The Reaper

Two

Chocolate cakes were in heavy demand at the Fox-ford Church fete, held in the rectory garden. The devil's food, Black Forest, death by chocolate, brownies, chocolate fudge and chocolate orange sold in the first hectic ten minutes, before anyone bought coffee or lemon. Apple cake was almost as popular. In fact, anything with fresh fruit in it, cheesecake, pies and tarts included, sold easily. Rich fruit cakes, being more of a winter treat, were slower to go, but they found customers in the first hour.

Rachel Jansen was assisting. She would have been better on the garden stall, because she knew as much about plants as anyone in the village, but a local nurseryman had an arrangement with the organisers and sold his own produce, giving a percentage to the fete profits. The honour of running the cake stall went to Cynthia Haydenhall, the Chair of the Women's Institute, who behaved as if she had cooked them all herself. Rachel enjoyed Cynthia's company in the way she enjoyed rum truffles and Bette Midler: in small delicious amounts. Cyn was fun and the source of wonderful gossip, and she liked to dominate. Her improbably black hair was scraped back, bunched and fixed with Spanish combs, suggesting that when things went quiet she might climb on the trestle table, clap her hands and perform a noisy flamenco over the cakes. There was no chance of people ignoring her. She had made it clear at the beginning that she would run the show, price the cakes, sell them and handle the money. Fine. Rachel was content to set out, wrap and keep things tidy. To be fair, the system worked. They reached the point when the only cakes left were a slab of Madeira as solid as cheese, some weary-looking coconut pyramids and Miss Cumberbatch's toffee crispies, steadily congealing into a solid mass attracting wasps.

"Should we cover these?" Rachel suggested to Cynthia, knowing it was unwise to do anything without asking.

"The toffee dreadfuls? I don't know what with, amigo. We've only got this roll of kitchen towel, and that will stick to them."

"They won't be saleable if we let the wasps crawl all over them."

"It's an open question if they ever were saleable. Is Miss Cumberbatch still here?"

"Over by the bottle stall, with her brother."

"Right." With that decision made, Cynthia dipped below the table for a cake tin. "In here, while madam has her back turned. I'll dispose of them later."

"We can do the same with the others. They're never going to sell now."

Rachel should have known better than to make two suggestions in the space of a minute.

"Oh, yes they will," Cynthia informed her. "The rector hasn't been round yet. Last year at the end of the fete he bought everything off the stall just so that no one's feelings were hurt."

They looked across the lawn to where the Reverend Otis Joy was trying the coconut shy. On this warm afternoon not many had bothered with it. His throw missed the coconuts by a mile, perhaps on purpose. The rector wasn't supposed to win things.

"So he gets the cakes nobody wants," Rachel said. "Poor guy. He deserves better. We should have saved something he can eat."

"We don't know what his taste is."

"I bet he likes chocolate. Devil's food cake. All men go for that."

Cynthia vibrated her lips at the idea. "You can't offer devil's food to a bible-basher."

"He'd see the joke. He's got a sense of humour."

"In spades," Cynthia agreed. "He could tour the clubs with his sermons."

"As a stand-up?"

Their eyes met and each of them stifled a giggle.

"And he's so relaxed about everything."

"Not a bad looker, either," said Cynthia.

"Generous, too. He'd give you the shirt off his back," said Rachel, her thoughts returning, as they had more than once, to the afternoon when she'd called for the Help the Aged sack. The rector in his apron was sharp in her memory. The crop of silky dark hair across his chest had been a revelation.

"That's what Christianity is all about," said Cynthia.

"Oh?"

"It's his job. Thinking of others."

"But it's easy to be generous if you can afford it," Rachel pointed out. "Vicars don't earn much."

"Don't you worry about him," said Cynthia. "He lives rent free in the largest house in the village. He's always smartly dressed. I expect he has a private income, on top of his stipend."

"Is that possible?"

"Of course it is. Family money. Stocks and shares. Property. He could be better off than we are."

Rachel thought back to the two shirts in the Help the Aged bag, not frayed at the cuffs and not a button missing.

