She cast a disparaging look around, at the flowers up by the altar, dropping their petals and wilting. One of the carved saints from his niche seemed to be giving her a hard stare, and she stared insolently back. If they thought that after an insult like this she was going to clean their stupid church, they were out of luck. Stuff the lot of them!
She was still holding the parcel, and now looked at it again with automatic curiosity. She shook it, tentatively, then felt the edges. A book, by the feel of it; not much interest in that. Probably just someone returning one they had borrowed.
Minnie turned it over idly. There was writing on the back, she noticed suddenly, near the bottom of the left-hand side: a small, neat, distinctive script.
‘Pray for us sinners,’ it read, ‘now and at the hour of our death.’
Her eyes narrowed in sudden interest, and she looked at the package hungrily.
After all, it could be urgent, couldn’t it? There could be a message inside that Miss Moon needed to get at once, and with the poor lady in hospital, Minnie saw her own duty clear.
Delicately she slid her finger under the sealing tape and prised it off.
***
Margaret had not been aware of falling asleep again, but she awoke to a cheerful nurse asking her to sit up so that she could remove the bandages.
There was no time to agonize. First there was weak light, then strong, and then she was blinking blearily in a world she had almost managed to convince herself she would never see again. Her eyes were watering, she explained defensively to the nurse in what remained of her voice, only because of their sudden exposure to light.
‘Of course,’ the nurse agreed sympathetically and found tissues so that she could give her nose a good blow. Promising some of the ice cream and jelly they kept for tonsils patients, she left Margaret to appreciate the riches of normal existence.
She groped for her glasses on the bedside table and put them on, and the fuzzy outlines of the room jumped into vivid focus. Her eyes were smarting, her throat felt as if someone had taken sandpaper to it, and now she considered it, she was probably homeless as well. But she could see, and she was hungry; to these blessings were added the sight of Robert coming in at the door.
‘Goodness,’ she grated. ‘You do look peculiar!’
The strain which had been etched so markedly on his face eased.
‘You have no idea how happy I am that you are able to tell me that, even though it shows an appalling disrespect for Jean’s handiwork and Ted’s taste.
‘But don’t try to talk. It’s obviously painful, and anyway you wouldn’t wish to deprive me of the only opportunity I may ever have to talk uninterrupted while you are in the room. I’ll let you tell me if there’s anything special you want, but keep it brief.’
The nurse brought in a tray as Margaret squawked, ‘Information!’ then obediently subsided to address herself to soup, milk, and the promised jelly and ice cream with a good appetite.
‘Well, the house first of all –’
Catching sight of her frown, he checked himself. ‘Oh, Pyewacket, I suppose. I can’t think why you need to ask. He saved his own elegant skin via the cat-flap of course, and is now being so pampered by Jean that he may never deign to return.’
She thought about laughing, but deciding that might be too ambitious smiled instead.
‘The house isn’t as bad as you might think, though I’m afraid one end of the sitting room is pretty much a write-off. You’ve lost quite a few books and a couple of paintings and of course that old suite, but that was what caused the trouble with the fumes anyway. There’s some smoke damage, but Jean Brancombe’s been round there and had all the windows open, and she says that once the clothes and the curtains have been to the dry-cleaners and the carpets have been professionally cleaned – she’s arranging all that – there won’t be much damaged beyond repair except the mattresses. And your insurance will take care of all that.’
Margaret nodded, making impatient ‘get-on-with-it’ signals with her hands.
‘The police work? Well, there’s not much to say, unfortunately. The sitting-room window was broken, fireflighters were laid along the window ledge inside by the curtains, so that they caught, then fell on to the armchair – and the rest you know. There are no footprints except a smudge of mud that might or might not have something to do with it.
‘They’ll be taking fingerprints from you and me – oh, and the dreaded Minnie Groak, I suppose – for elimination purposes, though they don’t think they have anything meaningful.
‘They’re questioning all the women who fit the profile, which as you can imagine is causing no end of fuss. Vezey says there have been four complaints to the Chief Constable already, two alleging that nothing is being done and two complaining about harassment.
‘Is there anything you can suggest yourself? I’ll get you a pen and paper so you can write it down.’
He failed to register Margaret’s hesitation. Then she shook her head. ‘Oh, I don’t need paper,’ she said hoarsely. ‘I won’t talk much, but my throat’s quite bearable now it isn’t so dry.’
‘Well, don’t overdo it,’ he said, not noticing her evasion. ‘I don’t know when they’ll let you out, but Jean’s got your bed made up already, and is killing me with kindness. And you’re under police protection, too, for the next bit; there’s a nice chap out there, having a wonderful time chatting up the prettier nurses. So we should be safe enough, unless my coronary artery furs over as a result of Jean’s cooking in the next couple of days. Ted’s continued survival is a mystery to me.’
***
Minnie Groak lived with her mother in a maisonette at the council end of the small housing estate which also included the vicarage.
Mrs Groak was as grossly fat as Minnie was spare and angular. She had muddy grey eyes, paler than Minnie’s, and thinning iron-grey hair gathered into a wispy knot at the back and splayed in greasy strands across her flat skull.
