Peter Lovesey - The Reaper

The doorbell rang at least! three times while he was still in the office. Sudden noises weren't good for his nerves.

He tried the drawers of Joy's great mahogany desk. Blank stationery, stamps, paperclips and a stapler. A wire basket on the windowsill excited him briefly. It was stacked high with paper. Catalogues of religious books.

This was not so simple as he'd hoped.

The two box files on the bookshelf were the only possibilities left. One was filled with church music and when he opened the other dozens of communion wafers scattered across the floor. He used valuable time picking them up.

Outside the office he stood in the hall for a moment listening to the voices in the front room. They sounded well launched into conversation about how they'd celebrated the new year. With luck, he wouldn't be missed for a while.

This, after all, was the last opportunity he would get to search the rectory for evidence of the man's real identity. But which room? Apart from the drawing room where everyone was, and the kitchen, dining room and cloakroom-unlikely places to keep private documents-there was only the upper floor. Was it worth the risk? Fainter hearts than Burton's might have abandoned the search. He braced himself and crept upstairs. Joy's bedroom was as likely a place as any.

The stairs creaked horribly. If the front room door was flung open and Joy demanded to know where he was going he'd say he needed the bathroom. How was he to know there was a cloakroom downstairs?

He'd reached the landing halfway up when the doorbell went once more and Joy came out into the hall. Burton backed out of sight and waited.

Peggy Winner, downstairs, said, "Am I the last?"

Joy told her, "Don't worry, Peggy. We're still missing someone, but I can't think who it is."

He took her coat and hung it in the hall and they went back to the others.

Burton climbed the rest of the stairs. He'd have to be quick now. Tiptoed along the upstairs passage, opening doors. Found the bathroom and a guest room bare of everything except the bed and a wardrobe.

The next room had to be Joy's.

It wasn't how he imagined a rector's bedroom might be. No crucifix, Bible or embroidered text. A music centre, portable TV and double bed with a quilt covered in a Mondrian design. Two shelves of fat paperbacks. Every sea story Patrick O'Brian had written. Quite a few Hornblowers.

He looked around for the kind of box or briefcase that might contain personal papers. Nothing. Looked into the wardrobe, the chest of drawers and the bedside cupboard. Felt on top of the wardrobe and among the shoes at the bottom.

Then the bedroom door opened and a voice said, "What the fuck are you doing?"

He swung around guiltily.

It wasn't Joy, thank God. It was John Neary.

"Poking around," he answered.

"What for?"

"You'll find out soon enough."

"Bloody hell. I was sent to collect you from the study. He thinks you're overcome with shyness, or something. I heard you moving about up here, so I came up."

"You don't have to tell anyone," said Burton.

"What's up with you-creeping around up here?" demanded Neary.

"Just don't say anything to him please. I'll come down."

"Bloody weirdo."

Sheepishly, Burton followed him downstairs. In the room where the party was, Ann said loudly, "Here he is. Where were you all this time?"

"Bit of a headache," was the best Burton could think to answer.

"Do you want something for it?" Joy asked.

Burton shook his head.

Neary rolled his eyes upwards and said nothing, and the talk started up again. Peggy Winner was asking if the rector minded sleeping alone in this old building.

"Is that an offer, Peg?" said Geoff Elliott, chuckling over his fourth gin and tonic.

"No problem. The rectory has a good atmosphere," said Joy.

"Everyone said it was haunted when I was a kiddie," said Peggy.

"If it is, the ghost has got to be one of my predecessors in the job," said Joy, "so it doesn't bother me. A blue lady or a knight in armour might give me the jitters, but not a humble cleric. There are some I'd definitely like to meet."

"Waldo Wallace?" suggested Norman Gregor.

"Top of the list."

"And what would you ask him?"

Joy held out his hands expansively. "There'd be no need to ask him anything. The man was unstoppable, full of good stories, like the one about Archbishop Tait at a dinner party. The old Archbishop was sitting next to the Duchess of Sutherland and suddenly went white as a sheet, turned to her and said confidentially, 'It's come to pass as I feared. I dreaded this. I think I'm having a stroke.' The Duchess said without even looking his way, 'Relax, your Grace, it's my leg you're pinching, not your own.'"

Everyone liked the story. "He sounds like a man after your own heart," Gregor said. "Some of your stories aren't so bad, Rector."

"The best ones I borrowed from Waldo. He threw better parties than me, too. His home brew was a legend in the parish."

"Where was it brewed?"

"Underneath us, in the cellar. Unfortunately some tee-total rector removed it all early this century, but you can still see traces of the kegs on the floor."

"What do you use it for?"

"The cellar? All the furniture I don't want. Someone who comes after me may find a need for a Victorian commode or a wind-up gramophone, but I get by without them."

"Things like that could be valuable," said Peggy.

"Oh, I sold the Chippendale chairs."

"I never know when you're serious," she said.

Burton stood with Ann Porter near the door, saying little, listening to the man in his element, the centre of attention, charming an audience. Inwardly Burton was fuming that for all the risk he'd taken, no evidence had come to light. But the mention of a cellar had not escaped him. "Which way is the cloakroom?" he asked Ann.

After she'd told him, he nodded, as if asking her to cover for him, and stepped outside again. Surely that cellar was worth looking into.

He guessed there might be access somewhere towards the rear of the house, through the kitchen, and he was right. There was a door in the scullery, to the left of the old leaded sink. The key was in the lock. He let himself in, located a light-switch and went down some whitewashed steps.

The cellar was in a respectable state, as if some effort had been made to keep it free from dust and cobwebs. Plenty of old furniture was stored down here, just as Joy had claimed. Otherwise all he could see were newspapers and magazines in tidy stacks. He stepped around an old coat-stand, checking the furniture, trying to miss nothing, hopeful of locating another filing cabinet. You can tell when a place has been untouched for years, and this was not it. j

Then he saw the display cabinet, an unappealing mid-Victorian piece in some dark wood, without legs, and with three glass doors. What caught his eye was the array of white boxes and small brown bottles, an unlikely collection to be housed here. He opened one of the doors. The interior was in use as a medicine cabinet.

Odd, he thought. Why keep your medicines down here when most people want them handy in the bathroom, or at least in the house? He looked more closely. These weren't the sorts of medicines you keep for emergencies. There were no Band-Aids, aspirins, Alka-Seltzers or Vaseline. Neither were they prescription drugs. They had labels, certainly, but they were handwritten, with just the names of the contents, and nothing about dosage. Burton was not well up on pharmacy, but he was intrigued by this lot. Insulin, hyoscine, morphine, dextromoramide, aconite, digoxin, antimony. Even with his limited knowledge he could tell there were poisons here, lethal poisons. What was a village rector doing with a collection like this hidden in his cellar?

It shocked Burton to the core. He'd harboured suspicions of malpractice, impersonation, even the taking of life. None of it had prepared him for this. For all the evidence to the contrary, he couldn't shake off the thought of Joy as a man of God.