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  The Mushroom Man

  ( D.I. Charlie Priest - 2 )

  Stuart Pawson

  Stuart Pawson

  The Mushroom Man

  Chapter 1

  Father Tudor Harcourt had a problem. At such times he found it a great comfort to have a silent, somewhat one-sided conversation with God.

  Occasionally, the Almighty showed him the answer. He was not an impatient man: had he known that he was pencilled in for a personal audience in the next fifteen minutes he would have waited.

  He'd reached the part of the lane where the county council had regravelled the road. Why on earth did they waste the taxpayers' money every year resurfacing perfectly acceptable country lanes, used only by agricultural vehicles and elderly clerics on equally elderly bicycles?

  The three-speed Raleigh didn't roll as freely on the new surface, so he had to pedal more. Then there was the increased risk of a puncture. He winced as loose chippings, picked up by the tyres, rattled under the mudguards. The gravel was deepest along the edges of the road, so he steered into the middle, where the small amount of traffic had worn a smoother passage.

  The problem, for which he needed the guidance of the Almighty, involved Father Harcourt's imminent retirement and his friendship with Miss Felicity Jonas. Miss Jonas, a petite and charming member of his flock, 'did' for him three days a week. She cleaned his house, washed and darned his socks and ironed his vestments. She also kept his diary up to date, arranged his appointments and filed his sermons.

  Sometimes he would discuss a sermon with her, if he felt he had to use his position to comment on a particularly pressing social issue, and he found she had a down-to-earth wisdom that sometimes pulled him back from taking a too holier-than-thou standpoint. She gave him much more than all this, though. She was, he believed, his friend. His best friend, his only friend. The only proper female friend he had ever known. And she gave him a constant, aching reminder of the only woman the only other woman he had ever loved.

  Fifty years ago it had been a long, hot summer. Young Harcourt was kicking his heels before going to theological college. He would be the third generation of Harcourts to take the cloth via a line of uncles, of course. A Harcourt had been tortured and executed after the Popish Plot three hundred years earlier; he was the last of a long, proud line. Never had he held a moment's doubt about his vocation, his calling, until he met Mary Hemsby, and now, fifty years later, those same doubts were creeping back.

  Mary had been sixteen. She took him on long walks on summer afternoons, in those optimistic days after the war, through the wheat fields that loaned their golden colour to her hair and long, bare limbs. She showed him secret places, and promised pleasures that caused him to lie, sweating and sleepless, through the sultry, tormented nights. He was saved from making the hardest decision of his young life when her parents sent her away. They, he believed, apparently not realising he was a Roman Catholic, had not wanted her to marry a clergyman. He often wondered if she had found happiness.

  The truth was more prosaic. Mr. and Mrs. Hemsby sent their daughter to a relative in Wales in something of a hurry because it was becoming increasingly obvious that she was pregnant. The butcher's boy had banged her up one wet April afternoon, delivering rather more than the half of stewing meat and some polo ny that his basket held. She'd had a lasting, but not happy, marriage, and now lived less than fifteen miles away.

  Father Harcourt puffed with the exertion of pedalling. He could see the black and white chevrons of the barrier marking the bend in the road, a quarter of a mile ahead, where it reached Peddars Dyke and turned abruptly right to run alongside it. Not far beyond that bend was Miss Jonas's cottage and afternoon tea. What was he going to say to her? When he retired he would have to leave his home. A place had been reserved for him at St. Jude's Retreat, near Walsingham, and very nice it was too, but it was not what he wanted. What he wanted was to move into Rose Cottage with Miss Jonas. Ideally, he would like to marry her. That would offset one scandal, but would it create another, within the Church? At the very least he'd need a dispensation from the Pope, which could take years. God wasn't coming up with any answers.

  OK, he'd accept the wagging tongues and the moving curtains when he walked through the village: Just let me find the right words, and may Felicity's response be favourable.

