by Charles Todd
The Vicar looked up. Tansy, the liver-and-white spaniel sitting by his chair, patiently waited for Sims’s fingers to resume scratching behind the curly ears. He said, almost diffidently, “In the War it was the same. They were so young, most of them. But old in experience that I couldn’t match. I sent more than a few of them along to the Methodist chaplain, who was closer to their fathers’ age than I was. That seemed to be the best thing to do for them.” Then he turned the conversation, adding to Father James, “You must be thanking God that this weather held until after your Autumn Fete at St. Anne’s. It was a blessing. . . .”
Ellen said, “Martin went with Hetty to the bazaar. He brought me a brush for Tansy, and a new lead.” A smile lit her pale face, and then faltered. “Papa was well enough to go last year.”
“So he was,” the Vicar answered, returning her smile. “He has been a rock of strength each spring at Holy Trinity, too. I always took pleasure in working with him.”
As soon as it was decently possible, Father James rose and took his leave. Martin Baker escorted him to the door and thanked him again. The priest stepped out into the night. The rain had dropped off once more, and there was only the wind to keep him company on his long walk home.
Dr. Stephenson, climbing the stairs once more, found that the priest was right: Herbert Baker seemed to be resting quietly, slowly losing his grip on life.
In the small hours of the night, the man died peacefully, his family gathered about him. His daughter, Ellen, sobbed quietly and his two sons watched in anguish as he drew several short, uncertain breaths, then stopped breathing altogether, only a thin sigh passing his lips. The Vicar, by his side, prayed for Herbert Baker’s soul as the sigh faded.
The funeral was well attended, and Herbert Baker, coachman by trade, was sent to his eternal rest with the goodwill of a village that had known him to be an honest and plainspoken man with no vices and no outstanding talents, except perhaps for loyalty.
A week after the funeral, Dr. Stephenson returned to his surgery late one afternoon to find Father James just walking out the door.
“Well met!” Stephenson exclaimed, with pleasure. “Come in, let me pour myself a drink, and I shall be at your service. First babies are not to be hurried! This one kept his mother and me awake all of the night and well into the afternoon, and I’ve missed my breakfast, my lunch, and my usual hours.” He led the way back through the doorway, down the passage, and into his private office. The room smelled of wax and disinfectant, a blend that Father James found to be a sneeze-maker. He dragged out his handkerchief, sneezed heartily three times, and grinned crookedly at Stephenson.
“You should hear me when they’ve waxed the pews and the confessional at St. Anne’s! The blessing is, I’m not bothered by incense.”
The office was small, painted a pleasing shade of blue, and offered three chairs for visitors as well as the more comfortable old leather one behind the doctor’s broad wooden desk. Dr. Stephenson settled into that, and Father James took his accustomed place in the ancient wingback. As Stephenson lifted the bottle of sherry and offered it to him, the priest said, “No, thank you. I’ve another call to make, and she’s temperance-mad. I’ll lose my reputation if I reek of good sherry.”
Stephenson grinned. “How does she manage communion wine, then?”
“It’s consecrated, and the evil of the grape has been taken out.”
The doctor chuckled, then poured his own glass. “Yes, well, the mind is a wonderful thing, wonderful.”
“It’s about the mind I’ve come,” Father James said slowly.
“Oh, yes?” Stephenson sipped his sherry with relish, letting it warm him.
“I’d like to ask you if Herbert Baker was in full control of his faculties when he called me to him on his deathbed.”
“Baker? Yes, well, that was an odd business, I daresay. But he was dying of congestive heart failure, and his mind was, as far as I could tell, clear to the end of consciousness. Any reason why you feel it might not have been?” His voice lifted on a query. Stephenson was a man who liked his own life and that of his patients as tidy as possible.
“No,” the priest replied. “On the other hand, I’m seldom asked to second-guess Mr. Sims’s parishioners. Or he mine, for that matter. It was curious, and I found myself wondering about it afterward. Baker most certainly appeared in full control, though understandably weak. Still, you never know.”
“Which reminds me,” Stephenson said, turning the subject to something on his own mind. “There’s one of your flock I do want to talk about. Mrs. Witherspoon. She’s been refusing to take her pills again, and I’m—er—hanged if I can understand it.”
The priest smiled. “There’s a challenge for you. At a guess, I’d say that when she feels a little stronger, she’s convinced she doesn’t need them. Then she feels unwell again and quickly takes two to make up for it. A good-hearted woman, but not overly blessed with common sense. If I were you, I’d have a talk with her husband. She pays more heed to what he says than to anyone else. The sun shines out of Mr. Witherspoon, in her view.”
The ironmonger was the most lugubrious man in Osterley.
Stephenson laughed. “The eye of the beholder. Well, there’s a thought. That woman will make herself seriously ill if she doesn’t heed someone!” He looked at his wine, golden in the little glass. “I had a patient once who swore that sherry was Spanish sunlight caught in a bottle. Never been to Spain myself; I’m hard-pressed to escape for a few hours in Yarmouth. But there’s most certainly medicinal magic in it.” He finished the wine, then said, “How are those triplets of yours?”
