Murdering Ministers Read Free

whose career was entirely based on sexual ecstasy.
    Oliver always liked working with Ben, partly because his friend and landlord owned a black Lamborghini, and partly because the attention Ben inevitably attracted gave Oliver an excuse for barely being noticed himself. Now in his mid-twenties, he had more or less accepted that, Ben or no Ben, his unkempt fair hair, cheap glasses, and that certain absence of firmness about his jaw were hardly the assets that would capture the interest of a sultry stranger across a less-than-crowded place of worship. Besides, he reflected proudly, he had a steady girlfriend now.
    But what had intrigued Oliver about the assignment was the name of the minister of the selected church: the Reverend Paul Piltdown. Oliver had gone to school with a Paul Piltdown. And a call to the manse in the north London suburb of Plumley confirmed that this was indeed the same Pauly Piltdown who’d shared his first copy of Playboy and with whom he’d played baccarat during long winter lunchtimes, using rules learned from a James Bond novel. Which explains why Oliver was sitting in church that Sunday evening, thinking of rude things for Finsbury to say about the service and, despite his agnosticism, feeling thoroughly guilty about it.
    Oliver had long suspected that his school friend would find a vocation in the church, ever since Pauly’s whispered confession as a twelve-year-old that he thought he might look good in a cassock. (Ah, that’s the difference!) But this church? In the sixth form, Piltdown had been addicted to High-Church Anglicanism, and when Oliver had last seen him, seven years earlier, he’d been heading off to Cambridge with ambitions for a bishopric, an almost gymnastic addiction to genuflecting, and a best blazer that always smelled faintly of incense. Yet instead of the surplices and stoles he had coveted as a teenager, Piltdown’s only religious attire this evening was a white clerical collar, worn with a rumpled navy-blue suit that sat awkwardly on his hefty, rugby-player’s body.
    His surroundings were similarly unadorned. Above the dark oak wainscoting, the only ornamentation on the sallow walls was a row of dimly glowing electric heaters, which were doing little to lift the temperature on that damp December evening. Since there was no altar, Piltdown had conducted most of the simple service from behind a sturdy wooden table, set firmly on the lowest level of a carpeted platform. This platform, which stretched almost the full width of the building, rose a couple of levels behind the minister, presumably for a choir, but instead of an elaborate reredos or dazzling stained glass window, Piltdown’s backdrop was the pipe array of a sizeable organ, painted an ugly battleship gray. (The hymns, however, had been accompanied by a young woman who played an upright piano, on the floor to the left of the platform.) The space struck Oliver as more like a theater than a church.
    Piltdown had only left his station to deliver the sermon, when he had climbed the steps to a high pulpit, rising out of the right-hand side of the stage like a submarine’s conning tower. The one touch of color in the church was a garish, appliqué banner pinned to this pulpit, proclaiming JESUS IS LORD in childish lettering.
    â€œAs we draw close to Christmas,” the minister was saying, unconsciously patting his thatch of thick, wild hair, “our thoughts naturally turn to that well-known story of our Savior’s birth. Perhaps we first learned it from Nativity pageants performed by children, just like the one our own Sunday School will be performing during our Christmas Eve carol service. I myself can remember playing a king one year, wearing a splendid cardboard crown covered with silver foil and my new dressing gown with the gold piping as a robe…”
    Piltdown glanced across to the younger people, seeking a smile or nod that would accompany a similar reminiscence, but