Mortal Spoils Read online

  D.M Greenwood describes herself as a retired low level ecclesiastical civil servant. Her first degree was in classics at Oxford, her second in theology. She worked for the diocese of Rochester for fifteen years and has published nine novels featuring The Rev’d Theodora Braithwaite. She lives in Greenwich beside the Thames.

  THEODORA BRAITHWAITE NOVELS

  CLERICAL ERRORS

  UNHOLY GHOSTS

  IDOL BONES

  HOLY TERRORS

  EVERY DEADLY SIN

  MORTAL SPOILS

  HEAVENLY VICES

  A GRAVE DISTURBANCE

  FOOLISH WAYS

  Mortal Spoils

  D. M. Greenwood

  Ostara Publishing

  First published in 1996

  Ostara Publishing Edition 2012

  Copyright © 1996 D. M. Greenwood

  The right of D. M. Greenwood to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP reference is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781906288846

  Printed and Bound in the United Kingdom

  Ostara Publishing

  13 King Coel Road

  Lexden

  Colchester CO3 9AG

  www.ostarapublishing.co.uk

  For David Herbert

  Contents

  Chapter one The Body

  Chapter two The Stowage

  Chapter three The Place

  Chapter four The Foundation

  Chapter five The Fatted Calf

  Chapter six The Game

  Chapter seven The Vicarage

  Chapter eight The Dinner

  Chapter nine The Office

  Chapter ten The Exhibition

  Chapter eleven The Agenda

  Chapter twelve The Computer

  Chapter thirteen The Boat

  Obsequies

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Body

  ‘What does “Venerable” mean?’

  ‘Downpipes and gutters. Archdeacon. Sort of works manager. Supposed to be able to read the bottom line. Every diocese has one or two. They come next to bishops.’

  ‘What do I call them?’

  ‘Mr or Archdeacon or sir.’ Sergeant Ashwood, ex-Royal Artillery, currently head porter of Ecclesia Place, Westminster, looked down on his raw recruit, under-doorman Trace, with some misgiving. The lad was fresh from five unsuccessful years at South-West London Comprehensive where, clearly, they had taught him nothing about the structure of English society. He had a ring in his left ear and his fair hair was long on top and short like fur and darker round the back and sides. His black porter’s jacket had been tailored for a bigger man. It hung on him like washing on a line.

  Trace pushed his finger down the list. ‘Right Reverend,’ he spelt out with incredulity.

  ‘Bishop. Ours have purple shirts and cassocks. The Roman Catholics don’t. They have black. It’s confusing when you have these ecumenical dos.’

  ‘Ecu what?’ Trace wondered if he really wanted this job.

  ‘More than one branch of the Church. Like Methodists, and Greek Orthodox and that.’

  Trace didn’t know about them either. ‘What do they do, then, bishops?’

  ‘Bishops run dioceses. Groups of churches,’ Ashwood hurried on to forestall the impending question, ‘all in the same part of the country. Like counties.’ Had the lad heard of counties?

  Trace had heard of counties, it seemed. ‘Very Reverend?’

  ‘Ah, that’s deans. They run cathedrals. Chief church in any diocese where the bishop has his seat. Smoothies. Sometimes scholars but most often only pretending.’ Ashwood’s brother was a verger at Medwich. He had inside information. ‘The evangelical ones will ask you your Christian name and call you by it. Don’t try the same back. You call them Dean or Mr Dean. What is your Christian name, Trace?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Your first name.’

  Trace knew this one. ‘Kevin,’ said Kevin proudly. ‘After Kevin O’Con.’

  ‘Yes. Pity it isn’t more Christian.’

  Trace was hurt. ‘Well, what’s yours then?’

  ‘Daniel. As in the lions’ den.’ Years of church parades had left their mark on Ashwood.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Forget it. What’s next?’ Ashwood peered at the list.

  ‘Canon. Canon?’

