Day of Vengeance: Dorothy Martin investigates murder in the cathedral (A Dorothy Martin Mystery) (7 page)

‘My birthday is in October.’

‘Your unbirthday present, then.’

‘Well, we do need to stay in London to spend some time with Walter and his girlfriend. I promised Jane we’d phone him.’ I explained to Lynn that we wanted his opinion about Mr Lovelace. ‘Though now I’m not sure we need another opinion. But I’d like to see him, anyway, and meet his lady-love.’

‘Let’s do both,’ said Lynn. ‘We’ll go shopping, just us girls, and then meet Walter and his girl and the guys for lunch. There’s a trendy new place in Parliament Square I’ve been dying to try. That part’ll be our unbirthday treat for you, Dorothy.’

W
hen I’m with Lynn, we take taxis. Cost is not an issue with the Andersons. So we pulled up at Harrods’ main door in splendour, and found the millinery department after only a brief survey of the Food Halls, which I can never resist.

The hats were stunning. Many of them were the ‘fascinator’ type, entirely unsuited to a woman my age, but the clerk tactfully steered me to the ones designed to flatter grey hair and cover wrinkly foreheads.

The one I chose at last was pale blue, a cloche made of some sort of stiff net, with a bow and spangles. It was utterly impractical, and utterly gorgeous. ‘And it goes with that outfit,’ said Lynn. ‘Leave it on. And we need to hurry a bit if we’re to meet Walter and Sue on time.’

We had agreed to pick up the kids at their flat in Bloomsbury before meeting our husbands at the restaurant. There was time for no more than introductions before we all piled back in the taxi and headed down Charing Cross Road.

I hadn’t seen Walter for ages, so we had a lot of catching up to do. He was excited about the possibility of a job with the Museum of London.

‘I’m really interested in treasure trove and that sort of thing,’ he said, ‘so this is right up my street. It wouldn’t pay a lot at first, but there are lots of possibilities for advancement. And Sue just might be able to get in at the Museum of Childhood.’

‘Ooh, that’s the one with the dollhouses, isn’t it?’ I became interested in dollhouses – or dolls’ houses, as the Brits call them – some years ago and still enjoyed them, though I no longer had one of my own. So we talked toys, and miniatures, and London history, quite happily until we were jarred by a sudden stop.

‘Sorry about that,’ said our driver. ‘Bleedin’ idiots!’ He was plainly addressing not his passengers but the drivers ahead. ‘Oughtn’t to be allowed, if they don’t know how to drive in London.’

We were nearing Parliament Square. Traffic on the other side of the street was moving, but nothing on our side. Lynn made a quick decision. ‘We’ll walk the rest of the way, thanks. Not your fault,’ she added to the driver. ‘Here you are.’

‘Thank you very much indeed, madam,’ said the driver with a broad smile that gave me some idea of the size of the tip.

‘Is there a parade or something?’ I asked. ‘I’ve never seen the traffic this bad.’ The pedestrian traffic was thick, too; we were not the only ones to have abandoned wheeled transport.

‘Not a parade,’ said Lynn. ‘The cabbie would have known. It could be a wedding or a funeral at the Abbey, I suppose, but only
really
important people are married or buried there, mostly royalty, and it would have been all over the news … Oh, good heavens!’

We had rounded a corner and could see in front of us what looked like a riot scene. People everywhere, placards waving in the air, bullhorns blasting out slogans, on the one hand, and orders from the police to move along, on the other.

‘What on earth? Are those cardboard crowns they’re wearing?’ Sue, who was the shortest of us, craned her neck to see.

‘They’re mitres,’ said Walter. ‘A lot of women wearing cardboard mitres!’

The signs were homemade, and were all different, but with the same theme: ‘The Church is Sexist!’, ‘Mitres for Women’, ‘Equality under God’. I saw one reading ‘Diana was Murdered!’ which seemed to imply some confusion on the part of the demonstrator, but for the most part the women were united in their demands, and getting quite raucous about it.

As we drew closer, the chants grew better organized. ‘What do we want?’ shouted one woman with a bullhorn. ‘Women bishops!’ the crowd chanted back. ‘When do we want it?’ ‘NOW!’

