Late of This Parish

by Marjorie Eccles

  When Mayo had sorted out what the constable had said from what he actually meant to say, he asked, ‘But if Lampeter shot the badgers at Willard’s instigation, presumably he was on Willard’s side?’

  ‘That’s as maybe,’ Wainwright said obscurely. ‘There’s no accounting for them Lampeters.’

  ‘What d’you mean? Has he been in trouble before?’

  ‘Once or twice before he went in the army. Joyriding and nicking radios from cars, that sort of thing, but nothing since ... nothing I can lay a finger on, at any rate. Mind you, hard to say what he lives on since he come out the army. He lives with his sister, Ruth. She keeps the post office – and him and all, I shouldn’t wonder. Thinks the sun shines out of his backside, but he’s a lazy devil. Odd jobs here and there, that’s all he seems to do.’ He added thoughtfully, ‘Never seems short of a bit of the ready, though.’

  Having finally ascertained that the badger-shooting had been the most disruptive event to happen in Castle Wyvering for at least a year, and that nothing more sinister which could account for Willard’s death had been brought to Wainwright’s notice, Mayo let him go.

  He wouldn’t dismiss this quarrel about the badgers; passions were often aroused by much less. But he had other ideas as well, after seeing Laura Willard.

  Pale and distraught as she’d been during those few moments he had been with her, he had recognized her immediately as the woman he’d seen in the Town Hall on Good Friday, over a month ago now, during the St Matthew Passion. Although subsequent events had erased the incident from his memory until now, seeing her again, he remembered her tears. And the certainty he’d had that during the performance, she had come to some sort of momentous decision.

  When the constable had left, Mayo took a quick look round the house. Two attics, three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, one attic bare, the other used for storage. Two of the bedrooms not in use but furnished with heavy, old-fashioned mahogany bedroom suites. The third was evidently Laura Willard’s. Totally unlike the rest of the house, it was frilly and feminine, done up in lavender and white with lacy cushions and a flounced spread and thick pale carpet. As disconcerting as a swansdown powder-puff in a nun’s cell, he felt it said a good deal about her and what her life with the old man must have been like.

  Downstairs again, he saw why the sitting-room had been used as a study. Willard had slept in a small room that had perhaps once been his study and now, because of his disability, had been turned into a bedroom. Like the sitting-room, it was lined with books. Apart from that, there was a single bed with a crucifix over it, an invalid commode, and a small table in the corner spread with a white cloth and on it the needs of a sick man: alcoholic rub, soap and talc, and enough bottles of pills to kill an army, if one had been so disposed. On the night table was a Bible, a stack of books, notebooks and pencils.

  There was nothing of interest to him and he went back into the sitting-room and turned his attention to the desk but was brought to a halt before he began, momentarily defeated by the chaos thereon. If an uncluttered desktop was supposed to denote a clear and decisive brain, the owner of this one should have been a moron, but that was contradicted by the numerous books of a scholarly nature, their margins annotated in pencil, the many reference books with markers inserted at frequent intervals between their pages. Willard appeared to have been working on some sort of manuscript, probably the one the Rector had mentioned. Scads of almost illegibly handwritten papers covered what was left of the desktop, piled anyhow on top of one another, almost obscuring the telephone. He glanced at some of them and saw there was much rewriting and crossing out, though a slight film of dust indicated they hadn’t been looked at for some time.

  In the end he gave the top up as a bad job for the time being and turned to the drawers. Here he found bank statements showing comfortable balances, a large envelope of share certificates in all the recently privatized public utilities, the deeds to the house and insurance papers. One drawer was full of old letters and another held a jumble of defunct ballpoints and paperclips, plus a large stiff-backed foolscap diary, a current three-year affair with a day to each page.

