A Dead Man Out of Mind (20 page)

Emily was horrified. ‘But that's terrible! How could anyone do that – just let someone die?'

‘I used to feel that way about it,' Rachel said with a small sigh. ‘I certainly couldn't do it, myself. But now I realise that other people's circumstances are different. For instance, I'm very fortunate – the financial side of it isn't a problem for me. But nursing care of the type Colin needs doesn't come cheap, and might be devastatingly expensive for someone who didn't have the money and who wanted something beyond the level of care that the NHS provides.'

‘Colin is lucky that he has you,' Emily declared staunchly, then realised how it might sound to define as lucky a person who was doomed to spend the rest of his life in a hospital bed, completely unaware of his surroundings – especially to the person who seemed likely to spend the rest of
her
life looking after him in one way or another.

But Rachel didn't take it amiss. ‘Well, yes,' she said in a facetious tone. ‘If he didn't have me, Francis would be his next-of-kin, and he might decide to pull the plug!'

CHAPTER 15

    
When my spirit was in heaviness thou knewest my path: in the way wherein I walked have they privily laid a snare for me.

Psalm 142.3

At St Margaret's it would be remembered as one of the all-time great rows in the church's history, its causes and its aftermath discussed endlessly afterwards. Oddly enough, in all the postmortem analysis, no one ever thought to accuse Father Keble Smythe of deliberate maliciousness in sending his curate to take the service in his place, or indeed to attribute to him any base motivation or blame for what ensued from his opting out. And though the question of his whereabouts might have come up at the time, such minor matters were swept away by what happened, and later no one gave it a thought. Suffice it to say that Father Keble Smythe was not present at St Margaret's that evening, and never claimed to be; no one else would have admitted missing it.

Robin West, the sacristan, took credit for having seen her first. He was in the chancel when she came in through the church, and though the sole fact of her presence in the church was not a great shock, he was alarmed to see her heading towards the sacristy, his own domain.

His natural impulse, whenever he saw Rachel Nightingale, was to flee, but on this instance, for whatever reason, he decided to stand and fight. Moving in the direction of the sacristy, he intercepted her near the door, just under the stained glass window depicting the stoning of St Stephen. ‘Where do you think you're going?' he demanded.

As it was the first time he'd ever spoken to her, she was understandably startled. ‘To the sacristy, to vest,' she explained. ‘The Vicar has asked me to take the service.'

The sacristan bristled in outraged indignation. ‘That doesn't seem very likely. I'm sure that
Father
would never do such a thing.'

It was just the sort of reaction that Rachel had expected; she took a deep breath and stood her ground, and her voice sounded remarkably calm. ‘Nevertheless, it's quite true.'

Robin West sputtered ineffectually for a moment and paused as Rachel continued on her way into the sacristy. Uncertain, he turned to find that Martin Bairstow, Stanley Everitt and the Toppings had arrived more or less simultaneously at the back of the church; he rushed to intercept them. ‘It's that woman!' he announced dramatically. ‘She claims that Father has sent her to take the service She's gone into the sacristy!'

In spite of her considerable bulk, Dolly was the first to reach the sacristy door, followed closely by the others. They met Rachel coming out, her face set in determination, carrying the veiled monstrance. ‘Oh no, you don't,' Dolly bellowed. ‘Not here. Not at St Margaret's. You're not ruining
our
church. Can't you see that you're not wanted here? Why don't you just go away and leave us alone?'

Stanley Everitt wrung his hands in an even more agitated manner than usual and begged everyone to stay calm, but his voice was scarcely heard in the fracas. Bairstow raised his voice in support of Dolly; Norman Topping nodded vigorously and emitted the occasional squeak of encouragement. In the midst of it all, Rachel Nightingale stood with her eyes closed, her scar standing out in angry relief on her pale cheek. She clutched the base of the monstrance, willing it all to end. I didn't ask for this, she said to herself, trying to think of a way to escape. It was clear that no service would be held that night: no matter the outcome of the battle, these people were in no fit state to worship God, to bow their knees and their heads before the presence of the Sacrament.

Incensed beyond rational thought, Dolly made a grab for the monstrance. She hadn't counted on Rachel's firm grasp; for a moment the two women seemed locked in a stalemate. Then, with a superhuman wrench, Dolly tore it away from Rachel, and the veil, dislodged by the violence of the gesture, floated downwards between them like a silent scream of protest.

It was only a short time later, though it seemed an age, that Rachel was on her bicycle, traversing the familiar streets that led her, every morning and every evening, to the nursing home and Colin. She made a very great effort not to dwell on the horrific scene that had just taken place, thinking instead about Father Desmond, about Colin, and about the unfortunate and unhappy Nicola Topping.

