Rainbow's End

CHAPTER THREE

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The Reverend Stephen was a conscientious soul who knew all about the citizen’s duty where murder or mayhem were in question, or even the self-violence that could hardly be associated with Rainbow. He drew back from the appalling wreckage among the graves with great care, marking his path in case some other, less innocent, had also trodden here during the night, and went to call the police, whose job this clearly was. But he was so far adopted into the tribal structure of Middlehope that it never occurred to him to call anyone but Sergeant Moon.

Homicide might live in Comerbourne. Here in Middlehope Sergeant Moon was the official guardian of the tribe’s peace, to be trusted absolutely, and turned to in all emergencies. The Reverend Stephen never for one moment entertained the idea of notifying Barbara Rainbow of her husband’s present whereabouts and present state. Nor did it occur to him that he was treating her as a woman of the tribe, not an alien from the outer world. Middlehope had spread a wing over her from that moment, whether she knew it or not.

‘Oh, yes, quite dead,’ said the vicar simply, at ease with the man to whom he spoke. ‘He’s broken to pieces, you see. He must have come off the tower, he couldn’t have been shattered like that any other way. Yes, it was his wife who rang me, fretting about him not coming home. I think he sometimes didn’t, but this time she hadn’t any clues, and she was troubled.’ A good Biblical word, troubled. ‘I haven’t told anyone, and nobody’s likely to go through there, not close. I thought better let well alone rather than mount a guard. No, I haven’t said a word to her.’

‘All right, sir,’ said Sergeant Moon briskly, ‘you go and just keep a discreet eye on the place, and fend people off it if need be, and I’ll be with you in ten minutes.’

‘She mustn’t see him, you know,’ said the vicar, and blushed to hear himself giving advice to an old hand like the sergeant. But after all, he had seen what was left of Rainbow, and as yet Sergeant Moon hadn’t. ‘I suppose it’s properly my job to tell the widow…?’

‘We’ll take care of all that,’ said Moon imperturbably, and cleared the line in order to get through direct to headquarters at Comerbourne.

‘Oh, no!’ protested George, confronted with this altogether too apt confirmation of the sergeant’s forebodings. ‘You’ll have to give up prophecy. Jack, you’re too unnerving.’

‘Could be accident,’ said Moon, without much confidence. ‘Sounds as if he fell from the church tower. I’m on my way, and I’ve called the doc.’

‘Right, we’ll be with you in twenty minutes.’

In the event it took the squad a full half-hour to reach Abbot’s Bale, since the morning rush was in full swing, and the roads congested. But within an hour the whole grisly apparatus connected with sudden and suspect death had arrived, and was grouped about all that remained of Arthur Everard Rainbow.

The police doctor, confronted with this wreckage, shrugged his helplessness, testified unnecessarily to the fact that life was extinct, opined that it had been extinct for many hours, almost certainly all night, and left it to the pathologist to go into detail, since this was now obviously his affair. The photographer shot a great deal of film, and the forensic scientist, arriving last, looked down at the body, looked up at the tower, looming close over the spot, and wondered whether he was needed at all.

‘Not much doubt where he fell from, is there?’ he observed mildly. ‘Pretty plain case of accident, wouldn’t you say?’ He had not, so far, taken a close look at the set-up.

‘On the face of it, yes,’ agreed George, ‘except that I don’t much like its face. There are grazes on his palms, and the balls of his fingers, for one thing, white marks of what looks like stone-dust, and the same under his finger-nails, as well as what I think you may find to be fragments of moss. And since he can hardly have done any scrabbling about on the stones here after he hit, if I’m right the debris is from up there.’

‘He’d try to grab hold and save himself if he found himself falling,’ suggested the devil’s advocate, already interested.

‘Why should he find himself falling? There doesn’t seem to be a large chunk of masonry that’s come down with him, or anything like that. And though I haven’t been up there, I wouldn’t mind betting that parapet is breast-high. You don’t overbalance over a barrier like that. Not to mention the question of what he was doing up on top in the first place.’

‘Hmmm, that’s true. They’d hardly keep the organ out on the leads, would they? Well, now, let’s have a look, before the doc takes him away.’ And delicately he began to move round the rim of the scene, looking at grass-blades and the scarred mosses on the stones. Dr Reece Goodwin, a round, bouncing, energetic ball of a man, well into his sixties but looking fifteen years younger, was kneeling beside the body, touching and probing with spatulate fingers.

‘An odd chance, he fell with all the lower part of him on this table tomb and these two headstones, smashed himself to pieces from the waist down, but he came down head and shoulders in this thick tangle of grass and brambles. Nothing but superficial damage, scratches and impact grazes to the head. And yet he’s bled from the back of the skull, and I think we’re going to find there’s an indented wound here resting against nothing but all this cushiony vegetation. And he certainly never moved after he hit.’

