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

by Debbie Young

  But the vicar hadn’t finished yet. Mrs Broom returned to her seat to let him have the floor once more.

  “You are all invited. You are all welcome as my guests. However, this generous invitation is offered provided that you don’t disobey me and mark Halloween. There must be no Halloween celebrations in any school for which I’m responsible. My children, I say this only for your own good. I have your best interests at heart. Because I care about you. So no dressing up in Halloween costumes, or you may get mistaken for a guy and get burned on my bonfire, ha ha.”

  Nearly everyone gasped again, but Mr Neep steamrollered on. He looked from one child to another around the room as the adults exchanged dubious glances. “Because my mission at this school is to keep you all on the path of righteousness. Should you stray, I have it on the highest authority of the good Lord above that when your turn comes to depart this life, you will burn eternally.”

  “What’s a ternally?” The vocabulary-curious child from earlier triggered sniggers from the grown-ups. “Is it one of those big candles from Ikea?”

  One grey-haired grandmother put up her hand. “Do we need to bring food, vicar? Or fireworks?”

  “Or booze?” asked a dad. Mr Neep looked pleased, as if he’d found the way to their hearts at last. “No, no, all will be supplied. Food, drink, and fireworks will all be served up in abundance.”

  “So much for fostering abstinence,” I whispered to Ella, although looking at the vicar’s lean frame, I suspected his idea of abundance was different to mine.

  When the vicar finally sat down, Mrs Broom stood up to make a final address. “Well, children, mums and dads, grannies and grandads, well done for another wonderful week. Now go away and have a restful and relaxing half-term break. Come back to school refreshed and ready to share another busy and exciting term’s learning.”

  Along with the rest of the adult guests, I stayed in my seat while the children filed out of the hall. The vicar and the Head disappeared in the direction of Mrs Broom’s office. In the absence of any figures of authority, the conversation at the back of the hall immediately rose to playground volume.

  “I heard the old duffer’s teetotal,” one of the dads was saying. “I bet his free drinks won’t be worth having. It’ll be glasses of squash all round, I reckon.”

  “I don’t call that a party,” said another. “Besides, what about our lovely Halloween costumes? We can’t wear those on bonfire night. Most of them are nylon. We’d go up in flames at the slightest spark. We can still let the kids trick-or-treat away from school, so long as they don’t call in at the vicarage. So we can still do most of Halloween, just not the disco. And then enjoy the vicar’s fireworks party the following week.”

  “With the addition of a little firewater, perhaps.” One of the dads gave a sly wink as he mimed drinking from an imaginary bottle. “He doesn’t need to know. We just won’t give any to him.”

  “Shame about losing the disco, though,” said a dark-haired lady. “That means the PTA will miss out on the ticket sales and the bar profits.”

  “We don’t get many opportunities for a good bop in this place,” said one of her friends.

  “We could always make the PTA a few quid by running a sweepstake, like we do for the Grand National,” said a dad. “Whose guy burns first, fastest, slowest, last. There are plenty of possibilities – £1 a ticket, £20 to the winner, and the rest to the PTA.”

  “That’s a bit ghoulish,” said somebody’s gran. “Like the ancient Romans seeing which Christian will be first to be eaten by the lions. But my money’s on my little grandson.”

  Still plotting, the adults departed into the playground, ready to collect their children to go home.

  I followed Ella back to her office, pausing only for her to tug on the rope to ring the school bell for the end of the day. There were already a couple of parents waiting at her office door, probably to complain about the vicar, so I thought it better to take my leave, said goodbye and wandered despondently out of the building, putting on my coat.

  13 Right Guy, Right Place

  “Please don’t shoot the messenger, Hector. I’m just telling you so you can be prepared.”

  I tried to find a positive spin on events.

  “Maybe we could buy in some history books about Guy Fawkes, and make a display in the window to draw attention to them. I bet most modern kids don’t know much about the Gunpowder Plot.”

  Hector blinked thoughtfully, then clapped his hands as if the problem was solved.

