Evil Angels Among Them (32 page)

Lucy took a deep breath; she found, to her surprise, that her hand was suddenly clammy. ‘Oh!' she gasped, requiring no effort at all to sound like Becca. Technical problems? she thought with the portion of her mind that remained detached and analytical. What was he talking about? Then, hearing the faint traffic noises in the background, she realised that he was ringing from a public call box.

‘They finally left this morning, those guests of yours – I was glad to see their car leaving Walston. Now we can resume our little . . . chats . . . my dear. As long as we're careful, that is.'

Careful – to use a call box, presumably. How long would it take the police to trace the call and reach the call box? she wondered. It depended, of course, on where the call box was located. It was up to her, Lucy realised, to keep him on the line for as long as possible, to give the police a fair chance. She looked at her watch to mark the time.

‘You're very quiet this morning, my dear. Aren't you glad to hear from me, then?'

‘Why don't you just leave me alone?' Lucy moaned.

‘Your maidenly reluctance is most becoming,' he said with a chuckle. ‘Though we both know you don't mean it.'

The analytical part of her mind registered that chuckle; it confirmed to Lucy that she had been right about the identity of the caller.

‘I've got a new fantasy that I want to share with you,' the voice went on. ‘I hope you'll like it. This one takes place in church. Your husband is at the altar with his back to the congregation, so he can't see. During the prayers you look at me across the church and I can tell that you want me. You get up and go to the sacristy, telling me with your eyes to follow you. I know that I shouldn't, but I can't help myself. Once we're in the sacristy, you lock the door from the inside. I stand there and watch you as you unbutton your blouse . . .' On and on the voice went, all the more horrible for its unemotional, matter-of-fact tone; all that was required from her was the occasional moan, and she discovered to her surprise that the moans were not feigned.

Lucy had been prepared to find the call unpleasant; what she wasn't prepared for was the strength of her visceral reaction of nausea and revulsion. Even though the man's filth wasn't really directed at her, she found herself shaking, her flesh creeping in repugnance, and she had to fight the impulse to slam down the receiver. Endure it for Becca, she told herself, her eyes fixed on the dial of her watch. Only a few more minutes.

Before, she had had a great deal of sympathy for Becca in her continuing ordeal; now she suffered with her in a way that went even beyond empathy. It was demeaning, it was abominable, it was worse than obscene. No one should have to put up with such a violation of their personhood. With a great force of will, Lucy channelled her feeling of disgust, of defilement, and turned it to anger.

What would he do if she accused him by name? Put down the phone, perhaps, or hang on to find out how she knew. At that moment Lucy knew that it was a chance she had to take: she couldn't bear to listen to another single sickening detail of what this man wanted to do to Becca in the sacristy.

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr Purdy,' she said scathingly, her voice cutting across his soft tones.

There was a gasp, a sharp intake of breath and an agonising period of silence. ‘Who . . . is this?' he asked at last, cautious.

‘Never mind that. The shoe is on the other foot for a change, isn't it, Mr Purdy? I know who you are, and you don't know who I am.' She paused for breath. ‘How dare you terrorise a poor young woman like Becca? Don't you realise what you've done to her?'

‘I never meant any harm,' he whimpered, then began sobbing. ‘I'm sorry. Please don't tell.' His sobs were breathy, pathetic.

‘Never meant any harm?' Then, as rapidly as the anger had come, it was gone, transmuted into a profound pity, as she reminded herself that she was talking to a deeply disturbed man. ‘Oh, Mr Purdy,' Lucy said, her voice sorrowful. ‘Don't you know what you've done?'

‘I've been a very bad man,' he sobbed. ‘I'm sorry. I couldn't help it. I've been so . . . frustrated.'

She understood only too well: the sick wife who was neither one thing nor the other, neither dead nor really a wife; the daughter, voluptuous and always around, but not sexually available to him; and the final ingredient in the recipe for disaster, the new Rector's wife, young and innocent and beautiful, the perfect object for sexual obsession. Lucy realised, too, that talking about it was the way to keep him on the line. ‘Your wife,' she said. ‘She's been ill.'

