Death of a Chancellor

11

Johnny Fitzgerald and the Powerscourts were having breakfast in Fairfield Park. Thomas and Olivia had gone back to London with their nurse. Olivia’s favourite person in the whole world, her grandmother on Lady Lucy’s side, was coming to help look after them until their mother returned.

Powerscourt was perusing the latest edition of the Grafton Mercury. Patrick Butler had told him about the missing journals the morning after his meeting with Mrs Booth. On that occasion Patrick had confined himself to the facts. The account in the newspaper, however, was slightly more fanciful. ‘The Grafton Mercury has reason to believe,’ Powerscourt read with a slight smile, ‘that the contents of these volumes may well contain the key to the mysterious death of Mr Arthur Rudd. We call upon the authorities to display the utmost vigilance in the hunt for them. Not an hour, not a day must be lost. Even now the perpetrator of this atrocious crime may have burnt or destroyed them. They must be found before it is too late.’ People reading the article, Powerscourt felt, would suppose the author to be some middle-aged reporter, grown cynical and disillusioned with age. It was hard to imagine the youthful and cheerful figure of Patrick Butler composing this report at his chaotic desk in the chaotic offices of his paper.

For the rest of the day, as for the previous days, the Powerscourts haunted the cathedral. Powerscourt had found, oddly enough, that the most illuminating guide to the building was not a member of the Chapter or the verger, but the policeman. As a boy, Chief Inspector Yates informed Powerscourt, he had wanted to be an architect when he grew up. The only problem was that he couldn’t draw anything at all. Even his houses were scarcely recognizable. So he had become a policeman instead. Powerscourt had tried hard to work out the connection between architecture and detective work and totally failed to find it.

‘High altar, rebuilt late seventeenth century. East, my lord,’ he had said to Powerscourt the day before, standing before the high altar in the sanctuary, ‘east was the most sacred point of the compass for these medieval church builders. East pointed towards Jerusalem, towards Zion the Celestial City, linked metaphorically with the most sacred place in Christianity, the Temple in Jerusalem where God’s presence was said to be strongest.’

Chief Inspector Yates was gazing up at the great stained glass window behind the altar. He was a tall man with a neat moustache and dark brown eyes. He was twisting his hat between his hands as he spoke.

‘So, my lord, the high altar is at the east end of a church, the side altars are all placed on the east walls, the congregation faces east. The sun rising in the east is linked with the dawn on Easter Day when Christ rose from the dead. Even the dead bodies buried beneath the paving all around us, my lord, were placed with their feet to the east so that on the Last Day, when they rose from their vaults, they would stand up and face their Creator.’

Lady Lucy began her days with Matins. She knew by now the faithful, the regular attendees at the various services. The two old ladies with their walking sticks she had met at Evensong with Francis nodded to her politely as they passed. There was a tall, skeletally thin old man whose clothes no longer fitted him. Lady Lucy suspected he was dying, come to make his last peace with his Creator before he was called home. There was a tramp or a drunk, Lady Lucy couldn’t quite decide which, come perhaps to pray for the forgiveness of sins. He looked, she thought, as if he could do with the Resurrection now rather than later. So few, she thought, so very few had come to Morning Prayer in this enormous building.

‘All the earth doth worship thee, the Father everlasting.’ The choir were singing the Te Deum, Lady Lucy’s eyes fixed, as ever, on the faces of the choirboys. ‘To thee all angels cry aloud: the Heavens and all the powers therein. To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.’

The tiny choirboy had stopped singing. Lady Lucy wondered if he was going to break down and weep, here in the midst of the choir stalls.

‘Almighty God, who hast safely brought us to the beginning of this day,’ the Dean spoke the words of the collect without looking down at his prayer book at all, ‘Defend us in the same way with thy mighty power and grant that this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger.’

Lady Lucy sank to her knees and prayed for the choirboys. She prayed that no harm might befall them that day. She prayed that no harm had befallen them in the days gone by. She prayed that no harm would come to them in the days ahead. She prayed that the fear be taken from them. But, as she followed them out of the west transept, hoping to be able to speak to one or two of them, she suspected that, on this occasion at least, her prayers would not be answered.

