Strict and Peculiar (The Falconer Files Book 7)

by Andrea Frazer

  ‘Well, that was a load of twaddle, but it suited me perfectly. Here was an unrepeatable chance to get him on his own. He was an adulterer, and he’d sullied our leader; our lovely Jocasta. Of course, she’d have to accept her own punishment for it when she was faced with it, and confessed her sins; but for now, I’d settle for him.’

  ‘It was easy enough to be the last to leave. Everyone else had smoked a bit of dope, but I’d not inhaled, to keep a clear head.’

  ‘Some of you were seen that night. There were witnesses to your presence there,’ Falconer interrupted her.

  ‘Trespass is a civil offence,’ she answered coolly, and carried on with her story. ‘I used the same pretext as before. When he turned up, I told him that Jocasta couldn’t make it, but had left him a note in one of the hymn books on the top shelf, only this time I’d had the chance to go back to my car, under the pretext of leaving, and come back with my bat, which was concealed under my robe. The rest, as they say, is history: a direct repeat of it, in fact, but without the tablecloth this time.

  ‘Oh, if you see Chris, would you tell him I really liked him, and I’m sorry he was a sinner, or at least hoping to be – with me.’ She blushed a dark red at this point, and looked almost coy, except that, with her acne, which had worsened considerably in the last few days, she looked more like one of the more evil models from Madame Tussauds.

  ‘Interview terminated at …’ Falconer had to get out of that room before he was sick. The piety of the woman in the face of what she’d done had turned his stomach, and he had to get some fresh air before he lost that lovely breakfast that Carmichael had so carefully cut up for him.

  Once back in his own office, Bob Bryant rang to say that when Elspeth’s room had been searched, the tyre iron had been found on the top of her wardrobe, beneath a pile of clean bed linen and towels. Her car had revealed the presence of a blood-stained robe, and a spare.

  That only left the other fibres from Steve Warwick’s clothing, and a brief call to the forensic department came up with a result on those, but a perfectly innocent one. It was believed that, just before he finished his work in there, Steven Warwick had lain on the threadbare rug that sat in the choir stalls, to touch up the wall there. The fibres were a perfect match, although the joker on the other end of the line suggested that the fibres on Warwick’s clothes probably represented more than were left in the rug by now. That was all, apart from the few fibres from the other threadbare specimen, where Doc Christmas said the man had been felled, but that was only to be expected.

  When Carmichael came back into the office he took one look at Falconer and told him to go home. ‘If you don’t take a couple of days off on sick leave, I’m going to report you to Chivers for not being fit for work. I can finish up here for you. You get off out of it. You could do with a complete break, and at least your arm’s not actually broken. Go home and do nothing for a couple of days, until you’ve finished those painkillers.

  It made sense, and so he did.

  Epilogue

  Friday 19th November

  Falconer was feeling a good deal better by now, and found that he could drive again. He had, therefore, decided that he would go back to work the following day, a Saturday, so there wouldn’t be too many people around, he hoped. But before he did that, he wanted to pay a last visit to Steynham St Michael, and speak to Dimity Pryor. He knew she’d like to hear the real story, and he was also sure that, if the story came from him, she would feel better about the chapel.

  The weather was bitter and windy that morning when he set out, and dirty-grey clouds were beginning to scud across the sky. Falconer, not being a countryman, had no idea what that indicated, but just hoped that it kept itself at bay until he had completed his visit and returned home.

  He located Dimity in the charity shop that she managed in the High Street, and she immediately closed up for a while so that they could go back to her cottage to converse in private.

  As she put on the kettle she called through a question to him. ‘Would you mind if I invited Vernon and Charles along? They were here with me when all this was starting, and we were thrown so much together after what happened earlier this year, that I think it’s only right that they should hear everything from the horse’s mouth – not that I’m calling you a horse, or anything rude like that.’

  ‘No problem,’ he called back. A few days off had not only helped his arm, but his general mood, and he was feeling magnanimous today, sitting in this cosy little cottage in front of a log fire which Dimity had set a match to when he had arrived.

  Within ten minutes there were two more ‘be back soon’ signs on shop doors in the High Street, and Vernon Warlock and Charles Rainbird had arrived, blowing on their hands and stamping their feet to keep them warm as they entered.

  Dimity distributed cups of steaming hot tea and passed round a plate of chocolate digestives, and Falconer got stuck into his narrative, to many ‘ohs’ and ‘ahs’, and managing to omit the bits which involved Monica Raynor and, at the end, there was a short silence as his audience struggled to break the narrative spell.

  ‘Such wickedness!’ commented Dimity, at last.

  ‘Such cunning!’ added Charles.

  ‘And all done by a girl, of no age at all,’ finished Vernon.

  ‘I’m surprised you haven’t had Tilly Gifford round sniffing for titbits. She’s the village gossip-hound, isn’t she?’ asked Falconer, helping himself to another biscuit.

  ‘Oh!’ exclaimed Dimity, ‘I forgot! She’ll be back today.’

  ‘Back from where?’ Falconer enquired.

  ‘She’s been away on a three-week winter break to the Canaries,’ Charles Rainbird informed him, then burst out laughing. ‘She’s going to be furious that she missed all the action.’

