The Hat Pin at Harrow’s End
The post office at Harrow’s End smelled of rubber bands and slightly damp brown paper, the way it always had, and probably always would. Iris Calloway stood at the counter with a packet of lavender seeds to post to her niece in Shropshire, listening to the rain tick against the single window, and watching the churchyard across the lane.
There were two funerals that week. That in itself was not remarkable. Harrow’s End was a small village, and its residents were, on the whole, elderly. The first service had been that morning: Geoffrey Phelps, eighty-one, retired schoolmaster, much liked. The second was that afternoon: Constance Radley, seventy-three, who had lived alone at the top of Ferry Hill and was, by most accounts, rather less liked, though Iris considered that an unkind way to remember the dead.
It was Mabel Oakes, the postmistress, who said it first.
“She was at both.”
“I’m sorry?” Iris turned from the window.
Mabel was sorting second-class post with the absent efficiency of someone whose hands operated independently of her mind. “Mrs. Hartwell. She was here this morning for Geoffrey’s. Now she’s there again.” A tilt of the head towards the churchyard. “Black coat, large hat. You can’t miss her.”
Iris looked. A woman stood near the yew tree at the far edge of the gathered mourners, slightly apart, her posture extraordinarily upright. The hat was indeed large, a wide-brimmed felt thing with a long pin whose silver head caught the grey afternoon light.
“They were not related,” Iris said, mostly to herself. “Mrs. Hartwell and Geoffrey Phelps.”
“No.” Mabel pressed a strip of tape across a parcel with more force than was strictly necessary. “Nor was she close to Constance Radley. Constance couldn’t stand her, if you remember. The business with the Flower Show in ’09.”
Iris did remember. A disagreement over the provenance of a dahlia. These things left marks.
She paid for her postage and did not leave.
The question that settled itself quietly into the centre of her thoughts was not why Mrs. Hartwell was attending two funerals in one day. People attended funerals for all manner of reasons. Respect. Habit. Loneliness. The question was the hat pin. Iris had seen that particular pin that morning at St. Crispin’s, worn at a slight angle. Now it sat perfectly straight. One does not re-pin a hat between funerals unless one has removed it entirely. And one does not remove one’s hat entirely in a churchyard in the rain.
Unless one had not been wearing it when the rain began.
She said this to Mabel, carefully.
Mabel set down her tape dispenser. “You think she left and came back.”
“I think she was somewhere else between the services.”
“That’s not a crime, Iris.”
“No.” Iris folded her receipt into her coat pocket. “But Geoffrey Phelps’s daughter telephoned you on Tuesday, didn’t she. About the collection at the church door.”
A pause. The rain ticked. Mabel’s expression shifted in the particular way of someone who has just connected two things they had kept in separate drawers.
“The tin was short,” Mabel said, quietly. “Forty-odd pounds expected. Eighteen inside. I assumed people had been generous elsewhere.”
“Was Mrs. Hartwell near the door?”
“She was the last to leave the church.”
Iris buttoned her coat to the collar. “Do you know where she lives now? I thought it was Tetbury.”
“Moved last spring. Renting at Foxmere, by the millpond. Though, funnily enough, her post still goes to a box number in town. She collects it herself, apparently.”
Iris walked across the lane in the rain.
She did not approach Mrs. Hartwell directly. She stood instead near the gate and waited, in the way she had once waited outside classrooms, with the particular patience of someone who knows time will do most of the work.
It was the silver hat pin that confirmed it. Up close, it was not decorative. It was a tool. Long, thin, and slightly bent at the tip in a way that no dress pin ought to be. Iris had seen a similar thing once, demonstrated by a rather self-satisfied locksmith at a village hall talk on home security.
When the service ended and the mourners dispersed into small murmuring clusters, Iris stepped alongside Mrs. Hartwell on the path.
“Cold, isn’t it,” Iris said. “I always think November funerals are the hardest.”
Mrs. Hartwell turned. She had sharp eyes and a smile like something retrieved from a drawer where it did not quite fit. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“We haven’t. Though I taught your nephew briefly, years ago. Charles. Very good at geography.” Iris smiled pleasantly. “I imagine the collection tin at Constance’s service will be rather sparse. They so often are, for people without close family. I’ve spoken to the vicar about placing someone reliable on the door.”
Something moved behind Mrs. Hartwell’s eyes. Just for a moment. A small, cold current.
“How thoughtful,” she said.
“Isn’t it,” said Iris, and turned back towards the post office.
That evening, she rang Geoffrey Phelps’s daughter and suggested she contact the village constable, not urgently, but soon. She gave no further explanation. She heated a tin of soup, fed the cat, and listened to the rain ease against the kitchen window.
The lavender seeds, she noticed, were still on the hall table. She had forgotten to post them.
She would go tomorrow. Mabel would be there. They would have a great deal to discuss.
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