Trick or Murder?: A Sophie Sayers Village Mystery (Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries Book 2)

by Debbie Young

  “Oh, Hector!” I squealed, coming up for air. When he released me, I darted behind the counter and threw myself into his open arms. I lay my head contentedly on his shoulder, for which he was the perfect height, and he stroked my hair. If I was a kitten, I’d have purred. Recognising the scent of his shower gel, tea tree and mint, I shivered with pleasure as I pictured him applying it in the shower earlier that morning. Minty by name…

  “Oh no,” he said suddenly, pushing me away. Would this man never make up his mind?

  Then the shop door creaked loudly, indicating the arrival of a customer.

  Hector told me afterwards what he’d seen the minute he’d opened his eyes. I was gratified to know that his eyes had been closed. Mr Neep was standing outside the shop, gawping open-mouthed. But his expression of horror was fixed not on the window display, now jam-packed with Halloween books and accessories, nor the clerical spider suspended above it, but on the sight of Hector and me locked in an embrace.

  “Mr House! What in heaven’s name do you think you are doing?” The vicar charged up to the counter. “Taking advantage of this poor child.” His low voice seemed more threatening than if he’d shouted his accusations.

  I leapt to Hector’s defence. “I’m twenty-five! And I have absolutely no objections to Mr Munro’s behaviour!”

  Mr Neep looked only at Hector. Immediately, I regretted my choice of words, which made it sound as if Hector and I weren’t even on first-name terms.

  “If that is how you treat your staff, I shall have to insist the village school buys its books from an alternative emporium, for the moral safety of its young charges.”

  Then he strutted back out into the High Street, slamming the shop door closed behind him. As he marched off in the direction of the vicarage, he was muttering to himself and shaking his head like a madman.

  Startled now on two counts, I staggered across to the tearoom and sat down heavily on the nearest chair. Hector remained where he was, gazing after the retreating figure. “Is it me, or does that man sound like he belongs to a different age?”

  “Perhaps he’s not the real new vicar at all, but one that’s just arrived here from the Victorian era in a time machine.”

  “That would certainly explain his prim attitude. But there is something strangely familiar about him. I can’t think where I would have met him before. Maybe he was the college chaplain when I was at university, someone with whom I had few dealings. Either that or he did something so bad to me in my past that I’ve subconsciously repressed the memory.”

  Shaking his mane of dark curls, Hector stood up and stretched, king of the bookshop once more. “Still, we’d better make sure he’s not really going to scupper our relationship with the school. It’s our single biggest customer. I’d like to think the school staff are too smart to listen to his nonsense, but they do have to keep on the right side of him, because of the school’s historic connection with the church. He’ll automatically be a governor because of his position as parish priest.” He thought for a moment. “Do you think you could make some discreet enquiries with Ella Berry to see how they’re getting on with him? It might seem better coming from you than from me.”

  “Sure. I’ll see if she’s up for a drink after work. I won’t say anything about you. I’ll just suss out what they think of him.”

  “Thank you, Sophie. And then, maybe—” He hesitated. “How about on Guy Fawkes’ Night, we go out for a meal together, then hit the council fireworks display in Slate Green?”

  Suddenly I completely forgot about the vicar. I could hardly believe my good fortune. I sensed it had cost Hector a lot of effort to ask me out, and although I didn’t know why, it was not an offer I was going to refuse. I just wished we didn’t have so long to wait. Fireworks Night was still a couple of weeks away.

  I tried to think of a better setting than the village pub for a romantic first date.

  “How about that new Chinese in Slate Green?”

  Hector looked relieved. “Excellent idea, Sophie. There are some things I’d like to tell you without being overheard by people in Wendlebury.”

  My heart dropped like a stone down a well. Why was he so keen to be somewhere we might not be recognised? Perhaps he had another girlfriend in the village that I wasn’t meant to know about. Maybe Neep was hiding some dark secret from Hector’s past, and Hector wanted to get in with his confession before Neep told me. A vicar would of course be a better judge of character than me. Perhaps I had made an awful mistake about Hector, and given the chance, the vicar might prove to be my saviour.

