Sidney Chambers and The Shadow of Death (The Grantchester Mysteries)

hand on Phil’s shoulder. ‘I will pray for her.’
    ‘She was an angel,’ Claudette’s father replied.
    Sidney timed the journey from the stage to the Ladies and diagonally across the room. Even with the crowded tables it would have taken little more than a minute to cross. He tried to think how a murderer could have struck so quickly and powerfully and without being seen. It seemed impossible, and yet it had happened. He watched as two ambulance men took Claudette’s body away. There was no beauty or stillness in her death, only absence.
    He returned to where he had been sitting and waited as the members of the audience gave their details and statements. Then he put his head in his hands.
    Where was God now? he asked himself. Where had He been on the battlefields of Normandy, in the Blitz over London and in the bombed cities of Europe? How could a loving God permit such monumental suffering and what purpose did it serve? And, in contrast with such a widespread human catastrophe, how could God also allow something so small in scale and yet so intimately brutal as the murder of this single girl on this particular night? What could anyone have had against her to provoke such violence? How could there be any reason or justification for her death?
     
    The two friends took the first morning train back to Cambridge. It was already light when they arrived and Sidney had only a few hours before early morning Communion. He would wash and shave and then try to catch some sleep in the afternoon. There was no time to go to bed.
    He took Dickens out for his favourite walk across the Meadows but, despite the stillness of the river and the beauty of the light amidst the willows, Sidney’s mood could not lift. He was haunted by the murder and what he might have done to prevent it.
    He walked across the graveyard filled with trees of yew, holm oak and cherry, and stopped before a broken column: the grave of a twenty-six-year-old man whose life had been cut short in 1843. He passed the memorial for the twenty-five soldiers from Grantchester who had died in the two wars:
     
    They shall grow not old
    As we that are left grow old . . .
     
    Inside the church, he began to pray for the soul of Claudie Johnson and for the sorrows of the world. Today, he decided, he would visit the sick of the parish: Beryl Cooper, who had acute arthritis; Harold Streat, the funeral director, whose elderly father was suffering from dementia; Brenda Hardy, the postman’s wife, who had breast cancer. He had to stay with each one for as long as possible, providing unhurried comfort, calm and companionship. It was the least he could do, and every time he did so, he realised that the sick and the dying could teach him more than he could ever learn amidst the hurly burly of the everyday. The elderly and the sick had a different view of the world; they were already more than halfway on their journey towards the invisible realm where, it had been promised, all things shall be made known.
    That afternoon, Sidney’s sister Jennifer telephoned to say that the Johnson family were inconsolable. There was nothing she could do or say that might comfort them. All she could do was offer practical help. Could she therefore ask for her brother’s advice regarding Claudette’s funeral arrangements? There was going to be a post-mortem, and then a service in a London crematorium but, as not one of the Johnson family was a churchgoer, perhaps Sidney could say a few words at the service?
    ‘I’m sure their vicar will be able to do that, Jennifer.’
    ‘They don’t have a vicar.’
    ‘Everyone has a vicar. Whether people choose to use him or not is another matter.’
    ‘But they like you, Sidney.’
    ‘Do you know what parish they are in?’
    ‘Somewhere in Brixton, I think. But Johnny has asked for you. They trust you.’
    ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
    ‘Johnny’s father is so upset that he won’t speak.’
    ‘It will take a long time.’
    ‘I can’t believe anyone could have done such a thing, Sidney. Claudie was going to be a little sister to me.’
    ‘So it’s serious with Johnny?’
    ‘We can’t think about ourselves at the moment.’
    Sidney tried to imagine what it might be like to lose a sister. It was almost unthinkable. There was so much that he felt that he still had to share with Jennifer that to lose her so suddenly, as Johnny had lost Claudette, without any farewell, would make him regret all the times in his life that he had taken