Mrs Canning led the way into what she designated the vicar’s study. It was his study, but it was also—patently—the family living room. Masters had visions of young Mrs Canning being forced to beat a retreat to the kitchen whenever her husband received callers on private business. He was there now. The chair he occupied was high-backed and winged and covered in faded and much patched chintz. But it was old and comfortable. It was obvious from the way he occupied it that it had been tried over long years as a nest of rest and had never been found wanting. The vicar was sunk into it, with his legs straight out in front of him, ankles crossed, shoes kicked off. He was blissfully asleep. He had a peaceful air about him as though his whole being knew that, being a good man, he could enjoy the sleep of the just.
“It’s a pity to wake him,” said Green, his sarcasm heavy enough to drive piles through granite. “Let’s go away and leave him to sleep it off.”
Masters shot him a glance of exasperation and hoped Mrs Canning would pay no attention to his colleague’s words. He need have had no worry. Mrs Canning woke him with a kiss. “Come along, old sleepy,” she said, planting the kiss on his forehead. “You’ve got visitors.”
Canning woke with difficulty, as if drugged. When he recognised Masters and Webb, he struggled to sit up straight and to put his feet into his shoes at the same time.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you again quite so soon, Superintendent. Please forgive. . . .”
“Nothing to forgive,” said Green. “If I’d had the chance I’d have had a zizz myself after lunch on a hot day like this.”
“Chief Detective Inspector Green, vicar,” said Masters.
“Oh, hello. Please sit down.”
There were plenty of places to sit—of one sort or another. Mrs Canning chose a pouffe, although she referred to it as a humpty, which Masters privately thought to be a far more attractive name for it. “May I stay?” She asked nobody in particular, but in a voice which intimated that she proposed to do so, come what may.
Green said: “We’re not going to eat him, you know.”
She gave him a look which suggested that she didn’t really know whether she could trust Green not to go that far. But it was clear she was there to protect her mate from men who had already proved—by giving him too much whisky—that they didn’t have his best interests at heart.
“Please stay, ma’am,” said Masters. He turned to face Canning. “Vicar, this morning you told us that during his conversation with you on the afternoon you met him, Melada mentioned another man.”
“Did I?”
“The friend whom he wished to phone to come and pick him up.”
“Oh yes, I remember. Rex somebody or other.”
“Rex Belton.”
“I didn’t hear the surname.”
“The name of the man whose body was recovered from the well is Rex Belton.”
The vicar’s face showed his sorrow at the news. “His friend, too? I take it you are saying it is the same Rex?”
“Rex Belton and John Melada were close friends.”
“This is dreadful. He was . . . murdered, too?”
“He was dead before he went into the water, and dead men don’t throw themselves down wells.”
“Couldn’t he have . . . died near the well and when he . . . collapsed . . . have somehow fallen down the shaft?”
“Chance in a million,” grunted Green. “In ten million, in fact.”
“I see.”
“Vicar,” said Masters after a pause, “I know you regard these two deaths as a great tragedy but we, as policemen, regard whoever caused them as a menace who may not yet have finished his grisly work.”
Canning nodded miserably. “Fiend,” said his wife. “Whoever has done it is a sacrilegious fiend.”
“You must of course take that view,” began Masters.
“No,” said Canning. “Whatever he has done, whoever he may be, he is one of God’s children. Not a fiend, my dear. Fallen, but not a fiend.”
Masters again seized his chance. “My concern, vicar, irrespective of your view of the killer, is to protect the living. To this end, I want you to tell me, in the greatest detail, what transpired during the conversation which took place in your car whilst you were driving Melada and Happy to the garage here in Beckby.”
Canning shook his head doggedly. “I told you I was not involved in the conversation. Nothing of note was mentioned that I can tell you about.”
“Ah!” said Green. “I don’t believe you, vicar.”
Mrs Canning, scandalised, turned on Green. “How dare you?”
Green was not abashed. “You heard, Mrs C. I don’t believe your old man. Look at the facts for yourself, love. Your old man is a great talker. He loves the sound of his own voice. Do you really believe he could keep quiet for yoinks while his two new friends chatted away?”
“He said he was left out of it by them.”
“Think again, missus. Your hubby is doing a kindness to two extrovert people with whom he’s just been gabbing twenty to the dozen in the church, and they ignore him in the car?” He switched to the vicar. “Which of them was sitting next to you?”
“He was.”
“Laughing, smoking, chatting?”
“Yes.”
Green turned back to Mrs Canning. “Your old man is a good parson. He doesn’t like telling lies. He tried to qualify one just now. He said: ‘Nothing of note was mentioned,’ but then he added, ‘that I can tell you about.’ Well, it’s not because his memory’s bad. He’s proved that. So it must be that he thinks what he heard was privileged information.”
“My husband is a minister of the church. Like lawyers, much of what they hear is. . . .”
“Don’t stop,” said Green. “You were going to say sacrosanct. Or something like that. Like in a confessional.”
