by Ellis Peters
‘And nobody else has turned up a useful fact? Nobody in the pub heard anything? No regulars who failed to show?’
‘Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything, nobody knows anything. And nobody has to issue orders, or even set the example. They all wanted rid of him, and generally speaking they’ve all got open minds about the rash soul who took steps about it. The consensus of opinion seems to be that the situation wasn’t as desperate as all that, and this action is unjustifiably drastic, but all the same… Well, you know yourself, alibis are meaningless in Middlehope. When threatened, they close ranks. For all you know,’ said Moon generously, ‘it could be anybody. It could be me!’
‘Interesting!’ said George. ‘Was it?’
‘Well, no, it wasn’t. But then,’ pointed out the sergeant reasonably, ‘we’d all say that, wouldn’t we?’
‘Come on,’ said George, ‘let’s go and see if the church is any more informative.’
St Eata’s church – a local dedication which occurred in several of the hill villages – dated back to Saxon times, but nothing much of Saxon workmanship was left above-ground, and even the succeeding Early English had largely been patched, built on to, and defaced in several later ages, even before the ambitious nineteenth-century renovation was undertaken. The fabric had ended up as slightly top-heavy neo-Gothic, with the upper part of its old tower rebuilt and made more lofty, with a new battlemented surround. It still had a respectable congregation, and so had escaped the horrid fate of being declared redundant. Its one unchallenged excellence was its organ, an early masterpiece lovingly rebuilt.
‘Any amount of people go in and out here most days,’ said Detective-Sergeant Brice, looking up from the nave towards the organ pipes, towering above the left-hand side of the chancel. ‘I thought we should have to spend half our time keeping folks out today, but only the vicar’s been near. It’s as though the place has been tabu from the time they saw us move in. Not that this part has anything much to tell us. It’s different once you get up above, where hardly anyone ever goes. We’ve marked several details for you.’
‘The organ first,’ said George.
Rainbow’s music-case was still lying on the organ-bench, unfastened, sheet music fanning out from it. George looked round at the demigod’s view of the church from this angle, and up at the correctively awesome vista of pipes. Organs are designed to prostrate the onlooker with humility before their vastness and beauty, and exalt their handlers into daemonic self-glorification. But here everything was neat, placid and undisturbed; here there had certainly been no sudden assault, no life and death struggle. The floor was clean, every surface dustless, everything in order.
‘Right, now the tower.’
Down to the body of the church again, and along to the west end, to the curtained alcove and the narrow stairway that led to the bellringers’ room. This, again, was regularly used and scrupulously cleaned, no dust to trap intruding footprints. The looped ropes of an eight-bell peal dangled motionless, their padded grips striped spirally in red, white and blue cotton, like barbers’ poles. A fair amount of light came in from Gothic lancets. In one corner an open-treaded stairway, broad, solid and safe, slanted upwards into a narrow, dark trap above. George climbed, and emerged into a sort of attic limbo below the still invisible bells. A stout, boarded floor, roughly finished, an enclosing scent of old timber, and a sense of being suspended in half-light between two worlds. In the far corner another step-ladder, still with broad treads, pursued its upward way. Here people seldom came, and very few of them. Here there was dust, moderately thick, peacefully still, with the furred neatness of undisturbed places.
‘Here it gets more interesting,’ said Brice. ‘Look here, on this first stair. More than one set of feet has trodden up the middle, mostly the prints are overlaid and scuffed, but here there’s one left foot that stepped well to the side of the tread, and the mark’s quite clear. We’ve followed all the tracks up. This one just doesn’t seem to occur again, unless he very carefully trod always in the middle where the dust was already disturbed. It looks as if somebody got this far, and then changed his mind.’
‘And there are two sets of tracks beyond?’ asked George.
‘Two detectable. Could be more, but definitely two. But not this one. Or never distinct beyond this point.’
The soft dust, securely settled, had taken an excellent impression. An old shoe, trodden down at the heel, unevenly weighted, and with a distinct crack across the sole. A print that suggested a smallish foot in an over-large shoe, the foot of an older man who liked his comfort, and clung to the old friends that ensured it.
