Folly (13 page)

One more corner and another door stood open, but blocked by O'Reilly's broad back.

He didn't block the chair that lay on its side, or the rope hitched over an exposed beam. Straining upward with the man in his arms, he struggled to take the weight of Brother Percy's hanging body.

‘H
i, Tony. I don't want to give you a shock.'

Startled, he slammed the door of his Land Rover and looked toward the back door of the clinic. Alex perched on the single narrow step with Bogie at her feet.

‘Hello.' He frowned at her disheveled appearance. ‘Didn't see you there. Just let me get Katie out.'

This was early surgery morning, which meant he put in a couple of hours here in the village before taking off to the surrounding farms. As often as not, no patients showed up and he used the time to catch up on paperwork. Alex had never come here before.

Keys in hand, he hurried toward her with Katie running ahead.

Trying not to stare, he unlocked the door and pushed it wide. Alex didn't resist when he took her by the hand and helped her get up.

‘Do I look scary?' she asked with a half smile. ‘I feel scary. And maybe scared, too.'

He almost put an arm around her shoulders but waved her inside instead. ‘You look worn out and rattled,' he said, choosing diplomacy and caution.

‘I remembered you had your clinic here in the village today,' Alex said. She went uncertainly through what had been the kitchen in the cottage he had renamed Paws Place when he bought it. The room now doubled as a dispensary and operating room for minor procedures.

‘Go on through,' he told her. ‘The sitting room is on the left.'

The sitting room was also where he had a desk and dealt with records.

‘Alison will be in at any time, I suppose,' Alex said of his assistant. ‘She'll wonder what I'm doing here.'

He stopped himself from saying the woman would assume she was there for Bogie and told her, ‘Alison's on holiday,' instead.

‘This isn't going to work,' she said. ‘You'll have patients shortly. I'll get out of your hair.'

He cut off her attempted retreat. ‘If I have a patient, I'll deal with it. Do you have somewhere else to be now – or soon?'

She shook her head, no. Her hair was uncombed and twisted into wild curls. The blue parka she wore was too small; the rest of her clothes were rumpled. Purplish marks underscored the inner corners of her eyes.

‘There isn't anyone else I can go to, Tony.'

‘Flattery will get you anywhere.' His regret was instant. ‘Sorry, kiddo. I didn't mean that the way it sounded.'

‘I didn't mean what I said the way it sounded, either. I would have come to you anyway because I think you've got some of the same concerns I have. Or maybe I should say doubts.'

Furnished with a hodgepodge of comfortable but mismatched furniture, the sitting room still managed to look inviting. He led Alex to a deep chair covered with a rose damask even his father laughed at, and urged her to sit. Panels of gathered lace hung at bay windows on to a pathway beside a stream where ducks plied back and forth.

He lit the gas fire and both dogs promptly arranged themselves as close as they could get to the warmth.

‘You need tea,' he said.

Alex laughed.

‘What's funny?'

‘You, playing mother. What I need is to find out if you think I'm on to something, or I've lost my marbles.'

An electric kettle and tea supplies sat on a tray atop a small refrigerator draped with a checkered cloth. ‘We can have it all.' He plugged in the kettle and pulled a ladder-back chair close to her. ‘Let's have it.'

‘That man who died in the woods wasn't a random victim of some passing lunatic.' She struggled out of her parka and spread it over her knees.

‘Probably not.'

‘He was part of something bigger. Something really creepy, not that murder isn't creepy enough to begin with.'

When she flopped back in the chair and closed her eyes, Tony got up and tossed tea bags into mugs. The water boiled on cue. He used a generous helping of milk for each of them from a carton kept in the refrigerator.

A paper bag of Bourbon biscuits in individual plastic wrappers was the best he could do but he pressed several into Alex's hand and said, ‘Eat, you need the sugar.'

‘No one needs sugar,' she muttered, fumbling with the packaging.

‘You do if you're in shock. And that's how you look right now. Eat the biscuits. I've put sugar in your tea, too.'

