by S. T. Haymon
Sergeant Ellers began: ‘I sent PC Hinchley over to Chalgrove Manor to tell her father –’
‘Except that he isn’t, poor sod. Still –’
‘Sod’s about right. Bob Hinchley came back boiling. Seems the gentleman wanted to make a bargain. He’d go along to the mortuary so long as he got an undertaking nothing would be said at the inquest to bring his paternity into question. Otherwise, so far as he was concerned, the police could find somebody else to say it was or it wasn’t the ungrateful little trollop he’d been misguided enough to give his ancient name to.’
‘Did he agree, finally?’
‘Oh, he agreed – soon as Bob mentioned the newspapers. Just the word, casual-like. Could have been something to wrap his skate and chips in, but it did the trick.’ The Sergeant looked at his superior officer a little uncertainly. ‘Madam in the east wing wasn’t all that better. Gave me a look when I was shown in like I was selling brushes and she didn’t want any. Then, when she’d heard what I had to tell her, said “How very unfortunate!” in that frost-bitten voice of hers, and had the maid show me out without another word. Know something?’ Jack Ellers finished. ‘Somebody ought to give that one a bit of padding for Christmas – inside as well as out. Foam rubber’d be better than nothing.’
‘Can’t all be like your Rosie.’ Jurnet sat back on the seat overlooking the lake, where the two had seated themselves. He lifted his face to the sun. With eyes shut you could still think Bullen Hall a place of loveliness. The smell of green things growing. Children laughing in the distance. Lambs bleating, and a buzz of insects.
A buzz of insects. The detective stood up abruptly.
‘Time to get on.’
At his side Sergeant Ellers offered: ‘Accident and suicide in one day! All go at Bullensthorpe. Only thing – can’t see how it gets us any further on with who killed Chad Shelden.’
‘Look on the bright side, boyo! Number of suspects reduced by two. If they only continue to drop off at the present rate of progress, the crime’ll solve itself with no sweat from us whatever.’
The two walked a little way in silence, making for the door in the west wing, until the little Welshman said, sounding troubled: ‘I suppose it was OK to let that kid Steve go shooting off like that?’
‘You think he should have stayed and watched our lads doing their stuff?’
‘Not that. I only meant –’
‘The boy’s at home, among friends, family. We’re police officers, Sergeant, not universal aunts, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Shouldn’t think there’s all that much comfort to be found on Aunt Elena’s bony bosom –’
‘There’s always the Hungarians –’ Jack Ellers hid a smile as the Inspector’s next words made it clear that he was by no means as unconcerned about young Steve Appleyard’s well-being as he had pretended. ‘You might as well pop over to the smithy, Jack, and put Mr Ferenc What’s-his-name in the picture. The boy may even be there already.’
‘Will do.’ The little Welshman turned to go.
‘Wait a minute, though. What’s that?’ Jurnet stared at the west wing, at that protruding H of brickwork which housed the curator’s flat and the Long Chamber: then broke into a long-legged stride which left his chubby companion far in the rear.
‘Come on!’
The smoke curled out of the open window, a single ringlet spiralling upward into the summer sky. A tongue of flame peeped over the sill, and coyly withdrew. Suddenly, with a sound like a rifle crack, one of the diamond-shaped panes of glass exploded, to be followed by another, and another. By the time the two detectives reached the footbridge an alarm bell was ringing distantly in the main part of the house, and billows of smoke, orange-tinted at the base, were shrouding the parapets.
Sergeant Bowles, scorched and smoke-blackened, leaned against the bridge handrail, striving to regain his breath and the dignity proper to his calling. On the grass, somewhat the worse for its precipitate descent down the staircase, lay the steel filing cabinet from the incident room.
‘Got the records out all right, sir,’ he gasped, as Jurnet ran up. ‘Called the Brigade. Phoned Mr Coryton to clear the house.’ Coughing: ‘If Jack could just drag that file a bit further away –’
‘Don’t worry. He’ll see to it. Did the boy get out all right?’
‘Boy?’ The Sergeant shook his head dazedly. ‘Weren’t no boy –’
‘How did this get started?’ Urgently: ‘You’re sure there’s nobody up there – nobody’s been up there, in the study?’
