Death of a Chancellor Read online

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance, Dr Williams,’ said Powerscourt doubtfully ‘that this isn’t the work of human hand? There aren’t any wild animals in the neighbourhood that could have caused this kind of damage?’

  ‘The wolves left long ago,’ said the doctor, ‘and Compton is not in Africa. We don’t have any lions or tigers reported missing, Chief Inspector, do we?’

  ‘I wish we had,’ said the Chief Inspector. ‘Could I ask you, Lord Powerscourt, why you think the body may be lying elsewhere, in one of the neighbouring villages I think you said.’

  ‘Well,’ said Powerscourt slowly, ‘think of the effort involved in hacking this leg off. Think of the amount of blood all over the place. For all we know other parts of the body may have been cut off as well. You’d need somewhere very secure to carry out all this butchery. It might be easier to take the dead man out of Compton altogether and perform your terrible work in a field miles from anywhere.’

  Dr Williams was replacing a couple of medical items in his bag and preparing to depart. ‘I can see the sense in that. But how did this leg get back here then?’

  ‘I can only guess that the murderer brought it back with him. Maybe it’s meant to be a sort of message,’ said Powerscourt.

  There was a loud rap at the door. ‘Six men now reported for duty, Chief Inspector sir,’ said the Sergeant who had been guarding the front desk.

  ‘Right, Sergeant. I shall take those men on a search of the town. Man the fort here, Sergeant.’

  ‘Chief Inspector,’ said Powerscourt, ‘Johnny Fitzgerald and I could search the cathedral and the Close if that would make your life easier.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Chief Inspector Yates as he set off on his mission. Powerscourt lifted up the blanket and took another glance at the severed leg. He wondered if he could learn anything from the trousers. All he discovered was a set of keys in the pocket. If only he knew which door the keys opened, they might be able to identify the corpse. He covered the sad remains once more and set off to find Johnny Fitzgerald, the keys now jangling in the side pocket of his jacket.

  Powerscourt found his friend on patrol just outside the Deanery, the blanket flung over his shoulder. They walked in silence right round the Close, peering into the front gardens, inspecting the railings. They criss-crossed the Cathedral Green, the west front with its host of statues looming in front of them. Nobody seemed to be awake in Compton yet, though lights were beginning to appear in one or two of the windows. The wind was stronger now, angry gusts shaking the branches of the trees.

  ‘Do you think the rest of the body is here, Francis?’ asked Johnny.

  ‘I do not,’ said Powerscourt, refusing to give any reasons for his answer.

  They watched the two old ladies walking slowly along the path to the west door, the only worshippers for Holy Communion at seven thirty. Johnny Fitzgerald continued his circuit of the Close. Powerscourt sat at the back of the choir for the service, his mind racing. He felt sure that the dead man must have had connections with the cathedral, like John Eustace and Arthur Rudd. Maybe he was another member of the vicars choral. He remembered the two members of the vicars choral who had vanished over the previous eighteen months and who had never been found. It seemed as if the dark secret of Compton Minster might be contained inside the body of those with the most beautiful voices, in choirs and places where they sing. But that theory didn’t work either. John Eustace had been concerned with the archives and the library not the singing.

  As the service finished he wandered round the cathedral, making sure the rest of the body was not there. The stone knights slept on. The dignitaries in their chantry chapels still waited for the second coming. The armies and the military men in their stained glass windows were still frozen in time as they had been for centuries. The little orchestra of wooden angels in the choir played on with their ancient instruments. But the dead of Compton had not been increased in number overnight. The rest of the body was not there.

  As he left, he met Patrick Butler in a state of high excitement. But it was Powerscourt, searching for some piece of cheerful news on this terrible day, who asked his question first.

  ‘Good morning, Patrick. Have you done it yet?’

  ‘Done what, my lord?’ said a bemused Patrick Butler.

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean, young man. Have you done it yet?’

  ‘I’m not very good at riddles, Lord Powerscourt, and certainly not at this time of the morning.’

