Stately Homicide

by S. T. Haymon

  Jurnet swallowed hard. He said easily: ‘All complaints to be addressed to the Chief Constable.’ Adding, and, for Danny’s sake, even managing a grin: ‘First time anyone’s complained because an Inspector hasn’t called!’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t make a joke out of everything. Danny’s very upset with you. He can’t bear to see me unhappy, and what was I to think when it was as plain as pikestaff you didn’t believe a word I told you about the earrings, and about Chad – oh, and everything! My work’s suffered, I haven’t been able to settle to anything. Even Tommy’s sensed something’s wrong and has gone right off his food –’

  Tommy as well! Jurnet thought. She wants it all, the greedy cow, she grudges every last crumb. Wishing with all his heart that he could imagine Miriam so ferociously possessive, he said, still making himself sound amicable: ‘Well, now you’re off the hook you must all be feeling fine again. All three of you.’ He did not feel it necessary to add that, in his book, nobody who had become, however, peripherally, caught up in a murder investigation was ever off the hook until the culprit was delivered up to justice.

  ‘Danny’s gone in to Angleby. I haven’t had the chance to tell him yet.’ Spoken as if this too were the detective’s fault.

  ‘Never mind. Pleasure in store.’

  Anna March said angrily: ‘I know you think he’s dim. Believe me, Ben Jurnet, he can see through you!’

  ‘I should hope so,’ the other returned simply. ‘I’ve never pulled any blinds down, where Danny is concerned.’

  Behind him, perched on the defunct fountain in the centre of the yard, the peacock let out a despairing cry.

  The detective wheeled about in the baking glare.

  ‘Doesn’t anyone ever think to give that blinking bird a drink of water?’

  He had earlier noticed a standpipe in one corner of the yard, with a bucket hung over the tap. Now, thankful for the excuse to cut short the conversation, he went over and filled the bucket; brought it back to the centre of the yard and tipped the water into the basin. The peacock, perched on the rim, supervised the operation with what seemed to the detective sardonic amusement.

  No wonder. As fast as he poured, the water found its way through the cracked stone, and spread itself out on the cobbles. Jurnet could feel it soaking into his socks.

  Anna March was laughing, the sharp-nosed cow.

  Jurnet waved to her cheerily.

  ‘Now you know why I never joined the Scouts! Give Tommy my love!’

  On the drive in front of the house, parked next to his own car, and in front of the stone bulls guarding the bridge over the moat, Jurnet had come upon the two Hungarians, Ferenc Szanto and Jeno Matyas, unloading their gear from the latter’s small Renault. Which was to say, Szanto was doing the unloading, watched by his friend propped on his sticks, shoulders hunched, his face shaded by a straw hat whose underbrim had been lined with some green material which imparted to the pale skin something of the faint, unearthly glow Jurnet had sometimes noticed in corpses on the point of putrescence.

  ‘The Detective-Inspector!’ Szanto had hailed him jauntily. ‘Just the man I wanted to see! I have made a discovery of the greatest interest!’ He put down a canvas holdall in order to clasp the detective’s hand and shake it warmly. ‘Tell me – do the police know that madness is catching? Because – can you believe it? – thanks to this lunatic here, I, a man hitherto sound in all my faculties, have just spent hours, starting from before daybreak, bent double in a wooden box, horseflies biting, my spine fractured with the weight of binoculars, one cup of instant coffee, and a sandwich filled with sand – for what? To peep at young girls dancing naked on the beach, perhaps? In that would be sense. No, Inspector – to look at birds! Birds! Flap, flap, they fly. Flap, flap, they sit down again. I tell Jeno the excitement is killing me. Especially since, for most of the time, I do not even see this miraculous flap, flap, which sends him into ecstasies. Perhaps you do not know that there is on binoculars a little wheel you must turn: – too much one way is all fuzzy one way, too much the other way is all fuzzy the other way. In between is all fuzzy also. I tell you, Inspector, only a madman can see through binoculars, and not until the afternoon – by which time I am become as mad as Jeno – do I see without fuzzy. And then, what do I see? Flap, flap, sit!’

  Jeno Matyas looked at his friend with affection.

