Time to Prey

Julius Falconer

Description

On the morning following the feast of St Giles, 1 September 1966, the Bishop of Worcester, the Right Reverend Giles Wyndham-Brookes, is found slumped and lifeless in his study at Hartlebury Castle, his official residence. The doors and windows are securely locked from the inside, and on his desk is a fifteenth-century book (in Middle French and Gothic script) which he could not read. He had seemingly tripped on an edge of carpet and hit his head on the fender; but there is a distinct whiff of murder in the air. The immediate suspects are the members of his household: his wife, the chaplain, the secretary, the housekeeper, his almoner and the archdeacon of Worcester. Others, including a woman found casting spells in the castle grounds, a young Italian lurking at night in the bishop's chapel and a suggested unknown late-night visitor, appear in the course of the investigation. Inspector Wickfield and his sergeant embark on a roller-coaster tour of the Anglican Church in a search for motive and for a cunning killer. There are forays into Naples, relics, assassination, locked-room mysteries, the cult of the saints, wicca and blue moons.Follow the inspector if you dare - but hold on to your hats! In this latest offering from the pen of the adept Julius Falconer, you will be instructed, entertained and intrigued in equal measure.Book reviews online @ www.publishedbestsellers.com

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Pneuma Springs Publishing
• Date de parution: 28 janvier 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782281498
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A Time to
Prey



Julius Falconer


Murder at Hartlebury: Inspector Wickfield Investigates
Copyright

First Published in 2010 by: Pneuma Springs Publishing
A Time to Prey Copyright © 2010 Julius Falconer
Mobi eISBN 9781907728761 ePub eISBN 9781782281498 PDF eISBN 9781782280606 Paperback ISBN: 9781905809837
Castle line drawing used by permission
Pneuma Springs Publishing E: [e-mail] W: www.pneumasprings.co.uk
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Published in the United Kingdom. All rights reserved under International Copyright Law. Contents and/or cover may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written consent of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, save those clearly in the public domain, is purely coincidental.
Dedication


To one who happens to be called Giles –
My Brother!
The Novel
ONE
Do you know Hartlebury Castle, the residence of the Bishops of Worcester? It is a grand mansion - more of a stately house as it stands today than a castle in the usual sense of that word. It is, as far as you and I, who are not architectural historians, are concerned, a late-seventeenth-century creation on a thirteenth-century foundation, forming a sort of shallow U, with the remnants of a moat along the back of the house. The front looks on to a circular lawn surrounded by a tarmacked drive which deposits the visitor in front of a grand door surmounted by a lantern, a coat of arms and two stone spheres. There are shrubs, trees and virginia creeper, and the immediate surrounds of the house and grounds are the ploughed fields of timeless Worcestershire. The house is spacious: a great hall, a gallery, a library, a chapel, other public rooms, the usual offices, servants’ quarters, outbuildings and so forth. If I had seen it in more auspicious circumstances, my memories would perhaps be less tinged with melancholy. The fact is that I was granted admittance only because the bishop had met an untimely death. He had, not to put too fine a point on it, been murdered.

Your informant is Stan Wickfield, a name I hope familiar to most of you as an inspector with the Worcestershire Criminal Investigation Department since 1961. I live in Worcester, am married to Beth, and have two sons, neither of them policemen. To forestall Mr Julius Falconer in the telling of this bewildering case, I have taken a stretch of extended leave, in this year of grace 1966, to put down for you the sequence of events while they are still fresh in my mind. Mr Falconer and I, I regret to tell you, have had words*. I am less bitter than I was, but since our breach is not quite mended, and far from confident that he will do justice to the ins and outs of this case, and in particular to my own role in it, I have determined to lay the murder (and its solution!) before you myself.

__________
* Occasioned by his intransigence in the case of the St Mary’s Court skeletons: see The Bones of Murder.


Probably the best starting-point is to introduce you to the bishop’s household, by which I mean his wife, his chaplain, his secretary, his almoner and his housekeeper. There is also an archdeacon who will claim our attention. I list these here in the order in which we happened to interview them on that first morning, and I ascribe no further significance to it. Furthermore, you will forgive me, I trust, from confirming or denying that one of these household members was responsible for the death. You see, I wish you to view matters as Sergeant Hewitt and I viewed them, and we came to the case without preconceptions of any kind, prepared to consider an intimate of the bishop, a casual acquaintance, a complete stranger, an insider or an outsider, as the perpetrator; no possibility was barred. I shall give you neither more nor less than all the information we had at our disposal (including the crucial clue that I failed to spot at the time), as it came to us.

