Wycliffe And The Last Rites

Book 0: The Cornish Detective

by W.J. Burley

Genres: Mystery; Cozy Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

A puzzling murder mystery. A tough new case for Detective Wycliffe to investigate. A bizarre murder shakes a quiet Cornish village. Arriving at the church on Easter morning, the vicar finds the body of a woman sprawled across the chancel steps. To add to the horror, the church is filled with the discordant sound of an organ chord, the notes apparently chosen at random and wedged down. How has the church been desecrated by a Satanic ritual? Chief Superintendent Wycliffe sees the crime more as an expression of hatred deep within the community, but his investigation is frustrated at every turn, throwing up more questions than answers. Then another murder is committed, as shocking as the first. Wycliffe thinks he knows the killer's identity - but can he prove it?

Release date: May 15, 2018

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 192

Sample

He came in from the bathroom, still naked, and reached for his briefs. Katherine, sitting up in bed, watched him dress. Geach was a big man – not tall, but powerfully built, rough hewn; his body surfaces seemed to consist of intersecting planes rather than curves. The tangle of hair on his chest was turning grey but his head was thatched with dark, tight little curls. He put on his shirt, socks and trousers and came to bend over her.

‘All right?’

‘I expect I’ll live.’

He kissed her on the lips, then on her breasts. His features, like the rest of him, were on a generous scale; the skin of his face, free from any blemish, was coarse, lightly pitted like the skin of an orange. He was smiling, a little smile of self-content.

He went to the door, paused, and looked back. ‘See you later!’

‘I’ll be down.’

‘Don’t bother; have a lie-in. Elsa will look after me.’

It was as though he had patted her on the head and said, ‘You’ve done your bit.’

She remained in bed, motionless, staring at nothing. After sex with Abe she seemed to exist only by proxy, a reflection in a mirror. She was nothing, she felt nothing, she had nothing – not even a body that was hers.

Of course this was nonsense! Abe was no monster, and she was better off than most; she had a daughter; she had a home – an old house which she loved; a car for her own use … money, which she could spend without question … True, these things were contingent upon her being and remaining Mrs Abe Geach, but hadn’t she settled for that?

‘You don’t know when you’re well off!’ Others would have told her, but there was no need. She told herself. But that was logic and she had never found much consolation in logic.

From the bed she could see herself in the mirror of the dressing table: one of Abe’s contrived titillations. I am thirty-nine. Do I look it? Her hair was dark and lustrous; no sign of grey yet. Later she would go through that iron-grey phase which is supposed to make men look distinguished but delivers women to the sorcery of hairdressers. Well, she would have none of that. If it turned out that there was life after the menopause she had no intention of making herself ridiculous, fighting a rearguard action.

The pallor of her skin was accentuated by her dark hair and eyes. Johnny Glynn had said once, ‘Your eyes are like minefields, Kathy – still, yet menacing.’ Vintage Johnny Glynn, master of the slick phrase and the slicker lay. God! I mustn’t start thinking of all that.

Watching herself in the mirror she ran her hands slowly through her hair, lifting its weight from her head and letting it slip back through her fingers.

Her twin sister, Jessica, had gone about things differently … She wondered about Jessica. Was she happier? Silly question. Was she content rather than resigned? Against all the odds it might be so. Two women, a man, and a teenage boy, trying to scrape a living out of a few acres with little real know-how between them.

In a sudden burst of restlessness Katherine got out of bed and drew back the curtains. There it was, the scene that had become part of her: the lawn and the shrubbery, then the low, crumbling bank, a stretch of muddy shingle, and the creek. There were primroses in the hedge which separated them from the churchyard. Across the creek the little boatyard, with its shed and thicket of masts, stood out against the rising ground of Trennick Wood. The rusty iron roof of the old shed glowed red and orange in the sunlight. It was half-tide and gulls padded about the muddy margins. Perhaps it was the house she had married.

