Missing Joseph (34 page)

“Nothing that was recorded by the adjudicating party indicated Mr. Sage's ministry to be wanting in any way.” The deacon's monotone, a demonstration of hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil, and step-on-no-toes, no doubt served him well in the political-religious arena in which he worked. It did little to add to their knowledge, however.

“As to Mr. Sage himself?” St. James asked.

The deacon ran his tongue over his protruding teeth and picked a piece of lint from the lapel of his black suit jacket. “Yes?”

“Was he himself wanting?”

“As far as the parish was concerned, and from the information I was able to gather from my attendance at the inquest—”

“I mean in your eyes. Was he wanting? You must have known him as well as heard about him at the inquest.”

“We none of us are capable of achieving perfection,” was the deacon's prim response.

“Actually, non sequiturs aren't of much help in examining an untimely death,” St. James said.

The deacon's neck seemed to lengthen as he lifted his chin. “If you're hoping for more—perhaps something detrimental—then I must tell you I am not in the habit of sitting in judgement upon fellow clerics.”

The bishop chuckled. “What balderdash, Dominic. Most days you sit in judgement like St. Peter himself. Tell the man what you know.”

“Your Grace—”

“Dominic, you gossip like a ten-year-old schoolgirl. Always have done. Now, stop equivocating before I climb off this damnable machine and box your bloody ears. Pardon me, dear madam,” to Deborah who smiled.

The deacon looked as if he smelled something unpleasant but had just been told to pretend it was roses. “All right,” he said. “It seemed to me that Mr. Sage had a rather narrow field of vision. His every reference point was specifically biblical.”

“I shouldn't think that a limitation in a priest,” St. James noted.

“It is perhaps the most serious limitation a priest can take with him into his ministry. A strict interpretation of and consequent adherence to the Bible can be perfectly blinding, not to mention severely alienating to the very flock whose membership one might be trying to increase. We are not Puritans, Mr. St. James. We do not harangue from the pulpit any longer. Nor do we encourage religious devotion based upon fear.”

“Nothing we've heard about Sage indicates that he was doing that either.”

“Not yet in Winslough, perhaps. But
our
last meeting with him here in Bradford certainly stands as monumental evidence of the direction in which he was determined to head. There was trouble brewing all round that man. One sensed it was just a matter of time before it came to a boil.”

“Trouble? Between Sage and the parish? Or a member of the parish? Do you know something specific?”

“For someone who'd spent years in the ministry, he had no essential grasp of the concrete problems faced by his parishioners or anyone else. Example: He took part in a conference on marriage and the family not a month before he died and while a professional—a psychologist, mind you, here in Bradford—attempted to give our brothers some guidance on how to deal with parishioners having marital problems, Mr. Sage wanted to engage in a discussion of the woman taken in adultery.”

“The woman…?”

“John, chapter eight,” the bishop said. “‘And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery…' etcetera, etcetera. You know the story: Feel free to throw stones, if you've not sinned yourself.”

The deacon continued as if the bishop hadn't spoken. “There we were in the middle of discussing the best approach to take with a couple whose ability to communicate is clouded by the need to control each other, and Sage wanted to talk about what was moral versus what was right. Because the laws of the Hebrews declared it to be so, it was moral to stone this woman, he said. But was it necessarily right? And oughtn't that be what we explore in our conferences together, brothers: the dilemma we face between that which is moral in the eyes of our society and that which is right in the eyes of God? It was all perfect rubbish. He didn't want to talk about anything concrete because he lacked the ability to do so. If he could keep our heads up in the air and fill up our time with nebulous discussions, his own weaknesses as a priest—not to mention his deficiencies as a man—might never be revealed.” In conclusion, the deacon waved his hand in front of his face as if whisking away a pesky fly. He gave a derisive tut. “The woman taken in adultery. Should we or shouldn't we stone sinners in the market-place. My God. What drivel. This is the twentieth century. Nearly the twenty-first.”

“Dominic always has his fingers on the pulse of the obvious,” the bishop noted. The deacon looked miffed.

“You disagree with his assessment of Mr. Sage?”

“No. It's accurate. Unfortunate, but true. His zealotry had a distinctly biblical flavour. And frankly, that's off-putting, even for clerics.”

The deacon bowed his head briefly in humble acceptance of the bishop's laconic approbation.

Glennaven continued to pump away on the stair machine, adding ever more to the increasing stains of sweat on his clothes. It clicked and whirred. The bishop panted. St. James thought about the oddity of religion.

All forms of Christianity sprang from the same source, the life and words of the Nazarene. Yet the ways of celebrating that life and those words seemed as infinite in variety as the individuals who were the celebrants. While St. James recognised the fact that tempers could flare and dislikes could brew over interpretations and styles of worship, it seemed more likely that a priest whose mode of devotion irritated parishioners would be replaced rather than eliminated. St. John Townley-Young may have found Mr. Sage too low church for his taste. The deacon may have found him too fundamental. The parish may have been irked by his passion. But none of these seemed significant enough reasons to murder him. The truth had to lie in another direction. Biblical zealotry did not appear to be the connection that Lynley was hoping to unearth between killer and victim.

“He came to you from Cornwall, as I understand it,” St. James said.

“He did.” The bishop used the rag to scour his face and to sponge the sweat from his neck. “Nearly twenty years there. Round three months here. Part of it with me whilst he went on his interviews. The rest in Winslough.”

“Is that the ordinary procedure, to have a priest stay here with you during the interview process?”