Mrs Wyndham-Brookes, the bishop’s significant other, was a stately woman in her fifties, whose twin goals in life were to sustain her husband’s position in society and to bask in its glow. I trust that you will not take this remark in a derogatory spirit: there are, after all, such things as justifiable pride and Christian self-love. I should not wish you to cast Mrs Wyndham-Brookes in the mould of Mrs Proudie, who was in any case a fictional character. Mrs Wyndham-Brookes, née Sybil Scrutton, had met her husband when he was a humble curate in the rural parish of St Peter’s, Martley, to the west of Worcester, and, divining that he was marked out for preferment, cultivated his acquaintance assiduously. Actually, I must take myself to task there. The investigation of Bishop Wyndham-Brookes’ death led me to dislike his relict, for no rational reason that I could lay before you, and I urge you to take no notice of remarks from my pen that might be taken to be disparaging in her regard. (Furthermore, she displayed a tender side later in our investigation, and I had occasion to revise my initial opinions – to some extent.) I could just as easily, and perhaps should, have told you that from their earliest meeting she determined to submerge her own ambitions in order to promote the evident virtues of young Mr Wyndham-Brookes in the service of his (and her) Church: a noble self-sacrifice – except that that is not quite how matters occurred!
I understand from people who study these matters that one’s self-image, one’s understanding of one’s own person, is intimately linked with one’s body: its shape, its size, its appearance. Do you wish that your ears were smaller? that your nose were a little less snub? that your legs were sturdier? that you presented an altogether more pleasing aspect to the world at large? Then you need counselling. Mrs Wyndham-Brookes, on the other hand, was entirely satisfied with her appearance. Her dignified, even regal, bulk was the fitting embodiment of an imposing and majestic spirit that tolerated little opposition from mortals whose position in society placed them below that of bishop. Conversely, she fawned on the titled and the privileged. This was because she recognised, by instinct and by experience, that the titled and the privileged were the movers in society and in the Church, and that it was therefore they who could, if properly cultivated and encouraged, ensure the continuance of the Church as the permanent presence of Christ’s Body in British society.

I have come to appreciate, in the course of a so far short but, um, distinguished career, that at the start of a case, everybody is suspect. This is the only attitude that encourages alertness in the investigating officers. It was, very early on, borne in on us that Mrs Wyndham-Brookes was a disappointed and frustrated woman. You must wonder why the see of Worcester, and with it Hartlebury Castle as a private residence, should not measure up to almost anyone’s ambitions. The truth is that Sybil Wyndham-Brookes had begun to nourish ambitions to be the wife of an archbishop, of which there are only two in the Church of England. Pictures of Bishopthorpe Palace and even Lambeth Palace floated increasingly before her mind’s eye, her husband a person of the greatest consequence in the divine order of things, and she herself a fitting spouse at his side. Now Bishop Wyndham-Brookes had, with Worcester, exhausted his allocation of ambition. More than that, he was losing fire. At over sixty, he was beginning to wonder whether an early retirement might not suit him best, whereas his consort had no intention of being put out to grass in mere middle age. If she were suddenly to find herself a widow, she would be free to set her cap at Bishop Boyde of Colchester, who was considered by many to be most eligible for the see of York. I suppose, to do the lady justice, that such ideas were unformulated, possibly hidden even from herself, but I teased them out for myself in the course of our investigation – I was in any case mistaken in my supposition. Her aim was not to promote herself but to put her gifts unflinchingly at the Church’s service, even if, by divine fiat, it meant changing horses mid-stream (if one may so express it without disrespect). So much for the moment for Mrs Wyndham-Brookes. Let us pass on to the bishop’s chaplain.
The Reverend David Skyner was a tall, powerfully-built individual whose talents included cricket, ancient languages and the pianoforte. His muscular frame and impressive height would have given him influence even if they had not been matched by an active and forceful personality. He had been proud to be chosen to be the bishop’s chaplain, because the position gave him access to ecclesiastical personages of every kind and level and to the inner councils of the great and good. I should perhaps explain that, as I saw it, the Bishop of Worcester’s chaplain was more than a confidant: he was an alter ego , supporting the bishop with advice, encouragement and information. He acted as a sounding-board, a purveyor (to the bishop’s discreet ear) of rumour, a point of contact, a confessor, a theologian: in short, a right-hand man. Mrs Wyndham-Brookes did not resent his influence over her husband, because, firstly, she recognised his gifts, in many ways superior to her own, and, secondly, she saw that he kept the bishop’s courage screwed to the sticking-post.

Mr Skyner was from a professional North Country family, steeped in the unforgiving climate of Northumberland and the traditions of catholic Anglicanism. He had prospered at school, gone on to Queen’s College, Edgbaston, for his theological training – there was no reason why a high churchman should not attend an ecumenical college, if only to broaden his outlook! - a