Caroline Minuscule (14 page)

The Church Dormant was there as usual – this time sheltering behind the
Sunday Telegraph
. There was no sign of Lee or Tanner. Had they already had breakfast? Or were they going to come in after a minute or two and do their best to upset his digestive processes?

A dumpy waitress with a face like a wet sponge took his order. Amanda had generously waived her right to breakfast again, so he was able to double his allowance. While he waited, he decided to tell Mrs Livabed they were leaving.

She was sitting in her office off the hall in front of an ashtray overflowing with Silk Cut butts.

‘Hullo, Mr Massey. What can I do for you?'

‘Not disturbing you, am I?' Dougal pointed at the calculator beside the ashtray.

‘Doesn't matter.' Her mouth drooped lugubriously. ‘It's only the Value Added. Though it should be called Trouble Doubled if there was any justice in this world.'

‘Drat the VAT,' suggested Dougal. She laughed. He explained that they would like their bill made up, apologizing for the short notice. Amanda had suddenly remembered it was her grandmother's birthday; they had decided to drive to Wales and pay her a surprise visit.

Mrs Livabed graciously denied any possibility that their sudden departure would inconvenience the hotel. Dougal, not to be outdone, hinted that, if the programme got off the ground, a production team could hardly ask for a better headquarters than the Crossed Keys.

It was fortunate that they were interrupted before Mrs Livabed had had time to ask too many questions about the composition, habits and requirements of production teams.

The stolid face of the waitress craned round the door. ‘Yer breakfast,' it said reprovingly, and vanished.

‘Oh, dear,' muttered Mrs Livabed, ‘those Fen girls. I do try, Mr Massey, I really do.'

An hour later, they were out of the hotel. Dougal was full and Amanda was clean; both of them in their different ways were equipped to meet the morning.

It was sunny outside. Despite the cold, the sky was an improbable shade of Mediterranean blue. Dougal felt a mild euphoria which he sternly told himself was nothing but a reaction to last night. He was immensely relieved that neither Lee nor Tanner had put in an appearance.
See no evil
. . .

In the courtyard the Mini was waiting for them beside a grey Ford Anglia, bespattered with bird droppings, and a gleaming black Lancia with a pink fluffy object on the window ledge.

Amanda shook the car keys in the direction of the Lancia. ‘Lee's?'

Dougal nodded. ‘We should have checked the register.' He was annoyed with himself for missing such an obvious point. ‘I bet Lee did.' It was always possible that Lee had left his car somewhere else.

The Mini gave a depressed moan when Amanda pressed the starter. They hadn't used the car since Friday evening and it evidently felt aggrieved by their neglect. Amanda patted the steering wheel and crooned to the Mini in the sort of voice people usually reserve for puppies, kittens and babies in their less revolting moments. Dougal sneered at this useless sentimentality in the privacy of his mind. The engine gave an asthmatic cough and began to roar.

‘Charleston Parva,' said Amanda.

Dougal sighed. All his instincts urged him towards escape. ‘We go out of town the way we came in. Then we turn off left on the B something – it should be signposted to Slungford.'

‘Isn't that where they make loo paper? People got upset about one of their adverts.'

‘It was the bottom that did it.' Dougal quoted: ‘
Sveltex from Slungford . . . the supersoft way to bring a touch of luxury to your bottom
. Charleston Parva's about four miles before Slungford, I checked on the map after breakfast. It looks as small as the name suggests.'

After a mile the outskirts of Rosington gave way to the dark monotony of the Fens. The landscape flattened them, Dougal thought, and the sky, like an immense Wedgwood bowl upturned around the horizon, reduced the Mini to a brightly coloured insect.

As they turned off towards Slungford, Dougal glanced back over his shoulder. The road was empty.

Amanda settled down to a steady forty. The road was a geometrically straight line which ran in the lee of a floodbank. Dougal lit a cigarette, whereupon Amanda said he was smoking too much, and didn't she get offered one too?

Dougal replied by passing her his cigarette, lighting another and saying, ‘
Wilt thou set thine eyes on that which is not? For riches certainly make themselves wings: they fly away as an eagle towards heaven
. I don't like it, love. Too bloody devious by half – as if the whole business is a nasty series of illusions.'

