A Talent For Destruction (10 page)

‘But it just might have been someone local. You don't happen to know of any youngster who suddenly acquired a tent last summer, I suppose? He wouldn't necessarily have stolen it, but he might have been tempted to buy it dirt cheap.'

‘I haven't heard of anything like that.' Robin Ainger picked up the duffle coat that he had left bundled on the stone bench in the porch, and began to put it on. ‘Incidentally – I've been meaning to ask you this ever since we first found the body – what will happen to the remains? Assuming that they are Athol Garrity's.'

‘If they're his, it'll be a matter for the Australian authorities to arrange with his family. There don't seem to have been any enquiries about him, so the family can't be too anxious; even so, they might want what's left of him flown back for burial. If he's to stay here, the coroner's officer will have to fix something up as soon as the remains are released. The costs will have to be met from local funds, and you'll probably find yourself called in to officiate.'

‘That's what I thought. And what I wanted to say is that if the burial is to be here, I shall be glad to officiate. After all, I knew him slightly. I feel that it's the least I can do for his family.'

Quantrill gave the Rector a straight and narrow look. ‘I'm sure they'd appreciate it,' he said. ‘They'll be glad to know that he died among friends.'

Robin Ainger muttered something about telephoning the oil company and turned away abruptly, red to the roots of his wavy hair.

The Rector hurried off, between ranks of simple eighteenth-century gravestones that leaned towards each other as though the cherubs whose heads and wings appeared in relief at the top of each stone were harmonizing in perpetuity. The Chief Inspector was about to follow when it occurred to him that he had never, in his ten years at Breckham Market, entered the church, except dutifully and reluctantly for an occasional wedding or funeral. This might be a good opportunity to look round, and at the same time talk to the verger. He pushed open the massive oak door, with its elaborate horizontal fleur-de-lys iron hinges, and stepped down into the fifteenth century.

He expected to encounter the smell of the dark interior of the older, smaller church in the Suffolk village where he had been brought up, a compound of dank stone and mouldering hassocks that he had assumed to be the essence of Anglicanism. But in St Botolph's, this smell was completely absent. The church was not exactly warm, but the chill had been taken off it. It was lofty and remarkably light.

The parish church of Breckham Market had had the great good fortune to escape the over-zealous attentions of Victorian restorers, and so most of the woodwork was original. The low benches were silver-grey oak, their arms carved into figures worn so smooth by the handling of generations of worshippers that it was difficult to decide whether the subjects were sacred or secular. What could be discerned of the figures'short tunics and pudding-basin haircuts suggested that the carving had been done some time between Agincourt and the Wars of the Roses.

There was an unfortunate east window in the chancel, commemorating a late nineteenth-century Rector in glass that was stained a bilious art-nouveau yellow; otherwise, apart from some fifteenth-century fragments in the north aisle, the glass was completely plain. Light, all the brighter for being reflected from the untouched snow that lingered in the churchyard, flooded in not only from the windows in the aisles but also from the high windows of the clerestory.

The height of the nave was impressive. Quantrill's eye instinctively followed the line of the stone pillars up towards the wooden roof, every detail of which was clearly illuminated. The roof was supported by an alternation of tie and hammer beams, and from the ends of the hammer beams great wooden angels stretched their wings and floated face to face across the void.

‘What you might call uplifting, don't you think, Mr Quantrill?'

The Chief Inspector had never, to his knowledge, met the verger; but he had become accustomed to being known by sight and reputation to far more people than he himself knew. The local newspaper had a photograph of him on file, and reproduced it to help fill their columns whenever he was working on a serious crime and was unable to give them any hard news about it. But although he had never heard of Edgar Blore before that week, Quantrill had now seen him mentioned twice in reports from DC Wigby: once in his capacity as caretaker of the vandalized church hall, and again when he had told Wigby about the Australian girl who had visited the Rectory. The verger, he calculated, was likely to know as much as anyone in Breckham Market about the Reverend Robin Ainger.

‘A very fine roof, Mr Blore,' Quantrill agreed. ‘I expect you have a lot of visitors here in the summer?'

