The Evil that Men Do

by Jeanne M. Dams

  ‘It has to do with Paul Jones, I’m sure.’ I made an attempt to clean up the crumbs on the floor.

  ‘Leave it. Pam and her staff will cope. She was certainly lying when she said she didn’t know him, did you notice?’

  ‘Give me some credit, husband of mine. I haven’t been married to you for all these years without learning a little something about liars.’

  ‘Most of which you knew already. Teaching those wretched children, and reading every detective novel ever written.’

  ‘Only the cosies,’ I said absently. ‘Sayers and Christie and that crowd. Alan, whatever is wrong with the women?’

  ‘Something to do with Jones, I agree. And Pam said we’ll get a surprise about him this evening. Or something like that.’

  ‘Meantime, I’ve given up on sleuthing for the moment. We’re getting nowhere, and it’s nap time.’

  ‘And the house is apparently deserted,’ said my husband, with a certain tone in his voice.

  We did nap, eventually.

  It was late afternoon when I woke. The sun streaming in our window had a honeyed look, the waning of a gorgeous summer day. I yawned and stretched, and smiled at Alan, who had been up for long enough to make tea. I had a cup, showered and dressed, and then we wandered the village for a little while, had an early dinner, and came back to the Holly Tree.

  ‘What now?’ I asked Alan, sitting on the bed. I was beginning to get a trifle homesick. Doing exactly what one likes can actually pall after a while. I wanted my cats, my home, even my housewifely duties.

  ‘A bit restive?’ Alan asked. The man nearly always knows what I’m thinking. ‘Perhaps we should find Pam and ask her what her big secret is. She seemed to think we might know by now, but I haven’t a clue.’

  ‘I guess there’s nothing better to do. I’ve been wondering why I even care about Paul. He doesn’t seem to be in trouble any more.’

  ‘You care because you like the boy, and there’s some mystery about him. Perhaps if we find Pam, the mystery will be solved.’

  So we went downstairs. No one seemed to be in the kitchen or Pam’s private suite, but voices were coming from the lounge, so we followed them.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ said Pam. ‘I hoped you would see this. It’s almost time. Sit down and have some sherry.’

  Most of the guests seemed to be in the lounge, as puzzled as we. Barbara McGath and Eileen O’Hanlon shared a small couch, looking as disapproving as ever. The television was on, end credits rolling for some programme I didn’t recognize. Pam found chairs for Alan and me and poured us sherry, and we sat and waited.

  When the next programme started, we all looked at each other in some dismay. Eileen O’Hanlon said ‘Preposterous,’ and she and Barbara tried to get up to leave, but the small room was too tightly packed with people and furniture to make escape easy.

  I understood the impulse, though. For once I was in agreement with the two Irish ladies. What we were about to watch was, apparently, a rock concert. For someone like me, whose taste runs from Bach to Gilbert and Sullivan, it would be a form of torture.

  ‘Excuse us,’ said Barbara, steel in her voice. ‘Could you let us through, please . . . excuse us . . .’

  ‘Sshh!’ said Pam. ‘They’re about to begin.’

  Barbara and Eileen sat down again, perforce. Barbara folded her arms and picked up a magazine from the table in front of her. It was a golfing magazine, and there was too little light to read, but she effectively demonstrated her distaste for her situation.

  ‘And now, for the very first time on television, ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to present . . . Peter James!’

  The end of the emcee’s announcement was swallowed up in cheers and screams and applause. The backup group began playing and singing immediately, though they were inaudible to us over the crowd noise, and I suspected to those in the crowd, as well.

  ‘Can they hear anything at all?’ I murmured to Alan.

  ‘Probably not. They’re all partially deaf, anyway, from listening to this rubbish since they were babies.’

  The boom of the bass cut through the general riot of sound, and the camera panned the group and then zoomed in on the soloist caressing the mike.

  Alan was the first to react. He slapped his knee with a sharp crack that I felt but couldn’t hear. ‘So that’s it,’ he mouthed in my ear.

  ‘What’s what . . . oh!’

  Heads came up throughout the room. Barbara’s mouth dropped open; Eileen clutched her arm.

