Late of This Parish

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘Would he do that? Seeing he thought such a lot of him?’

  ‘If his high moral principles prevented him agreeing to his daughter marrying a divorced man, he’d hardly be likely to stick at shopping Sebastian Oliver, however much he thought of him. It must’ve been causing him a bit of heart-searching, though.’

  ‘And would it put the wind up Oliver enough to kill Willard for it?’

  ‘It might. Oh yes, it might, if he were involved in that bomb plot.’

  ‘He had an alibi for the time of Willard’s death. Which depends of course on Phyllida Thorne. And since she’s up to her neck in SARA she’d be only too pleased to give it.’

  ‘It looks,’ Mayo said, ‘like another ride out to Wyvering. Sebastian Oliver – plus his girlfriend. Not to mention another talk with Danny boy’s sister while we’re out there.’

  Events, however, were to overtake them. It was to be some time before either of them were able to speak to Ruth Lampeter.

  CHAPTER 17

  Catherine Oliver was in the Rectory kitchen, making pastry. She was well aware of her limitations as a cook and had been pleased if alarmed when Lionel, the previous Christmas, had bought her a food processor – thinking, no doubt, of delicious cakes and even homemade bread. You couldn’t go wrong, making pastry in one of those things, everyone said, but Catherine had found she could. Reaching for the off switch now after the required second or two, as the instruction book advised, she decided it couldn’t possibly have taken such a short time to bind the mixture together. Perhaps she’d better give it another few minutes, just to be sure. But when she took the dough out and began to roll it, it felt as solid and looked as grey as her pastry always did.

  It was no good, she wasn’t in the mood for cooking. She couldn’t concentrate on anything. What on earth was Sebastian thinking about, taking himself off like that, without a word to anyone since supper last night? And it was now half past three! It wasn’t like him. Why?

  A few minutes later, she knew, unbelievably, why.

  When Kite drew up the car once more in Parson’s Place, they found Wainwright there before them, parked outside the Rectory. The constable, looking as though life would have taken a simpler turn had he suddenly been put in charge of the Vice Squad or maybe the whole of the Metropolitan Police Force rather than the lawless parish of Castle Wyvering, took all of three minutes to relate what had happened.

  ‘A goner?’ asked Mayo.

  ‘No, sir, not quite, but very bad, according to the doctor. He’d been hit on the temple, see, and must’ve been laying there all night. They’ve taken him into the Lavenstock General but they don’t give much for his chances.’

  ‘Who found him?’

  ‘Mrs Wentworth that lives up on Main Street, just before she went to pick the kiddies up from school. Apparently the little ’un, young Damian, had been up there yesterday with his dad and lost one of the bits off his remote-controlled car. He was that upset she promised to go and look for it while he was at school. She wouldn’t have seen the body if she hadn’t been searching around. He’d been thrown into what used to be the moat, where the long grass grows. Rector and Mrs Oliver are both at the hospital.’

  And a PC at Sebastian’s bedside in case he came round, though according to the medics he wouldn’t remember anything immediately previous to the attack if he did.

  All the routine steps would have to be repeated, house-to-house inquiries, taking statements, the whole lengthy rigmarole. The difference being there was no corpse, this time. Just a flattened area of long wet grass and weeds where Sebastian Oliver had lain. Apparently no attempt had been made to cover him. He had simply been thrown into the moat from the path and left for dead. The moat was deep, choked with grass, nettles and giant hogweed, and at that point shaded by a willow which grew at the side of the path and overhung the moat, so he’d been effectively hidden from any casual passer-by.

  ‘Could’ve lain there for days without being seen, I reckon,’ Dexter, the SOCO Sergeant, informed Mayo, ‘except this woman was looking more closely than most. Lucky he’s still in the land of the living.’

  But only just. Not giving anything away at the hospital, they reported his condition as ‘unchanged’.

  A methodical search of the surrounding area was already taking place when Mayo arrived. The entrance to the castle grounds had been put out of limits to anyone except the police personnel; the few square yards around where the body had lain and a section of the path had been taped off. ‘This seems to be where he was attacked, sir.’ Dexter waved to a point on the path. ‘We’ve found traces of blood and there’s the heel marks showing where he was dragged before being lifted and thrown down into the moat.’

