Murder at the Old Vicarage

by Jill McGown

  Lloyd was listening. But she was saying nothing new. ‘So he’s got the prior claim, is that it?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said, her voice exasperated. ‘He has, I suppose, but that’s not it. Because I don’t think it would break his heart.’

  Lloyd was lost again.

  ‘Until this year, he spent half his time abroad,’ she said. ‘He did what he pleased when he was away, and I could have done the same, I suppose. But I didn’t.’

  ‘Until I came along?’

  ‘Not even then,’ she said. ‘Because this isn’t the same, is it?’

  Every time Lloyd thought he’d got hold of something, she seemed to change tack. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘What are you saying? That you were faithful to Michael until I came along and seduced you, or what?’

  She closed her eyes. ‘No,’ she said, opening them again. ‘You,’ she said. ‘If I was faithful to anyone, then it was to you. Because I’ve never wanted anyone else.’ The tears weren’t far away when she spoke again. ‘So, no – I’m not just after your body,’ she said, her voice bitter.

  She had been hurt by that; Lloyd put his arms round her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Truly, I am. Take no notice of me.’ He held her close. ‘But I don’t understand why you won’t just leave him,’ he said.

  ‘Because I’m a coward,’ she answered, her voice muffled. ‘You said I was frightened to leave him, and you’re right. I’m scared to change my whole way of life just like that.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t be on your own!’

  ‘I know,’ she said, standing up. ‘And I do have to go,’ she said.

  ‘It’s this or nothing? Is that what you’re saying?’

  She nodded. ‘Unless it’s too sordid for you.’

  He looked up at her. ‘My tongue gets carried away sometimes,’ he said. ‘It’s Welsh. You have to make allowances.’

  She didn’t reply. After a moment, he heard the outside door close.

  He’d done it again. It was some time before he could make himself move, go into the kitchen, and carry on. And he ate his stir-fry, but his appetite had gone, and he didn’t enjoy it. He tried to watch television; some of the proper programmes were back, but they were all, to his jaundiced eye, unwatchable. After the news, which he would have been better advised not to have watched, he went to bed, at an unreasonably early hour for him. He was tired, but he took his book, as he always did.

  He opened his eyes when it landed on the floor. Blinking, he picked it up again, and carried on reading, as though to fool it into believing that he’d never been asleep. The words were easy enough, but he didn’t know what they meant. Then the print moved and swam before his eyes, and the book slid away again. This time he caught it, admitted defeat, and closed it. But the action involved had made him properly awake, now, and he might as well carry on reading.

  He opened the book, almost against his will, at the inscriptions. A hastily written ‘Best wishes from’ followed by the indecipherable signature of the author. Underneath, in her neat, clear, writing, ‘and from me.’

  But he didn’t want to think about Judy, or the arrangement that he no longer wished to live with, or without. He closed the book again, and switched off the light.

  He was drifting off to sleep again, when an image came into his mind. George Wheeler. George Wheeler, emptying ash from a dustbin on to the vicarage driveway. Grey ash, black speckled.

  Just like the melted nylon ribbon in his ashtray.

  Marian Wheeler watched her husband as he got ready for bed. At first, he wasn’t aware of it; she watched him become aware, try to ignore it. She watched him become awkward, as if she were a stranger.

  He buttoned his pyjama top. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Why are you staring at me?’

  Marian took a deep breath. ‘What’s making you sick, George?’ she asked.

  ‘I told you,’ he said lightly. ‘This business. You know what I’m like – I used to be sick for a week before exams. I was sick in the vestry before I gave my first sermon.’

  ‘Is it because you’re being unfaithful to me?’ she asked, when he’d finished.

  George closed his eyes briefly, and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing happened on Christmas Eve, Marian. I went there to get my tie. That was all.’ He sighed. ‘But I realised that I could stay there or come back here and spend the evening with my son-in-law. So I stayed.’

  Marian didn’t speak.

  ‘Nothing happened then, and nothing’s happened since. I’m not being unfaithful to you.’

  ‘Because you haven’t actually slept with her?’

  George looked away.

  ‘Why don’t you, George?’ she said. ‘Perhaps it would settle your stomach.’

  ‘Marian—’

  ‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘If you want to break commandments, go ahead and break them. Don’t agonise over it.’

  George didn’t say anything at all. He turned the bedclothes back slowly, and got into bed.

  Marian put out the light, and lay back. She had known about Eleanor Langton’s effect on George long before he had noticed it himself; she had prepared herself for the reckoning, unlike him.

  Poor George, making a fool of himself over a girl not much older than Joanna; becoming, Marian was sure, the subject of behind-the-hand murmurings amongst the other play-group mothers. Making himself sick with worry and guilt, and for what? A fantasy. Well, Marian would back herself against a fantasy any day.

  And yet, she was grateful to Eleanor Langton, in a way; at least she had been with George on Christmas Eve, and that proved that he couldn’t have killed Graham.

  If only she could be that sure of Joanna’s whereabouts. But nothing she could say would make Joanna tell her where she’d gone that night. Marian toyed with the idea of a similar assignation to George’s; she even considered the possibility of Joanna’s being pregnant by another man. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t told them about the baby.