  ‘My apologies, Patrick,’ said Powerscourt with a smile, ‘you would be surprised how often Lucy asks me for news on this important subject. It seems to be a matter of endless fascination for the females of the species. Have you proposed to Anne Herbert yet?’

  Now it was the newspaper editor’s turn to smile. ‘I’m afraid I have not, my lord. I don’t seem to have got around to it, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘But have you made any plans? Sometimes you need to make a plan of campaign in these matters.’

  ‘I did say I would take her to Glastonbury for the day when I can get away. That’s a very romantic sort of place. I thought I might be able to manage it there, if you see what I mean.’

  Powerscourt had been to Glastonbury years before when Lady Lucy was pregnant with Thomas. It was only an hour and a half from Compton by train. It wasn’t a place he would have chosen himself with its melancholy ruins and legends of the body of Christ and Joseph of Arimathea, but he felt it might do the trick for some.

  ‘But tell me, Lord Powerscourt,’ the interests of journalism seemed to be stronger than those of romance this morning for the man from the Grafton Mercury, ‘do you know what is going on here? There are policemen searching all over the city and they won’t tell me what they’re looking for. They’re all as solemn as owls. You’re wandering round the cathedral looking pretty sombre too. Has there been another murder?’

  Sooner or later, Powerscourt felt sure, word would reach the newspaper that a fragment of a body had been found. ‘I’m afraid there has, Patrick. But we don’t know who it was. We don’t know if it is connected with the other death in the Cathedral or not. All the police have so far is a human leg.’

  ‘Leg, not legs, Lord Powerscourt?’

  ‘Leg singular, I’m afraid. The police are searching all over the county for the rest of the corpse.’

  ‘Male, I presume?’ said Patrick Butler. Powerscourt thought you could almost see him composing the copy for his paper as he spoke.

  ‘Male,’ said Powerscourt, wondering how much detail the authorities would want to provide, if they ever found any details. ‘I fear you may have to be restrained again in the reporting of this death, as you were with Arthur Rudd, Patrick. It’s impossible to say at this stage.’

  Patrick Butler was already on his way back to his office when he turned back for a final word with Powerscourt.

  ‘I saw a very curious thing yesterday afternoon, my lord. It might interest you. The choir were processing over to St Nicholas, for another rehearsal of the Messiah, I think. The replacement for Arthur Rudd has arrived. He’s a man called Ferrers, my lord, Augustine Ferrers. I was at school with one of his brothers in Bristol.’

  ‘What’s the curious thing, Patrick? No earthly reason why a chorister from Bristol shouldn’t come to Compton, is there?’

  ‘The Ferrers family,’ said Patrick Butler, watching a detachment of policemen approaching the Green, their eyes scanning the ground like uniformed retrievers, ‘are Roman Catholics, always have been.’

  Part Three

  Lent

  March 1901

  15

  There were no reports concerning the rest of the body that morning. Shortly before midday the Dean reported to Chief Inspector Yates that a member of the choir, one Edward Gillespie, was missing. Powerscourt wandered between the Close, the cathedral and the police station. He wondered if you could write an architectural history of Britain based on the houses around the Close, their construction
spanning five or six hundred years, the changing fashions in domestic design still standing around the cathedral. Just after lunch a report came in from Bilton, one of the neighbouring villages, that another leg had been discovered in the churchyard. The limb was being brought to the morgue in Compton with all speed.

  Powerscourt went down to the offices of the Grafton Mercury and found Patrick Butler surrounded by his normal chaos. The editor informed Powerscourt that he was reserving a space for the details of the next Minster Murder. If they had the details before ten o’clock the following morning, he could include the story in the next edition. Otherwise it would be too late. He would, of course, have an alternative story ready to fill the space, probably a report on the rehearsals of the Messiah. Powerscourt found himself wondering if Patrick Butler would place his own engagement, assuming he ever got round to it, in the appropriate section of his paper. He took away with him Butler’s best recollection of the Ferrers address in Bristol, 42 Clifton Rise, he had said, not far from that huge suspension bridge over the river.