Cynthia returned to the subject of the cakes. "Leave out the coconut pyramids, anyway," she summed up. "They're edible. Not everyone's choice, that's obvious, but Otis can well afford them. We'll spare him the Madeira. It could sink the QE2, by the look of it."

The way the "Otis" tripped casually from Cynthia's tongue was noted, as she intended. Every woman in the parish was on tenterhooks to see who would make a play for the rector. Cynthia wasn't on first name terms. Who did she think she was kidding? As a divorced woman living alone she might consider herself a catch, but she was at least eight years older than he was, if not ten.

Rachel, at twenty-eight, was about his age, and trapped in a childless marriage with Gary, forty-two, pot-bellied and trying to beat hair loss by training his side bits across the top.

As for the rector, the word from his previous parish was that he had been married to a pretty French woman, who had died quite suddenly.

Tragic. He deserved a second chance at matrimony. But not with Cynthia, surely.

And now he had taken his three throws and missed, and was striding across the lawn towards them. He'd taken off his blazer for the coconut shy and swung it over one shoulder. In his sunglasses and straw hat, he could have passed for a youthful Harrison Ford.

He stretched out his hands. "This is where the action is. I couldn't get near until now. Tell me, ladies, is it you, or the cakes?"

"Well, the cakes have all gone, but we're still here," said Cynthia, beaming and entirely missing the point.

"Am I too late, then? No, I see you have some of my all-time favourites-marguerites."

"Coconut pyramids, actually." Cynthia couldn't resist correcting him.

"Whatever. I'll take them. And the damage, Mrs. Hayden-hall?"

Rachel heard and savoured that little touch of formality.

"You can have them for thirty pence," said Cynthia.

"No special price for the clergy," said the rector. "I'll pay full whack."

"Twenty-five, then," Rachel said at once.

He thought a moment, then laughed, and looked at Cynthia. "You weren't over-charging me?"

"It was worth a try," said Rachel. She was careful not to look at Cynthia. "In a good cause."

When the rector had moved on, bag of" cakes in hand, to the next stall, Cynthia said to Rachel, "What a strange thing to say. It made me look quite foolish."

There was an unkind answer to that, but Rachel held herself in check. "Just a bit of fun, Cyn. He knew what was going on. They're human, you know."

Cynthia turned her head like a hen and looked in the opposite direction.

Rachel nudged her in the ribs. "I saw him eyeing up your coconut pyramids."

She swung around, her spirits restored. "Go on-you didn't!"

"He fancies you something rotten."

"The rector?" Cynthia's eyes shone. "He ought to be ashamed of himself."

Not far away, someone else was discussing the rector. Owen Cumberbatch had recently come to live with his sister in Fox-ford. Tub-shaped and triple-chinned from many years' consumption of pub food and beer, Owen had been a publican all his adult life, steadily drinking the profits. When the brewery retired him, he no longer had a home, so he appealed to his family for help, and his youngest sister, being single and in possession of a good house, was the family's choice for fall guy. Owen was already well known in Foxford as a man eager to impress, claiming friendship with Peter O'Toole, Denis Thatcher, Placido Domingo, Tiger Woods and the late John Lennon, and the names were always prefaced with "my old chum." To be fair, he usually had some intriguing inside knowledge of his chums to confide, just enough to create uncertainty.

Pausing by the bottle stall, he was telling Bill Armistead, the organiser of the Neighbourhood Watch scheme, outrageous things about the rector's career as a serial killer. "Oh, yes, he's clever with it, but there's no denying he did away with several in his last parish, including his wife and the sexton. 1 lived in the next town, you see, so I saw what was going on."

"I didn't know sextons still existed," said Armistead, sidestepping the main issue. He didn't want to be caught discussing such slanderous nonsense.

"There's one less at St. Saviour's, Old Morden, I can tell you that," said Owen with a smile.

"What do they do exactly?"

"Sextons? Look after the building and the churchyard, dig the graves and toll the bell, of course. This one was an awkward cuss, I heard. He disappeared one night. He's on the missing persons' list to this day, but no one's going to find him. Only Otis Joy knows where he is, and he won't tell."