  “You’re right. I have never liked Guy Fawkes’ Night. The whole sorry episode was hardly England’s finest hour. Commemorating it just propagates animosity between faiths. That’s the last thing we need more of in today’s society. But I suppose we could add a modern slant to promote it as a cautionary tale.”

  As I came round behind him to hang my coat up, I was pleased to see him start searching our suppliers’ database for books about Guy Fawkes.

  To my surprise, the parents and children who came into the shop a few minutes later on the way home from school seemed reasonably happy with the vicar’s proposal.

  “Have you got any books about this guy Mr Fawkes, Hector?” asked a little boy. “My mum said she’ll buy me a sticker book of him if you’ve got one.”

  “Are there are any colouring sheets with bombfires on them?” asked a little girl, sitting down at the play table in the tearoom.

  “Bonfires,” said her mother, rooting through our pile of seasonal colouring sheets. Finding none, she turned over a witch picture to provide a blank sheet and picked out red, orange and yellow crayons from the box. “You’ll have to draw your own. Good girl.”

  Hector went out to the stockroom, returning a few moments later with cellophane sheets in fiery shades – protective packaging from some expensive art books we’d taken delivery of earlier that week. From behind the counter he produced glue sticks and safety scissors.

  “Here, cut these sheets up to make a collage of a bonfire, and I’ll put the best ones on the wall.” He reached behind the tearoom counter to grab a couple of empty cardboard coffee capsule sleeves. “There you go, you can use these to make the logs.”

  “Just what we need in this village, trainee arsonists,” he said so quietly that only I could hear, but at least he was smiling as he passed the cardboard to a little girl.

  Having completed the orders for tea and coffee, I was about to start dusting the bookshelves when the shop door creaked and Joshua teetered in, accompanied by a blast of cold wind.

  “Ah, hello, my dear. I hear the weather’s about to take a turn for the worse, so I decided to go for a constitutional before the rain starts.”

  He crossed slowly to the tearoom. One of the mums removed her handbag from the last spare chair to allow him to sit down. The children all knew Joshua, as he led the Carnival Parade every year at the Village Show, marching smartly in his best tweed suit and velvet bow tie from the village green to the showground. Watching him teeter across the shop now, I realised the procession might have to slow down next year so as not to overtake him.

  A little girl took her picture over to show him, perhaps wise to his reputation for slipping sugar lumps from the bowls on the table to small children who took the time to talk to him.

  “Do you like my firebomb picture, Mr Hampton?” she asked sweetly. Joshua shot an alarmed glance to her mother.

  “Bonfire, darling.”

  Joshua laughed. “Ah, a bonfire. Gunpowder, treason and plot. Lovely, my dear. Now, can you draw a nasty old Guy Fawkes sitting on top of it?”

  The little girl gave him such a lingering quizzical look that I thought she might be about to use him as a model. I stuffed my duster in the back pocket of my jeans and went over to watch the artist at work.

  “I suppose you did all that sort of thing when you were little, Joshua? Bonfire night? Making a guy so you could go begging for a Penny for the Guy, and all that?”

  Joshua nodded. “Ah, yes, so much nicer than this m
odern Halloween business, which always seems disrespectful of the church tradition. I much prefer the second of November. All Souls’ Day is about remembering and respecting your long-lost loved ones, not making death something to fear.”

  I could understand that philosophy in an eighty-six-year-old like Joshua, but it seemed unfair to make little ones remember dead people. The biggest bereavement most of them had experienced would have been the loss of a pet.

  “Whereas Guy Fawkes’ Night was harmless fun, and of course we spun it out for several days, making our guys the week before. The task was not much different to making scarecrows, building an effigy by filling old clothes with straw and newspaper. We took delight in drawing on the kind of beards and moustaches they sported in the days of the Gunpowder Plot.” He stroked his chin. “Little pointed beards, you know, like the Cavaliers. We couldn’t always get the clothes to make a guy, though. They were on ration. Dear me, no. ‘Make do and mend’ was my mother’s motto. She’d have had forty fits if we’d put clothes on a guy that had any wear left in them. Not even a bit of sacking. That would be turned into a rag rug. Sometimes we had to improvise our guys out of nothing but branches and leaves.”

