A Crowded Coffin(46)
He paused, then continued, ‘I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to talk to her, but you ought to know what’s been going on.’ He ran through the background and then filled her in on Sam’s most recent brief history of the missing researcher and the vicar’s tenuous connection with him.
‘The police asked Forrester about Colin Price but they seem to have been pretty gentle with him, from what Sam told me.’ He responded to her questioning look with a shrug. ‘They had no reason to press him anyway, but the thing is, the night Price was last seen in the village was the night before Mrs Forrester’s funeral. The police asked the vicar if Price had told him anything that might suggest he was about to abscond with his ill-gotten gains, but the vicar said he had no recollection of seeing Price at that time, let alone talking to him. Who could wonder at it? The poor bloke must have been in a complete state the whole time.’
‘You’ve changed your tune,’ she said. ‘I thought you didn’t like him.’
‘I don’t, but that’s no reason not to feel sorry for him. Anyway, Sam doesn’t like him either, but that’s doesn’t stop him giving Forrester an alibi for when someone was knocking down your grandfather.’
She looked up, startled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘On the night in question, Sam was at a diocesan discussion, attended by a dozen-or-so local clergy, including John Forrester. The meeting didn’t go smoothly and things got heated – nothing to do with Forrester or Sam – so what with having to calm everyone down, Sam said it was late finishing. And then one of the others suggested they go back to his place for a nightcap. About eight or nine people accepted, including John Forrester, though Sam says he never actually got to speak to Forrester that night, partly because he barely knows him and mostly because he, Sam, was drawn into a debate with a couple of friends. Anyway, by the time the vicar left Winchester, even driving his flashy car, he’d hardly have been in a position to run down your grandfather out in the fields.’
She nodded slowly and he glanced at her in surprise. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’
‘I suppose so, it’s just….’ She hesitated and sipped her coffee. ‘Ugh, it’s gone cold.’ She pushed her cup aside, shaking her head when he offered her another. ‘It’s just that yesterday, when John ran me home via Harriet’s place, I fed the cat and then left John in her sitting room while I went upstairs to collect the things on her list. When I came down again, he didn’t hear me at first, and I found him in her study, flicking through some papers on her desk. He straightened up at once and moved away, making some comment about having picked up the papers from the floor. He said he’d gone in there by mistake while looking for the loo and that it must have been the cat that scattered them, unless Harriet was very untidy and he didn’t think that for a moment.’
She tried to remember. ‘He went to put Harriet’s bag in the car while I locked up, so he didn’t see me take a sneaky look at the paperwork on the desk. The first thing I saw was the name, Colin Price. It jumped out at me from what looked like a précis of the problems at the archive, something Harriet must have written down to try and make sense of it.’
She stood up as Rory glanced at his watch. ‘I don’t believe John is involved in anything shady,’ she said as they made for the exit. ‘But, but if he is,’ her voice faltered and she hunched her shoulders anxiously. ‘If he is, he knows now that Harriet has been nosing around about the Stanton Resingham archive and she can only have got that information from Sam.’
Sam Hathaway was fidgeting uneasily. For once, as he stood in the longest cathedral nave in Europe, he was unconscious of the soaring beauty of the pillars and arches. Harriet had slept well the previous night, she had assured him when he called her earlier, and said she was planning to return to her cottage the following day.
That much was a relief, but Sam found himself haunted by the thought of how miraculously she had survived the accident, haunted too by the desolation that her death would have caused him. What the hell was going on in Locksley village? One of the prettiest spots imaginable, painted so often that it was difficult, some days, to get near the church or the village duck pond for easels and hefty great bags of painting gear, while artists sat hunched on little folding stools. An old farmer run down on his own land; a respectable middle-aged woman deliberately driven into a disused quarry and only saved by a clump of trees that clung to a craggy chalk face. These things simply didn’t happen in his and Harriet’s world.