Stately Homicide

by S. T. Haymon

  For a moment the room was silent; Ellers waiting quietly confident of the outcome: Batterby, the ambitious cop, not quite hiding his hope that at last Detective-Inspector Benjamin Jurnet had gone too far.

  Then the Superintendent smiled, without irony or equivocation, almost.

  ‘No, Ben, you may not ask. You know that I hold the Chief in the highest esteem.’ The smile faded, the friendliness endured. ‘But you can give Mrs Barwell my compliments when you next run into that lady, and tell her to keep up the good work. In my book, violent death is the ultimate insult, and, like justice, when it’s done it has to be seen to be done, in all its unmitigated ghastliness, if that’s the way it happened. If a few weirdoes get a kick out of reading all about it, too bad. If tender susceptibilities are hurt in the process, or if it frightens the kiddies, so much the better. That’s the way the world is. I hold that it’s never too early to learn that a human being foully down to death is more than a gambit in a guessing game.’ The Superintendent got up from his chair and went towards a small table where a little pile of chastely jacketed books awaited his attention. ‘Rommel.’ He picked them up, one after the other. ‘Jan Smuts. Cecil Rhodes. Bernadotte. Significant, d’you think, the way he went for strong men?’

  Dave Batterby said, too happy to be able to put his superior officer right to consider the risk inherent in doing so: ‘Not his choice. Every one of them commissioned by the publishers. It’s all in my report.’

  ‘And a very remarkable report it is, too,’ the Superintendent asserted, with a warmth that only a Jurnet might think suspect. ‘I’m looking forward to Ben seeing it. Give him some very useful ideas, I don’t doubt. According to Dave, Ben, there was more to Shelden than met the eye. Seems the greenery-yallery, Grosvenor gallery bit was all a front, merely putting on the persona expected of a writer, while privately he beavered away at his job like it might have been a grocer’s assistant or a plumber.’

  ‘Civil servant or stockbroker, more like it.’ Batterby was clearly enjoying his position of man in the know. ‘Nothing arty about his flat, even if it was in Hampstead. Word processor, micro computer, notes filed away in cabinets, bank statements and bills dealt with up to date. He had quite a portfolio of shares there –’

  ‘Who gets his money?’ Jurnet broke in. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘Neither his solicitor nor his bank know anything about a will. Young chap – probably never got round to making one. Unmarried. Mum and Dad killed in an air crash five years ago. No brothers or sisters or near relations. As of now, looks like the Treasury’s in for a nice little windfall –’

  ‘Girl friend?’

  ‘Nothing much on, male or female, far as I can make out. In the time available, that’s to say.’ Adjusting his best sleuthing face, eager yet attentive, Batterby leaned forward in his seat and addressed the Superintendent. ‘I take it, sir, you’ll be wanting me to return to London to continue with my inquiries?’

  ‘What do you think, Ben?’ No mistaking the glint in the Superintendent’s eye. ‘Could the key to Shelden’s death lie in London after all?’

  Jurnet replied with all due gravity: ‘Anything’s possible, sir.’

  ‘It is indeed. So, yes, Dave – we’ll be sending you off on your travels again.’ Surveying the detective with a benevolence so marked as to be positively alarming to one with eyes to see: ‘Besides, how else are you going to find yourself a shirt to go with that suit?’

  Jurnet put his hand into his pocket and brought out the earrings. He put them down on the desk, where they lay, the silver gleaming, the strange red stones cool and ambiguous.

  ‘You’ll be wanting to know about these,’ he said.

  Anna March had held her hand out for the earrings with a little cry of pleasure.

  ‘Oh, good! You found them! Had they slipped down the back somewhere, then?’

  Jurnet did not yield up the earrings. His fingers closed over them, pressing the red stones into his palm.

  ‘Slipped down where?’

  ‘In the bedroom, of course. It was so hot and they began to feel like a ton of coal. One ear even began to bleed a little. If I ever use that design again it’ll have to be lighter altogether. Honestly, I thought, if I don’t take them off, by the end of the evening I’m going to have lobes like those African women, hanging down to my navel.’

