“But if you’ve hit your head—”
“Just banged up my face on that silly door, didn’t I?” She backed herself cautiously into the chair and put one hand on each arm. Her movement was slow and it looked deliberate, as if she were digging out of her memory the appropriate way to sit and behave when someone came to call. But something about her manner — perhaps it was the way her arms moved, like mechanical extensions of her body, or the way her fingers uncurled with an effort and lay flat against the chair’s upholstery — suggested that she really wanted nothing so much as to cradle herself, doubled over, until some interior pain went away. When neither Lynley nor St. James spoke at once, she said, “Church wardens asked me to keep the place up and get it ready for another vicar. I’ve been cleaning. Sometimes I work too hard and get a bit sore. You know.”
“You’ve been working on the house since the vicar died?” It seemed unlikely. The place wasn’t that large.
“It takes time, doesn’t it, to get things sorted out proper and to make them tidy when someone passes on.”
“You’ve done a good job.”
“It’s just that they always look the vicarage over, don’t they, the new ones? It helps them make a decision if they get offered the job.”
“Is that how it worked with Mr. Sage? Did he come to look the vicarage over before he took the position?”
“He didn’t mind what it was like. I s’pose it was because he didn’t have a family so it didn’t much matter about the house. There was only him in it.”
“Did he ever speak of a wife?” St. James asked.
Polly reached for the amulet which lay in her lap. “Wife? Was he thinking of getting married?”
“He’d been married. He was a widower.”
“He never said. I thought…Well, he didn’t seem much interested in women, did he?”
Lynley and St. James exchanged a glance. Lynley said, “How do you mean?”
Polly picked up the amulet and closed her fingers round it, returning her hand to the arm of the chair. “He never acted any different with the church-cleaning ladies than he did with the blokes that ring the bells. I always thought…I thought, well, maybe the vicar’s too holy. Maybe he doesn’t think about ladies and such. He read the Bible lots, after all. He prayed. He wanted me to pray with him. He’d always say, Let’s start the day with a prayer, dear Polly.”
“What sort of prayer?”
“‘God, help us to know Your will and to find the way.’”
“That was the prayer?”
“Mostly. But it was longer’n that. I always wondered what way I was s’posed to find.” Her lips curved briefly. “Find the way to cook the meat proper, I guess. Except he never complained about my cooking, the vicar. He said, You cook like Saint Somebody-or-other, dear Polly. I forget who. St. Michael? Did he cook?”
“I think he fought the devil.”
“Oh. Well. I’m not religious. I mean the kind of religion with churches and such. Vicar didn’t know that, which is just as well.”
“If he admired your cooking, he must have told you he’d not be home for dinner the night he died.”
“He only said that he wouldn’t be wanting any dinner. I didn’t know he was going out. I just thought maybe he wasn’t feeling right.”
“Why?”
“He’d been holed up in his bedroom all day, hadn’t he, and he didn’t eat his lunch. He came out once round tea time to use the phone in the study, but he went right back to his room when he was done.”
“What time was this?”
“Round three, I guess.”
“Did you hear his conversation?”
She opened her palm and looked at the amulet. She rolled her fingers against it. “I was a tad worried about him. It wasn’t like Mr. Sage not to eat.”
“So you heard his conversation.”
“Just a tad is all. And only because I was worried. It wasn’t like I was listening to
Lynley leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He said, “It’s all right, Polly. You had good intentions. No one’s about to judge you for listening at a door.”
She didn’t look convinced. Distrust fl ickered behind the skittish movement of her eyes from Lynley to St. James back to Lynley.
“What did he say?” Lynley asked. “Who was he talking to?”
“You can’t judge what happened then. You can’t know what’s right now. That’s in God’s hands, not yours.”
“We aren’t here to judge. That’s up to—”
“No,” Polly said. “That’s what I heard. That’s what the vicar said. You can’t judge what happened then. You can’t know what’s right now. That’s in God’s hands, not yours.”
“Was that the only phone call he made that day?”
“Far’s I know.”
“Was he angry? Was he shouting, raising his voice?”
“He sounded tired, mostly.”
“You didn’t see him afterwards?”
She shook her head. Afterwards, she said, she took tea to the study, only to fi nd that he’d gone back up to his bedroom. She followed him there and knocked on the door, offering him the food which he refused.
“I said, You haven’t had a bite all day, Vicar, and you must eat something, and I’m not leaving this spot until you have a bite of these nice toast fingers I’ve got here. So he fi nally opened the door. He was dressed, and the bed was made but I knew what he’d been doing.”
“What?”
“Praying. He had this little prayer place in a corner of the room with a Bible on it and a place to kneel. That’s where he’d been.”
“How do you know?”
She rubbed her fingers against her knee in explanation. “Trousers. The crease was gone from right here. There were wrinkle places as well, where his leg bent to kneel.”
“What did he say to you?”
“That I was a good soul but I mustn’t worry. I asked him was he ill. He said no.”
“Did you believe him?”
“I said, You’re wearing yourself out, Vicar, with these trips to London. He’d just got back the day before, see. And every time he went to London, he looked a bit worse than the last time he went. And every time he went, he came home and prayed. Sometimes I wondered…Well, what was he up to in London that he came back so tired and peaky looking? But then, he went on the train, didn’t he, so I thought maybe it was just the aggravation of travel and such. Getting to the station, buying all the tickets, switching trains here and there. That sort of thing. Makes you tired, a trip like that.”
“Where did he go in London?”
Polly didn’t know. Nor could she say what he’d been doing. Whether it was Church business, whether it was personal, the vicar kept the information to himself. The only thing Polly was able to tell them for sure was that he stayed in a hotel not far from Euston Station. It was the same hotel each time. She remembered that. Did they want the name?
Yes, if she had it.
She started to rise, then caught her breath with something like surprise when the movement didn’t come easily to her. She disguised a small cry by coughing. It did little enough to hide her pain.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m silly to fall. Got myself real banged up. Clumsy old cow.” She inched her way forward in the chair and pushed herself up when she got to the edge.
