Past Praying For (19 page)

This
time there was no mistaking the other woman’s surprise, or even shock.

‘
Oh, dear God! Is it all over the village? I suppose he was with Hayley Cutler – I could swear I recognized her perfume on the shirt he was wearing last night.’

Margaret
had suffered agonies of gaucherie as a teenager, but it was many years since she had felt so helplessly embarrassed.

Her
face flaming, she stammered, ‘Oh – oh no, you misunderstand me! I wasn’t talking about your husband at all.’

As
if blushing were contagious, Elizabeth too turned a painful colour. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but no words came.

‘
You obviously haven’t heard,’ Margaret said hastily. ‘I assumed you would know – the fire at the Boltons’ – ’

‘
Oh yes, of course.’ She struggled to regain her composure. ‘But – but that was just the garage, wasn’t it? Paula said they had got it under control last night.’

‘
Well yes, but unfortunately an old tramp had taken refuge there –’

Her
embarrassment forgotten, Elizabeth listened in horror, her eyes filling with ready tears.

‘
How – how perfectly horrible! Poor Suzanne – I’ll phone her whenever I get home. And – and about the other thing –’

She
paused, and Margaret was wise enough to say nothing.

‘
I’ve blurted it out to you now, so where you’re concerned I haven’t any face to save. And they always say, don’t they, that there’s no such thing as a mistake in these circumstances. Perhaps I really wanted someone to know. Sometimes I feel it’s destroying me, that I shall go mad if I go on and on, acting as if everything is all right. My whole life is such a wretched mess; whatever I do is wrong –’

‘
Wrong for whom?’ Margaret interjected crisply. ‘Wrong for you? Wrong for your children? Or just wrong for your husband?’

Elizabeth
stared at her, as if this were entirely a new idea.

‘
He wouldn’t like me talking to you – to anybody.’

‘
I don’t think that’s specially relevant, do you? I’m always at the end of a phone.’

‘
You’re very kind. I’ll think about it. I’d better go now. I felt I needed to come, but I didn’t tell anyone I was going out.’

As
Margaret went back to the vestry, she paused for a moment in front of the altar. She wasn’t yet prepared to surrender her larger grievance, but in fairness she had to admit that getting out of bed this morning hadn’t been as pointless as it seemed.

***

When she got back to the vicarage at half past eight, there was a car parked outside. She was no expert on marques, but it was large and black and somehow brutal-looking, and she sighed.

It
was an unwelcome sight. Muttering darkly, she let herself in and followed the voices through to the kitchen.

Robert,
looking uncharacteristically grave, was seated at the little round kitchen table, facing her as she opened the door. She recognized the man with his back to her as Vezey, the detective who had questioned her the night before. He did not get up as she came in.

Robert
did, to pull forward another chair, though the table was not really designed for three.

‘
Margaret, you’ve met Rod Vezey, I gather.’

‘
Yes, last night. Good morning, inspector.’

‘
Yes,’ he said, glancing at her briefly before transferring the powerful focus of his attention back to Robert. ‘So that’s the current state of play. Anything you can make of it?’

Margaret
pointedly lifted the empty coffee pot and made a business of refilling the kettle and noisily setting out a cup, saucer and plate for herself.

With
his elbows on the table, Robert made a steeple of his fingers, and contemplated them.

‘
Profile of a pyromaniac,’ he said slowly. ‘Well, putting it simplistically, it’s revenge for lack of love, of human warmth. There’s something very trite about psychological symbolism, isn’t there? Conscious symbolism is always considerably more subtle – but I digress!

‘
They’re more commonly male than female, though that’s based on old research: women are achieving equality in all sorts of unexpected areas these days. Often the parents have been either physically or emotionally absent.’

‘
Personality?’

Robert
considered the other man’s question.

‘
Liable to be anxious and self-punishing; when anxiety for one reason or another gets out of control, rage takes over. The fire may be an undirected explosion of fury, or an act of direct revenge against someone in particular. But I don’t suppose that’s really taken you much further.

‘
Is there any hard evidence?’

Not
much. They can tell it wasn’t a gang of kids, for instance – no trampling on the soft ground round about, apart from the firemen, of course, and the regulation boot is nothing if not distinctive. But there’s concrete right round the garage, so anyone could have walked across it and left no trace.’

As
Margaret came back to the table with the coffee pot, Vezey wordlessly held out his cup to be refilled. Offer it up, Margaret’s better self urged, but she could only suppose that offering God seething resentment controlled by the conventions of hospitality put her on a par with Pyewacket hopefully presenting her with a particularly mangled mouse.

Noticing
his sister’s expression, Robert hurried on. ‘How much have they been able to establish about the way the fire was started?’

‘
Very neat. Set just as you’d set a fire in the hearth, with paper and sticks. The end wall had been sprayed with that gel stuff they use on barbecues – lethal. I’d take it off the market, if I had my way. We found the bottle – with smudges rather than prints, unfortunately – but it could come from any one of a dozen shops. There was one like it in the Bolton’s garage: there’s probably one in half the sheds in Stretton Noble. It’s real barbecue belt round here.’

There
was a sneer in his voice, and Margaret discovered, to her own surprise, that she felt defensive.

‘
Eating out of doors is hardly a crime,’ she said tartly.

