Late of This Parish

by Marjorie Eccles

  There was silence. 'Bloody silly name,’ Uttley added.

  ‘S-A-R-A,’ Mayo repeated, enunciating the letters separately. SARA, as Willard had written it. He wanted to kick himself, hard. Not a girl’s name, not even the name of Illingworth’s wife, but an acronym made from the initials of an organization.

  ‘It rings a bell?’

  ‘It rings several.’ He thought further. ‘Christ, Fred, IRA connections?’

  Uttley thought not. ‘Apart from a bit of know-how from Quinn’s brothers and a streak of inherited violence, I should doubt it. One of these tinpot little outfits that keep mushrooming everywhere. It was a homemade bomb at the Fricker – capable of doing a fair bit of damage, mind – the poor sod who copped it was probably killed accidentally, if that’s any consolation to his widow. Between the fur job and the bomb, the members seem to have confined themselves to protests at hunt meetings, letters to the papers and MPs and so on, none of it actually concerning animal research, I might add, but I suppose it’s all one to them. After the bomb there was complete silence, which seems to support the theory that they’d gone a bit further than they intended. Until last week, when they claimed responsibility through a telephone call to the editor of the local paper. He’s a rare bird – a journalist with a sense of responsibility – and realizing this was a lot more serious than burning a few furs, he contacted us before doing anything about it. He agreed with us to hold back publishing their claim, since that’s all they want, publicity.’ He added sourly, ‘But they’ll go to someone else eventually who won’t be so high-minded, local radio or TV probably.’

  Mayo was still thinking about those initials. ‘Sorority? Does that mean they’re all women?’

  ‘Sorority, sisterhood, I wouldn’t put anything past women these days,’ Uttley said, with a regretful glance back at the days when women knew their place. ‘But yes, I think so, originally, though they seem to have enlisted the help of a few men recently. Probably need their help if their activities are becoming more militant. Anyway, since the Fricker incident, we’ve kept as much of an eye on Patman and Quinn as we can spare the manpower for. There was some sort of meeting on Saturday evening at the terraced house here in Hurstfield where they live.’

  ‘Last Saturday?’

  ‘Right, the nineteenth. And this is what might interest you – a couple who were followed back to their car when they left. It was an MG coupé and it was subsequently traced to a Phyllida Thorne. Don’t have to spell out who she is, do I?’

  ‘Good God.’

  But the shock was merely an initial one. It needed no effort of the imagination, as far as Mayo was concerned, to see Phyllida Thorne as a member of such a group and to be convinced that if she were she would be at its militant centre. He didn’t share Uttley’s view that men had been needed in SARA to run the group’s militant activities. In his opinion, she for one would be more than capable of orchestrating the violence and any men who joined would be subject to her will.

  ‘You don’t think she could’ve been organizing a cell in Hurstfield of some bigger organization? It would account for her being involved here, when she lives and works in London.’

  ‘Distinct possibility, yes. One we’re working on. It’s a name we’ve heard before, by the way,’ Uttley said.

  ‘What, SARA?’

  ‘No, Phyllida Thorne. About seven or eight years ago she was one of a gang of sixth-formers who made a protest sit-in outside the gates of the Fricker – causing us the usual amount of bother, wasting God knows how much taxpayers’ money. Set fire to an effigy and nearly had the gatehouse on fire into the bargain.’ Uttley paused. ‘An effigy of the Director. Her own father,’ he added, in case Mayo hadn’t taken his point.

  Mayo understood now what the Thornes had been so evasive about. Why Denzil Thorne had been so uneasy in the garden on Sunday. Did they suspect their daughter’s involvement with SARA? And if so, how would they feel about that? How would he feel himself if Julie had transferred her half-baked ideas into something like this? The kind of hopeless despair, he imagined, that all parents must feel when their offspring are intent on pursuing a life-denying, wrong-headed course that can lead only to self-destruction. How far had Phyllida Thorne’s involvement with SARA taken her? To the point where her own father had almost been destroyed by her fanatical ideals? As far as Cecil Willard’s melancholy end?

