Stately Homicide

by S. T. Haymon

  ‘Yes. I still want to know.’

  ‘It’s simple, really. Perce mentioned he’d heard that the alarms in the state rooms were going to be switched off for the night.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I didn’t dare for us to go. I knew in all that jam of people I’d never be able to keep my eye on him every minute. The only way I could be certain was for the two of us to stay home in front of the telly till it was time to go to bed.’

  ‘You aren’t telling me he was planning to steal from Bullen Hall!’ The detective did not hide his disbelief. ‘Every item catalogued and photographed a dozen times over!’

  ‘It depends what you mean by stealing.’ Mrs Toller was crying a little now, the detective noted with relief. WPC Frampton unobtrusively produced some tissues and pressed them into the woman’s hand. Mrs Toller blew her nose into one of them, regained a precarious equilibrium, and lamented: ‘And I had to put the Open University into his head!’

  ‘How’s that again?’

  ‘Books, Mr Jurnet. Once he signed on and started in on the foundation course all I heard was books. Especially old ones, antiquarian. You’d think they’d just been invented. It was like a madness. “A book’s the words inside,” I used to tell him, “not the year it was printed.” But he’d say no: to hold an old book in your hand was to hold history and literature at one go. Perce wasn’t lying to you when he said he’d given up the kind of thieving you used to pick him up for. Anyone try to knock off a postage stamp at the Hall, he’d have been on to them like a tiger. But books were different. I think he’d have whipped out every book in the Bullen Hall Library if he’d thought he could get away with it. Not to sell. To keep. He said it was shameful the way they were kept there, nobody doing anything but read the titles on the spines, caged up behind bars like wild animals, unable to live the life they were meant for.’

  ‘And you were afraid that, if you went to the party, he might seize the opportunity to slip away and liberate a few?’

  ‘He said it’d be an act of charity. He said, even when they came to take the inventory, they didn’t let them out of their cases. One of the clerks just read off the title, and the other ticked it off his list. And he said they were packed so close together nobody would notice if he took one or two.’

  Jurnet demanded: ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me when I asked before?’

  ‘He wanted you to think he was an honest man.’

  Daybreak took him by surprise. ‘D’ye ken John Peel’ sounded on the door chimes, and there on the step was a young police constable, rosy as the light inching minute by minute into the eastern sky. The rain had stopped, the battered annuals along the path were picking themselves up and getting their act together again. High above the trees, a scrap of blue promised felicities.

  Jurnet was sure he had not slept, even though he had no recollection of how he had passed the unaccounted-for hours. Mollie still sat upright on the chrysanthemum-covered sofa, her hair-do impeccable, WPC Frampton in her facing chair bent forward in unflagging vigilance.

  The young policeman’s name was Ledbetter, and his mother was the Bullensthorpe postmistress.

  He had a message for Mollie.

  ‘I told Ma about Mr Toller. She says, if there’s anything she can do –’ The plump little figure on the couch made no acknowledgement. Red with earnestness, the young PC promised: ‘We’ll find him, Mrs Toller! Don’t you fret yourself.’

  To Jurnet, in the hall, out of earshot of the silent woman, he was less sanguine.

  ‘What a night, eh, sir? What a blooming night!’

  ‘I’ve known better.’

  ‘I’d look out at the bridge, sir, if I was you. The water’s almost up to the top of the arch, and it’s well over the carriageway either side. That Rover of yours is a bit low on the ground.’

  ‘Thanks for the warning. I’ll take care. Tell your Ma there is something. Anyone she can get to come in and stay with Mrs Toller? Someone she knows and likes?’

  ‘I’ll pop in and tell her. She’ll know. She’d come herself, if she didn’t have to open up the shop.’

  Jurnet accompanied the PC as far as the garden path, and stood there for a little after he had gone, breathing the sweet, cleansed air. Leaving the door open, he went back in, into the bathroom; found Percy Toller’s shaver, and thankfully took off the dark stubble which, every morning, to his unfailing disgruntlement, did its best to distort the unremarkable image to which he aspired.

