The Judgement of Strangers Read online

  Michael was staring in fascination at Audrey. I took a step towards her, hoping to shoo her into the study. She stood her ground.

  ‘He was beheaded some time after death,’ Audrey went on, her voice sounding unexpectedly triumphant. ‘It was no accident, Mr Giles was sure of that. It was almost certainly some sort of saw, definitely something with a serrated edge, like a hacksaw. I do so wish I knew what had happened to the head.’

  I dared not look at Vanessa. ‘Audrey –’

  ‘And then he was left for us to find at the church door.’ She swallowed and her eyes filmed with tears. ‘Hanging by his tail.’

  Michael gave a strangled giggle. I could not blame him. Audrey was one of those unfortunate people whose tragedies are tinged with farce.

  ‘David,’ she hissed. ‘You do realize how diabolical this is? Every detail so carefully thought out.’

  I nodded.

  ‘It’s a sort of blasphemy,’ Rosemary muttered.

  ‘Yes, dear. Exactly.’ Audrey smiled at her. ‘And the police may be content to pretend it never happened, but I’m not. Why, this is the next best thing to murder. I’m simply not prepared to hide my head in the sand. If the police won’t do their job, I shall just have to do it for them.’

  ‘Like Miss Marple,’ Rosemary suggested. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘Precisely. Though I say it myself, I do have some knowledge of human nature.’

  I made another attempt to sweep Audrey into the study. She wouldn’t move. She wanted an audience.

  ‘Don’t you think this sort of thing is best left to the police?’ I said.

  ‘Fat lot of good they’ll be. If I leave it to them, nothing will happen.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s wiser to try to put something like this behind one.’

  ‘I’m not putting Lord Peter behind me. Not until I’ve got to the bottom of how he died.’

  ‘We found something yesterday afternoon,’ Rosemary said. ‘I think it’s a clue. It was in Carter’s Meadow.’

  Audrey spun round, still blocking the doorway. ‘What?’

  Rosemary had the Golden Virginia tobacco tin, which had spent the night on the hall table, in her hand. She opened it and showed Audrey what it contained.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We think it may be a piece of Lord Peter’s fur. And that browny stuff – see? – I think that may be blood.’

  Audrey seized the tin. While she examined its contents, her mouth worked uncontrollably.

  ‘Toby – that’s Toby Clifford, I mean – he was with me when we collected it. It’s his tin, actually. Toby thought perhaps you could compare the hairs with Lord Peter’s. Perhaps the vet –’

  ‘If it can be done, then Mr Giles will do it. I’ll make sure of that.’ Audrey raised a pink, shiny face. ‘Thank you, my dear. This is a start. Now, tell me exactly where you found it.’

  Prodded by Audrey’s questions, Rosemary described what had happened yesterday afternoon. When it transpired that I had seen the fur in its original position, Audrey was delighted.

  ‘You’ll make an ideal witness, David. People trust what a clergyman says.’

  That had not always been my experience.

  ‘There was also an empty bottle of cider nearby,’ Rosemary was saying. ‘Toby says glass is very good for fingerprints, so we brought that away.’

  ‘What sort of cider, dear?’

  ‘Autumn Gold.’

  ‘I knew it.’ Audrey vibrated with excitement. ‘I’ve seen them drinking it in the bus shelter. They leave the empty bottles there –’

  ‘It’s in Daddy’s study if you need it. Toby says that it could be important if the fur turns out to be Lord Peter’s.’

  ‘How very thoughtful of him,’ Audrey said. ‘He sounds a very nice young man.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rosemary; and paragraphs were compressed into that monosyllable.

  Vanessa cast a longing glance at the coffee pot. ‘Well, now that’s settled, should we –?’

