The Chorister at the Abbey (8 page)

14

Such as are blessed of God shall possess the land, and they that are cursed of him shall be rooted out.
Psalm 37:22

David Johnstone, estate agent and local developer, poured himself a generous gin and tonic, and took some paperwork into the lounge. The large new house had been built for him and Pat only two years earlier. It was on the edge of one of the prettiest views in the area and the planning permission had taken some getting. Fortunately there had been a barn on the site and the house was technically a conversion. There were still some remnants of the thick boulders which had made up the walls and there were two beams in the kitchen which were original.

But the lounge was David’s pride and joy, a vast space with beautiful smooth modern plasterwork, a huge glass sliding door at the end, and a small fireplace with a gas coal-effect fire.

‘D’you want this gin or not?’ he called to Pat, who was in the kitchen across the large, parquet hallway with its massive mahogany staircase plundered from one of David’s developments. ‘The ice is melting.’

It was the Saturday after New Year and one of the rare weekends when the Johnstones were not involved in the busy social life which David needed to keep up with his ‘contacts’. Some of these people were leading lights in local business organizations. Others were murkier characters he met in bars in Newcastle or Manchester or in remote pubs in the country. But they all needed schmoozing. Drinking was a big part of his life.

David sighed. He loved to sit with a drink by the fire, but he was damned if he was going to have dirty coal or flaky logs in his front room. Yet it wasn’t quite the same. He remembered his mother shouting, ‘David, you little bastard, you’ve let the fire go out!’ and clouting him on the side of his head. Keeping the fire in had been a religion when David had been a lad.

His mother’s hands had been like leather, ingrained with coal dust. His father, a much older man, had once been a miner, when there had been busy pits near the coast. They had always had coal. But his dad wasn’t very reliable, in and out of work depending on his drinking and his women. The pits had all been closing anyway, and his dad had been left with one hobby – the local male voice choir. David had been dragged along to it, until he found girls more appealing.

‘Come on, Pat,’ he called, his bad temper growing. ‘Let’s have a cuddle.’

His wife was a bit past it, he thought. She’d never been very interested, but he’d persisted and then got her into trouble. That was it, in a family like Pat’s – they were Catholics, and marriage was the only option. He had been a bit wet behind the ears then. But it hadn’t been too bad, although Pat wasn’t the world’s greatest brain, as he frequently told her.

The Johnstones had two boys, both in good jobs in the south, and Pat’s favourite, the younger, was about to present them with a grandchild. She was really looking forward to being a grandma. Not that David was going to let her bugger off down south every other weekend. She had already started angling to get away. Well, sod that. Her job was here. She was a wife first and a grandma second.

David grimaced. Married to a grandma! He had inherited his father’s tendency to womanize, though he could afford higher class totty! And for a bit of rough, there was a woman in Fellside he visited from time to time. But she was unlikely to blab. Safe as houses.

Houses. Now, there was his real passion. He had made a mint in property. He stretched his legs. It was funny how he’d been thinking of his mam and dad. It must be because Fellside, where he was born, was on his mind. Sixty years ago it had been a grim village of terraced houses, homes once for miners and before that for the slate quarrymen, a blot on the local landscape. It wasn’t much better now. It was ugly.

But maybe not for long.

On the edge of the village there was a dilapidated Victorian house, boarded up for years, which had housed a group of Anglican nuns when David had been a boy. But there was land around it, and at the back it sloped to the quarry. He’d had his eye on it for some time. The problem was that there was some wrangle about who owned it and no one really cared because Fellside was such an uninviting spot. If he could get over the ownership issue and if he could manoeuvre the council into thinking big, then the quarry could become a lake and leisure area and there would be huge potential for holiday flats in the convent itself.

The problem was the chapel inside the old house. Johnstone could remember it from going there once as a boy for choral evensong with his nan, who was religious and made him sing church music. It was a Victorian monstrosity, he thought, but the sort of thing Little loved. Now he was dead, only a handful of people could remember it in its prime, and if a developer moved fast, it could be stripped before anyone thought about all that listed building crap.

As far as he was aware, the quarry was still owned by the ancient Lord Cleaverthorpe. And Cleaverthorpe had some sort of claim on the convent too. Johnstone’s posh mate Brian Dixon was connected to the Cleaverthorpes. The Dixons sang in the Abbey Chorus. Maybe joining this choir might be a good idea?

David pondered a strategy. He needed to get his hands on that bungalow where baldy-bonce Prout’s drunken sister-in-law lived, too. He’d checked. The bungalow’s squalid little garden bordered the convent’s grounds.

