A Taste for Death (13 page)

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snow storm; two models of racing cars; three large veined marbles; and another jam jar, this one holding a bunch of roses, whose heads were already bending on their high thorn-less stems. An old chest of drawers, the only other furniture, was piled with an incongruous collection of objects, shirts still in their transparent packets, women's underwear, silk scarves, tins of salmon, baked beans, soup, a packet of ham and one of tongue, three model kits for making boats, a couple of lip-sticks, a box of model soldiers, three packets of cheap scent.

Massingham had been a policeman too long to be easily moved. Some offences, cruelty to children or animals, vio-lent crime against the vulnerable old, could still produce a flare of the spectacular Massingham temper which had resulted in more than one of his forebears facing a duel or a court martial. But even this he had learned to discipline. But now, viewing with angry eyes this childish room with its pathetic neatness, its evidence of small self-sufficiency, the single jar of flowers which he guessed the boy himself had arranged, he was seized with an impotent anger against the drunken slut next door. He said:

'Did you steal these things, Darren?' Darren didn't reply, then he nodded. 'Matey, you're in trouble.'

The boy sat on the edge of the bed. Two tears rolled down his cheeks, followed by sniffs and heaves of the narrow chest. Suddenly he shouted:

'I ain't going to one of them council homes, I ain't! I ain't!' 'Stop crying,' said Massingham urgently, hating the tears, wanting to get away. Christ, why had AD let him in for this? What was he supposed to be, a childminder? Torn between pity, anger and his impatience to be back on his

proper job, he said more roughly:

'Stop crying!'

There must have been something urgent in his voice. Darren's gulps were immediately checked although the tears flowed on. Massingham said more gently:

'Who said anything about a home? Look, I'm going to ring the Juvenile Bureau. Someone will come to look after you. It will probably be a WPC, you'll like her.' Darren's

face expressed an immediate and lively scepticism which in other circumstances, Massingham would have found amus-ing. The boy looked up and asked:

'Why can't I go 'ome with Miss Wharton?'

Why not, indeed, thought Massingham. The poor little bugger seemed to be attached to her. Two waifs supporting each other. He said:

'I don't really think that's on. Wait here, I'll be back.' He looked at his watch. He would have to stay, of course, until the WPC arrived but she shouldn't be too long and at least AD would have an answer to his question. He knew now what had been worrying Darren, what he had been concealing. One small mystery, at least, was solved. AD could relax and get on with the inquiry. And so, with luck, could he.

11

Even Father Barnes's predecessor, Father Kendrick, hadn't been able to do much with St Matthew's Vicarage. It occupied the corner of St Matthew's Court, an undistinguished three-storey, red brick block of flats bordering the Harrow Road. After the war, the Church Commissioners had finally decided that the existing huge Victorian house was unmanageable and uneconomic, and had sold the site to a developer on the understanding that a maisonette on the ground and first floor should be made over, in perpetuity, to house the parish priest. It was the only maisonette in the block but was otherwise indistin-guishable from the flats, with their mean windows and small, badly proportioned rooms. At first the flats had been let to carefully chosen tenants and an attempt made to preserve the modest amenities; the square of lawn border-ng the road, the two rose beds, the hanging windowboxes on each of the balconies. But the block, like most of its kind, had had a chequered history. The first property com

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pany had gone into liquidation and it had been sold to a second and then a third. The rents were raised, to general dissatisfaction, but were still inadequate to cover the maintenance costs of a poorly constructed building and there were the usual acrimonious disputes between the tenants and the landlords. Only the church maisonette was well maintained, its two storeys of white windows an incongruous badge of respectability among the peel-ing paint and disintegrating windowboxes.

The original tenants had been replaced by the transients of the city, the peripatetic young, sharing three to a room, unmarried mothers on social security, foreign students; a racial mix which, like some human kaleidoscope, was con-tinually being shaken into new and brighter colours. Those few who did attend church found a congenial home with Father Donovan at St Anthony's with its steel bands, car-nival processions, and general interracial bonhomie. None of them ever knocked on Father Barnes's door. They saw, with watchful and expressionless eyes, his almost furtive comings and goings. But he was as much an anachronism at St Matthew's Court as was the church he represented.

