Death in Holy Orders (24 page)

He parked his Vauxhall Cavalier in the road and walked to his front door, down the concrete path which dissected the spongy saturated lawn on which decaying rose petals were dissolving into the unmown grass. The house was totally silent and he entered, as always, with apprehension. Barbara had been sullen and fidgety at breakfast, and the restlessness and the fact that she hadn’t bothered to dress were always a bad sign. At their lunch of soup from a carton followed by a salad, still in her dressing-gown, she had pushed her plate away, saying that she was too tired to eat; she would go to bed for the afternoon and try to sleep.

She had said petulantly, “You’d better go to your boring old parishioners. They’re all you care about anyway. Don’t disturb
me when you get back. I don’t want to hear about them. I don’t want to hear about anything.”

He had not replied, but had watched with a surge of anger and helplessness as slowly she mounted the stairs, the silk belt of her dressing-gown trailing, her head drooping as if in an agony of despair.

Now, returning home and burdened with apprehension, he closed the front door behind him. Was she still in bed, or had she waited for him to leave, then dressed and gone out on one of her destructive and humiliating insurgencies into the parish? He had to know. He mounted the stairs quietly; if she were asleep he had no wish to wake her.

The door to the bedroom was shut and he turned the doorknob gently. The room was in semi-darkness, the curtains partly drawn across the one long window, which gave a view of the rectangle of grass, rough as a field, the triangular beds which were the garden, and beyond to the rows of neat identical houses. He moved towards the bed and, as his eyes adjusted to the half-light, saw her clearly. She was lying on her right side, her hand curled against her cheek. The left arm was flung out over the bedclothes. Bending down, he could hear her breathing, low and laboured, could smell the wine on her breath and a stronger, sweet, disagreeable stink which he identified as vomit. On the bedside table was a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. Beside it, lying on its side and with the screw-cap rolled a little apart, was a large empty bottle which he recognized. It had contained tablets of soluble aspirin.

He told himself that she was asleep, that she was drunk, that she needed to be left undisturbed. Almost instinctively he picked up the wine bottle and was about to judge how much she had drunk when something as strong as a warning voice made him put it down again. He saw that there was a handkerchief protruding from beneath the pillow. Taking it, he wiped the bottle clean, then dropped the handkerchief on the bed. It seemed to him that his actions were as without volition as they were without sense. Then he left her, closing the door behind him, and went downstairs. He told himself again: She’s asleep, she’s drunk, she won’t want to be disturbed. After half an hour he went to his study, calmly got the papers together for the six
o’clock meeting of the Parochial Church Council and left the house.

He had no mental picture, no memory of the PCC meeting, but he could remember driving home with Melvyn Hopkins, one of the churchwardens. He had promised Melvyn to let him have a sight of the latest report of the church’s committee on social responsibility and had suggested that Melvyn accompany him to the vicarage. And now the sequence of images was clear again. Himself apologizing for the fact that Barbara wasn’t there and telling Melvyn that she had been unwell, going up again to the bedroom and again gently opening the door, seeing in the half-light the still figure, the wine bottle, the bottle of pills on its side. He went over to the bed. This time there was no low raucous breathing. Putting out his hand to her cheek, he found that it was cold and knew that what he was touching was death. And then there came a memory, words heard or read from some forgotten source, but now terrifying in their implication. It was always wise to have someone with you when you found the body.

He couldn’t relive the events of the church funeral service or the cremation; he had no memory of either. In their place was a jumble of faces—sympathetic, concerned, frankly anxious—zooming at him out of darkness, distorted and grotesque. And now there was that one dreaded face. He was sitting on the sofa again, but this time with Sergeant Yarwood and a young uniformed boy who looked no older than one of his boy choristers and who sat silent throughout the interrogation.

“And when you returned to the house, from visiting your parishioners, shortly after five, you say, what exactly did you do, sir?”

“I’ve told you, Sergeant. I went up to the bedroom to see if my wife was still sleeping.”

“When you opened the door, was the bedside lamp on?”

