Rite Judgement

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Rite Judgement - book excerpt

Prologue

There had been the Arab Spring. Well, what was called the Arab Spring, but there had been a spring, first in Tunisia, then Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, Morocco and Jordan – all springs of varying degrees of success and all aimed at overturning an oppressive regime, or what at least was deemed to be oppressive, but had, in the course of time, been shown to be benign dictatorships, if that is possible?

To say that Britain faced, or needed a spring, might be pushing the analogy too far, but certainly the people felt oppressed by the establishment, comprised of the government, civil servants, banks and financial institutions, corporations, as well as wealthy individuals, all perceived to be in the grip and control of the elite; the one per cent. The people felt and were, in reality, disenfranchised. The elite, the Eton bunch, the old-money privileged, felt they had a God-given right to rule. A divine arrogance, established through generations of the same families, all moneyed, and all convinced they knew best. The plebs? Well, they should be grateful for what they got. The crumbs off their table.

To say Britain needed a spring would also depend on which side of the fence you sat, silver spoon in a bouche raffinee, or a rusty nail stuck up your arse. But, something was brewing, and it looked as if it was not just letters to the newspaper, tuts at coffee mornings and grumbles in the working-men’s clubs. This was different, there was a groundswell that was germinating, flourishing and growing in momentum. It had the hallmarks of a peasants’ revolt, led not by an uneducated Wat Tyler, but some more powerful and influential persons and organisations supporting the movement, goading it even, some for altruistic reasons, but others saw that a dystopian society made for more opportunities to make smash-and-grab raids on the country’s family silver. These unscrupulous institutions could do very well indeed, provided it went their way, which it was anticipated to do. As it had always done. But would it this time? They played a dangerous game and so what of the risks? The people would not see them until it would be too late.

On the other hand, would the power of the people be enough to overcome? And what was it they had to overcome? The enemy was nebulous and this had always been the way. Who are you fighting? Certainly in some cultures, as proven in the Arab Spring, the people had a known enemy that generally did not shield itself behind the pretence of a democracy and, the people had the will and the spirit; never say die. But did the British? The Brits had to be up for work in the morning, of course, but that was becoming less of an issue as jobs disappeared or people were slammed into zero-hours contracts. They would be up, but then a phone call; no work today. Idle hands? Maybe not, there might be something good on the telly, though this had been manipulated as much as it could with diverting news, often made up, of gung-ho sporting fixtures, jingoistic headlines, anything to distract the plebs, but even that interest was waning as people started to become aware of their cruel circumstances. It is hard to ignore hunger.

There were rumblings of discontent. The whiff of revolt in the air. A gathering storm, the big Mo. The established order was being challenged on several fronts and many of the traditional barriers, proven successful in the past, like starving the poor, disabled and sick, were being charged down. Revolution was being nurtured, but would it be a bloodless coup and, most of all, would it succeed? Read on…

Part One: The Dancers, the Players…

Chapter 1

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 fucking 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, HolyBarbaras? Hell hath no fury like a ratted-out Mother Superior, and then there would be the reaction from the Barbaras.