Chapter 2: Struck Late
There are thirty-one steps up the spiral to the ringing chamber at Upcott Petrock, and Gill had counted them since she was eleven. She counted them now with Philip's breathing behind her, and his hand on the rope rail, and at the top the door standing open the way nobody in this tower ever left it.
"I didn't touch him," Philip said. "I didn't know if you're meant to."
Derek was lying on his back at the foot of the clock-chamber ladder with his head against the corner of the muffle chest. One arm was under him and one was out, palm up, as if he were asking for something. His cap had come off and lay a yard away, upside down. That was the first wrong thing. In forty-five years she had never seen the top of his head.
She knelt and put two fingers under his jaw anyway, because you do, and his skin had the cool of the room in it already. She took them away.
"Gill?"
"Sit down on the stairs, Philip. Sit on the top step and put your head down." She heard him do it. She took her phone out and her hand did the three nines and she told a woman in Exeter where Upcott Petrock was, which took a while, because nobody ever knows.
Then she stayed where she was, on her knees on the boards, and because she was waiting and because she was who she was, she looked.
The ladder was standing where it always stood, reaching up to the open square of the clock-chamber trap. The ropes were up on their hooks, all eight, coiled. Derek's tweed jacket was on its peg by the door, where he hung it before he rang anything, the shape of his shoulders still in it. Behind the boards on the west wall the clock's pendulum went past its little window in the box, tick and tock.
And the ladder's feet weren't in their hollows.
She looked at it a long time to be sure. The two worn beds in the boards, smooth as the inside of a spoon, and the ladder's left foot sitting on the lip of one, the right an inch to the side of the other. Not much. You'd need to have been looking at that ladder for most of your life to see it.
She didn't touch it. She looked at the tenor's rope instead, hanging on its hook with two turns and a tuck. Low down on the sally, on the white, there was a mark the colour of rust, about the size of a thumbprint. It meant nothing. Forty-odd pairs of hands had been on those ropes since one o'clock and somebody always bleeds.
On the stairs, Philip said, to his knees, "He'll have gone up to do the hammer."
"Yes," said Gill.
PC Sam Rowe came from Okehampton in twenty-two minutes with his blue lights on through the lanes, and Gill heard him take the stairs two at a time and then stop on the twenty-ninth, the way people do when they've been told what's at the top. He was thirty-four. He had learned to ring in this room at nine and given it up at fifteen, after Derek told him he was a waste of a good rope. He still stood in the doorway like a boy who wasn't sure he'd been asked.
"Gill."
"Sam."
The paramedics came, and were kind, and didn't hurry. A sergeant came out from Okehampton with his coat over his arm and looked at the ladder and the open trap and the old man at the bottom of it and said what anyone would say, and Gill sat on the bench under the peal boards while they said it.
They let her go down when Ray Northcott came up. Ray had heard. News goes through a village faster than anyone carries it. He didn't come in. He stood at the top of the stair with his hand flat on the stone of the doorway and said, "Oh, Derek. Oh, you silly bugger," and then he went back down and sat with Philip in the porch and neither of them said anything at all.
Sam took the times in the church, at the back, on a pew, with his notebook on the hymn-book shelf. Half the village had come in and been told to sit at the front, and they sat at the front like a congregation that had arrived early for a funeral and didn't know whose.
"Moorcombe came down at what, two minutes to five?" Sam said.
"Fifty-eight minutes past. Out of the tower about one minute past. Westaway went off up the lane at four minutes past." Gill had her fault sheets folded in her jacket. She didn't take them out. "Then his goodnight. Eight minutes past till thirteen past."
"His what?"
"The tenor. He rings her up on her own when everyone's gone. A minute, then down."
"Christ, I remember that." Sam wrote. "Everyone heard it?"
"The whole village heard it. You hear the tenor in Chagford with the wind right."
"So after quarter past five he goes up to put the clock hammer back on and he comes off the ladder." Sam looked at what he'd written. "Is the hammer on?"
"No. It's still pinned off. I looked."
"So he was going up. He never got there." Sam closed the book on his pen. "I'm sorry, Gill."
"Sam. The ladder."
"I saw the ladder."
"Its feet aren't in their holes. It's stood in the same two holes since 1953. It's out by an inch."
"He fell off it," Sam said gently. "It moved. That's what ladders do when a fifteen-stone man comes off them." He glanced up the nave to where Philip was sitting with Callum, the boy's head on his father's shoulder, the father's hand not quite on the boy's back. "You've told him a hundred times it wanted a bracket. You'll be saying that to the coroner, I expect. If they want a statement."
That was the other thing. She had told him. Every time.
