by S. T. Haymon
He paused, positively inviting Jurnet’s inevitable question: ‘What were Dr Colton’s second thoughts?’
‘Submersion in the moat for some hours – Colton estimates the time of death to be between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. – coupled with the voracious and undiscriminating appetite of the eels, have between them, as the good doctor was at pains to stress, not made his task any easier –’ The Superintendent broke off again; added some extra decoration to the word BLOOD.
Jack Ellers offered: ‘With Dr Colton there’s always something.’
‘Agreed. But today, I’d say, wouldn’t you, that he had a point. He says the man’s spinal cord was fractured. If I follow him correctly, cervicle 6 had been slipped completely across cervicle 5, which, in layman’s English, as Dr Colton was at pains to translate, means that Shelden must have been completely paralysed by the fall.’ The Superintendent waited to let the full consequences sink in; then, in a voice carefully devoid of nuance, spelled them out nevertheless. ‘It would have been absolutely out of the question for Shelden, in the condition he was in as a result of that fall, to get himself across that stretch of grass and into the moat.’
‘Then –’
‘Quite right,’ the Superintendent pronounced encouragingly. ‘Then somebody must have done it for him, mustn’t he?’
Chapter Twelve
‘I’ve just had an idea,’ Sergeant Ellers announced, as he turned the Rover out of the road, through the magnificent entrance gates of Bullen Hall, and slowed down to a walking pace to accommodate the sightseers, bedecked with cameras or encumbered with small children, who surged backwards and forwards across the gravelled driveway. ‘What say we go to the National Trust and make them an offer? They lay on the stately home, and for 20% of the increased takings we provide the corpse. What do you think?’
Jurnet in the passenger seat looked about without committing himself. Whatever else you could say about murder, it was certainly good for business. Good for fish, too, judging by the family groups hanging perilously over the moat, hoping to tempt the eels from their lairs with offerings of everything from half-eaten sandwiches to worms dangled on a string. Good for newspaper men enjoying a day out in the country; and for telly reporters posed fetchingly against ancient walls and speaking to camera in the slightly breathless voices they affected when they had nothing to report except the fact that there was nothing to report.
Good for everybody, except the poor bugger lying in the morgue. Jurnet frowned. If truth were told, he hadn’t taken much of a shine to Chad Shelden, alive. Dead was another matter. Someone had to protect the dead man’s interests. He certainly wasn’t in any position to do it himself.
‘Why the hell did that blasted handyman and the cleaning lady have to let on about the eels? The papers have had a field day.’
‘Only human nature. Keep something like that bottled up inside you, you’ll end up in the loony-bin. You have to let it all come out. Very cathartic. Like Syrup of Figs.’
‘Thank you, Dr Freud!’ Jurnet gave his colleague an ironic pat on the knee, released his seat belt, and got out of the car. A little girl holding a completed daisy chain looked up at him and asked: ‘Can you lift me up, please? I want to put it on the cow.’
Jurnet obediently picked up the child and held her while she carefully worked the floral necklace over the head of one of the pair of bulls guarding the bridge over the moat.
‘There! Doesn’t she look pretty?’
‘Beautiful!’ The detective lowered the child to the ground. ‘Are you going to make a chain for the other one, as well?’
‘I haven’t time.’ The little girl smoothed down her smocked dress, and made sure the ribbon in her hair was in place. ‘As soon as Daddy comes back with the lollies we’re going to look at the eels which ate a man up.’ She bent her brows in charming thought. ‘I wonder what he tasted like.’ She ran off, calling back in childish glee: ‘I bet he tasted horrible!’
Elena Appleyard said: ‘I really am put out about my papers.’
‘You’ll have them back,’ Jurnet assured her, ‘the minute our people have finished. They’re quite safe, I promise you.’
‘So I keep telling myself,’ the woman came back, her calm presence contradicting the agitation to which she laid claim. ‘Yet I feel very uneasy not to have them in my hands, now that the flat’s unoccupied. It isn’t as if there are any copies.’
