Stately Homicide

by S. T. Haymon

  ‘Letting someone tread all over you like a doormat?’ Tormented by a sudden vision of Miriam, wanton on her Greek island, Jurnet’s voice held disbelief and comprehension in equal parts.

  The curator put his glasses on again.

  ‘Anyone who treads on your doormat,’ he pointed out, ‘at least has come through your door.’

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Jurnet came up the stairs to the curator’s flat, purposely seeking out the squeaks in the uncarpeted treads. The old oak obligingly cooperated, and the detective’s features, dark and dissatisfied, relaxed into an expression that was almost paternal as, above, the clatter of teacups, the animated rattle of conversation ceased abruptly. A girlish giggle cut itself off in mid-hilarity. Footsteps lighter than those of a policeman receded down the hallway.

  By the time, taking each stair with deliberation, he achieved the landing, the incident room was a hive of quiet industry, PC Hinchley busy at the filing cabinet, PC Bly on the phone to the Lord knew who, Sergeant Ellers at a typewriter which he attacked with one-fingered ferocity. Only the smallest noise of crockery came from the adjoining kitchen, whence Sergeant Bowles issued benign and unruffled to announce that, by a happy coincidence, he had just that second put the kettle on.

  Jack Ellers declared an armistice with the typewriter, and came over to let his superior officer know that Mrs Coryton had been on the blower several times, asking for him.

  ‘Didn’t you get out of her what it was about?’

  ‘All she said was, you’d know if I told you she was phoning from Mr Winter’s, in the Coachyard.’

  ‘Ah! She’s been gazing into young Mike Botley’s beautiful black and blue eyes.’

  ‘She said she was there, and would stay there till you came. When I said I’d get you to call her back when you came in, she said it wasn’t anything she could discuss on the phone. It was something you had to hear, and see, for yourself.’

  Jurnet said: ‘We’d better get on down there, hadn’t we?’

  Even as he spoke, Sergeant Bowles, that kindly man, appeared, bearing tea and biscuits. Jurnet gulped down the scalding liquid, and took the Bourbons along ‘for afters’. A minute later, crossing the little footbridge over the moat, he broke the two biscuits into several pieces, and dropped them into the water. They floated on the surface for a little, before descending leisurely into the murk.

  If the eels were waiting, they did not let on.

  In the pottery, the dust hung heavy. It revolved sluggishly in the shaft of sunlight that sloped through the open half-door, kept aloft – or so it seemed – by nothing more affirmative than a listless disinclination to obey the laws of gravity. In the gloom that bounded the sunlight upon either side, the dust was something to sense rather than see; a weighing upon the spirits that had bowed the broad shoulders of Charles Winter and twisted Mike Botley’s face into an expression of rigid petulance. The young man, arms flopped between his legs, sat slouched on a low stool. Between the first and second fingers of his right hand a lighted cigarette slowly reduced itself to ash and a wisp of ascending smoke.

  As the two detectives came in, the potter, hollow-eyed and unshaven, ejaculated ‘Oh, Christ!’ in a voice naked with suffering. He stood at his wheel, wearing the same canvas apron, slacks and dirty yellow sweater in which Jurnet had seen him earlier; his large hands resting on a damp cloth which covered a small mound of clay. Into Jurnet’s mind came some half-remembered story about giants who renewed their strength by contact with the earth. He looked closely at the man, who returned his look with something between aversion and despair.

  Even Jane Coryton, in her white cotton dress, seemed diminished by the prevailing greyness. Just the same, the voice with which she greeted the police officers’ arrival held an undeniable note of triumph.

  ‘Oh, good!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’ve brought somebody with you to take notes.’ Wheeling round to where Mike Botley sat contemplating his cigarette as if mesmerised: ‘All right, then! Tell them! Tell them what really happened!’

  The young man raised his head momentarily: long enough for Jurnet to note that his face, though plentifully scabbed, was halfway back to its normal coarse prettiness. The head and ears were still bandaged, but more lightly than before, and with a clean bandage.

  ‘Get stuffed!’

  ‘Charles!’ Mrs Coryton appealed to the tall, anguished figure at the potter’s wheel. ‘You tell them, if he won’t.’

  ‘Darling Jane,’ said the potter, in a gentle tone more piercing than swords, ‘this is your party. You laid it on. You invited the guests. So why don’t you do the honours?’

