They heard the sound of feet clattering up another set of stairs. Powerscourt fired defiantly after the retreating figure.
Johnny looked sadly at his leg. Protestant blood was now flowing freely on the upper levels of Compton Cathedral. ‘Dammit, Francis, one more minute and I could have got the bastard.’ He tore off a section of his surplice and wrapped it round the wound. ‘Are you sure God is on our side, Francis? Is your arm all right?’
‘Mine’s only a scratch, Johnny. Not sure about God. Can you wait here for a while?’
Johnny Fitzgerald winced. ‘Bloody hell, Francis, I’m not going to miss the last minutes of the match. I’ll crawl if I have to.’ With that he inched his way into the lower tower. Powerscourt was peering suspiciously at the stairs.
‘That’s the upper tower above,’ he said. ‘After that it’s the spire.’ The words of the Thirty-Nine Articles were still sounding from the middle of the great transept. Powerscourt thought he heard something about the marriage of bishops, priests and deacons. Surely they must be near the end by now. A gust of fresh air rushed into the lower tower. Powerscourt began to climb the wooden stair. Blood was still flowing from his arm. Very faintly now, they could hear the sobs above them. When Powerscourt charged into the upper tower it was empty. A door was open and the bright blue sky of Compton’s Easter Monday was visible outside. He heard Johnny behind him, coming up the stairs backwards, swearing as he raised himself up step by step.
‘Dean!’ Powerscourt shouted into the open air. He wasn’t sure if the man had jumped down or begun to climb the spire on the series of rungs and brackets that marked the way to the top. ‘Why did you do it?’
Powerscourt poked his head out of the door. He doubted if the Dean would be in a fit state to fire down at him and hold on at the same time.
‘I’ve waited and planned and organized for years for yesterday! Finest day of my life! ‘Powerscourt saw that the weathered grey of the stone was flecked with the Dean’s blood. The Dean was about twenty feet above him, making his way agonizingly slowly upwards.
Powerscourt saw that blood was flowing fast from a great wound in his side.
‘I’ve left you a letter, Powerscourt. I wasn’t sure today was going to go well.’ The Dean began speaking to the spire in front of him, then turned to look down at Powerscourt. Powerscourt saw that the Dean’s face was white, turning grey. Down below a collection of tiny dots in uniform were staring upwards at the Dean’s last moments.
‘Come back! For God’s sake, man, come back!’ Powerscourt yelled at him. ‘You can still come down the same way you went up! I could come and get you with a rope, if that would help!’
‘For Christ’s sake, Francis.’ Johnny Fitzgerald had raised himself into a sitting position against the wall. ‘I’ve heard of the Good Samaritan but this is ridiculous. Bloody man must weigh fifteen stone at least. He’d pull you both down to your deaths for sure. Don’t think Lucy and the children would approve.’
Powerscourt looked at the rope he had found in a corner of the upper tower and put it down again.
‘Dean!’ he shouted once more. ‘Turn back, man! For God’s sake, turn back! You’ll get yourself killed!’ He looked up the face of the spire. The Dean was now over halfway to the top, moving ever more slowly. Powerscourt suddenly remembered that there was a statue of the Virgin at the top, next to the risen Christ. Another prayer began.
‘Anima Christi, sanctifica me, Soul of Christ be my sanctification.’
Powerscourt heard the sound of footsteps rushing up the stairway to the clerestory beneath him.
‘Body of Christ, be my salvation.’
Powerscourt leant out of the door as far as he dared and shouted up into the sky, ‘Come back, man! Come back!’
‘Blood of Christ, fill all my veins, water from Christ’s side, wash out my stains.’
In the nave the voices of Canon Gill and Richard Hooper had fallen silent. The words of a Catholic prayer, the Anima Christi, Soul of Christ, punctuated with great groans, filled the air.
‘Passion of Christ, my comfort be. O good Jesus listen to me.’
Powerscourt saw that the man had only another fifteen rungs to go before he reached the top. Somehow, in spite of the terrible deaths, he hoped that the Dean would reach the pinnacle. Then the investigator in him fired one more question up into the morning sky.