But his imagination was running away with him . . .

‘Come here, woman!’ he yelled, more aggressively this time, and scrawny Pat came running in from the kitchen at his command. David pulled her on to his lap, pinny and all, and stuck his hand down her jumper in a proprietorial way. She still had tits, he thought, though only just.

‘You’d better forget any ideas about going down south for a while,’ he said.

Pat’s eyes narrowed. She looked out of the french window at the dusk lengthening like fat dark fingers in the garden, and waited for him to get bored.

These days it didn’t take long, thank goodness.

Alex Gibson shifted in the lumpy, dented bed that had been her mother’s. She had wanted to die but she hadn’t had the energy to do anything about it, and so here she was, alive. She knew, deep down, that she wasn’t the suicidal type. It required too much organization. She had got to the point where she just didn’t care enough about herself even to negate herself. Her pain had been too low-level, the miserable discomfort of the hangover from hell meeting a rotten cold. She had been ill for days and had fed her condition with painkillers, washed down with whisky and hot water, till she had no memory of exactly when she had collapsed in bed.

But on the evening of the fifth night, she had run out of sleeping tablets to scrabble for on the tatty old bedside table. She started dreaming, all the usual old horrors. Except that this time they ended with her racing down the corridors of Norbridge College, away from Robert Clark. She woke in a sweat. It had been luridly realistic except that she knew she was too fat and breathless now to run anywhere.

She had put Robert Clark out of her mind over Christmas and New Year, but now in the cold light of day she looked back to the night she had found Morris Little’s body. Even in her shock and distress, the one thing she had wanted to avoid at all costs was meeting Robert again. She had gone out in icy rain and waited in the lane for a taxi rather than risk bumping into him at the Cliffords’.

But eventually he would come face to face with her, at short range. She mustn’t let that happen. If necessary, she would resign from the college. She hadn’t been to work for days anyway, and no one had so much as phoned her. She could sell the bungalow and go away. Chris and Reg would be pleased. She’d bugger off and leave them to it, with their ghastly friend David Johnstone. They could have the cash and get rid of the embarrassment.

The next morning she would give in her notice.

Her night was sweaty, restless and wretched. When she woke, in the soggy light of the winter morning, she dragged herself into the smelly kitchen to drink some scalding coffee. This is it, she thought. Goodbye Norbridge.

And then her phone shrieked out. Astonished, she picked it up, her hand looking surprisingly small and bony, shaking in the greasy grey light of morning.

‘Alex, how are you?’

‘Fine. I’m OK. Who’s speaking? What time is it?’

‘It’s five past nine. I tried yesterday but there was no reply.’

‘I’ve been rather poorly. A fluey cold. Did you say your name?’

‘It’s Edwin. Edwin Armstrong. You know, from the Music Department. We met the night of Morris Little’s murder.’

Alex sat up on the rickety kitchen chair, and listened.

‘Young Tom Firth asked me to call you. We were worried about how you were. Are you OK? You sound a bit shaky.’

‘I’m fine. Just a fluey cold like I said. There’s no problem. I’m coming into work later today.’ Was she? Well, she would have to, now.

‘I’m glad to hear it. Look, there’s something I’d like to ask you about. It’s a bit complicated. If you’re feeling better, could we meet today? Just for a few minutes? I need your help.’

Alex stared at the phone. What could Edwin Armstrong possibly want from her? She didn’t know what to say.

‘Look, Alex, I’m in a hurry now. Should we have lunch? In the staff restaurant? Twelve fifteen?’

‘Uh . . .’

‘Good, see you there.’

‘Oh, OK then. And Edwin, thanks.’

The word sounded rusty on her lips. But she had said it. And she knew she would have to turn up in what they called the ‘staff caff’. It was literally years since anyone had asked her for help other than in settling an invoice. What could it be about?

At the other end of the line, Edwin wondered if he had done the right thing. Alex was hardly his lunch companion of choice. But she had seen Morris Little’s body within seconds of Tom finding it. If there had been a psalter knocking about, she would perhaps have recognized it. What was it Lynn had said about her before the abandoned dinner party? ‘
Alex Gibson likes church music so you’ll have
something to talk about
.’

Maybe Alex would be able to clarify things. It was worth a try. There was something rather odd about the whole business and Edwin was beginning to wonder what exactly had happened in the corridor outside his office.

15

And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even a thanksgiving unto our God.
Psalm 40:3

‘It’s great to have a minute to ourselves,’ Rev Paul said to his wife.

