They found Thomas Salcher out back of his house by the pigpen. Over the fence in front of him, two enormous pigs were standing with their snouts lifted in expectation of food.
“That’s a couple of good-looking hogs,” Carvell said.
“Yes,” Salcher said. “Pretty good. Just about good enough to have their throats cut.”
He giggled. But behind the chat he was studying them warily.
“We’re thinking,” Carvell said, “that you may be able to help us with a little problem we have. Why don’t we go inside out of the wind?”
They sat around one end of the kitchen table. Ada Salcher sat in a rocking chair, her dropsied legs above her sneakers like a pair of corpse-white balloons filled with water, the rest of her a shape-less pile of breasts and belly. She eyed them as she might have eyed someone passing on the road. In spite of the cooler weather, the stink in the house seemed to Dorkin even worse than when he had been there before.
“The problem,” Carvell said, “has to do with Reverend Clemens.”
“Oh?” Salcher said. “What kind of a problem would that be now?”
“We’ve heard some strange things,” Carvell said.
“Oh?”
“We’ve heard that sometimes on Saturday nights, he dresses up in a pair of old overalls and goes roaming around in the woods behind the dance hall. Have you ever heard anything about that?”
“Well, now,” Salcher said, glancing back and forth between Carvell and Dorkin, “I don’t know.”
“You either know or you don’t know,” Carvell said. “Have you?”
“Well,” Salcher said, “I guess I have. Yes.”
“Seen it even, perhaps?”
“Well, yes. It’s just that he told me I wasn’t supposed to tell nobody about it. He said it wouldn’t do to have it git around.”
“What exactly was it that you weren’t supposed to tell? What was he doing out there?”
“He didn’t like that dance hall. He said it was a palace of sin. He was gonna git it shut down, and he wanted to be able to say what was goin’ on there. So sometimes he went to spy on it.”
“In an old pair of overalls and a railroad cap.”
“Well, yes. That’s right,” Salcher said. “He said if he got recognized, and they knew what he was doin’, he might git beaten up. Even killed. He said people were threatenin’ him because he preached against the dance hall.”
“I see,” Carvell said. “He drove here to your place and parked his car, did he?”
“Yes. Out back there.”
“What about the overalls?”
“Well, now, he used to leave them here. Outside the back door there with my coats and jackets and stuff. They just looked as if they was mine. He’d put them on and then go off down the path back there into the woods.”
“How long was he gone?”
“I don’t know. Maybe an hour. Maybe longer.”
“You never thought that maybe the reason he was going down there was to have a peep at the boys and girls in the woods?”
“Well, I did once or twice,” Salcher said. “But that ain’t no crime.”
He giggled.
“I guess not,” Carvell said, “if that’s all he did. Did he come here on the night of July 1?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know about that,” Salcher said. “That was a long time ago.”
“In court, he said he was here that night. He said he had a religious visit with you and Ada. That’s how he happened to be driving the Hannigan Road.”
“Yes, that’s right. I just didn’t remember the date.”
“It was the night Sarah Coile was murdered. Did he go out spying in the woods that night?”
“Now, I don’t remember that,” Salcher said. “I didn’t think nothin’ about all them things at the time.”
Before Salcher had even finished, Carvell’s fist came down on the table so hard that everything on it jumped. Salcher jumped too.
“Stop horsing around,” Carvell said. “I think you know god-damned well what all this is about. You tell me lies, and you’re going to find yourself in more trouble than you’ve ever seen in your life before.”
Salcher couldn’t have looked more cowed if Carvell had picked him up and slammed him against the wall.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, he was here that night.”
“So what happened?”
“Just like usual. He parked out back and came in and talked for a while and said a prayer for Ada and then put on the overalls and cap and went out. Off down the path behind the house.”
“When did he come back?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t watch the time. An hour maybe. Maybe more. I don’t know.”
“But he did come back?”
“Yes. But he didn’t come in. He didn’t bring the overalls back neither. I just heard the car start up and drive off.”
“Did you look out?”
“No. I just saw it go by under the windows.”
“You didn’t see if there was anyone in it besides Clemens?”
“No. I didn’t look.”
“And you don’t know what time it was?”
“No. I never paid no heed.”
“Did he bring the overalls back here later?”
“No. I never seen them again. And I don’t know as he ever went into the woods again neither. Leastways, he never came here before he did. But he came a couple of times just to visit.”
