Sins Of The Fathers

6

The man lay on his back in the middle of the zebra crossing. Inspector Burden, getting out of the police car, had no need to ask where he was or to be taken to the scene of the accident. It was all there before his eyes like a horrible still from a Ministry of Transport warning film, the kind of thing that makes women shudder and turn quickly to the other channel.

An ambulance was waiting, but nobody was making any attempt to move the man. Inexorably and with a kind of indifference the twin yellow beacons went on winking rhythmically. Up-ended, with its blunt nose poking into the crushed head of a bollard, was a white Mini.

"Can't you get him away?" asked Burden.

The doctor was laconic. "He's had it." He knelt down, felt the left wrist and got up again, wiping blood from his fingers. "I'd hazard a guess the spine's gone and he's ruptured his liver. The thing is he's still more or less conscious and it'd be hell's own agony to try to shift him."

"Poor devil. What happened? Did anybody see it?"

His eye roved across the knot of middle-aged women in cotton dresses, late homegoing commuters and courting couples on their evening stroll. The last of the sun smiled gently on their faces and on the blood that gilded the black and white crossing. Burden knew that Mini. He knew the stupid sign in the rear window that showed a skull and the words: You have been Mini-ed. It had never been funny and now it was outrageous, cruel in the way it mocked the man in the road.

A girl lay sprawled over the steering wheel. Her hair was short, black and spiky, and she had thrust her fingers through it in despair or remorse. The long red nails stuck out like bright feathers.

"Don't worry about her," said the doctor contemptuously. "She's not hurt."

"You, madam..." Burden picked out the calmest and least excited looking of the bystanders. "Did you happen to see the accident?"

"Ooh, it was awful! Like a beast she was, the little bitch. Must have been doing a hundred miles an hour."

Picked a right one there, thought Burden. He turned to a white-faced man holding a sealyham on a lead. "Perhaps you can help me, sir?"

The lead was jerked and the sealyham sat down at the kerb.

"That gentleman..." Blanching afresh, he pointed towards the crumpled thing lying on the stripes. "He looked right and left like you're supposed to. Bui there was nothing coming. You can't see all that well on account of the bridge."

"Yes, yes. I get the picture."

"Well, he started to cross to the island like, when that white car came up out of nowhere. Going like a mad thing she was. Well, not a hundred, but sixty, I reckon. Those Minis can go at a terrible lick when they've had their engines hotted up. He sort of hesitated and then he tried to go back. You know, it was all in a flash. I can't rightly go into details."

"You're doing very well."

"Then the car got him. Oh, the driver slammed on her brakes for all she was worth. I'll never forget the noise to my dying day, what with the brakes screaming and him screaming too, and sort of throwing up his arms and going down like a ninepin."

Burden set a constable to take names and addresses, turned away and took a step in the direction of the white car. A woman touched his arm.

"Here," she said, "he wants a priest or something. He kept on asking before you came. Get me Father Chiverton, he says, like he knew he was going."

"That right?" said Burden sharply to Dr. Crocker.

Crocker nodded. The dying man was covered now, a folded mac under his head, two policemen's jackets across his body. "Father Chiverton is what he said. Frankly, I was more concerned for his physical than his spiritual welfare."

"R.C. then, is he?"

"God, no. Bunch of atheists, you cops are. Chiverton's the new vicar here. Don't you ever read the local rag?"

"Father?"

"He's very high. Genuflecting and Sung Eucharist and all that jazz." The doctor coughed. "I'm a Congregationalist myself."

Burden walked over to the crossing. The man's face was blanched a yellowish ivory, but his eyes were open and they stared back. With a little shock Burden realised he was young, perhaps no more than twenty.

"Anything you want, old chap?" He knew the doctor had given him a pain-killing injection. With his own bent body he shielded him from the watchers. "We'll get you away from here in a minute." He lied. "Anything we can get you?"

