Presently the doors of the church opened and what appeared to be a man dressed as a birthday cake stepped out onto the top step. I took this to be Vicar Padget, who apparently went in for the High Anglican fashion of purple vestments for Eucharist.
“Welcome, welcome,” said Padget, with the deliberate sort of austerity of men who deliver bad news professionally. “Welcome to Saint Stephen’s.” He was a short and slight man, and he wore a cope of purple velvet and ivory piping that had been made for a bigger vicar. He completed the picture of the oppressed, harried village parson with fingers that fidgeted as though knitting an intricate and invisible cardigan.
“Good evening, Father Padget. I’m Anthony Boisjoly, nephew to Azalea Boisjoly.”
“I know, Mister Boisjoly.” Padget smiled sympathetically and shook my hand. Then he looked searchingly behind me over thick, round glasses that had steamed to an opaque finish in the cold air. “I had hoped to see your poor aunt this evening.”
“She wasn’t up to it. She told me to have an extra helping on her behalf.”
“Oh, very well. I...”
“Lovely church, Saint Stephen’s.”
“Yes, yes.” The vicar looked into the glowing interior with a dubious accord. “I’m afraid it’s a little cold — we don’t have a coal stove, as such.” He smiled weakly. I smiled weakly back, and we were in unvoiced but perfect alignment on the gravity of the absence of coal-heating in church. “And the roof leaks, when it rains. And sometimes when it’s not raining, strangely enough.”
I was sufficiently habituated to the practices of the country vicar that I had come to expect this appeal, and I was about to ask Padget if the collection plate would trust my personal cheque, but he hadn’t finished the inventory of woe.
“Be careful where you sit, incidentally, many of the pews are cracked and it’s not unheard of for parishioners to receive a nasty splinter.”
“Noted.”
“And there are termites.”
“The clocktower is very practical,” I suggested as a panacea. Padget looked upward, either at the clock in question or toward a vengeful God.
“It’s never worked properly. It wants manually winding by hand-crank. Separately, you understand — north, east, west and south.”
“One of Mister Trimble’s initiatives?” I asked.
“Possibly not the most effective use of discretionary funds,” said Padget with that indulgent smile that’s on the final exam at vicar school.
“At least you have a very nice weather vane.”
A cloud passed over the clergyman’s face.
“Yes,” he said, staring into the middle field. “There is that.” He appeared to mentally leave me for a moment, and when he returned he brought along a change of subject. "Tell me, Mister Boisjoly, how is your dear aunt coping with the tragic news?”
“About as well as one might expect, under the circumstances,” I said. “And considering those circumstances are the brutal murder of her only friend on Christmas morning.”
“Oh dear.”
“Yes. Did you know the major?”
“Oh yes, yes. Yes indeed.” The vicar nodded earnestly, as though shooing away any doubt. “I was ministering to him. I’d like to think that in some small way I contributed to his decision to…” Padget sought inspiration from above, “...resume his place in society.”
“He was coming to church?”
“Every Sunday, of late. He was growing quite enthusiastic about it, in fact.”
“And he was frequenting the Sulky Cow.”
“So I understand. Mister Barking tells me that the major was quite the famous raconteur,” said Padget with the forbearance of the long-suffering shepherd for the errant lamb.
There was a square-hole-round-peggish feel about something the vicar had said, and I was struggling to put my finger on it when Barking appeared from the interior of the church, wearing a verger’s cassock. He said, “Evening, Mister Boisjoly,” then took a firm hold of the bell-pull and gave it a good, hard, yank. A portentous ‘ding’ rang out overhead, followed by a deep, rich peel that waved over the silent night as only a church bell can. Barking appeared to derive much catharsis from the act, as though it settled some long-running disagreement he’d been having with the bell. He nodded resolutely and faded back into the interior of the church.
“Industrious chap, your verger,” I observed. “I’m surprised he can spare the time for much vergering.”
“He’s a tremendous help in the evenings. And, of course...” The vicar once again raised his eyes skyward for strength. “...he made the weather vane.”
