“You’re looking for a weapon! A weapon—here in the church!”
Purbright raised a hand. “I am simply examining possibilities, Mr Tiverton.”
The vicar threw a glance to the tower gallery. For an instant, he cowered, as if threatened.
“Not that poor woman who...”
The man was by now so obviously alarmed that Purbright abandoned diplomacy.
“We no longer believe that Mrs Croll died as the result of a fall. We think she was attacked and struck down.”
“What, here? Attacked?”
“Here, yes.”
“In a locked church?”
“Churches are capable of being unlocked, vicar, like any other buildings.”
There followed a long pause.
“You must see the terrible implication of what you are saying, inspector.”
“And what is that, sir?”
“Oh, come now. It is obvious enough. If what you say is true, and this appalling thing has been done...oh, but no, you cannot be making such an accusation...”
“I have accused no one, Mr Tiverton.”
“But the keys, man. The keys. You talk of unlocking. Locking, unlocking—and by whom? A murderer? There are only two keys. Two, that’s all. I have one. My warden has the other. Which of us are you going to arrest, inspector? Or is it to be both of us?”
Purbright had caught a strong whiff of sherry. He gave Mr Tiverton what he hoped was a reassuring smile.
“It is scarcely likely that I should be talking to you so frankly, sir, if I had any intention of arresting you. As for Mr Cork-Bradden, I don’t doubt that he will be able to give his own account of such matters as I might need to have explained to me.”
The vicar looked a little abashed. “This comes as quite a shock, you know, inspector.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Especially as we were just preparing for a joyful occasion. Our first baptism in the village for more than a year. We could have done without this...this unexpected shadow.”
For the next half hour or so, and with the vicar’s permission but not his company, Purbright roamed every accessible part of the church on the lookout for potential blunt instruments. Nothing suggested itself. He walked out into the sunshine.
The ancient yew trees in Mumblesby church yard looked solid and nearly black against the bright sky. When the light was not behind them, though, they had a curious viscous appearance, like hangings of dark green lava.
Beyond the yews and huddled beneath the tresses of a vast, arthritic willow, were some of the oldest graves in the parish. Their headstones leaned at random in the rank grass, peaceful as sleeping drunks.
Purbright strolled idly among the dead, deciphering here and there a name or a date. It was not a profitable, nor even in any sense a relevant occupation, but it served to delay his call upon one of the living, to whom he was by no means sure what to say.
It was when Purbright had reached the limit of this part of the burial ground and was about to descend to the path leading to Church House, that he happened to glance across to one of the plainly glazed windows of the church.
He stopped and stared, transfixed by the wild impression that the church, like some great stone ship, was slowly sinking, and that this had been brought about by none other than the vicar himself—its captain, as it were—whose hauling upon a rope had opened the sea-cocks.
The illusion lasted only a moment. It was not the church that was sinking, but something within it—an object of considerable mass, whose immobility one took for granted—that was just as improbably rising.
The great seventeenth century font cover of carved oak had parted from its octagonal base, the much more ancient font itself, and was being slowly drawn aloft.
Eventually, Mr Tiverton stopped pulling and lightly wound a few turns of rope round a cleat in a nearby pillar.
The font cover (it looked, Purbright decided, rather like a junior version of the Albert Memorial) was by now suspended at a height of three or four feet above the stone basin. Plenty of room, he supposed, to manoeuvre a baby into the prescribed baptismal attitudes.
The vicar stepped up to the font and leaned forward to inspect the basin.
Suddenly he frowned and pouted in a good-gracious kind of way. He reached down into the font and picked something up. Whatever it was, it was too small for Purbright to identify from where he stood.
For some moments, Mr Tiverton examined his find on the palm of his hand. Then he wrapped it in a piece of paper. He was about to put it in his pocket when his eye happened to meet the inquisitive gaze of the inspector.
At once, he held up the discovery and signalled by gesture that Purbright was welcome to share it.
The inspector returned to the church. Mr Tiverton had not moved.
“In the font,” he said. “How awfully odd.”
Purbright stared for a full minute at the little silver-cupped jewel that the vicar had handed to him.
When at last he raised his eyes, it was to seek out the arched top of one of the lancet windows. Then his regard moved to the font and, finally, to its suspended cover.
Mr Tiverton saw Purbright’s face muscles tighten, as if with pain, and heard a softly suspired “Christ!”
Chapter Fifteen
Ever since his breakfast-time encounter with Zoe Loughbury, Mr Buxton had found room among his sizeable collection of uncharitable sentiments to include the faint, but attractive hope that his late employer had met his end by other than natural causes.
Why otherwise, he asked himself, should the widow be so cheerful and at the same time so insensible of the sanctity of legal protocol? Her attitude towards the late Mr Loughbury’s testamentary disposition (“will” indeed!) had been almost flippant. This was not the behaviour to be expected of a woman bereaved.
“It was almost,” Mr Buxton had told his own, very respectful, wife that evening, “as if she regarded me as somebody from the Pools.”
He did not mention Zoe’s greater sin: her failure to make the bearer of good tidings the recipient of her personal gratitude, there and then.
That was not the only circumstance that fuelled Mr Buxton’s suspicion, of course. The marriage itself, furtively procured by special licence and largely unacknowledged by the sort of people with whom Mr Richard normally associated, had run less than a year of its course. (I put it to you, madam, that you could not wait for the Great Reaper to drop a fortune into your lap: you had to wield the scythe yourself, did you not? Thus Buxton, the eminent Silk, cross-examining in his own head.)
And why, if the death of the Senior Partner had been straightforward, were the Flaxborough police now making inquiries?
He himself had seen an inspector of his acquaintance call at the Manor House and there was talk among the solicitors about visits to the village by a detective sergeant.