"Father Chiverton..." it was a toneless whisper, as detached and inhuman as a puff of wind. "Father Chiverton..." A spasm crossed the waning face. "Confess ... atone ... spare Thou them which are penitent."

"Bloody religion," said the doctor. "Can't even let a man die in peace."

"You must be an asset to the Congregationalists," Burden snapped. He got up, sighing. "He obviously wants to confess. I suppose they do have confession in the Church of England?"

"You can have it if you want it but you needn't if you don't fancy it. That's the beauty of the C of E." When Burden looked murderous, he added, "Don't get in a tiz with me. We've been on to Chiverton, but he and his curate are off at some conference."

"Constable Gates!" Burden beckoned impatiently to the man noting down addresses. "Nip into Stowerton and fetch me a—a vicar."

"We've tried Stowerton, sir."

"O God," said Burden quietly.

"Excuse me, sir, but there's a clergyman got an appointment with the Chief Inspector now. I could get on to the station and..."

Burden raised his eyebrows. Kingsmarkham police station had apparently become the battleground of the Church Militant. "You do that, and quick..."

He murmured something useless to the boy, and moved towards the girl who had begun to sob.

She was not crying because of what she had done, but because of what she had seen two hours before. It was two or three years now since she had had what she called a waking nightmare—though at one time they were more real than reality—and she was crying because the nightmares were going to begin again and the remedy she had tried had not erased the picture from her mind.

She had seen it in the estate agent's window when she was coming home from work. It was a photograph of a house, but not as it was now, dirty and weathered, set in a tangled wilderness. The estate agents deceived you, they meant you to think it was like it had once been long ago ... You? As soon as she found she was addressing herself as "You" she knew it was beginning again, the re-telling of the nightmare. So she had got into the Mini and driven to Flagford, away from associations and memories and the hateful You voice, to drink and drink and try to send it away.

But it would not go away and you were back in the big house, listening to the voices that went on coaxing, cajoling, arguing until you were bored, so bored until you went out into the garden and met the little girl.

You went up to her and you said, "Do you like my dress?"

"It's pretty," she said, and she didn't seem to mind that it was much nicer than her own.

She was playing with a heap of sand, making pies in an old cup without a handle. You stayed and played and after that you came to the sand every day, down there out of sight of the big windows. The sand was warm and nice and you could understand it. You could understand the little girl too, even though she was the only little girl you had ever known. You knew a lot of grown-ups, but you could not understand them, nor the ugly words and the funny wheedling way the talk was always about money, so that you seemed to see coins dropped out of wriggling lips and sliding dirtily through twitching fingers.

The little girl had some magic about her, for she lived in a tree. Of course it was not really a tree but a house inside a kind of bush all shivering with leaves.

The sand was not dry like the desert you lived in now, but warm and moist, like beach sand washed by a tepid sea. It was dirty too and you were afraid of what would happen if you got it on your dress...

You cried and stamped your foot, but you never cried as you were crying now as the good-looking inspector came up to the car, his eyes full of anger.

Did he seriously imagine he was going to find anything new after so long? Archery considered Wexford's question. It was, he decided, more a matter of faith than of any real belief in Painter's innocence. But faith in what? Not, surely, in Mrs. Kershaw. Perhaps it was just a childlike certainty that such things could not happen to anyone connected with him, Archery. The child of a murderer could not be as Tess was, Kershaw would not have loved her, Charles would not want to marry her.

"It can't do any harm to see Alice Flower," he said. He felt he was pleading, and pleading weakly. "I'd like to talk to the Primero grandchildren, particularly the grandson."

For a moment Wexford said nothing. He had heard of faith moving mountains, but this was simply absurd. To him it was almost as ridiculous as if some crank had come to him with the suggestion that Dr. Crippen was the innocent victim of circumstances. From bitter experience he knew how difficult it was to hunt a killer when only a week had elapsed between a murder and the beginning of an investigation. Archery was proposing to open an enquiry a decade and a half too late and Archery had no experience at all.

