Page 45 of Return Ticket

He looked so distressed, as soon as he stepped down Gabriella walked over and slipped her arm through his.

“Why don’t we go make a big pot of tea, Vicar? There’ll be a lot of people arriving soon. You can show me where everything is and I’ll get on it.” She despised the notion that women always hovered in the background, making tea and providing creature comforts while the manly men got on with things, but she didn’t think the vicar was going to be able to stay on his feet much longer.

Evans caught her eye and gave her a subtle nod, acknowledging what she was trying to do, and that went a long way.

She gently led the vicar back to the house, but before they got there he pointed to the rear door to the church, and fumbled for and produced a huge set of keys. “The church kitchen,” he explained. “It’s got a proper urn that we use for church get-togethers. We can let the coppers come in and help themselves as they like.”

That sounded very sensible, so she carefully filled the massive stainless steel urn and switched it on, then found the tea bags, sugar and milk under the vicar’s direction.

“We just held a fundraiser for the roof last night, so the milk should be perfectly fresh,” he told her.

“What happened to the roof?” she asked, stacking cups neatly on the long counter beside the urn.

“Bomb hit it in the war,” he said.

Surprised, she looked over at him. He’d taken a seat on a thin, pale yellow formica chair near the door, and he already looked better. “So long ago?”

She wondered how they’d managed until now.

He nodded. “Twenty years, it’s been. We had to have a temporary fix done at the time. Some plastic sheeting and some fibercrete over the top, just to tide us over. But we couldn’t afford a proper fix for a long time, and months turned to years. The temporary fix finally failed three months ago, and now it simply has to be done.”

“You’re lucky the whole church didn’t collapse,” Gabriella said, thinking they’d gotten away lightly if all they got from a bomb was a hole in the roof.

“We were lucky that the bomb never exploded. It fell straight through the roof without detonating, but the tragedy was that sometimes, when the sirens sounded, people would take refuge wherever they were, and that night, a woman must have come into the church for shelter from the bombing raid. The falling debris and slate tiles from the roof landed on top of her and she died.”

“That’s terrible.” Gabriella couldn’t imagine the terror of that. “Were you the one who found her?”

The vicar nodded. “First thing the next morning. It took them a while to find out who she was, poor dear. What with the chaos of the war, the police didn’t check the missing persons list until a month after her death. Fortunately, she was not yet buried and they were able to identify her by her dental records. Her family came to visit me when they finally worked out what had happened to her.” He waved a hand to the door beyond. “They put up a plaque in her memory on the church wall.”

As he finished speaking, the urn began to rumble and shake as the water boiled, and Gabriella switched it over to the keep warm setting. “I’ll go let the lads know there’s tea available, and I’ll most likely be off to finish my rounds. Would you like me to walk you home?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I’ll stay here. Thank you for your kindness, my dear.”

Unsure what to do, but going on instinct, Gabriella walked over and he lifted his hands toward her. She held them in both of hers.

“All the best, Vicar. I hope they find who did this.”

She left the door open as she went back to the scene, and caught Evans’s eye again.

“Tea?” he asked, hopefully.

“Round the back of the church in the kitchen. I’ve left the door open, and the vicar is back there, too.” She glanced at the tradesman, and then at the hive of activity around the skip. “Is it alright if I go on my way? I haven’t finished my rounds.”

“Aye.” Evans gave a nod. “Just tell me how it was when you got here. Mr. Yates over there says it was as he noticed the body.”

She thought it over, gave a nod. “He was chipping bricks off the side of the tower and setting them to one side on the ledge. I could hear the sound of the chisel as I walked down the street and looked up. When there was no room to stack any more bricks, he picked them up and turned, tossed them into the skip below, but as he let go, I think he saw the body. He didn’t know that she was dead, and he gave a cry of absolute terror as the bricks dropped down.” She’d never forget that sound.

Evans lifted his gaze from his notebook. “That’s more or less exactly what he says. He says he saw you on the street and called to you for help.”

She nodded. “He did. He climbed down the scaffolding, and pulled the box to the side of the skip and looked in.”

“The box wasn’t already there?” Evans asked.

She shook her head. “It was set up against the side of the building. It looked like it was where someone would sit to take a tea break.”

Evans scribbled a bit more. “Thanks. You can go. If I need more from you, I know where to find you.”

She gave him a grateful smile and left to work her way through the rest of her route. She kept picking at the story of the woman found dead under the roof in the church during the war. At the sheer bad luck of it.

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