The Judgement of Strangers (18 page)

As the evening progressed, the storm slackened to a steady downpour. It was surprisingly cold for August.

After Toby had driven away, I went into the study and, without turning on the light, dialled the familiar number of Tudor Cottage. The phone rang on and on. I stared out at the village green. There was less traffic than usual and hardly any pedestrians. The car park of the Queen’s Head was almost empty.

The tea room would have closed several hours ago. Audrey must be out. I wondered idly what could have taken her away from the warmth and shelter of her home on a night like this. It did not occur to me to worry about her. In the end, I replaced the receiver. The news about Rosemary’s unpleasant discovery this afternoon could wait.

The next day, Saturday, the doorbell rang while we were still having breakfast. Vanessa raised her eyes to the ceiling. Rosemary pushed back her chair and went to answer the door. I heard an excited voice and footsteps; then Audrey burst into the kitchen. She seemed somehow larger and pinker than before, as though she were on the verge of erupting from her clothes like a chick from its shell.

‘Well!’ she announced, stopping in the kitchen doorway. ‘I was right.’

Vanessa gave me what old-fashioned novelists used to call a speaking look. This one said, loud and clear:
Can’t your bloody parishioners leave us alone even at breakfast time?

I abandoned my toast and stood up. ‘Shall we go in the study? Perhaps a cup of coffee –?’

Rosemary’s face, bright and feverish, appeared at Audrey’s shoulder. ‘What do you mean? How were you right?’

‘I saw the vet last night. He confirmed what I’ve said all along.’ Audrey sniffed. ‘Lord Peter was beheaded. The good news is that the poor darling was … was dead before those terrible things were done to him. The vet said his spine was broken, almost certainly by a car going over him, and that’s probably what killed him. He may not even have known what was happening.’ Audrey’s voice faltered. ‘If only that was all that had happened. I think I could have accepted that.’

Michael was staring in fascination at Audrey. I took a step towards her, hoping to shoo her into the study. She stood her ground.

‘He was beheaded some time after death,’ Audrey went on, her voice sounding unexpectedly triumphant. ‘It was no accident, Mr Giles was sure of that. It was almost certainly some sort of saw, definitely something with a serrated edge, like a hacksaw. I do so wish I knew what had happened to the head.’

I dared not look at Vanessa. ‘Audrey –’

‘And then he was left for us to find at the church door.’ She swallowed and her eyes filmed with tears. ‘Hanging by his tail.’

Michael gave a strangled giggle. I could not blame him. Audrey was one of those unfortunate people whose tragedies are tinged with farce.

‘David,’ she hissed. ‘You do realize how
diabolical
this is? Every detail so carefully thought out.’

I nodded.

‘It’s a sort of blasphemy,’ Rosemary muttered.

‘Yes, dear. Exactly.’ Audrey smiled at her. ‘And the police may be content to pretend it never happened, but I’m not. Why, this is the next best thing to murder. I’m simply not prepared to hide my head in the sand. If the police won’t do their job, I shall just have to do it for them.’

‘Like Miss Marple,’ Rosemary suggested. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘Precisely. Though I say it myself, I do have
some
knowledge of human nature.’

I made another attempt to sweep Audrey into the study. She wouldn’t move. She wanted an audience.

‘Don’t you think this sort of thing is best left to the police?’ I said.

‘Fat lot of good they’ll be. If I leave it to them, nothing will happen.’

‘Sometimes it’s wiser to try to put something like this behind one.’

‘I’m not putting Lord Peter behind me. Not until I’ve got to the bottom of how he died.’

‘We found something yesterday afternoon,’ Rosemary said. ‘I think it’s a clue. It was in Carter’s Meadow.’

Audrey spun round, still blocking the doorway. ‘What?’

Rosemary had the Golden Virginia tobacco tin, which had spent the night on the hall table, in her hand. She opened it and showed Audrey what it contained.

‘What is it?’

‘We think it may be a piece of Lord Peter’s fur. And that browny stuff – see? – I think that may be blood.’

Audrey seized the tin. While she examined its contents, her mouth worked uncontrollably.

‘Toby – that’s Toby Clifford, I mean – he was with me when we collected it. It’s his tin, actually. Toby thought perhaps you could compare the hairs with Lord Peter’s. Perhaps the vet –’

‘If it can be done, then Mr Giles will do it. I’ll make sure of that.’ Audrey raised a pink, shiny face. ‘Thank you, my dear. This is a start. Now, tell me exactly where you found it.’

Prodded by Audrey’s questions, Rosemary described what had happened yesterday afternoon. When it transpired that I had seen the fur in its original position, Audrey was delighted.

‘You’ll make an ideal witness, David. People trust what a clergyman says.’

That had not always been my experience.

‘There was also an empty bottle of cider nearby,’ Rosemary was saying. ‘Toby says glass is very good for fingerprints, so we brought that away.’

‘What sort of cider, dear?’

‘Autumn Gold.’

‘I knew it.’ Audrey vibrated with excitement. ‘I’ve seen them drinking it in the bus shelter. They leave the empty bottles there –’

‘It’s in Daddy’s study if you need it. Toby says that it could be important if the fur turns out to be Lord Peter’s.’

‘How very thoughtful of him,’ Audrey said. ‘He sounds a very nice young man.’

‘Yes,’ said Rosemary; and paragraphs were compressed into that monosyllable.

Vanessa cast a longing glance at the coffee pot. ‘Well, now that’s settled, should we –?’

