They’re an odd match. Tall, elegant Clara and short, dumpy Brian. Not that I want to be judgemental.
‘Congratulations.’
‘You’re a widow?’ Clara says, reminding me how much I hate that word.
‘My husband died, yes.’
‘You’ve raised Flo all alone.’
‘Like I said, I’ve been lucky. She’s a good girl.’
‘And how is she settling in?’ Rushton asks. ‘I’m afraid there’s not a lot to do in the village for the youngsters.’
‘Well, she likes photography. We were actually thinking of turning the cellar into a darkroom.’
‘Ah.’
‘Is there a problem with the cellar?’
‘No. It’s just there are still quite a few of Reverend Fletcher’s things down there,’ Clara says. ‘I sorted through as much as I could –’
‘He didn’t have any family?’
‘Sadly not. He bequeathed everything to the Church and the items we could donate, such as furniture, clothes, his laptop, we did. But there was a lot of –’
‘Junk,’ Rushton says, less tactfully. ‘To be fair, it’s not all Reverend Fletcher’s. A lot is general church stuff. We didn’t know what to do with it, so it’s still in the cellar.’
‘Well, looks like I shall have plenty to keep me busy over the coming weeks.’
Something else occurs to me.
‘Is Reverend Fletcher buried here? I feel I should pay my respects.’
‘Actually, no,’ Rushton says. ‘He’s buried in Tunbridge Wells. Near his mother.’
‘He didn’t want to be buried here,’ Aaron suddenly chips in from behind me.
I turn. ‘Oh. Why?’
‘He said that the chapel had become corrupted.’
‘Corrupted?’
‘As Malcolm mentioned,’ Clara interjects, ‘Reverend Fletcher had been under a lot of stress.’
‘He wanted it exorcized,’ Aaron continues. ‘That was just before –’
‘Aaron!’ Rushton says sharply.
Aaron shoots him a strange look. ‘She should know.’
‘Know what?’
Rushton sighs. ‘Shortly before his death, Reverend Fletcher tried to burn the chapel down.’
FOURTEEN
‘Not the first time someone has tried that, of course.’ Rushton sips his latte.
We’re sitting at a table in a corner of the village hall, which, according to a bright, handwritten sign on the door, is: ‘Open for coffee Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays 10–12’. Clara has joined us. Aaron, unsurprisingly, has not.
I’m surprised how busy it is. In Nottingham, the coffee mornings were generally only attended by the truly faithful or the homeless. I suppose most other people feared they would get a religious lecturing or, worse, crap coffee.
The patrons here are older but well dressed. There are a couple of mums with babies. Even the coffee is half decent. I’m pleasantly surprised. Which is the first pleasant surprise I’ve had since I came here.
‘So, what happened?’ I ask.
‘Catholic separatists. Descendants of Queen Mary’s Marian persecutors. They burnt the old chapel to the ground in the seventeenth century. Destroyed everything, including most of the parish records. The current chapel was built by Baptists some years later.’
‘Sorry, I meant what happened with Reverend Fletcher?’
‘Oh. Well, fortunately he didn’t get that far. Aaron found him before the fire could really catch hold.’
‘What was Aaron doing there?’
‘It was late at night. Aaron happened to be passing and saw a light in the chapel. He found Reverend Fletcher standing over a pile of lit pew cushions.’
‘He said someone had broken into the chapel,’ Clara says, shaking a second packet of sugar and emptying it into her coffee. Obviously, her figure isn’t maintained by dieting.
‘Could they have?’ I say, thinking about the unlocked door and the light I saw last night.
‘No sign of a break-in. Aaron and I are the only other people with keys to the chapel,’ Rushton replies.
‘Right.’ I make a mental note of this. ‘Could it have been left unlocked?’
Rushton sighs. ‘Matthew – Reverend Fletcher – had been behaving oddly for a while.’
‘In what way?’
‘He claimed to have seen apparitions,’ Clara says.
I tense. ‘What sort of apparitions?’
‘Burning girls.’
Icy fingers grip my scalp.
‘They’re something of a local legend,’ Clara says, a glint in her eye. ‘Two young girls, Abigail and Maggie, burnt at the stake along with six other martyrs in the sixteenth century.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘At least, some of it.’
‘Jack has been doing her homework,’ Rushton says. ‘She even knew about the dolls.’
‘Really?’ Clara’s eyebrows rise. ‘Where did you hear about those?’
There’s something about her searching gaze that makes me feel uncomfortable.
‘Oh, online.’
‘A lot of people find them a bit ghoulish.’
‘Can’t imagine why.’
She smiles. ‘Small villages have their ways.’
‘I wouldn’t really know.’
‘You grew up in Nottingham?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t have much of an accent, if you don’t mind me saying.’
‘Well, my mum was from the south.’
‘Ah, that explains those soft vowels.’ She sips her coffee casually, but I don’t think anything about her questions is casual.
I turn back to Rushton. ‘Just because Reverend Fletcher thought the chapel was haunted, it doesn’t necessarily make him unstable. I’ve known a few priests who believe in apparitions.’
‘It wasn’t just that,’ Rushton says. ‘He’d become increasingly paranoid. Obsessive. He believed that someone was out to get him. That he was being threatened. He claimed that Burning Girls had been left in the chapel and pinned to the door of the cottage.’
‘Did he go to the police?’
‘Yes. But he had no proof.’
‘Did anyone have any reason to threaten him?’
‘No,’ Clara says. ‘Matthew had been the vicar here for almost three years. He was well liked.’
‘But in the last year, he had lost his father and mother,’ Rushton says. ‘A close friend had been diagnosed with cancer. He was wrestling with many personal issues. He handed in his resignation shortly after the fire in the chapel. I think he accepted things were getting on top of him.’
I consider. The Church is still a long way behind other institutions in recognizing mental illness. We’re not encouraged to talk about it and, possibly because the majority of priests are male, it’s seen as some kind of failing.
Prayer is a useful medium for focussing the mind. But it is not a magic cure-all. God is not a therapist or a psychiatrist. We still need the support of other people and sometimes those people are professionals. I often wonder, if my husband had sought help sooner, if things might have been different.