The Killer in the Choir Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Simon Brett

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Simon Brett

  The Fethering Mysteries

  BONES UNDER THE BEACH HUT

  GUNS IN THE GALLERY *

  THE CORPSE ON THE COURT *

  THE STRANGLING ON THE STAGE *

  THE TOMB IN TURKEY *

  THE KILLING IN THE CAFÉ *

  THE LIAR IN THE LIBRARY *

  THE KILLER IN THE CHOIR *

  The Charles Paris Theatrical Series

  A RECONSTRUCTED CORPSE

  SICKEN AND SO DIE

  DEAD ROOM FARCE

  A DECENT INTERVAL *

  THE CINDERELLA KILLER *

  A DEADLY HABIT *

  The Mrs Pargeter Mysteries

  MRS PARGETER’S PACKAGE

  MRS PARGETER’S POUND OF FLESH

  MRS PARGETER’S PLOT

  MRS PARGETER’S POINT OF HONOUR

  MRS PARGETER’S PRINCIPLE *

  MRS PARGETER’S PUBLIC RELATIONS *

  * available from Severn House

  THE KILLER IN

  THE CHOIR

  Simon Brett

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2019

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  Crème de la Crime an imprint of

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  This eBook edition first published in 2019 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2020 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  Copyright © 2019 by Simon Brett.

  The right of Simon Brett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-118-5 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-610-4 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0227-7 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  To the hope that,

  in my next incarnation,

  I’ll be able to sing

  EPITAPH ON AN AMATEUR SOPRANO

  Her final note has now been sent,

  Her final chord’s undone.

  After life’s gloom, death should present

  Her moment in the sun.

  Alas, she has the worst of fates –

  She must in Limbo stay

  And wait outside the Pearly Gates

  For ever and a day.

  She’s not shut out because of sin.

  Her virtue’s plain to see.

  It’s just … she never knew when to come in,

  And could never find the key.

  ONE

  The trouble is, thought Carole Seddon peevishly, that no one knows any of the old hymns any more. Though devoutly anti-religious, she did have standards when it came to certain matters of British tradition. And she was strongly of the view that children should be brought up to know the basic repertory of hymn tunes that she’d had to learn at their age.

  Carole was not a frequent visitor to All Saints Church in the village of Fethering. Lack of faith precluded regular Sunday attendance and, as a divorced woman in her fifties, she was not invited to many weddings or christenings. So, it was just funerals, really. And it was a funeral that had brought her to All Saints that Thursday morning in late February.

  She had not known the deceased, Leonard Mallett, well, nor liked him very much. Of his professional career, in the world of insurance, she knew nothing. But they had both been on the same committee, which he had chaired, for the Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront. Though the group only met a couple of times a year, Carole had found out through the local grapevine that most of the other members would be attending the funeral. So, after the disproportionate amount of soul-searching that she brought to every social situation, she’d decided she ought to join them. Though Leonard himself was obviously beyond being offended, and Carole hardly knew his wife Heather, she still felt the danger that her absence might be interpreted as some kind of snub (unaware of the more likely truth that it simply wouldn’t be noticed).

  So, she was there in the church. Though there are many beautiful old churches in West Sussex, some dating back to Saxon times, All Saints Fethering was not one of them. It had been built by the Victorians in dour dark red brick and seemed somehow too high and cavernous ever to feel welcoming. As with every such institution in the country, the age of its dwindling congregation mounted with each passing year, and there didn’t seem to be many young people leaping in to replace those called to a Higher Place.

  Leonard Mallett’s funeral, however, had very nearly filled the church. Despite arriving characteristically early, Carole had been ushered into one of the side pews. This vantage point, though not in the favoured central block, gave her a good view of the altar and choir stalls, and of the trestles on which the deceased’s coffin would shortly rest.

  At the door, she had been handed an order of service. A quick glance through its contents revealed no surprises. The hymns were totally predictable. As were the readings, even down to the inevitability of Joyce Grenfell’s ‘If I should die before the rest of you’ and Henry Scott Holland’s one about having ‘slipped away to the next room’. (Carole had nothing against either of them as poems; she just wished people might occasionally choose something else. But funerals were rare and stressful events for most people, so perhaps it was too much to hope for originality.)

  On the order of service’s cover there was a colour photograph of Leonard Mallett. Characteristically unsmiling, he wore the frustrated expression of a man who wasn’t at that moment getting his own way. It was not a face that inspired affection.

  But something about the man had inspired the healthy turnout for his funeral. There were a few Fethering regulars, some members of
the Seafront committee, to whom Carole gave minimal nodding acknowledgement, but most of the congregation were unfamiliar to her. Presumably people from Leonard’s former London life, senior managers from the world of insurance, who had ventured down to the South Coast to pay their dutiful respects in the forbidding draughtiness of All Saints Fethering.

  Somehow, to Carole, the church’s bleak austerity felt appropriate for the funeral of someone she had hardly known.

