Absolute Truths (8 page)

There were two police cars parked outside the church and a young
constable was on guard in the porch, but the adjacent vicarage
was not yet besieged by either the police or the hound from the
Starbridge Evening News.
Parking my car in the forecourt of the
bleak Victorian house I rang the front doorbell and waited, eyeing
with dismay the state of the woodwork, which needed a coat of
paint, and the windows, which were caked in grime. Eventually I
was admitted by the daily housekeeper, a dour woman who con
ceded with unprecedented animation that the news had given
her ‘ever such a turn’. Also present in the hall was the elderly
parishioner who had found Desmond lying in a pool of blood when
she had entered the church to perform her weekly chore of dusting
the pews. Various other members of the small, ageing congregation were twittering in the front reception room
as
I looked in.

I was unsure how quickly the police would be able to pick up
a search-warrant, but knowing Malcolm would delay them as long
as possible I thought I had at least an hour in which to prove or
disprove the worst. Willing myself to betray no trace of impatience,
I singled out the one male in the group and asked him to escort
home the woman who had found the body; luckily the woman
lived across the street so I was not obliged to waste time giving
them a lift in my car. Then I dismissed the remainder of the gather
ing by assuring them that there was no need for anyone to linger
at the vicarage for news; the churchwardens would be issued with
regular bulletins which would be posted in the church porch. As
the front door closed after the last parishioner I got rid of the
housekeeper by requesting some tea and finally invaded Desmond’s
study, a large dim dusty hole where the temperature hovered uncer
tainly above freezing.

I need hardly say that by this time I was exceedingly worried.
Of course there might still be an innocent explanation for the
attack: a parishioner might have had a brainstorm or a passing
tramp might have succumbed to psychosis, but Desmond’s past
did mean the attack was capable of a seamy explanation. After the
attack upon him in the public lavatory in London he had been
arrested for soliciting. The charge had later been dropped but the
Bishop of London’s archdeacon, taking charge at the vicarage
as
Desmond languished overnight in hospital, had to his horror discovered a cache of pornographic magazines in the study. Homo
sexual behaviour combined with a taste for pornography could
well have led to imprisonment. Desmond had been lucky to escape
and had no doubt been spurred on by gratitude when he had made
the best of his rehabilitation, but if he were now in the midst of
a second breakdown, the possibility that his old weaknesses had resurfaced was strong.

I knew I had to search his study. I had no wish to impede the
police in the execution of their duty but what drove me on was
the dread that the police might uncover material which was irrel
evant to their enquiry but of immense interest to the press. I
thought it unlikely that Desmond would have managed to acquire
the kind of hard-core pornography which would render him liable
to prosecution on a pornography charge alone, but even a soft-core
collection could prove disastrous if Sergeant Locke chose to make
a caustic comment to the hound
from
the
Starbridge Evening News.
The hound’s scoop would tip off Fleet Street and then all hell
would break loose.

I glanced around the study. At once I noticed that the desk was in chaos, a sinister sign indicating a disorganised mind unable to
cope with the daily routine, but the upper layers of paper contained
nothing more sensational than unpaid bills and copies of the
Church Gazette.
I looked at the desk-diary. The page for the day
contained – to my relief – only two morning appointments, but
it did occur to me that an afternoon appointment might still have
existed even though Desmond had chosen not to write it down.
Opening the drawers of the desk I found that although they were
crammed with an extraordinary variety of rubbish ranging from candle-stubs to undarned socks, no pornography lay waiting to
be revealed. The cupboards below the bookshelves were similarly
innocent, and the books themselves were unimpeachable, dis
playing a respectable, orthodox, old-fashioned taste in both Eng
lish literature and theology. The fact that the volumes were so
neatly arranged on their shelves, however, suggested that they had
not been read for some time.

I concluded that although I had discovered evidence of a priest
fraying at the seams, there was nothing to suggest that he had
actually fallen apart. Sitting down in the chair behind the desk I
reached for the telephone and dialled the South Canonry.

‘
It would take a week to go through the study properly,’ I said
to Lyle after I had given her a rapid résumé of events, ‘but at least
there’s nothing frightful lying around.’

‘
Well, of course there isn’t, not after that archdeacon in London
went looking for an address-book and instantly uncovered horrors!
Wake up, darling! This time there’ll be a hidey-hole designed to
outwit any archdeacon – try the bedroom.’

‘
I couldn’t.’

’Why not?’

‘Only private detectives invade bedrooms.’