She put on her dressing gown and slippers, spent a few minutes in the bathroom, then went downstairs to the kitchen. They always breakfasted in the big, old-fashioned kitchen. Abe was finishing his second egg and there was a yellow smear on his chin. He had eaten two soft-boiled eggs for breakfast every morning since the age of thirteen, when his mother decided that male adolescents required special nourishment. Now, at forty-one, regardless of hazards from cholesterol and listeria, he clung to his eggs as an addict to his regular shot.

The wall clock showed ten minutes to eight. Kathy said, ‘Julie not down yet? She’ll be late for school.’

Abe looked at her in mild reproach. ‘It’s Wednesday; from today she’s off school for the Easter holidays. You did know, Kath.’

Black mark. She should have remembered.

Elsa came in from the yard. ‘Oh, you’re down, Kathy. There’s plenty of coffee in the pot.’

Elsa’s position in the family was ambivalent, a sort of cousin who was also a sort of housekeeper. She was three years younger than Kathy, unmarried and childless, yet, in Kathy’s eyes, she was the real woman of the two. One could hardly look at Elsa without being conscious of her plump body, her pink skin, and her freckled fairness. Did Abe ever … ? Very likely; but Kathy had decided early on that there would be no friction on that score.

Kathy poured herself a cup of coffee; no sugar, but a dash of semi-skimmed.

Abe finished his second egg, drank his coffee, and said, ‘I shall be in the site office for most of the day if you want me …’

Abe looked what he was, a prosperous builder, and he followed tradition in carrying on the family firm.

‘Try to keep Julie away from the farm, and the Vinter boy.’

Kathy was irritated. ‘I can’t choose her friends for her and neither can you; she’s seventeen.’

‘You could try.’

As he spoke, Julie came in wearing a jade-green dressing gown over her nightdress. A slim, dark girl, her hair was tousled, her eyes puffed with sleep. She yawned, bracing her shoulders and stretching her arms. ‘Any coffee going?’

Abe, briefcase in hand, was ready to go. ‘Ah, there you are!’ He pecked at his daughter’s cheek, ruffled her hair, and said, ‘Bye, kid! Have a good day, and keep away from young Vinter, he’s a poof!’

‘He’s not a poof, Dad.’ Julie’s protest was mild.

‘Well, if he isn’t he’s in training to be one.’

Julie produced a handkerchief from the pocket of her dressing gown, moistened it with her saliva, and wiped the egg from his chin. ‘You are a mucky pup, Dad!’

She went with him out into the yard, to his car.

Elsa said, ‘They make a good pair. She knows how to handle him, which is more than can be said for her mother. I bet she’ll come back with a nice crisp tenner tucked in the pocket of her dressing gown.’

They heard Abe’s car drive out of the yard and a moment or two later Julie came in with a handful of mail which she dropped beside Kathy’s plate.

‘I met the postman.’ She stood, hesitating, then, ‘I think I’ll go up and get dressed. Then I’m going out – is that all right?’

‘It’s your holiday.’

The two women sat on, nibbling cold toast and sipping coffee. Elsa lit a cigarette.

Although Abe built houses with designer-everything, fingertip central heating and a proliferation of elegant plumbing, Trigg House itself was, in all these things, at least forty years behind the times. But that was how Kathy liked it. Above all there was this archaic kitchen with a great square table in the middle, reminding her of the farmhouse in which she had been brought up.

Julie came down dressed for the street: jeans and a T-shirt with an unreadable slogan. ‘All right; I’m off. Don’t worry if I’m not in for lunch … Bye!’ She was gone.

Katherine’s eyes followed her daughter. ‘She’s changed. I seem to be losing contact and it worries me sometimes.’

‘She’s growing up, Kath; she’s a young woman.’

Katherine reached for another piece of toast, changed her mind, and pushed her plate away. ‘Abe is right about young Vinter; I wish she would find somebody else.’

Elsa mumbled with her mouth full, ‘You don’t know when you’re well off. At least he’s safe. She’s not going to turn up pregnant one day – not by him, anyway.’

Elsa cleared her mouth and reached for her coffee cup. ‘By the way, I suppose you know that Jessica is working part-time for Arnold Paul?’

Kathy paused, her cup to her lips. ‘What on earth is she doing there?’

