Cecilian Vespers Read online

  “It’s our word against yours.”

  “Very well then. I’ll admit to the conversation but come up with a very convincing tale about why I engaged in such a fanciful discussion.”

  “You won’t have them fooled for long, particularly if the physical evidence against you doesn’t hold up.”

  “The evidence will hold up. It may not be the evidence of a professional criminal. It may in fact be the evidence of someone who wanted to draw attention to his crime in a rather ham-handed fashion. But I am an amateur, and have never pretended otherwise.”

  “Robin. You’ve virtually admitted you’re not a criminal at all. You’re not making any sense here.”

  “It must be the environment, Brennan! It is a psychiatric hospital, after all. Now, I must ask you gentlemen to leave me in peace. I’d show you out of the building, but I have no idea where they hide the exit. Good day to you both.”

  We drove to the rectory to see Michael O’Flaherty, but Mrs. Kelly told us he had been called to the Victoria General Hospital to attend to a dying parishioner. Burke and I stood discussing our loopy conversation with Robin Gadkin-Falkes, then Burke said goodbye and went up to his room to prepare for his afternoon classes.

  “Not making any headway, Mr. Collins?” Mrs. Kelly came up to me as I headed for the door.

  “Not as far as I can tell, Mrs. Kelly. Unfortunately.”

  “Well, if there’s anything you’d like to do here …”

  “Sure, if I think of something I’ll ask. Thanks.”

  “Like look around anywhere. The rooms or whatever.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “They say you can learn a lot about a suspect from his room. Of course the police have been through Brother Robin’s room already. Still …”

  It was hard to miss the hint. “It wouldn’t hurt me to have a look around in there, if you have the key.”

  “Let me see. Is this it? No. Wait … I think it’s this one.”

  “Perfect. Thank you.”

  Robin Gadkin-Falkes’s room was on the top floor of the three-storey building. His bed was still unmade. One black robe was slung over a chair; another hung in the wardrobe. There were two suits with shirts and ties, a pair of casual pants, and a sweater. There was nothing but underwear and socks in the bureau drawers. A small CD player sat on top of the bureau; his collection included chant by various monastic choirs, choral music by the Tallis Scholars, and a collection of works by Hildegard von Bingen. He had brought a small library with him. I noted Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua and an ancient book titled The Great Standing Army of Rome: Monks in England before the Suppression of the Monasteries in the Time of Henry VIII. I smiled when I saw a video of Monty Python’s Flying Circus; whatever else could be said of Robin Gadkin-Falkes, he was not without a sense of the absurd.

  But what was it Mrs. Kelly thought I should see? Something the police had missed? And why was she being so indirect? I continued my examination.

  The monk had a cardboard briefcase containing materials from the course at the schola, and a scribbler full of notes made in black ink during class. He had drawn little cartoons in the margins. I guess when you’re a mature student, you don’t worry about having your knuckles rapped for doodling in your notebook. One of the drawings showed a man with a halo over his head; circles or spirals were drawn around the figure. It gave the impression he was turning. This was in the margin beside the words “Enough Palestrina!!!” There was a blue question mark next to the picture. I got the impression the question mark was done by someone else. In reply, Robin had written: “St. Charles spinning in his grave!” The blue ink answered: “True!” Must have been an exchange with the student at the adjacent desk, provoked by someone else saying he or she — Jan Ford perhaps? — had had enough of Palestrina, the great sixteenth-century Catholic composer. Obviously, Robin, his classmate, and Saint Charles did not agree.

  The room contained more secular items as well. A bottle of gin stood half empty on a table, beside a kettle and an assortment of exotic-looking teas. There was nothing connecting Robin to Schellenberg, but I hadn’t expected to find anything.

  When I opened the door to leave, my foot hit something on the floor. I bent over and picked up a small rosary. It had red and white beads, and an oval religious medal at the end of the chain where a crucifix would normally be. There was a note attached to the chain with a paperclip. The note was printed on high-quality marbled paper, and had been torn from a longer sheet. It read: “Fac me tecum plangere.” Let me cry with you? I would run it by Burke to make sure. From its position on the floor, it appeared to have been shoved under the door. I dropped it into my pocket and headed for Brennan’s room. Then I thought I’d better find out what had set Mrs. Kelly on my heels.

