Murder in a Cathedral (15 page)

As he began to walk the long way home around the back of the cathedral, an idea occurred to Amiss that made him stop and think hard. If the dean was only just back, could it be that he didn’t yet know about the shamans? If so, should he not be briefed? To be introduced to them by their daybreak drumming might lead him in his present mood to run completely amok.

Amiss imagined what that might involve and he found himself smiling. Perhaps a berserk dean was exactly what the shamans needed. But would a briefed berserk dean not be in a stronger position than one jetlagged and sleepy in the early morning who could not know without investigation that the drummers were not simply overenthusiastic seekers after God?

He leaned against the cathedral wall, looking up at the new moon and trying to decide where his duty lay. On the one hand was the dean – a frightful fundamentalist bigot who had just perpetrated a humiliating assault on a good woman. On the other was Tengri, who had so far routed the forces of decency with contemptuous ease.

Put like that, Amiss decided, there was no contest. He turned, retraced his steps and entered the deanery garden by the side gate.

The clock tower was just striking 9.00 when Tilly Cooper opened the door. Her bland, pretty face was becomingly tanned and even the return from the cathedral of a raving husband did not appear to have rattled her serenity. She greeted him warmly.

‘Why, Robert, bless you for calling to welcome us home.’

‘I saw the light and thought I’d drop by for a moment. I would have waited for the morning, but there’s something I should tell the dean.’

‘Come in, do.’ She led him into the hall and closed the front door.

‘Are you just back?’

‘Hey, yes. We’re ahead of ourselves. We’d always wanted to come back today but hadn’t been able to get the flights, but I just prayed hard, and Jesus fixed it. So here we are, fresh and eager to get going on God’s work.’

‘Excellent, excellent. Now you’ll be tired, so I won’t hold you up. Is it possible to have a quick word with the dean on a matter of some urgency?’

‘Sure, sure. Follow me.’

She took him into a room whose wonderful Georgian proportions, high ceiling and splendid French windows were constructed for elegant furniture and elegant people. Dean Roper’s furniture had already been dispatched to various appreciative legatees; in its place was an array of spartan and unattractive chairs and sofas.

‘I’ll go and find my husband. May I give you anything? Water? Juice, if we’ve got any?’

‘How kind, but no thanks.’

Tilly went off singing in a low voice about being a twinkle in God’s eye, and returned within a couple of minutes escorting her husband, whose tan was overlaid with a red flush. Though he managed a controlled and polite welcome, the dean was clearly struggling to contain his feelings. Amiss gave him a few more minutes to simmer down by asking inane questions about flights and what sort of a break they’d had and had there been any time for a holiday before their studies. As he might have expected, he elicited from Tilly the information that studying Jesus was in itself a rest for mind and body and that no happier month could have been spent anywhere than in the loving companionship in worship experienced at the Bible college.

‘And I don’t want to boast, Robert, but I have to tell you something happened that’s made me very proud.’

He tried to look keenly interested.

‘I preached for the first time. I preached – and I think I can say I’ve found my vocation. Norm was not the only one kind enough to tell me I showed real promise.’

Husbandly pride was restoring the dean’s good humour. ‘I’m very proud of my wee wife,’ he announced. ‘She has a God-given gift. I can tell you that at times she moved that congregation to tears. And at the end they applauded as if she was Billy Graham himself.’ He nodded portentously. ‘And you’ll be getting your chance to hear her in the cathedral just as soon as there’s a vacant slot in the schedule.’

‘I look forward to that very much.’

‘Now, young man, I don’t want to rush you, but we’re dog tired. I understand you have something urgent to tell me.’

‘Have you seen Bishop’s Green since you got back?’

‘No. We came straight to the deanery.’

‘You haven’t been out since?’

‘Only to the cathedral for a brief visit.’

‘In a nutshell, the green was taken over a few days ago by an encampment of New Age travellers who have proved exceptionally disruptive. While the chapter have gone through the legal motions, it is clear that these people will leave only if forced. And since there are small children involved, this could produce very bad publicity for the cathedral.’

‘What kind of people are these?’ asked the dean, his lips set in a straight line and his eyes narrowed.