‘Interesting!’ said George. ‘It looks as if you’ve got yourself a job this afternoon.’

Dr Goodwin bounded up from his knees, and scrubbed his hands vigorously. ‘So it seems! Right now I wouldn’t give you a precise cause of death, obvious though it may seem. Can I have him now?’

So that was that. A post-mortem was essential, and the shadow of murder was already looming as the shadow of the tower crept round to mark the passing of noon. A man falling by accident may certainly claw at the stones to try to arrest his fall. Even a suicide may change his mind at the last moment, and try to cling to the world he has set out to abandon. But in neither case is he likely to end up with his head the most intact part of him after the fall, cushioned in vegetation, and yet with an indented wound at the back of his skull.

They hoisted the rag-doll remains of Rainbow into a plastic sheet, packed him into a shell, and stowed him away in Reece Goodwin’s van for his journey to the hospital mortuary in Comerbourne. The vicar, hovering unhappily in the background, was almost relieved when he was asked if the police might borrow the parish hall as an incident room, and was left there with Sergeant Moon to make a formal statement, while Detective Sergeant Brice and Constables Reynolds and Collins began a methodical examination of the church from nave to tower, layer by layer, and George, ruefully shouldering the most distasteful duty left, went in person to break the news to Barbara Rainbow.

He was halfway up the drive, among the calculated spaces and tastefully positioned statuary, when it dawned on him that while the widow might be badly shaken by this death, possibly no one in the world would be really sorry. In his own business circles Rainbow appeared to have been watched, respected, envied and copied, but never actually liked. In this valley he had made himself not so much detested as dangerous, and not to be tolerated, like a disease. Middlehope would breathe more freely now that he was gone. And the spectacular Barbara?

She opened the door to him herself, in grey slacks and a silk shirt, her hair down round her shoulders; and her black brows, drawn together over eyes focused somewhere far beyond him, suddenly smoothed out in relief. She recognised him gladly. Recalling the party intimacy, she said: ‘George…!’ and even launched upon a genuine, if anxious, smile, and then she looked more closely, and grew cool and still, and certain of a thunderbolt. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry! That was presumptuous. It’s Superintendent Felse isn’t it? This is official.’

‘I’m afraid so,’ said George.

‘Come in! As a matter of fact,’ she said, closing the door upon the world and leading the way into the small drawing-room where Rainbow’s grand piano stood, ‘I’ve just called the police down the valley. Do sit down! But you… you’re C.I.D, aren’t you? How could you be involved?’ The dark eyes were intent and guarded, and she was pale. Hardly any make-up, he realised, and as beautiful as ever. ‘I’ve been calling his shops, and his dealers, and everybody I could think of who might know his movements, ever since I called the vicar, early this morning. Nobody knows anything. So finally I called the police. But just the police. That wouldn’t come straight to you. You must have come into it some other way. And you do know something, don’t you?’

‘The vicar called Sergeant Moon,’ said George, ‘who called me. For sufficient reason.’

‘Yours is the criminal division,’ she said deliberately. ‘Are you suggesting there’s something criminal involved?’

It was an eventuality which had never occurred to him, though all too clearly it had to her. He could not believe that she was acting or prevaricating. The first thing that had occurred to her, when her husband vanished without trace, was that he had excellent reason for doing so. What she dreaded was something that would involve her loyalty. Not her integrity. Not her affection. George was suddenly sure that the news he was actually bringing would be very much easier to bear.

‘Not as you mean. No question of any criminal act on your husband’s part. After your morning call the vicar was naturally worried, and went to see if there was any suggestion to be found in the church. He found a situation which made him call our department at once. Your husband is dead, Mrs Rainbow. It looks as if he fell to his death from the church tower last night. I’m sorry to be the bearer of such news.’

He’d been right to go ahead bluntly with the fact. And the first thing he saw in her, or was almost certain he saw, was that she had never for a moment considered this possibility. Either that, or she was an actress right out of his experience. Her eyes flared wide open, her face blanched with shock, her hands, which had been bunched into doubled fists a moment before, lay loose in her lap. The second thing he saw, as she stirred slowly out of her stillness, was that she had glimpsed a marvellous light at the end of a long and still suspect tunnel. So that was all! He was dead, and she hadn’t killed him, or even willed his death. Simply, he wasn’t there any more!

