“Peter Kinsey was wicked.”
Tom was silenced momentarily. He leaned forwards, elbows on his knees, cupped his face in his hands, and thought about what he had heard.
“But how do you know he sold the Guercinos?” he asked finally.
Phillip’s nose flared as he took a deep breath. “He told me.”
“He admitted it?”
“Yes. I told him to meet me in the vestry and no excuses.”
“This was the evening before Ned Skynner’s funeral last April, yes?”
“Knew he had no appointments Monday evenings. Day off, you know. He couldn’t fob me off, saying he had a meeting or a home visit. Finally got him on the vicarage phone.”
“Why the vestry?”
“So he couldn’t claim the Guercinos were there, and I was some old duffer who couldn’t see past my nose. Be in the vestry in half an hour, I told him.”
“Did you tell him exactly why?”
“Told him the auditors had questions and I needed answers before we went to the PCC annual meeting later in April.”
“So, half an hour later, you joined Peter in the vestry and … voiced all your suspicions? How did he react?”
“He … he laughed. ‘Do your worst,’ he said.”
“No attempt to excuse himself?”
“None. He simply laughed at me.”
“But he must have realised you could take your concerns to a higher authority or possibly the police. How could he think he would get away with it?”
“He was wicked. I said.”
“Still, why didn’t you have a word with the rural dean or the archdeacon?”
“Padre, how could I?” The old man regarded Tom truculently.
It took a moment for Tom to decipher. Of course. If you killed the vicar who was fiddling sums, you couldn’t very well report the sum fiddling without dire personal consequence over the issue of motive. This would also explain the colonel’s later unhelpfulness to the police over the mysterious sum in the Exeter safe-box. Nonetheless, Tom didn’t believe for a moment Colonel Northmore had killed Peter Kinsey, and he said so.
“Well, I did,” the colonel responded.
“In anger, I suppose? Without malice aforethought?”
“Yes.”
Utterly unconvinced, Tom thought to test him: “What did you kill him with?”
“The verge—the verger’s staff. It was lying on the vestry table.”
“And how?”
“Hit him. Back of the head.”
Tom bit his lip. The murder weapon was unspecified, and might remain so, but the colonel’s last answer was correct. Eyewitness account or lucky guess? Had the colonel got wind somehow? Màiri White had told him, Tom, the postmortem results in confidence, but that didn’t mean the knowledge mightn’t seep out in other ways. Who had visited the colonel in hospital in the last few days? Madrun. Sebastian. Alastair. Perhaps others. He looked at the colonel and met defiant eyes.
“All right, Colonel, I’m willing to believe you killed Peter Kinsey, as you say,” Tom white-lied again, “but I have trouble believing you … dragged his body or … carried his body through the churchyard and rearranged Ned Skynner’s grave to accommodate him.”
“Wasn’t a large chap.”
“So I understand. Nevertheless, not to make too fine a point, you’re not in the flower of youth.”
“I was in the grip of strong emotion, padre.”
“Colonel, I haven’t known you long, but this doesn’t seem at all like you. Even if I allow that in the grip of strong emotion you did kill Peter, I can’t believe you wouldn’t do the decent thing.”
“Didn’t do the decent thing at Omori, did I.”
“That was different.”
“Oh? How?”
Tom could feel his patience growing thin. He didn’t fancy a philosophical discussion. “Why are you telling me this at all?”
“On my conscience.”
“But why now?”
“On my way out.”
“Nonsense, you’ll be right as a trivet once you’re fixed up with a new hip.”
Phillip made no response. He turned his head away. His lids sank over his eyes. Tom studied the figure under the hospital blankets, the bruised hand where the intravenous needle entered, the ancient visage with its bloodless lips, the thin, lank hair, at the tangle of monitoring wires disappearing into his chest. Yes, old boy, he thought, you probably are not long for this world. He felt a pang of sadness for that, and then, following like the sun upon the rain, the bliss of a tiny epiphany. He smiled as he said, “Colonel, you realise you’ve unburdened your conscience to me outside of the seal of confession. Colonel?”
Phillip opened one eye.
