Читать книгу The Killer in the Choir - Simon Brett - Страница 9

The trouble is, thought Carole Seddon peevishly, that no one knows any of the old hymns any more. Though devoutly anti-religious, she did have standards when it came to certain matters of British tradition. And she was strongly of the view that children should be brought up to know the basic repertory of hymn tunes that she’d had to learn at their age.

Carole was not a frequent visitor to All Saints Church in the village of Fethering. Lack of faith precluded regular Sunday attendance and, as a divorced woman in her fifties, she was not invited to many weddings or christenings. So, it was just funerals, really. And it was a funeral that had brought her to All Saints that Thursday morning in late February.

She had not known the deceased, Leonard Mallett, well, nor liked him very much. Of his professional career, in the world of insurance, she knew nothing. But they had both been on the same committee, which he had chaired, for the Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront. Though the group only met a couple of times a year, Carole had found out through the local grapevine that most of the other members would be attending the funeral. So, after the disproportionate amount of soul-searching that she brought to every social situation, she’d decided she ought to join them. Though Leonard himself was obviously beyond being offended, and Carole hardly knew his wife Heather, she still felt the danger that her absence might be interpreted as some kind of snub (unaware of the more likely truth that it simply wouldn’t be noticed).

So, she was there in the church. Though there are many beautiful old churches in West Sussex, some dating back to Saxon times, All Saints Fethering was not one of them. It had been built by the Victorians in dour dark red brick and seemed somehow too high and cavernous ever to feel welcoming. As with every such institution in the country, the age of its dwindling congregation mounted with each passing year, and there didn’t seem to be many young people leaping in to replace those called to a Higher Place.

Leonard Mallett’s funeral, however, had very nearly filled the church. Despite arriving characteristically early, Carole had been ushered into one of the side pews. This vantage point, though not in the favoured central block, gave her a good view of the altar and choir stalls, and of the trestles on which the deceased’s coffin would shortly rest.

At the door, she had been handed an order of service. A quick glance through its contents revealed no surprises. The hymns were totally predictable. As were the readings, even down to the inevitability of Joyce Grenfell’s ‘If I should die before the rest of you’ and Henry Scott Holland’s one about having ‘slipped away to the next room’. (Carole had nothing against either of them as poems; she just wished people might occasionally choose something else. But funerals were rare and stressful events for most people, so perhaps it was too much to hope for originality.)

On the order of service’s cover there was a colour photograph of Leonard Mallett. Characteristically unsmiling, he wore the frustrated expression of a man who wasn’t at that moment getting his own way. It was not a face that inspired affection.

But something about the man had inspired the healthy turnout for his funeral. There were a few Fethering regulars, some members of the Seafront committee, to whom Carole gave minimal nodding acknowledgement, but most of the congregation were unfamiliar to her. Presumably people from Leonard’s former London life, senior managers from the world of insurance, who had ventured down to the South Coast to pay their dutiful respects in the forbidding draughtiness of All Saints Fethering.

Somehow, to Carole, the church’s bleak austerity felt appropriate for the funeral of someone she had hardly known.

In Fethering, of course, the fact that you hardly knew someone didn’t mean that you were totally ignorant of their circumstances. Gossip could be relied on to generate an extensive dossier, based on some fact and much conjecture, about every resident of that South Coast village. And, although Carole had received none of the information from the man himself, she knew that Heather was Leonard Mallett’s second wife, though it was a first marriage for her. They’d had no children together, but he had a daughter with his first wife, who had subsequently died (though nobody knew exactly when). The girl was called Alice. She was rumoured to be an actress who didn’t get much work, but who lived quite comfortably in London on an allowance from her father.

Fethering gossip had it that Alice was engaged to be married. It also said that she didn’t get on with her stepmother. Though there was evidence about the forthcoming wedding, because it was due to take place at All Saints, the bit about tensions between the two women was pure speculation. But then Fethering gossip always tended to go for the rather simplistic fairy-tale interpretation of family relationships. It wouldn’t entertain the idea of a stepmother and stepdaughter who got on well together.

