by Hazel Holt
“Elsie is a saint,” Rosemary said, “and fortunately Mr. Preston has done work for her before and knew what to expect. Anyway, it’s finished now, so I haven’t got to be in constant attendance, so how about it?”
“That would be marvelous,” I said. “Would tomorrow be all right? The forecast’s fine, so we might really indulge ourselves and go and have a cream tea at that nice place in Dulverton.”
It was a lovely day, mild with mellow sunshine and, along the Exe Valley road, some of the trees had already turned golden.
“It’s really good to get right away,” I said. “I seem to have been living in Mere Barton lately!”
“You certainly seem to be taking this book thing seriously,” Rosemary said, skillfully avoiding a pheasant apparently intent on suicide. “I thought you might have abandoned it when Annie died.”
“It did cross my mind, but everyone there seemed so keen on the idea that I didn’t have the heart to disappoint them. Anyway, I’m sort of interested in it myself now.”
“Did you say you’d got some of Annie’s stuff for it?”
“Yes. I collected it from the cottage after she died. Actually, while I was in there, I came across something rather odd.” And I told her about the list. Of course, I didn’t mention William’s secret, but I did give her his explanation about how Annie had controlled events in the village.
“Blackmail!” Rosemary exclaimed. “Good heavens. And you think the people on the list all had secrets they wanted to hide.”
“It looks like it. You remember that book by her bed, the memoirs of that oil man? That might have been something to do with it.”
“How fascinating.”
“The thing is,” I said tentatively, “something like that might have been a really big secret, too big for whoever was hiding it to let Annie have that sort of hold over them.”
“What do you mean? Oh, surely you can’t think someone killed her!”
I explained about how I thought Annie wouldn’t have made a mistake about the fungi.
“Well, yes, I suppose you could be right about that. But how on earth could someone substitute poisonous ones—always supposing anyone knew enough about the things in the first place.”
“It would be easy enough to read up, and, as for getting into the cottage, I’m sure Annie left her back door open, and she was always out and about in the village, so there were plenty of opportunities for someone to sneak in from the field at the bottom of her garden.”
Rosemary cautiously overtook a tractor. “It’s all possible ,” she said, “but aren’t you just making a mystery where there really isn’t one?”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “It’s just that it’s been nagging away at me ever since I saw that list.”
“Well, I think Father William is right; it was just a way of putting pressure on people—nothing more sinister than that!”
It’s never easy to park in Dulverton, even after the holiday season, so we had quite a way to walk to the tearooms we always go to. As we passed another café in the main street I happened to look through the window, and to my surprise I saw Lewis Chapman at one of the tables, in earnest conversation with a young woman. Once we had gone past the café I stopped and told Rosemary what I’d seen.
“Really!”
“I suppose she might have been a colleague,” I said doubtfully.
“A young woman? And here in Dulverton? I don’t think so.”
“I suppose not.”
“We could go in and have our cream tea there,” Rosemary suggested.
“Goodness, no! It would be too embarrassing—that is, if there’s anything . . . well, you know . . . Anyway, it’s nothing to do with us.”
“Perhaps she’s Lewis’s secret. Was he one of those on Annie’s list?”
“Well, yes, he was.”
“There you are, then.” She turned to look back at the café. “Hang on a minute; they’re coming out. Pretend to be looking in this shop window!”
Lewis and the girl stood for a moment outside the café; then he put his arm round her shoulder and they moved off in the other direction.
“Well!” Rosemary said. “Did you see that! Certainly not a colleague. She couldn’t be more than twenty, and really pretty.”
“Yes. Very pretty. But there could be some perfectly innocent explanation.”
“There could,” Rosemary agreed, “but I prefer to think the worst.”
I can’t deny that our cream tea (warm, freshly baked scones, proper strawberry jam and plenty of cream), excellent in itself, had an added dimension as we discussed what we had seen.
“Mind you,” Rosemary said as she carefully balanced a strawberry on top of a mound of cream, “you couldn’t blame him. I don’t imagine life with Naomi is much fun.”
“Not a word one would immediately associate with her,” I agreed.
“I can’t think why he married her, or why she married him, for that matter. It’s fairly obvious that her career is the only thing that matters to her.”
“And no children,” I said. “Presumably she thought they’d get in the way. It’s a shame. Lewis is a sweet person; he deserves better. It’s that superior manner of hers that always gets to me. No, you couldn’t blame Lewis for looking for a little comfort elsewhere.”
“I wonder why they were meeting in Dulverton,” Rosemary said. “Perhaps she lives down here. We really should have followed them.”
I laughed. “I think we’re too old to play private detectives,” I said. “Anyway, think how awkward it would have been if he’d seen us.”
“We’ve just as much right to be in Dulverton as he has,” Rosemary said. “But,” she added regretfully, “I do see what you mean. Oh well, you’re right; it’s Lewis’s secret and nothing to do with us.”
The next day, when I was thinking about what we’d seen, I decided that however disagreeable it might be for Lewis, if Naomi ever discovered his little affair, it wasn’t really a motive for murder. Instead of indulging in profitless speculations, what I really needed to do was finish looking through the parish records.
