A New Lease of Death (9 page)

‘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 that he should listen to a small spate of domestic sins mumbled out each Friday morning. Hers was a masochistic, self-abusing 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 realized 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, in 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 and 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 Elizabeth Crilling, yes. One of the wild young things of Kingsmarkham. A boy friend – 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 eyes 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 page-boy’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 above-board. 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 vasty 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.’

7

Into how high a dignity … ye are called, that is to say to be Messengers, Watchmen and Stewards …

The Ordering of Priests

TWO PEOPLE SAT
in the public gallery of Kingsmarkham court, Archery and a woman with sharp, wasted features. Her long grey hair, oddly fashionable through carelessness rather than intent, and the cape she wore gave her a medieval look. Presumably she was the mother of this girl who had just been charged with manslaughter, the girl whom the clerk had named as Elizabeth Anthea Crilling, of 24A Glebe Road, Kingsmarkham in the County of Sussex. She had a look of her mother and they kept glancing at each other, Mrs Crilling’s eyes flicking over her daughter’s string-thin body or coming to rest with maudlin watery affection on the girl’s face. It was a well-made face, though gaunt but for the full mouth. Sometimes it seemed to become all staring
dark
eyes as a word or a telling phrase awakened emotion, sometimes blank and shuttered like that of a retarded child with an inner life of goblins and things that reach out in the dark. An invisible thread held mother and daughter together but whether it was composed of love or hatred Archery could not tell. Both were ill-dressed, dirty-looking, a prey, he felt, to cheap emotion, but there was some quality each had – passion? Imagination? Seething memory? – that set them apart and dwarfed the other occupants of the court.

He had just enough knowledge of the law to know that this court could do no more than commit the girl to the Assizes for trial. The evidence that was being laboriously taken down on a typewriter was all against her. Elizabeth Crilling, according to the licensee of The Swan at Flagford, had been drinking in his saloon bar since six-thirty. He had served her with seven double whiskies and when he had refused to let her have another, she had abused him until he had threatened to call the police.

‘No alternative but to commit you for trial at the Assizes at Lewes,’ the chairman was saying ‘… Nothing to hope for from any promise of favour, and nothing to fear from any threat which may be …’

A shriek came from the public gallery. ‘What are you going to do to her?’ Mrs Crilling had sprung up, the tent-like cape she wore billowing out and making a breeze run through the court. ‘You’re not going to put her in prison?’

Hardly knowing why he did so, Archery moved
swiftly
along the form until he was at her side. At the same time Sergeant Martin took half a dozen rapid strides towards her, glaring at the clergyman.

‘Now, madam, you’d far better come outside.’

She flung herself away from him, pulling the cape around her as if it were cold instead of suffocatingly hot.

‘You’re not going to put my baby in gaol!’ She pushed at the sergeant who stood between her and her view of the bench. ‘Get away from me, you dirty sadist!’

‘Take that woman outside,’ said the magistrate with ice calm. Mrs Crilling spun round to face Archery and seized his hands. ‘You’ve got a kind face. Are you my friend?’

Archery was horribly embarrassed. ‘You can ask for bail, I think,’ he muttered.

The policewoman who stood by the dock came over to them. ‘Come along now, Mrs Crilling …’

‘Bail, I want bail! This gentleman is an old friend of mine and he says I can have bail. I want my rights for my baby!’

‘We really can’t have this sort of thing.’ The magistrate cast an icy scornful look upon Archery who sat down, wrenching his hands from Mrs Crilling’s. ‘Do I understand you wish to ask for bail?’ He turned his eyes on Elizabeth who nodded defiantly.

‘A nice cup of tea, Mrs Crilling,’ said the policewoman. ‘Come along now.’ She shepherded the demented woman out, her arm supporting her waist. The magistrate went into conference with the
clerk
and bail was granted to Elizabeth Crilling in her own recognizance of five hundred pounds and that of her mother for a similar sum.

‘Rise, please!’ said the warrant officer. It was over.

On the other side of the court Wexford shovelled his papers into his briefcase.

‘A friend in need, that one,’ he said to Burden, glancing in Archery’s direction. ‘You mark my words, he’ll have a job getting out of old Mother Crilling’s clutches. Remember when we had to cart her off to the mental unit at Stowerton that time? You were her friend then. Tried to kiss you, didn’t she?’

‘Don’t remind me,’ said Burden.

‘Funny affair altogether last night, wasn’t it? Him being on hand, I mean, to show that poor kid his way to heaven.’

‘It was lucky.’

‘I only remember that happening once before, except in the case of R.C.s, of course.’ He turned as Archery slipped between the wooden forms and came up to them. ‘Good morning, sir. I hope you slept well. I was just saying to the inspector, there was a fellow killed out Forby way soon after I came here. Must be all of twenty years. I’ve never forgotten it. He was just a kid too and got it in the neck from an army lorry. But he wasn’t quiet, he was screaming. All about a girl and a kid it was.’ He paused. ‘Did you speak, sir? Sorry, I thought you did. He wanted a clergyman, too.’

‘I hope and trust he got what he wanted.’

‘Well, no he didn’t as a matter of fact. He died –
unshriven
is the word, I think. The vicar’s car broke down on the way. Funny, I’ve never forgotten it. Grace was his name, John Grace. Shall we go?’

The Crillings had departed. As they came out into the sunshine, the policewoman came up to Wexford.

‘Mrs Crilling left a note with me, sir. She asked me to give it to a Mr Archery.’