A Voss and Pike Casefile: The Early Days
Section 46: Wrong Pew
“You did it,” you said, on instinct, in the cold nave of the chapel, and Josiah Penhale looked at you with the patience of a man who had been accused by the best. He closed the ledger gently, as one closes a Bible. Then he stood, and he was taller than you’d noticed.
He had a chapel full of witnesses to his whereabouts, hymn after hymn of them, and so far you had a stool and a feeling.
Rook, when you rang him from the vestry phone, was gentle about it. “I can’t arrest a man for missing prayers, Dr Voss.” By morning the ledger had been burned in the vestry stove, for damp. Penhale led the Sunday service as he always did, his voice the steadiest in the room, and when you passed the chapel door on Monday it had been painted.
The town noted who had come looking for a villain in its chapel, and remembered it.
“Being right and being able to prove it,” you told Jonah, “are different problems. I really must stop quoting myself.”
Sociological note: A pattern is not proof. The sociologist's hunch about a Weberian motive might have been correct, but without evidence it only became one more definition of the situation, and the town defined it as an insult to its chapel.