Murder in Advent Read online

  ‘Good innings, though,’ said Margaret Hitt cheerfully. ‘They say he was well over eighty. Let’s hope it was a painless end.’

  ‘He was against the sale. We never discussed it directly.’ The Dean smiled and shook his head. ‘He made the point with heavy inferences. Or, rather, what he imagined were oblique references to my cupidity in the matter.’

  ‘Commander Bliter told me he’d have defended that Magna Carta with his life.’

  The Dean considered Treasure’s words for a moment before replying. ‘Possibly true. Certainly he’ll be writhing in paradise now for causing its destruction.’

  ‘Was there a charge to view the Old Library?’

  ‘No.’ It was Mrs Hitt who replied. ‘There should have been, but Mr Pounder, for one, would certainly have objected.’

  ‘And since he and a few other elderly volunteers supervised through the opening times for nothing . . .’ The Dean punctuated his remark with a shrug. ‘Pounder used to cover that late session four days a week, you know?’

  ‘Sitting in a draughty room with both doors open,’ added his wife.

  ‘Would they have been open?’ This was Treasure.

  ‘Not tonight. Not on Thursdays for some reason,’ the Dean answered. ‘They were closed when Ewart Jones and I left the cathedral. Pounder was in situ by then.’

  ‘Did you go up the stairs?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘My husband has a disarming way of seeing or, rather, hearing round corners,’ Margaret Hitt put in promptly. ‘Or up spiral staircases, as in this case.’

  ‘Anyone can do it who keeps his eyes closed and his ears open,’ said the Dean dismissively. ‘Blind people get the most practice. It’s to do with vibrations.’

  ‘Would he have kept the doors closed when he had that heater on? To stop anyone smelling the paraffin?’ asked the banker.

  The Dean shook his head. ‘Not a hope of that. He did it to keep the warmth in, I expect.’ He made a soft whistling noise through his teeth.

  ‘Gilbert means a blind person also develops an acute sense of smell,’ said Margaret Hitt with what the banker deemed to be surprising frankness. ‘More brandy, Mr Treasure?’ she asked.

  ‘And what exactly does a farm secretary do?’ asked Treasure as he and Glynis Jones walked westwards across the cathedral close. It was just after eleven. The two had run into each other as the banker had been leaving the Deanery. Canon Jones’s daughter had come out to exercise Jingles, who was now trotting several paces ahead of them.

  ‘Broadly, I’m in charge of accounts. Depreciation. VAT. The works. Currently for nineteen farmers. Various sizes but mostly small to medium. Each client gets about a day a month. Except it’s not so neat in practice. I handle wages for all of them. Farm-workers like to be paid in cash. On Fridays. Fridays are hairy.’

  ‘You’re self-employed?’

  ‘You bet. Each client pays me a fee. Quarterly. Most of it in advance.’

  ‘Did you qualify in accountancy?’

  ‘I’m in the process. Don’t have to. I can cope without. I’ve done a farm secretary diploma course.’

  ‘There is one?’

  ‘Sure. Two years at an agricultural college. Better value than a degree in sociology, for instance. Useful if I marry a farmer too.’

  ‘You planning to?’

  ‘Not straight away. Eventually, maybe. Back home in New Zealand. Hello, why all the renewed action, I wonder?’

  The two had nearly reached the north porch when a police van drew up there. It had been driven along the pedestrian pathway from Bridge Street. Six uniformed policemen got out of it. Under the direction of a sergeant, they began arranging a semi-circular cordon of steel barriers around the porch, and some yards out from it. Before this there had been only one lone policeman standing in the emptied close. Now a police car was coming along the path from the same direction as the van.

  ‘What’s going on, Sergeant?’ Treasure enquired.

  ‘Orders from the station, sir. This area to be closed off till further notice. Could I have your name, please.’

  ‘Mr Treasure’s with me, Peter.’

  ‘Oh, hello, Glynis. Didn’t recognise you. You’ll have to move on, I’m afraid. It’s residents only and no loitering for anyone in the close. Better put that dog on the lead. Excuse me.’ The young sergeant stepped away to meet the two plainclothes men who had got out of the car. Jingles, inside forbidden territory, having sniffed the bases of the porch buttresses, liberally anointed the ground in front of the eastern one and scurried back to her mistress with head up and both ears cocked.