‘
And the police! Darling, do you really want Desmond to hit
the headlines in the
News of the World?’

There was a pause while I wrestled with my middle-class
upbringing, my public-school mores and my Christian duty
as a
bishop to look after a wayward member of my flock. ‘If you only
knew,’ I muttered at last, ‘how much I wish I was back in Cambridge –’

‘
Charles, this is not the time to wallow in a pointless nostalgia.
Think of the Church – think of the diocese –’

‘
If only I’d never taken him on! Of course I knew it was a
risk but the Abbot-General absolutely swore Desmond was fully
recovered as the result of that long retreat with the Fordite
monks –’

‘
Darling, stop fluttering around in a purple panic and
search that
bedroom.
Or do I have to come over and do it myself?’

‘
I must say I think this is a singularly distasteful conversation
for a bishop to have with his wife!’

‘Don’t waste any more time thinking, Charles – ACT!’

‘
Very well.’ I replaced the receiver, marched out of the room
and almost collided with the housekeeper who had been approach
ing with my tea. Thanking her profusely I returned to the study,
but as soon as the tray had been deposited on the desk and the
housekeeper had once more retreated to the kitchen, I made
another swift exit into the hall.

As I padded silently upstairs I was aware of the size of the
house, built for a large Victorian family with several servants, and
it occurred to me that this size was enhanced by the interior dilapi
dation which underlined the high ceilings, the wide staircase and
the long corridors. I suspected the housekeeper neither dusted nor swept, probably because Desmond had never noticed whether she
did so or not. Upstairs the cold intensified. Stooping over the floor
in one corner of the landing I flicked open my lighter and saw the mice-droppings beside the hole I had noticed in the wainscoting.
The notorious lines of a well-known hymn flared in my mind:
‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate; God made
them high and lowly, and ordered their estate.’ I thought of my
comfortable home and felt not only guilty but angry and ashamed.

I told myself that something should be done for the parish, but
I knew the problems it presented were intractable. The diocesan
board of finance had already classed the church as a white elephant which required too much money too often. The congregation had
dwindled to a remnant. It was hardly surprising that the vicarage
was now a mere sordid niche for a man whom no other bishop
would employ, but how I hated that long decline from Victorian
power to mid-twentieth-century enfeeblement! It made me despair
of the future of the Church.

But then I remembered St Athanasius, battling on
contra
mun
dum,
never giving up, never sinking back into despair, and it
occurred to me that I should stop bewailing the present in disgust
and pray for the future with hope. So I said in my head to God:
‘Breathe new life into this parish — resurrect it from the dead!’ — an outrageous demand indeed and I hardly hoped for it to be met,
but no attempt to align oneself with God can ever be futile, and
perhaps the result of my prayer would be that in future I would take
more interest in this dying parish, a move which would produce
beneficial results for the congregation.

To finish off my prayer I added my current mantra: ‘All things
work together for good to them that love God,’ and feeling frac
tionally calmer — or was I in fact more depressed than ever? — I resumed my journey to Desmond’s bedroom.

In contrast to the chaos in the study, this room was uncluttered.
It was as if Desmond had created a small, austere space where he
could escape from a world which demanded too much of him.
The narrow bed had no counterpane and no eiderdown and the
top blanket looked as if it had come from an army surplus store.
A dressing-gown, frayed at the cuffs, hung from a hook on the
back of the door, but all his other clothes’ had been consigned to
the wardrobe. Beside the bed I saw the Missal of the Fordite
monks — Jon’s old Order — stacked with the Bible and the Book
of Common Prayer. An alarm clock nearby was so wearhered by
the vicarage climate that the metal had rusted at the base.

I noted the prie-dieu by the window, the crucifix above the bed,
and suddenly
as
the aura of a devout life permeated my conscious
ness I felt as if Christ himself were watching me from some corner
of the room which lay just beyond my field of vision.

Immediately I asked myself what Jesus would have thought of
this shoddy episcopal invasion of a devout man’s monk-like cell,
but my task at that moment, as Lyle had so forcefully reminded
me, was not to think but to act. I picked up the Missal and shook
it but no pornographic photograph or incriminating letter fell from
the pages. Desmond had wanted to be an Anglican monk long
ago, but when the Fordites had turned him down he had decided
he was called to parish work after all. But had that decision of the
Abbot-General been correct? Perhaps if the Order had accepted
him ... But I was wasting time in thought again. Setting down
the Missal, I shook the Bible and the Prayer Book with equally
unproductive results and opened the drawer of the bedside table,
but I found nothing there except indigestion tablets. I examined
the drawers inside the wardrobe but the majority were empty.
Desmond had even fewer clothes than I had imagined.