‘Are you sure?’ she said in a muted, wary voice, letting the syllables slide out one by one as if they had to carry passports. ‘Arthur’s dead? But how could it happen? Why should he fall from the tower? Why should he even climb the tower? All he wanted was the organ, and the choir to go with it.’ The single virtue Rainbow had possessed hit her suddenly, she knotted her hands again, and rocked like a genuine widow. ‘He did care for music, you know! Only he never really felt it in his bones.’

His bones were in splinters from the waist down, and he was almost excessively dead. George experienced her brief, guilty, unloving pity, and understood it. She didn’t really owe very much.

‘You’ll want to ask me questions,’ she said reasonably. ‘Where is he? Do you need me to – to identify him, or anything?’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ said George. ‘But you’ll understand that his death presents something of a problem, and we shall have to collect all the information possible that can shed any light on it. For instance, it seems hardly likely that he set out to take his own life.’

‘No, he never would,’ said Barbara positively.

‘The idea of an accidental fall presents difficulties, too.’

‘I understand,’ she said bluntly. ‘You can’t rule out the possibility that someone else had a hand in it. It’s all right, I know where I stand now. The marriage partner is normally the first suspect. You’ll want access to all his papers and accounts. You’d better have the key of his office now, everything in it is just as he left it. And you’ll want a statement from me, about his movements yesterday, and mine.’

‘I’ll send someone later to get a formal statement. Now just tell me. Things were as usual yesterday? He went to choir practice at the usual time? There was nothing out of the way in his manner?’

‘Everything was just the same as ever. He always walked to the church, it’s not far by the side gate. He went out at the usual time, and he told me he’d be late back, because he wanted to get in some practice after the choir left. That’s why I wasn’t worried until around midnight. He could easily have stopped in at the vicar’s afterwards, and sat talking about his plans for the season’s music. He intended some drastic changes. They weren’t too popular with the choir. Some modern music is very ungrateful stuff for voices. I was here alone all the evening, and went to bed without waiting for him. Even when I woke up later, and found he still hadn’t come in, I can’t say I was really worried. He didn’t invariably consult me, or even warn me, before taking off on business at a moment’s notice. And besides, nobody could have started much of a hunt for him in the middle of the night. But when there was no telephone call this morning, and his car was still in the garage, I thought I’d better make some discreet enquiries. That was when I called the vicar, and since then I’ve called everyone I could think of, half a dozen dealers, both the shops, even Charles Goddard in Comerbourne, and John Stubbs down at Mottisham. And then you came. And that’s all. Oh, and I’ll give you his solicitor’s name and number. As far as I know, they hold his will.’

She was perfectly in command of herself and her situation now, and her composure in speaking of such details as her husband’s will was completely detached and impersonal, as though the disposal of his worldly goods had nothing to do with her, and could hardly affect her.

‘And what happens about the funeral arrangements? I suppose there has to be an inquest. And then will they release his body? I suppose I ought to call in a firm to take responsibility, in any case.’

‘It would be wise,’ George agreed. ‘I’d like the addresses of the shops. And I will take the office key, with your permission. We shall probably have to disturb you occasionally during the next few days, but we’ll try not to upset your life more than we have to. You have no servants living in the house?’

‘To vouch for my movements last night?’ she said with a faint, grim smile. ‘No, I’m afraid you’ll have to take, or doubt, my word for it. There are two girls who come in, mornings, and help out if I have a dinner-party. And a woman who comes in twice a week to clean. All from the village. I’ll give you their names, too.’

Nothing could have been more open or more practical. She handed him the freedom of the house and of all her husband’s papers and records, as though they were now nothing to do with her. As though, in fact, she felt the whole load of this house, this business, this association, lifted from her, and was undertaking the final chore of handing over to someone else with the greatest equanimity. The end of an employment. Rather an abrupt end, but the times were such that sudden redundancies were commonplace.

It occurred to him as he was leaving that there was even a note of curious anticipation in her practicality, rather as though the redundancy did not come amiss to her, almost as though she already had some other and more congenial situation in mind. It sent him away wondering how accurate his judgement of her had been, and how good an actress she could be at need. For there was no blinking the fact that Rainbow had not projected the image of a successful marriage so much as that of an efficient working partnership, and the lady had a field of admirers as long as Middlehope itself, besides the outsiders from Rainbow’s world. Now just how do all these hopeful swains stand, George wondered, now she’s a widow?

Sergeant Moon and Detective-Constable Barnes, who was a Middlehope man himself, were making the rounds of the nearest houses to the church, in search of someone, somewhere, who would admit to having seen, or heard, or even thought, anything during the past twenty-four hours. They were both guileful and resourceful men, well versed in the ways of their neighbours, and they made every approach obliquely, with mild deception in every phrase. But neither of them was surprised to find that the news had flown before them, even though no curious onlookers had had to be chased away from the churchyard. However deviously they circled the real reason for their enquiries, just as deviously the interrogated counter-circled, well aware of what had happened to Rainbow, and impervious in the armour of ignorance. Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything, nobody knew anything.

