Sweet Sorrow (27 page)

The first part of the climb was made easy by bands of stone that acted like a ladder. After that, Paul had taken a grip of the lightning conductor – little more than a copper wire attached to the wall by clamps. He had managed to loosen one of them, get his fingers around the wire, and was now pulling himself up, using the conductor as a rope. It was a painful and exhausting business. The width of the ‘chimney’ down which the wire ran was scarcely more than that of a man’s thigh. As they watched, Paul levered himself up on to a broad sloping ledge and stopped to draw breath.

Edward sighed with relief, judging that it was now safe to urge him to come down. Just as he was about to do so, Paul began to climb again, his feet pressed against a stone flange about four inches wide, his back taut against the side wall at right angles to the main wall of the Chapel. Edward saw that he had taken off his shoes so he could grip with his bare feet. He climbed rapidly and was soon eighty feet above them. Then he was on the roof and Edward breathed a second, more profound sigh of relief. Provided Paul did not attempt one of the Chapel’s four turrets, he was safe. He knew he needed to keep Paul talking until the authorities could be summoned and the Chapel opened. There was, he remembered, a stone staircase inside which led on to the roof.

‘Catherine, call to him and ask if he’s all right,’ Edward said, as calmly as he could.

‘Please, Uncle, come down! You are frightening us,’ she cried, cupping her hands to her mouth to make her voice carry. If Paul heard, he gave no sign of it.

They watched in amazement as he began to take off his clothes. He was soon naked and they could hear that he was singing. He spread his arms wide, either in imitation of Christ on the Cross or perhaps to show himself to his God without a fig leaf behind which to hide himself. It was a ludicrous sight, almost funny if it had not been tragic. Paul – so tightly wound up – had finally snapped like an over-stretched rubber band.

‘The Nunc Dimittis,’ Edward muttered. ‘Now let us depart in peace . . .’ Was he now preparing to depart from the world he despised?

‘Paul, it’s me, Edward . . .’ he called, cupping his hands to make a trumpet. ‘You wanted to talk to me, remember?’

He shouted so loudly that he was sure Paul had heard him. He looked down and almost fell. He righted himself but Edward had no idea if he knew who was calling to him. In his madness he might think it was God or, more likely, the devil.

He made a decision. ‘Paul, wait!’ he shouted. ‘I’m coming up. You said you wanted to tell me something.’

Paul seemed to recognize him for the first time and beckoned with his finger as though tempting him to join him on the roof.

‘No!’ Verity said. ‘I won’t let you, Edward. It’s too dangerous. It’s not worth the risk. They’ll come and rescue him.’

‘It’s not dangerous – not that first bit. I want to talk to him face to face. Catherine, you run and get help – call the Proctors – while I keep him occupied. Take this, will you?’

He took off his jacket and gave it to Verity to hold. She bit her lip, knowing that once Edward had made up his mind there was no point in trying to get him to change it. Quickly, he pulled off his shoes and socks and swung himself up the first few feet. He then began to climb, using the slender wire as a rope. It was harder than he had thought and he found it difficult to get a grip. Being much taller than Paul, he was unable to use his feet against the stone wall where the chimney was narrowed. He had to drag himself up using just his arms and, though he was strong, he was not as fit as he had once been. He wondered how long his muscles would do his bidding before they weakened or cramp set in.

The stone was soft and, as he fought to gain a foothold, a sizeable piece came away, narrowly missing Verity. The sweat poured off him and, when a cloud briefly obscured the moon, he missed his footing and was a second away from falling. He struggled on, feeling his strength ebbing, but at last he reached the low stone balustrade which encircled the roof and scrambled over it. He lay on the lead platform panting, unable to move. He was as exhausted as he had ever been climbing in the Drakensberg as a young man. His legs and arms trembled uncontrollably but he had made it. A sense of triumph turned him light-headed. He was not too old yet, he thought grimly.

He had met the physical challenge but now a new, psychological, challenge faced him. He had to prevent this crazed man from killing himself. Paul stood, stark naked, on the very edge of the roof swaying backwards and forwards as he communed with his God.

