The Bell Rope That Was Never Pulled
The morning of the Nettlewick Summer Fete always began with the bell at St. Oswald’s. Eight o’clock, without fail, five peals rung by old Douglas Carver, who had held the bell rope every fete morning for thirty-one years. The sound carried across the green like something solid, bouncing off the butcher’s awning and settling into the damp grass of the churchyard, where the stalls were already being erected with much clanking of poles and argument over the position of the tombola.
Agnes Poole stood beside her garden gate at three minutes past eight, listening. The silence where the bells should have been sat strangely on the air.
She reached into the pocket of her cardigan and found the hard square shape of her notebook. Then she put it back, closed the gate behind her, and walked towards the church.
The vestry door was unlocked. Agnes pushed it open to find Reverend Calloway crouched on the flagstones beside the bell-rope cabinet, his reading glasses pushed up into his grey hair, his hands worrying at each other in the way hands do when their owner is trying very hard to appear calm.
“Agnes.” He stood. “I was about to telephone someone.”
“Where is Douglas?”
“That’s rather the question.” The Reverend’s voice was steady but his collar was not straight. “He hasn’t come. And when I tried the cabinet myself, I found it locked. Which it should not be. Douglas keeps the key.”
Agnes looked at the cabinet. It was a plain oak box, wall-mounted, about the size of a bread bin. The lock was a small brass thing, perfectly ordinary. She stepped closer and bent to examine it without touching anything.
There was a faint smell. Linseed oil, and something under it, sharper. Machine oil, the kind that came in a thin yellow tin.
“Has this lock been oiled recently?” she asked.
“I couldn’t say.”
“Douglas’s hands, when you last saw him. Were they clean?”
The Reverend blinked. “I saw him yesterday evening. He came to check the rigging, he said. His hands were…” He paused. “He was rubbing them on his trousers when I came in.”
Agnes straightened. “And where does Douglas live now? Still at the cottage on Peel Lane?”
“His daughter’s house. Birch End, on the Moreton road. He moved there after Christmas.”
Agnes was already writing in her notebook. The pencil made a dry scratching sound that filled the small vestry. She tore out the page, which she rarely did, and handed it to the Reverend.
“Telephone PC Riddle. Ask him to go quietly to Birch End and make sure Douglas is quite all right. Then telephone Mrs. Carver on Peel Lane.”
“Douglas and Patricia have been separated for two years.”
“I know.” Agnes put the notebook away. “That’s why I want you to telephone her.”
She walked back out into the green. The fete was assembling around her. Marjorie Hewitt was shouting instructions from beside the cake stall, her voice carrying the particular edge of someone who had not slept. Two teenagers in matching red aprons were struggling with a gazebo that kept collapsing sideways. The smell of bruised grass and warm tarpaulin floated across everything.
Agnes found the produce stall and purchased a jar of damson jam from young Caitlin Marsh, who was seventeen and paying careful attention to the wrong things, as seventeen tends to do. Agnes examined the label on the jar while she waited, and eventually Caitlin said, “Do you know if there’ll be trouble? About the bells not ringing?”
“Why would there be trouble?”
Caitlin’s gaze moved briefly to her left before returning to Agnes. A small, practised redirection. “I just heard people saying.”
“What did you hear?”
“That Douglas had a row with someone. In the car park at the Queen’s Head. Two nights ago.” She took Agnes’s coins and did not look up. “With Mrs. Carver’s new friend. The one who’s been fixing up her cottage.”
Agnes stood very still. “What sort of row?”
“The sort,” Caitlin said quietly, “that ends with someone pointing.”
Agnes thanked her and walked to the churchyard wall, where she could see across the green without being seen to be looking. She thought about the linseed oil smell and the machine oil under it. She thought about a cabinet lock that had never been oiled in thirty-one years, and a key that had never left Douglas Carver’s possession.
PC Riddle arrived at half past nine. He spoke to the Reverend first, then to Agnes. Douglas had been found at his daughter’s kitchen table with a sprained wrist, a bruised pride, and a story about slipping on the path. The key to the bell cabinet was not on him.
It was found at eleven o’clock, when Marjorie Hewitt’s cake stall attracted the attention of a small terrier, who knocked over a wicker basket behind the counter, and out of the basket, among the tissue paper and spare price tags, rolled a small brass key on a plain iron ring.
The basket belonged to Patricia Carver. She had set it down behind Marjorie’s table early that morning while helping to arrange the stall.
Agnes stood at the churchyard gate as the bells finally rang, two hours late, pulled by the Reverend himself with more enthusiasm than technique. The sound was slightly ragged. It crossed the green anyway, settled into the warm July air, and landed on all of them like something that had been a long time coming.
She opened her notebook and closed it again without writing anything. Some conclusions did not need recording. They simply needed witnessing.
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