Souvenirs of Murder (8 page)

‘But an unlikely person to commit murder?' Patrick queried.

‘She's gentle,' Elspeth said. ‘A real lady from an old landed Cornish family. Vulnerable and the kind of person to be easily bullied.'

‘Would she have had the trees felled just because of what he'd said?'

‘Oh, no. They're her children. I have an idea she talks to them.'

‘
Not
easily bullied then.'

‘All right, in every other respect,' Elspeth corrected.

‘Were you ever invited to the Blanches' place for dinner, or drinks?'

‘Oh, no. I don't think they ever entertained.'

‘Do you know if there are any children?'

‘I can't remember them mentioning any. They're not the kind of people you ask personal questions of.'

‘Do you know anything about this black magic sect?'

‘No, you'll have to ask John when he comes back as he'll have gone into Bristol by now. He deals with that. I don't want to know about things like that.'

‘But you must hear rumours,' Patrick remarked gently. ‘The WI, the Mothers' Union . . .'

‘All I know is that it involves incomers. And we're not talking about batty females who roll naked in the dew and concoct potions to cure warts but real Satanists.'

‘Shame about no naked females,' Patrick murmured, grinning at her and thus breaking the spell. ‘How terrorized by me were you on a scale of one to ten?'

She thought about it. ‘Oh . . . nine.' And then laughed.

John's car had gone from outside the church so we went back into the building.

‘Tell me exactly what you did, before and after, when you and Mrs Crosby found the body,' Patrick said, gazing around as though he was seeing the place for the first time.

‘There was nothing of real interest to the investigation about it,' I told him. ‘As I've previously said she came to the rectory asking for the church to be unlocked as it wasn't and ought to have been. She wanted to check the flowers. I told her that the sexton should unlock when your father's away but she retorted that he often oversleeps and—'

‘Do we know if he had overslept?' Patrick interrupted.

‘No, he hadn't. He'd unlocked the church, presumably at the usual time, around nine thirty.'

‘What time was Blanche killed?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Didn't Carrick mention that?'

‘I don't think he knew when I last spoke to him. And I haven't been too interested in this up until now as my husband is in trouble and I didn't make a point of asking him.'

He had scooped up the shopping pad and pen after I had given them back to Elspeth having torn off the written-on sheets and now noted this down, glancing up to give me a raised eyebrow look. ‘Always in trouble, is he, Madam?'

‘A complete tosser,' I answered in a bored voice.

We both giggled.

‘Ingrid, why am I doing this?' Patrick said, flopping down in a pew.

‘To try to take your mind off the trouble.'

He gazed at me and I saw the depthless misery in his eyes.

‘You didn't kill those people,' I said quietly. ‘And even if you had because you were off your head with the drugs I would still love you to bits.'

He gave me a wan smile and then turned his attention to his notes. ‘Right, you and Mrs Crosby came in, unlocking the door with the key that hangs in Dad's study. Then what?'

‘The flowers hadn't been touched, still last week's. She got on her high horse, consulted the flower rota in the porch and said she would phone the woman who should have done them and give her a piece of her mind.'

‘Who was it?'

‘Pauline Harrison. I told her not to as I knew that Pauline's father had been taken ill with a stroke.'

‘How did you know that?'

‘By a fluke. I'd overheard a conversation in the village stores. I have discovered since, from Elspeth, that Pauline had had to drive up to Cambridge. Her dad died.'

‘I must remember that if we have to talk to her. Then you unlocked the vestry door.' Patrick got to his feet and went in that direction. ‘Why did you need to go in there?'

Following him, I said, ‘I'd asked Mrs Crosby to take care of the flowers in the circumstances and she said that as she didn't live nearby and hadn't brought her purse with her she would need to take money from the flower fund box – which is kept in the vestry.'

‘Did you believe that? Don't women usually take their handbags, or purse, with them everywhere?'

‘No, I didn't believe her. I think she didn't want to have to pay for the flowers herself.'

‘Mean old bat. Then what?'

‘I didn't open the door, she did. The key's kept on a ledge by the organ. I didn't know where that one was.'

‘I wonder how many other people do.'

‘Loads. James can probably tell you who they are.'

Not surprisingly, Patrick knew where the vestry key was kept and unlocked the door. The room was some twelve feet square and all seemed as I had seen it last time except for the carpet which had been removed by the forensic team and was presumably still being examined in a lab somewhere. He stood still for a moment, staring at the floor and then opened the one large cupboard the room possessed revealing a vacuum cleaner, dusters, a long broom, a dustpan and brush and brass cleaning materials. There were also flower arranging items on an upper shelf.

‘It must have been one of the tools from that cleaner that was forced down his throat,' I said.

Patrick rummaged. ‘There isn't a narrow nozzle tube here so that must have been it. But why did Blanche come here that morning? We know he wasn't on the cleaning rota, nor were he and his wife on the flower rota – I looked in the porch on the way in. There are no parish papers kept in this room: they're all in the safe at the rectory. You don't have to come in here to gain access to the tower in order to wind the clock either. Anyway, a retired farmer by the name of Bill does that.'

‘He might have been dragged in here having been hit on the head somewhere else,' I suggested. ‘Does James know what he was struck with yet?'

‘He hadn't when we last spoke but there might have been developments. We'll have to go to the nick.'

I wandered back into the nave. ‘Where are the heavy brass candlesticks kept when they're not in use?'

‘At home, in the safe with the communion silver. They're all valuable antiques.'

‘And your father cleans those too?'

‘Yes.'

‘But someone else must have had the keys to the safe while your parents were away.'

‘Good thinking.'

‘Would that be the sexton as well?'

‘No,
probably
someone like the Chairman of the PCC.'

‘Mrs Crosby's husband then.'