William gave me the key to the vestry and an invitation to sherry afterwards and I got to work. There wasn’t a great deal to be done—much of the stuff had gone to the Records Office in Taunton—and I finished rather too early to present myself at the rectory for sherry. So when I left the church, I went to have another look at the field that ran behind Annie’s cottage. I was leaning over the gate trying to work out how easy it would be to slip through unnoticed when I heard a movement behind me. It was Diana, who had dropped one of the two halters she’d been carrying.
“Oh, hello,” I said casually. “I was admiring your beautiful horses.”
“I never had you down as a horsey type,” she said amiably.
I hadn’t seen Diana since our encounter at the Harvest Supper and I was relieved to see that she seemed perfectly normal. Indeed, she looked much better than she had for ages, certainly more cheerful. She handed me the halters.
“Here, can you hang on to these while I get the gate open?” It was a metal gate and the fastening was rather stiff. “Damn,” she said, “I’ve broken a fingernail. I must get this latch oiled.” She took the halters from me. “Thanks, Sheila. What are you doing in the village anyway?”
I explained about the parish records.
“Oh, that book—are you still going through with it? I thought you weren’t too keen.”
“I wasn’t to begin with,” I replied, “but it’s sort of grown on me and now I’ve got quite a lot done it would be a shame to stop. Besides, I feel I owe it to Annie to finish what she started. A sort of memorial to her.”
Diana gave a sort of snort of derision. “I don’t think we need any reminder of her,” she said. “Good riddance—and I don’t mind who hears me say so—interfering old bat!”
“I know she was a bit hands- on,” I said, “more or less running things, but surely she did a lot of good in the village.”
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��She was far too nosy about things that didn’t concern her. In and out of people’s houses all the time, eavesdropping on conversations . . .” Then, perhaps thinking she’d said more than she intended, she went on, “I think you’ll find I’m not the only one who’s glad to be rid of her. Mind you,” she added with a short laugh, “I don’t suppose they’d come right out and say so!”
She closed the gate behind her. “I must be getting on. The farrier will be here any minute now, and I’m not ready for him.”
“Right. I’d better be moving too. Incidentally, is there a right of way across this field?”
She looked at me curiously. “No, there isn’t—why do you ask?”
“I just wondered. Judith said Annie used to use it as a shortcut to get into the wood up there.”
“Oh, Annie,” she said scornfully. “That one was a law unto herself.” She gave me a wave of dismissal and went over to the horses.
I looked at my watch and decided it was now a reasonable time to visit William. He greeted me as an old friend, and I decided that since our last meeting we seemed to have progressed from being mere acquaintances to something approaching friendship. Certainly I felt I now knew him very much better and liked him more in consequence. I noticed with amusement that today there was only one decanter of sherry, the amontillado, which seemed to be a little private joke between us.
Today he wasn’t wearing his cassock, and in a well-cut gray suit he seemed very much more an ordinary person than a clergyman. There was the clerical collar, of course, but the small band of white was almost covered by his high- necked pullover. And, what I took to be a further sign of friendship, he had almost completely dropped his usual affected manner.
“So, Sheila, how is it going?”
“I’ve finished with the parish records now—many thanks—so I can begin organizing the material I’ve got so far.”
“I hope that doesn’t mean we won’t see you in the village so often.”
“Oh no—there’s still a lot I need to find out.”
“You said ‘find out’ in a way that makes me think you don’t just mean collecting material for the Book. Am I right?”
“Well, yes, in a way,” I replied in some confusion.
“All those secrets.”
“All those secrets,” I echoed, and then I told him about the list.
“And I was crossed out? How gratifying.”
“It would seem that you were the only one who actually stood up to her.”
“And you want to discover the rest of the secrets?”
“Oh, don’t—you make me sound like Annie! No, I was curious, of course, but there’s something else. Thinking about it all, I started to wonder if Annie’s death was an accident, if she knew something so damaging about someone that—”
“That they felt the need to kill her?”
“Well, yes.”
“By substituting poisonous fungi for the harmless kind?”
“It would have been possible.”
“Poison by fungi—that sounds like something out of Herodotus, or a Jacobean tragedy. It certainly argues a subtlety of mind that I hadn’t thought to find in this village. However, you may be right.” He clasped his hands together, possibly in thought, possibly in prayer. “Do you intend on telling the police about your theory?”
“I don’t think they’d take it very seriously.”
“But if you are right, then, perhaps we should.”
“We?”
“Like the rest of my clerical brethren, I like a good detective story. So, certainly, anything I can contribute—though within the bounds of my profession, of course.”
“The secrets of the confessional?”
“Well, Mere Barton is not yet ready for that, but I do, naturally, hear certain things that I couldn’t pass on. But if your natural curiosity leads you to make casual inquiries, perhaps you might like to share your thoughts with me, on a strictly confidential basis.”
“It sounds silly, but I do feel that finding that list was in some way meant, and if Annie’s death wasn’t an accident, then perhaps I ought to try to get to the bottom of it.”