“I could go to the police with this information.”
“Do what you must, padre.” He closed his eye and crossed his hands over his stomach.
Tom lifted himself from the hard plastic seat. “By the way, Colonel, by any chance, did you serve in the war with—now let me think—the ninth Earl of Kinross?”
Phillip opened the other eye. “Yes.”
Tom allowed his smile to widen. “I see.”
“Bit off topic, isn’t it?” The colonel opened both eyes and regarded him warily.
“Colonel, at the risk of being repetitive, I don’t for a moment believe you hit Peter Kinsey over the head. Nor do I believe you put his body in an open grave. In fact, I’ll wager you weren’t anywhere near St. Nicholas’s the evening in question.”
“Was, too!” was the colonel’s heated and uncharacteristically childish response.
“Was too what?” said a voice. “I trust you’re not upsetting the patient, Tom.”
Tom looked over his shoulder. The door to the room had opened on silent hinges and Alastair was slipping a clipboard off the edge of the bed. He frowned at it, then moved bedside, opposite Tom.
“I just thought I’d pop up to see how you were,” he addressed the colonel.
“I’m surprised you’re not golfing on this lovely Saturday afternoon,” Tom remarked.
“I will be shortly,” Alastair muttered. “I’ve just come off a shift at the health centre.” He looked at Tom more fully. “Nice work on that eye. Should I ask what happened to the other guy?”
“Surely Julia told you.”
“Actually, she did.” Still smiling, he turned back to his patient. “How are you feeling, Colonel?”
“Dr. Hennis saw me.” Phillip glowered at Tom.
“I saw you when?” Alastair responded, shifting to study the IV line.
“Colonel Northmore is fretting about Peter Kinsey’s death.”
“Mmm …”
“Doctor, you greeted me in the road. You had been up in the Pattimores’ flat.”
Alastair snapped his fingers against the ampoule. “What are we talking about here?”
“The period of Peter Kinsey’s disappearance,” Tom explained.
“You greeted me in the road,” the colonel repeated to Alastair urgently. “It was a Monday evening, about seven. Remember?”
Alastair frowned. “Are you asking me to remember what I was doing on an evening … what? thirteen, fourteen months ago?”
“Well, even I remember, Alastair,” Tom said. “It was the end of the first full day of my and Miranda’s visit with you and Julia. You had a house call to make. I think your service paged you. I remember the news was just starting on ITV when you got it, about six-thirty.”
Alastair’s eyes roamed the room then landed on the two of them. “All right, yes. I do recall. I think.” His frown grew deeper. “I’d been attending to Enid. I was just stepping out of their gate when you passed by, Colonel. You seemed to have something on your mind, now I think about it. I can’t recall you returning the greeting. And then—this I do recall—Charlie Pike nearly knocked me over on one of those bloody skateboards.” He paused and regarded Phillip. “Is this important?”
Tom looked to the patient, thinking that being seen on Poynton Shute
that evening, around the corner from Church Walk, a few hundred feet from St. Nicholas’s, hardly supported his contention that he had done away with the Reverend Peter Kinsey. Still, he expected an expression of complacency from the old man, but none came. Instead, the colonel’s pupils dilated and a brooding, watchful intensity settled for a moment along the folds and creases of his face. And then he turned his head to the wall.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“The usual?”
“Make it a pint.”
Eric’s eyebrows, red and thick as foxtails, twitched almost imperceptibly, but not so imperceptibly that Tom didn’t know that Eric sussed that some planet was wobbling in its orbit. Publicans were sussers of information and keepers of secrets—not unlike priests, in their way—and therefore mindful to be open to soul-barers without sending out engraved invitations.
“Don’t often see you in here of a Saturday afternoon.” Eric closed the copy of the Daily Mail he’d been perusing and reached for the pump handle. “No weddings?”
“Only one. Strange—usually they’re queued up four deep this time of year.”
“It’s been a strange week.”
“That would be understatement.”
“We haven’t had a day like this since Thornford won the Cup final five years ago.”