‘Paul!’ he called urgently when his chest had finally stopped heaving and his heart racing. It was more of a grunt than a voice he recognized and Paul ignored it. Edward struggled to his feet and called again. ‘Paul! Tell me what has made you do this.’

It sounded feeble but how to ask a man on the point of jumping from the roof of King’s College Chapel whether he was a murderer? ‘Paul, is it because of Byron Gates . . .? Is it because of Catherine . . .?’

As he had hoped, the directness of his questions caught Paul’s attention.

‘There’s an axe in the belfry covered in blood,’ he almost chanted.

‘And did you put it there, Paul?’

‘I don’t think so.’ He sounded uncertain but then he added in a stronger voice, ‘Guilty as charged.’

Edward felt nauseous. ‘Why did you do it?’

Paul wiped a hand over his eyes as though he was puzzling something out. He swayed and Edward put out a hand to steady him, but Paul pushed him away.

‘God told me to . . . to write and warn people . . .’

‘So you wrote those letters to Byron, to Miss Bron and Miss Fairweather, and to me . . .?’

‘I had to . . . immoral lives . . .’ Paul was mumbling now. Then he said quite firmly in a normal voice, ‘But I didn’t kill . . . I’m sure I did not kill. Christ forbade vengeance.’

‘Then you aren’t a murderer!’ Edward felt relief overcome his weariness.

‘I did kill . . . I wrote a letter to Mark Redel and he killed himself.’

‘He
tried
to kill himself but he survived. He will soon be out of hospital.’

‘He’s alive?’ Paul sounded disbelieving.

‘You’ve forgotten. You’ve been ill. Yes, Mark survived. You haven’t killed anybody.’

‘I’ve been ill . . .?’ Paul repeated doubtfully.

‘Yes, you’ve been ill but now you will get better,’ Edward said with gentle urgency. ‘Please understand, you are not a murderer.’

‘No, I remember now. He confessed to me kneeling at the altar so I could not tell anyone. The burden was intolerable.’

‘Who confessed? Mark? Did Mark confess? You can tell me now and lay down your burden.’

‘“Seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us . . . Almighty God who desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness and live . . .” I told him . . . I told the Colonel . . .’

Paul was looking inwards and in another moment might have collapsed on to the roof. But that was not to be. There was a sudden noise far below them. A police car’s strident bell broke the silence . . . a blue light flashed.

Paul turned his head and took a step back. Puzzled by the lights and the noise, he seemed overcome with giddiness. Turning to Edward, he stretched out a hand, whether in appeal or apology Edward would never know, and toppled back over the parapet, thudding against the stone as he fell.

Edward rubbed his forehead as he always did under stress and then knelt, his head pressed against the cold stone, but in that holy place no prayer came to solace him. Rather a few words of Horace, ‘
Premet nox alta
’, ‘Deep night will cover it.’ Paul Fisher was dead. Edward had failed.

17

Edward drove Verity back to Rodmell in the Lagonda on the Monday. Tommie had returned to London by train the night before. He had been waiting anxiously for Paul and Catherine on the Friday evening at her aunt’s house and had been horrified when he heard what had happened. He blamed himself for not having been able to help his friend but Edward told him that Paul’s brainstorm had been so sudden that it could not have been foreseen.

Privately, Tommie believed that Paul might have benefited from psychoanalysis but this was probably wishful thinking. He would never have let his deeply held faith be explained away. He believed he knew what God was asking him to do and, surely could never have been persuaded that this was a delusion. He had confessed to Edward, on the roof of King’s College Chapel, that he had sent poison pen letters to people of whose morals he disapproved and that he was tormented by the notion that Mark Redel might have tried to kill himself after receiving one, but that was all. He could admit to no other sin. He was doing God’s work and that was all there was to say about it.

Tommie tortured himself with the thought that persuading his friend to come to dinner with Edward, Verity and the Woolves had tipped him over the edge but, as Edward said, had it not been that it would have been something else. In his view, if there was anyone to blame for Paul’s descent into the hell of madness, it was the murderer who had confessed to him at the altar and left a bloodied axe in the church. This man had murdered Paul just as surely as he had murdered Byron Gates and Frieda Burrowes.