  He'd reached the bend. Oh dear! A car was coming the other way, its roof visible above the hedge from his vantage point on the upright Raleigh. He pulled over towards the side of the road, where the loose gravel had been swept into a swathe, like a sandbank round the outside of a bend in a river. The stones rattled staccato under his mudguards, as loud as hailstones on a greenhouse roof, and the bicycle wobbled alarmingly.

  Reg Davison was having a good day, a bloody brilliant day. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel in time with Radio Fenland's current chart-topper and mused on the vagaries of his fortunes. The only cloud was the fact that he was way over the alcohol limit for driving and still twenty miles from home. That was why he was on this back road instead of racing along the A47.

  "Take the old Roman Road," Edgar Johnstone had advised him. "No fear of being pulled over by the traffic police along there." It was advice Reg had taken gladly. His licence already displayed ten penalty points, picked up for speeding of fences a drink-driving rap would be the end of everything he'd worked for.

  It wasn't going to happen, though. He was on a winning streak. He listened to the gravel chipping off the paint under the car and luxuriated in the comfortable feeling that a company vehicle generated.

  No large garage bills for him. Next week he'd suggest to the boss that they trade in this old tub. The new, twenty-four-valve model looked good, and, by Christ, he'd earned it.

  The winning streak had started the day before. Reg chuckled at the thought of it. He'd never know how he'd managed to keep his face straight when old man Wimbles had taken him to one side and given him the news that Julian wasn't coming home, but was marrying and settling in America. For fifteen years Reg had struggled, virtually single-handedly, to build up Wimbles Agri Supplies. Being sales manager was all right, but he'd been promised a directorship. Then, one fine day, young Julian Wimbles had breezed in, fresh from university, and demanded his birthright. Reg was back on the road; a thousand miles a week, in rain, fog or snow.

  The old man had sent Julian to the States to study methods and gain some experience. Well, he'd done just that. Reg's body jerked up and down in time with the music. Rarely had such a mundane tune been so joyfully received. Julian had fallen in love with a rancher's daughter in Utah. He'd converted to Mormonism and was going to marry her. They were building a house on Daddy's land.

  "Oh, you must be very disappointed that he won't be taking over here,"

  Reg had said sympathetically when Mr. Wimbles told him, but in the privacy of his own office he had danced a jig round the desk, before collapsing with paroxysms of glee into his executive chair.

  That was yesterday. That was only for starters. Today he'd entertained Edgar Johnstone and the committee of the North Anglia Farmers Cooperative for lunch and obtained their signatures on a three-year feed contract. Eighteen months of hard slog had come to fruition with the biggest order Wimbles Agri had ever taken. And there could be more. Next year the seed contract was up for grabs, and Reg had made some good contacts, shaken some interesting hands.

  He belched and farted at the same time. For a horrible moment he thought he'd messed his pants. Too much success was bad for the digestion. Duck a l'orange, accompanied by a gin and tonic, two pints of bitter, nearly a bottle of Beaujolais and two brandies wasn't good for it either. That thought tickled Reg, and he threw back his head and laughed.

  Live hard and play har
d, that's the way to do it, he said to himself.

  He glanced at the yellow blur of the oil-seed rape racing by to his left, and the extensive acres of barley off to his right. "All mine," he said out loud, 'soon you'll be all mine," and he laughed again.

  He was going far too fast when he reached the bend where the road turned sharply away from the drainage dyke. It would be kind to say that old Roman roads are not expected to make sudden right-angled diversions, but the truth was that Reg Davison was in no fit state to be loose in a motor car. He hit the brakes and swung on the steering wheel. The back of the car skidded out. Instinct took over as Reg corrected the skid, but this took him wide, into the deep gravel round the outside of the bend. For a second he was convinced he'd made it, but then he saw, or thought he saw, the figure on the bicycle. There was a clatter of metal against metal, and Reg glimpsed a black-clad apparition flying towards him, like a geriatric Batman. The figure hit the windscreen with a hollow ker-clump, and then it was gone.

