‘Neither do I. And if there were any, our job would be impossible.’
Green grunted. Hill, from the front, said: ‘What’s necrosis?’
‘Lord knows. We’ll have to get medical advice on that one.’
Green said: ‘I think it’s something to do with the liver—like cirrhosis is.’
‘But they’re not the same?’
‘No. Cirrhosis—you get that from too much booze. Your liver shrinks or grows hob-nails, or something.’ Green suddenly leaned over Masters to point out of the window. ‘There you are, see. Stonehenge. You wouldn’t think that circle was ten thousand feet in circumference, would you?’
They all stared out. The cromlechs were casting only small shadows in the near-midday sun. Masters was amused. This was the sort of fact Green always knew. His memory was phenomenal: his greatest asset. Let him read a guide-book once and he’d have the facts for life.
*
They ran into Barnstaple soon after four o’clock, with Hill driving; and passed through on the way south towards Instow. There was no sign of a village on the road. A public house—Devon Boys—stood on a corner where a narrow lane came in from the left. Opposite, where the lane continued on the seaward side, was a small white finger-post almost overgrown with briar roses. Brant managed to decipher its message: Throstlecombe.
There was very little to Throstlecombe. Apparently not even a church. But what there was glowed like a gem in the late afternoon sun. Wattle and daub cottages bathed in red gold and throwing heavy shadows clustered round a triangular wedge of village green: a furry billiard table dappled with tree shade.
Even Green seemed lost in admiration as he got down from the car, stiff from his long sit. Uncharacteristically he didn’t complain. He drew Masters’s attention to the post office and police house, nestling next to each other under the same roof. The red of geraniums on the windowsill of the house matched that of the Edwardian post-box let into the wall next door. Masters walked over. His knock was answered by a young policeman, smart in trousers and shirt, with his sleeves turned up above his brown elbows in a roll neat enough to satisfy a sergeant-major.
‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Masters.’
The constable said: ‘Oh, lord,’ and turned his head to shout: ‘Nancy! Bring me my cap, will you? I’ve got the gentlemen from Scotland Yard here.’ He turned back to Masters. ‘Sorry, sir. I didn’t know you’d fetch up here. The Super, he’s set up his mobile van in the grounds of Throscum House. He’s waiting for you there.’
‘Throscum? Is that how you pronounce Throstlecombe?’
‘That’s it, sir.’
‘How far away is it?’
‘Nothing at all from here. My back garden runs up to the fence of the grounds. But to get to the gate you’ll have to go back on to the main road, turn right up the hill for a couple of hundred yards or so. You’ll see the wall. There’s iron gates, set back a bit with the big house just inside.’
‘Thank you. What’s the name of your Superintendent?’
‘Mundy, sir.’
‘And yours?’
‘Benham, sir.’
While they had been talking, Benham’s girl-wife had come up behind him, holding his cheese-cutter cap. Masters smiled at her. She was plump and pretty and dimpled easily when she smiled back. He said: ‘You stay and finish your tea, Benham. We’ll find our own way.’
Masters said, when he rejoined the others in the car: ‘Don’t show your ignorance and call this place Throstlecombe. Throscum is the locals’ way of pronouncing it.’
‘We might have guessed,’ Green said.
Throscum House, situated only about thirty yards inside the main gates, presented its end elevation to passers-by. A pleasant end, nevertheless, with a conservatory, and a french window leading out on to a grassy bank three feet high, dropping down to a sunken lawn with sundial. The asphalt drive left the main road at right angles and ran past the front of the house. It was red brick with stone copings and a pillared portico with just two shallow steps up to a double door. Masters judged it had been built at the turn of the century. Even at that time it would have been considered big. Now, on the end away from the road, there appeared to have been extensions: nasty additions of concrete blocks with roofs of ridged asbestos sheeting.
The brass plate at the door said the house was the registered office of the Throstlecombe Holiday Camp and Motel Company. A notice in gold-leaf on varnished wood told guests that the dining-room, TV room, lounge, bar, ballroom, writing and games rooms were all on the ground floor. Guests were requested to note that the first and second floors were private.