  Pam, her hand on the remote, turned the volume down and beamed at us all. ‘And that is the secret Paul Jones confided to me yesterday! He is Peter James!’

  ELEVEN

  So that’s that,’ I said rather flatly as we were reading in our room before bed. ‘Shave off the beard, and he’s a famous pop star. At least I suppose he’s famous. I’m not up on that kind of music.’

  ‘Oh, he’s famous, all right. And probably ten, twenty, forty times richer than we are.’

  ‘And we felt sorry for him and bought him lunch.’

  Alan grunted. It struck me as funny, for some reason. I chuckled.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘You’re disgruntled. You grunted. Never mind.’

  He smiled, giving the remark more credit than it deserved. ‘I am, a bit. We’ve been wasting a good deal of sympathy on that lad, and spoiling our holiday. Let’s hire a car tomorrow and get ourselves to St Michael’s, Buckland, for church. And then we can take off in whatever direction suits our fancy.’

  ‘What a good idea. That’s a beautiful church, and I’m getting a bit claustrophobic here. Shall we keep our room?’

  ‘We’re booked in for a week, and tomorrow night would be the last night of that. Let’s leave our things here, and decide on Monday what’s next on the agenda.’

  ‘Did you check on service times?’

  ‘Service time, singular. It’s a very small village, you know, and the parish must be tiny. Holy Communion at nine thirty, and with the 1662 Prayer Book.’

  ‘Not only tiny, but conservative as well. This is a very good idea, Alan. Only, can we hire a car on a Sunday morning?’

  ‘I’ll go down and ask Pam. I need to tell her we won’t be in for breakfast, anyway.’

  He was a little longer than I had hoped, and when he got back the news wasn’t great.

  ‘There’s no regular car hire in the village,’ he reported. ‘Bourbon, love?’ He held out the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and, when I nodded, poured a tot into a tea cup and passed it to me. ‘Pam thinks we might be able to talk one of her friends into some sort of unofficial arrangement, but I’d actually rather not, because of insurance complications.’

  ‘Oh, shoot. I was beginning to look forward to a service in that beautiful church.’

  ‘All is not lost. There’s one chap in Broadway who will drive us anywhere we want to go, even on a Sunday. If he’s free, we can go to church, then have him drive us back to Winchcombe where we left our car. Then we’re mobile again and can go where we like – on foot when we want, in decadent comfort when we don’t.’

  ‘Perfect,’ I said, and lifted my cup in a toast to pleasant plans.

  We got up early the next day, to the sweet sound of church bells, and everything went like clockwork. Pam had phoned the driver, and yes, he was free, and yes, he would be happy to take us anywhere we liked. Our hostess had also kindly packaged up a portable breakfast, so on the brief drive to Buckland we nibbled on fruit and oatmeal bread and drank excellent coffee.

  I marvelled, as we drove, over how different the countryside looked from a car. I had never given much thought to how much one misses when being whisked along at highway speeds. The small flowers, the strange and beautiful beetles, the lovely, fresh smell of the moist earth, the movement of the clouds – all of these are overlooked. ‘We’ve lost something,’ I said to Alan.

  He smiled, knowing what I was thinking. ‘We’ll walk more, I promise. There’s good walking near home, too, you know.’

>   ‘They all used to walk. Everyone. These paths were made by people going someplace, hundreds and hundreds of years ago.’

  ‘Yes, but don’t forget that some of them rode, the wealthy ones who had horses or mules. And if they had a long way to go, they had to contend with rain and wind and even snow sometimes, and predatory animals – and humans. We’ve lost the closeness to the earth, but we’ve gained safety and comfort. And of course speed. We could be in Edinburgh by teatime.’

  ‘I don’t want to be in Edinburgh by teatime. I want to be right here, doing exactly what I’m doing. And later I want to walk and walk.’

  ‘Hmm,’ was all Alan said.

  The church service was lovely, simple and dignified. There was no choir, which was possibly just as well. We were used to the acclaimed Cathedral choir at Sherebury, and the efforts of a small group of village singers wouldn’t have been quite the same. But the organ was good, and the organist acceptable, and the congregation sang the hymns with vigour.