‘Dean,’ he shouted. ‘Did you act entirely alone?’ It was, he realized, an absurd question to put to somebody two hundred and fifty feet above the ground, blood pouring from his wounds, desperate to reach the statue of the Virgin before he died.
‘Yes. Alone.’ The voice was little more than a groan now. The prayer went on.
‘In thy wounds I fain would hide. Ne’er to be parted from thy side.’
Chief Inspector Yates, panting heavily, was inspecting Johnny’s wound. One of the other policemen tried to step out of the window on to the spire. Powerscourt pushed him back.
‘Guard me when my life shall fail me. Bid me come to thee above.’
The Dean was but a few rungs from the top now, way above Powerscourt and the others in the upper tower. Then something seemed to happen to his lower leg. He looked as though he might fall. Just in time he reached aloft and pulled himself up, holding on to the feet of the Virgin. Then his other arm reached her waist.
‘With all thy saints to sing thy love. World without end. Amen.’
It was hard to tell the precise sequence of events at this point. The statue, designed to withstand the storms and gales of centuries, was not designed to take the weight of a fifteen-stone man holding on to it for dear life. Very slowly the Virgin began to lean. Then she leant a little further. Then she fell, breaking into several pieces on the cathedral roof before tumbling to the ground. The Dean seemed to hang suspended at the top of the spire. Then he too fell, a last Hail Mary following his passage back to earth, bouncing off the side of the spire, rolling over the parapet of the upper tower, crashing on to the roof of the east transept, then a final sickening crunch of flesh and bones as he landed on the ground twenty paces from the Chief Constable. Ambrose Cornwallis Talbot, Dean of Compton Cathedral, was dead before he touched the ground. Pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen.
Two burly policemen were carrying Johnny Fitzgerald down to earth. Powerscourt sprinted along the clerestory and down the stairs. The cathedral dedicated to the Virgin was empty. Canon Gill and Richard Hooper had departed. A dark blue police cloak had been placed over the body of the Dean where he had fallen. Dr Williams, summoned to attend the morning’s events by the Chief Constable, had made a cursory inspection.
‘He’s dead, of course,’ he said to Powerscourt and the Chief Constable. ‘Let’s pray that he’s the last.’
‘He is,’ said Powerscourt quietly, staring sadly at the dark blue cape that covered the battered body of the Dean. ‘It’s all over now.’
The Dean’s letter was three pages long. Powerscourt found it on the study desk in the Deanery, addressed to himself, written in a flowing copperplate. Ambrose Cornwallis Talbot spoke of his growing disillusion with the Anglican Church, a disillusion that gradually turned into hatred. He said it was a Church that had turned its back on belief in favour of comfort, that had sacrificed the difficult truths of the Christian faith in favour of a quiet life in the countryside and the pomp and privilege of its bishops in the worldly surroundings of the House of Lords. Its buildings were in the wrong place, in the countryside rather than in the cities, where a national Church should be based with the vast numbers of the urban poor rather than in the upholstered comfort of parsonage and rectory. Soon, the Dean continued, the Anglican Church would be completely filled with the wrong sort of worshippers, devotees of the numinous cadences of Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and the soaring beauty of the anthems of Purcell and Byrd. But a Church was not meant to be a place of pilgrimage for lovers of the English language or the anthems of centuries past. It should be rooted in the present, daily confronting the problems of God’s people, preaching Christ’s Gospel where it was most needed. It was in his own former parish in the slums of London’s docks that his Anglican faith had finally ebbed away with the tides. So great was the personal crisis that his doctors ordered him to take a quieter position in Compton. Nine years ago the Dean had joined the Bishop in the Catholic faith. The Bishop, with a more acute sense of history than his, had first suggested the reconsecration of the minster to the true faith on the Easter Sunday of its thousandth anniversary. The Dean had organized it, the slow process of secret recruitment, the appointment of the Archdeacon to carry out the negotiations with Rome. Reluctantly they had sanctioned his mission to Melbury Clinton, realizing that it was a terrible risk, but believing him when he said he could not carry on out without the consolation of regular celebration of the Mass. All three had been members of Civitas Dei for the past seven years. The two missing vicars choral had found out about the Archdeacon at Melbury Clinton. The Dean had packed them off to a new life in Canada with six months’ wages in their pockets.