Masters was reading this information when Hill said: ‘Somebody coming this way, Chief.’
A man was emerging from a wide grass ride curling out from behind a screen of magnolia bushes opposite the front door. Masters said: ‘Superintendent Mundy?’
‘That’s me. And you’ll be Masters—complete with full first team.’
‘All present, sir.’
Mundy was very sunburnt. His face showed irregular lines of white skin—the edges of areas that had peeled. His nose was shiny and purplish through the same cause. His bare arms, above the elbows, looked painful. He grinned at Masters. ‘I overdid it on holiday in Spain. I thought coming from glorious Devon I’d be immune. But I wasn’t.’ Masters could see why. He was very fair: almost bleached white. His eyes were blue. The Nordic type, more likely to be at home in temperate climates. Mundy said: ‘Come over to the van. I’ve parked it just behind the magnolias to be out of the way of cars and so as not to depress the holidaymakers with the sight of too many bobbies. You’ll find it a useful H.Q.’
Mundy asked the driver of the towing Land Rover to fetch a tray of tea from the house, and then led the way into the van. Masters found it cramped quarters. He was too big for it. The whole of the front panel was fitted with radio and phone links. The centre was taken up by an operations table. Masters, having stooped to enter, had to shuffle sideways between the table and the bunk seat. Green, coming in behind him, said: ‘I’d feel like a tinned earwig working in here.’
Mundy said: ‘I know it’s not built for chaps the size of us lot. But it’s the mobile provided for use on these occasions and I thought you’d like an operations centre on the site.’
‘Site? Ah, yes. Mrs Partridge was on holiday here?’
Mundy said: ‘Not on holiday.’
‘Permanent guest?’
‘She owned the whole shebang.’
Green said: ‘Aye, aye. Motive—normal. Poisoned for what she had to leave, eh?’
‘It looks like it,’ Mundy said. ‘Whenever you get money and property valued at—well, I think it’s over two hundred thousand—you immediately look at those who benefit, don’t you?’
Masters said: ‘She was a widow. So there’s no husband to consider. Kids?’
‘None of her own. Two stepdaughters.’
‘How old?’
‘As old as she was. She was their father’s second wife, and a lot younger than her husband.’
The police driver handed the tea-tray through the door. Mundy said: ‘Shall we get rid of this first, because it’s a longish story?’
*
The teapot empty. Masters smoking his pipe. The air, hot inside the van, filled with layers of smoke, drifting lazily upwards at first, to be suddenly whirled away in a spiral, sucked through the ceiling ventilator by an up-draught. Green adding Kensitas smoke.
Mundy said: ‘You know, we wouldn’t have suspected murder if those two poodles hadn’t died.’
‘You mean to say that the woman’s condition didn’t suggest it?’ Green said.
‘Not really. It was a suspicious circumstance, I suppose, looked at in the light of what we know now. But the post-mortem carried out on anybody who dies suddenly from unknown causes is to establish the cause of death. Not to find out what caused the cause, if you get my meaning. Mrs Partridge died from necrosis of the liver, and liver complaints are common enough to be
one of the natural causes most of us die of. So, of itself, it didn’t cause much excitement. But not many of us die as suddenly as she did. Or as young. It was strange from that point of view. And it was only when we heard her two dogs had died at the same time, of the same complaint, that the doctors began to get really worried as to why necrosis should be developed by a young woman who, up to a few hours before, had seemingly been in normal good health. Like the doctors, and knowing what we knew about her circumstances, we began to think all sorts of things. And so did the coroner yesterday afternoon. He plumped for murder straight away.’
Masters said: ‘Couldn’t it have been misadventure? The woman and her two dogs could all have been poisoned from eating the same food—if it were bad.’
