Chapter 3: The Book
The top shed at Higher Shilstone was a granite linhay on the shoulder of the hill, open on one side to the weather, with a tin roof that had been held down since the eighties by tractor tyres. There was no heifer in it. There was Philip's Land Rover, with Philip in the driving seat and the engine off and the windows fogged, at seven on Monday morning.
Gill knocked on the glass. He wound it down an inch.
"Iris Kingdon saw you come in the lychgate," she said. "Twenty-five past five. And out again at half past."
He looked at the steering wheel. He had his father's hands on it. She'd never noticed before.
"You'd better get in," he said.
She went round and got in. The passenger seat had a bag of mineral licks on it and a calving rope and a copy of the Farmers Guardian from April, and she sat on all three.
"I went to have it out with him," Philip said. "About the money."
"What money?"
He didn't answer that. He started somewhere else, a field away from the gate. "The TB money came through in May. For the forty-one. Thirty-eight thousand, near enough, from the Ministry. It's in the farm account. His name and mine. It's the only thing between us and the bank." He rubbed the windscreen with his sleeve and made it worse. "Saturday morning I'm in the yard and I look at the app on my phone, and there's nineteen thousand gone out of it on Friday. To the bell fund."
Gill said nothing. Outside, a crow walked across the yard.
"So I said at dinner. At the Oak. I said, that was the TB money, Father, what have you done? And he said it was his name on the account before it was mine, and he'd do what he liked with it, and to finish my pasty. In front of the Moorcombe lot." Philip's jaw moved. "Then after the results I couldn't sit there. I went over. I went up."
"And?"
"The door was shut. The ringing room door." He was looking straight ahead at the fog on the glass as if the door was there. "I put my hand on the latch. I said, Father. He didn't say anything. I could hear the clock going. I thought he was up top doing the hammer and he'd heard me and he wasn't going to answer, because that's what he did, you'd say something to him and he'd let you stand there, he'd let you stand there till you'd said it twice and then he'd say, what? As if you'd not spoken." He stopped. "So I didn't say it twice."
"You came down."
"I stood there about as long as it takes to lose your nerve, and I came down. I went and stood in the top field in the wet for ten minutes so I'd have something to say I'd done. Then I went to the hall and drank a cup of tea. And at five to six Mandy sent me back." He turned his head at last and looked at her. "If I'd opened that door. Gill. If I'd opened it at twenty-five past."
She knew what the police thought: that Derek had come off the ladder after his goodnight, after quarter past five. That he might have been lying there alive at twenty-five past, behind a door his son had his hand on. She could see Philip had thought it every minute since Saturday, sitting up here with his hands on that wheel.
"You'll go to Sam," she said, "this morning. By yourself. And tell him what you've told me."
"They'll think..."
"They'll think worse if Iris tells them first. And Iris will tell them first, my lover, because she's eighty-eight and she's been waiting all her life for a policeman to ask her something."
He wound the window down the rest of the way, and the cold came in, and the smell of the yard.
"He never once said well done," Philip said. "Not once. Fifty-one years. I rang the seventh for him thirty of them."
"He never said it to anyone."
"He said it to you."
That stopped her. "When?"
"When you got the job at Tiverton. Nineteen eighty-eight. He said it at the table. He said, the forge maid's going to hang bells, and fair play to her." Philip started the engine. "Not to you, mind. To us."
The unit in Tiverton was on the estate by the river, between a man who reupholstered caravans and a firm that sold hot tubs to people who would regret it. VOSPER BELLHANGING was painted over the roller door in letters Gill had done herself in 2009, slightly downhill. Inside, a six-hundredweight bell from Bampton sat on a pallet waiting to go to the foundry, and Tyler was wire-brushing a cast-iron headstock with his earbuds in, nodding to something.
She did paperwork, which she hated, and then she sharpened every pencil in the place, and then she rang Sam and found Philip had been in at half past nine and was still there, and Sam's voice had gone careful.
"Gill, I've had to pass it up. Your ladder, and him lying. It's gone to CID."
"Right."
"It's not me now."
"I know, my lover."
