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Death in Elysium

A Jodie Welsh Mystery

Severn House Publishers Limited

I wasn't put on this earth to be a vicar's – even a rector's – wife. Nor, come to think of it, an amateur detective doing the police's work for them. I was put on this earth to be the consort of a multimillionaire, preferably one with his own yacht. But thanks to the curious love life of an old friend, Sarah, and her failed date with a man she'd met on the Internet, a rector's wife I am. And an amateur detective, of course.

In the absence of a suitable, indeed likeable, plutocrat, I'd made my own good luck. After gaining my doctorate at Imperial College, I thought I might be an academic, but spread my bets by studying for an MBA at Harvard – financed by a little IT company I set up. The little company grew bigger, and I allowed it to be taken over, trying not to roll my eyes at the number of digits on the cheque. Then I settled for a corporate career, swiftly moving into the very highest echelons of management as IT consultant or director – in blue-chip companies, you understand. By my fiftieth birthday I was heart-whole and solvent enough to celebrate by acquiring a better Porsche. My life couldn't have been better. Then, wouldn't you know it, I was invited to join the ranks of the newly-redundant unemployed. Don't shed any tears for me; save them for the people whose whole lives are torn to pieces when they lose their jobs. I might have had my pride dented, but at least I was very much more than solvent. My mortgage was paid off long ago. I'd made some extremely shrewd investments. And my golden handshake was nothing short of embarrassing. My financial adviser told me what I already knew: I need never work again – I could simply retire and indulge myself. But I couldn't imagine a life of leisure, and was delighted when many of my old contacts were willing to offer me contract work, pointing out that as a freelance I'd never have to get out of bed for less than twelve hundred pounds a day. I got out of bed most days – even some weekends.

But all that changed.

My life hadn't been entirely devoted to Mammon: throughout my adult years I'd enjoyed a series of fleeting but highly enjoyable flirtations, often with people in the arts, thanks to my position as trustee or board member of a number of musical organizations. But marriage had never really presented itself as an option: either I had been too busy testing each rung of the corporate ladder, or any putative partner had whizzed off to dance or play in New York or St Petersburg. With hindsight, and with that backward-looking morality that some people adopt, some of my liaisons might have been seen as inappropriate for a clergyman's wife, so I didn't mention much of my past when I moved to Lesser Hogben, where even the height of my heels seemed to shock villagers I passed in the street. This was compounded by the embarrassing time I walked up the aisle to take Communion and got firmly stuck in a heating grating. Eventually the Louboutin stayed where it was, and, like any true penitent, I had to make my way to the altar rail in my stocking feet.

Thanks to Sarah, however, I was now more concerned with my future than my past. Widowed after twenty-five years of happy marriage, Sarah had decided, after a decent interval, to get back on the dating scene. Safety first, I counselled, worried that she was vulnerable in so many ways. But she carefully sorted the sincere wheat from the kinky chaff. Just when she decided she was simply wasting time and money, not to mention emotional effort, she moved to a Christian introduction agency and struck gold: she connected with a widower of the right age, in his fifties. And a clergyman to boot. Theo Welsh. At least he wouldn't be a useless pervert, not if his drily funny emails were anything to go by. But like the sensible woman she was, when it came to meeting this guy in the flesh, she arranged to meet him in public and told me to phone her halfway through the evening to see if she needed rescuing. When I did, her coded reply told me that they had all the mutual attraction of sausage and custard. So as promised, I happened casually to drop by the wine bar to find them – as if by accident. My dear kind friend, her pretty mouth drooping with boredom, was sitting opposite six foot two of the most desirable man I'd seen in years. Why hadn't he been attracted by her beauty, her stunning figure? Why hadn't she been entranced by his startling blue eyes, his smile, his gorgeous laugh? Heaven knows. All I knew was that Sarah was soon sitting back and watching her date and her rescuer fall gobsmackingly in love. Just like that.

There was a happy ending for her, too, as it happens. A man at the next table, stood up by his date, registered all the drama and stepped over with his bottle of champagne. If Theo and I could hardly tear our eyes from each other, Sarah and Mr Fizz could scarcely keep their hands to themselves. In fact, they left first, wrapped round each other like cling film. It transpired they shared a mutual passion for tandem cycling too, so their future seemed – still seems – assured.

'Do you think things will be so easy for us?' Theo had asked as we polished off the champagne. 'Our backgrounds are chalk and cheese after all.'

They were. Who'd have imagined a country parson falling for a woman who had made her life in the city – and indeed the City?

