A Crowded Coffin(75)

With no idea what, if anything, might be happening outside, Harriet prayed desperately that John Forrester’s vanity would keep him in confessional mood.

‘I got Colin drunk,’ he was saying. ‘I waited till he passed out on the sofa and used the syringe on him. I just used the same method again yesterday in the cathedral. Why change the plot?’ He didn’t even notice their involuntary gasps, Harriet realized, he was so deeply absorbed in his story. ‘I unscrewed Gillian’s coffin, ripped out the padding and lining, and managed to squash him down on top of her. He wasn’t a big guy but though it was a tight squeeze, I managed it in the end.’ There it was again, that light, amused laugh. ‘It was quite funny, really. I ended up having to sit on the coffin to get the lid screwed on, like a slapstick comedy, sitting on a bulging suitcase. Next day was the funeral and the coffin never left my sight, not for a moment. I even insisted on following it through at the crematorium and watching it as it was consigned to the flames. One of the perks of office,’ he chuckled. ‘Even though they all clearly decided I’d flipped by then, but I wasn’t risking some fly operator doing a last-minute sweep for jewellery, or running a used-coffin racket.’

‘That took some nerve,’ Harriet ventured, trying to keep him pleasant, to show appreciation of his cleverness. It seemed to work.

‘Didn’t it just?’ he agreed. ‘The next day I had a bonfire of Gillian’s oldest clothes. I’d helpfully insisted on packing all the decent stuff into her suitcases and asked various village ladies to take them to charity. Poor dear vicar.’ He grinned at her, inviting her complicity. A tremulous half-smile, which was all she could summon up, seemed to do the trick.

‘It was easy to slip Colin’s bag and the coffin lining into the flames and I dug the ashes into the garden, round the roses, with a generous helping of bone meal and chemical fertilizer mixed in with compost, just to make sure it couldn’t be traced. The urn, containing the ashes of the dear departed, I scattered at sea in an ostentatious service of commemoration. No forensics there, you see, and it made such a good impression on the village worthies, stiff upper lip, heroic tears hastily mopped.’

He took another turn round the gallery while Harriet braved a swift glance in Rory’s direction. Oh dear, he was looking even worse now, sweat beading on his forehead, his hand clutching at his damaged ribs and his left eye beginning to look discoloured from one of John’s earlier blows. Harriet’s own head was throbbing so badly it was almost blinding and she was only too aware that a badly injured Rory, along with a woman over sixty with an outsize in headaches, was no match for a fit man in his prime. She could only pray for deliverance.

‘All those detective stories,’ he suddenly surprised her, ‘where the murderer has to boast about what he’s done … I never believed that, it seemed plain stupid, but would you believe it? Old Agatha was right. I’ve been longing to tell someone. It’s amazing, like the best sex ever and you can’t tell, but lucky me, here you are and now you both know. I’ll let you go – maybe.’ His glance flickered away from Harriet and she felt a chill of despair. ‘By the time you’ve told everyone else, I’ll be reading all about it in the papers in some unnamed foreign refuge.’

He straightened up and Harriet’s despair deepened as she registered his cold, practical expression. Without taking his eyes off them he reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of handcuffs, flourishing them at her with a brief return of his charming smile.

‘Astonishing what you can find in an English vicarage,’ he remarked lightly. ‘These came down the dining room chimney with a load of soot when I had the sweep in. Whatever do you suppose my predecessor did with them? Here.’ He snapped them on Rory’s wrists and shoved a cloth into the younger man’s mouth. ‘That ought to keep you out of trouble. Get on your feet.’

Harriet felt her stomach churn. This was it. John Forrester beckoned her to him. ‘Give him a hand up onto the roof,’ he ordered. ‘I’m not risking gunshots, the sound carries, and I left the syringe at home. You go first.’ He shoved Harriet unceremoniously up through the narrow door in the wall and manhandled the now shackled and gagged Rory after her so that Harriet, breathing an incoherent prayer, had no option but to reach back and grab Rory’s shoulders. The vicar scrambled after them and up on the leads Rory shot a frantic, wide-eyed stare at her. Harriet grabbed at him, terrified he might slip and take them both down; she had a poor head for heights at the best of times and this wasn’t one of them. The best of times, the worst of times, the words rang foolishly in her head as she clung grimly to a railing.