Death at the Sign of the Rook

For God’s sake, the man was like Rasputin. Or a cartoon villain who just bounced back after every assault.

He held his mug very carefully, two hands, Trump-style.

although it was easier to believe in the devil than it was in God. The devil was everywhere, whereas God was, clearly, nowhere to be found.

God Almighty, Jackson thought. Neither of them could open their mouths without a cliché falling out.

He excavated a Tesco ready meal (mushroom risotto) from a lost corner in the freezer. It would do. Was that Christian acceptance or just laziness? It was a fine line.

The family dinner table strained with conversations about Nietzsche and Hume and Beatrice Webb and Rilke, so that Simon, who had previously got by with paddling in the intellectual shallows, felt permanently out of his depth.

heart was the repository of guilt. It was crammed now, painfully swollen with sins and misdemeanours. He fully expected it to burst any day. They could put “guilt” on his death certificate rather than “myocardial infarction.

After dinner, Lady Milton charged Ben with marshalling the guests and showing them to their rooms. He tried to point out to her that he had no idea where any of the rooms were, but his initial success in finding the Library seemed to have convinced her of his capabilities. Either that or--and this, in fact, seemed more likely--she was under the impression that he had joined the staff of Burton Makepeace. So be it, he thought. Private Dogsbody had been promoted to Major Domo, or perhaps even to General Factotum.

They should bring back hanging,' the gloomy man at the counter said, indicating the rolling news on the TV screen behind him. 'Well,' Reggie demurred. She didn't agree with hanging, she much preferred the idea of criminals roasting in the fires of hell twenty-four hours a day. Did they have day and night in hell? Did they damp down the fires in the evening and stoke them up again in the morning?

All days seemed long now, and at the same time terrifyingly short.

I’m sure you’re not the only cleric who finds himself an atheist,” his bishop said gloomily when Simon went to him for pastoral advice. “Best just to carry on as if you still believed. I don’t think it makes much difference, to be honest.

He was never entirely sure what financial services meant. It seemed to cover a spectrum from innocent to guilty and then extremely guilty with knobs on.

That was what age did to you—you ran the gamut from spouting gobbets of Das Kapital in your green youth to embracing Thatcherism by the end (he wasn’t there yet, thank goodness). It was depressing. He supposed that anarchy, like sex, was best left to the young, as they were blissfully blind to the consequences of both.

It would have taken a hundred Marie Kondos to sort out the Red Room—she would probably have been galvanized by the amount of joy sparked in that room alone.

Did Alice herself have a job? She gave the appearance of being a lady of leisure. A pop-up Court of Women assembled themselves in the back seat of the Defender and gave a collective sigh.

It was depressing. He supposed that anarchy, like sex, was best left to the young, as they were blissfully blind to the consequences of both.

she appeared in the doorway of his study and placidly announced she was leaving him. "It's you, not me," she said.

They were like a comedy double-act, but without the laughs unfortunately.

The painting had no provenance, as they say,” Hazel said, approaching the word carefully, as if it might be dangerous in some way.

Well, animals,” Simon Cate said vaguely, “they’re better than us, aren’t they?

The fall of man," the vicar said. "You never hear anyone say the fall of elephants, do you? Or the fall of sloths or robins or even hornets or hyenas for that matter." But he had been right, of course. Man had fallen and had kept on falling and there was no sign of him stopping. The abyss was bottomless, apparently.

Best just to carry on as if you still believed. I don’t think it makes much difference

Perhaps this was the way out of depression—simply to become someone else? It made sense.

Sometimes he fantasized about moving to India and becoming a Jain monk, carefully considering every step for fear of treading on an ant, wearing a mask in case he inhaled a midge. And apparently no alcohol for fear of destroying the microorganisms it contained. It would be an exhausting penance. Perhaps he could be reincarnated as a microorganism, humble and useful, brewing beer, maturing cheese, more like a diligent monk than a microorganism.

on St Francis's Day where he held a service to bless people's pets. It was always lovely. He wished the pets would just come on their own every Sunday.

The part of Caro Miles had gone because Stella Pickard, who played her, had simply walked out on them with no apology, mid-performance in Basildon. Christmas Is Murder, for a party in a church hall. Toned down a bit for the kiddies. Father Christmas was the murderer. A very unpopular choice, it turned out. The way the company was dropping like flies, Titus would soon be the only one left. A monologue. Then There Was One.

In Ben's opinion, if you spent too long trying to look on the bright side you eventually became dazzled and couldn't see anything properly at all.

He didn't care, some bits of the past you carried with you for ever, other bits you jettisoned as quickly as possible.

Simon had no memory of what happened immediately before his heart attack. The last thing he could recall was walking into a room and seeing a woman lying on the floor (part of the Murder Mystery, he discovered later) and then everything went blank, as though a heavy curtain had dropped suddenly on his memory. He only learnt afterwards that an American woman called Anita, a retired cardiologist, had done CPR on him, and Cosmo, of all people, remembered that there was a defibrillator in the hotel reception and had run to fetch it. Then an ambulance had made its laborious way through the snow and the paramedics had “worked” on him before carting him off to the local hospital. After a few days he had been moved to Leeds General, where he was still lingering. His heart was weak and, according to the consultant, he was “a complicated case.” True on both counts, Simon thought.