  ‘He comes because he doesn’t want me to carry things, and because he’s afraid I may be taken ill out there alone on the marshes, with no one to help me.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ the other protested. ‘I come because I cannot believe that, mad or sane, he goes all the way to Hoope just for flap, flap. I want to know who is the beautiful lady he goes to meet. Is she a mermaid, perhaps, or a foreign spy who comes ashore from a waiting submarine? All I know, Inspector – and you, as a policeman, will understand my feelings – it is very suspicious!’

  The bookbinder said: ‘In a little while the terns will be leaving. We think it’s hot, still high summer, but they know better. One of these mornings they’ll be off – a few at first, the over-anxious or the impatient ones – then more and more until it is hard to remember they were ever there.’ In a voice devoid of all self-pity, he concluded: ‘We know, of course, that next year they’ll be back again, so why make a song and dance about it? What we can’t be sure of is that we’ll be here to welcome them.’

  Jurnet, a little at a loss, turned to Ferenc Szanto.

  ‘Want me to give you a hand with that stuff?’

  ‘You hear that, Jeno?’ the big Hungarian demanded. ‘What a country it is, this England, where, without loss of face, a Detective-Inspector can offer himself as a baggage boy! I’m honoured beyond words, my dear sir, but I’ll not hear of it. Give me the keys, Jeno. I’ll see you home first, then come back for all this. I’ll be needing the car keys for tonight, anyway.’

  The other handed over the car keys as requested, but announced stiffly: ‘I don’t need any help, thank you.’ With a brief nod in Jurnet’s direction, he moved slowly away.

  ‘A porcupine has not more prickles,’ Ferenc Szanto remarked, watching the painful shuffle. ‘I tell him, you fill in a form and there is a special card you can get to put in the car window, lets you park in special places only for the disabled. But he says no, he will not – there is on the card a picture of a cripple in a wheelchair, and he is not a cripple.’ With a shake of the head: ‘A young man, still. It is a tragedy.’

  ‘Is there any prospect of a cure?’

  The other shrugged his shoulders, and went back to the task of removing binoculars, cameras and tripods from the car.

  ‘He, as you say, bites my head off when I try to ask. So I don’t ask.’

  Jurnet asked: ‘Why do you need the car tonight, if you don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘Aha!’ The big man straightened up, twinkling. ‘So you have not found your murderer while we were gone.’

  ‘’Fraid not.’

  ‘You still think you will find him?’

  ‘I know we shall.’

  ‘Bravo! And yet –’ the Hungarian swung round and stared at Bullen Hall as if he had never seen it before – ‘one more little murder in all the long perspective of history – Is it truly worth all your effort?’

  Jurnet said: ‘I’m not much of a one on perspective. I reckon we only live – or die – one minute at a time.’

  ‘How typically English! And how strange when you, Inspector, if you will allow me once again to say so, look yourself so un-English. But perhaps that is the essence of Englishness – disguises, always disguises.’ Eyes still on the house: ‘How typically English, eh, the old bricks, the little turrets, the lawns and trees, the lake with waterfowl. And how typically English the worm in the apple, the violence which lies concealed within the so peaceful exterior! The Queen Anne and her brother, my black-hearted friend Laz, poor Mr Shelden – and that is to speak only of what we know –’

  ‘Enough to be going on with.’ Jurnet refused to be deflected. ‘The car,
sir. You were saying –’

  ‘I see you are not to be put off. I shall have to confess, Inspector, and hope you will let me off lightly. As an antidote to a day of lunacy I propose to spend my evening in the company of the sanest people who ever lived – the Marx Brothers. You know them? Fantastic! They are on tonight at the Classic in Angleby.’

  ‘Something the matter with your own car, is there?’

  ‘I have no car. I share with Steve the jeep, bought from the American air base – very strong, but with the steering wheel on the wrong side. Or perhaps it is your English roads which are on the wrong side, I am not sure which. All I know, when your police constables see me in the distance they sharpen their pencils and turn over a clean page in their notebooks. They have even learnt, with practice, to spell my name! So, when he is not using it, I borrow Jeno’s car, which is made with the wheel, and the roads, in the right place.’ With a broad grin: ‘OK?’

