Late of This Parish

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘That wasn’t it at all,’ Philly said. ‘You know what Seb’s like. He’d never miss passing on a bit of spicy gossip. He’d already told me.’

  ‘He’d told you?’ Reece stared at her incredulously for several moments, then said, ‘And you really believe he didn’t realize where this bit of spicy gossip might lead?’

  ‘Well, he certainly could never have dreamt – nobody in his right mind would – that you’d actually go so far as to kill the old man to stop him using what he’d been told!’

  ‘Just a moment, though,’ said the Rector, ‘if what you’ve said is correct, Philly, then when Cecil Willard was killed both you and Sebastian must have known that Reece here, of all people, had a prime motive. Why did you not tell the police?’

  Phyllida hesitated, then she said, ‘This is where you all came in. I was just about to tell Jon where I’d been these last two days. I expect he can’t wait. Well, I’ve been to London to see Peter Falk.’

  Reece did not move but Mayo was aware of his every muscle tensing, every nerve end vibrating. ‘Who is Peter Falk?’ he asked.

  ‘The man he goes to London to be with every other weekend.’

  Reece’s colour had mounted and there was a glitter in his eyes, but he said nothing.

  ‘And?’ Mayo prompted.

  ‘And Peter confirmed what I’d thought, that ...’ She stopped. ‘It’s rather complicated.’

  ‘Take your time. There’s nothing to rush for, that I can see.’

  ‘Well, as Mr Oliver said, we knew' who had a motive for killing Mr Willard but Seb, for some reason, wouldn’t go to you – the police. I couldn’t understand why, unless he was involved in some way himself, in which case it wasn’t up to me to press him. Anyway,’ she added with a touch of her old bravado, ‘I thought, well, the police are so bloody clever they’re bound to find out anyway so what does it matter whether we tell them what we know or not?’

  Mayo chose not to comment on this, but waited stolidly for her to go on.

  ‘But then, on Sunday afternoon, I overheard Seb quarrelling with Jon in the garden. I’d gone into the house to answer the telephone and when I came back they were obviously having a big argument. Jon left as soon as I came back and Seb wouldn’t tell me what it was about, even though I kind of gathered it concerned me, and that made me so furious,’ she admitted, slightly subdued, ‘I’m afraid we were scarcely on speaking terms after that.’

  ‘Sunday afternoon,’ Mayo repeated. It had been as he thought: Reece’s voice had been the one he had heard in the Thornes’ garden and later, by the river at Stapley, recalled to whom it belonged. Starting suspicions in his mind which had temporarily been eclipsed by other events, sufacing only after the attack on Sebastian, an act of carelessness which would cost Jon Reece his freedom. Sheer luck had carried Reece through the first crime, where a more carefully premeditated plan might have failed him, the element of luck that was present in all successful crimes, but it had been unrealistic to think it would continue. ‘Let’s talk about this attack –’

  ‘It was after that I really started to think,’ she cut in. ‘I remembered that a few weeks back, in London, I was with Seb when he and Jon came face to face with each other for the first time since Halsingbury. It was at a party given by Peter Falk who, incidentally, is a member of – of SARA.’ Reece drew in his breath sharply and audibly but she went on, pointedly avoiding looking in his direction and speaking tensely to Mayo, hesitating before uttering the name but nevertheless looking him straight in the eye. No dissembling, prepared to face the music. She wasn’t short on courage, whatever else; but then, they none of them were, these blinkered fanatics. What they lacked, among a lot of other things, was a proper sense of proportion.

  ‘Later, we’ll go more fully into the matter of SARA,’ he said. ‘For the moment, let’s concentrate on what we were talking about. This Peter Falk, presumably, had passed on the information to Mr Reece here that you were involved in the organization?’

  She nodded. ‘He tells Jon everything, they’ve no secrets from each other – or that’s what he said when I saw him in London this morning.’ Reece gave a barely suppressed groan. ‘Though I don’t suppose he’d have admitted it if he’d known why I was asking.’

  ‘And presumably,’ Mayo pressed on, ‘Sebastian wasn’t at first aware that Falk was a member of SARA, or that he’d passed on to Reece that you were, otherwise I suppose he might have thought twice about gossiping to Willard.’

