Andrew Pepper - The Detective Branch

Presently they were joined by Guppy’s widow Matilda, a frail creature whose otherwise plain face was lifted by dark, liquid eyes. Her nose and cheeks were mottled from her tears, and after she had blown her nose a couple of times and wiped her eyes, she described, in halting tones, how her husband liked to take the air at night, especially after dinner, to think about what he might say in his Sunday sermons. She told them that she had been sewing in the living room when Fricker — the churchwarden — had brought her the awful news. He’d come straight from the churchyard, she explained, where he’d heard the constable’s shouts. At this point, she burst into tears, and Fricker reiterated what she’d just told them; that he had heard the policeman’s shouts and rushed into the yard, only to find the rector already dead. He concluded with a perfunctory remark, perhaps for the widow’s sake, that Guppy was a very generous man.

Nutt, the beadle, nodded vigorously. ‘I think it’d be fair to say the rector was universally loved by his parishioners.’

Clearly not by everyone, Pyke thought. He exchanged a quick glance with Whicher and asked who had last seen the rector alive.

‘That would be me,’ Nutt said. ‘I was doing my rounds when I happened to spot the goodly man perambulatin’ in the church grounds. We conversed about the chill in the air and I enquired after Mrs Guppy’s health. He assured me Mrs Guppy was quite well and we went our separate ways.’ Anticipating Pyke’s next question, he added, ‘This would have been at approximately eight o’clock. I remember the bells chiming shortly afterwards.’ He smiled to reveal teeth that were yellow and black at the roots.

Beadles were a throwback to a system when the parish had assumed responsibility for policing; they were untrained, poorly paid and universally derided. Despite the new policing provisions, some parishes had decided to retain their beadles, perhaps out of personal loyalty, but their work was now largely pastoral.

‘Did you notice anything unusual? Did he seem anxious, for example?’

‘A little anxious, maybe. He did seem keen to go about his business, now that you mention it. But other than that, he was perfectly normal. He was wearing his surplice; he said he was preparing his sermon and wearing the surplice always helped put him in the right frame of mind.’

‘A surplice?’ Pyke had already conferred with Fricker inside the church, and no mention had been made of such a garment.

The churchwarden confirmed that Guppy hadn’t been wearing his surplice when he’d come across the rector’s battered corpse and explained that the garment itself was rather unusual in that it had strips of rabbit fur lining the shoulders. Pyke made a mental note to go back to the churchyard, once he had finished at the rectory. The fact that the garment appeared to be missing added a new dimension to the situation. When he asked whether anything else had been taken, Fricker shook his head and added that there were a few coins in Guppy’s pocket and his gold wedding ring was still on his finger.

At the mention of Guppy’s ring, the wife broke down in tears again. ‘Did your husband perhaps mention that he’d arranged to meet someone at the church?’ Pyke asked, when her crying had stopped.

She stared at him through weary eyes, seemingly perplexed. ‘If my husband had intended to meet someone, why would he have not invited them to the rectory?’

A little later, while tea was being served in the drawing room, Nutt took him aside and ushered him into the hallway. ‘I hear Fricker has already told you about this chap, Francis Hiley. The rector called him his odd-job man, and seemed fond of him, although I couldn’t see what the fuss was about.’

Pyke stared into the beadle’s podgy face. ‘You didn’t like him, then?’

‘It’s not that I disliked him.’ Nutt lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘But he was a strange fellow, if truth be told. He never said very much but he was always around, looking, keeping an eye on things.’

‘How did he come to be working here?’

‘He was recommended by the Reverend Martin Jakes from one of our sister churches, St Matthew’s in Bethnal Green.’

Pyke’s thoughts turned immediately to the search earlier that evening, which had been focused on the area around St Matthew’s. He thought, too, about the scavenger he’d arrested and then let go, when it became clear that the man knew nothing about the murder.

The picture that Nutt sought to paint of the rector was one of a generous and selfless man who had given food and shelter to a lowly ex-convict, but he couldn’t really say what Guppy had hired Hiley to do, except tend the graves and keep the yard tidy, which, Nutt admitted, was also the duty of the gardener. Nutt told Pyke that he’d heard Hiley had spent time in Coldbath Fields, possibly for killing his wife, but his information was sketchy. Like Wells, he had already made up his mind that Hiley had killed the rector and was trying to push Pyke in this direction. Tapping his nose, Nutt explained that no one had seen Hiley since the murder and that they weren’t likely to. Nutt was rather less helpful in providing a motive: he told Pyke he had no idea why Hiley might have wanted to kill Guppy but suggested that some men were just predisposed towards violence.

Back in the drawing room, Pyke asked Whicher what he’d been able to find out. Whicher said that the police constable’s description of the man he’d seen in the yard matched Fricker’s description of Hiley.

‘No chance the two of them could have conferred?’ Pyke asked.

Whicher shook his head.

It was late, already well past one in the morning, but Pyke had insisted that all of the servants and household be summoned, so that he could question them about their dealings with Guppy.

Pyke conducted the interviews in the drawing room but no one had very much to add. All the servants, gardeners and stable-hands were polite but tight lipped about their employer, and none of them could give any reason why someone might have wanted to kill him. They were a little more forthcoming about Francis Hiley. None of them seemed to have liked him, and to a man — and woman — they backed up the beadle’s belief that Hiley was a little odd. A loner, someone said; a thief, another reckoned. When Pyke asked Matilda, the wife, about Hiley, she seized the chance to praise her husband’s philanthropy; the fact that he’d been willing to give a felon another chance when the rest of society had turned its back on him. The implication was clear: look how the scoundrel repaid his generosity. She clearly felt, as Nutt did, that Hiley had killed her husband.

How long had Hiley been employed by her husband? Pyke asked. She’d thought about it and said since April.

And had there been any indication that Hiley had a temper?

No, she conceded. He had always behaved in a respectful manner.

Later Pyke accompanied Whicher back to the church, where the body was waiting to be taken to the nearest public house for the inquest. To Pyke’s relief, Wells had already left.

Pyke had never liked churches, their cold, draughty interiors and the hard, functional pews that people, in some instances, had to pay to occupy. Their size was supposed to convey something of God’s majesty, but standing in the aisle, looking towards the altar, all Pyke could think about was how many men had been needed to build it and the pittance they’d doubtless been paid.

Candles had been lit and placed on the table in front of the altar, casting their flickering light upwards and illuminating the plain wooden crucifix that hung above it. It made Pyke think about the Saviour’s Cross and the three men who’d been killed in Cullen’s shop in the summer; even more so since the archdeacon himself was shortly expected at the rectory.