Death in Holy Orders (19 page)

He pondered what he had learned. It was an odd coincidence
that Clara Arbuthnot had died in the same hospice where Margaret Munroe had been a nurse. But perhaps not so very odd. Miss Arbuthnot might well have wanted to die in the county of her birth, the job at St. Anselm’s would have been advertised locally and Mrs. Munroe had been looking for a post. But the two women could not have met. He would have to check the dates, but it was clear in his own mind. Miss Arbuthnot had died a month before Margaret Munroe had taken up her post at the hospice.

But the other fact he had learned was an uncomfortable complication. Whatever the truth about Ronald Treeves’s death, it had brought nearer the closure of St. Anselm’s College. And when that closure took place, four members of the staff would become very rich men.

He had decided that St. Anselm’s would welcome his absence for most of the day, but had told Father Martin that he would be in for dinner. After two hours’ satisfying exploration of the city, he found a restaurant where neither food nor décor was pretentious and ate a simple lunch. There was something else he needed to do before returning to the college. Consulting the telephone directory at the restaurant, he discovered the address of the publishers of the
Sole Bay Weekly Gazette
. Their office, from which they published a number of local papers and magazines, was a low brick building rather like a garage close to one of the road junctions outside the city. There was no problem in obtaining back copies of the paper. Karen Surtees’s memory had not been at fault; the issue for the week before Mrs. Munroe’s death did indeed carry a picture of the ribbon-bedecked heifer at her owner’s graveside.

Dalgliesh had parked in the forecourt in front of the building and now returned to the car and studied the newspaper. It was a typical provincial weekly, its preoccupation with local life and rural and small-town interests a refreshing relief from the predictable concerns of the national broadsheets. Here were reports from the villages of whist drives, sales of work, darts competitions, funerals and meetings of local groups and associations. There was a page of photographs of brides and grooms, heads together, smiling into the camera, and several pages of advertisements for houses, cottages and bungalows
with pictures of the properties. Four pages were devoted to personal notices and other advertisements. Only two items hinted at the less innocent concerns of the wider world. Seven illegal immigrants had been discovered in a barn and it was suspected that they had been brought in on a local boat. The police had made two arrests in connection with the finding of cocaine, raising suspicion that there could be a local dealer.

Folding the paper, Dalgliesh reflected that his hunch had come to nothing. If anything in the
Gazette
had sparked off Margaret Munroe’s memory, the secret had died with her.

T
he Reverend Matthew Crampton, Archdeacon of Reydon, drove to St. Anselm’s by the shortest route from his vicarage at Cressingfield, just south of Ipswich. He drove towards the A12 with the comfortable assurance that he had left the parish, his wife and his study in good order. Even in youth he had never left home without the assumption, never voiced aloud, that he might not return. It was never a serious worry but the thought was always there, like other unacknowledged fears which curled like a sleeping snake in the pit of his mind. It sometimes occurred to him that he lived his whole life in the daily expectation of its ending. The small diurnal rituals which this involved had nothing to do with a morbid preoccupation with mortality, nor with his faith, but were more, he acknowledged, a legacy of his mother’s insistence every morning on clean underclothes, since this might be the day on which he would be run over and exposed to the gaze of nurses, doctors and the undertaker as a pitiable victim of maternal unconcern. As a boy he had sometimes pictured the final scene: himself stretched out on a mortuary slab and his mother comforted and gratified by the thought that he had at least died with his pants clean.

He had tidied away his first marriage as methodically as he tidied his desk. That silent visitation at the corner of the stair or glimpsed through his study window, the sudden shock of hearing a half-remembered laugh, were mercifully supine, overlaid by parish duties, the weekly routine, his second marriage. He had consigned his first marriage to a dark oubliette of his mind and shot the bolt, but not before he had almost formally passed sentence on it. He had heard one of his parishioners, the mother
of a child who was dyslexic and slightly deaf, describing how her daughter had been “statemented” by the local authority and had understood that this meant that the child’s needs had been assessed and appropriate measures agreed on. So, in a very different context but with equal authority, he had statemented his marriage. The words, unspoken, had never been consigned to paper, but mentally he could recite them as if he were speaking of a casual acquaintance, and always of himself in the third person. That brief and final disposal of a marriage was written on his mind, pictured always in italics.