‘Your Hungarian friend was a bit glum we turned up when we did.’
‘Ferenc?’ She uttered the name in a tone which made plain both her dissatisfaction with the man and with the status the detective had accorded him. ‘It was all his doing they were there in the first place. I had intended to give Mr Shelden a few days to settle in, before unloading them on to him, but Ferenc persuaded me –’
She crossed her long, elegant legs, and uncrossed them again. With the midday sun full on her face, Elena Appleyard looked older than she had the night before. Older and more beautiful: every line a positive statement to the effect that, however it might be with others, she was imperishable.
A lesser mortal, thought Jurnet, a woman especially, would have chosen a chair out of the light. Elena Appleyard sat in its full glare, as if to show that she had no vanity.
Unless it were a subtle form of vanity, to make such a point of having none.
The conviction that he would never understand this extraordinary woman made the detective feel clumsy and ill at ease; and the room in which she received him completed his disorientation. Shown in by an elderly maid encased in a dress of some shiny black material which highlighted every whalebone and suspender of her old-fashioned corset, he had expected to find himself among the chintzes and little tables loaded with photographs in silver frames which, over the years, he had come to associate with country-house living. Miss Appleyard’s sitting room at first shocked, and then pleased, by its almost complete emptiness. It was, one might say, furnished with space, as fastidious as its owner. Such pieces as there were – and there were few enough of those – were modern Scandinavian. A number of seats, resembling up-market deckchairs, were propped, folded, against a wall.
One such had been placed ready for the detective. That, to his surprise, he found it superbly comfortable, in no way allayed his feeling of being far from home.
As if she sensed his discomfort, Miss Appleyard said smilingly: ‘It isn’t really so out of keeping. The Appleyards who first used these rooms, like everybody else four hundred years ago, went in for very little furniture. A bed, a trestle table, a few stools … How very sensible!’
Jurnet who, alone in his flat, quite often had fantasies in which three-piece suites covered in dralon figured prominently, and Miriam naked on a bed with built-in telly and Teasmade and fifty-two weeks to pay, agreed cravenly: ‘Very!’
‘Besides, there’s so much past enshrined in the rest of Bullen Hall, I decided to dedicate my own tiny corner of it to the present – or even the future. So long as life remains there are always possibilities, are there not?’ The woman looked at the detective, but not as if she expected an answer. ‘That’s really why I’ve been so anxious to get Laz’s biography over and done with. Propitiate the ghosts once and for all. Then one can go on to the next thing.’
Jurnet said, with intent: ‘I can see how annoying it must be for you to have all your plans knocked out of kilter –’
The other smiled, understanding perfectly.
‘You think it unfeeling of me to give priority to my private concerns, instead of expressing distress at Mr Shelden’s untimely – not to say, inconvenient – death.’ Making condolence sound unutterably non-U: ‘Consider the formal words spoken, if it makes you feel any better: but, apart from his literary gifts, which are a great, and possibly irreparable, loss, you mustn’t expect me to mourn unduly the passing of a really rather bumptious young man. It was simply that, in his person, as it seemed to me, two things came together very conveniently. Bullen Hall needed a new curator; and I couldn’t stand the thought of any more o
f those Boys’ Own Paper effusions about Appleyard of Hungary.’
‘It can’t be easy to find somebody else who can undertake both jobs.’
‘One of them, at least, has been taken care of. Fortunately, Francis has agreed to come back pro tem. When I telephoned him and told him what had happened, he offered at once to fill the gap. Not to go back to the flat, but to come in from the village for as many hours a day as may prove necessary.
‘And that reminds me –’ Miss Appleyard produced a hand-bag of soft white leather and took out a bunch of keys. Selecting one, she removed it from the ring, and held it out on the flat of her palm. ‘Will you please take charge of this? It seems to me a quite unnecessarily theatrical gesture, but Francis insists. He wants to be sure you have the key actually in your possession before he sets foot again in Bullen Hall.’
Jurnet got up from his chair and stood looking down at the thin, fine-boned hand.