Both
men looked at her, Robert in mild surprise at her tone, and Vezey, she thought, with the air of one addressed by a kitchen chair; interested in the phenomenon but far from sanguine about the quality of its contribution.

‘
I didn’t say it was,’ he said.

Before
Margaret could speak again, Robert interposed. ‘And the victim? Is it possible it was murder rather than accident?’

Vezey
gave the question his careful consideration, but the downturn of his mouth expressed scepticism.

‘
The mechanics would be far too elaborate. And there’s no mystery about him; he was Tom Porter, well known to the local force. Travels round various different circuits in the course of a year, so as not to use up the good will. Done it for years. We lift him every so often when someone complains.

‘
He goes in to the city during the summer months – where you encountered him, Miss Moon – and he knows all the hostels where he can con a bed in winter. They reckon he would have been making his way to the hostel near Broadhurst, but we found an empty bottle of vodka beside him. Presumably some dogooder was misguided enough to give him cash in hand as a Christmas box.’

The
sneer was back, but Margaret managed not to leap into a denial of responsibility. ‘So at least he would know very little about what happened?’

There
was no compassion in his face. ‘Who knows?’ he said, rising abruptly.

‘
Work that up into a profile for me, Robert, will you? I’ll contact the force in Bath – say I need you here for a few days.’

He
walked out without farewell, and they heard the front door slam behind him.

Margaret
counted to ten. ‘Would you like me to invite you to stay with me for a little longer?’ she asked sweetly. Robert grinned. ‘He’s quite something, isn’t he?’

‘
Does that sort of rudeness come naturally, or has he been specially trained?’

‘
He’s focused,’ Robert said placidly. ‘He’s superbly effective – just doesn’t waste energy on the peripheral things.’

‘
Like common politeness.’ Margaret refilled their coffee cups, but as curiosity overcame her indignation, asked, ‘What will he do now?’

Robert
shrugged. ‘Arrange door-to-door enquiries. Talk to the scene-of-crime officers and the fire scientists. Chase up the path lab for a full report on the body – they’ll drag their feet, because charred bodies...Well, it’s understandable.’

Shuddering,
Margaret agreed.

‘
Then he’ll have to get back to his desk and deal with the other ninety-three cases he’s got sitting there. Everything else doesn’t stop, you know; this is just one more case.’

‘
And do you think you can point him to any short cuts?’

‘
Mmmm. One or two fairly obvious things, I suppose. The neatness of the fire-laying – that’s extremely interesting. Usually it’s a case of dowsing with petrol and flinging a match.

‘
This suggests someone in the habit of setting domestic fires. Could be male or female, but it does have implications about social class. They don’t put open fires into council houses any more, so setting one is almost a forgotten art. Having an open fire is rapidly becoming another middle-class affectation. And the barbecue fuel – that’s interesting too. Such a very domestic substance to use, wouldn’t you say? Most male fire-raisers would, as I said, automatically think of petrol, or possibly paraffin, if its handy.

‘
Of course, you know as well as I do that it’s not an exact science. I have to follow hunches, and the skill lies in analysing whether the hunch is soundly rooted in a subconscious synthesis of legitimate information, or whether it’s something the little green men from Mars whispered in passing. It’ll be easier once they get me a précis of the evidence and I have something to get my teeth into.’

‘
Have a guess.’

He
sighed. Now you want a crystal-ball answer again, which wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for the fact that Vezey will too. If I had to make a wild guess, I’d say the perpetrator was middle-class and female.’

‘
Like the letter-writer?’

‘
Sorry, you’ve lost me.’

‘
The anonymous letter-writer. Female, you said, and educated.’ Female, educated and hostile towards me, she thought, but did not say.

‘
I’d forgotten all about that. How extraordinary! I should have mentioned that to Vezey; it’s certainly the sort of thing that could be connected. You’ve still got it, haven’t you? They just might manage to lift some prints. I’ll take it along and try to catch him after breakfast. Unless you would like the fun of telling him yourself?’

Margaret
pulled a face. ‘I have better things to do. I promised I’d visit Suzanne Bolton this morning.’

Then,
trying to reassure herself, she added, ‘At least he seems satisfied that it was an accident. It would be awful to think we had a murderer in our midst.’

When
Robert fixed upon her that look of detached curiosity, she always felt like a laboratory rat demonstrating some unusual aspect of animal behaviour.

‘
How very extraordinary that you should find that reassuring,’ he said. ‘You mean, you would rather have a pyromaniac on the loose, setting random buildings ablaze with no concern for safety, than a murderer with a specific and probably quite logical reason for killing one particular person?’

‘
Who says it would be a logical murderer?’ she protested, for form’s sake. But in truth, despite what she had seen last night, she had not until now understood the terrifying subtext to the blaze. Last night she had seen the extinguishing of the fire as the end of the crisis, not the beginning.

Looking
back in the light of later events, she could pinpoint this moment as the first time she experienced the cold trickle of fear between her shoulder blades. She shivered involuntarily.

Then
she laughed. The winter sun was shining brightly, showing up the windows which were badly in need of cleaning. The homeliness of the kitchen, with its cheerful yellow walls and its comfortable domestic smells of toast and coffee made her reaction seem melodramatic.

‘
Robert, you are the limit,’ she said. ‘I thought you would have grown out of trying to wind me up, and I would certainly have thought I was much too old to let you.’

***

Laura didn’t know what to do.