Murder at the Vicarage
or Who Killed Sally Brown
by Charlotte Dickles

When Sam finally discovered the house where his mother lived and died, he thought it would be the end of his search. He little realised that events would soon plunge him into the search for his mother's murderer. Even less did he realise he would have to stand in for her in the re-enactment.

The complete story has been serialised into five parts which will be published at approximately daily intervals.

PART THREE - WEDNESDAY

The next day, Sam was packaging up all three samples for testing, having added his own to it, when his answer to Emily's "most likely suspect" question popped into his mind. Had Luke been rather too helpful in providing the DNA testing kits? It took him just a few minutes on the internet to discover that the name on the packaging, Charminster Laboratories, did not exist, and that the address given for the laboratories was the address of Dr Luke Lockhart's surgery! So perhaps the Agatha Christie logic was correct after all.

Without discussing it with Emily, he went out to a chemist and bought several more off-the-counter DNA testing kits, repackaged the samples, and posted them off. The lab would email the results back to him, and it would take a few days to get the results. A thrill went through him; was he really this close to discovering his father?

***

When he got back to the house, Emily was just going up to bed for her afternoon nap. "You still have plenty of work to be going on with, don't you?"

Sam told her he'd had, rather looking forward to having some time on his own. Emily was lovely, but he found her rather overpowering as she supervised his work. But she'd only been upstairs for a few minutes when the doorbell rang.

"You're Samantha, aren't you?" The woman was looking extremely cross, and she pushed past Sam and went into the Hall.

"I'm sorry, I don't know who you..."

"I'm Rachel, Mark's wife."

Sam had already suspected as much, and had just a few seconds to decide how to handle it. "I'm pleased to meet you Rachel. I met Mark yesterday with his brothers..."

"Don't give me that innocent shit! You shagged him, didn't you?"

"I'm sorry. I don't know what you're talking about. Mark left here the same time as Matthew and Luke; I think he'd given Luke a lift down here."

"But Luke came back with Matthew. Mark stayed on."

"Have you spoken to Mark? What did he say?"

"Oh, the same as always. He stopped for a drink somewhere - which is his way of saying he had sex with some tart."

"Well, in that case..."

"You're just like that slag of a mother. Well you'd better watch out. You shag my husband again and you might find the same thing happening to you!"

With that, she stormed out of the house, slamming the door after her with a loud bang.

***

Sam was still trying to decide whether that made Rachel a murderer, or simply the wife of a wayward husband, when a voice interrupted his thoughts.

"Hello, you must be Samantha."

Sam turned to see a slim, blonde woman facing him, who added, "I'm Fiona, Matthew's wife."

"Hello," Sam greeted her. "It's nice to meet you." It seemed they were all coming to take a look - or perhaps size him up as a victim for murder!

"Matthew told me how similar you were to your mother, so I thought I'd come and see for myself."

Sam smiled at her. He found it quite easy to smile at her, particularly if you like your blondes slim, as he did. "I never knew my mother, so you'll have to be the judge of that."

"Oh, I got to know her very well," Fiona said. "Very well indeed. I found I was coming over here most days."

"I'm glad my mother had a good friend," Sam said, wondering just slightly whether there was any inuendo in her words.

"Oh, we were more than good friends," Fiona said. "We were lovers."

"Oh," Sam said. "I didn't realise..."

"Sally was always discrete," Fiona said. "It wasn't that I was ashamed of what we were doing, but I do so hate being the subject of vicious gossip."

"I guess most of us do," Sam said.

"It was to cover my abhorrence of sex with men that I invented a story about wanting to stay a virgin until I was married. I thought that would put all males off. But I was in the choir and suddenly the vicar's son, Matthew, was being thrust upon me. He wasn't bad looking then and was training to be an accountant. I thought that in exchange for very occasional sex he could provide me with a life of comfort, whilst I seduced every woman in the congregation."

"And did you?" Sam asked with a smile.

"Oh no! Most were far too indoctrinated by male society to consider letting their female urges roam freely. But it was great when Sally arrived, and we had some fantastic times together. In fact, I think I'd better show you what we got up. Now, come over here and kiss me."

***

"You must have missed Sally when she was killed," Sam said, afterwards. Fiona had reached a very satisfactory orgasm, but frustratingly, he had not. It was weird; he'd had sex with Mark and had the most incredible orgasm of his life, but sex with a woman had been flat. Was he really turning into a woman?

"We'd had a tiff by then," Fiona said. "She'd said I was rather a selfish lover, and I rarely gave any pleasure to her. I mean, I know she was your mother, but she was only a maid. It was hardly my job to give her earth-shattering orgasms."

"So how did you feel about that?" Sam asked, feeling rather better about his own predicament.

"How did I feel about Sally calling a halt to the best sex I'd ever had? I thought she was an absolute bitch and I danced on her grave when she was dead."

THURSDAY

"Hi Sam," Luke said as he came into the kitchen.

Sam looked up and smiled. "Hi, Luke. I heard Emily talking to someone and I thought it might be you."

He shrugged. "I occasionally come over here to see her on a Thursday, but it was you I wanted to see more than Mother."

He grinned rather sheepishly. "The thing is, you look so much like your mother. As soon as I saw you, it was as though I'd immediately gone back twenty five years. You see... I was so much in love with Sally, when she died, I wished that I could die too."

"You were in love with my mother? You didn't say before."