  ‘Two sorts. Hardworking parish priests. Sort of MC for service in the field. Called honorary. And the other sort, called residentiary, help deans run cathedrals. Bone idle. Big beautiful houses in cathedral closes, large cars and light liturgical duties.’

  ‘Can anyone apply?’

  ‘No one applies for jobs in the Church of England. You catch a bishop’s eye.’

  ‘Most Reverend.’ Kevin was tired after so much concentration.

  ‘Archbishop. The top brass. Field marshals. Only two of them. Canterbury and York. York’s coming for today’s big do. Addressed as “your grace”.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Kevin.

  ‘I wouldn’t use too much language, laddie, the clergy don’t like it.’

  ‘They use enough of it themselves.’ Kevin felt he was being bright and keeping his end up in this strange world.

  ‘Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open. It’s bound to be a bit foreign to you first time round. You just learn the faces of the regulars so you can greet ’em by name. They like that.’

  ‘They don’t half think well of themselves.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t they?’ Ashwood felt his own authority was bound up with his employers. He was part of the system. He had his place. ‘And do your jacket up. It looks horrible like that.’

  ‘It’s hot and it doesn’t fit,’ Kevin objected.

  ‘I said, do it up,’ Ashwood snapped. ‘You’re the front line. People what don’t know no better could judge the whole of the Church of England by you being the first thing they meet across the desk here. Appearances matter.’

  Kevin did up his buttons as though they were unfamiliar bits of technology. Just as well the lad should know how things stood, Ashwood felt.

  ‘Any tips?’ Kevin inquired, searching for a ray of sunshine.

  ‘You should be so lucky. Not so much as a florin has come my way in going on six years.’

  ‘Flinty?’

  ‘Some are. Some of ’em haven’t got much themselves. I’ve never seen such a set of down-at-heel scruffy shoes as you get in here.’ Sergeant Ashwood had military standards in leather goods. His own boots shone, as they had throughout his service. ‘I reckon they think ’cos it’s the Church you work for, you do it for charity like. They don’t take no account of wives and families.’

  ‘You got a wife and family, Dan?’

  ‘I got grandchildren I like to spend on now and again.’

  ‘I ain’t got no wife and family. But I could do with a bit in advance.’

  ‘You ’aven’t done nothing yet. You get paid Friday same as everybody else. Now just you learn that list and keep your mind on your job. There’ll be a lot of strangers coming and going for this here meeting. Everyone what comes in, signs in, and everyone what goes out, signs out. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘The telly’ll be here round fiveish so they can film the end of the meeting round seven.’ Ashwood consulted his clipboard. He felt safe with orders for the day in his hand. Even so it was going to be a strain, he could tell. Canon Clutch was a nasty-tempered beggar if anything went wrong and often if everything went right too. ‘You’ll beable to tell them, the telly lot. They look a l
ot different from the clergy. More casual and richer. Cost a mint, some of that gear. And they bring a lot of stuff with them. Cameras and sound stuff and such.’

  ‘Telly, eh?’

  ‘News at Ten.’

  Sergeant Ashwood was impressed. Kevin was impressed.

  ‘They’ll want to film the Archimandrite,’ Ashwood said.

  ‘What’s an Archi …?’

  ‘Foreign. Same as our Archbishop.’

  ‘What’s he here for then?’

  ‘They’re going to sign something. A treaty or whatever. Him and the Archbishop.’

  ‘So it’s, like, quite important, this place?’ Kevin was readjusting his perspective on his first job which he’d advertised to his friends in Betterhouse, the other side of the Thames, merely as ‘across the water’, not daring to add it was to do with the Church.

