Trouble in the Town Hall (12 page)

“Call on whom, Mrs. Martin?” he asked again, raising his voice. All those pillars and the stone surfaces of walls and arched roof create echoes that make normal speech impossible.

“Clarice Pettifer.” I repeated my story. “I'm very concerned about her, but I hesitate to go over there again. If I happened to run into Mr. Pettifer, it'd probably make things worse—we hiss and spit at each other. Figuratively speaking,” I added hastily, and the dean found it necessary to cough into his handkerchief.

“Anyway, Mrs. Finch—do you know Mrs. Finch?”

“Since we were children,” said Margaret, who was Sherebury born and bred. “She's chapel, all her family always were, but her mother was one of the cathedral cleaners and used to bring little Ada along. I was a bit older, and we used to play together. Now she's taken over the family stand, comes in one day a week to do the brass. She does a lovely job, but I do try not to get talking with her, at least if I'm in a hurry—”

“Because you'd be listening till Christmas,” I said, laughing with her. “I know. Anyway, she's been looking after Clarice from time to time, but I think Clarice needs to talk to someone who'll let her get a word in edgewise. Something's bothering her, and I can't figure out what.”

“I'm glad you told me,” said the dean. “I can't do it myself, I've no time. Sometimes I wish I'd never taken on an administrative post; it leaves me so little energy for any real pastoral work. But I'll speak to Canon Richards; he knows her quite well, I believe. The Pettifers are not at all regular churchgoers, of course, but she's a very loyal volunteer.”

“I know. I think Mr. Pettifer comes mostly to be seen and do a little politicking, and brings her along for window dressing. It didn't work very well this morning, I shouldn't think. They were barely speaking to each other, from the way it looked.”

Someone was trying to get the dean's attention, waving and inching toward us, smiling as he excused his way through the crowd.

“Mr. Dean—” I gestured and he turned, trying without success to push his chair back.

“Ah, Lord Mayor! I'm sorry, I don't seem able to stand up at the moment. However—do you know Mrs. Martin?”

“Daniel Clarke,” he said in reply, shaking my hand. “Delighted to meet you, Mrs. Martin.”

I'd never seen the Lord Mayor up close before. Without the trappings of his office, it was somehow even more obvious that he was a man to be reckoned with. I noticed the very keen eye, the alert tilt to the head—oh, yes, this man had earned his office.

“I'm so sorry, Kenneth, I know this isn't the time or place, but with the festival less than a week off there are a few details I do need to check, and I'll be away for a few days, so if you don't mind—”

“Yes, of course,” said the dean. “We'll have to go elsewhere, if we're to hear ourselves think. If you'll excuse us, ladies—oh, I'm so sorry, Mr. Wellington, I didn't mean to back right into you—”

The dean finally pushed himself out of the tight corner and led the Lord Mayor away, while Margaret and I finished our coffee.

“They're two of a kind, those two,” she said with a fondly exasperated sigh. “Kenneth should leave the details of the music festival to the canons responsible, but he can never feel that anything is really properly done unless he's seen to it himself. And Daniel Clarke is exactly like him. Small wonder neither of them ever finds time for a holiday.”

“He's a conscientious mayor, then?”

“Oh, yes, I should think so. Of course Kenneth and I try to stay away from town politics, but one can't help hearing things.”

Indeed. I suppressed a grin.

“And people do say he's hardworking, and incorruptible. Which of course makes him unpopular in some quarters.”

“I didn't think there was such a thing anymore as an incorruptible politician.”

“We-ell, Daniel isn't exactly a politician. At least, he is in a sense, of course. He's been on the City Council for a donkey's age, and they finally elected him head—which gives him the title Lord Mayor, you know. But his primary interest, I think, really is the welfare of the town, rather than his own ambitions. His people have lived here for generations, time out of mind—he's actually connected with the Lynleys, through his great-great-grandmother, or something like that. You know the Lynleys?”

“Not personally,” I said with an attempt at a straight face. “They've all been dead for a hundred years or so, haven't they? But of course I know who they were, more or less. Richest people in town, endowed everything in sight, and so on.”