  ‘The evidence is beginning to build up,’ Audrey announced. ‘I’ve been approaching the case from another angle. And I’ve managed to uncover another piece of evidence.’ She paused for an instant, as if expecting a round of applause. ‘I happened to be in Malik’s Minimarket this morning, and Doris Potter was there. A very good sort of woman … She was asking me about Lord Peter. People are so kind. Even Mr Malik expressed his sympathy, and being Muslim – or is it Hindu? – he can’t really be expected to appreciate how terrible it all is. But at least he tried. Where was I? Doris. Yes, she actually popped into church on Thursday afternoon. Heaven knows why – it’s not her week for the flowers and she’s not on the cleaning rota at all.’ The possibility that Doris might have some other purpose in going to church had eluded Audrey. ‘She was on her way to Lady Youlgreave’s. So she thinks it must have been about four. The point is, she’s absolutely sure that Lord Peter wasn’t in the porch then. She remembers looking at one of the notices, the one about South Africa, when she came out. So – that’s useful, isn’t it? Slowly we’re building up a picture. I know we still have an awful lot to learn. But at least we know that Lord Peter was brought to church sometime between four o’clock and seven o’clock on Thursday evening.’ She beamed at Rosemary, revealing teeth to which clung small yellow specks, perhaps corn flakes. ‘And if we put that information together with what you’ve found out, dear, it’s possible that whoever did it came into the churchyard by the gate into Roth Park rather than from the road.’ Once again she hesitated. Then she added, with a devastating lack of subtlety, ‘What time exactly did the Cliffords arrive here in the evening?’

  The rest of the weekend was quiet. On Saturday afternoon I drafted a sermon which after tea I redrafted because on reading it seemed abstruse and pompous. I had planned to spend some of the evening tracking down the origin of the phrase which presumably had given Francis Youlgreave the title of his poem: Cursed is he that perverteth the judgement of the stranger, the fatherless, and widow. In the event, however, I spent most of the evening at the bedside of a man who eventually died shortly after midnight. Neither he nor his wife was a churchgoer, which led later to a heated argument with Rosemary, who could not understand why these people were as much my responsibility as Audrey Oliphant or Doris Potter.

  On Sunday, I celebrated Communion twice in the morning, dozed after lunch and conducted Evensong. I went to bed early.

  Externally the pattern was familiar and comforting. But my mind was less placid than I would have liked. I thought a great deal about the Cliffords. Where had their money come from? Who had their parents been? Was their father alive? I found that I could visualize the faces of both Toby and Joanna with unusual clarity – Toby’s with its bony features, its frizzy curls, and the nostrils permanently flared, which gave him an apparently misleading effect of perpetual disdain. And Joanna – what I remembered most clearly about her was the down on the curve of her cheek and the green eyes with a dark edge to the iris, and the green dappled like a pond under trees on a sunny day. Most of all, I wondered about the relationship between them, whether Toby was all he seemed, and whether Joanna’s apparent fear of him was due to calculation, paranoia, or a simple and entirely rational response to a genuine threat. There was Rosemary to consider, too: she seemed to be attracted to Toby.

  I tried to talk about some of this with Vanessa on Sunday evening as we were going to bed.

  ‘Puppy love,’ she said briskly. ‘Rosemary’s too young for him. Nothing to worry about – he seems a perfectly sensible young man so it will probably die a natural death. As for Joanna, from what Toby said, she’s had some sort of nervous breakdown. But she’ll get over it, I’m sure, with Toby’s help. I wish I could warm to her more, though. She’s rather off-putting, don’t you think?’

  I wasn’t sure what I thought about Joanna Clifford. What I needed very badly was to talk to my spiritual director about the Cliffords in general and Joanna in particular. But Peter Hudson was out of the country and I had not
yet met his successor. To make matters worse, I wasn’t sure whether I thought of Peter’s absence as a problem or as a stroke of good fortune. I did not really want to talk about the Cliffords with anyone – not with Peter and certainly not with a priest I did not know well. By arranging for Peter’s absence at this juncture, it was as if Providence had allowed me to stray briefly into limbo.

  ‘No, Rosemary will be all right,’ Vanessa went on. ‘But I’m not so sure about Audrey.’

  ‘The Miss Marple business?’

  ‘It’s absurd, isn’t it?’

  ‘She’s so obstinate it’s almost magnificent.’

