by Ann Granger
‘No, why should I?’
‘Because I understand you were in the churchyard.’
‘No, I wasn’t,’ said Billy promptly.
‘A witness saw you hurrying away from the building, over in the far corner of the churchyard.’
Billy scowled. ‘Who’s your witness? He wants spectacles, whoever he is.’
Markby waited silently. Billy turned the matter over in his mind. ‘I might,’ he said. ‘Only might, mind you! I might have cut across the corner of the churchyard on my walk. I often do that. I can’t recall exactly. At my age, your memory gives out. But I know I never went near the church itself. And I never saw no one.’
Billy appeared pleased with this somewhat contradictory statement. ‘That’s it,’ he said and picked up his mug again.
‘Does anyone else have a habit of dropping in the church?’ Markby asked him.
‘No.’ Billy shrugged. ‘Unless it’s visitors. They come to see the monuments. We got some very good monuments. They was nearly all put up to the Fitzroys. They used to be the big family around here. There’s none of ’em left now. There was a visitor in only the other day, tall good-looking woman. She and her partner, as she called him …’Billy sniggered, ‘they’d come looking to buy the old vicarage. Wants their heads seeing to, darn great place like that. It’s what you’d call a white ellyphant.’
‘Yes,’ said Markby, discomfited. ‘I don’t think we need count them. No one else?’
‘Who else,’ countered Billy, ‘comes to Lower Stovey? It’s the end of the world is Lower Stovey.’
‘But you’ve lived here all your life?’ Markby contemplated him.
‘It used to be a good deal livelier,’ Billy grumbled. ‘Before they took our school away and never replaced the old vicar. We had a couple of little shops, and all. They’ve gone. Now a feller comes a couple of times a week with a van selling groceries. He charges the earth. Mrs Aston, she takes Dilys with her into Bamford once a week and Dilys does our shopping then. Dilys cleans for her. She’s a nice lady, Mrs Aston.’
‘And Miss Millar? Was she a nice lady?’
‘She was.’ Billy sucked his discoloured teeth. ‘But she wasn’t a local. Mrs Aston, she’s one of us.’
Whether poor Ruth Aston liked it or not, reflected Markby, she was for ever to be associated with Lower Stovey in the minds of its native population.
‘She went to the village school for a bit,’ went on Billy. ‘She went to school with our Sandra and Dilys.’
Markby couldn’t help but think that time had dealt more kindly with Ruth Aston than with Dilys, who must be the same age but looked ten years older.
‘I remember when the village had a school,’ he said.
Billy stiffened. He put his mug down slowly. ‘How’s that, then?’
‘I was here before, oh, a long time ago. Twenty-two years. You still had the school then and a post office.’
‘Oh, yes?’ said Billy, treating him to a wary look. ‘They never ought to have taken away our post office. I got nowhere to draw my pension. Dilys has to draw it for me when she goes to Bamford.’
There was a note of genuine resentment in his voice. Markby wondered if this meant that having got her hands on his pension money first, Dilys put most of it towards the housekeeping, and doled out tiny amounts to her father which limited his spending power in the local pub.
‘There were a number of attacks on women in Stovey Woods,’ he prompted Billy. ‘That’s why I came here before.’
‘So they said,’ mumbled Billy, gazing into his empty mug. He looked up and his withered lips twisted in an unkind smile. ‘I never reckoned to it. Them girls give it away and then they took fright in case they found themselves in the family way. They made up that story. You ask anyone in the village.’
Markby well remembered this attitude at the time. It angered him as much now as it had then. He snapped, ‘Two of the victims were from outside the village, a hiker and a cyclist on the old drovers’ way.’
‘There you are, then,’ returned Billy unrepentantly. ‘What were they doing up there, all alone, a couple of young girls like that? Not decent. Asking for trouble and they got it.’ He jabbed a finger at Markby. ‘The police never found anyone, did they? Stands to reason they didn’t. There never were no Potato Man.’
‘You remember his nickname then,’ Markby observed drily.