Leonard Mallett was said to have been some fifteen years older than his second wife. He had moved to the village, into a large house called Sorrento on the exclusive Shorelands Estate, towards the end of a long and lucrative career bossing people about in insurance. After a few years of daily commuting to London, he had devoted his retirement to bossing people about in Fethering. It was on his initiative that the Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront committee had been set up, and the fact that he had persuaded Carole Seddon, not by nature a joiner of anything, to become a member, was a measure of his bossing skills.

She had not enjoyed his hectoring manner at meetings, but could not fault the fact that he had set up the committee. On her morning walks with her Labrador, Gulliver, she had become increasingly aware of the pollution affecting Fethering Beach. Every day’s tides deposited more tar-soiled plastic items on the shoreline. And tourists seemed deliberately to avoid the litter bins on the prom, preferring to scatter their burger boxes, polystyrene chip trays and ice-cream wrappers directly on to the ground. As she grew older, and perhaps since she had been blessed with two granddaughters, Carole had become increasingly worried about the legacy of pollution being bequeathed to future generations.

Fethering gossip’s dossier on Heather Mallett was less detailed than the one it had compiled on her husband. This was in part because she was rarely seen around the village. Though Leonard was a constant and loud presence at all Fethering events, and particularly in its only pub, the Crown & Anchor, his wife kept herself to herself. She was rarely to be seen shopping on the Parade. Presumably, she favoured the large anonymous supermarkets, like Sainsbury’s in Rustington, over the local outlets. The only guaranteed sightings of her in the village were at church on Sundays, and at Friday rehearsals for the All Saints choir, of which she was a diligent member.

Heather Mallett was a pallid creature, who favoured anonymous colours: beige, light pinks and taupe. Though probably about the same age as Carole, she had the resigned air of a woman who did not expect post-menopausal life to yield any excitements. Unlike Carole, whose hair had been cut in the same helmet shape since schooldays when it was dark brown until now when it was grey, Heather’s hair, that pale blonde which edges almost imperceptibly into white, was cut very short. Like Carole, she usually wore undistinguished rimless glasses.

That was the first thing about her at the funeral that looked odd. In place of the familiar, almost transparent pair, Heather Mallett was wearing glasses with thick, oxblood-coloured frames. They looked almost fashionable, and certainly emphasized the rather fine brown eyes which nobody had ever noticed before. She had let her hair grow longer too. And the black trouser suit she wore was almost ‘sharp’, making a definite change from her normal dowdy appearance.

The other odd thing that morning in All Saints was that Heather Mallett did not follow the coffin into the church, in the customary manner of a newly bereaved widow. Nor did she subsequently take her place in the front pew, attended by sympathetic family members. Instead, she had entered earlier, with the rest of the choir, all of whom wore their usual clothes rather than cassocks. Following someone’s directive – possibly the widow’s – they had not ‘robed’ for the occasion.

The line-up of the choir was predictable. Obviously – and inevitably – more women than men, and women whose average age was pushing seventy. The youngest female members were an acne-plagued teenage girl and a thin, tough-looking woman in her forties. The girl Carole recognized from behind the till at Allinstore, Fethering’s uniquely inefficient supermarket. The woman she did not know, which, given the way the village worked, probably meant she came from elsewhere or was a recent arrival.

The male components comprised two. There was a bustling, bearded man in his early seventies, whom Carole did actually know. He was a retired schoolteacher called Ruskin Dewitt, who had also been a member of Leonard Mallett’s Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront committee. The other male was a boy enduring the aching awkwardness of early adolescence, whose main aim in life seemed to be not to catch the eye of the Allinstore checkout girl. So deficient was the choir in male voices that the church organist, whose name Carole happened to know was Jonny Virgo, joined lustily in all the singing.

As did Heather Mallett. Which still seemed odd to Carole. She supposed that, for someone to whom singing the praises of God was important, to do so might feel like the best tribute one could bring to the celebration of a husband’s life. But it still didn’t feel quite right. Carole disliked witnessing any divergence from the conventions and rituals that she didn’t believe in.