Greyshott had been shocked when Edward returned with Verity in a police car at three o’clock in the morning, utterly exhausted, his clothes torn to shreds. He had sat in his pyjamas, his head in his hands, as they told him what had happened. Afterwards, GG had looked at Edward as though he was responsible for the tragedy and Verity had had to work hard to persuade him otherwise.

After a few hours tossing and turning in GG’s rather uncomfortable guest bedroom, Edward had bathed, eaten a hurried breakfast and driven round to the police station. He had a lot of explaining to do but was finally able to convince the Cambridge police that Paul’s fall from the roof of the Chapel was an accident, not suicide, and that he had done everything he could to prevent it. Paul’s broken body was to be returned to Rodmell for burial as soon as the police had completed their inquiries.

There would, of course, have to be an inquest but, with the police offering no evidence to the contrary, the verdict would be accidental death. No one wished to muddy the waters and encourage the press to speculate on how a respected Church of England vicar came to die in so dramatic a manner. Edward had hinted to Ken Hines that Paul had drunk rather too much and then tried to emulate a youthful exploit which had gone tragically wrong. Ken had his own suspicions – the connection with Rodmell was too much of a coincidence – but, at Edward’s urging, he kept them to himself. None of the papers, to Edward’s relief, mentioned that he had been present when the accident occurred.

On the Saturday morning, while Edward was being interviewed by the police, Pernel Strachey had gone to see Catherine. Verity had telephoned Newnham first thing that morning to let her know what had happened. She had grasped immediately how important it was that Catherine should be comforted and supported and had offered to go round straight away.

She found Verity and Catherine going over the events of the previous night, trying to decide if there was anything more they could have done to save Paul. Catherine’s aunt, a cold woman who seemed unmoved by her brother’s death and her niece’s distress, had made it more than obvious that the invasion, however kindly meant, was unwelcome. She pursed her lips and informed Verity and Pernel that she had known for some time that her brother was mentally ill but had not been able to make him see a doctor. It was clear she thought her niece was making a fuss about not very much.

‘I can’t think why she is taking on so. She hardly knew Paul and he had done all he could to stop her going to Cambridge, so why should she mourn him?’

She had no patience with sentiment, she told them, and repeated that her niece ought to pull herself together and get on with her life. To their relief, she disappeared into the kitchen, without even offering them a cup of tea. Disgusted, Pernel and Verity decided to ignore her and concentrate on giving Catherine the support she so desperately needed and would not get from her aunt.

They set out to convince her that she could not have prevented Paul’s death. She had gone to Edward for help as soon as she understood that his mind was disturbed. There was nothing else she could have done. Pernel, who often had to deal with undergraduates suffering breakdowns of one kind or another – usually the result of pressure from their families to achieve more than was possible academically – knew only too well the damage that could be done to a young mind if that guilt was not expunged, and she encouraged her to tell them everything.

‘When Uncle Paul arrived here without any warning, I thought he had come to tell me that I must leave Newnham – which he did. However, there was something much more important he wanted to tell me – who my father was. He said he was a man called Byron Gates. I knew the name because I’m keen on poetry and had read in a newspaper that he had been murdered in a rather macabre way, but you can imagine how amazed I was to be told that this man was my father.

‘According to my uncle, he had been teaching at a preparatory school where my mother was the under-matron. She was seventeen and very pretty and Byron – I can’t seem to think of him as Mr Gates – was unable to keep his eyes off her. When she eventually had to confess everything to my uncle, she told him that she had resisted him at first but Byron could be very charming, very persuasive. He was much older than her and a published poet. She fancied herself in love with him and it was inevitable that she would let him seduce her – at least, I think so. My uncle was much more severe in his judgement.

‘Anyway, as I understand it, all might have been well except that my mother became pregnant with me. When she told Byron, he said it was nothing to do with him but offered her fifty pounds to have the baby aborted. My mother was horrified and saw for the first time the true nature of the man whom she thought she loved and who, she had believed, loved her.’ Catherine sighed. ‘I’m afraid my father – I must call him that and not evade the issue – was that all too common figure, a practised seducer, selfish, cold and without any compassion. Nothing bored him more than a needy woman, I am sure. I think I have enough of him in me to understand how he thought.’