Sidney Chambers and The Dangers of Temptation by James Runcie Page A

annoyed. He just couldn’t get anything out of Tom Raven, a boy whose effortless southern English confidence had got under the detective’s Northumbrian working-class skin. ‘We’ve always suspected that cult’s a scam, but it’s proving impossible to nail the bastards.’
    ‘It seems a very odd way of making money, doesn’t it?’ Sidney observed. ‘You pretend you don’t believe in worldly goods and then cash in.’
    ‘The Church has been doing it for years.’
    Sidney gave his friend enough of a look to force an instant apology.
    ‘Sorry, that was ungenerous of me. I didn’t mean it.’
    ‘I think you did. Working in a cathedral like Ely, one can’t deny that the Church has wealth. Fraser Pascoe did have a point. It might be better if we conducted ourselves more monastically.’
    ‘But the monks were just as bad, Sidney. Isn’t that why their monasteries were all dissolved? People had had enough of them, and went round hacking away at all that wealth and corruption, cutting the heads off the statues in the Lady Chapel and then decapitating human beings as well. They were filled with the passion of the Lord, I seem to remember.’
    Sidney tried to concentrate on the motive behind the murder. ‘The Raven family do seem pretty suspect.’
    ‘Giles Raven, “The Magician”, has already got his lawyers on to us. His son has a very strong alibi. Father and son were both in London at the time of Pascoe’s death. Loads of people saw them. They were at the greyhounds.’
    ‘That’s unfortunate.’
    ‘I don’t know, Sidney. When I started out in this job, a senior officer told me that crime was nearly always about sex or money. You just had to follow one or the other. In this case it’s probably both.’
    ‘Do you think the Wilkinson family are wealthy?’
    ‘Not any more. Divorce soon sorts that out. And if you start handing out cash to a dodgy cult then you’re asking for trouble.’
    ‘Which brings us back to Danny Wilkinson.’
    Sidney had a little walk around the room to help order his thoughts. ‘You don’t think that in some strange way he’s been trying to save his parents’ marriage? If his mother did have an affair with Pascoe, he then kills her lover, pins the blame on Tom Raven and attempts suicide in the hope that his parents will be so shocked by his unhappiness that they reunite?’
    Geordie thought things through. ‘And Danny could have stolen the sedatives from his father. When’s your next appointment? You will have to make it sharpish, Sidney. Unless you want another session with the boy’s mother?’
    ‘I’d rather leave Barbara Wilkinson to you, if you don’t mind.’
    ‘You’re lucky I don’t fancy her.’
    ‘Geordie, I don’t fancy her
either
. In fact, come to think of it, I
can’t stand her
.’
    ‘Oh dear,’ his friend replied. ‘It’s as bad as that, is it?’
    *    *    *
    Sidney’s prayers to St Apollonia, the patron saint of dentists, to relieve his toothache had gone unanswered. He therefore made further arrangements to see Mike Wilkinson, both to sort out the vexed matter of his teeth and to ask a few more questions about Mike’s wife, his son, and his recent whereabouts. It was not going to be easy, not least because his mouth would be open and anaesthetised, there would be padded wool along his gums and both the sound and no doubt discomfort of continual drilling. There would not be long to ask questions, but as he had deliberately booked the last appointment of the day, he hoped there would be no emergency patients and that the receptionist might have left, giving Sidney the time and privacy for an unofficial interrogation.
    Mike Wilkinson saw through the ruse. And although his attitude was curt (a quality often wrongly attributed to his Scottishness) the information post-surgery was revealing. He was sure his son had taken an overdose in a bid to attract his mother’s sympathy and contrition. It turned out that, despite Barbara