Father James beamed. The triplets were his younger sister’s children and lived some distance away. “Thriving. Sarah is coping, with the help of two nuns I found for her, and every member of the family we can dragoon into service. I’ve done my own turn walking the floor at night. I expect those boys will be holy terrors by the time they’re eight. Their father was something of a devil himself at twelve!”
Stephenson said, “Aren’t we all? But responsibility comes soon enough.”
The priest’s face changed subtly. “It does. I’ll be on my way, then. Get some rest, you look as if you could use it!”
Watching him out the door, Stephenson had the curious feeling that Father James should take his own advice.
Nearly two weeks had passed since the funeral. Stephenson, rested and busy, had long since put Herbert Baker out of his mind when he took his wife to visit friends.
It was a dinner party like a dozen others the doctor attended with some enthusiasm whenever he could. There were eight couples, and he’d known all of them for years. Comfortable with each other, sharing a common history, they had found in one another a companionship that had few boundaries. Stephenson could count most of them as his patients, and his wife had sat on committees of one sort or another with every one of the women—church bazaars, flower arrangements, food baskets for the poor, spring fetes, charity cases, visiting the sick, welcoming newcomers to Osterley, and generally forming an ad hoc social group that was as small as it was select.
He couldn’t have said afterward how the subject arose. Someone asked a question, another guest expanded on it, and a wife raised a laugh by adding her own views. Stephenson found himself picking up the thread, and the next thing he knew, he was telling the story of a dying patient who had wanted to hedge his bets in the next life by seeing both the Vicar and the priest.
One of the guests leaned forward. “Was that old Baker? My wife remarked to me that she’d seen Father James walking out of Baker’s front door one night in a pouring rain, saying good-bye to young Martin on the step. I told her she must have been mistaken—Baker was sexton for seventeen years at Holy Trinity!”
Richard Cullen said, “Had the right idea, though, didn’t he? Who was it that said Paris was worth a Mass?”
That dissolved into a debate over whether it was Henri IV and progressed to a recital of the opening lines of “The Vicar of Bray.”
Herbert Baker had been forgotten once more.
It was late in the evening on the second of October when Father James returned to the Victorian Gothic house that served as St. Anne’s rectory. He let himself in through the unlocked kitchen door, grateful for the lamp still burning on the small table by the window, and sniffed appreciatively at the lingering aroma of bacon. He crossed the room to peer into the oven. His dinner was sitting on the rack in a covered dish. Lifting the lid, he saw that the contents were a little dry but certainly still delicious. There were onions as well, and what appeared to be a Scotch egg.
The housekeeper, Mrs. Wainer, had—as always— remembered that the body needed nurturing as well as the soul. He could feel the saliva flow in his mouth. Onions were his greatest love.
Father James set the lid in place and closed the oven door. Tired from a long vigil by a very ill parishioner, he stretched his shoulders as he straightened his back. The chair by the bed had been too low, and his muscles had knotted. But the man had lived, thank God. His family needed him.
He went down the passage that led past the parlor and the small music room that he had converted into a parish office. In the darkness he moved with the ease of long familiarity. As he reached the hall by the front door, he could hear the clock in the parlor cock itself to strike the hour, the whirr of the gears a soft sound that stopped him, one hand on the newel post at the foot of the stairs.
The clear golden chimes always reminded him of the house where he had grown up—the clock had come from there—and the laughter of his mother and father, sharing the reading of a book as the children sprawled at their feet. It had been a nightly ritual just before bedtime, and it was something he himself, celibate and alone, missed. Mark had died in the War, killed on the Somme, and Judith had died of the influenza, taking her unborn child with her. But Sarah had brought her triplets alive into the world, and he looked forward to the day when their rowdy spirits and lively voices would brighten the silence of the old rectory. Sarah had already promised them for a week each year, though they were not yet three months old. He smiled to himself at the thought. Mrs. Wainer, bless her, would probably quit in dismay.
As the chimes echoed into silence, he went on up the stairs to his study on the first floor. The lamp on the desk wasn’t lit, but one in his bedroom was burning, a low flame that guided his movements. He went through the bedroom door to put his case and coat away, and then wash his hands before dinner.
Coming back into the dark study, he failed to see the shadow that stood immobile in the deeper shadows beside his private altar. The gold chain on the priest’s chest gleamed in the moonlight pouring through the windows. Noticing that the draperies hadn’t been drawn, Father James crossed the room to pull them to, reaching high over his head to move the heavy velvet across the wooden rod. The first pair were only half shut when the shadow stepped out directly behind the priest. In the figure’s hand was the heavy crucifix that had always stood on the altar between a slender pair of candlesticks. It was lifted high, and the base of the cross brought down with stunning force, straight into the bald head that seemed, in this light, to be tonsured and unnaturally white.
A target that was so clear it seemed to draw a sigh from the priest. He began to crumple, like old clothes falling to the floor. The crucifix was lifted again, the base flashing in the pale light as it descended a second time. As the priest hit the carpet with an ugly thump, the bloody scalp was struck a third time.
