Murder in Advent Read online

  David Williams

  MURDER IN ADVENT

  PAN BOOKS

  This one for Michael and Elizabeth Sieff

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Foreword

  Three thousand miles across the Atlantic from England, at a big isolated house on the Florida coast, a skeletal male figure shuffles out of the elevator in the basement.

  He is old, this lean, parched figure, tall and stooping, and dressed in a thin, ill-fitting light grey suit that flaps about him like a shroud. He crosses the carpeted corridor and operates the electric combination lock on the steel door opposite.

  When the door slides open the man goes through into the wide, silent and carefully lit square gallery beyond. He closes the door again with a push button on the far side. It is cooler down here – the temperature kept at an unvarying level at all times to protect the exhibits. It is the same with the larger collection upstairs on the second floor, but the items here are in all senses even better protected.

  The man sighs. The steely eyes wear a look of lustful anticipation. It is an expression that nowadays is more or less reserved for the daily visit to what most outsiders understand is a fall-out shelter.

  He pauses with a sort of reverence before the Rembrandt Self-Portrait. Next his gaze devours the Corot Girl Musing by a Fountain – an especial favourite. Later he pays a kind of obeisance to the Rubens Christ on the Cross, and then caresses the fifteenth-century bas-relief Jesse’s Tree because he finds its tactile quality a truly sensuous experience. When he comes to it, he stares very hard at his early Magna Carta, frowning as he remembers the promised report still hasn’t been delivered. Breathing more heavily he moves on. The anger that has been welling in him is quickly dissipated at the sight of his Van Dyck Portrait of a High-Born Lady.

  There are thirty-one exhibits altogether – not a large collection, but every one has, in its time, been something the man has desired and been temporarily denied. Some had not been for sale: others had been available only at exorbitant prices. The man is immensely rich as well as powerful, but he is not a fool with money. He had paid a proper price for every item – in an unconventional way. Each had come to him through the same special dealer. It is no inconvenience to him that the collection cannot be shown to others: on the contrary, as time goes by he draws increasing satisfaction from having to keep it all to himself. He has made arrangements for its disposal after his death – an event he considers is still a long way off. He is a widower recluse. Only his business manager and one trusted servant know of what is here.

  Among his special favourite, the Corot had come from Montreal, the Rubens from Rome, the bas-relief from France, the Rembrandt and the Van Dyck from Italy and the Magna Carta from England: not all the items have been publicly reported as stolen – but the man knows they have been all the same.

  Chapter One

  ‘The Lord be with you,’ chanted Minor Canon Twist on B flat, unaccompanied and perfectly pitched. He allowed the last vowel to linger, then to dissolve in a refined diminuendo. The effect was nearly as pleasing to his hearers – and possibly even to God – as it was to Minor Canon Twist himself.

  ‘Aa-wey-wa-spey-wi-T,’ responded the choir of Litchester Cathedral in mellifluous, unisoned Donald Duck. The emphatic end consonant was marvellously arrested by the baffle that abruptly silences end consonants in cathedrals. This has something to do with tall, enclosed choir-stalls – but more with the way cathedral choir-masters fixate on emphatic end consonants.

  The blind Dean Gilbert Hitt shifted his knees on his hassock. He was a big man: a sixty-two-year-old greyed eminence with an urbane wit and a reputation as a preacher. He had just read the second lesson. Processing to and from the lectern had warmed him a little, but the effect was fading. Every year they decreased the winter temperature in the cathedral by a degree. Not for the first time in early December the Dean took comfort that he’d likely be retired before the congregation was reduced to doing warming-up exercises in the stalls.

  ‘Lord, have mercy upon us,’ cantored Gerard Twist, who at twenty-eight, the dean calculated wryly, might survive to hear this standard supplication acquire an added poignancy.

  ‘Chri-aa-aa-see-aa-aw-u-Su,’ cawed the choir at a congregation which it comfortably outnumbered, and all of whose members understood the chanted words without benefit of translation. There were fifteen such worshippers spread out along the canopied back rows of intricately carved canons’ stalls on both sides of the chancel aisle. The officiating clergy sat here too, in the end seats nearest the nave. Next to the Dean was gaunt, bearded Canon Brastow, the Cathedral Treasurer. Immediately opposite on the right-hand side was the ample Canon Merit, the Chancellor and thus second in the Chapter pecking order. Between him and Minor Canon Twist knelt the impish and ebullient Canon Ewart Jones, Precentor. In front, in paired rows of stalls, were the robed choristers.

  All week-day services were held in the enclosed choir – the part of the chancel immediately east of the crossing of the nave with the north and south transepts, and the massive central tower that marked that crossing and illuminated it with its Norman lantern.

  Litchester Cathedral is almost wholly Norman, where rounded arch everywhere imposes over rounded arch, where there is solidity in immense pillars, magnificence in breadth as well as in height, majesty in length, the whole structure breathtakingly awesome – and ruinously expensive to run.

  The diocese is small – like the town which, despite its having a cathedral, is seldom now referred to as a city. Litchester is smaller than neighbouring Hereford and Shrewsbury, or more distant Worcester and Gloucester. Only its cathedral is bigger – and poorer too, than any of those others. It is also less visited because it is less accessible, and despite its being indisputably one of the finest examples of Romanesque architecture in Europe.