  ‘The sergeant and I are both bellringers,’ said Glynis, attaching a lead to the little terrier. ‘What d’you think they’re doing.’

  ‘Evidently something they left undone before,’ answered Treasure.

  ‘I’d better tell Dad.’ The girl looked and sounded disconcerted. ‘Well, good night, Mr Treasure. See you tomorrow.’ She turned about and hurried away.

  The fresh activity at the cathedral wasn’t reflected in deserted Bridge Street as Treasure made his way back to the Red Dragon. There were cars parked near the hotel, but the television van had gone. There were only a few people in the residents’ lounge when he passed it on his way to the reception desk. The cathedral fire was not proving to be much of a crowd-keeper after all – not four hours after the event.

  The night porter was in charge of the desk. ‘Mr Mark Treasure is it, sir?’ he asked when he was getting Treasure’s key, and which the banker noted he could just as easily have reached for himself. ‘Telephone message for you, sir.’ He handed over an envelope which had already been opened. The room number typed on it had been altered in ink. ‘Sorry, it was given to another guest by mistake, sir.’

  Treasure read the word typed on the sheet of hotel message-paper. ‘Doesn’t say who it’s from. D’you know if it was a man or a woman?’

  ‘Couldn’t say, sir. Telephonist might remember. Got a time on it, has it?’

  ‘Yes. Nine-fifty.’

  ‘Have to wait till tomorrow then, sir. The girls leave at ten. That’ll be Daphne. The one who took that message. She’ll be on again at four tomorrow afternoon. Funny she didn’t get a name.’

  ‘She might have thought she had. It’s confusing.’ And it’s also meaningless, he added to himself as he read the message again in the lift. It said: ‘Ask about the Magna Carta from Daras.’

  Chapter Six

  ‘You reckon I can go home now, then?’ asked Cindy Larks in a rich country burr. She was coming down the stairs still preening her shock of red hair. A big girl, Cindy was pretty in a rough-hewn, gypsy way. ‘I’ll stay if you like, of course.’ She paused on the bottom step fixing Dr Donald Welt with what she imagined was a provocative smile. She dropped her hands on to her gently swaying hips. ‘Why can’t I ever stay all night?’

  ‘Because you’re not old enough.’

  She advanced into the living room and put her arms around his neck. She was taller than the thirty-two-year-old bearded organist. He enjoyed the feel of her body – just as he admired her natural singing voice, but for less selfish or for more overtly commendable reasons.

  ‘I’m plenty old enough. I’m eighteen. You know that.’

  ‘Well, your mother wouldn’t approve.’

  ‘Go on. My mum couldn’t care a . . .’

  ‘It’s better like this,’ he interrupted. He couldn’t say baldly that, despite her physical charms and compliant ways, he couldn’t cope with any more of her inane conversation – especially not tonight. He was a man who compartmented his life – and his day: it was getting late, and he did his best composing around midnight. ‘Just leave quietly. And try not to let anyone see you, there’s a good girl.’

  ‘If I was a good girl . . .’ she began with a wicked grin.

  ‘You are. And that’s why you’ll get to London. If you practise.’ He began steering her towards the hall.

  The house was part of the eastern terrace of Abbot’s Cloister
– a row of monks’ cells now converted as quarters for cathedral officials. It was small – two bed-rooms and a bathroom upstairs, a big living room and a well-equipped kitchen below.

  ‘Can I come tomorrow as well? You said there’d be an extra lesson this week. To make up. And the other. You know? That’s if you want.’ She sniggered.

  He nodded, thinking she was a sensible girl at heart: didn’t make a nuisance of herself when she didn’t get her own way. And he remembered he had promised an extra session because he’d be away next Thursday. ‘Same as today, then,’ he said. ‘Seven-fifteen.’

  ‘I could come straight after evensong. Give us more time like. You know?’ She looked at him coyly – except coyness wasn’t one of Cindy’s convincing affectations.