  Or did Hector just want to keep up his pretence to Carol that he was gay and therefore unavailable to her? If that was the case, it might help if he knew what Carol had confessed to me that morning.

  “Carol’s set her sights on Mr Neep, by the way. But don’t tell her I told you.”

  “Set her sights? What, like with a crossbow? I bet she’s not the first to do that.”

  “No, silly, I mean romantically. Poor Carol, she’s so lonely, and she doesn’t meet many unattached men in the village. It’s not surprising that she sees him as an opportunity.”

  Hector groaned. “She must want her head examined. That man…”

  He stared off into space, and our conversation fizzled out into awkward silence.

  7 Away in a Nativity Play

  When I texted Ella to see if she wanted to meet at The Bluebird that evening to compare notes about the new vicar, she was keen enough. From her reply, I sensed she was not about to found a fan club for him.

  When I arrived, she was already sitting in our favourite quiet booth by the door with two glasses of wine lined up ready – a large house white for me and a red for her, and a packet of kettle chips split open for us to share. The minute I’d shed my warm winter coat and sat down on the bench seat opposite her, I could tell she had had a bad day.

  “Go on, then, spill the beans.”

  She closed her eyes and sighed. “Please, don’t mention beans, I’m sick to death of beans. We’ve had them every day for weeks with school dinners. I’ll be glad when the first frosts come and kill off the vines.”

  “No, not runner beans. Whatever beans are making you look so miserable.”

  Ella took a long swig of her drink, then wrapped her hands around the glass for comfort.

  “It’s this new vicar.”

  She looked at me to appraise what I’d made of him before voicing her own opinion.

  “Don’t worry, he’s not exactly my new best friend.”

  She smiled weakly. “Nor mine.” Then she thumped her hands decisively on the table. “Honestly, you’d think he owned the school. Before he had even met the staff and had a proper tour, he started laying into me about our policies. Our disgraceful policies, to be precise. He doesn’t think we should have the internet in school because it’s full of filth and corruption.”

  “Well, that speaks volumes about what he gets up to on his computer.”

  “Then he thinks we should have a half-hour religious service in school every single day. I don’t know how he thinks we’d fit that in. We have trouble squeezing in the curriculum as it is. It’s not as if we never have religious assemblies. We do them for Christmas and Easter, and Eid and Diwali, even though we’ve no Muslims or Hindus on the roll.” She paused for another sip of wine. “Our weekly Friday Celebration Service is lovely. Although it isn’t overtly religious, it’s always full of love, tolerance and human kindness – qualities which apply to all faiths worth having. I hope that if the vicar comes to one of those, he’ll cut us some slack about daily assemblies, but he hasn’t been here long enough to attend one yet.”

  “Have you invited him to this Friday’s?”

  “Yes, of course, although I’m half hoping he refuses to come, after how rude he was to me this morning.”

  I stared into my glass. “Surely he should be putting his objections to the Head and the Board of Governors, rather than having a go at you, Ella? I mean, I know your role as Busine
ss Manager is an important one, but you’re not responsible for making the school policies, only for implementing them.”

  Ella set her glass down on a beer mat. “Damn right, Sophie. I get the impression he’s just a bully. I’m hoping the Head and the Governors will put him straight.”

  I nodded. “I think so too. He was really trying it on in the bookshop this morning. He told Hector he’s going to ban the school from ordering books at Hector’s House if we don’t remove our Halloween stock.”

  “For goodness’ sake, he’s meant to be a vicar, not a dictator.” Ella snapped a kettle chip in half. “You can tell Hector not to worry. We won’t take our custom elsewhere. School policy is to support local businesses so that they’ll support us too. Besides, we’d never get as big a discount or as local a service from any other bookshop.” She paused for a moment to eat the fragments of kettle chip. “To be honest, I can understand the vicar saying he doesn’t like trick-or-treating. Not everyone wants a string of sugar-fuelled monsters banging on their front door all evening. Some of our teachers don’t like it either, but he has no right to stop children doing it at all. That’s for the parents to decide.”