  Vanessa clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. ‘She’s a grown woman, David. There’s nothing magnificent in having absolute faith in the forensic wisdom in the novels of Agatha Christie.’ She glanced at me and her eyelids fluttered. ‘If you ask me, it’s unwise to have absolute faith in anything.’

  I smiled at her. ‘Are you sure?’

  She laughed. ‘Now you’re trying to make a fool of me.’ That was how matters stood on the morning of Monday, the 17th August. Vanessa and I were in the kitchen preparing breakfast and listening to the eight o’clock news on the radio. Michael was doing his teeth in the bathroom, clearly audible in the kitchen below. Rosemary was still in bed; recently she had taken to sleeping late. The telephone rang.

  ‘I don’t think I can stand much more of this,’ Vanessa hissed at me. Her face had reddened. ‘They never leave you alone. Can’t you let it ring? Just this once.’

  I already had my hand on the door. ‘No – I’m afraid I can’t.’

  ‘But this is an utterly ridiculous time,’ she snapped, her voice rising. ‘Tell them you’ll ring back.’

  She glared at me and, God help me, I glared back. I went into the hall, closing the door rather more loudly than I should have done. In a cloud of childish indignation I stormed into the study and picked up the telephone receiver. Outside in the main road, the dustcart had drawn up outside the Vicarage. A dustman dropped the lid of our bin on the ground with a clatter and hoisted the bin itself on to his back.

  ‘The Vicarage.’

  There was a strangled sound on the other end of the line, which after a moment I identified as sobbing.

  I tried to make my voice gentler. ‘Who is this, please?’

  The dustcart drove away. Someone was whistling. On the other end of the line, the sob mutated into a snuffle.

  ‘It’s me. Doris.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘She’s dead. The old lady’s dead.’ There was a fresh burst of sobbing.

  ‘Doris, I’m so sorry.’

  The sobbing continued. I had not realized that Doris was quite so attached to her employer; nor would I have said that she was an hysterical woman – quite the reverse. But death is a great revealer.

  ‘You’ve just found her, I imagine?’ There was no reply, except sobbing, but I persevered. ‘My dear, she was an old lady. It had to happen. Probably sooner rather than later.’ The familiar platitudes slipped out of my mouth automatically. ‘She was in a great deal of pain, and there was nothing to look forward to, either.’ Platitudes have the outstanding advantage of being true. ‘And think how she would have hated having to go into a home or a hospital. At least she died in her own bed.’

  ‘But she didn’t,’ Doris wailed.

  ‘She’d managed to get up in the night, had she?’ Perhaps she had wanted her commode. ‘After the nurse had –’

  ‘I could kill her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That nurse. The bloody woman didn’t turn up. The old lady’s been lying there for days.’ The voice rose into a wail again, but the words, though distorted, were clear enough. ‘And the dogs have been eating her.’

  22

  Ronald Trask loved committees the way other men love football or train-spotting. He was in his element, especially when he was in the chair. He had the knack of driving his way through the agenda, achieving his own aims while preserving the appearance of democracy. He had become archdeacon two years before; and since then he had invited me to more meetings than his predecessor had done in the previous eight years.

  One of Ronald’s little gatherings was scheduled for half past ten on the morning of Monday the 17th August. The weather was cool and cloudy. Six of us sat at the round table in the Trasks’ dining room. We could see our faces in the polished surface. There were flowers, a carafe of water, glasses, pristine ashtrays and in front of each of us a neatly typed agenda, the work of Cynthia. The details stuck in my mind like pins in a pin cushion – hard, sharp particles of reality embedded in a sponge of uncertainty; I concentrated on them because they left less room for what I had seen an hour earlier at the Old Manor House.

  ‘We are not so much a committee,’ Ronald informed us, ‘as a working party.’

  He and the others murmured soothingly in the background. Our purpose was to examine ways of halting the decline of Sunday School attendance. On two occasions Ronald tried to draw me into the discussion but without marked success. Afterwards, as the others were leaving, he asked me to stay behind for a word. He took me into his study.