  ‘Well, of course he’d have thought twice,’ Pyllida said, ‘I guess he’d no idea that Jon knew anything about me until after Mr Willard was killed, probably not until last Sunday. When Jon came and threatened him with telling what he knew about me if he didn’t keep his mouth shut. He must’ve been torn between dropping me in it and keeping to himself who the murderer was.’

  He said to her, ‘All right, but if Sebastian didn’t know that Reece was aware of your connections with the organization, why mention SARA at all to Mr Willard?'

  She went suddenly scarlet. Whether from annoyance or some other emotion, a deep, painful red spread from her neck upwards. ‘I’ve told you, he didn’t go to see Mr Willard primarily about Reece.’

  ‘Well, why then?’

  ‘For advice about me, if you must know! Seb’s like a lot more men, he only pays lip-service to women’s freedom and he said it worried him, if you please, that I was a member of SARA! That’s the only reason he agreed to go to that meeting with me on Saturday, I’m sure, to see how much I was involved. Bloody cheek, as if I’m not perfectly capable of taking care of myself, which is more than he is,’ she declared, the hurt in her eyes denying her anger. It had obviously come as a shock that what Sebastian thought and felt about her should mean such a lot to her, and she was mortified that it did. ‘So now you know everything.’

  Mayo said, assuming his thick-headed copper role, ‘Well, no, maybe not everything. You see, maybe we’re not as clever as you think we are, Miss Thorne. It puzzles me what Sebastian was doing, arranging, or agreeing, to meet you, Mr Reece, by the castle.’

  How the hell, he thought, could anyone be such a fool? Meeting someone you knew to be a murderer on a dark night in a lonely place?

  But you could if you were Sebastian Oliver, irrepressibly self-confident, believing you could manipulate the situation to your own advantage because you had the whip hand.

  At that moment Mayo felt it was more of an inspired guess than a conscious process of logical deduction which gave him the answer he’d been looking for. Later he was to see that it followed inevitably from what he’d learnt during the conversation. ‘He was putting pressure on you, wasn’t he?’ he said to Reece.

  With an angry, sweeping gesture that almost knocked over the bottle on the table next to him, Reece violently denied any such thing. But for the first time, there was a glint of fear in his eyes.

  ‘I think he was. Over Peter Falk – who’s no ordinary, run-of-the-mill member of SARA, is he? I think he was the one who masterminded the bombing at the Fricker Institute that killed the security guard.’

  ‘I never told Seb that,’ Philly’s small voice said into the silence.

  But Sebastian was clever. Intuitive enough to put two and two together and make half a dozen. He’d have picked up a hint here, a nuance there, and drawn the inevitable conclusion.

  Mayo stood up. ‘Mr Reece, I must tell you that there is forensic evidence which will connect you directly with both crimes. For one, there are fibres from a black tracksuit which you sometimes wear for running, but we also have a witness who will testify that he saw you in the church, and –’

  ‘That’s impossible!’ He was still blustering, but the last revelations had done more than any of the previous accusations to sap his confidence. And now, looking from one to the other, he seemed to sense it was all over, that there was no escape, and his defences suddenly collapsed. ‘It’s no use trying to explain, none of you will understand.’ Sagging almost visibly with the weight of the chip in hi
s shoulder, the schoolboy cowlick looking limp and defeated, he said in a slurred voice loaded with self-pity, ‘It’s dangerous to be as I am in my profession. There’s no room for guys like me. My whole life has been spent denying myself and how I feel and it’s so bloody unfair! At least Peter’s been free to be himself and work for what he believes in.’

  And then with disconcerting suddenness, he jumped up and stood looking from one to the other with a wild look in his eye. ‘No! Why the hell should I make excuses? I did what I did. I didn’t want to have to kill Willard, I didn’t go with that intention, I swear. He wanted me to withdraw my application and I went to the church to plead with him to think again. All I wanted was for him to keep quiet, which shouldn’t have been too much to ask. But he wouldn’t even listen. And in the end it was so easy. So quick. No more hassle.’ He rubbed his hand across his eyes. ‘But I’d forgotten Sebastian. It was only afterwards that I remembered what he knew.’