Powerscourt and Chief Inspector Yates were walking slowly round the cloisters. The Chief Inspector looked up at the extraordinary carvings on the roof. ‘Cloisters, my lord. Finished about 1410. Fan vaulting. Perpendicular. Last phase of English Gothic. There used to be a stream here next to these cloisters, my lord, but it was sent underground about forty years ago. The cathedral masons thought it was going to cause subsidence so they diverted it. They did leave a sluice gate that could be opened from somewhere in the cathedral so the building could be flooded in case of fire.’

‘Could we come back to the cloisters in a moment, Chief Inspector? What do you make of these missing journals of Arthur Rudd’s? Do you think they’re important?’

‘I’m not sure what to think about them,’ said the Chief Inspector. ‘We had to promise an increase in the number of visits to the husband in jail before that wretched woman would speak to us at all. Even now, I’m not sure she couldn’t be mistaken. I certainly don’t think they’re as important as that young man Patrick Butler thinks they are.’ The Chief Inspector fished around in his pocket for his copy of the Grafton Mercury. ‘What did his paper say? “We call upon the authorities” – that means me in this case – “to display the utmost vigilance in the hunt for them. Not an hour, not a day must be lost.” I can tell you this, my lord. We’re looking everywhere for those bloody journals. I’ve even got a couple of my officers wading through all the rubbish in the Corporation dump. I don’t suppose the young man on the Mercury fancies a day or two of duty squelching through all that mess.’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘It all depends, surely,’ he said, walking past the entrance to the chapter house, ‘on why the journals were removed, if they were removed. Was it because this diary would have told us who the killer was? Not very likely, on the face of it, because most people have no idea they’re going to be murdered, never mind who their murderer is going to be. Or was it because it contained something that would have led us to the murderer? Was he killed because of what was in the diaries? In which case how did the murderer know what was in the diaries? Did he pop in when Rudd was out and read the latest instalments? That doesn’t seem very likely to me. Or did the murderer intend to kill him anyway and then remove the diaries afterwards to protect his own identity?’

The bells high up in the tower at the bottom of the spire tolled eleven o’clock. Powerscourt thought they sounded very loud. He thought briefly of all those monks long ago whose daily lives would have been regulated by the notes of Great Tom and Isaiah and Resurrection and Ezekiel a couple of hundred feet above.

‘Had you ever thought of being a journalist, my lord?’ Chief Inspector Yates was smiling now. ‘If you can produce that many questions off the top of your head, think of the pages of the papers you could fill without ever leaving the office. For my money, my lord, the most likely explanation is your last one. The diaries might have given us all a clue as to who the murderer was.’ The Chief Inspector stopped suddenly and stared at the snow melting on the grass in the centre of the Great Cloisters. ‘This has only just occurred to me, my lord. Suppose the killer has just put the unfortunate Rudd on the spit. He’s already dead, as we know. He pops three doors up into Vicars Close and does a quick check on Rudd’s possessions and Rudd’s diaries. There’s something that would implicate the murderer. So they’ve got to go too. So the murderer trots back down into the kitchen and puts them on the fire. They’d be turned into dust and ashes long before anybody could find them.’

Powerscourt stared at the policeman. ‘I wish I’d thought of that, Chief Inspector. It’s so obvious when you think of it.’

They pulled back to the side of the cloister to let the choir pass on their way to Holy Communion at eleven fifteen.

‘These cloisters here, my lord,’ said the Chief Inspector, ‘they’re not as well preserved as the ones at Gloucester. Maybe that stream did them no good at all. I had to go there for a murder case two years ago and I made the time to go and have a look. The thing about this fan vaulting, my lord, is that all this tracery,’ the Chief Inspector stopped and pointed up at the delicate and elaborate patterns in stone that ran in almost perfect order along the roof of the cloisters, ‘they’re all ornamental, they don’t have any function at all. You could say that the masons were just showing off. And now, my lord, I must leave you. My Chief Constable won’t be pleased if he finds out that we’ve been having architectural tours of the cathedral. I do have to pop back later on this afternoon, mind you. Perhaps I’ll see you then.’

With a last look at the roof Chief Inspector Yates departed on his business. The patterns may have only been ornamental, Powerscourt thought, but they were incredibly graceful. They didn’t look as though they were made of stone at all, but of some much lighter substance, as if a fifteenth-century stonemason had managed to spray the roof with icing and it had set for five hundred years.

