Late of This Parish (12 page)

She looked suddenly rather pinched. ‘In his position it's inevitable, isn't it? But there's been nothing lately, that I know of.' And paused. ‘I think he would've told me if there had been.'

So there had been something at one time. But what, he saw by the sudden closed look on her face, she wasn't apparently prepared to say. He stood up, ready to leave. ‘I'd like to talk to your daughter some time.'

‘Philly? She's probably gone to bed by now. She's been out to dinner with Sebastian Oliver and she came back very tired.'

‘I didn't mean now, later will do. I've just been talking to him – he's a particular friend of hers, I gather?'

‘Yes,' Miriam said, with so little enthusiasm he raised his eyebrows. ‘Yes,' she repeated, and sighed. ‘Oh, he's all right, I suppose. He's certainly redeemed himself by now but –'

‘Redeemed himself?'

‘Well, you know, he was expelled from Halsingbury – at least, that's what it amounted to, though his parents – no, you mustn't take any notice. I'm not being fair. He's really quite different now.'

He didn't waste his time trying to make her say any more at this juncture. He could see that she already felt she had said too much.

Mayo finally put his key into the lock of his front door in the early hours of Sunday morning, gritty-eyed and ready only to zonk out. Having reached a point where he'd decided nothing more useful could be accomplished that night except calling a halt and sending everyone off to snatch a few hours' sleep, Cherry had put in an appearance, ready to go through the case so far with his usual thoroughness and not averse to Mayo going through it with him – but then, he hadn't been without sleep for nearly forty-eight hours. Mayo had drunk another mugful of the tongue-stripping coffee that was Spalding's forte, and summoned up a second wind. It wasn't until an hour later that he'd been free to shut up shop.

Moses, the grey cat belonging to Miss Vickers, was sitting as usual on his doormat, waiting for the chance to insinuate himself inside. The familiar moment's struggle for supremacy ensued when Mayo tried to open the door wide enough to get in while at the same time endeavouring to hold the cat back with his foot. He wasn't over-enamoured of this particular feline, which had a wall eye and a frustrated determination to be loved by him. Its plaintive miaouing could be heard through the closed door of the flat, which had its usual desolate look when he came back to it tired and hungry. The daffodils Julie had bought were dying. There was a note from Alex saying the pork chops were in the fridge with the rest of their abandoned meal and they'd better be eaten up a.s.a.p. She reminded him what duty she was on next week and ended with love and kisses, Alex.

Somehow he'd missed out on the eggs and bacon at the Drum and Monkey and he felt ravenous but the thought of cooking the chops was too much. He wondered if the cat might eat them or whether in view of his name he wouldn't consider them kosher. He settled for a corned beef sandwich which he ate propped up at the kitchen counter before dropping into bed.

Once there, he found himself maddeningly wide awake, the events of the case chasing themselves around in his mind. Finally, he gave up the attempt at sleep and began to try to gather up the threads, counting them out as if he were counting sheep:

One, Cecil Willard had been killed for no apparent reason. He hadn't been an altogether pleasant personality but the arguments he had had with people hardly seemed to constitute sufficient grounds for murder.

Two, he was objecting to his daughter's marriage, which was disagreeable for her but hardly insurmountable – killing him to avoid the unpleasantness of opposing him was taking a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.

Three, there had been trouble with Mrs Oliver over the shooting of some badgers. It had upset her very much but unless the affair had, without anyone being aware, blown up to epic proportions – as admittedly such trifling incidents had been known to do – it didn't at the moment seem to be of such paramount importance that he was prepared to give it much credence.

Four, what seemed more important was that Willard's death had come at a time when he might have been troubled in his conscience about some unspecified moral issue he had come across, very likely to do with someone called Sara. Was it coincidence that the name had appeared in close conjunction with that of Sebastian Oliver, the smooth young man with the sharp edge who had visited Willard the day before his death but claimed to know nothing about any Sara? He was adamant that his relations with the old man had been friendly. There was no reason to believe otherwise and he had an alibi for the time of death. This depended upon Phyllida Thorne – and hers upon him for that matter. Mayo was not easy in his mind about either of them, though he'd yet to speak to her – and to Laura Willard, if it came to that.