Then, with efficient grace, the shadow stepped back, dropped the crucifix from a gloved hand, and set about silently, swiftly, wrecking the room.
The police, summoned the next morning by a distraught Mrs. Wainer, took note of the food left untouched in the oven, the black blood pooled beneath the priest’s head there by the window, and the state of the room: the paper-strewn floor and the scattered contents of the desk drawers. They examined the tin box that lay upside down and pried open with scissors, emptied of parish funds. And came to the conclusion that Father James, returning home unexpectedly, had been attacked by someone he’d disturbed in the midst of a burglary.
Not a target. A victim.
He’d heard a noise in the house, they concluded, discovered there was an intruder upstairs, and gone to the window intending to see if there was anyone at home next door. The neighbor had three nearly grown sons—it would have taken only a few seconds to unlatch the window and call to them to come and search the house with the priest. The alarmed thief, very likely concealed in the bedroom just behind the study, must have seen Father James at the window and hastily reached for the first weapon that came to hand—the crucifix—striking the priest down from behind to stop him from calling for help. In his terror he’d hit the priest again, and then fled, the money from the box in his pocket. Muddy shoe prints near the lilac bush showed a worn heel, a tear in the sole near the toe. A poor man, then, and desperate.
As luck would have it, the house next door, usually noisy with three generations of family, had stood empty the previous night. Taking even the elderly grandmother with them, they’d traveled to West Sherham to meet the girl one of their sons wished to marry. But the thief couldn’t have known that.
If the family had been at home, they’d have arrived in force, very likely in time to glimpse the fleeing man. It would have been satisfying to have a description of the killer.
The townspeople of Osterley, whether members of St. Anne’s, Holy Trinity, or no church at all, were shocked and horrified. They gathered in little clusters, silent for the most part or carrying on conversations that ended in head shakes and stunned disbelief. A few women wept into their handkerchiefs, red-eyed with grief and misgivings. Children were shushed, told to go to their rooms, questions unanswered. It was a wicked thing, to kill a clergyman. No one could recall even having heard of such a crime happening before in Norfolk—certainly not in living memory! Osterley would be the talk of East Anglia. . . .
Mr. Sims, trying to minister to his flock as well as the murdered priest’s until the Bishop could send someone else down from Norwich, heard the same litany again and again. “He was such a good, caring man! He’d have helped whoever it was, given them the money, done his best for them— there was no need to kill him!”
A growing aura of suspicion spread through the town, as people tried to second-guess the police.
Then it slowly began to occur to inhabitants, one after another, that the killer couldn’t be a local man. Not someone they knew. It simply wasn’t possible.
Still, eyes turned suspiciously, glanced over shoulders, followed this man or that down the street with furtive conjecture—an unease spreading like a silent illness through the town.
Mr. Sims found himself thinking that there was a reason for killing Father James, if he’d seen the face of the man invading his home and threatening him with the crucifix from his own altar. Recognition was knowledge—and there were some who might be afraid that even the compassion of a priest had its limits.
Fear was seldom ruled by reason; it reacted to danger first and logic afterward. The first blow must surely have been fear—the succeeding blows could have been fear, or could have been cunning, the need to silence. How was anyone to know, until the priest’s killer had been found?
Sims tried not to look into the faces of the people of Osterley and speculate. But he couldn’t stop himself from doing it. Human nature was human nature. He was no different from the rest of his neighbors.
The War had taught Sims that frightened men did whatever they had to do to stay alive. And in the trenches, killing had become a natural reaction to peril. He wondered if the priest’s attacker was an unemployed former soldier, one so desperate that he’d felt no compunction about taking life.
One man in Osterley came close to meeting those criteria. Sims refused to entertain the likelihood that he would ever kill again.
The Vicar scolded himself for such unchristian speculation. Surely not even a war-hardened veteran would kill a priest!
All the
same, how far would the few pounds stolen from the rectory go? How long before empty pockets drove the killer—whoever he was—to strike again?
That night—for the first time since he’d come to Osterley nine years before—Mr. Sims locked his doors. The vicarage stood behind a high wall in an expanse of wooded lawn, old trees that had always been his pride and given him a sense of continuity with those who had served Holy Trinity before him. Now the house seemed isolated and secretive, hidden away and intolerably vulnerable.
He told himself it was merely a precaution, to lock his doors.
In bitter fact, he was coming to terms with the unexpected discovery that the Cloth, which had always seemed his armor and his shield, was neither, and that a man of God was no safer than any other householder.
CHAPTER 2
OCTOBER 1919
London
RUTLEDGE CUT HIMSELF SHAVING AND SWORE.
His sister Frances, sitting in the chintz-covered chair by the window, winced but said nothing. When he did it again, she couldn’t stop herself.
“Darling, must you carve up your face on your own? Or could I do it for you? Surely I’m a better butcher than you are?” The words were light, intentionally.
He shook his head. “If I’m to return to work, I must learn to manage.” He was on medical leave from the Yard, and it was dragging on, day into endless day, chafing his spirit.