Late of This Parish

by Marjorie Eccles

  LATE OF THIS

  PARISH

  Marjorie Eccles

  CHIVERS

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available

  This eBook published by AudioGO Ltd, Bath, 2012.

  Published by arrangement with the Author

  Epub ISBN 9781471310584

  Copyright © 1992 by Marjorie Eccles

  The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  All rights reserved

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental

  Jacket illustration © iStockphoto.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  CHAPTER 1

  It had been a day of cheerful sunshine and blue skies interspersed with dark rainclouds and showers. Easter, with its hope of rebirth. Good Friday, and reminders of death.

  The Town Hall was that evening crammed to capacity, the audience listening with varying degrees of enjoyment and attention to the massed choirs of Lavenstock’s three churches singing the St Matthew Passion. The women members of the choirs wore black for this occasion, the female principals purple. The mothers of the choirboys had washed and starched their surplices and ruffs to a dazzling white and their faces looked as angelic as choirboys’ faces were supposed to look. They were surpassing themselves with their singing.

  Mayo stirred, trying to bring back his wandering attention, easing his long legs into the too-narrow leg-room. He was finding it difficult to keep his mind on the music, and that was a major irritation because music was one of his chief pleasures and not only had he paid good money for a ticket to this charity performance, he’d moved mountains to make sure he got here. And now murder, however much he tried not to think of it, would keep jumping to the forefront of his mind. As a Detective Chief Inspector, it was a familiar enough subject to him in all conscience but one he could have done without that evening. Maddeningly, morbidly, thoughts of violent death would keep intruding as a sinister and distracting counterpoint to Bach’s benign harmonies. But he was a policeman first and foremost and there was a rapist on the loose, and at the back of his mind the ever present thought that there might soon be another victim – one who wouldn’t be so lucky as the previous five.

  There were other things bothering him, too.

  Briefly, rain drummed on the roof, almost drowning the music. The next moment the lozenges of stained glass in the windows were lit by shafts of evening sunshine and he caught a glimpse of his daughter’s shining fair-gold hair from his eye corner. Julie, whom he had thought he knew through and through – until last night, when she’d come home from college and delivered her bombshell. As a police officer of long experience, Mayo had come to consider himself shock-proof – only to find he wasn’t. Not when he was personally involved.

  He sighed and closed his eyes. All right, don’t fight it, he told himself. Go along with it, think about it if you must. And naturally, as soon as he’d given up the attempt to concentrate on the music, his whole attention was grabbed by it, caught by the melodious power of the voices of the Christus and the Evangelist, and the majestic, sonorous chorales invoking the scene of the Crucifixion. As the first part came to its sombre conclusion he opened his eyes, his glance refocused and came to rest on a woman sitting two rows in front, slightly to his left.

  She was seated in a corner, half obscured by a pillar, and presumably thought herself unobserved. He could see a regular profile, a round curve of cheek, a fan of thick eyelashes, heavy dark brown hair waving almost to her shoulders. Not young, still a good-looking woman – but it wasn’t that which held his attention. Quite clearly he could see a rain of tears pouring silently down her cheeks.

  The flow was splendidly unchecked, without any furtive dabbing at her eyes. At first he thought it was emotion engendered by the ineffable music, but then he thought no, it’s more than that, there’s personal sadness there as well. Music did that to you. Capable as nothing else was of giving profound pleasure and solace, he knew only too well how it could also touch unbearable chords of memory and pain.

  He saw her again as they emerged into a Town Hall Square garden full of the mingled smells of rain-washed earth and traffic fumes. Darkness had fallen and the street lamps shone on wet pavements, light spilled from illuminated shop windows, passing traffic sent hisses of water from under their wheels. She stood on the steps, assessing the necessity or otherwise of opening her umbrella. Deciding against it, turning up the collar of her mac, she began to walk quickly down the street towards the municipal car park. She was above middle height, generously proportioned and carried herself well. There were no traces of tears now. Her chin was lifted, her mouth had an upward curve, she looked warm and vibrant. He thought: There is the face of one who has come to a decision.

  Later, in the restaurant, he couldn’t help being aware of heads being turned towards their table. He’d always had a natural prejudice towards believing his daughter beautiful. Now, bursting with pride, trying to look at her objectively, he knew that his opinion was not entirely coloured by love. She seemed to have grown, in a way utterly amazing to him, straight from pony-tailed schoolgirl into a self-possessed young woman, without any of the attendant horrors he’d dreaded. Tall and rangy, she wore casual clothes and no make-up. Her eyes were slate-grey like his own, under decidedly-marked brows, the barley-blonde hair was exactly the colour Lynne’s had been. Apart from that, she was unlike either Mayo or his dead wife, uniquely herself. She was barely eighteen and he was beginning to wonder if he hadn’t made the mistake of congratulating himself too soon on how she’d turned out. He felt he didn’t know her any more, that now there were whole sections of her life which were suddenly foreign to him.

