Cross walked through the village towards a small house which had a very ordered, traditional cottage garden at the front. Roses abounded in various pale shades of yellow and pink, together with pots of nasturtiums, lobelias and a large collection of different types of fuchsias. As he walked up the path the air was filled with the scent of thyme. He looked down and saw that in the cracks between the paving stones small clumps had been planted. So as the visitor came towards the house their feet crushed the herb and they were greeted with a fragrant welcome. He pulled an old cast iron bell pull. A bell rang inside the house. Not an electric one, but an actual bell sounded by a clapper.
After a few moments the door was opened by a woman in her seventies wearing a floral housecoat and a pair of Marigold gloves. An Hermès scarf was tied around her head of white hair. But it was all carried off with a supremely confident elegance.
‘Hello,’ she said brightly. ‘Can I help you?’
Cross held up his warrant card.
‘DS George Cross,’ he informed her.
‘Oh, you must be here about poor Mr Moreton. What a terrible thing.’
‘Are you Mrs Toby Bath?’
‘I am Mrs Deborah Bath, yes,’ she corrected him with a twinkle in her eye. ‘Would you like to speak with my husband about the parish council?’
‘I would.’
‘You’ll find him in his greenhouse. He really should put a bed in it the amount of time he spends in there. Come in.’ She waved him on.
Cross walked through the low-ceilinged house into a narrow garden at the back. It was a well-stocked garden. Barely an inch of soil was visible anywhere. A varied floral scent filled the air. A gap in a well-trimmed tall hedge led into a wilder section of the garden with long grass and a small orchard. But before then was a vegetable garden filled with lettuces, onions, herbs and a tall, long pyramid of runner beans. There was a greenhouse to the side in which a man could be seen working. Cross approached the entrance. The glasshouse was filled with tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers. The man was working at a bench to one side potting on seedlings. He was wearing a baggy pair of reddish-brown corduroy trousers, held up by a pair of wide braces, a thick checked Viyella shirt and knitted tie. Over this he wore a green apron which had a leather tool belt around it. Cross thought he had to be impossibly hot on a day like this, let alone in a sweltering greenhouse.
‘Mr Bath?’ Cross enquired.
‘Yes,’ replied the man without turning round.
Cross held up his warrant card despite the man still not looking at him.
‘My name is George Cross. I’m investigating the murder of Alistair Moreton.’
This got Bath’s attention. He turned immediately.
‘Oh, yes. I’ve been expecting you. Let me just get cleaned up.’
A few minutes later they were sitting at a table outside the back door of the house.
‘An absolute pain in the backside. My backside in particular,’ Bath answered in reply to Cross’s first question about Moreton.
‘In what way?’
‘Well, as I’m sure you’re aware, I’m the chair of the Crockerne parish council,’ Bath went on with the habitual air of self-importance that seemed to come with holding such positions in small communities. ‘For someone who had so little to do with the village or the people within it, he had an awful lot of opinions about the affairs of Crockerne.’
‘Were there any issues that were particularly troublesome?’ asked Cross.
‘Any? There were dozens. That man had an opinion on everything. Whether he had the knowledge to back it up or not was often a matter for debate.’
‘Was he on the council?’
Bath scoffed at the very idea. ‘Good Lord no. No one would have voted him on. But he came to all the public meetings. Every single one during his time here. Before his arrival they lasted an hour to maybe an hour and a half. With him, they regularly became two to three hours long. He loved the sound of his own voice.’
‘What were his particular concerns?’
‘Anything! Literally anything. I’ll give you an example. A few years ago, we had to design a one-way traffic system for the village. As you’ve probably noticed the lanes here are very narrow and it was virtually impossible to have two-way traffic. Constant bottlenecks and arguments about whose right of way it was. Naturally, the county council held a consultation. Moreton tabled over a hundred questions and concerns. He held the bloody thing up for over a year. The council almost put its hands up in surrender. We nearly lost the scheme because of one man, when the entire village was in favour of it. Moreton objected to the introduction of parking restrictions and residents’ bays and he didn’t even own a car! He had things to say about the shop changing its opening hours which wasn’t even a parish council matter. That didn’t stop him bringing it up and talking about a loss of amenities. The dates of the annual fair, which he never came to, not once. He made everything impossibly difficult. It was as if that was his sole purpose in life. To make my life a bloody misery.’
‘That must have been very frustrating for you,’ Cross commented.
‘Now, I’m going to say this because others will say they heard me say it and it’s true. I often wanted to kill the bloody man.’
‘And did you?’ asked Cross.