The congregation for Holy Communion was slightly larger than the one for Matins, Lady Lucy observed. The service was held in the Lady Chapel where the size or lack of size of the congregation was less apparent. The two old ladies were still there. Perhaps they never leave, she thought, hiding away overnight in some dusty corner of the huge building to pass the night with the rats and the departed saints. The drunk and the very thin old man had gone, but were replaced by a couple of elderly gentlemen in rather better health who spoke the responses in loud and self-important tones. There was an ascetic young man with a wide-brimmed hat on his knees who looked as if he was undergoing some profound religious experience, a mystic perhaps. Certainly he looked as if flagellation and hair shirts might not have been too far away. The choirboys were still there, looking, to Lady Lucy’s eyes, even more frightened than they had done that morning.

‘The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving.’ A look of rapture, a look of ecstasy crossed the face of the young mystic as he took the bread in his hands. Lady Lucy remembered Francis telling her about the bitter controversy that had racked the Church of England some years before. It concerned, she thought, something called the Doctrine of the Real Presence. Very High Church Anglicans known as ritualists, the ones closest in religious position to the Roman Catholics, believed that the bread and wine were transformed in the Communion Service into the real body and blood of Christ. The opposite party, principally Evangelicals, contended that such beliefs were incompatible with the doctrines of the Church of England. Anybody who believed in the idea of the Real Presence was effectively a heretic and should be expelled from the Anglican Church. One or two of these cases had actually ended up in court, one or two parsons had actually gone to jail, and, in the most farcical case, the Archbishop of Canterbury himself had eaten a consecrated wafer at the heart of the dispute. At the time of its consumption the wafer was over four months old.

The little congregation filed out of the Lady Chapel, the young man staying behind to kneel in front of the cross. Lady Lucy was closer here to the faces and expressions of the choirboys as they made their way towards the north transept and the cloisters. She could see no improvement.

Powerscourt spent most of the rest of the day reading the back copies of the Grafton Mercury. He had an appointment after evensong with Vaughan Wyndham, Organist and Master of the Choristers of Compton Minster, the employer and conductor of the late Arthur Rudd. Patrick Butler had assembled a great mountain of newspapers to the right of his desk. ‘You don’t mind, Lord Powerscourt, if they’re not exactly in the right order, do you? I always mean to sort them out week by week but there never seems to be enough time. Now I’ve got to go and talk to a man at the printers.’ With that Patrick Butler had grabbed his hat and rattled off down the stairs. He returned at various points during the day, searching hopelessly for some notes on his desk, crawling about on the floor to retrieve some material for the printers.

At first Powerscourt found the experience of reading these papers in the wrong order rather exhilarating. Reports of a bumper harvest in one paper might be followed by accounts of the longest period of rainfall in the county records in the next. Descriptions of cricket matches could be followed in the next paper in the pile with a sad account of the early departure of the local football team from the FA Cup. Eventually Powerscourt decided he had had enough. He spread all the papers out on the floor and reassembled them in the correct order. It took, he checked, precisely thirty minutes. It could be his way of saying thank you to the editor. Then he read them all, a year and a half’s worth of Grafton Mercury at a single sitting.

Powerscourt would have had to say, if asked, that there was not much in these newspapers that would have informed the citizenry about the wider world. Of events in the continent of Europe, of events in London, of events even in the neighbouring county there was nothing at all. The Grafton Mercury did not run to accredited correspondents in St Petersburg or Vienna, in Paris or even in Westminster or Whitehall. That was not its job. But its readers would have been very thoroughly informed about what was going on around them, a weekly budget of births, marriages and deaths, reports of the decisions of the county council, of the local court cases, of harvest festivals and outbreaks of bad weather, of the activities of every local society across the entire county of Grafton. Powerscourt thought the paper became livelier and more adventurous with the arrival of Butler as editor. Youth had replaced crabbed old age, he thought, and it showed on the page. As he read, his mind was registering what was not there in these papers as much as the printed stories themselves. There had been no murders. There were no reports of death in mysterious circumstances. There was only one unusual story about the cathedral in the seventy-eight back copies he read through. Some months before, strange pagan signs had been found, daubed on the floor beside the high altar. Powerscourt thought Return of the Druids might have been a little strong for the headline. He suspected Patrick Butler had written the headline and the story himself. It referred extensively to a prehistoric site just across the county border which was a centre for followers of ancient cults. But there were no reports of further incidents. Powerscourt felt sure that if Butler had been able to discover a scintilla of evidence for further pagan activity, however small, it would have featured heavily in the pages of the Grafton Mercury. There was one constant refrain that ran with increasing frequency through the pages. Powerscourt felt desperately sad each time he came across another report. The young men of the county had signed up for military service with the local regiment. There were glowing descriptions of their departure, the military bands playing, the young men marching off together to the war in South Africa. Now they were dying. Once a fortnight or so another death would be reported, another family heartbroken at their loss. There was talk of erecting a permanent memorial to the fallen in the cathedral when the war was over.

