Free Ellis Peters - George Felse 04 - A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs by Ellis Peters

habit would crack and fall away, and leave him naked to the chill of what he knew. Furiously he plucked apricots he was not aware of seeing and loaded them into the basket he hardly knew he was filling.
     
    “You might,” said Miss Rachel, making an unexpected appearance in the library at about half past eleven, “take out some ginger-beer and cake for Paddy. I daresay he’d like something by now.”
    “I daresay he would,” agreed Tamsin, “if he hasn’t eaten himself sick on apricots. I know which I’d rather have.”
    “Paddy isn’t afraid of spoiling his figure,” said Miss Rachel nastily.
    Tamsin rose from her work with a sigh, and took the peace-offering the old lady had prepared with her own hands. And very nice, too, she thought. Chocolate layer cake, and the almond biscuits he likes best. What did he do to be in such high favour to-day? Or what’s she trying to smooth over? Come to think of it, why doesn’t she take it out to him herself?
    She was back very quickly, and still carrying the tray.
    “He’s not there.”
    “Nonsense, he must be there.” Miss Rachel’s resolutely confident face grew indignant at the suggestion that things could slip out of the comfortable course she had laid down for them. “You haven’t looked properly.”
    “Under every leaf. He isn’t there, and his bike isn’t there, and his basket isn’t there. And the apricots from that first tree aren’t there, either. He must have worked like a demon. Probably to get away and down to the dunes before the matinée’s over.”
    “Ah!” said Miss Rachel, seizing gratefully on a solution which permitted her to keep her self-righteousness, her indignation against him, and her cheering conviction that children were as tough as badgers. “That’s probably what it is. The little wretch! I just hope Tim will send him home with a flea in his ear.”
     
    They rode down to the church promptly at ten, in Tim’s Land-Rover and Simon’s grey Porsche, dropping from the coastal road through the dunes by a pebble-laid track among the tamarisk hedges, silted over here and there by fine drifts of sand. The tang of salt and the straw-tinted pallor of salt-bleached grasses surrounded them, the fine lace of the tamarisks patterned the cloudless but windy aquamarine sky on either side. The small car led, with Simon driving it and George beside him. The Land-Rover, used to being taken anywhere and everywhere by Tim,, ambled after like a good-natured St. Bernard making believe to chase a greyhound pup. Tim and Sam Shubrough up in front, the Vicar behind for ballast, with the additional tackle they had brought along in case of need.
    A formidable team, thought George, considering them. Simon and George himself would have passed for presentable enough physical specimens by most standards, but here they were the light-weights. Tim stood an inch or two less than either of them, but was half as broad again, and in hard training from the outdoor life he had led in all weathers. Sam Shubrough was a piece of one of the harder red sandstones of the district, animated. But the greatest surprise was the Reverend Daniel Polwhele.
    The Vicar of St. Mary’s, Maymouth, stood six feet three in his socks, and looked like the product of several generations of selective breeding from the families of Cornish wrestlers. He wore the clothes of his calling with a splendid simplicity, and was neither set apart by them nor in any way apologetic for them. Shouldering a couple of crowbars, he looked as much at home as with a prayer-book, because he approached everything in the world with a large, curious and intelligent innocence, willing to investigate and be investigated.
    He was probably forty-five, but dating him was the last thing you’d think of trying to do. He had a broad, bony Cornish face, without guile but inscrutable, and a lot of untidy, grizzled dark hair that he forgot to have cut, and eyes as thoughtful, direct and disconcerting as a small boy’s,