The Fox in the Forest (5 page)

8

The big old car cruised quietly into the silent village. Lambert parked it beside the tiny children’s playground, where swings hung motionless in the dank air.

There was not a soul to be seen on Christmas Eve. Lambert was reminded of the mining disaster which had been one of his most difficult assignments as a young, uniformed policeman. The community then had shut itself off in its grief, as though outsiders, however sympathetic, were intruding upon emotions they could never understand. Only one man had died this time, but it was a small village, and he had been its vicar.

Even in these harsh and hedonistic days, the cloth should afford a man some protection. And Peter Barton had been a man who had loved his flock and been loved himself. Perhaps his parishioners realized this only with his brutal removal from their midst. The thirst for revenge, that most primitive and insistent of human reactions, would gather force as the day drew to its close. But the village now was still shocked enough to resent intruders. Lambert and Hook were observed from curtained windows, but no one came willingly to offer them help or opinions.

Half unconsciously, they moved towards the church, as much because it was traditionally and physically the centre of village life as because it was the working place of their victim. It was a stone church with a surprisingly elegant steeple, which seemed taller than it really was because of its slenderness. Even on this day of grudging half-light, the local stone had the soft orange glow which gave the place a serenity appropriate to its purpose.

Lambert stood for a moment at its gate before he walked along the flagged path between the mounds and the lichened tombstones; fifteenth-century, he guessed, though no doubt there had been a church on the site for much longer than that. Restored and modified a little by the Victorians, who had replaced two narrow windows with the soaring neo-Gothic they so favoured, but without the virulent stained glass that disfigured some of their more opulent additions. It was a small church; no doubt it was still too large for its modern congregation, but scarcely unique in that.

The big wooden door opened readily when he turned the heavy iron ring of its handle. The two big men stood a little awkwardly in the aisle, as though they felt they should explain their presence here if they were not going to kneel and pray. The empty church was ready for Christmas, looking incongruously joyful, as if it had not yet heard of the fate of its incumbent. Brasses gleamed brightly on the altar; the patina of the mahogany communion rail was deep enough to reflect the colours of the opulent chrysanthemums which stood in tall vases beyond it. The front of the pulpit which Peter Barton would never occupy again was flecked with a multitude of deep red holly berries.

Lambert walked over to the side altar where the crib had been set up. An appealing collage from the village primary school covered the wall behind the crib. Three small wise men followed a huge star which had been exuberantly smothered with tinsel. An anorexic angel, with his trumpet clasped at an unlikely angle, flew uncertainly across a navy sky, like a Lowry drunk on his way home from a Christmas binge. Its innocence was a world away from the scene they had left in the woods.

As if to echo that sentiment, a voice behind them said tremulously, “The church seems so empty now. And all of this seems useless. Worse than useless; it’s an insult to his memory. I feel like taking it all down.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t do that, Mrs ?”

“Coleman. Deirdre Coleman.”

“John Lambert. Superintendent Lambert, I’m afraid, CID. And this is Detective-Sergeant Hook.”

“Oh, I see. Yes, of course.” The woman looked as if she did not see at all, or only very dimly. She was probably in her fifties, but at the moment she looked older. She had been crying; the flesh around her eyes was puffy and her make-up was in ruins. She made an effort to pull herself together which was curiously touching because it was so transparent. “I was here when I heard, you see. I sent Mrs Jenkins home. Then I just sat in the vestry. It’s true, then, about Peter? I couldn’t believe it, at first; then I sat in there and prayed to God it wasn’t true.”

“I’m afraid it is, Mrs Coleman.” He wondered how much she knew of the detail of the killing. Probably everything: the body had been discovered by village children, and rural imaginations, bred on the abattoir disposal of stock, would pass on and enlarge the gruesome particulars. Melodrama like this was unique in the lives of most of them.

She looked past them, staring unseeingly at the altar she had dressed so lovingly over the last few days. “He was such a lovely man,” she said dully. “Who would want to kill him?”

