'Don't know,' Geoff replied. 'Maybe she was a Catholic. Her first name was Louise, a French name.'

Bravo, I applauded him secretly. He was even better at this than I was.

Iain didn't appear at all surprised by our discovery. 'Either way,' he said, 'we'd best get it cleaned up a little, if there's someone at rest in there. I'll drop round tomorrow with the scythe and see what I can do.'

Vivien sighed in mingled amusement and impatience. 'What's that on your job list?' she asked him. 'Number one hundred and one?' I 'I like to keep busy,' he defended himself.

'I'll help him,' Geoff promised, and Vivien let it go with a toss of her fair head.

Tom was still stuck on an earlier thought. 'It's rather sad, isn't it, to think of someone being denied burial in consecrated ground?' He took a thoughtful sip of Scotch. 'The Church certainly has a lot to answer for, in history.'

'Keep talking like that,' I teased him, 'and you'll be defrocked by Christmas.'

My brother shook his head. 'Not a chance. The archbishop and I get on rather well together. Besides, there's my name to consider. I was destined to become a man of the cloth, and you know how strongly I feel about the path of destiny.'

I glanced at Geoff and our eyes met in a flash of silent shared communication. As Tom and Iain launched into an esoteric discussion of Christian ethics, Geoff leaned across me to order another drink, resting a Warm hand on my back between my shoulder blades. It was a touch of reassurance, of promise, of gentle apology, and my heart swelled in response.

I could wait a little longer, I told myself. For Richard, I could wait.

Twenty-eight

‘Yes, Mum, I know.' I cradled the telephone receiver against my shoulder and reached to straighten a tilted picture frame on the wall beside the stairs. 'Tom told me all about it this afternoon. Quite a nice surprise for you and Dad, I expect.'

'Mmm.' My mother's voice was absent, and not entirely convincing. 'Your father will keep entering these crossword contests, you know, so I suppose it was only to be expected. Although I'm not sure that a week's holiday in Brighton would be my idea of a truly grand prize. Still,' she said, adopting a positive attitude, 'your father is pleased as punch. You'd think we'd never been on holiday to hear him talk, and here we are barely home a month.'

She couldn't hide the smile in her voice, though. We both knew my father well enough to know it was the winning, and not the prize, that excited him—the thought of having something for nothing.

'Is Dad at home?'

'No, he's gone off shopping for swimming trunks. Imagine,' she said, chuckling, 'with his legs! I shall have to walk ten steps behind him and wear dark glasses so no one will think we're together.' I grinned. 'They have naked bathing in Brighton, don't they?'

'Are you trying to cheer me up, or put me off going?'

'Oh, you'll have fun, Mum. And it is only a week. When do you leave?'

'Next Saturday. We'll be stopping the night at Tom's place in Elderwel, and we thought if you weren't doing anything that evening, you might want to drive down for dinner—make a family gathering of it.'

'Sorry.' I shook my head. 'I couldn't possibly. Not next Saturday. Rachel's getting married that day, and she'd be disappointed if I wasn't there.'

'Rachel?' My mother's puzzled voice halted me in my tracks, and my hand tightened around the receiver as I realized the significance of what I'd just said.

'Rachel Evers,' I elaborated, keeping my voice steady. 'An old school chum.'

'Oh,'

From the silence that followed I knew that my mother was systematically searching her memory for a face to match the name, and I hastened to switch the subject. 'Tom said that Dad had been having problems with his shoulder again,' I prompted, and relaxed when my mother sailed off on a new tack. She was always happy to discuss my father's health problems—brought on mainly, in her opinion, by too many evenings of wine and snooker at his club.

For the rest of the conversation I was only half listening, filling the occasional pauses in my mother's narrative with appropriate noises of agreement or sympathy.

'Are you sure you're all right?' she asked me, at the end of a particularly long anecdote.

'Of course I am. Why?'

'You haven't said two words in the past ten minutes.'

'Haven't I? Sorry. I was up rather early this morning, and it's starting to catch up with me.'

'Well, see that you get your rest,' my mother advised me, in a tone I remembered all too well. 'And eat properly. And make sure your vitamins have iron added. You are still taking vitamins? Good. You wouldn't want to be taken ill, now, would you?'

'I feel fine,' I said again, for what seemed like the hundredth time that day. It was a lie, I admitted to myself as I hung up the telephone. I had told it to Geoff that morning, and to Tom that afternoon, and just now to my mother, but it was a lie. I didn't feel fine, at all. In actual fact, I was feeling rather depressed, and I knew there was only one person in the village who would fully understand the reason why.

Mrs. Hutherson's house was the second house past the old redbrick vicarage on the High Street. It was more of a cottage, really, small and square and sagging beneath the weight of its ancient tile roof. The walk was edged with lavender, and flowers dripped from the window ledges between freshly painted green shutters. Even if Alfreda Hutherson herself had not been crouching by the side fence, tending a bed of gargantuan tomatoes, I would have known that the house was hers.