31

I was still angry on Thursday morning when the parcel came. I was in the drawing room doing the dusting. The postman knocked at the back door and David answered. He brought the parcel up to me, which I suppose was meant as an olive branch. I recognized the handwriting at once and so I expect did he.

He gave me the parcel and said, ‘Wendy, I must apologize.’

‘What for?’

‘Last night. I know I was upset but I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.’

‘And on Janet and Rosie,’ I reminded him, rubbing salt into the wound. I was in no mood for an apology, and I thought if David was going to put himself on a pedestal as a clergyman, he should have had all the more reason to act like a civilized and Christian human being.

‘Yes,’ he said mildly. ‘You’re right.’ But the Olivier nostrils flared momentarily and I realized that I was trespassing yet again on the wrong side of an invisible line. Not that I cared. ‘In any case,’ he went on, ‘it was unforgivable of me.’

Suddenly there was no longer any satisfaction in attacking him. ‘It’s all right. Anyway, it’s not me you have to worry about, is it? It’s Janet.’

He nodded curtly and left the room. I knew it was pointless to goad him, but if he was angry with me then I was angry with him. There hadn’t been much point in his shouting at Janet over supper last night, or in his storming out of the kitchen in the middle of the meal and slamming the door behind him.

If David hadn’t been a priest, if he hadn’t been a man who habitually kept his emotions so tightly under control, it would have been less shocking. After he’d left, Janet had wept into a tea towel, Rosie had played with Angel in the corner by the dresser, and Mr Treevor had quietly finished off all the untouched food on everyone else’s plates.

I sat down on the sofa, turning Henry’s parcel over and over in my hands. On Monday Henry had said he wanted to buy a birthday present for Rosie and in the end there hadn’t been time that afternoon. He had the cheek to ask me to do it for him, but I’d refused.

It was odd seeing my name in Henry’s handwriting, as subtly unsettling as receiving a self-addressed envelope. I undid the string and unwrapped the brown paper. Inside were three books and a letter. Noddy Goes to Toyland and Hurrah for Little Noddy were by Enid Blyton. He had written Rosie’s name inside but in a way they were meant for me. The third book was a slim green volume almost identical to the library book in my bedside cupboard upstairs. It was a copy of Francis Youlgreave’s The Tongues of Angels.

I opened the letter, which was written on note-paper from Brown’s Hotel. He was obviously still doing his best to run through the £47,000 as soon as possible.

My dear Wendy

I hope Rosie likes the Noddy books. Noddy looks like an odious little twerp to me, but perhaps I’m not the best judge.

Anyway, over to Youlgreave. I’ve done a little checking. There is a Farnworthy collection listed in the catalogue of the British Museum Library – mainly theology. It doesn’t include the sermons of Dr Giles Briscow, though the library does have a late-seventeenth-century copy of that. So presumably it’s not the one that Youlgreave had, if Youlgreave’s ever existed.

Now for the big news. On Tuesday I went to the Blue Dahlia only to find your little bald man just leaving. I followed him back to Holborn. He’s got an office over a tobacconist’s. Harold Munro, Ex-Detective Sergeant Metropolitan Police, Private Investigations & Confidential Enquiries Undertaken. That’s what it said on his card in the tobacconist’s window. And I know it’s him, because he came into the shop for some cigarettes while I was there and the tobacconist called him Mr Munro.

Munro asked the tobacconist to take any messages the next day, that was Tuesday, because he had to be out of the office. The tobacconist said where was he going, and hoped it was somewhere nice. And Munro said it was a place called Roth, up the Thames near Shepperton.

There were footsteps in the hall and I looked up. Mr Treevor had come up from the kitchen and was moving towards the downstairs lavatory.

‘I’ve seen him before,’ Mr Treevor said. ‘I’m pretty sure he’s a ghost.’

‘Might have been.’ Mr Treevor twisted the handle of the lavatory door. ‘Yes, I think he was.’

‘And can you remember the shape of his bald patch? You must have seen it from above when he was in the High Street.’

‘I expect so,’ said Mr Treevor obligingly, vanishing into the lavatory and locking the door behind him.

So next morning I went down to Waterloo and caught a train for Shepperton – Roth is too small to have a station. In fact, Roth hasn’t got much of anything besides a church, a bus shelter and a pub. It’s one of those villages that got swallowed by the suburbs and apart from a whacking great reservoir and one or two fields that the builders forgot, all you can see are houses.