  ‘No,’ he answered bluntly and knowing she wasn’t going to argue over that, either. She knew which side her bread was buttered. He was doing a great deal to develop her voice and her singing career, which was more than could be said for Gerard Twist, who was shy of the girl choristers and put up with them only as an economic necessity.

  Welt was sure the girl had a professional future as a mezzo-soprano – but not while she went on working at a check-out in a supermarket. He was giving her free singing lessons – and he had very nearly engineered her acceptance and a bursary at one of the London music colleges.

  So, he rationalised again as he took down her coat, he earned his physical enjoyment of her. He had no conscience in the matter, and in precious few other matters. He had no conventional good intentions about an enduring relationship, and the girl knew it – this girl and several other girls.

  He was given to explaining he would never remarry, that once had been enough, and that his single and consuming passion was the creation of music. His first musical play had been a critical success and a financial disaster – at the Edinburgh Festival: it had never reached London. The next would be more ambitious – and another two years in the writing and composing.

  Meantime the income from his job at Litchester was important to him. So he didn’t risk unnecessary gossip about his private life. He didn’t let young women stay in his house all night, and he tried to avoid their leaving late. There were morality clauses in his contract and he suspected quite a few people around ready to invoke them, given the opportunity.

  Tonight had invented special problems. He’d been called to the cathedral over the fire. Cindy had arrived before that. She’d shown curiously little interest in the event, and remained at the house. Although he had told her to slip away if he didn’t return shortly, she’d been waiting for him when he got back – in his bedroom. He had found it hard to turn her out then, especially bearing in mind there had still been a good many people about.

  ‘If I come earlier sometimes, I could make you a nice supper, you know?’ she persisted as he helped her on with the coat. ‘We get ever so many out-of-date frozen-food packs. At the shop. For nothing. For staff. TV meals. You know? They’re all right. Only we can’t sell them when they’ve expired. You know?’

  And if she said ‘you know’ again he’d expire as well. ‘Thanks, no,’ he said aloud. ‘I need to have supper alone. To think,’ he added to avoid insult. She respected his intellect. ‘I have it early. In the town.’

  ‘Did you come back past the cathedral tonight?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Only you could have seen the fire.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t.’ It was the first time she’d shown any concern with what had happened, except to say she was sorry about Pounder.

  ‘If they get the money, the insurance, like you said, your job’ll be OK, will it? Same as if they’d sold the Magna Carta?’ She watched his frown deepen. ‘Well, you said last week they might get a cheaper organist. Part-timer. If they packed up the choir school and didn’t get the organ mended. You know? Wouldn’t have been right, that. Not to my way of thinking. Wouldn’t have been fair.’

  He recalled telling her something of the kind. ‘I’ll be OK, yes. Anyway, you shouldn’t worry about me.’

  ‘I’m not. Not now, then.’

  ‘Will you be putting the kettle on again, Mother? It’s parched I am. Not surprising as well,’ Patrick Duggan, the head verger, swayed uncertainly. He regularly addressed his wife as ‘Mother’. He’d got into the habit of it years before when all the children were at home. Her name was Bridget, which he’d never cared about. For her own part she happily countenanced the constant reminder that she had been a fruitful wife – there had been five offspring – even if the memories of their begetting brought no joy to her at all.

  Bridget, fifty-eight, but looking older, went out to the kitchen where they took their meals. Duggan stayed in the main room where she had been watching television with their youngest son Rory when her husband had come in. The house was on a council-owned estate on the far side of town from the cathedral.

  Rory, a burly twenty-three, hadn’t looked up when his father had entered. The young man was unemployable rather than unemployed – though he had been that, too, and fairly consistently since leaving school. He took jobs often enough and long enough to ensure he was entitled to national assistance in the far longer periods when he was idle. The dole constituted pocket money for Rory because fundamentally he lived off his parents – which saddened his mother, who could find no fault in her last-born, and infuriated his father, who couldn’t stand the sight of him.

  ‘Anybody else dead? Besides old Pounder?’ Rory asked, then looked around suddenly. His eyes widened when he saw what his father was doing. ‘Oh, yes? Come into money, have we? Christmas bonus already?’

