The Reaper (2 page)

Then the doorbell rang.

The clergy are used to unexpected callers, but Joy had suffered one already. This was inconvenient. He was tempted to ignore it. Then he remembered his car was standing on the drive, unlocked, advertising that he was at home. He had taken the precaution of backing it out of the garage, and putting the bishop's BMW out of sight in there.

Suppose someone was dying and wanted a last Sacrament. He hoped not, for both their sakes. Standing up, he remembered he was naked and looked round for something to cover himself.

The bell rang again.

He fetched an apron from the kitchen and, like Adam, tied it around his waist.

He opened the front door a fraction, just enough to peer round, with only his head and one bare shoulder showing.

"Oh, great timing!" There was an embarrassed laugh from one of his younger parishioners, Mrs. Rachel Jansen, blonde, slender, unthreatening—if any caller can be called unthreatening when there's a corpse back there on the office floor.

He told her, "I'm on a messy job. You'll have to excuse me."

She said, "I can easily call back when you're decent, Rector. I mean—"

She had turned quite red.

"No," he said with more force than either of them expected. "It's all right. I'm wearing;something." He opened the door wider to prove it.

The sight of the young rector in yellow rubber gloves and a striped apron did not lessen Rachel Jansen's embarrassment.

He smiled at her. "Saves my kit."

She nodded several times, humouring him. She seemed unable to speak.

"What can I do for you?"

She took a step away, raising her hand dismissively. She found her voice again, and it was nervous. "Really. Don't trouble."

"Out with it, Mrs. Jansen."

She was trying to find an exit line.

"Fire away," insisted Joy.

The words came in a rush. "The day before yesterday I put a white plastic sack through your letterbox. Help the Aged. Old clothes. Isn't that it behind you at the bottom of the stairs?"

He glanced over his shoulder, taking care not to present his back view. It was the Help the Aged sack and it contained his bloodstained clothes.

"If you look," said Rachel Jansen, "it's printed on the side."

"I'm sure you're right." He was trying to give the impression of calm. "Hang on. I meant to put in something else." He took two steps backwards as if Mrs. Jansen was the Queen, snatched up the sack, backed further to the kitchen and tipped everything out and grabbed two perfectly good shirts he had washed the day before and left on hangers to dry over the boiler. He stuffed them into the sack and returned to the door. "Hope these will do."

She thanked him and left, still pink at what she had seen, or almost seen.

He closed the door and said aloud, "Joy, my boy, you don't come closer than that."

The next phase of the plan was to remove the body from the office. The bishop was no lightweight. Joy hauled him to the centre of the Wilton and dragged rug and corpse across the polished floor, through the hall and kitchen to the back door of the garage. Opened the boot of the BMW, took a grip under the arms, lifted the torso to a sitting position, braced like a weightlifter, made a supreme effort and heaved the upper body high enough to flop over the storage space. With the main weight in position, raising the legs was easier. He persuaded them in and threw the rug over the corpse and brought down the lid. It was good to have the thing out of sight.

Work remained to be done: office work, he told himself with a smile. He fetched a bucket, filled it with hot water and detergent and used an old-fashioned scrubbing-brush on the bloodstains.

The floor looked better after repeated scrubbings. No doubt a scene-of-crime team would find plenty to interest them, but he had no intention of letting such people into his office.

He took a shower, changed into a sweatshirt and jeans and passed a salutary half-hour studying the dossier from the car. The bishop had gone to some trouble assembling all this evidence of malpractice. Five years of bank statements and photocopies of the St. Saviour's parish accounts, with copious marginal notes in red and more pages of calculations. Copies of his (under)statement of income to the Church Commissioners, ensuring that he got the maximum stipend. Grisly reading. The only good thing about it was that apparently no one else had seen it.

He tore each sheet into small pieces and made a fire in the grate in the dining room. Whilst the evidence was turning to ashes, he fetched the bishop's laptop from the office and got to know the controls. The resignation letter wanted some modification now. He deleted his name and substituted the bishop's. Then he made more adjustments. The wording on the screen now read:

I, Marcus Glastonbury, Bishop, profoundly regret the
embarrassment my actions must cause the diocese and the
Church. I can see no alternative.

After reading it through, he added the words
Pray for me.

