The Chorister at the Abbey Page 4

  That was the dream family Christmas I wanted, thought Robert. But already he suspected it had been spoilt. Hurrying into the rain, through a sobering blast from the icy wind, he opened the car door, sank into his seat, and started the engine.

  For Alex Gibson the first few jumbled minutes after their arrival at Uplands rectory seemed to be happening to someone else. She was vaguely aware that Lynn Clifford had hurried out into the night. Then Edwin Armstrong’s mobile rang. It was his boss, she realized, the dreaded Wanda Wisley, calling again for more information. As soon as he got rid of her, Edwin started phoning someone else, a friend of his, asking him to come over straight away.

  I’m a non-person, Alex thought again. Things are being arranged round me. But this time it was worse than the usual self-pity. With a cold frisson that cut through the shock and brought her back to earth, she suddenly realized who Edwin had been calling.

  ‘Listen, Alex,’ Edwin was speaking to her slowly and carefully as if she was a child. ‘Wanda Wisley wants me to go back to Norbridge to see the Head of Security at the college for her. A friend of mine, Robert Clark, says he’ll come over and stay with you and Chloe. I don’t feel I can leave you on your own.’

  Robert Clark. Could this be happening? ‘Oh … no. Please, there’s no need for this. I’ll be OK in a minute. Perhaps if I can have a drink?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll get Chloe to pour you one. You will stay the night here, won’t you?’

  Alex tried to shake her head but it was caught in a paroxysm. ‘I’m all right,’ she whispered. ‘It was a bit grim but nothing I can’t cope with. I ought to go home to Fellside.’

  ‘But you’ve had a shock, and there’s been the police questioning too. You ought to stay here. What would you like to drink?’

  ‘Whisky, please.’ She could stay for that. She needed it. But then she would escape.

  Chloe called loudly from the room next door which served as the parish office, ‘I’ve got Dad on the phone. Where’s Tom Firth now, Uncle Edwin?’

  ‘The police let him go. I should think his parents will have called the doctor. He was pretty shattered.’

  ‘So what exactly happened to boring old Morris?’ Chloe asked.

  6

  Break their teeth, O God, in their mouths. Psalm 58:6

  Alex Gibson spoke brusquely. ‘There was a lot of blood. The boy had it on his hands.’ She shuddered, remembering. Tom had been stunned, white-faced, and had been shrieking at her. It had never occurred to her that he might be the attacker. He seemed too distraught. She had cleaned his hands with some wipes from her bag, taken him by the shoulders and turned him away, into the wide corridor and down the stairs.

  Tom had been making a strange noise, half sobbing and half crying out, and the security guard had come towards them from the desk. He had sat Tom down behind the counter and contacted his colleagues. Then the police and ambulance arrived, bringing the cold air with them, and suddenly the atmosphere had become official.

  And while all this was going on, Tom had been whining softly and Alex had watched the goings-on distractedly, as if through a thick pane of glass. A half-amused little voice kept saying in her ear: so, this is shock again. You know all about this, Alex.

  And then Edwin had arrived, supposedly to pick Alex up and take her to supper at the Cliffords’. By that time, things were becoming clearer.

  ‘There was something about the body and a piece of wood. They were suddenly more interested in that, than in quizzing Tom,’ Alex said to Chloe. She added firmly: ‘Look, Edwin, I’m OK now. You ought to go.’

  ‘I’ll wait till Robert comes.’

  ‘No, really.’ Alex sounded more forceful. ‘Please.’ She mustn’t see Robert Clark. As soon as Edwin had gone, she would leave too. She recognized the feeling of consciousness after a crisis, the strange mental tingling, as if blood were trickling back into numbed mental extremities. It hurt a bit but it meant you were returning to life. I don’t want to be sitting here, she thought, with these concerned people, being the object of sympathy, waiting to face Robert Clark in this condition. It made her feel nauseous.

  Edwin put his hand on her shoulder for a moment, but she felt rigid and determined.

  ‘Do go, Edwin. I’ll be fine.’