At four the archdeacon rang, sounding like a man holding a hot plate. There was to be an emergency meeting of the parochial church council at seven, in the vestry. Mandy Leaman, as treasurer, had something about the restoration fund which the council needed to hear, and since it concerned the contract, the archdeacon felt that Mrs Vosper had better be present. In a spirit of openness.
"What's it about?"
"I think," said the archdeacon, "it would be better coming from Mandy."
Tyler took one earbud out. "Are we in trouble?"
"We're in Upcott," said Gill.
The vestry at St Petrock's was nine feet square and held a safe, a table, eight chairs, and a hundred years of stacked hymn books that nobody would throw away in case. The Reverend Jo Ilbert sat at the head of the table with her spaniel underneath it and the look of a woman who had nine parishes and was going to feel this in all of them. Malcolm Cann, the churchwarden, eighty-one, sat with his hands on his stick and his eyes half shut, which was how he attended everything. Martin Ashby had brought his own pen. Gill sat by the door. Ray Northcott, who wasn't on the council, sat on a stack of hymn books by the safe because nobody had the heart to tell him to go.
Mandy had a cardboard folder and an old-fashioned cash book with a marbled cover and a printout from the bank, and she laid them out square on the table in front of her the way she laid out splits.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry, all of you. I've been sitting on this since Saturday and I can't. I've not slept." She opened the folder. "I'll just..."
She didn't just. She took a breath and went at it.
"On Friday, nineteen thousand pounds was paid into the restoration fund. From the Coakers' farm account." She turned the printout round. There it was, between a standing order from the Ashbys and the interest, which was nothing. COAKER D&P HIGHER SHILSTONE 19,000.00 CR. "Derek never said. He never said a word to me about it."
"A donation?" said Jo.
"I thought so. On Friday night I thought, bless him, that's for the deposit, that's Derek all over." Mandy's voice went up and came back down. "Then I sat down with the book on Sunday, because I had to do the figures for the archdeacon. And I went back through it." She opened the cash book. "These are the stubs. Two years."
She put the cheque book on the table, and the stubs fanned out of it, every one filled in in Mandy's round blue capitals, and Gill read them upside down from where she sat. CASH. VOSPER, ROPES. £4,200. CASH. VOSPER, BEARINGS SERVICED. £2,850. CASH. VOSPER, CLAPPER WORK. CASH. VOSPER, STAYS & SLIDERS. Twelve of them. CASH. VOSPER. And every cheque that had gone out against them, Mandy said, signed twice: D. Coaker and M. Leaman.
"He'd say, Gill wants paying, she does a discount for cash," Mandy said. "And he'd write it out and I'd sign it, because you didn't say no to Derek. And he'd take it to Okehampton on market day and cash it." She looked at the stubs, not at anyone. "It comes to nineteen thousand. Near as makes no odds. Nineteen thousand and fifty."
Nobody spoke. Under the table the spaniel sighed.
"And then on Friday," said Martin slowly, "he paid nineteen thousand back in."
"I don't know what to think." Mandy's eyes filled. "I don't. I've known him my whole life. He gave me my first go on a rope. I'm not saying anything. I'm only saying what the book says."
"Gill?" said Jo.
They all looked at her. Even Malcolm Cann opened his eyes.
"I've never had a penny in cash off Derek Coaker in my life," Gill said. "Not a penny. He still owes me forty pounds for a stay from 2011."
"With respect," said Martin, "it doesn't look terribly good."
"It doesn't look good to me either. I didn't do the work." She heard her own voice go flat and hard, the voice she used on men who told her she'd want a lad to carry that. "Those ropes are mine from 2017. I put them in myself. Nobody's put a new rope in that tower in nine years. And those bearings have never been opened since I painted them. I've got photographs from Saturday morning of every bolt."
"Then where did nineteen thousand pounds go?" said Martin.
"Ask the man who cashed it."
"He's dead," said Ray, from the hymn books, very quietly.
"I've an invoice somewhere for the ropes," Mandy said. "I'm sure I have. He brought me invoices. I'll look in the shop." She pressed the heel of her good hand into one eye. "I'm sorry, Gill. I didn't want to say it in front of you. I had to say it to somebody, so on Sunday night I rang the police."