For once the banal sentiment which was so familiar to policemen rang true. Hook said gruffly, “That’s what we’re here to find out, Mrs Coleman.” She reminded him in her distress of the aunt who had died when he was a boy, the only relative he could remember before he went into the home. He resisted a temptation to put his arm round the hunched shoulders as a sob shook them: the woman was quite obviously middle class, and he was on duty. “The Reverend Barton was well liked in the village, then?”

She looked at him resentfully, as though it was vicious in him even to ask for confirmation of it. “You won’t find anyone with a bad word for him,” she said. Her chin jutted resolutely as she took courage from her assertion of his reputation; it was all she could do for him now.

“How long had he been here, Mrs Coleman?” As usual, Hook was the better of the two at getting information from people in distress.

“Four years.” The reply came so promptly that they suspected a no doubt highly respectable passion on her part for the young vicar. “He seemed very modern at first, but he was so gentle and polite with everyone. And when we got to know him —” Her voice caught and tears gushed in new channels through the powder on her cheeks.

Hook said, “I’m sorry to upset you, but all this is most helpful information to us, Mrs Coleman. We can hardly bother his widow just now, though we shall have to see her quite soon.”

For a moment she looked as though she was about to offer them a view on Mrs Barton. Then the tragedy fell again across her mind, and she looked down at the pew in front of her. “Clare’s been taken to identify the body, I believe.” The village grapevine was flourishing healthily, as they had thought it would.

As Deirdre Coleman dabbed at her face with a tiny handkerchief which was wholly inadequate for her grief, Hook said gently, “Please think carefully for a moment, then we’ll leave you in peace. Is there anyone at all, inside or outside the village, who might have a reason to wish him dead?” He held up a hand as she rushed to refute the idea. “Think about it for a moment, please. It’s the last service you can offer to Peter Barton.”

The use for the first time of the dead man’s full name, which she took as an acknowledgement of her closeness to him, stilled the denial in her throat. She accepted Hook’s guidance as meekly as any child, and thought dutifully for a moment before she spoke. Perhaps she desperately wanted to find a culprit for them, to render an intimate service in death such as the personable young vicar had never permitted to her in life. After a moment, she shook her head miserably. “He hadn’t a single enemy round here. Or anywhere else, I’m sure.”

Hook looked at his chief, collected the briefest nod of acquiescence, and said, “Thank you for your help, Mrs Coleman. We’ll get the person who killed him, in due course.”

They left her behind them with her grief. When they looked back from the church door, she had fallen on her knees before the altar, with all thought for the appearance she had checked so carefully before leaving home now gone. Her elbows sprawled across the pew in front of her, providing support for shoulders almost collapsed by her grief. One of her shoes was almost off, its heel worn flat on one side. Her head was so bowed that all they could see was a few wisps of grey hair.

Yet her grief in the deserted church gave her a dignity that struck home to both of them as they closed the door upon it. Peter Barton could have had much worse representatives to his memory.

***

In the deserted Crown, they drank two halves of bitter and tried to collect a different impression of Peter Barton from Keith Harrison, licensed to retail spirits and ales.

“He was one of us,” he said with conviction. It was not clear who were ‘us’, and still less who were the unspeakable ‘them’ that his use of the phrase implied. But it was plain that his approval of the dead clergyman was as unstinting as Mrs Coleman’s, and from a totally different section of the community — basically male and non-churchgoing.

They heard about skittles and darts, and how Peter Barton respected beliefs which ran contrary to his own. Harrison polished horse brasses vigorously, and the noise rang round the empty hostelry almost as resonantly as if they were still in the church across the lane. Eventually, Lambert said desperately, “But he must have had enemies. Everyone has.”

The landlord swept his hand over his balding head, then scratched it thoughtfully, as if he had removed a nonexistent cap to permit himself the indulgence. He prided himself on being a worldly-wise, realistic man, and he collected his share of confidences and freely offered views on the world and its denizens, particularly the local ones. He wanted to offer suggestions to the police, feeling obscurely that his self-image as a village sage might be at stake here.