‘Oh yes, from all over the world. And not just because of the roof. The monumental brasses are our real glory, of course.'

‘So I believe. I must have a look at them while I'm here.'

The verger drew a deep breath, twitched anxiously at his moustache, and began a rambling, mournful apology for having named the Chief Inspector's son as one of the likely church hall culprits. Quantrill interrupted to reassure him that he had done the right thing, and then steered the conversation back to the church brasses. He knew nothing about brass-rubbing, but Ainger had said that Athol Garrity had professed an interest in it; and judging by the notice in the porch, brass-rubbers gave the Rector a considerable amount of harassment.

Having stopped twitching, the verger rolled back some drab strips of carpet to reveal eight figures engraved on brass, set into slabs in the worn stone floor of the church. Four of the figures were at the east end of the south aisle, two at the foot of the chancel steps and two more, the finest, in the chancel itself, close to the altar rail. Some were almost life-sized, some no more than twelve inches long. All of them had been placed with their feet towards the altar, so that, when the bodies in the graves beneath rose up on resurrection day, they would come face to face with God.

The clarity of detail, five centuries on, was astonishing. Here, with every joint in the men's plate armour, every fold in the women's gowns, every elaboration in their head-dress, clearly visible, were the leading citizens of fifteenth-century Breckham Market. Having stared for several minutes, intrigued, at the largest knight's long hooked nose, cleft chin and drooping moustaches, the Chief Inspector felt – even though the brass might have been a medieval form of identikit rather than a definitive portrait – that he would have a good chance of recognizing Sir John Bedingfield if he were ever to meet him.

There were Bedingfields in and around Breckham Market still, though they looked nothing like Sir John. They were a swarthy, shiftless, pugnacious tribe, so frequently in trouble that whenever a petty crime was committed the police checked them out first. Sir John and the high-nosed lady at his side would have disowned them on sight, thought Quantrill, amused.

‘They're very fine brasses, Mr Blore,' he said. ‘Very interesting. No wonder you get a lot of visitors to the church. An Australian was here last summer, the Rector told me.'

‘Would that be the man Mr Wigby was asking me about?'

‘That's right – we think that the skeleton in Parson's Close might be his. But DC Wigby didn't know, when he spoke to you, that the Australian had been inside the church. Mr Ainger tells me that he was interested in the brasses, and that he camped in the meadow while he was making some rubbings. Are you sure you don't recollect him?'

‘Quite sure. I'm sorry I can't help you, Mr Quantrill, but we're over-run every summer with strangers who come to rub the brasses, and I try not to get involved with them. It's my ulcer, you see. Oh, most of them are not much trouble. They bring a big sheet of white paper and spread it out on a brass and spend hours crouched over it, rubbing away with a stick of heelball to get the impression of the figure on the paper. They're quiet and neat and tidy, and I make no complaint about them at all. But others …'

The verger began to work himself up into a state of high moral indignation: ‘You wouldn't credit what some of them do, Mr Quantrill. I could hardly contain myself over their behaviour when I first became verger – and of course it made my ulcer play up. In the end, Mr Ainger told me to let him deal with the brass-rubbers. He keeps the appointments book now, and sorts out all the problems.'

‘I saw the notice in the porch,' said Quantrill. ‘I gather that some of the rubbers don't make appointments, and try to get out of paying the fees.'

‘That's not the half of it!' Edgar Blore spluttered. ‘It's behaviour I'm talking about, and reverence. Appointments are important, you see, because most of the rubbers aren't churchgoers and so they don't take the services into consideration. Many's the time – before Mr Ainger began the appointments system – that I've come to prepare the church for a service and found that I couldn't get into the chancel without tripping over somebody. And when I asked them to move, some of them were really belligerent. And then they'd argue when I asked them to pay! It's not that we charge much, but it's the principle of the thing. Don't you agree, Mr Quantrill?'

The Chief Inspector made assenting noises, and bent to help the verger roll the carpets back over the brasses to protect them from wear.