He opened the bishop's briefcase and looked for stationery. He found a sheaf of notepaper headed with the address
The
Bishop's Palace, Glastonbury,
and printed the note. As a final touch he opened the pocket Bible, looked up the parable of the prodigal son, underlined the phrase "... hath devoured thy living with harlots ..." and slotted the white ribbon marker in place.

After midnight, he returned to the garage and took his Moulton fold-up bike—with the characteristic small wheels and Hydrolastic suspension—from its hook on the wall. A Wiltshire product, his farewell gift from a grateful congregation at St. Saviour's, that little bike was going to come in useful tonight. He stowed it on the back seat of the BMW. He put on gloves, started up and drove out into Rectory Lane. Small risk of being seen; less of being recognised. People noticed the dog-collar before they looked at anything else. Without it, he could drive through the village in broad daylight and they would look straight through him.

The young rector's leisure-time reading in forensic science provided him with the useful knowledge that when a body is moved after death the post mortem signs are not so reliable as pathologists once supposed. Hypostasis, the gravitational effect of blood cells, was once believed to show how the body was lying immediately after death, but more recent studies showed that secondary gravitation could take place. When a body was moved to a new position, the hypostasis relocated as well after a further few hours.

He drove ten miles into Somerset around the town of Frome and out on the Shepton Mallet Road, the A361, stopping at the all-night filling-station. But not for petrol. As the bishop himself had remarked, Otis Joy was a wicked young man. He bought a copy of Men
Only,
and studied it for a time. Then he took it to a payphone and used the bishop's Visa card to call one of the sex lines advertised in the back pages. "Madam Swish, able with a cane" seemed a neat match for a bishop. He let the recording run on for a good ten minutes before hanging up. If the police were any good at their job, they would check the credit card statement when it came in. Marcus Glastonbury alive at 12:40 a.m. Alive and kinky.

At Nunney, he left the main road for the country lanes, into an area he had once walked. The site he had in mind was a disused quarry, one of several around the village of Egford where the local stone was mined. This one had been left with a massive face of rock where the exposed carboniferous limestone could be seen tilted and folded under the more even Jurassic strata.

It was pleasingly quiet out here. A fox crossed the lane, turning confidently to look at the car. Small, white moths swooped into the beam of the headlamps. He spotted the sign ahead saying Quarry: Strictly
No Admittance.
Pulled up and got out to pull the chain off the gatepost. Drove in and along a track rutted by heavy lorries. Up a steep incline to the highest point of the hill overlooking the excavation.

This was it, then. He stopped and got out. There wasn't enough moonlight to see much, and certainly not the length of the drop. It didn't matter. He knew he was standing at the top of a sheer cliff at least a hundred feet high. He got in again and backed the car close to the edge, switched off, got out, opened the boot, pulled back the Wilton rug. He didn't enjoy sliding his hands under the torso and drawing it towards him in a macabre embrace. He hauled the thing out: awkward, back-straining work. With an extra effort he succeeded in taking the weight on his shoulder and staggering to the edge, where he first let the corpse flop on the ground for fear of falling over himself.

He stood for a time, recovering his strength.

Crucial things remained to be done. He replaced the credit cards in the pocket of the bishop's jacket. Rolled up the bloodstained rug. Removed his trusty little bike from the BMW and snapped it into shape. Moved the car away from the edge and parked it a few yards back with the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition. The suicide note, the Bible and Men
Only
would tell their own story on the passenger seat.

One last effort, then.

He bent down to roll the body over the edge, into the quarry. Grappled with the slack, solid bulk, sickening to the touch, and got a surge of relief when it tipped over. There was the satisfying sound of shifting rubble as it struck something far below. Then silence.

This might have seemed the right moment to offer up a prayer, if not for the bishop, then for himself. Not so. He was more concerned about things on earth. With a leafy branch he swept away his footmarks.

He rubbed his hands, got on his bike and rode off with the bloodstained rug. It ended up two miles away, face down and weighted with stones in the River Frome, where it was soon invisible under a layer of mud.

