The Damp Umbrella Stand at Netherwick Cross
The village of Netherwick Cross smelled of rain before rain arrived. Agnes Peel had lived there long enough to know the signs: the way the horse chestnuts along the lane released a faint green bitterness, the way the flagstones outside the post office darkened in patches before a single drop had fallen. She was standing beneath the post office awning with her canvas shopping bag hooked over one wrist when she noticed the umbrella stand.
It was an old cast-iron thing, painted black, bolted beside the door. In it stood four umbrellas of various ages. Three of them glistened with moisture, their nylon ribs beaded and dark. The fourth was bone dry. Its handle was a polished walnut crook, its canopy a deep burgundy with not so much as a water spot on it.
Agnes noted this. She went inside.
The post office of Netherwick Cross was also its only general shop, and it was run by a man named Gerald Finch, who had taken it over from his aunt eleven years ago and not materially changed a thing since. The smell of the place was complex: rubber bands, old paper, the burnt-sugar ghost of someone’s morning toast. Gerald stood behind the counter wrapping a parcel in brown paper, pressing down the tape with the flat of his thumb.
“Morning, Gerald.”
“Miss Peel.” He didn’t look up.
She selected a small jar of lemon curd from the shelf and a box of stock cubes. She set them on the counter.
“Dreadful morning,” she said pleasantly. “Did you walk in?”
“Always do.”
“Your umbrella is in the stand outside. The burgundy one.”
He tore a strip of tape. “Is it.”
“It’s perfectly dry.”
He looked up then. He had pale eyes and a habit of holding his jaw very still when he was thinking. “I must have forgotten to open it. Ran from the car.”
“I thought you always walked.”
The tape dispenser clattered against the counter. “Some mornings I drive.”
Agnes paid for her items and tucked them into her bag. She walked home through the beginning of the rain, which arrived in thin, decisive sheets off the fell, and thought very carefully about the burgundy umbrella.
It was the vicar’s. She was almost certain. Reverend Hartley owned an umbrella of exactly that colour, with exactly that sort of handle, because Agnes had borrowed it once at the church fete two summers ago and admired the weight of it. Reverend Hartley had been on sabbatical for the past six weeks. He was staying with his sister in Gloucestershire. He had told Agnes so himself over the fence the morning he left, with his car packed and a thermos tucked under his arm.
She paid a visit to the vicarage that afternoon.
The front path was overgrown with self-seeded valerian, pink and faintly medicinal in the damp air. Agnes walked round the side to peer through the kitchen window. Nothing unusual. She tried the back door. Locked. She crouched and examined the doorstep: a clean rectangle where the mat had been lifted and replaced. The mat sat slightly off-centre, its corner curled.
She stood up and rang the vicar’s sister in Gloucestershire from her kitchen telephone.
Reverend Hartley had left three days ago, the sister said, rather flustered. He had received some message about a burst pipe at the vicarage and had driven back urgently. He hadn’t rung since.
Agnes replaced the receiver and sat for a moment with her hands in her lap, looking at the rain on the window.
She telephoned Constable Briggs.
He was a young man who took Agnes seriously only because she had, on two previous occasions, saved him a considerable amount of paperwork by being right. He arrived within twenty minutes, stood in her kitchen with his cap in his hands, and listened without interrupting.
They found Reverend Hartley at the vicarage. He was quite unharmed, if considerably dishevelled, locked in his own pantry with a bag of almonds and a draught from under the door. Gerald Finch had sent him a fraudulent message to draw him back from Gloucestershire, intending to spend a few undisturbed days in the vicarage, searching for a Victorian deed of land he believed the vicar had inherited along with the property. A deed which, Gerald had discovered through his own family’s old papers, showed that the strip of garden between the vicarage and the post office had been sold incorrectly. Gerald had lately received a planning notice. He wanted that land registered to him before it became relevant.
He had not been able to find the deed. It was, as Agnes later learnt, tucked inside a copy of a collected Trollope on the vicar’s study shelf, and had been there unremarkably for nine years.
Gerald was taken away in Constable Briggs’s car.
The vicar stood on his front path in his shirt sleeves, pressing a glass of water with both hands as though it might float away.
“It was the umbrella that gave it away,” Agnes told him. “He used yours to run from the vicarage to the post office before the rain started properly this morning. But it hadn’t rained yet when you left yours. So it was dry.”
Reverend Hartley looked at his own front door for a long moment. “I’ll put the kettle on,” he said finally.
The horse chestnuts dripped steadily along the lane. Agnes followed him inside.
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