Armistead looked about him. Nobody was close enough to listen. "What would a man of God be doing, knocking people off? I can't believe a priest would kill people."

"That's the clever part. No one suspects him."

"Except you."

"Except me, yes. It's an ideal situation for a serial killer when you think about it. A position of trust. Nobody expects the priest to slip them poison in the Communion wine."

"Now that's ridiculous."

"There you go. You don't believe he'd do it, so he'd get away with it."

"You've got a fertile imagination, Owen, but you want to be careful. If he's really in the murdering line, he'll top you one of these days for spreading stories like this."

Owen took that as a compliment. "I'll watch out for him, then, be on my guard day and night."

At last came the time when the raffle was drawn, the bottles of sweet sherry, the knitted dolls, the cheap chocolates and the baskets of fruit claimed, and they could dismantle the stalls. The cakes had raised over eighty pounds. Cynthia strutted across to hand the money to Stanley Burrows, the parish treasurer, confident that her stall had raised more than any other.

Rachel was left to deal with the trestle table. She didn't mind. It was a relief to do something her own way. And even better when someone behind her said, "You can't lift this on your own."

She knew the voice. A little frisson of excitement fizzed through her.

Together, she and the rector carried the table across to the church hall and stacked it with the others. "How about a cuppa in the rectory?" he offered.

Blushing, she said, "That'p kind, but-";

"It's open house. Other people are coming."

"Oh. In that case …"

"And I won't be serving coconut pyramids."

She laughed. "Saving them all for yourself?"

"Don't ask."

"But the whole point about the pyramids is that they were built to last, weren't they?"

"Not these."

The great and good of the parish gathered in the rectory and Rachel was disturbed to find that through some oversight Cynthia had been left out. It couldn't have been deliberate. She went outside to look for her, but she had definitely gone. She would have wanted to be there, and should have been.

Returning, she went into the kitchen to help, not from altruism, but to get a sight of how the rector lived. The kitchen was huge, old-fashioned and spotless.

Two full kettles were slowly coming to the boil. He was alone in there unwrapping biscuits, trying inexpertly to loosen the paper at the top.

"Careful," she said, and some little demon made her add, "You may need your apron."

His eyes flashed and he was quick to respond, "I only put it on to answer the door."

She showed him how to cut the packet with a knife. She arranged the biscuits on a plate and offered to carry them in.

"Great idea-but not till I pour the tea. The Potter children."

"Are they keen on biscuits?"

"Anything. On the last Sunday school outing, Kenny Potter ate three people's picnic lunches and was sick before we got to Weymouth."

"Watch out, then," said Rachel. "I saw him with his sisters going through the hamburgers this afternoon, followed by candy floss."

He pulled a face. "Pink alert."

She laughed. "So how can I be useful?"

He gave that a moment's thought and said mysteriously, "By not being useful. Take a seat. Relax." He went on to explain, "You've been hard at it all afternoon. This is my chance to thank you."

"And all the others," she pointed out.

"And all the others," he repeated in a downbeat tone that Rachel took as a compliment.

Since this seemed to be getting personal, she said, "But you've been on duty like the rest of us."

"So I have," he said. "Let's forget the others and clear off to the pub." He aimed two fingers, pistol-style, at his head. "Joke. Shouldn't have said that, you a married woman, and me … I think we're coming to the boil, don't you?" He took a large blue teapot to the kettle and warmed it in the approved fashion before tossing in several teabags. "And if anyone mentions coffee, pretend you didn't hear."

Rachel carried in the first tray. This wasn't her imagination. The rector was getting frisky. If that was what the church fete did to him, what was he like after a couple of beers?

She didn't find out that evening, though she stayed long enough for a glass of the elderflower wine he had bought from the bottle stall. With a couple of other people she helped stack up plates beside the deep, old-fashioned sink that had been there since the forties. The rector was insisting that he would do his own washing up later.

