Death in Holy Orders Read Free Page B

if I were ill, settling me in one of the easy chairs before the fireplace, switching on two bars of the electric fire in case I felt cold with shock, and then drawing the curtains so that I could have what she described as “a good long rest.
”
    I suppose it was about an hour before the police arrived, a youngish sergeant with a Welsh accent. He was kind and patient and I answered his questions quite calmly. There wasn’t, after all, very much to tell. He asked me how well I’d known Ronald, the last time I’d seen him and whether he’d been depressed lately. I said I’d last seen him the previous evening, walking towards Mr. Gregory’s cottage, I suppose for his Greek lesson. Term had only just started and that’s all I had seen of him. I got the impression that the police sergeant—I think his name was Jones or Evans, a Welsh name anyway—was sorry he’d asked the question about Ronald being depressed. Anyway, he said that it all looked quite straightforward, asked Ruby the same questions and then left
.
    Father Sebastian broke the news of Ronald’s death to the whole college when they assembled before five o’clock Evensong. Most of the ordinands had guessed by then that something tragic had happened; police cars and a mortuary van don’t arrive in secret. I didn’t go to the library, so I never heard what Father Sebastian said. All I wanted by then was to be alone. But later in the evening the senior student, Raphael Arbuthnot, brought me a small pot of blue African violets with the sympathy of all the ordinands.One of them must have driven into Pakefield or Lowestoft to buy them. When he gave them to me, Raphael bent down and kissed my cheek. He said, “I’m so sorry, Margaret.” It was the kind of thing people say at a time like that, but it didn’t sound commonplace. What it sounded like was an apology
.
    It was two nights later that the nightmares began. I have never suffered from nightmares before, not even when I was a student nurse and first encountered death. The dreams are horrible, and now I sit in front of the television until late every evening, dreading the moment when tiredness drives me to bed. The dream is always the same. Ronald Treeves is standing beside the bed. He is naked and his body is plastered with damp sand. It is matted in his fair hair and over his face. Only the eyes are free of sand, and they gaze at me reproachfully, as if asking why I didn’t do more to save him. I know that there was nothing I could have done. I know that he was dead long before I came upon his body. But still he appears night after night, with that accusing reproachful gaze, the damp sand falling in clumps from his plain, rather pudgy face
.
    Perhaps now that I have written it down he will leave me in peace. I don’t think I am a fanciful woman, but there is something strange about his death, something I ought to remember but which lies nagging at the back of my mind. Something tells me that Ronald Treeves’s death wasn’t an end but a beginning
.

2
    T he call to Dalgliesh came at 10:40 a.m., just before he returned to his office after a meeting with the Community Relations Branch. It had gone on later than scheduled—such meetings invariably did—and there were only fifty minutes before he was due to join the Commissioner in the Home Secretary’s office at the House of Commons. Time, he thought, for a coffee and to make a couple of outstanding telephone calls. But he had hardly reached his desk when his PA put her head round the office door.
    “Mr. Harkness would be grateful if you would see him before you leave. He’s got Sir Alred Treeves with him.”
    So now what? Sir Alred wanted something, of course; people who came to see senior officers of the Yard usually did. And what Sir Alred wanted he invariably got. You didn’t run one of the most prosperous multinational corporations without knowing instinctively how to control the intricacies of power, in small matters as in large. Dalgliesh