  After the service we explored the church more thoroughly than we had on our previous visit. The oldest bits of it were thirteenth-century, and there were some remarkable works of art, extremely old and very well preserved. One of the sidesmen (I called them ushers until somebody, years ago, told me the proper English usage) showed us around, with a good deal of expert knowledge and not a little pride. ‘One of the finest parish churches in all of England,’ he said, and we couldn’t disagree. Of course we wouldn’t have, anyway, but it was easy in this case to say the right thing.

  ‘In Broadway for the festival, are you?’

  ‘In a way,’ I said. ‘We’re enjoying it, although we didn’t know it was happening till we got there. We live in Sherebury.’

  ‘You’re American, though, aren’t you?’

  ‘By birth. I’ve lived in England for a good many years, now, but I guess I’ll never quite lose the accent.’

  ‘It isn’t just the accent, you know, love,’ put in my husband, with an amused smile.

  ‘Well, I don’t see what else it is! I buy all my clothes here, for heaven’s sake. I know how to pronounce Gloucester and Worcester and Leicester, and I think it’s a mean trick that Cirencester is pronounced with every single letter given its full value. I watch English television and read English books. I love fish and chips and steak and kidney pie. Why am I instantly spotted as an American?’

  Alan and the sidesman looked at each other and shook their heads. ‘Can’t put it in words, ma’am, but you just look American. Something about the way you walk?’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘And I suppose we just look as if we’ve come from Broadway this morning.’

  ‘Well, maybe. I happen to know Fred, your driver.’

  He said it without the hint of a smile, and Alan replied as gravely, ‘Ah, well, that would help.’

  I swear I’ll never know for sure when an Englishman intends to be funny. Maybe that’s one of those indefinable things marking me for ever as American.

  ‘Terrible thing that was, poor Bill Symonds getting killed the other day,’ said the sidesman, now certainly serious. ‘You’ll have heard about that, I expect?’

  Alan took my arm and pinched me, rather hard. ‘We did hear something about it, yes. Did you know him?’

  ‘Sixty years and more. Went to school together, been sidesmen here long as I can remember. I stood up at his wedding.’

  ‘I thought—’ I began, and Alan’s pinch grew stronger.

  ‘He was married, then?’ he said mildly.

  ‘Widower. His wife died years ago, trying to have their baby. He’s lived alone all these years, but for his friends.’ The man took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose fiercely. ‘A good man, he was, and coped wonderful well, for all he was deaf as a post. You’d never have known it, talking to him. He could read lips as well as you and I can read a book.’ He paused, and then said, with a dark intensity more convincing than a shout, ‘Whoever did that to him is a devil from hell, and if I find out who he is, that’s where he’s going.’

  ‘Why didn’t you want to talk about it?’ I asked Alan as we got back into the car. ‘And did you need to pinch quite so hard? I’ll be black and blue.’

  ‘Sorry, love.’ He pulled me over to him and kissed the spot. ‘There. That’ll make it better. And in answer to your question, I don’t quite know. Old policeman’s habit, I suppose. Ask more than you tell. It probably wouldn’t have mattered at all, and I’m truly sorry I hurt you.’

  ‘I’ll mend. But goodness, he was upset, wasn’t he?’

  Alan ran his hand down the back of his neck. ‘The man Symonds was well-loved, they told me in Broadway. Of course everybody knows everybody in a place like this. It’s unusual, when someone has died, to find no one with an axe to grind, but in this case all the clichés seem to hold true.’

  ‘Not even some ill-natured gossip at the Post Office about goings-on with the widow next door, or a deal gone wrong over pigs, or anything?’

  ‘Not a thing. They’ll be proposing him for canonization any day now.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’ Like all policemen, Alan hated cases that were not only unsolved, but apparently incapable of solution. This looked like being one of those, and even though it wasn’t his, he was going to brood about it.

  It was nearly lunchtime when we got to Winchcombe, so we found a pleasant pub and treated our driver to lunch before sending him on his way with thanks.

  ‘Now, where shall we go?’ We had reclaimed our car from the station car park, and Alan was at the wheel.

