Day of Vengeance: Dorothy Martin investigates murder in the cathedral (A Dorothy Martin Mystery) (3 page)

‘Thank you very much, Mr Dean, Mr Nesbitt. I think those are all the questions I have for now. I appreciate your cooperation. And may I offer my condolences on your loss.’

I didn’t miss his quick glance at all of us after that barbed remark.

A
fter they had left, we were silent, contemplating what came next. Alan was thoroughly accustomed to murder, of course, after his long career with the police. I had poked my nose into enough mysterious deaths that I, too, had acquired a certain patina of acceptance. But this one came too close to home. I doubt that Alan had ever before been asked to ‘assist the police in their enquiries’.

And as for the dean, I wondered if he was completely out of his depth. With spiritual malaise he was totally familiar, and he knew how to deal with it, kindly, competently, compassionately. He was a good administrator for the Cathedral, whose business affairs were, as far as I knew, in excellent condition. But murder?

I thought back to the first murder case I’d ever been involved with, when I first moved to Sherebury from my life-long home in Indiana. That, too, had involved the Cathedral – the murder of one of the canons. Alan had still been chief constable then, and a friend of the dean’s, and had investigated discreetly but thoroughly. The dean had handled the situation with dignity and quiet faith.

Perhaps I was underestimating him.

He was the first to speak. ‘Alan, I did not kill Andrew Brading. Nor did you. But you and I may well know the person who did. Given our knowledge of the tensions within the commission, we may be in a better position than most to have insights that the police will not. I think it is our duty to put all our energies into helping the police discover the murderer.’

‘You do realize that we are both bound to be under suspicion.’

‘Of course. But as we are innocent, we need have no fear.’

Alan looked – as I felt – just a trifle exasperated. ‘I’m afraid, Kenneth, that your little speech about damage control didn’t do you any good. If you’ll accept my advice, you’ll have one of the Cathedral counsel with you the next time you speak with the police.’

‘My dear Alan.’ The dean smiled. ‘You think I’m too open, too forthcoming? But again I say, the innocent need fear nothing.’

‘Not from the final judgement, no. I accept that. But there are a good many steps before we get to that judgement seat, and some of them are in charge of fallible humans.’

‘I never,’ said the dean with the hint of a twinkle, ‘thought the day would come that I would hear you describe the police as fallible.’

‘Oh, I can attest to the fact that they are,’ I said, ‘and really, Kenneth, you need to listen to Alan. If they start suspecting you – well, once the police get an idea in their heads, it can be awfully hard to dislodge. But you’re quite right, of course. We’re going to have to do all we can to figure out who killed this man. For a start, who hated him enough to do this terrible thing?’

Alan looked at the dean. The dean looked at Alan. Both sighed. Watson was once again disturbed. He whined softly, and Alan reached down to pat him on the head. ‘Don’t worry, mutt. Everything’s all right with your world. The trouble with your question, my dear, is that so many people disliked the man.’

‘Dislike and hatred are two different things.’

‘Of course they are. And the one isn’t simply an intensification of the other. It takes, typically, either a series of increasing grievances boiling up or a single action intolerable to the – the disliker, if I may coin a word – for dislike to develop into hatred. Kenneth, how did you read the commission meeting? Among those opposing Brading, did you sense anyone harbouring real hatred?’

The dean shook his head slowly. ‘I wish I had a definitive answer. There was so much ill feeling in the room, so many opposing views about all the candidates, that I couldn’t sort out who was feeling what.’

‘And you’re good at discerning emotions,’ I said thoughtfully.

‘Well, when one has been a priest for over forty years, one does learn a little about human nature.’ The dean spread his hands self-deprecatingly.

‘A policeman learns to sort out emotions, too.’ I turned to Alan. ‘What did you sense?’

‘You know I can’t go into specifics, even to you. Political interests were overt, of course,’ he said. ‘Church politics, I mean. Jostling for position. Then there was a good deal of self-interest – less obvious, but certainly present. Several of the members thought they stood to lose something if one or another candidate became bishop.’

‘It wasn’t all personal, though,’ said Kenneth. ‘Some of the clergy, especially, were agonizing over the impact on the Church as a whole, or on the diocese in particular.’

‘That sort of thing can get awfully heated,’ I pointed out. ‘Look at the wars that have been fought over religion. All religions.’