“Modelled on the work of his father, I’m told. Mister Trimble suggested I have a look at the museum. I understand it’s fashioned along the lines of the Royal Albert, but with the nuance of the Louvre.”
“Mister Trimble subscribes to the grand vision school of municipal planning — he believes that if Graze Hill acts like a boomtown, it will become one.”
“I understand he was putting a lot of stock into the prominence of the local hero.”
“Such a pity.” Padget twined his fingers and studied them carefully. “Mister Trimble was very fond of the major — we all were, of course — but his father, Sergeant Morris Trimble, served with him. Owed Major Fleming his life.”
“Odd he didn’t mention that.”
“He will. Mister Trimble has a disarmingly erratic speaking style, but he gets around to most things, eventually. Ah!” Padget exclaimed at someone behind me, and I turned to take in what, at first glance, appeared to be one half of a Pat and Mike cross-talk act. He was a handsome young chap, perhaps my age, with clean-cut aquiline features that seemed designed for reduced wind resistance. He wore a white overcoat on top of a deafening red and black checkered boat jacket which, in turn, was performing the public service of covering an emerald green waistcoat. He had a monocle in his left eye, which was fortunate because if he hadn’t had a monocle he’d have needed one to complete the effect of having been dressed as a last-minute replacement for master of ceremonies of a Vaudeville performing animal act.
“Mister Millicent, how are you holding up?” Padget grasped the young man’s outstretched hand in both of his and cocked his head like a puppy with a conundrum.
“Oh, all right, all things and all that, what?” said Mister Millicent with a lisp that spoke of public schools and fox hunts and a worryingly uncomplicated family tree.
“Mister Boisjoly, this is Cosmo Millicent,” said Padget. Then he lowered his voice theatrically, as though navigating the audience through a tricky plot development. “Mister Millicent is Major Fleming’s nephew.”
“I’m very sorry about your uncle, Mister Millicent,” I said.
“Oh, quite. Thanks very… Cosmo, though, shall we say?”
“Pleasure Cosmo. Call me Anthony or, if you’re pressed for time, Anty.”
“Right ho, Anty.”
“Shall we tour the museum?” I suggested. “And leave the vicar to gather his flock?”
Cosmo and I wandered into the little church.
“I understand that you’re staying with Mister Padget while in Graze Hill,” I said.
“Yes. Not my very first choice, if I’m completely honest, but there’s not a broad selection. It was that or a boarding house in Steeple Herding that smelled rather of barn, and I would have been expected to either help with the milking or transcribe the life story of the family patriarch, whose chief claim to notoriety is that he ’s never been further than Stevenage.”
“I’d have been sorely tempted.”
“The vicarage is closer to my uncle.”
“Your uncle’s place is even closer. Couldn’t you have stayed with him?”
“I could have done, yes,” said Cosmo, tentatively. “He asked me, of course, and it pained me to say no, but have you seen Tannery Lodge? It’s not really the sort of space two grown men could comfortably share.”
“I have seen it, and I take your meaning. You visited him there,
then?”
Cosmo nodded. “Regularly. We were negotiating terms, as it were.”
“Terms?”
“His life story, don’t you know, what?” said Cosmo. We had entered the northern transept and were confronted by a tin likeness of Hildy. She stood, somewhat self-consciously for a tin statue, on a card table which was draped with purple cloth to form an honorary plinth. “Did you notice the gold version of that thing on the tower? There’s a real one, too, you know. It’s a most extraordinary animal. Four feet tall if it’s an inch.”
“We’ve met. Only briefly but I feel I’m a better man for it and, I flatter myself to think, she, too, remembers the occasion fondly.” I wandered the little museum of Graze Hill artefacts, including a series of elaborate cassocks behind glass vitrines and an astonishingly large collection of bovine photography. “So you and your uncle had not yet settled terms with regards to his biography?”
“In the main we had. A few fiddly bits remained, some ‘i’s in want of dots, ‘t’s short a few crosses, but he’d agreed in principle to let me write the thing.”
