Pleasure and a Calling (32 page)

By now Marrineau had opened a bottle of Napoleon brandy he’d won in his own Christmas raffle. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t have the strength to put it back in. Sin provides too. Which is why it’s so appealing.’

I have no taste for drink but I joined him in saluting its quality. He drank without inhibition. He was full of joy. He told me that he was not lonely; on the contrary, he chose to be alone. ‘Believe it or not, I’ve had no shortage of offers since Sarah left. But my life now is more focused. My parameters have been redrawn to best carry out the labours I promised God I would devote my earthly life to. And it works. No one gets hurt, by which I mean by my negligence, by which I mean Sarah.’

He had not once enquired into my own religious beliefs (I have none), but urged me nevertheless to come to his 10.30 service in the morning. ‘There’ll be baptisms, so don’t sit too near the front, followed by my sermon, which is not to be missed. This week, temptation. It’s actually a diatribe against credit cards,
which is one of my bêtes noires. Debt is so destructive. I try not to be too judgemental but Jesus and I would have been in full agreement on how much violence you might legitimately inflict on moneychangers.’ He grinned, squinting at me. ‘I’m joking. But tomorrow I won’t be.’

He talked me into staying. ‘The spare room is always ready for guests,’ he said. ‘Plus, I’ve heard that your B&B has a serious bedbug problem. Or was it rodents? I’m sorry, that’s not true. I must stop saying the first thing that comes into my head. But please, do stay.’

I lay in the dark, aware of the faint ticking of the clock in the hall. The old Marrineau would have taken an eye for that eye. I wondered how Zoe was getting on. I fell asleep to the sound of snoring from the next room, transformed in a dream – in which I was unable to apply brakes on a heavy vehicle rolling slowly backwards – to a distant road drill. When I awoke he was gone. There was a note in the kitchen: ‘Two (non curry) sausages in the fridge are yours. Have an egg. Cornflakes in pantry – M’.

I went back upstairs. Marrineau’s bedroom was untidy. And dusty. There was a pile of laundry next to the basket. The drawers, yanked open, their contents in a jumble, suggested a frantic search for some arcane item of clerical garb – collar studs, I imagined. There was a garish plaster crucifix on the wall above his bed of the sort available in Italian souvenir shops and a tattered paperback copy of the Bible on the side table. Opposite the bed was a colourful tapestry, doubtless woven by Marrineau’s female devotees, that read simply JESUS IS OUR LORD.

I was disappointed to find no traces of the old Marrineau. The wardrobe rattled with empty hangers as I looked in vain for his rawhide jacket with its leather fringes; his boyhood sporting
trophies were nowhere to be seen. In the bathroom his enviable crocodile-skin gift set of razor and brush had been replaced by an electric shaver. A single toothbrush stood in a mug, above it a clouded mirror that I imagined Marrineau standing before every morning, tugging a comb through his tangle of hair, adjusting his eye-patch and feeling blessed.

The dog appeared in the doorway and came to be patted, sniffed at my leg, woofed and padded off again. I searched through a concertina file of old papers in the hope of finding a letter from my aunt or Isobel, or even a copy of my damning boyhood psychiatric report. Weighed down by a snowy Nativity paperweight was a pile of more recent correspondence – messages of thanks, a note from the family of someone who had died, a postcard from a couple on honeymoon. As I leafed through, I came upon a photograph I had seen before, and with it a letter. It was headed St Mary Hospice, Meldringham, and was dated some months previously and written in ink by an unsteady hand.

Dear Marrineau,

You should have this. You may even remember the day I took it. Perhaps you wondered why. But you were young, of course, and not given to questioning masters. You were hurrying with your gym class across the Middle lawn. I called you back, asked you to give me a smile for my camera. I’m afraid I had planned it in advance. It was foolish of me.

I took photographs of other boys too, but this is the only one I kept. I am deeply ashamed and yet at the same time I cannot regret it. I have lived at the wrong time – though not for very much longer.

My confession, such as it is, ends there. I have never touched a boy. I am guilty only of loving from afar. I am
grateful for your visits and prayers (no doubt I shall need them where I am going), but I would rather you didn’t come again. I am sure you will understand.

I am sorry for the distress this will perhaps cause you.

Yours sincerely,

Geoffrey Stamp

I hadn’t the heart or stomach to eat Marrineau’s last two sausages. Instead I walked back to my B&B, showered and had breakfast there. Then I drove the hire car back to St Alban-in-the-Dale in time to see the congregation coming out. Marrineau was at the door in his robes and black eye-patch, shaking hands and laughing. Ladies of the parish, rejoicing in their eccentric, charismatic pastor, queued up to praise him, some calling him ‘Father’, some ‘David’. As the crowd drifted away he spent ten minutes in particular with one side-whiskered and florid gentleman who could only be a farmer. Wholeheartedly roaring about something together, they looked like a comedy double act. I lingered until the man had rumbled away in a muddy Range Rover before approaching Marrineau.

‘I missed your sermon. And now, alas, I must take my leave.’

‘That’s a pity. Not tempted to stay for our homeless Sunday lunch? It’s free if you take part in doling it out.’ He didn’t wait for my answer but pointed down the road. ‘I’ve just talked that man with the whiskers into a large donation.’

‘Good news for your church spire.’

‘Ha, let me tell you a little secret. As much of the cash as I dare skim off goes to keeping my groups going – youth support, mother-and-baby, my drop-in centre for the unwashed, unwanted, the unemployable, the lonely, the inadequate, the unappealing,
the plain needy. People would rather give money to buildings. Sometimes I think, bugger the spire. Until it’s actually falling down, I suppose.’

