The Monogram Murders(34)

“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.”