The Marsh & Daughter Casebook

by Amy Myers

  She had just finished helping Gwen with the washing-up when Mike arrived. He looked tired, and Gwen quickly made him some cocoa, when he turned down the offer of coffee. ‘Have you finished now?’ Georgia asked.

  ‘For today at least. The SOCOs haven’t, of course. They’ll be here for another day or two. I thought you’d like to know that Sandy from the pub was in fact Sandro Daks, born in Estonia to an Estonian family, and now living in Budapest. He was over here to do an art course of some kind at Canterbury and doing pub work to help out. This was his evening off.’

  ‘Had the pub any ideas on why he could have been killed?’

  ‘No, but that’s nothing unusual. We’ll know more after the autopsy. No obvious signs of injection so far, anyway. No rumours of drugs at the pub, but that’s not surprising either.’

  ‘And none in the village, so far as I know,’ Terry put in defensively. ‘He was a nice lad, even if he did have an eye for the main chance.’

  ‘A wicked smile,’ Gwen said reflectively.

  ‘Wicked as in evil?’ Georgia asked.

  ‘No. Wicked as in I wish I was forty-odd years younger, but I’m glad I’m not. The sort one falls for at seventeen.’

  ‘This,’ Terry joked, ‘is our honeymoon. I feel seventeen again. By the way, Georgia, what happened about Maureen?’

  ‘She wasn’t there. Everything in darkness.’ Georgia had forgotten they didn’t know, and she quickly remedied this. ‘I still need to see her,’ she finished. Her own mission still had to be completed, regardless of what had happened tonight.

  ‘So,’ Mike pointed out gently, ‘do we. And we come first, Georgia.’

  *

  ‘Do you have to stay another night?’ Luke asked later as she hopped into Gwen and Terry’s guest bed. ‘I’ll have to get back tomorrow morning. Saturday or not, this week the oast house calls.’

  Georgia hesitated, but this was Luke, whom she loved, so she should give some explanation. ‘I’d like to stay here rather longer, go to the pub perhaps.’

  ‘There’s a good pub in Haden Shaw.’

  No help for it. The real reason was necessary. ‘It seems like running away from Sandro Daks’ body if I leave too soon,’ she confessed.

  ‘In that case,’ Luke said practically, ‘it’s a good job you’ll have a warm one next to you tonight to remind you of what you’re missing.’

  Georgia laughed. ‘I’m in complete agreement.’ After all it was only one more day and after that not only Sandro Daks, but Lance Venyon, King Arthur, and the rest of the round table could surely be laid to rest for good.

  Rest, it appeared, was denied to her, however. Sleep did not come easily.

  ‘Are you awake?’ she heard Luke whisper later that night.

  ‘Yes. I can’t sleep properly for nightmares.’

  ‘Worrying about Sandro Daks?’

  ‘About death and Sandro Daks.’ The nightmare that rolled round her head taking her over, threatening, retreated as she framed it into words.

  ‘It comes with the territory,’ he murmured, turning over to hold her tightly.

  ‘What territory?’

  ‘Your job. Peter’s job. Even my job.’

  ‘Don’t good things happen in it too?’

  ‘You know they do. They just get crowded out once in a while, and need to be hunted down again to make themselves felt.’

  They did, and his hands and body assured her of it, first gently, then possessively until pleasure took over mind; eventually mind rejoined it to reassure her that Luke was right. Given its chance, the positive always won. It was merely that in today’s world it usually had to play the waiting game.

  *

  Next morning, while waiting for Luke to finish in the shower, she found herself at the window, looking over the garden to the field that Jago Priest had so intensively scoured for traces of King Arthur. She would surely soon be free of golden goblets and Lance Venyon; she could return to Medlars and the project file, which now appeared not frustrating but as a treat in store. Peering to the right, she could see figures moving around the churchyard, early though it was. In the lane the mobile incident van would be set up, and that thought returned last night’s horror to her in full force. That too would be over today, so far as her role was concerned. She would give a formal statement and that would be that, except for perhaps giving evidence at an inquest or trial. Her duty to Sandro Daks was nearly over, she told herself. She only had Maureen Jones to think about, whom she hoped she could meet some time during the day – and with luck Elaine too. Then she could take Terry and Gwen to dinner at the pub tonight . . .

