Slaying is Such Sweet Sorrow

by Patricia Harwin

  “Tom’s a fine young man.”

  “He is, although these days—” He broke off as we passed through the forbidding doorway into the serene, flower-scented little church with its heavy round pillars, low ceiling, and age-worn oaken pews. Archie went for the pews, crawling under and over them, talking to himself.

  “Is Tom having problems?” I asked.

  “Well—I must admit to being rather worried about this engagement of his. The young woman—Gemma—seemed at first very suitable, academically minded, well mannered—They became engaged last winter, but after only a few months she became infatuated with the man who was so unfortunately murdered the other night, Mr. Stone. She broke off the engagement and Tom was devastated. Now Stone is dead, he tells me the ring is back on her finger—the one she’d returned to him when this fellow took up with her! Doesn’t that seem to you very flighty behavior? Hardly auspicious for a successful marriage.”

  “Well, yes, it does,” I had to admit. “And my own experience tells me any attempt to talk to him about it just results in a quarrel?”

  “Quite.” He sighed deeply. “He is far too much in love, I’m afraid.”

  I was touched by his openness, so untypical of the English, telling a near-stranger like me such personal things. There was a naïveté about him that was very appealing. I was about to confide how immovable Emily could be when she’d formed an opinion, to show him he wasn’t the only parent with that problem, when I heard a ringing crash at the front of the church. We both started and looked toward the sanctuary. Someone had left the celebrant’s chair close beside the altar, and Archie was in the process of climbing from the one to the other while a gold candlestick rolled back and forth on the floor.

  He made it onto the altar before I could reach him and stood up on the embroidered white cloth that covered the stone top, beaming at his accomplishment. I heard the vicar oh-dearing and tut-tutting behind me as I put my hands under Archie’s arms and lifted him to the floor, complimenting him enthusiastically on his jumping ability.

  “Do you think this would be a good chance to speak to him about the sanctity of the altar?” he asked.

  “Oh, Vicar, he’s much too young,” I said, unable to repress a laugh, “and his vocabulary’s very limited. I don’t think he’s anywhere near ready for theology!”

  Archie was now squatting on the floor, rolling the candlestick around, and I could see the white candle it held had split down one side.

  “You must let me pay for a new candle,” I said to Mr. Ivey, “and I’ll take the altar cloth home and wash those muddy shoeprints out of it.”

  “No, no, we have quite a supply of candles, I shouldn’t think of taking money for it. The cloth, now—I’ll accept your kind offer there. Mrs. Watkins won’t be coming for the laundry until Tuesday, and we shall need this cloth for Sunday services.” He fingered it rather wistfully. “Some of the parishioners disapprove of these things, you know—candles, altar cloths, even the use of the old Prayer Book. I’ve been told my services come perilously close to papistry!” He smiled ruefully. “I have tried to explain that these things were the norm in our church until about thirty years ago, but of course people have forgotten.”

  “I think most of us like your way of doing things,” I assured him. “It’s a tremendous relief after Ian Larribee!”

  “Ah yes, my predecessor of scandalous memory. Shocking to hear of a priest doing the things he was accused of! Oh, I believe you are correct, it’s only a small group of people who disapprove. But I hate to think I keep anyone from finding satisfaction in worship. I wonder who left that chair so near the altar? It ought to be at the back of the sanctuary.”

  The last remark came as I followed his gaze and saw Archie starting up onto the chair again. This time I lifted him down without any games and answered his protesting howl with “Not going to happen, matey” as I carried him struggling down the aisle. Once in the churchyard he was quickly distracted and only grumbled a bit as he followed Mr. Ivey and me to the gate.

  “I’ll have the cloth back to you before Sunday,” I promised. “I do apologize for Archie. You won’t have to do a bell-book-and-candle to restore the altar’s holiness, I hope?”

  Not a very tasteful joke, I realized, as he thought seriously for a moment before answering, “Oh, no, not even I should go that far, Catherine.”

