Ellis Peters - George Felse 13 - Rainbow's End by Ellis Peters

gumstrip to TCP, and frozen peas to fresh eggs. It was as immaculate and brisk as all such genuinely professional shops are, and as informal, an exchange-point for news and gossip, a first-aid post for local protection, sending out feelers towards isolated old people unaccountably not seen for some days, delivering without benefit of fee where there was need, advising where regulation forms frightened intelligent but direct folk out of their normal routine. Its compact space of freezer and cases and shelves was everything anybody needed of modernity, without the gimmicks. And Gwen was a farmer’s daughter, fresh as new milk, large, fair and kind.
    Miss de la Pole was standing at the counter when they entered, in the act of lighting one of the small cheroots she had just been buying. ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ she was saying comfortably, in her ripe baritone, ‘the child’s too close to it, that’s all. He just can’t digest it, it isn’t that he really cares. Give him a week or two, and he’ll have forgotten all about it. The man wasn’t likeable, you know, nobody can blame the boys for not liking him.’ She turned and recognised the police entering. ‘Why, hullo, George! We were just talking about this affair. Hullo, Jack, nice to know you’re standing by. I must say, it’s a shake-up for us all.’
    ‘It is,’ agreed Moon heartily. ‘Here yesterday and gone today. It makes you take stock.’
    ‘I’ve been doing that for some time,’ she assured him drily. ‘At my age, one does. You’re just a youngster, Jack. And then, I must have disliked him about as violently as anyone could, and that does make one take stock, as you put it.’
    ‘You didn’t, by any chance, make away with him, did you?’ asked George mildly.
    ‘No, sorry, George, I don’t really have the resolution, you know. I might dream about it, I’m unlikely ever to do it. In any case, I’m probably one of the last to see him alive, and he was mobile at the time, so I didn’t get the chance. I happened to look out of the window before I drew the curtains, last night, round about a quarter to twelve, and I saw him driving towards the gates, on his way home.’
    Wonder of wonders, she was one of those whom the grapevine reached only vaguely, because in her aristocratic solitude she merely received, never queried. She knew Rainbow was dead, but had not acquired the details. Doubtless she knew he had been found broken under the church tower, but the time was unknown to her, and the spectacle of a man driving home at a time when he had almost certainly been dead presented her with no problems. Here was one who could have confessed to his murder with absolute security, her guilt disproved within ten minutes.
    ‘Oh, really?’ said George cautiously. ‘Coming down from the head of the valley, was he? Which car was he using?’
    ‘The little sports job.’ Her voice was faintly disapproving. The Aston Martin was not what she would have expected of Rainbow. ‘Very handsome,’ she admitted, ‘as a work of art. Not his style, would you think? There was something so – orthodox and cautious – about him.’
    Well, that was something definite. She knew the little sports job too well to be mistaken, and she had the incisive mind that is always scrupulous in reporting and accurate in timing. She had something else, too, the shrewdness to note their very slight stiffening, and the brief glance they had exchanged, and that was all it took to make her look again at what she had seen and said, and wonder exactly what had taken Rainbow up the valley towards Wales after choir practice, and above all, what had taken him back to the church at nearly midnight, since that was where he had been found. From that it was but a step to pondering whether the Aston Martin had been left in its garage or taken out again, and whether, in fact, it had actually been Rainbow driving it…
    A remote and thoughtful stillness took possession of Miss de la Pole’s noble