‘This is wrong. I don’t want to wait here.’ Evelyn Restrick wanted agreement, he wanted to be told it was time to go to the police and tell them everything.
‘You came after me, Restrick, not the other way around.’
The mobile connection faded in and out. Although the vicar sat at the top of the crypt stairs, reception was bound to be poor.
‘I didn’t mean it to happen but it didn’t hurt anyone.’ It hadn’t. A little more money in the church’s all but empty coffers had been the only result. Until now. And if the contribution he’d originally asked for hadn’t been refused he would never have felt cross enough to insist.
‘Blackmail always hurts someone. In this case, me. But all you have to do is keep your mouth shut and carry on. This doesn’t have to be anything to do with you. The donations will keep coming. Now stay there till everything dies down at the rectory.’
‘So you admit you—’
‘Shut your mouth, you frickin’ stupid old man. There’s nothing to panic about. We’ll talk. Wait and I’ll be there as fast as I can.’
‘I can’t go on like this, I tell you. We have to—’
Reverend Restrick heard the connection click off and climbed down the stairs, the many-times capped heels of his shoes clicking on ancient stone.
Under the oldest part of St Aldwyn’s, this crypt had been left untouched over the hundreds of years when sporadic renovations had gradually turned the main part of the building into an imposing enough but commonplace Victorian edifice. At that point the rebuilding had stopped but the church was left as a solid building in good repair.
Or it had been until the roof showed problems.
Muscles in his jaw jerked rigid. And that was when he had started down a path he had never expected to tread. But it hadn’t been blackmail, never that. He hadn’t threatened anything if he wasn’t given big sums to get the roof done.
Sinking to his knees on the cold stone, Evelyn Restrick clasped his hands together. The threat had been implied, or had been taken as implied, and he’d never put the impression right.
Tears squeezed from his closed eyes. ‘Dear God, I would never have hurt anyone with what I knew.’
But he had made a terrible mistake and allowed that mistake to perpetuate.
The spiral steps leading down here were wide enough for only one to pass. Candle in hand, he had taken refuge among the long dead, their sarcophaguses lining the windowless tomb.
At any moment the police might scour the church above him. That good man should not have died as he had, alone in a stranger’s rectory. He could help the police shed light on what had happened – he was sure of it. If he went upstairs now and started his story from the beginning, they might follow all the threads leading back to a hot afternoon when no clouds marred a cerulean July sky. An innocent sky. An innocent day when his life changed forever.
A faint, musty breeze made the candle flame flicker. It was as if what was foul about him breathed up around cracks in the flags.
He thought of the man killed in the woods, his body left to freeze. Fumbling, he set the candle on a ledge beside him, covered his face and sobbed aloud. It could have been stopped on that July day.
Air brushed his cheek and the faint candlelight he saw through his eyelids flickered out.
Evelyn welcomed the total blackness.
He heard his skull crack.