by Bart Casey
“Thank you very much,” said Margaret. “It means so much to hear you say it.”
“I also wanted to let you know about a change in the investigation of all this. It’s very likely—in fact, it is certain—that the vicar’s death will now be ruled ‘suspicious.’ That’s in light of how all this began, with Verger Andrew finding him unconscious, and then the doctors thinking it was from a blow struck on his head, not just a fall, and now the robbery. Our village force will never take the lead on any investigation where a homicide may be suspected. Detectives at the county level or higher will be assigned. That will mean, at some point, that all of you here—Verger Andrew, Mister White, and you, Miss Hamilton—will surely be interviewed again, as well as everyone else who had touched the case in any significant way. That might seem redundant and very annoying, but, as you can imagine, we will want the most experienced and professional people to help us with this. We are all dedicated to finding the truth, most especially when we are dealing with the death of someone as respected and beloved as your dear father, miss. While we won’t be in charge of the continuing investigation, please call me directly if you need me to intervene in any way. I would take it as an honor to help you after the vicar’s twenty-five years of service to us all.”
“Thank you, chief. That’s a great comfort.”
“We’ll also be keeping an eye on your safety here while the investigation is on. Nothing intrusive. Just keeping an eye on the vicarage round the clock during our regular patrols.”
“Again, thank you.”
“We’ll be going now, miss. You’ll be in our prayers.”
Then Verger Andrew walked them to the door as Stephen and Margaret sank back onto the sofa, suddenly very tired with it all.
~
The next two dull days of approaching autumn went by without Stephen or Margaret really living them. The loss of Margaret’s father colored each day with a persistent ache that began on awakening and continued throughout the day.
Stephen helped Margaret with the obituaries for the Village Advertiser, the newspaper for the larger town nearby, and the local paper where the vicar had grown up. Stepping back to write them only underlined how Margaret’s father had just disappeared in an instant from the normality of the previous twenty-five years. When they started writing, Margaret rummaged around in her father’s desk for his old CV and biography, but then just fell down onto the desk chair and cried for five minutes with her elbows propped up holding her head. Stephen just let her alone to get it out.
Verger Andrew had been right about the other logistics after the death. After Margaret placed the obituaries, she had to speak to reporters from the Advertiser and also to the local BBC East office in Norwich, who were now onto the case. Now the funeral was set for Friday morning, with viewings for the public on the day before at the local funeral home. Stephen would be at her side for all that.
At the funeral service, the bishop presided. The children and teachers from St. George’s, where the vicar had been the chaplain, walked down the hill to fill the back of the church by 10:20 a.m., the boys on one side and the girls across the aisle. All the children were delighted at the morning off from their normal routine and the youngest were giggly in the pews. Stephen had to walk over and put the fear of God back into everyone with a stern glare. Then he returned to sit next to Margaret and her family at the front. He saw the police and the fire brigade were well represented. After the service and homily, the burial would be in the clergy’s small section of the churchyard, just next to the wall of the chancel and nearest to the altar, where all the clerical bodies were placed facing east so as to be in prime position with their flock on resurrection day.
The church choir opened the service with the vicar’s favorite funeral hymn, “Be not afraid, I go before you always.” Margaret had heard it scores of times when her father presided. The rest seemed to proceed in a blur until the reading of Psalm 23 just before the bishop was to speak. Vicar Hamilton had always said the King James Version of it was the perfection of prayer, and Margaret knew it had the words her father would have wanted:
The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul;
he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for
his Name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death,
I will fear no evil; for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table for me in the presence
of my enemies;
Thou anointest my head with oil;
my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Margaret had never liked the bishop, although her father seemed quite content with him as his boss. To her, he seemed to move as if standing on a kind of float, cruising down the aisle of the church, or even inside the vicarage, as if he were standing on a low cloud that lifted him along while he could turn side to side, dispensing downward benedictions with each slight dip of his hand. But that was the job, she supposed. Stephen actually felt her stiffen as the bishop ascended the stairs of the pulpit and set his hands melodramatically along the sides of the lectern, peering down on the congregation from under his ridiculous glittering miter.
The words seemed harmless and appropriate enough as the bishop remembered Vicar Hamilton’s twenty-five years of leadership and service to the community, building up to the possible foul play that put him into his coma and final days. That’s when the sage bishop moved on to counsel the congregation on how to behave going forward.