  ‘And decided to kill him, too. That was no spur of the moment decision, you went prepared, with a baseball bat. It was too bad you didn’t know that Miss Thorne knew as much as he did, otherwise he wouldn’t now be in a hospital bed.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have tried it on. I’m the wrong person to put up with that sort of blackmail!’ His face had grown red and shiny, the blue eyes hot, a pulse beat in his temple, as if a violence that had been repressed and held down too long could no longer be contained but had to come boiling out, like steam under pressure. Yet the expression on his face was almost exalted. ‘What’s more, I’m damned if I’ll listen to any more of this!’

  In a flash, he had made his move. Straight for the door in a few long strides. Out of it, slamming it behind him and over the wooden rails in one leap, never mind the steps. He could easily have broken a leg from that height but he knew what he was doing, how to land, which Kite, following after, didn’t – or didn’t care to test whether he knew or not. Both he and Mayo were in fair condition but they knew they hadn’t a hope in hell. Reece, on top of his form, had a good lead and soon outstripped them both, making for the main school building. The west tower, with its net of scaffolding. The ladders, still in place and Reece swarming up them like a monkey.

  Kite had reached the bottom of the first ladder, was about to follow him, just like in the cops and robber series so that the poor dumb cop would be in danger of being pushed off the roof by the bad guy.

  But Reece had already reached the top and with scarcely a moment’s pause, leaped straight off. Directly beneath him was a pile of builders’ sand. Embedded upright in the sand by its spike, ready to be hauled up to the roof, was the new, replacement finial, its leafy crown of acanthus leaves now clearly defined around its central, sharply-tapering boss, pointing in all innocence to the sky.

  CHAPTER 19

  The month of May had decided to live up to its reputation and bow itself out in a feast of blossom, blue skies and the beginning of a heatwave. Castle Wyvering, peaceful and sleepy in the sun, looked at its best, while Uplands House School on a May morning was incomparable.

  ‘Reece came with the highest recommendation from the Headmaster at Halsingbury,’ Richard Holden was saying, ‘and I immediately felt he’d fit in here, which he always did. Never thought anything of it when he told me he preferred to be known simply as “Reece” rather than his full name. Less pretentious, he said, and I was inclined to agree.’

  Mayo had come to the school to find Miriam Thorne and after speaking with her was leaving when he had encountered the Headmaster on the front lawn, watching as the scaffolding on the west tower was being dismantled, ready to be taken away. Bolts were being uncoupled and planks thrown down to the accompaniment of the sort of language which would certainly have enriched the boys’ vocabulary had they been there to hear it. The work was now completed, the damaged tiles replaced and the acanthus-leaved finial upon which Jon Reece’s body had been impaled cemented into place on the apex of one of the gables, looking newer than its companions but otherwise innocent of its deadly function.

  Holden stood with his hands clasped behind his back, bouncing slightly on his toes, his gown billowing behind him. There was a subtly different air about him, a relaxation of tension perhaps, a renewed energy.

  ‘But that isn’t what you mean, is it?’ he went on. ‘And the answer is no, I’d no idea he was gay, though God knows that must be the last word to apply. Not at first, that is. Later, I began to suspect.’

  ‘Didn’t it bother you at all, sir?’

  ‘I like to think that I’m not prejudiced, and I can assure you there was never any danger at all that any of the boys would be at risk. Had I had the slightest inkling of anything like that he would have had to go. No, I’m as certain as I ever shall be of anything that he was speaking the truth when he said he kept the two sides of his life apart.’

  ‘But when he was likely to be made Headmaster?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know for certain that what I suspected was true and short of asking him outright, which he would have denied, I don’t know what I could have done. I certainly wasn’t going to conduct any sort of witch hunt.’ Holden watched a large lorry doing a reverse turn on the drive, keeping his eye on it to make sure it didn’t clip the edges of the lawn with its wheels, then said, ‘All right, yes, it bothered me. Look, shall we go into my study? It’s too noisy to talk out here and I think there’ll be some tea waiting.’