Nor was she the only person registering disapproval. In the front pew, next to the aisle, in the seat which might have been considered the rightful place of the widow, sat the deceased’s daughter, Alice Mallett. Though Fethering gossip placed her in her early thirties, she had the look of a recalcitrant schoolgirl. The loose black dress she wore failed to disguise her dumpiness, and the black straw Zorro-style sombrero had not been a good fashion choice.

Beside her sat a tall man of matching dumpiness, dressed in conventional pin-striped suit and black tie. His attentiveness to his companion suggested that he might be the fiancé Fethering gossip had announced Alice Mallett was about to marry. Regrettably, the full resources of the Fethering grapevine had not been able to come up with a name for him.

The All Saints choir was in place by the time the coffin entered, accompanied by Jonny Virgo the organist’s expert playing of Bach’s ‘Cantata No. 208 Sheep May Safely Graze’. The chief undertaker, in his tall black hat at the front of the procession, appeared to be enjoying his master-of-ceremonies role, and the pall-bearers looked more as if they were his employees than dignitaries of the insurance world.

As they lowered the coffin on to its waiting trestles, the vicar moved into position in front of the altar and requested that the congregation remain standing for the first hymn, predictably enough, ‘The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, is Ended’.

‘… and the fact that we are all gathered here to see Leonard off on his final journey shows how much he meant to every one of us.’

Carole found the vicar’s words arguable. She certainly wasn’t in All Saints because the deceased had meant much to her. And looking round at the other attendees, she didn’t reckon he had figured a great deal in their affections either. It was just social convention, not any genuine emotion, that had brought them all out for the funeral. (Very occasionally, Carole Seddon worried that her cynicism about the motivation of her fellow human beings was increasing, but she could quickly reassure herself by observation of their behaviour, which showed no signs of improving.)

‘Leonard,’ the vicar went on, ‘was very successful in his professional career, in the world of insurance, and I am delighted to welcome many of his former colleagues to All Saints today for this … celebration of his life. When he moved down here to Fethering, he did not just put his feet up, as many retired people seem to do. He entered thoroughly into the affairs of our community, bringing those organizational skills which had served him so well in his business life, into “doing his bit” for our village. It was Leonard who set up a committee for the Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront, and he did sterling work in …’

It was clear to Carole that, as was so often the case with contemporary funerals, the celebrant knew nothing about the person whose departure his church was hosting. Maybe the two had met through Heather’s connection with the choir, but Leonard Mallett had resolutely not been a church-goer. Clearly, the two men had spent very little time together.

Apart from anything else, the vicar was relatively new to the Parish of All Saints. Of course, the dearth of church-goers in Fethering did not mean that his arrival had passed unnoticed by the wider village community. He had already been much discussed and commented on, before and after he took up the post. Lack of interest in religion in no way precluded interest in a new vicar, which in a small village reached almost Jane Austen proportions.

Carole reviewed the dossier which Fethering gossip had already compiled on him. The Reverend Bob Hinkley had not spent his entire career in the church. He had worked ‘in industry’ and ‘apparently been quite high up’, though nobody could specify what industry he had been in, or how high up he had been in it. But he was said to have had a ‘Damascene conversion’ in his early fifties and decided then to train for holy orders. The career change had caused him, everyone agreed, ‘a serious loss of income’.

To the acquisitive minds of Fethering, this was definitely a bad thing. But perhaps not such a bad thing for Bob Hinkley as it might have been for most people. Because Bob Hinkley was rumoured to have ‘a rich wife’. It was here that the contents of the Fethering gossip dossier became rather sketchy. Because nobody had actually met his rich wife.