  “What, like a wicker man?” Hector sounded impressed.

  Joshua nodded. “We may not have had the material goods these youngsters have nowadays, but we knew how to have fun. We used to take them to sit on the pavement outside the pub and ask for a Penny for the Guy as our reward. You could get a banger for a penny in those days.” He noticed the children looking puzzled. “A banger is a very small firecracker. You light one end, throw it on the ground, and it jumps about all over the place in a shower of sparks. We’d chase each other down the High Street with them. Such larks! Every penny I got for my guy went on bangers. And we always had a cracking bonfire on the green to burn our guys on.”

  A couple of the mums exchanged anxious glances. Surreptitiously I counted Joshua’s fingers, to make sure he had grown up intact.

  Some boys from the top class started crumpling bits of coloured cellophane. Its crackling sounded surprisingly like real fire.

  “Sophie, please may we have some silver foil off the cakes? We’re making a model.”

  I passed them a few empty foil cupcake cases that I’d just washed to put in the recycling. “Here you go. And here’s a cardboard cake box you can use as a base.”

  By the time their mums had drunk their coffee, the children had presented Hector with a recognisable miniature bonfire and were imploring him to put it in the window. Hector returned a few Halloween books to the shelves to make room for it.

  “Now all you need is a guy,” said Joshua, nodding approval on his way to the front door. “And Handel’s ‘Firework Music’.”

  Obediently Hector curtailed Saint-Saens’s ‘Danse Macabre’, which he’d designated as our default Halloween soundtrack, and clicked on Joshua’s requested piece. As the first notes resonated around the shop, I thought how atmospheric the music was – an overture to excitement yet to come.

  “You can borrow one of my Action Men to be a guy, if you like, Hector,” said one of the boys. “But you won’t really burn him, will you? I will get him back after it’s all over, won’t I?”

  “I sincerely hope so,” Hector said solemnly, holding the door open for Joshua, “unless pyromania breaks out in the village.”

  “Pirate what?”

  “Never you mind,” said the boy’s mum.

  Resisting the temptation to put the Action Man in a vicar’s outfit, I decided to call in to the village shop on my way home to ask Carol to knock up a tiny Guy Fawkes costume. I didn’t want to fan the flames of Hector’s relationship with the vicar. If there were going to be any fiery feelings in this shop, I wanted them to be strictly between Hector and me.

  14 Penny For Them

  When we opened the shop on Saturday morning, the clerical spider was still watching over us from where he was suspended in the shop window. I hoped he would not bring us bad luck for the last weekend before Halloween, because we still had masses of stock to shift.

  However, I needn’t have worried. As the day went by, more and more customers came in to buy ghost stories, spooky stickers and creepy colouring books. Some parents told me they were planning to celebrate Halloween at home. Others would be allowing their children to trick-or-treat, but only if they promised to avoid the vicarage. As all the parents compensated their children for any disappointment by spending more on Halloween goods at the bookshop than they otherwise might have done, Hector’s mood lightened.

  When I called in to see Carol on the way home that evening, she was experiencing the same effect.

  “I haven’t done so badly after all. There’s still over a week to go, but I’ve sold a lot of costumes and trick-or-treat sweets. I’m just sad not to have the chance of meeting that special someone at the disco.”

  I was feeling sorry for myself on that score too. Although I still had my night out with Hector to look forward to on Guy Fawkes’ Night the following Saturday, we’d miss the opportunity for an earlier date.

  The only one who seemed to have welcomed the vicar’s ruling was Joshua, buoyed up by fond memories of burning past guys. When he knocked on my back door next morning to bring me a couple of late cooking apples from his tree, he had further developments to report.

