Blood Brotherhood (7 page)

‘Au pairs, eh?' said the Bishop eagerly. ‘Now how did you find that experience?'

‘Slave labour,' said Bente Frøystad.

‘Of course one could be lucky,' said Randi Paulsen. Her hands fluttered nervously to her hair, and her eyes, blinking, went down into her lap. ‘But I have heard of several girls who have had some
most
unpleasant experiences!'

No one enquired further, and the pursed lips did not encourage them to.

‘It's a sad thing,' said Ernest Clayton. ‘The au pair system could be such a good one for all parties, and yet it seems to work out either as a scandal or a joke.'

‘I don't see anything good in the privileged classes getting cheap labour,' said Stewart Phipps.

‘Does your wife go out to work?' enquired Bente Frøystad.

‘No, of course not,' said Phipps.

‘Then you merely married your au pair,' said Bente. The alliance seemed to have become more fragile since the afternoon walk. The male sympathizer with women's lib is in roughly the same position as the white liberal in the American racial conflict, and gets about as much thanks.

Randi Paulsen seemed to want to turn the conversation back to her own experiences. ‘The stories I could tell about things that have happened to Norwegian girls in England are quite appalling,' she said with a twisted expression on her face. ‘You wouldn't believe it possible.'

She left the phrase suspended in the air, perhaps hoping that someone would press her. But they all seemed to prefer to stick to the general rather than the particular.

‘Of course we have the idea that Scandinavian girls all know how to look after themselves,' said the Bishop. ‘But is this always the case? I seem to remember reading statistics that suggest the proportion of girls already pregnant when they marry is very high.'

‘Quite untrue,' snapped Randi Paulsen.

‘True enough,' said Bente Frøystad. ‘But we prefer to choose the man we're pregnant by.' This remark earned her a furious look from Randi, who looked as if she was treasuring up such remarks to report them back to the Church authorities.

It was unnecessary to ask how the others had got there: they had been recommended by their bishops — because they needed a rest, needed feeding up, or needed to get away from their wives. Those, at any rate, were the usual
reasons. The Bishop of Mitabezi had been recommended to come by Church House, to keep him out of their hair, and to ensure that he didn't make too many fiery statements to the press. Some organs were still pretty unhappy about Christian Socialism, and most certainly drew the line at Christian terrorism.

Ernest Clayton was about to take the conversation a stage further by enquiring anew into the topic he had raised on the first night — why the brothers had decided to take orders, what background they came from, and what were their experiences outside the walls that made them take their decisions — when he looked in the direction of Brother Dominic. His face, usually set, though not serene, was now apparently in the grip of some strong emotion or other. His strong will seemed to be getting the upper hand, but the ugly force of the passion inside him was impossible to hide altogether. At that moment Brother Dominic looked very unpleasant indeed.

Ernest Clayton changed his mind about bringing up that particular subject. ‘I'm for my bed,' he said. ‘I'm an early bird at home, if only to save electricity.'

His move gave a general signal to break up. The three brothers evaporated quietly, without fuss. With the rest, rather more pother was created and more formality observed, but eventually they made their way tentatively up their dark staircase — Father Anselm had not been seen since the evening meal, and the light switches were difficult to find — and into their rooms. Again, noises of ablution and evacuation were dimly audible through the thick stone walls, as was the determined sound of Randi Paulsen dragging her wardrobe across her door. Then all that was to be heard, and that only if one put one's ear close to the door, were the snores of My Lord of Peckham.

The snores continued intermittently for some hours. The Bishop liked his sleep. But at half past two in the morning, when — half asleep — he was leaning over to his little shelf
to get a drink of water, he thought he heard a sound. Shaking the sleep from his head, he took a gulp of water. Then the noise came again, more insistently.

Someone was knocking at his door.

‘Come in,' he said, feeling rather ridiculous, and if the truth were known, rather scared.