He had been rather surprised when Mark Wilson had turned down the usual invitation to supper that evening. Mark was their neighbour on the estate, in a short-term council let. He made no secret of the fact that he had taken a lower grade job for a while, so he could think about his future in the Church. Even so, his maisonette flat had more space than Paul and Jenny’s house. They needed an office for Paul on the ground floor, but despite the squash Mark liked the warmth and busyness of the vicarage.

But tonight Mark wasn’t here. The baby was asleep. So for once Paul and Jenny were alone. Paul approached his wife rather gingerly. She seemed to tense whenever he came near her.

‘I mean,’ he went on, trying to hit the right note, ‘I really like Mark, but he’s been here every night since New Year and I suppose that must be a bit awkward for you.’

‘For me?’ Jenny stared into the sink where the potato peelings curled like fat tropical vegetation. ‘No, he’s all right.’

‘But I can see it from your point of view. I mean, you’re the one who has to look after him – making the meals, chatting, and things . . .’

‘You can’t see anything from my point of view, Paul.’

‘What do you mean? What have I said?’

‘Well, implying that I can’t cope with Mark, for a start.’ She talked angrily to the wall. ‘I’m your equal and your partner, spiritually and practically. So everything I do, I do because I want to. If Mark wasn’t welcome here, I’d tell him.’ Jenny peeled with a new intensity.

‘So how do you think Mark is doing?’ Paul asked his wife in an attempt to build a bridge. It was the sort of excluding, couple-affirming question that they had asked of each other throughout their relationship.

‘Mark’s very certain about things. And you know, Paul, his interest in the liturgy is different. I find it quite exciting.’

‘You do?’ Paul looked at his wife’s back with new interest. Jenny wheeled round, peeler in hand.

‘Yes. I know we come from the evangelical wing of the Church. But I’ve been thinking about what Mark has said . . .’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, here at Fellside the church is ugly, isn’t it? But we should think about aesthetics too, for the poor souls that live here. I know you’re going to say that it’s fine, somewhere like Oxford, say, to have choral evensong, and fabulous music, and that we can’t do that properly in Fellside. But Mark has made me think about another form of spirituality. The beauty of holiness. We maybe should be guardians of beauty too. You know, I’m sick of rap and grime beat and harshness.’

‘But that’s what people want . . .’

‘Is it? What about the Victorian Church in darkest Liverpool? Or London? It was those self-denying priests in inner cities who reinstated beauty. I’ve been thinking about those old East End priests. The first priests to be called ‘Father’ were Anglicans, you know, not Catholics. Fathers to their people. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Cecil Quaile Woods up here. You know all about him, don’t you?’

‘So what are you suggesting? That I flap around in a lacy surplice and ask people to call me Father Whinfell?’

‘Don’t mock me. And what would be wrong with being Father Paul? People need to look up to their priest. I’ve been reading this pamphlet Mark lent me – it’s called “The New Puseyites”. There’s a movement, just the beginning of one . . .’

‘But that’s the exact opposite of everything we’ve stood for!’

‘No, it isn’t, really. Life with unemployment, drugs and dreariness isn’t so different from the Victorian postindustrial revolution with its laudanum and drink and dark terraced housing. Only with us it’s post-computerization. Mark has been talking to me about it . . .’

This was all totally new. Despite his genuine interest, Paul was feeling little stabs of shock and hurt. When had she been having these long conversations with Mark? Why hadn’t he been included?

‘So do you know where Mark is tonight?’ He tried to make it sound casual.

‘He’s gone into Norbridge. He’s thinking of joining a choral society at the Abbey.’

‘What? You mean the Abbey Chorus? But that’s just a load of sad oldies.’

But Paul felt strangely undermined. He left her peeling, and crept away back to the computer to log on to ancestry.co.uk. The past seemed reassuring. He was searching for his great-great-grandfather, and it was proving truly absorbing. But whenever he had mentioned it to Jenny, she hadn’t wanted to know.

So it was funny that she had mentioned Cecil Quaile Woods.

Alex Gibson met Edwin Armstrong for lunch in the college canteen as planned. Her face looked like waxy old cheese, her nose jutting out like a bright pink plastic beak with her big heavy bifocals perched on top. Her hair was more scraped back than ever and she was wearing an enormous androgynous cardigan.

Edwin felt sorry for her. Lynn had told him that she had gone to pieces after her mother died and there had been some sort of crisis prior to that. Alex was fumbling with files and bags and papers, and looking huntedly around the room. She was sitting at the only table which had been available when she arrived – an island in the middle of a fast food motorway.