Five, six, seven and so on ... there was more than enough to occupy him before he need start reaching for conclusions.

Having decided this, he turned over and fell dreamlessly asleep until he woke at seven, fully awake to the exigencies of the day before him which included, first thing because of Timpson-Ludgate's golf commitments, attendance at the post-mortem. For reasons not too far to seek, he decided to skip breakfast.

The events of Saturday night produced on the following morning an interest in the church at Wyvering normally not granted to it. Half the village seemed to have found urgent and compelling reasons to be out and about in the direction of Parson's Place and a great deal of confusion was occasioned in the narrow confines of Dobbs Lane, owing to cars being refused entry into the square and having to reverse out.

Lionel Oliver, dismayed at the unwonted intrusion but unable to do anything about it, finally gave up and went back into the Rectory, looking decidedly upset at such distasteful behaviour, envisaging the quiet decorum of his church disappearing in a welter of chocolate wrappers and Coke tins. ‘I hesitate to believe such ghouls can be our own village people, gawping and staring at the scene of a murder! Not that there's anything to see, as I have repeatedly told them. I explained, in so far as I could, why it had been necessary to cordon off the churchyard and to limit vehicle access into the square and I endeavoured to suggest – quite reasonably in my opinion – that they were being no help at all to the police in hanging around. But I don't think they were really listening.'

Catherine wasn't surprised. Lionel's orotund utterances frequently had that effect on people. ‘Well, at least it meant we had a good turn out at eight o'clock,' she reminded him briskly.

He had pinned up a notice from the vicar of St Peter's in the neighbouring village of Stapley, inviting the faithful to join his own Sunday flock for Matins and Evensong, but Holy Communion had been celebrated here in the parish rooms. There had been twice the usual number of communicants but this evidently hadn't pleased Lionel.

‘Hardly a matter for congratulation, having them to do the right thing for the wrong reason,' he answered Catherine's cheerful remark with pained reproof, yet feeling for some reason – and not for the first time lately – that it was he who was in the wrong.

This unusual state of affairs was very unsettling to him. In fact, he was feeling thoroughly upset – and much of this, he was sorry to have to admit, was due to his wife. He was seeing her with new eyes, ever since she had blurted out her confession to him. Which she had done with trepidation, obviously afraid he would be disturbed by what she had to tell him, as well she might be, after having been so secretive.

Well, he certainly was disturbed, not only by the fact that she had deemed it necessary to keep from him that she had written a book, but also that it was about to be published.

Was he then such an ogre? he asked himself. Would he not have been delighted to hear of it? The answer was no, in both cases. No, he was not an ogre – he was a very approachable man, as everyone knew, and he rarely lost his temper, though that did not mean he wasn't entitled to show his displeasure when the occasion warranted it. And no, he was certainly
not
delighted to hear about her book. The idea of his wife seeking notoriety was repugnant to him.

‘Notoriety? What rubbish, Lionel! It'll be a nine days' wonder, if it's noticed at all – which I doubt very much indeed.'

‘Not when you're sponsoring an organization which supports violence for its own ends.'

‘You know me better than that,' she said, but avoiding his eyes. He had the feeling she wanted to tell him something else but didn't know how to begin. He waited but when nothing happened he sighed and turned away.

Yes, he was upset. For the first time in nearly thirty years of what he had always regarded as mutually supportive work and marriage, he felt he didn't know how to deal with Catherine. He was shattered, as his son would have put it. Oh dear, Sebastian! Another worry. That business rearing its ugly head again, after all these years! Lionel was very much afraid that, much as he disliked the idea, he was going to have to try again to resolve that situation, this time once and for all.

