Ngaio Marsh - Grave Mistake

The Vicar’s wife and Mrs. Field-Innis and the Ladies Guild, including Mrs. Jim, were in the church and well advanced with their flowers and brass vases. Verity joined Mrs. Jim, who was in charge of Bruce’s lilies from Quintern and was being bossily advised by Mrs. Field-Innis what to do with them.

An unoccupied black trestle stood in the transept: waiting for Sybil. The Ladies Guild, going to and fro with jugs of water, gave it a wide berth as if, thought Verity, they were cutting it dead. They greeted Verity and spoke in special voices.

“Come on, Mrs. Jim,” said Verity cheerfully, “let’s do ours together.” So they put their lilies and red roses in two big jars on either side of the chancel steps, flanking the trestle. “They’ll be gay and hopeful there,” said Verity. Some of the ladies looked as if they thought she had chosen the wrong adjectives.

When Mrs. Jim had fixed the final lily in its vase, she and Verity replaced the water jugs in their cupboard.

“Police again,” Mrs. Jim muttered with characteristic abruptness. “Same two, twice today. Give me a lift up there. Got me to let them in, and the big one drove me back. I’ll have to tell Miss Prunella, won’t I?”

“Yes, I expect you must.”

They went out into the westering sunlight, golden now and shining full in their faces.

“I’m going round to have a word with Bruce,” said Verity. “Are you coming?”

“I seen him before. I’m not overly keen on graves. Gives me the creeps,” said Mrs. Jim. “He’s making a nice job of it, though. Jim’ll be pleased. He’s still doubled up and crabby with it. We don’t reckon he’ll make it to the funeral but you never know with lumbago. I’ll be getting along, then.”

The Passcoigne plot was a sunny clearing in the trees. There was quite a company of headstones there, some so old that the inscriptions were hard to make out. They stood in grass that was kept scythed but were not formally tended. Verity preferred them like that. One day the last of them would crumble and fall. Earth to earth.

Bruce had got some way with Sybil’s grave and now sat on the edge of it with his red handkerchief on his knee and his bread and cheese and bottle of beer beside him. To Verity he looked like a timeless figure and the grave-digger’s half-forgotten doggerel came into her head.

In youth when I did love, did love,

Methought ’twas very sweet—

His shovel was stuck in the heap of earth he had built up and behind him was a neat pile of small sticky pine branches, sharpened at the ends. Their resinous scent hung on the air.

“You’ve been hard at work, Bruce.”

“I have so. There’s a vein of clay runs through the soil here and that makes heavy going of it. I’ve broken off to eat my piece and wet my whistle and then I’ll set to again. It’ll tak’ me all my time to get done before nightfall and there’s the pine branches foreby to line it.”

“That’s a nice thing to do. How good they smell.”

“They do that. She’d be well enough pleased, I daresay.”

“I’m sure of it,” said Verity. She hesitated for a moment and then said: “I’ve just heard about your link with Captain Carter. It must have been quite a shock for you — finding out after all these years.”

“You may weel ca’ it that,” he said heavily. “And to tell you the truth, it gets to be more of a shock, the more I think aboot it. Ou aye, it does so. It’s unco queer news for a body to absorb. I don’t seem,” said Bruce, scratching his head, “to be able to sort it out. He was a fine man and a fine officer, was the Captain.”

“I’m sure he was.”

“Aweel,” he said, “I’d best get on for I’ve a long way to go.”

He stood up, spat on his hands and pulled his shovel out of the heap of soil.

She left him hard at work and drove herself home.

Bruce dug through sunset and twilight and when it grew dark lit an acetylene lamp. His wildly distorted shadow leapt and gesticulated among the trees. He had almost completed his task when the east window, representing the Last Supper, came to life and glowed like a miraculous apparition, above his head. He heard the sound of a motor drawing up. The Vicar came round the corner of the church using a torch.

“They’ve arrived, Gardener,” he said: “I thought you would like to know.”

Bruce put on his coat. Together they walked round to the front of the church.

Sybil, in her coffin, was being carried up the steps. The doors were open and light from the interior flooded the entrances. Even outside, the scent of roses and lilies was heavily noticeable. The Vicar in his cassock welcomed his guest for the night and walked before her into her hostelry. When he came away, locking the door behind him, he left the light on in the sanctuary. From outside the church glowed faintly.

Bruce went back to her grave.

A general police search for Claude Carter had been set up.

In his room up at Quintern, Alleyn and Fox had completed an extremely professional exploration. The room, slapped up twice a week by Mrs. Jim, was drearily disordered and smelt of cigarette smoke and of an indefinable and more personal staleness. They had come at last upon a japanned tin box at the bottom of a rucksack shoved away at the top of the wardrobe. It was wrapped in a sweater and submerged in a shirt, three pairs of unwashed socks and a wind-jacket. The lock presented no difficulties to Mr. Fox.

Inside the box was a notebook and several papers.

And among these a rough copy of the plan of the room in the stable yard, the mushroom shed and the point marked X.

ii

“Earth to earth,” said the Vicar, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In sure and certain hope…”

To Alleyn, standing a little apart from them, the people around the grave composed themselves into a group that might well have been chosen by the Douanier Rousseau: simplified persons of whom the most prominent were clothed in black. Almost, they looked as if they had been cut out of cardboard, painted and then endowed with a precarious animation. One expected their movements, involving the lowering of the coffin and the ritual handful of earth, to be jerky.

There they all were and he wondered how many of them had Sybil Foster in their thoughts. Her daughter, supported on either side by the two men now become her guardians-in-chief? Verity Preston, who stood nearby and to whom Prunella had turned when the commitment began? Bruce Gardener, in his Harris tweed suit, black arm-band and tie, decently performing his job as stand-in sexton with his gigantic wee laddie in support? Young Mr. Rattisbon, decorous and perhaps a little tired from standing for so long? Mrs. Jim Jobbin among the representatives of the Ladies Guild, bright-eyed and wooden-faced? Sundry friends in the county. And finally, taller than the rest, a little apart from them, impeccably turned out and so handsome that he looked as if he had been type-cast for the role of distinguished medico — Dr. Basil Schramm, the presumably stricken but undisclosed fiancé of the deceased and her principal heir.

Claude Carter, however, was missing.

Alleyn had looked for him in church. At both sittings of the inquest Claude had contrived to get himself into an inconspicuous place and might have been supposed to lurk behind a pillar or in a sort of no-man’s-land near the organ but out here in the sunny graveyard he was nowhere to be seen. There was one large Victorian angel, slightly lopsided on its massive base but pointing, like Agnes in David Copperfield , upward. Alleyn trifled with the notion that Claude might be behind it and would come sidling out when all was over, but no, there was no sign of him. This was not consistent. One would have expected him to put in a token appearance. Alleyn wondered if by any chance something further had cropped up about Claude’s suspected drug-smuggling activities and he was making himself scarce accordingly. But if anything of that sort had occurred Alleyn would have been informed.