“No, it wasn’t. The curtains were almost completely drawn and the room was in semi-darkness.”

“Did you go up to the body?”

“I’ve told you, Sergeant. I just looked in, saw that my wife was still in bed and assumed that she was asleep.”

“And she went to bed—when was that?”

“At lunch-time. I suppose about half-past twelve. She said she wasn’t hungry, that she was going to have a sleep.”

“Didn’t you think it strange that she should still be sleeping after five hours?”

“No, I didn’t. She said that she was tired. My wife often did sleep in the afternoons.”

“Didn’t it occur to you that she might be ill? Didn’t it occur to you to go up to the bed and make sure she was all right? Didn’t you realize that she might urgently need a doctor?”

“I’ve told you—I’m tired of telling you—I thought she was asleep.”

“Did you see the two bottles on the bedside table, the wine and the soluble aspirin?”

“I saw the wine bottle. I guessed my wife had been drinking.”

“Did she take the bottle of wine up to bed with her?”

“No, she didn’t. She must have come down for it after I left the house.”

“And carried it up to bed with her?”

“I suppose so. There was no one else in the house. Of course she took it up to bed with her. How else could it have got on the bedside table?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it, sir? You see, there were no fingerprints on the wine bottle. Can you explain how that could be?”

“Of course I can’t. I assume she wiped them off. There was a handkerchief half under the pillow.”

“Which you were able to see although you couldn’t see the upturned bottle?”

“Not at the time. I saw it later, when I found her body.”

And so the questions went on. Yarwood returned time and time again, sometimes with the young uniformed constable, but sometimes on his own. Crampton came to dread every ring at the door and could hardly bear to look out of the windows in case he saw that grey-coated figure moving resolutely up the path. The questions were always the same, and his answers became unconvincing even to his own ears. Even after the inquest and the expected verdict of suicide the persecution continued. Barbara had been cremated weeks before. There was nothing
left of her but a few handfuls of ground bones buried in a corner of the churchyard, and still Yarwood continued his inquiries.

Never had nemesis arrived in a less personable form. Yarwood looked like a doorstep salesman, doggedly persistent, inured to rejection, carrying with him like halitosis the taint of failure. He was slightly built, surely only just tall enough to qualify for the police, sallow-skinned and with a high bony forehead and dark secretive eyes. He seldom looked directly at Crampton during the questioning but focused on the middle distance as if communing with an internal controller. His voice never varied from a monotone, and the silence between the questions was pregnant with a menace which seemed to embrace more than his victim. He seldom gave notice of his coming but seemed to know when Crampton was at home and would wait with apparently docile patience at the front door until silently ushered in. There were never any preliminaries, only the insistent questions.

“Would you say it was a happy marriage, sir?”

The impertinence of it shocked Crampton into silence, then he found himself replying in a voice of such harshness that he could hardly recognize it: “I suppose that for the police every relationship, even the most sacred, can be classified. You should hand out a marriage questionnaire, it would save everyone time. Tick the appropriate box: Very happy. Happy. Reasonably happy. A little unhappy. Unhappy. Very unhappy. Murderous.”

There was a silence, then Yarwood said, “And which box would you tick, sir?”

In the end Crampton made a formal complaint to the Chief Constable and the visits ceased. He was told that after the inquiry it was accepted that Sergeant Yarwood had exceeded his authority, particularly in arriving alone and pursuing an investigation which had not been authorized. He remained in Crampton’s memory as a dark, accusing figure. Time, the new parish, his appointment to archdeacon, his second marriage—nothing could assuage the burning anger which consumed him whenever he thought of Yarwood.

And now today the man had appeared again. He couldn’t remember
what exactly they had said to each other. He only knew that his own resentment and bitterness had been poured out in a torrent of angry vituperation.

He had prayed, at first regularly and then intermittently, since Barbara’s death, asking forgiveness for his sins against her: impatience, intolerance, lack of love, failure to understand or to forgive. But the sin of wishing her dead had never been allowed to take root in his mind. And he had received his absolution to the lesser sin of neglect. It had come in the words of Barbara’s general practitioner when they had met just before the inquest.