  ‘OK!’

  It had begun to rain; a noisy, intemperate storm as overdone as the heat it displaced. Jurnet went round the flat hauling in the drenched curtains, shutting the windows he had earlier thrown wide. As he reached for the bar which anchored the small casement in the bathroom, the cat he had seen on the forecourt scrambled over his bare forearm and plopped down softly on to the vinyl floor.

  The detective finished fastening the window, and went into the kitchen; filled a bowl with milk and called ‘Puss, puss!’ feeling pretty sure, however, that his uninvited guest was not the kind of cat to come when called. Sure enough, no animal materialised, then or later. Jurnet looked under the bed, the gas cooker, everywhere. No cat. Had he not borne the proof of two long scratches on his right arm he would have thought he had imagined it.

  Feeling rejected by the world, human and animal alike, he went and lay down on the bed, counting the interval between lightning and thunder as he had always done, ever since he was old enough to count. One, two, three, four miles away. The familiar ritual soothed him and, for all the racket and flash outside, he fell asleep, a descent into a limbo empty alike of dreams and vague half-thoughts that floated tantalisingly just out of reach. When he awoke, the rain had quietened to a muted strumming, and the telephone was ringing. The bedside clock showed 3.47.

  His caller was Mollie Toller. No need to ask how Mollie came to know his home number. She had begged it from him back in the days when Percy had stumbled from disaster to disaster. Now, as always in the past, she began with an apology for bothering him outside working hours; a set piece, her voice soft, the accent posh: and, as always, Jurnet waited, not interrupting, until the thin shell which encased her mounting hysteria cracked, and an anguished wail came over the wire.

  ‘He hasn’t come home, Mr Jurnet! Perce hasn’t come home!’

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  At Headquarters he picked up WPC Frampton, a sensible girl not given to small talk. The duty sergeant who had taken the detective’s earlier call and put the necessary wheels in motion was able to pass on the news that there was no news – no accident involving anyone answering to Percy Toller’s description, no one of that name in custody anywhere in the region; no break-in bearing the unmistakable marks of the little man’s genius for making an almighty botch of it.

  On the rain-slashed drive out to Bullensthorpe Jurnet tried to convey to the quiet girl at his side something of his feeling for the ex-burglar: only to shut up in mid-sentence when he suddenly realised he was speaking in the past tense.

  Every light in ‘Pippins’ was on, flooding out to the garden. Mollie Toller had the door open before the two police officers had got the garden gate off the latch; and they ran through the downpour and into the little hall like children rushing in from school.

  ‘If it’s all the same to you,’ said Mollie Toller, ‘I’ll have your coats. No point in getting the upholstery damp.’

  Her voice was level, her hair combed, her flowered housecoat buttoned from throat to hem. No trace of the distraught woman on the telephone. There was even a hint of a smile upon discovering that the Detective-Inspector had thought fit to bring along a chaperone. This appearance of normality struck ice into the detective’s heart. It could only mean that Mollie had given up her husband for dead, and was already concentrating on hiding her grief from the impertinence of official commiseration.

  She said: ‘Lionel brought me home. He’s my nephew, just become a father for the first time. A lovely little girl. They’ve asked me and Percy to be godparents. But now –’ she paused, as if contemplating with composure an unavoidable change of plan. ‘Half-nine, it must have been,’ she went on, ‘or a little before. Lionel ’d remember, probably, though he’s so cock-a-hoop about the baby he hardly knows what day of the week it is, let alone the time. Dark, anyway: darker than you’d expect because the storm clouds were already piling up, and the first drops began to fall just as I came through the door. I knew it was Percy’s night for his tutorial, so of course I didn’t think anything of it till half-past ten, when I thought, well, he’s late tonight and no mistake. Though, even then, I wasn’t too surprised because I knew he was to take his finished essay in for sending off to Milton Keynes, and he’s always full of himself when he’s just got a bit of his work signed, sealed and delivered. He and Miss Grant – that’s his tutor’s name – always go at it hammer and tongs, in the nicest possible way, of course. “I don’t know about the others,” I always used to say to him, ‘but she earns her money with you.”’