  Reg sat there, bathed in cold sweat, knuckles white around the wheel, as sober as a tightrope walker. He reached down to switch off the radio. What had happened to him? He looked around. The road looked the same. The barley was still waving seductively in the breeze and the rape was as cheerful as ever. Nothing had changed. Or had everything changed? He prayed that his imagination had been playing tricks, as he got out and walked round to the front of the car.

  There was nothing imaginary about the bicycle, with its bent front wheel and handlebars twisted sideways. Or about Reg's smashed headlight. But where was the cyclist? Reg knew the answer. He reluctantly accepted the reality of the situation as he tentatively looked round the back of the car, to where Father Harcourt lay in a ragged heap.

  "Christ!" Reg exclaimed. "He's a vicar. I've killed a vicar." He rested his forehead on the roof of the car, realising that his lucky streak had rolled clean off the table, possibly for ever. He thumped the roof three times with his right fist, saying: "Shit! Shit! Shit!"

  Then he repeated the gesture with both fists, sobbing: "Fuck! Fuck!

  Fuck!"

  His initial reaction was fairly honourable. He ran back to the bend in the road to see if any help was approaching. It wasn't, thank goodness. Although he felt sober he knew that he'd still measure the same on a breathalyser. It wasn't just his job that was at stake, he could go to jail for this. Well, he'd got himself into it, he'd have to get himself out. Dispose of the evidence, that was the priority. He unlocked the boot lid and opened it. The crumpled body was lying face down, with a small, sinister pool of blood forming under the head, bright against the new gravel. Reg hooked the fingers of one hand under Father Harcourt's dog collar and grasped a handful of trouser material with the other. As unceremoniously as if he were loading a fifty-kilogram bag of weaner pellets to help out one of his customers, he heaved the cleric's body into the boot.

  Now for the bike. There wasn't room in the car, so it would have to be hidden nearby. The neighbouring field was the obvious choice the oil-seed rape was over a metre tall and wouldn't be harvested for another six or seven weeks. Reg crossed the road and looked over the hedge. At the other side of the field he could see a small, isolated cottage.

  "Mmm, better make it the barley," he decided. "It would be just my luck for some old biddy to be watching out of the window."

  He wasn't wrong. In Rose Cottage, Miss Felicity Jonas was glancing anxiously down the track that led to her home, awaiting her cue to put on the kettle. Father Harcourt — Tudor, as he had asked her to call him on these informal occasions was never late. She was wearing a new blue dress, and had dabbed on her wrists some of the expensive perfume that her niece had given her two Christmases ago.

  The barley would be harvested before the oil-seed rape, but not for at least another month. Reg cast an expert's eye over the crop. It was good, probably destined for making before being transmuted into beer or even whisky. He stooped and squinted across the tops of the waving fronds, looking for the telltale signs of wild oats, standing higher than the rest of the field. He knew that in the next week or two the farmer would walk his lands, roguing out any oats that contaminated the crop. Reg couldn't see any he was safe.

  He carried the bike about fifty yards into the field and carefully laid it down, trying not to compress the tall stalks beneath it. He spent a few minutes teasing them through the spokes and stepped back to admire his handiwork. From ten yards away it was invisible, and in a couple of days the barley would straighten itself up again to conceal it even more. He dusted his hands together with a sigh of relief and walked back to the car.

  Stay cool, Reg, he told himself. Stay cool and calm and think clearly, then we can get away with it. Remember the old motto: He Who Dares Wins. He'd never been a soldier, but the SAS were his heroes, and the saying appealed to his gambler's instincts. There was just the matter of the broken headlight. He found the scattered glass amongst the gravel and picked up as much as he could. Any bits remaining were so small as to be unidentifiable. After a final look around he climbed into the car and drove off. Two hundred yards up the road he turned round in a gateway and went back the way he'd come he'd had an idea about where he could dispose of the body.