I didn’t see exactly what happened next, but one woman either dropped her sign or else deliberately hit a policeman over the head with it. At any rate, she fell, and immediately the women around her were brandishing their signs and shouting at the police. Others began running in that direction.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Walter. I hurriedly took off my new hat and crammed it into its box, and then followed as he miraculously shoved his way through the gathering crowd, dragging Sue by the hand.

More than anything in the world right then, I wanted Alan beside me.

‘Where are we?’ I asked after a few minutes, as we panted in Walter’s wake. I thought I knew London pretty well, but there were still plenty of odd backwaters where I could get lost in two minutes without my trusty A to Zed.

‘There’s a church just along here,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about it, but if there’s a quiet place anywhere, a church ought to be it.’

‘Not if there are any lady bishop wannabes in it,’ I thought I heard Lynn mutter.

The church, thank heaven, was quiet. There were a couple of women going purposefully back and forth on some business or other. A young man in a cassock and dog collar glanced our way for a moment, and then stopped to speak to one of the women. A lingering odour of incense hung in the air, and a statue of the Virgin Mary occupied a niche above a small stand of lighted candles.

‘Roman Catholic?’ I whispered to Walter.

‘I don’t think so.’ He gestured to a Book of Common Prayer in the pew rack. ‘Anglo-Catholic, probably.’

‘I don’t think they’d like me using my mobile, but I must talk to Alan. He and Tom may be waiting for us somewhere in that mob, and they’ll be worried.’ I stood and approached the young priest. ‘Excuse me,’ I said in those stifled tones one tends to use in a place of worship, ‘but my friends and I came in to get away from an unpleasant demonstration a few streets away. Is there a place where I might use my phone without disturbing anyone?’

‘Ah, yes,’ he replied in a normal voice. ‘The ladies who want to be bishops. Poor things. They’ve been at it for a few days now, and getting rowdier by the moment. Not exactly the behaviour one would think might tempt the Church to consider their demands. However, yes, certainly you may use your mobile anywhere you like. There is no service scheduled until later this afternoon.’

Once I reached Alan, he had to find a place quiet enough that he could hear me, and then I had to ask Walter where we were, so he could find us. ‘Alan, it’s really scary out there! I don’t know what we would have done if Walter hadn’t been able to get us away. Where are you?’

‘We did what you did, and took refuge in a church – the Abbey. There’s not a lot of peace and quiet, though. Too close to the action. And it may take us a little while to get to you. I’m going to ask a verger if there’s a back way out. Stay put and wait for us.’

We finally achieved lunch, not at the lovely restaurant Lynn had planned, but at a Pret a Manger in Victoria Place, the shopping centre in Victoria Station. As fast food goes, theirs is really pretty good, and quite a lot healthier than the fat-laden concoctions one finds in other places. And after fighting our way through the crowds, we were all a bit too hot and dishevelled for any posh place. Besides, this place was crowded and noisy, an ideal spot for a private conversation.

After we’d fetched our food and found a place to sit, the first thing Tom asked was, ‘Did you manage to save your hat, D?’

‘I did.’ I held up the slightly battered hatbox. ‘The box suffered a bit, but the hat is fine. I took it off at the first sign of trouble. I’d rather have lost my purse than this!’ I took it out for admiration, and all agreed I could wear it to Royal Ascot the next time I was invited, or, of course, to a Buckingham Palace garden party.

‘Or even to church on Sunday, which is somewhat more likely. Now. What do you two know about that fracas in Parliament Square? Did the Abbey people know anything about it?’

‘The vergers were quite knowledgeable, as we were far from the first bystanders to seek sanctuary there. The demonstration started on Monday, while the commission was meeting, apparently in the hope that a woman would be nominated for our position, even in advance of the legislation that would permit her appointment.’

‘Some hope,’ said Lynn crisply. ‘The mills of God may grind slowly, but they’re greased lightning compared with Parliament.’

‘Indeed. At any rate, when the shortlist was announced late on Tuesday, the demonstrators weren’t happy about it, and their numbers grew. Then Brading was killed and the women seemed to believe, using a thought process not entirely clear to me, that his death gave their cause a better chance of success, with the result that you saw today.’

‘As if!’ Sue was indignant. ‘They’re fools if they think causing a riot is going to make anyone believe they’d be good bishops. I don’t go to church much myself, but even I know that a bishop is supposed to be – well – dignified and that. And acting like louts isn’t doing any good to any other women’s causes, either.’