‘Housework, I suppose – what else? I gather things have got too much for the old housekeeper biddy now that Arnold has his brother there. I heard it in the shop yesterday but I thought you must know.’

Kathy put down her cup. ‘I can’t believe it!’

‘I don’t know why not; she’s done the church cleaning for years.’

Kathy was tense. ‘That’s different. I wish to God she’d agree to sell the bloody farm. Abe’s syndicate would pay through the nose and it’s not as though she’ll ever make a decent living from it.’

Elsa blew out a cloud of pale-grey smoke. ‘Not with the hangers-on she’s got there now, she won’t. At least Jess is willing to work, I’ll say that for her; I don’t know how she fits it all in.’

Kathy was on her feet. ‘I’m going upstairs to change. I shall have a word with Jessica.’

A quarter of an hour later Kathy came down, transformed; she wore a fine checked skirt, a silk blouse, suede jacket and shoes, all in matching shades of grey, set off by a jade necklace and earrings mounted in gold – Abe’s Christmas present.

Elsa was appraising. ‘You’re taking the car?’

‘No.’

‘You’re never walking along the river bank in those shoes?’

‘I’m going round by the road.’

‘I see. We want to bolster our courage. Anyway, don’t blow your top when you get there; it won’t do any good.’

The village square, junction of three roads, merged with the foreshore where boats were drawn up on the shingle. At spring tides, when the wind was right, there was sometimes flooding and none of the houses around the square was without its stock of sandbags, ready filled. Across from Trigg, the garage with its petrol pumps adjoined the boatyard, while pub, post office, general store, café and a few houses completed the square.

‘Morning, Kathy!’ Tommy Noall, at the garage, his head under the bonnet of a car. They had been at the village school together until the age of eleven. Henry Clemens, who kept the general store and post office, was washing down his shop front. ‘Nice morning, Mrs Geach! Makes you think the good Lord has given us spring at last.’ Henry was the churchwarden.

Kathy usually enjoyed walking through her village, knowing, and being known. She was still one of the Dobell twins but she was also Mrs Abe Geach, wife of the contractor who built quality housing, government offices and schools. At such moments it pleased her to be both, but the news about Jessica had put her off-balance.

She turned up Church Lane, which followed the Trigg boundary until it reached the churchyard. The trees, their leaves breaking out of bud, were misty green against the sky and, opposite the church, in the gardens of detached villas, there were camellias and magnolias in flower.

Another two or three hundred yards, and she was in open country, out of sight of the village. Only the church tower, with its four pinnacles and flag-pole, rose out of green fields to mark where the village lay. A ramshackle gate labelled ‘Minions’ gave on to a rutted track which ran through an area of scrub where tethered goats were browsing. The track dropped steeply between high hedges, to end at another gate and the farmyard where hens strutted and pecked over the cobbles. A house backed on the yard and there were outbuildings on two other sides. As always, the yard, the hens and the smells brought back her childhood with disturbing poignancy. Nothing had changed.

Minions had belonged to her parents, both killed in a coach crash in the early years of her marriage. Jessica had insisted on keeping the farm going, first with the help of paid labour, later with the doubtful assistance of a succession of lame ducks needing a roof over their heads. The latest and, so far, the most enduring of these, was a family of three: Laurence and Stephanie Vinter, and their son, Giles.

As Kathy unhooked the gate Jessica’s collie came bounding out of the house, barking, but changed to tail wagging when he saw Kathy. The door led directly into the kitchen and Kathy went in without knocking. The boy, Giles, was seated at the kitchen table, his school books spread out in front of him. He was the same age as Julie and they were in the same form at school. Slim, and small and fair, with the delicate features and colouring of a girl, his eyes were an intense blue, accentuated by the powerful lenses of his spectacles.

‘Oh, Mrs Geach!’ His manner was precise and distant.

‘Working in the holidays, Giles? I wish Julie would. What subjects are you doing for your A-levels? Physics, chemistry and biology – the same as Julie, isn’t it?’

‘I’m doing mathematics instead of biology.’ Giles glanced down at his books and back again. ‘You want to see Miss Jessica? I think she’s mucking out the goat house.’ The blue eyes blinked at her and she realized that she was being dismissed.