‘I was under the impression Mr Coryton had already given Shelden all the keys. What are these you’ve got – duplicates?’
‘I do have a duplicate set, which I keep in the safe. These, however, are the ones Ferenc brought back with him, after he’d seen you.’
Jurnet exclaimed angrily: ‘I told him nothing was to be moved!’
‘So he said,’ Miss Appleyard responded serenely. ‘But he told me he’d already put the keys in his pocket before you arrived, and it quite slipped his memory until after you’d gone. He asked me whether he should return them to the flat, but I said no. I felt sure you wouldn’t want the Bullen keys left lying about any more than I would. Please take this one, Inspector, or I shall be left without a curator all over again.’
Jurnet took the key with some reluctance.
‘Opens the drawer with the famous letters, I take it?’
‘Exactly,’ The woman smiled. ‘You are now the custodian of state secrets, Inspector. Guard them well.’
‘Evidence of unlawful carnal knowledge, is how I’d put it. By two people old enough to know better.’
‘Have it your own way, Inspector.’ There was no denting that lacquered composure. ‘I feel myself under no obligation to justify either the sins or the virtues of my forebears. Francis, however, is at great pains to impress upon the police that he has no wish to take advantage of Mr Shelden’s sudden demise to gain access to the letters – that’s so you shouldn’t think he killed poor Mr Shelden in order to get hold of them. He told me, in fact, that, in bed after the party, Jane had already persuaded him that he was not, after all, the right person to undertake the task of editing them.’
‘Remarkable woman, Mrs Coryton.’
‘A very good soul.’ Miss Appleyard might have been speaking of an upper servant. After a brief silence, she inquired politely: ‘Have you arrested anyone yet?’
‘Give us time!’ Jurnet exclaimed, startled. ‘We’ve barely been introduced to the corpse. We weren’t even looking for anyone, at first. We thought it was an accident.’
‘Exactly what I thought myself –’ Elena Appleyard inclined her head slightly – ‘when I found him lying there on the grass, and the stones from the balustrade lying all about.’
‘When you what?’
Jurnet, who had sat down again, sprang from his seat. His hostess, her unruffled calm in pointed contrast to the other’s vehemence, regarded him with mildly disapproving eyes.
‘When I found him lying on the grass,’ she repeated. ‘I’m a poor sleeper at the best of times, and after all the stimulation of the party I knew going to bed would be hopeless. The night was so warm and so bright. So after I’d read for a while I went for a little walk in the grounds, as I often do, when I have difficulty sleeping. It must have been about 3 o’clock, or a little after.’
‘But why, in heaven’s name, if you found the man lying hurt, didn’t you get help? It might have saved his life.’
Miss Appleyard shook her head.
‘Quite impossible. As you may or may not be aware, I was a nurse during the war. I know whereof I speak. It was obviously hopeless. Mr Shelden was deeply unconscious, haemorrhaging from nose and mouth. There was barely a pulse. I could see no point in getting police and ambulance men out of bed in the dead of night, knowing he was bound to be dead long before they could arrive.’
‘Just the same,’ Jurnet insisted obstinately, ‘it seems – not to put too fine a point on it – pretty callous to leave a badly injured man lying, knowing he was still alive.’
Miss Appleyard’s self-possession was a little jarred by that.
‘Nothing of the kind! I stayed until he stopped breathing.’
The detective shook his head.
‘The post-mortem showed that Shelden was still alive when he went into the moat. Either you were mistaken about his condition – in which case, nurse or no nurse, you could have been equally mistaken when you decided there was no point in seeking help, or –’ the detective broke off.
‘Or,’ Miss Appleyard finished for him, ‘it was I who pushed him in. In which case, Inspector, why should I ever have mentioned my nocturnal stroll? I’m quite sure I left no tell-tale clues.’
‘You have a point there,’ the other admitted, readily enough.