  I tracked her down in the kitchen. She looked at me and asked:

  “Anything there? Maybe not …” She tried for a tone of idle curiosity.

  I drew the rosary from my pocket and held it carefully by the edges of the medal at the end. “I found this.”

  “I saw it there! That note might mean something.”

  “I’m going to assume it does.”

  “The police must have missed it!”

  “Could be.” But I doubted it. I inclined to the belief that it had been slipped under Robin’s door after the police had searched the room. Placed there by whom? “I’m going to take it to the police. They’ll try for fingerprints. Thanks, Mrs. K. This could be very helpful.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Do you have an envelope?” She brought me one, and I placed the rosary inside.

  “I’ll see what Brennan has to say about the Latin.”

  Her face clouded over. The fact that she had told this to me and not to Burke — or the much more approachable Monsignor O’Flaherty — suggested that she felt she had been remiss in her duties somehow. I wondered if she had noticed it a while ago and failed to mention it. Whatever the case, I wouldn’t allude to her involvement.

  “I’ll just say I decided to search the room. That will make me look as if I’m on the ball!”

  Her relief was obvious. I headed up to Burke’s room, and found him sitting at his desk with a stack of books and a writing pad. From the stereo came the glorious soprano voice of the woman of his dreams, Kiri Te Kanawa. She was giving him an incomparable version of “Vissi d’Arte.”

  Sempre con fè sincera la mia preghiera ai santi tabernacoli salì. Always with true faith my prayer rose to the holy shrines.

  I pressed the pause button and got down to business. “Have a look at this. It’s a rosary I found on the floor just inside Gadkin-Falkes’s room. Someone must have slipped it in there after the police were finished.” I shook it out on Burke’s table and began to caution him about handling it as little as possible. The look he gave me was meant to convey that I might be an imbecile but he was not. He didn’t touch it.

  “It’s not a rosary; it’s called a chaplet. A set of prayer beads for a certain saint. This one is —” he bent over the table and peered at the medal “— Saint Philomena. I don’t know what significance the number of beads has but I’d say the three white ones symbolize virginity and the red ones, thirteen in all, symbolize martyrdom.”

  “What do you know about Saint Philomena?”

  He shrugged. “We’ll consult Michael. But I’m more interested in the note, as I’m sure you are.”

  “How do you translate plangere?”

  “It means to beat your breast or your head in lamentation. A sign of grief. So whoever wrote this is saying: ‘Let me grieve with you’ or ‘Let me share your grief.’”

  “Someone sympathizes with his plight, his wrongful arrest.”

  “Or someone thinks he actually did it, and is expressing solidarity with the deed, or whatever drove him to it. Makes you wonder whether the writer of the note has more information than we do about our man Robin.”

  “Right. I’m going to take it over to the police station now. Maybe they’ll get some prints of
f it.”

  “Maybe so. But the only one who’ll have fingerprints on file to compare them with …”

  Burke’s voice trailed off. Robin Gadkin-Falkes wasn’t the only person whose prints were on file; Burke himself had been fingerprinted at the time of the wrongful murder charge that had propelled him into my life.

  “Yes, well, I’ll leave you to your lesson plan.” I picked up the chaplet by the edges of the medal and returned it to the envelope. Burke was lost in his own thoughts and didn’t say goodbye. I pressed the button on his stereo, and Kiri resumed her lamentation:

  Nell’ora del dolor perché, perché, Signor, ah, perché me ne rimuneri così?

  In the hour of grief why, why, O Lord, ah, why do you reward me this way?

  I drove directly to the Halifax Police Department on Gottingen Street, presented the chaplet, and left it to be fingerprinted and catalogued with the other evidence. Then I went to the office for my afternoon appointments. As usual, there was bad news for some of my clients over the weekend. Two of them had talked to the police when they should have exercised their right to remain silent; neither of the confessions was as eloquent as that of Robin Gadkin-Falkes.