‘You’ve isolated and copied everything above that might be useful? Right, up we go!’ But even so George trod carefully, up into the dimly-lit bell-chamber, smelling of clean, dry must, and haunted by monstrous, still bronze shapes in the gloom. A large area of floor here, and only a runged ladder continuing the ascent. There was also a quantity of debris stacked in corners, left behind from the renovations, carved stones so weathered that the carving was almost obliterated, bits of voussoirs half worn away with corrosion but retaining a shape someone hadn’t wanted to throw away. All too massive to provide handy weapons, but the suggestion was there. And there were two huge but sadly decayed wooden chests, one with a disjointed lid propped back against the wall, and layer below layer of discoloured papers spread in some disorder within. George crossed to look more closely, for though age and damp had marked the contents in brownish ripples, only some of them were filmed with a layer of dust, and even that only superficial, and some of those half-uncovered below were perfectly clear of dust. The lid had not been thus open long, the contents had been only recently disturbed. He read titles of Victorian magazines, Ivy Leaves, Harmsworth Magazine, Musical Bits, and the modest headings of parish magazines. And some older, Gentleman’s Magazine, The Grand, as far back as the late eighteenth century. The floor beside the chest was trodden more or less clear of dust, dappled with treads so that no clear print was visible.
‘Somebody was interested,’ said George.
‘Yes, sir, and not so long ago. Maybe more than one, but one very recently indeed. But I doubt if they found much of anything.’
‘Not to interest Rainbow, one would imagine. This stuff might be treasure to a social historian, but not to an antiquarian in it for the money. No great value there. Unless, of course, there was some unusual item among the collection. We’ll have to go through all this in detail, but on the face of it it isn’t his cup of tea. Leave it just as it is. And meantime, we’ll ask the vicar if anyone has been up here, legitimately, in the last few months. There could be occasions when need arose.’
‘Well, above here it’s by ladder. The dust’s been rubbed off the middle of the rungs, as you’d expect, but not much else to be found. No traces of blood, or anything. I’ll lead the way.’
The ladders, built into place, proceeded by four short stages, making the circuit of the square tower, and brought them out by a low and narrow wooden door into daylight on the leads. The doorway, pointed Gothic in relatively new stone, was accommodated in the wall of the single corner turret, rising nine feet above the general level of the parapet, which was breast-high to a man of middle height. And abandoned to weather and moss in the corner by the turret lay the obvious fragments of the old stone voussoirs from the former archway, a few pitted and crumbling strips of moulding, a couple of decorative bosses worn to the fragility of shells.
‘Any indication of where he went over? It would be this side, wouldn’t it?’ After that spiral ascent it took a few seconds to regain a sense of direction, but a glance down over the parapet located the spot where Rainbow’s body had fallen. And even without Brice’s eager demonstration, there were the faint, pale streaks where nails had clawed ineffectively at the crest of the stonework. The embrasures between the merlons of the embattled wall dropped to waist-level. Not so hard, perhaps, to grip a man round the knees and hoist him over the edge. But still improbable for anyone to
overbalance and fall. ‘Yes, that’s clear enough. He grabbed for the solid wall on either side of the embrasure.’
‘And there are two or three dark spots here that could be blood.’ Brice showed them, incredibly insignificant to be the only signs of a man’s death-blow, but blood, almost unquestionably. A fast bash and a heave over the edge, as Reece Goodwin had said.
George went back to the pile of stone fragments in the corner, and stood looking down at them attentively. Moss had bound them into a coagulated mass, a few small tufts of grass had found enough soil at the edges to survive. The one long strip of stony pallor, devoid of its thin green covering, showed like a scar. Something about ten inches long and no more than two wide, slightly curved, had been removed from there recently. A broken piece of moulding from the doorway arch? Whatever it was, the bare leads showed no sign of it now.