'Who wants easy? I've always found overcoming difficulties the most exciting thing in life,' I declared.

'Your life could be about to get a whole lot more exciting, then.'

We shared a smile at the ambiguity.

'I certainly hope so,' I said, taking his hand

I can't deny that there were problems – his late wife hovered on the verge of becoming one. Perhaps for fear of hurting me, he was very reluctant to talk about their life together. He described her as a good woman, whom he'd married young. Merry – a pet variant of Marilyn – was a civil servant and he a teacher; he'd not become a clergyman till he was forty. He said, with something of a sigh, that she'd thrown herself into parish work, doing almost as much as he. It had been her idea to move to his present parish from Birmingham, which he claimed to have loved. One thing in its favour, I suppose, was that it was only just over an hour by train from London.

Now he lived geographically closer, but in attitude and even rail journey time it was much further away.

Kent.

Rural Kent.

A village. Lesser Hogben.

Not even Greater Hogben.

During the six months before we got married, Theo must have become sick of each station, each hole in the hedge, as we pursued in what more leisured days would have been called a courtship. Any other man and we'd have been at it like rabbits from day one – but Theo's religion was more than dog-collar deep, and don't forget I was committing to a great deal more than I could begin to understand at that point. Why, for instance, did he always come up to London to see me, and not the other way round? At first I was inclined to be a touch miffed: was he ashamed of me? And why could we never spend more than one day a week together? And why, most of all, even when our engagement was official and the banns read, was he still most insistent that I should keep the St John's Wood pad when I moved to the country? Such extravagance was most unlike him: he was embarrassed by my accumulated wealth to the point of being in denial about it.

If I didn't really understand all his churches' problems (he had seven or eight in his care), I soon understood, and shared, his need for a bolt-hole. Two months into our marriage, I understood a lot more about being a Kentish parson's wife. Life had become very interesting indeed. The honeymoon was over, in more than one sense – except on the one day a week we managed to shoot back to St John's Wood, where he shed ten years and remembered how to laugh.

As a matter of fact, on a day like today, I admitted to myself that Kent might not be too bad a place to live, though at first I'd hated its remoteness and the fact it wasn't London. That especially. It had been a long, hard winter, bad enough if you lived in a city, with a wind coming from Siberia without pausing for breath, drying everything in its path like a hairdryer set to icy. But now what seemed like permafrost had thawed, a random leaf or two was risking a quick look at the world, and I'd swear I heard a brave bird testing its vocal chords.

While Theo went about his parochial duties, I'd just run up the hill overlooking Lesser Hogben, at a second or two beyond my previous best. I could reward myself with a few minutes looking at the view if I kept running on the spot. Yes, from here it was truly idyllic: the landscape picturesquely spread before me, with miniature farms and Lego villages.

I looked harder. As if bored with Toy Town, someone was busy rearranging part of it between here and Greater Hogben – deep in a hollow, which you could only see from up here, men were busy with what looked like heavy diggers and JCBs. A spring ritual, no doubt – something to do with ploughing, perhaps, though they seemed to be dealing with some huge trees. And by dealing with, I mean cutting down. Then grubbing out the roots. You couldn't do that in cities without planning permission, but I supposed that a different set of controls regulated rural activities. Nothing to do with me, anyway.

Much closer, just a couple of miles away, was Lesser Hogben itself, with St Dunstan's at its heart. It stood with the solidity of a thousand years, surrounded by the yew trees that made the churchyard famous, looking benignly over the village green, which was large enough to host the local cricket team. A second side of the green was dominated by a handsome Regency house, The Old Rectory. The third was occupied by a duck pond, still not fenced in despite the loud insistence of the families who weekended here, fearful that their little angels might drown. A hit into the pond was counted as six and out. Overlooking the fourth side was what should have been a vibrant village pub, thatched roof and all: the Walnut Tree, known by the cricketers who adjourned there after their toils as the Pickled Walnut. Apart from them, there were very few drinkers.

But it was not cricketing weather yet; there was still a mean breeze, just enough to chill vulnerable muscles. I needed to start moving properly again, soon accelerating down the long, gentle slope towards home.

The activity in the churchyard announced itself way before I reached it: any venturesome birds were outsung by an even more premature strimmer, snarling and whining round the graves where Ted Vesey's sit-on mower wouldn't reach. He'd donated the mower to the church but kept it for his exclusive use, despite the fact that he never sullied his manicured hands in his own garden. Actually the mower wouldn't reach many of the rows at all: the headstones defied health and safety recommendations by leaning at all angles, and a dear old push-and-pull lawnmower, the sort that made stripes my father was always proud of, would have been far more effective.