‘‘Course I do. But that don’t mean he ever was real. He weren’t Ever since I was a boy there’s been stories about Stovey Woods. People used to reckon it was haunted. They said the old Green Man was up there. You know about him?’
‘I’ve heard of the Green Man,’ Markby told him.
‘Right, then you’ve heard all you need to. Folk have always believed there was something in those woods and when those girls started telling their stories, people remembered the old tales. Only instead of Green Man, they called him the Potato Man. But it’s the same feller and just as much twaddle.’
Billy pointed at the photograph of Sandra outside Disneyland. ‘It’s all as real as anything you’d see at that place. Dwarves and fairies and the like. In the old days, people believed anything. They was simple,’ concluded Billy, dismissing his forebears. ‘Daft as a brush.’
Markby got to his feet. ‘I don’t think you’re daft as a brush, Mr Twelvetrees. I want you to think carefully about today, about your walk, about the churchyard, about whether or not you went into the church or saw Miss Millar or anyone else. The police will call on you again. Not me, probably, but someone else.’
‘I’ll tell him the same as I told you,’ said Billy sourly. He brightened. ‘Here, tell ‘em to send one of the young policewomen!’ He gave Markby a cunning sidelong look. ‘I might talk to one of them.’
‘I’ll let myself out,’ Markby told him, ignoring this suggestion. What an unpleasant old devil he was. And lying through his teeth. He either saw Hester outside or inside the church. Markby would bet his bottom dollar on it.
The hall was empty but he could hear Dilys moving about in the kitchen. He tapped on the door and pushed it open. He was rewarded with a view of Dilys’s pink nylon rear as she bent over a chipped enamel pedal bin. He cleared his throat.
Dilys jumped up and the lid of the pedal bin clashed down. She whirled round.
‘I’m leaving,’ said Markby.
‘Right you are, then.’ She looked relieved. ‘Dad didn’t have anything to say to you, then?’
‘I expect he’ll tell you all about it. I understand you clean for Mrs Aston – and Miss Millar.’
‘I work for Mrs Aston,’ returned Dilys pedantically. ‘Miss Millar only lived there. It wasn’t her house.’
‘Were you there today?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t go every day this time of year, only Tuesday and Friday. I do a bit extra in the winter because of the stove in the old hearth. They burn logs in it. The ladies make no mess. I just go over there and do the rough work, such as it is.’
‘You went to school with Ruth Aston, your father tells me.’
She blinked. ‘Only for a couple of years. Then the vicar took her out of our school and sent her off to some fancy one. Don’t know why they ever sent her to our school in the first place. But the old vicar, he was full of ideas like that. You know, he thought he was being one of the villagers.’ Dily snorted. ‘Him? I often thought he ought to have been a schoolmaster himself, always with his head in books as he was. He had all kinds of daft ideas, always wanting to know about what he called local legends.’
‘Like the Green Man?’ Markby asked.
‘Oh yes, he was very keen on the old Green Man. He’d knock on people’s doors and ask them if they knew any stories. What he called folk memory. No wonder half the village thought he was crackers.’
Markby held out his hand. ‘Thank you, Dilys.’
She looked at his outstretched palm in dismay but nervously placed her stubby fingers on his. ‘No trouble I’m sure,’ she said with an assumed prissy gentility.
<
br /> Back in his car, Markby stretched his hand out to put the key in the ignition and saw, to his surprise, that his shirt cuff was stained with a pinkish smear. He’d been careful to touch neither the body nor anything in the area where it had been found. He frowned, peered at the offending stain, sniffed at it and finally, cautiously touched it. It was sugary, something he’d brushed against in Dilys’s kitchen. It would probably be difficult to remove. Dilys, in her own way, had had the last word.
Having left Pearce conducting investigations in Lower Stovey, Markby drove back to Bamford. As he put distance between himself and the village, he felt as if he drove out of thick cloud into sunshine. It was a feeling which had nothing to do with the weather which was mild and unremarkable. It was the atmosphere which clung to the place. But he couldn’t distance himself from what had happened there that day completely. He had a call to make.