T
HE DOOR SWUNG
open, and through the darkness the Bishop of Peckham perceived a shape entering the room quietly. It was all so like a Gothic horror novel that in the normal way the Bishop's sense of humour would have delighted in the situation. The trouble was that, at the moment, he felt like doing nothing so much as making the classic response to such situations — pulling the blanket over his head and shrieking to the thing to go away. Especially when it turned round, slowly and shut the door.

‘Who are you?' said the Bishop, all too aware of the quaver in his voice. ‘What do you want?'

‘Father Anselm,' said the shape, pausing at the foot of the bed. ‘Please get up and put on your clothes.'

The command put a grain of fighting-spirit back into the Bishop. He had never liked being told what to do, even in the Second World War, in which he had served, wittily.

‘Look here,' he protested, ‘this is thoroughly reprehensible. Coming here in the dead of night, scar . . . when you might have scared me to death — and throwing out orders in that way. I mean, anyone would think we were behind the Iron Curtain!'

‘You must be considered leader of this symposium,' said Father Anselm, not moving from his minatory position at the foot of the bed. ‘I have to consult you before I do anything. I must ask you to do as I suggested at once.'

The Bishop was surprisingly easily cowed. Father Anselm had the sort of rock-steady assurance that his ironies could not dent. And, besides, looking at the black outline, unmoving and unmoved, gazing at him across the expanse of bed, he found that his teeth still displayed a disconcerting
desire to chatter. He got up, turned on the little bed-light on his shelf, and then pulled on his socks and shoes, and put on the smart Austin Reed dressing-gown hanging by a hook near his bed. He groped and fumbled, for his equanimity was still far from restored.

‘Well,' he said at last, squaring his shoulders, ‘I'm ready. Though I can't for the life of me . . .'

Father Anselm said nothing, but turned abruptly with a swirl of his habit, and led the way through the door. The dim light over the staircase was on, but not that in the corridor. They therefore aimed themselves in that direction, Father Anselm as usual keeping the upper hand by being much more confident in his movements than the Bishop. Though the Bishop felt better as soon as he made the stairwell, still he was disconcerted to realize that his heart was beating very hard indeed. It was almost as if he was expecting to find some ecclesiastical secret policeman at the end of their quest, who would put him through a series of inquisitions, with rack and strappado, on the subject of his various heresies.

They came to the cloister around the main hall, where one or two lights had been switched on, casting little light, but immense shadows. They plunged down the dark corridor leading to Father Anselm's office, but they did not stop there. They went instead further along, past one door, and then stopped by a second. Father Anselm paused, and turned towards the Bishop.

‘Prepare yourself,' he said grimly.

The Bishop's heart, which had been doing a hectic tribal dance, suddenly seemed to stop altogether. The situation seemed to call upon him to say something, but though he swallowed, he could force nothing out. At last he managed a very feeble little nod.

Father Anselm, quietly and carefully, pushed down the mock-medieval door-handle, and swung open the door. It did not squeak, or possibly the Bishop would have sunk, a jibbering mass of terror, to the floor. As it was, he could
scarcely summon up the nerve to force one foot in front of the other.

The room was lighted by the same sort of little bedside-lamp as was in his room. Father Anselm having swirled into the room, the Bishop stood in the doorway, blinking to accustom his eyes to the lurking shadows. After a few seconds he got his bearings and saw.

‘Goodness me,' said the Bishop of Peckham.

It was one of his favourite expressions, but it could not be considered adequate to this occasion. On the bed lay Brother Dominic, clad in a rough white bed-robe. At least, it had been white. Now the whole of the middle part of it was savagely cut to ribbons, and heavy with thick red blood, which had spurted over the walls and dripped in sticky pools on to the floor. It looked as if a manic gorilla had been at him with a knife and ripped his bowels out.

There was, needless to say, no sign of life. Brother Dominic was presumably, at this very moment, freezing his Lord.