  ‘Does the name Sebastian Oliver mean anything to you?’ Uttley asked.

  ‘Yes, I know him. I take it he was the one who visited the house with her?’

  ‘That’s right. Parson’s son, I hear. You wouldn’t credit it, would you? Every advantage and they screw up their chances, getting involved in tacky little schemes like this. They were followed after they left the house. Went straight out to that new place in King’s Grafton, what’s it called, the River House? Had dinner there and then drove back to Wyvering.’

  ‘That’s what they told me – only they omitted to say where they’d been first. D’you know who else was at this meeting?’

  Uttley drew a list of names from his desk drawer and pushed it across, followed by a file. Mayo ran his eye down the list, then flicked through the photographs in the file – crowd snapshots and individual ones bearing the name of the subject beneath, with biographical details. Most of those in the crowd snaps had not been identified. One face he wouldn’t have been surprised to see was not there – that of the Rector’s wife – but there was another which did surprise him.

  ‘Sebastian Oliver and his girlfriend aren’t the only ones who’ve been lying to me,’ he remarked.

  ‘Someone else in your case?’

  Mayo stabbed his finger at a snapshot of a woman caught in a milling crowd, struggling to hold up a banner. If, when trying to envisage something which would have animated her, he had tried hatred, he would have succeeded. The face that looked straight into the camera was alight with fanaticism.

  ‘This one,’ he said. ‘Her name’s Ruth Lampeter.’

  Things had suddenly begun to look different. SARA was explained, and offered some positive connection with Willard’s murder. In some way Willard must have learned of the organization and it was this which had posed his moral dilemma – whether to inform the authorities and implicate his young friend Sebastian Oliver, or to remain silent, with further risk to human life. It could not, Mayo thought, have been a dilemma unresolved for long, as far as someone like Willard was concerned. Only he had not been given time to resolve anything.

  The case building against Illingworth was collapsing. It was nothing, after all, to do with what had happened to him at Cambridge. This new information put a different complexion on many things which Mayo needed to talk over with Kite. He turned his car towards Wyvering and then remembered that by now Kite should be back in Lavenstock, and with luck, interviewing Danny Lampeter.

  Kite was having a successful morning.

  Making what was beginning to feel like a habit he ought to kick, he had driven over to Wyvering to interview Macey Smith, and struck pay dirt. After the first token skirmishes, she had admitted to buying some Victorian jewellery during the previous week from a young man answering to the description of Danny Lampeter. Produced them, what was more, in an attempt to show how cooperative she was. Too cooperative, said the nasty suspicious copper in Kite, making an opportunity to have a word with Farrar, whom he could trust to beaver around and find out whatever was to be found that was behind Macey and her son Tigger setting up shop in sleepy Wyvering.

  Back to Lavenstock and the run-down part of the town where Sam Biggs’s granddaughter had taken up residence. Over a greengrocer’s shop, with a flight of stairs leading from a side entrance where the overflow from the shop was piled up, and crates of tomatoes and oranges, onions in nets, sacks of potatoes stood about waiting to be carried in. Kite leaned on the bell and held his nose at the smell of rotting vegetation issuing from two plastic dustbins overflowing with several days’ rejects.

  It was mid-morning when they got there and
he was prepared for trouble. He had brought Deeley with him, good-natured but solid beef and no messing around when it came to ratbags like Lampeter. Mindful of Deeley’s biggest fault, that he was likely to hit out first and think later, Kite said, ‘Go easy on him, Pete. We want to take him virgo intacta, if you’ll excuse the phrase.’

  Deeley’s round, ingenuous face, red as a farmer’s boy’s, took on an injured expression. ‘As if I would.’

  A thick miasma of hamburger and cigarette smoke hit them in the face when at last the door was opened by a big, well-developed girl of about eighteen, adorned with a shaven haircut and a mini skirt so short and tight it had difficulty in covering her bottom. She had a doughy face which she’d been in the middle of making up. The one heavily-shaded eyelid gave her the appearance of having been the loser in a punch-up but Kite thought even Deeley might run if confronted by this Amazon in an alley on a dark night.