‘I did not,’ he replied, genuinely shocked by the question. ‘And despite my dislike for him, I feel terrible about what has happened. We all do. Well, except for the Cotterells, of course. But then again, they’re not villagers really. We had a responsibility of care for him, as with everyone else in the village. But we did our best to neglect and as chair of the parish council I must bear the brunt of,’ he said tragically.
‘Why are you responsible?’ asked Cross.
‘Because if we’d paid a little more attention to him… What am I talking about? Any attention to him, this might not have happened. We shouldn’t have been put off by his outward demeanour. People can often be awkward and difficult when they don’t mean to be. Don’t you find?’
Had anyone else been with Cross they would have felt the question was, perhaps comically, a little close to home. It didn’t strike him as such.
‘Were there people in the village who were particularly antagonised or inconvenienced by Mr Moreton’s interference in village affairs?’ Cross asked.
‘Everyone was antagonised, but only because no one likes a busybody, especially when they take up so much of everyone’s valuable time. Nothing more serious than that. His murder is baffling. I can’t believe it was anything to do with someone in the village, but then again, I suppose you must hear that all the time.’
‘What about the neighbours?’
‘That did get a bit bloody. Naturally everyone sided with them at the outset.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, it didn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to picture what life must’ve been like to be his neighbour. I mean, if his behaviour at parish meetings was anything to go on. Everyone thought he might have been making their life hell. But when the details emerged at the first court hearing, people took his side. In a weird way it changed people’s attitudes to him altogether. They started to ask him how it was going and if the Cotterells had paid up. At the second hearing some people spoke for him, others even just turned up to show their support.’
‘Was he grateful?’ Cross asked.
Bath laughed. ‘You didn’t know the man, Sergeant. Put it this way, if he was grateful he never showed it.’
‘What do you make of the Cotterells?’ asked Cross.
‘Truth? Not good people. I don’t like them. In part because they don’t seem to like us. They’re outsiders, second-homeowners what’s more. They make no effort to be a part of the village, even for three days a week. They think that just because they come from London they’re in some way better than us. The only time they came to the council – and not to a meeting mind you, but quietly to each member – was when they tried to drum up support against Moreton. They tried all sorts of ways to persuade us. You wouldn’t believe,’ said Bath.
‘I’m a policeman. You wouldn’t believe what I’d believe,’ Cross remarked which, to his surprise, caused Bath to laugh. ‘Bribes?’
‘Correct, and when that didn’t work they offered to contribute to the village financially. A sort of community bribe, if you like. They must’ve thought that would be cheaper than a court fine.’
*
Cross didn’t make it as far as the vicarage as he encountered Alison Smith in the village street. She suggested they go to the local tearoom. She was in her thirties, Cross estimated, and had an eager, enthusiastic quality about her in the way she moved, spoke and gestured. Her hands and arms were in a state of perpetual motion. Her facial expressions were over-articulated to the point of exaggeration. As if to make them more easily read. For Cross though, the artifice in this actually made her more difficult to read. She went from laughter to concern in the blink of an eye when asking about the tearoom owner’s elderly parents as she took their order.
‘So, poor old Alistair. I’m not really sure how I can help, Sergeant,’ she began, with a handwringing expression of apologetic sympathy. ‘I can’t think of anyone who would want to cause him harm. Isn’t that the first thing you usually ask in these situations?’
‘It is not,’ replied Cross.
‘Oh, right,’ she said scooping her blonde hair into a ponytail and securing it with a hair tie, as if she now understood this was serious business. Either that, or to ensure her dog collar was definitely visible.
The tea arrived in a china pot with cups and saucers which Cross thought was a positive start. Then he saw the tea strainer and realised that there was every chance it might prove to be his second acceptable cup of tea in the village. Crockerne was performing admirably in the proper-cup-of-tea stakes.
‘So how can I help?’ the vicar asked, face-width smile accompanied with a furrowed, concerned brow.
‘Alistair Moreton was a regular churchgoer. As his vicar, did you have much contact with him?’
‘Of course. Although he was Catholic, he came to our services. For the convenience only, as he would constantly tell me,’ she laughed.
‘Did you know him well?’
‘As much as anyone, I suppose. Actually, that’s not true. I think I knew him much better than most in the village, certainly after our tricky start.’
‘“Tricky” in what way?’
‘I’ve only been in the parish for four years. Before that there was a male vicar. Whether it was Alistair’s Catholicism or just downright misogyny I don’t know, but he was vehemently opposed to my appointment.’
‘Because you’re a woman?’ Cross asked.
‘Correct. He had no truck with female vicars. He objected strongly, wrote letters to the parish, emails, you name it. This from a man who didn’t even come to the village church at the time. He probably would have started a petition but realised no one in the village would have signed it. He frequented a Catholic church about five miles away.’
‘But he ended up in your congregation? Why the change of heart?’ asked Cross.
