Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death (5 page)

‘Golf?’

‘Every Wednesday. It helps to break up the week. I sometimes combine it with business. So much easier when you are out of the office . . .’

‘And were you playing golf the afternoon that your colleague died?’

‘Afternoon? He died after work, didn’t he? We always shut up shop early on a Wednesday. That’s how Stephen made sure he couldn’t be stopped. It’s a terrible business. When a man decides to do something so drastic there’s nothing you can do to stop him, don’t you think?’

‘I suppose not,’ Sidney replied. ‘And there were no big arguments with clients, that sort of thing? No one who might have a grievance against him?’

‘None, as far as I am aware. Solicitors can sometimes get on to the wrong end of things but I was always confident that Stephen could charm his way out of a tricky situation. What are you getting at?’

Sidney paused. ‘It’s nothing, I’m sure,’ he replied. ‘I am sorry to have taken up so much of your time.’

‘That’s quite all right. I don’t mean to rush you but I don’t think we were expecting you. We don’t have much call for clergymen in the office . . .’

‘And I admit that, in the church, we don’t have much call for lawyers . . .’ Sidney replied, more testily than he had intended.

He had never taken such dislike to a man before and immediately felt guilty about it. He remembered his old tutor at theological college telling him, ‘There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. We need to remember this about ourselves when we think of others.’

On the way out of the office, Sidney felt ashamed of his rudeness. He worried about the kind of man he was becoming. He needed to return to his official duties.

He bicycled over to Corpus and arrived just in time to take his first seminar of the term. It was on the synoptic gospels, a study of how much the life of Christ found in the accounts of Matthew, Mark and Luke was dependent on a common, earlier source known as ‘Q’.

Sidney was determined to make his teaching relevant. He explained how, although ‘Q’ was lost, and the earliest surviving gospel accounts could only have been written some sixty-five years after the death of Christ, this was not necessarily such a long passage of time. It would be the equivalent of his students writing an account of their great-grandfather just before the turn of the century. By gathering the evidence, and questioning those who had known him, it would be perfectly possible to acquire a realistic account of the life of a man they had never met. All it needed was a close examination of the facts.

Sidney spoke in familiar terms because he had discovered that when students were first at Cambridge they required encouragement as much as academic tuition. On arrival, those who had been brilliant at school soon found themselves in the unusual position of being surrounded by fellow students who were equally, if not more, intelligent than they were themselves. This, matched by the superiority of Fellows who didn’t actually like teaching, meant that undergraduates in their first year were often prone to a vertiginous drop in confidence. The gap between a student’s expectation of academic life and his subsequent experience could prove dispiriting. At the same time, the University itself displayed little sympathy for their disorientation, believing that those in their charge should understand that it was a privilege to be at Cambridge and they should either shape up fast or go crying back home to Mummy. Sidney therefore saw it as one of his duties to look upon the more vulnerable undergraduates with more sympathy than that shown by his colleagues, especially towards those theological students who found the rigorous investigation of some of the more unreliable biblical sources a challenge to their faith. Sidney, as in so many other areas of his life, had to ensure that those in his charge took a long view of life and held their nerve. The race was not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, he told himself. Time and chance happened to them all, and it was vital, above all, to hold a steady course.

It was a lesson he still needed to learn himself.

Although Sidney knew that he would see Inspector George Keating for their regular game of backgammon the following day, he decided that he really did need to telephone his friend, even if it might incur wrath. This it did, as the inspector had made it clear in the past that he never liked to have open and shut cases questioned and he was still smarting from England’s loss at football to the Hungarians the previous evening.

‘6-3! And to think we invented the game, Sidney. Wembley Stadium is the home of football and a team no one’s ever heard of put six goals past us. Unbelievable!’

‘I don’t know why you are so fond of football,’ his friend replied. ‘It always leads to disappointment. Cricket is the game . . .’

‘Not in the winter . . .’

‘Then Rugby Union. Perhaps even hockey . . .’

‘Hockey!’ Inspector Keating exclaimed. ‘You think I should start taking an interest in hockey? Next thing it will be bloody badminton. Why are you on the telephone, man?’

‘There is something I wish to discuss with you.’

‘Can’t it wait until tomorrow?’

‘It could but I don’t want it to ruin our game of backgammon . . .’

The inspector let out a long slow sigh. ‘You had better pay a visit to my office, then. If you can fit me in between services . . .’

‘I think you are rather busier than me.’

‘Come to St Andrews Street, then.’

Sidney had never been invited into the inner sanctum of the police station and had been expecting something altogether more organised, modern and scientific than the sight that greeted him on arrival. Inspector George Keating’s private space was not the methodical hub of an organised crime-fighting force but a mass of manila files and papers, notes, diagrams, paper bags and old cups of tea that covered every conceivable space: desks, chairs and bookcases. The windows were lightly steamed from the heat of a two-bar electric fire, the ashtray was full and the desk-light had blown. The whole interior could easily have been mistaken for the rooms of a university don, an effect the inspector would not have intended.

Sidney often wondered whether he should say something about his friend’s demeanour. He was a man who was two inches shorter than he wanted to be, which was not his fault, and his suit needed pressing, which was. His tie was askew, his shoes were scuffed and his thinning sandy-coloured hair was not as familiar with a comb as it should have been. The demands of the job, three children at home and a wife who kept a tight control on the family finances were perhaps beginning to take their toll. There were times when Sidney was glad that he was still a bachelor.

He knew that his visit was something of an imposition and felt increasingly guilty, but his suspicions were on his conscience and he needed to share them. He reported what he had discovered and conveyed his concerns about the whisky.

