17 The Knocked Door

Sylvia Standish returns to the story...

WORDS MEAN DEATH

      Sylvia Standish was annoyed. Jilly, purveyor of doom and gloom had popped in and let it be known that the elderly clergyman who visited Sylvia too often had finally been arrested and marched unceremoniously to the police station where he was no doubt incarcerated in a damp and smelly cell, and serve him right. So Sylvia decided that there was only one thing she should do and that was pop out to the library and find a book that might just fill her heart with the hope that her love-life might not be as empty as it actually seemed to be. After all, Paul wasn’t a hugely arousing lover. In fact, he was hardly any sort of lover and instead, quite an unsettling snorer.

The late and very much missed Len had been a different kettle of fish altogether, and she still occasionally dreamed of waking up next to him and partaking in some of his amorous antics. The number of times he had made her squeal with a wonderful mixture of shock and pleasure! Paul had never been anything like that and he barely shared her bed once a week when he was around.

Apparently, according to him, he had a brother in Newhaven, wherever that might be, and he stayed with him whenever he could because the poor old soul needed him. What with her home, his own house here in Brumpton and a brother in Newhaven sometimes two or three weeks might pass before he knocked his rat-a-tat rhythm on her door and she let him in, and when they climbed the stairs wearily to her bed there was only a pale shadow of Len’s cheeky ways as he emerged in her memory when Paul almost snuggled up to her. But Len was dead and that just had to be that.

She was in the middle of trying to see sense of what Jilly had said about Paul being put into a dusty old cell when there came a knock at the door.

“Why, that’s Paul’s knock!” she sighed, her relief being like a flood of goodness all over her because she hated the idea of going to bed with a desperate criminal. Bed, she thought, was for love, and she forgot for a moment that there had never been much of that with the Reverend Paul Wolf.

And when she opened the door Paul, looking somewhat dishevelled, was almost falling to his knees on the other side of it.

“Quick, let me in, love,” he begged, and he pushed past her, rather too roughly for her own liking even though he had called her love, which in a strange sort of way warmed her heart.

So she stood to one side and watched him almost hurtle in past her, grab the open door and pull it to behind him. Then, in a sort of apology, he spluttered,

“There are liars about, sinners worse than any you’ve known in all your pretty life, you don’t know who am, have never heard of me, and if you had you would tell them, so quick, let me hide in your boudoir, and if anyone comes to enquire about me I’m not here, get it?”

“But what is it, Paul?” she begged him, “what have you done?”

He had reached the bottom step of the staircase that he intended to climb in order to reach her bedroom, or boudoir as he called it.

“I was taken like a common criminal to a cell at the police station,” he tried to hurriedly explain, “but I am no common criminal and there isn’t a cell that could contain me for long. So here I am, and if I shelter under your quilt for a day or so, all will be well.”

It might have been a fairly comprehensive explanation as far as he was concerned, but to Sylvia’s mind it posed more questions than it answered. For instance, she couldn’t help wondering, why would the police want to arrest him in the first place and could some of the rumours that Jilly had enjoyed telling her be true? It needed to be asked.

“What do they think you’ve done, Paul, the Police I mean?”

He frowned at her, grabbed half of her short grey hair and gave it a little tug.

“They are fools and I want you to get it into your head that I wear this collar…” he indicated the clerical collar that wasn’t as clean as it should have been, “and wearing this collar means that I am without sin so cannot possibly be a sinner. Is that enough for you?”

It wasn’t, but she could tell that it ought to be for her own sake.

“I suppose you’re tired out after all the fuss,” she murmured.

He wasn’t, but it seemed logical to him that he might be, so he nodded.

“That’s right,” he smiled, finally letting go of her hair, “so I’ll get under your quilt, my dear. You have been a descent housewife and made your bed, I hope? I don’t like dirty beds, you must know that.”

Of all the cheek, accusing me of ever having a dirty bed, she thought.

“It’s very clean and I freshened it specially for you,” she said nervously in case freshening it wasn’t what he meant. But he let it pass and smiled at her.

He was half way up the stairs when the front door was knocked again.

Oh no, she thought.

“If that’s the fuzz, I’m not here,” he hissed at her, and that was his one big mistake. Referring to the forces of law and order as the fuzz was too much like the ranting of a major criminal in a television drama than the words from a decent clean-living and holy clergyman.

She watched him continue on his way up the stairs, and the door was knocked again.

“Go and answer it,” he hissed, and “you silly cow!” he added threateningly.

In her mind she was clearly dealing with a devious and cruel crook after all, possibly a murderer, so she went and opened the door.

Without caring who was there knocking, she started weeping. “He’s up the stairs and going to bed, the naughty boy…” she stammered.

© Peter Rogerson 26.01.24

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