He had been escorted back to the Vicarage by a plainclothes officer, not the one who had been working most closely with Commander Dalgliesh, but an older man, broad-shouldered, stolid, reassuringly calm, who had spoken to him in a soft country accent which he couldn't recognize but was most certainly not local. He said he was from the Harrow Road Station but had only recently been transferred there from West End Central. He waited while Father Barnes unlocked the front door, then followed him in and offered to make a cup of tea, the British specific against disaster, grief and shock. If he was surprised by the grubbiness of the ill-equipped Vicarage kitchen he concealed it. He had made tea in worse places. When Father Barnes reiterated that he was perfectly all right and that Mrs McBride who did for him was due at ten thirty, he didn't persist. Before he left he handed Father Barnes a card with a number on it.

'That's the number Commander Dalgliesh said you

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were to ring if you need anything. If you're worried like. Or if anything new occurs to you. Just give a ring. It'll be no trouble. And when the press come bothering, just tell them as little as you need. No speculating. No use in specu-lating, is there? Just tell it how it was. A lady from your congregation and a boy found the bodies and the boy fetched you. Better not give any names unless you have to. You saw that they were dead and rang for the police. No need to say more. That's all there is to it.'

The statement, stupendous in its over-simplification, opened a new abyss before Father Barnes's horrified eyes. He had forgotten about the press. How soon would they arrive? Would they want to take photographs? Ought he to call an emergency meeting of the PCC? What would the Bishop say? Ought he to ring the Archdeacon at once and leave it to him? Yes, that would be the best plan. The Archdeacon would know what ought to be done. The Archdeacon was capable of coping with the press, the Bishop, the police and the Parochial Church Council. Even so, he feared that St Matthew's was fated to be the centre of a dreadful attention.

He always went to Mass fasting and, for the first time that morning, he was aware of feeling weak, even para-doxically a little sick. He sank down on to one. of the two wooden chairs at the kitchen table and looked rather helplessly at the card with its seven clearly written digits, then glanced round as if seeking inspiration where to put it for safe keeping. Finally, he dug in his cassock pocket for his wallet and slipped it in with his bank card and single credit card. He let his eyes roam round the kitchen, seeing it as that pleasant policeman must have seen it, in all its sad decrepitude. The plate from which he had eaten his hamburgers and frozen green beans, which had been last night's supper, still unrinsed in the sink; the splatter of grease marks above the ancient gas stove; the viscous mess of grime gumming the narrow gap between stove and cupboard; the soiled and smelly teacloth hang-ing from its hook at the side of the sink; last year's calendar askew on its nail; the two open shelves jammed

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with a conglomeration of half-used cereal packets, jars of stale jam, cracked mugs, packets of detergent; the cheap, unstable table with its two chairs, their backs grubby from numerous clutching hands; the linoleum curving at the wall where it had become unstuck; the general air of discomfort, uncaring, negligence, dirt. And the rest of the flat wasn't much better. Mrs McBride took no pride in it because there was nothing to take a pride in. She didn't care because he didn't. Like him, she had prob-ably ceased to notice the slow accretion of dirt over their lives.

After thirty years of marriage to Tom McBride, Beryl McBride sounded more Irish than did her husband. Some-times, indeed, Father Barnes suspected that the brogue was less acquired than assumed, a music hall stereotype of Irishness adopted either out of marital togetherness or from some less recognizable need. He had noticed that in rare moments of stress she was apt to revert to her original Cockney. She was employed by the parish for twelve hours a week and her nominal duties were to come in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, clean the flat, wash and spin dry any linen or articles in the soiled linen basket, and prepare and leave for him a simple lunch on a tray. On the other weekdays and at weekends, Father Barnes was expected to look after himself. There had never been a job description. Mrs McBride and the current incumbent were expected to work out a mutually agreed arrangement of hours and duties.