“You’re a professional writer?”
“Ah, well, in the strictest sense of the word ‘professional’, no, I’m not. Not yet, at any rate. But what is writing, at the end of the day, what? It’s just bunging the vitals down on paper and a working knowledge of the thesaurus to keep you using the word ‘temerity’ twice in the same sentence.”
“You certainly sound like a professional writer,” I observed. “Will the story be published posthumously?”
“It’ll rather have to be, now, won’t it?”
“Manifestly so, yes. But how will you determine the aforementioned vitals without benefit of the horse’s mouth?”
“The very point that has been much on my mind, as it happens,” said Cosmo meditatively. “I don’t know.”
“Surely you kept detailed notes from your evenings at Tannery Lodge and the Sulky Cow.”
“Oh, quite. Reams and reams. Yes, indeed.” Cosmo briefly perked up at the recollection. “I was rather counting on the old man’s help to sort through it all, mind you. Provide a bit of what we in the writing game call ‘background’, don’t you know?”
“Ah, there you are, Millicent.” The rafters of Saint Stephen’s quivered existentially with this booming announcement. Cosmo and I turned to receive what I took to be a baritone soloist appearing in the role of a country squire. He was twenty-odd years older than Cosmo and I and he had that bushy, jowly appearance of a class of gentleman who grow bushy and jowly as a matter of duty to God and country. He cultivated a grey moustache that passed beneath his nose as part of a full orbit around his head, taking in mutton-chop sideburns and the coastal region of a glistening bald pate. He was dressed in tweed and yet somehow managed to wear it like a military uniform. Time had broadened the foundation and polished the dome, but I recognised this as the modern manifestation of the smiling young man standing to the left of Flaps Fleming in the squadron portrait.
“Hello Monty,” said Cosmo. “Anty — Mister Boisjoly — this is Flight-Lieutenant Montgomery Hern-Fowler, RAF.”
“Boisjoly, you say?” bellowed Monty. “Knew a Boisjoly at Whitehall during the war. Edward or some such.”
“Edmond, I expect,” I said. “My father. He managed to find his niche in Army Intelligence.”
“Perhaps not, then. Chap I’m thinking of spent all his time drinking in the VIP mess.”
“That was him,” I confirmed. “‘They also serve, those who only stand drinks,’ he used to say. His speciality was rapid-response hospitality and precision bombing, so to speak. He claimed to have invented the Five Inch Field Gun — three parts gin, two parts champagne, poured gently over cracked ice. He said it came to him one day as a matter of necessity when an entire shipment of seltzer was delivered flat.”
“I did indeed know your father,” said Monty, very much in the manner of one turning a page on a sordid chapter of the past. “What the devil is that?”
“A cow,” I explained with reference to the tin likeness of Hildy.
“Looks like one of those ridiculous dogs. Sausage-shaped German mutts.”
“Dachshund.”
“Bless you.”
“I take it this is your first visit to Saint Stephen’s, Monty.”
“Blew in last week.”
“And what brings you to Graze Hill?”
“Looking up old brothers in arms. I came to visit my old wingman, Flaps Fleming.”
“What unfortunate timing,” I said. “You have my sympathies.”
“Poor chap,” Monty solemnly yelled. “Knife in the back, they tell me.”
“A very literal way to go,” I confirmed. “I understand you were among those present when he made his farewell tour of the nation’s pubs.”
“I was.”
“Then tell me something, gentlemen,” I addressed myself to Cosmo and Monty, “are you quite certain of the time that the major was in the pub?”
“Oh, absolutely,” said Cosmo. “From about ten till just around eleven. Quite sure.”
“That barmaid kept pointing at the clock,” added Monty. “Kept that poor sot — Soapy Mike — on some sort of schedule.”
“Soaky Mike,” I corrected gently. “And when the major left you, was there anything unusual in his departure?”
“There rather was, now you mention it,” answered Cosmo. “He wished me luck... with the book, you know... with a sort of, oh, I don’t know…” Cosmo squinted and doubtless wished he’d thought to bring his thesaurus to church. “...finality?”
