Rite Judgement

Chapter 1

ONE

Leonard Bernstein said, “If there is no one to play second fiddle, there is no harmony,” and it is reliably thought he did not refer to the brand of hairspray of that name. But, in this instance, may his words have been misconstrued?

However, it is true that if an orchestra is to have a long and successful life, the leader of the second violins needs to be a player of the utmost capability; though often it is considered the player sent to lead the second violins is sacrificed on the conductor’s altar, much like a virgin would be walled up by mediaeval builders, or the Romans sacrificed a bull and drank its blood; for the greater good. Should it therefore have come as a surprise that the second fiddle player, leader of the second violins, in the celebrated St Winifrede’s Convent Orchestra, The Nuns’ Orchestra, Sister Winifrede, who also taught geography at the St Winifrede’s Roman Catholic Convent School in Portsmouth, sat in a pool of sacrificial blood. The ensanguined floor, a crimson pool, was highlighted by a brilliantly intense shaft of light that seemingly had no terrestrial electrical source.

The nun had been decapitated, her body posed on a chair in her position as leader of the second violins. She was playing the violin, except there was no chin present to tuck the violin under. Regardless, she gave a peerless and chinless recital, playing a beautiful and celestially haunting tune, The Lark Ascending.

The decollated head of Sister Winifrede had been placed on the conductor’s desk, atop the score for Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Her wimple was missing and the nun’s hair, previously savagely cropped, had been superbly coiffed; she had the serene look of an Audrey Hepburn in her heyday.

It was June the twenty second, sixteen days after the Portsmouth celebrations of the seventieth anniversary of D-Day and the not so much celebrated, though thoroughly acknowledged in the newspapers, partial destruction of Frisian Tun, a previously enchanting middle class street in pretentious, so some say, middle-class Southsea (See Road Kill – The Duchess of Frisian Tun). An English idyll within the City of Portsmouth, a strategically important naval and commercial port on the south coast of England and, to pile conundrum upon Gordian Knot, this was just a few days after the revelation that the Duchess of Frisian Tun was none other than the notorious London transvestite gangster and socialite, Mad Frankie the axeman.

The social mores were all asunder. Unusual? Not really. So much was happening that was inexplicable? A collision of catastrophic events, too numerous to list. Something in the stars? Certainly the past few weeks had the pundits running panic stricken for their copy of Nostradamus, their Old Moore’s Almanac, but they should have waited for the revelation from Crumpet and Pimple, investigative journalists, as even more was to be exposed; something would need to be done.

And now there was Umble Pie.

Orchestra practice was at lunchtime… would it go ahead, if you pardon the pun?

To say Ernest, the caretaker at St Winifrede’s, was odd might be an understatement, though the degrading aspects of his job suited his purpose; he sought only promotion within his Order and, sacrifices had to be made.

Ernest sloped his head and cupped a hand to his ear as he drifted, broom in hand, toward the school hall, as if drawn by the tantalising scent of Bisto gravy, sniffing out an inspirational audio trail, not a mouth-watering aromatic fragrance, but a spooky melodic emanation. The elegiac chords bountifully suffused the corridors with an evanescent life, supplanting the ordinarily insensate passageways during lesson time, much as the gravy would enrich even the dullest roast meat.

Ernest tracked the haunting sound and soon arrived outside the school hall, the source of the music. He tipped on to his toes, for he had the appearance of an insignificant short man, which to all intents, he was. He was short and cultivated his insignificance, which actually came naturally to him and, if he had stopped to think about it, he might have realised this was why he was still lowly within the Order. He peeked into the hall through the porthole window in one of the double doors. He didn’t know about the importance of a second fiddle, or harmony, but he did know that orchestra practice would likely not go ahead later that morning.

The hall was a terrible mess and this would mean trouble. He would be blamed; he always was. He took in a panoramic view of the assembly room, a gloomy ambience to what was ordinarily a light and bright auditorium now seemingly subjected to an artificially created darkness, daylight mysteriously occluded. His comprehension of a gloom-saturated disarray was, however, short-lived and only cursory, as his focus was drawn to the body of the decapitated nun captured in an extraordinarily bright laser like beam, its illuminating journey picking up fairies dancing to the music; agitated dust motes, moving as if dancing a ballet to the tune being played, A bird going up, he thought. A minor distraction from the macabre scene.

