Peter Lovesey: The Reaper

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.

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!"