The Snares of Death Read Online Free PDF

Mary, its paintwork faded. The outside entrance of the open porch had once been fitted with bird doors of a good quality, but the netting had now entirely disappeared, leaving only the wooden frame. Dexter pulled the doors apart and entered the porch, regarding with disdain the mildewed stone holy-water stoup.
    The porch was quite small; on his right he saw a large dark green noticeboard, so ancient and well riddled with drawing pins over the years that it appeared to have been infested with woodworm. On the top a neatly painted gold-leaf inscription read, ‘St Mary the Virgin, South Barsham. Diocese of Norwich’, and below it the times of the Sunday Masses and Weekday Services (‘Saints’ Days as announced; Confession by Appointment’). The usual notices were posted there: a list of fees for funerals, a notification of the revision of the church electoral roll, a flower-arranging rota. A fairly new-looking notice advised, ‘In the event of a pastoral emergency, please contact Father Mark Judd’, followed by a telephone number. That must be the curate who’d been taking the services since the old Vicar died, he decided. At the bottom of the board was a little scroll, picked out in gold paint rather than gold leaf, with the words, ‘Mary pray, Jesu mercy, Ora pro nobis ’, and the names ‘Mabel and Fred’. Bob Dexter curled his lip and turned to the board on his left.
    Above a large umbrella stand, its white enamel tray badly chipped, was another noticeboard, this one of bright blue. It boasted only one item: a poster, faded and covered in polythene, with a picture of Our Lady of Walsingham, and the inscription, ‘A lamp burns for this church at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham’. ‘Not for long, it doesn’t,’ Dexter said aloud, seizing the poster by the corner and ripping it down. He immediately felt better.
    The door to the church opened easily with a push. Bob Dexter frowned at the carelessness, blind trust or just plain stupidity in this part of the world; although visiting churches to admire their architectural merits was not something that interested him, on the occasions that he had been to East Anglian churches he had invariably found them unlocked, and usually deserted. That would never happen in Richmond, in London, or indeed in any civilised part of the country. Dexter told himself, not for the first time, what a sacrifice he was making on the Lord’s behalf in coming to this primitive backwater.
    The body of the church was down four steps. The smell hit him first – that smell peculiar to ancient country churches, a mixture of damp stone (he’d been right about the damp – he could see plaster flaking from the walls!), mouldy prayer books, and stale incense. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he noted the finger bowl in a niche to his right, encrusted with limescale and filled with holy water. He turned away from it to find himself confronting a large painting on wood, looking almost like a tavern sign, he thought. It was blackened with age, with varnish and with candle smoke, but he could see that it was the Virgin Mary, standing on a crescent moon, crowned with a halo of stars, rosary beads dangling from her outstretched hand. It was an offensively popish image – popish in style and tone, the repulsive subject matter entirely aside – and not even English, to his unpractised eye. This was going to be worse than even he had imagined; again he turned, facing east.
    Dexter moved to the centre aisle and paused at the visitors’ book which lay open on a scruffy table to his left, a blue biro attached to it with a bit of string. He flipped through it; it was an expensive leather-bound volume which had clearly been there for years. Its entries began some twenty years earlier and tailed off in number as the years progressed. There hadn’t been a new entry in nearly a month, he noted. Not even the faithful on their