  Yes, and better, she could have lunch there herself. She might learn more by being on her own. Not even Mike, she told herself, could prevent her from taking a pub lunch in the Green Man. Then she caught her own faulty logic. So her duty to Sandro Daks was nearly over, was it? Why then was she intent on going to the Green Man? Because of Sandro himself? Just because she had found his body? No, she realized with dismal certainty, it was because of that churchyard and more particularly that corner of it. The rank smell of evil stemming from it made it seem almost as if Sandro Daks had wandered into it by chance, rather than caused it by his death. And that was why she felt the need to rid her mind of it, to convince herself that she had been mistaken – if that were possible.

  *

  For a weekday lunchtime the pub was surprisingly packed with customers; then she realized that it was the obvious place for the village to gather for discussion about the crime, especially since the pub was the heart of the tragedy.

  Should she join in and establish her street cred as the person who found the body? Georgia decided against it. She was a stranger. Everyone would clam up, glad of a chance to see her as Public Scapegoat No. 1, instead of one of their own. Instead Georgia ordered some food and waited. She seemed to be the only one eating, which suggested whoever brought her order to her might have more time to chat than the bar staff. She was rewarded when her ploughman’s arrived courtesy of a good-looking, if sulky, young girl who peered at her unenthusiastically from behind a dark screen of hair falling over her face.

  ‘Thank you.’ Georgia waved aside the proffered extra chunk of bread in the interests of an opening gambit. ‘I’m not that hungry, not after last night—’

  ‘Last night?’ The girl stared at her as though she were bragging about an orgy.

  ‘I’m the person who found Sandro’s body.’

  ‘You?’ A suspicious look.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Georgia said sincerely. ‘It’s always a shock when death strikes so close, no matter whether you’re close to the person or not.’

  ‘Everyone liked Sandy. He was fun. We had the police here this morning and last night.’

  ‘It was a terrible thing,’ Georgia mused.

  ‘He was shot, wasn’t he? Did you see it happen?’

  A touch of the ghoul was appearing, and it was a hopeful sign that she was at least asking questions. Georgia expanded on what she had seen and not seen. ‘Were you his girlfriend?’

  ‘In a way, see?’

  Georgia thought she did. The girl who announced herself as Karen would have liked to have been Sandro’s girlfriend was her translation of this reply.

  ‘He’d been here eight months. He liked Wymdown, he said.’ Karen managed to make it sound as though she were the entire reason for this. As, for all Georgia knew, she was.

  ‘Did he live in the pub?’

  ‘Rented a room somewhere.’

  ‘Was he a clubber? Wymdown seems a quiet place for a student of his age.’

  ‘Nah. He liked sketching and that. He went clubbing in Canterbury or Dover.’

  ‘Did he have a car?’

  ‘If you can call it that. A beat-up old wreck. Yeah. What you interested for?’ Karen asked belatedly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Georgia replied truthfully. ‘I suppose it’s because I found him. I felt I needed to know more. Were you working here when he arrived?’

  �
�Yes.’ This seemed to encourage her to open up. ‘I thought he was gorgeous, but Tom, my boyfriend, said he’d wallop me if I went out with him.’ Some pride here, Georgia thought. A century of women’s rights had apparently passed Wymdown unnoticed. ‘“What’s he here for, if not you?” Tom asked,’ Karen continued. ‘So I said he’s got family here, he says, wants to look them up.’

  ‘Family?’ Georgia picked up. ‘From Hungary?’

  ‘Or friends. Dunno. He was asking after someone called Lance Vennon or something like that.’

  ‘Venyon,’ Georgia corrected automatically, in shock at this innocent thunderbolt.

  ‘Whatever.’

  Karen disappeared leaving Georgia looking bleakly at her ploughman’s. It seemed she was not going to be able to wipe Wymdown and King Arthur from her mind as quickly as she’d hoped. Peter would never let this vanish into thin air now that even Georgia had to admit there were questions here to be answered. Lance was linked not only with her bête noire, King Arthur, but worse, with a corpse that she herself had discovered.

