by L. C. Tyler
‘Not sure why Annabelle what?’ asked Ethelred.
‘. . . Why she wants you to question us all.’
‘She just wants to be sure the police missed nothing.’
Brent shrugged. ‘I can’t see this is necessary.’
‘She doesn’t like to think it was suicide . . . that Robert was that unhappy . . . he’d just remarried, after all.’
Brent made a face. ‘Why does Annabelle think everything is about her? I’m guessing Robert was a pretty sick man?’
‘But with months to live-months he could have shared with her,’ said Ethelred, who was clearly under the delusion sharing time with Annabelle was in some way desirable.
‘It was a sham of a marriage,’ said Brent with some vehemence.
‘I don’t think Annabelle saw it that way,’ said Ethelred.
Brent laughed. ‘No?’
‘No,’ said Ethelred firmly. ‘She loved him.’
‘How many people have you questioned this morning?’
Ethelred listed the names.
‘And that is still your view?’ asked Clive Brent.
‘It’s the one thing that I am certain of,’ said Ethelred.
‘It looks as though Annabelle made a good choice of detectives then,’ said Brent. Anything else?’ he added, looking round the room.
‘I’ve got all I need for the moment,’ said Ethelred. ‘Thanks.’
‘Well, that was interesting,’ I said.
‘Interesting?’
‘Seeing how many lies could be packed into forty-five minutes,’ I said.
Ethelred looked at his notes. ‘Such as?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘let’s begin with this intruder. O’Brian says that the light was bad and that he scarcely got a glimpse of him – in fact, come to think of it, they both said that. Anyway, in spite of it being almost dark, O’Brian is certain that the man was wearing a blue suit with a red pinstripe – whereas I could see the red stripe in the material only when it was close up and in good light. Brent confirms the blue pinstripe suit but is vague about most other things, except that the guy was wearing a beanie – something O’Brian would surely have spotted and commented on? And why is O’Brian so sure that the man in the blue suit wasn’t a guest? He was out in the garden and says he didn’t pay much attention to people arriving. How does he know all the male guests were in dinner jackets? Brent says he told nobody about the man in the suit, but O’Brian clearly knew Brent had also seen him. Oh, and both can spot that a cigarette has a filter tip at some distance in fading light.’
‘Anything else?’
‘There’s something else I can’t quite put my finger on, but I think that both were lying all the way through.’
‘Clive Brent was certainly wrong about Annabelle,’ said Ethelred. ‘She was devoted to Robert – and he to her.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’re the one who’s been married. But if that was connubial devotion, I think I might just stay single.’
Unless John O’Brian was available, of course. He was a liar, but he was a hot liar. And possibly stupid enough to commit murder for that special lady in his life.
Eleven
Elsie had wandered off, leaving me alone in the conservatory. Like Elsie, I felt there was something a little queer about the last two interviews that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Nothing to worry about – just something that wasn’t quite right. I was therefore rereading my notes when Jane Smith appeared. She was still wearing her evening dress and looked tired.
‘I thought you wanted to talk to us all,’ she said. She sounded defiant and slightly pathetic at the same time, almost like a child justly fearing some punishment but building themselves up to a self-righteous denial.
‘Gerald came and saw me earlier,’ I said. ‘I think he didn’t want to disturb you.’
‘He should have brought me along. You said you wanted to speak to all of us.’
I hadn’t really made a public pronouncement on the subject, so Annabelle or one of the guests must have told her that.
‘Why don’t you sit down?’ I said.
She sank into the chair opposite me and moodily toyed with an imaginary speck of dirt on her sleeve.
‘Does Gerald think I have nothing to say in my own right?’ she demanded.
That seemed likely on the face of it. He was that type.
‘Do you have anything to add to what he told me?’ I asked.
‘How should I know? I don’t even know what he said.’
For a moment I thought she was going to stamp her little foot, but she chose this point to burst into tears. I stood by nervously as I usually do under these circumstances. I half held my hand out to her but then, on further consideration, withdrew it. ‘I’m sure . . .’ I began. I fumbled in my pocket as a preliminary to offering her a handkerchief that was almost certainly not there. Still, it gave me something to do – something that wouldn’t make things worse. Not making it worse is often as much as you can hope for.