  Duggan stuffed the five-pound notes he’d been counting back into his pocket. ‘None of your bloody business. It’s earned money, so it is.’ But he looked furtive all the same.

  ‘Dirty Protestant money, is it? The wages of sin, to be sure.’ The pronounced Southern Irish cadence didn’t come naturally to Rory as it did to Duggan. All the children had been born and brought up in Litchester. He thickened the accent and broadened the idiom to irritate his father. And the Protestant jibe came in the same context.

  Except for Duggan himself, the family was Roman Catholic. Bridget actively practised the faith; Rory had not so much lapsed as never seriously joined.

  Duggan had undergone self-conversion to the Church of England just before applying for a job in the cathedral forty years earlier. That was after he had served three years in the British Army. Already married at the time, he had crossed the Channel to volunteer near the end of the Second World War to enhance his prospects of peacetime employment in England later. The last expectation was only actually realised through the intervention of a service comrade, the much older Neville Pounder, who had already returned to his job at the cathedral. The friendship between the two had later foundered – like a number of similar attachments made during Duggan’s time in the local Litchester Regiment, and due mostly to his penchant for borrowing money and failing to return it.

  ‘If you must know, the money’s me winnings,’ he blurted out angrily, then wished he hadn’t.

  ‘Winnings, is it? With no racing all this week? Not anywhere on account of fog.’ Rory turned about completely in the armchair he’d been straddling, the better to interrogate his father, who he sensed was fuddled with drink and hiding something.

  ‘Dogs. Me winnings on the dogs. Ah, thanks, Mother.’ Bridget had returned with a tray of tea things.

  ‘Is it all settled now? At the cathedral. There’s no more danger?’ she asked.

  ‘The fire’s out. Hours ago now. They’ll be looking to the damage in the morning.’ He hiccupped loudly. ‘It’s a sad thing.’

  ‘But we made some money on it.’ This was Rory, who had been studying his father the whole time. ‘Now, how did we do that?’

  ‘Is that right, Patrick?’ Bridget looked up from pouring his tea.

  ‘No, it’s not right. It’s a . . . it’s a foul invention. I collected me racing winnings tonight. And I nearly didn’t.�
� His face screwed up as he concentrated. ‘Because didn’t I lose the ticket? Well, I found it again, except that’d made me late. Never had the time for checking the money.’ He turned on his son. ‘And didn’t they fetch me straight from the pub when I got there? When the fire was on? And I’ve not been home since.’

  ‘You were late in the pub, then?’ said his wife quietly.

  ‘They were big winnings,’ Rory said, tiring of the baiting. He swung around again to watch what was on the screen – a repeat showing of a football match with the sound turned low.

  Duggan sat on the sofa with his wife. He sipped the tea. He wasn’t concentrating on the television, though.

  ‘Got the offer of Neville Pounder’s job,’ he half-whispered, not intending Rory should hear, though he couldn’t wait to announce the news to Bridget.

  ‘Is that for sure, then?’ she asked, and sounding unconvinced.

  ‘Certain sure. The Commander himself. Just now.’

  Duggan would be sixty-five – official retirement age – the following March. For years he had been angling to be first in line for Pounder’s job when it became vacant. The Dean’s verger was paid by honorarium – an annual fee, not a salary. It was part-time work and not pensionable, but it wasn’t subject to an age limit, either.

  ‘I can start straight away. Sure it’ll be no problem doing the two jobs for a while.’

  ‘And Mr Jakes isn’t in for it at all?’

  ‘Because it’s not fitting work for a gardener. Wasn’t I always saying that? Well, I was right.’

  ‘But didn’t Mr Pounder start as a gardener? You’re certain the Dean himself will approve?’ She still seemed doubtful and carefully watched her husband’s reaction to the question. ‘You were never his favourite man.’

  ‘That’s not true. Not any more. We’re great friends. The Dean and me.’ Duggan scowled at his tea; then, forgetting, he added in a louder voice, ‘Anyway, the Commander’s promised, so he has. He can’t go back on a solemn promise.’