The Discourtesy of Death (Father Anselm Novels) (2 page)

Feeling strangely weightless, Michael walked to the graveyard and laid the tulips on Jenny’s grave in Saint Mary’s. He then motored to the Slaughden Sailing Club, just south of Aldeburgh, where he kept
Margot
, his small yacht. He put the Billingham bag in the cabin and then drove south to Harwich, using his British passport for a crossing to Holland. On reaching the Hoek, he went to Harlingen and the holiday home bought with Emma’s inheritance. It was from here that the family had sailed around the Frisian Islands, mooring here and there to hire bikes and cycle along the long, deserted lanes. After the quick promised phone call to Emma, he went to bed but didn’t sleep. After breakfast he hired a Citroën with a spacious boot, purchased a large tarpaulin and then took the road back to the Hoek, where a customs official barely glanced at the proffered Canadian passport. Heading north, he retrieved the camera bag from
Margot
and drove the remaining few miles to his final destination: the Southcliff Guest House, a charming Victorian property on the promenade at Southwold. He was a single man on holiday, exploring the windswept coast of north-east Suffolk. Jenny had loved it as a child.

‘There is no God,’ murmured Anselm.

‘You’re going a bit far, there,’ replied Bede, Larkwood Priory’s tubby archivist.

‘No, I’m not. This is one of those moments of insight that sent Nietzsche over the edge.’

Anselm stared in horror at the open pages of the
Sunday Times
, laid out for all to see, on a table in the monastery’s library. The title ran: ‘The Monk who Left it All for a Life of Crime’.

‘Bin it.’

‘I can’t and won’t.’

‘Why?’

‘The Prior said not to.’

‘But it’s … embarrassing.’

‘It’s about you. The Superman. It’s about Larkwood. It goes into one of my binders.’

Several brother monks had already read the article. Only ‘article’ didn’t do justice to the author’s exertions. It was more of a biopic. A careful examination of the unusual twists and turns in a strange man’s life. Anselm had come running to the library after hearing a few loud guffaws in the calefactory.

‘Bede, everything’s out of proportion.’

‘You can make annotations, giving the right dimensions.’

‘Get stuffed.’

Anselm leaned over the table, his wide eyes skimming down the columns of print, culling facts and quotations. French mother, English father. Quirky at school. According to John Wexford, headmaster of the day,
Charming fellow, but he could never see the wood for les arbres
. Graduate in law from Durham University. Called to the Bar at Gray’s Inn. No academic distinctions to speak of. A barrister for ten years in the chambers of Roderick Kemble QC.

Bede’s chubby finger appeared.

‘This is my favourite,’ he purred, stroking a paragraph. ‘Let’s read it quietly together.’

They did:

‘A rare breed of man’, argues Kemble, one of London’s most distinguished criminal lawyers. ‘A loss to the Bar when he became a monk. I’ve rarely come across such a remarkable combination of brilliance, sound judgement and disarming humility. The top corridor of justice is a colder place for his absence.’ Great men have great flaws, I suggest. Kemble frowns, obliged to acknowledge a certain kink in the character of his former protégé. ‘Well, as the Good Book says of King Solomon – another fine jurist – he loved many strange women.’

‘I’ll never forgive you,’ breathed Anselm and, addressing Bede, ‘He’s joking.’

‘Manifestly.’

With an oath, uttered in French, Anselm moved onto ‘the hidden Larkwood years’ and the ‘quiet eruption of unreported forensic activity’. Each investigation was explored in some detail, culminating in a hymn of admiration. To give it prominence Bede cleared his voice: ‘“After the closure of each case, this reticent sleuth returned to Larkwood, refusing interviews, disdaining praise. But justice had been done in places beyond the reach of the law. He resumes a quiet life tending bees. To this day he repudiates any—”’

‘That’ll do.’

‘It only gets better. Try this—’

‘Belt up.’

They were quiet for a moment while Anselm chewed his lip. The call from the
Sunday Times
had come without warning. Having pieced together some old and scattered headlines, a journalist with an eye for the unusual had glimpsed the larger canvas. He’d called wanting an interview. In the nicest possible way, Anselm had declined to oblige, following which he’d assumed the matter had died a quiet death. He hadn’t imagined that the journalist might contact key witnesses, let alone examine his life prior to Larkwood. There was one small mercy.