‘There are four trailers, each housing a woman and two or three children; it seems that the commune is polygamous; each family shares the same man – known as Tengri – who is, as it were, husband and father to all.’

The dean’s eyes began to flash. Tilly emitted a shocked squeak.

‘The reason I came to tell you about it tonight was to warn you that you will almost certainly be woken at dawn by drumming.’

‘Drumming?’ bellowed the dean, giving the word an emphasis and inflexion reminiscent of Lady Bracknell and the handbag.

‘It’s a feature of his religion – or at least what he alleges to be his religion, which revolves a lot around drumming and conversations with spirits and’ – fuck it, he thought, let’s get the bastard well wound up – ‘magic and drug taking.’

Veins began to bulge on the dean’s forehead. ‘And these degenerates are given shelter in a place of worship?’

‘Not voluntarily, I assure you, Dean. In view of their immoral behaviour and their antisocial practices, although feeling that to an extent a hand should be held out even to the most despised of God’s creatures, the bishop and canons appealed to them to leave.’

‘No hand should be held out to degenerates, unless they repent. And certainly not to people who practise wicked superstition and sully the temples that are their bodies with vile substances.’

The dean brooded for a moment. ‘Do these people have a name for their degenerate cult?’

‘I suppose generically they’re pagans.’

‘Pagans?’ The dean’s voice was loud enough to reach Bishop’s Green.

‘More specifically, shamans. Tengri calls himself a shaman.’

‘Shaman! Shaman! Satan is everywhere!’ screamed the dean, leaping up and running from the room.

‘Jesus save us,’ said Tilly as she ran after him; Amiss brought up the rear.

Chapter 12

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For once Amiss had the pleasure of ringing the baroness at a time which suited him and not her. When he reached her at midnight she was deep in what she self-pityingly mourned as her baby sleep.

‘She who lives by the telephone dies by the telephone,’ said Amiss unfeelingly. ‘If you think I’m going to give you any sympathy when I think of the number of times you’ve woken me at some frightful hour, you can forget it. Now do you want to hear about the dean exorcizing the devil or do you not?’

The baroness’s grumbles ceased abruptly. ‘Do I just!’ She smacked her lips.

‘We start with the unfortunate events in the lady chapel.’ He took the baroness through the high points of the ceremony, which elicited predictable snorts of derision and condemnation. ‘Christ, what a load of bollocks all this sort of stuff is. Why they can’t just shut up about sex and enjoy it is beyond me. “Pray for those of us in the closet,” my arse!’

‘I certainly find it hard to imagine a closet which could contain you for long. However, can we drag ourselves away from you for a moment? I’m trying to tell you about the denouement.’

The story of the dean and the portrait was a great success. ‘Magnificent. I wish I’d been there.’

‘Have you no sympathy for poor Alice?’

‘Certainly not. It might do her a lot of good. She’s got to put all this rubbish behind her and get down to useful do-goodery on behalf of the deserving. I hope this deters her from ministering to self-indulgent weirdos.’

‘Which leads me to the shamans.’ His account of his visit to the dean caused her to pay him one of her rare compliments.

‘I hand it to you, Robert. Perfect timing. By morning he might have been calm.’ She chortled. ‘Ooh, good. I hope the next bit lives up to expectations. So we have him thundering through his front door pursued by wife and
agent provocateur
.’

‘Not only – as we were to find out – was his strength as the strength of ten, but his speed was as the speed of light. I hadn’t realized that righteous indignation adds wings to the feet, but so it proved to be. By the time we reached the green, Tilly and I – many years his junior – were in some distress, but the run appeared to have taken nothing out of the dean. Even his breathing was unaffected: he gazed at what by that time of night was the silent and apparently innocent quartet of trailers and emitted a thunderous bellow which put the fear of God into me – I can’t imagine what it sounded like to the slumbering, doped-up shamans.

‘ “Come out, you children of Satan!” he shouted. And when they didn’t instantly appear, he started racing around the trailers crashing his great fists against the sides and screaming about the fires of hell that awakened infidels. This presumably penetrated the adult brains – for, I suppose, when you live in encampments, your worst fear would be an arson attack.

