Late of This Parish (6 page)

Most of the houses were in darkness as they drove down Main Street, itself unlit save for the brash fluorescent anachronism of the Mobil garage and a few television screens flickering through uncurtained windows. Smoke curled lazily from chimneys. Two men having a late gossip and a smoke over their garden fences turned to watch the police car as it sped by. More lights, and sounds of muted revelry issuing from the Drum and Monkey. Otherwise, silence.

‘Strewth! Bet it all happens here of a Saturday night,' Kite remarked, so disgusted he almost overshot the narrow turning which PC Wainwright, the local policeman, had declared they couldn't miss. Having spotted it just in time, he braked and turned right, slowing to negotiate an exceedingly narrow street of small, very old houses whose upper storeys leaned towards each other.

Dobbs Lane gave no indication of what was waiting at the end, where it opened out into what was in effect a kind of miniature cathedral close. In the middle, in its own churchyard, was St Kenelm's church, a grey sandstone edifice with a strong square tower, gilded by the rays of the setting sun. The churchyard stood on a green sward and surrounding it was a narrow road of houses of vastly disparate styles and sizes, their doors and windows opening directly on to the pavement. Mayo drew in his breath with pleasure. Although erected haphazardly over the centuries, the buildings had grown into a natural sympathy with each other and most of them, he was glad to see, had escaped the tarting-up that always set his teeth on edge. Quiet and harmonious, Parson's Place lay undisturbed by the twentieth century.

Undisturbed except for two cars, one of which was Wainwright's police car, ignoring the No Parking sign outside the church gates. As Kite drew up to join them, a black furry object stirred in the shadow of the lychgate, revealing itself as a huge Persian cat which glared at them and then lifted its tail and stalked off, all offended dignity, on its stocky legs.

Dr Hameed, the locum, with Wainwright in attendance, had apparently been writing up her notes while waiting for them at the back of the church. She was small, slim and brown, her face a perfect oval and her expressive eyes large and dark and not a little disdainful. There was gold in her ears and a faint emanation of chypre issued from her. She was fashionably dressed in western clothes. ‘I don't have much time,' she told them crisply, consulting her watch, ‘but I'll give you any information you need before I leave. I have been asked to call on Miss Willard. Her father dying like this must have been a great shock to her.'

Her accent was that of the educated Indian, pedantically correct and precisely enunciated, with a borrowed touch of the pukka memsahib and a corresponding put-down effect; it seemed a safe bet from the colour of PC Wainwright's ears, glowing like traffic lights, together with his mortified expression, that he'd recently said something which had put him at the receiving end.

‘I understand and you won't be kept longer than necessary, ma'am, though I'd appreciate it if you could wait for our police surgeon,' Mayo replied, putting what was virtually a command in the form of a request out of consideration for the wait she'd already had. ‘Meantime, perhaps you could tell me what you found when you arrived that made you suspicious.'

Her eyebrows lifted, rather as if she thought he was questioning her integrity, and she said stiffly, ‘I think we should look at the deceased.'

‘Shall I tell the Rector you're here, sir?' asked Wainwright, anxious to assert himself.

‘Not for the moment. Doctor?'

The young doctor snapped her case shut with thin and delicate hands before leading the way through the elaborately-carved wooden screen separating the tower from the nave. Mayo and Kite followed her in procession down the aisle, their footsteps muffled by the strip of matting down the centre. Her legs, Mayo noticed, were nowhere near equal to the rest of her.

It was dimly-lit and very cold and he was sharply aware of the smell, peculiar to very old churches, an amalgam of stone and ancient dust, a chilly damp that any amount of modern central heating would never entirely dispel, overlaid with the scent of massed spring flowers, beeswax and Brasso. A faint breath of incense and he was back in his pre-agnostic High Church days, a very young thurifer swinging the censer in some festival procession. Death was too recent for it to have made its own olfactory presence felt. But it was also there, an odour in the mind.

At the foot of the chancel steps, facing the altar, stood a wheelchair, and here Dr Hameed paused. The ruby light of a sanctuary lamp glowed richly on flowers, white linen and lace, on an elaborately-painted reredos behind the altar and on the four highly-polished silver candlesticks and the brass lectern. But it was barely sufficient to light the area around the body in the chair and, peering into the dimness, Mayo called for more lights.