  ‘Important?’ Ashwood was outraged. Thirty-two years in Her Majesty’s armed forces, senior NCO with an (almost) unblemished record of conduct. Did the boy think he, Ashwood, would take a job other than in the first rank of things? He’d been offered the Institute of Directors. But Ashwood knew more about British society than that. The Church of England had the Queen as its head. There was history and ritual going for the Church. ‘This place,’ he said, fixing his eyes on the 1930s bleached oak panelling of the entrance hall of Ecclesia Place, ‘this here is centuries old. This is where the power is. What the Houses of Parliament are to ordinary life, Ecclesia Place is to the life of the Church of England. It’s the centre of the worldwide communion of the Anglican Church,’ he quoted. ‘The heart of the empire,’ he improvised. ‘The commonwealth,’ he amended. ‘So nothing at all’s got to go wrong today when we’re entertaining foreigners,’ he concluded.

  Three storeys above Ashwood and Kevin’s reception desk, Tom Logg swung his revolving chair from his desktop computer to his laptop computer and felt peaceful and fulfilled as the patience cards came up on the screen. Like Kevin, Ecclesia Place was Tom’s first real job. Unlike Kevin, he had no doubt about his ability to fill his role. His subjects at university had been Business Studies and French. Ecclesia Place had all the features enumerated in his first-year textbook What Is An Institution? It manufactured its own business. It took in bits of the outside world and processed them into Ecclesia Place-shaped tablets and then swallowed them. The means of tabletmaking were memoranda or, on more demanding topics, briefing papers. From attic to cellar, via an unreliable internal communications network of telephones and in trays, it kept itself in work. Part civil service, part club, part college, it had its ethos. Its regular members, known as ‘established’, greeted by name by Ashwood, possessed a patina, Tom had detected. The Place, as the established called it, had its pride, its traditional ways of doing things and its own jargon to baffle and deflate outsiders. Above all, it had a distinguished architectural presence. The structure and values of clerical culture were all proclaimed in the architecture. That is to say, it was impressive, it was expensive, and it didn’t work.

  To others of a more metaphysical turn of mind the building was an analogue of the inner, the religious life. It had been designed from foundations to door handles in the 1930s by a single architect. Entrances, staircases, corridors, windows and lifts formed a landscape of event and feeling far beyond bricks and mortar: here we meet, there we part, here we eat, there we debate. It was a cosmos, an orderly world – but easy, like the religious life, to get lost in.

  To strangers, certainly, the building was discouraging. Miles of expensively panelled corridors with identical rooms opening off them and staircases secreted behind doors which looked as though they must lead to rooms, deceived those not in the know. Direction boards so unobtrusive as to evade the harassed eye, or bearing a single enigmatic arrow, ensured that anyone without an established guide got lost. The traveller then had to humble himself to knock on a door and ask for directions. Often he would be met with a fish-eyed occupant disturbed in the middle of solving the secret of the universe.

  The corridors were without windows. The external world was excluded as though it was feared that perceptions might be contaminated by reality. Gallery led on from gallery, dome from dome. The landmarks, a mosaic walled conference hall in the Byzantine taste and a tiny chapel in Victorian Gothic, were met with relief by wanderers but they were no guarantee of ultimate salvation. For, once these were left behind, visitors would be plunged once more into the long soundless corridors imaging one version of eternity.

  Tom looked round his office. It had been his first challenge in his new job. There had been nothing in it when he’d first come into post except a table. He’d set himself twenty-four hours to get it properly equipped for work. Knowing nothing about the institution (there had been no induction course), with no contacts or network to rely on, no favours to call in, he’d managed to get a filing cabinet, a desk, a revolving chair, a phone and his two computers. In the course of his efforts he’d memorised the topography of the building from top floor to crypt library, sorted out the institution’s financial procedures and made a friend of his boss’s secretary. He’d made a good professional start, he reckoned.

  Now he consulted his computer’s digital clock. It flashed the date at him, Monday 4th October, Feast of St Francis of Assisi, as well as the time. He was hungry. He could do with elevenses but it was only ten past ten. Tom was almost permanently hungry. He ate four times a day if he could possibly manage it. He had huge feet and very long wrists and a neck which sprang like a sapling out of his collar. There was no ounce of spare flesh on his bony frame. An oblong head with black hair cut en brosse like a hogged mane gave him a slightly foreign appearance. His lips were pursed as though to deal with the demands of the French language at which he was competent. One attraction of the job at Ecclesia Place was that there was a canteen on site which was permanently in session from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tom liked that.

