Blood Brotherhood (10 page)

‘The blood around the bam. He made no attempt to hide it — from what we observed, he was in no condition to do so: he was completely in a trance. There would certainly have been some blood leading from Brother Dominic's room, if he had murdered him in the same state. But as you will have observed, there was none.'

Chief Inspector Plunkett muttered something in Croft's direction that sounded suspiciously like ‘Father Brown'. Then he said: ‘I suppose you also know who it was, if it wasn't the black.'

It went through Father Anselm's mind that the Chief Inspector's manner had passed beyond the limits of allowable police rudeness, and that he ought to complain to his superiors and get him taken off the case — and preferably off any case. Then it struck him that it was hardly up to the suspects to choose their own detective — and anyway . . . He merely answered: ‘I have no idea.'

‘Anyone could have got into his room?'

‘There are no locks on the door — none on any of the doors to the cells. However, the outside door, which you
came through, is locked, and the door into the brothers' sleeping wing. For purposes of security. Therefore it does seem certain that whoever it was was someone from this central part of the building.'

‘Meaning either you, or one of the guests.'

‘Precisely,' said Father Anselm, this time not bothering to proclaim his own innocence. Inspector Croft seemed about to ask a question, but he cast a look at his superior, and seemed to think better of it. Plunkett sat in meditation, his mouth screwed up with effort, or distaste.

‘Who are these
guests,
then?' he asked finally.

‘They are delegates to a sort of symposium-cum-retreat. The subject is “The Role of the Church in the Modern World”.'

‘You mean a sort of discussion group?'

‘Exactly. We try to keep these groups small, in order not to destroy the atmosphere of St Botolph's. Some of the delegates are English — priests of the Church of England, and the Bishop of Peckham — some are from abroad: America, Africa and Norway.'

‘How long have they been here?'

‘Two nights.'

‘And were any of them acquainted with this . . . Denis Crowther before they came?'

‘Not as far as I am aware.'

‘Someone seems to have taken an instant dislike then, don't they? Well, I'm going to have to see them all at some time. Have to see how the scientific boys are getting along first. They may have it all tied up. You got any questions, Croft?'

‘I presume you've been over how the body came to be found, have you, sir, and what — '

‘Yes. Been over all that,' barked Plunkett cavalierly. He waved his hand in Father Anselm's direction. ‘You can go.'

Dismissed from his own office, Father Anselm stood for a moment outside the door. That had been a near thing. For Plunkett had not in fact asked him how he came to
go to Brother Dominic's room and find the body in the middle of the night. Definitely he would not yet complain to this man's superiors about his conduct of the case.

Turning, he swirled towards the chapel, where he knelt for some time in prayer.

I
T WAS PLAIN
to Ernest Clayton as soon as he sat down to breakfast that something was wrong. He, unusually, was late, but the Bishop also had only just arrived. He sat hunched over his plate, his eyes paunchy and haunted. He was making hardly a pretence of eating, and was spending his time crumbling his bread on to his plate.

And he was not reacting at all to Randi Paulsen, who was in chirpy, spread-the-word-good-people mood. She was expounding at great length to Stewart Phipps (in a state of proletarian depression, and eating avidly to keep his mind off it) the special problems created by the large seagoing population of Norway.

‘Of course we have missions in all the major centres of the world, with resident chaplains, and a truly cosy atmosphere. I myself have helped to select some of the Christian reading-matter we make available to the men who come there, which has been a great joy. But so many of them are rootless young men, without families to go to when they return to Norway, or cut off from them by some sad misunderstanding or other, and the temptations for these young men when they get to the shore ports are really terrible. Sometimes they are drunk for
days.
I suppose with so many large ports in Britain your church must face the same problem?'

Stewart Phipps said ‘Urg', or possibly ‘Mng' — at any rate he made a noise somewhere between an assent and a protest.

