A Nice Place to Die (2 page)

In the Co-op in Old Catcombe, the old ladies asked each other, ‘What have we done to deserve this?' And the middle-aged woman behind the counter could only shake her head and say, ‘It's like there's a curse on this place.'

Nothing much came of complaints to the police or the council. The police sent a constable round the village houses to offer advice on security; the council provided a man with a mechanical street-cleaner early on Monday mornings to clear up after the weekend. But the intimidation continued and the villagers still felt themselves besieged.

Something had to be done. And, the Reverend Tim Baker told himself, it's my job to do it.

As was his wont, he looked first for solutions in books. Unable to communicate easily with his parishioners, he looked to local historical precedent and tradition for guidance. In the parish records he came across a contemporary account of the burning of the witch Hester Warren in 1568.

The next Sunday, the Reverend Baker delivered an impassioned sermon. He used the terrible fate of Hester Warren to call for an end to the ignorance and intolerance which still existed in the parish. He appealed to his congregation to seek reconciliation between the two Catcombe communities, divided, he said, by a lack of mutual understanding.

His regular churchgoers, ten elderly residents of Old Catcombe, showed no sign of having heard or understood anything he'd said. Some complained among themselves afterwards that they didn't like the way the vicar had shouted at them, it wasn't proper to raise his voice in church.

Tim told himself that if he was to achieve his goal he must get his message across to younger, more active people. That meant that he would have to look for converts to his cause among the residents of Catcombe Mead.

So, one breezy afternoon not long before Christmas, the young vicar, telling his wife that he'd be home for tea, mounted his new blue mountain bike bought for getting around his scattered parish, and made his way down the still pleasant country lane to the housing estate. There he intended to foster the spirit of the season of goodwill to all men among his new parishioners.

If the people of Old Catcombe and Catcombe Mead would only
talk
to each other, he thought, all this ill-will could be sorted out.

As he approached Catcombe Mead and the main road, he saw ahead the vast glass school and the supermarket car park. He didn't want to go there. People there would be too busy to listen to him. He intended to make contact with the people living in the residential areas, the ordinary people. He was naive enough to imagine that he could call on them in their homes as he did when he visited the Old Catcombe villagers. The newcomers were people like himself who would surely respond to a friendly approach just as his parishioners in the village did.

The Reverend Tim took the first turn on the right into Forester Close. This was a quiet-looking cul-de-sac of detached three-bedroomed houses. Nowhere looked its best this time of year but the leafless ornamental trees and the muddy grass verges in this street spoke of pretensions to human warmth and communal pride not even hinted at by the soulless blocks of flats and concrete pavements which bounded the main road. He thought the street looked promising.

He thought he saw a light on at the back of one of the houses and this made him happy. Here was a proper full-time mother, probably baking scones for her children's tea when they came home from school. He found the image comforting. This, he decided, was a good place to begin.

It was only after he dismounted from his blue bicycle and propped it against a low garden wall outside the house that he saw the group of teenage boys hanging around outside the front door. They were gathered round a tall sturdy youth with dark greasy hair. He wore studded black leathers and heavy laced boots which seemed to mark him out as some sort of leader. He was playing with the controls of a shining black motorcycle.

Tim Baker suddenly felt nervous. He was a small, thin, pale man who wore spectacles with thick lenses to correct his short sight. He had a nervous dithery way that irritated him as much as he knew it put off other people. Also, he had learned from childhood that there was something about him that triggered ridicule and sometimes outright aggression in the young.

But it was too late to retreat now. He took a deep breath and started to walk towards these new parishioners of his. He was acutely aware that they were watching him, and that they had formed a semicircle and were moving towards him.

‘Hallo, lads,' he said brightly, and tried to make his smile convincing. ‘Nice bike,' he said to the boy with the motorcycle. He thought that made him seem rather cool. He tried to deepen the high pitch of his voice. ‘I'm your new vicar,' he said. ‘My name's Tim. I'm hoping to get to know some of my parishioners here, right? If you've got any problems you'd like to talk about . . .'