For her part, Alex had been horrified. She had only been in the canteen once or twice before, and had hoped to sit in the darkest alcove. But everyone was back for the busiest period of the year, and the place was packed. Edwin joined her and said hello, aware of her discomfort. He put down his tray at the table and went straight to the point. She clearly wanted to escape.

‘Alex, I’m sorry if this seems insensitive, but when you found Tom with Morris’s body, did you notice a book?’

‘Yes, I did as a matter of fact. I only remembered it on New Year’s Day.’ She winced.

‘Look, what sort of book was it?’

‘How would I know? Look, I can’t be sure, but it was an unusual shape. My impression was that it was old. With respect to speaking ill of the dead . . . was it something Morris had pinched from the college?’

Edwin was surprised at her directness. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, ‘but I’ve been wondering why Morris was in the college at all.’

‘Me too. Was the book something to do with music? I thought it might be because of the shape of it. It was landscape. Longways. My first thought was that it was an antique children’s book of some sort.’

‘What did it look like? Just say whatever comes into your head.’

‘If you push me I suppose it looked like a . . . well . . . a psalter.’

‘You thought so too! So did Tom. How did you know?’

‘I sang in a church choir for years. In London. With my husband.’

‘Really? What sort of choir was it?’

‘Oh, High end. Actually it was bloody precious, to be honest. The sort of choir where people wear Prada under the surplices. And that’s just the men!’

Edwin laughed. Alex looked startled and then laughed herself.

‘I just wondered, because the police haven’t said anything about a book.’ Edwin said. ‘I’m going to ask them what happened to it.’

‘Could the Frosts have come back and stolen it?’

‘Maybe, though I doubt they’d have known a psalter from a copy of
Nuts
.’

‘Well, I did, though I’m more into
Loaded
.’

Edwin laughed again, surprised at her sense of humour. ‘Seriously, how much do you know about this? What have you sung in the past?’

‘The last thing I did was Handel’s
Dixit Dominus
. But I’ve done just about everything from Mozart to Mahler.’

Dixit Dominus
! What a coincidence, when he was working on that himself. And the Handel version wasn’t exactly easy. If Alex Gibson really knew her stuff then she might well recognize a psalter.

He needed more strong women singers. On the spur of the moment he said, ‘Look, Alex, if you’re an experienced chorister, why not join the Abbey Chorus? We need people like you.’

‘What, ageing sopranos?’

‘Rubbish. A good singer with proper intonation can keep going into her fifties, or even her sixties and beyond.’

Alex squirmed. Did she look that old? She would have described herself as forty-something. And anyway, there was no way she wanted to start singing again, getting involved. What was she doing, gassing on like this? It was the intoxication of being listened to, and light-headedness after hardly eating for days. But she had to go back to the office. She was behind with her work.

‘Hey!’ Edwin was signalling at someone. ‘Look, there’s Robert Clark. He started singing with the Chorus a couple of years ago.’

A look of wild panic seemed to pummel Alex’s podgy features from the inside. ‘I’ll think about it. I’ve got to go.’ She stood up, turning her back on Edwin, but as she bent down to grab her belongings, Robert strolled over, clutching a baguette.

‘Hi,’ he said, his eyes floating past her to Edwin. And that was that. There wasn’t even a flicker of acknowledgement.

Had she really altered so much? Alex thought. In real horror, she looked down at her bulging waist and fat thighs. She’d given up on them. But her face? Had that really changed beyond recognition? The two men were talking about the choir practice that night, and how they might do Stainer’s
Crucifixion
. Alex loved that piece.

‘Why not join us?’ Robert said to her. But his eyes had a faraway look.

There’s something wrong with Robert, Edwin thought. He’s completely distracted. He’s hardly acknowledged us. It’s not like Robert to be rude.

‘I must go,’ Alex mumbled, head down. ‘Excuse me.’ She turned away from them, and started pushing between the crowded tables to get out of the cafeteria.

‘Who was that?’ Robert asked, without much interest.

‘Alex Gibson. She’s the woman who was coming to supper at Lynn’s before Christmas. The one who found Tom with Morris’s body. You remember. I asked you to come and look after her, but she went home. She’s one of Lynn’s sad cases.’ He paused. ‘But actually, she’s not like that really. She kept her head and dealt with Tom very well. I quite like her. I was trying to get her to join the Chorus, but she didn’t seem keen.’

‘Pity.’ Robert had moved away, towards the queue to pay. Edwin was mildly surprised. Usually, Robert would stop for a chat, especially about something so interesting.

But this time his friend strode ahead, lost in his own thoughts.