She wrinkled her nose and said, ‘I hate sugar in tea.'

Tony ignored what she said but the wrinkled nose suddenly reminded him of Alex Duggins, the girl who didn't take crap from anyone, the girl from Underhill who outstripped most of the people in her class and laughed her way out of the slights and into a career that took her places.

He handed her the tea. A boy who had shouted, ‘There goes the uppity little bastard,' after her one day had felt Tony's fist. She never actually thanked him, but he'd found the plastic figure of a knight, complete with shield and broadsword, in his desk and knew who had put it there. And he still had the plastic figure somewhere. For a moment, he touched her cheek and she glanced at him with a tentative smile.

He sat opposite her again and waited until she drank some tea, wrinkling her nose again. ‘Give me that.' Removing a biscuit package, he took it from the wrapper and gave it back. ‘Eat, then we'll talk.'

Munching a biscuit, she took a giant swallow of tea and gulped it down. ‘I think I need a collaborator,' she said. ‘You won't be interested but I've decided to ask anyway.'

The words were intended to be light but there was nothing slightly humorous about her worried face or her increasingly rapid breathing. A sheen of sweat popped out along her hairline.

‘I'll help if I can, you know that. Just tell me what you need.'

‘Another man died early this morning. Another monk. We found him at the rectory.'

He swallowed his tea with difficulty. ‘We?'

‘O'Reilly and I. That's another story. He showed up when I was walking Bogie. Just before five this morning. Forget that. Concentrate on Brother Percy. He came to the Black Dog last night. He was looking for me because he heard I found Brother Dominic – that was the name of the man in the woods.

‘I'll spell out the details later but for starters, the police gave Brother Percy the brush off so he was going to leave last night. I wanted him to talk to O'Reilly with me today and Reverend Restrick offered him a bed for the night. That's why Percy was at the rectory. I told O'Reilly about him this morning. He didn't know he'd tried to talk to the police already. O'Reilly roared over there with me in tow and found the body.'

‘Oh, for God's sake.' Tony ran a hand through his hair. His next thought was that someone could make nasty connections between Alex being around at two murder sites. ‘Tell me it wasn't another dart.'

‘He hung himself with his belt thingie – cincture or whatever it's called.' Without warning, tears filled her eyes and she blinked rapidly.

‘You've had a terrible shock,' he said.

‘Stop telling me I'm in shock. I know all about shock. I'm upset and angry. If I hadn't insisted on him staying in Folly last night he wouldn't have been hanging in that room.'

She trembled visibly and Tony reached out to squeeze her hand. Alex surprised him by holding on tightly. With her other hand she felt around in her pocket. He put a box of tissues where she could reach them.

‘Oh!' She withdrew the hand again as if it burned. ‘Damn, I forgot I had this.' And she held out a short knife with a serrated blade from which a scrap of frayed white cloth trailed. ‘I had to get a knife from the kitchen to cut through Brother Percy's belt while O'Reilly held him up. I did it all wrong.'

Blood dimpled out at the end of her forefinger. She looked at it absently, and sucked on the spot.

Tony reached for the knife. ‘You did the best you could. O'Reilly shouldn't have involved you.'

Alex held on to the knife. She picked the frayed material away with a shaking hand. It had somehow become stuffed tightly into the serrated edge.

A tiny end of fine lace wriggled free.

Tony shifted forward to the edge of his chair, setting aside his mug. ‘What's that?' he said. ‘Doesn't look like part of a cincture – not that I've seen many up close.'

‘I wasn't thinking properly,' Alex said. ‘It was hard to cut through and I had to tear the knife through the last bit.'

Very gently, she pulled until a strip of fine lawn fabric, edged with lace, came free. She spread it out carefully on one thigh. ‘It must have been white once,' she murmured. ‘The lace is so delicate.'

He didn't know one kind of lace from another but the fabric looked old. ‘Is that machine made?' Looking closer, he touched little balls formed at the edge of each point of worked thread.