She sat habitually in an old moquette armchair close to the fire, like some bloated spider crouched balefully in the corner of her web. Persistent local rumour had it that the inoffensive long-departed Mr Groak, after performing his duty in providing her with a daughter to minister to her old age, had been eaten.
She didn’t get about much these days, but longer years than Minnie had yet served in minding other people’s business had whetted rather than sated her appetite for gossip. She had to feed it mainly on Minnie’s doggy-bags of information from the feast in the outside world, and today she was expecting some particularly rich pickings. Not only was there the detail of the fire at the vicarage and the police activity there, but Minnie had said she would take the chance to give the place a good sort-out while the vicar was in hospital. Mrs Groak knew precisely what that meant.
She actually licked her lips when she heard Minnie’s key in the lock, Minnie’s voice calling, ‘That’s me, Mum, I’m home.’
Minnie had been hugely excited when she got the parcel open. ‘My Diary’, the book had said on the front in worn gold letters on faded blue suede. It held the promise of a voyeuristic feast, and a sensual shiver of delight ran through her.
She did not think of blackmail, though she would have readily accepted that the effort of keeping secrets deserved reward. Her excitement was at once both purer and more sordid than that; that of infiltrating another person’s mind, preying on their inmost thoughts. The victim of a dreary life, she had only vicarious interest to infuse it with the colour and spice she craved. Access to a personal diary was riches beyond any expectation, and she opened the book with almost the feeling of incredulous awe with which she might have checked a winning sequence of lottery numbers.
But when, with fitting reverence, she turned the first page and discovered that what lay in her twitching grasp was a kiddie’s diary, her disappointment and disgust were such that she could have torn the miserable thing up on the spot.
It was only self-preservation that stopped her. There was no name, no m
essage inside, but what if Miss Moon had been warned to expect it, told that someone would be leaving it on the doorstep of the church? It wouldn’t take long for that Jean Brancombe to come round accusing her; she almost managed to feel aggrieved at the thought.
So what was she going to do with it now? Now she was worried – Minnie was a worrier – and all for nothing. What with that, and being chased out of the vicarage, it had been a bad morning. She had hoped there would be such a nice lot of ‘news’, as she liked to call it, to chew over with Mum today.
She grabbed the silly book and its wrappings together with anxious haste and shoved them into the raffia shopping-basket she always carried, arranging her unworn pinnie neatly across the top. With a final baleful glance round the church with its dead flowers and dusty surfaces, she left.
Mrs Groak, with a piercing look at her flustered daughter, took the little book greedily into her hands. She rubbed up the flattened suede, smoothed out the pages with her spatulate fingers with their purplish ridged nails.
The pages were stiff, almost brittle with age now, particularly the ones at the end which had been so oddly blackened with a thick layer of crayon. There were bobbles and blisters on some of the pages too, though it did not cross her mind that these were the stigmata of ancient tears.
She read slowly and with total concentration the first entries in that childish hand. ‘1st January, 1967: Today we went to the panto. I wore my new dress. It was funny. Even Daddy laghed.’ ‘3rd January: Today I rode my pony. Macroni cheese for tea.’
She turned the empty pages over too, almost as slowly, until she reached the poignant entry, ‘Mommy died on this day and I wish I could be dead too.’
Without comment, Mrs Groak read on, stroking the paper smooth and flat, turned the black pages in the same manner, then closed the book.
Minnie had watched her with open impatience. ‘Well? What do you think, then, Mum? What should I do with it?’
Mrs Groak pursed her rubbery lips, so like her daughter’s, and considered the matter.
‘It’s funny, that book is,’ she said at last. ‘Funny.’
‘What, I know it’s funny! Doesn’t take much to see that, does it? What I want to know is, what am I going to do with it now?’
But Mrs Groak never left a topic till she had sucked it as dry as one of the fly carcasses discarded in the corner of a spider’s web.
‘That there’s someone who’s lost her mother when she was a little thing. Took it badly, she did.’ She remarked on the phenomenon without pity.
‘Yes, but –’
‘Maybe taking it badly still. Maybe that’s why she wants to show the vicar, so vicar can help her. Tell her her mother’s gone to a better place, maybe. That’s what they tell people, if they’re daft enough to believe it.’
Minnie was not entirely convinced by this analysis.
‘Doesn’t seem likely, not after all these years. Seems a funny thing.’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘But what am I going to do with it now? No use to me, that book isn’t. And there’s them that goes around just looking to cause trouble.’
‘Shouldn’t rightly have opened it then, should you? Not for something like this, I mean,’ she added unreasonably.
With a feeling of injury, Minnie pointed out that but for the drawback that she hadn’t known the contents beforehand, she would indeed have adopted this wiser plan. She suggested, not very hopefully, that she might just throw the nasty thing away.
Mrs Groak sucked her teeth. ‘Can’t do that, my girl. Not by what you’ve told me. You can wrap it up again, same as it was, can’t you?’