‘For years – nearly five years it's been, since she's been a real wife to me.' His voice now became self-pitying. ‘And I've been faithful to her. But I'm a man, with . . . urges, like any other man. What am I supposed to do?'

Lucy decided not to mention his daughter; that would be touching on a taboo so deep that it might cause him to put the phone down in denial. ‘And then Becca came to Walston.'

‘It wasn't fair,' he whined. ‘Why should the Rector have her all to himself? It just started as . . . a bit of harmless fun. I just . . . wanted to know.'

Voyeurism, Lucy thought. Voyeurism, and the need for an essentially weak and powerless man to exercise power, to be in control. That's how it had started, but the charge he'd got from Becca's reaction had rapidly turned it into an obsession, one so strong that it had nearly wrecked a young girl's life and destroyed a marriage.

‘Don't you see?' he went on. ‘It wasn't meant to hurt anyone. I thought she knew that. I thought she was . . . playing along with me.'

But he'd known – he must have known – how distressed Becca was. Could he really have convinced himself that she was only play-acting? Was his capacity for self-deception, for self-justification, that great? Lucy reminded herself that he was a sick man.

It was at that moment that another voice was heard: the faint, polite voice of a policeman. ‘Sir, if you wouldn't mind coming with me . . .' There was a sudden, strangled cry, and then only a dial tone.

The wait seemed interminable, but in reality it wasn't much more than an hour before WPC Karen Stimpson arrived at the Rectory. ‘I'm here to let you know,' she told Becca, ‘that Mr Alfred Purdy has been taken into custody and is being charged in connection with a series of phone calls made to you over the last several months. I just wanted to tell you in person,' she added, less formally. ‘And I wanted to congratulate you for keeping him on the line for so long. We never would have got him otherwise, at a public call box like that.'

Becca gave credit where it was due. ‘It wasn't me,' she said, her voice full of admiration. ‘It was my friend Lucy. She can tell you all about it. She knew who it was, and she kept him talking.'

Over the past hour a great deal of coffee had been drunk as Lucy had explained to Becca how she'd guessed the identity of the caller, though she hadn't related her insights into Fred Purdy's psychosexual problems. Now the kettle was put back on and Lucy repeated her story to the WPC. ‘It was only a little thing,' she explained, ‘but it was the key to everything. When I was in the village shop on Thursday, Fred Purdy was discussing the calls, and Quentin Mansfield's arrest, with a customer. He mentioned Becca specifically and said that she'd been upset by the calls. I assumed at the time that the information had come from Diana Mansfield – that she'd found out from the police. But she told me later that she hadn't known that Becca was the recipient of the calls.' She took a sip of coffee. ‘And the other person who might have told him was his daughter Sally, who works at Walston Hall. But she told me that the police hadn't told her anything at all about the calls – she didn't even know that there was more than one, or that they were obscene.'

‘It was so clever of you,' Becca said admiringly. ‘I would never have thought of that.'

Lucy laughed. ‘It took me a while, I'm afraid. It wasn't until last night, when I was too keyed up to sleep, that I started putting the pieces together. The other day, when I was talking to David about it, I called Fred the font of village gossip – and last night I suddenly realised how apt that was. He wasn't just passing it on: he was the source of it. And he slipped up by telling other people something that no one but the caller – and the police – knew: the identity of the victim.'

‘
You
knew who the victim was,' Karen Stimpson pointed out.

‘Yes,' Lucy admitted. ‘And I also knew that I hadn't told anyone else, and neither had David. Or Stephen.'

‘How
did
he make the call from Walston Hall?' Becca asked suddenly. ‘I'd forgotten about that.'

The WPC nodded. ‘We asked him about that. It seems he was delivering some groceries there, and asked his daughter if he could use the phone – as Lucy said, she works at Walston Hall, and I'm sure she wouldn't have thought anything of it. Probably didn't even remember it when the constable talked to her.'

