The Organist’s New Shoes
The Wednesday morning flower rota brought Agnes Peel to St. Dunstan’s before anyone else had thought to unlock the vestry. She let herself in with the spare key kept beneath the third stone from the left, a fact known to half the village and, she suspected, one or two passing badgers. The church smelled of cold brass polish and the ghost of last Sunday’s candles, and she set her basket of bronze chrysanthemums on the pew end with the careful attention of someone unpacking something fragile.
She was arranging the stems in the stone font alcove when she heard voices from the vestry passage.
“You have no right to go through my things.” This was Geoffrey Ramsay, the organist, his voice low and cracked at the edges.
“The petty cash tin was kept in that cupboard, Geoffrey, and you’re the only one with a key.” That was Margaret Doyle, the parish treasurer, whose opinions were always delivered at the volume of mild weather.
Agnes stood very still, her fingers resting against a chrysanthemum stem, its rough, slightly tacky surface cool under her thumb.
“I’ve had that key for eleven years.”
“And the tin has been short for the last four months.”
Agnes heard footsteps, the soft deliberate kind that belong to someone trying not to seem as though they’re leaving. A door closed. Then silence.
She finished her flowers and said nothing to anyone.
—
At the Thursday market in the village square, Agnes bought two bundles of parsnips from young Harry Brent and allowed herself to be told, at some length, about the situation at St. Dunstan’s. Word had travelled with its usual efficiency.
“Poor Mr. Ramsay,” said Dot Fellowes from the next stall, wrapping a round of hard cheese in paper that crinkled sharply. “Forty pounds missing over four months. Doesn’t look good, does it?”
“It looks like something,” Agnes said.
She walked home via the long way, past the church. The noticeboard by the lych gate held the usual items: choir rehearsal, sponsored walk, harvest supper sign-up. And below these, a small card advertising private organ lessons, newly printed on stiff cream paper, the ink still sharp-edged and black.
Agnes stopped walking.
She read the card again.
Then she walked home and made herself a pot of tea and thought about Geoffrey Ramsay’s shoes.
—
She had seen him last Sunday, as she did most Sundays, filing in before the service with his music folder tucked under his arm. He wore, as he always had, the same scuffed brown brogues with the left sole lifting slightly at the heel. She had noticed because she always noticed. It was, her late husband had once said, her worst quality and her most useful one.
On Sunday he had worn new shoes. Dark tan leather, still stiff at the ankle, the soles unworn. She had assumed a gift, perhaps, or a birthday. But then she thought about the organ lessons advertisement, and she thought about the forty pounds, and she thought about something else entirely.
—
She telephoned Dorothy Meacham, whose granddaughter took piano lessons from the only other music teacher in Brambleholt: a young woman called Rosalind Kerr, recently arrived from somewhere north and recently installed in the cottage opposite the churchyard.
“Does Rosalind have a key to St. Dunstan’s?” Agnes asked.
Dorothy paused. “She’s been practising on the organ, I think. For her own interest. Geoffrey offered.”
“Yes,” Agnes said. “I thought he might have done.”
—
She went to Margaret Doyle that same afternoon, sitting across from her in the low-ceilinged kitchen of Rook House with a cup of tea she didn’t want.
“The cupboard where the tin is kept,” Agnes said. “Does it lock with the same key as the exterior vestry door?”
Margaret blinked. “It’s a mortice lock. Same type, yes. But Geoffrey’s is the only copy.”
“Is it?” Agnes set down her cup. “Or is it merely the only copy that’s been accounted for? Keys can be cut from impressions. Beeswax. Soap, even. Eleven years is a long time to leave a key lying about in a musician’s changing room.”
Margaret was quiet for a moment. A lorry passed on the lane outside and the windowpanes trembled faintly.
“You think it’s Rosalind Kerr.”
“I think,” Agnes said, “that someone who wanted access to an empty church at odd hours, and who had been trusted enough to practise in the vestry, might eventually notice where things were kept. And I think a person who prints advertisement cards for organ lessons before they’ve any pupils is perhaps hoping for a sudden improvement in their finances.”
—
It took Margaret Doyle and the village constable the better part of Friday to confirm it. A locksmith in Thetford recalled cutting a mortice key from a wax impression, four months prior, for a young woman with red hair who paid cash. Rosalind Kerr, when visited, had already begun packing.
Geoffrey Ramsay said very little when told. He polished his old brogues that evening, Agnes heard later, and put the new ones away in their box.
On Sunday she brought white dahlias to the church instead of chrysanthemums, and Geoffrey played the opening voluntary with the particular steadiness of someone who has been given something back.
She arranged the flowers slowly, listening to each note settle into the cold stone air, and thought that the best things in a village were, like good music, usually obvious once you knew where to listen.
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