The Bishop, having seen much, much more than he wanted to, turned aside from the sight, leaned his head against the door-post and retched. Nothing much came up, but he heaved and heaved and heaved again, like a dog who has eaten something he had better have left alone (though dinner had, in fact, been good). Before long he felt a hand on his shoulder, and let himself be led along the corridor to Father Anselm's study.

The very closing of the door brought relief to the Bishop's mind. The Thing was shut out. The Sight was not before his eyes. The Bishop sank into a chair, wishing his stomach was not still suggesting he was on the North Sea. The voice of Father Anselm seemed to come from a great distance.

‘Now,' he said, ‘the point is, what are we to do?'

The Bishop, trying desperately to concentrate on what was going on, asked him to repeat what he had said.

‘The question is,' repeated Anselm carefully, looking
straight at the Bishop, ‘what we are to do.'

The Bishop shook his head violently, as if ridding himself of the last vestiges of sleep and nausea.

‘You've called the police?' he said at last.

‘Not yet,' said Father Anselm quietly. ‘I thought I should have your authorization.' The Bishop seemed about to say something, and Father Anselm added: ‘Because this thing will inevitably come back to one of the members of your symposium.'

There was a pause.

‘How is that?' asked the Bishop finally.

‘The other members of the Community, the Brothers, sleep in the East Wing. The door between it and the main building is locked every night. We have some valuable silver in the main hall and some priceless things in the chapel. Since it would be child's play for a thief to get over the outer walls, it is necessary to minimize the number of possible means of entry. In practice, the only way into the Great Hall is through the door you came in when you arrived. The chapel has no entrance to the outside world — you remember it is reached by a small passage, the door to which is at the end of this corridor. This central block is entirely shut off from the rest of the Community's buildings at night.'

‘I see,' said the Bishop faintly.

‘The main door is, of course, locked and bolted from the inside at night,' pursued Father Anselm remorselessly. ‘Brother Dominic is — was — my assistant and personal servant. Only he and I sleep in this part of the building as a general rule. And then, of course, there are the guest-rooms . . .'

There was silence for a moment.

‘I see,' said the Bishop. ‘So he must have been killed either by you, or by one of us.'

‘As far as the police are concerned, that is so,' said Father Anselm austerely. ‘As far as
I
am concerned, he must have been killed by one of you.'

‘Quite, quite,' said the Bishop feebly. He made a heroic effort to collect his thoughts. ‘But of course you must in any case ring the police,' he said finally, gesturing in the direction of the discreet telephone in the murkiest corner of the room.

Father Anselm's mouth tightened. ‘Very well,' he said. ‘Now I have your permission.' He rose, and was proceeding in the direction of the telephone when both men were arrested by a sound.

The Bishop sat bolt upright and felt a tingling in his scalp which made him wonder if his hair was about to stand on end. It had been, to be sure, a very slight sound, and it seemed to have come from a long way off, penetrating the substantial door of Father Anselm's study. But it was a sound which unmistakably suggested a human being, and presumably one somewhere in the central block. The Bishop's look showed what he undeniably felt — that he had already had as much as, or more than, a human being could take. He was to feel that several times more in the course of the night.

Father Anselm, too, had been riveted to the floor by the sound. His deep, unfathomable eyes stared into the distance. Then he said: ‘There's someone out there. It sounded like the main door. But that's impossible.'

Noiselessly he turned towards the door of his room.

‘Come with me,' he said to the Bishop.

‘But don't you think — ' the Bishop began. But Father Anselm had swirled out of the room, and a second's meditation convinced the Bishop that the prospect of staying there alone, even with a door between him and whatever it was, was infinitely more terrifying than the prospect of following. He showed remarkable nimbleness in pattering out after his masterful host, whose undulating outline he perceived at the end of the dark corridor leading to the Great Hall. He started after it, but then he saw it stop suddenly. Involuntarily he stopped too, then, slowly and reluctantly, he made his way towards him, and finally stood
shoulder to shoulder with him at the point where the corridor opened out into the Great Hall.

The sight that met their eyes was a horrifying one.