He shrugged. "Sally said we had to keep it our secret, especially with our age difference. She said that if we told the other two, they'd only get jealous. After she died, I wanted to keep it our special secret."

Sam nodded. "I can understand that."

"The reason I arranged to see Mr Lawrence specifically on a Monday was because I knew Sally went to the cathedral that day. We'd go on the bus together into Charminster, and walk to Cathedral Lane."

Sam smiled. "Was she your first love?"

"My first and my only love, to be honest. Oh, Sharon was fine when I first met her, but after we got married, I realised I never loved her at all - not in the way I loved Sally. We've separated now and the divorce is going through, and all my life, I've thought about how it would have been if only Sally was still alive."

"You must have been young then."

"That was the problem. I was only fifteen, and Sally wouldn't have sex with me. Like I said, she'd do everything else, but we never had sex." He paused awkwardly. "The thing is... Well, the thing is..."

"You want to have sex with me!" Sam pretended to be shocked, but underneath his facade, the excitement ran through him. It couldn't be as good as it had been with Mark, could it? After the debacle with Fiona, he felt desperately in need of relief, but been unable to find it on his own.

"I need to exorcise Sally's ghost. Put her to rest in my mind in a way I've never been able to do in the last twenty-five years. Does that make sense?"

Sam nodded. "I guess so, but you need to understand that I don't have my mother's sexual experience, or even her body. I may look similar to her, but I am a different person beneath the skin." And he'd never said a truer word, Sam privately thought.

Luke smiled. "Of course, but you are just as beautiful." He suddenly moved very quickly across to Sam, and clumsily grabbed him and pushed his lips onto Sam's. Sam smiled, opened his mouth a little, and let his tongue flick forward into Luke's mouth.

"Oh God!" Luke said after some time, withdrawing his mouth from Sam's. "You are more like Sally than you can possibly imagine. Please, can we make love?"

Luke had pushed Sam backwards as far as the kitchen table, and now he fumbled beneath Sam's dress and pulled down his panties. He let a finger slide down against Sam's slit, and Sam let a moan escape his lips as he reached forward and unzipped Luke's trousers. He helped Luke shrug them off to fall to the floor around his knees. Then he slipped his hand beneath Luke's underpants and... he almost had to stop himself from laughing - he'd never felt such a small, fully erect penis.

Sam giggled openly then. The only other penis he'd felt apart from his own had been Mark's, and somehow he thought this was going to be a less experienced penis, but all the nicer for it.

As he rested his buttocks on the kitchen table, spread his legs wide and let Luke slip his prick inside, Sam thought he was going to have an even better orgasm than Mark had given him.

***

"You don't know how good it's made me feel," Luke said. "Thank you."

"I'm sure it wasn't as good as your dreams," Sam said. He'd had been right, he realised. He'd had a much nicer orgasm with Luke than with Mark - not in terms of the strength of his climax, but simply because Luke was not quite as mercenary about getting a shag with every woman he met.

"Of course it wasn't," Luke said, in a rather more brutal way than Sam was prepared for. "In fact really, it was a lousy screw, but that's why it was so good for me. All these years I've been fantasising about it, and now I realise that it was just childhood imagination."

Luke shook his head. "In fact, I think after that, I might go and be nice to Sharon again, and see if we can't make it up."

"Oh, right," Sam said, feeling more hurt than he had reason to be. After all, he was deceiving Luke in a quite abysmal way, but Luke didn't know that so he could have been nicer than he was.

But Luke was already moving onto the next subject. "I wondered whether you'd sent off the DNA samples, yet?"

Of course, Sam realised, trying to stop himself from crying, Luke would have been expecting the samples to be arrive at his surgery. Perhaps that was the main reason why he'd come over to his mother's house and shagged him.

"Yes," Sam said. "Only I had a problem after I'd packaged them all up. I had the envelope here and I accidentally dropped it into a sink full of water. The samples were all sealed so they were fine, but I had to go out and buy some new kits from the chemist, as all the paperwork was ruined."

"What!" Luke almost hissed through his teeth. "You stupid idiot. How could you be so careless?"

"Well it didn't really matter," Sam said. "There was only a nominal charge for the packs and both laboratories charge about the same price.

"Or perhaps you're cross," he added, "because I didn't think it ethical to ask your surgery to check your DNA?"

"How dare you! Are you suggesting I'm lying about not having sex with Sally?"

Sam paused for a second, thinking. No, he really believed Luke's story about his mother not doing it with a minor. "I'm wondering," Sam said, "whether there's any way that you could be my father without actually having sex with my mother."

Luke's reaction astonished him. He began to cry. A few seconds ago, Sam would have comforted him, but now he simply let him blub to a halt.

"The DNA will tell the truth," Sam said, "whether or not you do. I take it from your attempt to falsify the result that you could be my father, and I have just had sex with you."

Luke shook his head. "I wouldn't have had sex with you if I thought you really could be my daughter, only..."

"Only what?"

"Sally would let me masturbate over her."

"And you squirted between her legs?"

"I squirted everywhere. When you're fifteen, you have so much semen. But Sally complained when I squirted in her hair because it was so difficult to wash it out, whereas squirting at her vagina was all right - all she had to do was to drop her skirt over it and no one would be the wiser."

"So that's why you wanted the DNA samples to be sent to your surgery. Presumably, you were going to do the 'testing'?"

Luke didn't answer. Instead, he turned on his heel with a growl and left the kitchen.

Sam really hoped that neither Mark nor Luke were his father - and not just because he'd had sex with both of them!