He abandoned his prepared eulogy and decided to ad-lib his memory of another tragic scene—the one at Enniskillen, five years before. “It was in November 1987,” the bishop intoned, “that the British people were reminded of the Christian way to handle the blind and dumb adversity of an evil act. Eleven were killed and sixty-four injured by the terrorist bombing of the Remembrance Day parade in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, and even five years later, one victim still remains in a coma. Buried in the rubble that day were a sixty-two-year-old draper, Gordon Wilson, and his daughter Marie, a nurse. Wilson held his daughter as she died; her last words were ‘Daddy, I love you very much.’ As Wilson told that story to the nation’s hushed listeners on the BBC, he then astonished everyone by adding, ‘But I bear no ill will. I bear no grudge. Dirty sort of talk is not going to bring her back to life. She was a great wee lassie. She loved her profession. She was a pet. She’s dead. She’s in heaven and we shall meet again. I will pray for these men who killed her tonight and every night.’ Now faced with the tragedy that has befallen this village today, we must all embrace this spirit of Enniskillen.”
While the hymns and Psalm 23 had the desired effect of comforting Margaret, the bishop’s words on Enniskillen reignited her soul, but hardly in the way the bishop intended. Her coloring was back and she wasn’t stunned or moping as just before. Stephen had his hands full just restraining her from leaping up and strangling the bishop, now suspended above them in his lofty perch. At the burial, Margaret couldn’t even speak to him, which he probably put down to great grief. Luckily the plan was for her aunt from Yorkshire to step in to deliver the family’s thanks for his lordship’s pontification.
“Forgive the bloody murderers who hit him on his head,” hissed Margaret to Stephen. “I want to cut their bloody balls off,” she spat out, finally shaking off his arm. “To think that arsehole would stand up to everyone in the village and say let it all go, let’s forgive the murderers and move on—what an idiot! He’s campaigning for his own canonization, for god’s sake. You mark my words, I’m going to get to the bottom of whoever did this and make sure they pay, all right—they’ll damn well pay.”
Well, tho
ught Stephen, Margaret is back.
Margaret had not cooled down very much by the time of her interview with the new detectives Saturday.
In a light rain, she walked over to the local police station for the ten o’clock meeting with the heavyweights from the county police. Everything started out cordially enough. For the first fifteen minutes or so, she chatted over coffee with the two men interviewing her. One man was a bit older, very polished, and in a good suit, and the other was short, stocky, and a bit rougher-looking—he was quiet at the start.
Answering the first questions from the older man, she told them when she had heard the story of the papers from her father in her regular telephone calls to check in. Yes, he was very excited, and very glad that he had Stephen White, her former fiancé, right in the village to help him understand just what they were.
“And do you know how Mister White became involved with all this, Miss Hamilton?” asked the second man, the quieter detective.
“I believe my father called him right at the start...just after he had found the papers in a box in the vault. He saw they were very old, in an ancient style of handwriting, and he knew that Stephen had studied those sorts of things at Oxford. So he called him to come over. I think they actually took the rest of the papers out from the burial vault together, and then carried them up into the vicarage to dry out.”
“Did your father call anyone else to come look at the papers?” continued the man.
“I don’t think so. I mean, I think he wanted Stephen to help him understand what was there first—the likely dating and something of what the papers were about. And, I must say, Stephen told him they were from the precise period that he’d studied back in college, so he was obviously someone who could give my father a good answer.”
“Doesn’t it seem that as the vicar of the church your father should have alerted his superiors that something of such an unusual nature had been discovered?” countered the man, looking at her rather closely for her reaction.
“Well, there was the further point that the tomb these things were in belonged to a family member of ours: a direct relative on my late mother’s side. So I think he was aware that it was somewhat personal to our own family. Doesn’t seem very odd to me. And he certainly let Verger Andrew know what he’d found. He might have told his church secretary and superiors as well. I’m not sure of that. But he probably did. I mean, it all came out in the village newspaper soon enough.” Margaret felt herself sitting up a bit straighter as she made her response.
“Actually, miss, we have heard your father kept quite quiet about the details. This seemed to provoke a degree of speculation about ‘treasure in the tombs’ and so on. Did he mention he was holding back about details to you?”
“No. I mean, I think he was probably waiting to hear more about it all from Mister White, who was looking everything over.” She found herself choosing her words very carefully now and she felt her color changing.
“Apparently, Mister White was removing quantities of these papers from the vicarage, allegedly to study them off site. Were you aware of that?”
“I understood he was taking things home and reviewing them in the evening and in moments he had free to do so—I mean, he has a full-time job at school and the new term was just starting.”
“Did your father mention he was keeping track of what was being held at the vicarage and what was being removed—some sort of list, perhaps?”
“No. In fact, I think part of what Stephen—I mean, Mister White—was doing was making up an inventory of exactly what the papers were. A descriptive record. He wanted to make sure that was in place before the papers were sent to any outside experts for review, to make sure we had a list of what was there.”
“Doesn’t that seem to give Mister White too much of a free hand with all this?”
“It’s a question of trust, isn’t it? Mister White and I were engaged. He was almost a member of our family, too, and my father was very fond of him—and vice versa.”