  The cathedral choir is not outstanding. Years ago it had been. Now there isn’t the money. The choir school still exists – just, but it’s generally known it will have to go in the next lot of cuts. Meantime all the boys are recruited from the town: boarding facilities were abolished some years ago. Girls and young women are now admitted to the choir. There had been trouble about that from traditionalists, but the singing had improved. None of the choir men – the clerks choral – is full-time. Most work in banks or building society branches in the town. It’s why the week-day sung evensong is held as late as five o’clock. Of course, with an extra million pounds in the funds . . .

  ‘O Lord, save Thy people,’ beseeched Twist.

  ‘And bless Thine inheritance,’ Canon Brastow, tall and ascetic, responded reedily and unexpectedly from beside the Dean, interrupting the latter’s retrospections – and half a beat ahead of the choir’s appointed response.

  The Dean sighed to himself: Clive Brastow was testing his voice in preparation for leading the spoken prayers after the anthem. He had earlier complained of a sore throat. He was Canon Residentiary during December, which presaged a succession of Sunday sermons on social responsibility, the misconduct of the rich, and prescriptions for Third World ills. These would come at a time when Dean Hitt considered people could be better employe
d having their hearts and minds prepared for the joys of Christmas.

  At least Brastow had declared himself in favour of selling the exemplification: the Dean was steering his own mind to more charitable postulations. But was the fellow going to insist on those conditions? The priorities were absolutely clear without tomfool qualifications from members of the Chapter.

  If only dear Ewart Jones would see sense.

  ‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord . . .’

  Gerard Twist’s chanting of the third collect was too evidently a sensitively modulated solo to command attention as mere prayer. The over-prompt, identifiable ‘Amen’ at the end, emanating in a good, clear contralto from further down the Dean’s row, came more as a musical appreciation than a pious affirmation. That would be Laura Purse, an engaging spinster of this cathedral, and its librarian-archivist. It was the same attractive Miss Purse whose intentions concerning Minor Canon Twist had for some time been clearer to most present than they had seemed to have been to the Minor Canon himself.

  The anthem that came next was a modern piece which the Dean didn’t much care for – so his renewed resolve to apply his mind wholly to the service fell by the wayside once again. He knelt with everyone else when the choir stopped singing. Canon Brastow launched into prayers for the royal family with an almost treasonable lack of spirit and a voice only just made audible through the microphone in front of him.

  The Dean returned to pondering on Canon Ewart Jones after consciously determining the Queen could manage without his personal intercession till the morrow.

  Ewart’s stand about the sale of the exemplification was the more irritating for being infuriatingly explicable. He and the Dean were friends. Both men had been nurtured in the High Church tradition. Both were informed if uncomplicated believers. Both instinctively rejected the trendy, modernist disbeliefs. Both were family men, and both were conservatives – the Dean by instinct, the Canon by experience. The high-born Oxford classicist and the New Zealand farmworker’s outstanding son rarely had difficulty in reaching accord. They’d have had none now over the selling of the Litchester Magna Carta if the Dean’s view had matched the attitudes and values to which the two men normally subscribed. The Dean accepted that he was the inconsistent party. But he still felt his stand was more than justified.

  ‘. . . and dost promise, that when two or three are gathered together . . .’ Brastow was making husky going of the prayer of St Chrysostom. Canon Merit had earlier read the first lesson for him after volunteering to do so – and the prayers as well if he wanted – when Brastow had complained about his throat in the vestry.

  Almost anything Merit offered to do for Brastow – or Brastow for Merit – would be accepted grudgingly because it could be logged by the donor as a conciliatory gesture. They were not friends. It would be uncharitable to say they were enemies – just some distance apart on theological, doctrinal, liturgical, political, and social issues, which, it’s true, left very few others on which they could be at all close.

  If Canon Jones, the Precentor, had offered to take over the whole of the Canon Residentiary’s bits of the service – which he very nearly did, except Merit got in first – the offer would have been accepted with alacrity. As it was, Brastow had only himself and his pride to blame that while capitulating over the reading of the first lesson he was still left struggling with the prayers. As he made his way through them painfully, he avoided glancing across the aisle for fear of catching what he was sure would be Merit’s over-solicitous look signalling that he could still take over.

  It was unusual for all four members of the cathedral’s governing body – the Dean, the Chancellor, the Treasurer and the Precentor – to be together at a Thursday evensong. They were present this time because Dean Hitt had summoned a special Chapter meeting just before. At times there had been acrimony at the meeting. By common but unspoken charitable intention they had all come on to the service directly from the Chapter House.

  ‘Fulfil now, O Lord, the desires and petitions of Thy servants . . .’ Brastow soldiered on, smoothing his beard on to his afflicted throat.

  Canon Algy Merit, extreme Anglo-Catholic, and New Testament scholar, fifty-two-year-old bachelor aesthete and portly gourmet, dropped his gaze and gave up trying to attract Brastow’s attention. Now he bent his head half to one side, and in this characteristic pose appeared to be studying the upper buttons of his cassock. The folds under his chin sank well into his neck. His pink and shining cheeks sagged also in repose.

