The Chorister at the Abbey (25 page)

Edwin nodded slowly. He was embarrassed, Alex thought. He was almost growling when he said: ‘Actually, she’d like to meet you all. It would be great if you could invite Marilyn here, to The Briars. She can only come on Mothering Sunday, two weeks on Sunday. I could pick her up from the station and bring her over. Would that be OK?’

40

O how amiable are thy dwellings, thou Lord of hosts!
Psalm 84:1

February and March are in some ways the hardest months to bear in the North Country. Winter can be cruel but you know where you are. In this no man’s land of the seasons, the crisp frosts and even the occasional drama of snow are over, followed by endless grey rain.

There was mud all over The Briars. Even when Jake and Molly left their shoes by the front door they seemed to walk damp and mire through the hall. The carpet, which had been there for many years, was now an indeterminate shade of porridge colour with suspicious blobs on it. The back door, which led into the kitchen, seemed perpetually surrounded by discarded boots and children’s coats, some of which ended up on the floor and impeded anyone getting in. Mary’s once-bright copper pans hanging on the wall were now dingy, and Suzy’s attempts to come to terms with the stove had led to smoky patches up the walls. Robert was competent at basic DIY, but he could hardly be described as keen, nor would he be rushed by anyone. After a howling draught threatened to give them pneumonia, he finally got round to mending the smashed window pane in the cold little downstairs lavatory. It had been broken by Jake’s football. In fairness, one Saturday Robert painted the walls in Molly’s room a ghastly fuchsia pink which thrilled her and which Suzy thought was way above the call of duty, though she spotted that he hadn’t moved the wardrobe but just left that corner magnolia. Molly didn’t notice – she thought it was ‘supercool’.

Suzy was working extra shifts now as the production schedule for
Geordies in Space
hotted up. She had tentatively suggested to Robert that they get a cleaner for a while, knowing that Mary had always done all the housework herself. To her surprise Robert agreed, and even put an enquiry email out at the college, which resulted in Wanda Wisley’s ‘daily’ fitting them in for a couple of weeks.

‘I’m pretty busy at their place,’ she said. ‘That gadgee’s a pain, with his legs in plaster. He keeps roaring at me not to touch things, and then roaring at me when I leave ’em alone. And she’s pretty peaky all the time. Tummy bug, or so she says.’

This season is truly dreary, Suzy thought. We shouldn’t have to give up things for Lent – Lent gives up on us! A few days after their last meeting with Edwin and Alex, there was a bout of particularly nasty weather, with wind howling down from the fells and lashing rain. Robert discovered that the storm had beaten down the door on the old garage at the side of the house, and he asked Edwin to come over at the weekend and help him and Jake board it up. Alex came with him and, while the two men and the boy struggled with chipboard and hammers, unlikely workmen, Alex and Suzy made coffee.

‘Have you thought any more about the murder?’ Suzy asked.

‘Not really. I don’t suppose there’s much we can do. It will be up to Marilyn, I suppose, to try and get the thing looked into.’

‘How do you feel about meeting her?’

‘Strange. I’m trying not to think about it. Last Friday, Edwin and I went to hear the
St Matthew Passion
in Keswick and on Friday we’re going over to Newcastle again. We get on very well. But I guess everything’s on hold until the famous Marilyn has been and gone.’

‘Odd that she can only come on Mothering Sunday. Is she seeing her family?’

‘The whole business of Marilyn is odd, if you ask me. I get the impression from Edwin that she has nothing to do with her mother any more, so why this Mother’s Day visit is so vital I don’t know!’

‘And you can’t ask?’

‘Absolutely not. Edwin seems to have made some sort of promise he won’t break. Talking about Marilyn is strictly off the agenda.’

On the Wednesday of the following week, Suzy met Lynn Clifford at McCrea’s.

‘How’s Chloe?’ she asked.

‘Oh, much the same,’ said Lynn brightly. But there was a tic at the corner of her eye, and her smile was strained. Suzy took a deep breath.

‘Look, Lynn, I’ve no idea myself about teenage girls. Not yet. But I’ve seen Chloe in town and she’s not dressing like the other girls. She looks rather, well, odd. And she’s very keen on the Bible study course.’

Lynn smiled softly. ‘Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, I’m not knocking what you and Neil do. But isn’t Chloe, well, a bit extreme? She’s very intense about it, isn’t she? I mean, aren’t you just the tiniest bit worried?’

