Death in Holy Orders (15 page)

Until her sister, Marianne, was eleven, the two girls had been looked after by a sister of her father’s, a sensible, undemonstrative and conscientious woman who was totally devoid of maternal instinct but knew her duty when she saw it. She had provided a stabilizing, unsentimental care but had departed into her private world of dogs, bridge and foreign travel as soon as she thought Marianne had been old enough to leave. The girls had seen her go without regret.

But soon Marianne was dead, killed by a drunken driver on her thirteenth birthday, and Emma and her father were alone. When she returned to see him he showed her a scrupulous, almost painful courtesy. She wondered whether their lack of communication and avoidance of any demonstrative affection—which she could hardly call estrangement, since what had they been other than strangers?—was the result of his feeling that now, over seventy and bereaved, it would be demeaning and embarrassing to demand from her the love which he had never previously shown any sign of needing.

And now, at last, she was nearing the end of her journey. The narrow road to the sea was seldom used except on summer weekends, and this evening she was the only traveller. The road stretched before her, pale, shadowed and a little sinister in the fading light. As always when she came to St. Anselm’s she had the sensation of moving towards a crumbling coast, untamed, mysterious and isolated in time as well as space.

As she turned along the track leading to St. Anselm’s and the high chimneys and tower of the house loomed blackly menacing against the darkening sky, she saw a short figure trudging about fifty yards ahead and recognized Father John Betterton.

Drawing up beside him, she let down the window and said, “Can I give you a lift, Father?”

He blinked, as if for a moment not recognizing her. Then he
gave the familiar sweet and childish smile. “Emma. Thank you, thank you. A lift will be welcome. I walked further than I intended round the mere.”

He was wearing a heavy tweed coat and had his binoculars slung round his neck. He got in, bringing with him, impregnated in the tweed, the dank smell of brackish water.

“Any luck with the bird-watching, Father?”

“Just the usual winter residents.”

They sat in companionable silence. There had been a time when, briefly, Emma had found it difficult to be at ease with Father John. That had been on her first visit, three years ago, when Raphael had told her about the priest’s imprisonment.

He had said, “Someone is bound to tell you at Cambridge if not here, and I’d rather you heard it from me. Father John confessed to abusing some young boys in his choir. That’s the word they used, but I doubt there was much real abuse. He was sent to prison for three years.”

Emma had said, “I don’t know much about the law, but the sentence seems harsh.”

“It wasn’t just the two boys. Another priest, from a neighbouring parish, Matthew Crampton, made it his business to rake up further evidence and produced three young men. They accused Father John of worse enormities. According to them it was his early abuse that made them unemployable, unhappy, delinquent and antisocial. They were lying, but Father John still pleaded guilty. He had his reasons.”

Without necessarily sharing Raphael’s belief in Father John’s innocence, Emma felt a great pity for him. He seemed like a man who had partly withdrawn into a private world, precariously preserving the core of a vulnerable personality as if he were carrying within himself something fragile which even a sudden movement might shatter. He was unfailingly polite and gentle, and she could only detect his private anguish on those few occasions when she looked into his eyes and had to turn hers away from the pain. Perhaps he was also carrying a burden of guilt. Part of her still wished that Raphael hadn’t spoken. She couldn’t imagine what his life in prison must have been. Would any man, she wondered, willingly bring that hell
on himself? And his life at St. Anselm’s couldn’t be easy. He occupied a private apartment on the third floor with his unmarried sister, who could charitably be described as eccentric. Although it was obvious to Emma on the few occasions when she had seen them together that he was devoted to her, perhaps even love was an added burden rather than a comfort.

She wondered whether she ought to say a word to him now about the death of Ronald Treeves. She had read a brief account in the national papers, and Raphael, who for some reason made it his business to keep her in touch with St. Anselm’s, had telephoned with the news. After some thought she had written a brief and carefully worded letter of condolence to Father Sebastian and had received an even briefer reply in his elegant handwriting. It would surely be natural to speak of Ronald now to Father John, but something held her back. She sensed that the subject would be unwelcome, even painful.