  After my last appointment, my mind returned to the murder of Father Schellenberg. I pictured the murder scene, Reinhold Schellenberg’s blood-drenched corpse with the head nearly severed from the body. I thought of the near-decapitation of Saint Cecilia, on whose feast day the murder had been committed. I recalled the police reports showing the killer had mopped up after himself or herself, eradicating the bloody footprints he might have made on his way out of the church. The reports showed he had left a bloody towel and two plastic grocery bags by the door; the police believed he had used the bags to cover his shoes. There were no prints on the bags. If he had a covering over any other part of him, he had taken it with him along with the murder weapon. Schellenberg’s wallet had not been taken, but that meant nothing; nobody was pretending this was a robbery. I wondered what to make of the valentine cards left on the body, and the swizzle stick. The police had not been able to find any shop selling valentines at this time of year, so the cards could not be traced. The police had, however, located the source of the swizzle stick: the Wheel and Anchor Beverage Room in Dartmouth. They had shown Schellenberg’s photo around, but nobody remembered seeing him in the bar. Had they shown any other photos to the staff there? I couldn’t remember what the report said, but I knew which of the schola participants were without alibis for the time of the murder. So I decided it couldn’t hurt to collect their pictures and interview the waiters myself. It was Monday, which meant blues night, when my band Functus got together to wail and blow the harp and play slide guitar, but it wouldn’t be bad form to arrive late, especially if I had the perfectly acceptable excuse that I was coming from a bar.

  Monsignor O’Flaherty had gone about snapping photos at the reception held for the students on their first evening in Halifax. I found him in residence, borrowed what I needed — I had snapshots of Robin Gadkin-Falkes, William Logan, Fred Mills, Luigi Petrucci, Enrico Sferrazza-Melchiorre, Kurt Bleier, and Jan Ford — and took the Macdonald Bridge across the harbour to the Wheel and Anchor on the Dartmouth waterfront. The west-facing wall of the pub was all glass, overlooking the city of Halifax and the harbour in between. It had a nautical theme, with massive anchors, ropes, wheels, and other ship’s paraphernalia displayed around the room. The wait staff were togged out as sailors. Nobody on the day shift recognized any of the faces in my photos. The bartender suggested I come back later and, if I had no luck then, again on the weekend. I thanked him and headed off to join my band for an evening of the blues.

  “They found fingerprints on that rosary, or whatever you called it, the chaplet I found in Robin’s room.” I had heard the news from Moody Walker on Tuesday morning, and was now on the phone to Brennan, filling him in. “Actually, the prints on the beads and medal weren’t good enough to use. But there were identifiable prints on the note. Are you ready for this? The prints belong to Enrico Sferrazza-Melchiorre.”

  “What? Why would he give a note like that to Gadkin-Falkes? It doesn’t make sense. And if he did give it, when? It must have been slipped under the door after the arrest, so how would Enrico expect Robin to get it? Or was he hoping someone else would pick it up?”

  He paused. “But, more to the point —”

  “How come his prints are on file with the police?”

  “Right. Interpol, or whatever it would be.”

  “Guess we’d better ask him. Where would he be this time of day?”

  “Here in his room, as far as I know. Come on over.”

  I got snagged by a client on my way out of the office but I got him settled down, then drove to the rectory. I went upstairs, met Brennan, and followed him to the room of Enrico Sferrazza-Melchiorre. He came to the door wearing a smoking jacket of crimson satin with black lapels; he greeted us and bade us sit.

  We made a bit of small talk, then I opened the questioning: “Enrico, did you send a note to Robin Gadkin-Falkes?”

  The expression on his face didn’t change. “No.”

  “Are you curious about why we’re asking?”

  His elaborate shrug brought into motion his eyes, mouth, shoulders, and hands. “Va bene, I will ask you: why are you asking?”

  “Because somebody wrote a note to the monk, and attached it to a set of prayer beads, and your fingerprints are on the note.”