‘Yes …’ said Alan thoughtfully. ‘But that kind of feeling isn’t usually directed against one individual, but against a group. You get terrorist activity, you get massacres like the World Trade Center and, most horrendous of all, the Holocaust. Killing one cleric doesn’t seem to fit the pattern.’

I nodded. ‘I agree. So, what other kinds of nastiness surfaced at your meeting yesterday? Anything specific about this particular man?’

Neither man replied for a moment, then Alan said slowly, ‘I had a sense, which may have been completely mistaken, of a suppressed fury directed against Brading. Or it may have been aimed at Brading’s supporters, who were, as you might guess, the ultra-conservatives in the group. It wasn’t so much anything that was said as something that was left unsaid but was quivering in the air. I’m sorry. I know that’s not much help.’

‘I felt something of the same,’ said the dean, ‘but I have no idea who was projecting such distress. Of course, I’m not a trained observer.’

Alan groaned. ‘And I am. I know, I know. If I had been paying attention to body language, I might have seen a clenched fist, rapid breathing, pinched lips – but I wasn’t and I didn’t. I was too busy trying to keep my own reactions within the bounds of civilized behaviour.’

I sighed. ‘So I suppose it’s going to come down to a background check of Brading, interviews with anyone who knew him well, his cathedral staff, and so on. All the routine stuff, which obviously the police can do much better than we can.’

‘Routine background checks have already been done on anyone who might be nominated for the position,’ said Alan. ‘That’s an obvious necessity these days. No one with a criminal background, no one with a suggestion of sexually predatory tendencies, no one with any scandal of any kind in his past could be considered. The checks, however, weren’t anything like as complete and rigorous as the ones that will need to be done now. I didn’t always, as a policeman, agree with a great deal in your beloved detective stories, Dorothy. But, in one thing, Hercule Poirot was absolutely right: The key to solving a murder is often a thorough knowledge of the victim.’

‘And,’ I went on, ‘of his potential murderers. Now, in trying to limit that roster, it would certainly be useful to know when the man died. I know when he was found, but when did he actually die?’

‘I’m not sure the police know that yet, and the Gloucestershire people may not tell me when they do. Derek probably will. But you know as well as I do, Dorothy, the medical examiners can often only determine a range, sometimes rather a wide range, especially when the body is found some little time after death, as would appear to be the case here. So the time of death may not be particularly helpful.’

I took a deep breath. ‘Well, then, I think we need to work out where we can be most useful. There’s no point in trying to duplicate the efforts of the police. The things they do – the routine procedures – they can do far more efficiently than any amateur. Saving your presence, Alan.’

‘I’m an amateur now, love. I don’t have the might of the force behind me, though I can still call in a few favours now and again. But, essentially, I’m part of your posse. What did you have in mind?’

‘Nothing yet. We don’t know enough. We need to create an approach to the problem. What we need is to know everything we can about Dean Brading, and who might have hated him enough to prevent his ever coming to Sherebury. And since we have to start somewhere, I suggest we start with the members of the commission. What’s the most likely source of information about them?’

The four of us said, together, ‘Jane!’

Jane Langland, my next-door neighbour and oldest friend in Sherebury, was a mine of information about people. She wasn’t a gossip, but she was active in almost every women’s activity in Sherebury. She had been a teacher for many, many years, and scores of her former pupils visited her often. She looked a great deal like the bulldogs she loved, and behind a gruff manner she hid a heart of custard. We gathered in her kitchen and sat around the table, surrounded by the bulldogs. We weren’t eating anything, but they lived in hope. Jane had made a pitcher of lemonade, apparently anticipating our visit. She knew we’d come seeking information sooner or later.

‘Can eliminate the archbishops, for a start,’ said Jane. ‘They’ve better ways of dealing with an undesirable dean.’

‘Yes, we’ll give you the archbishops,’ said the dean, smiling. ‘And I think we can eliminate the two secretaries. They’re on the commission as functionaries, and took no part in the discussions. That leaves ten people, besides Alan and me.’

‘Nine,’ I interjected. ‘We know our MP, Newsome, was a friend of Brading’s’

‘Friends have been known to fall out, but you may be right,’ the dean went on. ‘We can leave him till last, at any rate. Now, I know the other four from our diocese reasonably well, but you, Jane, probably know more
about
them than I.’

Jane shrugged. ‘Bits here and there. Nothing startling, nothing much you don’t know, Kenneth. Some sorrows here and there. Vicar of Ledingham lost her baby years ago, born dead. Couldn’t have another.’