  I shrugged. “Oh well, it’ll be Christmas before we know it. That should pacify him.”

  “You’d think so, but no. He’s also declared war on our plans for Christmas.”

  “But that’s a church festival. How can he object?”

  “I’ll tell you over our second glass of wine.” Ella drained her glass, and I took our empties to the bar, wondering as I waited for Donald to serve me what sort of vicar could disapprove of Christmas. By now nothing would surprise me about Mr Neep.

  I returned with full glasses and a packet of salted mixed nuts.

  “So what’s wrong with the school’s plans for Christmas, according to Neep?”

  “Everything, apparently. But his main objection is that we always do a pantomime rather than a nativity play. A pantomime works well on so many levels.” She counted the advantages on her fingers. “It saves us taking the kids to see a pantomime in a theatre. It gives them more scope to show off their dramatic and musical skills. And it’s intentionally funny, unlike most nativity plays I’ve ever seen. They only make the audience laugh when they’re not supposed to. Also, there are more decent parts in pantomimes, and it’s easier to add in extra characters to give all the children something to say. Plus none of the girls cry because they haven’t been picked to play Mary. Nor do the ones who get a speaking part get inflated ideas of their own importance.”

  She paused to lick stray grains of salt off her fingertip. “It also suits the parents’ religious convictions, in that most of them don’t have any. More parents will come to see a pantomime than a nativity play. Some of them are the sort of middle-class smart-arses who put ‘Jedi’ in the Census form when asked to state their religion, but most of them just aren’t bothered. Those that are actively religious take care of their faith needs outside school. I explained all that to Mr Neep, but, oh no, he still says we have to do a nativity play, come what may. It’ll be Bedlam.”

  “I think you mean Bethlehem, young miss.” Billy appeared from nowhere to inspect what we were eating. “We always did nativity plays in my day at the village school, and it didn’t do me no harm.” Helping himself to a fistful of our nuts, he strolled off towards the bar, scratching his bottom with his free hand.

  “I rest my case,” said Ella.

  I pitied the children whose innocent pleasures the vicar seemed bent on destroying. “Well, maybe you can do a cross between the two. Add a new and different angle that makes a nativity play more fun for them than a pantomime.”

  “How do you mean?”

  I rummaged through the nuts to find an almond. “I’ve just had a brilliant idea. We can solve two village problems in one fell swoop. The Wendlebury Players need a new play script, and they’ve asked me to write one to suit their cast.” I leaned in to speak confidentially. “Frankly, I’ve been stumped as to how to handle it. But your dilemma has given me a brainwave: we can combine the two projects. The Players can work together with the children, running weekend workshops for rehearsals so the play needn’t eat into your school day, and they can give the kids some extra-curricular drama coaching. They’ll all enjoy that. The Players will also help you put on the play in the Village Hall. It would be positively educational.”

  Ella smiled for the first time that evening. “They’ll love that. When they do the panto in the school hall, we have to make a temporary stage out of wooden blocks. There’s always at least one child who falls off it or slips down between the cracks at some point. It will be great to be able to use the Village Hall with its proper stage.” She thought for a moment. “But who will play which character? Like I said, we don’t want the kids squabbling over the handful of key parts.”

  “I’ll write the speaking parts for the adults, and it will be super cute if all the children play animals or angels. Ian will obviously have to be Joseph, and the five women can play the other key roles – Mary, the Three Wise Men, and the chief shepherd. Why don’t we ask the teachers to join in too? The Head can be the Angel Gabriel, you can be the Innkeeper, and the rest of the staff can be shepherds.”

  Ella laughed and clapped her hands. “Typecasting or what? I could say, ‘No room at the inn, but we have got a couple of spaces in Years 2 and 5.’ That’s brilliant, Sophie. It’ll tick the box for community cohesion too.”

  I had to ask her to explain what that meant.

  “The school’s obliged to collaborate with the local community as much as it can. This will provide an ideal opportunity for the school and the community to work together. Do you really think you will be able to write an appropriate script in time?”

