A Crowded Coffin (19 page)

Rory and Harriet forgot, for a moment, their predicament, and craned their necks to look at the treasure. Harriet frowned but stayed silent. Rory stared at it, puzzled. It was clearly the jewel in the portrait, the knotwork casing that held the large garnet, surmounted by small pearls, but why did he feel cheated? To his dismay he realized he was not the only one to feel that way.

‘What the hell is this?’ It was a howl of rage from John Forrester. ‘This isn’t Aelfryth’s Tears, this is a copy.’

Furiously disappointed he flung the little silver chest with its bejewelled contents onto a small table and turned on Harriet and Rory. ‘Don’t you see?’ he demanded. ‘Look at the
workmanship
. Oh, I grant you it’s not bad, in fact it could be considered very good, of its kind. Of its kind, though…. I couldn’t say offhand what date it is, but I don’t even know that it’s real gold, could be pinchbeck, and they’ve just made random marks instead of the correct runic inscription. It should read,
“Joy, Prosperity and Fruitfulness”
. And as for the pearl….’

It was almost a wail of fury and despair. ‘I don’t know about the garnet, could be glass and the pearls don’t look right either. At a guess I’d say it’s an eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century fake.’ He picked it up again and fiddled with it. ‘Could be earlier, I suppose, parts of it recycled, perhaps.’

His probing brought results at last and the garnet in its basketwork casing swung back on a minute hinge, revealing a cavity the size of a hazelnut. ‘See? In the real jewel, this
compartment
would be smooth and polished. This isn’t bad, but it’s not
the quality you’d expect. The real one ought to have a glass inner seal too because of the Virgin’s tears inside.’

He fidgeted for a few minutes, eyeing up the aperture behind the panelling, then he turned to them with narrowed eyes. ‘I’m going to try and get through there,’ he said, glancing at the gun. ‘You’ll stay here and not try anything clever. I’d rather not shoot you, the noise will draw unwelcome attention, but it won’t bother me if I have to.’

Rory was surely looking more grey and weary than just now. Harriet slid a sidelong look at him, her own head throbbing badly. She turned away and nodded slightly in response to a lifted eyebrow from the vicar, watching as he wrestled with the outer door, a struggle in the cramped space as he wrenched at the ancient, rusted bolts. At last he succeeded and the door creaked open, revealing a minute platform on the leads and slates of the roof; probably an access door for maintenance, Harriet supposed, but not in use for a very long time now. It was bolted on the inside, she noted, so maybe those workmen on the roof, back in the twenties, could just have assumed it was sealed up and disused.

As John scrambled back down into the gallery, Harriet checked her watch. Oh God, what if the cavalry turned up now? She ventured a question.

‘What will you do now?’ she asked. ‘Join Colin Price
wherever
he’s hiding out? You won’t get away with it, you know.’

She was fleetingly aware of Rory’s consternation and realized he had, like Harriet herself, begun to formulate a theory about the missing man’s disappearance and was afraid lest she remind John of any of his previous opponents. However, John merely smiled at Harriet with the patronizing air he reserved for most women and she was close enough to Rory to catch his sigh of relief. He clearly understood now that she was trying to distract the other man. Perhaps – perhaps it would turn out all right.

‘I mean, did he go abroad as the police have suggested?’ she persisted. ‘Did you help him to go away?’

He laughed at her this time. ‘Oh yes, I helped him to go away. You could say that.’

His meaning was unmistakable, even to Harriet’s reluctant ears, but she couldn’t restrain herself. ‘You’re a man of the cloth,’ she whispered and he looked amused, relishing her naivety.

‘But – how did you manage it?’ She was stammering slightly now, praying that she could keep John’s attention long enough for the police to arrive. Where the hell were they? She didn’t dare sidle over to the window to look. ‘I mean, the police checked his room and he’d paid his rent in full, they said. And taken a bag of clothes. His passport was gone and he had money, so he could just disappear.’

‘Well, of course.’ He was still mildly amused by her, still instructive. ‘That’s just what I’d told him to do. I met him, you see, the day before Gillian’s funeral. It was just a casual encounter and he offered his condolences.’