She found Jessica manhandling a bale of bedding-straw into the goat house.

‘Kathy! Let me dump this and we’ll go indoors.’

They were twins, but no more alike than most sisters. Jessica was more sturdily built; her hair and eyes were less dark, her skin was lightly tanned, and her expression more open. She had a ready smile. In her denim blouse and jeans, her hair caught back with a clip, she seemed to typify the modern working woman in a way that Kathy had no desire to emulate but envied all the same.

The bale disposed of, Jessica came out of the goat house brushing herself off. She surveyed her sister. ‘You look like an advertisement in Country Life, Kath! Those shoes haven’t been along the river bank. Where’s the car?’

‘I walked round by the road.’ Katherine was terse.

‘Oh, I see; giving the peasants a treat.’

In the kitchen Jessica spoke sharply to the boy, ‘There’s straw in the goat house that needs spreading, Giles. Don’t use it all; there’s enough for tomorrow as well.’

Giles got up without a word and went out into the yard. ‘That boy would never get off his backside unless I chivvied him … Gets it from his mother. Come into the sitting room …’

Kathy said, ‘I thought Julie might have been here.’

‘She was, but it seems his highness wasn’t in the mood for dalliance. They chatted for a few minutes then she was dismissed. Everybody to their taste but I don’t know what she sees in him.’

The house fronted on an inlet from the river overhung by trees, and the tiny window of the sitting room let in a dim and sombre light. Little had changed here over the years except by wear and tear; the black leather sofa, the armchairs, his and hers, the coloured prints in gilded frames, the upright piano against one wall – all had been there when the girls were born in the room above. So had the roll-topped desk and the wooden filing box which successive Dobells had used for their farm records and accounts.

‘Take the weight off your feet, Kath. Feel like a sherry? To be precise, do you feel like risking my fortified wine which I now buy in five-litre plastic containers? I serve it from a sherry bottle but it might taste better from an old boot.’

The two sisters sat, side-by-side on the sofa, sipping fortified wine. ‘Where are Laurence and Stephanie?’

‘Laurence is out digging potatoes. As for Stephanie, it’s the first day of the curse so she won’t put in an appearance till mid-morning.’ Jessica sighed. ‘And lately she’s taken to having afternoons off. Where she goes, God knows, but I notice she’s having more baths than she used to.’

‘But if they’re no use, why do you put up with them, Jess?’

Jessica poured herself a little more wine. ‘Top you up? … No? … Oh, I don’t know! I can’t get anybody else and though Laurence isn’t God’s gift as a farm labourer, he works hard at whatever you tell him to do.’ Jessica grinned. ‘And he’s got other attributes – of a sort.’

Katherine looked at her sister. ‘I hope you don’t mean what I think you do.’

Jessica’s laugh had in it a strain of bitterness. ‘You’re an old prude, Kath! Sometimes I think you’ve turned being a woman into a career – like you took a course or read it in a textbook.’

Katherine was piqued. ‘And what have you done?’

Jessica emptied her glass. ‘Me? I don’t know – what comes naturally, I suppose.’ She was suddenly serious. ‘If I’ve done nothing else I’ve plucked the feathers from a few cockerels and put a stop to their crowing – and I’m not dependent on any one of the bastards.’

‘And I am? You might as well say it. But don’t let’s get into an argument. If you agreed, we could sell this place to the syndicate. You’d get a good price for your share and you could insist on a stake in whatever they made of it. You’d be well off, and still your own woman.’

But Jessica was indignant. ‘Not on your life! If you’ve come here to push Abe’s barrow, you’re wasting your precious time. If I give up here it won’t be for what I can get. Billy Eva would like to add it to his holding; then, at least, it would stay as a farm. As it is, I sell all I can grow, there’s a steady demand for the goats’ milk, and Billy is going to rent Five-acre for his store cattle … All that, with what I get from the church, and now from Arnold Paul—’

‘That’s another thing, Jess – I’ve just heard about it.’

‘So? It’s only two afternoons a week and the money’s good.’

‘But it’s charring, Jess!’

‘So what? I’ve been keeping the church clea. . .