To Suzy’s horror Lynn’s face crumpled as if she was going to burst into tears, but she recovered herself. ‘Suzy, I have faith in God. Neil and I realize that Chloe is going through an odd phase. But we believe that if we pray about it, we’ll be given understanding.’

‘Yes, well, I often think that if God had meant us just to pray about things he wouldn’t have given us legs!’

Lynn laughed. ‘But in this case, Suzy, I don’t know what else we can do! I’m just grateful that Chloe came home and didn’t go through all this in Leeds, away from us. And I’m there a lot more for her. She may not realize it, but I’m ready when she is. She’ll come round, I know she will.’

I hope so, Suzy thought.

At what was now officially the Lent Course at Fellside Fellowship the next evening, Suzy sat with Lynn and Alex, while Chloe was in the front row looking devotedly at Paul and Jenny. Suzy noticed that, this week, Jenny had a prettier version of Chloe’s shapeless headscarf. Jenny’s cropped wavy hair poked out from under it in short pretty curls, and she had chosen a striking blue colour. These scarves must be a new fashion, Suzy thought. She made a mental note to catch up with the latest celebrity trends. Maybe we’re all supposed to be into Soviet chic, she thought.

She found that she was looking round the room, rather than concentrating on Jenny’s analysis of Psalm 71. It was tedious stuff, but Jenny actually smiled once or twice and glanced adoringly at her husband. The only other new development was that Mark Wilson was off on a Norbridge Council away-day, and Freddie Fabrikant had been brought to the meeting by Wanda, who had pushed his wheelchair in, taken one look at the assembled company, and disappeared faster than you could say Dimitri Shostakovich.

Could Freddie have been involved in Morris’s murder? He was certainly big enough to smack somebody effectively, and he might not know his own strength. But wasn’t Paul a more likely candidate? There was something rather neurotic about him, Suzy thought, though she knew that these days she was always suspicious of clergymen. She thought they were all inclined to be excessive and egotistical, while she expected women priests to show common sense and understanding. It was irrational, Suzy knew, but not entirely. The few women priests she had known had all been sensible, kindly and inclusive, whereas the men . . . Although she had to concede that Neil Clifford seemed OK.

But what about women murderers? It could have been a lucky blow which finished off Morris. Jenny certainly seemed passionate enough to take things to extremes. She was coldly distant with Suzy and had a resentful manner when dealing with other women. Maybe she disliked her husband’s being wrapped up in genealogical research and had taken this out on Morris. Unlikely, though. Pat Johnstone was at the Bible study meeting, too and, from what Alex had said, Pat was calculating enough to have a go at anyone who stood in her way. Even Alex could have done the murder. She was strong enough and she had no alibi either. She had mentioned how much she disliked Morris Little for his nasty remarks about her drinking.

‘And now for our final prayer,’ Paul said, and Suzy snapped back from her imaginings.

Then they filtered out into the night, and she drove home to find that some of the work Robert had done on the garage door had collapsed. There was muck all over the hall floor, which he had walked in after going outside to do emergency repairs.

The Briars seemed rather sad, she thought. One of the light bulbs had gone in the hall and the old mahogany staircase looked shadowy and gloomy as a result. The living room, where they’d had so many lovely fires in the depths of winter, now had a blind black dusty socket where the glowing flames should be, and smelt of cold ash. She noticed how grey the paintwork looked. And the cat had trodden dirty little paw-prints over the cream easy chair, one of the few nice things she had brought from her own home.

Poor house! she thought. The Briars was a lovely place but it certainly needed some attention. She thought again about Robert’s suggestion that they should find something of their own. If they were going to sell it they would need to do some work. And it made sense. But somehow she didn’t feel the enthusiasm for the idea that she would have expected.

Robert was in the kitchen putting his tools away. ‘Bloody door!’ he said.

Suzy laughed. It was nice to hear Robert getting cross, something he usually left to her. She went over to him and gave him a hug.

* * *

A few evenings later, Alex couldn’t sleep. She got up at one o’clock in the morning and pushed her feet into her slippers. She pattered next door into her kitchen which, like her bedroom, had a view over the fell to where it drooped into the quarry.

