Chapter and Hearse (8 page)

‘Friend of the Dean,' said the ACC.

‘But the Dean wasn't the murderer, surely, sir, was he?' ventured Sloan, although he was naturally prepared to concede that it wasn't what you knew that mattered but who.

‘John Pycot didn't kill Walter Lechlade personally, if that's what you mean,' said the ACC, ‘any more than Henry II actually killed Thomas à Becket on an earlier and much more celebrated occasion.'

‘That, sir,' observed Sloan, greatly daring, ‘is a fine point.'

‘Oh, the King was morally guilty,' conceded the ACC, who didn't have to deal with split hairs on a daily basis in court. ‘No doubt about that.'

‘And did penance,' said Sloan. There had been a picture in his history book of a barefoot Henry, in sackcloth and ashes, making his way to Canterbury in the snow to be flogged that had stayed in Sloan's mind since he was a small boy.

‘The Dean did penance too,' said the ACC.

‘For helping get rid of another turbulent priest?' asked Sloan, his memory stirred now.

‘For getting rid of a priest,' amended the ACC.

‘Really, sir?' Sloan's mother, who was a great churchwoman, was forever insisting that she didn't know what the Church was coming to. It was beginning to sound as if she might be right.

‘From all accounts,' said the ACC drily, ‘it was the Dean who was turbulent.'

For reasons that Sloan had never enquired into, his mother always blamed any present-day trouble in a cathedral on Thomas Cranmer and his statutes – perhaps he should have listened to her more. Detection was a more arcane business than it seemed at first sight.

The ACC was still talking. ‘History, Sloan, says that Walter Lechlade was a peaceable enough fellow. Not that that saved him, of course.'

Detective Inspector Sloan nodded. Being peaceable was no insurance against being murdered. ‘How was he killed?' he asked, the policeman in him taking over from the erstwhile schoolboy and the inattentive son. There had, he remembered, been another Archbishop of Canterbury as well as Thomas à Becket who had been done to death in office. His name had stayed in Sloan's memory from his history lessons purely because of the manner of his murder.

The ACC consulted his papers again. ‘Two blows on the skull and the arm from knives, swords and Danish axes.'

‘Not a lot of those about, sir.' With that other archbishop, St Alphege, it had been ox bones.

‘There were then, Sloan.'

‘Then?' Sloan's pen stayed suspended above his notebook, a suspicion confirmed. ‘Do I take it, sir, that we're not talking about the here and now?'

‘Yes and no,' said the ACC, quite unabashed. ‘More of the there and then, perhaps, than the here and now, but some of both.'

‘Might I ask where?'

‘Exeter, Sloan.'

‘And when?'

‘November 1283.'

‘When the Mayor and the Dean murdered this Walter Lechlade…'

‘The Precentor…'

‘With a Danish axe?' Their pastry must have come later.

‘No, no, Sloan. The actual murder was done by others, orchestrated by three vicars and a canon…'

With Thomas à Becket, thought Sloan, it had been four knights, but the end result had still been the same spilling of brains.

‘In fact,' murmured the ACC, ‘one commentator called 'em satellites of Satan.'

Sloan said he wasn't at all surprised.

‘Henry de Stanway, clerk in holy orders, John de Wolrington, Vicar of Ottery St Mary, John de Christenstowe, Vicar of Heavitree, and Canon Reginald de Ercevesk,' recited the ACC. ‘Almost the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, you might say.'

‘Caused a bit of a flutter in the dovecotes, that, I dare say, sir.' There had been other clergymen who had hit the headlines, but Sloan didn't think this was the moment to mention them.

‘The Bishop appealed to the King for justice.'

‘And which King would that have been, sir?'

‘Edward I of blessed memory.'

‘The Hammer of the Scots?' More of those history lessons had stuck than Sloan had appreciated.

‘He was known as the English Justinian,' said the ACC, who had had a classical education.

‘I didn't know that, sir.'

‘And he came down to Exeter at Christmas 1285.'

‘Two years later?' In Sloan's book, justice delayed was justice denied.

‘This is where it gets interesting, Sloan.'

