‘Does it have any relevance to the death of Gloria Wiggins?’ Tremayne said.
‘They’re not biting, probably something to do with her,’ the man said. ‘Rupert Baxter is my name. The vicar was my younger brother.’
‘What happened?’
‘Our father tried to toughen him up, took him out running, enrolled him in the local football team, but it wasn’t going to work. James eventually found God, and for many years his devotion suppressed his needs.’
‘Gay?’
‘Today’s society may accept it, but it was illegal up until 1967. Before that, you could get two years in prison, but then you’d know that.’
‘Before my time,’ Clare said. ‘Although we learnt about it, part of our training.’
‘Your brother,’ Tremayne said.
‘It was 1998, so it wasn’t against the law, although most people in this village didn’t approve. James was the local vicar, doing a good job, but if his superiors had ever found out, he would have been defrocked, or whatever they do. Nowadays, it’s not so much of an issue. Anyway, James had his eye on a farmer’s son not far from here. Both of them were over the age of consent, but Gloria Wiggins caught sight of them holding hands once. James, he never did anything wrong, but we all need some fondness. The next Sunday, the woman is standing up in her pew denouncing James, a pawn of the devil, a sinner, a buggerer, a sodomite. Gloria Wiggins always had a colourful turn of phrase, especially when she was criticising someone, which was most of the time.’
‘What happened to your brother?’
‘James loved his church and tending to the needy. He knew that the woman’s condemnation would get to the ear of the bishop, and it would be all over for him. He was a keen motorcyclist, surprising for someone who was only slight, but he was good. He even raced them when he was younger. He had a BMW motorcycle, a powerful machine. He took off, giving it plenty of stick, no doubt trying to get the pent-up frustration and anger out of him. He rounded a corner not far from here and slipped on some ice. Straight into a tree, head first. I never saw him, not when they peeled him off, but later on I identified him at the funeral parlour.’
‘Gloria Wiggins?’
‘She went around the village telling everyone it was God’s retribution. No compassion from her, nor from Bert Blatchford and his wife, and some others in the village.’
‘The same as her?’ Clare said.
‘The same. There are others in the village who were not too comfortable with James’s issue, but he was a good man, and he could have done a lot for this village.’
‘The current vicar?’
‘He doesn’t have the passion that James did.’
‘And the farmer who had taken a shine to James?’
‘He married a local girl, three kids now. Not that he ever goes to church.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m there every Sunday, more for James than the man upstairs.’
‘When they bury Gloria Wiggins?’
‘I don’t think I could attend her funeral, although James would have said I am wrong. He saw the good in everyone, even when there was none. If you want my advice, check on who the woman maligned. It’ll keep you busy for a few weeks just getting through them. Now, if you don’t mind, I might just find my way down to the pub, have a drink, talk about the one that got away.’
‘That’ll not be the subject today,’ Tremayne said.
‘Don’t I know it. It’ll be Gloria Wiggins, and how we should drink a toast to her.’
‘You won’t.’
‘Not me. She destroyed my brother, I can’t forget that.’
‘A motive for murder?’
‘It is, but if you want to check, you’ll find I was forty miles from here when she died. Cast-iron alibi.’
‘We’ll take a statement from you later. And we will check. Where can we find you?’
‘At the pub. I’m the publican.’
***
The crime scene investigators were still busy when Tremayne and Clare arrived back at the dead woman’s house. In the garage, she was still hanging. Around her, a group clad in coveralls, gloves and overshoes moved around. On one side, Jim Hughes, Salisbury’s crime scene examiner, the person in charge of the assembled team. Young, still in his thirties, although closing in on forty rapidly, he was a man that both of the police officers respected.
‘Another one, Tremayne,’ Hughes said as he saw Tremayne and Clare arrive.
‘As you say,’ Tremayne said. ‘What do we have?’
‘Female, mid-fifties, no obvious ailments, and without further advice, I’d say in good general health.’