Tom frowned, not understanding. Eric placed a pint glass of Vicar’s Ruin in front of him and jerked his head in the direction of the saloon. Tom turned and glanced over the rim of his glass. He’d driven back from Torquay, parked the car at the vicarage, popped in to see if Miranda had returned from Exeter with Julia, had a brief and probably too candid conversation with Madrun, then hopped it to the Church House Inn, paying only half a mind to the crowded benches outside the pub, reasoning that it was a magnificent day in May at the end of half-term and why wouldn’t people lounge about outdoors with a drink? He’d made a beeline to the bar and hadn’t really noticed, as he did now, quite how sardine-tinnish the place seemed. Worse, a number of the punters had paused in noisy conversation and were looking at him. This he was accustomed to in church, and had welcomed on stage, when he’d been The Great Krimboni; still, it was rather disconcerting being gawped at in the pub, especially by strangers.
“You’ve seen the papers, yes?” Eric muttered, wiping the damp spot where Tom’s glass had enjoyed brief congress with the polished surface.
“Glanced at them,” Tom replied. And glance was all he had done. He’d been too distracted that morning with getting Miranda ready for Julia to take to synagogue in Exeter, Googling, and polishing his sermon to pay close attention to the coverage of Sybella’s funeral. Madrun had raced from the post office to the vicarage weighed with every newspaper in the realm and plunked them on the kitchen table, but Tom’s only interest had been in The Sun’s coverage—in Andrew Macgreevy’s reportage, its omissions rather than its commissions. He’d quickly flipped past the picture of himself on page six, predictably of Oona’s elbow growing out of his eye, under the sub-headline “Oona Funeral Fury,” right through to the sports pages at the back, and was both startled and cheered to see no reference to his absent verger. If Macgreevy knew what he, Tom, now knew, why wasn’t it in print?
“ ’Ow’s yer oi, Vicah?” A large man with a face red as a beetroot held his glass up in a toast.
“Never better,” Tom replied, with a theatrical wink of the afflicted orb. “Have they driven down from London for this?” he murmured to Eric.
The publican shrugged. “I shouldn’t like to see the state of your churchyard.”
“This is terrible. Sybella’s headstone isn’t even in place.”
“No fear. By Monday, they’ll have moved on to something else.” Eric folded the Mail and stuffed it under the bar. “At any rate, I hear Sebastian’s got Fred doing crowd management down at the church.”
So, Sebastian is back, Tom thought, gulping his ale while Eric shuffled down the bar to serve another customer. Wherever had his verger spent the night?
He, meanwhile, had taken Miranda and Emily Swan to the Apollo in Torquay Friday after the funeral reception to see some American film about high school students putting on a musical, a cinematic bonbon which thrilled the girls to bits, but which was so excruciatingly insipid Tom had ample opportunity to half-write his sermon in his head and ponder the week’s harrowing events. After returning the girls to Thornford, he’d walked over to the verger’s cottage, resolved to have a chat, but there’d been no response to his knock. He’d tried again an hour later, with no luck.
“Eric,” he began, calling the publican over, “how would you assess your memory?”
“Depends on what you want me to remember.”
“An early evening thirteen months ago.”
“You want me to remember something thirteen months back—?”
“I’ve heard that once today.”
“—then not bloody likely.”
“What if I pegged it to an event?”
“ ‘Where were you in the Great Storm of ’87’—that sort of thing?”
“Something of less national significance. Where were you the evening before the day of Ned Skynner’s funeral?”
Eric shrugged. He reached back to pull a packet of crisps off a nearby rack. “I was here. Where else?”
“Exactly.”
“But it was a day like all days. Which is what I told the coppers when they were asking a year ago.”
“Was it?”
Eric slid the packet down the bar to a young woman in a blazing pink sundress. “Ned was absent, of course, being dead and all, so we were still getting used to not having someone droning on about the inevitable fall of capitalism. It was a Monday. Early April. Just a few regulars.” He paused in thought. “Jago Prowse came in for a quick one. Told the detectives that. Didn’t usually see Jago at that time.”
“What time?”
