Sidney Chambers and The Problem of Evil (The Grantchester Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF

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    ‘My friend, it may have escaped your notice but we have a murder victim – a man of God, like yourself – and now we have a suspect on the run. There’s enough to worry about without you casting any aspersions about Miss Randall’s motives for helping me. Perhaps you’re just jealous.’
    ‘For heaven’s sake, it’s not that at all . . .’ Sidney began but the Inspector had put down the receiver.
     
    Philip Agnew’s funeral took place in the middle of June. It was a hot, dry and airless day, as if the life had been sucked out of it. There was no breeze, simply the remorseless heat and the threaded hum of a town that stopped only briefly to acknowledge the arrival of the coffin and the shock of a murder.
    The congregation was filled with priests who had known, respected and loved the victim, and there was an uneasy solemnity to the occasion. Sidney took the service, assisted by both Leonard Graham and Patrick Harland, the lay-reader who had sat beside them in Coventry only a few weeks previously. Harland was a small thin man with quick-moving eyes, dressed in a cheap suit that had started to shine at the knees and elbows and whose pockets had slackened. He prepared for the service with meticulous attention to every detail of the liturgy. Sidney wondered why he had never become a priest.
    ‘He gave up his training after a year,’ Leonard explained. ‘I think he found the academic side a bit too taxing after the excitement of divine revelation. But he’s a good sort even if he is prone to certainty.’
    ‘We all know what an error that can be,’ Sidney replied.
    He decided that his sermon would reflect on Philip Agnew’s goodness in the face of evil. He would talk about how a God of Love could have allowed something so terrible to happen. One had to make a distinction between moral evil (that human beings originate) and natural evil such as disease, flood and earthquake. Sidney began to argue, as he had done before, that the problem of goodness was just as intractable as the problem of evil. In the words of the old Latin phrase: ‘ Si Deus est, unde malum? Si non est, unde bonum ?’ He was even tempted to leave his Latin untranslated but he knew that Mrs Maguire and some of the regulars would be in the congregation, and it would not be fair to show off his donnish capabilities in her presence. ‘If there is a God, why is there evil? If there is not, why is there good?’ The mystery of evil was complex upon the basis of a good God, but the mystery of goodness was, he suggested, impossible on the basis of no God.
    ‘That was very thought-provoking,’ Patrick Harland told him after the service. Sidney thought there was a slightly patronising tone to his voice but told himself not to be over-sensitive.
    ‘Of course it’s such a terrible loss. Agnew was a good man. Sometimes naive, of course . . .’
    ‘Goodness and naivety often go together, I find,’ Sidney replied. ‘The holiest men are often thought simple.’
    Leonard hung up his robe, glanced at both men and muttered something about Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot before leaving the vestry to meet some friends. Sidney, who wondered how keenly Harland might really be feeling about the loss of Agnew’s fellowship, took the opportunity to ask how often he helped out at the Round Church and whether he had seen the victim on the day he had died.
    ‘A few hours before. He was talking to one of those waifs and strays who always want money. So many of them do. I think it’s better to give them food. You know they’re only going to drink any cash. You might as well throw it all into the lavatory.’
    ‘Have you told the police this?’
    ‘I didn’t think that it would make much difference to their line of enquiry.’
    ‘They haven’t interviewed you?’
    ‘I have been away for a few days.’
    ‘You could at least have provided a description.’
    ‘There were so many of them. Mr Agnew was always entertaining strangers.’
    ‘I’m not