Death of a Chancellor Page 10

Powerscourt looked carefully at Archibald Matlock. He decided to take him into his confidence. ‘I think it perfectly possible that the man who signed the will that day was not John Eustace.’

  ‘God bless my soul,’ said the solicitor. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘It’s only conjecture, Mr Matlock, not hard facts that lawyers like yourself are so fond of. The key thing, it seems to me, is the signature. I have compared the signature on that will with John Eustace’s hand and I cannot tell the difference. I doubt if anybody could. But suppose you had found a forger. Suppose the forger could reproduce John Eustace’s hand, or anybody else’s, perfectly. But he could not reproduce his voice. If the man wrapped up against his illness, with the muffler round his neck, had talked to you in a foreign accent, or an East End accent, would you have believed he was John Eustace? You would not. So the lights are low, he is heavily wrapped up, but the signature on the will seems authentic. The will is false. But that is almost impossible to prove.’

  ‘God bless my soul,’ said the solicitor. His left hand this time checked in vain for the return of the hairs on his head. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I wish I knew, Mr Matlock,’ said Powerscourt, beginning to take his leave. ‘Thank you so much for your time. I must return to Compton without delay.’ He knew perfectly well what he was going to do but he felt he had said enough already. As he walked down the stairs towards Chancery Lane, he saw another of those prints on the wall. It showed three lawyers seated round a table. The surface is invisible for the piles and piles of heavy coins heaped upon it. The lawyers are counting the coins and putting them into little bags. All three are smiling.

  Part Two

  Candlemas

  February 1901

  7

  The English countryside is turning into fairyland, Powerscourt thought, a white and rather mystical fairyland. Snow was falling fast over the hills and valleys of the county of Grafton, settling on the roads and lanes, smoothing and obliterating everything beneath it. Distant farmhouses looked like the blobs on a child’s painting. The horses were treading carefully now as the snow piled up. Soon, reflected Powerscourt, it would be time for the fairies to go home. Perhaps they already had, darting or flying back to their magical castles through this world of enchanted white.

  It was shortly after five o’clock in the morning. The Dean’s man, a human giant, well over six feet of brawn and muscle, had called for him at Fairfield Park with a cryptic message. ‘The Dean says you’re to come at once,’ was all he would say. Powerscourt’s attempts to glean further intelligence on the short journey into Compton had been in vain. The man was a silent giant. In the two days since his return to Compton Powerscourt had not been idle. He had walked yet again the short route between the house and the residence of Dr Blackstaff. He had called on the Chief Constable to announce his presence in the county and to request assistance, should that become necessary. He had walked several times all around Compton itself, spotted on one occasion by Patrick Butler, who had made a mental note that the man who might be an investigator was still in the locality.

  Powerscourt didn’t think it was the habit in English cathedrals to start the day with a service at five thirty in the morning. Perhaps, centuries before, the Benedictine monks would have been up for hours, with a couple of Masses already under their belts, but not now in this first year of the twentieth century. So what could have happened for him to be summoned at this ungodly hour of day? Another body? Another corpse? Not far to go now. Powerscourt realized that they were approaching the walls that ran around the Cathedral Close. Then he saw a light burning in the Deanery which lay opposite the minster in a handsome eighteenth-century house.

  ‘Good morning, Powerscourt. So glad you’re here. Please come in.’ The Dean, Powerscourt noted with interest, was wearing an enormous blue dressing gown. Beneath it, glimpsed occasionally as he walked, were a pair of white flannel pyjamas with dark blue stripes. He had a pair of battered slippers on his feet. He led Powerscourt into a large drawing room. A fire was beginning to splutter in the Dean’s grate but it had not yet warmed the room. The Dean’s drawing room was bitterly cold.

  ‘The Chief Constable you know, I believe.’ Powerscourt bowed slightly to William Benson. Benson, he noticed, had found the time to put on a dark suit, although Powerscourt saw that in his haste and possibly in the dark the Chief Constable had put on an odd pair of socks.

  ‘Chief Constable told me about your occupation, Powerscourt,’ said the Dean, trying to warm himself in front of his fire. ‘Suggested I should send for you.’