  He had been hit on the head with something hard, heavy and blunt. Ison, they were informed, had met the ambulance at the hospital, so he would have seen the wound before it was treated and might, with luck, have some idea as to what constituted the said instrument of attack.

  Later, when Mayo telephoned him from Wainwright’s office, a room built on to the side of his police house, Ison said he reckoned it must have been something with a rounded end, a cosh or a sand-filled sock, something like that. Even one of your police truncheons, he added, risking a joke. ‘Fracture of the left temporal bone, which means the killer was right-handed. He’ll have had a fair amount of blood on his clothes.’

  ‘Apparently Oliver’s mother last saw him just after supper last night, Henry, but she heard him go out about eleven. Can we assume that’s about when he was attacked?’

  ‘If he was, why he didn’t get pneumonia on top of everything’s a mystery, they tell me that moat’s only dry in a manner of speaking. Always damp in the bottom, like a ditch. But yes, I suppose it could’ve happened about then. Must have a cast-iron constitution as well as a thick skull. It was a blow hefty enough to kill, whether that was intended or not. Not much more I can tell you at the moment, but get in touch if there’s anything else you want to know.’

  ‘A truncheon,’ Kite echoed, when Mayo repeated the gist of Ison’s words, doodling a row of them.

  ‘Wainwright says Mrs Oliver last saw her son just after supper ... but she’s admitted she heard him go out about eleven. Rather reluctantly admitted it by all accounts. Seems she thought he had some clandestine assignment with Phyllida Thorne – which reminds me, we haven’t seen her yet. You carry on, I’ll go and talk to her myself.’ He stood staring down at Kite’s doodles. ‘While I’m gone, try asking the doc whether a baseball bat would do,’ he suggested.

  He was back in Wainwright’s office within twenty minutes. Phyllida Thorne, he said, had hopped it. Leaving a note saying she’d be back in a couple of days. Taking her little MG and as far as her distracted mother could ascertain, only an overnight bag.

  Could she be scared that she was going to be attacked, too? suggested Kite, half way through a mug of Mrs Wainwright’s tea and a piled plate of well-filled ham sandwiches made with thick slices from a crusty loaf. If Sebastian had been attacked for what he knew, then it was more than likely she knew it, too.

  There was a thought to play with. Phyllida Thorne, scared! Or even likely, as Kite went on to suggest, to be the one who’d bopped Sebastian on the head? Either possibility seemed to Mayo less probable than the scenario as he saw it.

  ‘It’s possible,’ he said, taking one of the sandwiches Kite pushed across the desk, reaching for the generous-sized teapot to pour tea the colour of port wine into a second mug. ‘But I don’t think so. Far more likely little Miss Phyllida’s flitted off to warn her fellow activists in London that we may be on to SARA. We need to find her, anyway. You’ve got her London address and the publisher where she works?’

  ‘No problem. By the way, Ison says a baseball bat could be just the thing, which makes life easier. Can’t be many places in Wyvering to look. I’ve sent some men down to Uplands House to have a shufty at their sports equipment. And just when we thought we were barking up the wrong tree with Illingworth!’

 
; ‘I want to go through all the case notes again, Martin,’ Mayo said, standing in front of the window, looking out on to the village street. ‘Everyone we’ve spoken to, and all the info we have on every single one of them, as far back as we can go.’

  Thursday afternoon. The tiny church at Stapley was, if not packed, fairly full with friends and one or two relatives, a representative sprinkling of clergy and a selection of staff and some older boys from Uplands House School. Scarcely a person there who wasn’t thinking of Sebastian Oliver, lying at death’s door. One or two were also thinking of Cecil Willard, already passed through that same door, and whose funeral service they were here to attend.

  ‘My song is love unknown/ My Saviour’s love for me/ Love to the loveless shown/ That they might lovelier be ...’