‘Paper’s torn.’ Minnie looked gloomily at the flimsy wrapping which in spite of caution had ripped under her attack. ‘I can put on a new wrapper – just gets thrown away anyway, it does. But what am I going to do with it then?’
‘Well, can’t post it, can you? That Betty Bailey who does the post in the shop snoops into everything.’
‘What if I take it back to the church, right where I found it? Nobody’d know then.’
‘Have to be careful, you would – see nobody saw you putting it back. But I reckon that’d be best. You get that done right away whenever it’s dark my girl, before someone finds out and stirs up trouble.’
So Minnie Groak wrapped up the pathetic little testament once more, addressed it with a blotchy ballpoint in her illiterate capitals and putting on her long raincoat set off once the lights had come on and a damp January dusk had set in.
But to her dismay, as she walked down the main street, raffia basket in her hand, she passed not one but two police patrols – bobbies on the beat, a sight not seen in Stretton Noble these ten years. As she neared the church, she could see two of them chatting under the lamp right outside the lych gate. They fell silent as she approached, so she marched straight on, feeling nonetheless as if they might be able to see right through the sides of the basket to the illicit package within.
Beyond the church, she turned up an alleyway into a back lane and stood, hand on bony chest, feeling her heart pounding. That did give her a turn, all right! And what was she to do now?
She daren’t go past the church again, that was for sure. She daren’t leave it till morning either, in case someone started asking awkward questions.
Minnie had been walking without conscious direction and instinctively had taken the turn for home. Just ahead of her now lay the vicarage, deserted at the moment with no lights and no one about. If she popped it through the letter box, chances were no one would be any the wiser. Anyone might have seen it lying on the step and brought it round to the house, anyone.
She dodged the fluttering police tape that had been strung across the gateway, and carried out her plan without mishap. She returned home feeling thoroughly ill-used; seldom had she expended so much effort for so little worthwhile result, and she still felt shaky when she thought about the policemen.
It gave her another nasty turn when two more turned up on the Groak doorstep next morning to take her fingerprints. It was, they explained, purely for the purposes of elimination and they would not be kept permanently, but even so after submitting to their ministrations Minnie’s guilty conscience left her, as she put it, ‘just a bag of nerves’ without even the spirit to go along to the shop to find out what was happening today.
10
It had been a quiet night, Rod Vezey reflected thankfully as he yawned a jaw-breaking yawn at his desk on Saturday morning. There had been saturation policing, but no one had anything to report which seemed, either to them at the time or to him reading their reports now, in the least suspicious. Perhaps the firebug was exhausted too. He certainly was, having gone to bed late, risen early and slept badly in between, expecting at any moment that the phone would ring summoning him to yet another disaster. He had trained himself long ago not to need much sleep, but he felt jaded today, lacking the clarity of mind he wanted.
In some ways, of course, the lack of activity was a disappointment, since success based on pure detection was rare. Most of the time, in policework, the way the job had been done told you who had done it, because they had done it that way so often before. There was the small problem of proof, but at least you knew where to start.
Apart from that, you had your informers, unsavoury but vital, and then the villians unlucky enough or inept enough to be caught in the act. That must cover fully ninety-nine per cent of cases solved.
This, unfortunately, looked like coming into the one per cent category. And after wading through last night’s ration of turgid prose (At 01.14 I was proceeding along Letham Lane’: did none of them just walk?) he couldn’t see that they were any further forward. It would have been nice if one of those expensive police patrols could just have picked her up as she struck the next match.
He sighed. That was the trouble with high-profile policing; criminals went to ground and kept their heads down till it stopped. He cherished no illusions that she might have got something out of her sys
tem. Robert’s warning hadn’t told him anything he didn’t know already; this one wouldn’t stop until somebody stopped her, or she went so barking mad that they were pointing at her in the streets. She might pause, though, pause for days, weeks or months, and the budget wouldn’t stand for more than another night or two at this level, especially since Miss Moon – thank God! – seemed to be recovering satisfactorily. One accidental death and two cases of arson did not justify the open-ended commitment of unlimited police resources, even if middle-class Stretton Noble was shrieking its collective head off.
Fortunately Cooper, the Chief Constable (‘Our ‘Enery’ to his men) was one of the few human members of the species he had ever come across, but even ‘Enery had wanted a direct report, and had finished the conversation by saying, more or less humorously, ‘All I ask, Vezey, is that you come up with something to get them all off my back. Yesterday I even had my ear bent by some ancient colonel who had my old Dad as his RSM about forty years ago.’
So that didn’t make things any easier, and once the Press got over their Christmas hangovers and realized that this was a juicy one, it would be worse still. He got up from his desk to make himself another cup of the strong black instant coffee that they claimed did terrible things to you, but without which he would be entirely unable to function.
It was like watching a shadow show behind a screen. He had had this sensation before while working with Robert Moon; he could let you see what was taking place, but was powerless to hand you the evidence that would rip the screen and expose the reality behind it.
He could see the woman he was looking for, could see her stress, her anxiety, her pain. He could see her desperately striking back at a world that must be punished for – what? Some failure of love, Robert had said, but how many lucky adults could say that this did not feature at some important part of their lives?
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