‘Which could well be true,’ admitted Barnes, comparing notes after an hour’s activity. ‘Because I reckon this was timed well on, round about ten if not after, and it would be dark, and there aren’t any houses so near that one heavy, dull fall, with no after-sounds, would get people rushing out to see what had happened. But no bones about it, the result would be the same if nine or ten of us had seen him shoved over the parapet.’ It was the measure of his entrenched loyalties that even in a police matter he said ‘us’ and not ‘them’, a fact which Sergeant Moon perfectly understood.

As for the choir, there was no way of getting at the boys until they were home from school and under the guardianship of their parents, and the men, scattered at work between upland farms, small craft workshops, and the factories of Comerbourne, had better also be left until evening. When, of course, they would say they went straight home after practice, and knew nothing further about anything connected with Rainbow. Still, they had to be asked.

In the post-mortem room at Comerbourne George watched what he had grown used to after many experiences, but would much rather not have had to watch. Mortality was an abstract idea, having its own solemn dignity, if not beauty, but even mortality disintegrated under the hands of Reece Goodwin, and there, but for the grace of God, went every one of us, identity and all, into sample-jars and dog-meat. The fact that the remains would undoubtedly be reassembled as decently as possible, and far beyond what would have been thought possible, hardly mitigated the harshness of this dissection. And yet it was meant for the protection of those still living, and the provision of justice towards this one, dead, and he had learned to accept it. To be the pathologist was quite a different discipline. The more impossible the task of extracting information from the material provided, the more enthusiastic did Reece Goodwin become. But this one was fresh and relatively simple, and he had to draw his ardours from its few subtleties.

‘Now this,’ he said didactically, probing round the head of the corpse with delicate, passionate fingers, ‘presents a very interesting problem. This head wound, you can see, is so situated that it cannot possibly have arisen in the course of impact after his fall. It lies low at the back of the skull, and is long and narrow and deeply indented, and was clearly inflicted before death, though probably very shortly before. It might well have been enough to cause death, if these multiple injuries received in the impact hadn’t intervened. If they really did intervene! He was not dead, or even unconscious, when he fell or was hoisted over the coping, for this stuff we’ve isolated from under his finger-nails, and these markings on his palms, are certainly traces of stone-dust – we’ll go into the kind! – and fine mosses. He was still able to claw at safety.’

‘And he couldn’t have made any such motions after his fall?’ George asked.

‘After his fall he was most definitely dead. Once for all. In fact, what is particularly interesting, though he was alive enough to try and cling to the stone at the top, he may very well have been dead before he hit at the bottom. One rather hopes he was.’

‘One does,’ agreed George drily. The thought that Rainbow might have made his exit in the mild autumn night between assault and violation, in mid-air, was curiously calming. Almost like being taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot, or by liberal-minded angels. If heaven was Rainbow’s destination? It did seem, to put it moderately, rather excessive. There should have been a sort of commercial limbo.

‘These obvious multiple injuries, though they did spatter the neighbouring stones, actually shed very little blood. I can’t tell you whether the head wound caused his death, or the impact. My guess would be, he was as good as dead when he landed, but it is a guess. I’ve got a lot of work to do on him before I can be more precise.’

‘Then the head wound is the only one that can’t have been either self-inflicted, or the result of the fall?’ George insisted.

‘That’s right, it can’t, and it’s the only one. Somebody hit him from behind, fairly low at the back of the skull. And with fell intent, and a long, narrow and very solid instrument. The marvel is that he was conscious enough to claw at the parapet as he went over, after such a clout. But take it from me, he was. He did.’

‘Would there have been much bleeding?’

‘I doubt if there was time. Seems to me it was a fast bash, and a heave over the edge. But you may find traces where it happened.’

‘Then there may also be matter useful to us, still in the wound. Any notion yet of what kind? Fragments of rust, wood splinters, stone dust?’

‘You’ll have to wait for the forensic boys to tell you for certain. Any amount of specimens here for them, as soon as I’ve certified them all. But I’d say, probably stone. Loose bit of coping up there? Edge of a tile? They did an extensive restoration job on the church last century, you said, there could be all sorts of fragments lying around up there.’

‘I’m heading back there now,’ said George. ‘Any idea about timing? It was a fine, mild night to be lying out, shouldn’t be anything freakish about the temperature factor.’

‘He was dead before midnight, I’m certain. Medically it could even have been as early as eight, but you’re going to be able to cut down on that end from evidence. I’d say most probably it happened between nine and ten.’