‘Naturally the people mainly concerned with the problem are the social welfare people in our church,' pursued Randi
regardless, squeezing a smile out to others in the vicinity to bring them in on the monologue. ‘We're just beginning a determined campaign to make sure that these men should be offered a real alternative to drink and . . .
worse . . .
when they are on shore. We're recruiting families with a really Christian atmosphere in the home to offer hospitality and even accommodation to these poor boys, and make them feel part of one big Christian family. We're launching the campaign very shortly, and we're using the slogan “Bring a Sailor Home for Christ”.'

It was at this point that there should have issued from the Bishop of Peckham's place an ecstatic gurgle, a cockerel chortle, a delirious whinny. No such sound emerged. The Bishop went on crumbling his wholemeal bread and looking at his plate. It was then that Ernest Clayton knew there was something wrong.

He was not to be long in finding out what. A minute or two later Father Anselm stalked across the floor of the Great Hall towards High Table, and placed himself imposingly at the end of the dais. Unlike the Bishop his appearance gave to the casual observer no sign of his nightlong ordeal. Such things, his manner seemed to proclaim, were all in a night's work at St Botolph's.

‘I'm afraid I have terrible news for you,' he said, without fuss or preliminaries, in a low but impressive voice. ‘During the night there has been a murder — of my assistant Brother Dominic, whom you all knew.' He paused and let his eye roam around the faces turned towards him. ‘The police are already here and working on the case. For the moment we are in their hands. I suggest that you cancel the discussions arranged for today and make yourselves available to the police if and when you should be called on.'

He let his fine, unfathomable eyes dwell on them and on their reactions of incredulity, horror and distaste for a few seconds more, and then turned to go. But he had not entirely quelled them. He was prevented by Simeon P. Fleishman.

‘Are you telling us there's been a murder?' he asked, his voice rising with incredulity. ‘He-arre?'

‘That is so,' said Father Anselm.

‘But the police can't want to interview
us,'
pursued Fleishman. ‘We're strangers here. We hardly knew the . . . young man. For heaven's sake, we're all clergymen.'

‘I wouldn't wish to anticipate the Inspector's wishes,' said Father Anselm. ‘It is to him that you must put such points. I merely suggest you make yourselves available to him if and when necessary.'

Ignoring further expostulations and questions, he strode down from the dais and towards the brothers breakfasting at the other end of the hall. Here, once again, he addressed them earnestly, but at greater length. He kept his voice so low that nothing could be heard by the delegates at High Table.

Where, in any case, the breakfasters were in a state of considerable shock. Randi Paulsen hazarded the opinion that the news was ‘dreadful' and ‘quite shocking'. The others were not able to dissent from this view, though Bente Frøystad seemed to bite back a sharp comment. Once Brother Dominic had been sung to his rest on wings of cliché they all got down to discussing the effects on themselves.

‘To my mind the sooner we wind up the whole damn symposium and get out of here, the better,' said Simeon Fleishman, whose linguistic patterns seemed to be changing under the pressure of this novel experience. ‘Being mixed up in something like this is poison — the mud sticks around you like a bad smell.'

There seemed to be pretty general agreement with this, though no one else was willing to put the matter in such worldly terms.

‘Certainly any discussions would inevitably seem a bit beside the point at the moment,' said Ernest Clayton, his eyes straying to the other end of the hall where Father Anselm was still addressing the brothers, who were looking
at him intently. ‘I suppose that the best we can hope for is that — '

He was interrupted — and so, at the other end of the hall, was Father Anselm, the set of whose body exuded displeasure—by the figure of Chief Inspector Plunkett. His walk as he entered the Great Hall had something of the quality of a goose-step — cocky and aggressive. He sited himself in the open space between High Table and the other eaters, and he said in a voice just that much louder than necessary: ‘Right!' His favourite word certainly succeeded in getting him everybody's attention, though Father Anselm gave him the sort of look a German music lover gives someone who says that
Faust
is his favourite opera. In the silence that followed, Plunkett let his rodent's eyes travel slowly and suspiciously round to every corner of the hall. As he intended, everyone who was not quailing before, quailed now. As he brought his attention back to more immediate prospects, his mouth twisted into an unpleasant expression of contempt.