  ‘But I can’t do that!’ the woman cried. The two detectives, waiting, watching, listening, said nothing. ‘It would only be at second hand.’ Appealing to Jurnet: ‘That won’t do, will it?’

  Jurnet said: ‘It’s quite true that if either, or both, of these gentlemen have anything to say as a matter of evidence, they must say it for themselves.’

  ‘Mike!’

  Jane Coryton planted herself in front of Botley. The young man’s face, behind the spiralling cigarette smoke, held a deliberate vacuity that was as much of an insult as a smack in the face. Mrs Coryton waited a moment longer. Then: ‘Well, don’t say you didn’t ask for it!’

  With a characteristically efficient gesture that brought the overlapping windings of gauze away as one entity, still retaining the shape of the skull they had moulded, she whipped the bandage off the young man’s head. The cigarette dropped to the floor and lay smoking in the dust.

  ‘Ow!’ Botley jumped to his feet, knocking the stool over. ‘You lousy scrubber!’ He raised a tenderly exploring hand to a wound on the left side of his forehead, just below the hairline. ‘If you’ve started it bleeding again I’ll bleeding sue you!’

  It was indeed a nasty gash; Jurnet could see that. It should have been stitched, especially for a young man whose face was his fortune. Judging by the look of the livid split, the skin on either side ridged and iridescent, Angleby CID could count itself lucky not to have ended up with another case of murder on its hands.

  Just the same, Jurnet’s gaze was concentrated elsewhere; upon the torn, swollen ear lobes, from each of which, it was only too evident, a vicious hand had wrenched an earring with none of the finesse required to disengage it without harm. From one of them, black with dried blood, a thin thread of flesh dangled as if it were itself some barbaric ornament.

  Mike Botley demanded mockingly: ‘If women will leave their handbags about, what can they expect?’

  ‘You saw how we had to leave early on account of he was pissed to the eyebrows.’ Mike Botley looked at the potter with a lively malice. The hurt incised deeply into Charles Winter’s face seemed positively to stimulate the other to garrulity. ‘Well, no sooner are we out on the landing than his lordship wants to throw up.’ Turning to Jane, strong young teeth bared in a caricature of a smile: ‘You got me to thank, Jane, for getting him to the lav on time. Sick all over yer carpets would ’a’ been nice, wouldn’t it?’

  Jane Coryton pointed out: ‘Not my carpets any more.’

  ‘Her Imperial Majesty Elena’s, then. She’d ’a’ done her nut.’

  Jurnet interposed, on a note of cold inquiry: ‘The earrings.’

  ‘Hanging about waiting for the old cack-arse, had to do something, di’n’t I? Thought he must’ve fallen down the hole, but no such luck. Anyway, I wandered into the bedroom where the women had put their coats an’ things. Combed my hair in front of the glass, poked about a bit –’

  Jane Coryton said succinctly: ‘All the drawers had been cleared out days before.’

  ‘You got a suspicious mind, ducky! All I did, someone had dumped a Spanish shawl on the bed. I draped it round me shoulders, took a flower out of a vase and did a bit of ole in front of the mirror, just for laughs. Christ, was I fed to the teeth with Charlie boy!’

  ‘The earrings,’ Jurnet said again.

  ‘The earrings!’ the other echoed mockingly. ‘T
here was this one bag someone had left behind. Well, it had to be Anna March’s, di’n’t it? Ethnic. A pair of earrings and 47 bloody p! I bet she doles out 10p to Danny for a sherbet sucker if he behaves himself and don’t answer back.’

  Jurnet said, in the same even tone: ‘You stole them.’

  ‘47p? I wouldn’t demean myself. I borrowed the earrings, that’s all. Anna weren’t using them, was she? We’re all mates here in the Coachyard – right? – so what’s wrong with borrowing a pair of earrings from a pal just for the fun of it?’

  ‘You were on your way home. Planning to wear them in bed?’

  ‘Just an idea I had,’ the young man said airily. His tone changed, he jerked a shoulder irritably in the direction of Winter. ‘Then he came blundering out of the lav, stinking like a drain, an’ I was the one had to get him home. And going on like a nagging wife about what did I mean by making eyes at Mr Shelden. I don’t mind telling you, if he’d fallen off that bridge into the moat – and he could have, easy, if I hadn’t seen him over like he was a baby – I’d’ve left the bloody eels to get on with it and good luck to ’em! Go on? I thought he’d never give over!’