He knew he sounded ridiculous, and frightened. But he couldn't help himself.

Tim wished they would stop staring at him. It made him even more nervous.

‘Quite,' he said, as though someone had said something. He asked himself, what's the matter with me? They're just kids, all they need is to feel someone cares about them.

He laughed. It came out all wrong, very shrill and forced, which it was. He said hastily, hearing his own desperation, ‘I think I've come at the wrong time. Everyone seems to be out today. Perhaps you could mention to your parents that my door's always open, right?'

He was sweating. This was absurd. They were harmless kids. But he started to move away, knowing that he must not turn his back on them. It seemed to him that he could smell his own fear. He'd always thought that was just something people said about fear, but now he knew that it was true.

‘Got a day off school, have you?' he said. ‘That's nice. You must study very hard these days to pass all those exams. I feel sorry for you kids today, there's so much pressure on you all to do well. But one day you'll be glad you worked so hard.'

The teenagers looked at each other and showed their teeth as though they were about to laugh but they didn't laugh.

You fool, Tim told himself, of course it's school holidays.

‘That's your advice, is it, Rev?' the boy on the motorcycle said. ‘That's what got you to where you are today, is it?'

The boy slowly and deliberately rolled a joint, lit it, then inhaled and passed it to one of his mates.

‘You want a drag, Rev?' one of the younger kids asked, pushing against Tim and blowing the aromatic smoke in his face.

‘Don't you know that stuff's dangerous,' Tim said, trying to sound like an older brother, not the heavy father. ‘You could get addicted,' he said. ‘It affects your brain, leads to short-term memory loss . . .'

‘What brains are you're talking about?' the first boy said. ‘Don't you know we don't have no brains?'

The kid with the joint reached up to touch Tim's dog collar. ‘Woof, woof,' he jeered and they all laughed. The boy, encouraged, grabbed the collar and pulled it off.

‘Walkies, walkies,' he said, imitating Tim's voice and accent. ‘Look, Kevin, I've let him off the lead.'

Tim suddenly felt horribly vulnerable.

‘I'd better go,' he said. ‘Things to do, places to go.' He very nearly giggled in his embarrassment. It was a nervous habit he had never been able to break.

‘Yeah?' Kevin said. He picked up Tim's new blue bicycle and threw it at him. Perhaps he didn't actually intend it to hit him, but the young vicar was moving forward and the bike knocked him down.

‘Oh, I say,' Tim said.

He could hear the way he sounded and he knew that they would mock him for it because he was old-fashioned and had nothing in common with them.

His spectacles had fallen off. Without them he was almost blind.

‘These what you're looking for?' one of the boys called, and Tim heard the crunch of glass as his tormentor stamped on them.

The boy pushed the spectacles roughly against Tim's face, nicking his skin with the broken glass so that blood began to dribble down the side of his nose.

‘Four-eyes, four-eyes, you got a bloody nose,' one kid began to chant.

He was so young his voice hadn't even broken.

‘No, it's just a scratch,' Tim said, trying to wipe away the blood with the back of his hand.

‘Not good enough for you, Rev?' Kevin said, ‘You looking to be some kind of martyr, are you? I'll give you a bloody nose.'

He hit Tim hard in the face. The sudden pain left the young vicar confused, struggling to catch his breath as blood poured out of his nostrils.

Tim tasted the blood at the back of his throat. As more teenagers began to hit him in the face, he put up his hands to try to hold them off, but he couldn't see where the blows were coming from. He couldn't speak, either; he just made a silly little protesting sound that seemed to enrage his tormentors further. He began to pray silently, Please, God, what do I do now?

He started to blubber, trying to get to his feet because he knew from the old days at school how his tears inflamed bullies. He could make out Kevin's voice, deeper than the rest. ‘You trying to run out on us, Rev?'