  I waved my hand dismissively, with the confidence that comes after two glasses of wine. “Easy-peasy. I mean, it’s not as if I don’t know the story already, or the characters. All I need to do is to sell the idea to the Wendlebury Players and get Carol to make about a hundred new costumes.”

  “I’m sure I can convince the Head and the staff, not least because it’ll mean a lot less work for them than the usual panto. Sophie, you are a gem!” She raised her arms in a cheer, and we did a quick two-woman Mexican wave.

  Our celebrations were cut short by the pub door being flung wide open. Making as dramatic an entrance as a gunslinger in a Wild West saloon, Mr Neep, clad in his usual black, stood glowering in the doorway. Dirty brown dead leaves blew in from behind him to scatter about his feet.

  8 Gunfight at The Bluebird

  If we’d been in Hector’s House, Hector by now would have been playing the theme music from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, but here in the pub Mr Neep’s entry was met with curious silence. The vicar stood in the doorway, slowly surveying the room as if wondering on whom to draw his gun.

  Donald, the publican, was first to speak. “Ah, Mr Neep, welcome to The Bluebird.” Like Carol and Hector, he was keen to keep on good terms with anyone who might be a source of potential business. Under the Reverend Murray’s direction, The Bluebird had been a regular venue for wakes and wedding receptions, and Donald wasn’t about to risk losing that income stream.

  The vicar approached Donald to reply, but stopped a foot distant from the bar, as if fearful it might be infectious.

  “Can I offer you a glass of sherry on the house, vicar?” Donald filled a large schooner and set it on the counter for him. “The Reverend Murray was always very fond of Harvey’s Bristol Cream. He said drinking sherry was just one of many ways of worshipping God.”

  “A true man of the cloth is temperate in his ways,” said the vicar.

  Ella winked at me. “Not our Reverend Murray.”

  Turning his back on Donald, Mr Neep left the sherry glass untouched.

  “Well, what did you come in here for, then?” called Billy from his game of dominoes in the far corner. Laughter rippled around the pub. The vicar swung round to skewer Billy with a look.

  “I might ask y
ou the same thing. And indeed, I might ask that question of all of you. Don’t you have families at home that you’re neglecting, domestic duties to attend to, instead of loitering mid-week indulging your addictions?”

  “I’m just popping outside for a ciggie,” said one of Billy’s dominoes companions. He produced a battered pack of twenty from his shirt pocket and exited via the side door to the smoking area. Two more players followed. Billy stayed behind, settling back in his chair as if anticipating some worthwhile entertainment.

  Donald, who never usually drank alcohol during opening hours, was pouring himself a Scotch. He forced a smile in Neep’s direction. “I could do with you when it comes to closing time.”

  Ella’s snigger set me off giggling, which unfortunately attracted the vicar’s attention to our secluded booth. He hadn’t noticed us when he arrived, but now stalked across and stood staring accusingly at our glasses of wine. I was glad I’d returned the empties when I’d ordered our second glass.

  “I might have known I’d find you here every night,” he said coldly, entirely without foundation. Ella and I seldom meet at the pub more than twice a week, and he’d never been there before in his life to catch us.

  Ella nudged me under the table with the toe of her shoe, while raising her glass in a toast to Mr Neep. “It’s only Ribena, sir.” I sometimes think she spends too long associating with the school’s naughtiest children, always her favourites.

  I followed suit. “Apple juice,” I said solemnly, before draining my glass to hide the evidence. Mr Neep seemed to be teetering on the brink of sniffing our breath for evidence, but I suspect his fear of germs held him back.

  Without a word, he stalked back to the bar, turned to face away from Donald and held up his hand for silence. For a moment I thought he was going to launch into a sermon. Instead, we just got a trailer.

  “The reason for my presence in this bar—” he practically spat out the word “—is to reach as many locals as possible in one place. Given that I have arrived too late to list any church services in this month’s parish magazine—” here he flashed an accusing look at its editor, Ella, as if his poor timing was her fault “—I invite you to join me for Morning Prayer at eight o’clock this Sunday. The service will include my first sermon in this parish. The topic will be abstinence.” He turned suddenly to glare at Ella and me. “Abstinence of all kinds.”