Ernest stepped through the doors and into the hall. He was not nervous, he was buoyed with an excitement that would be inexplicable to a casual observer. He had seen scenes like this in books and read about such apparitions in the Order’s pamphlets. Was this his blinding light? A clarion call to arms, his calling? If it was, then Ernest was ready, up to the task and, as he thought this, so his body inflated with Holy Caretaking spirits. He stood erect as he filled his lungs with air to puff out his pigeon chest, the consequence of which was he got a nostril full of the sickly ferrous scent of blood, and the accompanying sensitivity of death and its incumbent fear tingled along his spine. His ersatz though righteous bravado fading rapidly, Ernest’s naturally occurring simpering cowardice reasserted itself.

Overcoming his pusillanimity, his faith instilling him with spurious bravado, Ernest approached the orchestra practice area, the chairs and spindly music stands set out like skeletons waiting to be given body and soul through musicians in habits with their musical scores. He was attracted not to the fiddling headless nun, but to the conductor’s rostrum, where a second ethereal sunbeam spotlighted a head atop the conductor’s table and, as he focused his stare, he could see that the score had been annotated with a scrawled note in red. Blood? He closed in for a better look. The scrawl tailed away to the bottom of the page where the red ink oozing from the ragged neck end painfully slowly dripped off the desk to the floor, forming a gathering of tiny splash marks outside a blackening, congealing pool. Ernest polished his bottle-end glasses and read the score annotation in handwriting that appeared similar to the Stravinsky notation above the title, it read: Give us a sign, oh Lord. The reckoning is yours – £73, plus tip. Ernie had not a clue what that lot meant and only now he thought he might have misinterpreted the tableau? This was not a call to arms for him but the f*****g Druids, always troublesome at times of apostasy. Well, they would not disrupt his plans. His plans. Not this time.

Ernest Pugh was considered several picnics short of a shilling and he did nothing to dissuade people of this image – he encouraged it. But in this guise, he did make a fair caretaker at St Winifrede’s, which was a religious establishment considered lowly in his Order of Caretakers. His sister, Gladys Pugh, was the lay school secretary and she had arranged for her simple, oft-delusional, brother to get the job, where she could keep an eye on him. Although Gladys was not a nun, she did have empathy for the strict religious order and this was respected by the Mother Superior, encouraged even, but what would the head nun do if she was aware that Gladys reported back to the sainted, and much feared, Holy Barbaras? Hell hath no fury like a ratted-out Mother Superior, and then there would be the reaction from the Barbaras.

Kids can be cruel and the school children called the caretaker, a man in their view, diminished in stature and lacking in perceived mental faculties, “Hair Ernie”, and not because he had twenty three cross-combed hairs plastered across his bald top pate, giving the semblance of the railway track confluence at Clapham Junction, but because he had a toothbrush black moustache, very much in the mode of Herr Hitler. Or, they called him Blind Pugh, as a consequence of the bottle-end glasses he wore, which meant he could not reliably see beyond his politically questionable moustache and once, while cleaning the floor of the staff ladies lavatory, he cleaned rather too thoroughly the intimate regions of the headmistress, also the convent’s mother superior, as she bent down to pull up her gigantic knickers. They remain friends, the headmistress and the mop.

Blind Pugh he might be called, but Hair Ernie had a black spot or two up his sleeve and he sensed it was getting close to the time when he would be called upon to play his hand, which was at the end of the sleeve of his beige caretaker’s coat, the top pocket of which sported an emblem in a tawny fawn, with cream and pastel blue highlights – The Order of Christ’s Caretakers.

It was Hair Ernie’s task, as school caretaker, to make sure all was shipshape for the orchestra rehearsal and he discussed with himself and, a largely unresponsive nun, the mess around the second violin sister, who had now stopped playing; presumably distracted by Ernie’s interrogation. The caretaker eventually realised that his conversation was somewhat one-sided, albeit the answers lyrically sounded in the ether, much as he would expect of a vision. Turning to the conductor’s rostrum, he became aware that it was Sister Winifrede’s head, sans coif, who was conversing in reply, though geographically relocated. He did think she looked gorgeous with her new hairstyle. She had a beatific visage, especially glowing in the pencil beam of such high-ordered brilliance; Joan of Arc light, like.

