The Discourtesy of Death Read online

  WILLIAM BRODRICK

  THE

  DISCOURTESY

  OF

  DEATH

  THE FATHER ANSELM THRILLERS

  The ingenious, gripping series by

  Gold Dagger award-winner William Brodrick

  Featuring the brilliant criminal lawyer-turned-monk/ detective whose specialty is the intersection of murderous deeds and moral questions and “reminiscent of the early works of John le Carré … blending sharp suspense and literary resonance,” William Brodrick’s Father Anselm novels are “classics in the making” (Jeffrey Deaver).

  In The Discourtesy of Death, an anonymous letter arrives on the doorstep of Lakewood Priory accusing celebrity academic Peter Henderson of a grotesque murder: the calculated killing of his partner, retired dancer Jennifer Henderson. The letter challenges everything the family thought they knew about Jennifer’s death and pleads for Father Anselm’s help to uncover the truth. Father Anselm discreetly begins to investigate Jennifer’s death, unaware that someone else is investigating as well … someone with the intention of—and special skills for—avenging her death.

  As Anselm’s investigation looks deeper into the past, the details of Jennifer’s death grow murkier and the lines between right and wrong begin to blur, causing him to question his ideas of truth and justice. Thought-provoking, taut, and thoroughly page-turning, The Discourtesy of Death is a deeply compelling, psychologically acute mystery. Death, dying, and killing have never been so complicated.

  Also by William Brodrick

  The Sixth Lamentation

  The Gardens of the Dead

  A Whispered Name

  The Day of the Lie

  The Silent Ones

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2016 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],

  or write us at the above address

  Copyright © William Brodrick 2013

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-4683-1186-0

  Contents

  Also by William Brodrick

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  For my father, who met disability and terminal illness without complaint.

  Acknowledgements

  My warm appreciation goes to Ursula Mackenzie for companionship while handling the rapids of difficult moral questions and guidance in shaping the subsequent novel; to Richard Beswick, Iain Hunt and Philip Parr for help in preparing the text for publication; to James Hawks who, turning to W. B. Yeats, found the title; and to Françoise Koetschet, Christine de Crouy Chanel and Sabine Guyard, old friends of Anselm, for their unwavering support. For this American edition I express my sincere gratitude to Peter Mayer and everyone at The Overlook Press.

  Her heart sat silent through the noise

  And concourse of the street;

  There was no hurry in her hands,

  No hurry in her feet.

  Christina Rossetti

  Prologue

  The man in the tweed jacket knelt down and pulled back one corner of the bedroom rug, a large, expensive thing, handmade in the uplands of Kashmir and sold by a connoisseur of elegant home furnishings from a tiny shop in a back street of Cambridge. The pile was bright red, with an involved gold and blue design, its twists and turns suggesting an obscure meaning known only to Gurus not quite of this world. There were countless animals beneath arching branches. It was called ‘The Tree of Life’.

  The man’s scrubbed fingernails settled into a groove of planking. He pulled, gently, and the floorboard lifted like a lid onto a box of old tools. His hand entered the dark space, feeling for the Billingham camera bag that hid a small seventies tape recorder and the Browning Hi-Power 9mm automatic pistol with silencer. The magazine capacity was fourteen rounds. Four had been fired in quick succession thirty years earlier: BAM-BAM, BAM-BAM. Ten remained: one up the spout with nine ready to go. The safety catch was on. The silencer was detached, wrapped in a yellow cotton duster.

  ‘You can’t hesitate,’ came the low West Belfast voice down the years, dark like the damp sitting room in Ballymurphy where Army handler and informer had met for the last time. ‘You move quickly. He has to go down. You do the job.’

  The man in the tweed jacket stared at the complicated pattern in the carpet. He’d once been a captain in the British Army, dressed in jeans and a bomber jacket. He’d shaved infrequently and he’d worn his hair long.

  ‘There’s no other way,’ said the informer, holding out the gun. Liam knew what he was talking about. ‘All the thinking’s been done, hasn’t it? If you want peace, you’ll have to pull the trigger.’

  The man blinked and swallowed. Liam’s voice faded and with it the dim light of that tenement house in Northern Ireland. The Troubles were over. Birdsong came from the trees in the quiet Suffolk garden. Autumn sunshine lit the panes of polished mullioned glass. Shadows drifted across the neat lawn towards the trimmed garden hedge. Beyond, a red tractor rumbled along a quiet lane.

  Resolved, Michael Goodwin (clean-shaven now, with short, neatly parted hair) replaced the plank and smoothed the rug home with his foot. Opening a drawer on a dressing table, he took out his two passports, one British the other Canadian, and slipped them into the opposing inside pockets of his jacket. Sliding the drawer shut, he picked up the three framed photographs of Jenny and laid them in the small suitcase packed that morning by his wife. She was downstairs, waiting; edgy, like the informer in Ballymurphy; sure and convinced, like the man he once was, the man who could pull a trigger when it was necessary.

