Past Praying For (24 page)

She
managed a smile. ‘Always the little ray of sunshine,’ she said, and went to bed.

***

Having set down the receiver with a smash, Missy backed away from the telephone as if it were alive and deadly.

That
was dangerous, dangerous. Just like before, stupid bloody Dumbo had dropped them in it. That woman somehow knew too much, and she had said...had said...

Her
throat was constricting in a funny way, but she couldn’t cry. Missy had no tears. Missy had used them all up long ago.

But
she was afraid. She, Missy, clever Missy, had been lured into saying too much. It would be disastrous if they were discovered now, and there was no saying what Dumbo might do, once she got Missy back in her cage again. She hadn’t got the sense God gave little green apples.

No,
it was all up to Missy. She must do what was best for both of them, since for some stupid reason she couldn’t get rid of Dumbo. They were joined as horribly as Siamese twins, sharing all the vital organs, and if anything happened to Dumbo...

But
Missy never thought about these things. Missy did things, instead, and now she knew just what she had to do.

Not
that it was easy. She had to make do with what she could find, because Dumbo wouldn’t buy any of the things Missy really wanted: lovely, smelly paraffin; thick gloopy petrol in a can...And Dumbo was strong during the day, very strong.

Sighing,
she tiptoed through the quiet house to the coal-cellar. There wasn’t any more barbecue gel; firelighters would have to do.

In
the flimsy modern box that was the Vicarage there was no light, no sound.

In
the guest room at the back of the house, above the kitchen, Robert slumbered with his accustomed tranquillity, his sheet neatly turned down and his pillow unrumpled. Margaret, in her bedroom at the front, had collapsed into a stupor of physical and emotional exhaustion.

Neither
of them heard the sitting-room window break, or smelled the first wisps of smoke as they seeped through the floorboards. Only Pyewacket, snug on his cushion in the chair in the kitchen, raised his head, wrinkled his patrician nose, sneezed, then shot swiftly out of the cat-flap in the kitchen door.

It
was only when the smoke-detector in the kitchen started pulsing its shrill alarm that Margaret at last blearily opened her eyes. The air was thick with acrid fumes and her eyes began to smart and stream.

Dazed
and disorientated, she struggled through the smoky hell to where she thought the door might be. She fought the blackness, lashing out as if it were a circling foe, waiting for her to weaken, but her lungs were starting to labour in a desperate attempt to draw oxygen from the foul air. She could not get her breath; she staggered, and as she fell surrendered to the lurking dark which rushed in to engulf her.

9

Rod Vezey put his head in his hands and groaned.

‘
A nutter,’ he said. ‘Oh dear God! Are you really telling me that we are going to have to question women – middle-class, I-know-my-rights-and-may-I-just-have-your-number-before-we-start-officer women – when the one we want won’t even know when she’s lying?’

He
was seated at a desk in the shabby office of the sergeant whose patch included Stretton Noble, in the nearby small town of Burdley. Flimsy, garish paper-chains were looped incongruously from the corners of the room to the white plastic central lampshade, and below an improbable tinsel tassel dangled to swing in the dusty current of air from the radiator. It was half past nine, but as yet full daylight had not penetrated the dirty ribbed glass in the window.

Opposite
him, Robert Moon looked like a man whose self-image has been severely compromized. Wearing a hand-knitted fisherman’s sweater and baggy cord trousers borrowed from Ted Brancombe, he appeared dishevelled and unkempt; he had not shaved, and without his usual expression of cheerful composure he looked much older, the lines of age and exhaustion clearly marked. He seemed unable to sit still; he changed his position in the chair, fiddled with paperclips, got up to untangle a twisted sash cord at one of the windows. He was clearly exercising tight control, but every so often his fingers beat a betraying tattoo of frustration.

With
an obvious effort, he forced himself to give Vezey’s question his usual measured response.

‘
Yes, I think that is entirely possible. Well, yes and no, perhaps. From what Margaret told me before – ’ He broke off, then continued, ‘the woman knows that something is going on – something alarming and evil which she is powerless to prevent – though she can only guess at what it is, and certainly will have no precise knowledge of how it happened. She’s obviously going to be in a very overwrought state.’

‘
Unlike every other woman in the place, you mean?’ Vezey groaned again. ‘Have you any idea how many of them there are in Stretton Noble who meet your specifications?’

‘
A fair few, I daresay.’

He
spoke tersely, with the air of one deliberately distancing himself from a problem which is not his concern. Standing by the window, his fingers again drummed out his irritation on the sill.

Vezey
got to his feet. ‘I’d better get on. I’ve got a briefing to give in ten minutes, and they won’t be happy when they hear it’s a kid-gloves job.’

‘
You mean, they prefer it when they can beat them up round the back of the station, no questions asked?’

It
was such an entirely uncharacteristic remark that Vezey turned round to stare at him. The tension in the atmosphere had become so marked that even a lifetime’s dedication to dismissing the inconvenient emotions of others did not equip him to ignore it.

He
said, awkwardly and against his better judgment, ‘How is she – your sister?’

Robert
swung round, his eyes glittering.

‘
I thought you’d never ask. Oh, she’s fine, given that someone tried to kill her and very nearly succeeded. Of course, we won’t be sure her eyes are unharmed until they take the pads off today, and her throat’s so raw that she can’t really speak. It was the formaldehyde, you see, in the fabric of an old sofa, and the fumes came up through the floorboards straight into her bedroom. Nasty stuff, but they don’t
think
her liver and kidneys have been damaged, so that’s all right, isn’t it?’