‘After all,' continued Edgar Blore, neatly straightening one of the carpets that Quantrill had replaced, ‘the expense of maintaining the fabric of a church like this is alarming. To my mind anyone who visits it, let alone makes use of it, should expect to make a contribution towards its upkeep. And then, it isn't as if every rubber is doing it out of historical interest. Some of them make it into a commercial enterprise. Why, you can see rubbings of these very brasses in art and craft shops in Yarchester. People pay pounds, especially if the rubbers have used gold heelball on black paper, to have them as wall-hangings. It's a racket, that's what it is. And if I told you the way some of the rubbers behave when they're here in church – even when they've made an appointment and paid a fee – you wouldn't believe me.'

After twenty-five years in the force, Douglas Quantrill found nothing in human nature incredible. He had no difficulty at all in believing that a small minority of people could be greedy, abusive, pigheaded and bloody-minded, in church as well as out of it. What interested him in the conversation was the glimpse the verger had given of some of the unexpected stresses that went with the Rector's job. Until that week, Quantrill had unthinkingly assumed that being a parson was a soft option. During the past few days he had begun to learn that this was far from being true.

‘Tell me about it, Mr Blore?' he suggested.

The verger, having adjusted the carpets to his satisfaction, brushed down his cassock with the flat of his hand. ‘As I say, it's a question of reverence. Some of the rubbers seem to have no idea that this is a place of worship. Instead of bringing masking-tape to hold down the paper while they're rubbing on it, they use piles of prayer books – even the big Bible from the lectern. They have picnics in the choir stalls, and drop litter on the floor. And sometimes they bring small children and let them run wild, dressing up in the choir surplices, racing round the aisles, meddling with the bell ropes –'

He paused for breath, trembling with indignation. ‘And one day last year – you'll never credit this, Mr Quantrill – one day early last summer I came in by the south door and heard a terrible racket going on. And there was a young man, with a transistor radio going full blast, sitting on the altar swinging his legs and drinking out of a can!'

Even Quantrill was startled. ‘
Sitting
on the altar?'

‘
Sitting
on the
altar
. I told you that you wouldn't credit it! I was so furious that I couldn't bring myself to speak to him. I rushed straight round to the church hall and telephoned the Rector. He came roaring down St Botolph's Street in his car at sixty miles an hour and strode into the church like –' the verger lifted his eyes for inspiration and found it in the magnificent timbers of the roof ‘– like an avenging angel. I wouldn't have cared to be in
that
young man's shoes!'

‘What happened?'

Edgar Blore shook his head. ‘I didn't come back to find out. Mr Ainger told me to stay in the church hall and make myself a cup of tea, so I did.' His sad eyes looked defensively at the Chief Inspector. ‘I suppose you think it was cowardly of me, but the Rector understands about my ulcer. Besides, he's younger and bigger than I am.'

‘Yes, of course. Though it does seem to me,' added Quantrill, ‘that he hasn't looked so well lately. He seems to have lost a lot of his drive.'

The verger had begun to move down the south aisle towards the door, and for a moment Quantrill thought that he was too loyal to the Rector to want to discuss him. But Edgar Blore was merely choosing his words, and when he spoke it was with some relief.

‘To tell you the truth – and I haven't said this to anyone else, except Mrs Blore – that's what I've felt. The Rector hasn't been his old self for months now. I'm beginning to think that he's lost heart, and that's a sad condition for a parson. But then, he has a lot to contend with – as you and I know, Mr Quantrill.'

The verger gave the Chief Inspector a meaningful nod, and did not elaborate.

‘Mr Ainger's very well thought of in the town,' commented Quantrill.

‘Indeed he is! A very popular Rector. I put it down to the fact that he's not trendy. Trendiness doesn't do in a parish like Breckham Market. Mr Ainger's only a young man, but I'm glad to say that he believes in upholding all the old standards.'

‘Quite right,' agreed Quantrill. They had reached the south door and he put out his hand to the massive iron latch. ‘Well, I'm glad to have had the opportunity of –'