Yet in this single respect, Peter Barton failed him: he was unable to scratch up enemies of any kind, let alone any bitter enough to have killed him. Eventually he said gnomically, “No man is an island. Perhaps he had enemies we don’t know about here. I don’t know much about his private life.” For a moment, they thought again that they were about to be offered some speculative thought about Mrs Barton. Then the landlord seemed to reject the idea. He said almost reluctantly, “But you won’t find any to say a word against him around here.”

As policemen, it was not what they wanted to hear.

***

They came to the village store almost in desperation, and met there the kind of cautious hostility with which as policemen they were more familiar. It was almost a relief.

After enduring a few moments of surly non-cooperation, Hook produced his notebook and affected a more formal approach. “It’s Mr G. Farr, isn’t it?” he said, flicking to a new page and preparing apparently to record the words of the shopkeeper in detail.

“Everyone calls me Tommy,” said Farr. It was a small gesture of conciliation, and they took it as such.

“You see a lot of what goes on around here,” said Lambert.

“People come in and out. They don’t talk a lot.” Lambert reflected that they were probably not encouraged to do so. As if he read the thought, Farr said, “I run this place on my own, so I don’t have a lot of time for gossip.” In fact, he made it his business to be pleasant, but he saw no reason why he should volunteer so much to the police.

“Perhaps not. But you don’t strike me as a fool, Mr Farr, so I need scarcely remind you that it is your duty to offer whatever help you can to the police when they are investigating serious crime. I’m asking you what you thought of the Reverend Barton, and what other people thought of him.”

Farr looked at them coolly. “He weren’t my type. His wife might have been.” He bit his lip, banishing the surly smile of male complicity, regretting immediately the streak of himself which had been betrayed.

Lambert let the moment stretch, allowing what might have been no more than a rough masculine boast to gather a heavier significance, pushing his man a little more on to the defensive. Then he said, “You didn’t like Peter Barton?”

“I didn’t like or dislike him. I said he wasn’t my type. That doesn’t mean I took a shotgun to him.”

They both looked him full in the face then, watching the broken nose, the surprisingly regular white teeth, the blue eyes beneath the tightly curled grey hair which now had only traces of red in it. Lambert said, “So you know how he died, Mr Farr?”

If Farr thought he had made a mistake, he did not acknowledge it. The steely eyes held theirs, almost insolently. “The kids described the body. Their mothers have been in here.” It was as though he spoke in shorthand.

Hook said, “But you said they don’t talk a lot.”

“You try keeping them quiet over something like that.” It was a fair defence, but he spoke of his customers with contempt.

“And they told you the vicar had been killed with a shotgun?”

Farr had the sense to pause before he replied. “They talked about the injuries. It didn’t take much knowledge to guess they had come from a shotgun.”

“I see. Do you have a shotgun yourself?” If the man wanted to be insolent, Lambert could return the attitude with interest. Ultimately, he held all the important cards in this game.

Perhaps Farr realized that. He said sullenly, “Yes. You can see it, if you want.” Without waiting for a reply, he turned and walked through the door behind him.

Both of them knew the shotgun would be of no interest, or he would not have volunteered it so readily, but they were not going to turn down the chance to see how this aggressive curmudgeon lived. They followed him without even needing to look at each other.

The storeroom behind the shop was surprisingly untidy after the neat displays of merchandise they had left. Probably Farr knew his way around its clutter well enough. They were almost through the next door and into his living quarters when the menacing growl and bared teeth stopped them in their apprehensive tracks. “All right, Kelly, they’re friends. Back in your box!” said Farr. The Doberman loped away, obedient but seemingly disappointed; Farr’s smile of secret amusement convinced them that he had deliberately not warned them about the dog, which now stared at them from its bed with baleful brown eyes.