A Turbulent Priest Read online

  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.”

  Again that pause before she replied. Lucy found herself wishing that all their interviewees would give such thought to their words before they spoke. Percy Peach, on the other hand, much preferred people to speak on impulse, because they gave away so much more of themselves that way. But then Mrs MacMullen was not one of the suspects Percy was most at home with but an innocent, intelligent woman, genuinely helping them with an enquiry. Eventually she said, “I wouldn’t quarrel with any of that. Martha’s a good woman, and she saw more of John Bickerstaffe than any of us. But priests are men like other men, with human weaknesses as well as virtues.”

  Peach, who still found it odd to hear people using the first names of priests, said, “I can’t give you the detail of what Bishop Hogan told us about the situation. But it may help you to know that he indicated that Father Bickerstaffe was to be relieved of his duties as Parish Priest of the Sacred Heart.”

  “Yes. I suppose that was inevitable. I’m sorry it had come to that. He was a good man in so many ways. But if a man can’t be trusted with children, you can’t have him anywhere around them. Their only defence is the one we can give them.”

  They knew with these phrases not only that she knew about the priest’s activities, but that she had defended the children in her school herself, against other abuses than his. Despite her comfortable appearance, Percy knew in that moment that he would not have cared to be brought into this room as an erring parent. He said, “Were there children in your school who suffered from John Bickerstaffe’s actions?”

  “No. Not while they were in my school. These were older children, ex-pupils of this school — aged twelve to fourteen, I think.” She gave the impression that whoever had dared anything of the sort with children in her school would have had her to reckon with very quickly. But it was evident that Mrs MacMullen was in touch with both her pupils and the community around them; clearly not much would have escaped her.

  “Would you agree that the abuses which went on centred around the youth club in the church hall?”

  Her eyes strayed automatically to the building he mentioned. The high, windowless gable of the rear side of the hall was just visible through her window, beyond the stone wall which encircled the primary-school playground. “Yes, it seems so. The club kept a lot of children off the streets, and I like to think Father Bickerstaffe started it without any evil intentions in mind — but I don’t suppose that matters now.”

  “No. We’re not here to judge him about that, but to try to find who killed him. But what does matter is that we have full details of what was going on. That means which children were abused, and anything you know of their parents’ reactions when they discovered what was happening.”

  There was the now familiar pause whilst she weighed the question and what her answer would be. Then she said, “Yes, I see that. I don’t know any of the details of the assaults: as they were on former pupils of mine, no
t current ones, I didn’t need details. But I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  She gave them a series of names, a sad register of a man’s sins against those least fitted to cope with his attentions. Four were the names they had collected on the previous day from their visit to the Bishop’s residence. But their visit to the Sacred Heart RC Primary School was not wasted. Mrs MacMullen added a fifth name, which stopped them in their tracks for a moment. It was the name not of an abused child, but of an adult who had recently been in contact with John Bickerstaffe.

  It was a name which was of immediate interest to DI Percy Peach, who knew it from another context altogether.

  ***

  “Keep me fully briefed,” Superintendent Tucker had ordered. As the man nominally in charge of the case, he couldn’t afford not to be aware of developments. And Percy Peach was making the most of the command to relay his findings.

  “We saw the Bishop yesterday, sir. Right nest of vice being built under our noses in Brunton, apparently. Lucy Blake got it out of them; once she flashed a thigh at them, they were putty in her hands.” He paused to let this vision of a Lancashire Mata Hari dance into the dull brain of his superior officer. “I thought of bringing Bishop Hogan in for a bit of third degree — perhaps have him photographed with you in his robes at the station entry, I thought — but he seemed to have told us everything by the time we left.”

  Tucker was sure his Inspector was exaggerating. But he wasn’t sure how much. He tried to force authority into his voice. “I told you to go easy. It’s a delicate area. We don’t want to be accused of victimising the Catholic community.”

  “No, sir. But they’re a pretty thick lot, the Micks. Probably won’t have the sense to take offence.”

  “Peach, that’s racialist! Anyway, you’re out of date. Only a minority of the Roman Catholic population of Lancashire are Irish nowadays.”