oddly forbidding. Some were in white or black marble, some painted in amazingly bright colours for their age. Some were plain stone, on which the lettering had almost disappeared, as the stone crumbled with age and damp.
“Sacred to the memory of Lady Eliza Dalling,” she read from a chalky white tablet on the wall. “Died in infancy, aged two years, in the year of Our Lord, 1689.” Poor little soul. Then another, worse, named what must have been an entire clutch of children, all dying under twelve years old, and in the same year. Probably of some disease that would have been cured by antibiotics in a week, thought Lois, saddened at the list. Each had been a little child, lovingly welcomed into the Dalling family, laughing and running about the same rooms that Lois had just cleaned, skipping over the park through which she had driven. Then all died, little bodies lying still, with weeping parents kneeling in sorrow. Lois felt her eyes fill, and shook herself. For goodness sake, it was hundreds of years ago! But this was a place of death, and it had that terrible chill that had nothing to do with the absence of central heating.
It was also very quiet, but not a comfortable, peaceful quiet. It was as if the whole place was holding its breath.
Then she heard it. She whipped round, and there it was again. A faint sigh, a stirring of the air. Her immediate instinct was to run, but she checked it. She listened again. It seemed to come from the high, painted tomb at the other side of the church, where, in almost darkness, a recumbent stone figure lay waiting for the Day of Judgement. As she approached, she shivered at the thought of the old knight in his dull grey armour, and imagined his warrior face with drooping moustache. She was touched to see down at his feet the figure of a little terrier dog, head tucked between paws.
She looked around fearfully, but there were no more sighs, no scuttling mice or swooping bats. She peered again at the tomb. It must have been a nice little dog, keeping guard by his master for five centuries. Lois put out a hand to give it a friendly stroke, and recoiled. It was warm beneath her hand. “Oh my God!” she screamed, her body rigid. And then, as she stared, rooted to the spot in terror, the little dog lifted its head and turned a bleary eye to look at her.
? Terror on Tuesday ?
Eight
Derek had come home early after finishing a job with a couple of hours to spare. It wasn’t worth starting something new, so he’d come back to Long Farnden and planned some time in the garden. He was just changing his shoes when the telephone rang, and he was surprised to hear Lois’s voice. He didn’t recognize it at first, she sounded so strange.
“What, duck? What did you say?” She was on her mobile, and the reception wasn’t good. “Come where? Oh, yes, oh, all right, then. Dalling Park. The church, you said? What on earth are you doing in the church? Lois? Lois?” But the line had gone dead, and he frowned, worried at the obvious panic in Lois’s voice.
It didn’t take him long to drive to Dalling, his foot down hard on the accelerator. Why hadn’t she called his mobile, he wondered. Then he remembered he’d left it in the van when he got home. She’d probably tried it first, and when he hadn’t answered got into a worse panic about whatever it was. He came to the grassy drive leading to the church and skidded on the turn, reducing his speed. He banged the car door shut and ran at the double to the church, flinging open the door and leaping down the steps into the silent interior. “Lois! Lois! Where are you?”
He saw her then, sitting pale-faced in one of the black oak pews, staring at him, and mechanically stroking a dozy-looking, dun-coloured terrier curled up on her lap.
“Derek,” she said, “what kept you?” She smiled uncertainly, and he breathed a sigh of relief. She got up from the pew, and walked towards him. “Something very dodgy has been goin’ on,” she said in a muffled voice, as he put his arms round her and the dog and held them tight.
“Hold on, gel,” he said. “Give it a minute, then you can tell me.” If any bugger’s done anything to my Lois, I’ll kill ‘em, he said angrily to himself.
“This dog,” she said, finally pushing back from him. “I think it’s been drugged. I found it over there, on the end of that tomb. It was just lying there, like a stone dog.” She stopped, took a deep breath, and continued, her voice more normal now. “But there’s more, Derek. Come over and see.” They walked over to the tomb, Lois still cradling the little dog, which seemed to have gone back to sleep. “Look,” she said. “Look inside the knight’s helmet. It’s…well, just have a look.”
Derek leaned over and peered at the head of the figure. “Can’t see much in this gloom,” he said.
“Look closer,” said Lois, “look at his face.”
At that moment a shaft of sunlight shone through a diamond-paned window, high up in the side aisle of the church, a celestial spotlight, helpfully illuminating the knight’s tomb.
“Face?” said Derek. And then: “Christ Almighty! He’s alive!”
“I don’t think so,” said Lois quietly. “But it
“Bloody hell…You’re right,” choked Derek. “And I know who it is.” He looked again, and then shook his head in disbelief.
“Who is it, then?” said Lois, though she was fairly sure she knew.
“It’s the major,” said Derek. “And you’re right. He’s dead as a doornail.”
“Better ring the police, then,” said Lois flatly. “And while we’re waiting, we can have a good look around. Here, dog,” she said, “no good waiting for your master. We’d better put you in the van, though I expect the police will want to question you as an expert witness.” She gave Derek a wintry smile. “Who would want to kill the major, Derek?” she said.
“Quite a few,” he said, “from what I heard in the pub. Though none of it amounted to much, if you ask me. Still, better ring the cops, gel. Get on with it. Sooner the better.” And then he added, unable to keep a sour note from his voice, “It’ll probably be your pal Cowgill, the demon detective. No doubt you know the number.”
Lois ignored this, and looked at her watch. “You’d better get back, Derek,” she said. “The kids’ll be home from school shortly, and one of us must be there. I’ll wait…”
Derek frowned. Lois’s face was still pale. “Are you sure, me duck?” he said. “I can just as well stay here for the cops, and you go on home, make yourself a cup of tea.”
Lois shook her head. “No, I found him, so it’ll be me they want to talk to. I’ll be OK.” She took out her mobile, dialled a number and waited.
¦
“Afternoon, Lois,” said Hunter Cowgill, stepping down into the chill.
After twenty minutes or so of being alone, Lois was relieved that the church was no longer empty, that somehow the presence of the law at the scene of the crime had warmed the place up. She knew some people believed the spirit hung around for a while before a dead person truly departed, and there was undoubtedly something still present in the silence of the church. After five minutes of absolutely nothing happening, Lois had started to hum a tune to keep the shadows from advancing. It was an old tune, one her grandmother used to sing around the house. Halfway through, she’d forgotten how it went, and stopped. Her shivers returned.
It had been perhaps half an hour before the panoply of the law moved in, and, last of all, now a welcome sight amongst all those strangers, Lois had seen Hunter Cowgill striding swiftly towards her, a half smile on his face. Well, it was all right for him: dead bodies were his stock in trade. But this was the first – no, second – that Lois had seen. And her dad didn’t really count, because she had sat with him during those final hours, until he had slipped away in morphine-assisted sleep. There had been no sudden end, no point at which she could have said, now he’s dead, my dad, gone. But coming across the major like this, in the middle of a day when she’d had an hour or so to spare and decided to satisfy idle curiosity, this took a bit of getting used to.
“I won’t say I told you so,” said Cowgill, sitting down in the pew next to Lois.
“What?” she said sharply.
“On the phone, you said there was nothing for you to do, and I said there was always crime. And here it is, and you right in the middle of it.”
Lois stared at him. “You don’t think
