Peter Lovesey - Upon A Dark Night

‘Thanks.’ He gave a shout and stepped out briskly after a tall, silver-haired man in the act of bundling his vestments into the back seat of a car.

The vicar straightened up and looked round. Diamond introduced himself.

‘You’re a detective? This is to do with poor old Gladstone, I suppose.’

‘Can you spare a few minutes, sir?’

The vicar said that he doubted if he could help much, but he would answer any questions he could. ‘Have you had lunch? The Portcullis has a rather good bar menu.’

Diamond patted his ample belly. ‘I’m giving it a miss today.’

‘Then why don’t we talk inside the church?’’ Whatever suits you, sir.’

St Mary Magdalene, the vicar explained as they approached it, was pre-Conquest in origin. There were Saxon stones in the structure of the tower. The priest of Tormarton, he said, was mentioned in Domesday.

‘So you’re one of a long line, sir?’ Diamond commented, willing to listen to some potted history in exchange for goodwill and, he hoped, the local gossip.

‘Yes, indeed. The line probably goes back two or three centuries earlier than that. There are various theories about the origin of the name of our village. The first syllable, ‘Tor”, may refer to “torr”, a hill, or the pagan deity Thor, or it may derive from a thorn tree. But there’s no dispute about the second part of the name. The derivation is “macre tun” – the farm on the boundary, or border. We stand, you see – and it’s rather exciting – on the ancient border of the Kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex.’

‘Mercia and Wessex,’ Diamond said without sharing the excitement. There was a danger of the history over-running. ‘But the present church is basically late Norman, as you must have noted already.’

‘Certainly have, sir. Must take a lot of upkeep. Do you have a good-sized congregation?’

‘It depends what you take to be a good size. I suppose we do reasonably well for these times.’ The vicar opened the wooden gate and led the way up a small avenue of yew trees, through the genteel end of the churchyard, where a high complement of raised tombs blackened by age stood at odd angles. The main entrance was round the right-hand side of the church.

‘Was Daniel Gladstone one of your flock?’

‘They all are,’ said the vicar. ‘But I know what you’re asking. He didn’t join in the worship. He didn’t join in anything much. Quite a solitary figure.’ He paused, then sighed and said, ‘The manner of his death is on all our consciences. And it was too long before he was found, far too long.’

‘Several days, anyway.’

‘Dreadful. Every parish priest has a few like that, insisting on going on in their own way, shutting the world out. It’s a dilemma. I called on him occasionally and he was barely civil.’

‘No family?’

‘Not in the neighbourhood. Both his marriages failed. It was a hard life, and I don’t think the wives could take it.’

‘So there were two marriages?’ said Diamond. They stepped into the small arched porch and the vicar turned the iron ring of the church door and parted the red curtains inside.

‘Two, yes. He was married here the first time during the war, long before I came. She wasn’t a local girl, I understand. From London, I think, to escape the bombing. Old Daniel must have been more sociable in those days. Young and carefree. His father would have owned the farm, then.’

They had paused in front of a sculptured wall monument to one Edward Topp, who had died in 1699. The Topp coat of arms consisted of a gloved hand gripping a severed arm, the soggy end painted red. Diamond thought of the post-mortem, took a deep breath and switched his gaze to a floor brass of a figure in a long garment, with all his limbs intact.

‘Fifteenth century. John Ceysill, a steward. Note the pen and inkhorn at his waist,’ the vicar informed him. ‘The Gladstones are one of the village families from generations back. If you’re looking for their name on the memorials 192

– of which we have some fine examples – you will be disappointed. Ordinary folk were not commemorated like the gentry.’

‘Unless they’re on the war memorial.’

‘Good point. The two world wars had slipped my mind.’

‘Easily done.’

‘But there are many fine features here in St Mary’s.’

Diamond’s gaze had already moved up to the fine feature of the timbered roof, not to admire it, but to work out how to stave off a lecture on its history. He produced the Bible from his pocket, an inspired move.

It was enough to stop the vicar in his tracks. True, they were in the right place, but policemen didn’t usually carry the Good Book.

‘So was old Daniel the last of the line?’

‘To my knowledge, yes.’

‘His first wife was only nineteen.’

Then Diamond opened the inside page with the family tree and passed it across.

‘I didn’t know he possessed a Bible,’ said the vicar, quick to understand. ‘This evidently came from the wife’s family, the Turners. Ah. May Turner married Daniel Gladstone, 1943, St Mary Magdalene’s.’

‘But it didn’t last long, you say?’

‘That was my understanding. They separated quite soon and she must have left her Bible behind. I heard that she left suddenly. Can’t tell you when.’

‘If there was a second marriage…’

‘There must have been a death or a divorce,’ the vicar completed it for him. ‘I can’t tell you which. His second marriage would have been in the nineteen-sixties. She was another very young woman, the daughter of the publican, I was told.’

‘Would her name have been Meg?’

‘Meg?’ He sounded doubtful.

‘Short for Margaret.’

‘Well, we can check in the marriage register, if you like. I keep that in the safe with the silver. How did you discover her name?’

‘If you look in the Book of Psalms…’

He peered over his glasses at Diamond, deeply skeptical that anyone called Meg was mentioned in the Psalms. ‘Ah.’ He had let the Bible fall open at the Christmas card. ‘Now I see what you mean. Bibles have so many uses, not least as a filing system.’

‘Look inside the card,’ said Diamond. The vicar opened it and found the photo of the woman and child and read the writing on the card. ‘How very moving. It’s coming back to me now. I did once hear that there was a daughter of the second marriage. This must be Margaret with her little girl. If you’re thinking of returning the Bible to them, I don’t know how you’d make contact. She left him when the child was very young. Let’s check the marriage register, shall we?’ He returned the Bible to Diamond and led him through a passageway (that he couldn’t resist naming as yet another feature of St Mary’s, its ambulatory) to the chancel and across the aisle to the vestry.

‘You said he was a loner – a solitary man.’

‘In his old age, he was.’ The vicar smiled. ‘I see what you mean. For a loner, two wives isn’t a bad achievement. He must have been more sociable in his youth, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Did something happen, I wonder, that turned him off people?’

‘I wouldn’t know about that.’ The vicar took the keys from his pocket and unlocked a wall-safe.

‘Was there any gossip?’

‘I’m not the right person to ask. Not much Tormarton gossip reaches me at Marshfield. There were stories that he was miserly, sleeping on a mattress stuffed with money, and so on, but almost any old person living alone has to put up with that sort of nonsense.’

‘Some small amount of cash was found in the house.’

‘That’s a relief – that anything was left, I mean. I shouldn’t say this, but I know of one or two locally who wouldn’t think twice about robbing the dead.’ He lifted a leather-bound register from the safe and rested it on the table where the choir’s hymn-books were stacked. ‘There were not so many weddings in the sixties, before they built the motorway. This shouldn’t take long.’