  He switched off the shaver and became aware of a louder noise coming from the road; and, pushing open the opaque glass window, was in time to see Steve Appleyard drive past in the jeep. The young man looked bronzed, muscular, smiling.

  When the happy young man, his clothes soaked, his boots leaking mud over the floral carpet, came bursting through the front door of ‘Pippins’ not many minutes after, the smile had gone. Even the tan seemed to have paled.

  ‘I saw your car outside when I came past just now,’ he began breathlessly. ‘I thought you must be here. There’s a big branch caught up under the bridge. It was holding back the water, so I thought I’d better have a go at getting it free.’ He slowed down, made a determined effort to regain his composure, and achieved, even, a travesty of a grin. ‘I seem – don’t I? to be developing quite a gift for finding drowned bodies. It must be like dowsing. Only this time, at least –’ a shudder of remembrance and relief shook the taut young form – ‘there aren’t any eels.’

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Colton, in the suspicious way he had with the spoken word, distrusting any which was not written down and, for preference, enclosed in triplicate in an official folder, said: ‘You’ll have to wait for my report to the coroner. I’ll let you have a copy. The most I’m prepared to say is that at the moment – at the moment, mark you – I can see nothing inconsistent with a verdict of accidental death. That damn bank –’ the police doctor leaned over the parapet of the little bridge and scowled at the drop down to the river – ‘slippery as glass. That PC, the local one, says, what with the oil and the hot weather, the road surface lately hasn’t been much better. I’d have been in the water myself if he hadn’t grabbed hold of me. Someone ought to have a word with the Highway Authority. Extremely dangerous, the way that opening falls away directly down to the river, without so much as a strand of wire to stop a vehicle that’s come off the road.’

  ‘I understand the village kids use it all the time to go fishing for tiddlers.’

  ‘Oh, do they? In that case, it’s only a matter of time before one of them breaks his neck.’

  ‘Is that what happened to Percy?’

  ‘Have to wait till we get him on the table, won’t we? His neck certainly is broken, along with both legs and one arm, but any or all of those injuries could well have been caused after death by being caught up in that branch, and banging about against the arch all night long. My guess – and, mind you, that’s all it is – is that a blow on the left temple was what did for him – or at least rendered him unconscious, so that he couldn’t pick himself up and scramble out of the water.’

  ‘All nine inches of it. Ledbetter says that’s all it could have been when Percy came along. It didn’t start raining till after nine.’

  ‘More than enough to drown in, if you’ve just knocked yourself out – maybe on a stone, maybe on your own handlebars – and have the bad luck to land face downwards.’

  ‘Yes.’

  On the further side of the bridge, men were stripping off rubber suits and overalls, and packing them into polythene bags. They had already parcelled what remained of Percy Toller’s bicycle, and put it into the back of their van. Jurnet himself had retrieved the dead man’s briefcase, a bit of pseudo-executive nonsense in which, the detective guessed, Percy must have taken great pride. It had contained a sodden notepad, a plastic mac still neatly folded, and a small bundle of pencils, freshly sharpened, only one or two points broken.

  While the detective and the doctor watched, the mortuary van, which h
ad been parked on the grass verge, reversed, making a turn in the road which took it perilously close to the gap which had been Percy Toller’s undoing. As it mounted the hump of the bridge, the two men pressed themselves against the old brickwork to allow it room to pass, the driver saluting cheekily.

  In a minute or two more they were all gone, Colton included, leaving Jurnet still staring down at the water. He raised his head, and found to his surprise that Steve Appleyard had joined him.

  ‘Yes?’ he enquired abruptly. Then with more kindness, seeing the young man falter: ‘What can I do for you?’

  Steve Appleyard said: ‘I heard Jim Ledbetter talking about oil on the road, and I wanted you to know … What I mean is –’ making a fresh start – ‘the jeep’s been leaking – not much, but a bit – so I wanted to say this is the first morning I’ve brought it round this way. I’ve been working in the Hundred Field up the road, and always taken the track that goes through the wood. The back drive’s in such a state you take your life in your hands. It’s only because, after last night’s rain, the wood’s a bog, that I came along here at all.’

