The Judgement of Strangers (19 page)

‘What’s wrong?’

‘She’s dead. The old lady’s dead.’ There was a fresh burst of sobbing.

‘Doris, I’m so sorry.’

The sobbing continued. I had not realized that Doris was quite so attached to her employer; nor would I have said that she was an hysterical woman – quite the reverse. But death is a great revealer.

‘You’ve just found her, I imagine?’ There was no reply, except sobbing, but I persevered. ‘My dear, she was an old lady. It had to happen. Probably sooner rather than later.’ The familiar platitudes slipped out of my mouth automatically. ‘She was in a great deal of pain, and there was nothing to look forward to, either.’ Platitudes have the outstanding advantage of being true. ‘And think how she would have hated having to go into a home or a hospital. At least she died in her own bed.’

‘But she didn’t,’ Doris wailed.

‘She’d managed to get up in the night, had she?’ Perhaps she had wanted her commode. ‘After the nurse had –’

‘I could kill her.’

‘Who?’

‘That nurse. The bloody woman didn’t turn up. The old lady’s been lying there for days.’ The voice rose into a wail again, but the words, though distorted, were clear enough. ‘And the dogs have been eating her.’

Ronald Trask loved committees the way other men love football or train-spotting. He was in his element, especially when he was in the chair. He had the knack of driving his way through the agenda, achieving his own aims while preserving the appearance of democracy. He had become archdeacon two years before; and since then he had invited me to more meetings than his predecessor had done in the previous eight years.

One of Ronald’s little gatherings was scheduled for half past ten on the morning of Monday the 17th August. The weather was cool and cloudy. Six of us sat at the round table in the Trasks’ dining room. We could see our faces in the polished surface. There were flowers, a carafe of water, glasses, pristine ashtrays and in front of each of us a neatly typed agenda, the work of Cynthia. The details stuck in my mind like pins in a pin cushion – hard, sharp particles of reality embedded in a sponge of uncertainty; I concentrated on them because they left less room for what I had seen an hour earlier at the Old Manor House.

‘We are not so much a committee,’ Ronald informed us, ‘as a working party.’

He and the others murmured soothingly in the background. Our purpose was to examine ways of halting the decline of Sunday School attendance. On two occasions Ronald tried to draw me into the discussion but without marked success. Afterwards, as the others were leaving, he asked me to stay behind for a word. He took me into his study.

‘Are you all right, David? I thought you looked a little out of sorts in the meeting.’

‘I’m sorry – I do have a headache.’ I couldn’t face telling him the details about Lady Youlgreave so I merely added, ‘Two of my parishioners died over the weekend.’

‘It’s always a bit of a shock, isn’t it? Even when the death’s expected. Do sit down.’ Ronald waved me to a chair in front of his desk and hurried on. ‘Tell me, have you seen any more of the Cliffords?’

‘In a manner of speaking, we’re neighbours. They’re very kindly lending us their paddock for our fete on Saturday week.’

‘Ah.’

‘What is it?’

‘Don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong,’ he said, eyeing me curiously. He settled himself behind the desk, and his fingertips stroked the leather cover of his diary – tenderly, as though it were a woman’s skin. ‘Just grounds for caution.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘We had lunch with the Thurstons yesterday. Victor had been at some Masonic do the night before, and he’d been talking to one of his policeman friends. I thought I’d pass on what he’d told me. Word to the wise, eh?’

‘What’s wrong with the Cliffords?’

‘Nothing’s wrong with the children – not as far as I know, nothing for certain, though the boy seems to have some unsavoury friends. No, the problem is the parents. Ever heard of Derek Clifford?’

I shook my head.

‘Nor had I until yesterday,’ Ronald went on. ‘Not the name he was born with, by the way – his parents came from Poland. Apparently, he owned a chain of clubs in London. Little nightclubs, I gather. Most of them had a short life. Nothing was ever proved, but the police were absolutely certain that Clifford was running them as a front for all sorts of other activities – gambling, prostitution, even receiving stolen goods.’

‘But nothing was proved?’

‘Not in a way that would stand up in a court of law. But I understand that there was no real doubt about it.’