‘From three of the trailers emerged the heads of wary women and from the fourth the great shaman himself scrambled out looking slightly alarmed; a woman and child were silhouetted in the doorway behind him.

‘As Tengri ascertained that all that was in front of him was a large clergyman, a thin blonde and me, he reverted to type and began to sneer. Within two minutes the dean had pulled him down the steps, had got him in an armlock and was delivering maledictions of the Old Testament variety. There was quite a lot about the Lord raining brimstone and fire from the heaven down on Sodom and Gomorrah, various references to whetting glittering swords and rendering vengeance to his enemies and some rather incoherent stuff to do with false gods and smiting trangressors. It was pretty unnerving, I can tell you, especially to the women at whom he shouted that if they didn’t obey instructions he’d break Tengri’s arm. “Up and out,” he shouted. “If you’re not gone in ten minutes I’ll have the water hose turned on you and the insides of your abominable homes.” He waved with his free arm. “And take all your filth with you.”

‘One of the women looked nervously at the wretched Tengri, who incautiously began his response with the word “don’t”, and for his folly had his arm twisted so far up his back that he screamed like someone on a griddle and said, “Go, go.” “Where to?” asked one woman. “Far away from this city,” said the dean, “for if I catch sight of any of you again, believe me, this time the wrath of the Lord will be brought upon you and there will be no mercy. Do I make myself clear?” To which Tengri screamed, “Yes.” ’

‘By now, we had been joined by David, Jeremy and Cecil – the others, I learned later, were gazing through their windows afraid to emerge – but no one tried to intervene, for the dean appeared possessed. One would as easily have demurred at his treatment of Tengri as have had a quiet word with the Lord when he was in the middle of laying waste an altar of idols or sending down a plague of frogs. So we watched open-mouthed and silently.

‘Not until all the detritus had been removed from the green, the engines had been revved up and the headlights were on, did the dean take Tengri over to the door of his trailer and release him. “Begone, you Satanists and fornicators,” was his parting sally. “And never darken the gates of the City of Westonbury again.” ’

‘Compelling stuff. Was that it?’

‘That was it. They drove away without a backward glance, the dean and Tilly went off to bed and I came back here and did my best to rid David of his guilt at allowing – and even being pleased about – the expulsion of the people who’d been making his life a complete misery.’

‘It would be your guess that they won’t be back?’

‘Since they don’t even know who this mad exorcist was, I can’t see them taking the risk of running into him anywhere in Westonbury. No, I think they’ve definitely gone off to persecute some new community.’

‘Good for the dean. He did exactly what I told you to do the morning they arrived, with a few embellishments of his own. As an exorcist, he certainly beats the bell, book and candle merchants any day.’

‘He was the right man for the job, Jack. None of the rest of us has such balls.’

‘We might have to revise our opinion of him, you know,’ she said ruminatively. ‘The fellow’s only been back ten minutes and he’s already put paid to lesbian drivel, fag-hag art and New Age vandalism. Perhaps he should be Archbishop of Canterbury. See to it, will you?’

‘I hate him,’ said Cecil Davage some days later. ‘Hate, hate, hate. He’s a perfect example of everything that is nastiest in English life – that hideous puritan streak that took the religious art we had spent centuries perfecting and destroyed it. Look at this.’

He led Amiss to a tiny cell-like chantry, bare except for a stone altar. Davage unlocked the gate, switched on the light and pointed to a square foot of rose and silver paint in a corner just above the altar. ‘This whole wall contained a mural of the Nativity, said by the chronicler of St Dumbert to have been the most beautiful ever seen throughout the length and breadth of England – and that at a time when our religious art was possibly the greatest in Europe.’

He gave a muffled sob. ‘There’s evidence to suggest that this survived the first wave of vandals under Henry VIII and Elizabeth at a time when they were destroying every statue in the cathedral as well as the paintings, and stealing every object of value we possessed except those now in the treasury which the then dean managed to hide. But when Cromwell’s barbarians came, they mopped up what the others had missed. That’s when our wonderful medieval stained glass went – except for the rose window, which by some fluke they couldn’t get at in the time available. They threw some stones at it, but didn’t make much impact.