Dead Line

THREE

That morning the Reverend Thomas Willoughby hoped for rain. Earlier in the year, during the flooding in May, he had wanted never to see rain again. But now in late summer the grass had curled and died, yellowed from the heat and drought, and the gnarled old apple tree in the front of the churchyard looked pained, its carpet of wizened windfall fruit picked at by hovering wasps.

When he had first moved from his Norfolk village parish to St Barnabas, on the edge of the City of London, Willoughby had feared the worst – endless traffic and noise, vagrants, a secular culture that would have no time for his religion. Yet St Barnabas had been a surprise. It had turned out to be a refuge from the fast-paced urban world. Built by an anonymous student of Hawksmoor, the church had the baroque grace of the master, and a characteristic towering spire. It was just a stone’s throw from the bustle of the old Smithfield meat market and the thrusting steel and glass of the world’s greatest financial marketplace.

But the church figured on no tourist map and was visited only by the occasional aficionados, working their way through a weighty architectural guidebook. It was almost wilfully obscure, tucked away at the end of a small side street of eighteenth-century terraced houses, not yet gentrified. ‘Bit of a backwater, really,’ the previous incumbent had said on Willoughby’s first visit, then pointed at the small graveyard in one corner of the churchyard. ‘It’s been full up since Victorian times. That’s one service you won’t have to conduct.’

Like any city church, St Barnabas was locked overnight. Approaching the vestry door, the Reverend Willoughby was just reaching for his keys when he noticed that the door was already open. Not again, he thought, his heart sinking. The church had been burgled the autumn before – the collection box stolen, along with a silver jug that had been left in the vestry. Worse, though, had been the vandalism: two brass rubbings that hung on the chancel wall had been hurled to the floor, their frames smashed to smithereens; one of the ornate family memorial plaques had been badly chipped by a hammer blow; and – he shuddered at the indignity of it – human excrement deposited on a pew.

He entered the vestry apprehensively, confident the intruders would be long gone but worried about the destruction they might have left behind. So he was surprised to find the room untouched – the collection box (kept empty now) in its proper place, the cassocks hanging on their hooks; even the Communion articles sat on the dresser apparently unmolested.

Still anxious, he went cautiously through into the choir, dreading what he might find. But no, the altar stood unharmed, its white marble shining in a shaft of sunlight, and the delicately carved wooden pulpit seemed undamaged. He looked up and saw to his relief that the stained glass window in the chancel still had all its panes. Willoughby looked around, mystified, searching for signs of an intruder. There were none.

Yet there was a smell in the air, faint at first, then stronger as he moved down the centre aisle to the front of the church. Something pungent. Fish? No, more like meat. But Smithfield’s days as a meat market were over. It was being converted into smart apartments. And this was meat gone off. Ugh. The odour intensified as he examined the pews on either side of the aisle, all pristine, the kneelers neatly hanging on the backs of the wooden benches, hymnals in the low racks on every row.

Puzzled, he walked down to the front door of the church. Lifting the heavy iron bar that secured the massive oak door from inside, he swung it open, letting light flood into the nave. It was as he turned away, blinking from the sudden harsh sunlight, that he saw something odd. It was next to the large wooden box (a vestment chest originally, he’d always supposed) in which the extra hymn books were stored. Two or three times a year – at Christmas, or for the memorial service of a local dignitary – the church was filled to capacity, and then these spare books were pressed into service. But now they lay in a higgledy-piggledy heap on the ash-coloured paving stones.

He walked cautiously over to the pile, wrinkling his nose at the smell, which was almost overpowering now. In front of the box he hesitated; for the first time cold fingers of fear touched his spine. Trust in the Lord he told himself, as with both hands he slowly lifted the heavy oak lid.

He found himself looking at a young man’s face – a white face, an English face perhaps, in its twenties, with thinnish blond hair combed straight back. It would have been a conventional, perfectly usual sort of face, except that the eyes bulged like a gruesome parrot’s, and the mouth was set in a rictus of agony, lips stretched wide and tight over the teeth. The tendons of the throat strained against the skin of the neck like tautened cords. There was no question: he was dead.

As Willoughby stepped back, horrified and frightened, he saw that the man’s legs had been bent at the knee, presumably to cram him into the chest. The knees were pressed together, drawn up almost to the chin, held by a cat’s cradle of rope that encircled his throat, then passed down his back and around his legs again. The man had been trussed like a chicken, though since both his hands were gripping one end of the rope, it looked as if he had trussed himself. If that were so, who had put him in the box?