“Hoy, Colin,” I said, stepping in front of him to block his way. “I didn’t know you were a Scout.”
He put his head down, jammed his hands into the pockets of his shorts, and sidestepped me. I followed him into the church.
The older members of the choir had already taken their places, chatting away to one another as they awaited the arrival of the organist, the men on one side of the chancel, the women facing them, on the other.
Miss Cool, who was both Bishop’s Lacey’s postmistress and its confectioner, shot me a beaming smile, and the Misses Puddock, Lavinia and Aurelia, who owned the St. Nicholas Tea Room, gave me identical twiddles of their fingers.
“Good evening, choir,” Feely said. It was a tradition that dated back into the mists of Christian history.
“Good evening, Miss de Luce,” they responded, automatically.
Feely took her seat on the organ bench, and with no more than a “Hymn number three hundred and eighty- three,” barked out over her shoulder, launched into the opening bars of “We Plow the Fields and Gather,” leaving me scrambling to find the page in the hymn-book.
“
“
As I sang, I thought of Brookie’s body dangling from Poseidon’s trident in the downpour. There had been nothing soft or refreshing about that particular storm—in fact, it had been one hell of a cloudburst.
I looked across the chancel at Colin. He was singing with intense concentration, his eyes closed, his face upturned to the day’s last light which was now seeping in through the darkening stained-glass windows. I’d deal with him later.
“
The organ screeched to a halt in the middle of a note, as if someone had strangled it.
“De Luce,” a voice was saying sourly, and I became aware that it was Feely’s.
She was addressing me!
“The voice cannot emerge through a closed mouth.”
Heads turned towards me, and there were a couple of smiles and titters.
“Now then, again—from ‘the winds and waves obey Him—’ ”
She struck a leading note on the keyboard, and then the organ roared back to life and we were off again.
How dare she single me out in that manner? The witch!
To me, the choir practice seemed to go on forever, perhaps because there’s no joy in simply mouthing the words—in fact, it’s surprisingly hard work.
But at last it was over. Feely was gathering up her music and having a jolly old chin-wag with Cynthia Richardson, the vicar’s wife, whose fan club did not count me among its members. I’d take the opportunity to slip away unnoticed and tackle Colin in the churchyard with a couple of interesting questions that had come to mind.
“Flavia—”
Drat!
Feely had broken off her conversation, and was bearing down upon me. It was too late to pretend I hadn’t heard her.
She seized my elbow and gave it a furtive shake. “Don’t go sneaking off,” she said in an undertone, using her other hand to wave a cheery good-bye to Cynthia. “Father will be here in a few minutes, and he has asked in particular that you wait.”
“Father here? Whatever for?”
“Oh, come off it, Flavia—you know as well as I do. It’s cinema night, and Father was quite right—he said you’d try to dodge it.”
She was correct on both counts. Although I had since put it out of my mind, Father
And sure enough—here was Father now with Daffy, at the church door, shaking hands with the vicar. It was too late to escape.
“Ah, Flavia,” the vicar said, “thank you for adding your voice to our little choir of angels, as it were. I was just telling your father how pleased I was to see Ophelia on the organ bench. She plays so well, don’t you think? It’s a treat to see her conducting the choir with such verve. ‘And a little child shall lead them,’ as the prophet Isaiah tells us … not, of course, that Ophelia’s a little child, dear me, no!—far from it. But come away, the Bijou Cinema awaits!”
As we strolled through the churchyard towards the parish hall, I noticed Colin flitting from gravestone to gravestone, engaged apparently in some elaborate game of his own invention.
