David Dickinson - Death of a Chancellor

‘Didn’t you ask the Dean to write an article about the celebrations? Something to do with medieval abbots? Isn’t it going to be about that, Patrick?’

‘Medieval abbots be damned,’ said Patrick Butler, ‘this is more than that, I’m sure, much more. Look, I’d better get back and see where else is being closed down. Can I escort you home through the snow?’

Anne Herbert declined. But she did negotiate her way to the grocer’s where she bought a pound of Patrick’s favourite tea. Something told her she would be making the first cup later on that day.

Lord Francis Powerscourt spent much of the day wandering around the cathedral and its precincts. Normally he would have been fascinated by the building and its long history. But today it was as though he had a film or a glaze over his eyes. The flying buttresses and the chantry chapels, the medieval stained glass and the Angel Choir, the spandrels and the scissor arches, the presbytery and the misericords all left him cold. He wondered all day if there was a link between the death of John Eustace and the murder of Arthur Rudd. He still thought it possible that Eustace had committed suicide with the gun making some terrible marks on his face so he was hurried to his coffin with no relatives allowed to see him. But if he had been murdered, then surely money was the motive. Eustace had so much of it. Powerscourt entertained dark suspicions of Mrs Cockburn. Suppose she had forged that will six or seven months ago when Mr Archibald Matlock had witnessed the signature of a man who did not speak, the entire ceremony over in three minutes. Suppose she waited until the memory of that ceremony would have faded. Then she has her brother killed and claims the money, ignorant of the two other wills in existence. But why, in that case, should she employ Powerscourt at all? Why did she need to establish that her brother was murdered? That could not have any bearing on the wills.

But suppose the two deaths were linked, suppose the cathedral and the Close, so innocent-looking as they lay wreathed in the pure embrace of the snow, held the key to the deaths?

He wandered into the ancient chapter house where the abbot and the monks held their business meetings centuries before. Sitting on one of the stone seats he imagined he could hear one of those robed Benedictines start the occasion by reading a chapter from the Bible. It was that custom that gave the chapter house its name. Something obscure from the Old Testament, he felt, some tale from long ago of the sufferings of the Children of Israel out of the Book of Nehemiah or Hosea. Why would anybody want to kill a member of the vicars choral whose only crime was to sing for their supper?

He went to a choir rehearsal where he could observe the late Arthur Rudd’s colleagues in action. He learnt something of the strange world they inhabited, how fifteenth-century vicars choral were notorious for drunkenness and womanizing, how in some cathedrals they had formed themselves into guild associations so powerful that they could not be sacked and were entitled to generous pensions. In some places, he was told, reformers had taken up to fifty years to root out the corrupt practices of the past. But of a motive for the death of Arthur Rudd, he learnt nothing. He did learn that there were at least four ways into the kitchen of the Vicars Hall and that none of them were locked at night. Was the burning of the body some obscure biblical reference? Was it some terrible practical joke carried out when the victim was already dead?

He went over and over again to stare at the names on the choir stalls, the names not only of the officials of Compton Minster but of the parishes which had once been part of the diocese and whose income may have helped to build and maintain it. Perhaps they held the answer. He was hypnotized by the names. Grantham Australis, Powerscourt read. Yetminster Prima. Winterbourne Earl. Teynton Regis. Hurstbourne and Burbage. Fordington and Writhlington. If Rudd was already dead, why take the trouble to burn him as well? Was it the same person who strangled him and put his body on the spit, turning round and round in front of the flames? Or two different people? Yetminster Secunda. Minor Pars Altaris. Chardstock. Netherbury in Ecclesia. Weird figures from the Middle Ages were striding out of Powerscourt’s imagination now and taking their seats in the choir. Grimston. Grantham Borealis. Coombe and Harnham. Chisenbury and Chute. Was John Eustace a friend of Arthur Rudd? Was there a feud running through the Close? Wilsford and Woodford. Lyme and Halstock. Ruscomb. Bedminster and Redcliffe. There were no answers. Powerscourt suddenly remembered that Mrs Augusta Cockburn was due to return the following day to Fairfield Park. The second meeting about the wills with Oliver Drake the lawyer was only a couple of days away. The names on the choir stalls pursued Powerscourt as he walked down the nave towards the Cathedral Green outside. They were like a code whose meaning he could not decipher. Shipton. Netheravon. Bishopstone. Gillingham Minor. Beminster Secunda.

At a quarter to five on the same afternoon Anne Herbert was sitting in the little drawing room of her house on the edge of the Cathedral Close. Her children had gone to make a snowman in their friends’ garden four doors away. The snow had stopped but a wind had risen, blowing flakes of snow in random fashion all over Compton. Anne was wondering if she could afford a new sofa. The boys seemed to have worn her present one out completely bouncing up and down and performing somersaults. Maybe it would be simpler, she thought, just to have this one re-covered. A new sofa would be subject to the same level of assault and battery as the present one.

From time to time she found her eye wandering towards the hall and the front door. And it was not her two boys she was thinking of. Patrick Butler had been due to see the Dean at four o’clock that afternoon. She remembered the time distinctly. The Deanery was two minutes’ walk away at most. And the Dean, she knew only too well, prided himself on the rapid despatch of business. The entire transaction of Anne Herbert being transferred from her humble rectory after her husband died into this little house, more like a cottage than a house, had been carried out by the Dean in less than five minutes.

Maybe she should put the kettle on again and make some fresh tea. That would make him come, some of the breakfast blend she had bought in the grocer’s that morning. Five to five now, she checked the clock in the kitchen. There was still no sign of Patrick Butler.

Three pots of tea had been made and then thrown out before there was a knock on her door. A pale, distraught-looking editor of the Grafton Mercury presented himself and requested refreshment at twenty past five. Anne did not believe he could have been with the Dean all that time.

‘Patrick,’ she said, ‘are you all right? You look very pale. You don’t look at all well to me. Hadn’t you better go home and lie down?’

Patrick did not like to tell her that the two rooms he rented on the top floor of an old house on the outskirts of the city were usually even more untidy than his office. ‘I’ll be fine in a moment, Anne,’ he said. ‘I just need a moment or two in peace to compose myself.’

Anne was certain he must be ill now. Very ill. Possibly in need of urgent medical attention. Maybe she should take him to the hospital. For the one thing Patrick Butler had never done in all the months she had known him was to ask for time to compose himself. The composing and the being Patrick were, in Anne’s experience, totally incompatible. He was the most restless, the most energetic, the most mercurial person she had ever known. Composed he was not.

‘Tell me what happened, Patrick,’ she said, ‘only when you’re ready.’