But there’s a sort of green where the bus shelter is and the pub. This seems to be the centre of the place and I reckoned if Munro came to Roth he’d probably come there sooner or later. I spent about an hour having a cup of coffee in a ghastly little café, all chintz and horse brasses. No luck there. When it was opening time, I pottered along to the pub. Luckily our Harold had had the same idea. He was talking to an old codger in the snug, so I nipped into the lounge bar, got myself a drink and settled down for a spot of eavesdropping.

I wonder if he’s ex-Metropolitan Police because they kicked him out for inefficiency. I sat at the bar pretending to read the paper. I could hear some of what they were saying. Munro seemed to be asking about the Youlgreaves. They mentioned someone called Lady Youlgreave who lives in the Old Manor House (just down the road). Unfortunately some people came in and I couldn’t hear very well, because people were talking loudly on the other side of me.

But I heard the name Francis Youlgreave several times. The old codger was rabbiting on about a place called Carter’s Meadow. I think Youlgreave may have upset a neighbour by doing something beastly to a cat there.

Munro left soon afterwards. The last I saw of him, he was walking fast down the road to the station.

I didn’t want to follow, because I thought it might make my interest in him a little too obvious. So I had a look at the church, which is small and old. Francis Youlgreave is buried here – there is a memorial tablet in the chancel to him. All very discreet – just the family crest, his name and the dates of his birth and death.

The only other thing was the poems. There was a box of second-hand books near the door, threepence each, all profits to the Church Restoration Fund. One of them was some poems by Francis Youlgreave, which I thought you might like. I had a look at it on the train back to town, and I couldn’t make head or tail of it. Nutty as a fruit cake, as your mother used to say.

On Thursday, I’ll try and find out something about Martlesham and I’ll give you a ring in the evening. With luck you’ll get this before I phone.

I meant everything I said on Monday. I know I’ve been a bloody fool but don’t let’s throw it all away. If you haven’t cashed that cheque, please do.

I don’t know why, but that letter made me want to cry. I suppose it underlined how far Henry and I had travelled since we married, and especially since I found him with his Hairy Widow on the beach.

I went up to my room with the parcel. I’d have to find some paper to wrap up the present for Rosie. The house was very quiet. Janet had taken Rosie to school, David was in his study and Mr Treevor was in his room. I mounted the second flight of stairs up to my landing. When I put the books in my bedside table, I noticed the sprig of lavender resting on Henry’s cheque beside the gin bottle. I didn’t feel lucky. Just miserable.

I lit a cigarette. I was in no hurry to go to work. I stared at the photograph Canon Osbaston had lent me. It was propped up on an old washstand in the corner of the room behind the door. The trouble was, nothing made sense, then or now. What the hell were Martlesham and Munro up to? If they wanted to find out about Francis, why couldn’t they do it openly? Perhaps there was some obvious explanation staring me in the face which I couldn’t grasp because I was too busy making a mess of my life and watching Janet and David making a mess of theirs. Where did the mutilated pigeon come in? And what about the little man Mr Treevor saw, the little man like a shadow who might or might not be the same as, or at least overlap with, Harold Munro, the private investigator with a bald patch the shape of Africa?

I picked up the photograph and took it to the window so I could see it better. There, according to Mrs Elstree, was Francis Youlgreave. Hero or villain? Madman or saint? If I could climb into the blurred monochrome world of the photograph and talk to him for five minutes, I would at least find the answers to those questions. And perhaps I would also find the answers to others in the present.

I stubbed out my cigarette and got ready to go to the library. When I went downstairs I found David in the hall. He was wearing his hat and raincoat and bending over the oak chest. He poked his umbrella between it and the wall.

‘It’s this smell.’ He jabbed the umbrella viciously downwards. ‘I wondered if there’s something got trapped down here. I can feel something.’

‘It may not be terribly pleasant. If it’s a dead rat, for example. And wouldn’t the chest be rather heavy for you?’

Those nostrils flared, but he bit back the temper and nodded. There were handles at either end of the chest. We lifted it a few inches away from the wall, easy enough with two of us, though hard for one person to do without scraping the chest on the flagstones.

Wedged in the angle between the wall and the floor was a mass of feathers and bone. The smell was suddenly much stronger.

As if on cue, the kitchen door slammed, and we heard Janet’s footsteps coming up the stairs to the hall.