Evil Intent (17 page)

‘It’s important that I talk to her. Otherwise…well, it won’t be very pleasant for her. But I can help her.’

‘She’s not here.’ He regarded Lilith gravely, sizing her up. Then,
reaching
a decision, he opened the door more widely. ‘She should be back soon. I suppose you’d better come in.’

Adam’s flat was the ground floor of a large and beautifully-proportioned Georgian house. He was waiting at the door for Callie, and greeted her with an unexpected kiss on the cheek. ‘I’m so glad you could come on short notice,’ he said. ‘Running into you like that, Cal – I suppose it must have been God’s will.’

She could think of another way of putting it, Callie said to herself as he ushered her into the sitting room.

‘Pippa wasn’t meant to come down till tomorrow,’ Adam went on. ‘But since it was my day off today, she decided to call in sick to work, and make
it a long weekend.’

‘That’s nice,’ said Callie falsely. ‘What sort of work does she do?’ She was sure he’d told her, but it was one of the things she’d blocked from her mind after that excruciating conversation in which he told her that he was going to marry someone else.

‘She’s an infant school teacher.’

That figured, thought Callie.

‘It will be so useful when we’re married. She’ll make a wonderful vicar’s wife,’ he went on enthusiastically. ‘And a wonderful mother.’

Pippa came through and went straight to Adam, winding her arms round his waist. ‘Everything is about ready, darling,’ she said, with a smile of greeting in Callie’s direction. ‘If you’ll deal with the wine, I’ll give Callie a little tour of the flat. I’m sure she’d like to see it.’

‘Yes, of course I would,’ Callie confirmed.

‘Right, sweetheart.’ Adam gently extricated himself from her arms and kissed her on the nose, then left the two women alone together.

‘This is the drawing room,’ Pippa began. ‘Obviously.’

It was, Callie saw, a lovely room, with original features intact: an
elaborate
ceiling rose, plaster mouldings round the high ceiling, a marble
fireplace.
But a slightly bizarre note was introduced by the room’s main wall decorations: Adam’s collection of African tribal masks. His parents had been missionaries, and the collection was impressive. Seeing them, though, gave Callie an unexpected pang; the masks had adorned Adam’s room at theological college. The grotesque faces were familiar to her, as familiar as old and dear friends – friends who had witnessed some of the most
significant
events of her life. ‘Do you like the masks?’ Pippa asked.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘I think they’re a bit creepy. But I’m sure I’ll get used to them.’

You’d better, Callie thought. Adam would rather cut off his arm than give up his beloved masks.

‘I’ll show you the kitchen at the end,’ said Pippa, leading the way into the corridor. ‘Come this way.’ She opened a door into a bathroom. ‘The
little
room,’ she said coyly.

Callie gave the response she supposed was expected of her. ‘Very nice.’

‘And there are two bedrooms. This is Adam’s room.’ Pippa threw open the door.

Strangely, it did not affect Callie as much as the masks had done. She’d never seen any of the furniture before, and the bed – a double bed, rather than the narrow one he’d had at college – sported a smart new duvet cover in fashionable earth tones. The ratty old Indian throw which had covered his bed for all the time she’d known him was no more. That, she knew instinctively, would be down to Pippa.

Pippa was moving on to the next door. ‘And this is Adam’s study. It has a sofa bed, so it’s also the guest room.’ She pointed at a suitcase. ‘It’s where I stay when I visit. Until our wedding.’ She added, lowering her voice confidentially, ‘Of course, as Christians, Adam and I don’t believe in sex before marriage.’

Callie stared at her in astonishment, then saw that Adam had come up behind them. He shot Callie a nervous look; it was the most discomfited she had seen him since he had suggested this bizarre get-together. She
didn’t
say anything: let him sweat for a few minutes, she thought.

He put his arms round Pippa from behind. ‘Everything is ready,’ he said quickly. ‘Shall we eat?’

‘Oh, here you are, darling!’ Pippa purred. ‘I was just telling Callie why we plan to get married so soon. We just can’t wait much longer, can we?’

‘That’s right.’

‘The wedding will be at Christ Church,’ Pippa went on in the same
confidential
tone. ‘And Richard – Richard Grant, Adam’s vicar – says he won’t marry us if we’ve been living in sin. So the answer is to get married as soon as we can.’

‘Seems sensible to me,’ Callie said in a neutral voice. ‘Better to marry than to burn – isn’t that what it says in the Bible?’

Adam relaxed visibly. ‘Lunch is getting cold,’ he said. ‘Let’s eat.’

Much later, soaking in her fragrant bubble bath, Callie tried to make sense of it all. What on earth had got into Adam?