“Did you ever think there might be a connection between Sarah Coile being murdered that night and Clemens never going out spying again?”
Salcher hesitated. He was thoroughly scared now, sitting with his hands clasped tight in his lap.
“I wondered,” he said finally. “But I thought maybe he was afraid to go there anymore with all the police around that might see him.”
“Did he ever talk about Sarah Coile being murdered?”
“Once. I remember once he said it was a judgement.”
“Oh? A judgement for what?”
“I don’t know,” Salcher said. “For goin’ to the dance hall maybe. Or goin’ out back with boys.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“I remember he said somethin’ about how now all her sins would be forgiven.”
“Sort of a tough way to get into heaven,” Carvell said.
Dorkin and Carvell mounted the steps of the small front porch of the Reverend Clemens’s house on Broad Street, and Carvell turned the key of the doorbell in the centre of the door.
There was a long wait, and then the door was opened by a tall young woman dressed in a loose blouse, buttoned up to the neck, and an unpatriotically long skirt that reached almost to her ankles. She had a delicately boned, oval face completely without makeup, dark brown hair pulled back in a severe bun, very large, dark eyes, a long neck. This, Dorkin assumed, was the daughter whom Alden Bartlett had told him about, but Bartlett had not led him to envision such a strikingly good-looking woman. However, she was not working at impressing them with her looks. Her eyes were hard as she looked first at Carvell, then at Dorkin, studying his uniform with systematic disdain.
When she showed no sign of speaking, Carvell introduced him-self and Dorkin.
“We would like to have a few words with your father,” he said.
“Could I tell him,” she asked, “what it is you want to have a few words with him about?”
The accent was unmistakably southern.
“I’m afraid that it’s confidential,” Carvell said. “I’m sure he’ll understand.”
She hesitated, glancing beyond them at Carvell’s car parked in the yard behind her father’s, then stepped back.
“Come in, then,” she said, “and I’ll see.”
They stepped into a narrow hall fronting a flight of stairs and were ushered into a small parlour furnished with a horsehair sofa, several tightly packed, uncomfortable-looking chairs, and a lectern. There was a faint smell of damp as in a house where windows are seldom opened, and Dorkin had an unsettling sense of having passed into an alien world.
The girl vanished into the back of the house, closing a door behind her, and Dorkin and Carvell stood in the middle of the room, unspeaking and uncomfortable, studying the prints on the wall. There was one of Jesus with children, one of Jesus with the disciples, all of them suitably Aryanized, one of a sun-drenched landscape with a distant rainbow towards which some common folk in work clothes were making their way with rapturous, upturned faces.
From somewhere at the back of the house, Dorkin could just hear a murmur of voices. There was an interval of silence, then a man’s heavy tread. Reverend Clemens was in shirt sleeves and braces, massive and softly shapeless, though not so massive as he had appeared from the eminence of the witness stand, nor, no doubt, from his pulpit.
He looked at Carvell, then more closely at Dorkin. If he had cause for alarm, he didn’t show it.
“Sheriff Carvell,” he said. “Lieutenant.”
He made no move to shake hands.
“We’d like to talk to you for a few minutes about Sarah Coile,” Carvell said. “We understand that you were her minister.”
“I was,” Clemens said, emphasizing the pastness of it in an odd way. “I’m sorry that I could not have swayed her more than I did. Then all of this might not have happened.”
The tone of voice was distant, as if suggesting that he regarded Carvell and Dorkin as themselves part of the great worldly conspiracy against holiness that had destroyed Sarah. As in court, Dorkin caught the whiff of a southern accent, not as strong as the daughter’s, but unmistakable all the same.
“Yes,” Carvell said. “I’m sorry too. Everyone is.”
“That dance hall is a curse,” Clemens said. “I’m sure it has ruined more lives than hers.”
“Probably it has,” Carvell said.
“I’m not sure what it is you wanted to talk to me about,” Clemens said.
“Perhaps we could sit down,” Carvell said.
“Certainly.”
Clemens carefully closed the door, crossed the room with his slow, heavy stride, and sat down in the middle of the horsehair sofa, leaning back, his hands on his thighs, elbows out, his chin lifted. Dorkin and Carvell took chairs across from him.
“We have come into possession of some information,” Carvell said, “which tends to cast some doubt on the guilt of Private Williams.”
Watching closely, Dorkin saw, or thought he saw, a shadow as brief as that of a passing bird cross Clemens’s face.
“We thought you might be of some help to us,” Carvell said.