‘And the vicar left him, still at the organ, about half past eight. Say a couple of hours for everybody in the valley to account for himself. And either they’ll all have alibis,’ prophesied George, ‘or else none of them will. They stand or fall together up in Middlehope.’

He drove back to Abbot’s Bale with the tea-time traffic, to confer with Sergeant Moon at the parish hall before joining Detective-Sergeant Brice at the church. Moon’s report was exactly what he had expected.

‘I’ve seen all the boys, they all say they went straight home after practice, some of ’em together part of the way, naturally, where they live close. They’d all heard about him being dead, of course, not a hope of the grape-vine failing, up there, in or out of school. No question of shock or surprise, they already knew. All very quiet, very demure, a bit subdued, with a lot of excitement bubbling inside. They aren’t sorry, but they are sobered. None of ’em liked him, but this never entered their heads, whatever else they wished him. The men, Barnes is going the rounds now. But the result will be the same.’

‘And nobody else has turned up a useful fact? Nobody in the pub heard anything? No regulars who failed to show?’

‘Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything, nobody knows anything. And nobody has to issue orders, or even set the example. They all wanted rid of him, and generally speaking they’ve all got open minds about the rash soul who took steps about it. The consensus of opinion seems to be that the situation wasn’t as desperate as all that, and this action is unjustifiably drastic, but all the same… Well, you know yourself, alibis are meaningless in Middlehope. When threatened, they close ranks. For all you know,’ said Moon generously, ‘it could be anybody. It could be me!’

‘Interesting!’ said George. ‘Was it?’

‘Well, no, it wasn’t. But then,’ pointed out the sergeant reasonably, ‘we’d all say that, wouldn’t we?’

‘Come on,’ said George, ‘let’s go and see if the church is any more informative.’

St Eata’s church – a local dedication which occurred in several of the hill villages – dated back to Saxon times, but nothing much of Saxon workmanship was left above-ground, and even the succeeding Early English had largely been patched, built on to, and defaced in several later ages, even before the ambitious nineteenth-century renovation was undertaken. The fabric had ended up as slightly top-heavy neo-Gothic, with the upper part of its old tower rebuilt and made more lofty, with a new battlemented surround. It still had a respectable congregation, and so had escaped the horrid fate of being declared redundant. Its one unchallenged excellence was its organ, an early masterpiece lovingly rebuilt.

‘Any amount of people go in and out here most days,’ said Detective-Sergeant Brice, looking up from the nave towards the organ pipes, towering above the left-hand side of the chancel. ‘I thought we should have to spend half our time keeping folks out today, but only the vicar’s been near. It’s as though the place has been tabu from the time they saw us move in. Not that this part has anything much to tell us. It’s different once you get up above, where hardly anyone ever goes. We’ve marked several details for you.’

‘The organ first,’ said George.

Rainbow’s music-case was still lying on the organ-bench, unfastened, sheet music fanning out from it. George looked round at the demigod’s view of the church from this angle, and up at the correctively awesome vista of pipes. Organs are designed to prostrate the onlooker with humility before their vastness and beauty, and exalt their handlers into daemonic self-glorification. But here everything was neat, placid and undisturbed; here there had certainly been no sudden assault, no life and death struggle. The floor was clean, every surface dustless, everything in order.

‘Right, now the tower.’

Down to the body of the church again, and along to the west end, to the curtained alcove and the narrow stairway that led to the bellringers’ room. This, again, was regularly used and scrupulously cleaned, no dust to trap intruding footprints. The looped ropes of an eight-bell peal dangled motionless, their padded grips striped spirally in red, white and blue cotton, like barbers’ poles. A fair amount of light came in from Gothic lancets. In one corner an open-treaded stairway, broad, solid and safe, slanted upwards into a narrow, dark trap above. George climbed, and emerged into a sort of attic limbo below the still invisible bells. A stout, boarded floor, roughly finished, an enclosing scent of old timber, and a sense of being suspended in half-light between two worlds. In the far corner another step-ladder, still with broad treads, pursued its upward way. Here people seldom came, and very few of them. Here there was dust, moderately thick, peacefully still, with the furred neatness of undisturbed places.

‘Here it gets more interesting,’ said Brice. ‘Look here, on this first stair. More than one set of feet has trodden up the middle, mostly the prints are overlaid and scuffed, but here there’s one left foot that stepped well to the side of the tread, and the mark’s quite clear. We’ve followed all the tracks up. This one just doesn’t seem to occur again, unless he very carefully trod always in the middle where the dust was already disturbed. It looks as if somebody got this far, and then changed his mind.’

