by Jill McGown
Jill McGown
Murder at the
Old Vicarage
PAN BOOKS
First published 1988 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2014 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 9781509809639
Murder at the Old Vicarage Copyright © Jill McGown, 1988
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
REDEMPTION
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Post-Mortem
REDEMPTION
Hail, O ever-blessèd morn!
hail, redemption’s happy dawn!
sing through all Jerusalem:
‘Christ is born in Bethlehem!’
Chapter One
Lloyd finished the last chapter of his library book, and closed it with relief, wishing that it was in his power to abandon books half-way through. But no matter how obvious the plot, how stilted the dialogue, he was obliged by some natural law to finish them. The worse they were, the more likely he was to devour them, reading into the small hours to get them out of the way. Good books relaxed him, and he would fall asleep with them in his hand, but no such luck with the lousy ones.
He balanced the book on top of the others on his bedside table, and ran his hand over his hair to smooth it down. It was habit – he couldn’t get used to his hair being so short now. He had decided that people who were rapidly losing their hair should not draw attention to the fact by keeping the remaining hair long. He still thought it looked odd; Judy said she liked it. He had wondered about growing a moustache, to make up for the shortfall on his head – he craned his neck to see himself in the dressing-table mirror, and pulled a face. His unshaven face held the ghost of what a moustache might look like, and he didn’t think it would do. Tall, military types could carry off moustaches, but he had come in at the low end of the regulation height. Too small and dark, he decided. He’d look like a bookie’s runner.
He lay back, wide awake, aware that the pile of work which awaited him was being added to as he lay doing nothing. Added to by pre-Christmas burglars who helped themselves to the presents under someone else’s tree – added to by the ones who stole the trees, come to that; the chain-saws got stolen around August, the trees in December. Added to by the drunks, added to by the jolly Christmas spirit that brought out the pickpockets and the handbag snatchers, the credit-card frauds and the conmen in the market square.
One small, striped package and the odd Christmas card were the only hint of Christmas in Acting Chief Inspector Lloyd’s flat. Not that he had any objection to glitter and tinsel – in fact, if he were truthful with himself, which he quite often was, he was a bit of a sucker for jingle bells. But there was another natural law which decreed that no man be alone at Christmas, and he would once again be made welcome by Jack Woodford and his nice, comfortable wife in their nice, comfortable house. Lloyd didn’t really know if they actively desired his presence at their festivities, but they knew that they had to ask him, and he knew that he had to accept. And he would give their grandchildren presents that their parents would insist were too expensive, as he had done for the past three Christmases, and the collective Wood-fords would give him a bottle of malt whisky.
He liked buying presents for the children; his own were grown up now, and just got presents like everyone else’s. He had missed his annual excursion into the magic world of children’s toys. His Christmas visit to his own offspring consisted of an hour or two on Boxing Day, with Barbara making polite conversation as though they hadn’t been married for over eighteen years before it all came to pieces in their hands. So he was glad of the Wood-fords’ goodwill, and he enjoyed the cheerful, noisy family Christmas. Especially this year, now that his father was beginning to get used to the idea of being a widower, and had decided to go back to Wales to live, which he’d wanted to do ever since he’d left. What with that, and Judy about to have her in-laws staying with her, Lloyd would have been very much alone.
Judy was the detective sergeant with whom he’d worked, off and on, for seven of the fifteen years since he’d met her. He had been married then, and the twenty-year-old Judy had rejected his advances, her eyes sad. Eventually, she herself had married, and moved away. Because Barbara had wanted it, and because it might have saved his marriage, Lloyd had requested a return to Stansfield, but the divorce had happened anyway. Then, eighteen months ago, Judy had arrived back in his life, a brand new detective sergeant. Since then they had, with a sense of inevitability, become lovers. Occasional lovers, he thought, with an audible sigh. Very occasional.
When Michael was at home, he and Judy weren’t lovers. And Michael’s promotion had ensured that he was home for considerably longer periods than before. Michael, a computer salesman turned sales director; Michael, to whom Judy professed an unexplained wish to remain married.
The covert nature of their relationship was beginning to irk Lloyd, though Judy seemed happy enough with things as they were. He wished she was with him now, in his three o’clock in the morning wakefulness, though even that pleasure would have been qualified by her ability, figuratively at least, to keep him at arm’s length. He looked at the little gift-wrapped parcel on the dressing table. It ought to be tied with ribbon, he decided. And under a tree. He’d get one tomorrow. And some lights. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve; today, he corrected himself. Judy was on leave to play hostess to Michael’s parents. He probably wouldn’t even see her until after the holiday, but her present would be under a bloody tree if he had to keep it there until March.