‘The cause of death?’
‘Strangulation by hanging.’
‘Any noise?’
‘Some, but it wouldn’t have necessarily been enough to wake the neighbours.’
‘Could it be a suicide?’ Clare asked.
‘Not this time. The woman was hauled up, the noose around her neck. The rope was tied off to a post in the far corner of the garage. This was premeditated as there are clear signs that someone had thought it through. She may have been unconscious when she was raised, or possibly semi-conscious. Pathology may be able to help you there, but I’d say she was not conscious. It’s strange that people see these villages as havens of tranquillity, friendly neighbours, devoid of crime, when they’re just the same as everywhere else.’
‘The general verdict so far is that Gloria Wiggins was not popular,’ Clare said.
‘It’s a motive, and whoever wanted her dead was not the sort of person who acted on the spur of the moment. Lifting the woman, and she’s probably about hundred and sixty pounds, would have required some planning.’
‘And someone strong,’ Tremayne said. He was looking around the garage, having kitted up before entering, knowing full well that Hughes was pedantic about protecting the evidence.
‘You’d think so, but there’s a set of pulleys off to one side. We’re checking, and it may be that whoever it was had used the pulleys to lift her up and had then tied off the rope.’
‘Someone not so strong, is that what you’re saying?’
‘It’s a theory, although it would need someone with a degree of mechanical aptitude.’
‘It’s farming country,’ Clare said.
‘You’re correct. If a tractor is stuck in the mud, no doubt both men and women would know how to use a winch and pulley. Even so, the pulley system could lift the woman, but then there’s the tying off of the rope. Whoever it was, they took their time.’
‘How long?’
‘One hour, maybe less.’
‘And why the garage? It’s not the most pleasant of places,’ Tremayne said. ‘No sign of a car?’
‘None that we can see. It was used more like a storage shed than anything else. The woman next door, any help?’
‘She heard nothing, nosy though.’
‘Practical?’
‘She’s a suspect, and she’s educated, by her own admission. She’s addicted to the television.’
‘We’ve taken her finger and shoe prints. We found them outside on the garage door. So far, we’ve not been able to find evidence that she entered the garage.’
‘And I was looking forward to a couple of quiet weeks,’ Tremayne said as he and Clare walked away.
‘Not you. This is what keeps you going, and don’t deny it.’
‘Yarwood, we’ll need to do something about your attitude, too disrespectful of your superiors.’
Clare knew she was not. Tremayne was ageing, she could see it, and in the office at Bemerton Road Police Station he showed every year of his life, plus a few more. In the office, he looked in his mid-sixties. In the village of Compton, ten years had come off, and he walked properly, no more shuffling along, no more rounded shoulders. He was in his element, and so was she.
Chapter 3
Tremayne had to agree that the local pub served good beer. He and Clare had walked the short distance from the dead woman’s home to the pu
b, always the best place to get the feel of an area, the mood on the street. In one corner, an elderly couple sat. The man looked the fitter of the two; the woman had the countenance of someone who had just been told bad news, which, according to Rupert Baxter, the no-luck fisherman and jovial host of the Compton Arms, she had.
‘Bert Blatchford and his wife,’ Baxter said. He had poured a glass of red wine for Clare. The pub was warm, an open fire burning in one corner. On the walls of the cosy bar were horseshoes, antique farming implements, a couple of photos taken fifty years previously of two small boys and their parents standing outside the pub. The cars in the street Tremayne recognised from his youth when he had been first interested in cars: a Vauxhall Victor, a Ford Consul. At the time they had seemed to his young eyes to be the epitome of motoring excellence.
Nowadays, only the most avid collector of British cars would regard them as anything other than underpowered and antiquated. The sort of machines that had doomed the British car industry and allowed the Japanese to enter unhindered.
‘That’s me on the left,’ Baxter said. ‘The skinny kid to my right, that’s James.’
‘Did your family own the pub back then?’ Tremayne said.