  Perhaps it was this man that Graham met in the pub; why he got drunk, why he became violent. It would explain why Joanna had just stayed in the sitting room after she and George had come home, because she wouldn’t want to answer questions until she was ready. It would explain why she hadn’t taken them into her confidence about where she had been that night. For it would be natural, wouldn’t it, to go to him, to tell him what Graham had done.

  It explained everything, but Marian knew that it was nonsense. Joanna had been too hung up on her odious husband to have been looking elsewhere.

  Chapter Nine

  It was nice, not being stared awake by Tessa. Nice, but odd. Eleanor switched on the light, and looked at the clock, to discover that habit and worry had overcome freedom. Six o’clock. That was even earlier than Tessa’s start, but she was awake now, and she could never go back to sleep. She lay back, and considered the situation, which didn’t seem so bad, after a night’s sleep. She felt calmer now that she’d spoken to George, even if it had been an unsatisfactory communication. He couldn‘t have told the police, or surely the inspector would have asked questions? Or would he? He was fond of drama. The anxiety returned, as she slowly got out of bed.

  Not even daylight, she thought, as she ran the bath that at least she could have all by herself, without Tessa’s ministrations. She could soak for hours, if she wanted.

  The knock on the door made her jump. My God, who came at this time in the morning? Police. It had to be the police. Shouting that she’d just be a moment, she hastily grabbed her clothes, hopping about on one foot as her jeans refused to co-operate. She pulled on a sweater, and opened the door to George. Her mouth opened and closed again.

  ‘When you say first thing, you really mean it,’ she said; when she had got her breath back.

  ‘I had a bad night. I could see your light, so I came over.’ He went into the sitting room.

  Eleanor followed him in. ‘You told them you were here,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ He was by the window
, looking out at the courtyard. He didn’t look at her.

  ‘So did I,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ He turned from the window. ‘Just as well we told them the same thing,’ he said. ‘Or it might have looked rather odd.’

  ‘It might.’ Her eyes searched his, trying to make contact with him through the barrier of his blank, bland stare. ‘Why were they checking up on you?’ she asked him.

  He shrugged. ‘They have to suspect someone.’

  ‘I didn’t tell them anything else,’ she said, bracing herself for his reply.

  The smile that had attracted her to him slowly appeared, for the first time in days. ‘Neither did I,’ he said, and Eleanor felt the anxiety slip away.

  His eyes, alive again, took her in from head to toe, and back again. ‘Eleanor—’ he said, then suddenly, almost audibly, the barrier came back down. ‘I have to go,’ he said, walking to the door.

  Eleanor tried not to think of the man she had met two months ago; the man who had called on Christmas Eve. The man who had fleetingly reappeared with the smile.

  ‘George?’ she said. ‘When did you start feeling ill?’

  He turned, frowning. ‘When they arrested Marian,’ he said. ‘She has to be the mother-hen. Protecting her egg from predators. Offering herself up.’

  Eleanor turned away from him. ‘Eggs are supposed to hatch out,’ she said.

  She heard his footsteps coming towards her, felt his tentative hand touch her neck. As she turned, he walked away again, the front door closed, and she was on her own.

  Joanna drove out of the vicarage, taking Judy Hill’s advice to check the house. There wasn’t much conviction about the action, but it was something to do, something that might, just might, make the police start looking elsewhere. There was still an hour till sunrise, so with any luck she should avoid the stares of the neighbours.

  Her father’s car emerged from Castle Road. She doubted if he’d seen her, other than as another road-user. He had withdrawn into a world where other people didn’t exist. Except Eleanor Langton. Joanna had heard him leave even earlier than she had; what was so urgent that he had to visit her practically in the middle of the night? Eleanor Langton was doing her father no good, that much she did know: she had heard him during the night, walking up and down. The last time he’d had as bad an attack as this had been when he brought her home from hospital.

  She drove into Stansfield, and took the right turn into the private housing estate where she and Graham had lived, remembering the first time they ever saw it. Before they were married, they had come here, looking for a house. What were now neat if yet to be established gardens had been a sea of mud and builders’ rubble, the houses approachable only by planks laid precariously on bricks.

  The show house had been one of the expensive ones, beyond their range. So she and Graham had gone to look round one of the others, and she had got whistles from the workmen as she had picked her way up to the front door, still without the steps it needed. Graham had lifted her up, like a child. He had been excited about the house; it was just an ordinary house – one of the bedrooms was barely larger than the larder at the vicarage. ‘But it’ll be ours,’ he’d said.

  They had got into trouble from the site foreman, who had shouted at them about its being private property, and his responsibility if they got hurt. If they wanted somewhere to do their courting, they could find somewhere a lot bloody safer than a building site.

  They had bought the house a couple of doors away from that one. Joanna pulled up outside, her heart beating fast. It was almost as though he would be there when she went in, in a mood, as he always was when she’d been home.

  Home. That was what had caused one of Graham’s rages; when she had called the vicarage home. Was that this time? She couldn’t remember clearly. Only the chimes, and Graham’s face. What had triggered the violence was lost.

  But he wasn’t here, not now, not any more. There was no need for apprehension. It was an empty house, that was all.