Archdeacon Crampton married his first wife soon after he became vicar of his inner-city parish. Barbara Hampton was nearly twenty years younger, beautiful, wilful and disturbed—a fact which her family had never disclosed. The marriage had at first been happy. He knew himself to be the fortunate husband of a woman he had done little to deserve. Her sentimentality was taken for kindness; her easy familiarity with strangers, her beauty and her generosity made her very popular in the parish. For months the problems were either unacknowledged or not spoken of. And then the church wardens and parishioners would call at the vicarage when she was away and tell their embarrassed stories. The outbursts of violent temper, the screaming, the insults, incidents which he had thought happened only to and with him, had spread into the parish. She refused treatment, arguing that it was he who was sick. She began to drink more steadily and more heavily
.

One afternoon four years after the wedding, he was due to go out to visit sick parishioners and, knowing that she had gone to bed that afternoon pleading tiredness, had gone to see how she was. Opening the door, he thought that she was sleeping peacefully and left, not wishing to disturb her. On his return that evening he found that she was dead. She had taken an overdose of aspirin. The inquest returned a verdict of suicide. He blamed himself for having married a woman too young for him, and unsuitable to be a vicar’s wife. He found happiness in a second and more appropriate marriage but he never ceased to mourn his first wife
.

That was the story as mentally he recited it, but now he returned to it far less often. He had married again within eighteen
months. An unmarried vicar, particularly one who has been tragically widowed, is inevitably regarded as the lawful target of the parish matchmakers. It seemed to him that his second wife had been chosen for him, an arrangement in which he had happily acquiesced.

Today he had a job to do, and it was one he relished while convincing himself that it was a duty: to persuade Sebastian Morell that St. Anselm’s had to be closed and to find any additional evidence that would help to make that closure as speedy as it was inevitable. He told himself, and believed, that St. Anselm’s—expensive to maintain, remote, with only twenty carefully selected students, over-privileged and élitist—was an example of everything that was wrong with the Church of England. He admitted, and mentally congratulated himself on his honesty, that his dislike of the institution extended to its Principal—why on earth should the man be called Warden?—and that dislike was strongly personal, going well beyond any difference in churchmanship or theology. Partly, he admitted, it was class resentment. He thought of himself as having fought his way to ordination and preferment. In fact, little struggle had been necessary; in his university days his path had been smoothed by not ungenerous grants, and his mother had always indulged her only child. But Morell was the son and the grandson of bishops, and an eighteenth-century forebear had been one of the great Prince Bishops of the Church. The Morells had always been at home in palaces, and the Archdeacon knew that his adversary would put out his tentacles of family and personal influence to reach the sources of power in Whitehall, the universities and the Church, and wouldn’t yield an inch of ground in the fight to keep his fiefdom.

And there had been that dreadful horse-faced wife of his, God only knew why he had married her. Lady Veronica had been in residence at the college on the Archdeacon’s first visit, long before he was appointed as a trustee, and had sat on his left at dinner. The occasion had not been a happy one for either of them. Well, she was dead now. At least he would be spared that braying, offensively upper-class voice which it took centuries of arrogance and insensitivity to develop. What had she or her husband ever known of poverty and its humiliating
deprivations, when had they ever had to live with the violence and the intractable problems of a decayed inner-city parish? Morell had never even served as a parish priest except for two years in a fashionable provincial town. And why a man of his intellectual ability and reputation should be content to be Principal of a small isolated theological college was something of a mystery to the Archdeacon and, he suspected, not only to him.

