‘Now…?’
He shrugged and gave Dryden a first, direct look. His eyes were beautiful, even Dryden could see that, a turtle-dove grey with enough depth for a drowning. Tavanter unlocked his church. St John’s was Edwardian, built on an earlier medieval site. The church interior was as neat and cold as a crypt.
They passed into the vestry and out into the churchyard. This had survived the Edwardian construction and the rebuilding of 1947. The yew tree and a spectacular vine were much older than the church and several of the headstones reached back into the sixteenth century. His mother’s headstone stood by an old rubble wall. He deftly replaced the lilies with the fresh bunch he had brought, and, as always, took a pebble he’d collected by the river from his pocket and set it on the stone. He didn’t pause to remember but followed Tavanter through a gap in the hedge into a small enclosure full of cheap, standard headstones. Some graves were unmarked and others carried simple wooden crosses. The grass was unkempt and there were no flowers. With the dusk a gentle fall of snow had begun and was peppering the ground. An owl hooted ridiculously like a sound effect from a TV thriller.
They laughed, relieving the tension. ‘Paupers’ graveyard,’ explained Tavanter, taking a deep breath of ice-cold air. ‘Rather a lot of them, I’m afraid. As you can see someone has taken exception to them.’
Most of the stones had been badly damaged – presumably with something heavy wielded by someone determined. Few had survived intact, most were split in two, the fragments scattered in the frosty grass.
‘Why the publicity?’ The radio report would have come from police calls. It was rare for them to advertise vandalism.
‘Not my choice. Police think I should have told them about what was going on in the porch. They think publicity will scare them off. I told ‘em that was why the kids did it. To get noticed.’
‘This is the first…’
‘Oh yes. Nothing like this before.’
Dryden bent down and matched some of the broken stone shards to their disfigured headstones. Jack Gotobed 1823–1860. Martha Jane Elliot 1891–1976. Peter Noah Jones 1901–1964. Marjorie Phyllis Carter 1900–1972.
He felt the corrupt damp rising from the ground. He shuffled his feet. ‘Any relatives still around?’
‘Hardly. Rural depopulation. The last burial here was in the 1980s. Still consecrated ground, of course. Anyway, you don’t ask questions about relatives out here. Old joke but it’s true. When they ran a school here in the 1930s there were four family names on the register and twenty-eight children. They have family trees – they just don’t have any branches on them.’
They laughed together, the sound crackling in the frosty air.
‘Cost? Repair?’
‘Don’t think we’ll bother.’ Tavanter folded his hands inside his overcoat in a fluid movement which spoke of a lifetime in vestments. ‘Tidy up perhaps. I might get the tops of the stones rounded off. I’ll make a point of popping in over the next few weeks, leaving the lights on, generating some activity. But it won’t fool anyone. We might get a security light – but in the end it’ll make no difference.’
‘Any fears for the rest of the church?’
Tavanter sighed. ‘I can’t tell you what to write, Dryden, but why give ‘em ideas? It’s totally vulnerable of course. There’s six churches in the circuit I cover – to provide security for all would wipe out our income. And they’re only churches – stone and mortar – we try to concentrate our resources on the people. They could take the windows out I suppose, although they’re meshed. If they got in there’s arson, but they won’t push their luck that far.’
‘Kids then, you reckon?’
Tavanter gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘It’s not the only theory, as I am sure you’ve guessed. The police consider the sanctuary here at St John’s a hotbed of perverts. Buggery and vandalism – what’s the difference, eh?’
‘Where there’s kids there’s parents.’
Tavanter nodded, enjoying himself. ‘On the whole they come under the heading of what I think our American cousins call white trash. Poor white trash.’
Dryden raised his eyebrows in mock shock.
‘We’re all allowed our prejudices,’ said Tavanter, buttoning his overcoat to his neck.
They stood awhile in what had become the night. The only light came from the thick frost now underfoot. They turned together and retraced their black footsteps etched out on the grass.
Dryden stopped before the gap in the hedge that led back into the main graveyard and put a finger to his lips. He pointed down to a track of footsteps which had come out of the trees, shadowing their own to the paupers’ graveyard, but stopping short by the hedge. In the frost a cigarette butt smouldered. They heard a door open somewhere across the fields, letting the sound of a TV drift on the air. A dog barked and stopped when a door slammed.