I do hope that I've done the right thing about Nicola, Rachel thought. Sending her to talk to Vera Bright – it could well be a great help for both of them. Then again, it could backfire, and make things even worse.

She was an experienced bicyclist; no matter how preoccupied she was with other concerns, or how familiar she was with the quiet backstreets, she rode cautiously and didn't take foolish risks. But she never saw the car coming. It caught her broadside, sent her flying, and the pavement rushing up to meet her was the last thing that Rachel Nightingale saw.

Quiet as the street was, it was only moments later that the off-duty PC Huw Meredith strolled along, feeling sated and more than a little pleased with himself after one of his regular Friday evening interludes with Pamela Hartman. This evening's encounter had been exceptionally satisfying, and Pam had promised to try to make some excuse to her husband and meet him on Saturday as well. Even after tonight, or perhaps especially after tonight, that was something to look forward to: a whole Saturday afternoon in bed – or on the sofa, or in the shower, or on the hearth rug in front of the fire – with the delectable Pam.

What caught his eye was the spinning bicycle wheel. Its rapid revolutions had slowed considerably, but still it turned with the click-click-click sound of a roulette wheel. Huw Meredith paused to investigate, wrenching his mind away from Pam.

The sight was not a pretty one: apart from the spinning front wheel, the bicycle was a mangled and twisted metal sculpture with no resemblance to its former state. With a small shock, PC Meredith saw that its rider had been a blonde, like Pam, and that she had probably been an attractive young woman. Probably – with the injuries she had sustained, it was difficult to tell. He was an experienced policeman, whose beat included some rather unsavoury areas of London, and he had seen hit-and-run accidents before. ‘Bloody kids,' he muttered savagely as he looked round for a phone box, furious to have his enjoyable evening spoilt by a bit of juvenile tomfoolery gone wrong. ‘Bloody joy-riding kids.' He would ring the nearest police station; it was clearly too late for an ambulance.

Part 2

CHAPTER 16

    
Out of the mouth of very babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because of thine enemies: that thou mightest still the enemy, and the avenger.

Psalm 8.2

Few people in London truly mourned for Rachel Nightingale, but of those who did, Ruth Kingsley was inconsolable.

From the beginning – from the first shattering moment – she'd insisted that it had been no accident; nothing that anyone said could convince her to the contrary.

‘But darling,' said Lucy in her most reasonable voice, one which she'd been called upon to employ consciously with increasing frequency since Ruth's arrival. It was a raw March Sunday afternoon, the day after they'd learned about Rachel's death; with no real will to do anything else, the three of them were in the sitting room of Lucy's house, waiting for the day to end. ‘Darling, the police know about these things. They say that it was a hit-and-run driver who killed her. Another person was badly hurt in almost the same spot, just a few weeks earlier. By young kids, probably in a stolen car. It happens more often than you'd think in London.' David had checked with a policeman he knew, and he'd been quite definite.

‘That's what they
say
.' Ruth's tear-stained face had a mulish expression. ‘Maybe they believe that, or maybe they're just saying it. But I
know
. I know that someone at that church – at St Margaret's – did it, on purpose. They wanted to get rid of her, and they did. They ran her down in cold blood.'

‘Aren't you being just a wee bit melodramatic?' David's patience with Ruth, always tenuous, had worn a bit thin of late.

The girl seemed even more gawky than usual, wrapping her thin arms around her body as she glared at him with undisguised hostility. ‘I don't care what you say. I don't care what the police say. I know that they did her in, one of them.'

They'd been through it all before, endlessly, but Lucy, who was keeping a firm lid on her own emotional reaction, hoped that there might be something cathartic for Ruth in the process, and that it was better for the girl to talk about it than to bottle it up inside. ‘But why, darling? They're church people. Church people don't go round murdering one another just because they don't like them.'

‘Because she was a woman, of course. They were horrible to her. She told me so.'

Lucy lifted the lid of the teapot and peered inside. They'd been through a great deal of tea, but it looked like this pot might stretch to one more cup for someone, before she had to get up and boil the kettle again. Unselfishly she offered it to Ruth. ‘More tea, darling?'

The girl shook her head in a listless negative, but Lucy poured the remaining tea into her cup anyway, then took the empty pot to the kitchen. Not touching the tea, Ruth sat very still, tears trickling down her cheeks. After a moment, she gulped, wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, and said in a bitter voice, ‘The police won't do anything, will they?'