  “I see the Reverend Neep has put up posters around the village inviting everyone to his free fireworks party,” he said. “It’s very generous of him. He certainly seems eager to please the youngsters.”

  I took the apples from him, set them on the table, and turned to fill the kettle.

  “Don’t you think it’s a bit odd how adamant Mr Neep is about Halloween? I mean, I know he’s a vicar, but I didn’t think they made them like that any more. He’s a throwback to fire-and-brimstone puritanical times. He’s like someone who’s never met a vicar doing an impression of one.”

  Joshua settled down in his usual chair.

  “My dear, am I right to assume you’ve not spent much time in the company of vicars?” He had a point. I knew Joshua could draw on his decades of experience as a member of the Parochial Church Council. “In any case, it’s not for us to criticise the vicar. We must trust the judgement of the diocese to appoint the best man for the job.”

  “So you think Mr Neep is the best man they could get? I suppose these things are relative.” I shuddered to think of what the rejects might have been like. It had crossed my mind that Neep might have bought himself a vicarship, like you can buy phoney Scottish lairdships or degrees online. Or he might have been the only applicant.

  I spooned loose tea into the pot.

  “There will be a party line from the church, but each vicar may add his own personal touch, playing to his special strengths. We should support Mr Neep’s new ventures and encourage our fellow parishioners to interact with him in as positive a way as we can, for the good of the community.”

  Wondering whether the vicar’s special strength was arson, I hoped the vicarage was well-equipped with fire extinguishers.

  15 Poster Campaign

  The following morning, on the way to work, I spotted the vicar’s hand-drawn signs announcing his fireworks party, all in capital letters. They were pinned to every telegraph pole along the High Street, where previously there had been PTA Halloween Disco posters. I tried to look at them positively for Joshua’s sake, admiring the time and trouble Mr Neep had taken to spread the word, even if his artwork was appalling. His lettering looked shaky and uneven, like a ransom note in which the kidnapper has tried to hide his identity. The chilly drizzle, the first rain we’d had for a couple of weeks, was sending the ink into little rivulets down the page.

  Included were details of the guy competition. Entrants were invited to bring their guy to the vicarage by 5pm on the fifth of November so that the vicar could judge them. They should return with their families at 7.30pm for the grand lighting ceremony, followed by a firework display.

  When a smattering of children
, shiny and dripping in their waterproofs and wellingtons, came into Hector’s House that afternoon, they were buzzing with excitement about the contest. Their mothers, shaking the rain off their umbrellas before leaving them in the bucket by the door, were less enthusiastic.

  “Honestly, Sophie, we spend our lives trying to teach our kids to steer clear of matches, then along comes Mr Neep inviting them to set fire to things,” said one as I set down a cappuccino in front of her. She cast a nervous glance at the play table where her small son was absorbed in colouring a bonfire picture, going way over the lines in his enthusiasm to create a really big fire.

  “I suppose that’s one reason why we’ve always preferred having a Halloween Disco to a fireworks party at school,” said her friend. “Plus it means we all get to stay in the warm.”

  I brought over the cakes they’d ordered and set them on the table. “What will you do about it?”

  “Well, they all want to enter the competition now, so we can’t stop them,” said the first mother. “They’re treating it like homework, as the vicar first told them about it at school.”

  “I’ve never seen my son so eager to do homework in half-term before,” said the other. “Oh well, at least the vicar’s party won’t cost us anything. Which is more than could be said for Halloween. I always spend a fortune on decorations, costumes and sweets.”

  The other nodded. “Yes, and it’ll save us traipsing down to Slate Green to see the council’s display, which means we don’t have to worry about drinking and driving.”

  They both perked up. “And there’s not many homeworks that positively encourage parents to drink. So maybe it won’t be so bad after all.”

  When the mums returned to comparing notes about the previous night’s television programmes, I left them to it.

  I thought it wise to call in at the village shop on the way home to make sure Carol kept her stocks of matches well out of reach of small children, selling them only to responsible adults. I had yet to be convinced that the latter included the vicar.