“Now I come to think of it, almost as if, before the Doctor and I went up, someone had kind of scuffled it.”
“Yes. Behind the boulder and the trace of the rock. There was a flat bit of stone — did you notice? — lying near the bank. Muddy edge. It might have been used to obliterate prints.”
“I suppose,” Coombe said, “in a quiet type of division like this, you get a bit rusty. I could kick myself. At my time of life!”
“It may not amount to much. After all, we can isolate your prints and Dr. Mayne’s from the rest.”
“Well, yes. Yes, you can do that, all right. But still…!”
Alleyn looked at his watch. It was just on noon. He suggested that they return to the mainland and call on the Rector. The tide was coming in and they crossed the channel by dinghy. There was Alleyn’s car by the jetty, with his luggage in it. If things had gone according to plan, he would have been halfway to Troy by now.
They left it where it stood. The rectory was a five minutes’ walk along the front. It stood between a small and charming Norman church and Dr. Mayne’s Convalescent Home: a pleasant late-Georgian house with the look, common to parsonages, of being exposed to more than its fair share of hard usage.
“It was a poorish parish, this,” Coombe said, “but with the turn things have taken over the last two years, it’s in better shape. The stipend’s gone up, for one thing. A lot of people that reckon they’ve benefitted by the spring make donations. It’d surprise you to know the amounts that are put into the restoration fund boxes. I’m People’s Warden,” he added; “should have been there myself at 10:30, for the family service. The Rector’ll be back home by now. It’s his busy day, of course.”
They found Mrs. Carstairs briskly weeding. She wore a green linen dress and her hair, faded yellow, made an energetic sort of halo round her head. Her churchgoing hat, plastic raincoat, gloves and prayer-book were scattered in a surrealistic arrangement, along the border. When Alleyn was introduced she shook hands briskly and said she supposed he’d come about this dreadful business and wanted to see her husband — who was, of course, appalled.
“He’s in the study,” she said to Coombe. “Those accounts from the dry-rot people are all wrong again, Mr. Coombe. And the Mayor suggests a combined memorial service. But we don’t quite think — however.…”
“I’d really like a word with you, if I may,” Alleyn said. “We’re trying to trace Miss Cost’s movements early this morning.”
“Oh, dear! Yes. Well, of course.”
She confirmed Dr. Mayne’s account. Miss Cost had attended the first service at seven o’clock, and before church they had met at the gate.
“She was in a great fuss, poor thing, because of my necklace.”
“Your necklace?”
“Yes. It’s really rather a nice old one. Pinchbeck and paste, but long and quite good. I lent with reluctance, but she was so keen to have it because of the glitter; and then, of course, what must her great Cissy do but drop it at the first thunderclap and, in the stampede, nobody remembered. I said we’d retrieve it after church, or why not let Cissy go? But no: she made a great to-do, poor Miss Cost (when one thinks) and insisted that she would go herself. She was rather an on-goer: conversationally, if you know what I mean: on and on, and I wanted to go into church and say my prayers and it was pouring. So then she saw Dr. Mayne and she was curious to know if it was Mrs. Tretheway’s twins, though of course in the event it wasn’t twins (that was all nonsense), so I’m afraid I left her to tackle him, as she clearly was dying to do. And after church I saw her streak off through the rain before anyone could offer. Isn’t it dreadful?” Mrs. Carstairs asked energetically. “Well, isn’t it?…Adrian! Can you spare a moment, dear?”
“Coming.”
The Rector, wearing his cassock, emerged through French windows. He said how extraordinary it was that Alleyn should have been at Portcarrow; added that they were lucky to have him, and then became doubtful and solemn.
“One finds it hard to believe,” he said. “One is appalled.”
Alleyn asked him when the first service ended, and he said at about a quarter to eight.
“I’d expected a large congregation. There are so many visitors. But the downpour, no doubt, kept a lot of folk away and there were only six communicants. The nine o’clock was crowded.”
Alleyn wondered absently why clergymen were so prone to call people “folk,” and asked Mr. Carstairs if he knew Miss Cost very well. He seemed disturbed and said: Well, yes, in so far as she was a member of his congregation. He glanced at his wife and added: “Our friendship with Miss Cost was perhaps rather limited by our views on the spring. I could not sympathize with or, indeed, approve of her, as I thought, rather extravagant claims. I thought them woolly,” said the Rector. “Woolly and vulgar.” He expounded, carefully, his own attitude, which, in its anxious compromise, declared, Alleyn thought, its orthodoxy.
“And you saw her,” he asked, “after the service?”
They said simultaneously that they did.
“I’m one of those parsons who come out to the porch and see folk off,” the Rector explained. “But Miss Cost was on her way when I got there. Going down the path. Something about my wife’s necklace. Wasn’t it, Dulcie?”
“Yes, dear. I told Mr. Alleyn.”
Coombe said: “The necklace has been recovered and will be returned in due course, Mrs. Carstairs.”
“Oh, dear!” she said. “Will it? I–I don’t think—”
“Never mind, dear,” said her husband.
Alleyn asked if anybody else from the Island had been at the first service. Nobody, it appeared. There were several at the nine o’clock.
“The Barrimores, for instance?”
No, not the Barrimores.
There was a silence, through which the nonattendance of the Barrimores was somehow established as a normal state of affairs.
“Although,” Mrs. Carstairs said, in extenuation of a criticism that no one had voiced, “Margaret used to come quite regularly at one time, Adrian. Before Wally’s warts, you remember?”
“Not that there’s any connection, Dulcie.”
“Of course not, dear. And Patrick and nice Jenny Williams have been to Evensong, we must remember.”
“So we must,” her husband agreed.
“Poor things. They’ll all be terribly upset, no doubt,” Mrs. Carstairs said to Alleyn. “Such a shock to everyone.”
Alleyn said carefully: “Appalling. And apart from everything else, a great worry for Barrimore, one imagines. After all it won’t do his business any good, this sort of catastrophe.”
They looked uncomfortable, and faintly shocked. “Well,” they both said — and stopped short.
“At least,” Alleyn said casually, “I suppose the Boy-and-Lobster is his affair, isn’t it?”
“It’s the property of the estate,” Coombe said. “Miss Pride’s the landlord. But I have heard they put everything they’d got into it.”
“She did,” Mrs. Carstairs said firmly. “It was Margaret Barrimore’s money, wasn’t it, Adrian?”
“My dear, I don’t know. In any case—”
“Yes, dear. Of course,” said Mrs. Carstairs, turning pink. She glanced distractedly at the knees of her linen dress. “Oh, look!” she said. “Now I shall have to change. It was that henbane that did it. What a disgrace I am. Sunday and everything.”
“You melt into your background, my dear,” the Rector observed. “Like a wood-nymph,” he added with an air of recklessness.