1. Two Clergymen

Setting the scene

WORDS MEAN DEATH

1. Two Clergymen

Dorian Hemsworth switched on his elderly laptop and when it decided to cooperate with him, started typing a message to his agent-cum-editor.

I know you’re keen to get your teeth into the enclosed manuscript, he typed when it had sorted itself out and showed signs of cooperating with him, and I’m really quite excited by the way it’s turned out so far. My priest is a most unsavoury character! Read it and find out! I know you’ll expect me to make changes because I know the man that you are, and there are bound to be dozens of typos even though I’ve been through it loads of times, but you know me! But anyway, take a peek at it and let me know what you think… signed Dorian H.

It wasn’t much of message he knew that, but then Mike Copperly wasn’t the sort of man to want to read half a dozen pages when as many lines would do, and he was really pleased with his new plot which involved a priest being tempted to murder half a dozen parishioners, knowing that nobody would suspect him because of his reputation of being both a holy man and a friend to everyone he ever met. The Reverend Paul Fox had the potential of being the sort of character every writer wants, one who can guarantee a steady income for years. He might even be taken up by one of the major television companies, and if that happened, why, the sky could be the limit!

As he was musing along those lines and seeing himself the subject talk shows watched by everyone. It would have been wise of him to contemplate more mundane things, like the age of his geriatric laptop and his almost total refusal to attend to such important matters as the security of his internet connection. But had he been asked he would have scornfully said that nobody on this planet was interested in a virtually unknown retired schoolmaster and now a wannabe writer like himself.

But things are never as simple as wishful thinking makes them, and next door to where he lived was a cottage where the Reverend Paul Wolf lived and breathed and carefully massaged a very secret life, and one of the Reverend Paul Wolf’s favourite games was to spy on his neighbours when he wasn’t out and about sipposedly killing them.

Let’s face it, he was allegedly an ogre of a man, and not only because he was ugly. He was a man of the cloth, but that meant nothing to him and for the past forty years he had got by in all levels of society courtesy of a clerical collar that he still persisted in wearing even though he had been defrocked when it was discovered that he had a secret that involved the underclothes of elderly ladies who thought that having a reverend as a man friend was a sure-fire way of gaining golden stars in the eyes of Saint Peter at the pearly gates when their time came. Now, all these years later, it still worked, though a great deal more slowly. After all, old ladies are less likely to be attracted by an elderly vicar when there are younger men in the world.

And this unpleasant ex-vicar had a second hobby, one almost as satisfying. He delighted in intercepting whatever he could from the internet whenever someone was using it and he had some spare time. Usually it was nothing much, a joke to Facebook, or a photograph to Instagram, a few short notes to a so-called agent, though he had no idea what the agent might represent. But now there was meat attached to a message, a whole load of meat, and most of all a reference to somebody with a name that might be confused with his own. A Reverend Paul Fox, and he was the Reverend Paul Wolf. The same Christian name and two breeds of wild dog! And both Reverends!

So he started reading the manuscript he had snatched from the airwaves and he almost exploded with anger.

This Reverend Paul Fox had the same sort of secrets that he allegedly had! He unmercifully took advantage of old women and by the third chapter it was clear that he slaughtered some of them! Murder by a real clergyman was, to the Reverend Paul Wolf, something to keep totally secret because things could turn decidedly nasty if they came out, but somehow the man who lived next door (he’d already confirmed that was where the signal came from) must have got hold of his own dirty secrets and actually committed them to paper! He was reading a manuscript about himself. It had to be! And it looked as if the author wanted it to be published!

What should he do?

At first he thought of dropping his collar off for a while, going in plain disguise rather than persisting as a clergyman (retired), but then half of the fun in his life would be lost and the dear Sylvia Standish who thought he loved her and even wanted him to move into her grotty demi-detached with her so that they could, as she put it, cuddle all night long for ever and a day, would decide he wasn’t the man she thought he was, and sally forth to find a different man for rumpy pumpy love. If any would have her, of course. But it was a risk, and he happened to hope that she had recently altered her will in his favour. It was time for him to work out a clever out exit for her, from the world, but how could he if everything he had done and thought was top secret was being hawked in book form by the man next door?

He’d never terminated the life of a man largely because he didn’t fancy the intimate part of the exercise with a smelly old man snoring into his ears, but maybe the time had come.

Maybe it was time to plan the exit of the writer, and soon.

© Peter Rogerson 02.01.24