Past Praying For

by Aline Templeton

  ‘Of course, you know as well as I do that it’s not an exact science. I have to follow hunches, and the skill lies in analysing whether the hunch is soundly rooted in a subconscious synthesis of legitimate information, or whether it’s something the little green men from Mars whispered in passing. It’ll be easier once they get me a précis of the evidence and I have something to get my teeth into.’

  ‘Have a guess.’

  He sighed. Now you want a crystal-ball answer again, which wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for the fact that Vezey will too. If I had to make a wild guess, I’d say the perpetrator was middle-class and female.’

  ‘Like the letter-writer?’

  ‘Sorry, you’ve lost me.’

  ‘The anonymous letter-writer. Female, you said, and educated.’ Female, educated and hostile towards me, she thought, but did not say.

  ‘I’d forgotten all about that. How extraordinary! I should have mentioned that to Vezey; it’s certainly the sort of thing that could be connected. You’ve still got it, haven’t you? They just might manage to lift some prints. I’ll take it along and try to catch him after breakfast. Unless you would like the fun of telling him yourself?’

  Margaret pulled a face. ‘I have better things to do. I promised I’d visit Suzanne Bolton this morning.’

  Then, trying to reassure herself, she added, ‘At least he seems satisfied that it was an accident. It would be awful to think we had a murderer in our midst.’

  When Robert fixed upon her that look of detached curiosity, she always felt like a laboratory rat demonstrating some unusual aspect of animal behaviour.

  ‘How very extraordinary that you should find that reassuring,’ he said. ‘You mean, you would rather have a pyromaniac on the loose, setting random buildings ablaze with no concern for safety, than a murderer with a specific and probably quite logical reason for killing one particular person?’

  ‘Who says it would be a logical murderer?’ she protested, for form’s sake. But in truth, despite what she had seen last night, she had not until now understood the terrifying subtext to the blaze. Last night she had seen the extinguishing of the fire as the end of the crisis, not the beginning.

  Looking back in the light of later events, she could pinpoint this moment as the first time she experienced the cold trickle of fear between her shoulder blades. She shivered involuntarily.

  Then she laughed. The winter sun was shining brightly, showing up the windows which were badly in need of cleaning. The homeliness of the kitchen, with its cheerful yellow walls and its comfortable domestic smells of toast and coffee made her reaction seem melodramatic.

  ‘Robert, you are the limit,’ she said. ‘I thought you would have grown out of trying to wind me up, and I would certainly have thought I was much too old to let you.’

  ***

  Laura didn’t know what to do.

  James had come back from collecting the morning paper as usual, full of the events of last night as recounted to him in graphic detail by the newsagent. She listened, then burst into tears of horror, a reaction which, in the circumstances as he saw them, he clearly considered extreme behaviour. He took himself off for the London train promptly and with obvious relief, leaving the girls still in bed and Laura sitting at the breakfast table trying to control her panic and consider the situation more dispassionately.

  She couldn’t have done this. Surely she couldn’t! Surely she would remember something about it, or have wakened James going out – but then she had to admit that it had been her complaint when the children were small and noisy that a brass band marching through the bedroom wouldn’t have roused James.

  Her resentment against him grew. If he had done as she had asked – as she had begged – and taken them all away yesterday, she would not be sitting here this morning, wondering if she were going mad.

  And perhaps, a chilling voice inside her whispered, Suzanne’s garage would still be intact, and an old man would be shuffling on to his next begging round, hungover perhaps but otherwise unharmed.

  The feeling of suffocation she had experienced before came over her again, and she took gulping breaths, trying to get more oxygen into her lungs. She began to feel very strange, light-headed...

  Hyperventilating, she thought, I’m hyperventilating. I’ve told hysterical girls that often enough. With a supreme effort of will, she calmed her breathing, regained control of herself. She was a sensible, highly-intelligent woman – at least, she had been. If she still was, what would she do?