  ‘What has happened?’ said Powerscourt, his mind alert from his ride through the snow. ‘Has there been a disaster of some kind?’

  ‘Disaster?’ snorted the Dean. ‘You could call it that. Or maybe worse.’ He pulled his dressing gown tighter round his powerful frame. ‘Let me give you the facts. On the far side of the cathedral you may have seen a little terrace called Vicars Close. That is where the vicars choral, the people who sing in the choir, live while they are with us. There is a large building at the bottom of the Close, the end nearest the cathedral, called Vicars Hall where they eat their meals. The kitchen there is huge. It has a great spit, large enough to roast an ox. At four thirty-five this morning, the porter found the remains of a man who had been roasted all night on that spit. He was almost unrecognizable, but the porter managed to identify him as Arthur Rudd, a senior member of the community of vicars choral.’

  The Dean crossed himself very quickly. The Chief Constable bowed his head. Powerscourt looked at the fire. The flames of hell have come to this tiny city, he thought. For our God, he remembered the lines from the Old Testament, is a consuming fire, a fire that had sucked the last breath from the lungs of the unfortunate Arthur Rudd. Hieronymus Bosch and his apocalyptic vision of the torments of the damned are stalking the inhabitants of Compton Minster. What more tortures did he have in store for his victims?

  ‘This is terrible news,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Has a doctor been to inspect the body?’

  The Dean nodded. In matters of practical efficiency the Dean had no equal in the Cathedral Close. On the higher questions of the nature of good and evil, of sin and redemption, he might not have been so strong.

  ‘Dr Williams is with him now. He is supervising the removal of the body from the Vicars Hall to the undertakers. He is going to conduct a preliminary investigation there. He should be joining us shortly. And,’ the Dean went on, with a faint note of distaste in his voice, ‘I have asked the Bishop to be here at six o’clock.’

  ‘Could I ask you, Powerscourt,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘if you have ever come across anything like this before?’

  ‘I have not,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It is appalling. Could I ask, Dean, if the dead man had a wife and children?’

  ‘He did not,’ replied the Dean, ‘but I must tell you two gentlemen that I am almost at a loss to know what to do in these circumstances.’ Powerscourt rather enjoyed the almost. It implied that the situation might be desperate, the enemy might be at the gates, the vandals might be about to enter Rome, but the Dean would remain master of events.

  ‘I’m not sure I understand you, Dean,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘The matter must be investigated in the normal way, however distasteful that may prove to the members of the church administration.’

  ‘Think of our situation, Chief Constable, think of it, I pray you,’ said the Dean, stretching his hands in front of him as if he was preaching a sermon and imploring the sinners to repentance. ‘We have just had various members of the national press on our doorstep after the unfortunate death of Chancellor Eustace. I have to say that in spite of our best efforts that publicity was not altogether favourable. I dread to think what those gentlemen may say if they return to report on a member of the cathedral Chapter roasted to death on a spit in the Vicars Hall. The millennial celebrations for the Abbey and Cathedral of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary are but weeks away. And the last thing the Church of England as a whole
can afford is another scandal. Our congregations are not growing any larger, as you know, Chief Constable. One more scandal could see them fall yet further until we minister only to assemblies of devout old women and dying old age pensioners.’

  No need to talk to the faithful about imagining the fires of hell any longer, Powerscourt thought flippantly. You had a perfect example of the flames operating here, right inside the Cathedral Close itself. There was a loud knock on the door. Dr Williams, a handsome young man in his early thirties carrying a large medical bag, and the Bishop himself took their seats in the Dean’s drawing room. Formal introductions were made. Even in these dreadful circumstances, Powerscourt said to himself, decency and good manners must prevail.

