Poirot would call them, to Walter Stoakley’s
disjointed proclamations, had Victor Meakin left his
inn by the back door and stopped passersby on the
street to inform them of my presence in the village,
against my clearly stated wishes? I could imagine that
might be his idea of sport. What a strange and
unpleasant man he was.
I continued along the S-shaped street. Ahead of
me, a young man emerged from one of the houses. I
was pleased to see that it was the man with the
glasses and freckles whom I had met when I first got
off the train. When he saw me strolling toward him,
he stopped as if the soles of his shoes had been glued
to the pavement. “Hello!” I called out. “I found the
King’s Head, thanks to your help!”
The young man’s eyes widened as I approached.
He looked as if he wanted to flee; evidently he was
too polite to do so. If it hadn’t been for that distinctive
boomerang of freckles across his nose, I might have
concluded that this could not be the same person I had
met before. His manner had totally altered—exactly
as Victor Meakin’s had.
“I don’t know anything about who killed them, sir,”
he stammered before I had an opportunity to aim a
question at him. “I don’t know anything. I’ve never
been to London, like I told you.”
Well, that put the matter beyond doubt: my identity
and reason for being in Great Holling were common
knowledge. Silently, I cursed Meakin. “It isn’t London
that I’m here to find out about,” I said. “Did you know
Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus?”
“I can’t stop, sir, I’m afraid. I have an errand.” He
was calling me “sir” all over the place. He had not
done so the first time we spoke, before he knew I was
a policeman.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, might we speak later today?”
“No, sir, I don’t think I’ll be able to spare the
time.”
“How about tomorrow?”
“No, sir.” He chewed his bottom lip.
“I see. And if I force the issue, I dare say you
would only clam up or lie, wouldn’t you?” I sighed.
“Thank you for exchanging these few words with me,
at any rate. Most people see me coming and take off
in the opposite direction.”
“It’s no reflection on you, sir. People are scared.”
“Of what?”
“Three are dead. No one wants to be next.”
I don’t know what answer I was expecting, but it
wasn’t that one. Before I could reply, the young man
darted past me and marched off down the street.
What, I wondered, made him believe that there was
likely to be a “next?” I thought about Poirot’s mention
of a fourth cufflink, waiting in the murderer’s pocket
to be placed in a future victim’s mouth, and my throat
tightened involuntarily. I could not allow the
possibility of another laid-out body. Palms facing
downward . . .
No. That was absolutely not going to happen.
Announcing this to myself made me feel better.
I walked up and down the street for a while,
hoping to catch sight of someone else, but nobody
appeared. I was not yet ready to return to the King’s
Head, so I walked to the very end of the village
where the railway station was. I stood on the platform
for the London trains, frustrated that I could not board
one and return home immediately. I wondered what
Blanche Unsworth would cook for dinner tonight, and
whether Poirot would judge it to be satisfactory. Then
I forced my thoughts back in the direction of Great
Holling.
What could I do if everybody in the village had
resolved to avoid and ignore me?
The church! I had walked past its graveyard
several times without noticing it properly—without
thinking about the tragic story of the vicar and his
wife who had died within hours of each other. How
could I have been so oblivious?
I walked back into the village and made straight
for the church. It was called Holy Saints and was a
smallish building of the same honey-colored stone as
the railway station. The grass in the churchyard was
well tended. Most of the graves had flowers by them
that appeared newly laid.
Behind the church, on the other side of a low wall
into which a gate had been fitted, I saw two houses.
One, set back, looked as if it must be the vicarage.
The other, much smaller, was a long, low cottage, the
back of which was almost pressed up against the
wall. It had no back door but I counted four windows
—large ones for a cottage—that would have afforded
views of nothing but rows of gravestones. One would
have to be made of strong stuff to live there, I thought.
I opened the iron gates and walked from the street
into the churchyard. Many of the headstones were so
old that the names were illegible. Just as I was
thinking this, a new and rather handsome one caught
my eye. It was one of the few by which no flowers
were laid, and the names carved upon it made my
breath catch in my throat.
It couldn’t be . . . But surely it had to be!