  At a quarter to three he called on Chief Inspector Yates at the police station. ‘We’ve found the head, I think,’ said the Chief Inspector, ‘on the side of the road just outside Shipton. One of my men is bringing it in now. That only leaves the trunk and the arms, my lord.’

  ‘When is Dr Williams going to examine it, Chief Inspector?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘At six o’clock in the morgue, my lord. The Dean is coming as well to see if he can identify the corpse.’

  Powerscourt wandered off again. Faint outlines of a plan were beginning to form in his mind. He remembered an earlier case involving a morgue in the Italian city of Perugia, the corridor leading to it lined with pictures of the Virgin, where he had to identify the body of Lord Edward Gresham, the man who had confessed to Powerscourt that he had killed Prince Eddy, the eldest son of the Prince of Wales. There might have been a great deal of blood on that occasion, Powerscourt reflected bitterly, but at least the body was left in one piece.

  He stood under the west front of the cathedral, staring up at the statues once more. He wondered if Cain’s killing of Abel was somewhere in the limestone above, Abraham raising his knife for the sacrifice of Isaac. He felt angry with himself at his inability to catch the murderer. How many more mothers and fathers, wives and children were about to have their lives ruined for ever by the madman stalking the streets of Compton? By now Powerscourt felt sure that the murderer must be mad, not in the sense that he should have been incarcerated in an asylum, though the world would be a better place if he were, but mad with a consuming passion, a hatred that came from a source so deep that Powerscourt could not yet comprehend it. This was not a madman who saw visions or heard strange voices in his head or thought he was Napoleon or Ghenghis Khan or believed he could walk on water or jump safely from a high building. This madman, thought Powerscourt, is consumed with hate, with an obsession so strong that it drives him to terrible acts. A madness that permits of no remorse, no shred of human or Christian compassion even in a city devoted for a thousand years to the worship and the glory of Almighty God. Powerscourt felt sure now that the normal motives for murder, greed, jealousy, vaulting ambition even, did not apply to his particular madman. He was of a different order of madness.

  Powerscourt abandoned the west front and wandered off, his brain far away, to the railway station where he absent-mindedly collected some train timetables. He was to tell Lady Lucy later that he was scarcely aware of doing this and only realized what he had done when he found the papers in his pockets later on that evening.

  Powerscourt and Chief Inspector Yates were shown into an anonymous office deep inside Compton’s little hospital shortly before six o’clock that evening. The Dean was staring moodily out of the window, pausing occasionally to look at his watch.

  ‘Monthly meeting of the Diocesan Finance Sub-Committee at a quarter to seven,’ he told the newcomers, still staring at the little garden outside. ‘I hope this disagreeable business isn’t going to make me late. They’re always difficult, these financial meetings.’

  He turned back to face the Chief Inspector. ‘Have you managed to recover all the body now?’ He made it sound as though he believed Yates was personally responsible for the event.

  ‘We have, Dean,’ said the Chief Inspector. ‘The other two sections were discovered in Slape late this afternoon. They are with Dr Williams now.’

  Bilton, Shipton, Slape. Powerscourt wondered where he had seen these names before. In one of the past editions of the Grafton Mercury he had read in Patrick Butler’s office? On one of the walls or on the floor of the cathedral perhaps, past dignitaries from these neighbouring villages interred behind or beneath? No, he said to himself, and a feeling of great sadness overcame him as he remembered that these were some of the names on the choir stalls, names of the livings and the parishes belonging to the cathedral that had so enchanted him with their poetry earlier in his time in Compton. Maybe the corpse was the missing chorister whose body had been dismembered and sent to the very places that gave their names to the choir stalls where he had sat and sung the anthems of the Lord.

  ‘Forgive me if I am a trifle late.’ Dr Williams was wearing a white coat and looking rather tired. ‘Perhaps you gentlemen would like to come this way.’