Since this largely invented person was not sharing the vicarage with her husband, the locals, once again going for the obvious explanation, deduced that there was ‘something wrong with the marriage’. The sages of the Crown & Anchor even speculated further that his wife wanted a divorce, but Bob wouldn’t entertain the idea because it didn’t fit his image as a man of the cloth, particularly one recently arrived in a new parish. Speculation in Fethering, as ever, had only a nodding acquaintance with the truth. When the village residents got better acquainted with the new vicar, no doubt his dossier would grow bigger and, hopefully, more accurate. They would even find out that he didn’t have a wife, rich or otherwise.

‘So,’ the droning encomium continued, ‘as our brother Leonard moves on from this world to a better one, it is with the comforting knowledge that he lived a fulfilling and useful life …’

Carole’s cynicism struck again. How could Bob Hinkley possibly know that? How could anyone ever be sure what actually went on in another person’s life? From what she’d seen of Leonard Mallett, he gave the impression of being a complete bastard.

She knew the All Saints church hall quite well. There were few rentable public spaces in Fethering, so it was impossible to live in the village for long without having to attend some function at the venue. And though it was regularly maintained by the local council, the space never felt welcoming. Each repainting of the interior favoured the same cream and pale green paint and, even when bunting was hung out for wedding receptions, or lametta for Christmas parties, the hall remained resolutely institutional. Appropriate, perhaps, for the wake after a funeral of someone you hadn’t known well, or particularly liked.

It was not natural sociability that prompted Carole to go to the church hall. Her instinct would have been to head straight from All Saints back to her house, High Tor, but her curiosity proved stronger. There was something about the Mallett family set-up that intrigued her. Maybe it was just Heather’s glasses and longer hair, a suggestion that the invisible woman of Fethering was about to become more conspicuous.

If that was happening, the process was clearly continuing at her husband’s wake. By the time Carole arrived in the hall, Heather was already quaffing champagne and laughing extravagantly in the centre of a group of her church choir cronies. Perhaps it was sheer relief at the end of the ceremony, or a complex reaction to the grief of bereavement, but Heather Mallett seemed to have slipped very easily into Merry Widow mode.

One of the group Carole recognized was the church organist, who had so vigorously played and sung throughout the ceremony. On the authority of Fethering gossip, Jonny Virgo had relatively recently retired as Head of Music at some local school, where he had, as throughout his own education and subsequent career, suffered many jokes at the expense of his surname. He lived with his mother, now well into her nineties, in one of the old fishermen’s cottages down near Fethering Yacht Club. Whenever this fact was mentioned by Fethering gossips, it was done with a raised eyebrow, an implicit comment on his likely sexuality. But Jonny Virgo was believed never to have had a partner, of any gender. Nor had any scandal ever attached to his name.

Carole noticed that he stood rather awkwardly, as though he were in pain, on the fringe of Heather Mallett’s entourage. He wore a dull brown suit, and at the neck of his white shirt a cravat of a maroon paisley design, a slightly dated gesture to leisurewear. But the choirmaster seemed very much part of the communal jollity. Carole felt the instinctive recoil she did from any kind of hearty group dynamic. She never felt relaxed in the company of more than one person – and very rarely even then.

There hadn’t been anyone with filled glasses on trays to greet the guests arriving from the church, and Carole didn’t yet want to join the throng at the drinks table over by the serving hatch to the kitchen. She really felt like a glass of wine, but knew she’d probably end up with a cup of coffee. It wasn’t even twelve o’clock yet. She didn’t want to get a reputation. And reputations were easily acquired in Fethering.

Carole checked out the crowd for other familiar faces. It was a local routine that she knew well. All that was needed at an occasion like this was one person with whom you had previously exchanged dialogue. Although everyone in the village knew to the last detail exactly who everyone else in the village was, to introduce yourself directly was not considered good form. The correct procedure was to start talking to someone you’d talked to before, in the hope that they would then introduce you to people you hadn’t talked to before. And then, at the next awkward village event, you would have a wider acquaintance with whom you could initiate conversation. And so, in theory, your social circle expanded.

Carole looked round desperately for any fellow members of the Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront committee, apart from Ruskin Dewitt, who had looked straight through her, as if they’d never met before. She couldn’t see any others. Maybe they all felt that they’d done their bit by turning up at the church, and that attending the wake too was beyond the call of duty.

