Broken Music

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘Not even Mr Hatherley, night like that.’

  ‘Hatherley? Who’s he?’ Reardon asked, as if the name was new to them.

  ‘Mr Gervase Hatherley, his lands march with ours. He exercises his dog along here most nights.’

  ‘Aren’t there walks on his own land?’

  Naylor shrugged. ‘Nobody’s going to stop a friend and neighbour walking along here, if that’s what they want to do. He’s doing no harm. He only goes as far as the lake. Sits on one of the rocks for a while, then turns back.’

  ‘Oh, an old man like, needing to rest?’ Wheelan asked ingenuously.

  Naylor picked up the teapot to replenish the mugs, found it empty and put it back on the table. ‘It’s not that. He’s a younger man than me, but see – he were attached to Miss Marianne, the one you mentioned,’ he said, with a nod to Reardon. ‘Hit him pretty bad, when she died, I hear.’

  ‘What do you mean by attached? Was she his young lady?’

  ‘Not that I know of. And I shouldn’t think it likely. He’s what they call a confirmed bachelor, very well respected, not short of a bob or two. Big shot around here, JP and all that. And she was only a girl, but by all accounts he thought a lot of her. Likely he thought of her as a daughter.’

  ‘And that’s why he comes down here to look at the place where she died, every night?’ asked Reardon, unable to conceal the scepticism he felt.

  ‘Can’t think of any other reason he’d come this way so regular, apart from exercising his dog. But I said most nights, not every, and as to Monday night, I wouldn’t know. I didn’t go out and you can’t see the lake from here. Anyways, ’tain’t likely he’d be out a night like that, in that rain, much less sitting looking at the lake, is it?’

  Reardon couldn’t think of any other questions at the moment. Their tea was finished, and he stood up. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Naylor – and for the tea. You say this Mr Hatherley’s land adjoins this estate?’ he asked as they went out. ‘We might as well walk on to see him while we’re out this way. You never know, he might have chanced the rain. How far is it, then, to his house?’

  ‘Follow the lake, then take a right turning where the path branches. You’ll see the Gypsies’ caravans on t’other side and you’ll find the path skirts the base of the hill and into the next valley.’ He cast a weather eye on the sky. ‘Best get a move on. We’re in for some more rain, and it’s rough going in parts,’ he added, taking a dubious look at their feet. ‘Haven’t you got any transport?’

  The police contingent had arrived in Broughton squashed into a canvas-sided motor van, which had also transported Reardon’s motorcycle, but the men had now departed in the van, leaving only the motorcycle parked behind the Greville Arms. Wheelan’s deadpan jokes about it, and the size of him, led Reardon to feel it wouldn’t be a good idea to suggest the sergeant should ride pillion.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘The sergeant here enjoys a good walk.’

  When the two detectives had left him alone, Ben Naylor finished preparing the meat and vegetables for his supper, threw them all into the pot with a handful of pearl barley and a sprig or two of thyme, and set the stew on the stove where it would stay on a slow simmer all day. He put the innards aside for Fern later, and threw the head and skin onto the fire. He whistled for the dog and set off in the direction opposite to that taken by the two policemen, up to Peddy Covert, the nearest thicket of woodland that provided shelter for game. His head was thick after sitting up late, his mind troubled in fear that he’d given something away in his conversation with the police. Neither of them were fools and he believed that neither had been entirely convinced by what he had seen fit to tell them.

  Following his daily routine left his thoughts free to wander without the need for too much concentration, and with Fern running ahead of him he plodded on, planting his feet firmly on the familiar path, gun over his shoulder. What he’d told the police about his association with Lady Sybil was true but it left out most of what he felt about her. She was far more than an employer to him: he could say she was a friend without fear of contradiction from her, and one he had known for most of his life. They’d grown up together as children, running wild, in the unusual circumstances of Lady Sybil’s neglected childhood, not yet of an age to care about the differences of their stations in life. She was a high-spirited girl, fearless as a boy. She dared do anything. He had seen her put a dying squirrel, that had been attacked by a magpie, out of its misery with a stone on the head, and getting a bite for her pains. Ben had taught her how to look for birds’ nests and take but one egg; to climb trees. Shown her where the badgers’ setts were, how to imitate a bird’s call, or to skim a pebble so that it bounced seven times across the lake; he had taught her to swim in it. It had been an anarchic childhood, untroubled by authority. It could not have lasted. When she began to grow up she was sent to London to her father’s sister to be coached and primped and dressed and altogether be made into a young lady fit to take her place in polite society.