The dean nodded sadly. ‘She is an amazingly strong woman. I admire her greatly, and was very glad when she was elected to the committee, but I think we can wash her out as a suspect. The strength I refer to is moral, not physical. She’s quite small and delicate.’

Alan nodded in agreement.

‘And, of course, poor Tompkins’ mind is as strong as ever, but I doubt he could harm a flea, considering the palsy.’ The dean turned to Dorothy. ‘Ben Tompkins is the other diocesan cleric on the committee, vicar of Padston.’

‘So that disposes of the clergy, at least from this diocese. What about our other two lay members?’

‘I know very little about them, except that they expressed rather conservative views in the meeting,’ said Alan.

‘So they might have liked Brading,’ I suggested. ‘I know he was almost reactionary.’

I looked at the dean, who shook his head. ‘They don’t frequent the Cathedral. I never met them before the meeting, and know nothing about them.’

We turned again to Jane, who spread her hands. ‘Don’t know them well. Another tragedy in one of the families, the Lesters. Nephew bullied at school, killed himself. The mother never got over it, in and out of mental institutions. Years ago,’ she said to the dean. ‘You mightn’t have known. Don’t know anything about the other – Hathaway – except there’s some talk that he’s on dicey ground financially. Don’t know if there’s any truth to it.’

Alan had been taking notes. ‘All right, from this diocese we have one clergyman who could not physically have committed the crime, and one clergywoman who is unlikely. I’m going to leave her on the list, though, because it isn’t absolutely impossible that she could have done it. Until we know more about the actual cause of death, we’re speculating. We know almost nothing of the lay diocesan members, except for the tragedy in Lester’s family long ago, and a nasty rumour about Hathaway. That sort of thing, whether true or not, can make a man vulnerable, so at this point I rather like him as a possible suspect.

‘Moving on. We think we can eliminate Newsome, from the Synod contingent. I have reservations about that, but for now we can set him aside. What about the others? Kenneth, what do you know about the clergy?’

‘Not a great deal. I’ve met them casually, of course, on various occasions, but Birmingham and Leeds are rather out of my usual orbit. Letitia Morgan, of St Cross, Oxford, I know somewhat better. Admirable woman. Jane?’

She shook her head. ‘Out of my range as well.’

‘Of the other two lay members, leaving out Newsome, I know only what I gleaned from committee meetings, which wasn’t much. You, Alan?’

‘Ms Baring – she’s a barrister, Dorothy – is smooth and well spoken. Well-off, judging from her clothes and general appearance. She obviously can’t abide … well, another of the candidates, but I don’t recall much of her attitude towards Brading or the other two. Then Hilliard, the other layman, I could scarcely read at all. He seldom spoke, though when he did, his remarks were well argued and to the point. One can see why he’s a successful businessman. He didn’t seem to favour any of the candidates, particularly. I had the impression he was a trifle bored with the whole business.’

‘I agree,’ said the dean. ‘But that leaves us knowing very little about those two, or the Birmingham and Leeds clergy – as personalities, I mean.’

‘Then that’s the obvious place to start, the place where we know the least. Alan, is there any reason why we shouldn’t go on a little tour of the Midlands and the North?’

‘I can think of several reasons, Dorothy.’ Alan frowned. ‘The first is that the police will certainly be taking a careful look at the commission members. As you point out, that is the sort of routine at which they excel. And don’t forget that I am still under suspicion myself, and it does not behove me to take any action that might interfere with the police. Second, you seem to forget that we’re dealing here with a murderer, and there might be considerable danger involved. Third, although we’ve worked together successfully over several cases, they were far narrower in scope. This is a matter of national importance.’

‘“Any man’s death diminishes me”,’ the dean quoted gently. ‘But you’re right, Alan, on both counts, both as to the danger involved and the scope of this matter. I’m sorry, Dorothy. I know you’re pining to exercise your undoubted sleuthing skills. But I do agree with Alan that, as the police will be dealing with the commission members, we’d best leave them for now. There is a different direction that we can take, however; something we can all do – all five of us in this room. It is indeed required of you and me, Alan, and there’s no reason at all why our spouses or a member of the parish might not join us on occasion. We will visit the three remaining candidates in their home churches and try to learn as much about them as possible. And if, in the process, we were to learn something about Mr Brading and his associates, it would only prove that God does in fact work in a mysterious way.’