‘Why,’ I said cautiously, ‘don’t I just tell you what Gerald said?’ I looked at her and decided that I hadn’t put my foot in it yet.
Breathing a quick sigh of relief, I got her to sit down and gave her a quick summary of what I had written in my notebook.
‘That isn’t all,’ she said, the sobs slowly subsiding and the initial defiance reasserting itself. ‘That isn’t everything he told you. It can’t be.’
I checked my notes again. ‘It’s pretty much all.’
‘What did Gerald say about Robert and me?’
‘Just that you had worked for him.’
‘Nothing more?’
‘Is there anything more?’
She looked at me, trying to read my expression.
‘Oh, not really,’ she said eventually. ‘But didn’t he say that I was more than Robert’s secretary?’
I wondered for a moment whether she meant some higher position in the bank – or perhaps that she had some glorified title such as Senior Executive Assistant – but then I realized . . .
‘Yes, we had a relationship,’ she said, looking away. ‘That’s what they call it, isn’t it? A relationship. Before Gerald came on the scene, of course, or Annabelle for that matter. We . . . we slept together. It all lasted about a year. In a way it was rather sordid, but in a way it was rather wonderful – do you know what I mean? Then that silicon-enhanced bitch Annabelle came along . . . somebody told me last night that the two of them had met in a lap-dancing club, which wouldn’t surprise me . . . and, well, the rest is history, as they say.’
‘And Gerald knows about you and Robert?’
She looked at me again and gave me a brief smile. ‘Yes. I told him soon after we started going out together.’
‘But it all happened before you had even met Gerald?’
‘Before we started going out properly, yes.’
I pulled a face, but it didn’t sound that bad. Some husbands and wives have a bit of a thing about their spouse’s ex-boyfriends and girlfriends, but Gerald hadn’t mentioned any of this to me. I caught no hint of jealousy. If it was all some time ago, it didn’t seem very relevant to anything. Perhaps it still meant something to Jane though?
‘You don’t suspect Gerald of murder?’ she said suddenly.
‘Are you suggesting that your fling with Robert, years ago, could be a motive?’
‘No, of course not. It would have to be more than that, wouldn’t it? More than just that I had once slept with Robert?’
I thought she had implied she had slept with him a lot more than once. Still, I felt I could set her mind at rest.
‘It would need to be a lot more than that, surely?’
There was a long pause.
‘Yes, of course. It’s silly of me even to think it,’ she said.
‘And he had no opportunity,’ I said.
‘No. I was with him the whole evening.’
‘There you are. You know that it couldn’t be him.’
‘I’ve wasted your tim
e,’ she said, standing up. ‘I am really, really sorry.’
‘It’s OK,’ I said.
‘Sorry,’ she said. She stifled a final sniffle, gave me a brave smile and clutching her handbag to her body, she walked primly from the room.
After she had gone I wondered what had troubled me about that conversation. Yet again, I felt that I had been told only part of a story, and that the most significant part had been held back.
My interview with Dave Peart was necessarily brief.
‘Am I getting paid for my time here or what?’ he demanded. ‘My dad says Saturday should be time and a half. All day.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to ask Lady Muntham.’
‘If it’s down to Her Ladyship, I know the answer to that one then. Tight cow.’
He folded his arms and looked at me defiantly.
‘Maybe you could just tell me briefly what you were doing yesterday?’
‘Already told the bloody police, ain’t I?’
‘Yes, you’ve told the police,’ I said, ‘but it would help if you also told me.’
‘Huh! I don’t have to tell you nothing, mister.’ He made a noise halfway between a laugh and a snort and looked fairly pleased with himself until he noticed the resultant snot on his shirtfront. ‘Bugger.’
‘Quite right,’ I said, trying to ignore what he was doing with his thumbnail. ‘You don’t have to tell me about anything that you noticed. But I suppose you’re not really the observant type?’