  As his fingers flew over the keyboard in his tiny room on the top floor, he liked to think of the refectory a lift ride down on the ground floor, humming away with tea urns and grills. He felt himself supported and scaffolded by a great warm cloud of food-laden air. He was often the first customer for breakfast and the last out from supper twelve hours later. In between he hoped for, but did not always manage to achieve, lunch and tea. At night in his brother’s cold basement flat at the other end of Victoria, he slept intensely, as though dead, for about five hours between midnight and dawn. The rest of the time he worked. He had no lawn to mow, no wife to please, no children to ferry, no parish to nurse. One project after another dropped into his in tray to be translated into memoranda, briefing papers, background papers, scenarios, alternative scenarios, business plans, appraisals of business plans.

  His father, finding the fatigue of returning to the same woman every night more than he could bear, had left home early in his marriage. The task of seeing his mother right had fallen upon Tom. He had worked like a Trojan at school, at the supermarket on Saturdays and, later, at his provincial university. By the time he’d reached manhood, he’d got into the habit of working. He was perpetually surprised how little other people, especially other people at the Place, especially other people in the top echelons of the Place, actually did. They left letters unanswered, attended meetings without a briefing note to bless themselves with, seemed to think it was a form of cheating to acquire relevant knowledge when new demands were made on them, and eschewed training of any kind as though it might lead to death.

  Tom was not censorious. He made inventories not judgements. Clerical culture was just one more heading in the textbook he would eventually write for trainee managers. He’d chosen Ecclesia Place partly because it had an ethos which did not figure in his Business Studies course. He knew a lot about management structures at Ford and Nissan and workplace values at Lloyd’s and the Norwich Union, but the Church of England was uncharted waters. Here be dragons, he told himself as he set out on his chosen career. He was already on his third course of communication s
kills. He’d studied best practice in team building (he didn’t have a team as yet), chairmanship (he’d chaired at least one meeting so far), time management (very useful couple of courses those), and he reckoned he could meet all-comers in planning, policy-making and monitoring.

  He had been in post just long enough (ten weeks) to begin to wonder whether the organisation was really making the best use of him, whether in fact it deserved him. But he wouldn’t be hasty. He was embarked on a learning curve. He hadn’t got the organisation mapped as yet. He was thorough. Before he’d finished, he’d know everyone, their job descriptions, their performance indicators, their strengths and weaknesses. His research tasks, prioritised and computerised on his private disk accessed only by the password ‘cleric’, were, firstly, to find out what the aims and objectives of the institution were; secondly, whether it had any strategies for realising these; and thirdly, whether it had any forward financial planning to cost the hypothetical strategies. To be honest, he hadn’t actually got too far with any of this as yet. He simply must push on because he had to write it up for Modern Management’s Christmas number in a couple of months’ time. He hoped perhaps today’s visit, upon which so much, he was given to suppose, depended for the Church of England, might reveal at least something which could count as an aim. He made notes and kept careful case studies. Today’s operation was codenamed ‘Archiman’.

  Tom reported to the Chief Secretary to the Diet, the CSD, Canon Clutch. He’d got the latter’s work habits taped but not what the work actually was. Canon Clutch came in at ten-thirty, looked through the mail which Tom had sorted for him, indicated the nature of his answers on tape which Tom then worked up into letters, did The Times crossword and departed for lunch at twelve. Sometimes he wrote a letter to The Times and in this way contributed, Tom gathered, to both politics and scholarship in the Anglican mode. At four he might or might not reappear to sign a letter and at four-thirty he was on his way to Paddington for the five three to Thame.