6. Mike Copperly

More about the Reverend PAUL Wolf

WORDS MEAN DEATH

Sylvia was wrong when she thought that it was her occasional lover the, Reverend Paul Wolf knocking on her front door because when she opened it a complete stranger, smartly dressed in a suit with a shirt and tie, andhe had a nervous smile hovering on his face.
“Yes?” she asked, wondering if she should call him sir and deciding not to.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but a young woman told me that you knew a gentleman called Dorian. Dorian Hemsworth, to name him in full.”
“Er, maybe. Oh. Come in, won’t you… I don’t like the door being open…”
“That’s kind of you. Very kind, to a stranger like me.”
“You were asking about Dorian? First lf all, if you don’t mind, who are you?”
“You are quite right to ask and I should have introduced myself. My name is Mike Copperly and I’m an agent for men (and women) who write books, a sort of link with any publishers who might end up producing their books.”
“Ah, that explains you, then. Mr Hemsworth is our famous local book writer. Not that I’ve read any of his books, but then I only read romantic books when I read any at all.”
“That’s understandable. My wife enjoys a good romance. They sometimes seem to give her ideas!”
“And you’re concerned with Mr Hemsworth?”
“Did you know him?”
She had led him into a back room as they talked, a sort of kitchen come dining space, and sat him down. Then she turned to him.
“I’ll put the kettle on it you want. “
“No, it’s quite all right. I’ve only got a few moments.”
“So I only met Mr Hemsworth a couple of times, when he found out about my gentleman friend.”
“And he was interested in what you told him?”
“He seemed to be. But you said knew and did as if I don’t know him any longer,” she replied, “but yes, he made some enquiries about him of me. For a book he was writing, he said, a book about church men and did I know Paul Wolf with a collar, and I told him of course I know Paul he’s a visitor I sometimes welcome because I’m a widow woman and widows like me can’t give up life because they’ve been widowed by a husband thoughtless enough to die first! But you are, asking personal questions about a woman’s sex life?”
He was taken aback by the directness with which she asked that last question and stammered a heartfelt apology.
“Don’t rub it in!” she protested, “just say what you want.”
“Well,” he began, “I guess you won’t know Dorian Hemsworth now unless you spend your time in the company of corpses.”
She was silent for a long moment after that. Then, as if something had clicked inside her head, she stammered…
“You ...y-you mean he’s d-dead?
He clearly wasn’t heartless because he saw something human in the way she asked that question, and it moved him.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly, “I put it badly, but yes. At the bottom of his garden. Someone had done it. I don’t know who.”
“It wasn’t Paul!”
“Paul? I don’t know a Paul…”
“My gentleman friend who stays here overnight sometimes. But you wouldn’t know him because he’s a man of God.”
“Ah, a clerical collar!”
“He doesn’t always wear it. He says he doesn’t have to and it’s perfectly okay for him to leave it off! But if he does, if he leaves it in a drawer, say, out of sight and out of mind,… he’s still a… a man of God.”
“Why are you telling me about him?”
“It was the Dorian man when he called. They say he writes books, which is a clever thing to do, and he heard that Paul was my friend and he asked me a few questions about him because he was writing about a vicar and wanted some information from a female friend of a vicar, If you see what I mean. He wasn’t nosy, though, just sort of curious… he wanted to know if I’d written a will and put Paul into it! As if I would!”
“You might, if he was a friend.”
“He might be even older than me and being a man the chances are he’s likely to go first because I read that women live longer than men, on average.… is that what you meant when you mentioned a corpse?”
“I’m truly sorry, but yet I found his body… well, that’s only half true, two schoolgirls actually found him and made such a fuss about seeing a dead body on their way home from school that I had to look, and there he was. At least, I assume it was him, but the dead man was in his garden. I’ve never actually met him in the flesh though I do represent his books to publishers. He was in his own garden covered with his own grass cuttings all over him… not a pleasant sight, so I felt sorry for the two young lasses.”
“Do you know what happened to him? Did he have a fall? Or a heart attack?”
“From what I could see he had been stabbed several times and any blood in his veins had probably drained away,” he replied, “it can’t have been a pleasant experience. But tell me, if you don’t mind, what else did he want to know about the reverend gentleman?”
Sylvia looked uncomfortable, then she decided to answer the question and then get rid of the stranger, who was poking his nose too close to her own affairs for her to feel comfortable.
“He wanted to know how they, I mean we, I suppose, were in what you’d probably call a domestic setting. Meals, drinking, that sort of thing. And what was he like in bed. He wasn’t so good at that, though! I’ve known better, when my husband was still alive”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry into your personal life…”
“You asked about writing him into a will and that’s certainly personal”
“I hadn’t thought. I‘m not much good at this, am I? It’s just that he wrote a very good book about a church vicar in which the clergyman preys on elderly ladies and often makes off with their money, left to him when they die, which is quite often. But it is a book and the clergyman isn’t real. His name is the Reverend Paul Fox.”
“Paul Fox? How terrible…”
“I understand.”
She looked quite uncertain. “No you don’t. My friend is called Paul Wolf.”
“Oh. I see.”
She was about to ask him a little more about Dorian’s book when there was a knock at her front door. And to her there was a dreadful familiarity about the rhythm of that knock.
“Oh dear,” she mumbled, “this could be him.”
“Then I’ll go,” he smiled, “would it be all right if I went out the back way?”

© Peter Rogerson 09.01.24