‘A broken hip. Last year. He was in hospital for a while. I visited him when he came home. Encouraged him to take short walks with me. We got to know each other slowly. Then he decided to worship at the village church until he was able to go back to a “proper” one, as he put it. But he never did.’
‘What did you think of him? Once you got to know him?’
‘A complex character. Very private, almost to the point of being a recluse. Very set in his ways, but overall very misunderstood. People were suspicious because he kept himself to himself. They never really got over the missing girl.’
‘Kylie Turnbull?’ Cross volunteered after consulting his notes.
‘That’s right. Even though it had nothing to do with him, they never got past it. Mud sticks, even when you’re completely innocent it would seem,’ she said sadly.
‘Do you know Malcolm Fisk?’
‘Only on nodding terms. He’s not a churchgoer. Saw him this morning actually.’
‘Do you know who he works for?’
‘Hammonds, in Avonmouth. He brought one of the artics into the village for a fete day. It was huge. I have no idea how he managed to get through the lanes. The kids loved it. He let them climb all over the thing. You don’t think… I mean, they were always at each other’s throats.’
‘I haven’t spoken with him yet. Did you learn anything about Moreton’s life? His past?’ Cross asked.
‘Yes. He’d been married. His wife died about thirty years ago. I don’t think he ever got over it. They had a son.’
‘Did he see him much?’
‘Quite regularly, which speaks volumes.’
‘In what way?’ asked Cross.
‘Well, I can’t imagine Al was the easiest of fathers. He had high, somewhat unrealistic expectations of people and the way they behaved. Had a lot to say about the world, politics, mostly critical. He thought unemployment was self-inflicted and that there was a malaise of laziness in the country encouraged by a ludicrously generous benefit system. The only time he seemed content, at peace, even, was when he talked about literature. It was his safe place. He found sanctuary in the written word. But his son was devoted,’ she replied.
‘Did he have a military background at all?’
‘I thought he might initially. But no. He did his national service but that was it. He ran the cadet force at a couple of schools. He was a teacher, you see. Ended up being headmaster at a small Catholic prep school somewhere. Don’t know where. He seemed quite reluctant to discuss that part of his life.’ She then laughed. ‘What am I talking about? He was reluctant to talk about any part of his life.’
‘Did you meet the son?’
‘Yes, he popped in to see me occasionally. To ask after his dad. Get the truth of what was really going on, he said.’
‘Do you have contact details for him?’
‘I do,’ she said, looking for her phone. ‘He was here yesterday afternoon, obviously. As soon as he heard. He’s an MP in Dorset. Sandy Moreton’s his name.’
‘Oh, I know of him. Famous for his right-wing views on immigration, gay marriage and abortion. Recently lost the Tory party whip,’ remarked Cross.
‘Not only that, his constituency has just successfully petitioned for his recall. There’s going to be a by-election. It was announced on the day of Alistair’s murder.’
‘Really?’ Cross made a note of this. ‘Had anything happened in Alistair’s life recently, changed perhaps? Did you notice any difference in his mood, behaviour?’
She thought about this for a moment, hand to chin, lined brow to communicate how seriously she was considering it.
‘If I’m honest, which let’s face it should be a given with a vicar’ – she laughed heartily at this but elicited no response from Cross – ‘he didn’t seem himself recently. He did have this ongoing dispute with his neighbours but that had never affected him before. And he’d won, after all. But he missed church for a couple of Sundays. I thought he might have gone away until I remembered he never went away. Anyway, I asked Tom, he runs the pub. But you’d know that, wouldn’t you? He discovered the body, didn’t he? I should pop in and see them,’ she said, making a note in a vast, well-annotated diary. ‘I asked him if he’d seen Al but he hadn’t. So, I popped up there to make sure everything was okay.’
‘Was he there?’
‘He was. Yes. But he didn’t invite me in which was odd. Though, wouldn’t let me in might be more accurate.’
‘When was this?’ Cross asked.
‘Just a couple of weeks ago. He didn’t come to church after that. I was going to go up there this week. But obviously…’ She tailed off.
Cross made a note of this.
‘The thing is, Sergeant, and I know you’ll probably think this is silly, but when I went up to Alistair’s house, I was convinced there was someone else there. In the house.’
Cross thought about this for a moment. It occurred to him that for someone who didn’t involve himself in the life of the village and was something of an outsider, Alistair Moreton had at least two people in the village looking out for him. Maybe this was a benefit of living in such a small tight-knit community. He then got up and left the shop unceremoniously. She was quite startled by his sudden departure and equally taken aback by his reappearance a few seconds later when he walked up to the counter and paid before leaving again without even glancing in the vicar’s direction.