  ‘Are you all right, David? I thought you looked a little out of sorts in the meeting.’

  ‘I’m sorry – I do have a headache.’ I couldn’t face telling him the details about Lady Youlgreave so I merely added, ‘Two of my parishioners died over the weekend.’

  ‘It’s always a bit of a shock, isn’t it? Even when the death’s expected. Do sit down.’ Ronald waved me to a chair in front of his desk and hurried on. ‘Tell me, have you seen any more of the Cliffords?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, we’re neighbours. They’re very kindly lending us their paddock for our fete on Saturday week.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong,’ he said, eyeing me curiously. He settled himself behind the desk, and his fingertips stroked the leather cover of his diary – tenderly, as though it were a woman’s skin. ‘Just grounds for caution.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘We had lunch with the Thurstons yesterday. Victor had been at some Masonic do the night before, and he’d been talking to one of his policeman friends. I thought I’d pass on what he’d told me. Word to the wise, eh?’

  ‘What’s wrong with the Cliffords?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong with the children – not as far as I know, nothing for certain, though the boy seems to have some unsavoury friends. No, the problem is the parents. Ever heard of Derek Clifford?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Nor had I until yesterday,’ Ronald went on. ‘Not the name he was born with, by the way – his parents came from Poland. Apparently, he owned a chain of clubs in London. Little nightclubs, I gather. Most of them had a short life. Nothing was ever proved, but the police were absolutely certain that Clifford was running them as a front for all sorts of other activities – gambling, prostitution, even receiving stolen goods.’

  ‘But nothing was proved?’

  ‘Not in a way that would stand up in a court of law. But I understand that there was no real doubt about it.’

  ‘Is the father alive?’

  ‘He died last year. The mother died in the spring. There was an inquest.’ Ronald interlaced his fingers and stared at the ceiling, as if praying, as perhaps he was. ‘The poor woman was an alcoholic, and on the night in question she’d taken some sleeping pills. She choked on her own vomit. There was some question about the death – whether it was suicide or accident.’

  I thought of Joanna finding her mother’s body.

  ‘And then there’s the question of money,’ Ronald was saying. ‘I don’t know what those young people paid for Roth Park, but presumably the money ultimately came from their father. The odds are, it wasn’t honestly come by.’

  ‘You can’t blame them for that.’

  ‘It depends, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What do you mean?�
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  Ronald leant forward, his elbows resting on the desk, and smiled at me. ‘It depends on whether the children were involved with their father’s activities. Thurston’s asked his policeman friend to have a word with a few colleagues in London. Just in case there’s something there.’

  ‘I don’t like it.’ I stood up. ‘I’m sorry, Ronald, but it seems as though the Cliffords are being condemned because of hearsay evidence about what their father might or might not have done.’

  ‘Condemned?’ Ronald stood up as well. ‘Of course not. My fault – I can’t have made myself clear. All I’m saying is that it’s wise to take elementary precautions. Especially in our position. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘If you say so.’ I didn’t bother to keep the anger from my voice. ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘No, not at present.’ He followed me into the hall. ‘I’ll keep you informed.’

  We said goodbye. I wondered whether Ronald was doing his job, or using the Cliffords as a way to make my life a little uncomfortable. Or perhaps both – motives are often muddled. As I drove back to Roth, I thought about my reasons for taking an interest in the young Cliffords. I had no right to condemn Ronald or anyone else for mixed motives.

  Vanessa was at work so there were three of us for lunch in the Vicarage kitchen. No one was hungry. We nibbled at cold ham and elderly salad.

  Afterwards, while we were washing up, Rosemary said, ‘You know this thing about perverting the judgement of strangers – did you have time to look it up?’

  ‘Not yet. It’s Old Testament. I’m almost certain it’s from Deuteronomy.’

  ‘Does it mean muddling strangers?’ Michael asked suddenly. ‘Making visitors confused?’

  ‘No.’ I smiled at him. ‘It was about legal disputes in Israel. Widows and orphans and strangers were the vulnerable people in a community.’