It was a handsome town founded by the Romans on four crossroads much after the pattern of Cirencester. It went one better than the Cotswold town in that it had acquired under the Normans a cathedral in place of Cirencester’s memorable parish church of St John the Baptist with its gloriously over-ornate south porch and magnificent fifteenth-century tower; and Castercombe had a covered market in place of the open square in the town centre at Cirencester.
Laura asked no questions. She possessed the Highlander’s courteous but almost instinctive dislike of enquiring into other people’s business or motives. When her college friend, Kitty Trevelyan, had enquired the reason for this reticence, Laura had replied that what you did not know, you did not have to do anything about. This reply, Laura remembered with a non-Presbyterian grin, had shocked the High Anglican Kitty, who had demanded, ‘But, Dog, don’t you have any sort of a conscience?’
‘Can’t afford one,’ Laura had responded. ‘Your lot may be the Conservative Party at prayer, but our lot were brought up to quote Dr Johnson.’
‘As how? All he said was that the lady smelt and he stank. I shouldn’t have thought that was the sort of remark you made in Early Victorian drawing-rooms.’
‘In eighteenth-century drawing-rooms, ducky.’
‘Well, what about what he said about your lot?’
‘You ought to be made to analyse and parse that observation. Anyway, he asked where else would you find such horses and such men. He was talking about oats.’
‘Wild ones?’
‘No, fathead, the kind you eat.’
‘Well, even those you have to sow, I suppose,’ Kitty had said, ‘so it comes to the same thing in the end.’
‘Dear old Kitty,’ thought Laura nostalgically, as she took the one-in-four gradient down the Axehead hill into Abbots Bay and then followed the coast road to Castercombe. ‘Made a fortune in the hairdressing and the fashion businesses, and married a rich man into the bargain. He adored her and her idiocy and maintains that she was his inspiration. Who says fools don’t prosper?’
Having parked the car in one of the marked spaces in what had been the old marketplace in Castercombe, she waited for further instructions.
‘Half-past one,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Lunch, I think. You must be famished, as we breakfasted so early. Did I not perceive a likely-looking hostelry as we turned into this square? Would you care to walk over to it and find out whether they can put a table at our disposal?’
Lunch over, she produced her photographs and displayed them to the receptionist. The girl said she had only lived in the town for a year, so Dame Beatrice asked if there was anyone on the staff of the hotel who had been living or working there at least three years previously. She added that the subject of the pictures was unlikely to have been a guest staying at the hotel, but that somebody on the staff might have known him if that person had been resident in the town.
‘Try Fred in the cocktail lounge,’ said the girl. ‘He’s been here longest.’ She looked appraisingly at Dame Beatrice’s eccentric but obviously expensive clothes and at Laura’s well-cut summer suit and asked, ‘Come into a fortune, has he, this young fellow?’
Dame Beatrice cackled, thanked the girl and made for the cocktail lounge with her photographs. Here she ordered two brandies and asked the elderly barman what he would have. His was a small port in which he pledged the ladies’ health. Dame Beatrice asked him if he had ever known the young man in the pictures which she handed to him. He looked at them carefully, but shook his head.
‘Not without he worked for Parrish’s the chemist,’ he said. ‘I might have seen him in there, if I recollect. I’ll tell you who would likely know for sure, and that’s my brother Bert, as keeps a do-it-yourself shop in Paternoster Way, along by the cathedral. Always in and out of the chemist’s in his younger days owing to suffering with his stomach. Then he got Christian Science and give up the physic. About four or five year ago, you say. Ah, well, now, if anybody would recognise them pictures, Bert would. Ask for Mr Smallwood if his assistant’s minding the counter. They close for dinner-time, but he’ll be open again by now and most likely having his after-dinner snooze while the assistant runs the shop. There ain’t much doing in his line in the early afternoons. His trade is mostly on Saturdays and in the evenings when chaps come by on their way home from work.’
The cathedral was so much of a landmark that Dame Beatrice and Laura found Paternoster Way without difficulty. Laura opened the door of the do-it-yourself shop and saw that it was in the charge of a young man wearing a brown overall. She came out and reported that brother Bert was not visible, so was probably sleeping off his lunch.
‘Then we will not disturb him for a while,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I want him to be in sunny mood when I show him the photographs. We will visit the cathedral. I admire large, gloomy buildings erected to the glory of God and as a passport to heaven for those who built, paid for and maintain them.’
The interior was certainly grand enough and gloomy enough to satisfy her. She spent most of the time seated in one of the pews near the end of the nave and studied the architecture, the transition from Norman to Early English, the fourteenth-century east window, the fan vaulting of the chancel and the carved stone screen which separated the nave from the choir.
Laura wandered around, identified piscinas and aumbrys, the ornate fifteenth-century tomb surmounted by the effigy of the bishop who had been responsible for the later alterations to the building, found a little locked door which had led to the rood stair and examined the stone screen in greater detail than Dame Beatrice was able to do from her seat in the nave.
She came back to her employer and announced that she wanted a postcard or two from the stand by the south door. After this, they went into the cloister and the chapter house and then Dame Beatrice looked at her watch and decided that it was time they returned to Bert Smallwood’s shop. Laura opened the door of it again; this time two men, one of them elderly, were there.
Laura, already briefed, spent some time in selecting an assortment of screws and a plastic arm for opening and closing a casement window, bought some emery paper and a pair of nail scissors, while Dame Beatrice wandered around inspecting the stock and then bought some metal clips for which she had no use whatever and a set of curtain hooks.
Having thus prepared the ground for negotiations of a different kind, she produced the photographs. The result was gratifying, particularly when she mentioned that Bert’s brother Fred had sent her. The elderly man hardly did more than glance at the pictures.
‘Why, that looks like young Todhunter,’ he said. ‘Used to work at Parrish’s the chemist till he got the sack for putting his hand in the till. Went abroad, so I heard. I used to go regular to Parrish’s before I saw the light and my stomach stopped playing me up.’ The old man looked at her with curiosity and asked, ‘Is he back here, then? Had trouble with him, have you?’
‘Personally, no. I have never even met him.’ She took another picture from the briefcase she was carrying. ‘Could you recognise this as the same man photographed recently by the Axehead police?’
He went white when he saw the disfigured face of the dead man, but gave the picture far more attention than he had given to the photographs of the head which Tussordiano had modelled and then he shook his own.