Missing Joseph

  She was saying, “You see, I don’t think I want to do conventional studio portraits. I mean, I don’t want people coming in and posing for their anniversary snaps. I wouldn’t mind being called out to do something special, but largely I think I want to work on the street and in public places. I want to find interesting faces, and let the art grow from there,” when Ben Wragg announced from the rear door of the inn that Inspector Lynley was wanting to speak to Mr. St. James.

  The result of that conversation—Lynley shouting over the noise of some sort of roadwork that appeared to call for minor explosives—was a drive to the cathedral at Bradford.

  “We’re looking for a connection between them,” Lynley had said. “Perhaps the bishop can provide it.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ve an appointment with Clitheroe CID. After that, the forensic pathologist. It’s formality mostly, but it’s got to be done.”

  “You saw Mrs. Spence?”

  “The daughter as well.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know. I’m uneasy. I’ve not much doubt that the Spence woman did it and knew what she was doing. I’ve plenty of doubt it was conventional murder. We need to know more about Sage. We need to unearth the reason he left Cornwall.”

  “Are you on to something?”

  He heard Lynley sigh. “In this case, I hope not, St. James.”

  Thus, with Deborah at the wheel of their hired car and a phone call made to ensure their reception, they drove the considerable distance to Bradford, skirting Pendle Hill and swinging to the north of Keighley Moor.

  The secretary to the Lord Bishop of Bradford admitted them into the official residence not far from the fifteenth-century cathedral that was the seat of his ministry. He was a toothy young man who carried a maroon leather diary under one arm and continually riffled through its gold-edged pages as if to remind them how limited was the bishop’s time and how fortunate were they that a half-hour had been carved out for them. He led the way not into a study, library, or conference room, but through the wood-panelled residence to a rear stairway that descended to a small, personal gym. In addition to a wall-size mirror, the room contained an exercise bike, a rowing machine, and a complicated contraption for lifting weights. It also contained Robert Glennaven, Bishop of Bradford, who was occupied with pushing, shoving, climbing, and otherwise tormenting his body on a fourth machine that consisted of moving stairs and rods.

  “My Lord Bishop,” the secretary said. He made the introductions, snapped a turn on his heel, and went to sit in a straight-backed chair by the foot of the stairs. He folded his hands over the diary—now opened meaningfully to the appropriate page—took his watch off his wrist and balanced it on his knee, and placed his narrow feet flat on the floor.

  Glennaven nodded at them brusquely and wiped a rag across the top of his sweat-sheened bald head. He was wearing the trousers to a grey sweat suit along with a faded black T-shirt on which TENTH UNICEF JOG-A-THON was printed above the date 4 May. Both trousers and shirt were mottled by rings and streaks of perspiration.

  “This is His Grace’s exercise time,” the secretary announced unnecessarily. “He has another appointment in an hour, and he’ll need an opportunity to shower prior to that. If you’ll be so good as to keep it in mind.”

  There were no other seats in the room aside from those provided by the equipment. St. James wondered how many other unexpected or unwanted guests were encouraged to limit their visits to the bishop by having to conduct them standing up.

  “Heart,” Glennaven said, jabbing his thumb to his chest before he adjusted a dial on the stair machine. He puffed and grimaced as he spoke, no exercise enthusiast but a man without options. “I’ve another quarter of an hour. Sorry. Can’t let up or the benefits diminish. So the cardiologist tells me. Sometimes I think he has profit sharing going with the sadists who create these infernal machines.” He pumped, lunged, and continued to sweat. “According to the deacon”—with a tilt of his head to indicate his secretary—“Scotland Yard wants information in the usual fashion of people wanting something in this new age. By yesterday, if possible.”

  “True enough,” St. James said.

  “Don’t know that I can tell you anything useful. Dominic here”—another head tilt towards the stairs—”could probably tell you more. He attended the inquest.”

  “At your request, I take it.”

  The bishop nodded. He grunted with the effort of addressing the additional tension he’d added to the machine. The veins became swollen on his forehead and arms.

  “Is that your usual procedure, sending someone to an inquest?”

  He shook his head. “Never had one of my priests poisoned before. I had no procedure.”

  “Would you do it again if another priest died under questionable circumstances?”

  “Depends on the priest. If he was like Sage, yes.”

  Glennaven’s introduction of the topic made St. James’ job easier. He celebrated this fact by taking a seat on the bench of the weight machine. Deborah went to the exercise bike and made it her perch. At their movement, Dominic looked disapprovingly at the bishop. The best-laid plans gone awry, his expression said. He tapped the face of his watch as if to make sure it was still in working order.

  “You mean a man likely to be deliberately poisoned,” St. James said.

  “We want priests who are dedicated to their ministry,” the bishop said between grunts, “especially in parishes where the temporal rewards are minimal at best. But zeal has its negatives. People find it offensive. Zealots hold up mirrors and ask people to look at their own reflections.”

  “Sage was a zealot?”

  “In some eyes.”

  “In yours?”