  ‘So you took them off. What did you do with them?’

  ‘Put them in my bag – that little evening bag of Chinese silk I –’ The woman stopped abruptly. Her nose seemed to have become even sharper. ‘What is this? Why are you asking me all these questions? You’re interrogating me, Ben Jurnet. Are the earrings anything to do with Chad?’ She stared at the detective’s folded fingers as if they concealed a lethal weapon. ‘You’re not by any chance suggesting –’

  Jurnet said: ‘I’m simply trying to find out what happened.’

  ‘I told you! I took them off in the bedroom when I went to powder my nose, and I put them into my evening bag.’

  ‘Which you then carried about with you for the rest of the evening?’

  ‘No. I left it in the bedroom, on the bed, among the coats and scarves. All I had in it besides was a comb and lipstick and a bit of change. There seemed no point in carrying it around. When I came back to fetch it, just before we left, I found the bag open and the earrings gone.’

  ‘You never said anything.’

  ‘What was I supposed to say, for Christ’s sake? First off, I told myself I couldn’t have shut it properly. The earrings must have fallen out, and they were on the bed somewhere. I looked as best I could, moving the coats and scrabbling under the bed in case they’d fallen to the floor. But nothing: and the trouble was that people were coming in and out all the time, so I couldn’t take a really thorough look.’

  ‘I’m sure if you’d told them you were missing your earrings they’d have been happy to help you look for them.’

  Anna March’s body jerked in exasperation.

  ‘God, you’re thick, Ben Jurnet! If I’d done that, and the earrings still hadn’t turned up, don’t you see what it would mean? That someone at the party had stolen them. Somebody who’s part of this community where we all have to get along together, even if it kills us, otherwise it’d be bloody hell. What would you have me do? Run and tell you, so you could lock the door and not let anyone leave till you’d searched their bodily orifices?’

  ‘You’re a bloody cow, Anna,’ Jurnet said, and felt better for it. ‘And dirty-minded. And unconvincing. I reckon there were at least six people from the caterers, maybe more. Outsiders. Nobody for whose feelings you needed to have such exquisite consideration.’

  ‘I did think of them, if you want to know. But then I thought, you can’t go flinging about accusations you can’t prove. You’d have had something to say, wouldn’t you, if I’d come to you and said it was one of the waitresses – just like that, with nothing to back it up. But, most of all –’ and now, fleetingly, Jurnet caught a glimpse of the beauty which had possessed her on the night of the party – ‘the way I felt that night, I thought, what’s a pair of earrings when suddenly everything’s come right for you as you never expected it to, even in your wildest dreams?’ Anna March looked at the detective challengingly. ‘Pity you didn’t happen to come round when Danny was home. He’d have punched you in the nose, copper or no copper.’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not, once he heard that one of your earrings was found in Shelden’s mattress, and the other was in his hand as he lay dying on the grass.’

  The woman looked at him wide-eyed with horror, but also – Jurnet realised with a surge of aversion, the greater for having been so long repressed – with a certain odious self-satisfaction. ‘You mean, it was Chad himself who took them?’

  ‘As a souvenir of your one night of love?’ Jurnet demanded coarsely. ‘From what you’ve told me, it wasn’t anything to write home about.’

  Anna March said nothing for a moment. Then: ‘Know something, Ben? When this is over, you and I aren’t goi
ng to be friends any longer.’

  ‘Who says we ever were? Only pretended, or maybe kidded ourselves, for Danny’s sake.’

  ‘You’re just jealous because I married him.’

  ‘Now I know you’re crazy.’

  The Superintendent asked: ‘Do you believe Mrs March’s story?’

  ‘For the moment,’ Jurnet answered carefully, ‘I neither believe nor disbelieve. I just take note. I certainly don’t set much store by her suggestion that Shelden himself might have taken the earrings. Bit of women’s magazine sentimentality.’