  Peddars Dyke was part of the drainage system that had transformed this area from a good-for-nothing bog into the most productive arable land in Britain. The marshes had vanished, taking with them the fen orchid, the bittern and the otter, to be replaced with horizon-stretching vistas of barley, wheat and oil-seed rape. Reg had noticed the ditch running alongside the lane he had so recently travelled. At intervals a culvert would take it beneath a turn-off leading into a field or to a farm. He would shove the body into one of these.

  He quickly found a suitable place, and parked in the gateway above the dyke. So far he'd been lucky that no other vehicles had come this way, but something was bound to, before too long. He'd pretend he'd suffered a puncture, and had just finished replacing the wheel. The lifting jack was kept in the engine compartment. He pulled the release lever and the bonnet sprang open.

  Reg removed the jack from its resting place and moved round to the back of the car. He wasn't relishing what he had to do, but he acted with the purposeful ness of the desperate. He opened the boot.

  The lid rose smoothly on its hydraulic struts, and as it did, so too did Father Harcourt. He sat up in the boot and clutched imploringly at Reg's sleeve. His face was a scarlet mess and his eyes were white orbs, the uncoordinated pupils barely visible, one pointing up and one down.

  Reg screamed in terror and tried to shake his arm free from the old man's talons. He wouldn't let go.

  "Get off! Get off!" shrieked Reg, but the fingers tightened their grip. Reg was holding the jack in his right hand. His arm rose and fell, and the jack crashed against the parchment skull of the priest.

  Again and again the jack came down until the claw-like grip relaxed and Father Harcourt fell back, to keep his appointment with the Lord.

  Reg forced himself not to be sick. He sucked in great lungfuls of air through his open mouth and acted like a robot. With one movement he flung the jack into the boot and grabbed the priest under the armpits.

  Ten seconds later the body splashed into the shallow water. Reg jumped down after it and, standing astride the ditch and clinging to the bridge, managed to push it with his foot until it was out of sight.

  He climbed back up to the road. He'd done it. It was over. Then, and only then, did he renew his acquaintance with the duck a 1'orange.

  Traffic was heavy on the A47, but the risk of being pulled over for a driving offence now seemed trivial. Reg knew a car spares shop on the far side of Norwich where he could buy a new headlight. He'd obtained one there a couple of years previously, after a confrontation with a slurry trailer in someone's yard. He shuddered when he remembered the price of it; thank goodness he had his gold card with him. No, that was no good he could be traced through that. He'd have to withdraw a hundred quid from a cash dispenser and use real money. He gave
a smile of satisfaction he was thinking well.

  It was about six p.m. when he arrived home. This was about his normal time, but much later than he'd planned on this day of days. His wife gave him his meal and he told her about his triumph with the feed contract. She remarked that he looked strained, but Reg explained that he'd had to do some hard negotiating: it hadn't been as straightforward as he'd expected. Later, he went into the garage and changed the headlight. The refuse collection men were due next morning, so he dropped all the broken glass into the dustbin. Come nine a.m. it would be lost for ever, mixed with the jetsam of a thousand other homes. Then he'd be in the clear.

  The bin men came dead on time, as reliable as a quartz watch the one owned by the manager of the company that had subcontracted their services from the local council. Reg gave them a cheery "Good morning' as the week's avocado skins, yoghurt pots and murder evidence was tipped into the back of their lorry. Then he climbed into his car to drive to the office, thirty miles away.

  First of all he had to give the feed contract to old man Wimbles. Then they had a busy day ahead. All the cash flows, projections, stock control, orders everything needed completely re jigging They were big league now, and the credit was all his all Reg Davison's. And there was the little matter of his new car, he'd bring that up, too.

  The traffic of the suburbs thinned out, but Reg kept his speed down.

  Normally, when sober, he drove with the skilled efficiency of the professional driver, but he'd decided that a low profile might be a good idea for a few weeks. The bicycle would be found in late August when the barley was harvested. Presumably they'd find the body soon afterwards. It would be as obvious as a giraffe in a dance band that murder, or at least manslaughter, had been committed, but by whom? The police were good, but not that good. He tuned in to Radio Fenland to see if the vicar had been missed yet.