  “Yes. But not offensively so. I’ve a high tolerance for religious activism. Even when it’s not politically sound. He was a decent sort. He had a good mind. He wanted to use it. Still, zeal causes problems. So I sent Dominic to the inquest.”

  “I’ve been given to understand that you were satisfied by what you heard,” St. James said to the deacon.

  “Nothing that was recorded by the adjudicating party indicated Mr. Sage’s ministry to be wanting in any way.” The deacon’s monotone, a demonstration of hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil, and step-on-no-toes, no doubt served him well in the political-religious arena in which he worked. It did little to add to their knowledge, however.

  “As to Mr. Sage himself?” St. James asked.

  The deacon ran his tongue over his protruding teeth and picked a piece of lint from the lapel of his black suit jacket. “Yes?”

  “Was he himself wanting?”

  “As far as the parish was concerned, and from the information I was able to gather from my attendance at the inquest—”

  “I mean in your eyes. Was he wanting? You must have known him as well as heard about him at the inquest.”

  “We none of us are capable of achieving perfection,” was the deacon’s prim response.

  “Actually, non sequiturs aren’t of much help in examining an untimely death,” St. James said.

  The deacon’s neck seemed to lengthen as he lifted his chin. “If you’re hoping for more—perhaps something detrimental—then I must tell you I am not in the habit of sitting in judgement upon fellow clerics.”

  The bishop chuckled. “What balderdash, Dominic. Most days you sit in judgement like St. Peter himself. Tell the man what you know.”

  “Your Grace—”

  “Dominic, you gossip like a ten-year-old schoolgirl. Always have done. Now, stop equivocating before I climb off this damnable machine and box your bloody ears. Pardon me, dear madam,” to Deborah who smiled.

  The deacon looked as if he smelled something unpleasant but had just been told to pretend it was roses. “All right,” he said. “It seemed to me that Mr. Sage had a rather narrow field of vision. His every reference point was specifically biblical.”

  “I shouldn’t think that a limitation in a priest,” St. James noted.

/>   “It is perhaps the most serious limitation a priest can take with him into his ministry. A strict interpretation of and consequent adherence to the Bible can be perfectly blinding, not to mention severely alienating to the very flock whose membership one might be trying to increase. We are not Puritans, Mr. St. James. We do not harangue from the pulpit any longer. Nor do we encourage religious devotion based upon fear.”

  “Nothing we’ve heard about Sage indicates that he was doing that either.”

  “Not yet in Winslough, perhaps. But our last meeting with him here in Bradford certainly stands as monumental evidence of the direction in which he was determined to head. There was trouble brewing all round that man. One sensed it was just a matter of time before it came to a boil.”

  “Trouble? Between Sage and the parish? Or a member of the parish? Do you know something specific?”

  “For someone who’d spent years in the ministry, he had no essential grasp of the concrete problems faced by his parishioners or anyone else. Example: He took part in a conference on marriage and the family not a month before he died and while a professional—a psychologist, mind you, here in Bradford—attempted to give our brothers some guidance on how to deal with parishioners having marital problems, Mr. Sage wanted to engage in a discussion of the woman taken in adultery.”

  “The woman…?”

  “John, chapter eight,” the bishop said. “‘And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery…’ etcetera, etcetera. You know the story: Feel free to throw stones, if you’ve not sinned yourself.”

  The deacon continued as if the bishop hadn’t spoken. “There we were in the middle of discussing the best approach to take with a couple whose ability to communicate is clouded by the need to control each other, and Sage wanted to talk about what was moral versus what was right. Because the laws of the Hebrews declared it to be so, it was moral to stone this woman, he said. But was it necessarily right? And oughtn’t that be what we explore in our conferences together, brothers: the dilemma we face between that which is moral in the eyes of our society and that which is right in the eyes of God? It was all perfect rubbish. He didn’t want to talk about anything concrete because he lacked the ability to do so. If he could keep our heads up in the air and fill up our time with nebulous discussions, his own weaknesses as a priest—not to mention his deficiencies as a man—might never be revealed.” In conclusion, the deacon waved his hand in front of his face as if whisking away a pesky fly. He gave a derisive tut. “The woman taken in adultery. Should we or shouldn’t we stone sinners in the market-place. My God. What drivel. This is the twentieth century. Nearly the twenty-first.”

  “Dominic always has his fingers on the pulse of the obvious,” the bishop noted. The deacon looked miffed.

  “You disagree with his assessment of Mr. Sage?”

  “No. It’s accurate. Unfortunate, but true. His zealotry had a distinctly biblical flavour. And frankly, that’s off-putting, even for clerics.”

  The deacon bowed his head briefly in humble acceptance of the bishop’s laconic approbation.

  Glennaven continued to pump away on the stair machine, adding ever more to the increasing stains of sweat on his clothes. It clicked and whirred. The bishop panted. St. James thought about the oddity of religion.