‘Supposing you had just used a length of stone to break a man’s skull, and tipped him over here into the churchyard,’ said George thoughtfully, ‘what would you do with the weapon? To make it disappear most effectively?’
‘Easy,’ said Moon promptly. ‘I’d throw it off the tower on the other side. Not only because that would separate it as far as possible from the body, in a churchyard which I’ve got to admit is a right tangle, too thickly populated ever to get mown properly – but on that side the congestion is worst and the disintegration most advanced. That’s the oldest part. Looking for a slice of stonework there would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.’
‘Pity,’ said George with sympathy, ‘because that’s just what you and your boys are going to be doing as from now.’
‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ agreed Moon with equanimity. ‘If there’s a hunk of local stone around with traces of blood, and not native to where it’s lying, we’ll get it for you before the light fails. I know this place better than I’ve ever bothered to get to know the palm of my hand. Mind if I borrow another piece to send after it? One of these bosses – no mistaking that for the one we shall be looking for, I take it?’
He had a way, both reassuring and unnerving, of being entrenched in certainty where the habits and cosmography of his chosen ground were concerned, and of proving right practically all the time. George was not in the least surprised when the sergeant came to him in the parish hall, around seven o’clock, bearing on a fold of paper a ten-inch sliver of stone, very gently curved, easily wielded in one hand by any well-grown person, and retaining a murderously sharp edge of moulding on its clean side, protected by having lain face-down in the discard pile. It had also, impaled upon this sharp edge, palpable traces of blood and matter, and a few short hairs.
‘Sorry I can’t guarantee any guilty prints, George,’ said Moon, easy and unofficial, since they were alone, ‘but I doubt if we’ve got the best field for ’em here. But this is the weapon, all right. We’ve marked the place where it crashed. I was about a couple of yards too far to the left with that boss, but about the same range. You’ve got a pretty hefty bloke to look for. It was a good throw, and he’d be in a hurry.’
There was a mass of statements to be matched up by then, and he sat down and joined in the work as soon as the murder weapon had been despatched to the forensic laboratory. They worked together with maximum placidity and understanding; but the statements were as void as they had both expected.
‘The vicar knows of only one occasion when somebody was up in the bell-chamber legitimately this year,’ George said, when they had been through everything. ‘That was in late May, when a swarm of bees invaded. Bees get in wherever they think they will. Anyhow, they moved in among the woodwork there, and if the Reverend Stephen didn’t want ’em, at least he knew of some who did.’
‘ “A swarm of bees in May…” ’, murmured Moon sententiously.
‘I know! “Worth a load of hay.” And we’re talking in Middlehope terms now. Well, the leading bass, Joe Llewelyn, is a fanatical bee-keeper, and wins prizes with his honey all over Britain. So Joe moved in to take the swarm. Nobody’d laid claim to it, it seems they may well have been wild bees. Joe came twice, once to size up the situation, and the second time with a skip, and an assistant to help him. And the assistant was Bossie Jarvis. I can well believe that if there was anything out of the ordinary going on, Bossie’d be in on it. Joe’s got no complaints. He got his bees, and Bossie was first-class as aide-de-camp. Those two seem to be the only people who have been up there with those two chests of magazines this year. Joe is sure both chests were left tidily closed when they came away. The one is more or less empty, anyhow, just a few rotting organ scores. Joe is particularly sure because Bossie, when not fully occupied, was poking about curiously in the other chest, the full one. He’d never be able to resist any reading matter, anyhow, the odder the better. But they left everything as they found it when they came down with the swarm.’
‘So that accounts for one person who disturbed the layers of dust,’ agreed Moon placidly. ‘But in May.’
‘And now it’s October, and somebody’s been at them very recently. And Rainbow is an antiquarian, but hardly likely to be after The Gentleman’s Magazine, even for seventeen-some-odd. So if it was Rainbow, what was he after? And why should he expect to find it there? And did he find it? And above all, can it possibly have been something worth killing him for?’
