Vow of Obedience (20 page)

She entered it now, setting down the lamp, moving the blind an inch so that its gleam was visible beyond the window, going to the bed to turn it down before she slipped quietly out of the cell again and went noiselessly down the stairs into the tiny kitchen where she drew back the bolt on the door.

Now there remained only the waiting. She backed out of the kitchen and went up the stairs again. She would wait for two hours. After that Daisy Barratt would surely be missed from her bed.

Daisy Barratt with her bullying, impotent husband, her lack of friends, was also the only person connected with the events in Birmingham two years before and the murders of Valerie Pendon and Tina Davies. And she had lied. Sister Joan drew the programme of the school play from her pocket. At the bottom below the cast list, neatly typed, were the names of the backstage crew – Lighting, Prompt, Scenery, Wardrobe Mistress and – Costumes designed and made by Daisy Smithson. Daisy had said she couldn’t sew. One small, apparently unimportant lie in the course of a casual conversation might mean nothing but was more likely to mean a very great deal. Taken in conjunction with the telephone call she had made to the mental home it added to the weight of evidence. That brief telephone call echoed in her memory.

‘This is Sister Joan of the Order of the Daughters of Compassion. I am making enquiries about an acquaintance of mine, a Mrs Daisy Barratt? Would it be all right to visit her?’

A moment’s silence, the rustling of papers and then at the other end of the line a polite voice.

‘Daisy Barratt? I’m afraid you’re a little late, Sister. She left us a couple of months ago. Oh yes, she seemed very much better. Fortunately depression is often quite easy to treat these days.’

And Luther Lee had been in the same hospital during the same period. It was no wonder that Luther had gone to ground. Luther too had seen what Sister Hilaria had seen just before she had been knocked down.

It was colder inside the postulancy than outside.

She folded the programme and slipped it back into her pocket, then took a firmer grip on the comforting torch. Whether she would be able to bring herself to use it if it
became necessary was something she hadn’t yet dared to think about too closely. She prayed silently that she would never be called upon to make the decision. Quietly talking to an unbalanced person usually achieved positive results; at least that was what she had always read. With a little shock Sister Joan realized that in her whole life she had only once been in the situation of talking to an unbalanced person in order to diffuse potential violence. Now she was relying on one brief experience – staking her life on …

Her head which had begun to droop jerked upright. The religious life made one used to early nights, she thought ruefully, and shook her head to clear away the mists of sleep. It was essential that she remain awake and alert.

Her ears, straining to catch some sound beyond the coasting wind, caught the soft scrape of shoe against stone. Instantly she was on her feet, her eyes now accustomed to the gloom, fixed on the kitchen door. The handle was turning slowly, tentatively. Then it was released again with a sharp little click. She didn’t know if she imagined the soft padding of retreating feet or not.

Someone had tried the door handle and gone away again. Daisy Barratt was a clever woman, one accustomed to avoiding discovery. Only one person must have known of her connection with the Birmingham schoolgirl who had died, must have hastily arranged for her to enter a mental hospital for treatment, had moved from the stresses of his job in a large city to a rural post, had spent his evening off searching the convent grounds for any clue that might lead his superior officer to the truth.

And how, she asked herself silently, could I go to Detective Sergeant Mill with what amounts to nothing more than a few pieces of circumstantial evidence? Whatever solid evidence may exist would have been suppressed by Sergeant Barratt anyway.

There was no point in sitting here any longer. Daisy had been suspicious of the unlocked door and gone away again. She could wait here all night and nothing would happen. Rising from the stool where she had been crouched she went to the door and gently slid the bolt into its socket. She would go out of the postulancy by way of the front door and return to the main house, drawing her pursuer after her.

Time for one winged prayer that rose through the gentle moonlight as an urgent reminder that she herself, of her own power could achieve nothing, and then she had closed the front door behind her and passed through the gate into the sunken tennis court.