  As he flipped through this, it became apparent that Willard, like many another writer before him, had been incapable of seeing an empty space without scribbling on it. Many were the observations tucked in here and there in his small crabbed handwriting, the testing out of a felicitous phrase in the margins or on unfilled days, of which there were plenty, Willard being an invalid with his diary consequently fairly free of appointments. There were a few with his doctor and chiropodist, and it seemed he had been active enough to participate as a member of the parochial church council and to be a governor of Uplands House School. In fact, the approaching Monday held a reminder of a school governors’ meeting.

  The space for today was blank. But on Friday – yesterday – he’d had an appointment with someone called Quentin at 2.45 and on the same line a time, 6.30, was written. Was that when Quentin had been expected to leave? Possibly it denoted another appointment, for next to it the initials S.O. were scribbled. Beneath that was written, with a different pen: SARA? ‘An action done from duty has its moral worth, not from the results it attains or seeks to attain, but from a formal principle or maxim, the principle of doing one’s duty, whatever that may be.’

  The first thing Mayo saw when he went back towards the church was the gleaming maroon Rover of mature years in which the pathologist swanned around. Also adding to what was now promising to be an unprecedented traffic jam in Parson’s Place were several more police cars with lights flashing and a van indicating the presence of the Scenes of Crime team. He entered the church and found it humming with subdued activity as the white-overalled SOCOs swarmed over everything, dabbing with Sellotape, crawling over the chancel floor with hand-held vacuum cleaners and amassing their collection of samples in polythene bags. The photographer, Napier, was standing waiting by the rotund figure of the pathologist who was kneeling on one side of the wheelchair with Ison on the other.

  The two doctors looked up. Ison nodded and Timpson-Ludgate, after greeting Mayo in his usual genial manner, said, 'Not much doubt about this one. Plain as the nose on your face. Asphyxiation due to suffocation. The altar cushion, you say? Yes, it’s possible.’

  Timpson-Ludgate had recently gained a certain amount of fame (or notoriety) by writing a book about his experiences as a Home Office pathologist, the sort of thing for which the general public seemed to have an insatiable appetite. It was written in the racy manner one might have expected, given his personality. Despite the flamboyancy of his approach, Mayo had a great respect for him and his opinions.

  ‘The killers always make the same mistake of thinking their victims are too old and too feeble to struggle but they do,’ he went on, ‘and he must’ve struggled hard. See those petechial haemorrhages? With luck, there’ll be skin tissue under sonny boy’s nails, if and when you find him. I’m playing golf tomorrow but I know how impatient you always are so I’ll have him on the slab before I go, and set your mind at rest. Come on, laddie,’ he said to Napier, ‘one more shot – here – and then I’m finished.’

  The photographer adjusted his lens; the SOCO sergeant, Dexter, had put the altar cushion inside a polythene bag and was waiting to dab Sellotape on to the clothes of the dead man for any contact traces from the killer. Another hour and they’d all gone: the doctors in their cars; the fingerprint men, photographers and plan drawers in the Scenes of Crime van; and the body of the Reverend Cecil Willard in the mortuary van, encased in a green polythene body bag.

  Mayo despatched Wainwright home to a belated supper, with a request to be back sharpish in the morning, and leaving one of his men posted outside the church and the rest to await the arrival of the mobile unit, he asked Kite to accompany him on his next call, which he intended to be on Mrs Oliver.

  Kite had been gathering more information from Wainwright while Mayo had been otherwise occupied. ‘We’ve drawn up a list of the residents in the s
quare, ready for starting on the house-to-house tomorrow morning. Wainwright knows them all and he’s given me some useful gen. Most of them would’ve known Willard. The Mrs Thorne where Miss Willard is staying teaches languages at the boys’ school and her husband’s the Director of the Fricker Institute –’

  ‘The Fricker? Where the bomb went off? Hadn’t realized that. I only saw his wife when I called earlier.’

  The bomb which had been planted wasn’t Mayo’s investigation, it didn’t come under his jurisdiction, but he remembered it and recalled now that the Director of the Institute was a Dr Denzil Thorne. There was no reason why he should have made the connection between the Director and Mrs Thorne before, but now that he had, he felt a sudden prickle of the hairs on the back of his neck. Was it possible that here was the first lead?