  He showed his warrant card and told her they wanted to speak to Danny Lampeter. She looked at it without much interest but before she could deny he was there, a voice came from inside the room. ‘Who is it, Trace?’

  ‘Police,’ Kite said, and the girl shrugged and stood aside to let them in. A stocky, broad-chested, long-haired individual in his early twenties, naked to the waist, looked up from a newspaper propped against a milk bottle on the table.

  ‘What you been up to then, Danny?’ Tracey said from behind them.

  The room was disgusting. A rumpled bed in the corner, a sink under the window piled with unwashed dishes, on the table a meal of sorts which he’d been in the process of eating – breakfast or maybe lunch, whatever cornflakes followed by hamburgers and tinned spaghetti hoops might be designated.

  Some remnants of pride prompted Tracey to straighten the duvet on the bed and begin clearing the dishes from the table. ‘Never mind that,’ Kite told her. ‘Sit down while we ask your boyfriend here some questions.’

  ‘He’s not my boyfriend –’ she began scornfully.

  ‘Shut up, Trace.’

  ‘Danny Lampeter, isn’t it?’ Kite asked. ‘We’re here to make inquiries about some goods stolen from the home of the Reverend Mr Willard of Castle Wyvering.’

  ‘Well, you can bloody well go away again. Why should you think I know anything about that?’ Lampeter demanded, scraping his chair back and standing up in a threatening manner, muscular brown arms akimbo, the blue tattoos livid, his square jaw thrust forward.

  ‘Watch it, Danny!’ Tracey warned.

  ‘Shut up, I said, Trace.’ Tracey shrugged, picked up her eyeliner and hand mirror and opted out of the proceedings. Lampeter, however, looking at Deeley, fourteen stones of him leaning on the door, arms folded, sat down again, raking his hands through his unconfined and flowing locks.

  ‘I think you know quite a bit about it. That and one or two more things,’ said Kite.

  ‘Dunno what you’re on about.’

  ‘Come off it, Lampeter. You’re coming with us, whatever, so please yourself whether you spill now and finish your dinner while you talk, or talk later.’

  ‘Oh, ta very much. Somehow I’ve lost my appetite.’

  ‘Please yourself. Talk here, or at the station.’

  ‘What about?’

  Kite told him, succinctly. One, that he was in dead bother for nicking the things from the Willard house. Two, that he’d better have some alibi for the badger shooting. Three, he’d better have an even tighter one for the time of Willard’s murder.

  To the first, Lampeter made more pretence of not knowing what Kite was talking about. To the second he protested, ‘That’s a load of old cobblers!’ and would have gone on, had he not been silenced by Kite. When the third charge was made, his jaw dropped. ‘God Almighty!’

  ‘The Almighty’s not going to help you much, Lampeter. And don’t tell me you haven’t heard about the murder?’

  ‘ ’Course I have. I can read, can’t I? But what’s it to me? I’d nothing to do with it.’

  ‘You high-tailed it from Wyvering as though your backside was afire last Saturday. Just for the fun of it, huh?’

  ‘No law against it, that I’ve heard. If you must know, I’d had a row with my sis. I’d had it up to here with her, interfering old bitch.’

  ‘That’s no way to talk about your sister.’ Kite thought of Ruth Lampeter, unlovely, unattractive, lonely, stoutly defending this cretin. ‘After all she’s done for you. What was the row about?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing to do with you lot, anyway.’

  ‘Something to do with Willard’s murder, was it?’

  ‘No!’ Lampeter shouted. Sweat stood on his forehead. ‘I swear I don’t know a thing about the Rev being murdered, straight up.’

  ‘All right, I may as well tell you that the person you sold the brooch and the other things to last week has identified you, and I’m arresting you on suspicion of theft,’ Kite said, and proceeded with the caution. ‘Get your hair ribbon on, ducky, and come down to the station.’

  Danny suddenly caved in. ‘Oh, all right, it’s a fair cop. I nicked the brooch and the jet bracelet and things. But I didn’t do for the old man.’

