Free The Resurrection of the Body by Maggie Hamand Page B

parishioner had seen him on a previous day pruning the roses, and also noticed the resemblance. I thought I ought to let him know in case it turned out to be a relative. I posted the letter and waited in anticipation for something to happen. There was no answering phone call. I thought that probably Stone had read it with exasperation and put it in the bin. Perhaps that is where it belonged.
    I should at that moment have forgotten the whole incident , and nearly succeeded in doing so; indeed, if I had never sent that note it is quite possible that nothing further would have happened. But something strange had happened to me. I wanted to believe that this bizarre series of events had a meaning. I couldn’t bear to think that it hadn’t. When nothing more happened, when the trail seemed to go completely cold, I had a feeling of disappointment , that things were out of joint, that I had been somehow cruelly set up and then let down. I felt that if this event could be meaningless, the cruel murder and the theft of the body meaningless and unexplained, then everything could be meaningless and unexplained. Inother words, I felt I had lost the ability to live in faith. Everything became colourless, all the things I had previously enjoyed, even my relationship with Harriet and the children.
    I was suffering the kind of crisis that is, perhaps, not unusual among the clergy, a spiritual depression, a temporary or not-so-temporary loss of faith. I wrestled with this inside, not knowing what to do to help myself. I was forgetful, miserable, and withdrawn. In the meantime I went about the parish, performing my duties, taking services in the church, attending meetings, visiting the sick, writing letters and preparing the class for confirmation, and depositing my monthly cheque from the church commissioners into my bank account.

T he Detective Chief Inspector Accuses
    Monday is my day off. There was no reason why Detective Chief Inspector Stone should know this. The children were at school, and Harriet was out teaching, as she was three days a week. The house was in silence and I was lying on my back on the living-room floor, staring at the ceiling, and listening to a Bach cantata on Classic FM.
    There was a knock on the door. It was the same kind of loud, peremptory knock that bailiffs give. I had been in many houses of the parish where people live in daily fear of the bailiffs. Once I was there with a woman when they called because she hadn’t paid her poll tax or her counciltax. When she refused to open the door they had pushed a form through the letterbox for her to fill in saying what they could take. She had written angrily, her fingers pressing hard on the pencil: ‘Two children under five, one ageing husband, one cracked loo seat, a broken chair.’ Then she had passed it out again.
    I tightened my dressing-gown cord and went to the door. It was Detective Chief Inspector Stone.
    He walked into the house without my asking. I didn’t offer him a cup of tea.
    ‘Why did you send me this note?’
    He held it out to me, my own handwriting on the church notepaper.
    I was taken aback by his accusatory tone. ‘Because it happened. I thought it my duty to tell you.’
    ‘We have made enquiries.’ He walked around the room, looking at everything, staring into corners, in the way people do when they are buying your house. ‘There is no one of this description employed as a gardener by the council. The gardeners, in any case, do not work on Saturdays. And the roses were pruned in February. No one had instructions to prune them this late in the season.’
    I said, ‘But the roses have been pruned. I looked at them myself. They were recently cut.’
    ‘Why did you tell Mrs Marcus at the council offices that you had a pouch of his? Might I see this pouch?’
    At this I blushed red. ‘I’m sorry, there is no pouch. I’m afraid I made that up … a rather inept attempt to get some information, I’m afraid.’
    He looked at me in that