  ‘The doctor has just told me what happened,’ said the Bishop, ‘we met on our way over here. It’s truly terrible.’ The Bishop shook his head. Powerscourt remembered what the Dean had told him on the train to London. He doubted if expertise in the textual differences in the early versions of the Four Gospels would be much use to a bishop at a time like this. Maybe that other Moreton, Headmaster Moreton, accustomed to coping with scandals about drinking and debauchery among his pupils, might have been a better man in these circumstances. He looked closely at the Bishop. Episcopus, he remembered it said in Latin on the Bishop’s cathedra, or chair, in the ornate and beautiful choir stalls in the heart of the cathedral. Beatus Vir. The Bishop. A holy man. Like the Dean, the Bishop was tall, but not so powerfully built. He had a distinguished shock of grey hair, and eyes that seemed to look elsewhere, at the plains of Galilee perhaps, or the kingdom of God. He kept clasping and unclasping his hands.

  ‘Dr Williams,’ said Powerscourt, ‘have you had the time to complete a preliminary investigation of the late Arthur Rudd?’

  ‘I have,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Could I ask you a question, if I may? Was the man dead before he was put on the spit, or was he killed by the flames?’

  The Dean looked shocked that such a question should be asked in his drawing room. The doctor took a quick glance at the Dean as if asking permission to proceed. The Dean, wrapping his dressing gown ever tighter around his body, nodded slightly.

  ‘I cannot be certain yet,’ said the doctor. ‘I shall have to conduct another examination when, forgive me, the body has cooled down further. But I am fairly sure he was dead before he was placed on the spit.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ asked Powerscourt. He doubted if it would make much difference, but it might cast light on whether they were dealing with a complete madman, or merely a murderer with an advanced taste for the macabre.

  ‘Forgive me, Lord Powerscourt, but if the man had still been alive I am sure he would have screamed out in his agony. Other inhabitants of Vicars Close would have been woken in their beds by the noise. But no screams were heard, so I say I think he was dead.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Powerscourt, ‘thank you very much.’

  He wondered if the Dean would return to his earlier theme. He did.

  ‘My lord,’ he said, gazing down at Bishop Moreton, ‘I was raising the question shortly before you arrived of the possible methods of handling these terrible events.’

  The Bishop looked up at the Dean as if he didn’t quite understand what he was saying.

  ‘I was pointing out,’ the Dean carried on, ‘that a wave of scandal would erupt over this cathedral and over the Church of England if the full details of what happened in the early hours of this morning were ever to see the light of day. Think of what the newspapers will say, and all this just weeks before the celebrations for the thousand years of the minster.’

  He’s proposing a cover-up, Powerscourt said to himself. His mind drifted back to an earlier cover-up at Sandringham House years before when the Prince of Wales decided to conceal the murder of his eldest son. That too had been in January. Then too it had been snowing, great drifts piling up on the royal gardens and the royal roof. Then too doctors had been involved, concocting medical bulletins to deceive the newspapers and the public. He wondered about another doctor, Dr Blackstaff, asleep in his bed now, no doubt. Had he too concocted a cover-up story with the butler to conceal the facts about the death of John Eustace?

  The Bishop was staring hard at the Dean. One of the pockets on the dressing gown, Powerscourt observed, had simply disappeared. Maybe his housekeeper hadn’t noticed.

  ‘I was merely thinking, my lord,’ the Dean went on, ‘that we could perhaps say that the poor man died in his sleep. Nobody need ever know the terrible circumstances of his passing. You could argue,’ Powerscourt sensed that the Dean felt that the Bishop was not in favour of his scheme, ‘that such a course would be the least distressing for the dead man’s family, least distressing for the wider community of the cathedral, least distressing for the national community of the Church of England.’

  The Dean paused. Dr Williams was looking directly at the Bishop, as if measuring him up for any possible illnesses. The Chief Constable was also looking at the Bishop, wondering what he was going to do. The prevailing wisdom in Compton was that the Dean ruled over the Bishop with a rod if not of iron, then certainly of some hard and unbending material. Powerscourt was fascinated by the Dean’s expression. He looked, he decided, rather like a gambler who suddenly realizes that he may have overcalled his hand.