‘And there are two sets of tracks beyond?’ asked George.

‘Two detectable. Could be more, but definitely two. But not this one. Or never distinct beyond this point.’

The soft dust, securely settled, had taken an excellent impression. An old shoe, trodden down at the heel, unevenly weighted, and with a distinct crack across the sole. A print that suggested a smallish foot in an over-large shoe, the foot of an older man who liked his comfort, and clung to the old friends that ensured it.

‘You’ve isolated and copied everything above that might be useful? Right, up we go!’ But even so George trod carefully, up into the dimly-lit bell-chamber, smelling of clean, dry must, and haunted by monstrous, still bronze shapes in the gloom. A large area of floor here, and only a runged ladder continuing the ascent. There was also a quantity of debris stacked in corners, left behind from the renovations, carved stones so weathered that the carving was almost obliterated, bits of voussoirs half worn away with corrosion but retaining a shape someone hadn’t wanted to throw away. All too massive to provide handy weapons, but the suggestion was there. And there were two huge but sadly decayed wooden chests, one with a disjointed lid propped back against the wall, and layer below layer of discoloured papers spread in some disorder within. George crossed to look more closely, for though age and damp had marked the contents in brownish ripples, only some of them were filmed with a layer of dust, and even that only superficial, and some of those half-uncovered below were perfectly clear of dust. The lid had not been thus open long, the contents had been only recently disturbed. He read titles of Victorian magazines, Ivy Leaves, Harmsworth Magazine, Musical Bits, and the modest headings of parish magazines. And some older, Gentleman’s Magazine, The Grand, as far back as the late eighteenth century. The floor beside the chest was trodden more or less clear of dust, dappled with treads so that no clear print was visible.

‘Somebody was interested,’ said George.

‘Yes, sir, and not so long ago. Maybe more than one, but one very recently indeed. But I doubt if they found much of anything.’

‘Not to interest Rainbow, one would imagine. This stuff might be treasure to a social historian, but not to an antiquarian in it for the money. No great value there. Unless, of course, there was some unusual item among the collection. We’ll have to go through all this in detail, but on the face of it it isn’t his cup of tea. Leave it just as it is. And meantime, we’ll ask the vicar if anyone has been up here, legitimately, in the last few months. There could be occasions when need arose.’

‘Well, above here it’s by ladder. The dust’s been rubbed off the middle of the rungs, as you’d expect, but not much else to be found. No traces of blood, or anything. I’ll lead the way.’

The ladders, built into place, proceeded by four short stages, making the circuit of the square tower, and brought them out by a low and narrow wooden door into daylight on the leads. The doorway, pointed Gothic in relatively new stone, was accommodated in the wall of the single corner turret, rising nine feet above the general level of the parapet, which was breast-high to a man of middle height. And abandoned to weather and moss in the corner by the turret lay the obvious fragments of the old stone voussoirs from the former archway, a few pitted and crumbling strips of moulding, a couple of decorative bosses worn to the fragility of shells.

‘Any indication of where he went over? It would be this side, wouldn’t it?’ After that spiral ascent it took a few seconds to regain a sense of direction, but a glance down over the parapet located the spot where Rainbow’s body had fallen. And even without Brice’s eager demonstration, there were the faint, pale streaks where nails had clawed ineffectively at the crest of the stonework. The embrasures between the merlons of the embattled wall dropped to waist-level. Not so hard, perhaps, to grip a man round the knees and hoist him over the edge. But still improbable for anyone to overbalance and fall. ‘Yes, that’s clear enough. He grabbed for the solid wall on either side of the embrasure.’

‘And there are two or three dark spots here that could be blood.’ Brice showed them, incredibly insignificant to be the only signs of a man’s death-blow, but blood, almost unquestionably. A fast bash and a heave over the edge, as Reece Goodwin had said.

George went back to the pile of stone fragments in the corner, and stood looking down at them attentively. Moss had bound them into a coagulated mass, a few small tufts of grass had found enough soil at the edges to survive. The one long strip of stony pallor, devoid of its thin green covering, showed like a scar. Something about ten inches long and no more than two wide, slightly curved, had been removed from there recently. A broken piece of moulding from the doorway arch? Whatever it was, the bare leads showed no sign of it now.

‘Supposing you had just used a length of stone to break a man’s skull, and tipped him over here into the churchyard,’ said George thoughtfully, ‘what would you do with the weapon? To make it disappear most effectively?’

‘Easy,’ said Moon promptly. ‘I’d throw it off the tower on the other side. Not only because that would separate it as far as possible from the body, in a churchyard which I’ve got to admit is a right tangle, too thickly populated ever to get mown properly – but on that side the congestion is worst and the disintegration most advanced. That’s the oldest part. Looking for a slice of stonework there would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.’