Rather than standing there, exposed as someone who didn’t know anybody, Carole was about to slip away back to High Tor when she was greeted by a bonhomous cry of, ‘Hello. Bloody good service, wasn’t it?’

The voice came from the tall young man, dressed in a pin-striped suit and wearing an appropriate black tie, who had accompanied Alice Mallett in the church. He had the red face of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors, and the figure of a fit young man who was just starting to go to fat.

Carole was faced by another social dilemma. She was sure she knew who the speaker was, but she hadn’t been properly introduced and only had Fethering gossip as her guide. ‘Yes, very good service,’ she said clumsily. ‘I’m sorry? Do we know each other?’

‘No, but since I know hardly anyone here, I thought I should jolly well take the initiative.’

‘Very good idea.’ There was a silence. ‘I’m sorry. I still don’t know who you are.’

‘Ah. Right. Roddy Skelton.’

‘Oh.’ But still Fethering etiquette did not allow her to say, ‘You’re Alice Mallett’s fiancé.’

Fortunately, he supplied the deficiency by saying, ‘I’m Alice Mallett’s fiancé. Had her old man waited a bit longer before he kicked the bucket, I’d be able to say I was his son-in-law.’

‘Ah yes. Well, nice to meet you. I’m Carole Seddon.’

‘Old friend of the family?’

‘Hardly. That is to say, I met your father-in – your prospective father-in-law – through a committee he set up.’

‘Ah.’ After the initial burst, the conversation seemed to have become becalmed.

‘About the Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront,’ Carole volunteered.

‘Oh yes, good stuff. All have a responsibility for the countryside, don’t we?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Mustn’t forget it.’ Then he said randomly, as people always did in this kind of conversation, ‘Global warming, eh?’

‘So …’ Carole picked up after a long pause, ‘when are you and Alice actually getting married?’

‘Seventeenth of May.’

‘Ah. Here?’

‘Yes. Traditional stuff. We’re both locals, well, we were. Alice, of course, hoped her old man would be able to walk her up the aisle, but … well, there you go …’

‘Mm.’

The next silence that threatened was interrupted by the approach of Roddy’s fiancée. Alice Mallett was holding a flute into which she was pouring from a bottle of champagne. ‘Hello,’ she said in a voice that suggested she’d downed an unfeasible number of drinks since the wake started or, more likely, had got some in before the ceremony.

‘Steady on, old thing,’ said Roddy, indicating the glass. ‘You’re meant to be one of the hostesses here, you know. Pouring drinks and things.’

‘I am pouring drinks.’

‘Yes, but you’re meant to be pouring drinks for other people, not just yourself.’ He guffawed, somewhat unnaturally, trying to sound as if he was making a joke. But the look he gave his fiancée suggested genuine concern.

Alice Mallett stared at their empty hands. ‘You haven’t got glasses. I can’t pour for you if you haven’t got glasses.’

‘But maybe you could—’

‘Shut up, Roddy! I’m being more of a bloody hostess than she is.’ She jutted a contemptuous shoulder towards her stepmother.

‘Now come on, sweetie,’ said Roddy in a conciliatory tone which Carole felt might get used a lot in the course of his upcoming marriage, ‘today’s about your old man, not about Heather.’

‘Is it?’ demanded his fiancée combatively. She turned suddenly to Carole. ‘Do you like her?’

‘Sorry? Who?’ She knew the answer, was merely playing for time.

‘Her. Heather. My stepmother.’

‘I’ve never really met her properly.’

‘Very sensible. Keep it that way, if you’ve got any sense.’

‘Oh?’ Carole was bemused by this sudden aggression.

‘Well, I’ve met her properly,’ Alice continued. ‘I’ve spent much longer with her than I would ever wish to have done. And I don’t like her.’

‘No, I rather got that impression,’ said Carole.

‘As a general rule,’ came the acid response, ‘people don’t tend to like the woman who’s killed their father.’