“About six-thirty? If the bugger had bothered to tell anyone he’d driven down from Thorn Cross and dropped the vicar off, then we wouldn’t have spent three days wondering where the vicar’s car—and the vicar with it—had got to. We could have got on to the local constabulary faster, not that any of this matters now. Is this why you’re asking? About Peter’s disappearance?”
“Yes. It’s been on my mind.”
“I see.”
Tom smiled wanly. “You and I are similarly fixed, Eric. People tell us … things. The question is, what to do with what they tell us?”
“My policy is to keep stumm. It’s all my job’s worth.”
“Mine as well—much of the time. But there are moments …” Tom drained his glass. “You didn’t happen to see Colonel Northmore about that time?”
Eric’s expression betrayed a flash of curiosity, swiftly suppressed. “Cops didn’t ask me that one.”
“Did you see him?”
“He didn’t come in for a drink, if that’s what you mean. I usually only see the colonel here after services on Sunday, when he comes in with you and some of the others from church. But I did see him that evening, now you mention it. Happens I glimpsed him out the window when I was clearing one of the tables. And I’m only remembering because it wasn’t a time of day—it had to be after seven—when you saw the colonel out walking. Pretty regular he is—early morning and mid-afternoon. And he wasn’t walking Bumble.”
“Was he walking towards the church?”
Eric nodded. “Not what you wanted to hear?”
Tom tried wiping the glumness from his face. Two sightings of the colonel the presumed evening of Peter Kinsey’s death, both of him church-bound, did not a murderer make.
“And,” Eric continued, “now that you’ve set me off down memory lane, Sebastian came by earlier than usual.”
“He comes in for a drink after closing the church, doesn’t he?”
“The man’s as regular as the Westminster chimes. When the sun sets, he goes and closes up. But in early April, the sun isn’t fully set until about, oh, eight o’clock. Sebastian was here about”—Eric squin
ted into the middle distance—“about ten minutes or so after I’d sighted the colonel going by—say seven-ten or seven-fifteen.”
Tom stared into the dregs of golden liquid in his glass. Did the anomaly mean anything? Sebastian’s being in the pub outside his normal routine was surely unremarkable—people sometimes did deviate from their patterns—but it did call attention to itself, if anyone bothered to pay something so trivial any mind.
“Would you remember his demeanour?”
Eric did, actually. It wasn’t what Tom wanted to hear.
“Pour you another, Vicar?”
Tom looked at the empty glass. “No, thanks,” he replied, pushing away from the bar. “I need a clear head. I have a sort of pastoral visit to make.”
Tom had called at the verger’s cottage only once previously, when he’d first arrived in Thornford Regis, to ask Sebastian for the vestry door key, but then, as now, he felt he was a tolerated, but not wholly welcome, presence once he’d stepped inside. The terraced cottage, the last bordering the cobbled walk between the Church House Inn and the lych-gate, was small, a conventional two-up, two-down, its entranceway unadorned but for a pot of hostas facing Poachers Passage and the high stone wall that bordered the churchyard. On his visit in late March, the sitting room had been warmed by a low fire burning in the small iron grate, the elaborate Victorian hood of which was the single instance of decorative exuberance amid an almost punishing austerity. The walls were of the same distemper as the church’s, and unembellished but for a wooden crucifix, complete with writhing corpus, over a plain round oak table near the door to the kitchen. Facing the fireplace were two armchairs separated by a short bookcase with a low table in front with tiny towers of books, neatly massed, and space carved out for a single cup or glass. There was no television, no computer. But for the concession to modern acquisitiveness in the form of a smart-looking, lightweight rucksack hung by the door—the only discordant note—it might have been a monk’s cell. Or, perhaps, with no fire, and the sun absent on the far side of the sky, a prison cell.
Tom gave the latter a passing thought as Sebastian let him into the room. He now better understood his verger’s tastes and bearing, but this gave him little cheer. There were no formalities. Sebastian motioned him to one of the armchairs and took the other himself. He made no offer of tea or coffee or a drink, as if sensing that the vicar’s visit didn’t bear fussing with kettles and bags and cups, glasses and ice.
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