  He picked up the menu and scanned it to hide any traces of dismay he felt at this. It was in French and though he could find his way around it as well as the next man, he said, ‘You’d better decide what we’re to have. You’re the expert.’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Julie -’

  ‘Let’s eat first.’ She smiled, wide, entrancing. ‘Promise I’ll try and explain properly then.’

  He thought he’d better have a bottle of wine to make it easier on himself, or at least half. Julie didn’t drink and would be driving home.

  ‘Don’t go on at me, Dad,’ she began when they’d reached the coffee, looking suddenly young and vulnerable, all her assumed sophistication gone. ‘I’ve made my mind up – I really do know what I’m doing.’

  ‘Oh aye.’

  ‘And please don’t go all Yorkshire on me! It’s not that I don’t still enjoy cooking but I can’t make a career of it, I can’t imagine why I ever thought I could. The thought of spending my whole life thinking of nothing but food revolts me. Especially all that meat – it’s really gross! Look at them,’ she said, with an exaggerated shudder, averting her eyes from the sight of a man cutting up a bloody steak so rare as to be almost alive, ‘devouring their fellow creatures. It’s cannibalism! Well, it is, isn’t it?’

  Mayo was glad that he had, as a special deference to her new-found idealism, ordered the s
ame vegetarian dish as she had. It hadn’t been as bad as he’d feared. But he wished she’d been less graphic. At this rate he was never going to be able to look a lamb chop in the face again.

  ‘I wasn’t intending going on at you,’ he answered mildly, swallowing the urge to shout his frustration and ram down his fist and generally come the heavy father. What about her course at the catering college? What about the cherished plans for her own restaurant? What about the rest of her life? Not to mention the secondary consideration of his own disappointment. ‘Have you thought what you’re going to do instead?’

  ‘For the moment, I’m going to stay with Gran. I’ve rung her and she says I can.’

  At once, Mayo felt better. It wasn’t that he wanted to shift responsibility, but his mother, an active and sensible woman in her mid-sixties, a former teacher, wouldn’t let Julie do anything irrevocable just yet, giving him time to get to grips with a situation he had never envisaged but one for which he felt he was perhaps partly responsible. Julie had begun to take over the cooking when her mother had died. He had praised her, perhaps over-extravagantly, amazed at her capability, and plugged it as a career when, left to herself, she might never have thought of it.

  That night, the rapist’s wife returned from an extended visit to her lover and threatened her husband with what she’d tell the police if he didn’t agree immediately to what she wanted. She meant divorce on her own outrageous terms. Two hours later he tried unsuccessfully to shoot himself. When he came round in hospital to find a policeman at his bedside he knew he could have saved himself the agony. His wife had told them what she knew, anyway.

  Another case wound up. Nearly time to close the files and catch up on some lost sheep. To put thoughts of violence in their place, where they belonged.

  But by morning, murder had occurred again, though not on Mayo’s patch.

  This time it was in Hurstfield, twenty miles away. A bomb had been planted at the Fricker Institute, the research department of Fricker International, manufacturers of pharmaceuticals. It was sheer good luck that the only casualty was a security guard, blown sky-high. Bad luck that he had been a married man with three children.

  CHAPTER 2

  Castle Wyvering stood on a high eminence where aeons ago unyielding rock had forced the River Stockwell to change its direct course down the broad valley and make a sweeping curve around it. The valley road bypass had given the village a degree of isolation, since the road into Castle Wyvering was exceedingly steep, narrow and winding and led nowhere else except down the hill on the other side to rejoin the bypass. In any case there was little enough to encourage people to stop for at the top, nothing but the tumbledown old Saxon castle at the farthest end, the venerable church of St Kenelm at the other, with a straggling main street between the two. The street sported a few shops, a Mobil garage, the Drum and Monkey and some small cottages. Behind these was a short terrace of good-sized houses with plunging gardens and a magnificent view overlooking the valley. Outside the church was an attractive green known as Parson’s Place, surrounded by the rectory and a dozen or so houses of varying antiquity, whose inhabitants lived in more or less harmonious propinquity. Uplands House School, a boys’ boarding and day school of minor repute, was situated half way up the hill, the village school at the top of it. A tiny market was held every Friday. There was no industry as yet. And that was about it, the last outpost in the Lavenstock Division of the county constabulary, a parish of some three thousand souls.

  Not much, put like that, but few who lived in Wyvering had any wish to leave. The desire was all on the other side. Plenty of potential newcomers were anxious to invest in a piece of pleasant, peaceful, timeless England but so far the inhabitants had successfully resisted all attempts at such invasion. Except, that is, for the building of a group of small houses on the duller side of the hill. Originally meant as low-cost housing for young local people, who were unable to afford their escalated prices when they were finished, most of them had eventually been bought as retirement homes by elderly city people who formed a small, clubby enclave within the larger whole.