‘What worries me—' began Amanda.

‘I know. Who put the card with the second reference in the briefcase. And why? It's all cockeyed. It made sense before we found the card – that Lee should have kept you and then us occupied while Tanner searched our room for anything suspicious. Even that Tanner should have taken our reference—'

‘That was a pretty stupid thing to do, actually. One way of making sure we knew the room had been searched.'

‘Well, Tanner looks stupid,' Dougal objected. ‘Maybe he wanted a little hard evidence to show Lee. But what about the second card left in its place? Could it have been meant as a warning?'

Amanda nodded. ‘I suppose so. But it's not really Lee's style, is it? It doesn't fit in with what Hanbury said about him, either. You'd expect a more . . . forceful reaction.'

Dougal shivered and automatically glanced behind again. Simultaneously, Amanda dabbed viciously down on the accelerator and the Mini jerked forward. They had both seen the same thing.

A black car nearly a mile behind.

There was a bitter taste in Dougal's mouth. The Mini, he knew, would have difficulty outdistancing a healthy tractor; it stood no chance whatsoever against a new Lancia.

The road saved them – or rather those forgotten engineers who had drained the Fens. The floodbank turned abruptly to the left, like a dog offered a more interesting scent. The road obediently followed. Amanda, taken by surprise, negotiated the 90-degree bend in top gear. The car's brakes shrieked as it skidded on to the other side of the road. Dougal clutched his seat belt as if it was a lifeline.

‘Jesus,' he said in gratitude as the Mini picked up speed. The word was cut short by Amanda bringing the car to the sort of emergency stop that takes months from the life of a driving instructor.

‘The gate,' she said tersely.

Dougal was out of the car before he understood what she meant. The road had swung gently away from the floodbank, leaving a depression running between the two. A barbed wire fence, pierced by a five-bar gate, separated the road from this dry moat.

He swung the gate open and Amanda wrenched the Mini through the gap. A notice nailed to the lefthand gate post announced
GREAT OUSE RIVER AUTHORITY
–
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
. As he ducked down beside the Mini, uncomfortably aware that an observant driver would still be able to see the car from the road, he thought longingly of the relative physical security which a court of law implied.

A few seconds later, the black car swept round the corner. Dougal felt his fear change into a sense of his own stupidity.

The car was not the Lancia. It was an elderly Morris Traveller driven by a grey-haired woman with a perm like a German helmet. A wire grill divided the front seats from a writhing mass of dogs in the back.

A few minutes later, Dougal and Amanda drove on. They were both shaken. The woman in the car was unimportant, Dougal knew; in any case she couldn't have seen them, for she drove crouched over the steering wheel with her eyes glued to the road. It was the way that an unnecessary fear had swooped out of the bright sky which was alarming.

I'm just not cut out for this sort of life, Dougal thought. Aloud he said: ‘If Vernon-Jones gave Lee two clues as well, and if that quote from Proverbs was one of them (leaving aside how it came to be in our room), then we've got three of the four clues.'

He felt his pulse surreptitiously: it was returning to normal. Talking of clues was a reassuringly academic activity.

‘Probably Lee's got four now,' Amanda remarked crushingly. ‘If we'd hidden our two better, that wouldn't have happened.'

‘Yes, well.' Dougal was annoyed with himself for rising to the oblique reproof. ‘But let's see what we have got. If the photograph gives us the name of the village, the
Seek and ye shall find
quote implies the diamonds are somewhere obvious there. And the Proverbs one suggests they're hidden off the ground – riches making themselves wings and so on. The bit about flying towards heaven might mean they're in the church – up the tower, perhaps. After all, it's the only building in the village that we can be reasonably sure Vernon-Jones knew.'

‘Oh, sure,' said Amanda. ‘And what about the first bit of that Proverbs quote?
Wilt thou set thine eyes on that which is not?
That could be Vernon-Jones telling us that there's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Or Lee warning us off.'

Dougal stared out of the window. They were passing through a featureless Fen village, an island of drab buildings in a sea of mud. C
HARLESTON PARVA
2 said a signpost. ‘We've covered that,' Dougal said. ‘If we trust Hanbury's reading of his character, there's got to be a pot of gold. And Hanbury's reading of Lee's character suggests he'd warn us off in a much more . . . unequivocal way. And I rather doubt' – Dougal felt a touch of sarcasm creep into his voice – ‘that Lee has a pile of Vernon-Jones's cards to use when he runs out of postcards.'

