The Killer in the Choir. Simon Brett

Alice Mallett. Though Fethering gossip placed her in her early thirties, she had the look of a recalcitrant schoolgirl. The loose black dress she wore failed to disguise her dumpiness, and the black straw Zorro-style sombrero had not been a good fashion choice.

      Beside her sat a tall man of matching dumpiness, dressed in conventional pin-striped suit and black tie. His attentiveness to his companion suggested that he might be the fiancé Fethering gossip had announced Alice Mallett was about to marry. Regrettably, the full resources of the Fethering grapevine had not been able to come up with a name for him.

      The All Saints choir was in place by the time the coffin entered, accompanied by Jonny Virgo the organist’s expert playing of Bach’s ‘Cantata No. 208 Sheep May Safely Graze’. The chief undertaker, in his tall black hat at the front of the procession, appeared to be enjoying his master-of-ceremonies role, and the pall-bearers looked more as if they were his employees than dignitaries of the insurance world.

      As they lowered the coffin on to its waiting trestles, the vicar moved into position in front of the altar and requested that the congregation remain standing for the first hymn, predictably enough, ‘The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, is Ended’.

      ‘… and the fact that we are all gathered here to see Leonard off on his final journey shows how much he meant to every one of us.’

      Carole found the vicar’s words arguable. She certainly wasn’t in All Saints because the deceased had meant much to her. And looking round at the other attendees, she didn’t reckon he had figured a great deal in their affections either. It was just social convention, not any genuine emotion, that had brought them all out for the funeral. (Very occasionally, Carole Seddon worried that her cynicism about the motivation of her fellow human beings was increasing, but she could quickly reassure herself by observation of their behaviour, which showed no signs of improving.)

      ‘Leonard,’ the vicar went on, ‘was very successful in his professional career, in the world of insurance, and I am delighted to welcome many of his former colleagues to All Saints today for this … celebration of his life. When he moved down here to Fethering, he did not just put his feet up, as many retired people seem to do. He entered thoroughly into the affairs of our community, bringing those organizational skills which had served him so well in his business life, into “doing his bit” for our village. It was Leonard who set up a committee for the Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront, and he did sterling work in …’

      It was clear to Carole that, as was so often the case with contemporary funerals, the celebrant knew nothing about the person whose departure his church was hosting. Maybe the two had met through Heather’s connection with the choir, but Leonard Mallett had resolutely not been a church-goer. Clearly, the two men had spent very little time together.

      Apart from anything else, the vicar was relatively new to the Parish of All Saints. Of course, the dearth of church-goers in Fethering did not mean that his arrival had passed unnoticed by the wider village community. He had already been much discussed and commented on, before and after he took up the post. Lack of interest in religion in no way precluded interest in a new vicar, which in a small village reached almost Jane Austen proportions.

      Carole reviewed the dossier which Fethering gossip had already compiled on him. The Reverend Bob Hinkley had not spent his entire career in the church. He had worked ‘in industry’ and ‘apparently been quite high up’, though nobody could specify what industry he had been in, or how high up he had been in it. But he was said to have had a ‘Damascene conversion’ in his early fifties and decided then to train for holy orders. The career change had caused him, everyone agreed, ‘a serious loss of income’.

      To the acquisitive minds of Fethering, this was definitely a bad thing. But perhaps not such a bad thing for Bob Hinkley as it might have been for most people. Because Bob Hinkley was rumoured to have ‘a rich wife’. It was here that the contents of the Fethering gossip dossier became rather sketchy. Because nobody had actually met his rich wife.

      Since this largely invented person was not sharing the vicarage with her husband, the locals, once again going for the obvious explanation, deduced that there was ‘something wrong with the marriage’. The sages of the Crown & Anchor even speculated further that his wife wanted a divorce, but Bob wouldn’t entertain the idea because it didn’t fit his image as a man of the cloth, particularly one recently arrived in a new parish. Speculation in Fethering, as ever, had only a nodding acquaintance with the truth. When the village residents got better acquainted with the new vicar, no doubt his dossier would grow bigger and, hopefully, more accurate. They would even find out that he didn’t have a wife, rich or otherwise.

      ‘So,’ the droning encomium continued, ‘as our brother Leonard moves on from this world to a better one, it is with the comforting knowledge that he lived a fulfilling and useful life …’

      Carole’s cynicism struck again. How could Bob Hinkley possibly know that? How could anyone ever be sure what actually went on in another person’s life? From what she’d seen of Leonard Mallett, he gave the impression of being a complete bastard.

      She knew the All Saints church hall quite well. There were few rentable public spaces in Fethering, so it was impossible to live in the village for long without having to attend some function at the venue. And though it was regularly maintained by the local council, the space never felt welcoming. Each repainting of the interior favoured the same cream and pale green paint and, even when bunting was hung out for wedding receptions, or lametta for Christmas parties, the hall remained resolutely institutional. Appropriate, perhaps, for the wake after a funeral of someone you hadn’t known well, or particularly liked.

      It was not natural sociability that prompted Carole to go to the church hall. Her instinct would have been to head straight from All Saints back to her house, High Tor, but her curiosity proved stronger. There was something about the Mallett family set-up that intrigued her. Maybe it was just Heather’s glasses and longer hair, a suggestion that the invisible woman of Fethering was about to become more conspicuous.

      If that was happening, the process was clearly continuing at her husband’s wake. By the time Carole arrived in the hall, Heather was already quaffing champagne and laughing extravagantly in the centre of a group of her church choir cronies. Perhaps it was sheer relief at the end of the ceremony, or a complex reaction to the grief of bereavement, but Heather Mallett seemed to have slipped very easily into Merry Widow mode.

      One of the group Carole recognized was the church organist, who had so vigorously played and sung throughout the ceremony. On the authority of Fethering gossip, Jonny Virgo had relatively recently retired as Head of Music at some local school, where he had, as throughout his own education and subsequent career, suffered many jokes at the expense of his surname. He lived with his mother, now well into her nineties, in one of the old fishermen’s cottages down near Fethering Yacht Club. Whenever this fact was mentioned by Fethering gossips, it was done with a raised eyebrow, an implicit comment on his likely sexuality. But Jonny Virgo was believed never to have had a partner, of any gender. Nor had any scandal ever attached to his name.

      Carole noticed that he stood rather awkwardly, as though he were in pain, on the fringe of Heather Mallett’s entourage. He wore a dull brown suit, and at the neck of his white shirt a cravat of a maroon paisley design, a slightly dated gesture to leisurewear. But the choirmaster seemed very much part of the communal jollity. Carole felt the instinctive recoil she did from any kind of hearty group dynamic. She never felt relaxed in the company of more than one person – and very rarely even then.

      There hadn’t been anyone with filled glasses on trays to greet the guests arriving from the church, and Carole didn’t yet want to join the throng at the drinks table over by the serving hatch to the kitchen. She really felt like a glass of wine, but knew she’d probably end up with a cup of coffee. It wasn’t even twelve o’clock yet. She didn’t want to get a reputation. And reputations were easily acquired in Fethering.

      Carole checked out the crowd for other familiar faces. It was a local routine that she knew well. All that was needed at an occasion like this was one person with whom you had previously exchanged dialogue. Although everyone in the village knew to the last detail exactly who everyone