As she said it, there were steps in the nave, and a knock on the vestry door, and a woman in a navy suit put her head round it with her warrant card already out. She was about forty, short hair, a wedding ring and a cold.
"Detective Sergeant Ponsford," she said. "Exeter. Mrs Leaman? You said seven. Sorry, the Whiddon Down roundabout."
"It's always the Whiddon Down roundabout," said Malcolm Cann, and shut his eyes again.
The DS took the cheque book and the stubs and the bank printout in a clear plastic bag, and wrote Mandy a receipt in a carbon book, and thanked the council for their openness in a voice that suggested she'd seen a lot of openness. Then she asked Gill to step outside, and they stood in the porch, where the notices for the flower rota and the summer fete were drawing pins and curling paper, and the light was going green over the yews.
"Mrs Vosper."
"Gill."
"Gill. I'll be straight, because I've had a long day and I expect you have." DS Ponsford blew her nose. "On Saturday this was an old man who fell off a ladder. Then on Saturday night you told PC Rowe the ladder had been moved. Without you, it's an accident. You know that?"
"I know it."
"Then this morning Philip Coaker comes in and tells us he was at that door twelve minutes after his father's goodnight, and lied about it. And this afternoon I find out his father took nineteen thousand pounds out of the family account on Friday. The TB money. And tonight I've got twelve cheque stubs with your firm's name on them." She put the tissue in her pocket. "It's a lot of coincidence for one tower."
"It's a lot of tower for one village."
"What's that mean?"
"It means everything here goes through that door." Gill nodded at the tower, at the little arched door inside the west end, behind the font. "Every birth and marriage and death for six hundred years. Every row. If you went through anyone's life in Upcott, you'd find it all went up those thirty-one steps eventually."
The DS looked at her for a while. "You told PC Rowe Mr Coaker promised you he'd check a pin before he rang."
"He did."
"And PC Rowe told you he never did anything anybody told him."
"Sam's right."
"So which is it?"
"I don't know," said Gill. "That's what I can't stand."
"Well." DS Ponsford took out her car keys. "Don't go anywhere."
"I'm due in Loughborough Thursday with a tenor from Bampton."
"Then the tenor from Bampton can wait."
"She's waited since 1854. She'll not mind." Gill hesitated. "Will you swab that rope? The tenor's sally. There's a mark on it."
"PC Rowe mentioned. He said you said forty people had their hands on those ropes on Saturday."
"I did say that."
"Then I'd get forty people's DNA off it, and I'd have to explain to my inspector what I was going to do with them." The DS opened her car. "Bring me something better than forty people, Gill. Bring me one."
Mandy was waiting by the lychgate when Gill came out of the porch, with her folder held flat against her chest like a hymn book.
"I'm sorry," she said again. "You know I'm sorry."
"You did right to say it."
"Did I?" Mandy looked up at the tower. "I don't know what's right. I keep thinking I'm going to go in the shop in the morning and he'll be in there at seven for his Western Morning News, moaning about the price. He used to stand at the counter and read the deaths and the cattle prices and put it back on the rack without paying, every day for twenty years, and I let him, because it was Derek." She laughed, a small terrible sound. "I'll tell you what I'll miss. I'll miss him not paying."
Gill put her hand on Mandy's shoulder, which surprised them both. It was thin under the cardigan, the shoulder of a woman who lifted crates of milk at six every morning and rang a treble every Sunday and did the books and the tea and the flowers and everything else that nobody else in Upcott would do. Mandy put her own hand up and held Gill's there for a moment.
"Go home," Mandy said. "You look done in. I'll ring you if there's anything."
Gill drove home through the lanes with her headlights on in the dusk, and twice she had to pull into a gateway to let a tractor by, and both times she sat there afterwards longer than she needed to.
At twenty to eleven her phone went on the kitchen table. She didn't know the number.
"Gill?" It was Callum Coaker. He sounded about nine. "They've come for Dad. Two cars. They've put him in the back of one. They said it was just to ask him things, but they've put him in the back." He stopped. She could hear the yard behind him, a gate clanking, the cattle shifting in the dark. "Gill, I don't know how to do the cattle on my own. I don't even know where he keeps the feed figures."
"I'll be there at six," said Gill. "Put the kettle on at quarter to."