  He decided not to argue. He needed to get back to the college or Wanda Wisley would have hysterics. It seemed the head of department had no intention of getting involved herself, so it was all down to him. Robert would arrive at the house soon. And Chloe was coping. Edwin glanced back at Alex, who had sipped her whisky and had her eyes shut. He slipped quietly away.

  But when the front door shut behind him, Alex Gibson forced herself to focus, and stood up decisively. ‘Thank you, Chloe,’ she said, her voice suddenly authoritative. ‘I’ll go now. I think I’d be much better at home. I’m going to call Burns’ Taxis to come and meet me at the end of your lane. You’ve all been very kind.’

  Chloe nodded vaguely at her. She was already texting her friends.

  Alex went out into the night, feeling the sleeting rain which had blown down from the fells, falling like needles on her unprotected hair. It was freezing now. She didn’t care about waiting outside. The icy rain was almost cleansing, and when she got home she would be justified in opening a bottle of malt whisky and making very high-class hot toddies. Of course she would look like a drowned rat when the taxi came – but so what?

  It was Christmas. She might not see anyone for days. It didn’t matter if she caught a cold, and even less what she looked like. She trudged to the junction where the lane met the main road. In the distance she could see Morris Little’s convenience store, still garishly lit up. She had often popped in when she changed buses at Uplands, on her long dreary journey home to the much bleaker village of Fellside. She was sorry he was dead, but in her opinion Morris Little had been a thoroughly unpleasant man.

  But no one had bothered to ask her what she thought. She had just been the fat woman from Finance who’d found the boy and the body.

  She tasted the watered-down rectory whisky on her tongue. Yuk.

  Through the needling drizzle she heard the taxi approaching. She recognized the driver, a taciturn man, and she was grateful that she wouldn’t have to talk. He knew her too, and where she lived. He grunted something which sounded like ‘How do’, did a neat three-point turn and took her off to Fellside, her bungalow . . . and a serious drink.

  At midnight Robert Clark crawled into bed beside Suzie, who was immediately awake.

  ‘So what happened?’ she asked.

  ‘Morris Little has been murdered. A violent attack.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Suzy sat upright in bed and put the bedside lamp on. ‘Do they know who did it? Where was it?’

  ‘He was found just inside the Music Department. One of the lads from the Chorus had gone over to the college to use the computers, and stumbled on Morris’s body during a power cut.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘He was beaten about the head. His teeth were staved in.’

  ‘Good grief!’

  When Robert had arrived at the rectory in response to Edwin’s phone call, Chloe had told him that the other woman had gone home. His visit wasn’t really necessary but he’d stayed there until Lynn and Neil returned from Norma Little’s house. Chloe had retreated to her bedroom and her mobile phone.

  ‘So do you know what happened?’ Robert had asked Neil Clifford.

  ‘It all seems cut and dried,’ Neil had murmured. ‘I’ve been to see Tom Firth, and Norma Little too. Norma won’t accept it but the police think Morris had some sort of contretemps with a gang. The Frosts are being mentioned.’

  The Frosts came from Chapterhouse, a sink estate on Norbridge’s murky west side where the marshes crept up towards the town. It had always been the haunt of the tinkers and nomadic workers who had drifted between England and Scotland for centuries. It had been built up during the making of the canals which cut through the soggy coastal plain. And later the Victorian ra
ilway navvies turned the area into one of the roughest in Britain. In the 1960s, new jerry-built council housing had made it worse.

  Now, back in the warmth of his own bedroom, Robert gave Suzy the gist of what he’d heard.

  ‘Well, whaddaya know!’ she said. ‘Everything evil in Norbridge boils down to the Frosts, doesn’t it? The local bad lads. What would we do without them?’

  ‘Well, in this case, at least it means Tom Firth is off the hook. Neil heard that the police found half a plank flung outside the college. The Frost brothers had been seen messing about near the side door with the wood earlier. The police are hoping they’ll get Frost fingerprints or DNA on the piece of wood.’

  ‘But why would the Frosts kill Morris by hitting him with a plank?’