“If I can,” Clemens said.
His manner seemed guarded, perhaps wary, perhaps merely puzzled.
“I didn’t like to question you in court about Sarah Coile,” Dorkin took it up, “but we were hoping that just between ourselves here, you might feel free to tell us something about her.”
“Perhaps. What was it you wanted to know?”
“We were wondering if perhaps you might have some idea who the father of her child might have been.”
“I had assumed that it was Private Williams. But I gather from the trial that this seems doubtful.”
“You didn’t know that she was pregnant before you heard about it at the hearing?”
“No, I did not.”
“You’ve no idea of any special boyfriends?”
“No.”
“Was she someone whom you knew well? Someone you saw often?”
“Ours is a small church. Everybody knows everybody else.”
“She still came to church?”
“Yes. Not as often as she used to.”
“When was the last time you saw Sarah?” Dorkin asked.
He tried to pose his question in a way that suggested without making it too obvious that he might already know the answer. Clemens hesitated briefly—for a heartbeat or two, no more—and the look that he gave Dorkin was ambiguous. Was it wariness as he saw what he took to be a trap and realized that he dare not lie? Or was it merely an annoyed awareness that Dorkin regarded the question as a trap and was expecting him to lie?
“I saw her on the afternoon of July 1,” he said.
Dorkin carefully restrained himself from looking at Carvell. Then as they both waited, Clemens went on.
“She came to the church. My wife and daughter were both there helping me prepare things for Sunday. I talked with Sarah in my office at the back.”
“Would it be possible for you to tell us what she came to see you about?” Dorkin asked.
“No,” Clemens said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. People come to me in trust for my advice. I am not going to betray that trust.”
“Not even when they’re dead?”
“No. I’m sorry. It would still be a betrayal, and it would destroy the faith that others have in me if it were known that I had broken a confidence. You are a lawyer, Lieutenant Dorkin. I believe you are under an obligation not to divulge what your clients tell you. Why should you think that my obligation as a man of God should be less?”
“I’m sorry,” Dorkin said. “Of course, we respect your principles. It just seemed to us that there might be some special significance in her coming to you for advice on that particular day.”
“Is it possible for you to tell us if what she came about could be connected in any way to her death that night?” Carvell asked.
“No,” Clemens said, “it was not. Not in any way.”
“I see,” Carvell said. “Well, we don’t want to press you about it. We were also wondering if you saw anyone suspicious in the general vicinity of the dance hall that night?”
“No,” Clemens said. “I don’t recall seeing anyone at all.”
“There’s been some talk,” Carvell said, “about a strange man who was in the area that night and has never been identified. He was said to have been dressed in overalls and some kind of cap.”
This time the shadow that crossed Clemens’s face was not swift but slow spreading.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t see anyone.”
“That’s too bad,” Carvell said, drifting blandly on as if he had seen nothing unusual in Clemens’s reaction. “What time did you go to the Salcher place?”
“I’m not sure,” Clemens said. “As I said in court. I wasn’t watching the time. Sometime around ten o’clock.”
“You weren’t outside at the Salchers’?” Carvell asked. “Out back or anything like that? Nowhere you might have been able to see into the woods?”
“No,” Clemens said. “I just parked and went into the house. It was dark. And when I was leaving, I came out and got into the car.”
This time Dorkin did glance, as if casually, at Carvell. Carvell’s face retained its look of deferential inquiry.
“That’s too bad,” he said. “Maybe there wasn’t any man. When things like this happen, people sometimes let their imaginations run away with them.”
“Yes,” Clemens said. “That’s true.”
“When you were driving back,” Carvell said, “you didn’t hap-pen to see any other cars on the road?”
“No,” Clemens said.
“When you were going around the corner where you saw Sarah and the man, there weren’t any other cars going up or down the road? No one else who might have seen something in their headlights?”
“No,” Clemens said. “I didn’t see anybody.”
“All dark?”
“Yes,” Clemens said.
When they were back in Carvell’s office, Carvell had phoned Constable Hooper, and the three of them were now sitting around Carvell’s desk.
“But the fact is that he lied,” Dorkin said.
“Yes, he lied,” Carvell said. “But it may not mean what you’re trying to make it mean. Even if he were just roaming around in the woods looking at the girls, he wouldn’t want to admit it. And for all we know, he may have been screwing one of those girls who pick up their pin money out there—in which case he certainly wouldn’t be disposed to admit it.”