‘Didn’t say that,’ he said, rubbing off the last of the yellow mucus with the tip of his forefinger. With a well-practised flick, he launched it towards a distant part of the floor.
‘So what did you do and what did you see?’
He sighed, as though I had tricked him, then he said: ‘In the morning, up till dinner-time, I helped John in the garden, see? We was weeding and pruning mostly. Then I helped a bit in the kitchen and with laying the table. I got sent home at tea-time to change – I borrowed a jacket from Dan – he’s my brother – but the trousers didn’t fit, so I took my dad’s, ’ cause he only wears his suit for weddings and when he’s up before the magistrate, and I reckoned he wouldn’t miss them. Didn’t look too bad in that get-up. Proper little waiter, I was. So, like you know, I served the soup, then the main course and it was all rush, rush, rush – a bit like those cooking programmes on the telly, but without so much bad language. I did pretty well, though I say it myself. Might go in for waitering full-time – it’s got to pay better than this job anyway. Well, Her Ladyship doesn’t ring for the dessert, does she? Didn’t exactly bother us if it got cold. Unappreciative toffee-nosed whatsits, as Mrs Michie called them. So we waited and we chatted and we waited a bit more. After a while Mrs Michie says: “I wonder what’s keeping them?” Later on the police turned up. Didn’t get home until almost two in the morning, did I?’
‘Did you see any sign of an intruder?’
‘I was running around the place so fast I wouldn’t have noticed a dozen intruders.’ He laughed but this time wisely decided against a derisive snort.
‘Did you see anyone wandering around the garden in a blue suit?’
‘I ain’t never seen nobody wander round the garden in no blue suit.’
A quadruple negation seemed conclusive, so I moved on.
‘You really saw nothing all day?’ I asked.
‘Wouldn’t say that.’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘All right – I really will tell you something, Mr Amateur Detective. Mrs Michie sent me out in the afternoon to get some carrots from the kitchen garden. OK? John was in the greenhouse with Her Ladyship. They’d have had more privacy in the potting shed if they were planning to get up to that sort of thing – but the greenhouse being glass, it didn’t leave much to the imagination. They didn’t notice me pulling carrots ten feet away from them. I bet he got time and a half.’
‘Did Lady Muntham and Mr O’Brian often . . .’
‘As often as they could. But don’t take my word for it. Ask anyone in the village pretty well.’
‘And did Sir Robert know?’
‘Can’t say, rightly. Don’t see how he couldn’t. But then I don’t see how John didn’t know about that Brent fellow – took him a while to twig to that one.’
‘Clive Brent?’
‘That’s the one. Big green Jaguar. He parks it on the bypass sometimes and walks up. Thinks nobody won’t notice.’
‘I see,’ I said.
Dave Peart laughed. ‘You wouldn’t credit what goes on at this place,’ he said. ‘You would not credit it.’
Young Dave Peart,’ said Mrs Michie, wiping her large red hands on a tea cloth, ‘has a vivid imagination. It comes of those magazines he’s always reading – I know where he keeps them in the potting shed, under the growbags. He thinks those bags are too heavy for me to lift, but they’re not. Sex. That’s all that boy can think of. I wouldn’t set too much store by what Dave Peart tells you.’
‘There’s nothing going on between Lady Muntham and John O’Brian then?’
‘Nothing that I know of.’ Her face, perhaps through long and careful practice, was completely expressionless. She pushed a strand of greying hair behind her ear and stared at me with her unyielding, almost colourless eyes. It was my move.
‘And Clive Brent?’ I asked.
‘He’s a slippery customer, that Mr Brent.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Acts like he’s got some sort of hold on this family. Marches in. Demands to see him. Demands to see her. He’s just the bursar of that school down the road. And only part-time.’
I paused, my pen hovering above the paper, then wrote nothing.
‘So, yesterday, you started work at nine?’ I asked.
‘Worked nine in the morning until ten at night, with scarcely a break. That’s not even legal, that’s not. Then I had to hang around answering questions from the police.’