  Just in time. By then Ben had reached the age when he was becoming susceptible to girls, and was beginning, painfully, to imagine himself passionately in love with her, to suffer all the pangs of unrequited first love, and a boy’s unrealistic fascination with the unattainable. After she left, he went on with his life, and after a while he met and eventually married his Mary, a village girl who was his true and only love. Nevertheless, those childhood years were never to be forgotten. There wasn’t much Ben wouldn’t do for his Lady Sybil.

  Mary had died in childbirth, and their longed-for child with her, ten years after they were married, and Ben had retreated into himself, with no intention of ever marrying again. Since then, he had lived alone in the house where he had been born, following the same uneventful existence which had always been his. He had no problems with that but, contrary to everything he had previously believed, now that Mary had been dead so long, he had begun to feel the need of a wife. He had been brought up in a strait-laced household, where the teachings of the Bible were paramount, and anything else but married respectability was not acceptable.

  Then Edith came along. What he had told the police was not strictly true. He had wrestled with his conscience over her, about marrying her and making an honest woman of her, but when he compared her with Mary, something stuck in his throat. Yet Edith, walking fearlessly through the woods to his house at night, when everyone else was in bed…how could any red-blooded man resist what was so patently on offer?

  It was she herself who had begun to suggest marriage. But ambitious as she was, how long would she be content with life in a gamekeeper’s cottage, on a gamekeeper’s wages? Never, he thought, and was proved right when she began urging him to leave, to ‘better himself’ as she put it. Garbutt, the chauffeur, earned more than he did, she said, and had an easier life. If they were to go as a married pair, lady’s maid and chauffeur, they could find better-paid work than here at Oaklands. But she was not, Ben thought, what any man wanted for a wife, much less himself.

  He hadn’t loved Edith, but she had been, in her own way, an important part of his life. And now she was dead and he was left with another dilemma on his conscience.

  Like all such directions, the distance to Hathlerley’s house took nearly twice as long to walk as Naylor had predicted, nearer twenty minutes than ten. The going was rough but their shoes were stout enough, if not as stout as Naylor’s heavy boots, and the rain obligingly held off.

  Hatherleys, the house in the valley was called, proclaiming ownership by the name chiselled into its stone gateposts. A big house of raw-looking red brick with stone quoins, uncompromisingly geometrical, standing squarely in a soulless garden: two rectangles of lawn with a raked gravel drive running between them to the front door, two stone urns, empty at this season, either side of the steps. Even the lawns were pristine, having already been cleared of the storm debris that littered everywhere else.

  The door was answered by a large, youngish, capable-looking woman of comma
nding appearance, wearing a grey serge skirt with a dark-blue blouse tucked into her belt, and a permanent smile on her face that didn’t quite reach her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, when Reardon enquired if they might speak to Hatherley, ‘Mr Hatherley is indisposed. He can’t see anyone.’

  ‘I think he will see us. We’re from the police. I’m Inspector Reardon and this is Sergeant Wheelan.’ Reardon produced his official badge, which had no effect whatever when she condescended to lift the chain attached to a lorgnette reposing on her bosom in order to examine it. The smile remained in place but she was adamant. ‘I’m afraid it’s still not possible. I am Mr Hatherley’s housekeeper. He has a heavy cold and he’s keeping to his bed today.’

  ‘You do know that there’s been a murder committed around here? We need to see Mr Hatherley and talk to him.’

  She replied implacably, ‘He is indisposed and doesn’t wish to see anybody.’