‘Impossible. No sign of food poisoning. And by that I mean food that had gone bad, not food that had had poison added. She didn’t vomit, get diarrhoea or any of the usual things you get from eating crab paste that’s gone off. But even so, I checked up here—on the off-chance. Mrs Partridge and her dogs were fed from the communal kitchen. For days past neither she nor the dogs had been out to eat anywhere else. And she’d had no special dishes provided. So everything she’d had was eaten by scores of other people, and nobody else has suffered any trouble at all.’
‘What did she have for breakfast the day she died?’
‘Toast and black coffee. Not much to go bad among that, is there?’
‘It provides a double check on eliminating food poisoning,’ Masters said. ‘Food is digested within four hours, and if she’d had anything bad the night before she’d have been ill in the small hours. And certainly not in any condition to eat breakfast and take her dogs to the vet at nine o’clock.’
Green said: ‘That leaves us with either suicide or murder.’
Mundy grimaced. ‘Suicide? Possible, but not probable, I think. You see, Fay Partridge was one of them there. She was in the money and intended sticking with it. Besides that, would she poison her dogs as well as herself and then take them to the vet?’
‘Fit of remorse, perhaps.’
‘In that case, wouldn’t she have called a doctor for herself?’
‘Not if she loved the little doggie-woggies better than mumsy herself.’
Mundy shrugged. ‘O.K. What could she have poisoned herself with that the doctors couldn’t locate in her body and we couldn’t locate in her flat, the dustbins or anywhere else in this camp? Leaving aside the fact that there wasn’t the usual suicide note or anything of that sort and that, in a moment of lucidity at the hospital, she was able to assure the doctors that she hadn’t taken anything.’
‘I think you’ve made your point,’ Masters said.
‘We had to make sure,’ Green added.
‘Murder it is. But why ask for us?’
‘Because it stinks. The people who benefit from her death live miles away and haven’t been near here for long enough.’
‘The stepdaughters? Don’t they live here?’
‘Both married and living away. That’s point one. The second point is fixing the time at which she could have been poisoned. I reckon—in spite of everything—it must have been at breakfast time on the day she died, mustn’t it?’
‘Why?’ Green asked. ‘You’ve already exonerated the food.’
‘The food as it left the kitchen. But not necessarily in the state it reached Mrs Partridge.’
‘Meaning poison was added? To the sugar or something?’
‘Yes. It must have been breakfast because, as the Chief Inspector said, if it was dinner the night before or even her bedtime drink, she’d have been ill through the night, wouldn’t she?’
‘She certainly would,’ Masters said.
‘But we mustn’t forget the dogs were feeling ill by breakfast time,’ Mundy continued, ‘even though their mistress wasn’t. So they must have been got at before breakfast. I mean, even if, by any chance, the dogs did eat breakfast, they wouldn’t have had enough time to develop an illness for their mistress to get herself ready and round to the vet’s by nine o’clock. And if you can visualize a killer getting at two poodles in the middle of the night and their mistress in the morning, I can’t. It just doesn’t make sense. That’s why I asked for you to be called in.’
Masters said: ‘Right. Let’s forget the murder for a bit, shall we? Let’s have the background. Who Mr Partridge was and how she came to own this place, and so on. That way we’ll get the feel of the case. Get to know the people involved.’
‘That at least is easy enough. This place—Throscum House and its grounds—was taken over by the army in the war. The family that owned it—the Stipple-Houndsbys—stayed on in part of the house. The old man died in forty-three and his son was killed in action. There was a daughter, too, but she married some chap with a title, and lives in Berkshire. Anyhow, as far as we’re concerned, the family’s finished and hasn’t been heard of round here for ages.
‘But to get back to the war. The army put up quite a lot of wooden huts and laid a drill square and also used quite a lot of tented accommodation.’
Masters said: ‘How much land is there?’
‘In acres? Lord knows. But the property is about three-quarters of a mile deep, running from the road down to the bay, and I’d say four hundred yards wide at least at its narrowest point. But it’s not exactly rectangular, so it’s difficult to tell. Besides which, there’s a couple of sizeable meadows hedged off down on the western side.’
‘Quite an estate. Forty or fifty acres.’