Twelve hours a week had been an adequate, even generous.allocation of time when young Father Kendrick had been priest-in-charge. He was married to the proto-type of an ideal parson's wife, a capable and buxom physiotherapist, well able to run her part-time hospital job and the parish simultaneously and to pound Mrs McBride into shape as vigorously as, no doubt, she did her patients. No one, of course, had expected Father Kendrick to stay. He had only been a stop-gap, to fill in after Father Collins's long, thirty-five-year ministry and the appoint-ment of a permanent successor, if there were to be a

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successor. St Matthew's, as the Archdeacon was never tired of pointing out, was surplus to the Church's pastoral ministry in inner London. With two other Anglican churches within a three-mile-radius, both with vigorous young clergy and enough parochial organizations to pro-vide serious competition for the social services department, St Matthew's, with its small and ageing population, was an uncomfortable reminder of the declining authority of the established church in the inner cities. But as the Archdeacon said, 'Your people are remarkably loyal. It's a pity they aren't also rich. The parish is a drain on re-sources, no doubt about it. But we can hardly sell it. The building is supposed to be of some importance, archi-tecturally. I can never see it myself. That extraordinary campanile. Hardly English, is it? One isn't, after all, on the Venetian Lido, whatever the architect thought.' For the Archdeacon, who had, in fact, never seen the Venetian Lido, had been reared in the Close at Salisbury and, making some allowance for scale, had known from childhood exactly what a church should look like.

Before Father Kendrick had set off for his new city parish - racial mix, boys' club, mothers' union, young people's fellowship; the proper challenge for a mildly high-church, ambitious young priest with one eye on a mitre -he had had a brief word about Beryl McBride.

'Frankly, she terrifies me. I keep well out of her way. But Susan seems able to manage her. Better have a word with her about the domestic arrangements. I wish Mrs McBride had taken her husband's religion instead of his accent. That way St Anthony's would have had the benefit of her cooking. I did hint to Father Donovan that here was a brand ready for plucking, but Michael knows when to leave well alone. Now, if you can seduce his housekeeper Mrs Kelly into Anglicanism, you'll be in clover.'

Susan Kendrick, expertly wrapping china in newspaper and ankle-deep in shavings from her packing cases, had been briskly informative but hardly more reassuring.

'She needs watching. Her plain cooking is quite good although the repertoire is a bit limited. But she isn't so

dependable when it comes to housework. You need to begin as you mean to go on. If you set the right standards and she knows that she can't fool you, you'll be all right. She's been here a long time, of course, from Father Col-lins's days. She wouldn't be easy to dislodge. And she's a very loyal member of the congregation. St Matthew's seems to suit her for some reason. As I said, just begin as you mean to go on. Oh, and watch the sherry. There's no real dishonesty. You can leave anything out, money, your watch, food. It's just that she likes the odd nip. Better offer her one occasionally. That way there's less temptation. You can hardly lock the stuff up.'

'No, of course not,' he had said. 'No, I quite see that.' But it had been Mrs McBride who had started as she meant to go on. It had been hopeless from the start. He still recalled, with a flush of shame, that first, all-important interview. He had sat in front of her, in the square little room which was used as a study, as if he were the sup-pliant, and had seen her sharp little eyes, black as currants, move round the room, noting the gaps in the shelves where Father Kendrick's leatherbound volumes had been stacked, the meagre rug in front of the gas fire, his few prints stacked against the wall. And that wasn't all she had taken in. She had had him summed up, all right. She had seen his timidity, his ignorance of housekeeping, his lack of authority as a man or a priest. And he suspected that she had known more intimate secrets. His virginity, his half-shameful fear of her close, warm-smelling, over-whelming femaleness, his social insecurity, born in that small, terraced house near the river at Ely, where he had lived with his widowed mother, nurtured by the desperate contriv-ings, the small deceptions of respectable poverty, the depriva-tion that was so much more humiliating than the real poverty of the inner cities. He could imagine the words in which she would later report to her husband.

'He's not really a gentleman, not like Father Kendrick. You can see that. Father Kendrick's father was a bishop, after all, and Mrs Kendrick is the niece of Lady Nichols, when ali's said and done. There's no knowing where this