"He could do with a dishwasher," one of the women commented.

Nobody spoke, but there were smiles all round.

Gary wasn't in when she got back, and it was too late to do anything useful in the garden, so she made herself a sandwich and settled down to watch Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick. Men with devilry appealed to her, at least on screen. There wasn't much of the devil in Gary these days. On Saturday evenings he was with his jazz circle, a pathetic crowd of middle-aged blokes in black T-shirts and sandals who drank real ale and listened to records of players of fifty years ago they referred to familiarly as Dizzie, Bird and Bix. The sight of them stretching their necks to bob their bald heads like wading birds was not pretty. Upstairs Gary had a tenor saxophone he had been trying to master ever since his schooldays. She found out about it only after they married.

And why did they marry? There had been a spark of something when Gary had come to paint the outside of her parents' house and posted a note through her bedroom window suggesting a date. She'd always had a wild streak in her own character, so she didn't hesitate. He was in better shape in those days, with dark, sleeked-back hair. He knew which clothes to wear, took her to discos, to parties, to London. Helped her learn her lines for the plays she was in. Talked about what they would do with their lives, the foreign countries they would visit on their world tour. Made love to her under the stars on the beach at Weymouth, inside the tower on top of Glastonbury Tor, on a punt (carefully) on the river at Oxford, in a first-class compartment on the last train home from Paddington and in a hot-air balloon over Bristol, drunk on champagne, while the other passengers pretended to admire the view from the opposite side. He took risks then. He would have done it between the aisles in Sainsbury's if she had asked. Never mentioned the heart murmur he was supposed to have had since childhood. She heard about that much later. That murmur was his excuse to avoid all strenuous work. "Can't take risks," he'd say. So the garden was Rachel's responsibility. Fortunately she didn't mind. Plants in their infinite variety fascinated her. Without knowing their botanical names she had a passion for flowers and a sound knowledge of the best way to care for them. And, it has to be said, they gave her the excuse to get out of the house when Gary was home.

"Can't take risks." These days the biggest risk Gary took was stepping out of doors without his baseball cap. Didn't want the wind blowing that streak of hair off his scalp.

She told him once that the Walkman he used to listen to jazz was rubbing on his scalp, making him bald. Mean. He was sensitive about hair loss, but she was sick to the back teeth of hearing the tinny sound. He believed her for a while and took to wearing the headband under his chin, which made no difference to her frustration and just made him look more ridiculous than ever, with his silly spit of hair linking up to form an oval around his head, like a slipped halo.

There had been other boyfriends before Gary. She attracted them, knew how to perform the balancing act between sex and her reputation. She liked men, needed someone to share with. Yet by nature she was not a liberated woman. Oh, she was willing to have a career, make a contribution, but basically what she craved above everything was marriage and children. Chances had gone by. Men more attractive than Gary-men she had slept with-had found other partners and taken jobs in places she would have adored to live in, one in San Francisco and another Paris. Even Aberdeen, where her second lover ended up working for an oil company, would have been an improvement on Foxford, Wiltshire-or Wilts, as she thought of it.

No use moaning, she often told herself these days. Get on with life. The marriage was childless and barren of romance, so she put her energy into her part-time job, three days at the health centre as a receptionist; the garden, which she'd cultivated as a traditional cottage garden, with shrub roses, laburnum, foxgloves and herbs; and amateur dramatics, always a passion, plus her charity work and her support of the church. It was her Christian sense of duty that made divorce too awful to contemplate. True, she had erred and strayed in her youth, but she took the solemn vows of Holy Matrimony seriously. She had not been with another man since her wedding day.

Gary came in around eleven-thirty, after she had rewound Jack Nicholson and was watching some inane Saturday night programme aimed at the teenage audience. He wasn't a smoker, but some of his friends were and she could smell the cigarette fumes clinging to his clothes. He peeled a banana and flopped into a chair, the baseball cap still on. "How'd it go?"

"The fete, you mean?" she jogged his memory. He wouldn't recall how she was spending her day. "Top result. With weather like that, it couldn't miss. We were really busy on the cake stall."