‘Of course, in the morning, as soon as I telephoned Steve – actually, it was Jessica who answered and told me what had happened – I knew it must be murder: that, irrespective of whether Mr Shelden had fallen off the roof or been pushed, somebody must have come along later and put him in the moat. I can only think that I must have chanced along while the murderer was on his way down from the roof himself – unless he was there all the time, hiding in the shadows.’ The woman sounded quite untroubled. ‘I suppose, if we’d come face to face, he’d have had to kill me too!’
The detective observed soberly: ‘You may have had a lucky escape.’ More soberly still: ‘What I still don’t get, though, is why, once you realised Mr Shelden had been murdered, you still didn’t get in touch with us.’
‘It was very wrong of me,’ she agreed submissively. ‘I see that now. At the time, having spoken to Jessica, I merely thought, good, the police are here, they’ll take care of everything. If and when they come to see me, I’ll tell them what I know. I’m afraid I’m rather a passive person. I tend to let things happen to me, rather than make them happen. On the other hand –’ smiling – ‘you must admit, Inspector, if we at Bullen Hall have been remiss in one respect, we’ve been most cooperative in another.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The party, to which you came as a guest. There can’t be many cases, surely, where the police are introduced to the prospective victim and the suspects, and provided with a full set of motives, before the murder is even committed.’
‘It helps. It also confuses.’
‘Oh dear! And I thought we’d made it so easy for you – especially as Mr Shelden was only at Bullen Hall for a few hours all told.’
‘Time enough for somebody to fancy him – dead.’
Chapter Thirteen
Jack Ellers was waiting for him by the car, his chubby features rubicund in the sun, his mouth rimmed with brown from an elaborate confection of ice cream, nuts and chocolate flake, topped by a couple of improbable cherries.
Jurnet, whose taste ran to savouries, eyed the rapidly disintegrating structure with distaste.
‘What’s that on top, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Crown jewels, I shouldn’t wonder, considering what they stung me for it.’ The Sergeant dug in his plastic spoon with gusto. ‘Whatever you do, don’t tell Rosie. She’ll kill me, all these calories – and in this heat I couldn’t stand another murder, not even my own.’
‘You still don’t have to stuff yourself with that muck.’
‘Peckish, are we?’ The little Welshman eyed his superior officer shrewdly. ‘Her ladyship didn’t bring out the caviare and champers, then?’
‘Only information.’ And aggravation, Jurnet might have added. It hurt his professional pride not to call the shots. ‘What d’
you think of her? – says she actually found Shelden on the grass in the early hours, and, thinking him dead, did sweet Fanny Adams. Left him lying there, can you credit it, like he was an old crisp bag, for the serfs to sweep up in the morning, and put out for the dustman along with the rest of the rubbish. Charmingly apologetic, of course. But the question is: suppose Colton hadn’t put us on to it, would she have stayed mum and let them bury Chad Shelden as the victim of a tragic accident? In other words, is she covering up for someone?’
‘Such as who, for instance?’
‘You tell me. Could be herself. She’s the only one could get into the curator’s flat without even going outside. And she’s got a duplicate set of keys.’
‘Fragile ageing lady pushes vigorous young stud off the top of the house?’ Ellers looked doubtful. ‘She’s not going to get her brother’s life written up that way. Maybe all she wanted was a quiet life. The bloke was dead. Let dead curators lie.’
‘You may be right.’ Jurnet looked thoroughly discontented with himself.
Jack Ellers, recognising the signs, busied himself with his ice cream. The Detective-Inspector, as he well knew, always reacted to violent death with anger: – anger at the act itself, anger at his own thick-headedness in not being able instantly to put his finger on the perpetrator of the deed. Anger which could even include the corpse, lying there knowing all the answers and maddeningly saying nowt.
The Sergeant waited until he had successfully negotiated the last of his sweet goo, wiped his hands and face on his handkerchief, and disposed of the plastic spoon and container in a nearby litter basket. Then he began briskly, without prior introduction: ‘While you were gone I had a good look round the Coachyard, like you said. Everything pretty much as usual, far as I could tell. One place in the corner had a card on it: “Back in 20 minutes”.’
