Caroline Minuscule

by Andrew Taylor

  ‘Charleston Parva,’ said Amanda.

  Dougal sighed. All his instincts urged him towards escape. ‘We go out of town the way we came in. Then we turn off left on the B something – it should be signposted to Slungford.’

  ‘Isn’t that where they make loo paper? People got upset about one of their adverts.’

  ‘It was the bottom that did it.’ Dougal quoted: ‘Sveltex from Slungford . . . the supersoft way to bring a touch of luxury to your bottom. Charleston Parva’s about four miles before Slungford, I checked on the map after breakfast. It looks as small as the name suggests.’

  After a mile the outskirts of Rosington gave way to the dark monotony of the Fens. The landscape flattened them, Dougal thought, and the sky, like an immense Wedgwood bowl upturned around the horizon, reduced the Mini to a brightly coloured insect.

  As they turned off towards Slungford, Dougal glanced back over his shoulder. The road was empty.

  Amanda settled down to a steady forty. The road was a geometrically straight line which ran in the lee of a floodbank. Dougal lit a cigarette, whereupon Amanda said he was smoking too much, and didn’t she get offered one too?

  Dougal replied by passing her his cigarette, lighting another and saying, ‘Wilt thou set thine eyes on that which is not? For riches certainly make themselves wings: they fly away as an eagle towards heaven. I don’t like it, love. Too bloody devious by half – as if the whole business is a nasty series of illusions.’

  ‘What worries me—’ began Amanda.

  ‘I know. Who put the card with the second reference in the briefcase. And why? It’s all cockeyed. It made sense before we found the card – that Lee should have kept you and then us occupied while Tanner searched our room for anything suspicious. Even that Tanner should have taken our reference—’

  ‘That was a pretty stupid thing to do, actually. One way of making sure we knew the room had been searched.’

  ‘Well, Tanner looks stupid,’ Dougal objected. ‘Maybe he wanted a little hard evidence to show Lee. But what about the second card left in its place? Could it have been meant as a warning?’

  Amanda nodded. ‘I suppose so. But it’s not really Lee’s style, is it? It doesn’t fit in with what Hanbury said about him, either. You’d expect a more . . . forceful reaction.’

  Dougal shivered and automatically glanced behind again. Simultaneously, Amanda dabbed viciously down on the accelerator and the Mini jerked forward. They had both seen the same thing.

  A black car nearly a mile behind.

  There was a bitter taste in Dougal’s mouth. The Mini, he knew, would have difficulty outdistancing a healthy tractor; it stood no chance whatsoever against a new Lancia.

  The road saved them – or rather those forgotten engineers who had drained the Fens. The floodbank turned abruptly to the left, like a dog offered a more interesting scent. The road obediently followed. Amanda, taken by surprise, negotiated the 90-degree bend in top gear. The car’s brakes shrieked as it skidded on to the other side of the road. Dougal clutched his seat belt as if it was a lifeline.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said in gratitude as the Mini picked up speed. The word was cut short by Amanda bringing the car to the sort of emergency stop that takes months from the life of a driving instructor.

  ‘The gate,’ she said tersely.

  Dougal was out of the car before he understood what she meant. The road had swung gently away from the floodbank, leaving a depression running between the two. A barbed wire fence, pierced by a five-bar gate, separated the road from this dry moat.

  He swung the gate open and Amanda wrenched the Mini through the gap. A notice nailed to the lefthand gate post announced GREAT OUSE RIVER AUTHORITY – TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. As he ducked down beside the Mini, uncomfortably aware that an observant driver would still be able to see the car from the road, he thought longingly of the relative physical security which a court of law implied.

  A few seconds later, the black car swept round the corner. Dougal felt his fear change into a sense of his own stupidity.

  The car was not the Lancia. It was an elderly Morris Traveller driven by a grey-haired woman with a perm like a German helmet. A wire grill divided the front seats from a writhing mass of dogs in the back.

