've got to mingle with you for the rest of my life!'

‘And then?'

‘And then I think: Have I chosen the right profession?'

She was obviously serious, but Ernest Clayton was saved from having to give advice by Father Anselm, who emerged from the door of the great hall and stood for a moment surveying them all. In his ordinary brown robe he looked gaunt, impressive, and a little forbidding, just as Ernest Clayton remembered him on the day they had arrived. Then, followed by Brother Hamish, he came forward and went around from delegate to delegate, saying his farewells.
Exactly
like end of term, thought Ernest Clayton. And Father Anselm, like any good headmaster, was trying to disguise the fact that he hadn't actually liked many of the boys very much. When he had done the rounds, he turned towards the Bishop, who nodded his head with a mischievous little smile.

‘Half past eleven. Time to be off,' said Father Anselm. They all turned towards the main gate and began to shuffle in that direction, somewhat apprehensive at the thought of the reporters.

‘No, this way,' called Brother Hamish, and he led the way through the kitchen garden and across to the moors, his watery eyes gleaming, and his cunning face twisted into a smile. They all stepped out after him, and as they neared the wall they noticed a step-ladder leaning against it on their side.

The Bishop of Peckham was almost beside himself with boyish pleasure. ‘
Isn't
it a good idea?' he said to all and sundry. ‘I thought of it myself!' He was very good at executing this sort of notion.

On the far side of the wall, on a rough track a couple of hundred yards aways, stood three undistinguished-looking cars. Propped against the wall stood the bicycle of Stewart Phipps. ‘Quickly now,' said the Bishop, and one by one they popped over the wall and hurried over to the cars. In a couple of minutes they were all on their various ways, pedalling or being driven to their various destinations, or to railway stations whence they would be further sorted for delivery by rail, sea and air to their various portions of the globe.

Outside the main gate the reporters stood around. They sweated, undid another button on their shirts, and looked at their watches.

The only member of the symposium not to make his exit in this way was Ernest Clayton. His car was outside the main gate, so anything surreptitious in the way of departure was impossible for him. Father Anselm, generous in victory, had tried to spare him the wrath of the reporters, and had invited him to stay to lunch before he drove back to Lincolnshire, and he had gladly accepted. He watched the three cars and the little figure pedalling savagely disappear in different directions over the moors, and then turned to go for the last time into the Community of St Botolph's.

• • •

The shabby little suitcase was packed. The dirty underwear was rolled up in a plastic bag, the flannel and toothbrush and shaving gear were in the toilet bag and tucked into the corner. There was nothing to do now but eat lunch, be friendly to Father Anselm, then brave the reporters and drive off, back to Lincolnshire and the humdrum daily round. Meanwhile he could go out into the sun until lunch-time.

But he did not want to go out into the sun. He alone
of the delegates — the suspects — was left, and now the other faces were out of sight he wanted to sit down and think, quite abstractly, about this murder. Without the human element to intrude, he had an odd idea that the outlines might be clearer.

Ernest Clayton sat down on the bed.

The accepted pattern seemed to be this: Brother Dominic had run a service catering for unusual sexual tastes; one of his clients, coming by chance to St Botolph's, had recognized him and been recognized; fearing blackmail, he or she had murdered him.

He sat back against the wall and contemplated this pattern. It was neat. And yet . . . He remembered the Bishop of Peckham on the moors the next day, his face sagging at the memory, describing the body: ‘Dreadful,' he kept saying, seeming nearly to retch with renewed horror. ‘He must have been quite frenzied, quite crazed!' Why had the murderer not been neater, calmer, cleaner?