Sidney Chambers and The Shadow of Death (The Grantchester Mysteries)

Livingstone wealthy?’
    ‘Moderately . . . but I would have thought the doctor had a good enough income. It can’t have been for the money.’
    ‘And why are you telling me this?’ Sidney asked.
    The inspector leaned back and put an arm over the back of the chair next to him. ‘When people come to you to be married, you tend to put the couple through their paces beforehand, don’t you?’
    ‘I give them pastoral advice.’
    ‘You tell them what marriage is all about; warn them that it’s not all lovey-dovey and that as soon as you have children it’s a different kettle of fish altogether . . . .’
    Knowing that Inspector Keating had three children under the age of seven, Sidney recognised that he had to be careful of his reply: ‘Well, I . . .’
    ‘There’s the money worries, and the job worries and you start to grow old. Then you realise that you’ve married someone with whom you have nothing in common. You have nothing left to say to each other. That’s the kind of thing you tell them, isn’t it?’
    ‘I wouldn’t put it exactly like that . . .’
    ‘But that’s the gist?’
    ‘I do like to make it a bit more optimistic, Geordie. How friendship sometimes matters more than passion. The importance of kindness . . .’
    ‘Yes, yes, but you know what I’m getting at.’
    Sidney could tell that the inspector was impatient for another drink. ‘I think I can guess what you want me to do.’
    Keating stood up. ‘I’ll pay even though it’s your round . . .’
    ‘There’s no need for that . . .’
    ‘You’re not drinking anyway. All I am asking is that you do a bit of digging. Give them a few tough questions when they come and see you. Ask the girl about her mother. Watch the doctor’s face. I wouldn’t want you marrying a couple of murderers . . .’
    ‘I don’t think that’s likely . . . they’re a very friendly couple . . .’
    Inspector Keating ordered his third pint of the evening. ‘Well, if they’re as nice as you say then we won’t have anything to worry about, will we? Another game?’
     
    The winter of 1954 was relentless. Sidney awoke to fierce frosts on his window sills, the days never lightened and rime hung on the trees all day. When Sidney rose the next morning he felt that he had forgotten something. Then the dread returned. ‘Ah yes,’ he thought, ‘Keating. Another distraction. Another death.’
    He put on his dressing gown and looked out of the window. In another life, he thought, he might have been a naturalist. He had been reading how it had always been something of a tradition in the church. Gilbert White, the vicar of Selborne, for example, had noticed how, in winter, the rooks in the lane fell from the trees with their wings frozen together. He examined the different techniques with which the squirrel, the field mouse and the nuthatch ate the hazel nuts he had laid out for them, and discovered that the owls in his neighbourhood hooted in the key of B flat. Perhaps, this winter, Sidney thought, he could even emulate Reverend White. So much of life was about noticing things, he thought. It was about observation . He would try to be a man upon whom nothing was lost.
    It was too dangerous to bicycle to the Livingstone home, he decided. Even walking required caution. He put on his Wellington boots, draped his clerical cloak across his shoulders, and set off through the snow. Hector Kirby, the butcher and churchwarden, with a ready catchphrase and a depressed wife, was clearing a path to his shop; Veronica Hodge, an elderly spiritualist who had once told Sidney that she had been ‘mercifully spared the attentions of men’, was making her tentative way to the shops, and Gary Bell, the village mechanic, who had somehow managed to avoid National Service, was jump-starting a tractor.
    Sidney passed the frozen meadow, where his parents had met before the war, skating at sixpence an evening, and stopped to watch a group of boys in a snowball fight.
    As he walked into town he realised that he had never known Cambridge so still. The buildings looked like illustrations to a nineteenth-century fairy tale. The snow had muffled the once audible cries of the world. It was like grace, he decided, or the love of God, coming down silently and unexpectedly in the night.
    A slip and a very near fall awoke him from his musing. Perhaps he should daydream less, Sidney thought, as he walked towards a small terraced house in Chedworth Street. Not everything in life could