  Archie and I resumed our meandering walk, heading down the lane and then the main road past Rowan Cottage. I caught a glimpse of Muzzle’s worried face peering around the doorway of the potting shed, but Archie was chasing a butterfly and didn’t see him. The sun had gone in, and it looked as if it might rain again as we went into the Cobbs’ small combination village shop–post office. Enid’s habitually narrowed eyes became slits and her mouth set in a hard line when she saw Archie. I knew she was envisioning a floor littered with cans and broken bottles. But her husband, Henry, up a ladder stocking shelves, looked down at us with his customary sunny smile.

  Archie headed right for the ladder, but three young girls immediately converged on him as he passed the cosmetics, and the one with the blonde dreadlocks scooped him up and bounced him enthusiastically.

  “Hello then, Archie!” she sang out, planting a big kiss on his cheek. “Remember me—Jilly? You’ve grown quite a bit since I last seen you, han’t he, Audrey?”

  Audrey, Jilly’s inseparable friend, stood holding her own baby, a plump little girl about a year old dressed in a conventional pink knitted baby suit, in contrast to her mother who had recently dyed her spiked hair bright orange, and wore studded black leather pants, boots, and jacket. She had acquired a little silver nose stud since the last time I’d seen her.

  “He’s getting a big boy, i’n he?” she joined in. “Now then, Archie, don’t you remember Diana? Say, ‘yes, I played with her down at the petrol station last month.’ ”

  Archie of course said nothing of the kind, but he and Diana gazed at each other with the avid amazement small children always show when they spot a contemporary.

  “Ooh, I think there’s something going on there,” said the third girl, a rather silly redhead named Patty Jenkins.

  “How are things going with the new baby, Audrey?” I asked.

  She patted her stomach, with a contented smile on her bright purple lips.

  “Going a treat, Cath. It’s what I do best. See, I don’t just like getting preggers, I like being preggers too!”

  Enid Cobb’s bullhorn voice broke in, heavy with disapproval. “Was you three planning to buy any of that face muck, or are you just using me shop like your local?”

  Archie was struggling to be released, so Jilly set him down, and the three of them started toward the door. Before they went out Audrey turned back to me and said, “We was all sorry to hear about Archie’s dad being had up for that killing.” The other two murmured agreement. “Poor Emily! Fancy finding out your man’s a killer.”

  “He’s nothing of the kind!” I responded indignantly. “Don’t you go around saying such a thing, any of you. Peter wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “But how’s he going to get round that phone call from the bloke, saying he was killing him?” asked Patty.

  I was dumfounded. “How do you know about that?” I demanded. The village’s jungle telegraph system always amazed me, but this was something only the police and Peter’s immediate family were supposed to know about.

  “Molly Harper’s got a friend at the station,” Jilly explained.

  “She’s shagging a constable,” Audrey elaborated, “and he told her, and she told Patty, so now everybody knows.”

  I blew out a deep breath in frustration as they left, calling good-byes to Archie. Henry Cobb had him well in hand, murmuring encouragement as he helped him to climb the ladder, holding him carefully by the arms and showing him how to back down when he’d gone high enough.

  “Them girls is running wild,” Enid announced as I turned to the counter. “Disgraceful how their mothers lets them dress and talk! That Audrey’s
dead lucky young Harry Ames was willing to marry her, though I still say, as I said from the start, he’ll rue the day.”

  Audrey had produced Diana without revealing the father’s name, although the village was sure it had been a young man who’d left for parts unknown when she started to show. But Harry Ames was a decent fellow, if several degrees less cool than Audrey, and seemed happy to be a father to Diana as well as his own expected son. Audrey had announced she was naming this one Elton.

  “Oh well, maybe things will work out for them,” I said. She answered with a scornful snort. “She’s not such a bad sort, Enid. You must admit she’s a really devoted mother.”

  “Mark my words,” was her only answer.

  “Oh, all right. I’ll have a loaf of brown bread, a package of chipolatas, and, let’s see, a packet of Twiglets, please. And a can—I mean, a tin of those little raviolis.”

  While Archie was otherwise occupied, I paid for a bag of boiled sweets too and slipped them into my pocket for occasions when only bribery would work.

