The Vicar was aghast at such a calumny.
‘No, no, no, no, no! The very idea, Inspector! I would never, never have presumed … By lying as I did, it wasn’t at all my intention to puff myself up. I simply hoped to take those prying old – I mean, the ladies of the Church Committee, down a peg or two.
‘I recall a schoolmaster friend of ours – I’m thinking of Grenfell, dear,’ he said to his wife, ‘who once admitted to me that he, the very gentlest of souls, would be a regular martinet with his charges at the start of every new term, actually going so far as caning them for the most piffling of offences, even as it went against the grain, because he believed that, if he gave them so excessive a demonstration of his authority straight off, he’d never have to use his cane again. Well, that in a sense was what I was also trying to do. I allowed myself to tell one little untruth right at the beginning – merely to impose my authority, so to speak – and I trusted I’d never have to tell another.’
‘Yes – yes,’ replied Trubshawe, ‘I can see how that might have worked. But I have to put it to you again – what was the lie?’
‘The lie?’ said the Vicar sadly. ‘The lie was that, throughout the War, I’d been an Army padre in Flanders. Nothing grand, you understand, no heroics, no mention in dispatches. I just left my parishioners with the impression – not much more than an impression, I assure you – that I’d, well …’
‘I get you. You claimed you’d seen action in Europe. Instead of which …?’
The Vicar almost literally hung his head.
‘Instead of which, I’d been a company clerk in Aldershot. I hadn’t yet been ordained and, in addition, I was declared unfit for active service. My feet, you know.’
‘Your feet?’ said the Chief-Inspector.
‘They’re flat, I’m afraid. I was born with flat feet.’
‘Aha. I see. Well, Vicar,’ said Trubshawe benignly, ‘I have to say it strikes me as a pretty forgivable fib. Not much there for anybody to make a song-and-dance about, surely?’
‘No,’ said the Vicar, ‘perhaps not. If that had been all there was to it.’
‘There was more to it, then?’
‘Well, I fear it all rather got out of control. You’re familiar, I’m certain, with the old rhyme “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive”? Once I’d told the original lie, there I was, caught in my own web. Even though I played down any notion that I might have been a hero, I daresay I sinned by omission when I let the inference stand.
‘The consequence was that these ladies of the parish took it for granted that I was being disarmingly modest about my experience and started pestering me about everything I’d seen and done at the front. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, I feel sure their curiosity in this regard was utterly irreproachable, except – except in the case of Mrs de Cazalis herself, whom I confess I did come to suspect – it was most un-Christian of me, I know – but I did come to suspect her of harbouring, alas, all too well-founded doubts about the probity of my character and even of hoping to trip me up. Then it all came to a head with the matter of the organ.’
‘The organ?’
‘The church organ. When I arrived in the parish, it was in dire need of repair, as many church organs were in the aftermath of the War, and as always there was simply no money to pay for it. So, following innumerable committee meetings, with all the internecine bickerings which would appear to be part and parcel of these meetings, and whose endless ramifications and recriminations I’ll spare you, we decided to hold a Grand Charity Fête.
‘It had Tombola, Morris Dancing around the Maypole, a Punch-and-Judy show for the tots, a Pin-the-Nail-on-the-Donkey’s-Tail stall for the older children and an entertainment which we, the members of the Church Committee, got up ourselves. We invited some jolly Pierrots and Harlequins over from the Postbridge concert-party, the Fol-de-Rols. The girls of St Cecilia’s performed a series of tasteful Tableaux Vivants. Mr Hawkins from the Post Office charmed us all with his famous bird-call impressions. And his eldest son Georgie – well, Georgie, as I recall, did some sort of an act with gaily coloured hoops. I never did know quite what was supposed to happen to those hoops, as we had next to no time for rehearsals, but Georgie surely didn’t mean for them all to bound off the stage in every direction at once. Anyway, it got the biggest laugh of the day, which I suppose was the main thing.’
‘Mr Wattis,’ the Chief-Inspector nipped in quickly, ‘sorry, but where exactly is this business of the Fête going? And what has it to do with Raymond Gentry?’
There was a snort from the Colonel.
‘Really, Trubshawe!’ he cried. ‘Why must you badger the poor fellow so! You asked him for his story and that’s just what he’s giving you. It’s a deuced uncomfortable spot you’ve put him on, you know, but he’s doing his level best. Go on, Clem, and take your own time. Whatever courage you did or did not show in the War, you’re certainly making up for it now. You’re an example to us all.’
‘Very kind of you to put it that way, Roger,’ said the Vicar, visibly touched by his friend’s unsolicited words of support. In fact, with the relief of having got over the worst, there had now come a new confidence in his voice.
‘The thing is, Inspector,’ he went on, ‘I was expected, as Vicar, to contribute some little thing of my own to the show. And, as I couldn’t sing, or juggle, or do bird-call impressions, or anything of the kind, it was finally proposed – by the perfidious Mrs de Cazalis, surprise surprise – that I deliver a public talk about my wartime experiences.’
‘H’m. Quite a can of worms you’d opened up.’
‘I simply couldn’t say no, particularly as it was to benefit the church, and the other ladies of the committee excitedly backed her up, and I felt well and truly trapped. Cynthia will confirm how I agonised long and hard over how I might extricate myself. I tell you, Inspector – all of you – it got to the point where I even contemplated resigning from my living as the only decent thing to do, but – well, that would undoubtedly also have meant quitting the Church, which would have been a frightful cross to bear for the rest of my life. As well as something I could ill-afford.
‘Anyway, the upshot was, I agreed to give the talk.
‘There was absolutely no question, as I already said, of inventing stories of my own so-called courage, but I realised I would have to offer a detailed summary of conditions at the front. So I read every single book on the war I could lay my hands on, until I became quite an expert on the subject – history manuals, personal memoirs, whatever there was, I read it and made copious notes. And, you understand, I couldn’t even borrow these books from the circulating library, as I suspected it would soon dawn on the snooping Mrs de Cazalis what I was up to. So I had to buy them, putting a real strain on our purse-strings, given that Cynthia and I are as poor as a pair of church-mice.
‘But even if what I had to say wouldn’t be, couldn’t be, my truth, I wanted it to be, at some level, the truth. You do understand? That was very important to me.’
‘What happened?’
The Vicar seemed briefly in danger of once more losing his composure, but he swiftly rallied.
‘It was a fiasco!’
‘Really? But why? If, as you say, you’d done your homework?’
‘The fact is, I’m simply no good at lying. I was convincing, more or less, when I gave my audience a general outline of the situation in Flanders. But when I started to talk in the first person – about my visiting the trenches, my consoling the walking wounded, my holding a service in a half-ruined village chapel with the distant rumble of Big Bertha shaking the rafters – well, Inspector, I quite went to pieces. I stumbled over my words, I was hazy on details, I got my dates all mixed up, I lost the place in the notes I’d made, I hemmed and hawed and then hemmed all over again. I was clueless, clueless!’