‘Three generations. It was James that broke the mould. He liked the occasional drink, even as a vicar, but he had this revelation.’
‘Revelation?’ Clare said.
‘Not that I understood it, but James came back one day from a walk. He was nineteen, mad on motorbikes even then, and he said a voice spoke to him.’
‘What did you think?’
‘I thought he’d gone a little crazy. James was always sensitive, and people, especially some of our contemporaries in the village, even some of the old-timers, used to give him a hard time on account of his being effeminate.’
‘You’ve inferred that before, but riding motorcycles seems incongruous.’
‘He was a contradiction, and he was an amateur cyclist before he got his licence. He took to motorcycles with no trouble. I could never get the hang of them. I rode one of his bikes, an old BSA 650 twin, and came off, broke both of my legs. On a motorbike, he was a macho man, off of it, he was just James. Anyway, he comes back, tells our parents and me, they’re dead now, that he’s going to follow the path of the Lord.’
‘Did it upset you and your parents?’
‘It did at the time, but James went off to study theology. A few years later, he’s back here as our vicar. Those who had ridiculed him before showed him the respect he had always wanted.’
‘And then Gloria Wiggins?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your relationship with her?’
‘Civil. I hated her, she hated me.’
‘That’s how Stephanie Underwood described her relationship, but with them we got the impression of an underlying friendship coupled with an innate hatred,’ Clare said.
‘Stephanie’s a queer bird, you know that,’ Baxter said. He was on his second pint, so was Tremayne. Clare kept to the one glass.
Baxter left and went back to serving the other customers: a young couple who did not look to be local, a man who had come in on crutches, a couple of middle-aged women who both ordered gin and tonic. A burly man, taller than anyone else, stooped to get under the beam above the entrance to the two-hundred-year-old pub.
‘There are some that say the place is haunted,’ Bert Blatchford said.
‘We’ve not introduced ourselves,’ Tremayne said as he and Clare sat down next to the man and his wife.
‘You’re here to find out who murdered Gloria, aren’t you?’
‘Detective Chief Inspector Tremayne, Detective Sergeant Yarwood,’ Tremayne said. Both of them produced their warrant cards and showed them. Bert took a cursory glance, his wife continued to look the other way.
‘He did it,’ Blatchford’s wife said. Clare instinctively did not like her, although her husband, a ruddy-faced man, the sort of person who spent a lot of time outdoors, appeared approachable, almost friendly. Tremayne had told her, however, not to judge people on first impressions. She had learnt that lesson well. Her first great romance, a publican in Salisbury, had turned out to be a murderer, but time had moved on, painfully slowly for her until she had found someone else, a doctor this time. The man was treating her well, and she was enjoying his company, but once bitten, twice shy. They had been out a few times, including a romantic weekend in London where he had professed his love, but she hadn’t, and it had put a dampener on their time away. He was looking for marriage, she knew that, so was she, but she wasn’t sure if it was him or her that wouldn’t allow her to commit. She had a career that she enjoyed, a man she could spend time with, but marriage meant divided commitments, although, as her mother reminded her all too often, she wasn’t getting any younger, and in her thirties the biological clock was ticking. The inevitable lecture always came with ‘when I was your age, you were already eight and doing well at school, and what a joy you were to your father and me. But now, what are you? A police sergeant traipsing around Salisbury with an old man when you could be up with us in Norfolk, running the hotel, ensuring your legacy, finding yourself a good man and settling down, giving me a few grandchildren.’ Clare knew that she and her mother did not get along. Her father, a quieter person, said little, only to nod and shake his head at the right times when his wife was talking. Clare loved him dearly.
‘Who did?’ Clare said. She had moved round to where Blatchford’s wife was looking. She could see a hard woman: her eyes dark, her complexion fair. Across her left cheek was a scar.
‘Him at the bar, Rupert Baxter. He hated her.’
‘We’ve been told the story about his brother,’ Tremayne said.