‘Stephen Staunton’s wife specifically told me that he only drank Bushmills, which, as you may know, has a distinctive smoky, vanilla and bitter-toffee taste. However, the whisky in the office was of the more common or garden variety. Johnnie Walker, I suspect . . .’

‘Which leads you to conclude?’

‘That the whisky was placed on Stephen Staunton’s desk to give the illusion of Dutch courage but that he never drank any of it . . .’

‘Nor, I suppose you are about to tell me, did he put his revolver in his mouth and shoot himself?’

‘I seem to remember that there were no fingerprints on the revolver, Inspector?’

Sidney was not going to call his friend by his Christian name in the office.

‘None. We did check.’

‘And do you not think that is suspicious too?’

‘You’re suggesting the gun was wiped clean?’

‘It’s a possibility. Did you examine the decanter?’

Geordie Keating was now, if such a thing were possible, even more irritated. ‘Not especially closely. We didn’t really see the need. You’ll have to provide more evidence than this, Sidney. What you have told me just won’t do. Who would have killed Stephen Staunton, anyway? What was the motive? He didn’t have any enemies as far as we can make out. He was simply a hard-drinking and depressed solicitor from Northern Ireland. That is the beginning and the end of it.’

‘Yes, Inspector, only I don’t think that it is.’

‘Well, you’ll have to find more information from somewhere if you want me to do anything about it . . .’

‘But if I do so then you will investigate?’

‘If further evidence comes to light of course we will investigate; but in the meantime I’ve got a runaway teenager, a couple of burglaries and a nasty case of blackmail to contend with.’

‘Then I am sorry to have troubled you.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Sidney. If something comes up then of course we will investigate. You must know that we need more to go on than this. Jesus didn’t settle for one or two miracles, did he? He went on until people believed there was proof.’

‘I think we are quite a long way from Jesus, Inspector.’

Sidney left the police station, mounted his Raleigh Roadster and bicycled along Downing Street and past St Bene’t’s church. As he did so, he dreaded to think how Isaiah Shaw, the current vicar, would regard his current activities. Sidney could sense the man’s disapproval not only whenever they met but every time he passed his church. For Isaiah had let it be known that he disapproved of his colleague’s early rise through the ranks of the Church of England.

Sidney was forced to acknowledge that Isaiah had a point. He had, indeed, been fortunate. Following the untimely demise of his predecessor, the new Bishop of Ely, a Corpus man, had wanted to install his own domestic chaplain in Sidney’s place, and had therefore moved him swiftly onwards and upwards to the fortuitously vacant parish of Grantchester. This promotion to such a plum position at the relatively young age of thirty, followed by his acquisition of a canonry only two years later, was regarded with considerable jealousy by colleagues of a similar age who found Sidney’s effortless friendship with the senior clergy nothing less than an affront to their piety and hard work. There was more to being a priest, they argued, than their rival’s easy charm.

Consequently, Sidney felt that he had to prove himself not only to his parishioners, but also to his rivals. He had to earn his position as Vicar of Grantchester
after the fact
. This was not always easy, and so he took it upon himself to throw himself into as many situations as possible, doing whatever he could to bring a Christian perspective to everyday events.

He turned into Trumpington Street. There, even though he knew that it might ruin his appetite for lunch, he decided to stop off at Fitzbillies for a consoling Chelsea bun. He wondered what Mrs Maguire, his daily help, might have left for him back at the vicarage. On a Wednesday it was normally sausages. For some reason he didn’t fancy sausages, but then halfway through his bun he found that he didn’t feel like something sweet either. He was out of sorts.

He returned to his bicycle and set off down Mill Lane towards Grantchester Meadows. He hoped that the wind against his face might freshen him up a bit but nothing seemed to make any difference. A group of students in duffel coats and long college scarves were talking loudly on their way to lectures, walking off the pavement and into the road, paying no heed to passing cyclists. A sign writer was repainting the façade of the butcher’s shop and a window cleaner was at work above the new bank. Both of their ladders spanned the entire pavement, so that those of a superstitious nature, who did not want to walk under ladders, swayed on to the road and into the traffic. How removed all this was from the desperate world of suicide, or, more likely, murder, Sidney thought.

He passed Hildegard Staunton’s house and headed off across the fields to Grantchester. When he arrived home all was as he had expected. Mrs Maguire had done some of her famous tidying, moving papers that Sidney had carefully left in separate and organised stacks on the floor, and piling them all together on his desk so she could vacuum. There were sausages in a Pyrex dish in the kitchen and potatoes she had peeled and left in cold water. There was also a note:

‘More Vim please. And Harpic. Fish tomorrow. Not Friday.’

Sidney found it hard to address these concerns. He turned on the wireless and listened to the news. The Queen had just arrived in Canada on her Commonwealth tour. The Piltdown Man had been exposed as a hoax; and the Salvation Army were about to open a café in Korea. Sidney listened, ate his sausages and wondered what impact any of this information would have on the people of Cambridge.

As he cleared away his lunch and contemplated the possibility both of a cup of coffee and the second half of his Chelsea bun – there might even be a few quiet minutes in which he could listen to a bit of his beloved jazz music – there was a knock on the door.

Sidney opened it to find Miss Morrison standing on the step. ‘I hope I am not disturbing you,’ she apologised. She was wearing an elegant dark mackintosh and her hair was wet and windswept. ‘I saw the bus to Grantchester and just stepped on to it.’

Sidney had not noticed that it had been raining. ‘This is a surprise,’ he replied.

‘I hope a not unpleasant one.’

‘Of course not. Do come in . . .’

‘I won’t stay if you don’t mind, Canon Chambers. It’s only that I have something that I think you should see . . .’