A Crowded Coffin(32)

He made a token protest but caved in as she half pulled him across to the house and in through the glass door. At his bedroom door, Rory paused for breath then stood still, staring rigidly at the wall. Edith stared. She could see nothing but ancient oak panelling but suddenly it struck her. This was where Rory had supposedly seen – or, in spite of all his camouflage about medication, she suspected that he had seen – the Locksley ghost.

Harriet fussed around the kitchen, her wits unusually astray as she tried to make sense of everything. Sometimes she thought that Sam, who was back in Belfast for a night, winding up his project, had the right of it and she was making something out of nothing. There was still that nagging doubt, though, and she was glad she had dropped him at Southampton airport early that morning so there was no need to worry that he’d turn up today to apply his caustic common sense and laugh at her tentative theories. Edith, on the other hand, although generally speaking as sensible and practical as Harriet herself, would definitely be ready to discuss, discard and revisit all those theories.

What’s more, Harriet smiled reminiscently, Edith could keep a secret. Even the threat of detention had not made her tell who had sprayed paint on an unpopular teacher’s car. Harriet grinned as she remembered Edith, her hands spattered with incriminating paint, acting like an Angela Brazil schoolgirl and defiantly refusing to sneak. The situation was eventually resolved by a tearful confession from the culprit who admitted the crime, whereupon Edith stopped being a martyr and explained that the paint was only on her because she had found the discarded aerosol and put it in the bin.

The front doorbell rang and she greeted her former pupil with affection. ‘I’ve had a baking session,’ she said, leading the way to the garden. ‘I had a sudden, uncharacteristic urge to make a coffee and walnut sponge, so you’re my first victim. Tea or coffee?’

‘Harriet.’ Edith put down her coffee mug and spoke abruptly, abandoning the gentle chat about local affairs. ‘What do you know about John Forrester?’

‘The vicar?’ Harriet temporized. Here it was again; the vicar’s name kept cropping up, even if it was only in her own imaginings. Not only the vicar though; the village’s tame tycoon, Gordon Dean, was in there too, along with his minion, Brendan, and now his good-looking American visitor, Mike Goldstein.

‘Harriet?’ Edith was staring at her, curiosity written all over her face. ‘Are you okay?’

‘What? Yes, of course. Sorry, I was lost in thought. Where were we … oh yes, John Forrester. What do you want to know?’

‘You’re stalling,’ accused Edith. ‘I asked first. But, oh, all right. I was talking to him yesterday, at the party.’

‘I know,’ Harriet agreed. ‘I saw. He was looking very interested in your conversation. About the Roman origins of the farm, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s just it.’ Edith frowned and picked at a loose thread on the pocket of her jeans. ‘He was asking about the Romans. He claimed the late Roman period was his particular interest and in fact he was full of it when I was talking to him and I thought nothing of it, but I’ve been going over what we said, and it seems to me now that he wasn’t really all that clued up. He has a superficial knowledge, I admit, but he’s an educated man and he’s clearly mugged up on local history to get along with his parishioners, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do.

‘It’s not that, however, that makes me wonder. I’ve met lots of enthusiasts, you know, archaeologists and so forth, and when I first went to university I innocently let slip that we had our own villa at the bottom of the garden, so to speak. I soon learned to keep quiet, though, otherwise I’d be besieged by history buffs trying to pin me to the wall and scour my brain for details. Still happens occasionally, though I keep it quiet; they’re always angling to come and poke around the place but they never have any funding. Besides, Grandpa’s never been keen on strangers poking about on his land. But the point is, Harriet,’ Edith looked across at her hostess, ‘I can recognize a true enthusiast a mile off, is what I’m saying. I checked with Grandpa and the vicar hasn’t simply asked if he could come and take a look round. Grandpa would have been delighted, but John also made one or two slips about the Roman withdrawal from Britain that didn’t sit well with his supposed interest.’

‘So what are you saying?’ Harriet was intrigued, and aware of a deepening of the elusive anxiety she had felt at the previous day’s party. ‘Couldn’t it just be that he was trying to impress an attractive young woman?’