‘Thank God he didn’t speak to one of my old clients.’

‘On reflection, perhaps you were right,’ came Bede, purring once more.

‘What about?’

‘Nietzsche.’

Bede turned the page ceremonially as if it were a revered text. The chubby finger tapped a name in the article’s concluding paragraph.

‘Mitch Robson.’ Anselm murmured the name.

The insurance man who’d run a jazz club. The trumpet player who’d tweaked the rules of harmony. His two acquittals at the Old Bailey on charges of theft were memorable high points in Anselm’s career. A man of good character had been scandalously blamed for the slipshod accounting system of a ruthless employer. The lambent phrases (used twice) returned to Anselm’s mind. In a fancy, he glimpsed the jury’s indignation. He’d passed it on like an infection.

‘Don’t be churlish,’ scolded Bede in reply. ‘He speaks movingly of your gifts … your high character.’ The archivist paused to salt the wound. ‘You were close once, it seems.’

Anselm snatched the paper. He couldn’t bear the commentary any longer. He read on, with growing dismay: Despite this double vindication, Mr Robson remains aggrieved. ‘The law doesn’t always mesh with reality,’ he explains at home, an old pleasure wherry moored on the Lark. ‘One moment you’re driving on the right side of the road, and the next you’re in court battling to put your life back together. Thankfully, I knew Anselm. He winkled some justice out of the system.’ Mr Robson is not surprised that his one-time advocate became a monk, or that the monk then returned to the quest for justice. ‘He’s somewhere between this world and the next. That’s why he sees a little bit further than everyone else. That’s why anyone in a hopeless situation should give him a call. There’s no one quite like him.’ Mr Robson is right. And surely that makes this reclusive monk one of the more unusual detectives in England.

Give him a call?
thought Anselm in disbelief.
I’m not free to do anything.
He appraised his brother monk, seeking sympathy and a recognition that things had got out of hand.

‘C’mon, Bede, this makes me into something I’m not.’

‘Undeniably.’

‘Let’s put it where it belongs.’

‘Okay.’

‘In the bin.’

‘Nope.’ Bede rose and carefully folded up the paper. ‘No can do,’ he said, locking it beneath one chunky arm. ‘This is history. My job is to preserve it for the instruction of future generations. A cautionary tale, perhaps.’

‘I’m not sure I like you, frankly,’ whispered Anselm. ‘I do my best, you know, for the sake of the Kingdom, but I’ve always thought there’s something …
Vichy
about you. You’re an ally of dark powers. Just wait till
your
name appears in print.’

‘That day will never dawn.’ The archivist had reached the door. He turned and gave the newspaper a reproving slap with the back of his hand. ‘Like most of us at Larkwood, I keep out of the public eye. It’s called being a monk.’

Anselm stared out of the window. He could see fresh green treetops behind the blue slate of Saint Hildegard’s where the apples were pressed and the mash recycled into a hideous chutney reserved for communal consumption. Bells rang, punctuating moments of importance, but Anselm didn’t move. His mind meandered through remembered conversations. He picked his way over the rubble of another life, listening intently to guarded disclosures. At one point he groaned out loud, wryly noting the curious symmetry between his former life as a barrister and his present existence as a monk: so much of what he’d been told lay protected by a solemn promise of confidentiality. He could never repeat anything he’d heard until it was already public knowledge; he couldn’t voice any previous suspicions until they’d been openly confirmed. His role as a listener was a kind of prison, shared with the person who’d sought his counsel. After an hour or so, he left the library and went to his cell. He had letters to write, beginning with a few ill-chosen words for Roddy Kemble and ending up with a salvo to the editor of the
Sunday Times
to the effect that the hidden life is best left hidden.

The first letter arrived for Anselm’s attention on Tuesday morning. Three more came on Wednesday. Eight on Thursday. Twenty-six on Friday. By the following Monday, Sylvester – Larkwood’s frail Doorkeeper – had been obliged to fill an old shoebox, obtained for that purpose and stored in the nearby mail room. He glowered at Anselm when he appeared, all sheepish, to collect the morning’s intake.

‘I’ve got better things to do than heave that lot around.’

‘I didn’t write them, Lantern Bearer; I merely receive them.’