  ‘Tape-recorded interview between Daniel William Lampeter and Detective-Sergeant Martin Kite, May 23rd, 1991 at 11.50 hrs. Also present, Detective Chief Inspector Gil Mayo and Detective-Constable Peter Deeley.’

  Kite settled himself at the table in the interview room opposite Lampeter. After half an hour, they had a signed confession of guilt about the thefts but nothing more. He was, however, weakening. ‘If I tell you something else I know, will you put it down to be taken into consideration?’

  ‘What d’you think we are? The flaming Exchange and Mart? You’re in no position to make bargains, Lampeter.’

  ‘Then get knotted.’

  There was silence.

  ‘This row you had with your sister. It was about the badgers, wasn’t it?’ Mayo asked, speaking for the first time.

  Lampeter swung his gaze to face the Chief Inspector. ‘Might’ve been.’ He shrugged indifferently but his eyes were wary. ‘How come you know about that?’

  An educated guess, but he wasn’t about to tell Lampeter that. ‘Never you mind. Now come on, lad, it’s in your own interests to tell us what you know. There’s been a murder committed and if you don’t clear yourself you’re in for the chop.’

  ‘It was that Mike Tully,’ Lampeter said suddenly, after thinking for some minutes and evidently deciding he’d no option but to come clean. ‘Met him and his mate in the Butcher’s Arms one night when I’d sunk a few whiskies. He had this Lakeland terrier and he was going on about what a good rabbiter it was ... We got talking and I just happened to mention I knew where there was some badgers. I didn’t know they’d go out and kill the bloody things!’

  ‘What did you imagine they were going to do?’ Kite asked. ‘Take wildlife photos?’

  ‘I don’t see what all the fuss is about, anyway. Two or three badgers. Only a bit of sport, after all.’

  Mayo had never seen a badger, except on TV, and he doubted whether either of his colleagues had, either, but this mindless slaughter of dumb creatures for amusement made him want to throw up. Deeley looked as sick as he himself felt. Kite said, ‘You’re a shit, Lampeter.’

  ‘Here, you lot, I wasn’t there, don’t start blaming me!’

  ‘Beats me,’ Kite said, ‘why they stopped at that. Why they didn’t stand and watch the dog tear the badgers to pieces. That’s the usual form, isn’t it?’

  ‘You ever seen what claws they’ve got, them badgers?’ Lampeter demanded. ‘You should – Tully says one of ’em nearly gouged his dog’s eye out. Valuable dog like that, he didn’t want it blinded, did he? So they just shot ’em and left ’em.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more,’ Kite said. ‘You disgust me.’

  ‘How did your sister come to know of this?’ Mayo asked.

  ‘Because everybody in bloody Wyvering thought it was me, didn’t they? As per usual. And I was getting sick of it.
That sister of mine’s not right in the head when it comes to animals. Reckon she likes ’em a damn sight better than people,’ he added with a perception Mayo wouldn’t have given him credit for. ‘You’d think she’d be satisfied with all them demos, and letters she writes to the papers but no, she has to be one of the boss women of this society, this what they call SARA. She’d been looking at me sideways all week and in the end she asked me straight out, had I done it. I told her of course I bloody hadn’t but when I told her who had she went off her trolley, just the same. Seemed to think it was my fault and went on something rotten about me betraying everything she’d tried to teach me and all that crap. In the end I couldn’t stand it no more and I pushed off.’

  ‘Selling the things you’d nicked from Willard on the way?’

  ‘I was a bit short,’ Lampeter complained. ‘I haven’t been able to get a job since I came out the army.’

  ‘Not strained yourself overmuch trying, I’ll bet,’ Kite said.

  ‘SARA,’ he repeated later, disposing of a couple of jam doughnuts with his coffee when Mayo called him in to tell him what he’d learned from Uttley. ‘Obvious, isn’t it, when you know?’

  ‘SARA with a question-mark after it, remember. And in close conjunction with Sebastian Oliver’s visit. Could be that Willard had learned of Oliver’s involvement and was threatening to tell what he knew?’