Caroline Minuscule by Andrew Taylor

have everything pretty well worked out already.’
    â€˜Well,’ said Dougal, before he was interrupted by the doorbell.
    â€˜Oh, God,’ said Mrs Munns. ‘Do excuse me.’

9
    T hey agreed sometime afterwards that the moment when Lee walked into Mrs Munns’s sitting room was the moment when they should have left Rosington and put their involvement with Caroline Minuscule into the mental lumber room reserved for memories one wants to discard.
    It was at this point that their belief in coincidence became untenable. Lee in the hotel was one thing; Lee in the cathedral was another; but Lee at Mrs Munns’s house, though explainable by the fact that he could have discovered Vernon-Jones’s connection with the widow as easily as they had, was carrying synchronicity too far.
    Hindsight later suggested that Lee must have started thinking about them then. Not that his behaviour on the occasion had been in any way disturbing – he introduced himself as an old friend of the Canon’s, curious to know how he had died. (Mrs Munns had accompanied him to the hospital after his final heart attack, and was firm in her assertion that the dying man had never regained consciousness.) Lee recognized Amanda, and Dougal by association, and was politely interested in the projected series. He had accepted a cup of coffee – with milk and sugar.
    Lee was pleasant to everyone; soft Irish charm oozed out of him, so much so that Dougal found it hard to remember that the man’s eyes were narrow and cold, and that his voice had the flatness of an automaton’s. Without Hanbury’s letter, it would have been difficult to think badly of him.
    He left before them, but Dougal and Amanda followed soon afterwards. Mrs Munns lent them the authoritative history of the cathedral – Vernon-Jones’s chief source – and they arranged to return at tea time tomorrow and discuss the projected programme in more detail.
    Dougal found the interlude at Mrs Munns’s refreshed him, even though it got them no further. It was hard to be worried about the possibility of evil in that comfortable room with the central tower framed in the window and Lina chattering away to herself on the stairs. Lina was five, Mrs Munns told them, but small for her age; she was very imaginative – ‘One’s own child always is!’ It was difficult to keep up with the identities of her toys, which were subject to ruthless and frequent alteration. At present she ran a bus garage in a model of the cathedral. It was necessary to be particularly deferential to her largest teddy bear who had been installed as Queen Mother on Wednesday.
    â€˜Lives in a world of her own,’ said Amanda with a laugh. ‘Like William.’
    Afterwards, Dougal and Amanda strolled through the close arguing about Vernon-Jones. She was finding it increasingly difficult to equate the popular, septuagenarian canon with the
éminence grise
of the criminal information world.
    Dougal supported Hanbury – largely on the grounds that money and murder lent an air of plausibility to his interpretation. And, if Hanbury was right about Vernon-Jones’s past, he was probably right about the existence of the diamonds.
    The walk through the close failed to bring them any inspiration. They saw the original of the Rosington Augustine in the Chapter House museum. In Infirmary Lane they found Bleeders Hall. The house was shuttered and deserted. The guidebook said the monastic leech had plied his trade there, which Dougal thought was an appropriate description of the house’s last occupant.
    If nothing else, the walk gave them an appetite for lunch.
    As the only other occupant of the dining room of the Crossed Keys was the Church Dormant, slurping soup of the day in the corner, they felt able to discuss the morning’s progress, such as it was. Mrs Munns had been friendly but had produced no revelations. The original of the photograph had been