Sergeant Bowles passed a hand over his red-rimmed eyes and, with an effort, came to attention.
‘Nobody but me up there. The bloke what found Jessica said he had to go and tell his wife, she’d be wondering where he’d got to – Boy!’ On a mounting note of alarm: ‘You don’t mean young Appleyard?’
‘That fire didn’t start itself. It’s the Appleyard archives that are burning.’
‘Nick Bly had a fag in there before he went on duty, and I thought –’ Sergeant Bowles started shakily across the grass. ‘Young Steve!’
‘You’ve done your bit!’ Ellers, unbidden, caught the portly police officer by the arm, and guided him away from the house. Jurnet took off his jacket, dipped it quickly in the moat, then draped it, dripping, over his head and shoulders.
‘Let’s hope to God you’re right, and there isn’t anyone.’
The stairs were hot, but the air breathable, just about. A Persian rug smouldered on the landing. The smoke was thinner than Jurnet had anticipated, a curtain which did not so much conceal what was there as teasingly distort it into shapes which, as soon as the eye had painfully deciphered them, dissolved and re-formed into others, equally deceptive.
The heat was horrific, illuminated by flames which, except that they had the power to singe and scorch and burn, seemed equally an illusion, so inconstant were they – at one moment reduced to the merest pinpoints, at the next, reaching for the ceiling. Crouching and weaving, relying more on his knowledge of the layout of the flat than on what he could actually see, Jurnet found himself at last in the study. Ablaze, the Chippendale desk was still unmistakable.
‘Steve!’ he called, startled at the harsh croak that came out of his mouth. ‘Steve!’
No reply. The fire in the cardboard boxes had died down a little. Scraps of the raw material for the definitive life of Appleyard of Hungary floated about the room like moths, the ghosts of moths. One of the oak floorboards hissed a spray of sparks and settled down to a stolid burning, nothing fancy or extravagant. By its steady glow, the detective at last caught sight of what he was seeking, and hoping against hope not to find.
Huddled in an angle of the wall, his chin on his knees, Steve Appleyard sat and watched the fire with blank, blackened face. His clothes hung in shreds. What showed between the tatters seemed themselves patches, bearing little resemblance to skin. When Jurnet, by a supreme effort, at last reached his goal and put his hand on this odd, violated body, the boy screamed in sudden, surprised agony.
After that, it was easy. The boy had fainted, and suddenly become as light as thistledown. Jurnet, astonished, could not make it out – but by then he could scarcely make anything else out either. It was not the impossibility of breathing which surprised him, but rather that to stop breathing had become a positive pleasure. All that huffing and puffing, day in and day out – when you came down to it, what was the point of it all?
Had he possessed breath enough to say it, he would have made some such observation to the dark presence he felt to be looming over him, and whom – to his even greater surprise, not being what you would call a religious man, he took to be God. It was not until some hours later, when Sergeant Ellers and the Superintendent were at last allowed to see him in the Norfolk and Angleby, that he discovered his saviour to have been the Hungarian, Ferenc Szanto.
Chapter Thirty One
Sergeant Ellers said: ‘I’d not have believed it, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. He came down the stairs and o
ut of the door with the two of you slung over his shoulders like a couple of bags of wet wash –’
‘The kid!’ Jurnet sat up in the narrow bed, swung his legs over the edge. Back to the huffing and puffing, he thought, not sure whether to be glad or sorry. ‘Is young Steve OK?’
‘They think so.’ This from the Superintendent. ‘He won’t look quite so pretty, but otherwise they think he’ll do.’ He looked down at his subordinate’s blistered legs, bedecked in bits of gauze soaked in something yellow and strong-smelling. ‘And where do you think you’re going?’
‘Out of here. They’ll be wanting the bed for someone who needs it. I feel fine.’ The detective stood up, immediately feeling anything but. ‘Fine!’ he croaked, daring contradiction.
‘Thinking about yourself, as usual! Here’s Dave Batterby back from London, burning for a chance to prove he can succeed where the great Jurnet has failed – and you say you’re fine! Don’t tell me you’d deny the poor chap his big chance?’