  She clung to the thought. Putting a good face on it was, after all, second nature, and she thought the thing through. She would go and see Suzanne, of course. She would take along a neighbourly present – a quiche, perhaps, or a frozen stew that she could just pop in the microwave for supper – and she would put things back on a normal footing.

  She had probably been over-sensitive. It was probably quite true that the insurance company wanted the keys called in; they made all sorts of demands nowadays, and probably Suzanne had asked everyone else for theirs as well.

  She forced herself to be cheered by this reflection, and jumped up to busy herself in making her preparations, so that she didn’t have time to analyse it too closely. She left a note for the girls and set off.

  The activity, and the shroud of plastic sheeting enclosing the Boltons’ garage, took her by surprise, as if she had previously contrived to blot out the stark reality of what had happened. There were tapes cordoning off one side of the drive, and a knot of men stood in earnest conference. It made her feel strange and uncomfortable; she turned her mind instead to Suzanne’s need for her solace and support.

  As she rang the doorbell, she heard Suzanne’s voice, talking on the telephone, obviously. She heard the ‘ping’ of the receiver going down, and a moment later Suzanne opened the door.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said dully. ‘I was just arranging with the insurance to have a replacement car delivered today.’

  They were all in the habit of the friendly peck on the cheek in greeting; under stress, you might hurl yourself at your friend for a supportive hug. Suzanne did neither.

  Laura’s brave smile faltered. ‘I – we were so upset to hear what had happened. Er – I brought you this.’

  She held out the package, over-wrapped in foil, and Suzanne took it.

  ‘Thank you. Everyone’s been very kind. Do you want to come through to the kitchen?’

  She stepped aside. Laura hesitated briefly, then went in

  The kitchen, to anyone who knew Suzanne, was eloquent proof of her shaken state. There were cereal packets and a bottle of milk sitting on the kitchen table; unwashed mugs and bowls were lined up on the draining-board and the surface by the toaster was defaced with unwiped crumbs.

  Suzanne clearly wasn’t seeing it. She was pale, with deep olive shadows round her eyes, and her hair, normally so neat and springy, was lank and flattened to her head. She was dressed smartly as always, in neat black trousers and a soft white wool sweater, but this had been worn before and had a smudge of dirt on the sleeve.

  Laura felt brief shock, as if some part of the other’s personality had been eroded. Unthinkingly, she stretched out her hand.

  ‘Oh Suzanne, you poor thing –’

  There was no doubt about it; she shrank away. Then, as if embarrassed by the stricken look on Laura’s face, she tried to laugh.

  ‘Sorry, I’m just terribly twitchy today. I think I’m probably still in shock. I can’t describe how awful it’s all been.’

  But Laura noticed she moved to the far side of the kitchen table, as if Suzanne were trying to keep a physical barrier between them. She was beginning to feel light-headed again, and her only wish was to get out of there, get out of this terrible situation before one of them felt forced to confront it directly.

  ‘I think you should be in bed, you know,’ she said. ‘You can’t have got any sleep at all last night, so I’m just going to go away again. Is Patrick still sleeping?’

  ‘I told him to go in
to work today. He dropped Ben off at the Cartwrights.’

  They were walking through the hall as she spoke, Suzanne a little ahead. As if struck by a sudden thought, she spun round.

  ‘But he might easily come back very early,’ she added.

  Oh, my God! She’s afraid that if I think she’s on her own, I might come back and do something worse! Laura would never know how she managed to keep her voice steady, reply with the appropriate concern, ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right on your own till then?’

  Suzanne’s voice rose. ‘Yes, of course! In any case, Margaret Moon may well look in, and Mrs Burden’s been in already. Jenny Cartwright’s going to bring Ben back later – I’ll hardly have a minute to myself.’

  Laura was outside now, grateful for the coolness of the air on her face.

  ‘Lizzie will be along to see you too, no doubt.’