“There's more to it than that, actually.” As people were beginning to go home, the noise level was dropping so that Margaret and I could talk in some comfort. “In a sense, the Lynleys and their extended family built Sherebury. They put up a lot of the money for the abbey—the first abbey, the one that burned down in the fifteenth century, you know, and then again the present one.”

I nodded. The cathedral in use today had been begun in 1415 to replace the eleventh-century Cistercian abbey, destroyed by fire in 1402. With blinding speed, in abbey-building terms, the church was completed in 1504. One short transept leading from the choir to the cloisters had survived the fire, and the monks had been just about ready to tear it down and rebuild it to match the rest, when the dissolution of the abbeys intervened. For over a hundred years the abbey buildings had languished, houses had been built on the grounds (mine among them), and decay had set in, until the political climate changed and the old abbey was repaired and designated a cathedral.

Margaret was still talking about the Lynleys. “Several of them were abbots over the centuries, and later, deans, when it was made a cathedral. One was even a bishop, not a very effective one, early in Victoria's reign, I think that was. And, of course, the family laid out the street plan as the city began to outgrow its walls. I could go on, but the point is the Lynleys have been a power in Sherebury for—oh, nearly a thousand years, I suppose. Daniel actually lives in Lynley Hall, though he had to buy it; it had been out of the family for a generation or two. So one can see why he has a protective interest in the town.”

“Indeed,” I said thoughtfully. One could also see why he might be distressed about Pettifer's plans for the Town Hall. A man who liked to take matters into his own hands—I wished I'd noticed his hands while he stood next to me. I was going to have to find an excuse, somehow, to get better acquainted with the Lord Mayor.

A
LAN
'
S DRIVER DELIVERED
him right on time Monday evening.

“Good, you're being driven, that means you can have a drink or two. When's he coming back to take you home?”

“I'm not going home,” he said with a grimace that turned to a laugh when he saw my face. “No, I don't mean what you think I mean. I have to go back to the office to clear a huge stack of paperwork. So I can't drink much, or I'll fall asleep at my desk.”

“Well, we'll start with something good, then,” I murmured, very busy pouring Jack Daniel's into brandy snifters. I was glad I could excuse myself to the kitchen for a little last-minute soufflé preparation; it gave me time to recover from the ridiculous blush.

Alan and I had agreed, without ever saying a word, that we were not of the generation that fall into bed before knowing each other's full name. The circles we move in actually tend to the old-fashioned practice of waiting until marriage vows have been exchanged. Still, there was enough serious attraction between us that we'd given the matter some thought. At least I had, which was the reason for the blush. But, unsure as I was about the nature of our relationship, I wasn't anything like ready for it to take that kind of turn, so I was profoundly glad, when I got back to the parlor, that Alan had forgotten the subject.

“Do you want to tell me about your house first, or shall I make my report?” he asked, settling himself in my squashiest chair with Emmy on his lap.

“Report?”

“On the Town Hall body.”

“Oh, yes, please!”

He smiled. “You sound exactly like a well-brought-up child about to be given a present.”

“It's the way I feel. You're not always so forthcoming about crime, when I'm involved. I'm thrilled!”

“I'm not sure I've anything very thrilling to tell you, but for a start, we've identified the body. HOLMES tracked him down for us.”

I giggled, as I always do when the acronym for the police computer system is mentioned. Who would ever suspect the British police of a sense of humor? Emmy looked up, offended until she decided I wasn't laughing at her.

“And what did Sherlock discover?”

“Not a lot more than a name, actually. The man's fingerprints were easy to identify, because he had a minor criminal record—joyriding, assault, petty larceny, that sort of thing. His name is Jack Jenkins, he was twenty-three years old, and he lived in Sheffield.”

“Sheffield! That's a long way away. What was he doing in a little backwater like Sherebury?”

“That, of course, is one of the things Morrison is eager to discover.” He scratched under the cat's chin and her purr filled the room with organ music. “There's the obvious connection, of course.”