  All forms of Christianity sprang from the same source, the life and words of the Nazarene. Yet the ways of celebrating that life and those words seemed as infinite in variety as the individuals who were the celebrants. While St. James recognised the fact that tempers could flare and dislikes could brew over interpretations and styles of worship, it seemed more likely that a priest whose mode of devotion irritated parishioners would be replaced rather than eliminated. St. John Townley-Young may have found Mr. Sage too low church for his taste. The deacon may have found him too fundamental. The parish may have been irked by his passion. But none of these seemed significant enough reasons to murder him. The truth had to lie in another direction. Biblical zealotry did not appear to be the connection that Lynley was hoping to unearth between killer and victim.

  “He came to you from Cornwall, as I understand it,” St. James said.

  “He did.” The bishop used the rag to scour his face and to sponge the sweat from his neck. “Nearly twenty years there. Round three months here. Part of it with me whilst he went on his interviews. The rest in Winslough.”

  “Is that the ordinary procedure, to have a priest stay here with you during the interview process?”

  “Special case,” Glennaven said.

  “Why?”

  “A favour to Ludlow.”

  St. James frowned. “The town?”

  “Michael Ludlow,” Dominic clarified. “Bishop of Truro. He asked His Grace to see to it that Mr. Sage was…” The deacon made much of sifting through the chaff of his thoughts for a wheat-like euphemism. “He felt Mr. Sage needed a change of environment. He thought a new location might increase his chance of success.”

  “I had no idea a bishop might be so involved in the work of an individual cleric. Is that typical?”

  “In the work of this cleric, yes.” A buzzer sounded from the stair machine. Glennaven said, “Saints be praised,” and reached for a knob that he turned anticlockwise. He slowed his pace for a cool-down period. His breathing began to return to normal. “Robin Sage was Michael Ludlow’s archdeacon originally,” he said. “He’d spent the first seven years of his ministry climbing to that position. He was only thirty-two when he received the appointment. He was an unqualified success. He made carpe diem his personal watchword.”

  “That doesn’t sound at all like the man from Winslough,” Deborah murmured.

  Glennaven acknowledged her point with a nod. “He made himself indispensable to Michael. He served on committees, involved himself in political action—”

  “Church-approved political action,” Dominic added.

  “He lectured at theological colleges. He raised thousands of pounds for the maintenance of the cathedral and for the local churches. And he was fully capable of mingling without either effort or discomfort in any level of society.”

  “A jewel. A real catch, in other words,” Dominic said. He didn’t seem overly pleased with the thought.

  “It’s odd to think a man like that would suddenly be satisfied, living the life of a village cleric,” St. James said.

  “That was Michael’s thought exactly. He hated to lose him, but he let him go. It was Sage’s request. He went to Boscastle for his first posting.”

  “Why?”

  The bishop wiped his hands on the rag and folded it. “Perhaps he’d been to the village on holiday.”

  “But why the sudden change? Why the desire to go from a position of power and influence to one of relative obscurity? That’s hardly the norm. Even for a priest, I dare say.”

  “He’d travelled on a personal road to Damascus a short time before, evidently. He’d lost his wife.”

  “His wife?”

  “Killed in a boating accident. According to Michael, he was never the same afterwards. He saw her death as a punishment from God for his temporal interests, and he decided to eschew them.”

  St. James looked at Deborah across the room. He could tell she was thinking his very same thought. They’d all of them made an uninformed assumption based upon limited information. They had assumed the vicar hadn’t been married because no one in Winslough had mentioned a wife. He could see from Deborah’s thoughtful expression that she was reflecting upon the day in November when she’d had her only conversation with the man.

  “So I assume that his passion for success was replaced with a passion to make up for his past in some way,” St. James said to the bishop.

  “But the problem was that the latter passion didn’t translate as well as the former had. He went through nine placements.”

  “In what period of time?”

  The bishop looked at his secretary. “Some ten to fifteen years, wasn’t it?” Dominic nodded.

&
nbsp; “With no success anywhere? A man with his talents?”

  “As I said, the passion didn’t translate well. He became the zealot we spoke of earlier, vehement about everything from the decline in church attendance to what he called the secularisation of the clergy. He lived the Sermon on the Mount, and he wasn’t accepting of a fellow clergyman or even a parishioner who failed to do the same. If that wasn’t enough to cause him problems, he firmly believed that God shows His will through what happens to people in their lives. Frankly, that’s a difficult draught of medicine to swallow if you’re the victim of a senseless tragedy.”

  “Which he himself was.”

  “And which he believed to be his just deserts.”

  “‘I was self-centred,’ he’d say,” the deacon intoned. “‘I cared only for my own need for glory. God’s hand moved to change me. You can change as well.’”

  “Unfortunately, true though his words may have been, they didn’t constitute a recipe for success,” the bishop said.

  “And when you heard that he was dead, did you think there was a connection?”

  “I couldn’t avoid considering it,” the bishop replied. “That’s why Dominic went to the inquest.”

  “The man had inner demons,” Dominic said. “He chose to wrestle them in a public forum. The only way he could make expiation for his own worldliness was to castigate everyone he met for theirs. Is that a motive for murder?” He snapped closed the bishop’s appointment diary. It was clear that their interview was at an end. “I suppose it depends upon how one reacts when confronted with a man who seemed to feel that his was the only correct way to live.”