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intervened. ‘What did she say?’
    ‘The Rev? She just laughed, Kelli said, and then she said something about first casting something out of her own eye but Kelli didn’t know where she was at and nor don’t I.’
    If Wexford had a pretty good idea what Sarah Hussain had been getting at, he gave no explanation to Maxine. He had an appointment to talk to Dennis Cuthbert and he was very nearly late. The vicar’s warden lived in a four-storey Victorian villa, tall and narrow, red and yellow brick, incongruously steep-roofed and without quite enough windows.
    A widower, Dennis Cuthbert lived in darkness or near enough. There were, of course, overhead lights, both in the hall and the living room Cuthbert took Wexford into, but no table lamps, no standard lamp, and the bulbs were of low wattage. Opposite the fireplace, half covering the wall, hung a greyish-pinkish folkweave bedspread, intended perhaps to look like a tapestry. The impression in this almost bookless room where there were no plants and where the ornaments were of the kind you could pick up in seaside resorts half a century ago, was of almost total indifference on the part of its occupant to his surroundings. One book there was, the Book of Common Prayer, a worn black leather and gilt copy, lying face down on the low piecrust table. Wexford was ushered to an armchair covered in brown corduroy in front of an old-fashioned heater, the kind once called an electric fire, in a black marble fireplace in which lay a few ashes and numerous cigarette stubs that had evidently been there a long time.
    But Dennis Cuthbert himself wasn’t old. He might have seemed so to Clarissa but not to Wexford. Not much more than fifty perhaps. Sitting down himself, Cuthbert rather ostentatiously picked up the prayer book, marked his place with a ribbon bookmark attached to its spine and laid it on the table in a position where Wexford could hardly fail to see what it was. He then switched on the heater, lighting up one bar of the three, and a very faint breath of warmth came into the icy room. If Wexford hadn’t been able to see him but only to hear his high voice and old-fashioned accent, a perfection of what was once called ‘BBC English’, he would have supposed him a small thin elderly man but Dennis Cuthbert was quite unlike the impression these things conveyed, being at least as tall as Wexford with heavy shoulders and thick neck, a muscular body and big hands. His hair, still thick and dark, was untouched by grey. He was also, again unexpectedly, a smoker. Wexford had thought the smell of cigarettes and the stubs in the grate must have been left behind by some other visitor, but that illusion was soon dispelled by his lighting up as soon as they sat down. His yellow-stained hand shook a little.
    ‘You don’t object if I smoke, do you?’ he asked.
    Wexford smiled and shook his head. ‘It’s your home,’ he said, and then, ‘I’ve got some questions for you but I have to tell you that you don’t have to answer them. I was once a policeman but I’m one no longer. It’s entirely up to you.’
    Unexpectedly nasty, Cuthbert said, ‘Maybe, but we both know what you and your
real
policemen colleagues would think if I didn’t answer, don’t we?’
    Best to act as if he hadn’t spoken. Making what turned out to be an inspired guess, he said, ‘You’ve a copy of the Book of Common Prayer on the table here and I think you’d been reading it when I came.’
    ‘I often read it,’ said Cuthbert.
    ‘And like it, I imagine. What did you think of the Reverend Ms Hussain using the Alternative Service Book?’
    ‘I hate it. But I’m used to it. It’s been in use for forty years. Her predecessor used it and his predecessor. She
loved
it. She said now people could understand what God meant. I’d hoped things might change when we had a change of incumbent, revert to what they used to be, I mean.’ He drew deeply on his cigarette. ‘I may as well tell you that I nearly gave