David sighed. ‘They'll try to find the hit-and-run driver, if they can. After all, it was more than the usual hit-and-run – someone was killed. The driver could be charged with causing death by reckless driving, and that's a criminal offence, with a prison sentence involved.'

‘But how could they find them?'

He picked up his teacup and looked at the dregs in the bottom. ‘Oh, the police have ways. If the car was stolen, it may be abandoned later, and it might have prints in it. And they check body shops for cars that have been brought in for repairs to damaged wings. I mean, unless someone was driving a tank, that sort of impact would have to do some sort of damage to their car,' he explained, with a feeble smile at the mental picture of a tank on the streets of Pimlico.

‘If that's supposed to be funny,' snapped Ruth, ‘I don't think much of your sense of humour.'

Deciding that defending himself would be counterproductive, David lapsed into silence. He wished that Lucy would come back with more tea; he wished that it weren't too early for something stronger. In his opinion it was by no means too early, but he was sure that the
enfant terrible
would disagree.
Enfant terrible
: that was how he had come to think of Ruth. Once or twice it had slipped out when talking to Lucy, who didn't appear to find it very amusing.

The intrusive chirp of the telephone interrupted his reverie, as it rang just once; obviously Lucy had been near enough to pick it up right away. It meant, though, that she might be a while in returning. Clearing his throat, he tried again with Ruth, who had withdrawn into a bleak stillness. ‘I know that you're upset about Rachel, but . . .'

‘Upset?' She startled David with the intensity of her reply. ‘Of course I'm upset! She was the most wonderful person I've ever known, and now she's dead, and the person who murdered her is going to get away with it, because no one believes me!'

‘Murder is an easy word to throw around,' he said carefully. ‘But I think you'll find that people don't very often murder each other because of their gender. There are plenty of reasons I've heard for murder, but that's not one of them.'

In spite of herself, Ruth was interested. ‘Like what?' she demanded. ‘What sort of reasons?'

‘Money, for a start. If there were someone who was going to benefit financially from Rachel's death, I'd want to take a closer look at it myself. Or sometimes people commit murder to conceal a secret, something that they wouldn't want anyone else to find out. If Rachel had found out something like that . . .'

‘Maybe that's it,' Ruth interrupted him excitedly. ‘People confided in her, you know – she was that kind of person. Maybe someone told her something, and later regretted it. And then they murdered her so she wouldn't tell anyone else. I'm going to find out what it was,' she added with resolution. ‘If the police won't do it, I'll have to investigate myself.
I'll
find out who murdered her.'

The vehemence of David's reaction surprised him almost as much as it did Ruth. ‘Don't be so bloody stupid,' he said with quiet force. ‘You can't just go round asking people questions, as though it were a game of Cluedo! You're not dealing with Mrs Peacock or the Reverend Green here – we're talking about real people, with real lives and real secrets. You could get yourself into a hell of a lot of trouble prying into things that aren't your business, murder or no murder.'

Shocked but stubborn, Ruth didn't deign to answer, pulling her lips over her mouthful of metal and withdrawing back into herself. She turned away from David and bit her lip as the trickle of tears started again.

Why did I do that? David asked himself. I've only antagonised her, and she's going to go ahead and do whatever she damn well pleases anyway.

He was comforted when, a moment later, Sophie appeared and jumped on his lap. And so Lucy found them – sitting in silence, Ruth with her tears and David with the cat – when she returned, bearing a fresh pot of tea and looking thoughtful.

‘Who was on the phone, love?' David held his cup out.

‘Emily.' She took the cup, filled it and handed it back to him.

He sniffed the steaming liquid gratefully, waiting a moment for it to cool. ‘Anything important?'

She shook her head, but gave him a look which he rightly interpreted to mean that she'd tell him about it later.

Although David and Lucy generally favoured a rather leisurely approach to lovemaking, that night they made love with an unaccustomed urgency, fuelled by the inevitable sense of mortality in the aftermath of the death of someone they knew, someone younger than either of them. Afterwards, too keyed up to sleep, they talked for a long time.

‘You don't think that Ruth could be right – that Rachel's death wasn't really an accident?' Lucy suggested tentatively.

David laughed. ‘I know that our recent experiences have suggested otherwise, love, but sometimes people really
do
die by accident. Just because your charming niece has a fixation about Rachel Nightingale . . .'

‘That's not really being fair to Ruth,' she protested. ‘There
were
people who hated Rachel, who wanted to get rid of her. If it weren't Ruth who was saying it, you'd be the first one to agree that her death is a little too convenient.'

