20. The Clergyman's Knife

REMEMBERING REBECCA Part 20

Detective Sergeant Bob Short pulled up slowly outside the address he had for Leonora Lamplight. Hers was the last name on the list that the young D.C. had managed to work out as belonging to a child at the Brumpton Primary School sixty years ago and still residing in the same area of town.

It looked a neat enough little place, a middle house in what looked like a never-ending terrace of identical houses. There was no front garden, the front door opening directly onto a street that must have been there since the year dot, thought Bob.

He climbed out of the car and knocked the front door, there being no bell that he could see.

He waited a few moments, and knocked again, and eventually the door was flung open and an elderly lady with pink hair and bright red lips stood there and gazed for a moment, then clapped her hands theatrically.

“Darcy! Oh Darcy! I know you’d come back for me,” she squealed, “Oh do come in! In here!” And the gesticulated widely that he was welcome to enter her home.

The next door opened, just a few feet away from Mrs Lamplight’s, and a smiling young man whispered that he was the third Darcy to knock that door that week.

Bob shook his head warily and stepped in.

The bouffant yet thinning pink hair bobbed in front of him as Leonora led him into her living room, a space in which the dominant colour was pink with a little blood red adding some contrast.

“Darcy, my darling, sit down do, please, oh how I’ve been waiting for this moment for so many long years! Have you come to whisk me off to Pemberley?

Bob Short was at a loss as to how to reply, never having read or seen a screen adaption of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in which a Fitzwilliam Darcy lived in a fictitious country mansion called Pemberley. But he did know why he was there and decided to waste as little time as possible on what he perceived might well be a dotty old woman.

“You have me wrong, madam,” he said a little brusquely, “I am Detective Sergeant Short and I am here to ask you one or two questions.”

“Oh, Darcy, you little tease!” squealed, “and you’d love a nip of malt whisky? I know you would! To warm the cockles before we venture forth onto the wild road that leads to Pemberley!”

“Firstly, Mrs Lamplight, do you recall your school days? When you were ten or eleven, that is?”

“Oh, you must call me Miss Bennett, for that is my name, and I’m waiting to be swept off my feet by you! I can remember you now, climbing wet out of the lake that you’d swum across, the water waking your trousers cling teasingly to you… Darcy, why did you do that when you might have gone the long way round and remained toasty and dry?”

“Miss Lamplight, my time is precious and there is an offence called wasting police time,” growled Bob in reply to a tirade he couldn’t begin to understand.

“Miss Bennett. You must call me that,” she insisted.

“Were you at Brumpton Primary School sixty years ago?” he demanded, having no intention of ever calling her anything but Leonora Lamplight which as a name complete with alliteration seemed daft enough for this pink haired and red-lipped creature with an eager face and eyes that he perceived had long lost touch with the real world.

“School, yes Darcy, I was,” she said a trifle more soberly, “there was a boy there, maybe it was you in your infancy, Fitzwilliam, before you became my Darcy, who liked to hold my hand when we were taken to the hall for country dancing. I used to love country dancing and holding little Gregory’s moist fingers as he tried not to dance with me!”

I can imagine that, thought Bob, “Can you remember a girl called Rebecca Rowbotham?” he asked bluntly, determined to end this interview in record time.

“Dancing and twirling we were, to the music the teacher put on her machine… Rebecca, sweet darling Rebecca, my friend, she was, everyone’s friend, with a heart of gold and eyes like crystal pools… we all loved her, we did, and then Mr Collins came along and slaughtered her! I saw him do it, upside down! The world for little Rebecca ended that sad and evil day, Darcy. I hated the world back then and it’s only now that we’ve met again that I can learn how to smile like I once did … Poor Rebecca, so sweet, so sweet…”

“Then I’ll leave you in peace, Mrs Lamplight,” he said, concluding his interview with almost obscene haste, and making for the door.

But her pink bouffant hair bounced as she reached out and grabbed him by one arm.

“No, Darcy, what about you and me and Pemberley?” she asked, “and the sweet air of your home estate? And I haven’t told you … Mr Collins came here, he did, just the other day, with a knife in his hands. He tried to hurt me, he did, but I’m armed with good bone corsets that no knife could penetrate!”

“You mean, the same man tried to kill you? Why didn’t you report it?

“He didn’t hurt me, the silly man, and Mr Collins lived in the perfect world, not our little jungle. Now Fitzwilliam, take me to your boudoir…”

“And you’re sure it was Mr Collins? Think hard, Mrs Lamplight…”

“Of course it was! He wore the collar!”

“I see,” he frowned.

“So a little nip of malt whisky and a bun for tea?” she said, suddenly teasingly.

“I’m sorry, Mrs Lamplight, I must go!” he almost snapped, “thank you for your time.”

And he was too quick for her as she reached out to grab him again..

“Goodbye, Mrs Lamplight,” he said firmly, pulling away, “and I’ll remember what you’ve told me,” and he raced out of the house and to his car, no doubt breaking some kind of record as he did so,

He was back at the station also in record time, and his D.I was back at her desk, frowning.

“The lamplight woman,” he complained, “is three sheets to the wind!”

“You mean you couldn’t get on with her?” asked Rosie.

“When she wasn’t calling me Darcy, as if I’d come to rescue her from some kind of life-long hell! She wanted me to call her Miss Bennett, of all things! And Pemberley? Who ia Pemberley?”

“Ah, Pride and Prejudice. She must have thought she was living in an early nineteenth century novel,” smiled Rosie. “Pemberley, I recall, was a country estate.”

“Well, in the middle of her rambling she did say she’d seen the murder of Rebecca Rowbotham while she was hand-standing, because she said it was upside down. And she said that the man who killed the girl was called Collins. Mr Collins. She said that twice. Maybe there was a stranger there called Collins, and that only this week he returned with a knife to attack her! She mentioned her corsets being blade-resistent.”

“Mr Collins,” whispered The Detective Constable, “Pride and Prejudice? He’s the vicar in Pride and Prejudice… the pompous vicar whose only real interest was in gaining the respect of the socially high and well-heeled. Not a knife-man, but he was a clergyman.”

“The vicar…” mused Rosie, “and we have a vicar in our case… would you say that your Mrs Lamplight was calling the person she saw killing the girl Mr Collins because the person she actually saw was another child, but one who in the fullness of time would become a Mr Collins look-alike?”

“Could be,” murmured Bob, “Mrs Lamplight might live in another world, so to speak, and give people other-world names. But she knew what she saw, all right. That much was plain to me. She saw someone killing the girl, and hasn’t told a soul in sixty-odd years!”

© Peter Rogerson 25.01.21