‘Really, sir?' Interesting, he decided, it might be; urgent – today, this minute, urgent – he couldn't see how it could possibly be.

‘The case was begun on Monday 24 December…'

‘Christmas Eve?'

‘Christmas Eve – the judges were Roger de Loveday and Richard de Boyland – and then it was adjourned for Christmas.'

‘“The hungry judges soon the sentences sign”,' said Sloan, quoting Alexander Pope, ‘“And wretches hang that jurymen may dine”.' They had that piece in their speeches each time at the Berebury Magistrates' Annual Dinner.

‘It wasn't like that at all,' said the ACC a trifle plaintively. ‘No, they all kept Christmas Day in high old style and then, on St Stephen's Day…'

‘Boxing Day.'

‘They found Richard Stonyng…'

‘The gatekeeper…'

‘… guilty of murder.'

‘For not shutting the gate?' Sloan was sensitive about gates. There had been one terrible week in his schooldays when the boy who had been detailed to play brave Horatius, Captain of the Gate, had gone down with mumps. Sloan had been the unwilling understudy and anything to do with gates, fearful odds, ashes of his fathers and temples of his gods still struck an unhappy chord.

‘For opening the gate to let the felons in before the murder and for not shutting it after the deed was done to keep them in.'

‘I see, sir.' Dereliction of duty or complicity he would have called that himself, but apparently the judges had reckoned it murder. ‘An accessory before and after the fact,' he said neatly.

‘And as for “Mr Mayor, sirrrr”…' baaa'd the ACC in the tones of Larry the Lamb.

‘Alfred Duport,' supplied Sloan. The ACC's literary background had obviously been broad enough to have included
Toytown.

‘Found guilty of consenting to and planning the felony and receiving and harbouring the felons.'

‘Aiding and abetting,' translated Sloan.

‘And then on Holy Innocents' Day…'

That, thought Sloan, couldn't have been judicial irony, surely?

‘… all those who had pleaded benefit of clergy…'

‘That, sir,' said Sloan, ‘was some sort of establishment cop-out, wasn't it?' He knew that, like sanctuary, they didn't have it any more, although it was true to say that the only criminal clergymen to come his way officially had certainly been attempting – one way and another – something for their own benefit.

‘A way of exculpation of men of the cloth grounded in a text in the First Book of Chronicles,' said the ACC, admitting that he'd looked it up. ‘Chapter sixteen, verse twenty-two.'

Sloan decided he really would have to pay more attention to his mother's interests in future.

The ACC shuffled the notes on his desk and read out, ‘“Touch not mine anointed and do my prophets no harm.” And all they had to do to prove they were clerks in holy orders was to be able to read the first verse of Psalm fifty-one. The Miserere.'

‘So the clerical conspirators got off?' concluded Sloan doggedly.

‘Handed over to their bishops, except the Dean, who was sent to a monastery.'

‘And the actual murderers, sir?' Sloan knew who he meant – the ones with blood on their hands, which was as good a definition as any he knew.

‘Escaped abroad.'

Detective Inspector Sloan, currently coming to terms with the vagaries of the Crown Prosecution Service, sighed and said, ‘Not a very satisfactory outcome, sir.'

‘There was one more puzzle.'

‘Sir?'

‘The records are a bit shaky, but afterwards they wrote down that the Mayor had been hanged on St Stephen's Day.'

‘But,' said Sloan, frowning, ‘surely that was before he was tried?'

‘It has been known.'

‘Lynch law.' That was the only law the police were pledged not to uphold.

‘Actually, Sloan, it was known as Lydford law. Punish first and try afterwards.'

Sloan said he thought ‘Try first and don't punish afterwards' was more the vogue these days.

The ACC said, ‘What they meant was that the prisons were so awful that often those who were accused died from gaol fever before they could be brought to trial – which is rather different.'

‘Yes, sir.' Sloan paused. ‘I take it that this has all been written up somewhere?'

‘Admirably.'
*
The ACC patted a thin, square grey book on his desk. ‘I can't think why no one's made a play out of it.'