‘I can’t hold the fort and fool around in reserve. There are external lines, internal lines, buttons and switches. What am I to do if one of the phones rings?’

‘What you normally do, with that same, touching patience.’

Sylvester sniffed, nodding at a vacant chair. Larkwood’s receptionist was one of the community’s founding fathers, a thatcher who’d helped restore the ruin donated to a group of winsome ascetics after the Great War. The oral tradition regarding his contribution to the English Gilbertine revival was unequivocal: he’d talked twice as much as he’d thatched. The written account was mercifully threadbare, largely because Bede hadn’t yet turned up with his files and folders.

‘No one writes to me any more,’ he mooned.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Pushing daisies, the lot of ’em.’

‘Too busy, I suppose.’

‘Mmmm.’

Anselm took the shoebox.

‘You’re the last of your kind,’ he said, sincerely. ‘A scout among cubs.’

Like Merlin, Sylvester youthened with age. It was impossible to judge his years. His flimsy hair was gossamer white, his bones protruding and somehow soft.

‘What do they all want, anyway?’ The old man peered at the sealed envelopes with the same curiosity that sent him on tiptoe to any closed door.

‘Help I can’t give,’ replied Anselm, wondering if today’s requests would be any different. ‘So far, I’ve been asked to find a cat, contact the dead, tackle the Chinese on Tibet … you wouldn’t believe the range of things that blight peoples’ lives. Thanks to a throwaway line in that article, the friendless and cornered think I’m some kind of magician. A link between earth and heaven. What can I do?’

‘Go to the Prior.’

‘Why?’

‘I just remembered. He wants to see you. And don’t forget Baden-Powell: “Be prepared.” He’s got the Moses-eye.’

Which was Sylvester’s way of saying the Prior had that sharp look of vigilance that appeared when he feared someone might go astray: in the instant case – Anselm surmised – through a venture into self-engendered public acclaim.

‘I’ve been waiting for this,’ muttered Anselm, rising. ‘He thinks I’ve had a hand in that blasted article. He thinks I might take it seriously … that I might even dance around my own image and likeness. I’d better explain.’

Anselm set off for the Prior’s study. When he reached the arched door to the cloister, he swung around to face the old scout: ‘If I’m not back in half an hour send out Peewee Patrol.’

During a moment of shared reflection the Prior had once declared that Anselm would always be freed from his monastic routine to help people who’d fallen between the cracks on the pavement to justice. The promise was, however, grounded upon three unspoken principles. First, an element of secrecy, in that Anselm was expected to work behind the scenes and without public acknowledgement; second, any such release would be the exception rather than the rule; and third, the kind of case he’d be allowed to accept belonged to a limited class: grave matters that touched upon the community or, by extension, people known to it. Such conditions kept Anselm firmly lodged in the cloister rather than the world. It did not take a Desert Father to recognise that the
Sunday Times
article had offended the first of these principles. Anselm had become a household name, if only for Sunday morning, but that was bad enough. The Moses-eye had grown increasingly troubled throughout the week following publication and Anselm, drawing up a chair, knew exactly what the Prior was going to say.

‘I tried to put him off,’ began Anselm. ‘It’s the last thing I expected to happen, but you can’t stop these people. They’ve got to find something to fill out the paper. They chose my past.’

The Prior, lodged behind his desk, adjusted round, cheap glasses. They were almost alone. To one side stood a headless statue that had been unearthed by a plough in Saint Leonard’s Field. Old parts of monastic history were forever turning up like this – smashed decoration, sections of pillars, capitals: the waste of a once violent, reforming zeal. The figure seemed to watch with a patience acquired over centuries.

‘And now I’m receiving letters from people who need a solicitor, the police or a doctor,’ continued Anselm. ‘They’re from decent folk who think I can do something these others can’t. And, of course, it’s just not possible. I appreciate that. It’s not my place in life. It’s not Larkwood’s, either. I’ll be telling them all that they need to understand the limits of—’

‘A letter came for me, too,’ interjected the Prior, the Glasgow grain shining through the Suffolk sheen. He held up an envelope. ‘They can’t go to a solicitor. They can’t call the police. It’s too late for a doctor. They think you can help them. I understand why. I’m minded to agree.’

Anselm took a mental step backwards.

‘You’re not vexed about the article?’

‘No.’

‘The attention it’s attracted?’