  ‘No need to answer an accusation that hasn’t been made. Enough cars use this lane without your contribution.’

  The young man looked relieved nevertheless.

  ‘Percy knew how it was, that’s the funny thing. People never take their own advice, do they? Couple of days ago, when I’d stopped by the gate for a bit, he came by, pushing his bike. I asked if he’d got a puncture, but he said no: only that the lane was a blooming death trap, and he didn’t fancy breaking his neck.’

  It was as an act of homage to the retired burglar that, arrived back at the Hall, Jurnet, for all his preoccupations, did not make straight for the west wing and the continuing saga of finding out who had done for Chad Shelden. Instead, he passed over the bridge between the rampant bulls, crossed the courtyard, and entered the house, which had just that moment opened for business. The elderly woman busy replenishing the picture postcards in the revolving stand turned towards him moist-eyed: ‘Terrible about Mr Toller, isn’t it?’

  Well aware that, in the country, news – especially bad news – travelled faster than the speed of light, the detective knew better than to ask how she had come by the information with so little delay. He inclined his head slightly as he passed by, and murmured, as was expected of him, ‘Terrible!’

  Yet strangely, once in the Library which had been Percy Toller’s bailiwick, it did not seem as terrible as all that. Some echo of the little man’s artless enthusiasm seemed to hang in the air, another ghost to add to the many who already populated the place.

  What a naive delight the ex-burglar must take at finding himself one of such exalted company! Jurnet glanced up at the portrait over the fireplace, and fancied that even that dour and dyspeptic face looked a little happier. Could it be, at that very moment, in some dark cranny between space and time, a spectral Perce was eagerly exclaiming to George Bullen, Viscount Rochford, that he was the spitting image of a chap he used to know, a certain Detective-Inspector of the Angleby CID?

  Setting such fancies aside, the detective moved slowly along the ranks of books, peering through the gilded grilles and scanning each tier with an attention which plainly aroused doubts in the volunteer – a thin man, with a military manner – called in as an emergency replacement. The man crossed the room to where Jurnet, stretching his neck, was trying to check that there were no books missing from a top shelf; coughed to get the other’s attention, and then delivered himself of the fairly dispensable remark: ‘Books.’

  Jurnet agreed. The books were packed close together, all present and correct. Mollie could have that much consolation, at least.

  ‘A lot of them,’ the man said.

  ‘Yes. A lot.’

  From the Library, the detective found his way to the Appleyard Room; and this time, despite the heat already beating down through the glass roof, found himself – now that he knew it was all a load of old cobblers – actually enjoying the reverential display. Though the handsome blonde giant whose shrine it was was even less to his taste as a scoundrel who traded in men’s lives than as the hero of a fairy story, at least he had stepped out of the photographs into three dimensions. A real villain, a real man.

  By contrast, the photographs of Elena Appleyard as a child produced an exactly contrary impression. The child clasping her brother’s hand, the young girl seated on her pony, glowed with a flame the years had long since extinguished. The pallid woman who had been Laz Appleyard’s wife and Ferenc Szanto’s lost love stared out at the room with eyes which saw nothing but the wasteland of her own life. On his father’s shoulders, with perfect confidence in the arms clasped round his chubby knees, Istvan Appleyard – young Steve – frolicked gleefully.

  As on his earlier visit, the detective left the great glass bubble by the exit on the north side of the house, and made his way round to the west wing. Away to the right, as before, a solitary swan balanced on its reflection in the water.

  A fake, Jurnet decided: the whole landscape a stage set. Everything in its place, preprogrammed, waiting for the curtain up. Cast assembled in the wings, even the murderer awaiting his cue.

  If only Benjamin bloody Jurnet could remember what it was. Something, someone, was not going according to the script. As Jurnet made his way along the west front, divided from him by the darkly gleaming line of the moat, a slender figure ran across the little bridge that led from the curator’s flat: Jessica Chalgrove, her ponytail flying, her blouse and skirt billowing with the speed of her going. Solitary, she ran as if pursued. Halfway across the lawn, one of her white sandals came off. To the detective’s surprise, she did not stop and pick it up; instead, kicked off its fellow and ran on. Even when she came to the end of the grass there was no slowing as the soles of her bare feet met the gravel underfoot. On she ran and vanished among the rhododendrons.