“But that was all broken off, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but only because I—I mean we—wanted to take more time and not be so rushed right after graduating college and so on.” Margaret found she was surprising herself by stretching the truth a bit.
“You seem to be very defensive just now, miss,” interrupted the older detective, taking charge of the dialogue again.
“Well, I must say, I am a bit caught out by how you seem to be attacking Mister White—oh damn it, I mean, how you are attacking Stephen. When he’s been so great about all of this, helping my father, being back with me at the hospital, and now going through all the horrors of the funeral and so on.”
“I’m sorry if we seem to have provoked you, Miss Hamilton,” said the older detective in an exceptionally calm voice, impervious to the way Margaret was heating up. “But, as a reporter, you must be aware of how the situation could look from another perspective other than your own at this time. Mister White has had carte blanche with what could be a very valuable trove of antique documents. He inserted himself into a position of influence with your father—who has now been the victim of what seems to be a vicious crime—and now he is suddenly back at your side during what has become a very vulnerable time for you.”
“Well, it’s damn well because he was so close to us because he liked my father. And because he is probably still in love with me—and me with him. If you can’t see that yourselves, then you’re just clueless at your jobs as detectives, or whoever the hell you are.”
~
A few minutes after that, just as Margaret stormed out of the front door of the police station, Stephen sat unaware in a corridor on the other side of the building, looking at his watch and noting that it was now thirty minutes after his own interview had been scheduled to start. Comparing notes with Margaret later, they realized their time slots had been arranged to overlap deliberately so they wouldn’t be able to see each other in between the interviews.
When he was finally shown into the same room where Margaret had recently exploded, the detectives were not yet fully composed. At first Stephen had thought he was on friendly ground, and happy there was a coffee there for him. But then they led him through an intense reliving of his fight night in the pub with Miranda and Tony, and even his life history, with a special focus on “Miss Hamilton.”
Driving away after the session, Stephen resented how the detectives tried to make him feel like a despicable loser. Yes, he was a headmaster working with young boys in the village. No, he was not, nor had he ever been, a homosexual. Yes, he had been sleeping with Miranda when the vicar called him. Yes, later at the pub she told him she was pregnant and he insulted her. Yes, her big brother Tony then came over and punched him. Yes, he almost ran him over in the car park. Yes, back at the start of all this he helped the vicar lift the treasure from the tomb. Yes, he took the most promising items away from the vicar and back to his flat. No, he had not given the vicar a list of what he had taken. Yes, he intercepted Miss Hamilton in the waiting room where she was crying over her comatose father. Yes, he had spent every night afterward with her. No, he wasn’t lurking around Miss Hamilton, spinning a foul and evil web to ensnare her with his affections. And yes, he had even taken her away to Oxford—but not to relive their happy college days.
Perhaps he should just drive over to the river outside the village, put stones in his coat pocket, and walk in to drown himself, like Virginia Woolf in River Ouse.
~
Margaret was waiting for him at the vicarage. As he parked his car, he decided there was nothing to be gained from letting himself complain to her about his rough treatment. He would just try to suck all of that up, and stay fresh.
“How was your interview?” she began with mock brightness.
“Fine, very uplifting,” said Stephen. “At least they can’t think that I’m hiding anything, because I’m obviously pure crap.”
“Not to worry. I know from work experience that no one ever feels good after interacting
with our police force—myself included. I even shouted them down when I met with them. They do deliberately try to provoke you, you know. They hope to catch you out.”
Margaret told him how she had defended him. As she played back parts of her interrogation, Stephen couldn’t help but think how passionate she was. Perhaps she was on her way to coming back to him, he hoped. She had smashed each of the questions back at them as if she were wielding a cricket bat.
“At the end,” she said, “I surprised myself—because I blurted out you were probably helping so much because you still loved me. And then I said I probably still loved you, too.”
“Margaret—” Stephen began, but she cut him off.
“No, Stephen, I never went off you. You must know that. That wasn’t the reason I had to stop the engagement. I can see that all now. It was just being scared about getting boxed into life in this village as a ‘headmaster’s wife.’ I’d been looking forward to going out into the world since I was about eight, I suppose. The BBC job had just the sort of ‘world orientation’ I was hoping for, and it was all going so well. Then when you took over your father’s place at the school—and I know you had to do it, and I respect you for doing it—but it was as if any hope of the future I’d dreamed of was going away. That’s not how to go forward into a marriage, is it?”
“Well, it was a confusing and difficult time,” said Stephen, trying to be as honest and open as she was. “Everything just seemed to shift at once, with my father suddenly dead and my mother so injured, and then just the bald fact that the new school term was supposed to start in September—and I was sucked in. It wasn’t what I wanted either.”
They just let the silence hang in the air for a few moments.