“Special case,” Glennaven said.

“Why?”

“A favour to Ludlow.”

St. James frowned. “The town?”

“Michael Ludlow,” Dominic clarified. “Bishop of Truro. He asked His Grace to see to it that Mr. Sage was…” The deacon made much of sifting through the chaff of his thoughts for a wheat-like euphemism. “He felt Mr. Sage needed a change of environment. He thought a new location might increase his chance of success.”

“I had no idea a bishop might be so involved in the work of an individual cleric. Is that typical?”

“In the work of this cleric, yes.” A buzzer sounded from the stair machine. Glennaven said, “Saints be praised,” and reached for a knob that he turned anticlockwise. He slowed his pace for a cool-down period. His breathing began to return to normal. “Robin Sage was Michael Ludlow's archdeacon originally,” he said. “He'd spent the first seven years of his ministry climbing to that position. He was only thirty-two when he received the appointment. He was an unqualified success. He made
carpe diem
his personal watchword.”

“That doesn't sound at all like the man from Winslough,” Deborah murmured.

Glennaven acknowledged her point with a nod. “He made himself indispensable to Michael. He served on committees, involved himself in political action—”

“Church-approved political action,” Dominic added.

“He lectured at theological colleges. He raised thousands of pounds for the maintenance of the cathedral and for the local churches. And he was fully capable of mingling without either effort or discomfort in any level of society.”

“A jewel. A real catch, in other words,” Dominic said. He didn't seem overly pleased with the thought.

“It's odd to think a man like that would suddenly be satisfied, living the life of a village cleric,” St. James said.

“That was Michael's thought exactly. He hated to lose him, but he let him go. It was Sage's request. He went to Boscastle for his first posting.”

“Why?”

The bishop wiped his hands on the rag and folded it. “Perhaps he'd been to the village on holiday.”

“But why the sudden change? Why the desire to go from a position of power and influence to one of relative obscurity? That's hardly the norm. Even for a priest, I dare say.”

“He'd travelled on a personal road to Damascus a short time before, evidently. He'd lost his wife.”

“His wife?”

“Killed in a boating accident. According to Michael, he was never the same afterwards. He saw her death as a punishment from God for his temporal interests, and he decided to eschew them.”

St. James looked at Deborah across the room. He could tell she was thinking his very same thought. They'd all of them made an uninformed assumption based upon limited information. They had assumed the vicar hadn't been married because no one in Winslough had mentioned a wife. He could see from Deborah's thoughtful expression that she was reflecting upon the day in November when she'd had her only conversation with the man.

“So I assume that his passion for success was replaced with a passion to make up for his past in some way,” St. James said to the bishop.

“But the problem was that the latter passion didn't translate as well as the former had. He went through nine placements.”

“In what period of time?”

The bishop looked at his secretary. “Some ten to fifteen years, wasn't it?” Dominic nodded.

“With no success anywhere? A man with his talents?”

“As I said, the passion didn't translate well. He became the zealot we spoke of earlier, vehement about everything from the decline in church attendance to what he called the secularisation of the clergy. He lived the Sermon on the Mount, and he wasn't accepting of a fellow clergyman or even a parishioner who failed to do the same. If that wasn't enough to cause him problems, he firmly believed that God shows His will through what happens to people in their lives. Frankly, that's a difficult draught of medicine to swallow if you're the victim of a senseless tragedy.”

“Which he himself was.”

“And which he believed to be his just deserts.”

“‘I was self-centred,' he'd say,” the deacon intoned. “‘I cared only for my own need for glory. God's hand moved to change me. You can change as well.'”

“Unfortunately, true though his words may have been, they didn't constitute a recipe for success,” the bishop said.

“And when you heard that he was dead, did you think there was a connection?”

“I couldn't avoid considering it,” the bishop replied. “That's why Dominic went to the inquest.”

“The man had inner demons,” Dominic said. “He chose to wrestle them in a public forum. The only way he could make expiation for his own worldliness was to castigate everyone he met for theirs. Is that a motive for murder?” He snapped closed the bishop's appointment diary. It was clear that their interview was at an end. “I suppose it depends upon how one reacts when confronted with a man who seemed to feel that his was the only correct way to live.”

“I've never been good at this, Simon. You know that.” They'd finally stopped for a rest in Downham, on the other side of the Forest of Pendle. They parked by the post office and walked down the sloping lane. They circled round a storm-stricken oak that had been reduced to trunk and truncated branches and headed back towards the narrow stone bridge they'd just crossed in the car. Pendle Hill's grey-green slopes hulked in the distance with fingers of frost curling down from the summit, but they were not intent upon a hike towards this. Rather they had spied a small green on the near side of the bridge, where a stream cut a scythe's curve along the lane and flowed behind a neat line of cottages. Here a worn bench backed up to a drystone wall, and perhaps two dozen mallards quacked happily on the grass, explored the roadside, and paddled in the water.

“Don't worry about it. This isn't a contest. Remember what you can. The rest will come when it comes.”

“Why are you so obnoxiously undemanding?”

He smiled. “I've always thought it was part of my charm.”

The ducks came to greet them with the expectation of food on their minds. They quacked and set about examining footwear, investigating and rejecting Deborah's boots, moving on to St. James' shoelaces. These caused a flurry of interest, as did the metal crosspiece of his brace. However, when none of this produced the tiniest, edible morsel, the ducks fluffed and resettled their feathers reproachfully and from that moment displayed a disappointed aloofness to the human presence altogether.