‘Amen to that,’ I said, lifting a glass in salute. ‘That’s the trouble with organized protest. If it isn’t very
carefully
organized and controlled, it can degenerate so quickly into chaos, and worse. I wonder, though, that Mr Lovelace wasn’t there, seizing the opportunity to make a speech.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Walter, with a glint in his eye, ‘you were going to ask me about him, weren’t you? It does sound as though you’ve already taken his measure.’

‘I’ve gained an impression, but Alan and I would both like yours.’

‘The man’s a charlatan and a hypocrite,’ said Tom in disgust. ‘Taking credit for what other people have done, and lulling everyone with that smooth tongue of his. I despise him.’

‘He’s worse than that,’ said Walter, lowering his voice. ‘I did a lot of research a few months ago about London churches, past and present, for a paper I was writing, and I picked up quite a few interesting ideas. Research is a lot like detective work, you know, Mr Nesbitt.’

‘I do know,’ he said. ‘And it’s Alan.’

Walter ducked his head. He was still near enough his childhood to be embarrassed at calling an older man by his first name. ‘Yes, well, anyway. The thing is, I was especially interested in St Barnabas’, because I used to go there pretty regularly, though I was never actually on the parish roll. And you know how somebody once said that truth was not in accounts, but in account books?’

Several of us nodded. I remembered the phrase from Josephine Tey’s incomparable
The Daughter of Time
.

‘Well, I was able to look into St Barnabas’ accounts practically from the dawn of time, because I was with the BM at the time, and that’s a pretty respectable credential. And since it’s such a big church and I’d never officially become a member, nobody really looked at me twice.’

‘You think,’ said Alan, ‘that if they had known you were a parishioner, or at least an attendee, your access to the records would have been restricted?’

‘I’m damn sure they would have been! Sorry, Dorothy. But, you see, I was looking at both historical record books and modern ones. And only someone who’d attended services recently and seen how much money was going into the collection would have been able to compare that with the recorded income. And I tell you, Mr – Alan – there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark. Or the parish of St Barnabas’.’

‘Fraud,’ said Alan.

‘I can’t prove it,’ Walter admitted. ‘It’s based on personal observation. But it’s so terribly easy to steal from a church collection, isn’t it? All that cash, with no way to know who gives how much. Probably others besides the rector would have to be involved, and I think some of the parishioners pay by cheque, or even direct debit for the few rich ones, but most of those people are poor, Alan! They give all they can afford, and more, because they trust Lovelace. They love the man, and believe in him, and all the time he’s stealing from them. It makes my blood boil!’

‘Mine, as well,’ said Alan. ‘This is a very serious charge, Walter, and one that will have to be looked into. But you do realize that there could be any number of reasons for the apparent discrepancy? You say the congregation is poor, and Dorothy and I observed that for ourselves. Not all of them, but the majority, I’d say.’

He looked at me, and I nodded.

‘So it’s possible what you saw was a great many coins, but of little value, adding up to a less impressive total than you believe.’

‘It wasn’t just coins,’ said Walter stubbornly. ‘Banknotes. Five, ten, even twenty pounds. Euros, too, and they’re easy to spot, with those huge numbers. I suppose some people in the parish have family on the Continent who send them money, or come for a visit. I usually sat in the back, so the plate came around to me almost last, and I tell you, if there wasn’t at least a thousand pounds in there, I’m a Chinaman. And that was just one of the plates.’

‘Plates,’ I said. ‘Not those bags on long poles? Though, come to think of it, they used plates when we were there, didn’t they, Alan?’

‘I don’t remember, Dorothy. You may be right. We were well to the front, and I didn’t notice particularly. But that’s a point, actually. It would be far easier to pocket some of the contents of an open collection plate than a locked bag.’

‘Well, goodness knows I don’t care for the Reverend Mr Lovelace,’ I put in, ‘but there’s another side to be considered. It was obvious that money was being spent in the neighbourhood, and in the church itself. The style didn’t appeal to me, but there was the central heating, for one thing. And everything was bright and clean, no signs of neglect or poverty. How do you explain that, if Lovelace is raking some off the top?’

‘I don’t. Fraud was never my department. But I still know some people in the Met who specialize in that sort of thing. You must understand, though, Walter, that I can’t ask them to launch an investigation without more evidence than your observations.’