  It had been assumed, though as far as he knew there had as yet been no claim, four weeks later, that the bomb at the Institute had been the work of animal rights extremists, protesting against the experiments carried out there. He hadn’t heard, either officially or otherwise, how the investigation was proceeding and in the absence of any information to the contrary he’d assumed it wasn’t complete. The connection with Willard’s death might be altogether too tenuous and his suspicions quite unfounded. On the other hand, it might turn out to be a profitable line of inquiry to pursue.

  ‘Who’s in charge of the bomb inquiry down at the Fricker?’ he asked Kite.

  ‘Uttley, isn’t it?’ Kite said, after a pause for thought. ‘I’m not sure. Somebody in the Hurstfield Division, at any rate. I’ll find out. Likely to be some connection?’ he asked, his interest sharpening. He’d no stomach for domestic murder and preferred to think there might be some more intriguing motive for what happened, rather than the sordid despatch of some poor old bugger whose only crime was that he had lived too long.

  ‘It may be a long shot, but Willard was at loggerheads with the Rector’s wife over – would you believe it – some badgers who’ve made his lawn look like a rugby pitch after an international. Apparently she’s one of those people who are passionate about animals.’ He briefly summarized for Kite’s benefit what Wainwright had told him, ending with his own surmises. First Denzil Thorne, who had escaped any personal injury in the bombing but who would because of his work obviously be anathema to the champions of animal rights. And now Willard, who had been suspected of instigating a badger-shooting – though he would have suspected a letter bomb or some such would have been a more likely method to have been chosen as a means of despatching him. If indeed seeing Willard’s death as a penalty for shooting the badgers wasn’t in any case altogether too extreme.

  ‘The fact that both men live in the same village is intriguing, but it proves nothing. Not unless we can find some other connection.’ He added, ‘There’s the bad lad of the village we must take into consideration, for one thing,’ and recounted what Wainwright had told him of Danny Lampeter, though he’d little faith in him being their man. Even supposing he’d had some differences with Willard, which there was as yet no reason to believe, a man like Lampeter seemed unlikely to be the type who would use that particular method to get rid of an enemy, any more than animal rights activists would. Shooting badgers, however, might be a very different thing.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Rectory was the Georgian house with the grey slate roof opposite the church gate, whose front steps led directly off the street. A largish, foursquare house, yet separated from the Thornes’ crooked little black and white timbered cottage next door only by a narrow space. It was growing late by the time Mayo got around to seeing Mrs Oliver and the winding-up signature tune to News at Ten could be heard from a room at the back as the Rector opened the door to their knock and ushered Mayo and his sergeant into his study. A small, comfortable room at the front of the house, it was lit by a green-shaded lamp on the desk where papers were spread and the Rector had evidently been working.

  'We’re disturbing you, sir,’ Mayo said. ‘It’s really your wife we’d like to see, now. Would you like us to see her somewhere else?’

  ‘No, no, not at all. Catherine will be along shortly, we’ve been expecting you.’ Previously, the Rector had visibly been out of countenance by what had happened in his church, but his distracted air had now been vanquished by a professional good humour which Mayo guessed was habitual to him.

  Almost immediately, Mrs Oliver came in, pushing open the door with her knee and wheeling in a trolley laid with crockery and coffee things. ‘I supposed you wouldn’t have had time for anything to eat, so I’ve made a few sandwiches,’ she remarked diffidently.

  ‘That’s very thoughtful, but you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble, ma’am.’ Mayo hadn’t the heart to tell her that Atkins had persuaded the landlord of the Drum and Monkey to lay on bacon and eggs for later.

