The Bad Samaritan (15 page)

“If it was nothing, why should she?”

“You're being literal-minded, Mike. There was some kind of a
situation, an eyeball-to-eyeball thing. The boy was, according to this woman, disconcerted, and fled like a rabbit. Apparently there's been talk in the parish about him and Mrs Sheffield. What were you planning to do next?”

“Go to the offices of European Opportunities Ltd. I've got the address and Brian Ferrett's home phone number. I think I'll just commandeer all the papers I can lay my hands on, then bring Ferrett in here and see what I can get out of him. If I take a uniformed man with me I can give you a couple of hours, if you want to follow up this encounter.”

“Done!” said Charlie happily. He turned to the nearest woman with a computer. “There's a Mrs Gumbold in Severn Road. Could you get me her number?”

When Charlie arrived at the Gumbolds' he found both of them at home. Sunday was one day, Mr Gumbold explained, when he could usually get back from his job as a rep for a paper firm. He was overweight, probably from too much driving and sitting. The pair had heard about the murder on the parish bush telegraph, and Mr Gumbold left Charlie with his wife, saying he'd only got back at midnight and wouldn't be of any use.

Violet Gumbold was fadedly pretty, honest if Charlie was any judge, but not too bright and probably easily led. When asked to say exactly what happened at the party when the pizzas arrived, she became hesitant.

“Of course I've talked it over with people, told my husband, but it's so difficult to remember exactly what I saw, putting aside what people have said . . . . The young man came in, with a great pile of cartons, brought them over to the table where we were . . . . I'm trying to
see
 . . . .”

“That's good. Picture it all. Where was Stephen Mills?”

There was a pause. She really was trying.

“With two or three other men, to the young man's left . . . . The Reverend Sheffield was coming forward, I think intending to be friendly to the young man . . . . Then Rosemary—that's Mrs Sheffield—asked the young man if he would help cut up and serve the pizzas.”

“Did he say yes?”

“I can't remember him saying anything, but he started forward, and then . . . then he saw Mr Mills, and he was—well—
thunderstruck
, I'd say. As if . . . well, as if he was the last person on earth he would have wanted to see.”

“Did he look guilty?”

“That must have been it, mustn't it? Someone from his past whom he'd cheated or done down.”

She seemed to have seized on that explanation. Charlie said, very gently, “You don't sound entirely convinced. Has someone suggested that to you? Wasn't that how it looked?”

She frowned.

“Well, somehow it wasn't. I can't really say that the boy looked guilty.”

“Try to
see
it again. Try hard. How was it he looked?”

After a pause she said, “More outraged. Angry. And yet confused at the same time.”

“Thank you. That's very helpful. So what happened next?”

“Mr Mills said ‘Hello—' and then what I think was his name. It wasn't ‘Stinker,' like people are saying, but something like that. Though people have been saying his name is Silvio. Anyway, the boy stammered something about them being busy back at the pizza place, and he turned and fled, though I'm sure he'd been intending to come and help us.”

Charlie thought, fixing the picture in his mind.

“What was the expression on the boy's face as he left?”

“I couldn't see that. He turned and went away from us.”

Charlie was inclined to put the murderous expression down to the embroidery endemic in parish gossip.

“You said the Reverend Sheffield was coming over intending to be friendly. Why should he take pains to be friendly with the deliveryman?”

Violet Gumbold looked confused.

“Well, of course he's naturally a nice person, and courteous . . .” Charlie fixed her with an unrelenting stare. “And you see there was all this silly talk . . . .”

“Tell me more.”

She swallowed and went red.

“Well, actually it was about poor Rosemary and this young man from Pizza Pronto.”

“The vicar's wife and the fast-food cook. It sounds like a dirty story. I presume it
was
a dirty story.”

“Well, yes. People were saying—”

“I can guess what people were saying. Who was spreading the story?”

“Oh, I don't know about spreading—”

“Let's not quibble. Where did the story start?”

