Seeing the open books that Rosalind had mentioned, Lucas grimaced. “Does this interest you?”
“I am writing about it.”
“Violence and murder?”
“My…experiences.”
“What you’ve done, you mean? Here in the village?” Lucas leaned forward on the desk and the man’s brow creased.
“I don’t understand. No. Nothing happens here.”
“Two women have been murdered.”
“Hah. Hundreds are murdered every day. Women, children…my wife. And no one cares. But I care and I will write about it. About my wife and the things I’ve seen.”
It was all wrong, Lucas realised. This man was a drunken sot, and if his ease with blue ruin was anything to be going by, he’d been steadily drinking for a while. He couldn’t lure a woman into the woods, and he’d be lucky if he could cut anything with his shaking fingers.
“What exactly are you writing about?” The man looked up at Lucas’s question, his eyes unfocused.
“My time as a missionary…on the island. We were some of the first.” He paused and hunted around for more gin. “Do you know, only two of us came back. Out of fifteen good people. Fifteen.”
Scrubbing at his eyes with a sleeve, the vicar continued with venom, “Disease, death, flies. My friend went mad – ran naked, got bitten by something poisonous. He was delirious, spittle running down his face till he died. We shouldn’t have been there. We didn’t know anything. The natives hated us, stole our provisions and laughed at us. My wife…she was so gentle, so mild, she wanted to help, to preach the word, but no one wanted us. Dead after two months, her beautiful frame ravaged by fever.”
He snatched the picture back and held it close to his chest again, his voice falling to a sob. “But you never hear that, do you? But I’m going to tell the truth. When I came back, they placed me here. Told me I would regain my faith in the peaceful, Cheshire countryside. And I did. They were right and God told me to write the truth.”
“You’ve spent seven years writing?” Stone interjected.
“No, no, at first, I couldn’t. It hurt. But in the last years, with my curate here, I have finally been able. I’ve been free. It’s just…I’m forgetting. It’s been so long, but the gin helps me remember. I have dreams though, about their gods tormenting me, telling me to write. They have my wife with them…” He buried his face into shaking hands.
“Sir, I have to tell you it’s probably the gin that gives you the hallucinations and nightmares.” Lucas sat on the edge of the desk. “Your sermons are very…fervent. Has anyone spoken to you about them?” Stone frowned at his question, but the word whore written on Bridget’s dress had always prodded at him.
“I…no. But then I don’t write them now. I don’t have the tim–”
“What?” Lucas interrupted. “Who does then?”
“Caleb, my curate – has done since he came here. He’s been very good to me. Takes my memoirs seriously and encourages me to write, brings me the gin when I have trouble sleeping and writes my sermons. Even looks after any visitors when I’m busy. He’s an astonishing curate…an angel.”
Lucas felt light-headed. An angelic curate did not buy his vicar gin! What was Caleb doing? And why did he say outside the church last Sunday that the vicar wrote his own sermons?
“We will leave you now, sir.”
“Very well…” he muttered, his eyes closing, clutching his beloved painting close.
The men left the room without speaking and strode out into the fresh daylight, breathing in the pure, cold air. “God, I never knew. That poor man.” Stone pulled his leather gloves on, shaking his head. “I’ll see what I can do about getting some help for him.”
“He’ll need it. Gin is a foul brew. The worst part is that his own curate has been feeding him the stuff. We need to have words with that young fellow. I don’t like the sound of such a paragon of virtue.”
“I agree, although his grief seemed real enough to me.”
“Crocodiles apparently shed tears before they eat their prey.”
“A gruesome thought, Mainwaring. Is nobody as they seem?”
The curate’s house was at the very edge of the village with a bare climbing rose circling the door. Ivy had also started to rise against the brick, and it twirled its tendrils around the rose, its thick stems smothering the thorns.
“No one at home. We’ll have to come back later,” Stone said, after hammering on the door.
“Or…we could just have a look.”