  ‘There’s building work at the college. There was timber lying about. And Morris apparently had a run-in with the Frost brothers more than once at his shop. They went in for a lot of petty thieving.’

  Hardly surprising. Trying to do anything for the kids on the Chapterhouse estate was doomed to failure, and it was obvious, Robert supposed, that they would commit some sort of terrible crime sooner or later. But it seemed to him to be doubly sad. What made children turn out like that? They were hardly poor compared with kids in the Third World. Was it drugs? Or neglect? Drink? Or broken homes? Absent fathers? No role models?

  Robert felt wound up. Ten minutes later he said suddenly, in the dark, ‘I can’t help thinking about how I was talking to Morris only this evening. I told him Jake was my stepson.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Suzy yawned sleepily. ‘Just a form of words.’ She wanted to drift into sleep.

  ‘Maybe,’ Robert said. ‘But then again, maybe it would be better if Jake really was my stepson?’

  ‘What?’ Suzy snapped on the lamp again.

  ‘I think we should get married.’

  There was a long silence. Suzy looked at the wall in front of her. ‘Robert, Jake is fine. Death makes everything seem all out of proportion. Anyway, the next few days are going to be really busy. We won’t get a moment on our own to discuss it. Let’s talk after Christmas.’

  ‘OK,’ he said softly.

  His words hung over them both, heavier than the duvet. Suzy lay awake for a while. Then she whispered, ‘I do love you, Robert Clark. But I can look after my children myself!’

  But he had fallen asleep, shattered, and was too far away to hear her.

  7

  Leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure; fret not thyself, else shalt thou be moved to do evil. Psalm 37:8

  In the last few days before Christmas, Tom Firth found himself the centre of attention. ‘Oh Tom, how are you?’ everyone said in the same solicitous voice. But they were saying it, not asking it. He had the feeling no one really cared. It was just a form of words.

  ‘Oh, fine,’ he would answer. And after a while, he was fine. But he felt different.

  He had been hysterical at finding Morris Little’s body, but very quickly the memory became familiar. He often found himself re-examining what he had seen, like probing a tooth socket, which wasn’t surprising seeing that Morris’s mouth had taken the brunt of the attack. One side of his jaw had been smashed, though Tom’s counsellor had told him that death had come from the blow to Morris’s temple.

  Mrs Firth, a quiet woman who was a machinist in the last Norbridge textile mill, was off work for the Christmas closure, and followed her son around the house. They lived on the town side of Uplands.

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ she kept asking him. He wanted to say, ‘I’d feel better if you got me a laptop,’ but he knew that would be out of order.

  The one person who hadn’t made a huge fuss was Alex, the grumpy woman from Finance who had found him. She’d said hardly anything, but used loads of tissues from her big bag to wipe the blood off his hands. Then the police had come, and talked to him for what seemed like ages, and at last he’d gone home. Then the doctor had come out in person, and the rector had been to see him, and Tom had taken his first ever sleeping pill which had knocked him out and made him dopey all the next day. Despite the fact it was the weekend before Christmas, a student counsellor had come to see him at home, and that had made him feel better. Afterwards he watched non-stop DVDs. Making it into a story had lessened it somehow. Everyone had been really interested, except of course his dad.

  Tom’s father already found his son embarrassing. Mick Firth thought there was nothing wrong with being into bands and going to gigs – but the church business was creepy. At least Tom wasn’t a shirt-lifter, if the magazines under his bed were anything to go by. That was a relief. Still, the way people were coming round and cosseting him would be enough to turn any lad into a sissy. Mick Firth, who was a truck driver, had no time for counsellors and women police officers and vicars!

  ‘You’ll get over it, lad,’ he said to Tom the next day. ‘Pull yourself together. I’ve seen some nasty road accidents in my time. What you need is to get back to college and get yourself some practical qualifications.’

  Typical! But then after a second chat with the counsellor woman, who came specially to see him on the morning of Christmas Eve, Tom had felt all right. A few mates had emailed or texted him. But he had been annoyed that there had been nothing from Chloe Clifford. He wondered whether she had turned up at the Mitre Lounge that night. If he hadn’t been such a dickhead, running back to college to see if she’d emailed, then he wouldn’t have got involved.

