Joy Cometh With The Mourning by Dave Freer

Author:Dave Freer [Freer, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cozy, mystery, women sleuths
Publisher: self-published
Published: 2014-11-27T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

That afternoon Joy got down to going through the bookshelves. Peter Hallam — and, by the age of some of the books, his predecessors — had been keen readers. He had not been particularly systematic about shelving them, although they were in broad categories. Joy also did that with her books, but she also liked them in alphabetical order. She opened each book, and fanned the pages twice, before putting them in her piles to be alphabetically arranged. There were a lot of books on theology. That was to be expected. She really must get a bible-study group going. There was a broad spattering of novels, largely of the thriller type with a few gory whodunits — not her sort of book at all. And then she came to a collection of books on art and drawing. At first glance she’d taken them for, like his collection of fly-tying materials, an attempt to fit in with the art crowd here. But the books were old, and well-used. And they had his name in the inside cover. One was awarded as a school art prize to Peter John Hallam.

It would seem — despite Amabelle Tilton’s opinion — that he hadn’t been new to art. The next books on the shelf were several years’ worth of collections of cartoons — political cartoons, from a national newspaper chain. They were not recent, dating from twenty years ago, by a cartoonist who signed himself ‘Halley’. The signature looked familiar. And the books were in mint condition. It didn’t take Joy a great leap of intuition to go and find the parish register and compare the signatures. She was no expert, but it was certainly very much the same in style, and the way the letters were formed. Well. There was nothing to stop a priest being a cartoonist. She turned to the internet and was rewarded for her effort by the discovery that ‘Halley’ had been the pen-name of the cartoonist Peter John Hallam. He’d risen to national fame, won several awards, and then given it all up suddenly, after what the article described as the tragic death of his wife, Edith. They were very flattering about his ability to caricature, so Joy went to have a look at the cartoons.

It was an accurate comment. This was a man who could, with the sparsest use of lines, convey the whole of his subject’s face, expression, attitude — and could change the view of those with a twitch of the pencil. Joy had never been that kind of artist: her skill was in a precise rendition of what she saw. She knew she had been quite good at it, but Peter Hallam had not been quite good: he’d been a master-craftsman. And yet he’d walked away from it all to enter the ministry, and to quietly rot away here in this rural town. Having made that choice herself, she could understand that it brought a different reward.

But it still made her wonder.

Some hours later,

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