Not as a status symbol, however.

If Ted was proud of his mower, it didn't take more than one precocious buttercup rearing its head to bring out George Cox's strimmer, but not the ear and eye protectors I'd have thought essential. He would take huge pleasure at being at work before Ted, whether the graveyard merited such attentions or not. Whatever their rivalry did to their souls – and that, since they were churchwardens, was Theo's business, not mine – flourishing the strimmer certainly wasn't good for George's body, or his heart at least. Where his cheeks weren't purple they were grey. At least my appearance gave him the excuse to switch off the machine and lean casually on it, obviously settling down for a restorative chat, in which I was supposed to talk while he caught his breath.

'Afternoon, Mrs Welsh,' George greeted me, still ignoring my constant pleas to be called simply Jodie. After all those years as a Ms or preferably a Dr, I couldn't get my head round Mrs. Not in connection with me, at any rate. The new surname itself had been a major shock. But Theo had broken it to me that the villagers wouldn't like it if I insisted on using the maiden name I'd legally retained, by accident, as it happens. I'd been so overwhelmed by the wedding ceremony I'd simply forgotten to sign my new name. Thank goodness we'd been married back in St John's Wood: I can't imagine the churchwardens here keeping that titbit under their hats. But then, despite their differences, both were men who preferred a funeral to a wedding.

This cold wind was bad for both of us. At least my running thermals would protect me when I really ought to be keeping the muscles going in a warm-down, but George was in his late seventies. Though he sported a woolly hat and hillwalking-quality fleece, he must have been vulnerable. So I manoeuvred him into a patch of sun, sheltered from the worst of the breeze by a grandiose Victorian tomb, complete with winged angels and some overweight cherubs apparently blowing raspberries at my quads and hamstrings. A knowing look in their eyes told me that all this mowing and cutting was none of my business, and that any offer to fund a maintenance contract before someone dropped dead on someone else's headstone would have to be carefully, perhaps anonymously, done. Theo and I had had some of our few awkward moments when I simply wanted to throw a fistful of cash at a problem, church or village, that bowed him down, but he had won hands down when he reminded me of the proverb: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for life.

'Run far, have you?' George said.

'Just up to the ridge across the Downs and back again.'

'Just! You're planning on some marathon, are you?' He narrowed his eyes, as if appraising a willing pupil.

'I was. But I hurt my leg before the wedding, so I'm not going to be fit for London this year.'

His eyebrows shot up. 'The London Marathon! That's a shame. But it doesn't stop you running altogether.'

'I'd hate to give up,' I confided. Actually I rather suspected it was time to give up competing. But I'd not give up non-competitive running: it gave me far too much of a buzz, and my body complained if I dropped from my regular regime.

'And you kept it up through all that snow and wind?'

'At least the weather's looking up,' I said with a smile.

'Hm. But they say it won't last.' George sounded grimly satisfied at the thought of more cold greyness. Perhaps that was what years as a primary school head did to you.

'That's a shame – there's a wedding on Saturday, isn't there?' As if I didn't know each and every service Theo was scheduled to take: I'd done a spreadsheet for him, after all.

'Only rich Londoners wanting some arty photos. Not proper parishioners. Just people renting a place so they can claim the right to use the church.' I'd swear that if he hadn't been on hallowed ground he'd have spat. Actually no, not an ex-head, even one who with his gnarled hands and bent shoulders looked like a countryman straight out of Thomas Hardy. Of course he wouldn't. 'Let them go to a register office, that's what I say. Or one of those wedding venues. You know, a golf club or something.'

Theo hoped that the experience of a Christian ceremony might encourage the happy couple to explore more fully the religion they'd embraced for half an hour. Maybe some of it will rub off was his mantra. And each time he read the banns he made sure the congregation prayed for the unknown couple.

I murmured something to that effect to George, who responded with a face that wouldn't have disgraced a gargoyle. I could also have pointed out that St Dunstan's needed the money as much as any golf course, but the church's funds, or rather lack of them, was a contentious issue, dividing the Parochial Church Council and indeed the handful of parishioners who rarely – or do I mean barely? – filled the pews.

'They won't hear of the Flower Guild ladies doing their flowers – they've brought in some designer florist. And, mark my words, their guests will throw all that damned confetti,' George concluded, levering himself upright with the strimmer.

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Excerpted from Death in Elysium by Judith Cutler. Copyright © 2014 Judith Cutler. Excerpted by permission of Severn House Publishers Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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