And now St. Anselm’s was clearly in sight, roofs, the tall chimney stacks, turrets, tower and cupola seeming visibly to darken with the dying of the light. In front the two ruined pillars of the long-demolished Elizabethan gatehouse gave out their silent, ambiguous messages: crude phallic symbols, indomitable sentinels against the steadily advancing enemy, obstinately enduring reminders of the house’s inevitable end. Was it, she wondered, the presence beside her of Father John, or the thought of Ronald Treeves choking his last breath under that weight of sand, that caused this upsurge of sadness and vague apprehension? She had never come to St. Anselm’s before except with joy; now she approached it with something very close to fear.

As they drew up to the front door it opened and she saw Raphael outlined against the light from the hall. He had obviously been looking out for her. He stood there in his dark cassock, motionless as if carved in stone, looking down on them. She remembered her first sight of him; she had stared in momentary disbelief and then laughed aloud at her inability to conceal her surprise. Another student, Stephen Morby, had been with them and had laughed with her.

“Extraordinary, isn’t he? We were in a pub in Reydon and a
woman came up and said, ‘Where did you come from, Olympus?’ I wanted to leap on the table, bare my chest and cry out, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ Some hope.”

He had spoken without a trace of envy, Perhaps he realized that beauty in a man wasn’t the gift it seemed, and indeed for Emma it was impossible to look at Raphael without a superstitious reminder of the bad fairy at the christening. She was interested, too, that she could look at him with pleasure but without having the least sexual response. Perhaps he appealed more to men than to women. But if he had power over either sex he appeared unconscious of it. She knew from the easy confidence with which he held himself that he knew that he was beautiful and that his beauty made him different. He valued his exceptional looks and thought the better of himself for possessing them, but he seemed hardly to care about their effect on others.

Now his face broke into a smile and he came down the steps towards her, holding out his hand. In her present mood of half-superstitious apprehension the gesture seemed less a welcome than a warning. Father John, with a nod and a final smile, pattered off.

Raphael took Emma’s laptop and suitcase from her. He said, “Welcome back. I can’t promise you an agreeable weekend but it might be interesting. We’ve got two policemen in residence—one from New Scotland Yard, no less. Commander Dalgliesh is here to ask questions about Ronald Treeves’s death. And there’s someone else, even less welcome as far as I’m concerned. I intend to keep out of his way and recommend you do the same. Archdeacon Matthew Crampton.”

T
here was one more visit to be made. Dalgliesh returned briefly to his room, then went through the iron doorway in the gate between Ambrose and the flint wall of the church, and made his way along the eighty yards of track which led to St. John’s Cottage. It was now late afternoon, and the day was dying in a gaudy western sky streaked with pink. Beside the path, a fringe of tall and delicate grasses shivered in the strengthening breeze, then flattened under the sweep of a sudden gust. Behind him, the west-facing façade of St. Anselm’s was patterned with light and the three inhabited cottages shone like the bright outposts of a beleaguered fortress, emphasizing the dark outline of the empty St. Matthew’s.

As the light faded the sound of the sea intensified, its soft rhythmic moaning rising to a muted roar. He recalled from his boyhood visits how the last evening light always brought with it this sense of the sea surging in power, as if night and darkness were its natural allies. He would sit at the window of Jerome, looking out over the darkening scrubland, picturing an imagined shore where the crumbling sandcastles would be finally demolished, the shouts and laughter of the children silenced, the deck chairs folded and carried away, and the sea would come into its own, rolling the bones of drowned mariners around the holds of long-wrecked ships.

The door of St. John’s Cottage stood open and light spilled over the path leading to the neat wicket gate. He could still see clearly the wooden walls of the piggery to the right, and hear the muffled snorting and scuffling. He could smell the animals but the smell was neither strong nor unpleasant. Beyond the piggery he could just glimpse the garden, neat rows of clumped
unrecognizable vegetables, the higher canes supporting the last of a crop of runner beans and, at the end of the garden, the gleam of a small greenhouse.

At the sound of his footsteps the figure of Eric Surtees appeared in the doorway. He seemed to hesitate and then, without speaking, stood aside and made a stiff gesture inviting him in. Dalgliesh knew that Father Sebastian had told the staff of his impending visit, although he was unsure how much explanation had been given. He had a sense that he was expected but not that he was welcomed.