By the time they adjourned to pick up some cigarettes at the village shop before closing time, and snatch a pint and a sandwich at the ‘Gun Dog’, forensic had rung with reports on the matter found in Rainbow’s head-wound, and on that detected on the sliver of voussoir that had fractured his skull. The same stone-debris, the same species of moss, the same blood. The victim’s finger-nails had also provided specimens of all but the blood. No doubt about it, that was where he had died, and that was how he had died. Only who, and why, remained to be documented.
‘Which first?’ wondered George, stretching lengthily after hours of sitting. ‘Motive? My God, there’s no getting out of range of one motive, up here, is there? And yet ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of the time Middlehope is madly sane, if you’ll permit the paradox. They know this sort of solution only promotes a far worse problem. I don’t say they wouldn’t – I just say they wouldn’t without total safeguards for all the valley. And we also have a most equivocal lady, with a trail of admirers a mile long. And she surprisingly at home here, where he insulated himself totally. Perhaps he did everywhere? There are people who are chronically strangers here!’
‘Sad, that!’ said Sergeant Moon. ‘But what can you do, if they do the sealing? We’ve got nothing from the solicitors yet. Never take for granted the “Cui bono.” ’
‘I’ll see Bowes in person tomorrow morning,’ said George. ‘Do you feel as dry as I do?’
‘Like a lime-kiln. And I’m out of Woodbines. Mind if we stop in at Gwen’s?’
Gwen was Mrs Owen Lloyd, keeper of the shop, and mother of Toffee Bill.
‘A good idea,’ said George. ‘At closing time there might be something interesting to hear.’ For closing time did not hurry in the village. Trade ceased, but social exchanges frequently continued for another half-hour. And there was a sensation to be discussed today.
The shop was located on a corner, an enlarged house-window and an old, leaning roof above it, the usual invaluable local shop that has everything you’re ever going to need in an emergency, from gumstrip to TCP, and frozen peas to fresh eggs. It was as immaculate and brisk as all such genuinely professional shops are, and as informal, an exchange-point for news and gossip, a first-aid post for local protection, sending out feelers towards isolated old people unaccountably not seen for some days, delivering without benefit of fee where there was need, advising where regulation forms frightened intelligent but direct folk out of their normal routine. Its compact space of freezer and cases and shelves was everything anybody needed of modernity, without the gimmicks. And Gwen was a farmer’s daughter, fresh as new milk, large, fair and kind.
Miss de la Pole was standing at the counte
r when they entered, in the act of lighting one of the small cheroots she had just been buying. ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ she was saying comfortably, in her ripe baritone, ‘the child’s too close to it, that’s all. He just can’t digest it, it isn’t that he really cares. Give him a week or two, and he’ll have forgotten all about it. The man wasn’t likeable, you know, nobody can blame the boys for not liking him.’ She turned and recognised the police entering. ‘Why, hullo, George! We were just talking about this affair. Hullo, Jack, nice to know you’re standing by. I must say, it’s a shake-up for us all.’
‘It is,’ agreed Moon heartily. ‘Here yesterday and gone today. It makes you take stock.’
‘I’ve been doing that for some time,’ she assured him drily. ‘At my age, one does. You’re just a youngster, Jack. And then, I must have disliked him about as violently as anyone could, and that does make one take stock, as you put it.’
‘You didn’t, by any chance, make away with him, did you?’ asked George mildly.
‘No, sorry, George, I don’t really have the resolution, you know. I might dream about it, I’m unlikely ever to do it. In any case, I’m probably one of the last to see him alive, and he was mobile at the time, so I didn’t get the chance. I happened to look out of the window before I drew the curtains, last night, round about a quarter to twelve, and I saw him driving towards the gates, on his way home.’
Wonder of wonders, she was one of those whom the grapevine reached only vaguely, because in her aristocratic solitude she merely received, never queried. She knew Rainbow was dead, but had not acquired the details. Doubtless she knew he had been found broken under the church tower, but the time was unknown to her, and the spectacle of a man driving home at a time when he had almost certainly been dead presented her with no problems. Here was one who could have confessed to his murder with absolute security, her guilt disproved within ten minutes.