  A few minutes later, Dougal and Amanda drove on. They were both shaken. The woman in the car was unimportant, Dougal knew; in any case she couldn’t have seen them, for she drove crouched over the steering wheel with her eyes glued to the road. It was the way that an unnecessary fear had swooped out of the bright sky which was alarming.

  I’m just not cut out for this sort of life, Dougal thought. Aloud he said: ‘If Vernon-Jones gave Lee two clues as well, and if that quote from Proverbs was one of them (leaving aside how it came to be in our room), then we’ve got three of the four clues.’

  He felt his pulse surreptitiously: it was returning to normal. Talking of clues was a reassuringly academic activity.

  ‘Probably Lee’s got four now,’ Amanda remarked crushingly. ‘If we’d hidden our two better, that wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘Yes, well.’ Dougal was annoyed with himself for rising to the oblique reproof. ‘But let’s see what we have got. If the photograph gives us the name of the village, the Seek and ye shall find quote implies the diamonds are somewhere obvious there. And the Proverbs one suggests they’re hidden off the ground – riches making themselves wings and so on. The bit about flying towards heaven might mean they’re in the church – up the tower, perhaps. After all, it’s the only building in the village that we can be reasonably sure Vernon-Jones knew.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ said Amanda. ‘And what about the first bit of that Proverbs quote? Wilt thou set thine eyes on that which is not? That could be Vernon-Jones telling us that there’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Or Lee warning us off.’

  Dougal stared out of the window. They were passing through a featureless Fen village, an island of drab buildings in a sea of mud. CHARLESTON PARVA 2 said a signpost. ‘We’ve covered that,’ Dougal said. ‘If we trust Hanbury’s reading of his character, there’s got to be a pot of gold. And Hanbury’s reading of Lee’s character suggests he’d warn us off in a much more . . . unequivocal way. And I rather doubt’ – Dougal felt a touch of sarcasm creep into his voice – ‘that Lee has a pile of Vernon-Jones’s cards to use when he runs out of postcards.’

  Amanda made a moue with her lips and then laughed, which warmed Dougal. ‘Okay, William, we look at the church first.’

  A few hundred yards later, Dougal realized that her concession and her laughter were equally meaningless. The glow evaporated. Amanda had gained her main point last night – the agreement that they would go home through Charleston Parva. (Don’t be so timid, William. I want to be rich even if you don’t . . . that old tramp may be dead but we’re still alive, for God’s sake . . .)

  So were Lee and Tanner.

  ‘We’re going to be painfully obvious when we get there,’ Dougal observed, ‘if Charleston Parva’s as empty as that last village, Mudgley whatever it was.’

  ‘Mudgley Burnham. And nonsense, we look perfectly respectable. Lucky you’re wearing those tweeds. We’ll look just like the sort of tourists who always go for parish churches.’

  In February? thought Dougal, but kept the thought to himself. The new tweed was prickling through his shirt and scratching his legs.

  The road wiggled violently and they found themselves, without warning, in Charleston Parva. There was so little of the village that they overshot the centre and had to reverse back to the crossroads which seemed the only reason for the village’s existence. Amanda turned into the forecourt of a pub which sprawled across the northwest corner of the junction.

  The inn was L-shaped and called the Burnham Arms. Its roof, green with age, undulated irregularly. There were already half a dozen cars in the little car park, including the Traveller which had passed the Mini on the road. It was odd that there should be so many cars at this time of day – and ev
en odder, Dougal thought, that there should be a coach as well.

  The coach was old enough to have begun life as a char-à-banc. It had recently and inexpertly been painted purple. Flaming yellow capitals staggered along its side: RICHARDS OF ROSINGTON – THE ONLY WAY TO TRAVEL. It was empty.

  They climbed stiffly out of the Mini. A chorus of barking, led by a fox terrier, greeted them from the back of the estate car. There was a sticker on the back window, just in front of the fox terrier’s slavering jaws. VIVISECTORS ARE MURDERERS, read Dougal, and thought that the fox terrier probably would be if he could, as well.

