He found himself regarded fixedly by the small, angry eyes of a man not much more than five feet tall but of considerable shoulder breadth. The man, whose complexion was like an open stove, wore a suit of the peculiarly apposite colour of coke.
“Do you habitually blaspheme, young man, or was that a genuine case of mistaken identity?”
The Reverend Clement James Grewyear, MA, D D, Vicar of Flaxborough, continued to stare at the speechless Love until the sergeant took refuge in urgent exploration of one of the drawers of the filing cabinet. He then turned to the inspector, but did not abate the gravity of his scowl.
“Do take a seat, vicar.” Purbright had stood up behind his desk and was indicating the visitor’s chair.
Mr Grewyear hitched up his coke-coloured trouser legs and lowered himself into the chair without taking his eyes off the inspector. Purbright reflected that the vicar seemed to take literally the definition of his calling as that of a fisher of men: his gaze had all the tenacity of a two-hundred-pound line.
“You must come with me immediately to the church, Purbright.”
The inspector waited for amplification, but Mr Grewyear added nothing. He clearly expected Purbright to respond forthwith. Several seconds went by.
“Something has happened at the church, has it, sir?”
“That,” snapped Mr Grewyear, “is putting it very mildly indeed. Come along, man.” He stood up.
“I’m sorry, vicar, but you really must be more explicit. Are you referring to an accident? A crime? I have to know the kind of assistance you want me to give.”
Mr Grewyear said coldly and quietly: “You are not one of my communicants, I believe, Purbright.”
Purbright shrugged in apology for recusance.
The vicar nodded. “No, well, you will probably be none the wiser when I tell you that somebody—or something—has been perpetrating abominations.”
“That certainly sounds serious.”
“It is serious. You do not suppose I should be here otherwise, do you?” There was a smokiness in the vicar’s eye that warned Purbright not to dispute the point: even though he was not a churchgoer, the Chief Constable was, and Mr Grewyear was obviously sufficiently stoked up to carry his complaints a good deal further than Fen Street.
“Sergeant.”
“Sir?” Love disinterred himself from the filing cabinet.
“The vicar believes that there has been a case of sacrilege at the Parish Church. Will you accompany him there and let him show you what has been going on. You’d better pick up Harper on the way. Tell him to take his bag and a camera.”
Mr Grewyear looked at Love as a wealthy hospital patient might have regarded an apprentice plumber co-opted to remove his prostate.
“The sergeant will make a note of the details,” Purbright explained, “and if he thinks it necessary I shall come over myself a little later. But I am sure you will find him a most experienced and capable officer.”
Saying nothing more, but dark with doubt, the vicar rose and walked to the door. Love scurried to open it and followed him out.
The vicar’s car was at the police station entrance. It was an American-built Ford of about the same floor area as the Lady Chapel in the parish church.
Love and Harper sat in the back and wondered how the five-foot vicar was going to pilot the machine from a driving position that obliged him actually to reach upward in order to grasp the wheel. He showed no hesitation, however, and soon the vast car was sweeping along East Street towards the Market Place.
From the rear, Mr Grewyear’s upstretched arms gave him the appearance of administering extreme unction to those pedestrians who had stepped or been jostled from the narrow pavement and were now leaping out of the way of the car’s elephantine fenders.
Love drew Harper’s attention to the tinted windows. “Like being under water,” he whispered.
Harper nudged him and whispered back, indicating their driver: “No wonder the little bugger needs a periscope, then.” He laughed noiselessly.
Love, a little shocked, quickly looked the other way.
The vicar drove across the Market Place, passed the wrong side of a traffic bollard into Spoongate and parked beneath a “Funerals Only” sign near a gateway in the church railings.
Without waiting to see the policemen evacuate the rear hall of his car, he strutted along a path and disappeared through the wicket in the south door.
Love and Harper found him standing by the font. They walked up to him. Speechlessly, he pointed.
The heavy, elaborately carved stone cover was in its usual raised position and a plain wooden lid, padlocked, lay on the font ready for removal at baptismal services. To the very centre of this lid something had been transfixed by a butcher’s metal skewer.
The policemen stepped up on the plinth for a closer view.
The skewered object was a dead frog. Between its out-stretched rear legs, there had been drawn a cross. A black felt-tipped pen seemed to have been used. Farther down were words, printed by the same means.
Ad te omnis caro veniet.
Harper wrinkled his nose in distaste, but Love leaned nearer and examined the frog with considerable interest. Then he peered at the inscription and turned towards the vicar.
“What’s the French all about, then, padre?”
“French?”
“This bit of writing.”
Mr Grewyear, who hated being called “padre” perhaps more than anything else in the world, wrestled for some time with his anger before he trusted himself to reply.
Very quietly, and with eyes closed, he said at last: “Those words, sergeant, are Latin. I construe: ‘Unto Thee shall all flesh come’.”
Love gazed at the frog with innocent amiability. “Quite neat, really,” he said, “when you come to think about it.”
Harper had opened his case and was busily assembling camera and tripod. He held a light-meter at arm’s length and regarded it gloomily. Then he stared in turn at the roof, the great West window and the rood screen, as if debating which one of those obstacles he would ask the vicar to have removed.
“You will record the scoundrel’s fingerprints, of course, officer,” said Mr Grewyear.
Harper shook his head and sucked breath through his teeth in noisy denial. “Never in this world, padre. What, from wood like that?” He rummaged in his case, drew out a flash bulb, and began screwing it into an attachment to the camera.
When the frog had been photographed from several angles the vicar set off towards the nave altar, imperiously beckoning the policemen to follow.
With outstretched arm, he indicated the lectern.