  The organ was slightly out of tune and wheezed a little, but the St Kenelm’s choirboys, brought down for the occasion, sang sweet and true. Laura had arranged to have the funeral over and done with as soon as was compatible with seemliness, without appearing to show undue haste, but she couldn’t have borne to have held the service at Wyvering, in the same church where her father had worshipped but had then so horribly died. In any case, he had to be committed to the ground here, the churchyard at Wyvering having long since been filled and recently grassed over.

  'And who am I/ That for my sake/ My Lord should take frail flesh and die?'

  The choice of hymn must have been Laura’s, Mayo decided. He had come to know enough of Willard to believe that he would have turned in his coffin at hearing such an unconventional hymn at his own funeral service. Sitting beside Kite, both of them spruce in white shirts and dark suits, he wondered how the convention that the police should attend the funeral of the murder victim had arisen. Was it expected that the murderer, overwhelmed by conscience at the solemnity of the occasion, would cast himself down before their feet and confess? Give himself away by some other means? It was a disturbing and macabre notion to think that the murderer was here, yet a person who had committed the ultimate outrage, the extermination of another human being, must have passed so far beyond the laws of civilization that he would surely not hesitate to draw the line at attending the last rites of his victim.

  For it had to be someone within Willard’s own circle who had killed him, and had attempted to kill a second time. Had bodged it and must now be sweating on the top line, praying not for Sebastian’s recovery but that he wouldn’t ever come round and live to give away the name of his attacker.

  He’d made a mistake in trying it on a second time. Mayo thought about the forensic evidence which had just come in regarding Willard’s murder: minute traces of the red clay found on the river bank had been picked up near the altar steps, so maybe the assumption that the killer had come in that way was correct. On the other hand, it might be that someone else had gone into the church quite innocently after walking there. The fibres on the altar cushion, however, were a different matter. Some from Willard’s tweed jacket, and also a few minute threads of polyester jersey, caught up on the metallic gold cord edging the cushion.

  Most of those he’d spoken to in the course of the inquiry were here, except for Sebastian – and Phyllida Thorne, of whom there had been no trace as yet. The Lampeters, too, Danny in custody and Ruth who was being interviewed, possibly at this precise moment, by Fred Uttley. Ruth Lampeter, who was close-mouthed as they come, and an animal rights fanatic into the bargain, a species always so utterly convinced they were right – and in many ways they were – only there was never any room for compromise, nobody else’s opinion counted and human life was less precious than that of any animal, even in the interests of bona fide medical research; Ruth Lampeter who had stated she wouldn’t even keep a pet cat because she thought that deprived it of its natural dignity and freedom. But Uttley was determined he was going to get the bastards who’d blown up the security guard at the Fricker Institute and Mayo decided he’d put his money on Fred, despite the odds.

  Jon Reece read the lesson. His voice was strong and clear and the sun streaming through the stained glass haloed his head like that of some stained glass angel ... No, the analogy was wrong, Gina Holden thought, watching and admiring his striking good looks. More like some pagan god, Apollo surely, god of the sun, poetry and music: golden son of Zeus, who wielded thunderbolts and ruled the heavens.

  Jon closed the Bible, paused gravely, stepped down from the lectern and walked back to his seat. Passing the pew where the Head and his wife sat, he smiled at Gina. Dear Gina, how sweet she was. He would miss her when she had gone to Antibes. For a while. Like all the other women friends he’d had, he would soon forget her. As he settled in his seat he felt that he had carried the reading off fairly well. Not a tremor in his voice, despite the emotion he felt. His association with the old man had gone back a long way, and he was upset that it had had to end the terrible way it had. Especially since it had put his own future in jeopardy. But he wasn’t at this juncture going to allow thoughts of failure to enter his head. He had planned and schemed for this time. It was unbearable even to entertain thoughts of the prize being snatched from him. He looked at the back of the heads in front, Gina’s unfamiliar in her black hat. Richard’s pate more balding than ever from here and thought positively: Soon, soon everything will be mine.

