She had turned quite red.
"No," he said with more force than either of them expected. "It's all right. I'm wearing;something." He opened the door wider to prove it.
The sight of the young rector in yellow rubber gloves and a striped apron did not lessen Rachel Jansen's embarrassment.
He smiled at her. "Saves my kit."
She nodded several times, humouring him. She seemed unable to speak.
"What can I do for you?"
She took a step away, raising her hand dismissively. She found her voice again, and it was nervous. "Really. Don't trouble."
"Out with it, Mrs. Jansen."
She was trying to find an exit line.
"Fire away," insisted Joy.
The words came in a rush. "The day before yesterday I put a white plastic sack through your letterbox. Help the Aged. Old clothes. Isn't that it behind you at the bottom of the stairs?"
He glanced over his shoulder, taking care not to present his back view. It was the Help the Aged sack and it contained his bloodstained clothes.
"If you look," said Rachel Jansen, "it's printed on the side."
"I'm sure you're right." He was trying to give the impression of calm. "Hang on. I meant to put in something else." He took two steps backwards as if Mrs. Jansen was the Queen, snatched up the sack, backed further to the kitchen and tipped everything out and grabbed two perfectly good shirts he had washed the day before and left on hangers to dry over the boiler. He stuffed them into the sack and returned to the door. "Hope these will do."
She thanked him and left, still pink at what she had seen, or almost seen.
He closed the door and said aloud, "Joy, my boy, you don't come closer than that."
The next phase of the plan was to remove the body from the office. The bishop was no lightweight. Joy hauled him to the centre of the Wilton and dragged rug and corpse across the polished floor, through the hall and kitchen to the back door of the garage. Opened the boot of the BMW, took a grip under the arms, lifted the torso to a sitting position, braced like a weightlifter, made a supreme effort and heaved the upper body high enough to flop over the storage space. With the main weight in position, raising the legs was easier. He persuaded them in and threw the rug over the corpse and brought down the lid. It was good to have the thing out of sight.
Work remained to be done: office work, he told himself with a smile. He fetched a bucket, filled it with hot water and detergent and used an old-fashioned scrubbing-brush on the bloodstains.
The floor looked better after repeated scrubbings. No doubt a scene-of-crime team would find plenty to interest them, but he had no intention of letting such people into his office.
He took a shower, changed into a sweatshirt and jeans and passed a salutary half-hour studying the dossier from the car. The bishop had gone to some trouble assembling all this evidence of malpractice. Five years of bank statements and photocopies of the St. Saviour's parish accounts, with copious marginal notes in red and more pages of calculations. Copies of his (under)statement of income to the Church Commissioners, ensuring that he got the maximum stipend. Grisly reading. The only good thing about it was that apparently no one else had seen it.
He tore each sheet into small pieces and made a fire in the grate in the dining room. Whilst the evidence was turning to ashes, he fetched the bishop's laptop from the office and got to know the controls. The resignation letter wanted some modification now. He deleted his name and substituted the bishop's. Then he made more adjustments. The wording on the screen now read:
I, Marcus Glastonbury, Bishop, profoundly regret the embarrassment my actions must cause the diocese and the Church. I can see no alternative.
After reading it through, he added the words Pray for me.
He opened the bishop's briefcase and looked for stationery. He found a sheaf of notepaper headed with the address The Bishop's Palace, Glastonbury, and printed the note. As a final touch he opened the pocket Bible, looked up the parable of the prodigal son, underlined the phrase "… hath devoured thy living with harlots …" and slotted the white ribbon marker in place.
After midnight, he returned to the garage and took his Moulton fold-up bike-with the characteristic small wheels and Hydrolastic suspension-from its hook on the wall. A Wiltshire product, his farewell gift from a grateful congregation at St. Saviour's, that little bike was going to come in useful tonight. He stowed it on the back seat of the BMW. He put on gloves, started up and drove out into Rectory Lane. Small risk of being seen; less of being recognised. People noticed the dog-collar before they looked at anything else. Without it, he could drive through the village in broad daylight and they would look straight through him.
The young rector's leisure-time reading in forensic science provided him with the useful knowledge that when a body is moved after death the post mortem signs are not so reliable as pathologists once supposed. Hypostasis, the gravitational effect of blood cells, was once believed to show how the body was lying immediately after death, but more recent studies showed that secondary gravitation could take place. When a body was moved to a new position, the hypostasis relocated as well after a further few hours.
He drove ten miles into Somerset around the town of Frome and out on the Shepton Mallet Road, the A361, stopping at the all-night filling-station. But not for petrol. As the bishop himself had remarked, Otis Joy was a wicked young man. He bought a copy of Men Only, and studied it for a time. Then he took it to a payphone and used the bishop's Visa card to call one of the sex lines advertised in the back pages. "Madam Swish, able with a cane" seemed a neat match for a bishop. He let the recording run on for a good ten minutes before hanging up. If the police were any good at their job, they would check the credit card statement when it came in. Marcus Glastonbury alive at 12:40 a.m. Alive and kinky.
At Nunney, he left the main road for the country lanes, into an area he had once walked. The site he had in mind was a disused quarry, one of several around the village of Egford where the local stone was mined. This one had been left with a massive face of rock where the exposed carboniferous limestone could be seen tilted and folded under the more even Jurassic strata.
It was pleasingly quiet out here. A fox crossed the lane, turning confidently to look at the car. Small, white moths swooped into the beam of the headlamps. He spotted the sign ahead saying Quarry: Strictly No Admittance. Pulled up and got out to pull the chain off the gatepost. Drove in and along a track rutted by heavy lorries. Up a steep incline to the highest point of the hill overlooking the excavation.
This was it, then. He stopped and got out. There wasn't enough moonlight to see much, and certainly not the length of the drop. It didn't matter. He knew he was standing at the top of a sheer cliff at least a hundred feet high. He got in again and backed the car close to the edge, switched off, got out, opened the boot, pulled back the Wilton rug. He didn't enjoy sliding his hands under the torso and drawing it towards him in a macabre embrace. He hauled the thing out: awkward, back-straining work. With an extra effort he succeeded in taking the weight on his shoulder and staggering to the edge, where he first let the corpse flop on the ground for fear of falling over himself.
He stood for a time, recovering his strength.
Crucial things remained to be done. He replaced the credit cards in the pocket of the bishop's jacket. Rolled up the bloodstained rug. Removed his trusty little bike from the BMW and snapped it into shape. Moved the car away from the edge and parked it a few yards back with the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition. The suicide note, the Bible and Men Only would tell their own story on the passenger seat.