Authors: Peter Lovesey
He parked opposite the church and called at Church Cottage nearby. A woman answered, rubbing her hands on a towel. She smiled as if she knew why he was there. The fragrance of fried onions gusted from behind her, causing Diamond some unease over his still-turbulent stomach. He explained who he was.
‘You’re looking for the vicar, are you?’ The woman grinned. ‘Don’t worry. You’re not the first to make that mistake. Our vicar lives at Marshfield. We have to share him with two other parishes.’
‘Is there a church warden in the village, then?’
‘There is, but if you want the vicar, he may be in the church, still. There was a funeral earlier.’ Her gaze shifted from Diamond. ‘No, get your skates on - there he goes, at the end of the street.’
‘Thanks.’ He gave a shout and stepped out briskly after a tall, silver-haired man in the act of bundling his vestments into the back seat of a car.
The vicar straightened up and looked round. Diamond introduced himself.
‘You’re a detective? This is to do with poor old Gladstone, I suppose.’
‘Can you spare a few minutes, sir?’
The vicar said that he doubted if he could help much, but he would answer any questions he could. ‘Have you had lunch? The Portcullis has a rather good bar menu.’
Diamond patted his ample belly. ‘I’m giving it a miss today.’
‘Then why don’t we talk inside the church?’’ Whatever suits you, sir.’
St Mary Magdalene, the vicar explained as they approached it, was pre-Conquest in origin. There were Saxon stones in the structure of the tower. The priest of Tormarton, he said, was mentioned in Domesday.
‘So you’re one of a long line, sir?’ Diamond commented, willing to listen to some potted history in exchange for goodwill and, he hoped, the local gossip.
‘Yes, indeed. The line probably goes back two or three centuries earlier than that. There are various theories about the origin of the name of our village. The first syllable, ‘Tor”, may refer to “torr”, a hill, or the pagan deity Thor, or it may derive from a thorn tree. But there’s no dispute about the second part of the name. The derivation is “macre tun” - the farm on the boundary, or border. We stand, you see - and it’s rather exciting - on the ancient border of the Kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex.’
‘Mercia and Wessex,’ Diamond said without sharing the excitement. There was a danger of the history over-running. ‘But the present church is basically late Norman, as you must have noted already.’
‘Certainly have, sir. Must take a lot of upkeep. Do you have a good-sized congregation?’
‘It depends what you take to be a good size. I suppose we do reasonably well for these times.’ The vicar opened the wooden gate and led the way up a small avenue of yew trees, through the genteel end of the churchyard, where a high complement of raised tombs blackened by age stood at odd angles. The main entrance was round the right-hand side of the church.
‘Was Daniel Gladstone one of your flock?’
‘They all are,’ said the vicar. ‘But I know what you’re asking. He didn’t join in the worship. He didn’t join in anything much. Quite a solitary figure.’ He paused, then sighed and said, ‘The manner of his death is on all our consciences. And it was too long before he was found, far too long.’
‘Several days, anyway.’
‘Dreadful. Every parish priest has a few like that, insisting on going on in their own way, shutting the world out. It’s a dilemma. I called on him occasionally and he was barely civil.’
‘No family?’
‘Not in the neighbourhood. Both his marriages failed. It was a hard life, and I don’t think the wives could take it.’
‘So there were two marriages?’ said Diamond. They stepped into the small arched porch and the vicar turned the iron ring of the church door and parted the red curtains inside.
‘Two, yes. He was married here the first time during the war, long before I came. She wasn’t a local girl, I understand. From London, I think, to escape the bombing. Old Daniel must have been more sociable in those days. Young and carefree. His father would have owned the farm, then.’
They had paused in front of a sculptured wall monument to one Edward Topp, who had died in 1699. The Topp coat of arms consisted of a gloved hand gripping a severed arm, the soggy end painted red. Diamond thought of the post-mortem, took a deep breath and switched his gaze to a floor brass of a figure in a long garment, with all his limbs intact.
‘Fifteenth century. John Ceysill, a steward. Note the pen and inkhorn at his waist,’ the vicar informed him. ‘The Gladstones are one of the village families from generations back. If you’re looking for their name on the memorials 192
- of which we have some fine examples - you will be disappointed. Ordinary folk were not commemorated like the gentry.’