“I wouldn't want to accuse anyone. I'd much rather not say.”

Charlie sighed.

“Mrs Gumbold, if this story was going round the parish I can find a hundred people who will have heard it, of whom I guarantee ninety will be willing to tell me who was spreading it. It's all one to me if you want the reputation of obstructing the police rather than helping them.”

There was a long silence. Mrs Gumbold was a naturally law-abiding person. Finally she swallowed.

“Mrs Meadowes. It must have started with Selena Meadowes. I'm sure she meant no harm, but she'd been to Scarborough, you
see, at the same guesthouse where Mrs Sheffield had gone when she lost . . . when she lost her faith, and this young man was a waiter there, and she heard talk about . . . about his having been seen coming from her room. That's what everyone was saying. And then he turned up here and Mrs Sheffield found him a job . . . .”

“So this Mrs Meadowes put two and two together and broadcast the result. Sounds like a really nice little congregation at St Saviour's.”

“Oh, you mustn't think too badly of us. And I never heard it from her. She probably mentioned it to someone and it just . . . got around. And when she found out she was mistaken she went round to everyone to take the story back and say she'd wronged Rosemary.”

Ho, thought Charlie. And there again hum.

“And what was behind all this mudslinging?”

“Behind it?”

“Why were they so keen to do the dirty on Mrs Sheffield? She seems a very nice lady.”

“I wish you wouldn't use . . . I couldn't say . . . It's not for me . . .” Fixed by Charlie's stare again, she hurried on: “Well, there are people who say they wanted her out of her parish positions so they could take over themselves.”

“They?”

“Well, Mrs Harridance, Selena, and one or two others.”

When he left Mrs Gumbold's Charlie felt very much more wised up on parish matters than when he had gone there. A seething mass of ambition, dirty tricks, slander and innuendo, or so it seemed. This didn't surprise him. It would not have been very different in the predominantly black parish in his native Brixton with which he was well acquainted. His mother had fulfilled the double purpose of both spreading and providing the subject matter for a great deal of the gossip.

Charlie parked his car in a cul-de-sac off the Ilkley Road and walked along to Pizza Pronto. It was a takeaway he and his girlfriend had used in their time, though it was not the best in the area. He found it overflowing with waiting customers: word had obviously got around that there was a connection between it and the murder which was occupying everyone's attention that spring Sunday morning. There was a rather dim girl at the cash desk, and two men were working flat out around the ovens. He took out his ID and flashed it in the direction of the proprietor, a slim, worried-looking man in his fifties. He came over, visibly reluctant.

“We're very busy.”

“I can see that. Is that Silvio?”

He nodded in the direction of the small, frantically busy young man who was constructing pizzas as if he was aiming at the Book of Records.

“No. Silvio is off today. That boy I have on loan from the Trattoria Aliberti.”

“I see. You normally have two boys, don't you?”

“Yes. Is both off duty today.”

“Ah . . . . Right. Well, I'll come round and hope to see him tomorrow.”

Hesitantly, uncertainly, Signor Gabrielli said, “Of course. Yes. All right. I'll tell him.”

Thoughtfully Charlie walked back to his car. He very much doubted that he was going to be talking to Silvio in the near future. It might be that some kind of alert would have to be put out, though they would need more hard evidence that there was a connection with the dead man. It could be, he thought, that they could use more subtle methods. He looked at his watch. One fifteen. Service at St Saviour's would be long over. However, he drove towards it and cruised along the road that it stood on. The church was a large Victorian construction, abounding in
knobs and small spires. He had read a smart journalistic piece once saying how much better Victorian Gothic was than the real thing. He didn't think the author could have been thinking of St Saviour's.