He had certainly had no objections to sex before marriage when they’d been together.

It wasn’t that they’d jumped into bed five minutes after they’d met. It
hadn’t been like that at all; after all, they
were
both Christians, and preparing for ordination to the priesthood. Almost a year into their relationship, though, when they’d started talking seriously about marriage, about a future together, things had progressed. They were both relatively inexperienced in such matters, but what Adam lacked in experience he made up for in
enthusiasm.
It was a mutual decision, a natural outgrowth of their growing love and commitment. Callie had gone on the pill, and they’d begun sleeping together.

Theirs was a fairly liberal theological college, and a blind eye was turned to that sort of thing, especially when it was understood that they were engaged, that they would marry. On most nights, Adam would slip along the corridor to Callie’s room, or she to his, and they would squeeze
together
into a narrow bed, holding each other tight beneath Callie’s flowered duvet or Adam’s Indian throw.

What had Adam told that innocent child Pippa about their relationship? Had he told her that they were just friends? One thing for sure: he
certainly
hadn’t told her the truth.

And as well as sex, there was another of Adam’s appetites which Pippa seemed to have been successful in quelling.

At college, Adam had practically lived on bacon sandwiches. For a
special
treat, he loved nothing so much as a thick steak, barely cooked and oozing with juices.

Now, it seemed, he was a vegetarian.

‘We don’t eat meat,’ Pippa had announced, in the same proprietary and self-righteous tone in which she’d divulged their sexual abstinence. ‘Adam and I believe that eating meat is as bad as murder.’

She had produced a dish of pulses and marinated tofu, which, though it didn’t taste as bad as it looked or sounded, made Callie long for a juicy burger.

Adam had tucked into it with evident enjoyment. Was he indeed a reformed character?

In any case, there were things about Adam that she suspected he would not like Pippa to find out.

Callie smiled grimly to herself. Not that she’d ever tell her, but it did make a pleasant fantasy to imagine the look on Adam’s face if she did.

Saturday was Jane Stanford’s favourite day of the week. Throughout his ministry, Brian had taken it as his day off, and they had spent it as a family day. When the boys were young and they’d had a parish in the country, that had meant rambles in the countryside and outings to sites of interest. Latterly in London they often visited museums. Jane enjoyed planning their Saturdays, something Brian was glad to leave to her.

Now the boys were gone. Over the past few years Charlie and Simon had seemed to have more things of their own to do at weekends, so Saturdays were as often as not spent in the parish, with Brian relaxing at home before the demands of Sunday took over his life. Jane was the fierce watchdog and guardian of their sacrosanct Saturday privacy, leaving the phone unanswered and turning people away at the door. Anyone foolish enough to try to drop by the vicarage on a Saturday would be sent away with a flea in his ear; gradually the word had got round, and few
parishioners
would dare to chance it, even in extreme emergency.

On this Saturday, therefore, Jane was surprised to hear the doorbell ring. It was still quite early in the morning, and they were getting ready for a rare day out: they planned to drive to Oxford and take the boys to lunch. Jane had been looking forward to it for days, with a longing anticipation which surprised her. It had been less than a fortnight since they’d seen Charlie and Simon, but it seemed a lifetime to their mother.

She went to the door with a mingling of impatience at the interruption and goodwill engendered by her excitement about seeing her sons in just a few hours. If it was a parishioner, though, she would have no hesitation at seeing them off, and quickly.

Jane didn’t know the woman on the doorstep; she was not a member of the congregation. But she was nicely dressed and looked most respectable, so Jane was not quite as ferocious as she might have been. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I’m so sorry to disturb you,’ said the woman in a genteely accented voice. ‘But I saw that this was the vicarage, and hoped you could help me to find the curate.’

‘Certainly.’ Jane pointed towards the church. ‘The church hall is behind
the church, and her flat is above the hall.’

‘Thank you so much.’ The woman turned to go, and Jane closed the door, putting the incident out of her mind almost as soon as she had done so. Today she would see her sons; nothing could take away from her joy in that.

For the second morning running, the phone, ringing early beside the bed, woke Frances from sleep.

This time, though, it was not the welcome voice of Leo.

The man identified himself as a journalist with one of the major Sunday papers. ‘I was wondering, Reverend Cherry, whether you might want to comment on the story in this morning’s
Globe.’

‘No, I would not!’ she snapped, slamming down the phone.

That call was the first of several. After the second one, Frances stopped answering them and sent Graham to the nearest newsagent’s shop for a copy of the
Globe;
after the tenth one she took the phone off the hook. And before Graham had returned, someone rang the doorbell. Frances ignored it, drawing the curtains at the front of the house. When she’d said it to Leo the day before, it had seemed almost a joke. Now it wasn’t funny.