In no mood for their usual jousting, Jurnet demanded: ‘Is it OK, sir, for Sergeant Ellers to go and ask where they’ve hidden my clothes?’
‘In the dustbin’s my guess,’ the little Welshman put in cheerily. ‘Walk out of here the way you came in, boyo, I’d be obliged to run you in for indecent exposure.’ Relenting: ‘Not to worry! I rescued your keys, went back to your place, and picked up some replacements that look marginally better. You’ll have to wheedle them out of Sister, though.’
‘Are you sure you feel up to it, Ben?’ For once there was no residual irony in the Superintendent’s voice: a generous admiration. ‘I’m hanged if I’d’ve rushed into a blazing house to rescue an idiot boy from the consequences of his own folly.’ Oh yes you would, Jurnet thought; and emerged without a trouser crease out of place. ‘I shall, of course, be placing a full report before the Chief. Won’t do any harm on your record.’
‘Can’t see why, sir. I had to be rescued myself.’
‘Szanto says he could never have located the boy in time if you hadn’t found him first. The ceiling came down a second or two after he’d got the two of you out of the room.’
‘Is there much damage?’
‘The Fire Brigade managed to confine it to the curator’s flat – though that splendid Long Chamber’s going to need a lot of restoring. Did you know that Coryton was in the flat too?’
‘Coryton!’ The detective digested this surprising information. Then: ‘After the Anne Boleyn letters, I suppose.’
‘So he was,’ said the Superintendent. ‘And now he’s here, down the corridor, with his hands in a fairly nasty mess, and his temper to match.’
‘Why? Didn’t he find ’em?’
‘He did, in a manner of speaking.’ Sergeant Ellers took up the story. ‘He’d got into the flat from the main house, so nobody even knew he was there until he came stumbling out, waving a large envelope and grinning like he’d just won the pools. He tore the envelope open and took out a lot of yellowed old papers – the famous letters, I presume, though I can’t say for sure because, for a second or two, they held their shape, and then the whole shoot collapsed, disintegrated before our very eyes. They must have been baked to a biscuit – over-baked – only, being yellow anyhow, I reckon, it didn’t show up immediately. One minute they were sheets of paper, or parchment, or whatever – the next, little scraps blowing about like so much confetti. Mr Coryton carried on something dreadful, chasing after the bits like a butterfly catcher gone round the bend. Some of them blew into the moat, and he’d have followed, if Szanto hadn’t caught hold of him by the scruff of the neck, and made him give over.’
Discovering it was uncomfortable to be indebted to someone for saving one’s life, and doubly uncomfortable when that someone was somebody you might conceivably, one day, in the line of duty, have to arrest on a capital charge, Jurnet inquired ungratefully: ‘How did Szanto come to get into the act?’
‘He arrived back in his jeep from somewhere, with his pal, the lame one, just as people were streaming out of the main entrance after the alarm went off. PC Bly told him he weren’t to go any further, but he took blow-all notice, sounded his horn and kept on going, round the corner of the house and right up to the footbridge. And when he heard that young Appleyard might be inside, he just let out a roar and went charging through the flat door. Crazy!’
‘Lucky for me.’ Reluctantly.
‘You can say that again. Somebody must love you. Even the lame one wanted to have a go – ran a couple of steps like he was going to follow his mate – and, of course, fell flat on his face. When I went to help him up, he pushed me away and sat there, screaming something – in Hungarian, I suppose. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. I tell you, what with him and a raving lunatic chasing bits of old letters wafting in the breeze –’
‘Was it really a breeze?’ the Superintendent inquired whimsically. ‘Or was it Anne Boleyn and George Bullen making quite sure their passion remained private, not something for prurient academics to stick their noses into, in the name of history?’ Putting fancies aside: ‘Makes you wonder, though – eh, Ben? If a man’s willing to risk his own life for a bundle of letters, might he not be at least equally prepared to sacrifice someone else’s, to get his hands on them?’