Lionel Oliver was God-fearing, upright, and would never knowingly hurt anyone, but these were attributes which came naturally to him, without effort. He had never had to fight any tendency to personal sin. Nor felt any great need for introspection or self-examination. But now he had to ask himself why there were things going on in his own house, within his own family, about which he had been told nothing. That he would most certainly have put a stop to them was one reason, he admitted that. But were his loved ones, in fact, also
afraid
of him?

After the PM, and the essential briefing of his team at Milford Road station, a session with Atkins who would from now on be in charge of the incident room at Lavenstock, and a quick run through the papers and documents which continually piled up on his desk as inexorably as sand round the Pyramids, Mayo had a senior level discussion with Cherry and the ACC, concentrating mainly on what information should be released to the media and how to keep it as low-key as possible. By the time he was clear, it was mid-morning. Kite had already left for Wyvering and Mayo followed, driving himself. Leaving his car in the Drum and Monkey car park, he walked up Dobbs Lane. By the time he reached Parson's Place there was no sign of the house-to-house inquiries so presumably they had finished knocking on doors there and moved on elsewhere to find out the whereabouts of everyone in the village on the previous day.

‘The posh school included?' DC Deeley had asked at the briefing.

‘Everyone,' repeated Kite. ‘And if any strangers were noticed anywhere in the village. Which shouldn't stretch you too much. Village like this, they won't have missed a thing – casual comings and goings by outsiders, unusual behaviour, anything.'

It was a hazy, fitfully sunny day, cool for May, but warm when the sun came out. Mayo walked slowly so as to take a better look at the square, seen previously in the dark, liking what he saw even better in daylight. The little precinct had a timeless feeling about it and, despite the jarring police presence, a slumbrous sense of history to which the violent death which had occurred there would in time add its own dispassionate contribution. There were pink flowering cherry trees in the churchyard, lightening the gloom created by the large number of yews, unclipped, with great sweeping branches; he counted thirteen houses, every one charming and no single one like any other in the square, before completing his circuit. One or two were in fact no longer houses. Apart from a largish timbered one, now the parish rooms, he saw that one erstwhile cottage announced itself in its window as a knitwear cooperative, and spotted another of Georgian vintage which had become a solicitor's office.

He was looking for an entry Kite had spoken about, and found it opposite the back of the church. A high wooden gate marked
PRIVATE,
it nevertheless stood wide open, wedged with a stone. He walked down a narrow space between two houses to the top of an overgrown pathway between the two gardens flanking it, where it ceased to bear any semblance to a real path and plunged downwards. It was now little more than a slippery gully between rocks and overgrown clumps of gorse and bramble, likely to appeal to reckless children out playing but no one else. The reason for the gate being propped open was evident. Someone had been tipping garden rubbish, lawn mowings and hedge clippings, now littering the path either side. With some difficulty, he descended a few yards until he could see that it ended at the river bank, then he scrambled back, dusting the loose red soil from his hands and knees and continued on his way.

He was so busy thinking about the entry that he almost missed the building in the corner. Wedged in between two taller ones, it was a tiny house with a tall chimney, no more than one room and a door wide, one storey high, which had been turned into a shop. The window had been shuttered the previous night and he saw now something he had missed then, a modest signboard above the door which read:
M. SMITH, ANTIQUES.

Feeling under no immediate obligation to hurry, he stopped to look in the window. It was very small, the original window to the house, with a consequent lack of room for anything other than a pretty little display of Victorian trinkets, some glassware and china, odds and ends of bric-à-brac. A lamp had been placed at the back of the display and shone on some small pieces of antique jewellery – and there, set out on black velvet, was a pair of cameo earrings which he knew instantly would solve the problem of Alex's next birthday present. It wasn't her birthday until September and by then, the small thought niggled, who knew where she would be? On the other hand, if he waited they might have gone.

But the shop would be closed for Sunday. He was about to turn away, half-relieved that the problem had resolved itself, but on second thoughts tried the door. Unexpectedly, it opened to a jingling bell and he pitched forward into a dark interior, missing the step down and only just saving himself. As he regained his balance and his wits, his eyes adjusted to the dimness and he saw a face he recognized.