Graham managed to get past the hopeful man at the door and found Frances in the kitchen, drinking strong coffee. He dropped the tabloid on the table in front of her.

‘I’ve had a look,’ he said with an apologetic grimace. ‘It’s not as bad as it might have been.’

Frances was trying not to blame Graham, but it was proving difficult. How had he been so easily taken in, so naïve? She’d come home from work to find him with that journalist woman, talking to her over a cup of tea. Frances had soon sent her packing, in spite of her protestations that she was there to help her, to give her a chance to recount her side of the story.

‘I didn’t tell her anything that she didn’t know,’ Graham had insisted afterwards. ‘She knew about the row with Jonah. And she knew about your stole.’

‘About my stole?’ Frances echoed in horror. ‘Oh, God.’ She couldn’t believe it. Who would have told her that, if not the police? And she was sure that was one thing they’d been anxious to keep under wraps when it
came to the press. ‘So what exactly
did
you tell her, then?’ she demanded.

‘Just that it wasn’t like you to lose your temper like that. And that he had provoked you. He’d started the argument. That’s what you said to me about it, anyway.’

Now Frances opened the tabloid and stared at a fuzzy, blown-up photo of herself from some years earlier. She recognised it as one that had been taken when she’d stood in Dean’s Yard during the General Synod vote on women’s ordination. The eleventh of November, 1992 – a date she would never forget. The photo, which had appeared on the front page of several newspapers the following day, was cropped to remove those packed around her, showing only Frances with her banner reading ‘Women Priests: The Time Has Come’. The headline, running across the top of the page, said ‘Globe Exclusive: The Militant Woman at the Centre of Murdered Priest Mystery’.

Lilith Noone had been given a prominent by-line. ‘This reporter has learned,’ she wrote, ‘that a short while before he died, the murdered Nigerian priest Jonah Adimola had a public and heated row with the Reverend Frances Cherry, a prominent campaigner for the rights of women in the Church of England. Adimola, who was known to have disagreed strongly with the legislation which allowed women to be ordained as priests, is said to have provoked Cherry with taunts, and she reportedly reacted by throwing a glass of wine over him.

‘The petite redhead was in the forefront of the Movement for the Ordination of Women,’ the story went on. ‘She campaigned tirelessly for that cause, and was triumphant when, after years of debate, the General Synod of the Church of England voted by a narrow margin that women could be ordained. Cherry herself was amongst the first women to be ordained, in April of 1994. She now serves as a full-time chaplain at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. She lives with her husband, the Reverend Graham Cherry, a vicar in Notting Hill. “It’s not like Frances to lose her temper like that,” Graham Cherry told this reporter in an exclusive
interview.
“Jonah Adimola started the row. He was incredibly rude to her.”

‘Adimola, who preferred to be called “Father Jonah” by his parishioners at St Mary the Virgin, Marble Arch, was murdered some time on Tuesday
night in the vestry of St John’s, Lancaster Gate, a neighbouring church at which he – and Cherry – had attended a meeting that evening. Police are baffled by the murder of a man who, up till now, was not thought to have enemies.

‘Frances Cherry has been interviewed twice by the police, her husband has confirmed. No arrests have yet been made.’

Well, Frances reflected ruefully, the woman had done her homework. You had to give her that. She’d obviously been through the archives at the
Globe,
to have come up with that old photo and the background information.

And she was skilful as well, managing to imply far more than she said. Graham had opined that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been: what, though, could have been worse than giving the impression that the police were on the brink of arresting her for murder? Perhaps they were, or
perhaps
this article would itself be a catalyst, goading them into taking action.

Then she realised what Graham meant. There was one thing that Lilith Noone knew, but which she had withheld in her article: that Frances’
ordination
stole had been the means of Jonah Adimola’s death.

Frances supposed she should be grateful for small favours. But she very much feared that she hadn’t heard the last from Lilith Noone.

On Saturday morning, Callie knew that she would have to pay the price for her day off. For one thing, she hadn’t yet finished her sermon, and time was running out. She got up early, went to her desk and concentrated on it, blocking distractions from her mind. When she finally got to the final ‘Amen’ and looked at the clock, she realised with a feeling of panic that there was barely enough time to get dressed, and none to have breakfast, before she had to go to the church to say Morning Prayer. Afterwards, she promised herself, she could pop down to the shops for the newspapers, and possibly even stop by the bakery and treat herself to a danish pastry. She could munch on it, in lieu of breakfast, while skimming through the papers. With any luck they would have had enough of the Jonah Adimola murder by now and would have gone on to the next big thing.

She clattered down the stairs of the flat, glancing at her watch. No more than a minute to spare.