  Suzanne took a step back inside the door. ‘Oh – probably,’ she said, then closed it. Laura heard the safety-chain being slid along its groove.

  She wasn’t aware of walking out of the garden and along the road. Everything about her seemed remote and insubstantial, and she was only recalled to herself when she heard someone saying, ‘Hello, Mrs Ferrars.’

  It was the vicar in a grey coat and neat dove-grey shirt with the clerical collar at her neck.

  ‘Have you just been in to see Suzanne? I’m on my way over there. How is she this morning?’

  Laura stumbled on her words. ‘Oh – well – all, all right, I think. That is, as all right as she would be. Given what’s happened.’

  ‘Yes, naturally.’

  The vicar was looking at her, very directly. Behind the spectacles, her eyes were as clear and steady as a child’s; indeed, the whites, like a child’s, were clear and almost bluish. They were eyes that could look through you, see into your very soul.

  ‘And no doubt she’d be glad to see you,’ she said.

  Laura muttered something, and incontinently fled. The sarcastic tone in the vicar’s remark was pointed. The vicar knew, as Suzanne did, what she was doing; perhaps they believed she was doing it consciously and deliberately. They were only waiting for proof, and then...

  ***

  Inside the tent of plastic sheeting, it was now uncomfortably humid. Underfoot, the damp ash still held some residual heat; the sun, the arc lights and the body-warmth of the half-dozen men in white boiler-suits raised the temperature and intensified the acrid smell. The men’s breath condensed on the cold polythene, dripping back down in a sort of acid rain.

  ‘Just as well we don’t have a pine forest in here,’ one said to Rodney Vezey, who had just come in; he regretted the mild jest as the inspector’s eyes surveyed him expressionlessly before he turned away.

  They were sifting the ash now in great sieves, a thankless task which would probably leave them no nearer any solution to the crime. There was no reason to suppose that its perpetrator had set foot inside the garage, but it might yield a picture of Tom Porter’s last moments.

  Vezey was listening now to the man in charge.

  ‘Well, sir, as far as we can tell, he was sleeping on the garden lounger – tucked himself up in a few rags he most likely had in that holdall.’

  He pointed to a mess of burnt webbing and plastic on the floor. An empty vodka bottle, blackened and cracked by the heat, was lying on its side with the metal cap discarbed nearby.

  ‘It would take a bit to rouse him, with the skinful he had. But something must have – the heat, or the smoke making him cough – because he got to the door there, where they found him.’

  The doors, unyielding last night, stood open now.

  Vezey nodded curtly, then went back outside again, filling his lungs gratefully with the chill fresh air. He returned to his previous station, leaning up against the blackened brick of a garden wall in the corner where the pale sun provided a little warmth.

  Apart from instinctively thrusting his hands further into his jacket pockets, he paid no attention to the cold. Once you had served your time as a copper on the beat, you knew enough to wear good thick-soled shoes and then forget it.

  From his vantage point he had observed the comings and goings of women to the house with a flicker of contempt. They reminded him of his mother, and that wasn’t a compliment.

  She had just their sort of cool civility, which seemed to have no other purpose than to keep people in their place at a safe distance, and she had made no exception for her only child. Messy things, children, with uncomfortable needs, so you had as little to do with them as possible. You paid someone else to care – and sacked them if you thought they weren’t caring in precisely the way you had in mind – and you considered that you had purchased freedom from responsibility.

  He had only once – in some teenage desperation that seemed faintly comic now – approached her with a plea for help. She had been appalled.

  ‘My dear Rodney! Didn’t you talk to your housemaster? No, I suppose you wouldn’t. Well, there’s a wonderful chap who specializes in teen problems; I’ll fix up an appointment for you right away.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ he had muttered, and went out and got drunk instead. The resultant hangover had been surprisingly effective as distraction therapy.