‘Right,' he said again. ‘I gather you all know what happened last night. Eh? Murder. Right. Now, I'll want to talk to you — ' here he turned to the party at High Table — ‘one after another. In alphabetical order. Before that I've got an interesting conversation lined up with — ' here he paused to make quite certain that none of the breakfasters at High Table was black — ‘with another of your group. Then I'll send for you. OK?'

They all nodded miserably. Satisfied with having thoroughly intimidated them, Plunkett turned towards the mass of robed and cowled figures at the other end of the hall, and his voice, already too loud and harsh for such an environment, now seemed to have been subjected to a further twist of the volume-control knob. It was almost as if he knew that such a volume, and such a tone, were unheard of within the precincts of the Community, and that he was enjoying himself. There was a mute gesture from one of the older brothers — actually Brother Jonathan
— and there were anguished looks on the faces of some of the others, who resembled nothing so much as deaf men who had suddenly recovered their hearing during a performance of the
1812 Overture.

‘Now! You lot!' said Chief Inspector Plunkett. ‘So far as I can see, I may not need to talk to you at all. But you never know what we might uncover. I'll expect you to be available.' Turning towards the door, he paused for a moment, and then said: ‘So don't go away!'

With which fatuous command he bustled out of the hall, followed by Sergeant Forsyte. The euphoric expression on the face of the latter could be accounted for by the fact that he was treasuring up every detail of his chief's conduct for retailing to higher authority before many days were out. And he was expecting by then to have such a store — such a store.

• • •

The Bishop of Mitabezi was a pitiful sight, and not a pretty one. He had been released from his strait-jacket of bedclothes (the knots of which had been tied so effectively by Father Anselm that Sergeant Forsyte struggled with them for quite ten minutes), and now he lay on the stripped bed. The first things that met the eye were his hands and robe caked with dried blood. Hardly less remarkable was his expression, which was woebegone and hideously ashamed. He didn't know where to put his face while he was being untied. Unfortunately it was almost impossible, in the tiny room, to put it anywhere where it could not see Chief Inspector Plunkett, who was sitting on a chair drawn up beside the bed, and regarding the discomfited Bishop with an expression on his face so close to a sneer that it was the very last thing to restore the poor man's self-respect.

When he was untied Plunkett allowed him a minute or two to inspect his blood-stained hands and robe, regarding him sardonically from a chair the while. Then he said: ‘And now, perhaps, you'd like to tell me what you've been doing? Eh?'

There was a long silence, during which the Bishop of Mitabezi could be heard swallowing convulsively. At last he said: ‘I don't . . . exactly . . . remember. But I think I must have . . . killed something.'

‘Ye-es,' said Plunkett, with an intonation which said, ‘Go on — and the rest.'

‘I think it may have been a . . . lamb,' said the Bishop. ‘Could that be what . . . this is?' He held up his black-brown hands and looked at them with an expression of guilt that would have been comical to someone with a sense of humour. Chief Inspector Plunkett did not relax the expression of twisted contempt that was now suffusing his face.

‘A lamb
was
found,' he said. Then he leant forward, and went on, his voice rising in pitch and volume: ‘Found with its throat cut, and a great long slit down its belly. That was you, was it?'

The Bishop sighed, a luxurious moan in the bass clef. ‘I'm afraid it must have been. I felt it coming on. Earlier in the day. When we visited the farm and saw all the animals. I . . . felt it. Perhaps I should have said something. But how could I? What would people have said?'

‘Blood-lust,' said Chief Inspector Plunkett, his voice cracking with excitement. From the way his tongue sped round his mouth, moistening parched lips, it seemed like a blatant case of the pot and the kettle. The Bishop looked down, ashamed.

‘It was the night of the seventh moon. We had a tradition in our tribe . . . All the young men . . . A sort of initiation. Of course I renounced all such things when I became a Christian. All of us did. And yet, somehow . . .'