  'It’s no trouble, we’re used to providing hospitality here.’ A smile briefly illuminated her face and when he saw how vague and sweet it was he was obliged to rearrange his preconceived notion of her as a bit of a dragon. She poured out a liquid that didn’t promise much from its pale amber colour, and offered beef sandwiches (dryish, mustardless and almost meatless, for which even Kite couldn’t show much enthusiasm). She was small and unremarkable-looking with a meek expression in repose. Mayo could imagine her being soft about animals, one of those who put pictures of dewy-eyed kittens on the wall, he was thinking as he sipped his dire coffee and accepted another sandwich in the spirit in which it was offered. And then caught a quizzical gleam in her unexpectedly beautiful hazel eyes and changed his mind yet again.

  The Rector, reaching out for his third sandwich and munching with every appearance of enjoyment, said, ‘Now, Catherine, I believe the Chief Inspector wishes to ask you about seeing Cecil Willard.’

  ‘Yes, Lionel, that’s why I thought he was here.’

  The Rector nodded encouragement to the detectives to go on, the gentle irony apparently escaping him. Mrs Oliver waited composedly.

  She was evidently one of those women whose mind is on higher things than the clothes they wear, otherwise she surely wouldn’t have had on that drab jumper and skirt, garments no doubt practical and tidy but so insignificant Mayo thought he’d have been hard put to it to remember them if he closed his eyes for a second. Neither did the colour do anything but dull her brown and rather weatherbeaten complexion. A dedicated gardener, perhaps, for the hands which lifted her cup were small and rough-looking with the nails filed very short. Below her wedding band she wore an engagement ring which immediately caught the eye, so out of character with the rest of her did it seem – a row of five extremely fine diamonds which flashed fire as her hands moved.

  But then, the Rectory had a well-to-do and prosperous air, none of your brick box on a housing estate type, nor the draughty unheated Victorian mausoleum whose upkeep is impossible for an impecunious clergyman. It was warmly centrally-heated, tastefully decorated and graciously, even luxuriously furnished: Mayo, whose business it was to know about these things, if not able to envisage ever owning them, had already noted that the tall, breakfront bookcase in the corner of the study was Georgian, the coffee-pot was silver and the table it stood on of polished burr walnut speaking of a couple of hundred years of tender loving care. Pictures in here and in the hall were of the sort he imagined to be of some value.

  As Kite led into the questioning, it became clear there was nothing new Mrs Oliver could tell them about seeing Willard going into the church, nothing but what her husband had already told Mayo: she had observed no one else in the vicinity at a minute or two after six when the old man had been propelling his wheelchair up to the church door. ‘I remember the time,’ she said, ‘because I was keeping one eye on the clock. I had to be in Hurstfield by seven.’

  ‘Who was your appointment with, Mrs Oliver?’ Kite asked, pencil poised.

  ‘I was due to attend a meeting at a friend’s house to discuss raising funds for an animal welfare society I’m concerned with.’

&n
bsp; The dedication of people like the Rector’s wife to such causes never failed to arouse Mayo’s admiration, but at the moment he was more interested in the fanaticism which is sometimes a corollary. It didn’t follow that because you loved animals enough to want to alleviate their suffering, you had to go to any lengths to bring this about, however extreme or illogical, yet there were people like that. However, he felt it was going to take an immense effort of will to imagine Mrs Oliver as one of them. With enough of this sort of fanaticism to kill Willard for what he’d done, or for what she imagined he’d done. Even more to imagine her being associated with the acts of mindless terrorism which are indifferent to the killing and maiming of innocent people, such as the bomb attack on the Fricker. He didn’t dismiss it as impossible, though. Jack the Ripper might have been a mild-mannered man at home.

  He asked her, ‘As a close neighbour and presumably a friend, what was your opinion of Mr Willard?’

  Mindful of how her husband had reacted to the same question, he expected a similarly cautious assessment from Mrs Oliver but there was neither caution nor hesitation in her response. ‘He was no friend of mine! Nor did I want him to be. I know he was a very clever man – much too clever for me, in fact, and too cold, the sort whose head rules his heart. But his attitudes weren’t what one expects from a man in his profession and –’

  ‘I’m afraid my wife isn’t being very charitable,’ the Rector interrupted, throwing her a look of astonishment, rather as if the family pet had suddenly turned round and bitten him.