  Jurnet observed: ‘If he was that drunk, he must have gone out like a light once you got him back home.’

  Botley surveyed the detective with a fresh, almost childlike, interest.

  ‘Know what, rozzer? You’re bright. But then, I suppose you’re trained to it. Got his shoes off, that’s all, and there he was, sprawled out on the bed snoring fit to blow the roof off.’

  ‘Leaving you free, for the rest of the night at least, to put on Anna’s earrings and go your own sweet way.’

  The young man giggled. Jurnet, despite himself, felt his face stiffen with distaste.

  ‘Not just the earrings, Inspector! You are a one! I had a dress I’d been keeping for a special occasion. Crimson velvet with lovely sleeves –’

  ‘One of the dresses from the pageant. Where are they kept stored?’

  ‘There you go again!’ declared the other. ‘You’ll cut yourself, you’re so sharp. They’re kept in one of the empty coach houses –’

  ‘Something else you borrowed –’

  ‘Saved from certain death, more like. They got rats in there.’

  ‘Never mind that. You put on the dress, and the earrings –’

  ‘And my wig. That’s my own property. Charlie give it me for Christmas – didn’t you, Charlie boy?’

  The man said, out of the depths of some private hell: ‘I was only pretending to be asleep. I waited until he’d changed into that dress and was tiptoeing towards the door, and then I got up. I’d guessed all along he’d made some private arrangement with Shelden, to go to him after the party was over. That’s why I dragged the earrings out of his ears, why I beat him up. He never got through the door.’

  Mrs Coryton sprang forward, ready to protest, when Mike Botley forestalled her with a weary contempt beneath which the potter bowed his head silently.

  ‘You don’t want to pay no heed to him! Won’t be happy till he’s sacrificed his good name to save me from a murder rap. He’d been Jesus, he couldn’t wait to be crucified. Pity I didn’t leave those earrings alone, though. Didn’t even care for ’em, particularly. Not my style. You’d have never found out, otherwise.’

  ‘We’d have found out.’ Jurnet spoke with a conviction he did not entirely feel. ‘Had you, in fact, made a date with Shelden?’

  ‘Not in so many words. But I knew, he knew – what more do you want?’

  ‘More of a code, is it, then – like the Masons? What made you so sure he was gay?’

  Botley’s fists clenched. His face darkened.

  ‘I knew. I knew all right!’

  ‘OK. You knew. Calm down and tell us what happened.’

  ‘I rang the bell and he opened the door so fast I think he must’ve been waiting on the other side of it. Either that, or he come down the stairs four at a time. I don’t think he recognised me at first – you’d be surprised, that black wig makes me look a different person altogether – and then I said, “I’ve come to read the meter.” Laugh? You could’ve heard him all the way to Angleby, if you’d been listening.’

  Mike Botley looked at Jurnet, and said with a confiding air in which there seemed no artifice: ‘I don’t mind telling you I really fell for him in a big way. He was so lively, so full of get up and go – not like Old Constipation here, brooding over his clay and counting his senna pods. I felt like I was coming alive again after being left in suspended animation like those blokes in 2001. We went up the stairs laughing, his arm round my waist, and it was laughs all the way from then on. He took me into the kitchen and I made some sandwiches out of the leftovers while he put the kettle on and made us some coffee; and then we took it into a nice room with a desk in it, and we sat on the edge of the desk, eating and drinking, and chatting away as if we’d known each other all our lives. It was really great!’ The young man’s face brightened at the recollection. ‘No sex, believe it or not. Just friendliness. It wasn’t till we were doing the washing up together that he suddenly made a grab for me and kissed me – put his tongue in like he was looking for my tonsils. By the time he whispered in me shell-like ear, “Let’s take the mattress out on to the roof, what do you say?” I was as hot as he was.

  ‘I don’t mind admitting, I was real gone on him. I waited while he went and slipped into something comfortable. He said it like Mae West, wriggling his hips – and laugh! I thought I’d die. At last I managed to get out, “We’ll never be able to do it, if you don’t take it a bit more serious.” And do you know what he did then?’ Botley’s face had become white and intent, the damaged area round the eyes standing out purple by comparison. ‘He took my face between his two hands, very gentle, and he said, “You silly little goose, this is serious. This is for life.”’