“And he may only have been out there spying on the dance hall the way he told Salcher,” Hooper said, “and didn’t want to admit to that either.”
“I don’t think so,” Dorkin said. “Something happened that night that scared him enough that he took away his outfit and never used it again.”
“But even if he didn’t commit the murder,” Carvell said, “all the activity out there afterwards would have been enough to scare him off.”
It was now nearly three o’clock in the afternoon, and for over two hours they had been hammering it back and forth.
“He could have been lying about the cars, too,” Carvell said. “He had the wind up by that time. He didn’t know what we were getting at, and he may have decided to say that there weren’t any cars. Then if he had to, he could always pretend to remember later that there was a car. So there could have been a car, and he could have had light enough to see what he said he saw.”
“It is just possible that he could have seen her without the lights from another car,” Hooper said. “He knew her well enough that he wouldn’t have had to see much.”
Dorkin walked across the office and looked out the window at the church across the street and the little nook where Maclean had waited for him.
Shit, he thought. It went round and round.
“Look,” he said, turning back to them, “he was out there that night, and the account he gave in court of what he did there was a lie. If he spent time roaming around in the woods, all that talk of what time it must have been when he left Salcher’s place was just bullshit. He perjured himself. He had also been talking to Sarah that afternoon, and he never said anything about that until we bluffed it out of him.”
“Could you bring him in,” Carvell asked Hooper, “and tell him what we know from Salcher about his movements and ask him to make a new statement about what he did that night? If he is the one who murdered Sarah Coile, he’s going to be pretty rattled after this afternoon, and it’s possible he may go to pieces. And even if he didn’t do it, the fact that his testimony in court was perjured would certainly ensure that Williams got a new trial. It can’t just be let go now.”
Hooper looked at him unhappily.
“I shouldn’t do anything without getting permission from Fredericton,” he said. “It isn’t my investigation.”
“But it isn’t anyone’s investigation now,” Dorkin said. “Williams is in the jug. That investigation’s over.”
“I don’t know,” Hooper said.
“There’s something else,” Dorkin said. “If Clemens did kill Sarah Coile, we’ve put Salcher in danger by what we told Clemens this afternoon. If he’s a killer, he may also kill Salcher.”
“That would be pretty risky in the circumstances,” Hooper said.
“It would,” Dorkin said. “But Clemens doesn’t know we talked to Salcher. We just said we’d heard a rumour about a man in the woods. He may think he’s covering his tracks by getting rid of Salcher before we get to him. If he is the murderer, he’s going to be desperate.”
“I tell you what,” Carvell said to Hooper. “If you get in hot water with Fredericton, tell them what Bernie and I did by going to Salcher and Clemens. Tell them that we’re a couple of irresponsible assholes. It won’t bother me if it doesn’t bother Bernie. You were forced to act quickly because you were afraid for Salcher’s safety. So you decided to talk to Clemens to get to the bottom of what really happened that night.”
“I shouldn’t be doing it,” Hooper said. “Not without some authority.”
“But if Salcher is killed after what we’ve told you,” Dorkin said, “you’ll be in even deeper shit.”
“Not if I check with Fredericton first,” Hooper said.
“Do you think you can explain all this stuff to them so they’ll make a quick decision?” Dorkin asked. “They’ll have to get hold of Grant and god only knows who else. It could take all night.”
“Probably,” Hooper said.
“And the truth is,” Carvell added, “that when you look at what we’ve got, it doesn’t necessarily add up to all that much. Particularly to someone like Grant who doesn’t want to believe it in the first place.”
“You’re afraid that if I talk to Fredericton first,” Hooper said to Dorkin, “they’re going to tell me to leave it alone.”
“Yes,” Dorkin said, “I am.”
“Okay,” Hooper said. “But I don’t want to make it look like an official interrogation by bringing him in here. If it blows up on me, I’ll be in less trouble if I talk to him out there without any formalities.”
“But I’d better have some kind of witness to what goes on,” he said to Carvell, “so I’d like you to come along. It’ll also make it more difficult for him to shift his story around from what he told you.”
“I’m coming too,” Dorkin said.
Hooper hesitated, gathering himself to say no.
“I was the one who started all this,” Dorkin said. “I was the one who tracked all this down. I want to be there. I’ll go in my own car.”
“Okay,” Hooper said. “But I’ll ask the questions. I want you to stay out of it. I have the feeling that when this is over, I’m going to end up serving the rest of my career in the Northwest Territories.”