‘Pity,’ said George with sympathy, ‘because that’s just what you and your boys are going to be doing as from now.’

‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ agreed Moon with equanimity. ‘If there’s a hunk of local stone around with traces of blood, and not native to where it’s lying, we’ll get it for you before the light fails. I know this place better than I’ve ever bothered to get to know the palm of my hand. Mind if I borrow another piece to send after it? One of these bosses – no mistaking that for the one we shall be looking for, I take it?’

He had a way, both reassuring and unnerving, of being entrenched in certainty where the habits and cosmography of his chosen ground were concerned, and of proving right practically all the time. George was not in the least surprised when the sergeant came to him in the parish hall, around seven o’clock, bearing on a fold of paper a ten-inch sliver of stone, very gently curved, easily wielded in one hand by any well-grown person, and retaining a murderously sharp edge of moulding on its clean side, protected by having lain face-down in the discard pile. It had also, impaled upon this sharp edge, palpable traces of blood and matter, and a few short hairs.

‘Sorry I can’t guarantee any guilty prints, George,’ said Moon, easy and unofficial, since they were alone, ‘but I doubt if we’ve got the best field for ’em here. But this is the weapon, all right. We’ve marked the place where it crashed. I was about a couple of yards too far to the left with that boss, but about the same range. You’ve got a pretty hefty bloke to look for. It was a good throw, and he’d be in a hurry.’

There was a mass of statements to be matched up by then, and he sat down and joined in the work as soon as the murder weapon had been despatched to the forensic laboratory. They worked together with maximum placidity and understanding; but the statements were as void as they had both expected.

‘The vicar knows of only one occasion when somebody was up in the bell-chamber legitimately this year,’ George said, when they had been through everything. ‘That was in late May, when a swarm of bees invaded. Bees get in wherever they think they will. Anyhow, they moved in among the woodwork there, and if the Reverend Stephen didn’t want ’em, at least he knew of some who did.’

‘ “A swarm of bees in May…” ’, murmured Moon sententiously.

‘I know! “Worth a load of hay.” And we’re talking in Middlehope terms now. Well, the leading bass, Joe Llewelyn, is a fanatical bee-keeper, and wins prizes with his honey all over Britain. So Joe moved in to take the swarm. Nobody’d laid claim to it, it seems they may well have been wild bees. Joe came twice, once to size up the situation, and the second time with a skip, and an assistant to help him. And the assistant was Bossie Jarvis. I can well believe that if there was anything out of the ordinary going on, Bossie’d be in on it. Joe’s got no complaints. He got his bees, and Bossie was first-class as aide-de-camp. Those two seem to be the only people who have been up there with those two chests of magazines this year. Joe is sure both chests were left tidily closed when they came away. The one is more or less empty, anyhow, just a few rotting organ scores. Joe is particularly sure because Bossie, when not fully occupied, was poking about curiously in the other chest, the full one. He’d never be able to resist any reading matter, anyhow, the odder the better. But they left everything as they found it when they came down with the swarm.’

‘So that accounts for one person who disturbed the layers of dust,’ agreed Moon placidly. ‘But in May.’

‘And now it’s October, and somebody’s been at them very recently. And Rainbow is an antiquarian, but hardly likely to be after The Gentleman’s Magazine, even for seventeen-some-odd. So if it was Rainbow, what was he after? And why should he expect to find it there? And did he find it? And above all, can it possibly have been something worth killing him for?’

By the time they adjourned to pick up some cigarettes at the village shop before closing time, and snatch a pint and a sandwich at the ‘Gun Dog’, forensic had rung with reports on the matter found in Rainbow’s head-wound, and on that detected on the sliver of voussoir that had fractured his skull. The same stone-debris, the same species of moss, the same blood. The victim’s finger-nails had also provided specimens of all but the blood. No doubt about it, that was where he had died, and that was how he had died. Only who, and why, remained to be documented.

‘Which first?’ wondered George, stretching lengthily after hours of sitting. ‘Motive? My God, there’s no getting out of range of one motive, up here, is there? And yet ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of the time Middlehope is madly sane, if you’ll permit the paradox. They know this sort of solution only promotes a far worse problem. I don’t say they wouldn’t – I just say they wouldn’t without total safeguards for all the valley. And we also have a most equivocal lady, with a trail of admirers a mile long. And she surprisingly at home here, where he insulated himself totally. Perhaps he did everywhere? There are people who are chronically strangers here!’