I promised, as he’d hoped, to have my bank send him a cheque.

We shook hands and I drove off. Why had I come? I’d wanted to get out of town. And what better alibi, should I need one, than to have spent the weekend with a clergyman in Yorkshire – an old friend from a good family and a good school. But curiosity was behind it too; even a sense of unfinished business. Who knew? He had felt it too. Maybe he wasn’t too disappointed to find that I hadn’t needed ‘saving’, as he put it. I hadn’t apologized, or asked for or offered forgiveness. We had engaged in an unexpected way – though it wasn’t as friendly as we were each determined to make it look. It occurred to me that, for Marrineau, doing the Lord’s work wasn’t about making friends but gathering donors, tin-rattlers, volunteers, disciples, listeners – a clientele of the faith. He could have been selling a house. Perhaps we just glimpsed a little of ourselves in each other, enough to spark one evening into a beatific glow, two flints shaken together in a box.

I thought about Isobel and the girl, how I had done right by her. Maybe even changed her opinion of me. The point was, it was time to move on and, Marrineau’s God willing, continue with my own good work. And if that sounds a little self-congratulatory, just imagine what our town would be like without me.

I
GAVE IT ALL DAY
M
ONDAY
. I thought it might take time to track down Sharp’s golf club – or, rather, set of clubs – but I’ll be damned if they weren’t in the first charity shop I walked into. I almost immediately recognized the bulbous green-striped head of the club protruding from the bag. I had feared – hoped now – that the pattern on its metal striking surface (parallel lines pleasingly not unlike my own sign) might be matched to an imprint left in the skin, flesh and bone of Sharp’s right-side temple. I made a circuit of the shop, inspecting unwanted jigsaws, knick-knacks and worn clothes. I was reluctant to buy the whole set of clubs and risk jogging the memory (during the renewed surge of investigation that would surely follow) of the elderly lady who ran the shop. It seemed to me less risky simply to wait until she was in the back room sorting the contents of the bin liners that one saw piling up in the doorways of all such shops over the weekend, then slip the club out of the bag and walk out with it to my waiting car.

At the office, Wendy was flustered with news that Zoe had not turned up this morning to meet buyers at the Curries’ place
and that it was Katya’s day off. ‘We can hardly send Josh on his own.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll deal with them.’

‘I called her but she’s not answering.’

‘I’ll try her later. She’s probably having one of her downturns.’

‘Downturns?’

‘Yes, she won’t want people calling her every five minutes.’

Late in the day, I rang Detective Sergeant Monks.

‘Just a thought,’ I said. ‘And this is probably nothing. But having made a few enquiries, one of my staff
does
seem to have mislaid her binoculars. And I’m absolutely sure it
is
nothing but …’

‘But?’

‘Well, that’s the point. This is rather delicate.’

‘And yet, Mr Heming, I sense you want to tell me about it.’

‘It’s perfectly innocent – well, sort of. The fact is that Zoe – who is, I should say, an excellent young woman and a valued member of staff. Well, when I told her about the binoculars you’d found …’

‘You told her?’

‘Yes, and something rang a bell with her, I could tell. And then, sure enough, later she stepped into my office and told me she’d once had a brief relationship with Mr Sharp – Douglas, as she called him. Which, as she explained, was why she didn’t want to deal with the sale of his house when it came in. If the binoculars found in the car
are
hers – and she thinks they probably are – that’s how they would have got there.’

‘In the boot?’

‘Well, quite, that’s what I said to her.’

‘And what did she say?’

‘She became cross and said, “Use your imagination, Mr Heming.”’

‘Ah.’

‘The trouble is, I’m not certain that she really wants to tell you, though I’m sure it’s just a matter of eliminating her binoculars from your inquiry. Understandably she doesn’t want to get involved—’

‘Is Zoe in the office now?’

‘No. She hasn’t been in all day. I think she might be off sick. She does suffer from depression from time to time.’

‘Address?’

‘Ah. I’m going to have to get back to you on that. Wendy has now left for the day and I’m afraid she has the keys to everything. Would first thing in the morning be all right?’

There was a pause in which Monks sighed. ‘If you could do that.’

I had to think hard about Sharp’s handsome matching leather holdalls – the advantage of having them versus the danger of Abigail finding them missing and wondering if she ought to do anything about it. I had an idea where she had put them. I’d thought it odd that the key to her lock-up garage had been missing when I’d shown the Perettis round, and it made sense to assume that that’s where the bags were now – Abigail would have moved them into her lock-up garage after she and I had cleared it of her mother’s rubbish. But the other reason the spare lockup key was missing, I now realized – or reasoned with some confidence – was that I already had it, that it was the key with the green wooden fob I’d taken from her backpack on that hazardous day in the library.

First I needed to be sure Abigail would be safely at work. I
knew the times of her shifts, but she was nowhere to be seen at the library. I stood outside for some minutes trying to spot her, before driving to Raistrick Road. Here I called her landline. No answer. I rang at the door. I went round the back of the terrace to the garage. The green of the fob was a perfect match for the wooden door, and sure enough the key turned in the lock. But the bags weren’t there. The garage was empty of everything but a few gardening tools.

I relocked it and looked up at the bedroom windows. Something wasn’t right. I went round to the front door and let myself in. The echo that rose through the house said it all. I tried the front room, the living room, the sun room, the kitchen. I dashed upstairs. The house had been almost entirely emptied, almost certainly by one of the clearance firms that advertised in the paper. The curtains and carpets remained, along with a small assortment of items – a lamp or two, a wicker chair, a rug – that she evidently intended to come back for. The two holdalls were among them. I called the library and asked for Abigail.