Death in Holy Orders Read Online Free PDF Page B

And it isn’t unusual. I know a case. The adopted child always feels that he’s in the family under false pretences.”
    The words had been spoken with barely controlled vehemence. There was a moment’s silence, then Dalgliesh said, “That may account for it, that or guilt. He couldn’t love the boy when he was alive, can’t even grieve for him now he’s dead, but he can see that he gets justice.”
    Harkness turned and said brusquely, “What use is justice to the dead? Better to concentrate on justice for the living. But you’re probably right. Anyway, do what you can. I’ll put the Commissioner in the picture.”
    He and Dalgliesh had been on Christian-name terms for eight years, yet he spoke as if he were dismissing a sergeant.

3
    T he file for the meeting with the Home Secretary was ready on his desk, with the annexes tabbed; his PA, as always, had been efficient. As he put the papers in his briefcase and went down in the lift, Dalgliesh freed his mind from the preoccupations of the day and let it range free on the windswept coast of Ballard’s Mere.
    So he was going back at last. Why, he wondered, hadn’t he returned before? His aunt had lived on the coast of East Anglia, at first in her cottage and then in the converted mill, and on his visits he could easily have made the journey to St. Anselm’s. Had it been an instinctive reluctance to court disappointment, the knowledge that one returns to a well-loved place always under judgement, burdened by the sad accretion of the years? And he would return as a stranger. Father Martin had been on the staff when he last visited but must have retired long ago; he would be eighty by now. He would bring to St. Anselm’s only unshared memories. And he would come uninvited and as a police officer to reopen, with little justification, a case that must have caused the staff at St. Anselm’s distress and embarrassment and which they had hoped to put behind them. But now he was returning, and he found that the prospect was suddenly pleasant.
    He walked, unheeding the undistinguished bureaucratic half-mile between Broadway and Parliament Square, but his mind inhabited a quieter, less frenetic scene: the sandy, friable cliffs spilling onto a beach pitted with rain, the oak groynes half demolished by centuries of tides but still withstanding the sea’s onslaughts, the grit road which had once run a mile inland but was now perilously close to the cliff edge. And St. Anselm’sitself, the two crumbling Tudor towers flanking the front courtyard, the iron-bounded oak door and, to the rear of the great brick-and-stone Victorian mansion, the delicate cloisters enclosing the west court, the northerly one leading directly to the medieval church which serves the community as its chapel. He remembered that the students had worn cassocks when they were in college and brown worsted cloaks with hoods as a protection against the wind, never absent from that coast. He saw them, now surpliced for Evensong, filing into the church stalls, smelled the incense-scented air, saw the altar, with more candles than his Anglican father would have thought proper, and above the altar the framed painting by Rogier van der Weyden of the Holy Family. Would that still be there? And was that other possession, more secret, more mysterious and more jealously guarded, still hidden in the college, the Anselm papyrus?
    He had spent only three summer holidays at the college. His father had exchanged ministries with a priest from a difficult inner-city parish to give him at least a change of scene and tempo. Dalgliesh’s parents had been unwilling to immure him in an industrial city for most of the summer holiday and he had been invited to stay on at the rectory with the newcomers. But the news that the Reverend Cuthbert Simpson and his wife had four children under the age of eight, including seven-year-old twins, had turned him against the idea; even at fourteen he had longed for privacy during the long holiday.