He switched off the light, and closed his eyes. He wondered if it was still snowing, as it had been when he’d retired with his dreadful book. A white Christmas – it looked pretty, but the roads hadn’t been gritted, and the traffic lads would be busy. His thoughts dwelt on work until at last his mind began to shunt itself into a siding for what was left of the night. Filtered through the fog of sleep, the sighing of the wind reached his ears, and his last conscious thought was for the traffic division, if the snow drifted.
George Wheeler rubbed his eyes as the early morning sun glinted on the snow. Not so early morning, he realised. It was ten o’clock, and he still hadn’t written a word.
‘I’m sure you understand, Vicar, being a Christian.’
Perhaps it
was when those words were addressed to him by someone whose motives he had no desire to understand, and with whose values he had no desire to be aligned, that George Wheeler had stopped believing. Not in God, for he knew that he had never honestly believed in God as a being, an entity. As a force for good, perhaps – something inherent in man – but not as some sort of super-caretaker.
Stopped believing in himself? No, that wasn’t right either. George believed in himself, for there he was, flesh, blood and bodily functions. And bodily desires – was it perversion to find himself appreciatively eyeing the young mothers at the church play group, or mere perversity? Was it middle-aged conceit that made him imagine that young Mrs Langton was seeing past his clerical collar to the man, or a sign that soon he would be roaming the streets of Soho, a News of the World headline manqué?
He put down his pen, and sat back in his chair, the better to contemplate the prospect. He had played a bit of soccer in his youth, and he still did some refereeing when he got the time. He’d kept in shape, more or less. Good enough shape for the lovely Mrs Langton to fancy him? He smiled to himself. Chance would be a fine thing. Though he still had all his hair – its sand colour was diluted here and there by silver, but that was distinguished, according to his wife. George believed in himself enough to be vain about his appearance, so that wasn’t it.
No, he had stopped believing that he believed. It wasn’t something that it had ever crossed his mind to wonder before. His family went into the Church. His grandfather had made it to Bishop, and there had even been rumours that he was on course to make it all the way to Canterbury, but George rather thought that his grandfather had started those himself. At any rate, he didn’t. It was taken for granted – by George as much as anyone else – that he would go into the Church. It was a career decision, if decision it could be called, not a spiritual one. There was the Church, the armed services, the Civil Service. George had chosen the Church.
He addressed himself once more to the pale lines of the A4 pad in front of him, but inspiration, divine or otherwise, eluded him. George had been expected to do well, to rise through the ranks as had his grandfather before him, and as his nephew was doing even now. But George wasn’t a company man. He was well enough connected to have secured a living in one of the prettiest villages in England, complete with a vicarage about which anyone might be moved to write poetry. Verdant lawns, bushes, shrubs, climbers; light-filled rooms with elegant lines, and old, good furniture. Wonderful views from its hilltop site, across three counties which today all lay under a shifting blanket of snow. And just twenty-five minutes from Stansfield, with its new-town bustle, its supermarkets and cinema, trains, and buses. The best of both worlds, and for twenty-nine years George had clung tenaciously to his well-behaved flock and his uncomplicated life. Lack of ambition, said his superiors. Pure selfishness, George knew now.
It would take rather longer than usual to get into Stansfield today, George thought, glancing out of the window as the wind whipped up the fallen snow. It was drifting badly on the road, and the cars were already having trouble on the hill.
It was no crisis of faith, for there never had been faith, but it was a crisis of the heart, and the words for the midnight service simply wouldn’t come. He put down his pen, and stood up, holding out his hands to the one-bar electric fire. Central heating would make the vicarage truly a poem. As it was, there was still a sliver of ice on the inside of the study window. The parish couldn’t afford central heating, and neither could he. Until now, he had accepted that as his lot, just as he had accepted everything else.
He had accepted God, to the extent of praying to him in church, and sometimes out of it. Praying for the rescue of people in peril: physical, in intensive care, or spiritual, in the back of a Vauxhall Chevette. Prayer perhaps helped those who prayed, but that was all. And then there was worship. George had never worshipped God. He had taken part in acts of worship – if saying a few words about the sanctity of life and tossing off a couple of hymns to the less than talented Jeremy Bulstrode’s organ accompaniment counted as worship. But it didn’t. Not in George’s book.
Worship was naked, open adulation, to the point of total selflessness. George had never lost his sense of self, not even on a morning like this, when the elements combined to put man firmly in his place. Not even when he had fallen hopelessly in love, at thirteen, with his cousin from Canada, five years his senior and only in the country for a fortnight. Not in the throes of more mature passion, or grief, or anger. And not, certainly not, in the pulpit of St Augustus.