‘Not the truth,’ Sheila Blatchford said, finally turning around to join the conversation. Clare moved back to her previous seat.
‘What is the truth?’
‘Rupert Baxter told you it was holding hands?’
Bert Blatchford showed his empty pint of beer to Baxter. ‘You’re paying if you want us to talk,’ he said to Tremayne.
Tremayne could have said that a trip to Bemerton Road Police Station and the interview room would have made the man talk, but a few drinks in a warm pub often loosened the tongue more than a cold metal chair, an austere room and an electric heater in one corner. He shouted out across the bar. ‘Make that two.’
‘Three,’ Sheila Blatchford said. Clare held her glass, placed the palm of her hand across the top of it. One person needed to be sober.
Baxter came over, placed the three pints on the table and left. No words were exchanged, other than a thank you from Tremayne.
‘Coming back to what you said before, Mrs Baxter,’ Tremayne said. He was on his third pint, his last for the evening. There was a time, not so long ago, when he would have drunk six, but that was before the health scare that put him in hospital, and before Jean, his former wife, had moved in with him. They were still discussing getting remarried, but neither seemed committed to the idea. The relationship was comfortable, and they complemented each other. Their life was not the mad passion of youth when they had first met; now it was calm and mature, and even Tremayne had to admit that a quiet night at home with Jean suited him fine, more so than the boozy nights when he, as a police officer, should have known better. Once he had been so drunk that the officers in a patrol car that had come by while he rested by the side of the road had put him in the passenger seat and driven him home, even put him to bed. Not that it avoided having to stand up before his superintendent the next day and receiving a verbal: ‘if it happens again, you’re suspended and out on your ear pending a disciplinary’.
‘He told you they were holding hands?’
‘Words to that effect.’
‘He’s lying. James Baxter and the other man were, I can’t say the word.’
‘The relationship was not benign?’
‘I don’t intend to sully what I know with coarse language. They were committing themselves to the devil, that’s all I know.’
‘Do you have proof, Mrs Blatchford?’
‘Are you asking if I saw them?’
‘Did you?’
‘I know, so did Gloria, and so did my husband.’
‘Mr Blatchford, did you have proof that James Baxter was involved in a homosexual relationship?’
‘I trust the Lord.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘Our consciences are clear, so was Gloria Wiggins’, a good servant of the Lord.’
‘A dead servant,’ Clare said. ‘Are you sorry that she’s dead?’
‘One of God’s children, yes.’
‘That’s not an answer,’ Clare reminded her.
‘She was not a nice person, but she did not deserve to die.’
‘And James Baxter did?’
‘He had sinned, Gloria had not.’
‘There are some that would say that speaking ill of your neighbour is not Christian.’
‘We do not need lectures from those who do not believe,’ Sheila Blatchford said. ‘The good Lord condoned what Gloria did in that church, standing up and telling the congregation that the Reverend James Baxter was a sinner.’
‘You were there?’
‘We were.’
‘Did you know what she was going to do?’
‘No. But we would have agreed if she had come to us. We did not like her, any more than anyone else, but she was right. We can only commend her for that, and she is now with the angels.’
‘One woman makes an accusation in the church, of which you have no proof, nobody does, yet you accept her word?’
‘We did.’
‘Why?’
‘We don’t need to answer.’ Sheila Blatchford moved her seat and looked away. Clare could tell that she would say no more.
‘My wife is upset over Gloria’s death,’ Bert Blatchford said.
‘If you believe that Rupert Baxter killed her, then why are you in his pub?’
‘If he hadn’t, someone else would have.’
‘Enough to kill her?’
A return to the conversation from the recalcitrant Mrs Blatchford. ‘Our faith does not permit the killing of another,’ she said.
‘Nor does it allow the unsubstantiated accusation of a man without proof,’ Clare said. ‘A man who as an indirect result of that accusation killed himself in an accident.’
The DI Tremayne Thriller Box Set Page 117