A Turbulent Priest (6 page)

“No. He had been sent to Downton Hall. It’s a house we keep for retired clergy in the Ribble Valley. It’s also used by priests who are recovering from serious illnesses.”

And by those who have caused such embarrassment to the Church that they have to be removed from office and hidden away, thought Percy. He said dryly, “Presumably this place is fairly remote.”

“Yes. Father Walsh, my secretary, will show you its position on the map.” The Bishop had anticipated this, obviously. “It isn’t very far from the place where the body of John Bickerstaffe was found.”

“How many people knew he was there?”

“I and my secretary, plus Monsignor Eaton, who runs Downton Hall. But I can’t guarantee that other people couldn’t have found out. Probably most clergy in the diocese would surmise that a priest in trouble in his parish would be sent to Downton. They are usually discreet in these matters, but they’re not sworn to secrecy. It might surprise you to know that priests gossip among themselves as much as the rest of society, Inspector. Pieces of scandal pass round fairly quickly. It’s part of being lonely.” The Bishop allowed himself a sad smile.

Peach looked at the long, reflective face above the purple silk for a moment. “Bishop Hogan, we now know that Father Bickerstaffe had been dead for about ten days before his body was actually discovered. Yet no one had reported his disappearance. Why was that?”

Bishop Hogan sighed. “I think I must bear the responsibility for that. I was informed that John Bickerstaffe had disappeared twenty-four hours after it happened. We didn’t inform you because we thought he’d gone away to think things out for himself. All cases differ, but that’s not unusual for a priest in trouble. John had been warned that he might have to give up his priesthood, to seek a different kind of life somewhere else. It turns a priest’s life on its head. Like many Catholic clergy, John had relatives in Ireland. It was suggested to me that he might have gone there to contemplate his next step, but we weren’t able to check on that: we had no addresses.”

Lucy Blake looked up from her notebook. “Did you think he might have gone quietly away to commit suicide?”

It was a thought which might have been better left unvoiced, but Bishop Hogan did not flinch from it, nor bridle at the presumption of this fresh-faced young woman. “And relieved us all of an embarrassment, you mean? Of course we were aware of the possibility that a man in John’s position might take his own life. Suicide is always a temptation for those under great mental stress. But despair is still the ultimate sin for us Catholics, and the pressures against suicide are strongest of all for a Catholic priest. Suicides happen occasionally, but they are very rare.”

His frankness gave a dignity to his pronouncement. Peach, who had wanted to ask just when the missing priest’s disappearance would eventually have been reported, decided that the question would serve no useful purpose. He stood up abruptly. “Thank you for your help. And thank you for the refreshments. We may need to come back to you for more information after we’ve spoken to some of the parents you’ve named for us.”

By this time, all three of them were glad to end this meeting. The two CID representatives had driven ten miles and the car was climbing up towards the moors on the other side of Bolton before Lucy Blake said quietly, “I don’t like child abusers. They take advantage of those who can’t fight back.”

Peach’s hand stole towards hers, covered it for a moment, gave it a small squeeze, which might have been consolation, might have been appreciation. They drove another mile before he said, “Neither do I. But you’ve got to like murderers even less. It’s part of the job.”

Six

In twelve years of supervising Scene of Crime teams, Detective Sergeant Joe Jackson had never before visited a presbytery. And in forty years of housekeeping for a succession of priests, Martha Hargreaves had never taken anyone, let alone a policeman, into the private quarters of a minister of the Lord. The two regarded each other with mutual suspicion.

Jackson took a deep breath and plunged into the phrases he had used a hundred times before. “I’m afraid we have to search the premises. It’s in case we can find anything which might be useful. It’s what a Scene of Crime team does, Mrs Hargreaves.”

“It’s Miss Hargreaves. And there was no crime took place within these walls.” Her stance, with arms crossed firmly across her undefiled bosom, indicated clearly that she would never have permitted it.

“No. We call our men Scene of Crime Officers, though — SOCO for short. It’s our job to find and take away anything which might help us to discover who killed Father Bickerstaffe. You’d want to help us do that, wouldn’t you?”

“There’s no need to turn on the charm for me, young man.” Martha could have produced nothing more charming than this last phrase for the grizzled veteran who stood awkwardly on the ancient Persian carpet in the high-ceilinged hall. “I know what has to be done. It just doesn’t come easily to let someone into Father’s private rooms. I’ve never had to do it before without his permission.”

“And I trust you’ll never have to do it again, I really do.” Joe Jackson felt a sympathy for this upright, grieving woman, so loyal to her dead master’s memory. She was one of the very few women he had come across in the last ten years who would happily have accepted the term ‘master’. He leaned towards her, lapsed deliberately into the Lancashire accent he normally checked when talking to the public. “It’s a rum do, this, Miss Hargreaves, and no mistake. World’s coming to something, when they start murdering priests, isn’t it? We’ll find who did it, you know. But we’ll need a lot of help from people like you.”