  Across the road was a shuttered village shop, the last and largest of an uncoordinated terrace of cottages. Diagonally opposite the Burnham Arms was the small, dilapidated church. It looked as if it had grown out of the mound on which it stood by a long and entirely fortuitous process of organic growth; nature seemed to have given the experiment up as a bad job several centuries before.

  The only other building of note occupied the fourth corner of the crossroads. It was a trim Queen Anne house guarded by blank, neatly regimented flowerbeds and black iron railings. It reminded Dougal of a grown-up doll’s house.

  Apart from the dogs, there was no sign of life. Perhaps all the villagers lived in a council estate tucked inconveniently out of sight.

  Amanda strode across the road to the lychgate. Dougal followed, watching her hair bouncing on her shoulders and thinking that the village was like a stage before the actors came on.

  There was a notice board to the right of the gate. They stared at a weathered poster advertising a bring-and-buy sale in July of last year, in aid of the church spire. Dougal looked up at it. The sale seemed to have failed to achieve its purpose, for the spire perched like a tattered tepee on the squat tower of the church. Several of its slates were missing and the weathercock was bent at a 45-degree angle.

  The only other notice was a sheet of paper which informed them that the church was dedicated to St Tumwulf – ‘D’you see?’ said Dougal – and the vicar was a Reverend H. B. Black, BD, who was also Vicar of Charleston Monachorum five miles to the east and Rector of Mudgley Burnham. Services during Lent at St Tumwulf’s would be held on the . . . but at this point some mischance had removed the lower half of the paper, leaving a jagged tear.

  ‘What a name,’ said Amanda. ‘The vicar’s, I mean. Imagine all those jokes about putting lead in your pencil.’

  The hinges of the gate squealed in agony as Dougal opened it. They began to walk up the path through the churchyard. Aging gravestones, chipped, cracked and forlorn, clustered thickly on the mound around the church. The path led to a porch on the north wall of the nave, sending out two lesser tributaries, one of which circled the church, while the other continued eastwards to an iron gate rusting in the middle of a screen of rhododendrons and pines at the end of the churchyard.

  When they were still twenty yards from the porch, the sound of an engine made them stop and turn their heads back to the crossroads. A black Lancia cruised into the forecourt of the Burnham Arms and drew up beside the Mini. Dougal felt almost glad. The waiting was over; the Sunday morning tranquillity was a fake.

  The driver’s door opened and Lee lumbered out. He was alone, which was something. It also showed how low he rated their potential abilities as opponents – he must have thought Tanner would be unnecessary. But how had he known they would be here?

  Without noticing, Dougal and Amanda had been backing towards the porch. But they were too late. Just as they reached the shadow of it, Lee saw them. He raised his right arm in greeting. Or threateningly? His heavy body began purposefully to move across the road towards them.

  Panic gripped Dougal and Amanda simultaneously. They turned and ran into the porch, losing the vestiges of their credibility as innocent bystanders. Dougal scrabbled at the heavy iron latch of the door, pushed at it with all his weight and fell into the church with Amanda at his heels.

  They both gasped.

  Instead of an empty building, the church was full of people, many of them sombre in gowns of purple or black. A sonorous voice was saying, ‘. . . Hymn number four hundred and seventy.’

  A harmonium somewhere out of view wheezed the opening bars and was followed by a wave of sound which swam round the dumpy Norman pillars of the nave, ricocheted down from the grimy rafters and overwhelmed Dougal and Amanda as they stood by the door.

  Praise my soul, the King of heaven;

  To his feet thy tribute bring . . .

  13

  ‘Quite frankly,’ said the Reverend H. B. Black, BD, to the plate of cheese and tomato sandwiches which he held protectively to his broad, black-fronted chest, ‘I don’t hold with this sort of goings-on at all. Apart from all the Romish tendencies of the service, all these middle-class trappings aren’t entirely what I call Christianity.’ He put down the plate of sandwiches and downed his glass of sherry with one defiant swallow. The mournful, Mancunian voice droned on: ‘I wanted a city parish, of course – some sort of chance to open a valid dialogue with the secular lower-income bracket . . .’

