Blood Brotherhood (20 page)

‘What is it?' he asked, and the policemen fanned out to let him come in closer.

They were standing round an ancient incinerator, of sturdy local iron-work, looking as old as the buildings themselves, and hidden from the general gaze behind a row of green beans. It was capacious, and obviously used to destroy garden rubbish. The fire had been doused, however, and now the door was held open by one of the police boffins. He beckoned Croft over.

‘See here,' he said. Croft bent down close. Caught in the hinge of the door were several long strands of material, making up a little rectangle. As far as could be seen the material, which was brown, was stained and discoloured in some way.

‘That's what your man was wearing, I'd say, wouldn't you?' said the boffin.

‘A monk's habit?' said Croft.

‘Looks like it, doesn't it? That should make things simpler for you, shouldn't it?'

• • •

Ernest Clayton was a good sleeper. He lived a contented life, his job presented him with few problems that could not be sloughed off at the end of the day, and his digestion was good, never having been ruined by the sort of food and drink which were well beyond his income. He slept, if not the sleep of the just, at least the sleep of the temperate.

But tonight he did not sleep. When he did doze off, it was fitful and troubled, and soon he was awake again, staring at the ceiling, making patterns of the shadow cast
by the moon over his room, and trying to sort out his suspicions and see clearly his moral duties. All these considerations seemed to point in different directions.

One thing had become clear to him since his interview with Father Anselm that morning: his suspicions of that gentleman rested on laughably slight foundations. To that extent Anselm's points had gone home. On the other hand, suspicious of him he still was.

The simplest solution would be to go to the police. After all, it was undeniable that on the night of the murder, there was among the brothers an outsider, whose presence had not been declared to the police, and who had since left. He had no doubt that Detective-Inspector Croft would be more than interested to learn this.

On the other hand, he had hoped to be a little further than this when he presented the results of his investigations to the police. He had to admit to himself that since the Bishop had told him of the murder there had been gaining living space in his mind this image of himself handing the answer on a plate to the police, or at the very least asking the illuminating question that everybody else had forgotten to ask.

And then there was his loyalty to his church. Despondent though he was about the future of his religion, pessimistic though he was about the state of his church and (especially) the quality of its leadership, nevertheless it was to this church he had given his life, and this church that had provided him with his livelihood. It was undoubtedly true that if there was something untoward going on at St Botolph's it would be best for the Church if the matter were investigated by the Church. It wasn't only the Bishop of Peckham who felt that. But what sort of investigation would the Church undertake, and would its main aim be the fearless eliciting of the whole truth? Ernest Clayton wanted to think so, but he couldn't quite do so. He felt twinges of loyalty, conflicts of judgement. He also felt hot and sticky.

Finally he got up. His bed clung to him and oppressed him, as did the smallness of his room. He walked up and down, still going around in the same intellectual circles. Today he had been worsted by Father Anselm, well and truly. How was he to turn the tables? As he walked and thought, the first light of dawn began to creep in by the window of his room.

In the middle of his walk he heard a sound. It was very slight, and came, he judged, from the wall under his window, but farther along. Strange: there was no door in that wall, yet this had sounded like a door swinging open. The door to the main hall was round the corner, and surely too far away for him to hear.

He crept to the window and gently pushed aside the grey-green folk-weave curtain. He still could not see what had made the noise, but he could see two robed figures, walking away from the main building, past the barn whose side was visible to Ernest Clayton, and away towards the boundary wall. They walked steadily and determinedly—not hurrying, yet nearly so. When they reached the wall the taller of the two cupped his hands to make a stirrup, and the other, bundling his habit about him rather awkwardly, stepped into it, scrambled on to the top of the wall, and dropped over on to the ground on the other side.

The early morning light was still very dim, but Ernest Clayton was quite clear about what he saw next. First a brown monk's habit was thrown over the wall, and caught by the tall figure still inside. Then there was to be seen, scurrying away over the moors, a figure in jeans and white tee-shirt, fixing a ruck-sack clumsily on to his shoulders as he ran along. By this time the other figure, plainly intent on regaining the main building as quickly as possible, was in the shadow of the big barn. As he neared the main building, however, the morning light enabled the Reverend Clayton to be quite sure about his identity.