But there could, of course, be an explanation, and it lay in the terms of Miss Arbuthnot’s deplorable will. How on earth had her legal advisers allowed her to make it? Of course, she couldn’t have known that the pictures and the silver she had given to St. Anselm’s would so appreciate in value over nearly a century and a half. In recent years St. Anselm’s had been supported by the Church. It was morally just that when the college became redundant the assets should go to the Church or to Church charities. It was inconceivable that Miss Arbuthnot had intended to make multimillionaires of the four priests fortuitously in residence at the time of the closure, one of them aged eighty and another a convicted child-abuser. He would make it his business to ensure that all valuables were removed from the college before it was formally closed. Sebastian Morell could hardly oppose the move without laying himself open to the accusation of selfishness and greed. His devious campaign to keep St. Anselm’s open was probably a ruse to conceal his interest in the spoils.

The battle lines had been formally drawn, and he was on his confident way to what he expected would be a decisive skirmish.

F
ather Sebastian knew that he would have to have a confrontation with the Archdeacon before the weekend was over, but he didn’t intend it to take place in the church. He was prepared, even eager, to stand his ground, but not before the altar. But when the Archdeacon said that he would like now to see the Rogier van der Weyden, Father Sebastian, having no excuse for not accompanying him, and feeling that merely to hand over the keys would be uncivil, consoled himself with the thought that the visit would probably be short. What, after all, could the Archdeacon object to in the church except perhaps the lingering smell of incense? He made a resolution to keep an even temper and if possible to restrict the conversation to superficialities. Surely in church two priests could talk to each other without acrimony.

They made their way down the north cloister to the sacristy door without speaking. Nothing was said until Father Sebastian had switched on the light illuminating the picture, and they stood side by side regarding it in silence.

Father Sebastian had never found words adequate to describe the effect on him of this sudden revelation of the image, and he didn’t attempt to find them now. It was a full half-minute before the Archdeacon spoke. His voice boomed unnaturally loud in the silent air.

“It shouldn’t be here, of course. Haven’t you ever given serious thought to having it moved?”

“Moved where, Archdeacon? It was given to the college by Miss Arbuthnot precisely to be placed in the church and over the altar.”

“Hardly a safe place for something so valuable. What’s it worth, do you think? Five million? Eight million? Ten million?”

“I’ve no idea. As far as safety is concerned, the altar-piece has been in place for over a hundred years. To where exactly do you propose it should be removed?”

“To somewhere safer, somewhere where other people can enjoy it. The most sensible course—and I’ve discussed this with the Bishop—would be to sell it to a museum, where it would be on public view. The Church, or indeed any worthwhile charity, could find a good use for the money. The same applies to the two most valuable of your chalices. It is inappropriate that objects of such value should be kept for the private satisfaction of twenty ordinands.”

Father Sebastian was tempted to quote a verse of scripture—“For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor”—but prudently forbore. But he couldn’t keep the note of outrage from his voice.

“The altar-piece is the property of this college. It will certainly not be sold while I am Warden, nor will it be removed. The silver will be kept in the sanctuary safe and used for the purpose for which it was made.”

“Even though its presence means that the church has to be kept locked and is unavailable to the ordinands?”

“It isn’t unavailable. They have only to ask for the keys.”

“The need to pray is sometimes more spontaneous than remembering to ask for a key.”

“That’s why we have the oratory.”

The Archdeacon turned away and Father Sebastian walked over to switch off the light. His companion said, “In any case, when the college is closed the picture will have to be removed. I don’t know what the diocese has in mind for this place—I mean the church itself. It’s too remote to serve again as a parish church even as part of a team ministry. Where would you get a congregation? It’s unlikely that whoever buys the house will want a private chapel, but you never know. It’s difficult to see who would be interested in buying. Remote, inconvenient to run, difficult to reach and with no direct access to the beach. It would hardly be suitable for a hotel or convalescent home. And
with the coast erosion there’s no certainty it will be here in twenty years’ time.”