His voice, though not unduly raised, sounded shockingly loud in the silence, irritating him by making him feel the weight of some mysterious guilt, as though he'd committed some undisclosed indiscretion or was showing disrespect in a hallowed place. He could almost feel the child's conviction that here in church was where God lived and was sure to find out your sins and punish you if you were not unnaturally good as he looked at the prospect of the gloomy body of the church before him, inhospitable and intimidating by contrast with the resplendent altar. And the stained glass windows, which would be rich with colour against the light of day but were now, with the coming night pressing behind them, blank black voids, like dead eyes which had seen and condemned.

More lights suddenly sprang up as Wainwright pressed switches he had found at the back of the church. 'Good man,' Mayo said. Grunting, he turned abruptly away, dismissive of his fancies, and gave his full attention to the man in the wheelchair.

The body was that of a very old man. There was a rug across his knees and he wore a tweed jacket and a clerical collar. A tweed hat with a narrow brim lay some distance away as if it had rolled there. He had slumped backwards and his head was resting against the back of the chair, revealing a scrawny neck above the dog-collar. His sparse hair was in disarray and his face was blue. His skeletal hands hung loosely. Mayo gently lifted one of them and found it icy cold, but slack.

He stood looking down intently at the dead man. ‘Was this exactly as you found him?' he asked Dr Hameed.

‘His head had fallen forward. I had to lift it to examine him. I haven't moved him otherwise.'

‘When did you get here?'

‘Just before seven, about twenty minutes after I got the Rector's call. I believe he was the one who found him.'

‘So Mr Willard here wasn't the incumbent?' The doctor frowned and raised her eyebrows and Mayo waved a hand in apology. ‘Sorry, my mistake, I assumed he was Rector here. Where is the Rector now?'

‘He took Miss Willard away. She insisted on coming here to see her father when they told her. I estimated he had died about half an hour before I got here, possibly just before he was found. He was Dr Dickerman's patient and I was aware from his notes that he'd suffered a stroke some time since. I presumed he'd had another but as I'd never seen him before, I couldn't of course sign the death certificate.'

‘Would you like to hazard a guess as to the cause of death?'

‘I examined him carefully and I noticed the petechae: – the minute haemorrhages in the mucous membrane of the eyes and around the mouth, and I
diagnosed,
' she corrected him coolly, ‘that he had been asphyxiated in some way. A pillow or something soft over the face, perhaps ... It's easy enough, when someone is old and can't struggle.'

By nature Mayo was obsessively observant, and by training had learned to take note of every detail, however apparently insignificant, to be one step ahead of witnesses. After one glance at the cyanosed face, and noticing the apparent absence of marks on the neck, and the pinhead spots, he had anticipated what Dr Hameed might say and his eye had already searched the immediate vicinty for a possible means of asphyxiation, finding nothing, however. No squab cushions on the bench pews, and the kneelers were stiffly padded needlepoint ones, probably worked by women of the parish. If the old man's life had been smothered out, the means had been removed. Yet her words echoed in his mind as he looked around: ‘
A pillow, or something soft ...
'

‘Just a minute, Doctor.'

A step or two took him to the foot of the deep-blue carpeted chancel steps, beyond which he was careful not to go, wary of unnecessarily contaminating the scene. Behind the Communion rail stood the raised altar, its green silk-damask frontal embroidered in gold. On the right side of the altar, between the central silver Cross and one of the tall symmetrically-placed white candles in their silver candlesticks, sat a small blue velvet cushion, corded and tasselled at each corner. On it was placed the Altar Service Book, a dark blue morocco-bound volume tooled in gold.

Not all that soft, the cushion, but probably still a viable means. And if it had been used to smother out the old man's life, there would be traces – fibres from the attacker's clothing, or saliva stains the lab could match up with the victim's. In order to get hold of the cushion, someone would have had to walk up the chancel steps and cross the carpet, remove the missal and pick up the cushion, then reverse the procedure after using it. He would have left something of himself behind, something of the traces we all leave of ourselves as we move through the days: dead hair, dead skin ...