Her shadow ran ahead of her along the ground. A distorted shadow, made more grotesque by the outlines of the poke bonnet she had donned. She wondered if she had been recognized or if Daisy Barratt believed that it was Sister Marie who wandered through the grounds. She had no idea. She knew only that at the extreme rim of her vision another shadow had joined her own and kept silent pace as she walked briskly across the tennis court and up the steps into the enclosed garden.

In the moonlight the simple white headstones in the little cemetery gleamed like ivory. She glanced at them as she went by the low hedge and saw the swift flicker of movement as someone ducked down behind it.

She was safely through the garden and walking rapidly towards the main house. She would have more chance here of being heard if it did come to a struggle. It had perhaps been a mistake to go across to the postulancy but it did seem to have lured her pursuer closer to where others might hear and help.

Lilith whinnied softly from within her stable as Sister Joan went past. The moonlight didn’t pierce so far and there was a cavern of deep shadow in which a darker shadow stood. She longed to turn her head and look directly at this other but it was too risky. The final confrontation had to settle the matter once and for all.

She opened the back door, allowed herself to draw one long, quivering breath of relief and then was in the warm kitchen again. Outside the soft footfall rang gently against the cobbles and she half turned just as from behind the door a figure reared up.

Something was round her neck, something that had caught on the brim of her poke bonnet but was inexorably tightening all the same. She hit out wildly with the torch but it spun from her hand and then her hands were at her own throat, last desperate barrier between her flesh and the loop of strong wire that had been thrust over her head.

The torch struck against the cooker and sent a pan clattering down. She kicked out wildly again, aware of the wire cutting into her fingers, of the wind swinging wide the door, of footsteps running. Running from both directions, she thought, as they converged and someone called out,

‘You mustn’t hurt people. That’s a bad thing to do.’

The light snapped on with brutal clarity and the intolerable cutting pressure on her fingers ceased. Daisy Barratt, the veil of her nun’s habit half torn from her head, was struggling in Luther’s grip and Sister Gabrielle stood by the light switch. For an instant they were tableau’d like a Hogarth print and then Daisy tore herself free and ran.

She ran, not through the back door but the other way, blundering into the short corridor beyond, her voice rising into a screech as she called, ‘Come out and see me. Come and see me. I am going to find you, Sister Marie.’

Sister Joan tore the loop from her neck, dislodging her bonnet in the process and stumbled to the inner door. Daisy Barratt had reached the main hall, had her hand on the newel post of the balustrade, one foot lifted to the lowest step.

From the antechamber leading to the parlour a voice spoke sharply, with the habit of old authority.

‘Do exactly as I tell you and stay where you are,’ Sergeant Barratt said.

‘But they have to be punished,’ Daisy said, half turning, her face a white and terrible mask within the disordered frame of her veil. ‘They can all have babies but they won’t. They deny life and lock themselves away. And that’s not right. If no babies are born the human race will die out. We cannot allow unnatural behaviour. We cannot allow that, you know.’

‘You are to come with us,’ said another voice. Detective Sergeant Mill had emerged and stood, poised and calm.

There were other policemen in the hall and somewhere among them the small, indomitable figure of Mother Dorothy. Daisy looked at them all blankly and then moved her head slightly to look at the newel post she was gripping so tightly.

‘This must be cleaned first,’ she said. ‘We cannot allow smears, you know. I’ll come as soon as I finish polishing.’

And with the edge of her veil began slowly to rub away the faint imprint of her sweating palm.

Mother Dorothy looked round at the semi-circle of attentive faces and folded her hands neatly together. She looked slightly drawn but otherwise showed no sign that she had passed what must have been an almost sleepless night. Neither, thought Sister Joan, did Sister Gabrielle. The old lady looked, if anything, rather brighter than usual as if recent events had stimulated her.

‘I have decided,’ Mother Dorothy said, ‘that, in view of the circumstances, Detective Sergeant Mill should be invited to give his account of the events that culminated in last night’s arrest. Usually, thank God, such events don’t concern us, but since last night’s emergency forced us to break the grand silence then we may all benefit from an account. Detective Sergeant?’

