Blood on the Bones

Chapter Three-1

Chapter ThreeTrying to encourage some enthusiasm for the task ahead, Rafferty permitted himself no more prevarications. Pausing only to tell Sam Dally to send a uniformed officer to find them when he had finished examining the body, he strode with a brisk step towards the back entrance of the Carmelite Monastery through which the sisters had disappeared, conscious of Llewellyn, like a determined whipper-in, following on behind.

Momentarily forgetting his whipper-in, he muttered the question that had been puzzling him since his arrival at the scene: 'Wonder why it's called a monastery rather than a convent?'

But, of course, the Oracle that was the university-educated Llewellyn, had heard, and as he moved up to Rafferty's side, he proceeded to enlighten him.

'I believe it's connected to the fact that the Carmelites were originally just a male order and they—'

Annoyed with himself that he'd carelessly invited a lecture on top of the day’s other torments, Rafferty tuned Llewellyn out, and studied the building. It was a relatively modern one; Edwardian rather than medieval. From the outside it looked more like a pleasant country home rather than a house of prayer; the convent that had originally stood on the site having been torn down by Henry VIII when he indulged his sixteenth century wrecking spree of England's religious buildings. Elmhurst's Priory, another casualty of the times, although not razed to the ground like the earlier convent, instead, to this day, remained an enormous, impressive ruin. It provided a stark, rather eerie welcome to visitors approaching Elmhurst from the west.

Rafferty entered the large, echoing rear lobby, its lighting as frugal as only the wholehearted embrace of poverty could make it. Dimly, through the gloom, he made out three corridors leading off the high-ceilinged hall which was decorated with a statue of the Virgin and Child and three grim pictures of saints suffering assorted martyrdoms. They provided an even less welcoming ambience than did the blackened ruin of the priory.

'Cheerful little gaff,' Rafferty commented, with a gloom that was a perfect match for the hall. 'Don't I just love Catholicism?'

If the rest of the convent was as coffin dark as the rear lobby, he suspected his adoption-for-convenience wearing of spectacles during a previous case, would turn into an adoption of necessity before this case reached its conclusion.

He followed his nose and the dim illumination, and, to get his bearings, found again the front entrance with its Latin display of the Carmelite motto beside the no longer used 'Turn Room' with its little turntable which had enabled gifts and mail to be accepted while the 'turn Sister' remained unseen.

'Zelo zelatus sum pro domino deo exercituum,' Llewellyn had read the motto to him on their arrival, and, as expected, had gone on to provide the non-Latin reader Rafferty with its translation and the explanation: 'It's from the Vulgate or Latin Bible and means: 'with zeal have I been zealous for the Lord God of Hosts'.

'Very nice, I'm sure,' had been Rafferty's response. He had felt an urge to make some sarcastic comment suggesting they ought to produce some zeal themselves, but he had swallowed it.

Now that he'd seen the body, buried in the grounds of this house of contemplatives, he felt it might be appropriate if he allowed himself a few moments for contemplation. And, although aware that he found the life of an enclosed religious community incomprehensible, alien, surreal even, he was aware that he would need to try to understand such a vocation if he was to get to grips with this case. Particularly if one of the nuns should turn out to have embraced the violence of some of the Catholic faith's earlier bloodletting adherents, and had committed the ultimate sin.

So he read again the Carmel motto, studied again the Shield of Carmel with its groups of three stars which Llewellyn, his personal shedder-of-light where before had existed only darkness, had already explained, stood for Carmel in its Greek, Latin and Western eras. There was a hand with a torch, which Llewellyn had told him was supposed to remind the community of God's fiery intervention at the behest of Elijah on Mount Carmel.

The twelve surrounding stars symbolised the twelve points of The Rule by which the community lived: obedience, chastity, poverty, recollection, mental prayer, Divine Office, chapter, abstinence, manual labour, silence, humility and works of supererogation—Rafferty hadn't even bothered to seek enlightenment on the latter; words with six syllables being way beyond his desired vocabulary, particularly when they were religious ones.

But now, thinking again of the zeal of which the motto spoke, Rafferty swept past the statue of Saint Teresa of Avila the 16th century Carmelite reformer, who clutched the book and pen which, again, according to his personal Oracle, symbolised her power as a writer, while the arrow-clutching angel at her shoulder depicted God's love, something which, like their recently disinterred corpse, Rafferty currently had reason to doubt.

By now, with all this religious symbolism, Rafferty was getting a serious case of The Willies. He hurried down another gloomy corridor, Llewellyn at his heels, and finally found the Mother Superior's office. As he discovered as he flicked on the overhead light, like the rear lobby and the front entrance hall, her office was drab, badly lit, and lacked physical comfort of any sort. It was simply furnished, with just a basic desk, hard wooden chairs and a battered, presumably, second-hand filing cabinet. Another, smaller, statue of the Virgin stood in a recess behind the desk. The sparsely-furnished room was also empty of any human presence, and Rafferty recalled that Mother Catherine had said she and the other nuns must pray for the immortal soul of their now disinterred cadaver. Presumably, she – and they – were in the community's Chapel.