‘Unless they’re on the war memorial.’
‘Good point. The two world wars had slipped my mind.’
‘Easily done.’
‘But there are many fine features here in St Mary’s.’
Diamond’s gaze had already moved up to the fine feature of the timbered roof, not to admire it, but to work out how to stave off a lecture on its history. He produced the Bible from his pocket, an inspired move.
It was enough to stop the vicar in his tracks. True, they were in the right place, but policemen didn’t usually carry the Good Book.
‘So was old Daniel the last of the line?’
‘To my knowledge, yes.’
‘His first wife was only nineteen.’
Then Diamond opened the inside page with the family tree and passed it across.
‘I didn’t know he possessed a Bible,’ said the vicar, quick to understand. ‘This evidently came from the wife’s family, the Turners. Ah. May Turner married Daniel Gladstone, 1943, St Mary Magdalene’s.’
‘But it didn’t last long, you say?’
‘That was my understanding. They separated quite soon and she must have left her Bible behind. I heard that she left suddenly. Can’t tell you when.’
‘If there was a second marriage…’
‘There must have been a death or a divorce,’ the vicar completed it for him. ‘I can’t tell you which. His second marriage would have been in the nineteen-sixties. She was another very young woman, the daughter of the publican, I was told.’
‘Would her name have been Meg?’
‘Meg?’ He sounded doubtful.
‘Short for Margaret.’
‘Well, we can check in the marriage register, if you like. I keep that in the safe with the silver. How did you discover her name?’
‘If you look in the Book of Psalms…’
He peered over his glasses at Diamond, deeply skeptical that anyone called Meg was mentioned in the Psalms. ‘Ah.’ He had let the Bible fall open at the Christmas card. ‘Now I see what you mean. Bibles have so many uses, not least as a filing system.’
‘Look inside the card,’ said Diamond. The vicar opened it and found the photo of the woman and child and read the writing on the card. ‘How very moving. It’s coming back to me now. I did once hear that there was a daughter of the second marriage. This must be Margaret with her little girl. If you’re thinking of returning the Bible to them, I don’t know how you’d make contact. She left him when the child was very young. Let’s check the marriage register, shall we?’ He returned the Bible to Diamond and led him through a passageway (that he couldn’t resist naming as yet another feature of St Mary’s, its ambulatory) to the chancel and across the aisle to the vestry.
‘You said he was a loner - a solitary man.’
‘In his old age, he was.’ The vicar smiled. ‘I see what you mean. For a loner, two wives isn’t a bad achievement. He must have been more sociable in his youth, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Did something happen, I wonder, that turned him off people?’
‘I wouldn’t know about that.’ The vicar took the keys from his pocket and unlocked a wall-safe.
‘Was there any gossip?’
‘I’m not the right person to ask. Not much Tormarton gossip reaches me at Marshfield. There were stories that he was miserly, sleeping on a mattress stuffed with money, and so on, but almost any old person living alone has to put up with that sort of nonsense.’
‘Some small amount of cash was found in the house.’
‘That’s a relief - that anything was left, I mean. I shouldn’t say this, but I know of one or two locally who wouldn’t think twice about robbing the dead.’ He lifted a leather-bound register from the safe and rested it on the table where the choir’s hymn-books were stacked. ‘There were not so many weddings in the sixties, before they built the motorway. This shouldn’t take long.’
He found the year 1960 and began turning the pages.
‘So many familiar names.’ He stopped at 1967. ‘Here we are.
15th July. Daniel Gladstone, forty-four -
no spring chicken -
widower, farmer.
That’s one question answered, then. The first wife must have died.
Margaret Ann Torrington, twenty, spinster, barmaid
.’
‘Do you have the record of Baptisms? While you’ve got the books out, I’d like to see if we can find the child’s name.’
They started on another register and eventually found the entry for Christine Gladstone, baptised 20th February, 1970. ‘They stayed together this long, anyway,’ said the vicar. ‘What is it - two and a half years?’
Diamond thanked him for his trouble, still wondering if there was more to be discovered here about Gladstone’s death. ‘Who are the neighbours? Were they on good terms with the old man?’