  Her dad, their local rector, had come to see him again, which was nice, but a bit pointless really, as Tom told him he wasn’t depressed or anything, just a bit shocked.

  ‘I’m OK now, thank you, Mr Clifford. How’s Chloe?’

  ‘Chloe? Oh, in great form. Talking non-stop about life at university.’

  Oh, was she? Nice of her to completely ignore me, Tom thought.

  Neil Clifford had no idea that his daughter was supposed to be meeting Tom Firth on the night of the attack. He wondered if the boy had any inkling that he might have been in a cell now if it hadn’t been for the piece of wood found outside. And of course there was the drugged malice of the Frosts, who’d played into police hands by ranting about how they hated Morris, ‘that fucking bastard with his crap shop’. Not to mention showing off about how they’d broken into the college plant room and tripped the circuits.

  By the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Tom was already sick of being treated like an invalid. The Abbey Chorus members had accepted the Dean’s judgement that they should perform as planned at the carol service. The biggest congregation of the year from the whole Norbridge area could not be disappointed, and to cancel would be to give in to thuggery.

  So the carol service went ahead with Tom in the choir. The Dean mentioned the tragic events in his sermon, and talked about the endemic violence in society today. There was a short silence and a prayer for Morris’s family. The choir sang the rehearsed anthems. And Tom was there with the rest of them, though his fellow choristers treated him as if he were a fragile musical instrument in constant need of tuning.

  After the service, Tom was surrounded by concerned adults. It was quite heady for him. His parents had come along, but his father was irritable, hating to see his son being fussed over.

  ‘Come on, lad, we haven’t got all night,’ Mick Firth called gruffly, making for the territorial security of his car, his wife scurrying behind him.

  Tom loped after his parents, till he felt a tap on his arm. It was Chloe Clifford and, behind her, Poppy Robinson. He thought Chloe looked rather rough.

  ‘Hello, Tom. Are you –?’

  ‘Don’t ask me if I’m all right. Anyway, you could’ve been in touch.’

  Chloe jumped. Her eyes widened. ‘OK, no need to go over the top.’

  ‘If you’d emailed me sooner none of this would’ve happened!’

  He could hardly believe he was talking like this to the girl he had fancied for months, but so what? Everything was different now. He was in the limelight. He felt braver, more
attractive. And he was less than impressed with Chloe’s newly tinted jet black Gothic hair, which he could see had tarnished her high forehead, making it looked slightly green round the edges. The heavy earrings were like something cut-price from an ironmonger’s and the tiny skirt made her bum look huge. She’d put on weight at university. He’d never noticed before that her legs were quite chunky.

  Chloe shrugged elaborately. ‘Suit yourself then, but wait till you get headline deprivation. Come on, Pops.’ She strode off, jangling.

  Poppy lingered for a minute, fiddling with her woolly scarf and chewing a stray bit of hair from under her pulled-down hat. She crossed her eyes, making him laugh.

  ‘I’m sorry it was you that found him, Tom.’ She looked straight into his face. ‘I understand how sick you must be of people going on about it. But they only ask how you are all the time because they like you.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Well, not my dad. He’s a complete pain.’

  ‘Oh, parents!’ sighed Poppy. ‘What can you expect?’

  ‘Yeah, correct.’ It seemed like the first really personal sympathy he had received.

  ‘Tom!’ his father bellowed.

  In the car on the way home, Tom watched the Christmas lights go by, and thought that Poppy Robinson had been quite decent. He would have liked to talk to her, because underneath all this fuss there was something on his mind. But she wouldn’t have understood because she wasn’t a chorister.

  It was a pity Chloe had turned out to be such a cow, because at least she had sung in a choir. Tom was still baffled by something which no one else had even noticed. The dead Morris Little had been holding something in his right hand. Tom had only thought about it afterwards. You’d have to be a chorister to realize what it was, but any church choir member would have recognized the long narrow book, with the words of the Psalms printed underneath the few bars of each chant. But it was an odd thing to be carrying round.