She inclined her head politely to the man seated by her. Sister Joan looked down at her own clasped hands, her mouth twitching despite the solemnity of the occasion. He looked as if he would have preferred to be almost anywhere else.

‘Reverend Mother. Sisters.’ He cleared his throat slightly. ‘As you all know already two young women, Valerie Pendon and Tina Davies, were both murdered recently. There were similarities between the two killings that pointed to their both having been killed by the same person and there were similarities between the two victims as well. Both were quiet, respectable girls, practising Catholics without any known lovers. Yet both of them left their homes in the middle of the night and were found wearing white bridal gowns with wreaths of leaves on their heads; both had been strangled by a loop of wire dropped over their heads and pulled tight. Two particularly nasty murders.’

There was a general nodding of heads.

‘Murder,’ said Sister Mary Concepta, ‘is never very nice anyway. I have always disapproved of it most strongly.’

‘What I didn’t know,’ Detective Sergeant Mill was continuing, ‘was that two years ago a schoolgirl in Birmingham was found dead, also with a wire loop around her neck. There was no reason why I should have known. At the time there was no suggestion of foul play. The coroner returned a verdict of accidental death and the affair was never widely reported. The level of crime has risen so sharply in recent years that it simply isn’t possible for every incident to be made known to every police force in every county. Sometimes I wonder if a central register of crimes might not be a good idea save it reminds me too much of a police state. However I’m digressing. All that we really had that might be a clue was a note in the diary kept by Tina Davies. The note seemed to suggest that she was having a secret affair.’

He paused to glance down at the paper in his hand.

‘“Is this love? Like hunger eating you up, clean to the backbone? Like a fire burning? Is it? I wish I could ask someone but I can’t break my promise. I have to wait until it’s too late to pull me back”.’

Sister Marie had blushed a fiery red while Sister Elizabeth looked slightly affronted.

‘Sister Joan had seen this diary extract,’ he was continuing, ‘when she visited the Davies household as your representative and Mr Davies had just found the diary. She had the good sense to obtain his permission to bring it to me and I naturally began to look for the man in the case. Then Sister Hilaria was run over just outside the convent gates and pages were found to have been torn out of her private diary. Whatever had been written there could not possibly have referred to a love affair, and I assumed that she had recognized someone and connected it with the murders. Sister Joan, I understand you drew a different conclusion.’

He was smiling at her encouragingly, inviting her to speak.

‘I was in a more favourable position than the detective sergeant,’ she said. ‘I knew that Sister Hilaria would never dream of confiding any suspicions she had to a diary meant solely for spiritual matters, and in any case she takes little interest in mundane affairs. But when she first recovered consciousness she said, “It ought to have been a donkey”. And
I also had the advantage of knowing that Sister Hilaria had recently mentioned having had certain private revelations. It was a matter of reading the extract from Tina   diary in a slightly different way. I mean – the words might refer to an imagined religious experience. And then Sister Marie said something about it all starting again just as it had up north. Mother Dorothy kindly allowed me to talk to her further and I learned that a schoolgirl from the district in Birmingham where Sister Marie formerly lived had been found hanging from a tree with a wire loop round her neck. It was too big a coincidence.’

‘Sister Joan ought to have gone to the police immediately with what she had learnt,’ Mother Dorothy said severely. ‘However she had my permission to act as she thought fit in her assistance to the police and she decided, rightly or wrongly, to wait a while before informing anybody.’

‘Why was that, Sister?’ Detective Sergeant Mill enquired.

‘Because Sergeant Barratt had recently transferred from the Birmingham Police,’ Sister Joan said, ‘and it struck me as odd that he wouldn’t have mentioned the supposed accidental death when these two deaths took place. The three were so very similar.’

‘I reached the same conclusion by a different route,’ Detective Sergeant Mill said. ‘According to Sergeant Barratt he had requested a transfer in order to obtain a better chance of promotion. During the last couple of days I checked up on his transfer. He had certainly requested one to a rural district but the superintendent whom I telephoned informed me that Barratt was in line for promotion anyway. So he had some other reason for requesting a transfer. I wondered about that.’