"I ought to put you off," he said at last. "You don't know what you're attempting." It's pathetic, he thought, it's laughable. Aloud he said, "Alice Flower's in the geriatric ward at Stowerton Infirmary. She's paralysed. I don't even know if she could make herself understood."

It occurred to him that Archery must be totally ignorant of the geography of the place. He got up and lumbered over to the wall map.

"Stowerton's there," he said, pointing with the sheathed tip of a ballpoint pen, "and Victor's Piece is about here, between Stowerton and Kingsmarkham."

"Where can I find Mrs. Crilling?"

Wexford made a wry face. "In Glebe Road. I can't recall the number off-hand, but I'll get it looked up or you could find it on the electoral register." He turned round ponderously and fixed Archery with a grey glare. "You're wasting your time, of course. I'm sure I don't have to tell you to be very careful when it comes to throwing out a lot of unfounded accusations."

Under those cold eyes it was difficult for Archery not to drop his own. "Chief Inspector, I don't want to find someone else guilty, just prove that Painter was innocent."

Wexford said briskly, "I'm afraid you may find the former consequent upon the latter. It would be a wrong conclusion, of course—I don't want trouble." At a knock on the door he spun round testily. "Yes, what is it?"

Sergeant Martin's bland face appeared. "That fatal on the zebra in the High Street, sir?"

"What of it? It's hardly my province."

"Gates has just been on, sir. A white Mini, LMB 12M, that we've had our eye on—it was in collision with a pedestrian. It appears they want a clergyman and Gates recalled that Mr. Archery was..."

Wexford's lips twitched. Archery was in for a surprise. In the courtly manner he sometimes assumed, he said to the vicar of Thringford, "It looks as if the secular arm needs some spiritual assistance, sir. Would you be so good...?"

"Of course I will." Archery looked at the sergeant. "Someone has been knocked down and is—is dying?"

"Unfortunately, yes, sir," said Martin grimly.

"I think I'll come with you," said Wexford.

As a priest of the Anglican Church Archery was obliged to hear confession if a confessor was needed. Until now, however, his only experience of this mystery concerned a Miss Baylis, an elderly female parishioner of his who, having been (according to Mrs. Archery) for many years in love with him, demanded he should listen to a small spate of domestic sins mumbled out each Friday morning. Hers was a masochistic, self-abasing need, very different from the yearning of the boy who lay in the road.

Wexford shepherded him across the black and white lines to the island. Diversion notices had been placed in the road, directing the traffic around Queen Street, and the crowd had been induced to go home. There were several policemen buzzing and pacing. For the first time in his life Archery realised the aptness of the term "bluebottles". He glanced at the Mini and averted his eyes hastily from the bright bumper with its ribbon of blood.

The boy looked at him doubtfully. He had perhaps five minutes to live. Archery dropped to his knees and put his ear to the white lips. At first he felt only fluttering breath, then out of the soft sighing vibration came something that sounded like "Holy orders...", with the second word rising on a high note of enquiry. He bent closer as the confession began to flow out, jerky, toneless, spasmodic, like the gulping of a sluggish stream. It was something about a girl, but it was utterly incoherent. He could make nothing of it. We fly unto Thee for succour, he thought, on behalf of this Thy servant, here lying under Thy hand in great weakness of body...

The Anglican Church provides no order quite comparable to that of Extreme Unction. Archery found himself saying urgently over and over again, "It will be all right, it will be all right." The boy's throat rattled and a stream of blood welled out of his mouth, splashing Archery's folded hands. "We humbly commend the soul of this Thy servant, our dear brother, into Thy hands..." He was tired and his voice broke with compassion and with horror. "Most humbly beseeching Thee that it may be precious in Thy sight..."

It was the doctor's hand that appeared, mopping with a handkerchief at Archery's fingers, then feeling a still heart and an inert pulse. Wexford looked at the doctor, gave an infinitesimal shrug. Nobody spoke. Across the silence came the sound of brakes, a horn braying and an oath as a car, taking the diversion too late, veered into Queen Street. Wexford pulled the coat up over the dead face.