“Yes.”
“So you do think your husband heard something that day. Something detrimental to Melada. Something that he can’t tell us about. Well, I’ll tell you something. I agree with you, love. But his attitude is a load of bunkum. Melada is dead. So is Belton. They can’t be hurt by anything that’s said now. But probably somebody else can be saved. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Parsons save their souls? Policemen save their lives? Come on, tell him to open up.”
“Why should I?”
“For the best of reasons, love.”
“What’s that?”
“Because we don’t know and you don’t know if he isn’t to be the next victim. Let’s face it, the murderer has certainly got some sort of fixation about that church, and nobody’s closer connected to it than your old man.”
Green had frightened her.
“Do you really think my husband is in danger?”
“I’ve just said we don’t know. If we did, we wouldn’t be here asking questions. We’d be out there putting the joker in question behind bars.”
“If my husband answered your questions, how would it help?”
“He may give us some fact to help us identify the murderer. Some bit of knowledge he doesn’t know he has. But any information about the victim could help us find the killer. That’s all we want.”
“No,” said Canning decisively. “Not a word.”
“Excellent, vicar, thank you,” said Masters getting to his feet. “So definite a refusal to speak can only mean that you did learn something that day and you think that whatever it was was of so serious a nature as to be equivalent to a confession. And I can’t help but remember that confessions are usually admissions of sin or guilt.”
“You twist words,” accused Canning.
“It’s better than twisting necks,” said Green brutally. Then he changed his tone. “What are you holding back? The fact that Melada incriminated himself in some way? To say so wouldn’t harm him now. In fact he could purge himself of his guilt—if that’s the right phrase—through you, if you were to act as his mouthpiece now and so help to prevent further crime.”
The vicar shook his head, n
ot firmly, but indecisively. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Try a bit of muscular Christianity,” suggested Masters. “Don’t be indecisive. Be active in doing good.”
He seemed to have struck the right note with Canning, who asked: “If what I have to say is not . . . not relevant to your case, will you assure me that it will be kept secret?”
“As quiet as the grave,” said Green.
“But some graves don’t remain silent, as we know,” Canning reminded him.
“I promise you absolute discretion, vicar,” said Masters. “Absolute. We shall take no notes nor will we make any subsequently. And if we have to use your information, overtly that is, I shall consult you before doing so.”
“In that case, I’ll take your word.”
“Thank you. Now, is there a lot to tell us? If so, I suggest you emulate your excellent performance of this morning so that Mr Green can judge what a reliable raconteur you are. I sang your praises over lunch, and I believe he thought I was exaggerating your powers.”
Canning brightened considerably at this verbal applause. “There is quite a lot to recount. I’d better do my best to recall everything so that any elusive fact which may be lurking there will come out, even if it should not be immediately recognised.”
“Good,” said Green. “Do you mind if I smoke? No objections? Have a fag, Mrs C.” Green held out the crumpled packet.
“No thank you. But there is an ashtray on the mantel.”
When they were finally settled, Canning began.
“Melada sat in front with me. Happy was at the back, leaning forward with her arms resting on the backs of our seats for the most part. Melada smoked. He rolled his own in dark brown papers, which were unfamiliar to me but which he said were liquor-ice flavoured.
“As we started up, I asked Happy how old she was and she told me she was twenty-eight. I expressed my surprise—I thought she was little more than twenty—but Melada laughed when I said so and then he declared she had been his mistress for more than four years.”
“Did she deny it?” asked his wife.
“No. But this increased my surprise because I would have said she far out-ranked him in intelligence, so I asked what she had done before meeting Melada and she replied she had been too busy taking a first class degree in zoology and wild-life conservancy to worry too much about the mating habits of men. Her words, not mine. But it began to dawn on me that they were totally companionable. They totally accepted one another. And this, too, surprised me, because I judged Melada to be a womaniser. I hinted as much to him. It was Happy who replied.
“She said—in so many words—that he was a great womaniser: an accomplishment not entirely due to his own volition.” Canning looked across at Masters. “And it was at that point that I virtually dropped out of the conversation. All the verbal exchanges thereafter were between the two of them, although much of what was said was addressed to me.”
“I understand, Mr Canning. Please go on.”
“Happy said that women just went for Melada in a big way—personable and physically attractive women. So most of his friends were surprised that he lived with her, Happy, who was—she said it self-deprecatingly, you’ll understand—far from being a woman of striking beauty. His friends were not surprised that Happy had consented to team up with him, in view of his magnetic attraction for women, but they were surprised that she had stayed with him for so long because he had, while making no effort to conceal the fact, conducted affairs with at least half a dozen other women during the period of his relationship with Happy.