Lucy twisted a curl round her finger thoughtfully; she wasn't so sure that Karen Stimpson was right about that. There was one other thing that she'd remembered in the middle of the night and that she couldn't disclose to Becca or the policewoman without betraying a confidence: Sally Purdy's reaction when Lucy had stumbled on the truth about Cyprian Lawrence and his presence in the house on Thursday morning. She had looked . . . relieved, Lucy analysed in retrospect. She must have realised, once she knew the nature of the phone call and recalled that her father had both been in the house and had used the phone, that he was the guilty party; she had seized on Cyprian Lawrence as a way to deflect Lucy's suspicion. It had worked, if only briefly, and had caused considerable unnecessary heartache to Diana Mansfield, but Lucy knew that she couldn't judge Sally too harshly for shielding her father. In the completely unlikely event that John Kingsley had ever done something culpable, wouldn't Lucy have done the same?

After WPC Stimpson had gone, after Stephen had returned home and the story related yet again, Lucy managed to reach David at his office. ‘What's the matter?' he asked, alarmed.

She told him.

‘Good Lord,' he said, stunned. ‘Fred Purdy! But he always seemed such a . . . harmless buffoon.'

‘Don't forget,' Lucy reminded him, ‘you didn't have any trouble picturing him with naughty magazines, when I made that joke about the Quorn in the supermarket.'

‘I suppose you're right – that should have told me something,' he admitted. ‘I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. But how brave of you, love, to hang on till they caught him!'

It was something Lucy didn't really want to dwell on, though she was afraid that the recollection of the way it had made her feel – the creeping of the flesh, the sick sensation of being unclean – would stay with her for a long time. ‘Never mind that,' she said briskly. ‘But I thought you'd want to know as soon as possible, and I thought you might want to consider whether you need to say something to John Spring.'

‘About the possible connection to the murder, you mean.' David sounded thoughtful. ‘Yes, I see what you mean. You didn't mention it to the WPC?'

‘No. I thought that you might be able to get some . . . mileage . . . out of it with Spring. Like you did before, with the tip about the artificial sweeteners.'

‘Clever you,' David said with real admiration. ‘I'll see what I can do. And I'll be back in Walston as quickly as I can – this evening at the latest. But don't wait supper for me.'

David was as good as his word, arriving at the Rectory just as they were sitting down to supper in the dining room. It promised to be a delicious meal: cooking had seemed a good way to pass the hours until David's return, and Lucy had outdone herself with goat's cheese in filo pastry parcels, accompanied by tiny spring vegetables, delicately steamed.

‘I'm glad I didn't miss this,' he said as he joined them at the table. ‘It looks wonderful.'

Lucy indicated the empty glasses. ‘We were just wondering whether we should break out the bottle of champagne that I bought the other day or if we should save it until after supper. We didn't want to drink it without you.'

‘I think you'd better wait until you hear what I've found out,' David said soberly. Three alarmed faces turned towards him. ‘Oh, it's not that bad,' he assured them, ‘but I'm afraid it's not quite over yet.'

‘Tell us,' Lucy insisted.

‘Just a sec.' He went to the kitchen, retrieved a bottle of white wine from the fridge, brought it back into the dining room, opened it and poured it out while they waited. ‘I rang John Spring from London,' he began, ‘and suggested that he might want to talk to Fred Purdy about the murder. I mentioned our theory that Flora Newall had discovered he was making the phone calls and he'd killed her to keep her from talking. Spring was over the moon – he was sure I was right, that there was a connection and that he was on his way to promotion.' He sat down and took a sip of the wine. ‘Not bad,' he judged.

‘And?' Lucy prompted him.

‘I went by the station to see him on my way back. He said that they'd questioned Purdy about the murder and he denied knowing anything about it. The man was terrified, Spring said. He admitted everything about the phone calls, but insisted that he'd had nothing to do with the murder.'

‘Well, he would, wouldn't he?' said Stephen.

‘Yes,' David agreed. ‘But the thing is, Spring believed him. And no one had more at stake in getting a confession out of Fred Purdy than John Spring – no one could have wanted it to be true more fervently than he did. My friend the sergeant isn't best pleased, but he told me that he doesn't think Purdy did it. And I believe him.'

‘So that means,' Becca said slowly, articulating the thoughts of all of them, ‘that there's still a murderer loose in Walston.'