Crumbs on the Cassock

Constable Dabb arrived forty minutes later on his bicycle, pink and puffing, and was very firm with everybody about not touching anything, which would have been a great deal more useful had he arrived before half the village had touched everything. Tilly liked Constable Dabb. She had taught him long division in 1994 and he had not enjoyed it, and they had got on well ever since. But she could see at once that Dabb was out of his depth, because Lower Pibbleton's depth was, as a rule, the depth of a saucer — a stolen bicycle, a dispute over a hedge, the annual business with the Hartleys' goat — and a dead judge in the sponge marquee was, by local standards, the open sea. "It'll be his heart," Dabb said, hopefully, writing it in his notebook as though writing it might make it so. "Stout gentleman, hot day. His heart, Miss Marsh, that's what it'll be." "It may very well be his heart, Roland," said Tilly. "But I should be slow to write it in ink, if I were you. Have you looked at the cake?" Dabb looked at the cake. The fourth Victoria sponge along, the one with the single neat bite gone from it, sat on its plate looking entirely innocent, the way the most interesting things in a mystery generally do. "It's a cake, Miss Marsh." "It is the cake Mr. Albemarle was eating when he died. A judge works along the row, Roland — taste, note, move on. He had got to the fourth cake. He took one bite of the fourth cake. And then he went over." Tilly did not touch it; she had at least absorbed that much of Dabb's instructions. But she leaned close, and she breathed in, and underneath the warm sweetness of sponge and the sharp brightness of raspberry jam there was something else, something faint and bitter and wrong, the smell of a thing that had no business in a Victoria sponge. "I should want that cake looked at by someone cleverer than either of us. And I should want to know whose cake it is." That was the moment the second difficulty of the afternoon made itself known, and it made itself known in the form of the Reverend Pinch, who had been hovering at the tent flap and now came forward looking, if possible, greener than before. "That cake," said the Reverend Pinch, "is mine. That is to say — it was entered by me. I baked it. For the competition." He swallowed. "I baked it this morning, in the vicarage kitchen, and I carried it down myself, and I put it on the table with my own hands, and I do hope nobody is going to think —" "Nobody is thinking anything yet, Reverend," said Tilly, which was not strictly true, because she was thinking a great many things, and one of them was that the Reverend Pinch had crumbs down the front of his black cassock — small, pale, sponge-coloured crumbs — and that a man who had baked a cake at eight in the morning and not eaten since ought not, by half past three, to have fresh crumbs about his person at all. She did not say so. Thirty-one years in a classroom had taught Tilly Marsh that the fastest way to stop a frightened person telling you things was to let them see you had noticed something. So she smiled at the Reverend Pinch, the warm uncomplicated smile she had once used on small boys who had lost their plimsolls, and she said, "Why don't you sit down, Reverend, and have some tea. Norman, fetch the Reverend some tea. And Roland —" she turned to Constable Dabb — "I think, before anyone goes home, you had better find out a very simple thing. You had better find out who, between the marquee opening at noon and Mr. Albemarle reaching the fourth cake, was alone with that table." Constable Dabb wrote alone with the table in his notebook, and underlined it, and looked at Tilly with the particular expression of a man who has just realised his afternoon is not going to involve his tea for some considerable time. "And Miss Marsh," he said, a little plaintively. "What'll you be doing, while I'm finding that out?" Tilly Marsh looked down the long row of cakes, and at the half-finished judging, and at the little folded cards with their hopeful handwriting. "I," she said, "am going to find out who wanted to win."