'Sorry we couldn't oblige you, Sandy,' said Frost.
'That's all right,' replied the reporter. He zipped up his anorak. 'What about lunch today at The Crown?'
'Why not? 'said Frost.
The reporter waved and was lost in the snow.
'If anyone wants us, we'll be at the vicarage,' said Frost. 'Give us five minutes, then nip over and discover old Sam.' He studied the blizzard outside. 'You can't beat a white Christmas can you?'
The vicarage was a sprawling Victorian building, huge and cheerless enough for an army barracks, but the vicar, the Reverend James Bell, moonfaced and beaming, greeted them warmly.
'Inspector Frost! Come in, come in.'
He ushered them into an uncarpeted hall with dark brown walls and a high ceiling. It was colder inside than out.
'There's a fire in my study. This way.' He led them to a small room with an enormous marble mantelpiece and a fireplace large enough to roast an ox in; in it two pieces of smoldering coal fought for survival.
'It'll soon get warm,' said the vicar optimistically, attacking the fire with a poker until all signs of life were extinct. 'Oh dear.' He knelt and began puffing and blowing into the grate in a forlorn attempt to raise the dead. At last he stood, admitting defeat. 'Never mind. It's not as cold as it was.'
On the marble mantelpiece were several photographs of recent church functions. One showed a group of children. The Sunday school Christmas party. Tracey Uphill was in no the center of the group. Frost picked up the photograph and studied it. 'It's her we've come about, Padre,' he said, pointing. 'Young Tracey Uphill.'
The vicar sat behind his paper-strewn desk and shook his head, sadly. 'Oh yes. Terrible business. Simply terrible.' He blinked in surprise as a spent match dropped into his paperclip tray. Frost had lit a cigarette.
'Sorry, Padre,' boomed Frost, unabashed, 'thought it was an ashtray.' He retrieved the match and flicked it toward the grate. It missed by miles. 'Hello, does old Martha write to you as well?' He pointed to a letter lying on the desk… spidery writing in green ink on stiff, deckle-edged notepaper.
'This?' The vicar held it up. 'From our local clairvoyant, you mean?' He gave a tolerant smile. 'She wants to hold a public spiritualist meeting in our church hall. We can't pick and choose our lettings, I'm afraid. Our collections are not as generous as one might wish, and things are so expensive. The price of coal!' He swung round for another post-mortem examination of the fire, but stopped as he remembered the reason for their visit. 'I'm sorry. You're here about that poor child. How can I help you?'
'You knew her, didn't you, Vicar?'
The vicar seemed to start. 'Only through Sunday school.'
Frost's eyes narrowed. Why that reaction? 'I meant through Sunday school, of course, sir. Pretty kid wasn't she?'
'Was she? I hadn't noticed.' An attempt to sound offhand that didn't come off.
It suddenly occurred to Clive that both Frost and the Reverend James Bell were talking of Tracey in the past tense.
'Good looks run in her family,' continued Frost. 'You should see her mother. She's on the game, but I expect you know.'
'Yes,' replied the vicar, 'I know. I've often seen the men going into her house.'
Frost nodded. 'She gets thirty quid a time for her Sunday afternoon service. A lot more than you get dropped in your collection plate, I bet.' Frost was the only one who laughed and, to make up for the lack of appreciation, laughed loud and long. Clive looked openly disgusted, the vicar, both pained and rueful. Then Frost stopped abruptly, took a last drag on his cigarette, and hurled it in the general direction of the fireplace.
'We want to search the vicarage, Padre. The kid was supposed to have come here to play in the grounds, but she could well have sneaked into the vicarage without anyone knowing.'
'No!' It was the shocked reaction to an improper suggestion.
Frost stared hard at the vicar. 'Why not, sir?'
'It's not convenient, I'm afraid. We've got people coming. Later perhaps…?' He refused to meet the inspector's questioning eye.