Archery was shattered and cold in the evening heat. He got up stiffly, feeling an utter loneliness, a terrible desire to weep. The only thing to lean on now the bollard was gone was the rear of that lethal white car. He leaned on it, feeling sick.

Presently he opened his eyes and moved slowly along the body of the car to where Wexford stood contemplating a girl's shaggy black head. This was no business of his, Archery's. He wanted no hand in it, only to ask Wexford where he could find an hotel for the night.

Something in the other man's expression made him hesitate. The big Chief Inspector's face was a study in irony. He watched Wexford tap on the glass. The window was slid back and the girl inside lifted to them a face drowned in tears.

"This is a bad business," he heard Wexford say, "a very bad business, Miss Crilling."

"God moves in a mysterious way," said Wexford as he and Archery walked over the bridge, "His wonders to perform." He hummed the old hymn tune, apparently liking the sound of his rather rusty baritone.

"That's true," said Archery very seriously. He stopped, rested his hand on the granite parapet and looked down into the brown water. A swan sailed out from under the bridge, dipping its long neck into the drifting weed. "And that is really the girl who found Mrs. Primero's body?"

"That's Elizabethan Crilling, yes. One of the wild young things of Kingsmarkham. A boyfriend—a very close friend, I may add—gave her the Mini for her twenty-first and she's been a menace in it ever since."

Archery was silent. Tess Kershaw and Elizabeth Crilling were the same age. Their lives had begun together, almost side by side. Each must have walked with her mother along the grass verges of the Stowerton Road, played in the fields behind Victor's Piece. The Crillings had been comfortably off, middle-class people; the Painters miserably poor. In his mind's eye he saw again that tear-wrecked face down which grease and mascara ran in rivulets, and he heard again the ugly words she had used to Wexford. Another face superimposed itself on Elizabeth Crilling's, a fair aquiline face with steady intelligent eyes under a pageboy's blonde fringe. Wexford interrupted his thoughts.

"She's been spoilt, of course, made too much of. Your Mrs. Primero had her over with her every day, stuffing her with sweets and what-have-you, by all accounts. After the murder Mrs. Crilling was always taking her to psychiatrists, wouldn't let her go to school till they had the kid-catcher down on her. God knows how many schools she has been to. She was what you might call the female lead in the juvenile court here."

But it was Tess whose father had been a murderer, Tess who might have been expected to grow up like that. "God knows how many schools she's been to..." Tess had been to one school and to one ancient, distinguished university. Yet the daughter of the innocent friend had become a delinquent; the killer's child a paragon. Certainly God moved in a mysterious way.

"Chief Inspector, I want very much to talk to Mrs. Crilling."

"If you care to attend the special court in the morning, sir, she'll in all likelihood be there. Knowing Mrs. Crilling, I'd say you might again be called upon in your professional capacity and then, who knows?"

Archery frowned as they walked on. "I'd rather it was all aboveboard. I don't want to do anything underhand."

"Look, sir," said Wexford in a burst of impatience, "if you're coming in on this lark you'll have to be underhand. You've no real authority to ask questions of innocent people and if they complain I can't protect you."

"I'll explain everything frankly to her. May I talk to her?"

Wexford cleared his throat. "Are you familiar with Henry the Fourth, Part One, sir?"

Slightly puzzled, Archery nodded. Wexford stopped under the arch that led to the coaching yard of The Olive and Dove. "The quotation I had in mind is Hotspur's reply to Mortimer when he says he can call spirits from the vast deep." Startled by Wexford's deep voice, a little cloud of pigeons flew out from the beams, fluttering rusty grey wings. "I've found that reply very useful to me in my work when I've been a bit too optimistic." He cleared his throat and quoted, " 'And so can I and so can any man. But will they come when you do call to them?' Good night, sir. I hope you find the Olive comfortable."