‘Is the father alive?’

‘He died last year. The mother died in the spring. There was an inquest.’ Ronald interlaced his fingers and stared at the ceiling, as if praying, as perhaps he was. ‘The poor woman was an alcoholic, and on the night in question she’d taken some sleeping pills. She choked on her own vomit. There was some question about the death – whether it was suicide or accident.’

I thought of Joanna finding her mother’s body.

‘And then there’s the question of money,’ Ronald was saying. ‘I don’t know what those young people paid for Roth Park, but presumably the money ultimately came from their father. The odds are, it wasn’t honestly come by.’

‘You can’t blame them for that.’

‘It depends, doesn’t it?’

‘What do you mean?’

Ronald leant forward, his elbows resting on the desk, and smiled at me. ‘It depends on whether the children were involved with their father’s activities. Thurston’s asked his policeman friend to have a word with a few colleagues in London. Just in case there’s something there.’

‘I don’t like it.’ I stood up. ‘I’m sorry, Ronald, but it seems as though the Cliffords are being condemned because of hearsay evidence about what their father might or might not have done.’

‘Condemned?’ Ronald stood up as well. ‘Of course not. My fault – I can’t have made myself clear. All I’m saying is that it’s wise to take elementary precautions. Especially in our position. Don’t you agree?’

‘If you say so.’ I didn’t bother to keep the anger from my voice. ‘Is there anything else?’

‘No, not at present.’ He followed me into the hall. ‘I’ll keep you informed.’

We said goodbye. I wondered whether Ronald was doing his job, or using the Cliffords as a way to make my life a little uncomfortable. Or perhaps both – motives are often muddled. As I drove back to Roth, I thought about my reasons for taking an interest in the young Cliffords. I had no right to condemn Ronald or anyone else for mixed motives.

Vanessa was at work so there were three of us for lunch in the Vicarage kitchen. No one was hungry. We nibbled at cold ham and elderly salad.

Afterwards, while we were washing up, Rosemary said, ‘You know this thing about perverting the judgement of strangers – did you have time to look it up?’

‘Not yet. It’s Old Testament. I’m almost certain it’s from Deuteronomy.’

‘Does it mean muddling strangers?’ Michael asked suddenly. ‘Making visitors confused?’

‘No.’ I smiled at him. ‘It was about legal disputes in Israel. Widows and orphans and strangers were the vulnerable people in a community.’

This seemed to satisfy the curiosity of Rosemary and Michael, but it stimulated mine – and reminded me that I had promised Vanessa to look into the origins of the phrase. After washing up, I took my coffee into the study.

I found the relevant verse in Deuteronomy, Chapter 27, Verse 19. Both the Authorized Version and the Revised Version had an almost identical translation to that in the Prayer Book. I looked out my copy of the Vulgate to check the Latin translation:
Maledictus qui pervertit iudicium advenae pupilli et viduae
. The most recent translation I had on my shelves was the Jerusalem Bible. ‘A curse on him who tampers with the rights of the stranger, the orphan, and the widow.’ The notes in the commentary referred me to parallel texts in an earlier chapter of Deuteronomy and to a much earlier one in Exodus, Chapter 23:

Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. Ye shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child. If thou afflict them in any wise, and they cry at all unto me, I will surely hear their cry; and my wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword; and your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless.

I opened a drawer and took out a pad of paper, thinking that I should write a few notes for Vanessa. I knew, of course, that I was trying to distract myself from the thought of Lady Youlgreave and the implications of her death. This sort of work was a luxury for me; scholarship could be a snare just as surely as the more traditional temptations. It occurred to me as I was uncapping my fountain pen that I was not the only one looking for distractions. Why else had Rosemary raised the subject of ‘The Judgement of Strangers’ at lunch? Why had none of us mentioned the subject of Lady Youlgreave?

I pushed aside the questions and made notes. The Deuteronomic legislation of the seventh century BC had been comparable to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe over two thousand years later: a determined attempt to reform the national religion. The compilers of the book were intolerant of dissent, but their moral teaching was remarkably humane. The fact that the phrase ‘perverting justice’ was so well established in the Old Testament suggested that such abuse was a long-running problem.