"Did you bring one home?"

She shook her head. "It isn't the thing."

"What isn't?"

"For the people in charge to put cakes aside for their own use."

"Very high-minded. What happened to the ones you didn't sell?"

"Everything went. If you really want cake, I can cook one tomorrow."

"Don't bother. You'll be at church tomorrow."

"Not all day. There's time."

Gary shook his head. "So how did he shape up?"

"Who?"

"The new sky pilot."

"Have some respect, Gary. He's the rector. And he isn't all that new. He's been here since last year."

"A bit flash isn't he? Wears red socks."

"I hadn't noticed the socks," she said casually and untruthfully. "Who cares what colour his socks are if he does his job well? He stayed all afternoon."

Gary laughed. "He couldn't very well bog off, could he? What time did it end?"

"Five, or thereabouts." She chose not to speak of her invitation to the rectory afterwards. Instead she said, "He made a good speech to open the fete. He said the word 'fete' came from 'feast.' He'd found a parish magazine from the nineteen-thirties with a correction notice about a day of prayer and feasting in support of the Congo mission. It should have read prayer and fasting. He's always got a funny story."

Gary said without smiling, "Must be the way he tells them. What are they saying about the bishop, then?"

"The bishop?"

"Yours, isn't he? Glastonbury? It was on the local news tonight. Took a jump, didn't he?"

"The bishop?"

"They found him at the bottom of some quarry and his BMW at the top."

"Oh, that's awful! You're serious? Dead?"

"He made sure of that. The drop looked like Beachy Head. What made him do that, for Christ's sake?"

"I can't believe it. He confirmed me."

"P'raps he was on something. Thought he could fly with the angels."

Gary's tasteless humour left her cold. "Poor man."

They stared at the screen for a while, locked in their own thoughts. Rachel eventually suggested coffee.

"Don't bother." He reached for the remote control and turned down the sound, the unfailing sign that he wanted to say something momentous, however casual he tried to make it sound. "I was talking to the lads. I don't know who mentioned it. Gordon, maybe. There's a travel agent in Frome offering three weeks in New Orleans for nine hundred quid. That's everything. Flight, hotel."

"In America?"

"That's where New Orleans is."

"You're thinking of going?"

"It's the jazz capital of the world. Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver."

"And you'd like to go?" she pressed him. She would have preferred New York or San Francisco, but she would cheerfully settle for New Orleans, strolling the sunny streets in shorts, eating Cajun food in the French Quarter or on one of those Mississippi paddle boats. It would be the nearest thing to the world tour they had promised each other all those years ago. "When?"

"It has to be soon. The offer only lasts through September."

"I'm game," she said. "We can afford it, can't we?"

Looking uncomfortable, Gary ran his stubby fingers under the neck of the T-shirt and eased it off his skin. "It's a trip for the guys."

"What?"

"If I go, it's for the music."

She sat forward. "I'm not included? Is that what you're saying?"

"Nothing is fixed yet."

"I'm going to bed."

She left him in front of the screen, trying to look as if there was something of interest going on. Upstairs, in the privacy of the shower, she tasted her tears, and mouthed the word "bastard" repeatedly, hating him for his selfishness and herself for letting it get to her. Was this what twelve years of marriage added up to, putting up with life in this poxy village, living decently, staying faithful to a boring, unattractive nerd who ignored her except when he wanted "a ride," as he crudely called it? She felt a visceral rage at the humiliation, the discovery that she hadn't even entered his plans.

Well, she wouldn't demean herself by begging to go with him. Even if he saw how wounded she was, changed his mind and condescended to let her join him, she would refuse.

In their kingsize bed she lay so close to the edge of the mattress that she could feel the beading under her knee. She heard the selfish sonofabitch come upstairs, take off his things, go to the bathroom. Next, his bare feet crossing the carpet and finally the springs moving as he got into bed. She breathed evenly, feigning sleep. If he reached for her as he usually did on a Saturday, she would take her pillow and sleep in the spare room.

He had the sense to leave her alone.