“I was really too dismayed to ask questions. Country folk are probably as promiscuous as people like the two I was with, but they don’t parade it—flaunt it, almost. Melada however joined in and gave me an unasked for explanation. The essence of what he had to say—with much laughter—was that their friends didn’t fully realise that in Happy he had found what so few men are lucky enough to find: a girl from the exact mould to suit him mentally, physically and sexually. That is why he had stayed with her and she with him even though he constantly fell from grace due to the blatant opportunities offered to him by other women. And I certainly got the impression, Mr Masters, that because of her suitability for him, Happy could manage Melada—something I imagine no other woman had ever been able to do.”
“Would you say, vicar, that one of Happy’s qualifications for the job of Melada’s mistress was that she was as sexually voracious as he appears to have been?”
“If I had to guess, I would have said undoubtedly. Not that she said anything salacious in my hearing, but she had what I can best describe as almost a possessive air, full of sexual promise. I don’t know whether that will convey anything to you?”
“Most graphic, thank you, vicar.”
“She told me that Melada did everything with a laugh. She had noticed that I glanced at him from time to time during his outbursts. She said it was both his saving grace and his downfall. People liked him because he never appeared to take himself seriously, but had he been more temperate he could have been considered an able man. He never, apparently, stuck at anything for long, so that—as she put it—his list of jobs and enterprises was almost as long as the catalogue of women he had seduced.
“She confessed that in many ways he was lucky. Happily extrovert, he interviewed well. He had always managed to get himself a job when he tried—even, apparently, jobs for which he was totally unqualified. But he never kept one. It seems that employers found him out quite quickly and then, apparently, it was a toss up as to whether they grew disenchanted with him before he grew disenchanted with them. Whichever happened—according to Happy—they always parted company on the best of terms and, as a consequence, Melada had a host of acquaintances, all of whom regarded him as a likeable rascal. And that, she said, suited him admirably because whenever the need arose—as it often did in his life—he always knew somebody who might help with information he wanted or—and here I’m guessing—who could suggest some course of action which might be profitable to someone like himself not possessed of too many scruples.”
“You got the impression he was unscrupulous?”
“In business? Yes. As you will hear later, I think I have reason for my view. I think Melada would have made use of his best friend for profit—and then laugh it off.”
“Did he say what work he was doing at the time.”
“I got the impression he was resting between ventures. And that is why St John’s attracted him so greatly. Also, he said to Happy that he would like to get a mature student grant to read law.”
“He what?” grunted Green.
“It surprised Happy, too. She asked what he thought they would live on while he was studying and he replied: ‘Whatever you can make, love—plus the eighteen hundred I’d get.’”
“May I break in?” asked Masters. “Did Happy say what her job was, if any?”
“There was no mention of it. Not even a hint.”
“Thank you.”
Canning continued.
“She accused Melada of having looked into the business of mature student grants without telling her. He laughed it off, but then said he’d met a snag, and that was that even if he got the grant and a place at university the legal professions would never admit him.”
Masters said: “Stop there, vicar, if you’d like to. If it is easier for you, you needn’t tell us the reason. We can guess. The reason why a man would be debarred from a career in law is because he has been convicted of some crime. I suspect that is what you were uneasy about telling us.”
“One of the things,” admitted Canning.
“I’ll get on to records,” said Webb.
“Apparently it was for fraud. He did time. Happy told him she always knew his past would catch up with him and then said—and again I quote—‘You only got off the last time because the fuzz hadn’t quite enough evidence.’ To which he replied quite blithely: ‘True. Enough to put me in court, but not enough to put me inside.’
Then he went on to say that we have a good legal system here. He admired it and that’s why he would like to join in. He said that when he thought how much he’d paid his lawyer, he reckoned he personally could make a fortune at it.
“She said that if the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief held good he’d make a sensation as a criminal lawyer because he could certainly do the necessary talking to be a real mouthpiece. And that was the end of that particular bit of chat. The subject changed. He said it was because he couldn’t read law that he proposed to buy St John’s.”
“What on earth for?” asked Green.
Canning’s face clouded. “I must be honest with you and confess that I can’t decide whether what followed was a hoax—an attempt to pull my leg—or whether they were serious. It was so difficult to decide with Melada laughing aloud at everything, whether humorous or not.”
“We can appreciate the difficulty,” said Masters, “and we will bear it in mind as we listen.”
“I sensed—and I believed my feelings to be true at the time, and I still do, with the proviso I have just made—that when they got on to the subject of buying the church, Happy was . . . well, unhappy. I think she thought her man was obsessionally bent on buying St John’s.”
“He’d told her she could fix the price,” Masters reminded him.
“Even so, I think that she herself had experienced a love-hate relationship for the old church and she was filled with foreboding. That may sound as though I was exaggerating in the light of what has since happened, but she stated, in that rather serious little drawl of hers, that never before had one of his proposed ventures caused her concern, and they both knew that some of those had been hairy enough at times.” Canning looked across at his wife. “Please forgive some of my language my dear, but whenever possible I am using their words.”
She smiled at him. “You’re doing very well, Walter. Isn’t he, Mr Masters?”
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