Amanda made a moue with her lips and then laughed, which warmed Dougal. ‘Okay, William, we look at the church first.'

A few hundred yards later, Dougal realized that her concession and her laughter were equally meaningless. The glow evaporated. Amanda had gained her main point last night – the agreement that they would go home through Charleston Parva.
(Don't be so timid, William. I want to be rich even if you don't . . . that old tramp may be dead but we're still alive, for God's sake . . .)

So were Lee and Tanner.

‘We're going to be painfully obvious when we get there,' Dougal observed, ‘if Charleston Parva's as empty as that last village, Mudgley whatever it was.'

‘Mudgley Burnham. And nonsense, we look perfectly respectable. Lucky you're wearing those tweeds. We'll look just like the sort of tourists who always go for parish churches.'

In February? thought Dougal, but kept the thought to himself. The new tweed was prickling through his shirt and scratching his legs.

The road wiggled violently and they found themselves, without warning, in Charleston Parva. There was so little of the village that they overshot the centre and had to reverse back to the crossroads which seemed the only reason for the village's existence. Amanda turned into the forecourt of a pub which sprawled across the northwest corner of the junction.

The inn was L-shaped and called the Burnham Arms. Its roof, green with age, undulated irregularly. There were already half a dozen cars in the little car park, including the Traveller which had passed the Mini on the road. It was odd that there should be so many cars at this time of day – and even odder, Dougal thought, that there should be a coach as well.

The coach was old enough to have begun life as a char-à-banc. It had recently and inexpertly been painted purple. Flaming yellow capitals staggered along its side:
RICHARDS OF ROSINGTON
–
THE ONLY WAY TO TRAVEL
. It was empty.

They climbed stiffly out of the Mini. A chorus of barking, led by a fox terrier, greeted them from the back of the estate car. There was a sticker on the back window, just in front of the fox terrier's slavering jaws. V
IVISECTORS ARE MURDERERS
, read Dougal, and thought that the fox terrier probably would be if he could, as well.

Across the road was a shuttered village shop, the last and largest of an uncoordinated terrace of cottages. Diagonally opposite the Burnham Arms was the small, dilapidated church. It looked as if it had grown out of the mound on which it stood by a long and entirely fortuitous process of organic growth; nature seemed to have given the experiment up as a bad job several centuries before.

The only other building of note occupied the fourth corner of the crossroads. It was a trim Queen Anne house guarded by blank, neatly regimented flowerbeds and black iron railings. It reminded Dougal of a grown-up doll's house.

Apart from the dogs, there was no sign of life. Perhaps all the villagers lived in a council estate tucked inconveniently out of sight.

Amanda strode across the road to the lychgate. Dougal followed, watching her hair bouncing on her shoulders and thinking that the village was like a stage before the actors came on.

There was a notice board to the right of the gate. They stared at a weathered poster advertising a bring-and-buy sale in July of last year, in aid of the church spire. Dougal looked up at it. The sale seemed to have failed to achieve its purpose, for the spire perched like a tattered tepee on the squat tower of the church. Several of its slates were missing and the weathercock was bent at a 45-degree angle.

The only other notice was a sheet of paper which informed them that the church was dedicated to St Tumwulf – ‘D'you see?' said Dougal – and the vicar was a Reverend H. B. Black, BD, who was also Vicar of Charleston Monachorum five miles to the east and Rector of Mudgley Burnham. Services during Lent at St Tumwulf's would be held on the . . . but at this point some mischance had removed the lower half of the paper, leaving a jagged tear.

‘What a name,' said Amanda. ‘The vicar's, I mean. Imagine all those jokes about putting lead in your pencil.'

The hinges of the gate squealed in agony as Dougal opened it. They began to walk up the path through the churchyard. Aging gravestones, chipped, cracked and forlorn, clustered thickly on the mound around the church. The path led to a porch on the north wall of the nave, sending out two lesser tributaries, one of which circled the church, while the other continued eastwards to an iron gate rusting in the middle of a screen of rhododendrons and pines at the end of the churchyard.