I shook my head. “I may be dense, but . . .”

“Pettifer. He's from Sheffield, you know.”

“No, I didn't. I didn't even know he wasn't a Sherebury native. But Alan, that sounds serious!”

“Not really. It may mean nothing at all. Sheffield is a very large city indeed. Just because two people were born there doesn't mean they know one another. The crew are working on Jenkins's connections in Sheffield, but his associates don't like talking to the police, and apparently he had very little family. Just his mother, so far as anyone has said, and she seems to be out of town. Something may turn up there, in time. The curious thing, though, is that Pettifer isn't the only one in the case with a Sheffield background.”

“You're going to make me ask, aren't you?”

He lifted his glass and drained it. “I'm not being coy, really. It's only that it seems like
lèse-majesté
even to mention the name of Barbara Dean in connection with a suspected murder.”

I choked on my bourbon. When I had finished snorting and could speak again, I shook my head and croaked, “Oh, Alan! Surely not. I admit I'd thought of her, but only because she was at that meeting and is opposed to Pettifer. Really, I'd almost as soon believe the Queen had something to do with all this. You don't actually think—”

“I don't think anything at this stage, and neither does Morrison. He's gathering information, that's all. Do you want to hear the results of the autopsy?”

I thought of my lovely dinner, nearly ready in the kitchen. “How gory is it?”

“Not bad at all.”

“Come in the kitchen and tell me, then, while I put together a salad. I'm sorry I can't offer you another drink,” I added, pointing at his glass. “We've drunk it all—I keep forgetting to stock up.”

“Just as well. Now, I've already told you,” he said, gathering up Sam, who was trying to trip him, “about the head injury. That was the cause of death, as Morrison thought. The medical examiner found another one, just a bad bump, really, that he thinks happened some little time before death, so there may have been a quarrel that went on for a bit. Quite a wide range for time of death, because so many variables are unknown—they say from nine P.M. to two A.M. And then there's the bruise on the chin. Some scratches there, so the ME has guessed the murderer may have worn knuckle-dusters. It would explain why the blow was so effective; it actually broke the jaw, though it was the crashing of the head into whatever it hit that did the job. I gather you don't want all the medical details.”

“Not really,” I agreed. “I notice you've stopped qualifying yourself every time you say ‘murder,' though.”

“The injuries couldn't have been self-inflicted, and no one delivers a punch like that to the jaw by accident. The inquest hasn't been held yet, and all sorts of routine inquiries are still grinding along—tracing Jenkins's movements, and everyone else's, that sort of thing—but murder does seem the only reasonable possibility at this point.”

“Then all we have to do is figure out what a petty crook from Sheffield was doing in the Town Hall, and why someone wanted to murder him,” I said, taking the smoked salmon from the fridge. “Here, guard it with your life. That and a spinach soufflé are most of dinner—catch her!”

Sam managed to make off with only a little of the salmon, and my house is solid enough that the chase didn't damage the soufflé much. We put the cats out and sat down to our meal in peace.

“You haven't told me anything about your house yet,” said Alan. “I didn't notice any signs of roofing.”

“There aren't any. And my enthusiasm has dimmed considerably. The man I asked to do something about my roof isn't keeping his promises.”

Alan raised his eyebrows. “Who is he?”

“His name is Herbert Benson.”

The eyebrows rose still further. “Pettifer's friend?”

I smacked my hand on the table. “That's it! I knew I'd heard the name somewhere. He's the one Pettifer was drinking with, the night of the murder—the alibi. Good grief, and I thought I could trust him!”

Alan chuckled. “Having a pint or two with Pettifer surely isn't enough to make a man untrustworthy.”

“Maybe not, but add his failure to show up when he said he would—twice, now—”

“Did he give you a reason?”

“The first time he said he was shorthanded—some of his men didn't show up for work,” I admitted grudgingly. “Today I couldn't reach him.”

“Unreliable workmen can happen to anyone. Give the man a chance. But if he doesn't work out, what about Pettifer himself?”