  Dougal and Amanda sighed sympathetically and continued to eat and drink. Mr Black represented security: he guarded them in one corner of the large, elegant dining room, while Lee was across the other side of the room, blocking the only exit.

  It had been extremely embarrassing in the church, though Dougal realized that the unexpected congregation had saved them, for the moment, from Lee. During the hymn a black-gowned personage, who radiated ineffable superiority, had swept them into a pew beside the Morris Traveller woman. The latter had glared at them and said ‘Shush!’ before they had had time to say anything. There had been nothing for it but to fumble through the hymnals with which their guide had thoughtfully provided them. Then Lee had come crashing through the door and had been immediately deflected into another pew.

  Gradually the jungle of impressions had sorted themselves out. The godlike beings in black and purple gowns were public schoolboys; one or two girls, similarly attired, were among them. They looked like sixth formers. There were several masters and mistresses, distinguishable, from the rear, by the hoods on their gowns and the greyness of their hair. In the chancel of the little church, two priests, assisted by a pair of servers in surplices, were conducting the service.

  Dougal fumbled through the prayer book and discovered that they were in the middle of Matins. He calculated, with the aid of childhood memories, that they were in for Holy Eucharist after this. And probably a sermon at some point. It was a quarter to eleven and it seemed unlikely that Lee would be able to do anything until midday at least, as long as they stayed where they were.

  The service lasted for an eternity. They mechanically knelt, stood and sat when appropriate. The sermon, delivered by Mr Black’s colleague, a wiry, square-faced priest with flashing teeth and reptilian sibilants, explained what was happening. They were in the middle of a service in commemoration of the foundation of Rosington School.

  Tradition claimed, it seemed, that the school had been founded by St Tumwulf himself at Charleston Parva, and had moved to Rosington in the twelfth century to swell the ranks of the Abbey choir school. After generations of medieval obscurity and post-Reformation sloth, the vision of a Victorian headmaster had moved the school’s site outside Rosington again and turned it into the major public school it was today. (At this point Dougal thought he detected a nuance of sarcasm in the preacher’s voice.) But it was only right that they should gather together to remember their roots – a tiny school in this minute village, struggling to keep alight a small and flickering torch of learning. In such a way, the clergyman concluded, his delivery increasing in speed as the end drew nigh, did God keep the light of love burning in the human soul; and it was our duty, both as members of the school and of the human race, to nourish this precious flame which had been passed down to us from generation to generation. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

  The service continued. The only pe
rson who appeared to be enjoying it was the chaplain, who scurried about the chancel, occasionally muttering an instruction to Mr Black.

  During the last hymn, priests and acolytes processed away to the vestry. The congregation shuffled to its feet and eased its way out of the narrow and hideously uncomfortable pews. Dougal began to panic again and to wonder what Lee was about to do; he felt helpless, incapable of decision. But the immediate future was abruptly removed from his hands when the woman beside them leaned across Amanda and asked loudly: ‘Are you an Old Boy or a journalist, young man?’

  ‘Neither, actually,’ said Dougal diffidently. The old lies came out, in the absence of anything to put in their place. ‘We’re researching for a possible television documentary on Rosington and of course we could hardly leave out the school.’

  The implied compliment was more effective than Dougal could have wished. The woman blushed with pleasure, which Dougal found oddly disconcerting. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

  ‘How d’you do,’ she said gruffly, as if not quite at home with the phrase. ‘My name’s Burnham, Molly Burnham.’ She extended a large square hand, which was larger than Dougal’s and considerably rougher-skinned.

  Dougal and Amanda introduced themselves, and in return were invited across the road for a sandwich and a drop of something. ‘Nothing fancy, you understand, but you always need something inside you after a couple of hours in this church. Too damn draughty.’

  She shepherded them out of the church, pausing to pick up an elderly lady who had been sitting alone in state in a rather larger pew up by the chancel arch. Molly Burnham introduced her as her aunt, though conversation was limited, since Mrs Burnham was not only very deaf but also seemed frankly uninterested in the world around her.