Then he cycled home.

two

CHOCOLATE CAKES WERE IN heavy demand at the Fox-ford Church fete, held in the rectory garden. The devil's food, Black Forest, death by chocolate, brownies, chocolate fudge and chocolate orange sold in the first hectic ten minutes, before anyone bought coffee or lemon. Apple cake was almost as popular. In fact, anything with fresh fruit in it, cheesecake, pies and tarts included, sold easily. Rich fruit cakes, being more of a winter treat, were slower to go, but they found customers in the first hour.

Rachel Jansen was assisting. She would have been better on the garden stall, because she knew as much about plants as anyone in the village, but a local nurseryman had an arrangement with the organisers and sold his own produce, giving a percentage to the fete profits. The honour of running the cake stall went to Cynthia Haydenhall, the Chair of the Women's Institute, who behaved as if she had cooked them all herself. Rachel enjoyed Cynthia's company in the way she enjoyed rum truffles and Bette Midler: in small delicious amounts. Cyn was fun and the source of wonderful gossip, and she liked to dominate. Her improbably black hair was scraped back, bunched and fixed with Spanish combs, suggesting that when things went quiet she might climb on the trestle table, clap her hands and perform a noisy flamenco over the cakes. There was no chance of people ignoring her. She had made it clear at the beginning that she would run the show, price the cakes, sell them and handle the money. Fine. Rachel was content to set out, wrap and keep things tidy. To be fair, the system worked. They reached the point when the only cakes left were a slab of Madeira as solid as cheese, some weary-looking coconut pyramids and Miss Cumberbatch's toffee crispies, steadily congealing into a solid mass attracting wasps.

"Should we cover these?" Rachel suggested to Cynthia, knowing it was unwise to do anything without asking.

"The toffee dreadfuls? I don't know what with, amigo. We've only got this roll of kitchen towel, and that will stick to them."

"They won't be saleable if we let the wasps crawl all over them."

"It's an open question if they ever were saleable. Is Miss Cumberbatch still here?"

"Over by the bottle stall, with her brother."

"Right." With that decision made, Cynthia dipped below the table for a cake tin. "In here, while madam has her back turned. I'll dispose of them later."

"We can do the same with the others. They're never going to sell now."

Rachel should have known better than to make two suggestions in the space of a minute.

"Oh, yes they will," Cynthia informed her. "The rector hasn't been round yet. Last year at the end of the fete he bought everything off the stall just so that no one's feelings were hurt."

They looked across the lawn to where the Reverend Otis Joy was trying the coconut shy. On this warm afternoon not many had bothered with it. His throw missed the coconuts by a mile, perhaps on purpose. The rector wasn't supposed to win things.

"So he gets the cakes nobody wants," Rachel said. "Poor guy. He deserves better. We should have saved something he can eat."

"We don't know what his taste is."

"I bet he likes chocolate. Devil's food cake. All men go for that."

Cynthia vibrated her lips at the idea. "You can't offer devil's food to a bible-basher."

"He'd see the joke. He's got a sense of humour."

"In spades," Cynthia agreed. "He could tour the clubs with his sermons."

"As a stand-up?"

Their eyes met and each of them stifled a giggle.

"And he's so relaxed about everything."

"Not a bad looker, either," said Cynthia.

"Generous, too. He'd give you the shirt off his back," said Rachel, her thoughts returning, as they had more than once, to the afternoon when she'd called for the Help the Aged sack. The rector in his apron was sharp in her memory. The crop of silky dark hair across his chest had been a revelation.

"That's what Christianity is all about," said Cynthia.

"Oh?"

"It's his job. Thinking of others."

"But it's easy to be generous if you can afford it," Rachel pointed out. "Vicars don't earn much."

"Don't you worry about him," said Cynthia. "He lives rent free in the largest house in the village. He's always smartly dressed. I expect he has a private income, on top of his stipend."

"Is that possible?"

"Of course it is. Family money. Stocks and shares. Property. He could be better off than we are."

Rachel thought back to the two shirts in the Help the Aged bag, not frayed at the cuffs and not a button missing.

Cynthia returned to the subject of the cakes. "Leave out the coconut pyramids, anyway," she summed up. "They're edible. Not everyone's choice, that's obvious, but Otis can well afford them. We'll spare him the Madeira. It could sink the
QE2,
by the look of it."