Patrick James Ive, vicar of this parish, and Frances
Maria Ive, his beloved wife.
PJI. It was as I had explained to Poirot: the larger
initial in the middle of the monogram was the first
letter of the surname. And Patrick Ive was once the
vicar of Great Holling.
I looked again at the birth and death dates to check
that I had not made a mistake. No, Patrick and Frances
Ive had both died in 1913, he at the age of twenty-nine
and she at twenty-eight.
A vicar and his wife who had died tragically,
within hours of one another . . . His initials on three
cufflinks that ended up in three murder victims’
mouths at the Bloxham Hotel . . .
Confound it all! Poirot was right, loath though I
was to admit it. There was a link. Did that mean he
must also be right about this Jennie woman? Was she
connected too?
Beneath the names and dates on the gravestone
there was a poem. It was a sonnet, but not one I knew.
I started to read:
That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect,
For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair;
I had read only the first two lines when a voice
spoke behind me and prevented me from getting any
further. “The author is William Shakespeare.”
I turned and saw a woman of fifty or thereabouts,
with a long and somewhat bony face, hair the color of
horse chestnuts with the odd streak of gray here and
there, and wise, watchful gray-green eyes. Pulling her
dark coat tight around her body, she said, “There was
much debate about whether the name William
Shakespeare ought to be included.”
“Pardon?”
“Beneath the sonnet. In the end, it was decided that
the only names on the stone should be . . .” She turned
away suddenly, without finishing her sentence. When
she turned back to me, her eyes were damp. “Well, it
was decided that . . . by which I mean that my late
husband Charles and I decided . . . Oh, it was me,
really. But Charles was my loyal supporter in
everything I did. We agreed that William
Shakespeare’s name received plenty of attention one
way and another, and did not need to be carved there
too.” She nodded at the stone. “Though when I saw
you looking, I felt obliged to steal up on you and tell
you who wrote the poem.”
“I thought I was alone,” I said, wondering how I
could have missed her arrival, facing toward the
street as I had been.
“I entered through the other gate,” she said,
pointing over her shoulder with her thumb. “I live in
the cottage. I saw you through my window.”
My face must have betrayed my thoughts on the
unfortunate situation of her home, because she smiled
and said, “Do I mind the view? Not at all. I took the
cottage so that I could watch the graveyard.”
She said this as though it were a perfectly normal
thing to say. She must have been reading my mind, for
she went on to explain: “There is only one reason that
Patrick Ive’s gravestone has not been dug out of the
ground, Mr. Catchpool, and it is this: everybody
knows I am watching.” She advanced upon me
without warning and held out her hand. I shook it.
“Margaret Ernst,” she said. “You may call me
Margaret.”
“Do you mean . . . Are you saying that there are
people in the village who would wish to disturb
Patrick and Frances Ive’s grave?”
“Yes. I used to lay flowers by it, but it soon
became apparent that there was little point. Flowers
are easy to destroy, easier than a slab of stone. When I
stopped leaving the flowers, there was nothing for
them to destroy apart from the gravestone itself, but I
was in the cottage by then. Watching.”
“How appalling that anybody would do such a
thing to another person’s resting place,” I said.
“Well, people are appalling, aren’t they? Did you
read the poem?”
“I started to and then you appeared.”
“Read it now,” she ordered.
I turned back to the stone and read the sonnet in its
entirety.
That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect,
For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair;
The ornament of beauty is suspect,
A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air.
So thou be good, slander doth but approve
Thy worth the greater, being wooed of time;
For canker vice the sweetest buds doth love,
And thou present’st a pure unstained prime.
Thou hast passed by the ambush of young days
Either not assailed, or victor being charged;
Yet this thy praise cannot be so thy praise,
To tie up envy, evermore enlarged,
If some suspect of ill masked not thy show,
Then thou alone kingdoms of hearts shouldst owe.
“Well, Mr. Catchpool?”
“It’s a peculiar poem to fetch up on a gravestone.”
“Do you think so?”
“Slander’s a strong word. The poem suggests that
—well, unless I’m mistaken—that there were attacks
upon Patrick and Frances Ive’s characters?”
