“But that’s good, isn’t it?” he said. “If it isn’t here either, that means it wasn’t in the cathedral when the raid happened, and you can tell Lady Schrapnell she won’t need to have a reconstruction of it in the cathedral for the consecration.”

“You tell her,” I said.

“Perhaps it was removed for safekeeping,” he said, looking at the windows. “Like the east windows.”

“The bishop’s bird stump?” I said incredulously. “Are you joking?”

“You’re right,” he said. “It isn’t the sort of thing you’d want to keep from being blown up. Victorian art!” He shuddered.

“Besides,” I said, “I’ve already been to Lucy Hampton rectory — that’s where they took the windows — to check. It wasn’t there.”

“Oh,” Carruthers said. “Could it have been moved to somewhere else in the church?”

That was an idea. Perhaps one of the Altar Guild ladies, unable to stand the sight of it, had stuck it in a corner behind a pillar or something.

“Why is Lady Schrapnell so obsessed with this stump thing anyway?” Carruthers said.

“Why is she so obsessed with every detail of this project?” I said. “Before she assigned me to the bishop’s bird stump, it was monuments. She wanted a copy of every inscription on every monument in the cathedral, including the one on Captain Gervase Scrope’s tomb, which went on forever.”

Carruthers nodded sympathetically. “Organ pipes,” he said. “She’s had me all over the Middle Ages measuring organ pipes.”

“The real question, of course, is, why is she so obsessed with rebuilding Coventry Cathedral?” I said.

“Her great-great-something grandmother went to Coventry and—”

“I know, I know, the experience changed her great-great-something grandmother’s life, and when Lady Schrapnell found her diary, it changed her life, and she decided to rebuild the cathedral exactly as it was just before it burned down in honor of, et cetera, et cetera. I’ve heard that speech a number of times. Also the one about how God—”