  The statement was immediately contradicted by the presence behind her of a man who was descending the stairs and crossing the black and white encaustic-tiled floor of the large hall, which the open door revealed as a bare and echoing space that the presence of several large, dark and heavily framed Victorian paintings on the walls did nothing to mitigate. The handsome, red Chinese silk dressing gown he wore, patterned with black dragons, made the only startling splash of colour against the dullness of the monochrome background as he came forward.

  ‘Let the gentlemen in, Mrs Liddington. If they don’t mind catching a cold, I don’t mind sharing it. Gervase Hatherley,’ he announced himself with a nod, keeping his hand tucked into his pocket. ‘Send some tea into the study, will you, Mrs Liddington, and a couple of aspirin?’ He beckoned the two police officers to follow him into a room where a bright fire burnt and the electric lamps were lit. A black Labrador lay stretched across the hearthrug and only moved away with reluctance when ordered to.

  ‘Dreadful day,’ Hatherley remarked, as the rain Ben Naylor had predicted began, scratching against the windows. He stirred the fire into a blaze and settled into a deep chair next to it, motioning them to seats opposite. ‘Now, what can I do for you? I presume it’s about this young woman who’s been killed. Frightful business.’

  He was a grey man inside that richly coloured dressing gown: receding iron-grey hair, grey eyes in a pale, doughy face, though the pallor was probably due to the heavy cold he undoubtedly had. His voice was thick with it and his eyes, behind the heavy-framed spectacles he wore, were red-rimmed. Yet despite the cold, he remained dapper. What hair he had was well brushed, his nails neatly manicured and he wore a black silk cravat nattily tucked into the neck of his dressing gown. He was inclined to be portly, and Reardon guessed his age at around forty.

  ‘It’s good of you to see us,’ Reardon said.

  Hatherley waved a plump hand. ‘Not at all.’ His glance avoided Reardon’s face and skidded past his left ear to fasten on a vase on the window sill.

  ‘We wouldn’t have bothered you, as you are, only—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I understand. You have your duty. I cannot imagine in what way you think I may be able to help you, but I will if I can.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. To begin with, then – we’ve been told you often walk down by the lake in Oaklands Park.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true,’ Hatherley answered, looking without charity at the notebook Wheelan produced, and pursing his small, pink mouth. ‘It’s a regular evening exercise. Just the right distance to walk Caesar in the evenings.’ The dog pricked his ears and raised his head on hearing his name, then let it drop heavily and went back to sleep. Hatherley sneezed several times into a pristine handkerchief. ‘But I didn’t go down there on Monday night. I suppose that’s what you’re going to ask?’

  ‘Well, I was, but if you weren’t there, sir…’

  ‘Caesar had to do without his walk. Apart from the weather, I wasn’t up to it. Bed and a hot toddy was a much more attractive proposition.’

  The arrival of the tea, which neither man really wanted, was not brought in by the redoubtable Mrs Liddington, but by a blushing young girl who crashed the tray down so that the milk sloshed out of the jug. She dabbed at it with a napkin and gave an apprehensive glance at her master but he appeared not to have noticed. ‘Thank you, Betty.’

  She poured the tea, handed round the cups, forgot the sugar, retrieved her mistake, then left, no doubt thankfully. Hatherley raised his eyebrows with a gesture implying, what can one do about the help nowadays?

  Reardon said, as the door closed behind the girl, ‘This is the second death that’s occurred down there by the lake within the last few years. You will remember the other one, no doubt – Miss Marianne Wentworth?’

  Hatherley opened the round cardboard pillbox on the tray, extracted a couple of pills and swallowed them with a gulp of tea before he looked up and said to the vase, ‘How could anyone who knew her forget that?’

  ‘I believe you knew her well?’

  ‘Indeed I did.’

  ‘Is that why you go down there and sit looking at the place where she died?’

  The man’s calm did not desert him. He said evenly, ‘She was a very lovely young girl, on the brink of her life. The accident was tragic, but her memory is…precious to me.’ His eyes, magnified by his thick glasses, unexpectedly filled with tears. He blew his nose.