He ceased his conversation with the speaking head in order to clean up the mess beside a violinist whom he did not recognise. In fact, he knew only that the nun was a violinist as she had a violin in her hands and he wondered now if it had in fact been her playing that beautiful tune? Were his eyes and ears deceiving him? What he did know for certain was there was a God-awful mess of what looked like ketchup. So he brought his new mop into use; the headmistress had confiscated the old one and she had jovially said to Gladys, one day in passing, that she had the cleanest pelvic floor in the school.

And so Ernie set to cleaning, but there was gallons of the gelatinous stuff, a veritable lake. Gradually he began to realise, as he talked to himself, that both this new nun and sister Winifrede, were likely one of the same penguin and one part, the head bit, no longer conversed and, the complementary part, the body bit, no longer played. In fact, there was an eerie silence in the hall, so much so that Ernie could hear his ragged breathing. He took a drag on his inhaler, for he was an asthmatic, and scanned the orchestral mirage as he pictured in his mind the nuns playing, a vision so real in this eerie silence. Were they asleep in this vision? Ernie was aware that nuns got up in the middle of the night to attend to their scooters, but slowly it dawned on the simpleton caretaker that both nuns were not sleepy Vespa enthusiasts, but were now indeed dead and that this might, in actual fact be, just one nun, albeit separated and in different places and the mirage of the full somnolent orchestra faded slowly along with the lark, which had ascended and buggered off.

After running on the spot for several minutes, Ernie felt a call of nature beckoning, but remembering his sister’s words about photographing any high jinks or merry japes that the kids got up to, in order to protect himself, he took his phone from his leather utility belt and photographed the scene. Ernie had been given a leather builder’s belt for Christmas by his sister and he wore this all the time, the loops and pockets containing a sink plunger, an unsavoury toilet brush, light sabre, handkerchief for blowing his nose and for storing bogeys, his spam sandwiches, a bottle of water, a bottle of Domestos bleach, his inhaler, and of course his phone. There were two further leather loops that secured the broom and mop so these tools, the religious symbols of his trade, dragged behind him as he toured the school, redolent of Clint Eastwood in The Good the Bad and the Ugly, at least Ernest thought so. Well, he certainly had the ugly bit.

He photographed the scene and went to see his sister, the school secretary, to report his find, adding first of all an apology that he was ever so sorry that he had not got the hall ready for orchestra practice and that it wasn’t him, honest.

The headmistress with her supersonic, mother-superior bat ears, overheard the conversation and stepped into the school secretary’s office and joined Gladys with her brother in a one-sided conversation. Eventually sense prevailed and the mum penguin suggested they go to see what the fuss was all about and she stomped off in the direction of the school hall, the floorboards vibrating from the not inconsiderable weight and determined manner of the big mum penguin’s deliberate step. It was said that the novices knew when the mother superior was approaching during periods of contemplative, enforced silence, by putting an ear, in the manner of deep and sincere prayer, to the floor, and like an approaching train, the novices would be alerted at their heavenly station and, were thus able to take up a more traditional angelic prayer-like stance in readiness of the approaching Thunderbolt Express.

When the mother, Gladys, and Ernie, reached the hall, there was still the lake of blood, a trail of size-thirteen bloody boot prints leading in the direction of the corridor, but no body and certainly no head on the rostrum, though the front page of the conductor’s score was soaked a claret red and defaced, if you pardon the heady pun. The mother superior launched forth a raucous guffaw, which caused Ernie to hide behind his sister’s voluminous skirts, while proffering his phone that still displayed the photograph.

After a moment or two of collective sounds of mirth, all at the expense of poor Ernie, the mother looked at the picture and then to the floor and the red lake. She lowered herself, which took several more minutes, at the same time giving poor Ernie disturbing lavatorial flashbacks and, by and by, she stuck her index finger, the one she uses to stir the communion wine, into the red viscous liquid, fully expecting to scoop up some tomato ketchup deposited by naughty children and, after a moment or two of holding in her mid-morning doughnuts, she suggested this might indeed be blood and that the police should be called and they were.

The police soon arrived. They did not know what to make of the situation, but did agree it was blood and, something horrible must have happened. After a cup of tea out of the convent’s best bone china, with digestive biscuits, for the mother superior never shared her doughnuts, they cordoned off a crime scene and orchestra practice was postponed.