The way the "Otis" tripped casually from Cynthia's tongue was noted, as she intended. Every woman in the parish was on tenterhooks to see who would make a play for the rector. Cynthia wasn't on first name terms. Who did she think she was kidding? As a divorced woman living alone she might consider herself a catch, but she was at least eight years older than he was, if not ten.

Rachel, at twenty-eight, was about his age, and trapped in a childless marriage with Gary, forty-two, pot-bellied and trying to beat hair loss by training his side bits across the top.

As for the rector, the word from his previous parish was that he had been married to a pretty French woman, who had died quite suddenly.

Tragic. He deserved a second chance at matrimony. But not with Cynthia, surely.

And now he had taken his three throws and missed, and was striding across the lawn towards them. He'd taken off his blazer for the coconut shy and swung it over one shoulder. In his sunglasses and straw hat, he could have passed for a youthful Harrison Ford.

He stretched out his hands. "This is where the action is. I couldn't get near until now. Tell me, ladies, is it you, or the cakes?"

"Well, the cakes have all gone, but we're still here," said Cynthia, beaming and entirely missing the point.

"Am I too late, then? No, I see you have some of my all-time favourites—marguerites."

"Coconut pyramids, actually." Cynthia couldn't resist correcting him.

"Whatever. I'll take them. And the damage, Mrs. Hayden-hall?"

Rachel heard and savoured that little touch of formality.

"You can have them for thirty pence," said Cynthia.

"No special price for the clergy," said the rector. "I'll pay full whack."

"Twenty-five, then," Rachel said at once.

He thought a moment, then laughed, and looked at Cynthia. "You weren't over-charging me?"

"It was worth a try," said Rachel. She was careful not to look at Cynthia. "In a good cause."

When the rector had moved on, bag of" cakes in hand, to the next stall, Cynthia said to Rachel, "What a strange thing to say. It made me look quite foolish."

There was an unkind answer to that, but Rachel held herself in check. "Just a bit of fun, Cyn. He knew what was going on. They're human, you know."

Cynthia turned her head like a hen and looked in the opposite direction.

Rachel nudged her in the ribs. "I saw him eyeing up
your
coconut pyramids."

She swung around, her spirits restored. "Go on—you didn't!"

"He fancies you something rotten."

"The rector?" Cynthia's eyes shone. "He ought to be ashamed of himself."

NOT FAR away, someone else was discussing the rector. Owen Cumberbatch had recently come to live with his sister in Fox-ford. Tub-shaped and triple-chinned from many years' consumption of pub food and beer, Owen had been a publican all his adult life, steadily drinking the profits. When the brewery retired him, he no longer had a home, so he appealed to his family for help, and his youngest sister, being single and in possession of a good house, was the family's choice for fall guy. Owen was already well known in Foxford as a man eager to impress, claiming friendship with Peter O'Toole, Denis Thatcher, Placido Domingo, Tiger Woods and the late John Lennon, and the names were always prefaced with "my old chum." To be fair, he usually had some intriguing inside knowledge of his chums to confide, just enough to create uncertainty.

Pausing by the bottle stall, he was telling Bill Armistead, the organiser of the Neighbourhood Watch scheme, outrageous things about the rector's career as a serial killer. "Oh, yes, he's clever with it, but there's no denying he did away with several in his last parish, including his wife and the sexton. 1 lived in the next town, you see, so I saw what was going on."

"I didn't know sextons still existed," said Armistead, sidestepping the main issue. He didn't want to be caught discussing such slanderous nonsense.

"There's one less at St. Saviour's, Old Morden, I can tell you that," said Owen with a smile.

"What do they do exactly?"

"Sextons? Look after the building and the churchyard, dig the graves and toll the bell, of course. This one was an awkward cuss, I heard. He disappeared one night. He's on the missing persons' list to this day, but no one's going to find him. Only Otis Joy knows where he is, and he won't tell."

Armistead looked about him. Nobody was close enough to listen. "What would a man of God be doing, knocking people off? I can't believe a priest would kill people."

"That's the clever part. No one suspects him."

"Except you."

"Except me, yes. It's an ideal situation for a serial killer when you think about it. A position of trust. Nobody expects the priest to slip them poison in the Communion wine."

"Now that's ridiculous."

"There you go. You don't believe he'd do it, so he'd get away with it."

