'Mmmm?' She was ever so busy.
'That smelly old geezer from the Arcade. Remember?'
We shared the long horrid silence.
'I couldn't tell you yesterday,' she said.
We both watched her assemble my tin coffee gadget. Only Yanks can make coffee properly. They have this knack. I wonder what our women do wrong. I try, but I'm even worse at it than Janie and that's not far from horrendous. It might come out right, we were both thinking, because you never know your luck. The fuse went in the electric plug. She had a high old time unscrewing it and putting it right. We got mixed up over the wires. Well, morons keep changing the colours of the bloody wires. It's a wonder we aren't all electrocuted.
'He died early yesterday morning, love. I'm so sorry.'
Everything seemed falling to pieces. 'Police say anything?'
'Nobody really saw,' Janie said. 'No witnesses came forward.'
I thought a lot. Dandy suddenly seemed very close. And Manton and Wilkinson. Then fat Henry, and Eleanor. I looked across at Janie. She smiled up, feeling my eyes. We'd a real fire because I'd asked. It was raining. Outside in darkness my robin was probably nodding off. And Crispin my hedgehog was probably roaming, his snuffly infants behind him on the prowl in the muddy grass, filthy beasts. And Tinker Dill, three sheets sloshed in the White Hart by now. And Helen. And Margaret. And Nichole, If you ever bothered to list your responsibilities you'd go spare. I got a pen. Janie saw what I was up to and started us both on separate sheets, copying the diaries. My slowness almost made me bellow with frustration. She was twice as fast. I couldn't do the drawing. Janie had to do that.
It was gone midnight when I phoned Edward Rink to surrender. I wouldn't let him call at the cottage. He gave me a different postal address.
'I give you all I've got of Bexon's,' I told him. 'You leave my friends alone. Okay?'
'With pleasure,' he replied. I swear he was smiling.
We made the diaries into an envelope ready for posting, though it was a homemade job and looked botched.
Janie took it up the lane to our post office as soon as it opened in the morning. By then we'd copied the lot, word for word.
For the rest of the day I let my mind rest. I suppose Janie had slipped me a Micky on Doc Lancaster's orders. Or maybe it was her brew, the western world's most soporific stimulant. Anyway, I dozed a lot.
By evening I was alert enough to feel certain. Edward Rink was a maniac. He'd killed Dandy Jack. He was determined that, if old Bexon had left a clue about a Roman find, nobody else would get it but him. But what the hell did a beauty like Nichole see in a nerk like that? Doesn't it make you wonder, all those old sayings about women and rich men? Rink must have burgled the Castle to get Bexon's coins from the display case. To check they were genuine Romans, not crummy electrotypes people are always trying to sell you these days. It was as simple as that. A cool swine. We're never ashamed of our crimes, not really, but being thought inadequate in some way's the absolute humiliation. Aren't people a funny lot?
About eight o'clock our vicar, Reverend Woking, came to ask if I'd sufficiently recovered from my mythical 'flu to sing in the choir for Dandy Jack. The service would be at ten in a couple of days. They would do the Nelson Mass, though he's not supposed to have papist leanings. I said okay.
'I don't think Lovejoy will be well enough, Reverend,' Janie said. 'He's had an, er, accident in his workshop.'
'Yes, I will,' I said. 'I'm fine.'
'Good, good!' He hesitated, wondering whether to chance his arm and preach to us about Janie's status, but wisely decided to cut his losses.
'Before you start,' I put in as Janie prepared to go for me, 'you've never heard our tenors. Without me the Sanctus is doomed.' We bickered this way all evening.
CHAPTER XII
Contents - Prev/Next
HALF THE CHURCH was crowded. Half was bone bare. We were all there. Helen holy without a cigarette. Jimmo with his asbestos cough. Ted the barman from the White Hart. Jill Jenkins with her poodle and a bewildered young uniformed navigator she'd somehow got off a coaster new in harbour that day. Harry Bateman and Jenny lighting candles for all they were worth because their new place opened in the morning. Patrick sobbing into a nasturtium hankie, Lily trying to comfort him and weeping worse. Big Frank from Suffolk trying to look as if he wasn't reading a Sotheby's catalogue of seventeenth-century German and French jewellery. Tinker Dill giving everybody a nasty turn having no cloth cap on and shaming us all to death by stubbing out his fag in our church's exquisite thirteenth-century baptismal font ('Well, what's the bleeding water in it for, then?' he whispered in an indignant stage bellow when Lily glared). A miscellany of shuffling barkers unrecognizable with washed heads and clean fingernails - one had even pressed his trousers. Margaret, the only one of us all who knows when to kneel down and which book has the right hymns - we all followed her example. Gimbert's auctioneers had sent a ghoul or two by way of unmitigated grief. And Dig Mason in a morning suit for God's sake, gear so posh we all knew the Rolls outside was waiting for him and not the coffin. And Algernon falling over twice moving along the pew. He'd brought his uncle, Blind Squaddie from the houseboat, who felt the hand-embroidered kneelers a little too long. I'd have to count them after he'd gone. And a few villagers on a day trip from across the road to get a kick out of life.
Oh, and Dandy Jack.
We'd got some flowers in wreaths, one lot shaped like a cross. I'd sold Big Frank my single display Spode plate, cracked and just about in one piece, and bought a lot off lowers. I could tell Janie thought they were the wrong colours but they were bright.
Dandy Jack liked bright colours. By then I'd spent up. I got three lengths of wire from a neighbour's lad and threaded the flower stems in and out with green stuff I'd taken from my hedge. It's hard to make a circle. Try it. You don't realize how much skill goes into making things till you do it yourself. It looked just like a real wreath when it was finished. Making it didn't do my hands any good, but I was proud of it. Janie went off somewhere and came back with one of those cards. We wrote 'In Remembrance' and our names on it and tied it on with black cotton.
