M.C. Beaton: The Case of the Curious Curate

“Alice. Alice Bryan. She works as a teller in Lloyds bank in Mircester.”

“Serious?”

“It always is,” said Bill sadly.

And it’ll be over like a shot when she meets your parents, thought Agatha. Bill’s parents could repel any girl-friend.

“Anyway,” said Bill briskly, “what did you talk about?”

“Me, mostly,” said Agatha ruefully. “When I realized it was all about me and nothing about him, I asked him about himself. He told me about working in New Cross and forming a boys’ club and how the gang leaders thought they were losing members because of him. Five of them had attacked him one night and injured him and then he had a nervous breakdown.”

“Which church in New Cross was it?” asked John.

“Saint Edmund’s. Here! I don’t want you pair poking your nose in and interfering with police work.”

“As if we would,” said Agatha, flashing John a warning look.

“What did you think of Tristan when you heard him preach?” John asked Bill.

“I thought him stupid and vain and the sermon was a load of nothing. On the other hand, I could have been jealous. Alice was gazing at him as if an angel had come to earth. So, Agatha, he didn’t try to persuade you in any determined way to let him have money?”

“No, apart from suggesting he could invest some for me, he let the subject drop.”

“Strikes me as odd from the little I know of him. Any suggestion of a future dinner date?”

“No!” Agatha flushed angrily. Bill eyed her shrewdly.

“He got Mrs. Feathers to go to a lot of trouble producing an expensive dinner and nothing came of it. I’ll bet he thought you were a waste of space.”

“If he thought so, he didn’t tell me.”

“We’ll find out more when we study his bank account and find out who’s been giving him money, and if he invested any of it, I’ll eat my hat.”

“It still seems odd, this idea of someone watching the cottage during the night and then following Tristan to the vicarage,” said John. “If he’d cheated old Mrs. Feathers and she’d just found out about it, she could have heard him going out and followed him. The old sleep lightly.”

“I can’t see old Mrs. Feathers at her age going to tackle a young man like that.”

“She could simply have meant to berate him if she found him taking the church money,” pursued John, “and seized that letter opener and stabbed him. I mean, how many people would know that letter opener was so sharp? Did you, Agatha?”

“I was there one day talking to Mrs. Bloxby when he came in carrying the post. He was slicing open the letters and I remember thinking then that the letter opener must have been sharp. It was a silver one in the shape of a dagger. Not a real dagger.”

“And what about the vicar himself?” asked John quietly. “I mean, he could have caught him at it. Was there any sign of a struggle?”

“No, Tristan was stabbed with one blow to the back of the neck.”

“Yes, that would take a lot of force,” said Agatha.

“Not necessarily,” said Bill. “As the knife was sharp, once the skin was penetrated then the blade would sink in easily and it was sunk in up to the haft. Rather like stabbing a melon. But we’ll know more after the post-mortem.”

“I read somewhere,” said John, “that victims of stab wounds don’t often die immediately. Say the vicar did it, not in his study but at Tristan’s. Wonder if he has a key to that cottage? Anyway, some people stabbed with a sharp thin blade can walk around for a couple of hours afterwards. Say the vicar stabbed Tristan and Tristan doesn’t know how bad he’s hurt. So he decides to clear off, but first of all, he’s going to get that money out of the cash box and take it with him and he collapses in the vicar’s study.”

Agatha gave him an impatient look. “With the knife still in his neck?”

“Maybe he knew it was safer to leave it in until he got to a hospital.”

“Oh, really? And some doctor looks at the knife in the back of his neck and promptly calls the police.”

“Oh, shut up, you two,” said Bill. “That’s where amateurs are such a menace. Stick to the facts, to what you know.”

But John, undeterred, volunteered, “Maybe Alf Bloxby summoned him and made it look as if Tristan was robbing the church box.”

“You’re forgetting Mrs. Bloxby,” said Agatha. “She would never cover up for her husband if he’d committed a murder.”

“But she might not have known. They both probably claim to have slept through the whole business, but maybe she was heavily asleep.”

“I’ve had enough,” said Bill. “I’m off. Agatha, report to police headquarters tomorrow morning and sign a statement.”

Agatha was driving the next morning. “Look out for that child on a bicycle!” shouted John at one point and at another, “You’re going too fast.”

Agatha sighed. “This is like a marriage without the nookie.”

“May I point out that no sex was your choice?”

Agatha stared at him.

“Look at the road, Agatha, for God’s sake!”

“What is up with you, John? You’re usually so…so placid . Now you’re bitching and whining like an old grump.”

“I made some reasonable suggestions to Bill Wong yesterday and all you did was sneer.”

“I thought they were a bit far-fetched. I’m entitled to my opinion.”

“You could have told me afterwards. Look, Agatha. We are both amateurs at this game. There is no need to go on as if I am some sort of office boy.”

“I never…Oh, let’s drop the whole thing. I don’t want to quarrel.”

They continued in an uneasy silence.

After Agatha had made her statement, John said, “We should start off by going straight to New Cross.”

“What? Right away?”

“Why not?”

“Oh, all right. But I don’t like driving up to London.”

“Then I’ll drive, if your insurance covers me. Unless, of course, you have to be in the driver’s seat all the time, both literally and metaphorically.”

“Drive if you like,” said Agatha huffily. “My insurance does cover you driving.”

What had come over him? wondered Agatha, as they drove towards London. She was used to a rather colourless John. He had been going on as if he thought she was bossy. Like most high-powered people with a soft, shivering interior, Agatha considered herself a gentle lady, sensitive and sympathetic.

But by the time they reached New Cross, the driving seemed to have soothed John and he appeared to have reverted to his usual equable self. Probably his bad mood was nothing to do with me, thought Agatha. I don’t upset people. Must have been someone or something else and he took it out on me.

John stopped the car and asked directions to St. Edmund’s until he found a man who actually knew where the church was.

St. Edmund’s was in a leafy backstreet. It was a Victorian building, still black from the soot of former coal-burning decades. White streaks of pigeon droppings cut through the soot up at the roof. It had four crenellated spires with weather vanes of gold pennants. Beside the church was a Victorian villa, also black with soot, which, they guessed, must be the vicarage.

John pressed the old–fashioned brass bell-push sunk into the stone wall beside the door.

The door was opened after a few moments by a heavy-set woman with her hair wound up in pink plastic rollers. She had a massive bosom under an overall and a large, truculent red face.

“Whatissit?”

“We would like to see the vicar,” said John.

“’Sinerstudy.”

“Would you mind telling him we’re here?”

Without asking them who they were, the woman shuffled off. “Poor man,” murmured John. “What a housekeeper!”