It was Father Anselm, and he had been escorting from the grounds of St Botolph's the corrupted cherub.

T
HE WALL BENEATH
the guest wing looked solid enough. The whole of St Botolph's bespoke Edwardian substantiality, transmuted into religious terms. Viewed from a distance there was no sign of skimping or faking in that one wall.

But when Ernest Clayton came closer, jaded but eager in the hot morning sun, he saw that — symbolic of St Botolph's as a whole? — all was not quite as it seemed. At one point towards the end of the wing, surrounded by tomato beds and an unlikely place for a casual visitor to stray in, the inquisitive eye could detect a regular rift in the brick, forming the shape of a small door. The conclusion seemed inevitable: the brick at this point must in fact be merely a thin imitation of the brick in the rest of the wall, and must swing open to admit people, or to allow the exit of people, who did not wish to use the main door.

To which room, or from which room? The geography of the inside of the building was difficult, particularly at this point, where the main hall had degenerated first into the little rooms where they had met on the first night for drinks, and then into the maze of corridors, bedrooms and discussion rooms. Ernest Clayton crinkled his brow. It could not be into Father Anselm's study — that was farther along. Could it be Brother Dominic's bedroom? Or perhaps the next bedroom along the corridor, which he knew to be Father Anselm's.

He turned, and found Father Anselm watching him.

There was nothing to do now but to have it out with him. He walked slowly towards the barn where Father Anselm was standing. From a distance he resembled a statue, quite immovable. Closer up Ernest Clayton wondered
whether he was not more than a little taken aback.

‘You have found our priest-hole, I see,' said Father Anselm, with a somewhat shaky urbanity.

‘Is that what you call it?' said Ernest Clayton. ‘Used these days for priests of pop culture, I believe?'

There was a pause. Ernest Clayton suspected this blow was not unanticipated. Finally Father Anselm nodded his head.

‘I see. I rather thought I must have been detected.' Something of his old grimness of manner returned. ‘You were spying on me last night,' he said, sourly accusing.

‘I was looking out of my window,' said Ernest Clayton, with the calm that comes from knowing one holds high trumps.

‘I see,' said Anselm deliberately. He turned his eyes towards the purple waves of moorland, stretching to the far walls and beyond, as if he were surveying his past life before bidding farewell to it forever. ‘I think perhaps the time has come to take you into my confidence.'

‘You mean to start telling the truth, I suppose,' said the Reverend Clayton. ‘Is there any point? Clearly I must go to the police. You can save your explanation for them.'

‘You imply that I have been lying,' said Father Anselm, who was certainly showing no signs of shame. ‘I think you might regret that. At worst I have been — shall we say a trifle Jesuitical? I have never believed it wise to blurt out the whole truth, on every occasion. I have done no worse than occasionally withholding the full explanation from you and the Bishop.'

‘Nonsense. You said the young man had left.'

‘You
said he had left. I refrained from correcting you. But it is foolish to quarrel about quibbles of that sort. I think you and the Bishop would be wise to hear the whole story and judge for yourselves. Shall we say in the conference room, in an hour's time?'

Father Anselm's air was brisk and confident. Ernest Clayton felt sorely torn. The involvement of the Bishop was
clearly a clever ploy on Father Anselm's part: he was confident he would prove putty in his hands. On the other hand, it was not altogether an unfair ploy: he himself had been careful to involve the Bishop earlier when making his accusations, to add weight (or at any rate status) to his mission. And then, Father Anselm's apparent confidence did affect Clayton. It led him to consider the possibility that, far from solving the murder, he might merely make a fool of himself to the police. There is nothing more ridiculous than the amateur detective who fancies himself Sherlock Holmes and turns out to be Watson.

And then, most potent of all was the itch of curiosity: Ernest Clayton did desperately want to know the truth about St Botolph's.

‘I agree,' he said. ‘In an hour's time.'

• • •

It was odd, thought Croft, that the least vivid report he received was the collection of data on the victim. He had from the beginning decided that the late Brother Dominic was probably asking to be murdered, and it was his experience that in such cases the personality of the dead person was usually much more interesting than the personality of the murderer (as a bad smell is more interesting than a deodorizing spray). But if this was the whole truth about Brother Dominic, or Denis Crowther, it was a very dull truth indeed: nothing came off the page to enable him to pin down the nature of the man.