  The sun came out brilliantly as Laura Willard was tidying her office at the boys’ school before leaving. Instantly the dark secretary’s room next door to the headmaster’s study sprang to life, its gloom dispelled by the gleam of the sun on the old dark panelling, bringing out the still-rich reds and blues in the worn square of Turkey carpet. She allowed herself a moment to breathe in the freshened air before closing the window, although she was much later leaving for home than usual. It was guilt that had kept her: she wouldn’t be here for the open day tomorrow, and so she’d done as much as she could today. However, as a consequence she’d missed the last downpour and with luck might reach home before the next. She’d cycled to and fro in the rain all week and she was sick of it but she disliked driving and used her father’s sedate old Vauxhall only when necessary to get into Lavenstock or further afield for necessary shopping.

  The Head’s study and her own room were situated in the arm of the reversed L-shape of the school. The main wing stretched to her right, the rain-soaked stones glowing with a deep intensity as the rays of the late afternoon sun touched them. Even the scaffolding on the west tower didn’t mar the prospect and she felt suddenly pierced to the heart with pure joy: with the beauty and grace of her surroundings, the lovely grouping of buildings, the smooth stretch of the playing fields beyond, the line of huge old chestnuts down the drive, all seen with a new clarity through the lens of her own present happiness. Don’t, a cautionary voice warned, don’t be too sure, and she shivered as if someone had walked over her grave. She wasn’t used to rewards for anything she hadn’t worked for and couldn’t yet quite accept the idea that here it was: love, the blessed condition that other people seemed to take for granted.

  She snapped the window-latch down, made sure her desk was cleared and that she’d switched off her word-processor, an infernal machine which she still regarded warily, like a wild caged animal that might at any moment take a retaliatory bite. A few minutes later she was trundling her bike from the shed to ride down the drive under the still dripping trees.

  At that moment an untidy mob of the younger boys surged out from behind the main building. Kitted out for sports practice, scuffling amiably, elbowing and tripping each other up as they made for the playing fields, their unbroken voices shrilled across the front lawn. Bringing up the rear was Jonathan Reece, the geography master who occasionally took them for games, looking tough and muscular in his blue tracksuit, his fair hair haloed by the sun.

  ‘Shut up, you lot, quieten down and get a move on or it’ll be raining again before we get there.’

  The voice of authority brought the boys into slightly better order. One hung back to speak to him – Bedingfield, naturally, a budding Mafioso if ever there was one, despite his cherubic appearance. Jon slowed down to listen, smiling down at him and throwing a careless arm across the boy’s shoulder as he did so, then shooed him on with the rest. Tossing his hair back, a typical gesture, he was following the boys at a jog when he saw Laura and stopped to wait for her.

  ‘Hi, Laura. Did you leave those pamphlets out for the parents tomorrow?’

  ‘They’re on your desk ... I’m sorry I shan’t be here to help, Jon.’

  ‘Consider yourself lucky. You realize I’m missing my weekend in London because of all this fandango?’

  ‘It’s good of you,’ she answered, thinking privately that might be no bad thing, considering the recklessly aggressive way he drove his car. ‘I know your weekends off are important.’

  ‘Sure. Recharge the old batteries, become human again. But some of us must rally round Richard. Sorry, didn’t mean you, you’ve worked like stink to get everything ready.’ He smiled brilliantly, his charm-the-birds-off-a-tree smile, which still didn’t take the edge off his resentment. It had been another dig at David, who was registered for a weekend conference near Brighton and wouldn’t be at tomorrow’s open day, either.

>   He looked on David Illingworth, the senior science master, as a blinkered intellectual, not a fair assessment. Whereas David looked upon him as all beef and brawn, which wasn’t fair either; there was more to Jon than that. He might not possess a brilliant degree like David, but he was what was known as a good all-rounder, a reader, a music-lover, confident and sure of himself, thought by some, including himself, to be the obvious candidate to step into the Headmaster’s shoes when Richard Holden retired at the end of the school year.

  ‘Don’t look so worried,’ he said, ‘it won’t last.’

  This time he meant ‘when I’m Head’. She’d known him for some time and knew how to interpret what he said, though she still wondered occasionally what went on behind that square-cut, fresh-complexioned and apparently guileless face.

  Voices clamoured across the lawn and Jon said, ‘Must go. Little perishers are getting restless. Ciao, then, Laura.’ He was off at a sprint and in a minute she heard his whistle blowing, saw him charging down the field, throwing himself into it with his amazing energy as he did into everything.

  She was sorry in a way that he was in for a disappointment about the Headship. He was naïve enough to believe he couldn’t fail, which had possibly been true before David had arrived on the scene, a force to be reckoned with. One who could very easily over-topple Jon’s ambitions, although Jon was still a front runner with many of the school governors, including her own father, who had hoped – very nearly decreed – that she should marry Jon. She was horrified sometimes when she thought how narrowly she’d escaped.

  It might so easily have happened. I might well have given in, she thought, done what my father and Jon both want, though it was only when Richard had announced his retirement after his heart attack that it had apparently occurred to Jon that a wife was an asset to an aspiring headmaster. Despite being aware of this humbling fact, three months ago she’d been on the brink of stifling her doubts and agreeing when he’d asked her to marry him.