‘He suspected his wife had had something to do with the first girl’s death?’ It was Sister Gabrielle who enquired, her head held slightly sideways like an intelligent bird.

‘It seems as far as we will ever tell that the first death was an accident. If you would like to continue, Sister Joan?’

‘Sister Marie told me that before she entered the religious life she helped to produce a school play about Saint Bernadette of Lourdes. The girl who died – Carol Preston, she had the small role of Bernadette as a child. It wasn’t until Sister Marie showed me the souvenir programme that I saw
the costumes had been made by Daisy, Sergeant Barratt’s wife. That placed her in the right place at the relevant time. When I mentioned sewing to her yesterday, however, she made it very plain that she couldn’t sew at all. It was a totally unnecessary lie. And even though I’d met her several times she never once mentioned to me that she’d helped out in a school play shortly before one of the cast had died in almost exactly the same way as Valerie Pendon and Tina Davies.’

‘It seems that Daisy Barratt originally decided to test out some theory of her own,’ Detective Sergeant Mill said, taking up the narrative. ‘She believed that any vision could be faked if one were dealing with an impressionable child, and she tested out her theory on Carol Preston and her friend. The friend, Julie Jones, took fright and ran off, but Carol insisted she’d had a vision. I couldn’t understand how she’d failed to recognize Daisy Barratt who was, after all, making all the costumes, including white dresses and nuns’ habits, but as far as we can tell she wore a blonde wig and veiled herself. In one thing she was proved right. Poor Carol Preston was already disappointed that she hadn’t been given the main part throughout the play and she accepted the vision hook, line and sinker. Daisy Barratt has been telling us that she meant the joke – she calls it a joke – to end there but she was tempted to go on. She appeared again to Carol but the second time Carol got too close and realized she’d been fooled. Only Daisy knows exactly what happened then. She insists that she picked up a wire loop that was lying around in the undergrowth and tried to frighten the kid into keeping quiet. It’s possible but it’s more likely that she brought the wire with her just in case she was recognized. Perhaps to frighten? Who knows?’

‘And after the poor child died she had a breakdown?’ Sister Martha asked.

‘Sergeant Barratt insists that he had no idea his wife had any connection with the death of Carol Preston. However he persuaded her to enter hospital as a voluntary patient and she remained there for nearly two years.’

‘And Luther Lee was a patient at the same hospital,’ Sister Joan said.

‘Correct.’ He nodded at her. ‘Not that they were friendly. Poor Luther follows women around but seldom dares to
speak to any of them. However he saw Sergeant Barratt on visiting days and recognized him again when he was making enquiries up at the Romany camp. Luther is deeply suspicious of the police and terrified of being blamed for something he hasn’t done. So he’s been keeping out of the way.’

‘And Daisy Barratt started dressing up and pretending to be a vision again as soon as she arrived here?’ Sister Katherine asked.

‘Which doesn’t say much for the opinion of her doctor who had diagnosed her as suffering from clinical depression when it’s clear the problem was far more serious. However, he evidently was never told the full facts. Sergeant Barratt, very understandably, thought a quiet rural posting might suit his wife better. He was very fond of her. It’s a pity that he shows his affection by constant hectoring and nagging about cleanliness.’

Sister Joan, her mouth open to interpose ‘He behaves like that because he’s impotent’, closed it again. That confidence wasn’t hers to betray.

‘Dressing up as a vision is surely different from setting out to murder people,’ Sister Perpetua objected.

‘Exactly so, Sister,’ he said briskly. ‘Not that I’m approving of the mockery of sacred things, though I’m not personally religious, but the deliberate taking of a human life is the ultimate crime because there is no adequate compensation ever to be made. However, Daisy Barratt started at once to choose someone she could manipulate. Being a Catholic helped. Nobody would ever connect the mousy woman with a scarf over her head who slipped into early mass on Sundays with a veiled figure in nun’s habit who drifted about near the convent and near the Pendon and Davies homes after dark. She was a shrewd psychologist, unerringly picking out two unsophisticated, impressionable girls, both devout, both living rather restricted lives. Both of them thrilled and flattered at the notion that they might be receiving visions.’