Clemens’s Ford was still parked in the yard where it had been earlier in the day, and they drove in and parked side by side behind it, first Hooper and Carvell in the RCMP patrol car, then Dorkin in his staff car. It looked a little like a raid.
Once again, they rang the bell, once again waited, so long this time that they began to wonder if it was going to be answered at all. When eventually the door was opened, it was again by the daughter. She looked one after another at their three faces.
“There were just one or two more questions which we thought your father might be able to help us with,” Carvell said.
She stood with her hand on the door, looking past them at the cars in the drive, then above them, beyond the cars, at some-thing higher—the tops of the autumn trees, a passing bird, perhaps merely the sky—a trifling act of seeming inattention whose import Dorkin only came to understand when he remembered it later.
“My father has been having a nap,” she informed them. “If you want to come in, I’ll tell him you’re here.”
She stood aside by the open door, and they filed in. She ushered them once more into the parlour and with a small nod slipped away, closing the door quietly behind her.
They stood together awkwardly in the middle of the room. They looked at their shoes, at the furniture, at the pictures on the wall. Dorkin found himself studying the awful milksop Jesus. Except for their own breathing, and the shuffle of their feet, there wasn’t a sound in the room, nor from beyond the closed door, seemingly anywhere in the house. Their wait stretched to five minutes, then ten, and still there was no sound of Clemens’s oxlike tread in the hall.
The realization of what this silence might mean came abruptly to all of them at once, but it was Carvell who moved first. He flung the door open and strode down the hall to the kitchen at the back. It was empty.
A flight of very narrow stairs, as steep almost as a ladder, led up from beside the back door.
“Take the front ones,” Carvell said to Hooper.
He hurled himself up the stairs on all fours like an ungainly dog, and Dorkin followed. They met Hooper in the upstairs hall. There was a bathroom, a back bedroom, a storeroom, all empty. In the front bedroom behind drawn blinds, a small, grey-haired woman in a long-sleeved print dress was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap. She looked up at them without surprise, as she might have looked at someone from the household who had happened to glance in at her while passing. Then she looked down again at her hands. She seemed so much older than Clemens that Dorkin thought for a moment that she must be his mother or some aging parishioner he had taken in.
“Mrs. Clemens,” Carvell said, “we wanted to have a word with your husband. Do you know where he’s gone?”
“I was afraid,” she said without looking up.
“Your daughter,” Carvell said. “Do you know where your daughter and your husband have gone?”
“I have no daughter,” she said, almost as if she were talking to herself. “I had two sons.”
“Is she always like this?” Hooper whispered to Carvell.
“I don’t think so,” Carvell said. “I’ve never heard anything about it.”
“Your daughter Elizabeth,” he said to her again. “She let us in. Do you know where she and your husband have gone? Have they gone to the church?”
“Yes,” she continued in the same abstracted tone of voice. “To the church. I was afraid, and they couldn’t wait. We were going home. At last, we were going home.”
“There must be a path at the back,” Carvell said to Hooper. And then to Dorkin, “You’d better stay here with her. We’ll see if they’re at the church.”
At the door, he turned back to Mrs. Clemens.
“Mrs. Clemens,” he asked, “does your husband have a gun?”
“Yes,” she said without looking up. “Yes, we have a gun. There’s always danger for us. Evil men.”
“Shit,” Carvell whispered to Hooper. “We should have got him to come back with us when we were here the first time. Come on.”
They pounded down the front stairs and out of the house. Mrs. Clemens continued to sit, oblivious to the noise of their departure, oblivious to the presence of Dorkin. He did not want to be there, dropped out of what was really his show. He looked at Mrs. Clemens. She wouldn’t know whether he were there or not, and there must be neighbours who could be sent in.
He descended the stairs quietly so as not to arouse her from her reverie and went out the front door. Across the street, a white-haired man was raking leaves, or pretending to, while he watched the goings-on at Clemens’s house. Dorkin sprinted across to him.
“There’s an emergency,” he said. “Do you know the Clemenses?”
“Yes,” the man said. “Sort of. They’re neighbours.”
“Mrs. Clemens is upstairs. Is there anyone—your wife or someone—you could send in to stay with her for a few minutes?”
“Well, yes,” the man said. “My wife…”
He looked over Dorkin’s shoulder.
“Jesus,” he said. “Look at that.”
Dorkin turned. A cloud of dirty grey smoke was boiling up above the trees and drifting off towards the creek.