“One thing has been on my mind. If I’d realized when I came home that Barbara wasn’t asleep—that she was in a coma—and had called for an ambulance, would it have made any difference?”

He had received the absolving reply: “With the quantity she had taken and drunk, none at all.”

What was there about this place that forced him to confront the greater as well as the lesser lies? He had known she was in danger of death. He had hoped that she would die. He was in the eyes of his God, surely, as guilty of murder as if he had dissolved those tablets and forced them down her throat, as if he had held the glass of wine to her lips. How could he continue to minister to others, to preach the forgiveness of sins, when his own great sin was unacknowledged? How could he have stood up before that congregation tonight with this darkness in his soul?

He put out his hand and switched on the bedside lamp. It flooded the room with light, surely brighter than when, by that gentle glow, he had read his evening passage of scripture. He got out of bed and knelt, burying his head in his hands. It wasn’t necessary to search for the words; they came to him naturally, and with them came the promise of forgiveness and peace. “Lord be merciful to me, a sinner.”

It was while he was kneeling there that his mobile telephone on the bedside table broke the silence with its cheerfully incongruous tune. The sound was so unexpected, so discordant, that for five seconds he didn’t recognize it. Then he got stiffly to his feet and put out his hand to answer the call.

S
hortly before five-thirty Father Martin woke himself with a shriek of terror. He jerked up in bed and sat, rigid as a doll, staring wild-eyed into the darkness. Beads of sweat ran down his forehead and stung his eyes. Brushing them away, he felt his skin taut and ice cold, as if already in the rigor of death. Gradually, as the horror of the nightmare ended, the room took shape around him. Grey forms, more imagined than seen, revealed themselves out of darkness and became comfortingly familiar: a chair, the chest of drawers, the footboard of his bed, the outline of a picture frame. The curtains over the four circular windows were drawn, but from the east he could see a thin sliver of the faint light which even on the darkest night hovered above the sea. He was aware of the storm. The wind had been rising all evening, and by the time he had composed himself for sleep it was howling round the tower like a banshee. But now there was a lull more ominous than welcome and, sitting up rigidly, he listened to the silence. He heard no footfall on the stairs, no calling voice.

When the nightmares began two years earlier, he had asked to be given this small circular room in the southern tower, explaining that he liked the wide view of the sea and coast and was attracted by the silence and solitude. The stairs were becoming a tedious climb, but at least he could hope that his waking screams would be unheard. But somehow Father Sebastian had guessed the truth, or part of it. Father Martin remembered their brief conversation one Sunday after Mass.

Father Sebastian had said, “Are you sleeping well, Father?”

“Reasonably so, thank you.”

“If you are disturbed by bad dreams I understand there is
help available. I’m not thinking of counselling, not in the ordinary sense, but sometimes talking about the past with others who have suffered the same experience is said to be helpful.”

The conversation had surprised Father Martin. Father Sebastian had made no secret of his distrust of psychiatrists, saying that he would be more inclined to respect them if they could explain the medical or philosophical basis of their discipline, or could define for him the difference between the mind and the brain. But it had always surprised him how much Father Sebastian knew about what was going on under the roof of St. Anselm’s. The conversation had been unwelcome to Father Martin, the matter not pursued. He knew that he was not the only survivor of a Japanese prison camp who was being tormented in old age by horrors which a younger brain had been able to suppress. He had no wish to sit in a circle discussing his experiences with fellow-sufferers, although he had read that some found it helpful. This was something he had to deal with himself.

And now the wind was rising, a rhythmic moaning that rose to a howling and then screeching intensity, more a malignant manifestation than a force of nature. He urged his legs out of bed, pushed his feet into his bedroom slippers and pottered stiffly over to open the east-facing window. The cold blast was like a healing draught, cleaning his mouth and nostrils of the foetid stench of the jungle, drowning the all-too-human moans and screams with its wild cacophony, cleansing his mind of the worst of the images.