“Have you made any progress?”
I told him about the book by Annie’s bed, but a sort of delicacy stopped me from telling him about Lewis and the girl, perhaps because I felt slightly ashamed of actually spying on them.
“An oil tycoon? That certainly seems strange bedside reading for Annie. I can’t, for the moment, think of anyone in the village—certainly not anyone on that list—who might have connections there.”
“I’ve ordered it from the library, so I might get a clue when I’ve read it.”
“Excellent. Now, do have another glass of sherry to fortify you for the task ahead.”
We both had another sherry and I said, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Who’s paying for the publication of this book?”
“Interestingly enough, we have harked back to the eighteenth century—we have subscribers, whose names will be listed at the back, though not, of course, the amount they subscribed.”
“That’s a good idea. Who organized it? No, don’t tell me—Annie!”
“Certainly no one else could have raised quite so much money.”
“I can imagine. Will you have enough? Costs go up all the time and now that Annie is no longer with us . . .”
“Actually, I have said that I will be responsible for any shortfall.”
“That was very generous of you.”
“I rather like the idea of the Book, which is why I was so pleased that you continued with it. And, as it happens, I’ve recently come into quite a large sum of money—left to me by a distant uncle in Australia, which sounds like a Victorian melodrama, but is perfectly true.”
“How lovely,” I said appreciatively. “Now I’ll feel a particular obligation to do a good job.”
As I walked back to my car I met Rachel.
“Hello. I’m so glad I ran into you; I was going to ring you and Rosemary. Phyll and I would like you to come to supper next Tuesday. Martin Stillwell is coming down for a week and we thought it would be nice to have a few people to meet him.”
“I’d love to come and I’m sure Rosemary would too. We’ll just check the date and ring you. If Martin’s coming down, I’ll be able to return the key of Annie’s—I mean his—cottage. I didn’t quite like to trust it to the post.”
Driving home, though, I felt reluctant to give up the key. I don’t quite know what else I expected to find in the cottage, but I had the feeling that there was still something there that might hold a clue to Annie’s death.
Chapter Thirteen
I’d just come out of a meeting of the Hospital Friends when I saw Lewis Chapman standing by the lift. I greeted him and said, “I’m afraid that one’s out of order again.”
“I know; Sister Fraser’s just told me. Oh well, one of these days we’ll get a splendid new Cottage Hospital.”
“If they don’t close it down altogether!” I said.
“How’s the Book going?” he asked.
“Quite well, really. There’s still a lot to do, but I’ve got a nice lot of photographs and Rachel’s promised me some of her grandfather going round the village in his pony and trap.”
“That sounds fun. Actually, I had been going to dinner there this week (Naomi’s away on a course), but I can’t because I have to take my daughter to the airport.”
“Your daughter?”
“Yes, Joanna, she lives in France with her mother. That’s Susan, my first wife.”
“Oh,” I said, taken aback. “I didn’t know . . .”
“We were divorced ages ago. We married far too young and both realized it was a mistake—it was all quite amicable. No, Susan married again and they live in Normandy.”
“Do you get to see Joanna often?” I asked.
“Not as often as I’d like, of course, but she’s coming over here next year to do her master’s degree at Oxford and then it’ll be much e
asier.”
“That’s nice.”
He smiled happily. “She’s been down here for a fortnight staying with my sister, Madge, who lives at Dulverton. Poor Madge isn’t too well and I was so pleased when Joanna said she’d like to come over and see her.” He looked at his watch. “Is that the time? I’d better go and see if the other lift’s working—I don’t think I can face all those stairs!”
As I walked slowly out of the hospital my first thought was that I was glad I hadn’t told William about our “discovery” in Dulverton. My second was delight that Lewis had a daughter, and one who sounded really nice. I remembered with pleasure now how Lewis had put his arm round her shoulder, a gesture that showed how comfortable and easy they were with each other.
When I got home, of course I rang Rosemary.
“Fancy that!” she said. “And we never knew.”
“I suppose there’s no reason why we should. Usually we never see Lewis without Naomi and I don’t suppose it would crop up in conversation when she’s there,” I said. “I wonder how she feels about it.”
“She’s probably dismissed it from her mind as not relevant to her career,” Rosemary replied scornfully. “Hang on,” she continued. “If that isn’t Lewis’s ‘secret, ’ does that mean there’s something else Annie had on him? Or didn’t she know about the first wife either?”
“Well, he doesn’t seem to want to hide the fact that he has a daughter if he’s told Rachel he’s taking her to the airport. And if Annie had got hold of the wrong end of the stick and hinted darkly about a love child, then he’d simply have put her right.”
“I suppose so. I wonder if Rachel and Phyll know anything about the first wife,” Rosemary said. “Perhaps it will crop up in conversation when we go to supper.”
It didn’t actually crop up, but, soon after we arrived, Rosemary led the conversation round to Lewis, and Rachel said, “We did invite him for this evening, but he had to take his daughter to the airport.”