  If Brastow found croaking preferable to applying common sense, so be it, judged the Chancellor to himself. He was still finding it difficult to understand quite why the Dean had drawn such comfort from the Treasurer’s attitude over the exemplification. The condition Brastow was attaching to his approval of a sale wholly nullified the value from the cathedral’s viewpoint.

  Merit’s brow wrinkled as he closed his eyelids. His own attitude had been unequivocal: honest and unequivocal. He would consent to selling if a guaranteed British buyer could be found. Under no circumstances would he co-operate over the present offer. The eyelids tightened. It was a matter of principle. So, an early thirteenth century exemplification of the Magna Carta was not strictly a work of art: facing facts – it wasn’t a work of art at all. The left cheek twitched. Nevertheless, you couldn’t be the author of a quite recent letter to The Times deploring the sale and export of irreplaceable treasures from British collections and then be party to flogging one yourself to a museum in California. He flicked the check with an extended forefinger.

  Plenty of people would consider the Litchester Magna Carta as irreplaceable treasure. Of course, there was no British buyer – nor would there be at more than a million pounds, nor anything approaching it. Canon Merit opened his eyes to watch as well as hear Brastow trying to stifle a nasty cough.

  ‘. . . and in the world to come, life everlasting.’

  ‘Amen,’ responded Lieutenant-Commander Bliter, RN (Retired), five seats along from Merit, and admiring the way Canon Brastow was coping under handicap.

  Percival Arbuthnot Bliter was the Cathedral Administrator. He normally stopped work at four and wasn’t a regular attendant at evensong. Today was different. He had been formally required to take the minutes at the Chapter meeting and, not to put too fine a point on it, attending the service afterwards had offered a nice earnest of his piety to virtually all those who held authority over him. He had come in late, but he hadn’t been the last.

  Bliter had retired from the Royal Navy six years earlier, at the age of forty-seven. The cathedral job didn’t pay as much as he’d have liked, but it was suitable in the social sense, the hours were short, and after two years of unemployment he had been glad to take it – as well as the rent-free apartments in Abbot’s Cloister. His service pension was indexed, which meant it kept pace with the general cost of living but not with the specific price of gin.

  Percy Bliter had been a disappointment to his father, an admiral, also to his wife Jennifer, an admiral’s daughter. He had even been a disappointment to himself, but he didn’t let failure show, priding himself on maintaining standards, albeit ones that in the material context the Bliters had never at any time attained. There had been no children.

  Slowly he turned his head altarwise, making the movement seem like an act of devotion. He stole a lascivious glance at Cindy Larks in the choir opposite, before his gaze came to rest on Miles Nutkin, the Chapter Clerk, in the seat beside him and whose eyes he guessed would be closed. Percy deferred to Nutkin, who had appointed him to his job in the first place.

  The Administrator straightened his back and the knot of his Royal Navy tie. He was a tall and commanding figure, even when kneeling – and a bluff, jolly Jack Tar of a chap was another of the impressions he liked to foster. He sometimes prayed, and he did so now in his own way.

  ‘God, make them sell the Magna Carta’ was the simple sailor’s heartfelt, silent entreaty.

  As if on cue, Nutkin’s eyes flickered ope
n and stared momentarily at Bliter, who started guiltily. It was well known the Chapter Clerk was against the sale – but not that he could intercept messages to the Almighty.

  ‘Hymn number six,’ announced Minor Canon Twist.

  Miles Nutkin had been at the Chapter meeting in an advisory capacity. He, too, had felt obliged to attend the service. He had come in well after the start but he had needed to make some telephone calls: also he had run into Mrs Hitt, the Dean’s wife.

  The title of Chapter Clerk was a formal one, at once more important though less onerous than it sounded. The office was part-time and rewarded with an honorarium. The holder was required to be a practising solicitor, to be an adviser to the Dean and Chapter – mostly on matters of law – when occasion arose, and to appear at special services and functions clad in official regalia.

  Nutkin, though a year younger than Bliter, looked much the senior of the two. He was of medium height, slight build, and balding at the front, which served to accentuate a wide, high forehead. The thick spectacles with the heavy frames added to the general gravity of his appearance: so did his dark suits. He frowned a good deal and seldom smiled. He was married, and as well as being an important lawyer – the principal of a long-established family practice – he was a county councillor, on the board of the Litchester Building Society, inconspicuously rich, and preparing to become even richer. He was considered a prayerful and thoughtful man. In the previous half-hour he had prayed very little but had certainly been thinking hard. Seldom had the Dean and Chapter given him so much to think about.

  ‘He comes the broken heart to bind

  The bleeding soul to cure

  And with the treasures of his grace

  To enrich the humble poor.’

  Canon Jones, the breezy New Zealander, had as good a voice as any of the clerks choral: bass baritone, well controlled. He savoured the third verse of ‘Hark the Glad Sound’ and smiled up broadly and a touch mischievously at Algy Merit, while providing a spirited rendering to the last two lines.