Bamford vicarage was familiar to Markby and the vicar, James Holland, an old friend. But he wasn’t normally given to calling on James unannounced. As he walked up to the front door later that day he reflected that the vicar would guess it was police business of some kind as soon as he saw who stood on his doorstep.
‘Alan!’ exclaimed James with a flattering note of pleasure in his voice, before adding, as Markby had known he would, ‘Something wrong? Come on in and tell me about it.’
The vicar led the way to the antiquated kitchen, filled the kettle and plugged it in, then turned to his visitor. ‘Tea or coffee?’
‘Tea, please, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘Comes out of the same kettle,’ returned James placidly, unwittingly reminding Markby of the drinks dispenser at Regional HQ.
James’s tea was, thankfully, a big improvement on the brew dribbled out by the dread machine. They carried their mugs into the study and sat, facing one another, in large, rickety, comfortable armchairs. To Markby’s right were french windows giving on to the overgrown garden. The early evening sun bathed them in a warm orange glow.
‘This is a nice room,’ he said appreciatively.
James nodded. ‘It’s a nice house or would be, if it were done up. No chance of that. The bishop is still keen to sell it and put me in a modern three-bed box somewhere on one of the new estates. The PCC is fighting him tooth and nail and Bamford Council isn’t keen for fear of what might happen to what is a well-known building in the town. So I continue to sit here and the place continues to crumble about my ears.’
‘Meredith and I have been to view a former vicarage,’ Markby told him. ‘Out at Lower Stovey.’
‘The house-hunting, how’s it going? Lower Stovey,’ James went on meditatively. ‘Bit remote, I’d have thought.’ He drank some tea and as he did, his mug half vanished into his bushy black beard.
‘Its souls are in your charge, I believe.’
The vicar nodded. ‘I only get out there once a month. Sometimes old Picton-Wilkes takes a service for me there. He’s retired, over eighty, but likes to keep his hand in. The church is called St Barnabas and is quite a fine building. But it represents a problem to the diocese.’
‘Surplus to requirements?’
Another nod. ‘There’s hardly any congregation and the place is kept up by the dedicated efforts of a pair of ladies who act as churchwardens. One of them, Ruth Aston, is the daughter of the last incumbent. He died, let’s see, eighteen years ago but the problems had already begun. The population of the village was dwindling, few young families. Frankly, Pattinson, the vicar, was gaga for the last year. The decision was taken not to replace him and to attach St Barnabas to our church here in Bamford. The same thing happened to Westerfield church. So now I run the joint parishes. As regards Lower Stovey, a few new homes have been built there in the last five or six years, most when the old school was sold off for development. But it hasn’t made any difference to the community. The backbone of that was broken long ago.’
James sighed. ‘Mrs Aston is in her late fifties, as is her fellow-warden. They won’t want to carry on for ever. Within the next five years the crunch will come.’
‘I’m afraid, James, that the crunch has already come,’ Markby said, putting down his mug. ‘But not in any way you could have anticipated. One of your churchwardens, not Mrs Aston, the other one, Hester Millar, is dead.’
His words were met with shocked silence. Then James asked quietly, ‘How?’
Markby told him. ‘As it happened in the church, I’ve come not only to inform you, but to pick your brains.’
Father Holland stirred from the deep thought into which he’d been plunged since Markby began his tale. ‘About Lower Stovey? I’m afraid there’s little I can tell you about the place. To my shame my monthly visits are all I see of it. Ruth Aston could tell you—’
He broke off and shook his head. ‘But poor Ruth won’t be in a state to tell you anything. She and Hester were very old friends. After Gerald Aston died, Hester moved in with Ruth. My own acquaintance with Hester dates from then. She was a practical sort, no nonsense and absolutely no malice in her. I liked her but I can’t say I knew her well. Look, of course you’ll need to talk to Ruth, but anything to do with the church I’d rather you discussed with me. As for Ruth, I doubt she’ll make much sense in the circumstances.’
‘There’s something else I should tell you which you may or may not wish to tell Mrs Aston,’ Markby told him apologetically. ‘There are signs that someone has gained access to the church tower for – er – romantic reasons on at least one occasion.’