‘Sad, that!’ said Sergeant Moon. ‘But what can you do, if they do the sealing? We’ve got nothing from the solicitors yet. Never take for granted the “Cui bono.” ’

‘I’ll see Bowes in person tomorrow morning,’ said George. ‘Do you feel as dry as I do?’

‘Like a lime-kiln. And I’m out of Woodbines. Mind if we stop in at Gwen’s?’

Gwen was Mrs Owen Lloyd, keeper of the shop, and mother of Toffee Bill.

‘A good idea,’ said George. ‘At closing time there might be something interesting to hear.’ For closing time did not hurry in the village. Trade ceased, but social exchanges frequently continued for another half-hour. And there was a sensation to be discussed today.

The shop was located on a corner, an enlarged house-window and an old, leaning roof above it, the usual invaluable local shop that has everything you’re ever going to need in an emergency, from gumstrip to TCP, and frozen peas to fresh eggs. It was as immaculate and brisk as all such genuinely professional shops are, and as informal, an exchange-point for news and gossip, a first-aid post for local protection, sending out feelers towards isolated old people unaccountably not seen for some days, delivering without benefit of fee where there was need, advising where regulation forms frightened intelligent but direct folk out of their normal routine. Its compact space of freezer and cases and shelves was everything anybody needed of modernity, without the gimmicks. And Gwen was a farmer’s daughter, fresh as new milk, large, fair and kind.

Miss de la Pole was standing at the counter when they entered, in the act of lighting one of the small cheroots she had just been buying. ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ she was saying comfortably, in her ripe baritone, ‘the child’s too close to it, that’s all. He just can’t digest it, it isn’t that he really cares. Give him a week or two, and he’ll have forgotten all about it. The man wasn’t likeable, you know, nobody can blame the boys for not liking him.’ She turned and recognised the police entering. ‘Why, hullo, George! We were just talking about this affair. Hullo, Jack, nice to know you’re standing by. I must say, it’s a shake-up for us all.’

‘It is,’ agreed Moon heartily. ‘Here yesterday and gone today. It makes you take stock.’

‘I’ve been doing that for some time,’ she assured him drily. ‘At my age, one does. You’re just a youngster, Jack. And then, I must have disliked him about as violently as anyone could, and that does make one take stock, as you put it.’

‘You didn’t, by any chance, make away with him, did you?’ asked George mildly.

‘No, sorry, George, I don’t really have the resolution, you know. I might dream about it, I’m unlikely ever to do it. In any case, I’m probably one of the last to see him alive, and he was mobile at the time, so I didn’t get the chance. I happened to look out of the window before I drew the curtains, last night, round about a quarter to twelve, and I saw him driving towards the gates, on his way home.’

Wonder of wonders, she was one of those whom the grapevine reached only vaguely, because in her aristocratic solitude she merely received, never queried. She knew Rainbow was dead, but had not acquired the details. Doubtless she knew he had been found broken under the church tower, but the time was unknown to her, and the spectacle of a man driving home at a time when he had almost certainly been dead presented her with no problems. Here was one who could have confessed to his murder with absolute security, her guilt disproved within ten minutes.

‘Oh, really?’ said George cautiously. ‘Coming down from the head of the valley, was he? Which car was he using?’

‘The little sports job.’ Her voice was faintly disapproving. The Aston Martin was not what she would have expected of Rainbow. ‘Very handsome,’ she admitted, ‘as a work of art. Not his style, would you think? There was something so – orthodox and cautious – about him.’

Well, that was something definite. She knew the little sports job too well to be mistaken, and she had the incisive mind that is always scrupulous in reporting and accurate in timing. She had something else, too, the shrewdness to note their very slight stiffening, and the brief glance they had exchanged, and that was all it took to make her look again at what she had seen and said, and wonder exactly what had taken Rainbow up the valley towards Wales after choir practice, and above all, what had taken him back to the church at nearly midnight, since that was where he had been found. From that it was but a step to pondering whether the Aston Martin had been left in its garage or taken out again, and whether, in fact, it had actually been Rainbow driving it…

A remote and thoughtful stillness took possession of Miss de la Pole’s noble countenance, out of which concerned and steely eyes studied George and Sergeant Moon, and drew private conclusions.

‘His missus chose the Aston, I fancy,’ said Sergeant Moon with a face of bovine innocence, and paid for his Woodbines. ‘They both drove it, though. Thanks, Gwen, love!’

He led the way out, and George was aware, as he was, of the deep silence of the two women left behind them in the shop. Moon was grinning.

‘Whose side are you on?’ George wondered tolerantly.

‘Well, be interesting to see what results, won’t it? You going to get that pint and bite before you go and tackle the lady?’

‘I am,’ said George, and set course for the ‘Gun Dog’. ‘I’m going to need it!’