‘You’ve put your finger on one of the problems,’ said the vicar. ‘The adjacent farm, Liversedge Farm, changed hands a number of times in recent years. It’s much larger in acreage than Gladstone’s. His is no more than a smallholding, as you’ve seen, and the way it is placed is just a nuisance to the neighbours. If you took an aerial view, you’d see it’s in the shape of a frying pan, slightly elongated - the handle being the access lane - almost entirely surrounded by Liversedge land. He was approached a number of times about selling up, but he refused.’
‘Who are the present owners?’
‘A company. One of these faceless organisations. They do rather nicely out of the European farm subsidies. Much of their land isn’t being farmed at all.’
‘“Set-aside”?’
‘Yes. The rationale is beyond me, paying farmers not to grow things when much of the world is starving.’
‘Some of their land must be in use.’
‘For grazing, yes. Low maintenance. Nice for the share-holders.’
Diamond had a bizarre mental picture of some portly shareholders on their knees nibbling the grass. ‘Isn’t it good land for farming?’
‘Not the easiest. Remember we’re six hundred feet high up here, being on a scarp of the Cotswolds, but it’s all there is.’
‘A time-honoured occupation, like yours and mine.’
‘Indeed. Farming has gone on here for thousands of years. There has been human occupation in the area since the mesolithic period. Stone Age flints are picked up from time to time. Why, only as recently as 1986, when some work was being done in a barn, a stone coffin was excavated containing the skeleton of a child aged about five. They estimated it as 1,800 years old.’
Another disturbing mental image. Having just looked at the photograph of Gladstone’s daughter Christine with her mother, Diamond had no difficulty picturing a small, dead girl of about that age. ‘There’s evidence of recent digging on Gladstone’s farm. Quite recent. Since his death, I mean. Would you know anything about that?’
The vicar closed the safe and locked it. ‘I heard that you policemen were busy with spades. Everyone in the village has a theory as to what you will unearth. I hope they’re wrong.’
‘It’s all but finished now. We found nothing.’
‘That’s a relief.’
‘But we’d like to know who disturbed the land in the first place, and why.’
‘I’ve heard nothing about that.’
‘No stories of people digging?’
‘Not until you folk arrived. I wonder who they were. Do you think someone had a theory that the old man had buried his money there?’
‘That’s one possibility.’
‘It’s very peculiar. Whatever the purpose of the digging was, they must have known he was dead, or they wouldn’t have started digging. Why didn’t they notify anyone if they knew poor old Daniel was lying inside the farmhouse?’
‘They wouldn’t, would they, if they were nicking his savings?’
‘Good thinking,’ said the vicar. He smiled. ‘Perhaps I should stick to preaching and leave the detecting to people like you.’
The drive back to Bath found Diamond in a better frame of mind. He had made real progress over the mystery of the farmer’s death. Pity it was the one case he had no business investigating. John Wigfull would not be happy. But then Wigfull had virtually written off the farmer as a suicide victim. And as Diamond had decided there was a strong suspicion of murder, it would be out of Wigfull’s orbit.
He had not driven far along the A46 when he recalled that this was a significant stretch of road, the long approach to Dyrham where Ada’s friend Rose had wandered into the path of an approaching car. Some way short of the Crown Inn, he pulled off the main carriageway and got out to look around.
It was a bleak, windswept spot, one of those vast landscapes that made you feel insignificant. Miles of farmland lay on either side of the road and a row of power-lines on pylons stretched almost to infinity. The traffic sped by, oblivious, intent on reaching the next road-sign. He had often driven through himself without ever noticing anyone on foot along here.
Where had she come from that night? There were only two possibilities he could think of: one was that she had been set down at the motorway junction and walked this far, the other that she had made her way from the nearest village, perhaps a mile and a half back along the road. And that village was Tormarton.
On his return to Manvers Street Police Station, Diamond was handed a message from the Forensic Science Lab. Tests on the blood sample taken from the dead woman found at the Royal Crescent on Sunday morning had proved negative for drugs and so low for alcohol that she could not have drunk much more than a glass of wine. He gave a told-you-so grunt. Hildegarde Henkel had not fallen off that roof because of her physical state.
The phone had been beeping steadily since he came in. He picked it up and heard from the desk sergeant that ‘some nerd’ had come in an hour ago in response to the appeal for information about the party up at the Crescent.