‘I suppose she ordered them to follow her somewhere or other with the promise of some great revelation,’ Mother Dorothy said. ‘Poor, silly creatures.’

‘Sister Hilaria also believed she had seen Our Blessed Lady,’ Sister Gabrielle reminded her.

‘Through the window of her cell in the postulancy,’ Mother
Dorothy said with a shade of reproof. ‘Had she spoken to the figure she would indeed have realised at once that it was a mere human being. She did realize it, of course, when she was near the main gates and saw Daisy Barratt driving up the track in Padraic Lee’s pick-up. Her own Mini car was being repaired and she simply helped herself to the truck. Sister Hilaria had caught a glimpse of Daisy’s unveiled face and now, suddenly, she saw that same woman at the wheel of a pick-up.’

‘It ought to have been a donkey,’ Sister Joan said. ‘Our Blessed Lady would hardly arrive at the wheel of a pick-up truck. She must have run forward and then stumbled and Daisy ran her down.’

‘I don’t think that was deliberate,’ Detective Sergeant Mill said. ‘After all it’s unlikely that she recognized Sister Hilaria.’

‘She didn’t stop,’ Sister Teresa said.

‘No, she swerved aside and carried on. Since the pick-up was kept under a tarpaulin top at the far end of the Romany camp she found it easy enough to take and return it without being noticed.’

‘When Sister Hilaria recovered her memory fully she told Sergeant Barratt who was on duty at her bedside that she had recognized the woman – not as Daisy Barratt whom she had never met, but as the woman she had fleetingly mistaken for a vision. Sergeant Barratt tells me that he left the ward, ostensibly to telephone, and then returned, giving Sister Hilaria a message which purported to come from the prioress,’ Detective Sergeant Mill said. ‘Under obedience she was to say nothing about the experience to anybody. Sister Hilaria, accustomed to the habit of obedience and quite incapable of realizing that a police officer might be lying, accepted the injunction. Sister Joan, you telephoned the mental home, didn’t you?’

‘And found out Daisy Barratt had been a patient there at the same time as Luther.’

‘And instead of bringing the information to me,’ he said, ‘you decided to set a trap for her.’

‘Because all the bits of evidence were circumstantial,’ she protested. ‘Anyway Sister Marie was never in any danger.’

‘But you were in considerable danger yourself,’ Mother Dorothy said, primming her mouth.

‘I did leave a note, Mother.’

‘Which Sister Gabrielle found. She was wakeful as she so often is and when she heard the back door close she got up to investigate. She didn’t see the note at first and assumed you’d gone out to see to Lilith.’

‘Later on as I hadn’t heard you return I got up again,’ Sister Gabrielle said, ‘and on that occasion I found that very inadequate note you’d pinned up on the door. “Gone to complete investigations. Please don’t worry”. What kind of note is that?’

‘Sister Gabrielle very properly brought the note to me and I judged the situation sufficiently serious to telephone the police,’ Mother Dorothy said.

‘By then my own investigations were sufficiently well advanced for me to have Sergeant Barratt in for questioning.’

‘I did think at one stage that he was the killer,’ Sister Joan admitted. ‘He was wandering round in the grounds one evening when he wasn’t officially on duty.’

‘Checking up on his wife’s whereabouts,’ Detective Sergeant Mill said. ‘He knew by then that it had to be Daisy and he was doing his best to prevent a further tragedy. It was Sergeant Barratt who painted
I’M COMING
on the front door of the postulancy to ensure that the novices were brought over to the security of the main house, by the way.’

‘But he had already covered up for her,’ Sister Joan said.

‘And is being charged as an accomplice after the fact.’ The detective frowned.