I turned to the original Hebrew and to the Septuagint, the most influential of the Greek translations of the Old Testament. The word I wanted to check, the crucial word in the passage, was
stranger
. In Hebrew the word was
gêr
, which meant ‘protected stranger’ – in other words, a stranger who lived under the protection of a family or tribe to which he did not belong. (The Arabs had a similar word for the protected stranger, the
jâr
.) The life of a
gêr
could be hard – I made a note about Jacob’s complaint concerning his treatment by Laban in Genesis 31. A whole clan or family might be
gerim
. The same distinction was preserved in the Greek of the Septuagint. ‘Stranger’ was not translated by the obvious word,
xenos
, but by
proselutos
, which meant a licensed foreign resident. Was the implication, I wondered, that complete strangers were unprotected, that they were the legitimate prey of those whose territory they strayed into?

As I was making a note of these points for Vanessa, I heard a car pulling off the main road into the Vicarage drive. I glanced out of the window and saw an Austin Maxi drawing up. The passenger door opened and Sergeant Clough climbed out, pipe in mouth. Franklyn wriggled out of the driver’s side. My tranquillity evaporated. I reached the front door before they did.

‘Good afternoon, sir.’ Clough rubbed his bald head and stared past me into the hall. ‘Mind if we come in? Just for a quick word.’

I took them into the study, and settled them in hard chairs in front of my desk.

‘Mrs Byfield not in? She works, doesn’t she?’ Clough made the idea sound slightly indecent.

‘How can I help you?’

‘It’s Lady Youlgreave, this time, not the cat.’ He raised his eyebrows, perhaps signalling that he was making a mild joke; the rest of his face remained serious. ‘Sad business.’

‘Indeed.’

Franklyn took out his notebook and a pencil.

‘Don’t mind Frankie taking notes, sir. Just for the record.’

‘I’m not sure I see how I can help you. I didn’t actually find the body – Doris Potter did that. And Dr Vintner can tell you more about Lady Youlgreave’s injuries – he must have arrived about fifteen minutes after I did.’

‘Oh, we have to look down every avenue, sir. It may be a cul-de-sac, so to speak, but we have to check. You wouldn’t believe how much of Frankie’s time is spent taking notes that turn out to be absolutely useless. But you never know, do you? You can’t take anything for granted.’

Clough in his role as homespun philosopher was irritating me. ‘What exactly do you want to know?’

‘I wish I knew, sir – in a manner of speaking, that is. Something and nothing. In cases like this – sad death of old lady, who is already very ill – bound to have happened sooner or later, probably sooner – well, usually there’s no problem. Not as far as we’re concerned. And there may not be a problem in this case, either. But Dr Vintner thought that he should have a word with the coroner’s officer, and he thought we should have a word with you. In view of the circumstances, you see.’

‘Which circumstances?’

‘Well, first of all: the last person to see the old lady was apparently her cleaning woman, Mrs Potter. And that was at about seven o’clock on Friday evening. But the body wasn’t found till Monday morning. Now that’s –’

‘One minute,’ I interrupted. ‘Why didn’t the nurse from the Fishguard Agency go in over the weekend? Mrs Potter goes in – went in – during the week, Mondays to Fridays. But the agency nurse came in on Saturday and Sunday. Twice a day – morning and early evening.’

‘But not this weekend, Mr Byfield.’ Clough was watching me closely. ‘Curious, eh? Apparently, Lady Youlgreave phoned the agency on Friday evening – must have been about seven-thirty, they reckon – and said some relations had come to stay for the weekend, and they’d look after her.’

‘I wasn’t aware that Lady Youlgreave had any close relations. But I do know that she didn’t like using the telephone.’

Clough struck a match and held it over his pipe. The pipe made a gurgling sound. ‘Why did you go and see the old lady on Friday, sir?’

I did not want to involve myself in explanations concerning the bird table. I could imagine Clough’s reaction. Lord Peter had already made me ridiculous enough in the eyes of the police. I took the morally dubious course of avoiding the question while seeming to answer it. ‘I regularly visited her, Sergeant. It’s part of my job to visit the old and infirm.’