  After she had imparted this news to Peter on her mobile, he announced that he was coming over. Now – in case she was in any doubt. ‘We’ll have to tell Mike,’ he added.

  ‘Of course.’ Georgia did not relish the thought of it, though. Mike would not be pleased that his case, picked up through personal concern for her, might have become caught up in one of the Marshes’ whimsies, as he called them – generally, she conceded, when he was exceptionally irritated.

  She was right, but he’d calmed down by the time he arrived at Badon House. ‘I suppose I can’t blame you,’ he said grudgingly, after she’d explained exactly where they were, or weren’t, with Lance Venyon.

  ‘No,’ Georgia agreed. How could she possibly have guessed that Sandro Daks had known about Lance Venyon? ‘Unfortunately,’ she continued, ‘Karen, the girl at the pub, doesn’t seem to have enquired any further about Lance. She wasn’t sure whether he was family or friend.’

  ‘You said Lance Venyon died in 1961. That’s a long time to remember someone without having any news,’ Mike commented.

  ‘Estonia, where the Daks family stemmed from originally, was part of the Soviet Union until it split away in 1990,’ Peter pointed out. ‘It wasn’t too easy to conduct correspondence and there was no chance of travelling to the West out of the Eastern bloc.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Mike granted. ‘So tell me who I need to speak to about Daks’ connection with Lance Venyon?’

  ‘His daughter Elaine. Jago Priest, our main contact, was a friend not family. Do you,’ Peter asked, politely for him, since when he normally addressed Mike it was still as DI to sergeant, ‘have other lines of enquiry?’

  Mike looked at him contemplatively for a few moments, as if making him wait. Then: ‘It depends,’ he said.

  ‘On what?’ Georgia asked.

  ‘On whether this Venyon is a Marsh & Daughter case, or still one of your little hunches.’

  When did a hunch become a case, Georgia wondered. Usually when facts began to support it. Marsh & Daughter’s cases usually sprang from unresolved crimes that had left their mark on the place where they were committed, as tenprints (in police jargon) on time.

  Mike didn’t go in for atmosphere, or even hunches. No tenprints on time had yet made any appearance so far as Lance Venyon was concerned – unless he was connected with the corner of the churchyard. No, that was too tenuous, Georgia thought uneasily. Unless of course that was where his grave was? Stop, she told her racing mind. There is nothing, but nothing, to suggest anything unresolved about Lance Venyon.

  Except his name, her mind retaliated. Spoken by a young man who was now dead.

  She could tell that even Peter was stuck to answer Mike’s question, which he confirmed by his eventual reply: ‘We don’t yet know.’

  ‘My call, then. I’ll go with you. The reason that brought Daks to this village is a tenable line of enquiry, which means that Venyon could be too. Now for fact. You tell me Lance Venyon died in 1961 as the result of a yachting accident. We can check that. It’s too far back for anyone still active in the force to remember, unless we’re very lucky, and I doubt if any files remain, even if there were any in the first place. You said the family believes he was murdered. That’s no evidence, of course, but interesting.’

  ‘The wife is dead, so we’re only going by what the daughter and grandson tell us, and Jago Priest doesn’t agree with the murder thesis,’ Georgia explained to Mike.

  ‘Airy-fairy, so far, then?’

  ‘That’s our privilege,’ Peter rejoined. ‘You know we leave any airy-fairyness on our part behind when we take up a case,’ and when Mike reluctantly nodded, added, ‘Then Georgia and I will take on the Lance Venyon case. OK by you, Georgia?’

  ‘It breaks our rules . . .’ she began, then stopped. What she couldn’t voice was her trepidation at the thought of a murderer of today strolling towards them arm in arm with Lance Venyon, especially with King Arthur grinning in the background. It was a formidable prospect. Then she remembered Sandro Daks, who had been a young man in his early twenties but was now dead. A lost life. She owed it to him to see what this was all about. ‘It could all be coincidence,’ she ended hopefully.

  ‘I don’t believe in coincidence,’ Peter said flatly, ‘until it’s proved to be one.’

  ‘You’re right. Let’s go ahead,’ she agreed.

  Peter visibly relaxed. ‘Good,’ he said briskly. ‘What are the other lines of enquiry, Mike?’