  The Headmaster was as unaware of Jonathan’s gaze on him as he was of the service going on around him. He felt elevated, on another plane, uplifted and at peace because of the decision he had finally come to in the middle of a sleepless night, while Gina slept beside him. He hadn’t told her yet, though he was convinced it was the right thing to do for himself, for her, for everyone concerned, the way out of an impasse, no matter what the consequences. He would tell her tonight. As if she read his thoughts she turned her head towards him. Briefly, he touched her hand and then, serenely sure that their relationship was secure enough to weather the shock, that she would support him whatever came about, Richard Holden brought his attention back to the present.

  His admiration for Lionel, normally tempered with a slight amused scepticism, was on this occasion unbounded. Sebastian still lay in a coma in the hospital. Catherine would not leave his bedside, but Lionel had insisted that it was his duty, the least he could do, to perform the last rites for Cecil Willard. His rich, musical voice resonated around the tiny church. The last ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ filled it to the echoes. As he turned to face the congregation for the benediction and raised his hand, the light fell on his face, drawn and pale after the sleepless vigil of the previous night, ascetic as that of some medieval saint. As usual, he took the stage. The congregation shuffled to its knees.

  David Illingworth did not kneel but leaned forward in the pew, in the awkward half-sitting, half-crouching posture of the unbeliever, as if not quite denying participation. He despised himself for agreeing to be here at all in the circumstances. He would not have come, had it not been for Laura. He glanced surreptitiously at his wife, kneeling beside him, deep in misery and grief, mopping up yet more tears. His wife! He had not expected, when he had come to Wyvering, battered and bruised by what had happened to him, to fall in love. If the steady, deep content he felt with Laura could be called that. He had ‘fallen in love’ once before and found it like seaside candyfloss: sticky and clinging, oversweet, unsatisfying and ultimately tasting of nothing.

  He thought his life had ended when he left Cambridge. He had breathed the air of academia for so long he had thought he might die without it. Uplands House had been a poor second to that. He had never expected to find a new life waiting for him, heady with possibilities.

  He knew now that Uplands House School would benefit with him as Head but it was more than that. He needed the position to bolster his damaged ego and to enable him to give something back for what had happened to Matthew. He needed Laura, too, for a second chance to prove he could be a proper father. And here it was, within his grasp. If, he thought, remembering the interview with Richard the previous evening, he hadn’t already muffed h
is chances by saying too little, or too much. He knew he wasn’t good at these things. Immediately, he dismissed such thoughts. What had happened previously in his life had hardened him. With his usual single-mindedness, he intended to let nothing stop him.

  CHAPTER 18

  It had rained again during the night and the skies were still overcast. Parson’s Place had an air of desolation, with a gentle wind soughing through the dripping branches of the mournful yews and making a sad, sighing sound. The ground beneath the cherry trees was littered with a detritus of tattered pink blossom. Not yet having relinquished the key of the church, Mayo let himself in through the main door to wait.

  It hadn’t changed since Willard’s death, except that someone had been in with a broom and a vacuum cleaner after the SOCO team had left it. The same smell of incense, flowers, polish and old stone. No trace of grey fingerprint powder, everything back in its place, dusted and polished. There was a new cushion on the altar, red velvet this time, rather than blue. The clock struck and Mayo checked it as correct by his watch with a sense of déjà vu.

  A clock, like the elucidation of a murder, would only work if all the pieces were there, put together in the correct order, each piece interdependent upon the next one. And here now in his mind were all the constituent parts of this inquiry: the weapon – the baseball bat – had been found among the Uplands House sports equipment, phone calls had been made, he had spoken to Miriam Thorne. But most importantly, a witness had come forward, in the unlikely person of Tigger Smith. Everything was now laid out clean and shiny, oiled and ready for putting into working order. All that remained was to assemble the parts, set the balance wheel precisely against the hairspring to regulate its beat and wait for it to work.

  The search for the goods Danny Lampeter had stolen from the Willards and later sold to Macey had led Kite to make further inquiries about some of the goods she had on sale, not all of which were by any means as innocuous as the ones in the window. In an effort to mitigate his punishment, Tigger had offered some unexpected information.