‘No! Handmade and someone took a lot of trouble with it. See the tiny filaments of silver wound in? Harriet and Mary know about this stuff. They sell things made by ladies for miles around. If it was made in the area they might recognize this as a style … not that it's likely to mean anything.' She sounded defeated.

Her increasing distress worried him. Flopping back in her chair, she lost interest in her find and her lips parted. Her skin shone as if it were clammy and her breathing became gasps interspersed with short coughs. Quickly, he grabbed the biscuit bag, emptied the contents on the floor and scrunched the open end together. ‘Breathe into this. You're having a panic attack.'

She gave a nod and used the bag. Gradually she calmed down but her face was chalky.

‘Is this the first panic attack you've had?'

Alex shook her head, no.

There would be another opportunity to find out if she had issues he knew nothing about, which she almost undoubtedly did.

‘Alex, if someone intends to take their own life, they do it. You're blaming yourself for what happened but if it hadn't been at the rectory it would have been somewhere else. He must have been upset about the other brother. He could have been going through a crisis of faith even before that. Where's the vicar? What does he think?'

‘I don't know.' Her shaking became close to violent. She drove her fist into her diaphragm and breathed through her mouth. ‘He rushed away. I didn't see where. That's why there was only me to help O'Reilly cut the body down.'

‘T
his is wrong. I don't want to wait here.' Evelyn Restrick wanted agreement, he wanted to be told it was time to go to the police and tell them everything.

‘You came after me, Restrick, not the other way around.'

The mobile connection faded in and out. Although the vicar sat at the top of the crypt stairs, reception was bound to be poor.

‘I didn't mean it to happen but it didn't hurt anyone.' It hadn't. A little more money in the church's all but empty coffers had been the only result. Until now. And if the contribution he'd originally asked for hadn't been refused he would never have felt cross enough to insist.

‘Blackmail always hurts someone. In this case, me. But all you have to do is keep your mouth shut and carry on. This doesn't have to be anything to do with you. The donations will keep coming. Now stay there till everything dies down at the rectory.'

‘So you admit you—'

‘Shut your mouth, you frickin' stupid old man. There's nothing to panic about. We'll talk. Wait and I'll be there as fast as I can.'

‘I can't go on like this, I tell you. We have to—'

Reverend Restrick heard the connection click off and climbed down the stairs, the many-times capped heels of his shoes clicking on ancient stone.

Under the oldest part of St Aldwyn's, this crypt had been left untouched over the hundreds of years when sporadic renovations had gradually turned the main part of the building into an imposing enough but commonplace Victorian edifice. At that point the rebuilding had stopped but the church was left as a solid building in good repair.

Or it had been until the roof showed problems.

Muscles in his jaw jerked rigid. And that was when he had started down a path he had never expected to tread. But it hadn't been blackmail, never that. He hadn't threatened anything if he wasn't given big sums to get the roof done.

Sinking to his knees on the cold stone, Evelyn Restrick clasped his hands together. The threat had been implied, or had been taken as implied, and he'd never put the impression right.

Tears squeezed from his closed eyes. ‘Dear God, I would never have hurt anyone with what I knew.'

But he had made a terrible mistake and allowed that mistake to perpetuate.

The spiral steps leading down here were wide enough for only one to pass. Candle in hand, he had taken refuge among the long dead, their sarcophaguses lining the windowless tomb.

At any moment the police might scour the church above him. That good man should not have died as he had, alone in a stranger's rectory. He could help the police shed light on what had happened – he was sure of it. If he went upstairs now and started his story from the beginning, they might follow all the threads leading back to a hot afternoon when no clouds marred a cerulean July sky. An innocent sky. An innocent day when his life changed forever.

A faint, musty breeze made the candle flame flicker. It was as if what was foul about him breathed up around cracks in the flags.

He thought of the man killed in the woods, his body left to freeze. Fumbling, he set the candle on a ledge beside him, covered his face and sobbed aloud. It could have been stopped on that July day.