Missing Joseph

probably tell you more. He attended the inquest.”

“At your request, I take it.”

The bishop nodded. He grunted with the effort of addressing the additional tension he’d added to the machine. The veins became swollen on his forehead and arms.

“Is that your usual procedure, sending someone to an inquest?”

He shook his head. “Never had one of my priests poisoned before. I had no procedure.”

“Would you do it again if another priest died under questionable circumstances?”

“Depends on the priest. If he was like Sage, yes.”

Glennaven’s introduction of the topic made St. James’ job easier. He celebrated this fact by taking a seat on the bench of the weight machine. Deborah went to the exercise bike and made it her perch. At their movement, Dominic looked disapprovingly at the bishop. The best-laid plans gone awry, his expression said. He tapped the face of his watch as if to make sure it was still in working order.

“You mean a man likely to be deliberately poisoned,” St. James said.

“We want priests who are dedicated to their ministry,” the bishop said between grunts, “especially in parishes where the temporal rewards are minimal at best. But zeal has its negatives. People find it offensive. Zealots hold up mirrors and ask people to look at their own refl ections.”

“Sage was a zealot?”

“In some eyes.”

“In yours?”

“Yes. But not offensively so. I’ve a high tolerance for religious activism. Even when it’s not politically sound. He was a decent sort. He had a good mind. He wanted to use it. Still, zeal causes problems. So I sent Dominic to the inquest.”

“I’ve been given to understand that you were satisfied by what you heard,” St. James said to the deacon.

“Nothing that was recorded by the adjudicating party indicated Mr. Sage’s ministry to be wanting in any way.” The deacon’s monotone, a demonstration of hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil, and step-on-no-toes, no doubt served him well in the political-religious arena in which he worked. It did little to add to their knowledge, however.

“As to Mr. Sage himself?” St. James asked.

The deacon ran his tongue over his protruding teeth and picked a piece of lint from the lapel of his black suit jacket. “Yes?”

“Was he himself wanting?”

“As far as the parish was concerned, and from the information I was able to gather from my attendance at the inquest—”

“I mean in your eyes. Was he wanting? You must have known him as well as heard about him at the inquest.”

“We none of us are capable of achieving perfection,” was the deacon’s prim response.

“Actually, non sequiturs aren’t of much help in examining an untimely death,” St. James said.

The deacon’s neck seemed to lengthen as he lifted his chin. “If you’re hoping for more— perhaps something detrimental — then I must tell you I am not in the habit of sitting in judgement upon fellow clerics.”

The bishop chuckled. “What balderdash, Dominic. Most days you sit in judgement like St. Peter himself. Tell the man what you know.”

“Your Grace—”

“Dominic, you gossip like a ten-year-old schoolgirl. Always have done. Now, stop equivocating before I climb off this damnable machine and box your bloody ears. Pardon me, dear madam,” to Deborah who smiled.

The deacon looked as if he smelled something unpleasant but had just been told to pretend it was roses. “All right,” he said. “It seemed to me that Mr. Sage had a rather narrow field of vision. His every reference point was specifi cally biblical.”

“I shouldn’t think that a limitation in a priest,” St. James noted.

“It is perhaps the most serious limitation a priest can take with him into his ministry. A strict interpretation of and consequent adherence to the Bible can be perfectly blinding, not to mention severely alienating to the very flock whose membership one might be trying to increase. We are not Puritans, Mr. St. James. We do not harangue from the pulpit any longer. Nor do we encourage religious devotion based upon fear.”

“Nothing we’ve heard about Sage indicates that he was doing that either.”

“Not yet in Winslough, perhaps. But our last meeting with him here in Bradford certainly stands as monumental evidence of the direction in which he was determined to head. There was trouble brewing all round that man. One sensed it was just a matter of time before it came to a boil.”

“Trouble? Between Sage and the parish? Or a member of the parish? Do you know something specifi c?”

“For someone who’d spent years in the ministry, he had no essential grasp of the concrete problems faced by his parishioners or anyone else. Example: He took part in a conference on marriage and the family not a month before he died and while a professional — a psychologist, mind you, here in Bradford — attempted to give our brothers some guidance on how to deal with parishioners having marital problems, Mr. Sage wanted to engage in a discussion of the woman taken in adultery.”

“The woman…?”

“John, chapter eight,” the bishop said. “‘And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery…’ etcetera, etcetera. You know the story: Feel free to throw stones, if you’ve not sinned yourself.”

The deacon continued as if the bishop hadn’t spoken. “There we were in the middle of discussing the best approach to take with a couple whose ability to communicate is clouded by the need to control each other, and Sage wanted to talk about what was moral versus what was right. Because the laws of the Hebrews declared it to be so, it was moral to stone this woman, he said. But was it necessarily right? And oughtn’t that be what we explore in our conferences together, brothers: the dilemma we face between that which is moral in the eyes of our society and that which is right in the eyes of God? It was all perfect rubbish. He didn’t want to talk about anything concrete because he lacked the ability to do so. If he could keep our heads up in the air and fill up our time with nebulous discussions, his own weaknesses as a priest — not to mention his defi ciencies as a man — might never be revealed.” In conclusion, the deacon waved his hand in front of his face as if whisking away a pesky fl y. He gave a derisive tut. “The woman taken in adultery. Should we or shouldn’t we stone sinners in the market-place. My God. What drivel. This is the twentieth century. Nearly the twenty-fi rst.”

“Dominic always has his fingers on the pulse of the obvious,” the bishop noted. The deacon looked miffed.

“You disagree with his assessment of Mr. Sage?”

“No. It’s accurate. Unfortunate, but true. His zealotry had a distinctly biblical fl avour. And frankly, that’s off-putting, even for clerics.”

The deacon bowed his head briefly in humble acceptance of the bishop’s laconic approbation.

Glennaven continued to pump away on the stair machine, adding ever more to the increasing stains of sweat on his clothes. It clicked and whirred. The bishop panted. St. James thought about the oddity of religion.

All forms of Christianity sprang from the same source, the life and words of the Nazarene. Yet the ways of celebrating that life and those words seemed as infinite in variety as the individuals who were the celebrants. While St. James recognised the fact that tempers could flare and dislikes could brew over interpretations and styles of worship, it seemed more likely that a priest whose mode of devotion irritated parishioners would be replaced rather than eliminated. St. John Townley-Young may have found Mr. Sage too low church for his taste. The deacon may have found him too fundamental. The parish may have been irked by his passion. But none of these seemed significant enough reasons to murder him. The truth had to lie in another direction. Biblical zealotry did not appear to be the connection that Lynley was hoping to unearth between killer and victim.

“He came to you from Cornwall, as I understand it,” St. James said.

“He did.” The bishop used the rag to scour his face and to sponge the sweat from his neck. “Nearly twenty years there. Round three months here. Part of it with me whilst he went on his interviews. The rest in Winslough.”

“Is that the ordinary procedure, to have a priest stay here with you during the interview process?”