  “Did you hear the news about old George Crocker’s place, then?” Enid asked as she rang up my purchases. When I said I hadn’t, she went on with relish, “It’s been sold! Mind you, I don’t know no more, not yet. But I do hear there’s a building firm from Chipping Campden been out to measure the ground and that.”

  So, I was to have a new neighbor. As Archie and I made our slow way back to Rowan Cottage, I felt a tingle of excitement at the possibility of making friends with somebody even newer to the village than I was. I hoped they wouldn’t turn out to be like the London couple who had bought our former doctor’s house, at the other end of the village. They had no interest in living among us but descended on Saturdays with groups of friends in pricey sports cars, partied until the small hours, and then lay around the next day recuperating until they left in the late afternoon. It would be dreadful to have people like that across the road.

  Archie was tired out by now. I warmed up some of the canned ravioli, one of his favorite foods, and he ate about half of them and drank a few sips of milk, then lay down on the hearth rug in the sitting room and fell asleep. I lifted him onto the sofa and covered him, then settled myself in the wing chair with a cheese sandwich and my current mystery novel. I was not going to leave him alone there again, even if the door was locked this time.

  I was starting to nod off over my book when the phone rang. I sprang up to answer it before it rang again and woke the baby.

  “Is everything all right?” Emily asked with barely disguised apprehension.

  “Yes, darling, no disasters, accidents, or mishaps this time. Didn’t I promise you? He’s having a nice nap. What’s happening there?”

  “I just got in from my adolescent group,” she answered. “They were more than usually fractious, probably because I couldn’t concentrate on them as I should have. Lack of adult attention is the root of their problems, and they’re always poised to say I’m just like their parents.” She gave a deep sigh. “But I can’t think of anything but Peter right now!”

  “Of course you can’t. None of us can.”

  “Dad and I are going to see him this afternoon, with Mr. Billingsley. Of course she has to come along. I don’t know why she doesn’t just go shopping or something. She doesn’t give a damn about Peter or me. I wonder if she even cares about Dad, except for his money. He told me she and her husband were really poor when he met her.”

  “She was married too? Oh, never mind, I don’t want to know about it!”

  “Yes, she dumped the guy as soon as she got a chance at Dad. Oh, Mom, why did everything have to turn out like this?”

  “You think I know? Darling, you sound just about at the end of your rope. Let me take you to that Italian restaurant you like this evening, when I bring Archie back. We’ll have a good dinner and talk about what we can do to get Peter cleared.”

  “I already promised Dad I’d go to dinner with them.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake! Does he think he’s helping you by making you hang out with that woman all the time?”

  “Mother, he’s doing his best, and I appreciate it!” Her voice cracked, and I forced myself to speak calmly.

  “All right, love, I’m sorry. Listen, why don’t I keep Archie tonight, then you can have the evening with your father and you and I can visit tomorrow morning? Just be sure they know to keep away, and everything will be fine.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I miss Archie. The place seems eerie, all quiet and orderly like this. What if they really do take Peter away from us? What if Archie never has a father to love him like Dad loved me?”

  She was on the verge of tears again, so I took the decision off her shoulders. “You go ahead and have your visit with Peter and your dinner out, and I’ll bring the baby back tomorrow morning. He’s having a great time, and so am I. Just try to believe Peter’s coming home soon, because he is! Maybe your Mr. Billingsley will come up with some new idea after he talks to him.”

  It hadn’t rained when Archie woke, so we went out to the garden to work on the perennial bed I’d been planning ever since I moved into the cottage. I had diagrammed the drifts of compatible colors, changing through the seasons, all down the two long sides of my backyard, and now I was ready to double-dig it. This involved taking out the topsoil, breaking up the subsoil, removing weeds and big stones, adding dried manure and bonemeal, and returning the topsoil. Guaranteed to work off worry, anger, and frustration, at least temporarily!

  I had bought a miniature shovel for Archie so he could “help” me, and he pitched in enthusiastically for short periods, sending dirt flying in all directions until one thing or another distracted him. After an hour or so we had a break and I sipped tea while he ran around with his Twiglets, small sticks of dough coated with that Marmite stuff he liked so much. I had just resumed digging, and he was trying unsuccessfully to climb into one of the rowan trees that had given the cottage its name, when Fiona Bennett came around the side of the house.