“There were. Hence the sonnet. I chose it. I was
advised that it would prove too costly to engrave the
whole poem, and that I should content myself with the
first two lines—as if cost were the most important
consideration. People are such brutes!” Margaret
Ernst gave a disgusted snort. She rested the palm of
her hand on the stone, as if it were the top of a
beloved child’s head instead of a grave. “Patrick and
Frances Ive were kind people who would never
willingly have hurt anybody. About how many can one
say that, truly?”
“Oh. Well—”
“I didn’t know them myself—Charles and I only
took over the parish after their deaths—but that’s
what the village doctor says, Dr. Flowerday, and he is
the only person in Great Holling with an opinion
worth listening to.”
Wanting to check I had not misunderstood her, I
said, “So your husband was the vicar here, after
Patrick Ive?”
“Until he died three years ago, yes. There is a new
vicar now: a bookish chap without a wife who keeps
himself to himself.”
“And this Dr. Flowerday . . . ?”
“Forget about him,” Margaret Ernst said quickly,
which did an excellent job of fixing the name Dr.
Flowerday firmly in my mind.
“All right,” I said dishonestly. Having known
Margaret Ernst for less than a quarter of an hour, I
suspected that all-embracing obedience was the tactic
most likely to serve me well.
“Why did the inscription on the gravestone fall to
you?” I asked her. “Did the Ives not have family?”
“None who were both interested and capable,
sadly.”
“Mrs. Ernst,” I said. “Margaret, I mean . . . I can’t
tell you how much more welcome in the village you
have made me feel. It’s plain that you know who I am,
so you must also know why I’m here. No one else
will speak to me, apart from an old chap at the King’s
Head Inn who made little sense.”
“I’m not sure my intention was to make you feel
welcome, Mr. Catchpool.”
“Less unwelcome, then. At least you don’t flee
from me as from a monstrous apparition.”
She laughed. “You? Monstrous? Oh, dear.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“This man who made little sense at the King’s
Head—did he have a white beard?”
“Yes.”
“He spoke to you because he is not afraid.”
“Because he’s too furiously drunk to fear a thing?”
“No. Because he was not . . .” Margaret stopped
and changed course. “He is in no danger from the
murderer of Harriet, Ida and Richard.”
“And you?” I asked.
“I would speak to you as I have, and as I am,
whatever the danger.”
“I see. Are you unusually brave?”
“I am unusually pigheaded. I say what I believe
needs to be said, and I do what I believe needs to be
done. And if I happen to catch a suggestion that others
would prefer me to remain silent, then I do the
opposite.”
“That’s commendable, I suppose.”
“Do you find me too direct, Mr. Catchpool?”
“Not at all. It makes life easier, to speak one’s
mind.”
“And is that one of the reasons your life has never
been easy?” Margaret Ernst smiled. “Ah—I see you
would prefer not to talk about yourself. Very well
then. What is your impression of my character? If you
don’t object to the question.”
“I have only just met you.” Heavens above! I
thought. Unprepared as I was for an exchange of this
nature, the best I could muster was, “I’d say you come
over as a good egg, all in all.”
“That’s a rather abstract description of a person,
wouldn’t you say? Also rather brief. Besides, what is
goodness? Morally, the best thing I have ever done
was unquestionably wrong.”
“Was it really?” What an extraordinary woman she
was. I decided to take a chance. “What you said
before about doing the opposite of what people would
like you to do . . . Victor Meakin told me nobody
would speak to me. He would be delighted if you
neglected to invite me to your cottage for a cup of tea,
so that we can talk at greater length, out of the rain.
What do you say?”
Margaret Ernst smiled. She seemed to appreciate
my boldness, as I had hoped she would. I noticed,
however, that her eyes grew more wary. “Mr. Meakin
would be similarly delighted if you followed the
example of most in the village and refused to cross
my threshold,” she said. “He is joyous about any
misfortune to anyone. We could displease him on two
accounts if you are mutinously inclined?”
“Well, then,” I said. “It sounds to me as if that