  ‘Not all that long, as it turned out.’ Jurnet had to find some way of venting his discomfort.

  ‘Too long by half!’ The bitterness, the brutal change, was all the more shocking. ‘When he came back – gold pyjamas he had on, and his velvet jacket – we went into the party room, and then up the stairs to the roof. The mattress was propped up against the wall, just inside the door. It was one of those inflatable ones, partly blown up, but not as far as it would go. There was a foot pump to pump it up higher, and once we got outside Chad started pumping away as if his life depended on it. Me, I thought it was OK the way it was. I mean, when you’re boiling for a screw you don’t usually stop to check how many pounds pressure there is in the blooming bedding.’

  Mike Botley paused, and considered a moment. Then he said, quite softly, possessed of a rancour that imploded within, devastation invisible to the naked eye: ‘I told you he was gay, di’n’t I? I told you the way he kissed me. On’y thing I didn’t tell you, because I had to find it out for myself the hard way, it turned out Mr fucking Shelden didn’t really feel it right to be natural an’ enjoy the nature the good Lord seen fit to give him. Felt he ought by rights to be laying some flabby cow, all breasts and buttocks you could bounce off like a trampoline. Not that he didn’t still want me – he was looking like he’d got a prize marrow stuffed down his pyjamas – only all of a sudden lover boy has what I understand are called qualms. Bloody fool! Not that I made a scene, or anything, you understand. Disappointed, but then, that’s nothing new, living with good old Charlie. Only –’ and now the young man’s voice took on a note of harsh complaint – ‘why the hell I got to be the one to suffer, all on account some bloody weirdo’s got problems of identity?’ He petered out to a sulky silence.

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘Here’s what happened next! Here and here and here and here –’ Mike Botley pointed to his face, his gashed head, his mutilated ear lobes. ‘All of a sudden the geezer went berserk – goes for me like a raving lunatic, punching, kicking, I don‘t know what. When he wrenched the earrings out of my ears –’ the young man shuddered – ‘I think I passed out –’

 
Jurnet asked with scant sympathy: ‘You didn’t think to fight back?’

  ‘You could’ve soon fought back an earthquake. I did the only thing I could – rolled myself up like a Swiss roll, an’ waited for the earthquake to stop.’

  ‘You didn’t by any chance leap up, lock your strong young arms round your attacker and heave him over the parapet?’ While Botley stared at him in silent contempt, the detective added: ‘It could have been self-defence.’

  ‘You ain’t been listening. There weren’t no defence. Shelden beat me up like he’d been saving it up to take out on someone ever since he got potty-trained. Just my luck, that someone had to be me.’

  Jurnet pursed his lips reflectively.

  ‘If he was acting as crazy as you make out, how come he knew enough to turn it in before he did for you for good?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask him, won’t you? All I know is, suddenly he stopped hitting, put his hands up to his face, and screams at me to get the hell out. I didn’t have to be asked twice! An’ you know what?’ The damaged face twisted in a grimace. ‘Rushing down all them stairs in that bloody dress, what do I do but trip and fall all the way down the last flight! Oh, it was my night all right!’

  ‘What time was it when you left the flat?’

  ‘How the hell should I know? I weren’t charging by the hour, you know!’

  Charles Winter came to life again, and said, in a voice as grey as the clay that caked him: ‘He got home just after three.’

  ‘With respect, sir,’ said Jurnet, in a voice that indicated that he felt no respect, ‘you were in no condition to know what time he got in.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Inspector’ – and now it was as if the blood had begun to circulate again, the voice growing deep and vigorous: ‘Mike and I are on the same wavelength. Even in my drunken sleep it got through to me that he was in danger. The knowledge woke me up. I switched on the bedside light, and saw it was five minutes to three. I called “Mike!” and when he didn’t answer, and I could see he wasn’t anywhere in the place, I put on my shoes to go out and look for him.’ The potter passed the back of his hand across his forehead, leaving a further smear of clay. ‘I knew where to look for him, of course – except that it didn’t matter any more; only that my darling was hurt. He needed me. I’d just opened the flat door when he came stumbling up the stairs.’ The man closed his eyes, then opened them. ‘If you had only seen him! The pity of it!’ In a voice vibrant with emotion: ‘If Chad Shelden had put in an appearance at that moment I’d have torn him limb from limb!’