9. A sudden Collapse

THE SANDS OF TIME Part 9

Being well into his seventies Desmond Boniface was wary when it came to drinking a quantity of beer no matter how excellent it was because of the inevitable need to get up in the night to visit the toilet. So he ordered a whiskey and dry ginger I a small glass and looked around the lounge bar.

Pottle was still there, nursing the same pint of beer that he’d had before, and eyeing him warily whilst talking to the unknown clergyman.

“Sod it,” murmured Desmond to himself and he sauntered across to the table where his quarry was sitting, aware of the other’s nerves as he took every step.

“May I join you?” he asked when he finally got there.

“Do you have to?” demanded Gavin, “I’m having a private conversation with the Reverend here…”

“About you dear wife?” asked Desmond, wickedly.

“She went missing. You know she did. Haven’t I told you enough times? And didn’t I tell enough of your colleagues when it happened? It’s not easy for a man to lose his wife and still have to answer silly questions from obsessed ex-coppers sixty years later!”

“Sixty years? Is it that long? Let me see… I would have been a schoolboy back then, sixty years ago, studying the history of this fair land of ours and having the glory that was Britain stuffed into my brain even when there wasn’t much glory in it!”

“That’s one way of interpreting the past,” growled Gavin, “not my way, but as valid as any other once the years have rolled along and the characters in the drama are all dead and buried.”

“When you caned me, did you try to break my fingers?” asked Desmond, wanting to take the old man out of his comfort zone.

“Of course not, and you shouldn’t have been such a scallywag and maybe your fingers wouldn’t have been rattled,” grunted Gavin, “now if you’ll excuse me, the Reverend and I were talking and you’re demonstrating just how wretched your manners were back then and still are, interrupting me.”

Desmond was taken aback by the sharpness of the old man’s response and picked up his drink before backing away.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, “and I’ll see you another time when you’re on your own.”

“Are you threatening my friend?” put in the clergyman, “because if you are I’d like you to know I’m personal friends with the Chief Constable and he might have something to say about a hoodlum like you disturbing the peace.”

“The Chief Constable? Give him my regards when you see him,” shot back Desmond and he made his way to an isolated table at the other end of the room and sat down thoughtfully.

He’d heard the bit about personal friends of the Chief Constable so many times it had become a joke, but never from a clergyman who, as far he could judge was in his middle years.

He decided to wait a short time in the hope that the clergyman would leave the pub. He knew there had been another man of the cloth years ago in Pottle’s life, the one who had died in what was assumed had been a tragic accident when a holy statue had fallen onto his head and done its worst, but even then he hadn’t associated the wretched Gavin Pottle with anything religious. If anything it was his firm belief that the man was among the worst of sinners, and his sort didn’t often choose to enjoy the company of ordained reverend gentlemen.

He was so deep in thought that he didn’t notice when Gavin was left on his own and the clergyman had walked towards him.

But very quietly he came up to him and stood there, almost in the shadows cast by a coat rack so that Desmond almost jumped off his seat when he coughed quietly.

“Excuse me,” he almost whispered, “I don’t wish to intrude but I feel I ought to put your mind at ease…”

“Pardon?” asked the retired detective inspector, not used to being caught napping.

“I thought I ought to say something…” suggested the man of the cloth, “I was being consulted by your friend over there…” he nodded to where Gavin was still sitting.

“So?” asked Desmond.

“He knows he can’t have a great deal of time here on Earth and he wanted to make his peace with our Father in Heaven before he, you know, passes away. You must be aware that we all need to do that, even me.”

“So you were able to tell him that all his sins have been washed away and he can enter Heaven as innocent as a new born babe without a single dead body to own up to?”

The vicar shook his head. “I’m not into the Roman way of doing things,” he said, “I don’t take confession and act as a mediator when transgressions are confessed. But I do know a little of the scriptures, and our mutual friend sits nicely on the side of virtue.”

“He does?”

“As I said, I know the scriptures.”

“Of course you do.”

“There’s no need for you to take that attitude! I’m trying to mediate…”

“And I’m trying to catch a killer before old age and infirmity do and he gets carted off to the creatorium!”

“There’s no need to exaggerate either. If nothing else, he’s no killer, and you know it! He says, and I believe him, that you took exception to being punished as a boy because you were, to coin a phrase, his phrase, a tearaway.”

“He said that, did he?”

“And more. And before he passes away he wants our Lord to know that everything he’s done in life has been for the best. His wife left him, you know. He suffered the loneliness of a deserted man”

“She left him?”

The clergyman nodded. “He is aware of his shortcomings, and that she found someone else because of them, and moved in with him. Women used to, you know. My own wife, some years ago now, and I’m not looking at you for sympathy, but my own wife had an affair with the window cleaner, a decent enough fellow when he had a leather in his hands, and I still get on well with him But she left me because of him. I’m often called away on church business, you know, births, marriages and deaths, which led to a certain instability in out life together.”

“We all have our problems.”

“Anyway, Mr Pottle explained to me how his good lady wife had moved in with a chef from the Manor House and he doesn’t know what became of her after that.”

“A chef, eh? That’s one stage further than the police got when they were looking for her.”

“The police were looking for her?”

“Well, he did report her missing and that’s what the police do when someone is reported missing. Did he explain how the young vicar died? The one he was fond of and reportedly having a close relationship with even though such things between two men were illegal back then?

“The man has suffered unfairly in life. He told me that and I believe him.”

“You can believe what you like, father, or whatever you like to be called. Like many before you, you can look a lie in the face and call it truth if that’s the way your mind works. But you can take this much from me: that man, look, he’s going now, he probably knows what I’m saying to you, was a cruel sadist as a schoolmaster, and I should know because I was one of those he picked on. Why he was what he became I don’t know and don’t want to know, but he did say that he was knocked around a bit by his own father, a Victorian gentleman who believed you spare the rod and spoil the child.”

“Then he should have known better when his own turn came around,” growled Desmond, “but I’ll bear what you’ve told me in mind, though knowing him there’s no guarantee that there’s a word of truth in it.”

“There are always two sides to every story.”

“Perhaps there are. Well, Father, if that’s what you want to be called, I’m off. I’ve got a bed waiting for me at home, and truth to tell I could do with a good night’s sleep. But like many in the world, I get troubled dreams, troubled by the long ago of my life when things weren’t always what they should have been.”

“Oh dear.” The clergyman looked as if he was about to clear his throat and launch into a lecture on peace and harmony when the door to the lounge bar was pushed from the other side and the ancient shape of Gavin Pottle fell into the room and lay on the carpeted floor.

So instead of launching into his lecture the clergyman hissed at Desmond “look what you’ve done, you evil man!” and leapt to see whether he could help the prone figure on the floor.

© Peter Rogerson 15.03.22

...