  In Fethering, of course, the fact that you hardly knew someone didn’t mean that you were totally ignorant of their circumstances. Gossip could be relied on to generate an extensive dossier, based on some fact and much conjecture, about every resident of that South Coast village. And, although Carole had received none of the information from the man himself, she knew that Heather was Leonard Mallett’s second wife, though it was a first marriage for her. They’d had no children together, but he had a daughter with his first wife, who had subsequently died (though nobody knew exactly when). The girl was called Alice. She was rumoured to be an actress who didn’t get much work, but who lived quite comfortably in London on an allowance from her father.

  Fethering gossip had it that Alice was engaged to be married. It also said that she didn’t get on with her stepmother. Though there was evidence about the forthcoming wedding, because it was due to take place at All Saints, the bit about tensions between the two women was pure speculation. But then Fethering gossip always tended to go for the rather simplistic fairy-tale interpretation of family relationships. It wouldn’t entertain the idea of a stepmother and stepdaughter who got on well together.

  Leonard Mallett was said to have been some fifteen years older than his second wife. He had moved to the village, into a large house called Sorrento on the exclusive Shorelands Estate, towards the end of a long and lucrative career bossing people about in insurance. After a few years of daily commuting to London, he had devoted his retirement to bossing people about in Fethering. It was on his initiative that the Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront committee had been set up, and the fact that he had persuaded Carole Seddon, not by nature a joiner of anything, to become a member, was a measure of his bossing skills.

  She had not enjoyed his hectoring manner at meetings, but could not fault the fact that he had set up the committee. On her morning walks with her Labrador, Gulliver, she had become increasingly aware of the pollution affecting Fethering Beach. Every day’s tides deposited more tar-soiled plastic items on the shoreline. And tourists seemed deliberately to avoid the litter bins on the prom, preferring to scatter their burger boxes, polystyrene chip trays and ice-cream wrappers directly on to the ground. As she grew older, and perhaps since she had been blessed with two granddaughters, Carole had become increasingly worried about the legacy of pollution being bequeathed to future generations.

  Fethering gossip’s dossier on Heather Mallett was less detailed than the one it had compiled on her husband. This was in part because she was rarely seen around the village. Though Leonard was a constant and loud presence at all Fethering events, and particularly in its only pub, the Crown & Anchor, his wife kept herself to herself. She was rarely to be seen shopping on the Parade. Presumably, she favoured the large anonymous supermarkets, like Sainsbury’s in Rustington, over the local outlets. The only guaranteed sightings of her in the village were at church on Sundays, and at Friday rehearsals for the All Saints choir, of which she was a diligent member.

  Heather Mallett was a pallid creature, who favoured anonymous colours: beige, light pinks and taupe. Though probably about the same age as Carole, she had the resigned air of a woman who did not expect post-menopausal life to yield any excitements. Unlike Carole, whose hair had been cut in the same helmet shape since schooldays when it was dark brown until now when it was grey, Heather’s hair, that pale blonde which edges almost imperceptibly into white, was cut very short. Like Carole, she usually wore undistinguished rimless glasses.

  That was the first thing about her at the funeral that looked odd. In place of the familiar, almost transparent pair, Heather Mallett was wearing glasses with thick, oxblood-coloured frames. They looked almost fashionable, and certainly emphasized the rather fine brown eyes which nobody had ever noticed before. She had let her hair grow longer too. And the black trouser suit she wore was almost ‘sharp’, making a definite change from her normal dowdy appearance.

  The other odd thing that morning in All Saints was that Heather Mallett did not follow the coffin into the church, in the customary manner of a newly bereaved widow. Nor did she subsequently take her place in the front pew, attended by sympathetic family members. Instead, she had entered earlier, with the rest of the choir, all of whom wore their usual clothes rather than cassocks. Following someone’s directive – possibly the widow’s – they had not ‘robed’ for the occasion.

  The line-up of the choir was predictable. Obviously – and inevitably – more women than men, and women whose average age was pushing seventy. The youngest female members were an acne-plagued teenage girl and a thin, tough-looking woman in her forties. The girl Carole recognized from behind the till at Allinstore, Fethering’s uniquely inefficient supermarket. The woman she did not know, which, given the way the village worked, probably meant she came from elsewhere or was a recent arrival.

  The male components comprised two. There was a bustling, bearded man in his early seventies, whom Carole did actually know. He was a retired schoolteacher called Ruskin Dewitt, who had also been a member of Leonard Mallett’s Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront committee. The other male was a boy enduring the aching awkwardness of early adolescence, whose main aim in life seemed to be not to catch the eye of the Allinstore checkout girl. So deficient was the choir in male voices that the church organist, whose name Carole happened to know was Jonny Virgo, joined lustily in all the singing.

  As did Heather Mallett. Which still seemed odd to Carole. She supposed that, for someone to whom singing the praises of God was important, to do so might feel like the best tribute one could bring to the celebration of a husband’s life. But it still didn’t feel quite right. Carole disliked witnessing any divergence from the conventions and rituals that she didn’t believe in.

  Nor was she the only person registering disapproval. In the front pew, next to the aisle, in the seat which might have been considered the rightful place of the widow, sat the deceased’s daughter, 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’.