‘The evidence is beginning to build up,’ Audrey announced. ‘I’ve been approaching the case from another angle. And I’ve managed to uncover another piece of evidence.’ She paused for an instant, as if expecting a round of applause. ‘I happened to be in Malik’s Minimarket this morning, and Doris Potter was there. A very good sort of woman … She was asking me about Lord Peter. People are so kind. Even Mr Malik expressed his sympathy, and being Muslim – or is it Hindu? – he can’t really be expected to appreciate how terrible it all is. But at least he tried. Where was I? Doris. Yes, she actually popped into church on Thursday afternoon. Heaven knows why – it’s not her week for the flowers and she’s not on the cleaning rota at all.’ The possibility that Doris might have some other purpose in going to church had eluded Audrey. ‘She was on her way to Lady Youlgreave’s. So she thinks it must have been about four. The point is, she’s absolutely sure that Lord Peter wasn’t in the porch then. She remembers looking at one of the notices, the one about South Africa, when she came out. So – that’s useful, isn’t it? Slowly we’re building up a picture. I know we still have an awful lot to learn. But at least we know that Lord Peter was brought to church sometime between four o’clock and seven o’clock on Thursday evening.’ She beamed at Rosemary, revealing teeth to which clung small yellow specks, perhaps corn flakes. ‘And if we put that information together with what you’ve found out, dear, it’s possible that whoever did it came into the churchyard by the gate into Roth Park rather than from the road.’ Once again she hesitated. Then she added, with a devastating lack of subtlety, ‘What time exactly did the Cliffords arrive here in the evening?’

The rest of the weekend was quiet. On Saturday afternoon I drafted a sermon which after tea I redrafted because on reading it seemed abstruse and pompous. I had planned to spend some of the evening tracking down the origin of the phrase which presumably had given Francis Youlgreave the title of his poem:
Cursed is he that perverteth the judgement of the stranger, the fatherless, and widow.
In the event, however, I spent most of the evening at the bedside of a man who eventually died shortly after midnight. Neither he nor his wife was a churchgoer, which led later to a heated argument with Rosemary, who could not understand why these people were as much my responsibility as Audrey Oliphant or Doris Potter.

On Sunday, I celebrated Communion twice in the morning, dozed after lunch and conducted Evensong. I went to bed early.

Externally the pattern was familiar and comforting. But my mind was less placid than I would have liked. I thought a great deal about the Cliffords. Where had their money come from? Who had their parents been? Was their father alive? I found that I could visualize the faces of both Toby and Joanna with unusual clarity – Toby’s with its bony features, its frizzy curls, and the nostrils permanently flared, which gave him an apparently misleading effect of perpetual disdain. And Joanna – what I remembered most clearly about her was the down on the curve of her cheek and the green eyes with a dark edge to the iris, and the green dappled like a pond under trees on a sunny day. Most of all, I wondered about the relationship between them, whether Toby was all he seemed, and whether Joanna’s apparent fear of him was due to calculation, paranoia, or a simple and entirely rational response to a genuine threat. There was Rosemary to consider, too: she seemed to be attracted to Toby.

I tried to talk about some of this with Vanessa on Sunday evening as we were going to bed.

‘Puppy love,’ she said briskly. ‘Rosemary’s too young for him. Nothing to worry about – he seems a perfectly sensible young man so it will probably die a natural death. As for Joanna, from what Toby said, she’s had some sort of nervous breakdown. But she’ll get over it, I’m sure, with Toby’s help. I wish I could warm to her more, though. She’s rather off-putting, don’t you think?’

I wasn’t sure what I thought about Joanna Clifford. What I needed very badly was to talk to my spiritual director about the Cliffords in general and Joanna in particular. But Peter Hudson was out of the country and I had not yet met his successor. To make matters worse, I wasn’t sure whether I thought of Peter’s absence as a problem or as a stroke of good fortune. I did not really want to talk about the Cliffords with anyone – not with Peter and certainly not with a priest I did not know well. By arranging for Peter’s absence at this juncture, it was as if Providence had allowed me to stray briefly into limbo.

‘No, Rosemary will be all right,’ Vanessa went on. ‘But I’m not so sure about Audrey.’

‘The Miss Marple business?’

‘It’s absurd, isn’t it?’

‘She’s so obstinate it’s almost magnificent.’

Vanessa clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. ‘She’s a grown woman, David. There’s nothing magnificent in having absolute faith in the forensic wisdom in the novels of Agatha Christie.’ She glanced at me and her eyelids fluttered. ‘If you ask me, it’s unwise to have absolute faith in
anything
.’

I smiled at her. ‘Are you sure?’

She laughed. ‘Now you’re trying to make a fool of me.’ That was how matters stood on the morning of Monday, the 17th August. Vanessa and I were in the kitchen preparing breakfast and listening to the eight o’clock news on the radio. Michael was doing his teeth in the bathroom, clearly audible in the kitchen below. Rosemary was still in bed; recently she had taken to sleeping late. The telephone rang.

‘I don’t think I can stand much more of this,’ Vanessa hissed at me. Her face had reddened. ‘They never leave you alone. Can’t you let it ring? Just this once.’

I already had my hand on the door. ‘No – I’m afraid I can’t.’

‘But this is an utterly ridiculous time,’ she snapped, her voice rising. ‘Tell them you’ll ring back.’

She glared at me and, God help me, I glared back. I went into the hall, closing the door rather more loudly than I should have done. In a cloud of childish indignation I stormed into the study and picked up the telephone receiver. Outside in the main road, the dustcart had drawn up outside the Vicarage. A dustman dropped the lid of our bin on the ground with a clatter and hoisted the bin itself on to his back.

‘The Vicarage.’

There was a strangled sound on the other end of the line, which after a moment I identified as sobbing.

I tried to make my voice gentler. ‘Who is this, please?’

The dustcart drove away. Someone was whistling. On the other end of the line, the sob mutated into a snuffle.

‘It’s me. Doris.’