Free A Turbulent Priest by J. M. Gregson Page A

like jamjar bottoms and rapping his fingers with a ruler for the fidgeting which was his besetting sin as an eight-year-old. The headteacher who now came out from her office to meet him conformed to none of his images, and that in itself he found a little disconcerting. Mrs MacMullen was in her late forties, blond and buxom, erring a little on the side of the plumpness which most of her charges found reassuring. Hundreds of children and one or two staff had wept on her splendid bosom in the twenty years in which she had instructed the nation’s young. Percy, eyeing that instrument of comfort, thought how much happier his school days might have been if such noble consolation had been available to him.
    “Thank you for making time to see us,” he said.
    Her smile destroyed a few more of his prejudices. “It wasn’t too difficult. The children aren’t back at school until Monday. Most of the staff are in for in-service training, but we haven’t any pupils to worry about yet. Come into the office.” They followed her into a room which still had space for children’s paintings on the wall in spite of the piles of books and letters which seemed to dominate it. She had both chairs and coffee ready for them, anticipating that like good police officers they would arrive precisely at the time they had appointed. She sat down opposite them in an armchair, assessing this strangely dapper little man with the bald head and jet-black moustache and the sturdy girl with the red-gold hair beside him as coolly as if they had been a pair of the anxious parents she was more used to meeting here. She said, “It must be important, to bring me a Detective Inspector and a Detective Sergeant at the same time.”
    “It is. And I’m not sure how much you can help us. But we do need you to be completely frank with us. We are quite sure now that we are investigating a murder.”
    The shrewd blue eyes widened only a little. “Then it must be that of Father Bickerstaffe.”
    “Yes. And we’re still getting to know him. The better the picture we can get of a dead man, the better the chance that we shall locale his murderer. How well did you know Father Bickerstaffe?”
    She took a few seconds to frame her answer, thinking carefully before she committed herself to words. “I knew him quite well, in what I suppose you would call a professional capacity. I don’t worship at the Sacred Heart church myself —I live four miles from the school, in St Mary’s parish — but John Bickerstaffe came into the school and chatted with me about our problems about once a fortnight. He was also a governor of the school. He helped to appoint me three years ago.”
    “I thought the parish priest controlled his local school, that he would have appointed you himself, with the approval of the local authority.”
    Mrs MacMullen smiled again, and once more Percy found it disconcerting. “You’re years out of date, Mr Peach, I’m happy to say. May I ask if you are yourself a Catholic?”
    “I — er, well, no. Not now. I was brought up as a Catholic, though.”
    “And your ideas of school organisation date from those days, I think. Something like that did used to happen in most Church schools, in the old days. Nowadays, the priest of the church to which the school is attached is no more than one of the governors. Father Bickerstaffe wasn’t even Chair of our governing body, though he was always most helpful when it came to offering his services or providing us with accommodation for our fund-raising ventures.”
    Having thus been brought firmly into the new century, DI Peach nodded briefly at his sergeant, and Lucy Blake said, “We need to have your frank impressions of Father Bickerstaffe. He seems to have been killed quite deliberately and with malice aforethought. We have seen his spiritual superior, who has given us certain information. We have seen Miss Hargreaves, Father Bickerstaffe’s housekeeper, who told us” — she turned here to her notebook