  “My word, you’re dirty!” she exclaimed. “Why you’re determined to create this perennial border is beyond me. Just stick in a flowering bush here and there, much less tiring and messy.”

  “I’ve always wanted a perennial border,” I answered stubbornly, sitting down on the back step beside her. “Besides, there’s nothing like strenuous exercise to keep one young and flexible.” But I didn’t mind taking another break. I had to admit my back and arms were getting sore.

  “We’re too old for that sort of thing, Catherine,” she insisted, not realizing that was the best way to harden my determination.

  Archie wandered over, his face smeared with sticky brown Marmite, and ordered, “Dig!”

  “Your gran wants a rest,” Fiona said firmly. “Show me how well you can dig.”

  He went back to his shovel for a few minutes but then got a new idea and toddled around the yard calling, “Cat!”

  “I spoke to John,” Fiona said. “He called me at the shop, said he had a little time free and just wanted to see how my day was going. Wasn’t that sweet of him?”

  “I seem to be hearing about one happy marriage after another today,” I said with some acerbity. “The vicar’s, Audrey’s, yours. What is it, a conspiracy to make me feel like a failure?” I laughed to show I didn’t mean it, although I sort of did. “Did you remember to ask him about the postmortem results?”

  “Yes, indeed, that’s why I closed the shop a little early and came to tell you what he said. There was nothing whatever wrong with Edgar Stone. The postmortem found him a very healthy specimen, in fact more fit than average for his age.”

  “Damn!” I sat thinking for a few minutes, watching Archie crawl under a bush looking for Muzzle. “Oh, well, suicide did seem unlikely, the more one thought about it. Now we have to figure out how those calls were made, if Edgar didn’t make them. It just had to have been the real murderer, somehow sounding so much like Edgar that his wife and two of his colleagues are certain it was his voice.”

&nbs
p; “Hardly likely, dear,” Fiona said. “No thug off the street could have done that, or would have had reason to. No student with a grudge could have done it either, and again, why would they want to incriminate Peter? You must face the fact that it was Stone who made those calls.”

  “But I can’t face that, Fiona! It means Peter killed him, and I know that’s not true. Okay, the only people who had an obvious motive are his colleagues at Mercy. Stone was going to be the new chair of their department in a few months, with power over their careers.”

  “That’s a motive for finding a position somewhere else, not plunging a big knife into somebody,” Fiona replied.

  “What if the first call was genuine, he really had some startling news to tell Peter,” I began again, “and somebody killed him to keep him from telling it?”

  “More plausible,” she admitted.

  “How could we find out what that news was?” We fell silent for a few minutes, thinking.

  “Perhaps his wife would know,” Fiona offered.

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t have confided in her, but she could have seen or overheard something, right?” I felt a new rush of hope, almost as exciting as when I’d gone after Barbie. “You know, I think I’ll go and talk to her tomorrow, Fiona! She’s got some mental problems, of course, but if she does know something, I’m sure I can get it out of her.”

  Fiona turned down my invitation to stay for dinner, because John for once was coming home in time to eat with her. I gave up digging and joined Archie’s futile cat hunt, crawling under bushes with him and ending with a grand chase around the garden. It was after five o’clock by then, his usual supper time, so I gave him a bath and got him into his pajamas, then showered and changed and started cooking.

  One meal he would sit down for was a boiled egg served in an egg cup, with “soldiers,” strips of whole wheat toast to dip in the yolk. I fried up the sausages the Brits call chipolatas, pretty much like American breakfast sausages instead of the big fat “bangers” they prefer, and he ate one with his egg and toast, and drank some apple juice. I had the same, with a cup of tea instead of the juice, and then we went upstairs. It still got dark early, which made it easier to get him into bed. We looked at a picture book for a little while, but his eyes had drooped shut before the last page. Really, I thought as I went back downstairs, for such an active child he wasn’t hard to get to sleep at all. And, thank heaven, he was sleeping through the night now—or at least until just before dawn.