  Sitting in the large, comfortable room, with the windows open, tea poured and biscuits handed, Holden leaned back in his chair. ‘Sebastian, at least, I gather from Miriam Thorne, is making a good recovery. Showing a tendency to rethink his life and the way it’s going too, I understand – but concerned about Philly.’

  ‘Well, she’ll have to take the rap, you know, along with the others. With Patman and Quinn and Ruth Lampeter, though even they’re small beer compared to Peter Falk. But since she was only involved with setting up the cell here and not with SARA’s more militant activities, she should get off comparatively lightly. I thought I’d come along and reassure Mrs Thorne about that while I was here in Wyvering to sort out one or two other matters with PC Wainwright.’

  ‘It won’t basically change how she feels about things, you know,’ Miriam had said. ‘We’ve tried for years to do that. But maybe she’ll cool her opinions down a bit. What happened to Seb has shaken her badly.’

  And if Sebastian had the nous to take advantage of that – and Mayo was inclined to think he had his head screwed on the right way, despite appearances to the contrary in the matter of Jonathan Reece – then maybe it would turn out to be a different story. ‘She’ll be all right,’ he said to Holden now. ‘And so will young Oliver. Though his memory at the moment is all to pot and he doesn’t remember exactly what happened just before he was attacked.’

  Jon Reece – or Jonathan Talbot-Reece – hadn’t been so lucky. He had died within a few seconds of reaching the hospital. His spectacular leap from the scaffolding on to the stone finial had resulted in multiple injuries, rupturing his spleen and breaking his spine among other things. He had lain a few doors along the corridor from where Sebastian

  Oliver was slowly recovering, but had never regained consciousness.

  ‘Thank you for the tea, Mr Holden,’ Mayo said, preparing to go. ‘I don’t suppose we shall meet again but I’d like to wish you well and hope you and your wife will be happy in Antibes.’

  The Headmaster took off his spectacles, smiled and said, ‘We shan’t be going to Antibes, Mr Mayo. I’ve let myself be persuaded not to retire after all. Not just yet. I’ve spoken to my doctor and he supports the idea wholeheartedly. It wasn’t a severe heart attack I had, just a warning, as they say, and my doctor says there’s no reason why I shouldn’t live to be ninety – though I shan’t inflict myself on Uplands so long!’

  ‘That’s a surprise! What does Mrs Holden think of the idea?’ Mayo asked, though he could have bet his month’s overtime on the answer.

  ‘It was my wife who originally felt I sho
uld retire and I went along with her wishes but in actual fact I think now she’s rather relieved I’ve decided otherwise. She knows I shall be happier – and I’m certain she will be, staying here.’

  ‘Then Illingworth won’t get the Headship?’

  ‘No. No, he won’t. But all in all that might be no bad thing. That was partly why I changed my mind when the chairman of the governors sounded me out – before Reece died – on the idea of staying on for an interim period at least, until a more suitable person than either Reece or Illingworth could be found. Like me, one or two of the board members had apparently been having second thoughts, feeling that neither candidate was ideal. Maybe Illingworth can be groomed to take over when I do retire, though frankly, I’m not sure that teaching per se is entirely his metier. I can’t see him finding it enough of an intellectual challenge in the long run.’

  ‘Never struck me as being the sort to be a schoolmaster, but then, I’m not qualified to say,’ Mayo remarked.

  ‘No, though I was very happy to take him, of course, when he first came here. It’s not every day someone with his background applies for a position at a school like Uplands. He was quite frank about his reasons for leaving Cambridge and during his time here he’s performed quite adequately, but that’s rather different from being Head of a school like this. Jonathan would’ve been the better man of the two, but ...’ He shook his head.

  ‘It wouldn’t have done, though, would it?’

  ‘No, I must admit it wouldn’t. Easy, of course, to speak with hindsight but you know, I liked him, I liked him very much. I was aware he used his charm quite deliberately to get what he wanted but I thought it was harmless. I should have seen the aggression beneath the surface – it was there in dozens of ways. I always knew he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder but his kind often do. I’d never have thought him a potential suicide.’