He smiled with remembered satisfaction. ‘It was all
beautifully
planned. Gillian was becoming impossible and Colin was getting greedy, demanding a bigger cut. He said he had to take all the risks, set up the deals, see the contacts and that was worth more money. He did a lot of sailing, you see, so he took care of that side of the operation in Jersey and across the Channel. I wondered if I could get rid of the pair of them at the same time and for a while I toyed with the idea of the poor, tormented vicar suffering the ultimate humiliation of having his wife decamp with a toy boy, but I decided it was a bit contrived. It was easy to work out what to do about Gillian, but solving the problem of Colin’s “disappearance” took more thought.

‘I thought about scuttling his boat with him aboard,
somewhere
mid-Channel, but the practicalities were against it. How could I have got back myself, for a start? I could have staged an
“accident” and been washed up, but it was too risky and I didn’t want anyone to sniff out a connection between us.’ He frowned suddenly. ‘I was quite keen on the idea of disposing of him at the pig farm just up the road, but again it simply wasn’t
practical
. I made some enquiries when I was away from home, but although pigs are omnivorous, you’d actually need to dismember a body before getting it into the mincer and I’m much too squeamish, I’m afraid. No, the solution I came up with was absolutely foolproof.’

He was rummaging around in the cavity, reaching right back into the little wall safe. ‘Ha! What’s this?’ It was a small wallet of rotted leather and when he gently pulled it apart a tiny bundle wrapped in waxed silk was revealed. Delicately inserting his knife he sliced through the covering and a ring tumbled out. It was the ring Dame Margery was wearing in her portrait.

He stared down at it with surprise and pleasure and glanced across at the picture. ‘Oh well, not all a waste of time, then.’ Looking at Harriet, he stuffed the ring in his pocket and smiled ruefully. ‘Where was I? Bit of a classic, this, isn’t it? The murderer’s confession; but luckily for me, you’re no Miss Marple. Oh yes, once I’d decided how Gillian was to meet her end it was beautiful, I could kill two birds with one stone.’

He started to prowl round the gallery again, restlessly fingering the little emerald ring, the gun swinging nonchalantly from his fingers. Harriet moved slightly so that she was still in his line of sight; Rory leaned back in his chair looking exhausted but not, she narrowed her eyes, not quite as ill as he had appeared ten minutes or so ago. They were both carefully avoiding the window.

‘It was brilliant, you know, bloody brilliant.’ The carefree laugh rang out, striking chill into his listeners’ bones, and reminding Harriet once more of Avril and her list of
characteristics
of a charismatic psychopath. You got it right, Avvie, she thought with a sigh. No mistake about this one.

‘I played the grieving widower to the hilt and alternately wept manly tears or displayed an even more heroic stiff upper lip, according to my audience or comforter. Then, as a way of paying my last respects, I insisted on having her coffin at home the night before the funeral. Oh, they argued against it, said it would be too upsetting, but no-one could quite bring
themselves
to say outright that it was morbid, and not one of them felt able to deny a grieving husband, and him a clergyman, the privilege of a last vigil. It made it so easy.’

He hugged his memory to himself exultantly, straying perilously near to the window. Harriet moved casually in the other direction and, as she had hoped, his eyes followed her, anxious to tell her how clever he had been. It made frightening listening; this detailed confession didn’t bode well for herself and Rory for surely there was only one conclusion to draw when John had told them everything.

‘Our unexpected meeting was a blessing,’ he continued, still in that cheerful, conversational manner. ‘There were a few errands I had to do in Winchester and while I’d planned to ring him, it was safer this way. I told him I’d had a tip-off that Interpol were onto him and he was to get over to Locksley so I could help him get away. He was agreeable, a new start suited him and he’d no family and no real friends, only pub
acquaintances
, so I told him to wait in the church till the old biddies had stopped turning up at my door with their quiches and cakes and casseroles. There’s a path between the vestry door and the back door to the vicarage, so he slipped in unnoticed as I was seeing off the last couple of sympathizers. I’d told them I wanted to be quite alone, you see, and they were all pussy-footing around, respecting my grief.’

With no idea what, if anything, might be happening outside,
Harriet prayed desperately that John Forrester’s vanity would keep him in confessional mood.

