Free Chapter and Hearse by Catherine Aird Page B

urgent – today, this minute, urgent – he couldn’t see how it could possibly be.
    â€˜The case was begun on Monday 24 December…’
    â€˜Christmas Eve?’
    â€˜Christmas Eve – the judges were Roger de Loveday and Richard de Boyland – and then it was adjourned for Christmas.’
    â€˜â€œThe hungry judges soon the sentences sign”,’ said Sloan, quoting Alexander Pope, ‘“And wretches hang that jurymen may dine”.’ They had that piece in their speeches each time at the Berebury Magistrates’ Annual Dinner.
    â€˜It wasn’t like that at all,’ said the ACC a trifle plaintively. ‘No, they all kept Christmas Day in high old style and then, on St Stephen’s Day…’
    â€˜Boxing Day.’
    â€˜They found Richard Stonyng…’
    â€˜The gatekeeper…’
    â€˜â€¦ guilty of murder.’
    â€˜For not shutting the gate?’ Sloan was sensitive about gates. There had been one terrible week in his schooldays when the boy who had been detailed to play brave Horatius, Captain of the Gate, had gone down with mumps. Sloan had been the unwilling understudy and anything to do with gates, fearful odds, ashes of his fathers and temples of his gods still struck an unhappy chord.
    â€˜For opening the gate to let the felons in before the murder and for not shutting it after the deed was done to keep them in.’
    â€˜I see, sir.’ Dereliction of duty or complicity he would have called that himself, but apparently the judges had reckoned it murder. ‘An accessory before and after the fact,’ he said neatly.
    â€˜And as for “Mr Mayor, sirrrr”…’ baaa’d the ACC in the tones of Larry the Lamb.
    â€˜Alfred Duport,’ supplied Sloan. The ACC’s literary background had obviously been broad enough to have included Toytown.
    â€˜Found guilty of consenting to and planning the felony and receiving and harbouring the felons.’
    â€˜Aiding and abetting,’ translated Sloan.
    â€˜And then on Holy Innocents’ Day…’
    That, thought Sloan, couldn’t have been judicial irony, surely?
    â€˜â€¦ all those who had pleaded benefit of clergy…’
    â€˜That, sir,’ said Sloan, ‘was some sort of establishment cop-out, wasn’t it?’ He knew that, like sanctuary, they didn’t have it any more, although it was true to say that the only criminal clergymen to come his way officially had certainly been attempting – one way and another – something for their own benefit.
    â€˜A way of exculpation of men of the cloth grounded in a text in the First Book of Chronicles,’ said the ACC, admitting that he’d looked it up. ‘Chapter sixteen, verse twenty-two.’
    Sloan decided he really would have to pay more attention to his mother’s interests in future.
    The ACC shuffled the notes on his desk and read out, ‘“Touch not mine anointed and do my prophets no harm.” And all they had to do to prove they were clerks in holy orders was to be able to read the first verse of Psalm fifty-one. The Miserere.’
    â€˜So the clerical conspirators got off?’ concluded Sloan doggedly.
    â€˜Handed over to their bishops, except the Dean, who was sent to a monastery.’
    â€˜And the actual murderers, sir?’ Sloan knew who he meant – the ones with blood on their hands, which was as good a definition as any he knew.
    â€˜Escaped abroad.’
    Detective Inspector Sloan, currently coming to terms with the vagaries of the Crown Prosecution Service, sighed and said, ‘Not a very satisfactory outcome, sir.’
    â€˜There was one more puzzle.’
    â€˜Sir?’
    â€˜The records are a bit shaky, but afterwards they wrote down that the Mayor had been hanged on St Stephen’s Day.’
    â€˜But,’ said Sloan, frowning, ‘surely that was before he was tried?’
    â€˜It