‘There's your means, Martin,' he said to Kite, who had followed him to the chancel steps. ‘Your probable means,' he added with due caution, because he might be jumping to conclusions in a way he was always warning Kite about, though he didn't think so. Policemen didn't rely on hunches, they relied on feelings based on what experience of rogues and villains and the means they used had taught them, and his gut feeling this time told him he was right. Sure enough at least to be satisfied in his own mind that there would almost certainly be sufficient grounds to set up further inquiries.

‘Make sure the SOCOs give this bit the works,' he said to Kite. ‘Particularly the cushion.'

‘Will do.'

Dr Hameed was still standing by the wheelchair, mute and now seeming suddenly awkward and ill at ease. Her head was bowed as she looked at the body, and her hair with its black sheen, knotted into a bun at the back, her brown face and undeniably exotic appearance seemed strangely alien in the cold, grey English church. He wondered what she was making of it all. She murmured, as he approached, ‘It's the first time I've come across anything like this. Not since medical school. I couldn't be sure ... I hope ...'

She raised liquid brown eyes and put a hand on the pew as if to steady herself and he thought for a startled moment he'd overestimated her self-possession, and that she might even be about to pass out on him. He was sorry if he'd been too sharp in his judgement of her. ‘Don't worry, the police doctor's on his way.'

‘Of course.' Her chin lifted and she immediately became aloof again. ‘But I hope he won't be long. I'd like to be on my way. I still have to make another call.'

‘On Miss Willard, that's right. You did mention. Where is she? At the Rectory?'

Wainwright coughed. ‘Rector was going to take her to his neighbour's, next door. Mrs Thorne's by way of being a friend of Miss Willard's, sir.'

‘I hope you don't intend questioning her tonight, she'll be in no state for that.' The doctor's voice was sharp, but Mayo made non-committal noises, knowing that he would, as always, play it by ear.

‘She's been out all day and only got back just before the Rector found her father,' Wainwright said.

At that moment the door at the back of the church opened and Mayo saw Doc Ison walking towards him. Wiry and indestructible, the police surgeon walked quickly down the nave, a raincoat over his evening clothes, evidently in a hurry to get things over and back to the function he'd left. But a man to rely on, not one to skimp doing whatever was necessary. A tentative sort of friendship had developed between the detective and the doctor during their time of working together and he greeted Mayo cordially, but without wasting time on preliminaries. Within minutes he had his coat off and the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up, his notebook out, and was deep in consultation with Dr Hameed.

Mayo left them to it for the moment. Kite went out to the car to prepare for wheels to be set in motion, to have the necessary officers and the Scenes of Crime team alerted, and Mayo sent Wainwright to ask the Rector if he could spare time to speak to him. Left alone, he prowled around with his hands in his pockets, idly read the notices at the back of the church and flicked through the guide while his mind turned over and considered which line his inquiries were going to take. The church had that peculiarly indefinable air of great antiquity, tangible evidence of which was in the dusty hammer-beam roof and pale, barely discernible frescoes on the crumbling plaster of the south wall. The building was otherwise well maintained and kept in a spotless condition, no doubt by a band of those willing helpers who can invariably be found, even in this Godless age, to dust and polish and arrange flowers. The monumental brasses shone and the pews were well beeswaxed.

It had overtones to it, this old man's death, something he couldn't pin down but felt in the pricking of his thumbs. Murder, yes. Which without in any way condoning, he could understand. For human nature being what it was, deaths of this sort did happen from time to time. The old could all too easily become an insupportable burden, particularly on unmarried daughters who were expected to devote their lives to looking after them. Situations specifically designed, it seemed to Mayo, to lead to nothing but trouble, and it continually surprised him that anyone could show amazement when trouble happened, when years of resentment surfaced and the burden was not to be borne any longer: a momentary aberration when everything added up to just too much, a second's temptation, a pillow over the face, all over in a minute. When the victim was alone and in a helpless condition, preferably subdued with sleeping pills, conveniently in bed.