However I noticed that in the section of the wardrobe where
his one suit and spare cassock were hanging, a tin box was sitting
on the floor alongside a down-at-heel pair of shoes. It was the sort
of box, about fifteen inches high, in which people kept personal
memorabilia such as old letters and family photographs, but when
I tried to raise the lid I was unable to do so. Kneeling on the
threadbare carpet I flicked open my lighter again and confirmed
that although the hasps were unfastened a lock was holding the
lid in place. I told myself that it was not unnatural for Desmond
to wish to keep his personal memorabilia from the housekeeper’s
prying eyes, but the locked box bothered me and I became even
more bothered when I was unable to find the key.

I felt along the top of the wardrobe but my fingers encountered
nothing but dust. I stood on a chair so that I could see the top of
the picture-rail and door-frame, but no trace of metal glinted
among the cobwebs. I lifted up the box and looked underneath but found nothing. It was certainly possible that Desmond kept
the key with him at all times, but priests in charge of large churches
usually have quite enough keys on their key-rings without further
burdening themselves with one which was not in daily use.

I stood motionless for a moment in the centre of the room while
I tried to identify the one place which the housekeeper would never touch. My glance finally fell on the crucifix. Removing it
from the wall I found, to my utmost dismay, that a small key had
been taped to the back.

I now began to feel distinctly queasy. In truth I had not expected
to find the key hidden in such an abnormal place. A key hidden
on top of the wardrobe or picture-rail would have indicated a
normal desire for privacy; a key hidden behind a crucifix suggested
nothing less than a guilty desire
to be
secretive. Very carefully I
detached the key in such a way that the sticky tape could be reused,
and tried the lock. It yielded, and as I raised the lid my last faint
hope that the box contained innocent memorabilia expired. I found
myself plunged into an episcopal nightmare.

Removing the magazines I found the photographs. If I had
still been an army chaplain, working among men from all social
backgrounds, I could have taken the discovery in my stride, but
in that room, so quiet, so still, so redolent of a devout life, I was
appalled. I had knelt on the floor again to open the box, but now
I sank back on my heels and wiped the sweat from my forehead.
Gradually the shock faded and the anger streamed through me,
anger with Desmond for jeopardising the good name of the
Church, anger with the Bishop of London who had palmed him
off on me, anger with the Abbot-General of the Fordite monks
who five years ago had pronounced Desmond fit for service, anger with the decadent spirit of the age which encouraged pornography
to flourish — anger with anyone or anything other than with me
and my bishopric. But at last I pulled myself together, flicked
through the photographs to make sure none of them showed Des
mond himself in unspeakable circumstances, and confirmed that
there were no letters in the box. I then considered the implications
of my discovery.

It seemed clear that although I had uncovered evidence that
Desmond was in serious spiritual trouble, there was no evidence
either of blackmail or of a pornography ring; in addition to the
absence of letters, there was no list of addresses, no indication that
the collection had ever been shared. Moreover, although I was no
expert on pornography I suspected that both the magazines and
the photographs could be purchased without too much trouble in
the shadier shops of Soho, and if this suspicion was correct the
police would be unlikely to press charges. Desmond might indeed
have been beaten up as the result of an illegal homosexual encoun
ter, but there was no proof that the assailant had provided the
pornography and no proof either that Desmond had been con
ducting anything which could be described as an affair. I decided
I could purloin the box without worrying that I was obstructing
the police in the investigation of the crime.

Removing the sticky tape from the back of the crucifix I fastened
the key to the inside of the lid and secured the box by pulling
down the hasps. The crucifix I returned to its place on the wall.
My next step was to swathe the box in the malodorous dressing-
gown which hung on the back of the door; the anonymous bundle
could be passed off if necessary to the housekeeper as items which
Desmond required in hospital. I turned to survey the room for
the last time. All was in order. Switching out the light I padded downstairs, slipped outside to my car and stuffed the bundle in
the boot. Then I sped noiselessly back indoors, drank the cold tea
waiting for me in the study and summoned the housekeeper to
say that the Archdeacon would be in touch with her shortly. As I
finally made my escape I noticed that the two police cars were still
parked outside the church and the young constable was still on duty in the porch.

I drove erratically home to the Cathedral Close.