"He promised me this morning," she said, "he'd look at the hammer pin before he rang anything. It's worn. I told him it'd walk. If he did what he said, he went up that ladder before his goodnight, not after."
"And did he generally do what you told him?"
Gill looked at the font.
"No," she said.
"No," Sam agreed. "He didn't do what anybody told him. That's why I left." He stood. "Go home, Gill. You've been in that tower since ten this morning."
On her way out a constable was coming in with a bottle in an evidence bag, holding it up to the light. Glenmorangie, the good one, a luggage label on a string round its neck.
"Bottom of the tower stairs," he said to Sam. "Inside the door."
Gill read the label through the plastic. D. — Pax. M. She knew the capitals. They were on every poster for the restoration appeal in every shop window from here to Moretonhampstead.
In the hall they were telling each other where they'd been. That's what a village does with a death before it's ready to do anything else: it lays out its afternoon on a table and counts it. Gill stood by the hatch and heard it all, because she didn't seem to be able to go home.
Mandy had an apron on over her competition shirt and was making tea for the police in the big brown pot, because somebody had to. Her eyes were swollen.
"I was in the shop," she said to Sam, who hadn't asked. "From just before five. I went for the cream. Quarter past, I set the alarm, I came straight over. It'll be on the alarm thing, the company keeps it all, you can ring them. I had to do it twice because I put the code in wrong. I always put it in wrong." She put a cup in front of him. "Leanne saw me come in."
"Eighteen minutes past," said Leanne. "I looked at the clock because I was cross."
"Ray was here doing the chairs from half four," Mandy went on, as if she were reading the minutes. "Callum was here. Philip went up to see to a heifer..."
"I'm not asking, Mandy," Sam said.
"No. I know you're not. I'll just..." She went back to the pot.
Philip had gone up to see to a heifer at quarter past five and come back at twenty to six. Martin had gone home at five and come back at twenty to six. The vicar had been at a wedding, Roy in his Volvo, Gill in a back bedroom with a headless shepherdess. None of it mattered. Derek had rung his goodnight at eight minutes past five, and everyone had heard him, and after that he'd fallen off a ladder.
She drove home to Tiverton in the dark and didn't sleep, and at seven on Sunday she drove back, because the archdeacon had rung at ten past six to ask, with tremendous sympathy, whether she would make the tower safe and be good enough to put a line in writing about the ladder for the coroner's officer. "You know that tower better than anyone." He meant it as a kindness. She said yes before she could think of a way not to.
Tyler was waiting in the square with a meal deal from the Shell garage at Whiddon Down and his hood up.
"Is it weird to eat in there?" he said. "Like, where it happened."
"Yes."
"Right." He thought about it. "I'll eat on the stairs."
The bells of Upcott Petrock didn't ring that Sunday morning, which Iris said they hadn't failed to do since the war, bar the lockdown, and the silence came out of the tower at ten o'clock like a smell. People driving to the half-past ten at Chagford slowed and looked up at it.
The police had finished. Derek had gone to Exeter. The ringing chamber was too big now. The ladder stood where it had stood. The chalk outline she'd half expected wasn't there; that was only on the television. There was a bit of the paramedics' packaging under the bench.
She photographed the ladder's feet from four sides with a steel rule laid across the hollows. Twenty-seven millimetres out on the left, thirty-one on the right. She wrote it on the back of an envelope and then in her notebook, and then, because she didn't trust either, she drew it.
"That's like CSI," said Tyler, from the stairs, through a mouthful of chicken and bacon.
"It's like measuring a ladder."
"What does it mean, though?"
"It means it's not where it was."
"Because he fell off it."
"Probably," said Gill, and went up it.
In the clock chamber the lever was down and the pin was in its oval hole, a little proud, the way she'd left it after showing him. She put her thumb on it. It moved, the same as yesterday. Either he'd looked at it and left it, or he'd never looked at it at all. A pin can't tell you which.
The clock was still going. Derek wound it every Saturday night, and last night nobody had, and she could see from the weights how far down they'd come, nearly to the floor. Another few hours and it would have stopped. In the cupboard beside it was the winding book, a red Silvine exercise book, and inside the cover in Derek's capitals, WOUND. D.C., and a date, every Saturday since 1982, page after page, two thousand and more of them, and his last one a week ago.
She took the crank off its hook and wound the going train, sixty turns, and then the strike train, though the hammer was pinned off and the clock would strike nothing, because you don't let a clock stop. He'd taught her that too. In the book, under his last line, she wrote WOUND. G.V. and the date, and then sat on the clock chamber floor for a while with her back against the wall.