  He led them about fifty yards along a dark corridor and opened a very heavy thick door at the end. The walls were painted an antiseptic green. A couple of feeble bulbs in the ceiling cast a fitful light over the room. In the centre of the little morgue was a long table, about eight feet long and five feet wide with a package that might have been a body on it, covered with white sheets. There was a very strong smell, carbolic and blood, disinfectant and death, Powerscourt thought.

  ‘This should only take a moment, gentlemen,’ said the doctor, positioning himself at the top of the table.

  ‘I must ask you, Dean,’ said Chief Inspector Yates, ‘if you recognize this person.’

  The doctor pulled the sheets at the top of the package away. ‘We have assembled all the sections of the body now,’ he said. ‘I should tell you as a matter of record that the private parts have been cut off and the stomach and intestines appear to have been hacked out.’ Dr Williams was pale but composed as he spoke. ‘We have tried to clean up the head as much as we can. It is little consolation to anybody but I believe it was the knife to the throat that killed him. He was dead before the mutilation.’

  The Dean stared in horror at the severed head revealed beneath the sheets, marks of his wounds purple and livid around the throat. ‘I do recognize this person,’ he said calmly. ‘That is Edward Gillespie, one of our vicars choral.’

  The Dean bowed his head in prayer. Dr Williams pulled the sheet back over the corpse. Powerscourt found himself thinking about the words of Old Peter who had watched the services come and go in the cathedral for fifty years or more. Every day, he had said, the Dean and the canons referred to an act of bloody savagery, wounds in the side, nails through his hands and feet, Christ bleeding to death on his cross to save mankind. Now they were inspecting a real butchered body in a hospital morgue at six o’clock in the evening.

  ‘Dean, Chief Inspector,’ Powerscourt and the two men were back in the little waiting room, ‘I would ask you to consider how this information should be presented to the public. It is entirely in your hands. I spoke to Patrick Butler this afternoon and I believe he is aware that there may have been another murder. Should he be allowed to print all the details? Would it be of more assistance to you in your investigations, Chief Inspector, if the full facts were made public or not? And, Dean, you must speak for the cathedral.’

  The two men paused. ‘Let me say,’ the Chief Inspector began, ‘that we have, as it were, made a lot of noise today not only in Compton but all around these other villages, not just, I would remind you, in the ones where we found parts of the unfortunate Mr Gillespie, but in the ones where we didn’t. I think it would be difficult to contain the truth. A lot would depend
on how the information was presented, of course. But the more the public are on our side, dare I say it, the more frightened they are, the more they will be willing and eager to help us in our inquiries.’

  Powerscourt wondered if the dead man would be referred to for ever after as the unfortunate Mr Gillespie.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt,’ the Dean was looking at his watch, winding himself up for his later meeting perhaps, ‘what would your advice be?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that the Chief Inspector is correct when he refers to the way the information is presented. Patrick Butler is a responsible fellow, after all. He won’t want to offend his readers, especially the women, with the gory details. To say that the body had been cut up is much less offensive than what actually happened.’

  ‘Very well,’ said the Dean, preparing to leave, ‘I shall send for the young man at once. If I have to interrupt my meeting, so be it. If I may so express it, finance may have to wait for death. There’s just one other matter, gentlemen.’ The Dean had suddenly lost a fraction of his normal composure, running his hands through his hair, looking anxiously at his watch. ‘It’s about Edward Gillespie,’ he said nervously. The Chief Inspector was fiddling about in his pockets, looking for a notebook. ‘It’s bound to come out sooner rather than later. I’d rather you hear it from me rather than as a piece of chapter gossip.’

  Powerscourt wondered what was coming. Was Gillespie also in debt, like his fellow chorister, the late Arthur Rudd? Was he about to be kicked out of the choir?

  ‘I think, no, I am certain . . .’ The Dean paused, as if he wasn’t quite sure how to deliver his message. He was, Powerscourt noticed, turning rather red. ‘Gillespie was carrying on with the wife of one of the shopkeepers in the Square,’ he blurted out at last, ‘a very pretty young woman called Sophia. He told me the other day that the husband had found out about it. He was a very worried man.’