‘No, please, we can talk this through,' Tim was trying to say, and as he heard his own words in his head, he was mortified at the absurdity of what he was saying even though he could not make himself heard.

‘You're not going anywhere till we've shown you what we think of people like you,' Kevin said. ‘You want to talk? Here's what I've got to say.'

He kicked Tim hard in the crotch. Then the others joined in. Someone hit him at the base of the spine with something metal, and then there was a flash of iridescent white as one of the teenagers pulled a knife and sliced through his sleeve and forearm to reveal the bone and a silvery tendon. Then it disappeared under the dark flow of blood.

In Tim's last conscious moment, he remembered something he'd heard recently about a gang of girls seen playing football with a live rat. Somewhere in Yorkshire. Who'd told him about that? Had it been on television? It was no good, he couldn't think. Please, God, what is the world coming to?

He was unconscious by the time a car turned into Forester Close and the teenagers scattered.

In the car Donna Miller had seen her sons Kevin and Nate among the group gathered around something lying on the pavement. She saw them look up and then take flight like a crowd of crows rising from a dead rabbit in the road.

She telephoned for an ambulance.

‘Do you know who he is?' one of the paramedics asked her.

Donna shook her head.

The police asked, ‘Did you see who did this to him?'

‘No,' she said. ‘I found him lying in the road like this when I came home.'

A policewoman in plainclothes seemed to be in charge. She gave Donna her card. ‘If you think of anything that could help,' she said, ‘ring me. In confidence,' she added.

‘It could've been a hit and run, couldn't it?' Donna said.

There was something about Donna's face that caught the policewoman's attention. Shock, of course, but more than that an expression where primitive fear struggled with an unexpected defensiveness.

‘No, it couldn't,' she said. ‘This was a vicious attack and whoever did it will be on a murder charge.'

‘I didn't see anything,' Donna said.

TWO

H
idden behind the curtain at the window of her front room Alice Bates watched the murder of the young vicar.

The position of her house at the top of the cul-de-sac facing down the street gave Alice a clear view of what went on in Forester Close. She spent a great deal of her time watching everything that happened there. Nor was she a mere casual observer of her neighbours' doings. She had never even spoken to most of them, but she felt nonetheless intimately connected to them. Watching the secret lives of others from the safety of her front room provided Alice with a kind of virtual life of her own. That, and the television, were the emotional and spiritual touchstones that connected her to other people. They offered her an illusion of being involved in society but at the same time distanced from it. She did not distinguish between the real lives she watched unfold and the fictional ‘realities' of television drama. Thus she protected herself from the brutal actuality of life by refusing to believe that it was really happening.

So, for Alice, Number Three Forester Close contained the entire outside world. She was still the same person who would once have written on her prized possessions: Alice Bates, Three Forester Close, Catcombe Mead, Catcombe, near Haverton, Somerset, Wessex, England, United Kingdom, British Isles, Europe, the Western Hemisphere, the World, the Universe, the Mind of God.

She watched the young vicar cycle up the street. She was afraid he was going to come up to her house and knock on the door. Alice didn't like visitors. She had no friends to come and see her, and strangers only called if they wanted something.

So, without losing her vantage point, she moved behind the sideboard so as not to be seen. She saw the young man's pale, anxious, holy face outside her house, looking as though he was searching for something or someone. She saw that his dog collar was too big for his thin throat.

He must be mad, Alice thought, coming on his own to a place like Forester Close dressed like that.

She knew that something bad was about to happen.

Alice had noticed the gang of teenagers hanging about in front of the Millers' house before the vicar turned into the Close. They were there most afternoons when Donna and her partner Alan were out. They spent their time drinking and smoking, and jeering at anyone who passed by. Very few people did pass by because there was something savage about these youngsters; they were intimidating and no one wanted to run the gauntlet of their foul language and abuse.