“Send your wife in to stay with Mrs. Clemens,” Dorkin said. “And phone the fire department. I think it’s the church.”
Dorkin set off down the street at a run. There were already other people running—children, men, a few women. From far away beyond the creek, Dorkin heard the faint sound of the bell in the tower of the fire station. His man would not have had time. Someone else had phoned already.
Clemens’s Church of the Witnesses of the Lord Jesus Christ was on a little street only a block long, which ended in a thick wall of trees and bushes, beyond which would be the steep slope that ran down to the creek. Somewhere in there presumably was the path that Clemens and his daughter had taken from the back of the house.
The church stood in a little field, all mud and weeds and oddly reminiscent of the parking lot around The Silver Dollar. Like Clemens’s house, the building had the appearance of having been cobbled together by some ragtag group of parishioners. It was a kind of rectangular shed perfectly plain except for the little tin-sheathed steeple, not more than eight feet high, that perched near the front of the shallow-pitched roof. The roof was also sheathed in tin, a fireman’s nightmare. Once upon a time, the church had been painted white, but the paint was turning grey, flaking and peeling, leaving patches of bare wood. The fire was raging at the back of the building. There were half a dozen windows along the side wall. The last two had been broken by the heat, and dense smoke was rolling out. As it rose, it became grey, then white, but inside at its source it was black, as if choking for air, and inside the black there was an unholy, dark turbulence of fire. The smoke had also begun to seep out along the top of the wall under the eaves and around the base of the steeple, as the fire smouldered its way along the rafters.
Four steps led up to the front door of the church, but there was no porch, and Hooper was balanced on the top step, holding onto the little two-by-four railing and trying ineffectually to kick in the door. Carvell stood at the bottom watching. There were already dozens of people around the church and along the street, all talking and chasing around. More were arriving every second. In the distance, Dorkin heard the siren of the approaching fire engine.
“What’s happening?” Dorkin asked Carvell. “Where’s Clemens?”
“I think he’s inside,” Carvell said. “The girl too, probably.”
“Are you sure?” Dorkin asked. “This could be a diversion.”
“No,” Carvell said, “I don’t think so. One of the people next door said he thought he heard shots.”
“They must have bolted it top and bottom,” Hooper shouted.
He gave the door one final kick and retreated back down the steps, just as the fire engine rounded the corner of the street, sending the crowd scrambling for the ditches.
“You couldn’t have done anything anyway,” Carvell said to Hooper.
The fire engine turned into the yard and swung around. Half a dozen men in ordinary work clothes were hanging onto the back and sides. Two of them threw off a pile of black firemen’s coats, hats, boots. The other four freed the ends of hoses from the back of the truck, and the truck drove off again down the street towards a hydrant, flip-flopping the two hose lines behind it, as the rest of the volunteer fire-men began arriving in cars. They outfitted themselves from the pile of gear on the ground, and while they waited for water, a giant of a man mounted the front step with an axe, smashed the lock side of the door, kicked it in, and was promptly driven back by a rush of smoke.
“Do you think there’s anyone in there?” he asked Carvell.
“Yes,” Carvell said. “But I don’t think there’s anything you can do about them now.”
“What the hell’s going on?” the fireman asked.
“I’ll tell you later,” Carvell said.
“It sure got a start,” the fireman said.
“I think it had some help.”
Along the street, the hose lines snapped full and became fiercely alive, fighting the men who held the nozzles. They directed one of them through the windows at the back into the inferno inside, the other through the front door down the length of the church, sending rows of chairs tumbling end over end towards the pulpit.
Within a quarter of an hour, the main fire at the back was out, but it had already burned its way up into the low attic under the tin roof and was smouldering forward along the rafters. It took over an hour to get it out. The firemen cut a hole through the gable at the front of the church, ripped off sheets of tin roofing, and cut more holes and poured water inside. Gradually, the smoke ceased. Then, when it seemed almost out, the little steeple gave an oddly human groan and settled backward into the roof. The firemen scrambled off their ladders, but for a minute nothing more happened. The steeple stayed where it was, half sunk at a forty-five degree angle into the roof. Then with a final groan and a rending of timbers, the whole thing came down bringing part of the roof with it into the front of the church.
Through all this, Dorkin, Carvell, and Hooper stood beside the fire truck, waiting their time, now and then getting notices from the fire chief, a fat, garrulous man, who addressed Carvell casually as George. Finally, the firemen came down off their ladders, and the hoses were turned off.