  His determined disregard for social forms had begun as a punishment for his mother, then became rebellion, then habit. Now, having discovered its effectiveness, it was a principle. Time was increasingly a scarce commodity and he chose to bestow it only upon those who could be useful to him.

  Robert Moon was a useful man, carrying remarkably little baggage for a psychologist. Most of them only took it up because they were basket-cases themselves.

  He had been commendably prompt in coming along with his preliminary ideas and the anonymous letter, so that Vezey had been able to add pertinent questions to the list his cohorts had been primed to work their way through.

  People were always reluctant to admit to receiving hate-mail; even in cases where the content was harmless enough, to attract hatred is in itself somehow shaming. If you could suggest an epidemic, evidence was more likely to be forthcoming.

  The sun was a little stronger now. He tipped his head back, savouring the warmth on his face as he contemplated the meagre evidence.

  ‘Start every case, my son, by statin’ the bleedin’ obvious,’ his first detective-sergeant had instructed him, and it was a discipline which had proved itself over the years.

  The fire-raiser was someone who could get out at night: someone who lived alone, or who had a partner who was in collusion – unlikely, when you were talking about arson – or who slept soundly. Someone, perhaps, with access to sleeping pills, who could make sure they did? That probably meant half the village: insomnia was the mark of those not exhausted by hard physical labour.

  They could check whether anyone had bought barbecue lighting gel lately. At this time of year it would be a purchase unusual enough to attract attention. But the chances were it had been opportunistic, with a bottle beside the barbecue in every shed.

  Middle-class and female, Moon had suggested tentatively, with a positive maze of conditional hedging. Not the clientele you normally found down the nick. But then, as he himself could testify, that sort of life style was no guarantee of emotional security.

  And then there was the old boy, Tom – though in fact, despite the descriptions, he hadn’t been that old. Early fifties, the local sergeant reckoned, and he allowed himself a brief spasm of pity for the poor bastard. On the other hand, he couldn’t think an extended life span would have proved happy or rewarding. With increasing age and abuse would come the string of infections, the confusion of mind, the ultimate death in a hostel if he was lucky, a ditch if he wasn’t. If the smoke had got to him first, it would have been – bearable. If not...

  He never permitted himself to think about things like that. They got in the way.

  He had dismissed the possibility that it might be murder, but now meticulously he put the idea to the test.

  Cou
ld one of the almsgivers have plied him with vodka and told him he could get in to the garage? For a moment he toyed with the seductive notion that Tom might have been party to some scandalous incident in the vicar’s past which she had killed him to suppress, then regretfully discarded it. She, or anyone else, would have had to be sure that the doors would be left open, which happened only occasionally.

  Suzanne Bolton herself? She could have told the man he could bunk down in the garage, but she had been out all day and in all evening, having brought the boy back with her in the car. No, that didn’t look like a runner.

  Insurance fraud was the next thing to consider, of course. If Suzanne – just by chance, naturally – had happened to have left her car out last night, he’d have had the lighted matches under her fingernails by now, but he had yet to find the householder who would set fire to a garage next to the house containing a relatively new car with a full petrol tank.

  But someone had. You might have no reason to suspect the presence of a vagrant, but you would know that the car was there. It could be malevolence, recklessness or idiocy, but whichever it might be, it was an alarming situation. They needed to get this one under lock and key as soon as possible. Panic would spread like measles in a place like this, and they were probably all intimate friends of the Chief Constable.

  He contemplated the thought morosely, then went back inside to see how the investigation was progressing.

  ***

  After her visit to Suzanne, Margaret Moon headed towards the church once more. She had some organizing to do; she had decided that, as they had done at St John’s Marketgate, she would hold a Watchnight Service on New Year’s Eve. It was always very popular with the young, though the authorities tended to frown on the idea because of the danger of rowdyism. The Bishop, apparently, had raised his eyebrows – a salient feature – but Margaret was of the opinion that a higher authority even than he might find a spot of youthful exuberance a great deal more excusable than polite apathy.