Martha looked at him suspiciously for a moment, then nodded and unclasped her arms within their black cotton dress. She turned to the thick Victorian door behind her, which separated the hall and front room, where Father Bickerstaffe had been used to receive his callers, from the private sections of the house. “You’d best come this way, then.”

She led them through to an inner hall and then up a gloomy balustraded staircase. She paused on the landing at the top of the first flight. “This is the floor where Father lived. His lounge is through here. You’ll find his bedroom next door. There’s a smaller bedroom next to that, for visiting clergy, and a bathroom at the end.”

“And what’s up those stairs?” Jackson indicated the narrower flight of stairs which ran on up to the second storey of the house.

Martha bristled a little, resisting the impulse to fold her arms back into the ‘they shall not pass’ position. “Those are my quarters. I trust neither you nor your staff will need to search them.”

“No, indeed we shall not!” Jackson reassured her hastily. “Not at this point, anyway. But we shall need to be thorough in our search of Father Bickerstaffe’s rooms. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Yes. All right. I’ll leave you to it, then.”

“If you wouldn’t mind staying, it would be useful to us, Miss Hargreaves. Quite proper, in fact. You’d be acting as a witness, you see, to anything we found. You’d be able to make sure that everything was above board.”

The first smile they had seen from her surfaced at that. “Make sure you hadn’t planted anything, you mean? Or ‘found’ anything that wasn’t really here?”

“Precisely. You’d be an instrument of the law, Martha.” Even his daring use of her first name passed unchecked. It was quite obvious that Martha Hargreaves, like the majority of the people they saw nowadays, had picked up all kinds of dubious notions about the police and their methods from television crime series. “Not that any member of my team would do anything that wasn’t above board, of course.” Joe Jackson laughed heartily at the notion, and the three people who had trailed him up the stairs laughed behind him, less heartily and quite disjointedly.

Martha watched while the three men and a woman went methodically through the big, comfortable room where Father Bickerstaffe had spent most of his leisure hours. They took the books out of the bookcase, looked carefully to see if there were any papers between them, thumbed through the books themselves for any hidden, revealing papers. They felt down the sides of the deep-seated armchairs, investigated the mahogany sideboard, lifted it out to look behind it. They went through Father’s pile of CDs, took everything out of the television and video cabinet he had bought for himself last year, even lifted the ornaments on the two wide windowsills to make sure there was nothing hidden beneath them. Martha was glad that she had cleaned and dusted this room so regularly. When they had finished, Jackson nodded to the tall man in civilian clothes and he took three photographs of the room from different angles.

When they moved on to Father Bickerstaffe’s bedroom, Martha’s curiosity was overcome by her sense of sacrilege. Even she had rarely entered this room, for Father had insisted on making his own bed each day. She had gone in to vacuum the floor once a week and had spent no more than five minutes on each occasion in this neat, anonymous room. Now the men threw back the blankets on the bed, began to examine the sheets, then bundled them up and put them in a large plastic bag. When they opened up Father’s wardrobe and began to feel through the pockets of his clothes, Martha felt she could watch them at their work no longer. “I’ll away downstairs and make you some tea now,” she said desperately.

The team looked at Sergeant Jackson, who after a moment’s hesitation nodded and said, “We’ll be down as quickly as we can, Martha. But take your time with that tea — we have to be thorough. There may just be something here that will give us a clue as to who killed Father Bickerstaffe, you see.”

Martha smiled and went hastily out on to the landing. She had to brush the tears from her eyes before she could trust herself to descend the familiar gloomy staircase.

The team searched the room thoroughly, methodically, working to a system Jackson had devised through years of experience. It meant they came to the likeliest areas, the places which most people chose to hide things, at the very end of their search. And in this respect at least, Father John Bickerstaffe proved himself a conventional man. It was in the bottom drawer of his chest of drawers, beneath two pairs of underpants and a vest that had never been worn, that they found the material he had wanted to hide from the world. Pornographic material: stuff that these seasoned professionals had seen before, but which would have made poor old Martha’s grey hair stand on end.

Paedophilic photographs, of the kind which are not displayed openly on newsagents’ shelves even in these liberated days, but which are readily obtainable in many parts of Europe. Soft porn, by the dubious standards of the new century. Boys with old-young faces, smiling mirthless smiles, in postures scarcely conducive to laughter. The team had seen much worse, but they supposed these prints had given a sick excitement to the sad and lonely celibate who had hidden them here.

More interesting than the glossy photographs was the brief note which accompanied them. Joe Jackson picked it up deftly with his tweezers, for it might still provide fingerprints other than those of the dead man. There was no address, and the note said only, ‘
Thanks for the return of the magazines. Sorry to hear you don’t feel able to join our little group at the moment. Let me know if you reconsider. In the meantime, you might find these pictures of passing interest. Plenty more where these came from! Yours, Chris
.’

