'Miss Cool's recommendation, no doubt?'
Like the village idiot in a pantomime, I gave half a dozen quick, bobbing nods.
'I was sorry to hear about the way your uncle—Mr. Twining—died,' I said, and I meant it. 'Honestly I was. It doesn't seem fair.'
'Fair? It certainly was not fair,' she said. 'And yet it was not unjust. It was not even wicked. Do you know what it was?'
Of course I knew. I had heard this before, but I was not here to debate her.
'No,' I whispered.
'It was murder,' she said. 'It was murder, pure and simple.'
'And who was the murderer?' I asked. Sometimes my own tongue took me by surprise.
A rather vague look floated across Miss Mountjoy's face like a cloud across the moon, as if she had spent a lifetime preparing for the part and then, center stage in the spotlight, had forgotten her lines.
'Those boys,' she said at last. 'Those loathsome, detestable boys. I shall never forget them; not for all their apple cheeks and schoolboy innocence.'
'One of those boys is my father,' I said quietly.
Her eyes were somewhere else in time. Only slowly did they return to the present to focus upon me.
'Yes,' she said. 'Laurence de Luce. Jacko. Your father was called Jacko. A schoolboy sobriquet, and yet even the coroner called him that. Jacko. He said it ever so softly at the inquest, almost caressingly—as if all the court were in thrall with the name.”
'My father gave evidence at the inquest?'
'Of course he testified—as did the other boys. It was the sort of thing that was done in those days. He denied everything, of course, all responsibility. A valuable postage stamp had been stolen from the headmaster's collection, and it was all, 'Oh no, sir, it wasn't me, sir!' As if the stamp had magically sprouted grubby little fingers and filched itself!'
I was about to tell her “My father is not a thief, nor is he a liar,” when suddenly I knew that nothing I could say would ever change this ancient mind. I decided to take the offensive.
'Why did you walk out of church this morning?' I asked.
Miss Mountjoy recoiled as if I had thrown a glass of water in her face. “You don't mince words, do you?”
'No,' I said. 'It had something to do with the Vicar's praying for the stranger in our midst, didn't it? The man whose body I found in the garden at Buckshaw.'
She hissed through her teeth like a teakettle. “
'Yes,' I said.
'Then tell me this—did it have red hair?' She closed her eyes, and kept them closed awaiting my reply.
'Yes,' I said. 'It had red hair.'
'For what we have received may the Lord make us truly thankful,' she breathed, before opening her eyes again. It seemed to me not only a peculiar response, but somehow an unchristian one.
'I don't understand,' I said. And I didn't.
'I recognized him at once,' she said. 'Even after all these years, I knew who he was as soon as I saw that shock of red hair walking out of the Thirteen Drakes. If that hadn't been enough, his swagger, that overweening cockiness, those cold blue eyes—any one of those things—would have told me that Horace Bonepenny had come back to Bishop's Lacey.'
I had the feeling that we were slipping into deeper waters than I knew.
'Perhaps now you can see why I could not take part in any prayer for the repose of that boy's—that man's— rancid soul.'
She reached out and took the bag of acid drops from my hand, popping one into her mouth and pocketing the rest.
'On the contrary,' she continued, 'I pray that he is, at this very moment, being basted in hell.'
And with that, she walked into her dank Willow Villa and slammed the door.
Who on earth was Horace Bonepenny? And what had brought him back to Bishop's Lacey?
I could think of only one person who might be made to tell me.
AS I RODE UP THE AVENUE of chestnuts to Buckshaw, I could see that the blue Vauxhall was no longer at the door. Inspector Hewitt and his men had gone.
I was wheeling Gladys round to the back of the house when I heard a metallic tapping coming from the greenhouse. I moved towards the door and looked inside. It was Dogger.
He was sitting on an overturned pail, striking the thing with a trowel.
Clang… clang… clang… clang. In the way the bell of St. Tancred's tolls for the funeral of some ancient in Bishop's Lacey, it went on and on, as if measuring the strokes of a life. Clang… clang… clang… clang…
His back was to the door, and it was obvious that he did not see me.
I crept away towards the kitchen door where I made a great and noisy ado by dropping Gladys with a loud clatter on the stone doorstep. (“Sorry, Gladys,” I whispered.)