Feeling as if he was on his very own magical mystery tour, every twist and turn of which brought fresh unwanted discoveries, Rafferty flicked the light off, and headed back down the corridor to the hall. He tried the second corridor off it as he searched for the Chapel. Prayers could wait he thought. The dead man had, after all, done without them for however long he had lain in that hole in the convent's grounds. And, considering the vastness of eternity, he judged his soul could wait a while longer.

Concerned he was in danger of allowing the nuns, the oppressive, religious aura of the building, and Catholicism's age-old rituals, to intimidate him, Rafferty was keen to stamp his authority on the community from the start. Consequently, he stifled any remaining qualms at interrupting the nuns' prayers. And, as soon as he found what he thought must be the Chapel, he opened the door with an accompanying loud creak.

In an automatic, unthinking reflex action, he found his fingers dipping towards the basin of holy water at the entrance. Alarmed to discover how insidiously lingering was the Catholic indoctrination of his boyhood, he pulled his hand sharply back, aware that Llewellyn was close behind him and couldn't have failed to notice the jerky movement.

Not without an uneasy sense of guilt, he skirted the basin with its holy water lure, and marched up the central aisle of the surprisingly spacious and airy Chapel, his shoes, on the bare wooden flooring that gleamed a warm golden colour from copious quantities of beeswax and elbow grease, sounding like those of the vanguard of an advancing invasion force.

Once he reached the small table that he presumed served as an altar when their priest administered Mass, he said, 'Ladies,' in as firm a voice as he could muster, one intended to convey that he would brook no challenge to his authority. 'May I please have your attention?'

Slowly, to his left, to his right, ten – no, eleven – heads in the single pews aligned along the outer walls, were raised from their silent prayers for the dead man. Eleven pairs of eyes studied him. He was grateful the stares weren't accompanied by noisy questions as was usual at the beginning of another investigation.

But his gratitude for the sound of silence faded a few seconds later. Instead, its unnaturalness began to unnerve him. It was a silence so strange in the circumstances in which the community – and he – found themselves, that he continued in a rush.

'I apologise for interrupting your devotions,' he began. 'But as your Prioress observed a short while ago, a man is dead. It was unlikely to have been a natural death.' Anxious and feeling out of his depth, he added acerbically, 'And as it is equally unlikely that he managed to bury himself, this is officially now a murder inquiry.'

Rafferty paused to let this sink in while he scanned the faces. Apart from two young women, one in ordinary clothes and one in the pale veil which told him she must be a novice, the rest were all either middle-aged or elderly and had, according to the Mother Superior to whom he had spoken on his arrival, lived in the Carmelite Monastery for two, three or more decades each.

Although the presumed normal calm serenity on the faces of most of the older nuns was marred by nothing more than a mild anxiety conjoined, in a few cases, by an unholy tinge of excitement, the two young women, by contrast, looked scared half to death.

Unsure of the strength of their love for God, Rafferty assumed. Or His for them. And given God's latest unlovely behaviour towards me, he thought, he believed the two young women, would-be nuns or not, would be wise to be unsure of such an unreliable and fickle thing.

He again addressed his little congregation in order to introduce himself and Llewellyn. 'My colleague, Sergeant Llewellyn and I, will be conducting the investigation. Perhaps Mother,' he forced the religious title past unwilling lips as he turned towards the Prioress, trying not to recoil from the features that had been dreadfully altered by burns sometime during her life, 'you could manage to find a room that could be put at our disposal?'

He waited for her nodded confirmation, then added, 'We will need to question each member of the community to see if any of them are able to shed light on why a man came to be buried in your grounds.'

Slowly, with an immense dignity, Mother Catherine rose from her knees and smoothed her immaculate brown habit. Even through the burns that transformed her face into a grotesque's mask of puckered red skin overlaid in parts with an unnatural shade of white, she exuded an astonishing, unnatural serenity as she prepared to respond to Rafferty's remarks. So unnatural did such serenity seem to Rafferty, that he wondered whether her calm demeanour might not owe more to the numbness of shock rather than religious quietude.

'I'm sure, Inspector Rafferty, if any one of the sisters knew anything about this poor man's death they would have already confided such knowledge to me. They have not done so. Clearly—'

Rafferty interrupted with a smoothness he was far from feeling. 'I'm sure you're right, Mother' he told her, again finding the maternal salutation slip unwillingly past his lips. 'But it is surprising how often questioning by experienced police officers uncovers vital evidence, the significance of which has perhaps not previously been appreciated.

'Sisters.' He again glanced over the assembled faces before him: pleasant or severe, rosy or pallid, chubby, emaciated, and every style in between. 'Please hold yourselves in readiness for interviews. I would prefer it if you all remained here in the Chapel until you are called individually for questioning.

'Mother.' He again addressed the Prioress. 'Perhaps we could start with you? If you would accompany me back to your office?'

Rafferty abandoned his position in front of the simple altar; a position selected for its imbuement of what he had hoped would be a priest-like authority, told Llewellyn to find a female officer to guard the door of the Chapel so the remaining nuns didn't wander, and followed the now not quite so serene, Mother Superior through the high arched double doors and back down the corridor till they reached her office.

They had barely settled themselves on either side of the plain desk on the wooden chairs that were every bit as uncomfortable as they looked, before Llewellyn arrived. He nodded to confirm that Rafferty's instructions had been carried out, before he sat down quietly and brought out his notebook.