descendants ending with a female, May Turner, who had married Daniel Gladstone here in Tormarton in 1943. Then he let the pages fall open at the old Christmas card. He wanted another look at the photo inside, of the woman and child, and the wording on the card, concise, touching and yet remote:
He closed the Bible and slipped it into his coat pocket, trying not to feel furtive.
Outside, he made a more thorough tour of the outhouses than before. They had been ravaged by the winds endemic in this exposed place, and patched up from time to time with tarpaulin and pieces of corrugated iron. They should have been torn down long ago and rebuilt. Someone, he noticed, had recently fed and watered the chickens. It was one of life’s few certainties that whenever there were animals at a crime scene, you could count on one of the police seeing to their needs. He scraped away some straw in the hen-house in case there had been recent digging underneath, but the surface was brick-hard.
Then he returned to his car and drove through the lanes to Tormarton village, a cluster of grey houses, cottages and farm buildings behind drystone walls. Rustic it may have appeared, yet there was the steady drone of traffic from the motorway only a quarter of a mile to the south. The inhabitants must have been willing to trade the noise for the convenience. It didn’t take a detective to tell that many were escapees from suburban life. The old buildings remained, but gentrified, cleaned up and adapted to a car-owning population. The Old School House no longer catered for children. The shop and sub-Post Office had been converted into a pub. The Cotswold Way, another modern gloss on ancient features, snaked between the cottages and across the fields.
He parked opposite the church and called at Church Cottage nearby. A woman answered, rubbing her hands on a towel. She smiled as if she knew why he was there. The fragrance of fried onions gusted from behind her, causing Diamond some unease over his still-turbulent stomach. He explained who he was.
‘You’re looking for the vicar, are you?’ The woman grinned. ‘Don’t worry. You’re not the first to make that mistake. Our vicar lives at Marshfield. We have to share him with two other parishes.’
‘Is there a church warden in the village, then?’
‘There is, but if you want the vicar, he may be in the church, still. There was a funeral earlier.’ Her gaze shifted from Diamond. ‘No, get your skates on – there he goes, at the end of the street.’
‘Thanks.’ He gave a shout and stepped out briskly after a tall, silver-haired man in the act of bundling his vestments into the back seat of a car.
The vicar straightened up and looked round. Diamond introduced himself.
‘You’re a detective? This is to do with poor old Gladstone, I suppose.’
‘Can you spare a few minutes, sir?’
The vicar said that he doubted if he could help much, but he would answer any questions he could. ‘Have you had lunch? The Portcullis has a rather good bar menu.’
Diamond patted his ample belly. ‘I’m giving it a miss today.’
‘Then why don’t we talk inside the church?’’ Whatever suits you, sir.’
St Mary Magdalene, the vicar explained as they approached it, was pre-Conquest in origin. There were Saxon stones in the structure of the tower. The priest of Tormarton, he said, was mentioned in Domesday.
‘So you’re one of a long line, sir?’ Diamond commented, willing to listen to some potted history in exchange for goodwill and, he hoped, the local gossip.
‘Yes, indeed. The line probably goes back two or three centuries earlier than that. There are various theories about the origin of the name of our village. The first syllable, ‘Tor”, may refer to “torr”, a hill, or the pagan deity Thor, or it may derive from a thorn tree. But there’s no dispute about the second part of the name. The derivation is “macre tun” – the farm on the boundary, or border. We stand, you see – and it’s rather exciting – on the ancient border of the Kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex.’
‘Mercia and Wessex,’ Diamond said without sharing the excitement. There was a danger of the history over- running. ‘But the present church is basically late Norman, as you must have noted already.’
‘Certainly have, sir. Must take a lot of upkeep. Do you have a good-sized congregation?’
‘It depends what you take to be a good size. I suppose we do reasonably well for these times.’ The vicar opened the wooden gate and led the way up a small avenue of yew trees, through the genteel end of the churchyard, where a high complement of raised tombs blackened by age stood at odd angles. The main entrance was round the right-hand side of the church.
‘Was Daniel Gladstone one of your flock?’
‘They all are,’ said the vicar. ‘But I know what you’re asking. He didn’t join in the worship. He didn’t join in anything much. Quite a solitary figure.’ He paused, then sighed and said, ‘The manner of his death is on all our consciences. And it was too long before he was found, far too long.’
‘Several days, anyway.’
‘Dreadful. Every parish priest has a few like that, insisting on going on in their own way, shutting the world out. It’s a dilemma. I called on him occasionally and he was barely civil.’
‘No family?’
‘Not in the neighbourhood. Both his marriages failed. It was a hard life, and I don’t think the wives could take it.’
‘So there were two marriages?’ said Diamond. They stepped into the small arched porch and the vicar turned the iron ring of the church door and parted the red curtains inside.
‘Two, yes. He was married here the first time during the war, long before I came. She wasn’t a local girl, I understand. From London, I think, to escape the bombing. Old Daniel must have been more sociable in those days. Young and carefree. His father would have owned the farm, then.’
They had paused in front of a sculptured wall monument to one Edward Topp, who had died in 1699. The Topp coat of arms consisted of a gloved hand gripping a severed arm, the soggy end painted red. Diamond thought of the post-mortem, took a deep breath and switched his gaze to a floor brass of a figure in a long garment, with all his limbs intact.
‘Fifteenth century. John Ceysill, a steward. Note the pen and inkhorn at his waist,’ the vicar informed him. ‘The Gladstones are one of the village families from generations back. If you’re looking for their name on the memorials 192
– of which we have some fine examples – you will be disappointed. Ordinary folk were not commemorated like the gentry.’
‘Unless they’re on the war memorial.’
‘Good point. The two world wars had slipped my mind.’
‘Easily done.’
‘But there are many fine features here in St Mary’s.’
Diamond’s gaze had already moved up to the fine feature of the timbered roof, not to admire it, but to work out how to stave off a lecture on its history. He produced the Bible from his pocket, an inspired move.
It was enough to stop the vicar in his tracks. True, they were in the right place, but policemen didn’t usually carry the Good Book.
‘So was old Daniel the last of the line?’
‘To my knowledge, yes.’
‘His first wife was only nineteen.’
Then Diamond opened the inside page with the family tree and passed it across.
‘I didn’t know he possessed a Bible,’ said the vicar, quick to understand. ‘This evidently came from the wife’s family, the Turners. Ah. May Turner married Daniel Gladstone, 1943, St Mary Magdalene’s.’
‘But it didn’t last long, you say?’
‘That was my understanding. They separated quite soon and she must have left her Bible behind. I heard that she left suddenly. Can’t tell you when.’
‘If there was a second marriage…’
‘There must have been a death or a divorce,’ the vicar completed it for him. ‘I can’t tell you which. His second marriage would have been in the nineteen-sixties. She was another very young woman, the daughter of the publican, I was told.’
‘Would her name have been Meg?’
‘Meg?’ He sounded doubtful.