“I see. Monty?”
“Not that I noticed ,” shouted Monty thoughtfully. “Why do you ask?”.
“Just sticking my nose in,” I explained. “For the moment the chief suspect is my maiden aunt and one feels a certain duty, you know, when one’s flesh and blood is looking at a noose from the wrong side of the blindfold.”
“Does you credit, young man,” whooped Monty with feeling.
“Thank you.”
“Unless she did it. She didn’t do it, did she?”
“Certainly not. It just happens that there’s a — so far — unexplained sequence of events that require either my aunt to be a calculating and cold-blooded killer or Major Aaron Fleming to have visited the Sulky Cow three hours after his death.”
“Probably a ghost.” Monty barked this with a calm sincerity that caught me off guard.
“Do you believe in ghosts, Monty?”
“Of course. Seen some. During the war. Flaps saw them too, as it happens.”
Before I could give voice to some variation of “Wha’?”, Barking whooshed into the little museum in a flurry of worn silk and said, “If you’d care to take a pew, gentlemen.”
While we’d been nattering the rest of the congregation had arrived and the church was now teeming with as many as eight parishioners , not counting the vicar. Barking toured the premises, gently swinging a tin thurible and trailing thin strains of incense. Saint Stephen’s, as I had guessed when I saw Padget dressed in mauve and mad abandon, was a High Church holdout in dairy country, where few had time to spare for church at Christmas.
I settled in next to Ivor and behind Sally Barnstable and Soaky Mike, one of whom sat in the first row, no doubt, to gain early access to the Communion wine and the other, with equally little doubt, to stop him. Cosmo, Monty, and Everett found comparatively splinter-free surfaces on the other side of the aisle.
In light of the day’s events Padget must have struggled before settling on the Sermon on the Mount from the Book of Matthew which, among its generous list of benedictions, blesses those who mourn. He balanced that out in the second reading with a crowd favourite from the Book of Wisdom, including the hit “The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them.” The vicar leaned into that one a bit, eyeing the absent choir longingly, as he came dangerously close to singing the reading himself before he remembered that he was in an English church and not some hot-
blooded, Italian cathedral, and composed himself.
“Peace be with you, Inspector,” I said when passing the peace. “Have there been any developments?”
“And on you, Mister Boisjoly. I’m afraid so. It would appear that Constable Kimble was right about a romantic relationship between your aunt and Major Fleming.”
“And peace be upon Constable Kimble, though he’s a dimwit. My aunt has assured me that her feelings toward the major were the cordial sentiments of good neighbours.”
Ivor shook his head as one does when an inveterate gambler tells you he’s onto a sure thing, and Padget began his homily, which turned out to be an account of a Christmas Day he spent in the trenches.
The hymns were short and popular and hence well-chosen for a sparse congregation with limited rehearsal time. I don’t object to it but I mention for the record that I was rather carrying Ivor, who had a tendency to hide what I’m sure was a rich baritone beneath a drone of half-remembered lyrics to some carol unknown to all but himself.
The eucharist was quickly dispensed with and, as is customary after such affairs, there was a clamouring for the door. I was anxious to pick up my conversation with Monty at roughly the point where he had said “ghost” but Padget was running defence at the exit. I issued him a perfunctory “lovely sermon, Father” but he wouldn’t let go of my hand, instead drawing me into a zone of confidence.
“I say, Mister Boisjoly, you wouldn’t help me out with something, would you?” he said in a tone of spirited conspiracy.
“Of course Vicar. Give it a name and I’ll give it cracking good try.”
“I understand you read Classics at Oxford.”
“It was that or law,” I replied. “But that carried the very real risk of leaving school with professional qualifications.”
“I wonder if you might give me your opinion on something…” Padget slipped a folded length of heavy notepaper from his hymn book. “...Just a modest work of my own. I’d be very pleased to have your honest views.”
The Case of the Ghost of Christmas Morning (Anty Boisjoly Mysteries Book 2) Page 7