  ‘I’m ready,’ said Michael entering the kitchen.

  Emma turned around. Her right hand moved a stray hair above one eyebrow. Smoke from a cigarette lodged between two long fingers made her wince as if she couldn’t see properly. She stubbed it out, breaking the unburned length.

  ‘Don’t know why I bother,’ she said, languidly. ‘I thought these things were meant to calm the nerves’ – she nodded towards the open pack by the Sunday Times on the table – ‘all I feel is seasick. Waste of time and money. Should’ve had a stiff drink but I thought it’s far too early for a slug of gin. Didn’t want the headache. Damn thing always comes when I booze before lunchtime.’

  She paused to watch him shrug on his Crombie overcoat. His movements were slow and deliberate; irrevocable. One after the other he pushed the buttons through the eyes.

  ‘Actually, there’s no gin left,’ she said. ‘Finished the bottle last night.’

  Her matey fretting was just a performance – they both knew it. She wasn’t worried about the job, not as such. Her only concern was that her husband’s nerve might fail. That he might hesitate. The banter was just a kind of loving shove t
owards the door, urging him to get the necessary over and done with. For everyone’s sake.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, pocketing his trembling hands. ‘I’m ready.’

  Their eyes met across the long breakfast table. Emma’s outline was dark against the windows above the sink, but Michael knew well the shades of feeling in that fine-boned face, the deep hollows that held her tortured gaze, the wide half-open mouth. He’d watched the changes for thirty-five years. She’d been happy, once; like him.

  ‘Just think of Jenny,’ she blurted out.

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Keep her face in mind.’

  Michael nodded.

  ‘She deserved a better life.’

  Emma reached for the cigarettes, stamped on the pedal bin and dropped the packet in the hole as the lid opened. They were silent. Husband with his hands in his pockets, wife with her back to him, her shoulders juddering, her breathing like a kind of suppressed insane laughter. She snatched some kitchen towel to wipe her face. When she’d mopped up the spilled emotion, her voice was quiet and assured.

  ‘People bring dogs to the surgery. They’ve bitten someone … I mean the dog, not the owner … and I put it down, quickly and painlessly. I have to. Because it might bite again. You can’t talk to a cross-breed. You can’t bring a pit bull round with a warning. There’s something wrong with their minds. The thing has to go down. And, you know, when it’s lying there on the table, no longer dangerous, it looks peaceful; simply asleep. Grateful that it’s all over. No more chains around the neck. No more bloody postmen to ruin its life.’

  Emma turned from the window and walked the length of the beamed room to Michael. They faced each other, staring hard. Their hands locked.

  ‘Peter is not a good man, Michael.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Before they locked him up he was mouthing off on the radio about morality.’

  ‘Darling, I remember.’

  ‘He went to prison for the wrong reason.’

  ‘Yes, darling.’

  Michael seemed to stumble out of the kitchen into a memory. He saw Jenny after the accident, lying on her back in the orchestra pit. He saw again the splayed feet of his fallen angel, the failed ballerina. Don’t move her. Just wait for the ambulance. Bright stage lights flashed off the brass instruments as the players in rumpled black grouped to stare at the crippled swan.

  ‘He never cared for her.’ Emma was angling her head, coming closer to Michael, drawing him back to the matter in hand. ‘And yet he got all the sympathy and praise.’

  ‘Emma, darling, I don’t need reminding.’

  ‘You do, over and again.’ She kissed him violently, as if she might suck the pain once and for all out of his life. ‘You do, because you’re a good man who’d never harm a fly.’ She reached for the table and picked up a book off the breakfast table. ‘Here’s Peter’s present. It’ll keep him in his chair for hours.’

  Michael read the title to himself, feeling Emma’s angry satisfaction.

  ‘Well chosen,’ he said, without smiling. ‘He won’t be able to put it down.’

  They walked arm in arm outside into the warm sunshine, Emma shouldering the camera bag, Michael carrying the suitcase and the book. It was like their wedding day, only there was no guard of honour from the regiment, no cheery guests; they were starting this particular adventure on their own. On reaching the blue Volvo hatchback Michael said, ‘I’ll call tonight.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘After that, it’s lights out. No contact. I need to be completely alone.’

  ‘I understand, Michael. I’m ready, too.’

  ‘You only ring to confirm he’s out of prison and back home.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Use a coin box. Become someone else to make the call and then leave that someone else behind, in the phone box. Go home as if you’d done nothing.’

  ‘I will.’

  Michael put the bags in the boot and then examined his hands. The tremors and shakes had gone for the moment.

  ‘They’re good, clean hands, Michael,’ said Emma. Like the informer, she had the impatient energy of the person who had to stay behind and wait; the fussy authority of the accomplice who’d planned but wouldn’t act. ‘I know I’m angry … that I’ll always be angry, but this is not about vengeance, Michael. Our feelings about Peter are irrelevant. We’re doing this for Timothy, Jenny’s boy … our grandson. To give him a better future. We can’t leave him with Peter, not after what he’s done.’