  That produced a reaction. He leaned back defensively. “My fingers on it? How can that be?”

  “I was hoping you could answer that question for us.”

  “No, I cannot. This note, what does it say?”

  Brennan joined the conversation. “Fac me tecum plangere.”

  “Perché ‘plangere’?” he asked Brennan.

  “I don’t know why. I suppose a person could be grieving for a colleague who had fallen into mortal sin by taking the life of a fellow human being. Or it could be grief over a false charge of murder. Do you think he did it?”

  “How could I know? I was not there.”

  I said to him: “Whoever wrote the note is not the object of any suspicion. It’s just that, if the person knows something about Brother Robin and the killing of Father Schellenberg, it would be enormously helpful if that person came forward with information.”

  “I know nothing. And I did not write the note.”

  “Enrico, may I ask why your fingerprints are on file with the authorities?”

  His hands made a graceful gesture of dismissal. “A small thing, an inconvenience. Monty, it would put you to sleep if I annoyed you —” he looked at Brennan “— noia?”

  Brennan replied: “Boring. If you bored him.”

  “If I bored you by telling this long, foolish story. A misunderstanding is all it was. So. If you have no more questions about this strange English monk, I must dress for my day at your schola, Brennan.” We took our leave.

  “What do you make of that?” I asked Burke. He answered with a very Italian shrug. “Well, I’m certainly not satisfied with what we heard in there. I wonder how significant the prayer beads themselves are. If the guy just wanted to send a note, why attach it to the beads?”

  “We’ll assume the chaplet is significant,” he answered. “I’m not familiar with Saint Philomena. I meant to ask Mike. Let’s see if he’s in.”

  Monsignor O’Flaherty was not in, but his room was open so we went inside. “He has Butler’s Lives of the Saints. There it is.” He pointed to four faded red volumes on the shelf.

  “So,” I said, “Philomena. Starts with P. I’m guessing volume three.” I picked it up.

  “It may be number three or it may not. The collection isn’t organized alphabetically but chronologically. Liturgical calendar. If you don’t happen to know what Saint Philomena’s feast day is, pick a volume at random and start looking. The indexes are in the front.”

  It took us a while but we found her, and she was indeed in volume three, month of August.<
br />
  “I never expected to see a four-volume book of the saints so well-thumbed and dog-eared,” I remarked.

  “This edition was published in 1956, and I can believe Michael’s been reading it every night since. Let me see it.” He removed it from my unconsecrated hands, and skimmed over the entry. “Philomena. Martyred as a young girl in Rome. Miraculous cures attributed to her.” He closed the book, and we left the room.

  “Brennan, just how much of a factor are the saints these days? I can’t say I’ve heard much about them in recent years!”

  “Montague, what people these days think or talk about, with their brains addled by television, has no bearing one way or the other on the eternal realities. In the murder case before us, we have a Saint Cecilia death scene and a Saint Philomena chaplet. To ignore the saints as a possible factor would be to ignore the evidence. You wouldn’t want to do that, would you?”

  “No, Your Honour.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So, who’s your saint?” I asked him. “Are you devoted to any one in particular?”

  “You figure it out.”

  “Thomas Aquinas.”

  “Of course. The Angelic Doctor. I’ve named my new Mass after him. Now if I could only get it to sound the way I want it. The ‘Agnus Dei’ just doesn’t work. I hope to have the premiere in February, towards the end of the schola session, but now I don’t know. Anyway, Saint Thomas is my main contact in heaven. And Saint Gregory. Whatever role he played in gracing us with Gregorian chant must have landed him at the right hand of God. There’s a beautiful statue at Chartres Cathedral, the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove perched on Gregory’s shoulder, whispering in his ear. Bestowing the gift of Gregorian chant. I’m not a weepy fellow normally, but I was moved to the point of tears when I first saw that.”

  “So where did the Philomena beads come from, I wonder? One of the priests may have had them on hand. Or he may have gone out and bought them especially for the occasion. There may be something in the miraculous cures, a tie-in with the reference to grief. Is it time for another chat with the accused? How about tonight?”