“I’m going to put more water on it later,” the fire chief said, “but if we’re careful, we can go in and see what’s there. You better put these on. It’s going to be dirty and wet.”
He got three sets of boots, coats, and hats off the truck, and Dorkin, Carvell, and Hooper got into them and followed him to the back of the church.
The back door had been smashed with an axe. All that remained was a single upright board, blackened by fire, still attached to its hinges. On the other side, a heavy bolt holding some blackened splinters of wood was still shot into its housing. The floorboards inside were unsafe, and the firemen had laid planks across the joists. The three of them followed the fire chief inside. The stink of wet, burned wood was overwhelming.
Inside the door, there was an entrance hall, and to the right of that a small room. The fire chief stood to one side of the doorway, and one by one first Hooper, then Carvell, then Dorkin looked in.
The fire had burned up through the ceiling, and shafts of sun-light fell down into the room from cracks and holes in the roof above. The room held a desk, sodden and half burned, covered with debris from the ceiling, two chairs both overturned, and a couch. It was here that the fire must have been at its most intense—intense enough to burn through the floorboards so that the legs of the couch had punched through and the frame was now resting on the floor joists. The figure on the bed had been covered with a blanket that had been drawn up under the chin as it might have been in sleep, but the blanket, the clothing, skin, and flesh were charred and soaked into a single mass without distinguishable borders. The face on the pillow was like that of an Egyptian mummy, black, shrunk by the heat, the lips drawn back over the clenched teeth. It was evident that the figure was that of a woman, and there was in the face and the general proportions of the figure nothing that was inconsistent with its being the woman whom presumably it had to be.
Dorkin had never before seen so swift a transition from life to death. He was badly shaken, and as he stepped back from the door, he reflected that it was probably in that room and on that bed that Sarah Coile had also died before being taken to the gravel pit to be stoned and left for the dogs.
At the back of the entrance hall, a second door, charred to a cardboard thinness but still in one piece, led onto the platform in the main hall of the church. The ruins of the steeple filled the area by the main door, and in front of the platform there was the pile of chairs tumbled forward by the force of the fire hoses. A steady rain of black water was falling through the ceiling from the charred timbers under the roof.
On the platform there was a pulpit, blackened but upright, and just beyond it, lying curled up on its side as if it had been kneeling and fallen over, much less burned, much more recognizable than the other, lay the body of the Reverend Zacharias Clemens. Just beyond it lay a small .32 revolver.
When Dorkin and Carvell arrived back at the Clemens house, there were cars parked along the street and a small crowd of people on the lawn in front of the house.
“The Reverend’s flock, I expect,” Carvell said.
Dorkin looked at them with a mixture of pity and distaste: men whose trousers stopped six inches above their boots, slatternly women in ill-fitting print dresses, people grotesquely fat or grotesquely thin, or cross-eyed, or wall-eyed, people whose limbs seemed somehow to have got hung on wrong. The misfits of the countryside whom Clemens had taught to see themselves as the chosen of God.
Inside, there were more of them. Elders, perhaps, or whatever the especially chosen were called.
“Hello, Ezra,” Carvell said to one of them. “Is Mrs. Clemens still here?”
“Upstairs,” the man said. “Upstairs with some of the women.”
“Does she know what’s happened?” Carvell asked.
“I don’t know,” the man said. “I don’t know. I ain’t been up.”
He looked fearfully at Carvell, then at Dorkin.
“But you know?” Carvell asked.
“Yes,” the man said. “I guess so.”
Mrs. Clemens was still sitting on the edge of the bed where Dorkin had left her. There were three other women in the room, sitting on straight-backed chairs facing her. They stared at Dorkin and Carvell without getting up or speaking. Mrs. Clemens seemed hardly aware of them.
“I’m afraid we have some bad news,” Carvell said to her.
She looked at him for a moment, then her eyes drifted away and fixed themselves on something only she could see. Then they became hard. She looked back at Carvell.
“That girl,” she said fiercely. “That whore. She was even leading her own father into sin. Everyone knew it.”
Carvell turned to the women.
“I’d like to talk to her alone for a minute,” he said. “Could you wait outside?”
They glanced at each other and, still without speaking, rose and went out into the hall. Carvell moved as if to close the door, then changed his mind and left it open.
“Your daughter,” Carvell began.
“I have no daughter,” she said, repeating what she had said before. “I had two sons.”