  Thoughtfully, Jurnet diverged from his route, crossed the lawn to where the shoes lay, and picked them up, still warm from the girl’s feet. In the flat he found Sergeant Ellers standing on the landing. The little Welshman looked puzzled.

  ‘What’s got into young Jessica?’ Jurnet demanded. ‘Just saw her streaking across the grass like the bloodhounds were after her.’

  ‘Exactly what I was wondering myself. She barged into me as I came out of the door. Never so much as said she was sorry, let alone offer to kiss it better.’ He finished, with all the assurance of a married man: ‘Reckon she just remembered she forgot to turn the light off under lover boy’s dinner.’

  Jurnet set the sandals down side by side on the old oak chest in the hall. He made his way into the incident room, his subordinate following.

  ‘I suppose you’ve heard about Percy?’

  ‘Everybody back in Angleby’s feeling real cut up, even the Super. He particularly said to tell you how sorry he was.’

  ‘Oh ah.’ The detective fiddled with some papers on the table. He said: ‘I want you to go and see Mollie. Ask if there’s anything we can do. Find out where her nephew Lionel lives and get him over, if somebody hasn’t fetched him already. Tell her,’ he finished, ashamed of his own cowardliness in putting off the encounter, ‘I’ll be along soon as I can.’

  ‘Want me to go right away?’

  ‘If you’ve nothing further to report on Mike Botley.’

  ‘Depends what you want to know. Last time I had word he was threatening to complain to the European Commission on Human Rights. Otherwise, he sticks to his story that Shelden, after slobbering him with love and kisses, suddenly goes off into a blinding rage, and beats him up like a three-egg omelette.’ The little Welshman eyed his superior officer. ‘Think he’s telling the truth?’

  ‘Let’s say I don’t disbelieve. Botley’s a devious little bugger, but I don’t believe he’s clever enough to invent a balled-up character who first gives in to the homosexual side of his nature, but then draws back at the brink, because the other half – maybe it was more than half – wants to be str
aight.’ Jurnet was silent. Then he said: ‘I could begin to feel sorry for Mr Chad Shelden, and not just because he ended up in Bullen Hall moat.’ Voice hardening: ‘But then he has to go and take it out of that noisome little punk when it’s himself he’s angry at, really.’

  Ellers commented cheekily: ‘Thereby forfeiting your good opinion of him, once and for all!’

  ‘That’ll be enough of that, Sergeant!’ Jurnet laughed, and felt better. Even the Mike Botleys of the world had their uses. At last he was getting upon terms with his current corpse. ‘Did Botley have anything else to say?’

  ‘Only what time did the next train leave for London, and would I please ask Mr sodding Winter to put together a small pack with his necessaries.’

  ‘Nerve!’

  ‘No sweat delivering that particular message, anyhow. The poor prick’s been hanging round the duty desk like a lost soul ever since we took Botley in.’

  Love! thought Jurnet, with a sudden pang that could just as well have been the last knell of that bloody octopus.

  At one o’clock, Sergeant Bowles, who had been into Bersham to stock up the larder, came into the incident room with some tongue sandwiches and a cup of tea. He looked worried.

  ‘Seen Miss Jessica, sir?’

  Jurnet, looking up from the file he had been working on, saw no reason to add to the good man’s anxieties.

  ‘Just a glimpse. Why? Doesn’t she always go home, these days, to fix a midday meal for young Steve?’

  ‘It’s the way she left her room.’ Leading the way down the hallway, rightly confident the detective would follow. ‘It’s not like her to leave a room like that.’

  Jurnet took in the papers strewn about the floor.

  ‘Not as bad as it looks,’ he pronounced, disguising the fact that he had caught some of the other’s foreboding. Why had the girl gone haring off in that way? ‘It’s only one box. She could easily have knocked it off the desk as she got up to go, and not even noticed what had happened.’