He said, “Mr. Surtees? I’m Commander Dalgliesh of the Metropolitan Police. I think Father Sebastian explained that I’m here to ask some questions about the death of Ronald Treeves. His father wasn’t in England at the time of the inquest and he naturally wants to know as much as possible about the circumstances of his son’s death. I’d like to talk for a few minutes, if it’s convenient.”

Surtees nodded. “That’s OK. Do you mind coming in here?”

Dalgliesh followed him into the room to the right of the passage. The cottage could not have been more different from Mrs. Pilbeam’s comfortable domesticity. Although there was a centre table of plain wood with four upright chairs, the room had been furnished as a workplace. The wall opposite the door had been fitted with racks from which hung a row of immaculately clean garden implements, spades, forks, hoes, together with shears and saws, while a bank of wooden compartments underneath held boxes of tools and smaller implements. There was a workbench in front of the window with a fluorescent light above. The door to the kitchen was open and from it came a powerful and disagreeable smell. Surtees was boiling up pigswill for his small herd.

Now he pulled out a chair from the table. It rasped along the stone floor. He said, “If you’ll just wait here, I’ll wash. I’ve been seeing to the pigs.”

Through the open door Dalgliesh could see him at the sink washing vigorously, splashing water over his head and face. He seemed like a man cleaning himself of more than superficial dirt. Then he came back with the towel still round his neck and sat opposite Dalgliesh, stiffly upright, and with the strained
look of a prisoner steeling himself for interrogation. Suddenly he said in an over-loud voice, “Would you like tea?”

Thinking that tea might help to put him at ease, Dalgliesh said, “If it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble. I use teabags. Milk and sugar?”

“Just milk.”

He came back within minutes and placed two heavy mugs on the table. The tea was strong and very hot. Neither of them began to drink. Dalgliesh had seldom interviewed anyone who gave so strong an impression of guilty knowledge. But knowledge of what? It was ridiculous to imagine this timid-looking boy—surely he was little more than a boy—killing any living creature. Even his pigs would have their throats cut in the sanitized, strictly regulated killing-ground of an authorized abattoir. It wasn’t, Dalgliesh saw, that Surtees lacked strength for a physical encounter. Under the short sleeves of his checked shirt the muscles of his arms stood out like cords, and his hands were rough, and so incongruous in size with the rest of his body that they looked as if they had been grafted on. The delicate face was tanned by sun and wind, and the open buttons of the rough cotton shirt showed a glimpse of skin as white and soft as a child’s.

Lifting his mug, Dalgliesh said, “Have you always kept pigs or only since you came to work here? That was four years ago, wasn’t it?”

“Just since I came here. I’ve always liked pigs. When I got this job Father Sebastian said it would be all right to have about half a dozen if they weren’t too noisy and didn’t smell. They’re very clean animals. People are quite wrong to think they smell.”

“Did you construct the piggery yourself? I’m surprised you used wood. I thought pigs could destroy almost anything.”

“Oh, they can. It’s only wood on the outside. Father Sebastian insisted on that. He hates concrete. I lined it with breeze-blocks.”

Surtees had waited until Dalgliesh began drinking before raising his own mug. Dalgliesh was surprised how much he relished the tea. He said, “I know very little about pigs, but I’m told they’re intelligent and companionable.”

Surtees visibly relaxed. “Yes, they are. They’re one of the most intelligent animals. I’ve always liked them.”

“Lucky for St. Anselm’s. It means they get bacon which doesn’t smell of chemicals or exude that unappetizing, smelly liquid. And properly hung pork.”

“I don’t really keep them for the college. I keep them—well, for companionship really. Of course, they have to go to be killed eventually, and that’s a problem now. There are so many EU regulations about abattoirs and always having a vet in attendance that people don’t want to accept just a few animals. And then there’s the problem of transport. But there’s a farmer, Mr. Harrison, just outside Blythburgh who helps with that. I send my pigs to the abattoir with his. And he always hangs some of the pork for his own use, so I can supply the fathers with a decent joint occasionally. They don’t eat much pork, but they like to have the bacon. Father Sebastian insists on paying for it, but I think they should get it free.”