14. The Bishop’s Lady Friend

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

The vicar and his housekeeper are safe in the Retreat while the Bishop discovers something he'd rather not discover...

It was still short of noon but the Reverend Barney Pickl could think f nothing he would like to do more than stretching out on the bed of his freshly-allocated room at the retreat when he was guided to it by Brother Stonemason, a stolid enough monk with a tear in his habit that revealed naked legs underneath and a history of physical labour in a small stone quarry behind Swanspottle, and said, woods.

“Before I saw the light I worked with stone,” he explained to Barney and Emma (first names already) as they walked along a seemingly endless corridor that was illustrated by portraits of monks.

He smiled a surly grin at Barney a,d said, “This room is yours, number thirteen though I hope it’s not unlucky for you because if was for the last devil who used it. No sooner had he lain down on the very comfy bed than his heart stopped its toil and he was taken on invisible wings of holy angels to the Heavens above where he doubtless met his Maker after passing through the golden gate. Not pearly as it is in popular opin ion, please note, but golden as dreamed by Brother Headmaster in a nightmare on his first night here. You’ll meet him shortly and if he likes you he’ll not be too brutal in his punishments”

Then he turned to Emma Dresden, and smiled at her in the sort of way that indicated he might not object if he got to know her a great deal better. “This room next door and joined by a connecting door that is usually locked though can be unlocked should there be a good cause, room fourteen, has no such tragic tale attached to it. A gentleman by the name of Horace was its last tenant and he had a truly happy time in this retreat, where he met a host of angels most nights and when he went took one of them with him. If you chanced to pass by you might hear them singing, their voices raised in glorious song. “

“Er.. that’s nice,” she mumbled.

Brother Stonemason opened the door to Barney’s room and handed him the key. “All should be well and the bedding has been thoroughly cleansed of the liquid remains of its last tenant,” he said with a macabre touch to his accent, which has its birth, possibly, in Yorkshire.

“Make yourselves at home, have a shower if you need one, and shall we say in one hour you can turn up at Brother Headmaster’s Office to be greeted and advised of our few rules,” grunted Bother Stonemason.” Then, having given Emma her key as well he marched off, shoulders hunched, leaving them alone.

And when Barney Pickle, not feeling at all religious for a change, saw his bed all he wanted to do was stretch out on it despite the dire consequences he had been told of a predecessor doing exactly that.

Meanwhile, the Bishop, having made sure that all their possessions were taken from the boot of his car, and they included a second-hand pair of good looking shoes that the vicar had been talked into buying, drove off. He hummed to himself a quaint little love song he’d learned to sing in the olden days when he’d been a member of a popular music quartet in which he played the drums and sang, and the foursome gently filled the air wherever they went with a trendy mixture of pop rhythms and delicate romantic lyrics. But that had been before he had seen a light one night in the company of a devout young woman who preached her beliefs at him and refused the let him go anywhere near her knickers. He had long since started to wish he had never been besotted by her or seen the light she had preached.

Being a Bishop wasn’t as easy as it seemed to be at first. He had all sorts of book-keeping to attend to and on top of that goodness-knows how many parishes to keep a fatherly eye on and a wife at home who found his faith absurd and spent most of her time playing and replaying elderly episodes of Inspector Morse on th television. It didn’t matter that she knew the variety of plots, she enjoyed the programmes for their own sake. Maybe it was the streets of Oxford where countless murders seemed to need to be solved, or could it have been the characters of Morse and his sergeant, Lewis? Anyway, it kept her quiet when he needed a bit of peace to consult a variety of people who needed his help before falling into the wayside for eternity.

Before going home he knew he’d better call in on a dear old lady who on more than one occasion had sought his guidance and help. She was Maria Singleton, he suspected to be in her eighties that more than once she had hinted at being older than that. But now, with the wretched Pickle out of his way for at least a fortnight he felt like joining her for a cup of something slightly stronger than tea, though she never told him what the secret ingredient might be, and that beverage made the time pass in the most pleasant of ways.

The problem, though, was when he arrived at her home he knocked her door and unusually there was no answer. And when he dared to look through her front room window he could see her, and she was suspiciously still. But what worried him even more than he lack of movement was the magazine on her lap.

It looked very like an illustrated old testament but on it, in vivid felt tipped colours, was a drawing of a hammer smashing into a white-haired head.

And he knocked the window, but she remained so still that there was only one thing for him to do. He telephoned Superintendent Williams at the nearby Brumpton police station and suggested he was looking at a murder victim.

Why him, he thought, wouldn’t Mrs Pyke like this?