Peter Lovesey: The Reaper

"Right, then," Rachel said inadequately.

People were still emerging from the church in numbers, so she moved aside to encourage Cynthia to move on quickly. If she had not been so keen to get rid of her crotchety friend, she might have taken more care. She took a bold step back, forgetting this was a churchyard. Her heel nudged awkwardly against the raised edge of an ancient gravestone. She lost her balance and tipped backwards.

Her bottom took the main impact, a hard landing on a stone slab that would leave bruises for a week, but the real pain was mental, acute embarrassment at exposing legs, tights and knickers- oh, yes, the full show-to the faithful of Foxford as they emerged from church enriched with pious thoughts. Struggling to restore decency, she hauled herself to a sitting position and tugged at her skirt. Already she was surrounded by Good Samaritans.

Cynthia had swung around and said, "My God-what happened to you?"

"I'm fine, fine," she insisted before she knew if she was, or not. "I tripped, that's all. So silly."

And now the advice came from all sides.

"Take a few deep breaths."

"Try putting your head between your knees."

"Don't get up yet. You'll feel faint." She couldn't. She was fully hemmed in. Seated on a grimy old gravestone, wishing she was anywhere but here.

"Would a drink of water help?"

"Do you want smelling-salts, dear?" (from one of the two old ladies who sat behind her). "I always have them with me in church. It gets so close sometimes."

"Was it a faint?"

"No, I'm perfectly all right. Really."

Then: "May I? Excuse me. What's happened here?"

The voice of the rector himself, trying to find a way through the crush.

Someone made room for him and he crouched beside her with a hand on her shoulder. "Rachel! What's up …? Are you hurt?"

"I don't think so. I'd like to get up."

Cynthia said, "She'll be all right, Otis. She says she's fine."

He asked them to make room. She was shivering as if it was winter.

She tried to get up. Rested her right hand on the slab and cried out with pain the moment she put pressure on it.

"You are hurt," said the rector. "Here, let me help."

She managed to get to her feet with his support. In any other situation, Otis Joy's arm firmly around her back would have been bliss, but she was in no state to appreciate it. All those anxious faces did not help.

"You OK, Rachel?" he asked, still with; his hands on her shoulders as if she might lose her balance.

She hadn't noticed until that moment of pain. She just felt numb at several points of her anatomy, including the arm. She said she was sure she'd be all right. Without thinking, she tried to brush the back of her skirt, now covered in the yellow stuff that grew on the stone. A stab of pain travelled up her arm.

"It could be broken," said the rector. "Let me see."

He held the arm lightly and asked her to move her fingers. There must have been people qualified in first aid or nursing among the bystanders, but this was church territory and he was taking charge and no one had better interfere, not even Cynthia.

Rachel didn't want a fuss, yet couldn't hide the discomfort. The rector said she ought to get the arm X-rayed and meanwhile they had better immobilize it. As if it was the most natural thing in the world, he pulled his surplice over his head and improvised a sling for her.

The one good thing to come out of this mishap was that Otis Joy insisted he and no one else would take her to hospital. In no time at all she was seated beside him in his rattling old Cortina being driven to Bath.

"I should have offered you some aspirin," he said. "Idiot. I've got some in the vestry for emergencies."

She said the pain had virtually gone now that the arm was supported.

"Are you right-handed?"

She said she was.

"Isn't it always the way?"

"It's my garden that bothers me. It'll be a wilderness in no time."

"Won't your husband take a turn out there?"

She smiled. "You don't know him. He's flying to America, anyway."

In Accident and Emergency she was seen almost at once and then sent to another section for the X-ray. Otis Joy got up to go with her.

"There's no need for you to wait," she said. "I'll be all right now."

He refused to leave her.

"I could be here for hours," she said when they were seated in the radiography department.

"All the more reason for me to stay. After all, it was my fault."

"Why?"

"If I hadn't asked you to wait, this wouldn't have happened."

"No, it was my own stupidity," she repeated. "I stepped off the path without looking."

"It's in a dangerous place, that grave, so close to the church door. You're not the first to trip over it. I've a good mind to have the slab levelled flush with the turf."

"You couldn't do that. What would the relatives say?"

"They've long since gone. It belonged to one of the previous rectors, the Reverend Waldo Wallace."

"Now that you mention it, I've seen the name before."

"The incumbent for over fifty years, until about eighteen-eighty," he said. "And much loved by the parish. He brewed his own beer and supplied the pub. Believe it or not, tithes were still being paid in those days. Each year at harvest time, good old Waldo gave a tithe dinner at the rectory, a jolly for the whole village."

"With beer?"

"His home brew. It was a real bender. And a midnight firework display. Said he waited all year to hear the ladies crying 'Ooh!' and 'Ah!' as the rockets went up."

She giggled. "You made that up."

"No, Waldo said it. Pre-Freud and quite innocent, I'm sure. He never married."

She didn't know what to say.

"Anyway," Otis Joy added smoothly, "he wouldn't have wished this on you."

She said Waldo Wallace sounded a sweetie.

"Oh, sure. But on the other hand," he said, "we all get our kicks some way. If Waldo liked to hear the ladies going 'Ooh!' and 'Ah!' maybe he had something to do with you tripping over his grave."

"All he heard from me was 'Ouch!' I hope I said nothing worse."

"He must have heard some ripe Anglo-Saxon in his time. We clergymen do, you know."

"Not from a woman, surely? Waldo was never married, you said."

"He would have had a housekeeper, and I bet she dropped a plate occasionally and said something stronger than 'Oh, my word.'"

Rachel was called for the X-ray. There would be a further wait while they processed it and showed it to a doctor. She was feeling guilty about taking so much of the rector's time on a Sunday.

"Don't you have Evening Service soon?" she asked when she returned to the waiting area.

He looked at his watch. "Oceans of time."

"It must be hard, trying to find space for your own life."

"This is my own life," he said. "I don't think of it as a job. True, there are fixed points in the week, services, PCC meetings, choir practice, and so on, but I make time for other things when I feel the need. Wouldn't be much use to anyone if I never relaxed."

"So what do you do?"

"In my spare time? Fresh air and exercise. I like to get out. Music."

"What sort? Classical?"

"Catatonia."

"You're kidding?"

"There's some very good bands about these days."

"I'm surprised."

"I grew up with pop. Didn't you?"

"I thought you were going to say Mozart."

"Can't fault him, but I hear a lot of solemn music in church. Give me something with a heavy beat and grunge guitars."

"My husband thinks it's cool to listen to jazz, Benny Goodman and stuff. To me it's more dated than Beethoven." She felt a small stab of conscience for knocking Gary (not to say Beethoven), but it didn't trouble her much because she also felt the hurt of the proposed New Orleans trip. "His jazz crowd like warm beer and late nights."