  ‘He’ll be a Ph.D. yet!’

  The woman did not deign to comment.

  ‘By then, too, it was coming down cats and dogs, and I thought, he’s taken shelter somewhere that hasn’t got a phone, and that’s why he hasn’t let me know.’ Mrs Toller took a deep breath. ‘At eleven on the dot I phoned Miss Grant. Got her out of bed, but she was ever so nice about it once she knew who I was. She told me Percy hadn’t turned up for his tutorial at all, something that had never happened before. She also said what a pleasure it was to coach him, and how one student like him made her whole job worth while. Wasn’t that nice?’

  ‘Very nice,’ Jurnet agreed. He noticed that Mollie had begun to tremble slightly, as if with cold. WPC Frampton, who had noticed it ahead of him and left the room, came back with a blanket which she draped round the plump little shoulders. The detective said: ‘You should have got in touch with me earlier.’

  ‘If he’d had an accident, I thought, the hospital would have been in touch. He always carried his Bullen Hall card in his pocket, the one they give out to the volunteers, so anyone who found him would know who he was.’ After a pause: ‘If, on the other hand, he’s out on a job, I thought, I can’t help him.’

  ‘You know he’s finished with all that!’ Jurnet found himself coming heatedly to the absent Percy’s defence. ‘Besides, I told you. Nothing’s come up of any break-in with his signature on it.’

  ‘It was when I thought about the break-ins that might not have come up that I got on the phone to you.’ The woman looked at Jurnet stonily. ‘Since we came here to “Pippins”,’ she said, ‘Percy’s become very handy with Do-it-yourself. Plumbing, rewiring the electricity – saved us I don’t know how much.’ After allowing time for the implications of this last to sink in: ‘I think after all these years he’s learnt at last how to disconnect a burglar alarm without having the whole police force come down on him like he’d rung for the butler.’

  ‘You’re only guessing.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Mrs Toller inclined her head in agreement. The trembling had become more pronounced. ‘Guessing that I see him lying with a broken neck under a skylight, or fallen down some cellar stairs, and nobody knowing a thing till they come to work in the morning. He may have learnt about electricity, but he was still the same old Perce, never put a foot right when you can put two wrong.’

  Jurnet went over to the trembling little woman, and took her cold hands between his own.

  ‘What a carry-on!’ he chided gently. ‘Look, Mollie, you know me. Whenever I
caught Percy up to his tricks I ran him in – right? And much as I like him personally, if I were to catch him at them again I’d run him in again without thinking twice about it. But the way I’ve heard him talking lately – so respected, so proud to be at the Hall; studying for the Open University and all that – he’d never throw away all you’ve built up here for a few watches, a bit of silver he can’t get tuppence for. Give the man the benefit of the doubt, for Christ’s sake.’

  Mollie Toller went on dully: ‘You know that clapped-out old van he used to run about in? When it fell apart and I came into my Auntie’s money, he wanted us to get a car, something with a hatchback, but I said no: what do we need a car for? Actually, I’d have loved it, living out here, a mile and a quarter to the bus. But what I’d really decided was, you need a car to be a villain. You can’t pull off a job and then ride off on your bike with the pickings clanking away on the carrier. I didn’t want to put temptation in his way.’ She considered what she had just said, and then amended it with a painful honesty. ‘What I really mean – don’t I? – is, I didn’t trust him.’ Bleakly: ‘If you’re right and all that’s happened is he’s fallen off his bike and hurt himself, it’ll be my fault for not letting him buy that Volkswagen he’d set his heart on.’

  ‘Don’t talk daft!’ Jurnet’s tone was warmly jocular. He was sorry to have to follow it up with: ‘But there was something, wasn’t there, Mollie, not quite kosher, or you wouldn’t even be thinking along those lines. I noticed it the day you gave us tea, and again this afternoon – yesterday afternoon now – when I ran into Percy at the Hall. I’ve never known him out of temper before. He didn’t seem to want to look me straight in the eye.’

  Mollie Toller heaved a tired sigh and said: ‘I suppose you still want to know why we didn’t turn up at that party.’