He was just about to speed up towards the vicarage when he saw the door open at the Five Hundred pub, a short way away, and a family group emerge. He pulled his car up beside the kerb and watched them in the mirror as they came in his direction. It was the conventional enough family group—father, mother, daughter, daughter's boyfriend, son—yet somehow ill-assorted: or rather, with one discordant element, one cuckoo in the nest. The one whom he identified as the son seemed not to walk or talk or behave generally in the natural way the others had. It was as if he was conscious of being, or had persuaded himself that he was, on show.

Charlie got out of the car as they approached.

“Hello,” he said to Rosemary.

“Hello.” He was unsure how much welcome there was in the greeting. She turned to her family. “This is one of the detectives on the Mills case. I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name.”

“DC Peace.”

“Peace be with you,” said the son, and let out a laugh like the last of the bathwater escaping. He laughed alone. Charlie behaved as people do when they have heard every possible joke on their name.

“This is Mark,” said Rosemary, in a voice pregnant with meaning. “Janet and her boyfriend Kevin. And my husband Paul.”

“I'll probably want to talk to all of you before long—me or my boss. It was just you I wanted to ask about something at the moment,” he added, turning to Rosemary. She nodded, though Charlie felt she was suppressing anxiety. They let the others walk on, then followed at some distance behind.

“I'm trying to get something straight about the party last night,” Charlie began. “You said you were behind the table that the food was to be served from, and Mills was one of a little group standing about nearby, right?”

“That's right.”

“Tell me what happened when the food arrived.”

“I thought I had done. Let me see . . . .” Rosemary's voice had been edgy. Now she put on an air of trying to visualise the scene. Charlie was sure that she had thought about it all too often since their earlier talk. “The deliveryman from Pizza Pronto came in, bang on the dot when we had arranged. He had a pile of pizzas up to his chin. He put them down in front of us on the table, then I and the other ladies each took one out of its carton and started cutting them up.”

“And the deliveryman?”

“He left, of course.”

“There was no . . . confrontation, episode of some kind, between him and Mills?”

“Not that I noticed. I was busy slicing pizzas. It's not that easy if they have a crispy bottom.”

“There was no question of the man from Pizza Pronto helping you?”

Rosemary made gestures of just having remembered.

“Ah—that's right. I'd forgotten that. I asked him if he'd like to help—him being so much quicker and better than us, probably—and he started round, then remembered they were very busy at the takeaway and said he'd better not be away too long.”

Rosemary was a guileless liar, Charlie decided, but hardly a wise one: she must surely realise that parish gossip about her and the Pizza Pronto boy would get to the police before long. Then a thought struck him: probably she was lying to give the boy time
to get away. When she was sure he had, she would come clean. He could of course have challenged her version of events and of the situation, but he preferred to give the appearance of accepting it, if only on the well-worn principle of giving someone enough rope. He smiled down at her.

“Well, that clears that up,” he said. They had finished up outside the vicarage. “Are you going to eat straight away? I wondered if I might pop in and have a word with your family. They were all at the party, weren't they?”

“Yes, they were. You won't want me, will you? I've all sorts of little things to do in the kitchen.”

The Sheffield family were assembled in the dining room, talking and laughing. They were apparently unconcerned by Mills's death, and by the reappearance of the policeman investigating it. When Charlie asked if they had talked to Mills at the party they all shook their heads.

“He was talking to local businessmen,” said Paul Sheffield, who seemed, of them all, the most at ease. “He tended to. If there was no woman he was interested in, he liked to be polishing up his contacts.”

“
De mortuis nil nisi bonum
” said Mark. He considerately turned to Charlie and translated in a kindly tone. “One should only speak good of the dead.”

“That would make murder investigations practically impossible,” said Charlie.

“I've always thought that a silly injunction,” said Paul. “Surely it should be while they're living that you shouldn't speak ill of people.”

“So none of you had anything to do with him last night?” Charlie asked. He saw a flash of something pass over the daughter's eyes, but her boyfriend jumped in.

“I don't even know which one he was. It's very frustrating. Towards the end of the evening Janet introduced me to Mrs Harridance, and the rest of the time passed like a blur.”