Frost smiled. 'We won't pinch anything, I promise you. I've got more hymnbooks than I can read back at home. We'll let you know when we've finished.' He looked over the vicar's shoulder. 'Hello, there's a trace of smoke coming from your fire. I'd encourage it, if I were you.' A jerk of his head to Clive and they were out of the study before Bell could think of a reason to stop them.
Frost wound the scarf tighter round his neck. 'Like a flaming igloo in there.'
'He didn't seem too keen on our looking around,' remarked Clive.
'Doesn't trust you, son. It's your suit. Not much better than yesterday's effort, I'm afraid. We'll start at the top and work down.'
They trudged upwards. Staircase succeeded staircase, little sub-landings and corridors shooting off at each turn. The vicarage would be a swine to search properly. And then the stairs stopped and there were only brown cobwebby ceilings above and a gloomy passage lined with dark doors. They creaked the doors open and looked in on pokey attic cells with low sloping ceilings, flapping mildewed wallpaper, and tiny windows thick with years of grime.
'The servants would have slept up here in the old days,' explained Frost, stepping back hurriedly as a floorboard disintegrated under his foot. 'What a life the poor sods must have led when you think of it. Working like beavers from crack of dawn until nearly midnight, scrubbing, scouring, emptying the gentry's slop-buckets, then staggering up all those flaming stairs for a few hours' kip before it started all over again the next morning.'
I don't know about the slop-buckets, thought Clive, but their hours sound better than mine.
The dust and cobwebs in the attic rooms had clearly not been disturbed for years, so they descended to the floor below where the rooms were larger and the sour smell of decay slightly less pungent. On this floor the rooms were apparently used for storage, graveyards for the abandoned junk of past incumbents. They looked in cupboards and battered trunks that smelt faintly of lavender and strongly of mouldering linen and that contained stained ancient clothing and scuttling insects.
But the end room was different. The door opened easily and the smell inside was of stale tobacco smoke, like the vicar's study. Drawn, heavy curtains made it dark. Frost clunked down the old-fashioned brass lightswitch and an unshaded 60-watt bulb glimmered mournfully. He crossed to the window, dragged back the curtains, and looked down on the back gardens of Vicarage Terrace, now unified in a single plain by the heavy covering of snow. He couldn't tell which was Mrs. Uphill's garden; they all looked the same.
The room was used by the vicar as a photographic studio. The thick cord of an antiquated electric bowl fire shared a power-point with the thinner cord of a photoflood lamp and reflector on a tall metal stand. Around the walls were enlargements of photos of churches and local landmarks. Inside a corner cupboard they found more photographic equipment, including a tripod and an early model Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera.
But it was the sheet-draped rectangular object in the center of the floor that claimed the men's interest.
'That's where the body is,' said Frost.
Clive twitched the sheet away to reveal a battered metal coffin. A cabin trunk, well worn, its sides pasted with labels from long-defunct Edwardian shipping lines. The trunk was old, but the heavy brass padlock securing the lid was brand-new.
'Let's see if one of these will open it,' murmured Frost, producing the bunch of Skeleton keys he always carried with him. The third key he tried did the trick. Clive flung back the lid and they peered inside, almost fearful of what they might see.
Books. The trunk was tight-packed with books of all shapes and sizes, none of which seemed to warrant the expense of a heavy brass padlock.
They took them out. Old hymnbooks with the covers hanging by a thread. A copy of Mr. Midshipman Easy presented to Master James Graham Bell, Cooperley Primary School, June 1946, for good work. There were some bound volumes of The Boys' Own Paper dating from the turn of the century that Frost flipped through with interest. 'Could be worth a few bob, son. Wonder if he'd miss them.'
The next layer brought forth more ancient treasures including volumes of The Strand Magazine containing the Sherlock Holmes stories with Sidney Paget drawings of spade-bearded men in hansom cabs.
But in the next layer… Here the unexpurgated Fanny Hill was the tamest of the collection. Filthy books, obscene books. The sort of books kept under the counter in grubby little back-street Soho bookshops. The general
