The two human beings with him were less cheerful. The sadness of Roddy Hargreaves’s death, and the unsatisfactory way in which it might tie up the mystery of his wife’s death cast a pall over both the women.
“I don’t want to leave it like that,” said Jude.
“But how else can we leave it?” asked Carole. “We have no information. We don’t even know for sure that the police do think Roddy killed her.”
“No, and we probably never will know.” Jude picked up a stone and threw it into the retreating sea. Her mood was uncharacteristically despondent. “I don’t think he did kill her, though.”
Carole was silent for a moment, before saying, “Nor do I”
“But why do we think that? Given how little hard factwe’ve got about the case, why are we both convinced Roddy didn’t do it?”
“I suppose…”
“It’s because we liked him, didn’t we? We met him, and though we could recognize he was an alcoholic and a man with problems, we both had a gut instinct that he wasn’t the kind of man who’d commit a murder.”
Carole, reluctant to admit to such an irrational impulse as ‘gut instinct’, had nonetheless to admit that Jude had a point.
“So, just for a moment, let’s pretend that our gut instinct is right.”
“Why?”
“Because in my experience gut instincts usually are.” Carole awarded that a rather frosty harrumph. “Come on, if Roddy didn’t do it, who did?”
“We’re back to the same thing, Jude. We have no idea. We don’t have enough information.”
“Then we’d better get some more information, hadn’t we?”
“About what? About whom?”
“Roddy’d be a good person to start with. If we find out more about him, maybe we can actually prove he didn’t do it.”
“All right. So who do we know who can tell us about Roddy?”
“James Lister, I suppose. If we can talk to him without the dreadful Fiona present.”
“Yes. Or…” A smile irradiated Carole’s thin features. “There’s someone else.”
“Hm?”
“At the dinner party on Friday, Jude, don’t you remember? Someone admitted he’d had ‘one or two conversations’ with Roddy Hargreaves round the time Virginia disappeared.”
“Yes.” Jude smiled too as she nodded agreement.
“You know,” said Carole Seddon, “I think I might go to church in Fedborough this evening.”
Twenty-Three
It was a long time since Carole had been to any kind of church service, and even longer since she had been to Evensong. The liturgy sounded unfamiliar and awkward. She must have gone to church a few times since the Prayer Book had been modernized, but it was the rhythms of the older version that had stayed with her from schooldays, when non-attendance had not been an option.
The biblical readings were even worse. Again, she had grown up with the King James Bible, and its rolling cadences were deeply etched on her subconscious. The version that was now being used had clearly been assembled by people with no sense of rhythm at all, and every clumsy phrase just made her aware of the perfect symmetries it had replaced.
The language might have been more effective if presented with conviction, but the Rev Trigwell’s tremulous delivery suggested that he himself was uncertain of the text’s validity. Idly, as she listened, Carole wondered whether it was possible for a Church of England vicar to show conviction. As a religion, Anglicanism was so wishy-washy. A passionate Anglican was an oxymoron, and the idea of an Anglican fundamentalist simply laughable.
She tried to think back to a time when she had had faith, and couldn’t find it. Till her mid-twenties she had been a regular church-goer, but that wasn’t the same thing at all. Attendance had been a social convention, a polite ritual which had nothing to do with belief.
And, looking round the congregation in All Souls Fed-borough that June evening, Carole Seddon didn’t see much evidence of passionately held faith there either. The turn-out was better than most churches had come to expect in the first decade of the twenty-first century. At least two-thirds of the pews were full, but all with the same kind of people, respectable matrons with dutiful, suited husbands in tow. No ethnic diversity, and no children. Perhaps there was a Family Service on Sunday mornings, Carole reflected; there might be more of an age range on show in the church then.
The congregation were mostly regulars. At least they were very prompt on belting out the liturgical responses, all of which were different from the ones preserved in the amber of Carole’s memory.
And they certainly knew the hymns, which again weren’t ones she recognized. She wouldn’t have minded giving ‘Rock of Ages’ or ‘O God our help in ages past’ a good seeing-to, but since the words were unfamiliar, she had to fall back on the silent and inaccurate lip-synch she’d relied on in her early days at school. Mouthing something and sounding only the occasional final ‘s’ or ‘t’ has been a church stand-by of the unaccustomed and the tone-deaf for centuries.
Still, the respectable people of Fedborough treated the verses on their photocopied sheets as if they were proper hymns and delivered them with great gusto. Behind her, Carole could hear one female voice soaring and swooping over the others. Its owner might once have been a goodsinger, but somewhere along the line had got the idea she could create her own descants to dance around the words, independent of the tune everyone else was singing. She didn’t understand the choral principle of sublimating the individual in the group creativity.
A surreptitious look around brought Carole no surprise. The owner of the voice was Fiona Lister. Beside her, in a stiff suit, stood James, with the expression of a man who’d much rather be slumped in front of the television watching golf.
But in his face there was also a resignation. He had long ago recognized that he couldn’t escape. Church-going was one of the rituals in the freemasonry of Fedborough respectability. If Fiona said it had to be done, it had to be done. James Lister couldn’t perhaps help having been a butcher – though that still remained very regrettable – but in every other way he would have to conform to the middle-class stereotype.
At the end of the service, Carole deliberately dawdled. She had caught the eye of – and been graciously acknowledged by – Fiona Lister, to whom she mouthed a ‘Thank you so much for Friday night’ She also spotted the Durringtons leaving the church some way ahead, but they didn’t see her. Wondering whether the Roxbys might have considered church as a quick route into Fedborough society, she looked around, but saw no sign of them.
As the congregation filed out, they passed the Rev Trigwell in the porch. He did a lot of hand-shaking and feeble laughing, but bonhomie did not come naturally to him. He seemed, as ever, unrelaxed and gauche. A spike of his thinning hair was pointing upwards, and the red blotches on his face looked almost painful.
When Carole reached him, he took her hand in a double handshake of unconvincing heartiness. “Well, goodness me. All the way from Fethering. I’m honoured. Has news of the quality of my sermons travelled so far?”
His words contained the ingredients of insouciant small talk, but seemed to cost him a great effort to produce.
Carole had decided at the Listers’ dinner party that directness was going to be her most effective approach with the Rev Trigwell. “No,” she said. “I just wanted to talk to you.”
“Oh?”
“About Roddy Hargreaves.”
His second ‘Oh’ was much gloomier. And it was followed by an ‘Oh dear’.
The All Souls vicarage was a large building, but the Rev Trigwell only really lived in two rooms. They gave the appearance of having been furnished from second-hand shops by someone who had no interest in furniture. There were no pictures or personal photographs on the walls or mantelpiece. Philip Trigwell seemed as reluctant to impose his personality on his surroundings as on other people.