  ‘Keep it on the cards just the same. No use being high-minded. Sentimentality’s what makes the world go round.’ The Superintendent looked down at the earrings with an evident pleasure. ‘The woman knows her job, I’ll give her that. I take it the lab’s had a go at them?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Unfortunately, the one Miss Appleyard says she found, she left it on her dressing table when she came back from her stroll, where her old battleaxe of a maid found it in the morning before Madam woke up. Seeing it was dirty, she took it back to the kitchen and gave it a good rub up. That’s her story, anyway. Either way, the lab didn’t find a thing except silver polish.’

  ‘What kind of dirty? Did she say?’

  ‘Merely that it looked dull, and the little bit which goes through the ear was stained brown. She thought it might have been blood, but couldn’t say for sure. That would fit in with what Mrs March says about one of them making her lobe bleed. The other earring had one of Shelden’s prints, plus another, the lab says, too blurred to be any use. As you can see, being pressed under the mattress, it got coated with some of that marl they’ve got up there on the roof, which doesn’t make things easier.’

  The Superintendent observed tetchily: ‘If things were easy, there’d be no need of coppers.’ And to Batterby: ‘Well, Dave – it’s back to London at first light, then.’ He opened a drawer, took out the detective’s report with a care that brought a glow of pride to the cheek of its compiler, and handed the folder over to Jurnet as if it were something precious. The two exchanged looks, for once, of perfect complicity.

  ‘Take this with you, Ben, and give it the attention it deserves.’

  Trading was long over for the day when Jurnet and Ellers emerged from Police Headquarters on to the Market Place: the litter cleared, the wide plain a skeletal grid of empty stalls. Hard to believe that tomorrow the pyramids of oranges and apples would rise again, the cauliflowers stare moon-faced out of their green ruffs: T-shirts swinging in the breeze, budgerigars hopping from perch to perch, toasters and cassettes, Japanese watches and second-hand ginger beer bottles, all at once in a lifetime prices; and a rich mix of voices – Norfolk, Cockney, Brum, with cadenzas of the mysterious East – that spoke of buying and selling, hello and goodbye, but mostly of belonging, to that time, to that place.

  As always, when he had occasion to cross Angleby Market Place, even in the melancholy of evening, Jurnet felt a great surge of love for his native city. It mingled with his love for Miriam, and intensified his loneliness and longing. Tomorrow, the market would be back, in all its aromatic variety.

  He would still be alone.

  ‘Rosie,’ said Sergeant Ellers, as if he had guessed what the other was thinking, ‘said I wasn’t to come home unless I brought you back with me. She said I was to tell you it was Chicken Marengo, your favourite, and if you say no she doesn’t want to see neither of us ever again.’

  ‘Give her my love and tell her I know she doesn’t mean it.’ Jurnet smiled at his colleague with affection and understanding. Rosie Ellers, plump, pretty and devoted, and the best cook in Angleby, was a woman in a million. ‘You, I can understand. But how can she bear to cut me out of her life for ever?’

  ‘That’ll do, Valentino! Cost her a quid, anyway,’ the little Welshman announced with satisfaction. ‘Had a bet on it. I said you’d never accept, not with Miriam away and this bloody murder. One or the other, I said, but not both, not even if the menu was apple pie with sultanas – real live ones hot from the harem – coming out of the pastry doing the belly dance.’ Voice charged with a concern that was comically paternal: ‘You’re not going to bed without anything?’

  Without anyone’s what you mean, thought Jurnet. Aloud, he said: ‘Don’t talk daft! Miriam filled up the fridge before she left, enough for an army.’

  Too softhearted to nail the patent lie for what it was, Sergeant Ellers said nothing more until the two reached the roadside where they had parked their cars. There, he made one last try.

  ‘Rosie ’ll kill me.’

  ‘That’s OK with me, so long as she waits till we’ve finished over at Bullen Hall. One corpse at a time’s as much as I can manage at my time of life.’

  For lack of anything better to do he went to bed early; drew the curtains and lay in the dark outfacing the convulsive tic of the digital clock which Miriam, in the name of progress, had substituted for the dear old wind-up alarm he had been given as a twelfth birthday present. If this was the best modern technology could do, he didn’t think much of it.