‘What?’ James sat up straight in his chair. ‘Fornicating in the church?’
‘It looks like it. In the belfry room to be exact. We found a packet of condoms and a sleeping bag up there.’
‘That does it,’ said James grimly. ‘We’ll have to rethink having the church open during the day. It looks as if we’ll have to keep it locked all the time. I’ll discuss it with Ruth when – when she’s over the initial shock of Hester’s death. But in the end, it’s my decision, and after what you tell me—’
‘I was hoping,’ Markby interrupted him, ‘that you could tell me if there are any sets of keys to St Barnabas other than the one you hold and those held by the churchwardens. Whoever has been using the tower for unofficial purposes uses a key to unlock the tower door.’
James paled. ‘Someone has a key? How is that? The only other set I know of is held by Harry Picton-Wilkes. I hardly think he’s been misbehaving in the tower.’
‘Then could I ask you if you’d kindly find out on my behalf where the reverend gentleman keeps his keys and whether they’re accessible to anyone else. Are they hanging up in a pantry or something like that?’
‘Yes, of course I will. I need to know, too!’ James looked flustered.
‘Do you know whether Hester Millar had relatives?’ Markby brought the subject back to the victim.
Again a shake of the head. ‘I can only repeat I know – knew – little or nothing about Hester. What I know of Ruth is really only through her connection with the church and, of course, through Gerald, her late husband whom I knew slightly. I’m afraid I can only refer you to Ruth for details of Hester’s background.’
Markby looked through the small square panes of the french windows at the untrimmed hedges and weed-choked borders. What he wouldn’t give to get his hands on this garden.
‘Just now you spoke of the backbone of the community of Lower Stovey as being broken. Were you referring only to the population drift away?’
He was aware of James Holland’s intelligent gaze fixed on him. The vicar took his time before replying. Eventually he said:
‘I understand that there were some very unfortunate happenings there more than twenty years ago, before my time.’
‘A series of rapes,’ Markby said. ‘We never caught him.’
‘More’s the pity, and not only because such a monster must be caught in any circumstances. In a small community like that, such a terrible thing can shatter it and nothing can put it together again. Did the police su
spect anyone? A village man?’
‘We had no suspects. He might have been a villager but equally he might not. Two of the attacks took place on the old drovers’ way. He might have been a tramp, a wandering psychopath. Perhaps someone who’d been in trouble elsewhere and had taken to the road on the run? We don’t know.’
‘And because the police never nailed him, the villagers were left harbouring suspicions about their neighbours,’ James said. ‘The old trust and reliance on one another were destroyed. That’s what broke the back of Lower Stovey. It’s probably what did for Pattinson’s mental faculties. They couldn’t cope and neither could he.’
‘That’s when I first visited the vicarage there, in the course of those enquiries,’ Markby told him. ‘I had a long chat with Pattinson. I remember him as an old-fashioned, bookish sort of chap. He certainly wasn’t gaga then. Not quite in tune with the modern world, perhaps.’
The vicar’s beard moved indicating that beneath it he was pulling a wry grimace. ‘I hadn’t realised you were involved, Alan. I didn’t intend to sound as if I blamed Lower Stovey’s collapse on any failure on the part of the police.’
‘But we did fail,’ Markby said. ‘And when we fail, communities do suffer. An unsolved serious crime is like an open sore, never healing.’
‘And now you have a murder, Hester’s murder,’ James said.
‘Exactly. I don’t mean to fail Lower Stovey a second time.’
Something more than ordinary resolution in his tone had worried the vicar, who frowned. ‘Don’t take it personally, Alan. You’re a professional, as I am. You know as I do that sometimes you don’t win or you can’t rearrange matters. You and I both deal with cases which move us deeply. We’re human beings and we get angry, distressed, depressed. But we can’t help others if we get carried away ourselves.’
Markby burst out energetically, ‘I do take it personally!’ He flushed and added, ‘Sorry. I know you’re right. It’s just …’ His voice tailed away.
James was nodding. After a moment he said, ‘Didn’t someone find bones in Stovey Woods recently? I read something in the local paper.’