  ‘Mine,’ Mike replied warningly. ‘You keep strictly to 1961 and Lance Venyon’s death.’

  ‘And if he clashes with today?’

  ‘You know the rules. You’re on to me quicker than broadband.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Sandro Daks lodged with a Mrs Saxon on a farm on the outskirts of the village. We’ve been over his room for next-of-kin details in Budapest. He used the attic for painting.’

  ‘Karen at the Green Man said he did landscape sketches,’ Georgia observed. ‘That’s unusual for an art student today, isn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe not this one. We spoke to his tutor this morning. He was a talented pupil, but he didn’t specialize. He was a first-class copyist, and as for his own work he did line drawings, landscapes, portraits – you name it, he painted it. He earned money by sketching local sites for tourists.’

  ‘How did he sell them? In the street?’

  ‘One step up. Through a gallery and small craft shops. In particular a gallery in Dover, so we discovered from his room. We’re going to check it out. It’s run by a Roy Cook.’

  Well, well. Husband of the famous Kelly whom Georgia remembered from Gwen and Terry’s wedding. She also remembered her instant limpet-like attachment to Colin. Had she applied her claws to Sandro too?

  ‘. . . girlfriend in Canterbury,’ Mike was saying, ‘according to his mates, and one in Dover too.’

  Just like Lance Venyon, Georgia thought. At least King Arthur never flaunted his floozies.

  Chapter Four

  ‘You really think King Arthur’s involved in this?’ Luke was gracious enough not to laugh. Indeed he had immediately put his publisher’s hat on when she began to talk about Lance Venyon, and so mirth would have been out of place.

  ‘I can’t quite believe in a rumoured golden goblet being a serious motive for murder, but I suppose Arthur himself could have provided one through those paintings. Or some other art theft could be involved in it.’

  Georgia was conscious that she was breaking the ‘rules’ by chatting about work while setting the table for dinner. They’d been living together for less than six months, and such ‘rules’ and ‘vetoes’ took time to be established. Medlars, however, was a relaxed home to live in, and it was all too easy to forget that in talking to her partner, she was also talking to her publisher. The only fixed ‘rule’ so far was that Luke’s oast-house office was his kingdom alone, and she entered it only on Marsh & Daughter business. Seeing Luke leave for t
he thirty-yard walk to the oast house was like bidding farewell to King Arthur galloping off for Camelot. She couldn’t blame Luke, since she and Peter had their own ivory towers. Haden Shaw was only a mile or two from Medlars, but it felt much more once she was working in Peter’s office there or her own.

  Luke frowned. ‘You mean Venyon could have been on the track of some shady deal that went wrong?’

  ‘That’s one theory. Another is that a girlfriend bumped him off, or even his wife, but we haven’t made any progress on that front yet.’

  ‘And the death of Sandro D might have been connected with it?’

  ‘Only by an enormous jump. All we have is a coincidence waiting to be turned into evidence.’

  ‘The snag is,’ Luke said, watching her drain the spaghetti, ‘that if there is a link you can’t write it as a Marsh & Daughter case while the police are investigating the Daks death or if a trial is pending.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Trust Luke to hit the weak point, which Peter had been reluctant to face. ‘But we’ll take the risk when and if it comes.’

  ‘Georgia . . .’ he began tentatively.

  She knew what he was going to say, and would make it easy for him. ‘You can’t sign the book up with that proviso hanging over it.’

  ‘Not without safeguards.’

  ‘No contract or no money?’ she asked practically. Now the question was raised, she might as well get it answered.

  He put his arm round her. ‘I do love doing business with you, Georgia. The answer to that is no money and a get-out clause on both sides, if you want a contract now.’

  ‘I do love doing business with you, Luke. So generous.’

  ‘But still in business, you note.’ He looked anxious, though. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Georgia?’

  ‘No. We foresaw it.’ Well, it was almost true. Peter had been blithely hoping for the best, of course. ‘But Peter is stuck on this one at present.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I feel duty-bound and getting warmer,’ she acknowledged. ‘It has an odd attraction in that Venyon’s working life and character are intriguing even if there’s no evidence of murder so far. But I must admit it’s hard to see how we could ever make a credible case for it if he was simply pushed off the boat.’