"You've got a fertile imagination, Owen, but you want to be careful. If he's really in the murdering line, he'll top you one of these days for spreading stories like this."

Owen took that as a compliment. "I'll watch out for him, then, be on my guard day and night."

AT LAST came the time when the raffle was drawn, the bottles of sweet sherry, the knitted dolls, the cheap chocolates and the baskets of fruit claimed, and they could dismantle the stalls. The cakes had raised over eighty pounds. Cynthia strutted across to hand the money to Stanley Burrows, the parish treasurer, confident that
her
stall had raised more than any other.

Rachel was left to deal with the trestle table. She didn't mind. It was a relief to do something her own way. And even better when someone behind her said, "You can't lift this on your own."

She knew the voice. A little
frisson
of excitement fizzed through her.

Together, she and the rector carried the table across to the church hall and stacked it with the others. "How about a cuppa in the rectory?" he offered.

Blushing, she said, "That'p kind, but—" ;

"It's open house. Other people are coming."

"Oh. In that case ..."

"And I won't be serving coconut pyramids."

She laughed. "Saving them all for yourself?"

"Don't ask."

"But the whole point about the pyramids is that they were built to last, weren't they?"

"Not these."

THE GREAT and good of the parish gathered in the rectory and Rachel was disturbed to find that through some oversight Cynthia had been left out. It couldn't have been deliberate. She went outside to look for her, but she had definitely gone. She would have wanted to be there, and should have been.

Returning, she went into the kitchen to help, not from altruism, but to get a sight of how the rector lived. The kitchen was huge, old-fashioned and spotless.

Two full kettles were slowly coming to the boil. He was alone in there unwrapping biscuits, trying inexpertly to loosen the paper at the top.

"Careful," she said, and some little demon made her add, "You may need your apron."

His eyes flashed and he was quick to respond, "I only put it on to answer the door."

She showed him how to cut the packet with a knife. She arranged the biscuits on a plate and offered to carry them in.

"Great idea—but not till I pour the tea. The Potter children."

"Are they keen on biscuits?"

"Anything. On the last Sunday school outing, Kenny Potter ate three people's picnic lunches and was sick before we got to Weymouth."

"Watch out, then," said Rachel. "I saw him with his sisters going through the hamburgers this afternoon, followed by candy floss."

He pulled a face. "Pink alert."

She laughed. "So how can I be useful?"

He gave that a moment's thought and said mysteriously, "By not being useful. Take a seat. Relax." He went on to explain, "You've been hard at it all afternoon. This is my chance to thank you."

"And all the others," she pointed out.

"And all the others," he repeated in a downbeat tone that Rachel took as a compliment.

Since this seemed to be getting personal, she said, "But you've been on duty like the rest of us."

"So I have," he said. "Let's forget the others and clear off to the pub." He aimed two fingers, pistol-style, at his head. "Joke. Shouldn't have said that, you a married woman, and me ... I think we're coming to the boil, don't you?" He took a large blue teapot to the kettle and warmed it in the approved fashion before tossing in several teabags. "And if anyone mentions coffee, pretend you didn't hear."

Rachel carried in the first tray. This wasn't her imagination. The rector was getting frisky. If that was what the church fete did to him, what was he like after a couple of beers?

She didn't find out that evening, though she stayed long enough for a glass of the elderflower wine he had bought from the bottle stall. With a couple of other people she helped stack up plates beside the deep, old-fashioned sink that had been there since the forties. The rector was insisting that he would do his own washing up later.

"He could do with a dishwasher," one of the women commented.

Nobody spoke, but there were smiles all round.

GARY WASN'T in when she got back, and it was too late to do anything useful in the garden, so she made herself a sandwich and settled down to watch Jack Nicholson in
The Witches of
Eastwick.
Men with devilry appealed to her, at least on screen. There wasn't much of the devil in Gary these days. On Saturday evenings he was with his jazz circle, a pathetic crowd of middle-aged blokes in black T-shirts and sandals who drank real ale and listened to records of players of fifty years ago they referred to familiarly as Dizzie, Bird and Bix. The sight of them stretching their necks to bob their bald heads like wading birds was not pretty. Upstairs Gary had a tenor saxophone he had been trying to master ever since his schooldays. She found out about it only after they married.