  She walked into the house, through the sitting room to the kitchen, feeling like a visitor, like someone who had come to feed the cat. It was unbelievably untidy, with every surface covered in either dust or whatever Graham happened to have put down and never picked up again. The ironing board was up, with the iron still on it. At least it was unplugged. Graham had been used to having someone who washed dishes and dusted and hoovered carpets for him, especially since the firm she had worked for had done a moonlight, leaving the gates locked and thousands of pounds of bad debts. She hadn’t been there long enough to get any recompense, and Graham hadn’t wanted her to apply for unemployment benefit. So she’d had no money, and the mortgage meant that there wasn’t much left over from Graham’s salary. Her mother had given her a fiver now and then, but after the first time, Joanna had made sure that Graham didn’t find out.

  The kitchen was worse than the sitting room. There were dirty dishes in the sink, and she wished she hadn’t come. There were too many memories, too much grease clinging to the cooker, too many coffee mug rings on the formica, too much pain.

  Through the archway, over which hung the painting that Graham had bought from a street-artist in Paris on the first day of their honeymoon weekend, to the stairs – and they hadn’t seen a brush for weeks. He had been brought up to think that men didn’t do that sort of thing, even if they had no alternative. The alternative was to carry on exactly as though someone was going to come along behind and make it all neat and clean again.

  The bed was made – even Graham knew how to pull a duvet straight. He had changed the bedding at least once, she thought. It was the blue set, and it had been the pale yellow ones. She remembered everything about their last night in this house, except what had caused it all, just like at the vicarage. It was easier to remember the externals; the chiming clock, the yellow duvet.

  She remembered the ambulance men; she remembered Graham saying that she’d fallen downstairs. She had gone along with it, though it was clear that no one at the hospital believed it. Her father thought it was because she was afraid to do anything else, but it wasn’t.

  She sat on the bed, and looked round the room. Her slippers, which Graham had failed to pack in his remorseful co-operation with her mother, still lay where she had kicked them off that morning.

  No, she had gone along with Graham’s story for a dozen different reasons. It was easier than admitting to strangers what had really happened. It was unthinkable to go to the police, to go through a court case. And besides, it hadn’t all been like that. They’d had fun. Often. They’d had fun buying the house, doing it up, furnishing it. The mortgage payments had got difficult once she had lost her job, but they’d managed. The garden had been hard work, because neither of them knew the first thing about it, and she had been wise enough by then not to seek advice from her father. But even it had been fun, and they’d done it in the end. They had a lawn, and flowers. Graham even had vegetables at the back. She stood and looked out of the window, but the snow covered everything.

  Beneath the surface, there had been tension. She’d put it down to having to get used to one another. They were from different backgrounds; they had different opinions about how things should be. But everyone had to compromise, she had told herself, when they had had the odd argument, the occasional two-day huff. That had resolved nothing; she could see that now. And so the tension had gone on building, until at last it erupted into violence, and tears, and vows never to do it again. And forgiveness. But he had done it again, and again, until her parents couldn’t fail to notice. Their consequent concern had made matters worse; her mother had taken to calling unannounced, and Joanna had started going to see her more and more often to render such spot-checks unnecessary. It was as though everything had been planned, arranged, leading up to that night.

  The externals. Like a silent movie. Pulling up outside, like today, after a visit to her mother. Graham, cold-shouldering her when she went in, picking up his evening paper and going upstairs with it. Fo
llowing him up after a while, to see if she could get him out of his mood. She couldn’t remember what she had said, but she remembered that Graham hadn’t been listening, and that had upset her.

  She frowned. A flash of memory, like a dream. She could see Graham, handing the paper to her, asking if she’d read something.

  ‘Yes,’ she had said, annoyed by the interruption. ‘I saw the paper at home.’

  The little silence. She had dropped the paper on to the bed.

  She remembered trying to get to her feet, grabbing at the bed, but all she had got hold of was the yellow duvet which slid down, taking the paper with it. She could see the paper, as it was kicked under the bed in the struggle. Slow motion action replay.

  Then her mind went blank, shutting out the memory, until the moment that she had realised it had stopped, and she could get away from him. She had made it downstairs, then had collapsed at the foot, unwittingly offering Graham his explanation of her injuries. She remembered hearing his voice on the phone. Then the ambulance men, and the hospital. Her mother and father. No Graham. She had asked the doctor to check, just in case. Being told that the baby was all right was the confirmation of what had merely been a possibility, unsought and unmentioned.

  The bedroom was covered in Graham’s cast off clothes. The laundry basket was full, as though he’d thought she might come along and do his washing. He’d piled more things on top of it. His wardrobe only had some empty hangers in it; his drawer was stuffed full of unironed shirts. Two dry-cleaning bags lay on the floor, and underneath one she could see the corner of the paper, still under the bed.

  She reached down and pulled it out, still open at the page he had wanted her to read. One side was advertisements for used cars, but that wasn’t likely, because they had just bought hers when Graham got a backdated increase. News items on the other side. She glanced at them. It was probably just something that had caught his eye. A funny misprint, or a bit of local bureaucracy gone mad.