“Your husband’s daughter, then,” Carvell said. “Elizabeth.”
“Nor his daughter either. She was his Bride in God. As I was. I first, then Elizabeth.”
She looked at Carvell impatiently as at someone who lived in ignorance in some outer darkness, hardly worth her attention.
“He was a prophet,” she said. “Like Abraham. He had the right to more wives than one. They freed him so that he could bear wit-ness to God.”
“And Sarah Coile?” Dorkin asked. “Was she also a bride in God?”
“That one! She took possession of his soul and left him no peace. She was destroying him. She clothed him in a coat of fire. She was a witch. An agent of Satan. She would have brought destruction down on our house. She would have scattered our flock and left them to the mercy of the storm. It was the devil in her that was destroyed so that her soul could be saved.”
She stopped.
“I was afraid,” she went on. “When the time came, I was afraid. The time came, as he always said it would. But I was afraid.”
“I don’t want to distress you,” Carvell said. “But is there anyone we can get in touch with? Do you have relatives? I heard you were from the States.”
“I have no relatives,” she said. “I had a mother and a father and a husband and two sons, but I went out of their house because I had been shown the way.”
“Can we get in touch with them?” Carvell asked.
“No. It was long ago. Long ago.”
Downstairs, the people started to sing, raggedly, some hymn, and after a few bars, it was taken up by some of the people outside on the lawn.
“You should have heard him,” she said. “You should have seen him. The light of the Lord was upon him. I was afraid. But I was honoured still more that he should come to me. In the night. In a cloud of fire.”
Just before seven o’clock, Grant and his team arrived, three carloads of them. Dorkin stood at the corner on Broad Street and watched them drive up to the church and disembark. They had brought the tracking dog with them. They had also brought Corporal Drost. As he emerged from the back of one of the cars, he looked down the little street, and his eyes and Dorkin’s met. Surprised, he stared briefly, but he made no sign of recognition, nor did Dorkin. Dorkin watched the first of them enter the ruined church, then turned away, back to his own car, and left.
Now he sat in his office, waiting for the call that Carvell had promised him. It was almost midnight when it finally came.
“So?” Dorkin said.
“So,” Carvell said, “they spent over an hour talking to Mrs. Clemens. You were right. It was Clemens. You were probably also right about Coile. He was apparently messing around with Sarah, though it’s hard to say exactly how far it went.”
“Was it Coile or Clemens who got her pregnant?” Dorkin asked.
“It’s hard to say, but I suspect it was Clemens. It’s also hard to say exactly what happened. Mrs. Clemens wasn’t very coherent, and there were probably things she just didn’t know. It looks as if Sarah may have gone to Clemens about her father, and Clemens took advantage of her. Although I suppose it’s possible that she took advantage of him. That’s the way Mrs. Clemens sees it any-way, but I’m not sure I’d put much stock in that. Whichever way, he became involved with her, and it obviously got out of control. Out of his control, I mean. It sounds as if he was out of his mind over her.”
“What about the murder?” Dorkin asked.
“It’s hard to know exactly what happened there either. Apparently, Mrs. Clemens and Elizabeth weren’t at the church on the Saturday afternoon when Sarah went there to see Clemens as he said they were. It may be that she threatened him. She may have wanted money to get away with and maybe get rid of the baby. Maybe he didn’t have it. Maybe he thought that if he started giving her money, there’d be no end to it. If Sarah was trying to set Williams up, she must have had doubts about Clemens looking after her, and she was looking for another way out. It’s also possible that she told Clemens she was going to find someone else, and he was crazy with jealousy. But we’re never going to know.
“I don’t think we’re ever going to know exactly what happened that night either. After she left Williams, Clemens obviously intercepted her somewhere, probably on one of the paths up through the woods. It’s difficult to know how planned it may have been. Or where it happened. I suspect he may have lured her back to the church on some pretext or other. It’s pretty doubtful that he killed her there in the woods. There were too many people around, and he couldn’t have carried her very far given her weight. And it’s hard to know when she was taken to the gravel pit.”
“But there’s no doubt that it was Clemens?” Dorkin asked.
“No. No doubt at all. Apparently the three of them talked about it. It’s all crazy as hell.”
“Have you told Williams about it?”
“No. I thought you might want to.”
Dorkin hesitated.
“No,” he said. “You tell him. I’ll talk to him tomorrow before I leave. He’s not my problem anymore.”