You get to the point where even acknowledging the fact becomes habitual. You forget that for younger generations, this time round is still new and urgent.
The abbot thought about this as he observed the prior dealing with things. That's what the prior did, and did well. He dealt, he managed, he handled. He made the decisions weaker minds shied away from, and was admired for it. Had it always been thus, from the very beginning? The Rule said that under the abbot there was a prior as second-in-command, the abbot caring for the spiritual needs of the chapter and the prior for the secular. But priors came and went, and the division was not always that clear-cut. Tension between abbot and prior was nothing new, either. So the abbot was not surprised when one of the brothers came to speak to him in private, soon after his conversation with the prior.
'Tell me everything,' he commanded.
'I don't know everything,' Brother Stephen complained, 'That is what I wished to talk to you about. Apparently, there is a threat to our secrecy. Sarah says so, but of course he will not trust me with it. What's he planning?'
'Are you sure you wish to know?' the abbot asked him.
'No!'
It took the abbot a moment to realise that this was not an answer to his question, but a protest against its implications.
'No, it can't be that bad,' Stephen said, 'Not again. Surely he won't.'
'I am afraid he will, if he believes it necessary.'
Oh, the weasel words of it. No one, hearing this conversation, could tell what, exactly, they suspected the prior of planning. But that was always the way of it. The prior had his responsibility, and it was not theirs.
'We must protect the younger ones,' Stephen said, 'They can't know of this, father.'
'I agree. But let's not be hasty. We may forestall this, if we are careful. We may do some dealing of our own.'
He outlined his plan, so much simpler and milder than the prior's machinations.
They can't know of this! had been that early brother's cry, too, when he learned the secrets of the abbey. Dear Lothar. He had been horrified by where his convictions led him, but yet with the courage to carry them through. He had dissembled before Charlemagne himself, he had been a master of words, never betraying his unbelief. For that was the creed of the Chapter of St Cloud, brought into being by the death of two young princes: there is no life but this life and we must strive to keep it. This had been a shocking thought in an age of almost universal belief, they had been heretics before heresy was even thought of. They had been alone so long in this conviction that the abbot still found it strange that these days, most people shared it. Strange, also, that most people instead of a promised life eternal just accepted the inevitability of death. It didn't follow at all, as Lothar had so clearly seen. If this life is all there is, then we must hold onto it above all else, and that had always been the chapter's aim. Heresy and hubris. Such sins they had been, in the eyes of the church. But there was no concept of sin in the Rule of the chapter, though there had always been, and always would be, responsibility. Lothar's words still survived, in their much-copied uncial and later Gothic guises, and now in scholarly editions. He was always cited together with Theodulf and Alcuin, whom he knew and exchanged views with at the emperor's bright court, a scholar among scholars. It was easy to miss what wasn't there: nowhere in his ornate Latin did Lothar refer to the life to come. Already the chapter's thoughts were only for this life, already the abbot's days were long. Lothar died, his brothers died, and that pain was never mitigated by a fantasy of heaven.
13
DC Dasgupta waved a file at him. 'Pathologist's report, sir.'
'Just in time, give it here.'
He was on his way to see his boss, but he quickly leafed through the file to see if there was anything exceptional. He needed to see the DCI in full possession of the facts. But there was little in it of interest. The cause of death was blindingly obvious, and that the victim had been in excellent health was now sadly irrelevant.
'Morning, ma'am,' he said, entering his superior's office.
'Good morning, Collins.' She continued typing for a moment. DCI Flynn was a small, exceptionally neat woman with expensively cut grey hair. Her first name was Bridget, and she was known among her colleagues as 'old Biddy', but never to her face. She wasn't old at all, he put her at forty-five or thereabouts, and Collins always thought they might have been friendly if they hadn't had a slightly prickly work relationship. Bridget Flynn liked order, and she thought her DI's methods unnecessarily chaotic. He could never convince her that, in his head, he had it all sorted. Investigations took a certain shape where the DCI got increasingly impatient at his complete lack of progress, right until the moment when he suddenly collared a suspect. She never believed that he, too, could only explain how he got there afterwards.
'Right, that's done,' she said, 'The Chief Super is on to me again about statistics. You'd think statistics were the be-all and end-all of Her Majesty's police force, to hear him talk.'
'I'm afraid the violent crime stats have gone up by one,' he said.
'As long as the solved murder cases also go up by one,' she said. 'Will they?'
'I hope so.'
'So what have we got?'
He rapidly filled her in on the Whiteside case. 'I've got a strange feeling about this,' he concluded, very glad that Sergeant Walter wasn't there to hear him say it. 'It doesn't fit any picture I've seen before.'
Not that DCI Flynn was inclined to give him much quarter.
'Collins, a long tradition of fictional detectives notwithstanding, we're not paying you to have feelings. This is a criminal investigation. Investigate.'
Yes, Ma'am.
'Ma'am? If I wanted to look at a file from years ago, the mid-eighties, where would I look?'
'Why would you want to do that?'
'Just something that caught my attention.' He had learned by now that she didn't always push it if he refused to answer. She gave him a slightly exasperated look. 'You look it up in the computer, like you would a recent file, note down the number and ask the desk sergeant for the keys to the cellar.'
Walter and Dasgupta were questioning the people on Jim's list, to see if any of them were connected to the victim. Sergeant Pardoe was interviewing neighbours. Holmes was in the Hollow Crown, talking to Whiteside's colleagues. Collins spent the entire afternoon going through the events of last Sunday with the boy's parents, hoping to find a clue, a chink in the story, something that did not fit. They returned to the station one by one, filed their statements, filled in reports.
'The landlord nearly socked me one, when I suggested Sean might have been on the bend,' Sally said.
'He gets violent, does he?' Dasgupta asked.
'I said 'nearly'. Anyway, he didn't pull a gun on me.'
'And was he on the bend?'
'I don't think so. He seems to have been a pretty straight bloke.'
'Apart from the drugs.'
'Yeah, but if we locked up every student who got some pills for himself and his friends, we might as