  ‘My dear Dean,’ said the Bishop quietly ‘I can fully understand why such a course of action might seem superficially attractive. But it is completely unacceptable. The lights of our Church may be burning low at the present time, the candles may even be extinguished, but that does not mean that we should falter in our commitment to the truth. What else, apart from our faith, do we have to cling to? I do not care how wide or how deep the scandal flows round this cathedral and round our city. I do not care how much the newspapers print, or how lurid their stories are. I do not care if the celebrations of one thousand years of religion in this place are dimmed by obloquy and disrepute. The Church must tell the truth. Our own truths, the truths of humility and repentance and the necessity of loving an invisible and often unaccountable God, may be difficult to accept for our own faithful. But what happened to that poor man Rudd is also true. We must recognize and acknowledge that truth. We must also accept that it happened inside a community which is supposed, above all others, to love its neighbour as itself. This terrible death must be as much a part of God’s purpose as was that earlier death on the cross. We must tell the truth, Dean. We can do no other.’

  The room fell silent. Powerscourt thought that the Bishop might have spent years of his life searching for lost iota subscripts in the early versions of the Gospels, wrestling with the precise meaning of words in a language dead centuries before. But when the time came, even at six o’clock on a cold January morning with the snow falling outside, however unlikely a representative of God’s purpose he might have seemed, the Bishop had answered the call. His trumpet had sounded with clarity and conviction against the equivocations of the Dean. And the Dean, Powerscourt recalled, had but a single word above his stall in the cathedral choir, a word with no connotations of civic or ecclesiastical virtue. Deaconus. The Dean. The Bishop, however, had three. Episcopus, Beatus vir, Powerscourt thought to himself, looking at Gervase Bentley Moreton with fresh respect. The Bishop. A holy man.

  But the Dean was very quick in his response. Powerscourt thought he was extremely light on his feet for such a burly man.

  ‘My dear Bishop,’ the Dean began, echoing his superior’s own preamble, ‘how very eloquently you put it. How wisely do you recall us all to our Christian duty and our obligations to our fellow men. I could not have put it better myself.’

  Powerscourt thought he detected a slight smile crossing the face of the Chief Constable. Perhaps the man was an aficionado, a connoisseur of Bishop-Dean relations.

  ‘So now it is time to make our plans,’ the Dean swept on. A total volte-face, a complete reversal of his own position had been carried out in less than thirty seconds. Powerscourt, who was som
ething of a student of successful military retreats, was most impressed.

  ‘Chief Constable,’ the Dean began the disposition of his forces, ‘could I, as the person responsible for the cathedral, request you, as the representative of the forces of law and order, to commence your investigation into this terrible death? Could I make a humble plea for all possible discretion until we have conducted the funeral?’

  The Chief Constable nodded.

  ‘Could I make a suggestion here?’ The Bishop unclasped his hands and placed them on his knees as if ready for active service. ‘With your agreement, Dean, and yours, Chief Constable, might I propose that we ask Lord Powerscourt to take part in the investigation also, as a representative of the cathedral authorities? I’m sure his experience would be invaluable. If that is agreeable to you, of course, Lord Powerscourt?’

  Powerscourt nodded gravely. He had served his sovereign in his time. He had gone on a mission to South Africa for the Prime Minister himself. He had investigated murders and mysteries for the Prince of Wales and for the masters of money in the City of London. Mammon had had its day. Now it was time for the service of God. He felt Lady Lucy would be proud of him.

  The Dean embarked on a lengthy discussion with Dr Williams about funeral arrangements. The Chief Constable was staring at the snow still falling outside the window. The Bishop had closed his eyes, perhaps in prayer for the dead vicar choral, perhaps from lack of sleep. Powerscourt was listening abstractedly to the Dean as he reeled off the times when the cathedral would be unable to conduct the funeral because of previous commitments. He seemed to carry in his head the timetables of every service, prayer meeting and school visit over the next ten days.

  ‘My lord Bishop, Dean, Chief Constable.’ Powerscourt was beginning his service to his Lord and Master. Later he was to say it was more like the Stations of the Cross than any other event in the Christian calendar. ‘I have been thinking about what you two gentlemen have been talking about and your concerns in this terrible affair. I observed that you were both concerned in your different ways about the coverage the death of Arthur Rudd might receive in the newspapers. I would like, if I may, to offer some thoughts on that question.’