He had lived with his parents in Little Purlock, a village near Chelmsford, and had gone to a minor public school with an ecclesiastical tradition. His school-masters spoke of his strong personality, the dominating influence he had over other boys. He was clever, good at games, never in any serious trouble. He did not mix widely on vacations at home, and people spoke of him as remote and rather forbidding. His parents were the modern squire-equivalents: his father had been early in the public-relations game, and had built up a tidy fortune in the fifties. He and his wife
had glad-handed it around the village (the house they lived in had been the manor, and the owner had sold it to go and decay in warmth and comfort on the Algarve), but Denis Crowther had not been interested in playing the young squire. His parents were killed in a plane crash in Yugoslavia when he was nineteen. He had been left reasonably well-off. He kept the house in Little Purlock, but was only there at weekends, as he was working in some junior capacity with a City firm, and kept a flat in London. The first the villagers had heard of his entering the Community of St Botolph's was some months after he had ceased coming there, when the house was put up for sale.

There were two curious things about the report. It seemed that neither Denis Crowther nor his parents were regular church-goers — Easter communicants at best. Nor, in spite of the traditions of his school, was he remembered there as evincing any adolescent fervours in the matter of religion. It would seem, then, that his discovery of his vocation must have been the result of a sudden conversion. The other oddity was that the police could discover no trace of the activities in the City that the villagers spoke of. Investigations were continuing.

This last fact especially intrigued Croft: why should there be any difficulty in tracing the firm for whom he worked? Could this be a case of a young man leading a double life?

Simeon P. Fleishman bustled much more vividly from the page. He was a graduate of the Bob Jones University, and, according to the report, ‘a highly respected man of God' in the city of Omaha. He had fired the hearts of congregations at the Church of the Risen Jesus by some ‘truly inspirational' teaching, and had given some stirring radio addresses which had swelled church funds very satisfyingly. He had invited to the Church ‘many of the truly great evangelical preachers of the day, including your own Doctor Paisley', and had served for a spell on the National Council of Non-Denominational Churches. He had also been active
in politics: he had been a leading member of the ‘Draft Reagan' and ‘Reagan for President' Committees, and had chaired a rally which the great man had addressed from horse-back. He had a fine wife, daughter of a mid-West preacher, and two fine boys. They had all appeared together on television, with their dog. Lavish additions were planned to the church of which Simeon Fleishman was minister, and also to the extensive dwelling the congregation provided for him. The report concluded: ‘The Reverend Fleishman is a great and active force for good in the Christian communities of Omaha.'

Oh, God, thought Croft, another committed Christian. Still, it was easy enough to read between the lines. He had already marked Fleishman down as a fat cat on the make, and nothing in the report had led him to alter that opinion. Not a crook, perhaps, in American terms, for there religion was business, as business was religion. But still, one used to sailing on the windy side of the law. Slow but acquisitive, stupid but cunning. An eye to the main chance — but had he the ruthless will to seize it by murder? You wouldn't think it to look at him, but the cliché that almost always revalidated itself in murder cases was that appearances were deceptive.

The report on Bente Frøystad was much more dubious than the first report on Randi Paulsen. It seemed to have been gleaned mainly from the principal of the theological college which she had attended for the past few years, and from which she was shortly to emerge an ordained minister. There arose from the page a lukewarmness that always seemed about to change into positive disapproval. The principal had spoken of her intelligence, but this did not seem to be a quality he prized too highly; he had spoken of her liveliness, but there seemed to be an implied pursing of the lips; he had spoken of her modern outlook on her faith, and here there seemed to be downright disapprobation. He emphasized that, though free and easy in her attitudes, there was nothing specific in her behaviour
that he knew of
that could be objected to, or would suggest her unfitted for her vocation. He thought it very probable (not beyond the bounds of God's infinite grace, translated Croft) that when she had matured a little, and when she had the responsibilities of a parish on her shoulders, her personality would gain in seriousness and moderation. He added that she was an excellent all-round sportswoman, excelling in track-sports and basketball, and a keen fisherwoman.