‘I got Colin drunk,’ he was saying. ‘I waited till he passed out on the sofa and used the syringe on him. I just used the same method again yesterday in the cathedral. Why change the plot?’ He didn’t even notice their involuntary gasps, Harriet realized, he was so deeply absorbed in his story. ‘I unscrewed Gillian’s coffin, ripped out the padding and lining, and managed to squash him down on top of her. He wasn’t a big guy but though it was a tight squeeze, I managed it in the end.’ There it was again, that light, amused laugh. ‘It was quite funny, really. I ended up having to sit on the coffin to get the lid screwed on, like a slapstick comedy, sitting on a bulging suitcase. Next day was the funeral and the coffin never left my sight, not for a moment. I even insisted on following it through at the
crematorium
and watching it as it was consigned to the flames. One of the perks of office,’ he chuckled. ‘Even though they all clearly decided I’d flipped by then, but I wasn’t risking some fly
operator
doing a last-minute sweep for jewellery, or running a used-coffin racket.’

‘That took some nerve,’ Harriet ventured, trying to keep him pleasant, to show appreciation of his cleverness. It seemed to work.

‘Didn’t it just?’ he agreed. ‘The next day I had a bonfire of Gillian’s oldest clothes. I’d helpfully insisted on packing all the decent stuff into her suitcases and asked various village ladies to take them to charity. Poor dear vicar.’ He grinned at her, inviting her complicity. A tremulous half-smile, which was all she could summon up, seemed to do the trick.

‘It was easy to slip Colin’s bag and the coffin lining into the flames and I dug the ashes into the garden, round the roses, with a generous helping of bone meal and chemical fertilizer mixed in with compost, just to make sure it couldn’t be traced. The urn,
containing the ashes of the dear departed, I scattered at sea in an ostentatious service of commemoration. No forensics there, you see, and it made such a good impression on the village worthies, stiff upper lip, heroic tears hastily mopped.’

He took another turn round the gallery while Harriet braved a swift glance in Rory’s direction. Oh dear, he was looking even worse now, sweat beading on his forehead, his hand clutching at his damaged ribs and his left eye beginning to look discoloured from one of John’s earlier blows. Harriet’s own head was throbbing so badly it was almost blinding and she was only too aware that a badly injured Rory, along with a woman over sixty with an outsize in headaches, was no match for a fit man in his prime. She could only pray for deliverance.

‘All those detective stories,’ he suddenly surprised her, ‘where the murderer has to boast about what he’s done … I never believed that, it seemed plain stupid, but would you believe it? Old Agatha was right. I’ve been longing to tell someone. It’s amazing, like the best sex ever and you can’t tell, but lucky me, here you are and now you both know. I’ll let you go – maybe.’ His glance flickered away from Harriet and she felt a chill of despair. ‘By the time you’ve told everyone else, I’ll be reading all about it in the papers in some unnamed foreign refuge.’

He straightened up and Harriet’s despair deepened as she registered his cold, practical expression. Without taking his eyes off them he reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of
handcuffs
, flourishing them at her with a brief return of his charming smile.

‘Astonishing what you can find in an English vicarage,’ he remarked lightly. ‘These came down the dining room chimney with a load of soot when I had the sweep in. Whatever do you suppose my predecessor did with them? Here.’ He snapped them on Rory’s wrists and shoved a cloth into the younger
man’s mouth. ‘That ought to keep you out of trouble. Get on your feet.’

Harriet felt her stomach churn. This was it. John Forrester beckoned her to him. ‘Give him a hand up onto the roof,’ he ordered. ‘I’m not risking gunshots, the sound carries, and I left the syringe at home. You go first.’ He shoved Harriet
unceremoniously
up through the narrow door in the wall and manhandled the now shackled and gagged Rory after her so that Harriet, breathing an incoherent prayer, had no option but to reach back and grab Rory’s shoulders. The vicar scrambled after them and up on the leads Rory shot a frantic, wide-eyed stare at her. Harriet grabbed at him, terrified he might slip and take them both down; she had a poor head for heights at the best of times and this wasn’t one of them.
The best of times, the worst of times,
the words rang foolishly in her head as she clung grimly to a railing.

Then it happened.

‘What the….’ Harriet looked up as John let out a strangled gasp. ‘But – but he was
dead
.’ John Forrester was losing it now. His eyes bulged in appalled surprise as he stared down into the stable yard. ‘He was dead, I know he was. I killed him.’