And yet he knew how it felt, this loss of self, this giving over. Once, long ago, he had felt it. He walked to the window, and ran his finger down the sliver of ice, which melted to his touch. It wasn’t a woman, he thought, with a smile at himself. A few courteous and cautious walkings-out before Marian, and marriage. A happy, fulfilled marriage, but not worship. Joanna? No, not even her. He loved his daughter with all his heart, but it was still his heart. It was long ago, before any of that, before adulthood.
The dog. Of course, of course. His grandfather’s dog, whom he had had the privilege to know all his life until the old soldier died, when George was eleven. Perhaps only a child could truly worship, for he would have died instead, if he could have. So, he thought, as the sun shone blindingly on the white carpet below him, he had broken the first commandment.
Come to that, he had spent all summer spraying greenfly in a deliberate act of destruction. Did greenfly count? Birds did.
His father had shot birds; George had joined him once or twice on shoots, but he was a miserably bad shot, and had barely inconvenienced the game.
He had loved his father and mother, but that was no big deal. It wasn’t hard to love people who loved you, and it certainly wasn’t an honour to be thus loved. If honouring them meant putting flowers on their grave on the infrequent trips to his remaining relatives, then it was Marian who did the honouring. If it meant being straight with them, then he had dishonoured them by joining the Church.
And by joining the Church, he broke one commandment regularly, every Sunday. The Bible might not count taking Sunday services as work, but he certainly did. Standing in the pulpit, in the ever-present draught that gave him a stiff neck, seeing the same old faces staring back at him, not expecting anything from him. They were there, like him, from habit and custom; presumably they did find something that they needed in the chill air and the stained-glass light, but he never had. Whatever kind of fulfilment he sought, it was not to be found in St Augustus on a Sunday morning.
Could Mrs Langton provide it, he wondered? VICAR IN PLAY GROUP LOVE TANGLE. Except that she probably hadn’t given him the eye; it had probably never occurred to her that his mind ever dwelt on such things. But it had. Not News of the World stuff, then. A question on a game show, perhaps.
‘We asked one hundred vicars: Do you ever have sexual fantasies about the mothers in your church play group? How many vicars said yes, they did have sexual fantasies about . . .’
‘I’ve brought you some coffee. You must be frozen.’
He jumped at the sound of Marian’s voice, and turned from the window.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Were you working or day-dreaming?’
He smiled. ‘Oh, day-dreaming,’ he said, walking back to the electric warmth.
‘I’ve got the fire going in Joanna’s room,’ Marian said, handing him the mug. ‘It took about six fire-lighters, but it’s caught now. And George,’ she said, in her scolding voice, ‘must you leave your overalls in a heap on the hall floor?’
‘Sorry. I was looking at the car.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’ Marian asked.
‘Nothing. I was just—’ But she had never understood his love for things mechanical, so he didn’t try to explain. He put both hands round the mug of coffee, and stared at the empty pad on the desk.
‘Are you having trouble?’ she asked.
‘You could say that.’
Marian wasn’t what he though
t of as a vicar’s wife. Even he saw the situation comedy notion of Vicar’s Wife, when he thought of the actual words. Vicars’ wives were either dowdy, shy and full of good works, or blue-rinsed, tweedy and full of good sense. Marian had short, curly, dark blonde hair, and mischievous eyes. Her fiftieth birthday had just passed, and those eyes had tiny wrinkles that he supposed had once not been there, but which were a part of her that he felt he had always known. She had the suggestion of freckles on her nose, and a wide, generous smile. She wasn’t tall, and seemed even less so once Joanna had grown up to become three full inches taller than her. He smiled. His adulterous thoughts had made him feel quite frisky, and vicars weren’t supposed to feel frisky at ten-thirty on a Wednesday morning, especially not on Christmas Eve.
‘Which one?’ Marian asked.
‘Sorry?’
‘Tonight’s or this afternoon’s?’
He stared blankly at her. ‘Sorry?’ he said again.
‘Which sermon are you having trouble with?’
‘Oh. Tonight’s. This afternoon’s for the children really. It’s easy to talk to children.’
‘Well, I hate to break it to you, but Jeremy Bulstrode’s on his way over, in a state about something. He can’t play this afternoon.’
‘He can’t play, period.’
‘Something to do with his wife’s brother,’ she went on. ‘He’s on his way over for high-level discussions. What will you do?’
‘See him,’ George said, with a sigh. Ah well, it was highly unlikely that the vicar’s wife would want to know at ten-thirty on Christmas Eve morning anyway. And it just wouldn’t do for Jeremy Bulstrode to come in and find the vicar and his wife in flagrante delicto on the study floor. Would that interest the News of the World, he wondered? Or would it have to be the vicar’s wife who found him and Jeremy Bulstrode?