Powerscourt felt slightly disappointed as he headed back towards the minster across the windy expanse of the Green. He had hoped that there might be some clue hiding in the back pages that would bring him enlightenment. There was none. Evensong was nearly over when he returned, an anthem by Thomas Tallis soaring up to the roof. Lady Lucy was not to be seen. Powerscourt presumed she must have gone home. He was glad. He was growing increasingly worried about her obsession with the choirboys. He knew it all came from the highest of motives but he felt she was in danger of becoming ridiculous, something he had never encountered before in all his years of marriage.

He noticed that the builders had finally arrived. There was a battery of scaffolding in the crossing, the part of the cathedral where the nave met the transepts, underneath the tower that served as the launching pad for the spire. As he looked up Powerscourt saw that this must be the highest point inside the cathedral, a couple of hundred feet above the ground. The top of the scaffolding was next to a wooden trap door that led to the higher parts above. Waiting to be transferred the following day was an enormous pile of masonry slabs, destined to replace the broken sections further up. The workmen had spread thick dust sheets all over the surrounding floor. The Dean had complained to Powerscourt a couple of days before about the delays in the work, and about the enormous cost of having to operate at such high levels.

‘The Lord is meant to provide,’ he had said indignantly to Powerscourt, ‘but our constant fear is that one day he may forget about us here. He may have better things to do. And then what will happen to his crumbling buildings?’

The choir had finished. The silver cross led the way towards the cloisters once more. The two old ladies were definitely leaving the cathedral, nodding politely to Powerscourt as they hobbled past, chatting quietly to each other about the service they had just attended. He watched them go, almost pleased to be the only person left inside. The lights were still on in the choir, casting a faint light back down the nave. The Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary was completely silent as Powerscourt went back to stare up at the scaffolding.

Maybe it was the silence that saved him. He heard a very faint creak up above that might have been a rope running along a pulley. Powerscourt looked up. Then time stood still. The first thing that flashed across his mind was the memory of Beethoven’s Emperor Piano Concerto which he had listened to with Lucy in London weeks before. There was one passage where the orchestra falls silent and the piano descends down the scale, falling, falling, falling, it had seemed to Powerscourt at the time, as though it was going to drop off the edge of the world. The descending notes didn’t stay with him for long. For he realized that these great slabs of masonry stone were falling from their scaffolding and would land on top of him any second. He turned and dived full length through the entrance to the choir. He slid several feet along the polished floor and came to rest against the edge of the choir stalls. He hit his head hard against an ornate piece of wooden carving.

The noise was muffled by the dust sheets. The blocks of masonry smashed on to the stone floor of the crossing. Bits of broken stone ricocheted across the transept and down the nave. The dust of ages rose from beneath the cathedral stones and flowed outwards like a whirlwind. The Pillar of Smoke has come to Compton Minster, Powerscourt thought groggily and we shall all be consumed. Shards of stone flew off and cracked the wooden seats at the top of the nave. Then the lights went out.

As he rose, very unsteadily, to his feet, Powerscourt could feel the blood flowing freely down his temple where he had hit the carving. His brain told him that he had stopped beside the stall of Chisenbury and Chute. Grantham Australis was next door. His leg must have been twisted in the fall. He limped off very slowly towards the high altar. The great gold crucifix beckoned him on towards the place of sanctuary. Then he heard the doors close. He was locked in, shortly after five thirty in the afternoon. There must be fourteen hours to go before they would open again to greet another day. Lord Francis Powerscourt sat down in front of the altar and tried to collect his thoughts.