  ‘In fact, you had asked her to be your wife?’

  ‘Which I believe she would have been in time, had her life not been so tragically cut short, though I fail to see that is any of your business,’ he answered coldly.

  ‘Only in so far as anything that might connect the deaths of two young women in the same place is very much our business,’ Reardon said, and there followed a short silence. ‘Right, then, Mr Hatherley, if you weren’t there, down by the lake on Monday night, you can’t have seen anything, which is what we wanted to know.’ He made no move to go, however, but added casually, ‘I don’t suppose you knew Miss Huckaby at all, the unfortunate young lady who has been killed?’

  ‘Well, of course not, not in that sense, she was Lady Sybil’s maid. But as a matter of fact, I was acquainted with her, slightly. Through her mistress’s war work, you understand. The young woman used to help Her Ladyship. Being on the hospital administration side myself, there were occasions when we met.’

  ‘What was your opinion of her? Did you like her?’

  ‘Good Lord, I don’t know that I ever thought about it. One doesn’t, really. When one doesn’t meet them socially, I mean,’ he added, at last meeting Reardon’s look. ‘She seemed to do her job, and Lady Sybil appeared to like her, otherwise she wouldn’t have been in her employ for so long, would she?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘All the same, one doesn’t like to think of…what happened to her. She seemed harmless and inoffensive enough.’

  ‘Well, Mr Hatherley, I don’t think we need keep you any longer, though there’s just a small point we’d like cleared before we go. It’s come to our notice that you were in the habit of meeting Miss Wentworth sometimes, by the lake. Is that true?’

  This time, Mr Hatherley’s self-satisfaction was so far upset as to cause him to swear. ‘Oh, God, these bloody villages!’ he said. ‘Nothing is ever secret. All right, yes, but it was only once or twice – and not, I assure you, the day she died.’

  ‘Unwise, to say the least of it, wasn’t it, sir? Meeting her alone like that?’

  ‘I would not like to think you are implying that anything…untoward…took place. Because if you are, I would suggest you might think of framing an apology.’

  ‘If I’ve given that impression, then I do apologise, Mr Hatherley. That was not my intention.’

  Hatherley would not let it go. ‘I dare say you might choose to think the worst, but it was simply that Miss Wentworth did not wish to let everyone know her business – any more than I did.’

  ‘There was a party, the night she died. Were you a guest?’

  ‘I was. And yes, to anticipate your nex
t question, I did walk home via the lake – to clear my head. There had been quite a lot of champagne consumed.’

  ‘What time was it when you left?’

  ‘I don’t remember. Just after eleven, perhaps. The evening didn’t go on late. The guest of honour was an elderly lady.’

  ‘No meeting with Miss Wentworth that night?’

  ‘We had already met, at the party,’ he said coldly. ‘And in any case, I never met her at night.’

  Both police officers regarded him gravely. Then they stood. ‘Thank you for your time, sir,’ Reardon said. ‘You may hear from us again.’

  ‘Well, Wheely?’ Reardon asked as soon as they were outside and heading back along the lakeside path towards the village. The capricious rain had stopped again and they paused for a moment to allow Wheelan to fill and light his pipe. Reardon had given up smoking during the course of the operations on his face, the process had been too painful, and now he found he no longer had the desire for tobacco, though he still liked the rich smell that wafted across as Wheelan got the pipe going.

  ‘I doubt he’d anything to do with it,’ Wheelan said, sucking his pipe.

  ‘He seemed pretty upset at the mention of Marianne Wentworth.’

  ‘Ar, very likely. Summat tells me he’ll enjoy spending the rest of his life feeling sorry for hisself.’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh.’ Then Reardon laughed. ‘Summat tells me you may be right, Wheely.’

  Wheelan smoked on, and after a moment or two, pointed with the stem of his pipe across the lake to where smoke rose above the trees. ‘That the gyppos’ camp you was on about?’

  ‘I thought we would try to find time to go over and see them this afternoon. But first, I want to pay another visit to the Big House.’