The Knitting That Stopped on a Wednesday
The smell of rain on warm stone hung over Amberly Parva as Dorothea Hatch pushed open the lychgate and followed the path between the graves. It was Thursday morning, early enough that the dew still clung to the grass in silver threads, and she had come only to leave a pot of geraniums on old Nancy Cribb’s grave, as she did every month.
She had not expected to find the church door standing open.
Dorothea paused. She listened. A wood pigeon called twice from the yew, then stopped. She tucked the terracotta pot under one arm and went inside.
The pew nearest the font was never used. The hassock had a split seam, and the hymn book shelf had warped so badly it shed books onto anyone who sat beneath it. Dorothea had complained about it to the churchwarden for the better part of six years. So it surprised her very much to find Millicent Orde sitting there, bolt upright, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes closed, as if in prayer.
It surprised her even more to realise, after a careful moment, that Millicent was not going to open her eyes.
The geranium pot made a small scraping sound as Dorothea set it on the stone floor. She did not scream. She had been a secondary school teacher for thirty-one years, and she had trained herself out of screaming a long time ago.
She telephoned for help from the vestry, then sat on the step outside to wait.
Detective Constable Hargreaves arrived within the hour, cheerful in that way young officers sometimes were when they hoped a thing was natural causes. He took his notes. He spoke to the vicar, a flustered man named Timbs who kept touching the collar of his cassock as if checking it was still there.
“Nothing to suggest anything untoward,” Hargreaves said to Dorothea, pleasantly.
“Her knitting,” Dorothea said.
He looked at her.
“Millicent Orde has knitted at the Thursday Women’s Fellowship without interruption for nineteen years. I have never once seen her put down a project mid-row. Never. She considered it bad luck.” Dorothea nodded towards the bag that sat beside the pew, a large canvas thing printed with faded roses. “That cardigan is stopped in the middle of a row. On a Wednesday evening, which is not the fellowship. And there is a dropped stitch she would never have left.”
Hargreaves wrote something in his notebook. He did not look convinced.
“Perhaps she felt unwell,” he offered.
“She also,” Dorothea continued, “is wearing her good brooch. The cairngorm one she kept for high days. Millicent did not wear that brooch to sit alone in an empty church.”
She said nothing more. She simply waited.
It was Timbs who filled the silence, tugging at his collar again. “She did telephone me on Wednesday afternoon, now I think of it. Said she wanted a quiet word. I was rather busy. I told her Thursday would do perfectly well.” He looked at the flagstones. “I said Thursday would do.”
Dorothea watched him.
“Did she say what it concerned?” Hargreaves asked.
“The collection funds.” Timbs’ voice dropped. “She helped me reconcile them, you see. Every quarter.”
Dorothea stood up from the step. Her knees ached in the cold, but she stood up straight. “Then I think,” she said quietly, “that you ought to look very carefully at the collection funds.”
They did. It took a week, and it required a specialist from the county who understood accounts rather better than Hargreaves did. What he found was not large, as these things go. Three years of small, careful removals. A modest sum. The sort of amount that might go unnoticed if no one was paying close attention.
Millicent had been paying close attention.
The specialist confirmed she had made notes. They found them tucked inside the knitting bag, folded into the lining with the careful, deliberate neatness of a woman who understood she was doing something significant. She had intended to bring them to Timbs on Wednesday evening, before she changed her mind and arranged to hand them directly to the bishop’s office instead.
She had not quite made it that far.
Timbs did not raise his voice when they came for him. He sat very still and stared at the middle distance, his hands resting on his knees, which Dorothea thought was perhaps the most terrible thing about him.
On the first Thursday after, the Women’s Fellowship met as usual. The room smelled of digestive biscuits and the particular damp warmth of an electric heater working too hard. Someone had put a small vase of asters on the table where Millicent used to sit.
Dorothea chose the chair beside the asters. She had brought her own knitting, a plain stocking stitch square she made no claim to enjoy. She was not a natural knitter. She dropped stitches and lost her place and had to count on her fingers.
But she began the row, and she finished it, and she started the next.
She thought it was the least she could do.
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