The Judgement of Strangers. Andrew Taylor

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      We found the mutilated corpse of Lord Peter in the early evening of Thursday the 13th August, 1970. He was the first victim of a train of events which began towards the end of the previous summer when I met Vanessa Forde – or even before that, with Audrey Oliphant and The History of Roth.

      Every parish has its Audrey Oliphant – often several of them; their lives revolve around the parish church, and in one sense the Church of England revolves around them. It was inevitable that she should be a regular visitor at the Vicarage, and it shamed me that I did not always welcome her as warmly as I should have done. It also irritated me that the Tudor Cottage cat treated the Vicarage as his second home, braving the traffic on the main road to get there.

      ‘Miss Oliphant practically lives here,’ said my daughter Rosemary at the end of one particularly lengthy visit. ‘And if she doesn’t come herself she sends her cat instead.’

      ‘She does an awful lot for us,’ I pointed out. ‘And for the parish.’

      ‘Dear Father. You try and find the best in everyone, don’t you?’ Rosemary looked up at me and smiled. ‘I just wish she would leave us alone. It’s much nicer when it’s just the two of us.’

      Audrey was in her late forties and unmarried. She had lived in Roth all her life. Her house, Tudor Cottage, was on the green – on the north side between Malik’s Minimarket and the Queen’s Head. Its front garden, the size of a large bedspread, was protected from the pavement by a row of iron railings. Beside the gate there was a notice, freshly painted each year:

      YE OLDE TUDOR TEA ROOM

      (Est. 1931)

      PROPRIETOR: MISS A.M. OLIPHANT

      Telephone: Roth 6269

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