  ‘How about back to Broadway? Then maybe we can figure out a way to walk to Chipping Campden without climbing too many hills.’

  The old saying about the best-laid plans is irritatingly true. We had reached the Holly Tree and found a place to park just up the street when the rain started. I found a rain hat in the back of the car and put it on, but it wasn’t even real rain at first, just mizzle. Then the drops got bigger, and came faster, and we were really wet by the time we got in the door.

  ‘Alan.’

  ‘Yes? Would you mind not shaking your hat quite so fervently? It’s showering me like a wet dog.’

  I shook it in the other direction. ‘Is this rain what you meant back awhile when you said “Hmm”?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  There was still plenty of water left on the hat.

  I have quite a lot in common with cats. I possess a lively curiosity, and I love my comfort. One of my favourite precepts is: ‘When in doubt, nap.’ So after we got out of our wet clothes, it seemed only natural to crawl under the covers and get warm. And I didn’t wake until teatime.

  ‘You know,’ I said with a yawn, ‘other than eating and drinking and spending money, there isn’t actually an awful lot to do in Broadway.’

  ‘Lots of pictures.’

  ‘I think the galleries are all closed by now. Anyway, I’m getting sort of tired of pictures. And . . .’

  ‘And they’re getting tired of us. At least there’s one gallery where I feel we might not be welcomed back with great hosannas.’

  I made a face. ‘I wish I knew what was eating that woman. We really were just trying to help.’

  ‘Perhaps she doesn’t like our faces.’

  ‘Or my hats. Alan, is it still raining?’

  He peered out of the window. ‘Looks like it’s settled in for the night. Not hard, but steady and determined.’

  ‘Too bad to drive?’

  ‘Where did you have in mind?’

  ‘Just Cheltenham. I want to see another play, and there are lots of good ones on. Shaw, and Shakespeare, and I think I saw that somebody was doing some Gilbert and Sullivan.’

  ‘Lead on, Macduff.’

  ‘And no, I do not want to see Macbeth, thank you very much.’

  So we went to Cheltenham and had our tea, and then found a rollicking performance of HMS Pinafore, and then a late supper, and so back to Broadway and to bed.

  But I woke up in the middle of the night wondering, aga
in, what was so badly wrong with Sarah Robinson.

  TWELVE

  In the morning, at breakfast, all the guests were still bubbling over the revelation that a celebrity had stayed in our midst.

  Well, perhaps bubbling isn’t quite the word. The English don’t bubble a whole lot. I was reminded of a joke going around a while back among my American friends, about the contrast between the English and American ‘security alert’ levels, in which the highest English level was reported to be ‘really rather cross’.

  So the English guests were really rather pleased, in a quiet way, though I suspected they, like Alan and me, would have been somewhat more enthusiastic had Paul turned out to be a minor royal, or a Shakespearean actor. Most of us were a bit too old to go into raptures over rock stars.

  The Irish ladies were more effusive. ‘I knew he was something out of the ordinary,’ said Mrs McGath to Mrs O’Hanlon, but at a volume that included the whole room. ‘I was telling you, wasn’t I? That boy will go far, I said.’

  I choked on a bit of bacon. ‘Easy, love,’ said Alan in an undertone. ‘I know, but we can’t talk about it here.’

  ‘She never uttered one good word about Paul until she found out he was famous!’ I fumed when we were back in our room. ‘Now she acts like she invented him!’

  ‘Yes, dear. By evening she’ll believe she really did think and say what she claims. Her type used to be the bane of my existence. She doesn’t lie deliberately. She is simply sure that whatever she wants to believe is true. As a witness, the family cat was more reliable.’

  I nodded. ‘I’ve known some like that, too. If they possess a memory at all, it’s infinitely malleable to the shape they want. Alan, let’s get out of here. If I have to stay in the same house with that woman much longer, I’m going to say something I’ll regret.’

  ‘It’s time we moved on, in any case. New worlds to conquer.’

  ‘Or something.’

  We packed quickly. Having the car made everything much easier. ‘No more walking tours, don’t you think? Day trips, there and back. And if we want to go farther afield, we can take the car.’