‘It’s a thought.’ Jurnet nodded agreement. ‘That handing over of the key – that’s always got up my nose. A bit too pat, too contrived. You couldn’t help suspecting he had a duplicate stashed away somewhere, and one day – when we were finally off the premises and the coast was clear – he’d spirit the letters away, get them Xeroxed and returned to the desk drawer with nobody the wiser till he was ready to spring them on the world. Just to be on the safe side, on the off chance he couldn’t bring himself to wait for us to go, Jack here made it his business to keep tabs on them. The uses of a bit of thread! We checked those letters daily, and they were never touched.’
‘Stands to reason,’ the little Welshman pointed out. ‘If Coryton had managed to get them copied, there’d have been no cause to risk getting himself barbecued to get his hands on them.’
Jurnet demurred: ‘Don’t know about that. Would the experts accept photostats without having the originals to compare them with? I wouldn’t know.’
‘Give it some thought, anyhow,’ said the Superintendent kindly, but with that familiar undertone of threat which made Jurnet feel instantly better. ‘What shall I tell Dave Batterby?’
Whatever else he had done, the curator of Bullen Hall had at last succeeded in making himself look memorable.
‘You should have seen me twenty-four hours ago,’ he declared boastfully, his eyes, deep in a still swollen face, bright and watchful. ‘Out like a football. Really something to see. Besides, then you would have had to be nice to me, wouldn’t you? Can’t kick a football when it’s down. Could hardly have asked me, as I’m sure you intend to ask me today, with all the sinister overtones that implies, how I could have risked my life to rescue those bloody letters.’
Jurnet said, without beating about the bush: ‘Consider it asked.’
Francis Coryton looked down at his hands, inert on the bed. They were encased in clear plastic bags containing small quantities of some pink solution, and they seemed, almost, separated creatures: goldfish awaiting transport to the home aquarium.
‘The answer, Inspector, is that I did no such thing. Risk presupposes a conscious selection between choices. I simply didn’t stop to think – just as I didn’t stop to think what, given its exposure to heat and flame, would be the almost certain consequences of extracting the correspondence from its envelope instead of handing it over unopened to the conservation johnnies at the BM.’ Francis Coryton chuckled, a curious rumble of sound from between rubber lips. ‘Just as I didn’t stop to think that my unpremeditated action would undoubtedly restore me to the Number One spot in your list of suspects – assuming, that is, that I haven’t stayed there all along.’
Jurnet said: ‘I make a point of treating all my suspects the same. No favourites
. No top of the pops.’
‘I hardly know whether to be relieved or affronted. On the whole, I think, flattered. Such a macho thing, murder. Nobody before has ever thought me capable of it.’
Jurnet said deprecatingly: ‘Crippen was a mingy little man. You don’t have to be anything special to kill someone. All you need’s a defective moral sense and an overblown idea of your own importance.’
‘How deflating!’ Coryton looked at his hands again. Then: ‘Ever heard of the Judgement of God, Inspector?’
‘The Judgement of –?’
‘Trial by ordeal, if you prefer. In the Middle Ages, when they had someone up on a serious charge, they had two very effective ways of determining the truth, or otherwise, of the accusation. The accused person either was required to pick up a stone lying at the bottom of a cauldron of boiling water, or else was ordered, barehanded, to carry a lump of red-hot metal over a specified distance. The scalded or the burned flesh, as the case might be, was bound up and left for a few days, and then the bandages were taken off and the wounds examined. Though you, as a modern police officer, might not think so, they were reasonable beings, the people who devised such tests. They knew from bitter experience that the Judgement of God, like God himself, could be mystifying and equivocal. So they didn’t expect miracles – only that the hands should be well on their way to healing.’ Coryton raises his own, bagged, hands and held them out to the detective as if proffering a gift. The pink liquid swirled about his wrists. ‘Come back in a little while, Inspector, and see how mine are getting on. Maybe they’ll convince you.’
‘Of your guilt or your innocence?’
‘That will be for you to say.’
Chapter Thirty Two
It was a very nice funeral, as funerals went; the weather good, and Bullensthorpe churchyard as good a place as any for a kip pending the dawn of the last day. The whole countryside, of high and low degree, seemed to have turned out to wish Percy Toller happy dreams.
