David Dickinson - Death of a Chancellor

The tiny choirboy had stopped singing. Lady Lucy wondered if he was going to break down and weep, here in the midst of the choir stalls.

‘Almighty God, who hast safely brought us to the beginning of this day,’ the Dean spoke the words of the collect without looking down at his prayer book at all, ‘Defend us in the same way with thy mighty power and grant that this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger.’

Lady Lucy sank to her knees and prayed for the choirboys. She prayed that no harm might befall them that day. She prayed that no harm had befallen them in the days gone by. She prayed that no harm would come to them in the days ahead. She prayed that the fear be taken from them. But, as she followed them out of the west transept, hoping to be able to speak to one or two of them, she suspected that, on this occasion at least, her prayers would not be answered.

Powerscourt and Chief Inspector Yates were walking slowly round the cloisters. The Chief Inspector looked up at the extraordinary carvings on the roof. ‘Cloisters, my lord. Finished about 1410. Fan vaulting. Perpendicular. Last phase of English Gothic. There used to be a stream here next to these cloisters, my lord, but it was sent underground about forty years ago. The cathedral masons thought it was going to cause subsidence so they diverted it. They did leave a sluice gate that could be opened from somewhere in the cathedral so the building could be flooded in case of fire.’

‘Could we come back to the cloisters in a moment, Chief Inspector? What do you make of these missing journals of Arthur Rudd’s? Do you think they’re important?’

‘I’m not sure what to think about them,’ said the Chief Inspector. ‘We had to promise an increase in the number of visits to the husband in jail before that wretched woman would speak to us at all. Even now, I’m not sure she couldn’t be mistaken. I certainly don’t think they’re as important as that young man Patrick Butler thinks they are.’ The Chief Inspector fished around in his pocket for his copy of the Grafton Mercury. ‘What did his paper say? “We call upon the authorities” – that means me in this case – “to display the utmost vigilance in the hunt for them. Not an hour, not a day must be lost.” I can tell you this, my lord. We’re looking everywhere for those bloody journals. I’ve even got a couple of my officers wading through all the rubbish in the Corporation dump. I don’t suppose the young man on the Mercury fancies a day or two of duty squelching through all that mess.’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘It all depends, surely,’ he said, walking past the entrance to the chapter house, ‘on why the journals were removed, if they were removed. Was it because this diary would have told us who the killer was? Not very likely, on the face of it, because most people have no idea they’re going to be murdered, never mind who their murderer is going to be. Or was it because it contained something that would have led us to the murderer? Was he killed because of what was in the diaries? In which case how did the murderer know what was in the diaries? Did he pop in when Rudd was out and read the latest instalments? That doesn’t seem very likely to me. Or did the murderer intend to kill him anyway and then remove the diaries afterwards to protect his own identity?’

The bells high up in the tower at the bottom of the spire tolled eleven o’clock. Powerscourt thought they sounded very loud. He thought briefly of all those monks long ago whose daily lives would have been regulated by the notes of Great Tom and Isaiah and Resurrection and Ezekiel a couple of hundred feet above.

‘Had you ever thought of being a journalist, my lord?’ Chief Inspector Yates was smiling now. ‘If you can produce that many questions off the top of your head, think of the pages of the papers you could fill without ever leaving the office. For my money, my lord, the most likely explanation is your last one. The diaries might have given us all a clue as to who the murderer was.’ The Chief Inspector stopped suddenly and stared at the snow melting on the grass in the centre of the Great Cloisters. ‘This has only just occurred to me, my lord. Suppose the killer has just put the unfortunate Rudd on the spit. He’s already dead, as we know. He pops three doors up into Vicars Close and does a quick check on Rudd’s possessions and Rudd’s diaries. There’s something that would implicate the murderer. So they’ve got to go too. So the murderer trots back down into the kitchen and puts them on the fire. They’d be turned into dust and ashes long before anybody could find them.’

Powerscourt stared at the policeman. ‘I wish I’d thought of that, Chief Inspector. It’s so obvious when you think of it.’

They pulled back to the side of the cloister to let the choir pass on their way to Holy Communion at eleven fifteen.

‘These cloisters here, my lord,’ said the Chief Inspector, ‘they’re not as well preserved as the ones at Gloucester. Maybe that stream did them no good at all. I had to go there for a murder case two years ago and I made the time to go and have a look. The thing about this fan vaulting, my lord, is that all this tracery,’ the Chief Inspector stopped and pointed up at the delicate and elaborate patterns in stone that ran in almost perfect order along the roof of the cloisters, ‘they’re all ornamental, they don’t have any function at all. You could say that the masons were just showing off. And now, my lord, I must leave you. My Chief Constable won’t be pleased if he finds out that we’ve been having architectural tours of the cathedral. I do have to pop back later on this afternoon, mind you. Perhaps I’ll see you then.’

With a last look at the roof Chief Inspector Yates departed on his business. The patterns may have only been ornamental, Powerscourt thought, but they were incredibly graceful. They didn’t look as though they were made of stone at all, but of some much lighter substance, as if a fifteenth-century stonemason had managed to spray the roof with icing and it had set for five hundred years.

The congregation for Holy Communion was slightly larger than the one for Matins, Lady Lucy observed. The service was held in the Lady Chapel where the size or lack of size of the congregation was less apparent. The two old ladies were still there. Perhaps they never leave, she thought, hiding away overnight in some dusty corner of the huge building to pass the night with the rats and the departed saints. The drunk and the very thin old man had gone, but were replaced by a couple of elderly gentlemen in rather better health who spoke the responses in loud and self-important tones. There was an ascetic young man with a wide-brimmed hat on his knees who looked as if he was undergoing some profound religious experience, a mystic perhaps. Certainly he looked as if flagellation and hair shirts might not have been too far away. The choirboys were still there, looking, to Lady Lucy’s eyes, even more frightened than they had done that morning.

‘The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving.’ A look of rapture, a look of ecstasy crossed the face of the young mystic as he took the bread in his hands. Lady Lucy remembered Francis telling her about the bitter controversy that had racked the Church of England some years before. It concerned, she thought, something called the Doctrine of the Real Presence. Very High Church Anglicans known as ritualists, the ones closest in religious position to the Roman Catholics, believed that the bread and wine were transformed in the Communion Service into the real body and blood of Christ. The opposite party, principally Evangelicals, contended that such beliefs were incompatible with the doctrines of the Church of England. Anybody who believed in the idea of the Real Presence was effectively a heretic and should be expelled from the Anglican Church. One or two of these cases had actually ended up in court, one or two parsons had actually gone to jail, and, in the most farcical case, the Archbishop of Canterbury himself had eaten a consecrated wafer at the heart of the dispute. At the time of its consumption the wafer was over four months old.