  ‘Remember what she was like last time?’ asked Vernon with a little snicker, then sobered, as they all did, as they thought back to what had actually happened in that dark time of their lives.

  ‘Well, there’s nobody local hurt this time,’ Dimity announced, and then looked horror-stricken. ‘Oh, no! I totally forgot about poor Quentin. I suppose what I really meant was nobody from our little circle.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Falconer advised her. ‘It’s all finished with now, bar the shouting, and I don’t think we’ll have any trouble at all with a conviction, although she’ll probably go to an establishment for the criminally insane, because as far as I’m concerned, she’s completely lost the plot – gone gaga – lost her marbles – however you want to put it.

  ‘And you know, when I stood in the chapel the day Quentin’s body was found, I read that quotation on the wall, and I knew I’d seen it somewhere before recently, and I’ve just remembered where.’

  ‘Be sure your sins will find you out,’ murmured Dimity. ‘It was in the anonymous letter that led to my cousin Gabriel’s suicide.’

  ‘That’s right, Miss Pryor. This village does seem to have deep religious roots.’

  ‘And until this year, I thought all that was in the past. Still, old sins cast long shadows, although that doesn’t seem to have been so in this case,’ she added.

  ‘Unless you count the shadows cast by the Strict and Particular’s unusual take on punishment,’ Falconer replied.

  ‘I suppose you could be right at that, Inspector. I suppose we’ll just have to wait for the sun to go in, as far as that’s concerned.’

  ‘Oh, by the way, your keys,’ Falconer suddenly remembered.

  ‘I’d forgotten all about those, with all the trouble that’s we’ve had,’ exclaimed Dimity, shocked at how remiss she had been.

  ‘The set the builders had was found in Mr Warwick’s pocket, and I’ll get those back to you as soon as I can. The key the cult used was an old one that just happened to fit. Apparently Ms Gray used to collect such things for decorative purposes, then realised they might be a bit more valuable if she put them to a more practical use. That will also be returned to you in due course, but at the moment, it’s a
piece of evidence, and must remain with the police until after the trial.’

  ‘Don’t give it another thought, Inspector. It was very astute of you to remember them at all, but I shall sleep more soundly in my bed knowing that they are all accounted for.’

  Carmichael called round on his way home that evening to see for himself whether the inspector was well enough to return to work the next day.

  Satisfied with what he found, he began to fill Falconer in on what he’d missed in his absence. ‘We seem to have acquired a little cat,’ he began, crouching down to make a fuss of Falconer’s four furry housemates.

  ‘How’s that?’ Falconer enquired, busy making a pot of tea for his visitor. That was easy enough, with one arm still a little unreliable.

  ‘She just turned up out of the blue a couple of weeks ago, and she’s been round every day. A few days ago she started coming into the house – the cold, I expect – so I took her to the vet to see if she had a chip, but nothing.

  ‘The vet said she was a pedigree – an Abyssinian, I think he called her – and we’re allowed to keep her; unless she wanders off again, I suppose. Oh, but she’s a fantastic cat, sir. She’s so clever, you wouldn’t credit it.’

  ‘So you know the sex of this pet, then,’ Falconer cut in sarcastically.

  ‘The vet told me,’ replied Carmichael, trying to retain his dignity. ‘He also said she’d been spayed.’

  ‘Have you got a name for her, yet?’

  ‘She’s so into everything, we’ve decided she’s a right little monkey, so that’s what we’ve called her – Monkey. You’ll meet her when you come round for Christmas. Now, don’t look at me like that. You promised ages ago that you’d come this year, and I’m going to hold you to that. Kerry and the boys would be devastated if you changed your mind just over a month from the actual day.’

  ‘OK! I surrender, Carmichael. I’ll come, as promised.’

  ‘And that Dr Dubois’s a lovely lady, isn’t she, sir?’ asked Carmichael, just tossing in the question lightly, not recognising that he’d just lobbed a bomb into Falconer’s life.

  ‘Has she been at the station?’ the inspector asked, his face not knowing whether to go pale with shock or redden in embarrassment, and ending up rather mottled.

  ‘She came in on Monday and spent most of the day there interviewing Miss Martin and making phone calls. And she was in again on Tuesday and today. She’s done a full assessment on Miss Martin, and is arranging for her to go to a secure psychological unit until her trial comes up. She says it would be inhuman just to shove her in a prison on remand, but I told her it was inhuman what she’d done to three people, leaving two of them dead and one of them badly beaten. In the end we agreed to disagree, but she’s a cracking looker, isn’t she, sir?’

  ‘I suppose she is,’ replied Falconer, now mourning, that he had not returned to work after the weekend, but then had a vision of himself acting strangely from the effects of the painkillers, and perhaps making a fool of himself in front of her, and decided that it may have been for the best. He wouldn’t have wanted her to see him like that.

  ‘Oh, and she asked me to give you this, sir,’ said Carmichael, extracting an envelope from his pocket.

  It was a get well card, signed, ‘from Honey, affectionately, x’.

  Falconer fell into the armchair behind him with a whump, and told Carmichael that he’d see him tomorrow. Tomorrow was another day, after all, as Scarlett O’Hara had once said.

  The Falconer Files

  by

  Andrea Frazer