A woman was at the foot of the stairs, blocking her way. Callie had never seen her before, and assumed that she was a parishioner she hadn’t met yet.

‘Excuse me,’ Callie said, hoping that the woman was going to the church hall rather than looking for her. She could just about squeeze past her in the narrow stairway.

‘Are you the curate?’

Damn, thought Callie. ‘Yes,’ she admitted.

‘Could I possibly have a word?’

‘I’m sorry – I can’t stop just now. I’m due to say Morning Prayer. Might you be able to come back later, or another time?’ She hated to turn anyone away, but what would Brian think of her if she couldn’t even be on time for Morning Prayer on his day off, the first day she was on her own?

‘Can I come to the service?’ the woman asked, stepping aside so Callie could pass.

‘Yes, of course. Anyone can come.’

Not that many people ever turned up for it. On two mornings that first week, she and Brian were the only ones there; on Monday there had also been one old lady, and on Thursday two men had showed up.

Saturday drew a rather larger congregation, Callie discovered, with five people including the woman who had come to see her. Breathless, she slipped into her stall and picked up her prayer book.

After the brief service, the woman waited at the door for Callie. ‘Could we go somewhere for a coffee?’ the woman suggested.

That suited Callie very well. If they went towards the local shops, she could stop at the newsagent’s on her way back home. ‘There’s a Starbucks not far away,’ she suggested.

Walking along, they made small talk about the pleasant weather; Callie surreptitiously glanced at the woman, trying to make some assessment of her. She was probably about Callie’s age, or a bit older – it was difficult to tell. Her clothing was classic, discreet, and she wore her long hair in a rather elegant upswept style.

At one point in their progress, they had to step off the pavement to avoid a man jogging along towards them in the direction of Hyde Park. As
he drew close, Callie recognised him as Richard Grant, the man who had set himself up as an arbiter of his curate’s morals. She’d not actually
spoken
to at the Clergy Chapter meeting, and wasn’t sure whether he’d
recognise
her or not.

But she was, of course, wearing her clericals, so she would be difficult for him to miss. He was not: his abbreviated jogging shorts displayed
muscular
legs, as tanned and sinewy as his arms. He slowed a few feet short of them, smiling at Callie in recognition, then jogged in place as he said hello. Callie stopped and returned the greeting, her companion pausing at her side.

‘Beautiful morning,’ he added.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you settling in well?’ Richard Grant asked.

‘Very well, thank you.’

‘Adam seems to be taking to it like a duck to water.’ His ascetic face creased into a smile. ‘I’m very fortunate to have him.’

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ was the only response Callie could make to that
statement.

‘That was quite a business the other night,’ he said.

‘The meeting, you mean?’

‘The row. He really went for you, didn’t he?’

‘It was a bit upsetting,’ she admitted. ‘But not nearly as upsetting as the fact that he’s been murdered.’

Richard Grant shook his head with a pious expression. ‘God metes out judgement in mysterious ways,’ he said obliquely.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s not for me to judge, of course, but I can’t help feeling that Jonah Adimola’s sins caught up with him.’ With that, he nodded at her and resumed his long, loping strides towards the park.

Callie and her companion stepped back onto the pavement. ‘Who was that?’ the woman asked.

‘Richard Grant. He’s the vicar of Christ Church. It’s up Westbourne Terrace.’

‘And who is Adam?’

For a parishioner, the woman asked a lot of questions, Callie said to herself. ‘His curate. Adam Masters.’

‘A friend of yours?’

‘I know him a bit,’ she said cautiously, with an escalating feeling of unease.

‘Was he at the meeting the other night?’

Callie stopped and turned to face her. ‘Just a second,’ she said. ‘Why do you want to know? Who are you? You haven’t said.’

‘Let’s just say I’m someone who is interested in the truth. Isn’t that what you clergy are supposed to be all about?’

The penny dropped. ‘You’re a journalist, aren’t you?’

She raised her chin and looked Callie in the eye. ‘I’d like to help you. I’m in a position to be able to do that. All I ask is a few minutes of your time.’

Earlier in the week, Neville had hoped for a Saturday off, but clearly that was not meant to be. Instead, exhausted and dispirited, he dragged himself into the station early, stopping on his way to collect a sheaf of newspapers.

This time, in spite of the fact that he’d once again spent a late night in some of the seedier establishments of Soho – all in the interests of truth and justice, of course – Sid Cowley was already there, sitting at Neville’s desk reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette.

‘Morning, Guv,’ he said cheerfully.

Neville scowled. ‘You’re awfully bright this morning. Does that mean you’ve found something?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

Instantly awake and invigorated, Neville demanded, ‘Tell me!’