She made a cup of tea and stood looking out of the window. The back of the house was bleak. There was nothing between it and Norbridge. The bungalow stood alone on the ridge.

As Alex watched, she saw something which at first she couldn’t place and then she realized it was only a light, on the hill to her left. Was it poachers? she wondered. Or a car? But there was only one source and it wasn’t moving. She blinked, and then it had gone. Funny, she thought. It looked as if it was coming from the old convent. But then again, it might have been her imagination. Or a spaceship coming to turn them all into aliens. Alex was getting tired of constant speculation. The Little murder just went round and round in circles in her head. Like the others, she felt the Frosts might have been wrongly accused, but Alex had a tougher attitude. The boys had done little to help themselves and by confessing, at least to start with, they had given the police every reason to haul them in.

The Frosts were typical of a lot of families, she thought. A teenage unmarried mother from a bad background has one child and then teams up with a series of other men to produce a drug-ridden brood. Except that there was some confusion about how many siblings the lovely Marilyn actually had. She and Edwin had an unspoken moratorium on discussing the matter in detail, and, though she picked up the odd detail, she still hadn’t quite worked out who Marilyn’s sisters were.

Though she didn’t want to do so, she found herself thinking about it again. It was odd that Marilyn hadn’t visited her brothers earlier. What had Edwin said? – that she hadn’t been allowed to. But that was nonsense, wasn’t it? The Frost boys weren’t in solitary confinement!

And why was Marilyn so loath to come back to Norbridge? If
my
sister were remanded in custody you wouldn’t be able to keep me away, Alex thought, but then the very idea of fifty-year-old Chris being in trouble with the police was really quite funny. Unless you knew Pat Johnstone. Now there was an older woman who was capable of crime. Alex shuddered.

She left the window and the cold dark stretch of countryside beyond, and went back to the snugness of her bedroom. She tried reading for a while, but all her thoughts and fears about Marilyn Frost went round in her head.

And then a thought dropped into her brain from nowhere. She lay stock still. No, don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. She shut her eyes and willed herself to sleep.

Edwin usually found this part of the year unbearable. He was deeply frustrated about not being able to find out more about Quaile Woods’ music, but agreed with Alex that they had to wait. If the police started investigating again, maybe more information about Morris’s research would come out. Or maybe Robert would find out more from Norma.

The weather was windy and wet, but he and Alex went to a few really good concerts. And one day they both sneaked away and had a wonderful walk around Derwentwater, with tea at Watendlath.

He spent extra evenings practising with Tom Firth, whose voice was developing a rich powerful timbre despite his age. Tom, so gauche and non-committal in speech, was gifted in song.

And he visited Freddie several times. Each time, he got the impression that Freddie wanted to unburden himself about something. And he was also aware of the big man’s pent-up power. Wanda would open the front door and look at Edwin as if he had emerged from under a stone; then she would take herself off upstairs from where he could hear the sound of her computer keyboard clacking. He knew she was working on some learned article.

He also found time to visit his solicitor friend and ask him about the convent. ‘Oh, that’s a well-known local mess,’ his friend said genially. ‘The nuns were a one-off order, totally independent. There were quite a few like that in the nineteenth century, most of them in the south of England. This order lasted longer than most because they mainly recruited local women and concentrated their efforts on the slums in Norbridge and the Fellside quarry workers and miners.’

‘That’s quite a geographical spread!’

‘Before they had a car, they had a house in Chapterhouse where they would stay overnight, and put up the fallen women they rescued. But that was a little terraced place which was sold about twenty years ago. They had the deeds to that one. But they never had any deeds to the big convent. They claimed old Cleaverthorpe had given it to his daughter, but there’s no record of it.’

‘What do the Cleaverthorpes say?’

‘Not much. Old Cleaverthorpe isn’t very interested. Rumour has it that the Cleaverthorpes gave it to someone who held it on the nuns’ behalf anyway. There was no need for title deeds because it was built by Cleaverthorpe on Cleaverthorpe land. On top of that, women weren’t considered to be up to property owning, especially if they were supposed to be praying and doing good works!’ The solicitor laughed. ‘I wish my wife would try it instead of shopping. Anyway, the convent isn’t worth much, especially if the local history people push for it to be listed and what-have-you, though I gather that’s off the boil now. It would be much more desirable to developers if it could be demolished or rebuilt.’