He thought about that for a moment, then admitted with a self-deprecating chuckle, ‘Well, you may be right about that. I
am
inclined to take a contrary position where the
enfant terrible
is concerned. But that aside, Lucy love, I just can't see that anyone had a strong enough motive to . . . well, you know. Just because she was a woman who wanted to be a priest, I mean. I'd have to be convinced that there was some other motive before I even considered the possibility seriously. Like money, as I said to Ruth earlier.'

‘According to what Emily told me,' Lucy thought aloud, ‘Rachel must have had a lot of money. From the settlement after the accident, you know.'

‘Not necessarily,' he cautioned. ‘In the first place, the money might only just be enough to pay for her husband's personal care, assuming he lives for a good many years yet. And secondly, who would benefit financially from Rachel's death? Presumably only her husband, so that doesn't really lead us anywhere.'

The heat generated by their lovemaking had begun to dissipate; Lucy shivered slightly and pulled the duvet up under her chin. ‘Colin has a brother, Emily tells me. Couldn't he benefit somehow?'

‘I don't see how, as long as Colin is alive. Why – what does he have to do with anything?'

‘Well,' Lucy explained, ‘when Emily rang me this afternoon she told me that she talked to Rachel on the phone on Friday, just a few hours before . . . you know.'

‘And?' he prompted.

‘Rachel told her that Colin had a kidney infection, and that somehow his brother had got involved. Emily said that she made a little joke that she hoped nothing happened to her, or Colin's brother might decide to pull the plug. And a few hours later . . .'

‘Hmm. Just a coincidence, I'm sure,' David stated as he drifted off to sleep. ‘And not a very funny joke, as it turned out.'

But two days later, when he opened his morning paper to the obituary page, David read that Colin Nightingale had died at the age of thirty-five, of complications from a kidney infection.

CHAPTER 17

    
Thou hast turned my heaviness into joy: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness.

Psalm 30.12

David read the obituary out to Lucy over their after-breakfast coffee, while Ruth was taking her customary extended shower. ‘“The young scientist, whose brilliant career was cut so tragically short by a road accident nearly four years ago, had survived in a vegetative state since then. By sad coincidence, his wife Rachel, a Deacon in the Church of England, was killed in another accident just last week in London.” And then it goes on about his career, and the research he was involved in before the accident. Don't ask me to read it – I can't even pronounce most of the words.'

Lucy, still in shock at the news but fully aware of the implications, put her finger on the cogent point. ‘But it doesn't say anything about the money? Or about any survivors or other family members?'

‘Nothing. These things usually don't.'

‘Is there any way you can find out?'

He shook his head, still unwilling to admit that there was anything in it. ‘Not really. Why don't you ring Emily and see if she knows? If you're really that curious, that is.'

Lucy gave him a warning look as Ruth came into the kitchen, her face almost as white as her towelling dressing gown, the freckles standing out in sharp relief and her short, damp, copper curls providing a shocking contrast to her pallor; two days and nights of crying had taken their toll. ‘I don't really feel like going to work today,' she announced. ‘I think I'll just stay here.'

David was quick to agree. ‘If you don't feel well, then you must stay home. Your Aunt Lucy will take good care of you.'

The look Lucy gave him this time mingled understanding with annoyance – now
she
was the one whose work would suffer – though her voice betrayed nothing but concern. ‘Of course you must stay home, darling. I'm sure that David will manage without you somehow.'

He smiled wryly. ‘Yes, I'll manage.'

‘You'll just have to find some other flunky to make your tea,' the girl muttered, sitting down at the table in expectation of being waited on by her aunt.

Lucy did what was expected. ‘Would you like some tea now, darling?' She got up and went to fill the kettle.

‘Yes, please.'

‘And how about something to eat?'

Ruth considered the options. ‘I think I might be able to eat a poached egg. And some dry toast, perhaps.'

‘And I'd better be off,' David stated, anxious now to escape in spite of feeling vaguely guilty about lumbering Lucy with the burden of Ruth for the day. But it was Lucy's own fault that the girl was here in the first place, he justified to himself.

Lucy walked him to the front door. ‘Have a good day, David darling, and if you have a chance to find out anything about Colin Nightingale . . .'

‘Not likely, my love.' He kissed her lightly. ‘And you take good care of the
enfant terrible
for me.'

In spite of his scepticism, though, David found himself, during the course of the morning, thinking about Colin Nightingale and the unlikely coincidence of his demise just a few days after his wife's untimely death. Once again he remembered the feeling that had nagged him when Lucy had first told him about Rachel: there was something about that settlement that had been important.