Call The Vicar!

Part One: It’s 1964, and Annabelle has a surprise when she arrives at the manse.

- Judy Punch

The sight of St Edith’s Church filled Annabelle with relief as she turned off the busy main road into a quiet suburban street. The mid-morning sun was getting hot, and the weight of her suitcases was pulling her arms off.

Looking forward to a nice cup of tea, the twenty-year-old adjusted her grip on the well-worn leather handles of her cases for the final leg of her long walk from the station.

Across the street from the church, the vicarage was impossible to miss: a turreted Victorian detached house, clad in ivy and framed by a colourful but rather wild mature garden. The property’s ageing grandeur stood out like a relic of another time among the 1930s mock-Tudor semis and neat privet hedges that surrounded it.

As Annabelle steered her cases through a lopsided gate in an arch of sweetly scented privet, the sound of the Beatles belting out She Loves You assailed her from an open window.

Annabelle frowned. It wasn’t the sort of music she associated with the elderly Father Frederick Oak.

Dropping her cases on the step, she rapped the brass doorknocker, but the radio upstairs was turned up so loudly she doubted anyone would hear. She banged louder and yelled, “Hello?”

“Hi, there!” a voice answered.

Annabelle stepped backwards from the porch and looked round, shocked to see the leanly muscular naked torso of a young man jutting like a ship’s figurehead from the open window beside her. His long fair hair was wet and his wide grin was framed by a frothy white beard of shaving soap.

“Can I help you?” he called out confidently.

Taken aback, Annabelle forced herself to stop staring at that impudently exposed chest, and met his blue eyes – which were, truth be told, pretty distracting in themselves.

“I’m Annabelle,” she called back. “The housekeeper.”