  What was it Elena Appleyard had said? The future a dream, the present no more than a punctuation point: only the past was real. Anne Boleyn and George Bullen, Appleyard of Hungary and Chad Shelden – all dead by violence; past, and, according to that strange woman’s strange way of reckoning, timeless, and therefore contemporary. Between waking and sleep, the clock winking at him with unremitting ferocity, Jurnet grew uncertain of where, who he was. It seemed to him that he had seen more than Chad Shelden chewed by eels: been present on Tower Green when the Frenchman specially fetched from France had sliced off Anne Boleyn’s head with his sword as neat and nice as a turnip, and when a more journeyman executioner had done for George Bullen with an axe. Surely he had watched Laz Appleyard diving through that opening in the sluice gate, and cried out a warning, too late, as the centre board fell on his neck.

  Nearer to sleep, a great sadness overcame him – not for the past remembered, but for all the happy times he had forgotten. Nearer still, something else that had slipped his memory struggled upward towards the light, and sank back into unconsciousness.

  Something about Shelden?

  His life? His death? His –

  Jurnet slept.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Francis Coryton exclaimed: ‘At last!’

  ‘Exactly what I was feeling myself,’ Jurnet responded, deliberately misunderstanding. ‘I knew the house was large – but not such a maze! Even the ghosts must get lost. One more wrong turn and you’d have had to send out the St Bernards.’

  ‘Bad as that?’ inquired Coryton, looking pleased. ‘I used to have a little room off the front hall. Dreadful! Every little problem landed on my desk. So I decided to make myself scarce back here – and peace descended like the sweet dew from heaven. People find it such a fag to seek me out whenever something has to be done that they seldom bother. Which means, in practice, that I’m blessedly spared all those boring decisions which they are perfectly capable of taking for themselves, and I can sit here full of honour and mystery, doing absolutely nothing.’

  ‘But now that there’s no Mr Shelden to take over, you’re going to have to take a few decisions, aren’t you? All those things in that report you prepared for the trustees.’

  Coryton sighed.

  ‘Camel rides for the kiddies, etcetera?’ He regarded the detective with a thoughtful amiability which seemed more an expression pasted on to his face than an intrinsic part of it. ‘That all depends on you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘On me?’

  ‘On whether or not you arrest me for Shelden’s murder, of course.’

  ‘Why should I be doing that?’

  ‘Oh, come now, Inspector! Don’t tell me my fifty-odd years of devouring whodunnits have been wasted. You saw with your own eyes, heard with your own ears, how the new and late and indifferently lamented curator of Bullen Hall snatched from my trembling hands my last chance of fame and fortune. Probably too, traine
d as you are to see what one can manage to hide from lesser mortals, you sensed the black hatred that flooded into my heart when he refused to make the Anne Boleyn correspondence available to me, its discoverer. I’m sure men have killed for less.’

  Jurnet said mildly: ‘On the other hand, Mrs Coryton assured me you’d got over your disappointment before you’d even got back home. She said you’d agreed with her – and Mr Shelden – that, all in all, it was a work of scholarship you weren’t really up to.’

  ‘Did Jane say that? Then no doubt she also told you that I took the dog out while she was getting herself to bed; and that she hadn’t a clue what time I got back. Jane’s enthusiasm for the truth knows no bounds.’

  ‘Do I detect a note of sarcasm?’

  ‘Perish the thought! Apprehension, perhaps. The truth should never be published without a health warning. But my dear wife was absolutely right. I had calmed down. I had come to realise how ludicrously unqualified I was for the task which, in a moment of hubris, I had thought myself capable of bringing to a successful conclusion. Where she was absolutely wrong was in assuming that recognising the truth made me ipso facto willing to accept it. On the contrary! The more I accepted my undoubted shortcomings the more I hated the man who had, so to speak, rubbed my nose in them. I took Lulu – that’s our dog’s name, by the way: spaniel with a dash of this, that, and the other – partly because she asked to go, and because, even if it’s your intention to hurry off and clobber somebody to death, it doesn’t mean you necessarily want to come home afterwards to a pool of dog piss on the hall rug. But chiefly, it was to give myself an alibi. Who could imagine anything more innocent than an Englishman taking his dog for walkies?’