‘Were you in the kitchen all that time?’
‘Pretty much. I had Gill Maggs – she comes in from Findon Valley – to help me in the morning, then Dave Peart in the afternoon, not that he’s much use to anyone, even when his mind’s partly on the task at hand. It would have been good to have Gill back in the evening, but Her Ladyship wouldn’t hear of it – this is costing enough without that, she said. So it was just me slaving away in the kitchen and the boy spilling soup over people in the dining room.’
‘The food was lovely,’ I said, perhaps a little too late.
‘Was it now?’ she said. ‘Well, that’s good to know.’
‘I really enjoyed the . . .’ I began. Then I realized that I couldn’t remember a thing we had eaten. ‘The . . . starter,’ I concluded lamely.
She looked me straight in the eye and said nothing.
‘Did you notice anything odd during the afternoon or evening?’ I continued. My pen was still poised above the blank page.
‘There was nothing to notice, not in the kitchen. Where I was all day. Cooking. The starter and everything. It was soup, by the way, in case you were still wondering what you’d been eating.’
‘It was delicious,’ I said, though I could remember only how it was served, not which variety it was. Better to move the conversation on. ‘You didn’t see any sign of a man wearing a blue pinstriped suit – maybe with some sort of woolly hat? Standing over by the shrubbery.’
‘With a woolly hat?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘In the middle of summer?’
‘A couple of people say they saw him.’
‘After how many glasses of wine would that have been?’
‘John O’Brian reckons he caught a glimpse of him.’
Mrs Michie pulled a face. She seemed more inclined to believe John O’Brian’s word than most other people’s, but she was still doubtful. ‘He said nothing to me. When did John see him?’
‘Just before he went home, I think.’
She made the same face again, just in case I hadn’
t fully appreciated it the first time, and shook her head. ‘He popped in to say goodnight, but he didn’t say anything to me.’
‘Maybe he didn’t think it was important.’
‘An intruder in the garden? Not important? How do you make that out then?’
‘He thought at first it might be a guest.’
‘Not in a woolly hat.’
‘I suppose not,’ I said.
‘Funny John never mentioned that to me.’
‘Do you think I’ll be able to speak to Gillian Maggs?’ I asked.
‘She won’t be in until Monday. Gill was gone by lunchtime, though. She couldn’t have seen anything.’
‘Do you have her phone number by any chance?’
Mrs Michie eyed me up briefly. ‘Her Ladyship’ll have that, I reckon. Is it really worth bothering Gill?’
‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘Probably not.’
Twelve
As my old dad always used to say: ‘If you want to catch a villain, you’ve got to think like a villain.’ Of course, as a fruit and veg stallholder, he was rarely called upon by the Essex Constabulary to catch villains, so that was one bit of advice I always took with a pinch of salt. Still, somethings were true even though my old dad said them, and I tried to get myself into the mind of a murderer as I sat in the library and worked through the series of events.
There were plenty of ways into the library before it was locked – Muntham Court that evening had not been exactly Fort Knox. The problem with Shagger’s death being murder had been getting the killer out of the locked room again. It was a shame that the solution to such a classic problem was anything as naff as a secret passage, but it did mean that a killer could have made their escape and even hidden in the passage until things had quietened down. But, it would have been no casual intruder, because locating the opening mechanism had not been that easy – even for somebody of Ethelred’s mighty intellect, aided by the helpful and knowledgeable hints of the owner of the house. So, it had to be somebody who already knew the house well and who knew that Shagger would take a break halfway through dinner and head for the library . . .
It was the last bit that puzzled me. Why would anyone expect a host to abandon his guests and then sit around in the library, obligingly waiting to be murdered? Unless, of course, they had actually arranged to meet Shagger at some appointed hour or after some agreed signal – that made a lot more sense. Prior to his departure, Shagger had stood up, spouted a load of crap and then cleared off. But surely, if you wanted to slip away for a few minutes without arousing suspicion couldn’t you just say you needed to speak to the cook or fetch more wine?