‘It's a priority we go to the nick so that we can read up the notes on the answers to questions that have already been asked. No point in asking them all over again unless people gave evasive answers.'

Outside, a couple of minutes later, I surveyed the acre or so of graveyard and said, ‘Have the police really searched every inch of this for whatever it was that Blanche was attacked with?'

‘They must have.'

‘Only it's quite overgrown in places. What about the rectory garden?'

Part of this is literally over the wall towards one end. The drive to the house, with more garden bordering it, runs along the church boundary on the southern side.

Patrick rang Carrick.

‘They did, but, as yet, only as far as what was regarded the distance someone could throw something like a heavy hammer,' he told me, Carrick still on the line.

‘What about the builders?' I said. ‘Were they interviewed? Had they had any tools stolen? Had any of them known the murder victim? Or have previous convictions?'

Patrick gravely passed over his mobile.

‘Hello, Ingrid,' said the DCI. ‘I heard nearly all of that. Come to the nick and I expect you'll be able to find most of the answers.'

We agreed that the pair of us would do so at around two that afternoon.

‘There's time to search,' I told Patrick, setting off in the direction of the little gate that is in the boundary wall. ‘The killer might have gone right into the rectory garden to dispose of the weapon.'

‘What, look for a hammer or something similar?' he said, staying where he was. ‘I was thinking of an early lunch.'

I turned and held up one hand, fingers outstretched, palm towards him. ‘
Five
children,' I said. ‘Like you, I've signed a contract so this will be
my
job with SOCA for a while if there's no happy ending to your spot of bother.'

He caught up with me and we went through the gate.

‘I'd clean windows, wash floors, mow lawns, anything.' Patrick said.

I saw that I had really offended him and he was also tired. ‘Sorry, that was very unkind of me. I know you would. Perhaps I'm just trying to say that I don't want you to lose your edge.'

‘Have I?'

‘From your MI5 days? Yes, you have a bit.'

‘Am I relying on my consultant too much?'

‘Perhaps. At one time you would probably have towed me through all these hedges, looking, and be damned with lunch.'

For answer he grabbed me, gave me a big munching kiss, took my hand and soldiered off into the rectory garden.

After half an hour of soggy searching through the remaining rapidly melting thin layer of snow we found it.

SIX

The heavy hammer had been in the shrubbery long enough to have started to rust a little but had arrived sufficiently recently for the leaves of an evergreen plant, a branch of which it had borne to the ground, not to have yellowed beneath it. Only an Olympian would have been able to throw it to this spot from inside the churchyard so whoever had done so had either come into the garden or tossed it from a window of the house, the latter not an easy option either.

‘There's paint on the handle,' I said as we gazed down at it. ‘I'd put money on it belonging to one of the builders.'

‘It doesn't mean they had anything to do with the killing,' Patrick pointed out. ‘There have been vans parked out here for weeks with the rear doors open and any number of tools in full view. They only take the valuable stuff indoors with them. And this might not be the murder weapon.'

He drove to our present home to fetch a sample bag and gloves from his briefcase – which for some reason was not in the car – rang Carrick to tell him what we had found and we then went straight to Bath, only pausing to buy some sandwiches at a corner shop. We found that the DCI was on his way back from somewhere but would be with us shortly, this information given to us by Derek Woods, the duty sergeant.

‘Glad to have you back, sir,' said Woods, referring to a stint that Patrick had done with Bath CID the previous year. ‘And you, Miss Langley.'

‘Thank you, Derek,' Patrick responded. ‘Tell me, is it more likely to be a man or a woman who would murder a bloke by hitting him on the head with a hammer and then shoving a vacuum cleaner nozzle down his throat and pouring cleaning fluid down it?'

The sergeant grimaced, sucked in his breath through clenched teeth, thought for a few seconds and then, in his soft West Country voice, said, ‘It might depend if the body was moved at all and on how heavy the murder victim was.'

‘We're assuming until it's proved otherwise that both actions occurred at the same place, in this case a church vestry.'

‘Then first of all I'd start looking for a woman with a horrible grievance. She might have been aided by a male accomplice, of course. He may have wielded the hammer.'

‘Thank you. My thoughts entirely.'

‘Is this the investigation at Hinton Littlemoor?'

‘It is.'

‘There have been complaints coming from that quarter of what people have called “dodgy goings on”. Not the usual antics of youngsters coming back from the pub and making nuisances of themselves but adults drinking and making a lot of noise around a bonfire. It might have nothing to do with the case you're working on though, sir.'

‘Is this activity centred on any particular area?'

‘I understand it mostly involves the new development down where the railway station used to be.'

‘When does this happen?'

‘Seemingly during the night.'

‘That's where the new drainage scheme's being put in,' Patrick mused. ‘Thank you.'

‘And where the diocese was going to rehome your parents,' I said as we strolled in the direction of Carrick's office.

‘Noble reward for half a lifetime's service,' Patrick said sarcastically. ‘A bunch of shitty little bungalows that tended to flood in winter soon to be joined by phase two, another bunch of shitty little bungalows with gardens consisting of subsoil and rocks from the holes dug to put in drainage pipes. I gather that all the topsoil they could scrape together was sold off to provide beer tokens for the hard-working lads.' And, on an afterthought, he added ‘I must ask Dad about that black magic lot.'

‘But as Derek said . . .'

‘Yes, it probably has nothing whatsoever to do with our murder case.'

‘Do you know what time Greenway's due to arrive tomorrow?'

‘At around ten thirty.' Patrick gave me a big crazy grin. ‘How many Micky Mouse degrees do you have to have these days to be a street sweeper?'

James Carrick swept around a corner to the rear of us, Lynn Outhwaite behind him. I instantly got the impression that there had been a difference of opinion.