It was a casual, educated hand. A hand which had penned many words in its life. The signature was little more than a hasty scrawl, and there was no second name. Yet it was the signature that made Jackson sure that he had seen this hand before. He put the note between polythene sheets with extreme care, then made a note that it should be passed to their calligraphy expert as soon as it had been tested for prints. But in his own mind, he was already sure who had written that note.

There were times when Inspectors earned their money, he thought. He was glad that it would be that cocky little sod Percy Peach who had to follow this up.

***

A bright September morning with a soft breeze; white clouds moving gently across a bright blue sky; no rain since Monday, and none forecast, so the prospect of a dry round of golf on the trim acres of the North Lancs Golf Club at the weekend. All this should have made that Thursday morning a cheerful one for Percy Peach.

Yet as he got out of the police car and walked with Lucy Blake into the primary school beneath the spire of the Roman Catholic church, the Inspector was not happy. It was partly because of the child abuse which lay beneath this murder case: no policeman likes dealing with children or parents when there have been accusations of crime in this area. It was also partly because he did not know quite how he was going to tackle a primary-school headmistress. His childhood experiences of the breed, like his later experience of marriage, had left him carrying psychological baggage he would rather have been without. Percy would not of course have admitted even to possessing a subconscious, still less to any notion that it might in any way inhibit him.

The image Percy carried within him was that of a spinster, at least seventy years old in his childish eyes, acidic of expression and attitude, regarding him disapprovingly through lenses like jamjar bottoms and rapping his fingers with a ruler for the fidgeting which was his besetting sin as an eight-year-old. The headteacher who now came out from her office to meet him conformed to none of his images, and that in itself he found a little disconcerting. Mrs MacMullen was in her late forties, blond and buxom, erring a little on the side of the plumpness which most of her charges found reassuring. Hundreds of children and one or two staff had wept on her splendid bosom in the twenty years in which she had instructed the nation’s young. Percy, eyeing that instrument of comfort, thought how much happier his school days might have been if such noble consolation had been available to him.

“Thank you for making time to see us,” he said.

Her smile destroyed a few more of his prejudices. “It wasn’t too difficult. The children aren’t back at school until Monday. Most of the staff are in for in-service training, but we haven’t any pupils to worry about yet. Come into the office.” They followed her into a room which still had space for children’s paintings on the wall in spite of the piles of books and letters which seemed to dominate it. She had both chairs and coffee ready for them, anticipating that like good police officers they would arrive precisely at the time they had appointed. She sat down opposite them in an armchair, assessing this strangely dapper little man with the bald head and jet-black moustache and the sturdy girl with the red-gold hair beside him as coolly as if they had been a pair of the anxious parents she was more used to meeting here. She said, “It must be important, to bring me a Detective Inspector and a Detective Sergeant at the same time.”

“It is. And I’m not sure how much you can help us. But we do need you to be completely frank with us. We are quite sure now that we are investigating a murder.”

The shrewd blue eyes widened only a little. “Then it must be that of Father Bickerstaffe.”

“Yes. And we’re still getting to know him. The better the picture we can get of a dead man, the better the chance that we shall locale his murderer. How well did you know Father Bickerstaffe?”

She took a few seconds to frame her answer, thinking carefully before she committed herself to words. “I knew him quite well, in what I suppose you would call a professional capacity. I don’t worship at the Sacred Heart church myself —I live four miles from the school, in St Mary’s parish — but John Bickerstaffe came into the school and chatted with me about our problems about once a fortnight. He was also a governor of the school. He helped to appoint me three years ago.”

“I thought the parish priest controlled his local school, that he would have appointed you himself, with the approval of the local authority.”

Mrs MacMullen smiled again, and once more Percy found it disconcerting. “You’re years out of date, Mr Peach, I’m happy to say. May I ask if you are yourself a Catholic?”

“I — er, well, no. Not now. I was brought up as a Catholic, though.”

“And your ideas of school organisation date from those days, I think. Something like that did used to happen in most Church schools, in the old days. Nowadays, the priest of the church to which the school is attached is no more than one of the governors. Father Bickerstaffe wasn’t even Chair of our governing body, though he was always most helpful when it came to offering his services or providing us with accommodation for our fund-raising ventures.”

Having thus been brought firmly into the new century, DI Peach nodded briefly at his sergeant, and Lucy Blake said, “We need to have your frank impressions of Father Bickerstaffe. He seems to have been killed quite deliberately and with malice aforethought. We have seen his spiritual superior, who has given us certain information. We have seen Miss Hargreaves, Father Bickerstaffe’s housekeeper, who told us” — she turned here to her notebook to quote the phrases exactly — “‘He was a good man… A kind man. Always available when there was trouble… Always very good when there was a death in the family… Thoughtful about people, understanding.’ We want to know what you can add to that. And, frankly, whether you agree with all of it.”