‘
And you’re blaming us? Somehow we should have stopped it? You know better than that, Robert.’

The
opposition and the appeal to his common sense triggered the response he needed to make.

‘
Blame you?’ he exploded. ‘You knew there was a pyromaniac loose in a small village, but you all went home at tea time. Of course I blame you. But I blame myself a lot more.’

Wisely,
Vezey did not mention manpower or priorities. ‘You got her out,’ he said.

‘
Only just. It was minutes before the smoke alarm got through to me.’

‘
You can hardly blame yourself for sleeping heavily.’

‘
Oh, can’t I?’ He smiled mirthlessly. ‘You must know very little about psychology. Didn’t they make you take classes in it?’

‘
I’m not going to let you pick a quarrel with me, Robert, no matter what you say.’ Vezey crossed to the door. ‘I’ve got a lot to do –’

‘
You certainly have. In my professional capacity, I must warn you: this is only the beginning. Perhaps the first killing wasn’t planned, but the fact of poor old Tom’s death would breach a barrier in her mind. With the attempted murder last night she’s crossed the Rubicon. It may not be fire next time – though it may be, who knows? – but case histories often chart fire-raising as part of the progression towards direct violence.’

‘
It’s got top priority now. I’ve been taken off my other cases and we’re throwing everything into it.’

‘
There’s a proverb I’m trying to remember – something about stable doors –’

At
the sneer, Vezey’s lips tightened. He turned to the door and opened it, but said only, with obvious restraint, ‘I understand that you are distressed. I can only assure you we are doing all we can. And now, if you will excuse me…’

Moon
had twisted the sash cord into a tight knot: he flung it at the window which it hit with a thud.

Then
his shoulders sagged.

‘
I’m sorry, Rod,’ he said tiredly, rubbing his hand across his face. ‘I know that was unfair. I just can’t see things straight this morning.’

Vezey
closed the door again, though his hand still rested on the handle.

‘
It’s a funny thing, family,’ Robert went on. ‘We all lead our own, very separate lives. I see Margaret, what – twice, three times a year? But almost my first memory is being told it was my job to look after her. And I was there, in the room next door to her, when she nearly died.

‘
I want whoever did this put away, Rod. I can dress it up in fancy clothing, if you like, and I can even make it sound quite professional and caring: it’s just as important for herself that she be stopped as it is for the safety of society, blah, blah, blah. I can spout that sort of claptrap indefinitely.

‘
But what I actually want is for this person – this damaged, frail, vulnerable person who probably has every psychological excuse in the book – to be punished for what she did to my sister.’

Rod
Vezey was not given to flights of fancy, but he had a brief, vivid picture of a small stout schoolboy in shorts and spectacles valiantly standing between his smaller stout sister and the vicissitudes of childhood. Not much had changed.

Sancta
simplicitas
! He, who for his own preservation had excised any trace of the sacred simplicity of family feeling, knew a pang of acute regret.

He
said, with uncharacteristic gentleness, ‘I didn’t cut all the psychology classes. You don’t need me to tell you that yours is a perfectly healthy reaction.

‘
Go back to the Brancombes’, have something to eat, then get some sleep. Thinking is your best contribution to this investigation, and you’re too tired to think straight. I’ll be in touch.’

***

Jean Brancombe had neat, rounded ears, small quick hands, russet-grey hair and large, anxious brown eyes. With the imagined addition of a tail and whiskers, her resemblance to a fieldmouse would be complete.

She
tended to dart about restlessly, powered by short bursts of energy, her little fine-boned body quivering with the exertion, and her demands upon herself were relentless. While Ted, her husband, had what amounted to a genius for placidity, she existed in a state of permanent nervous exhaustion.

The
family Christmas – twenty-two of them round a festal board groaning under the weight of lightly-disguised cholesterol – usually left her almost prostrate, and Ted normally forbade further excitements for a month.

But
the events of the week had made rest impossible and her driven scurrying became more and more frantic. She had started getting up at night in her dressing gown and wellington boots to prowl round the barns, so temptingly full of combustible hay and straw, until Ted discovered what she was up to.

‘
I’m putting my foot down,’ he said, and Jean, as she always did when Ted put his foot down, complied. But he couldn’t stop her lying awake, twitching at every sound, from the movement of cattle in the fields to the unexplained crackle of a twig in the shrubbery under their bedroom window.

And
now this. She had gathered Robert up, of course, with her usual warm-heartedness; it was actually a relief to have somewhere to direct her nervous energy.

After
frying him a lavish breakfast she had made the pastry for the steak-and-kidney pie for lunch and popped the meat, along with the rice pudding (half-milk, half-cream, with flakes of butter on the top to make a nice thick skin) into the bottom oven of the Raeburn. Now she was ready to trot along to the vicarage – she never seemed able just to walk – to get some things to take to poor Margaret.

It
was drizzling and miserable, but a little crowd had gathered to view the aftermath of the latest village drama. There were about ten adults and half-a-dozen children watching the activity as if it were a side show; Jean knew most of them and paid the petty coinage of meaningless exclamation as she worked her way purposefully through their ranks.

Apart
from the blackened, broken window on the ground floor and the smoke-streaks up the wall, the house looked surprisingly normal. There were men in the garden; one crouching on the path below the window, two in earnest discussion, another taking measurements and writing them down in a fat black notebook.

At
the garden gate, a uniformed constable stood guard. He looked down at her, his youthful complexion turning pink as he almost visibly wrapped himself in the dignity of office, striving to project authority towards someone who had more than once caught him scrumping apples in her orchard.