The Reluctant Detective (Faith Morgan Mysteries) by Ockley Martha

Author:Ockley, Martha [Ockley, Martha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kregel Publications
Published: 2011-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

12

STEADY RAIN BLURRED THE GLASS. It transformed the neat confines of her blue car into a cosy private world, lulled by the sibilant hush of the water spray thrown up by the tyres outside. The traffic was slow into town. Bishop Anthony was expected to drop into the deanery meeting that morning. Faith hoped she might catch a word with him. The logical part of her brain asked what she could expect from him, but the rest of her longed for some authoritative advice: This is how a priest behaves when the law is seeking a murderer among their congregation…

As she tucked her car into one of the parking slots by Church House, she noticed an estate car bearing the logo of the local TV station. Beyond it stood the battered red Escort she had seen before on the green in Little Worthy. Journalists. Damn.

She unfurled the big black umbrella she kept on the back seat. Through a window she saw the diocesan press officer, George Casey, caught in the glare of a camera light. Fortunately the deanery meeting was being held across the way. There was no need for her to be spotted. It seemed, so far, that she hadn’t been identified as Alistair Ingram’s successor. Keeping her head down under the violet light of the umbrella’s deep bell, she picked her way across the rain-glossed tarmac, trying not to get her shoes too wet. There was nothing worse than spending a morning in a poorly heated hall with soggy feet.

She’d arrived half an hour early. There was no one in the hall apart from a couple of caterers setting out cups for the welcome coffee. They glanced at her impatiently as if she were harrying them. She decided to take a stroll.

The Close felt peaceful. The rain had eased to a light drizzle. Moisture dripped off the trees onto empty paths, hitting her umbrella with the occasional satisfying pop. Across the expanse of grass, a solitary couple shrouded in bright plastic macs consulted a guidebook. Few visitors were so eager as to venture out first thing on a wet Wednesday morning in April.

The Close made a patchwork of the church’s past. The thirteenth-century porch from the medieval St Swithun’s priory sewn into the fabric of the deanery; the medieval half-hipped roof and timbered frame of the Pilgrims’ Hall, and the Georgian façade of The Judges’ Lodging – the encrustation of the centuries accumulated in the shadow of the great cathedral, that magnificent expression of medieval technology and faith.

Bones and relics…of what? she pondered. Did this survival tell of the authority of the church, or the endurance of faith?

Her eyes roamed over the bricks and mortar. She had known this place all her life. She felt proud of its beauty and history, but it wasn’t this that had drawn her to the ministry. She had first found faith in faces; in people transformed by faith. She thought of the bereaved mother of a teenage knife victim she had met in her third year in the police force.

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