‘More like seventy or eighty, I reckon. You’ll be able to judge better if you walk round. I’m going by the price paid by Partridge.’
‘I interrupted. Sorry.’
‘What? Oh, yes. Well, when the Yanks started coming over in millions in the middle of the war, this was one of the camps they took over. They didn’t like the look of the British army huts, so as there was plenty of room to build, they took them over as stores and lecture rooms and put up their own accommodation, using prisoners of war for labour. Their huts were like our pre-war army bungalows. I’ve seen them at permanent army camps like Bulford. Bathrooms and lavatories in separate rooms at one end.’
‘Quite lush,’ Green said. ‘I’ve used them.’
Mundy said: ‘They did it in style. They built a big Officers’ Mess, too, out of concrete blocks, and put hand-basins and fireplaces in every room and so on.’
‘Hadn’t the British officers got a Mess?’
‘They used part of Throscum House. But the Yanks took that over just for a general and his staff. The ordinary regimental officers used this new block a quarter of a mile away on the eastern slope.’
Green said: ‘What are those pipes laid on dwarf pillars by the side of the road?’
‘That’s the American hot-water system. From a central boiler house. For the sake of speed they laid it above ground and just slapped about three inches of asbestos padding all round it so that it wouldn’t lose heat. And by cripes, it’s efficient. If we British tried to do it you’d get nothing out of it but snow broth—if it worked at all. But that’s been going all these years and from what I hear it’s never really broken down.’
Masters said: ‘What happened after the war?’
‘The Yanks upped and away, leaving everything just as it stood. The British army was making cuts and didn’t want the place back. The Stipple-Houndsbys were dead or gone. The executors of the estate wanted the army to clear the site. The War Office put the huts up for sale on condition that whoever bought them dismantled and removed them at their own expense. They’d a hope! Round here it was a daft thing to try. And who’d have removed the permanent buildings and drill square? If the place had been near London or the Midlands where there was a housing shortage something might have been done. But nothing was. This place looked as if it was going to go the way of the old wartime airfields. Left to go derelict.’
‘They could have housed a thousand homeless,’ Green said.
‘What was there in Throscum to bri
ng people here? No work. Anyhow, the executors couldn’t sell the house because it was too big for nowadays and the troops hadn’t exactly improved it. And nobody who could have afforded it would want it with huts and petrol pumps just outside the front door.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Well, in those days I was a sergeant, so I probably didn’t get all the ins and outs of it absolutely correct. What I mean is, what I got to know was hearsay. But I do know that Claud Partridge wasn’t much of a mucher. Oh, he did his bit in the war, you know, as lots of his type did. It suited him. He’d married a domestic science teacher, a very nice girl—funny how some of the nicest fell for those rake-hellies—and she stayed at home with their two little girls while he was away enjoying himself. And from what I heard he did just that in a big way.’
Masters said: ‘I’m told his type was not at all uncommon. The sort that helped win the war but couldn’t be bothered to help win the peace.’
‘That was Claud to a T. He’d never stuck at any civvy job for long, and he didn’t intend to when he came home, I can tell you. But he wasn’t a fool for all his drinking and womanizing. He saw how matters stood here with Throscum House, and started to do a bit of asking around. As I heard it, the Yanks had pulled out leaving their huts intact. They didn’t want them. But the damned things didn’t belong to the British so they weren’t on Whitehall’s books—didn’t exist, in fact. And there was the War Office, faced with the job of clearing them away. You can imagine what sort of an embarrassment it would be to Whitehall to have to pay for moving something that didn’t exist. Still there were the British huts here, and the executors were demanding their removal and the restoration of the grounds. Not that they were getting anywhere, and weren’t likely to. So when Claud Partridge asked what they wanted for the house, they said twelve thousand and a hundred pounds an acre for the land, just as it stood, not cleared up or anything.’
Green said: ‘That was dirt cheap.’
‘Maybe. Fully cleared it would have fetched twice as much. But even in those days the twenty-odd thousand they were asking was a tidy sum.’
Masters and Green Series Box Set Page 54
