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her.’
       ‘It’s because we don’t believe anything serious has happened to them, sir.’
       ‘Don’t we? It’s far too soon to make up our minds.’

Chapter 3

    Kingsmarkham’s new Roman Catholic church of Christ the King was a handsome modern building designed by Alexander Dix and built with donations from the town’s growing Catholic population, including Dix himself. Foreign tourists might not immediately have recognised it as a sacred building, it looked more like a villa on some Mediterranean promontory, but there was nothing secular about its interior, white and gold and precious hardwoods, a stained-glass window depicting a contemporary version of the Stations of the Cross and, above the black marble altar, a huge crucifix in ivory and gold. A far cry, as members of the congregation often remarked, from ‘the hut’ where they had heard mass from 1911 till two years ago.
       It was this humble building which Barry Vine was approaching now. Its appearance aroused no curiosity in him and not much interest. He had seen several like it in every country town he had ever visited in the United Kingdom, was so accustomed to these single-storey century-old (or more) brick edifices with double wooden doors and windows high up in the walls that he had scarcely noticed this one before. Nevertheless, it was instantly recognisable. ‘What else could it be but a church hail or a church itself, most likely in use by an obscure sect?
       No fence or gate protected it. The small area of broken paving which separated it from the York Street pavement held pools of water that seemed to have no means of escape. Someone signing himself Fang had decorated the brickwork on either side of the doors with incomprehensible graffiti, black and red. For some reason, perhaps a taboo born of superstition, he hadn’t touched the oblong plaque attached to the left side on which was printed in large letters: CHURCH OF THE GOOD GOSPEL, and in small ones, THE LORD LOVES PURITY OF LIFE. There followed a list of the times of services and various weekly meetings. Underneath this: Pastor, the Rev. Jashub Wright, 42 Carlyle Villas, Forest Road, Kingsmarkham.
       Jashub, thought Vine, just where do you get a name like that? I bet he was christened John. Then he noticed the coincidence if coincidence it was, that this pastor lived in the same street as Joanna Troy’s father. He tried the church door and found to his surprise that it was unlocked. This, he saw as soon as he was inside, was plainly because there was nothing inside worth stealing.
       It was almost empty; rather dark and very cold. Decades must have passed since the walls had been painted. The congregation was expected to sit on wooden benches without backs, and these were bolted to the wooden floor. On a dais at the far end stood a desk, such a desk as Vine hadn’t seen since he left his primary school thirty years before. Even then parents had pronounced the school furniture a disgrace. This one, he saw as he bent over it, had been operated on with penknives by several generations of children, and when cutting and: carving palled, scribbled over, initialled and generally decorated with ink, crayon and paint. There was a cavity for an inkwell but the inkwell was missing and someone had cut a hole of corresponding size in the middle of the lid. A stool, presumably for the officiating priest to sit on, looked so uncomfortable that Vine supposed Mr Wright preferred to stand.
       Jashub. . . ‘Where do you reckon it comes from, sir?’ Vine said to Wexford when he got back
       ‘God knows. You could try the Book of Numbers. “Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel after their families, by the house of their fathers . . .” You know the sort of thing.’
       Vine didn’t look as though he knew.
       ‘Or you could ask the man himself. Mike Burden wants to see this Troy chap and since they live practically next door to each other you