The inspector, squatting to take a close look at them, heard the raising of the latch, then the cushioned close of the south door. He did not get up. Footsteps approached, firm, businesslike, proprietorial.
“Good afternoon.” The Reverend Alan Tiverton gazed upon the half-kneeling Purbright with a mixture of inquiry and high benevolence. “There is no objection to you people taking rubbings, you know. We do rather prefer you to ask permission, of course, but, as I say, there’s no objection. Carry on.”
The inspector got up. “In point of fact...” he began.
At once, Mr Tiverton’s smile contracted to an O of recognition and he held forth his hand like a wrestler.
“My dear Mr Purfleet, forgive me. I did not recognize our knight-errant of the other day.”
Purbright took both the compliment and the misnomer in good part and inquired after the rescued lady’s health.
“In the pink,” declared the vicar. “Or so I understand.”
“An unfortunate time for such a misadventure,” the inspector suggested.
“Indeed, yes. Mmm. Rather.” Mr Tiverton had an interesting talent for sounding keen to prolong a conversation while in the very act of abandoning it. Already he was moving away from the inspector.
“Brass rubbings...” Purbright produced the words quickly, as a sort of holding device.
“Mmm?” The vicar halted and turned upon him an eyes-closed smile of solicitude.
“...are not at all my line, I’m afraid.”
The vicar’s eyes opened. He glanced down to where the inspector had been kneeling.
“Oh, dear. Not detection, I trust?” Behind the mildly fatuous good humour was something of anxiety.
“Hardly that, Mr Tiverton. I was simply wondering how candlegrease had come to be dropped so far from the altar. A Corpus Christi procession, perhaps?”
“God forbid,” exclaimed Mr Tiverton, piously. He peered at the spot. “Do you know, I’d never noticed it before. No, no, a procession couldn’t have been responsible. There’d have been a trail, not a group. You see? All together. These are drips from a candle held still and over a period.”
He straightened, boyishly pleased with himself. “There, now—what do you want solving next?”
Purbright smiled at the pleasantry, then immediately looked aloft.
“Hell of a way to commit suicide.”
Mr Tiverton looked startled, then grave.
“Any method of suicide is the hell of a way.” He said it slowly and with careful enunciation. Purbright gave the line full marks.
“She was a parishioner of yours, was she, Mrs Croll?”
“A parishioner, yes; a communicant, no.” The vicar waited a moment. “Of course, I cannot speak of the years before my arrival here.” A further pause. “Incidentally, the verdict at the inquest was an open one. I do not feel it would be right to ascribe suicidal intention to the poor woman, whatever her past transgressions.”
“Her reputation,” said Purbright, “was that of a very devout person.”
Mr Tiverton clasped his hands and nodded. “That is most gratifying,” he said. “It costs us nothing to think well of the dead.”
Suddenly, he was in striding motion along the nave. As he drew away, he raised his hand in farewell.
Purbright waited for the vicar to pass through a curtained door at the east end, then unhurriedly looked about him.
The fifteenth-century chest, with its three locks and its strappings and corners of iron, occupied a position between the tower and the big ornamental font. It was a formidable piece of furniture, built to thwart robbers and time. Purbright stroked the black, ice-cold edge of its iron. Deadly enough, certainly, to wreak execution at the end of a fall.
He looked up at the distant gallery, pictured the woman’s descent, a parabola, the body upright at first but turning in the plunge. Her head must have been struck by that edge with force enough to cleave it. Must? Well, no, not necessarily. Or there would have been more mess. Bone thickness was an unpredictable factor.
He remembered the boy. The retraction of his story, queer though it was, did not ring true. Oggy, weak-witted or no, had almost certainly been watching when the woman jumped. Through which window, though, had he peeped?
There were four possibilities, all lancet windows, plainly glazed; two in the south wall, two in the north, directly opposite.
Purbright left the church and began to walk round it, keeping close to the wall. Beneath the lancet windows on the south side was a monumental family tomb, about three feet high. An energetic ten-year-old would have had no difficulty in scrambling to its flat top.
Standing with the tomb at his back, the inspector looked through the left-hand window. Even in the relative darkness of the church, he could easily discern the chest, the font, with its massive elaborately carved cover, and the nearest two pillars of the nave.
He walked round the west end of the church to where the wall was pierced by the opposite, matching pair of lancet windows.
The ground was lower here, the windows harder to reach. The Howell boy would not have found this place much use as a vantage point. In any case, he would have needed to risk observation from the back windows of a house only a few yards away.
Purbright stepped back to take a fuller view of the window. Something crunched beneath his heel. He glanced down and saw the glitter of glass; a few fragments lay widespread about the narrow path. Again he looked up at the window.
At its very apex, scarcely noticeable from ground level, one of the little panes was missing.
Purbright returned to the south porch and re-entered the church. The vicar was leaning over a baize-topped table near the door, arranging pamphlets and postcards. There was a box on the table, slotted for coins. Purbright dropped in a fifty-pence piece and took possession of “The Story of Saint Dennis and His Church” by the Reverend E. Cherry-Morgan.
Mr Tiverton beamed approval. “One of my predecessors,” he explained. “Not that he’ll get fat on the royalties, I fear.” And he replaced the inspector’s copy with one he took from a cardboard box that once had held a dozen of Pale Fino sherry.
“Did you know you have a broken window?” Purbright asked.
The vicar’s face clouded at once. “Oh, dear—at the vicarage, you mean?”
“No, here.”
Mr Tiverton looked relieved. He followed Purbrights glance to the top of the lancet.
“That,” the vicar said, “was done quite a while ago—oh, last year some time. The diocesan architect...” He paused, vaguely sensible of the inspector’s having inserted a small question somewhere. “I beg your pardon?”
“I said, how? How did it come to be broken?”