"You all right?" said Tyler, at the top of the ladder.
"Pass me that drill."
"You're not using a drill."
"Pass it me anyway. I like to hold it."
Higher Shilstone was a mile out on the Chagford road, a granite farmhouse with its back to the moor and a yard full of cattle that weren't allowed to go anywhere. The TB notice was cable-tied to the gate. Philip was in the yard in the same clothes as yesterday, forking silage to a pen of South Devons the colour of conkers, big docile things with their breath going up.
He kept forking when she came in through the gate. She leant on the pen and watched him.
"They've said accident," he said.
"I know."
"They'll do a post-mortem. Then it'll be accident."
"I expect so."
He stuck the fork in the clamp. "He wouldn't put that ladder right. I asked him. Mother asked him. You asked him."
"Every time."
"Well then." He looked at the heifers. "Forty-one, they took in March. Shot them in that corner. He stood there with me. He never said a word, the whole morning. Then he went in and had his dinner."
"Philip. Which heifer was it, last night?"
"What?"
"You went up to see to a heifer, at quarter past five."
Callum came out of the house with two mugs. He was in a hoodie with EXETER UNI RINGERS across the back, which Gill was fairly sure he'd been forbidden to wear at the table. At Easter Derek had told him, in front of the whole tower, that if he went to Exeter to ring methods he'd not ring in Upcott again while there was breath in him. He gave her a mug.
"There's no heifer due," Callum said.
Philip didn't look at his son. "The top shed," he said. "I went up the top shed."
Gill drank the tea. It was strong enough to stand a spoon in, the way Derek had liked it.
"He always did goodnight first," Callum said. "That's what doesn't make sense. Goodnight first, then up the ladder for the hammer, then he'd wind her. Every time. Never up that ladder before goodnight in his whole life. So he did goodnight, and then he went up." He was looking at the gate. "So I don't know why he fell."
"I told him to look at the hammer pin before he rang," said Gill.
"He never did anything anyone told him," said Callum.
"No," said his father. "He never did."
Tony Westaway rang her at four, from a number she didn't have.
"They're saying I fought with him on the stairs."
"Did you?"
"He said we'd a ringer. A Somerset ringer. My sister's boy. He's lived in Moorcombe eight months, he's on the electoral roll, he's in the choir." Tony's voice got bigger, the way it did on the stair at competitions when the result went against him, which was always. "He was going to protest it. You've got ten minutes after the last peal to protest, he says, and I'll have you disqualified from the Final, Westaway, I'll have the lot of you. And I said, you've won, you old bastard. What more do you want?"
"What did he say?"
"He said he wanted it in writing." Tony breathed. "Then I got in the truck. Roy saw me go."
"He did."
"I never touched him. Gill. I never laid a finger."
"I know, my lover," she said, and found she didn't, quite.
Martin Ashby didn't ring. She went to see him at five, at the Old Rectory, which had a Farrow and Ball front door and a gravel drive that sounded expensive under her boots. He opened it in an apron. He'd been making bread, because he was the kind of man who made bread when he was upset, and he'd made a lot.
"The whisky," she said.
"I know. I know. They've been." He took the apron off as if it had betrayed him. "With respect, I didn't go up. Derek didn't allow anyone in the tower unless he'd said, and I've never once been asked. I came over by the church path, the back way from the Rectory, and put it inside the door at about twenty-five to six, with the note, and I came away. It was a peace offering. For the trebles business." His face did something. "It seemed very important on Saturday."
"You told Sam you went home at five."
"I did go home at five. I went home and I sat in my kitchen and I wrote the note four times, and I went back. I didn't think it was something one tells the police." He looked at his loaves. "I've got the whole day recorded, you know. Every peal. The machine was on the wall till I took it in at six. Forty hours of these bells, I've got now. I haven't had the heart to listen to Saturday."
"No," said Gill. "I don't suppose you have."
She went back to Iris's at seven for her pencils. She'd left them on the windowsill by the shepherdess.
Iris had the door open before she knocked. She'd been watching the square from the front window, which was the only thing Iris did more than talk.
"I didn't say to the policeman," Iris said, before Gill had got her foot over the step. "He didn't ask me anything. He asked me was I all right, as if I was ninety."
"You're nearly ninety."
"I'm eighty-eight." Iris pulled her in by the sleeve. Her hand was like a bunch of twigs and as strong as a dog. "Philip Coaker came in the lychgate at twenty-five past five. I saw him from this window. He went in the porch. And at half past he came out again." She stopped, which she never did. "He was walking like his legs belonged to somebody else, Gill. I've known that boy since the day he was born, and I've never seen him walk like that."