What Detective Inspector Sloan couldn't help but wonder was how something that had happened in the year 1283 could suddenly become enough of an emergency this morning for him to have been summoned post-haste from dealing with latter-day criminals who only ever pleaded broken homes and unhappy childhoods.

‘You think it hangs together all right, Sloan, do you?' asked the ACC.

‘Yes, sir.'

‘I've made myself quite clear, I hope?'

‘Perfectly, sir.'

‘And you found it an interesting case?'

‘Yes, sir.' He ventured a modest pun. ‘What you might call a top-brass rubbing-out.'

‘The difficulty is,' said the ACC, surreptitiously making a note of this, ‘that they have a literary and historical society attached to Calleford Minster. I belong myself.'

‘Really, sir?'

‘And they've got a bit of a problem.'

‘Sir?'

‘Yes, indeed.' The ACC leaned back in his chair. ‘Their secretary's just rung me to say that tonight's speaker has been taken ill and would I step into the breach with something suitable.'

‘I see, sir.' The quotation ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more' could, Sloan felt, safely be left to the Chairman in his introduction.

‘I thought I would tell them about this murder,' said the ACC.

‘The cathedral interest.' Sloan nodded.

‘I'm calling my talk “Another Exeter Riddle”, Sloan, because there were some famous medieval Exeter riddles…'

It all seemed quite open and shut to Sloan. He said restrainedly, ‘Should go down very well, sir.'

‘It was helpful to rehearse it with you,' said the ACC unblushingly.

‘Thank you, sir.'

‘I thought I would begin with a quotation.'

‘It's often done, I understand, sir.' It was always done at the Berebury Magistrates' Annual Dinner.

‘From Shakespeare.'

‘Naturally, sir.'

‘This one.' The ACC squinted modestly down at his notes. ‘“Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them…”'

The Widow's Might

Anthony Mainwaring Heber-Hibbs knew to a nicety the moment at which to step out from under the shelter of the canopy outside the airport lounge and into the hot sun of Lasserta. It was immediately after the aeroplane had trundled up the runway, come to a final standstill and been linked to the landing steps.

And not a moment before, the heat of the sun in Lasserta being what it always was.

He stood forward now but doffed his topi only as the cabin door opened and the first of the passengers began to stumble out into the open air after their long journey from England.

It wasn't by any means every visiting group that the Ambassador turned out for in this manner. There had been a party of archaeologists the month before that he hadn't so received and last week a posse of forensic accountants had similarly landed at Lasserta airport without being officially welcomed. They had arrived to look into the flourishing money-laundering industry for which the sheikhdom was renowned, Lasserta being one of the most efficient of the world's rapidly diminishing number of tax havens, while the archaeologists had been searching for signs of a really ancient civilization in this antique desert land.

Her Britannic Majesty's Ambassador had allowed both those other parties to touch down without affording them any diplomatic niceties. The East Calleshire Regimental Association – in this instance, a group of widows and orphans – came into a rather different category. The accountants had talked about ‘widows and orphans' as well, but they had referred to them in a financial context as potential assets for someone – he wasn't quite sure whom. His secretary too sometimes spoke of ‘widows and orphans' when she was producing reports, but why he never knew or asked.

These widows and orphans – the Calleshire ones – were quite different. And something had given him cause to think that they weren't going to be exactly assets either …

The people coming off the aeroplane now were real widows and real orphans from an ill-fated Anglo-Lassertan military campaign of some twenty years ago which had come to be known as the Engagement at Bakhalla. This disastrous action had strayed uncomfortably near the Sheikh's palace at Bakhalla, hence its name.

Anthony Heber-Hibbs had deemed it appropriate – the words ‘appropriate' and ‘inappropriate' were much used in diplomatic circles – that he give this particular tour a polite reception.

He therefore advanced, a model of civility, right hand outstretched, towards their leader as she reached the bottom of the steps. Mrs Norah Letherington, a woman clearly born to command and looking every inch the late Colonel's lady, responded with a firm – albeit slightly damp and sticky – grasp.

‘Is it always as hot as this here?' she asked faintly as the heat rising from the airport tarmac hit her in an advancing wave for the first time.