clustered like massive, broken teeth, upright headstones leaning out of true, solid table-tombs grown over with moss in their lettering, and deep in long grass bleaching to autumn, because in such a huddle it was almost impossible to mow or even to scythe. The vicar turned the corner of the tower, and clucked mild annoyance, because somebody had thrown down what looked like some old, dark rags among the long grass, or else the wind had blown them there, or some playful pup dragged them in. Dogs were not frowned upon in St Eata’s churchyard. The Reverend Stephen looked upon them as among the most innocent and confiding, if rowdy, of God’s creatures.
He went aside from the path to remove the offence, and froze after two paces. The dark rags had gained a distinct shape, had matter within them, had sprayed the table-tomb and surrounding stones with a sparse, blackened rain. The shape was grotesque, as if someone had loosed a heavy press at speed upon a human form, and squashed it into fragments, as some nut-crackers reduce a walnut to splintered pulp. But there was still a discernible, even a recognisable, head. There was a face, upturned, open-mouthed, open-eyed. The fall that had shattered all other bones had left this identifying countenance unmarked, the back of the skull lolling in the thick verdure beneath it.
Rainbow had had every reason for absenting himself from his somewhat equivocal connubial couch. He stared at the October sky past the Reverend Stephen’s head, and seemed almost immune to the ruin of his body. There was even a look of desperate eagerness left glaring from his fixed features, as though he had died with his eyes upon the crock of gold.
CHAPTER THREE
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The Reverend Stephen was a conscientious soul who knew all about the citizen’s duty where murder or mayhem were in question, or even the self-violence that could hardly be associated with Rainbow. He drew back from the appalling wreckage among the graves with great care, marking his path in case some other, less innocent, had also trodden here during the night, and went to call the police, whose job this clearly was. But he was so far adopted into the tribal structure of Middlehope that it never occurred to him to call anyone but Sergeant Moon.
Homicide might live in Comerbourne. Here in Middlehope Sergeant Moon was the official guardian of the tribe’s peace, to be trusted absolutely, and turned to in all emergencies. The Reverend Stephen never for one moment entertained the idea of notifying Barbara Rainbow of her husband’s present whereabouts and present state. Nor did it occur to him that he was treating her as a woman of the tribe, not an alien from the outer world. Middlehope had spread a wing over her from that moment, whether she knew it or not.
‘Oh, yes, quite dead,’ said the vicar simply, at ease with the man to whom he spoke. ‘He’s broken to pieces, you see. He must have come off the tower, he couldn’t have been shattered like that any other way. Yes, it was his wife who rang me, fretting about him not coming home. I think he sometimes didn’t, but this time she hadn’t any clues, and she was troubled.’ A good Biblical word, troubled. ‘I haven’t told anyone, and nobody’s likely to go through there, not close. I thought better let well alone rather than mount a guard. No, I haven’t said a word to her.’
‘All right, sir,’ said Sergeant Moon briskly, ‘you go and just keep a discreet eye on the place, and fend people off it if need be, and I’ll be with you in ten minutes.’
‘She mustn’t see him, you know,’ said the vicar, and blushed to hear himself giving advice to an old hand like the sergeant. But after all, he had seen what was left of Rainbow, and as yet Sergeant Moon hadn’t. ‘I suppose it’s properly my job to tell the widow…?’
‘We’ll take care of all that,’ said Moon imperturbably, and cleared the line in order to get through direct to headquarters at Comerbourne.
‘Oh, no!’ protested George, confronted with this altogether too apt confirmation of the sergeant’s forebodings. ‘You’ll have to give up prophecy. Jack, you’re too unnerving.’
‘Could be accident,’ said Moon, without much confidence. ‘Sounds as if he fell from the church tower. I’m on my way, and I’ve called the doc.’
‘Right, we’ll be with you in twenty minutes.’
In the event it took the squad a full half-hour to reach Abbot’s Bale, since the morning rush was in full swing, and the roads congested. But within an hour the whole grisly apparatus connected with sudden and suspect death had arrived, and was grouped about all that remained of Arthur Everard Rainbow.
The police doctor, confronted with this wreckage, shrugged his helplessness, testified unnecessarily to the fact that life was extinct, opined that it had been extinct for many hours, almost certainly all night, and left it to the pathologist to go into detail, since this was now obviously his affair. The photographer shot a great deal of film, and the forensic scientist, arriving last, looked down at the body, looked up at the tower, looming close over the spot, and wondered whether he was needed at all.
‘Not much doubt where he fell from, is there?’ he observed mildly. ‘Pretty plain case of accident, wouldn’t you say?’ He had not, so far, taken a close look at the set-up.
‘On the face of it, yes,’ agreed George, ‘except that I don’t much like its face. There are grazes on his palms, and the balls of his fingers, for one thing, white marks of what looks like stone-dust, and the same under his finger-nails, as well as what I think you may find to be fragments of moss. And since he can hardly have done any scrabbling about on the stones here after he hit, if I’m right the debris is from up there.’
‘He’d try to grab hold and save himself if he found himself falling,’ suggested the devil’s advocate, already interested.
‘Why should he find himself falling? There doesn’t seem to be a large chunk of masonry that’s come down with him, or anything like that. And though I haven’t been up there, I wouldn’t mind betting that parapet is breast-high. You don’t overbalance over a barrier like that. Not to mention the question of what he was doing up on top in the first place.’
‘Hmmm, that’s true. They’d hardly keep the organ out on the leads, would they? Well, now, let’s have a look, before the doc takes him away.’ And delicately he began to move round the rim of the scene, looking at grass- blades and the scarred mosses on the stones. Dr Reece Goodwin, a round, bouncing, energetic ball of a man, well into his sixties but looking fifteen years younger, was kneeling beside the body, touching and probing with spatulate fingers.
‘An odd chance, he fell with all the lower part of him on this table tomb and these two headstones, smashed himself to pieces from the waist down, but he came down head and shoulders in this thick tangle of grass and brambles. Nothing but superficial damage, scratches and impact grazes to the head. And yet he’s bled from the back of the skull, and I think we’re going to find there’s an indented wound here resting against nothing but all this cushiony vegetation. And he certainly never moved after he hit.’