  Michael drew her close and pressed his lips against her forehead. He left them there and closed his eyes.

  ‘Everything’s going to be just fine,’ he said, quietly. ‘Just go back to work and heal some cats and dogs.’

  He opened the car door, seated himself and wound down the window. Emma was holding out some letters. She’d been clutching them in her free hand during their slow walk from the kitchen to the driveway.

  ‘You forgot these,’ she said, affectionate and scolding. ‘There are some of mine, too. Remember to pop them in the post, will you? They’re urgent. Should have done it myself when I bought those awful cigarettes, but I had other things on my mind.’

  It was a desperate gesture to be normal. Doing what ordinary people do when their other half heads off to work. Michael glanced at her in the rear-view mirror as he turned into the empty lane. She was standing tall and remote, just like on the day Jenny was lowered into the ground. One hand was covering her mouth.

  Michael drove to the post office, bought some tulips from a florist and then made for ‘Morning Light’, a thatched cottage in Polstead. Jenny had found it shortly after she’d moved in with Peter. She’d been captivated by the lemon colour-wash. She’d said, ‘Dad, I want to live and die here.’ It stood empty now, waiting for the surviving owner to finish his custodial sentence. Michael went through the usual motions: he opened some windows; he raked up the leaves; he shut the windows again. For the umpteenth time he counted the number of steps from the fuse box by the back door to the sitting room, halting two yards before Peter’s chair by the fire. Twelve quick, silent paces. These tasks done, he then departed from the established routine. First, he placed the captivating book on the armrest; second, he put the wheelbarrow by the back door. After one last look at the chair by the fire, imprinting the image in his mind, he locked up.

  Feeling strangely weightless, Michael walked to the graveyard and laid the tulips on Jenny’s grave in Saint Mary’s. He then motored to the Slaughden Sailing Club, just south of Aldeburgh, where he kept Margot, his small yacht. He put the Billingham bag in the cabin and then drove south to Harwich, using his British passport for a crossing to Holland. On reaching the Hoek, he went to Harlingen and the holiday home bought with Emma’s inheritance. It was from here that the family had sailed around the Frisian Islands, mooring here and there to hire bikes and cycle along the long, deserted lanes. After the quick promised phone call to Emma, he went to bed but didn’t sleep. After breakfast he hired a Citroën with a spacious boot, purchased a large tarpaulin and then took the road back to the Hoek, where a customs official barely glanced at the proffered Canadian passport. Heading north, he retrieved the camera bag from Margot and drove the remaining few miles to his final destination: the Southcliff Guest House, a charming Victorian property on the promenade at Southwold. He was a single man on holiday, exploring the windswept coast of north-east Suffolk. Jenny had loved it as a child.

  Part One

  1

  ‘There is no God,’ murmured Anselm.

  ‘You’re going a bit far, there,’ replied Bede, Larkwood Priory’s tubby archivist.

  ‘No, I’m not. This is one of those moments of insight that sent Nietzsche over the edge.’

  Anselm stared in horror at the open pages of the Sunday Times, laid out for all to see, on a table in the monastery’s library. The title ran: ‘The Monk who Left it All for a Life of Crime’.

  ‘Bin it.’

  ‘I can’t and won’t.’
r />   ‘Why?’

  ‘The Prior said not to.’

  ‘But it’s … embarrassing.’

  ‘It’s about you. The Superman. It’s about Larkwood. It goes into one of my binders.’

  Several brother monks had already read the article. Only ‘article’ didn’t do justice to the author’s exertions. It was more of a biopic. A careful examination of the unusual twists and turns in a strange man’s life. Anselm had come running to the library after hearing a few loud guffaws in the calefactory.

  ‘Bede, everything’s out of proportion.’

  ‘You can make annotations, giving the right dimensions.’

  ‘Get stuffed.’

  Anselm leaned over the table, his wide eyes skimming down the columns of print, culling facts and quotations. French mother, English father. Quirky at school. According to John Wexford, headmaster of the day, Charming fellow, but he could never see the wood for les arbres. Graduate in law from Durham University. Called to the Bar at Gray’s Inn. No academic distinctions to speak of. A barrister for ten years in the chambers of Roderick Kemble QC.

  Bede’s chubby finger appeared.

  ‘This is my favourite,’ he purred, stroking a paragraph. ‘Let’s read it quietly together.’

  They did:

  ‘A rare breed of man’, argues Kemble, one of London’s most distinguished criminal lawyers. ‘A loss to the Bar when he became a monk. I’ve rarely come across such a remarkable combination of brilliance, sound judgement and disarming humility. The top corridor of justice is a colder place for his absence.’ Great men have great flaws, I suggest. Kemble frowns, obliged to acknowledge a certain kink in the character of his former protégé. ‘Well, as the Good Book says of King Solomon – another fine jurist – he loved many strange women.’

  ‘I’ll never forgive you,’ breathed Anselm and, addressing Bede, ‘He’s joking.’

  ‘Manifestly.’