Stately Homicide

by S. T. Haymon

  ‘The afternoon of his death, just after closing time, he came into the workshop in a very agitated condition; and when I saw what he had brought with him I was almost equally agitated, although this, I flatter myself, I managed to conceal. He began by telling me that Mollie was away, that he had been finishing an essay for the Open University to do with Jane Austen; and what with one thing and another, Mollie’s restraining influence being absent, he had taken the opportunity to break into one of the bookcases and forcibly “borrow” a first edition of Sense and Sensibility.

  ‘That was the book he held in his hand – or would have been, if that particular edition of Jane Austen’s masterpiece hadn’t been sold some six months previously to a collector in the United States.

  ‘He was no fool, was Percy; and he was in a blazing fury. Had he discovered that I was the murderer of Chad Shelden I don’t think he would have been half as angry.

  ‘“How could you do it?” he shouted, shoving the dummy book under my nose. “How the bleeding hell could you go and do a thing like that?”

  ‘I managed to calm him down eventually. I spoke to him about the Soviet oppression of my country and, in the end, had him almost in tears with my stories of children starving in the streets, and Cossacks galloping about the countryside ravishing virgins and then disembowelling them. I rather fancy the burglar story may have been true, because, otherwise, I think he would never have come to me for an explanation, but gone straight to the police. As it was, he finally promised to say nothing, so long as thenceforward I left the books alone. In his opinion, not even starving children nor ravished virgins justified the rape of one first edition of Jane Austen.

  ‘We shook hands on it, and off he went, leaving the telltale dummy safely on my worktable. He left in something of a hurry, our conversation having taken up time he hadn’t budgeted for. I gathered he was going home to snatch something to eat, and then he would be cycling into Angleby for an Open University tutorial, at which he intended to hand in his completed essay. Mollie, it appeared, was not due back in Bullensthorpe until later in the evening.

  ‘After he left, I sat for a little while. I liked Percy Toller. I also knew there wasn’t a hope that, sooner or later, he wouldn’t give Mollie a full account of what I’d been up to.

  ‘I shut up shop, perceiving there was no way out. Ferenc had borrowed my car to go and see the Marx Brothers. I took up my sticks and slowly made my way to the forge.

  ‘The jeep was parked in its usual place in a kind of open lean-to with a roof of corrugated iron. Ferenc, Steve Appleyard and I all had keys to this vehicle. Before the mysterious ailment attacked my legs I used to take it out quite a bit; but the clutch had a kick like a mule – quite beyond the control of a crippled man!

  ‘This, however, was an emergency. I hoisted myself into the driving seat, placed the sticks on the floor by my side, and drove off through the wood to the Hundred Field, taking the path that Steve had been taking daily during the harvest. No one was going to notice an extra set of tyre tracks.

  ‘When I got to the field, I parked the jeep on the headland, and, first pulling on my rubber gloves, made my way, parallel with the road, to the corner of the field which adjoined the bridge over the river. The Bullen estate, I soon found out the hard way, looks after its hedges. I had brought one of my sticks along with me, but even with its help to force back the worst of the quickthorn, getting through that hedge was no joke. I couldn’t have left the field by the gate and reached the bridge by walking along the road in case any of the Bullensthorpe people drove by and recognised me.

  ‘A bit battered, I crossed the bridge, and immediately concealed myself in that opening on the further side which the village children use to get down to the river. Through the sparse sprinkling of bushes that dotted the slope it was perfectly possible to keep watch on the road from Bullensthorpe without being seen oneself. It was very peaceful – a pair of collared doves calling in the woods, otherwise everything enveloped in that dense quiet which often seems to fall out of the sky with the dusk.

  ‘Fortunately for me, Percy Toller came along while there was still sufficient light for me to be sure it was him.

  ‘”Percy!” I said, in a jolly way, grasping my stick and stepping out into the road. “Hello there!”

  ‘”Mr Matyas!” he exclaimed, and got off his bike to speak to me.

  ‘He had no time to say more. I hit him hard on the left temple with the crook of my stick which is made from some wood as hard as stone, and he fell without a sound. The bicycle toppling over in the road made more noise than he did.

  ‘I dragged him on to the verge, wheeled the bicycle down to the water and left it there, one handlebar sticking well up into the air. Thank goodness it was getting dark! I hadn’t expected the water level to be so low. Then I put Percy in the river, face down. It was a gentle death.

  ‘There was one of those flat, modern cases on the carrier, and before I put that in the river I took a look inside. I found a mac, some pencils and a note pad, which I left, and a large manila envelope addressed to the Open University. It contained the famous essay. When I turned it over I saw that Percy had printed his name and address on the back, together with the essay’s title: “From Pamela to Sense and Sensibility: The Emergence of the English Novel, 1740–1810”. Seeing the title I thought I’d better take that with me, just to be on the safe side, far-fetched though it seemed that anyone would make the connection. That was an error of judgment, wasn’t it? If I’d left it in the river I doubt if anybody would have thought twice about it.‘Having retrieved it, it was even more of an error not to destroy it. I kept the essay at first because I was genuinely interested to see what Percy had written; and when I had read it, I was so enchanted with his fresh, exuberant approach to literature that I didn’t like to get rid of it. I even had thoughts of printing a little book from it when all the hue and cry had died down – a small gesture of personal homage – bound in tooled leather the way Percy would have loved it.

  ‘Foolish sentimentality! The bomb that blew up the car with the Soviet general also killed two little girls who happened to be wheeling their dolls’ prams along the pavement at the moment the car passed by. My job was to detonate the bomb by remote control from a shed less than a hundred yards away. I could see the street, I could see the children coming along, and then I saw the Russian car. Should I have let it pass unharmed for the sake of the lives of those two children? If your answer to that question is yes, you will never change the fate of nations. I pushed down the plunger and detonated the bomb.

  ‘After that, killing Percy Toller was, as you English say, a piece of cake.’

  Chapter Thirty Five

  The Superintendent said: ‘That administrator at the Norfolk and Angleby – he belongs to my golf club. He wanted to know if we always operate like that, waking people up in the middle of the night.’

  Jurnet looked surprised.

  ‘I thought he seemed quite pleased; once, that is, he understood I wasn’t asking him to divulge confidential information about a patient – quite the contrary. He told me he was usually up till all hours.’

  ‘Oh, he wasn’t complaining. Merely curious. Naturally, I told him we did it all the time.’

  ‘He was very helpful. So was the computer bloke, once he got his eyelids propped up. Ada’s what he called her – the computer. All the while he was plugging in and switching on he kept murmuring endearments, like it was a bird he wanted to have it off with.’

  ‘Every man’s fantasy,’ the Superintendent observed wryly. ‘A woman you can programme always to come up with the right answer.’

  ‘She did that time all right, even if it was, in a manner of speaking, no answer at all. Nobody by the name of Jeno Matyas ever was a patient at the Norfolk and Angleby. The bloke checked it twice over, just to be sure. The second time, Ada practically spat at him for doubting her word. The only real obstacle I came up against was the night sister when I asked could I have a word with young Steve.’
r />   ‘Whereupon you turned on that Latin charm, and she became as putty in your hands.’

  Jurnet reddened slightly, the Superintendent’s shot in the dark having landed precisely on target. It had been worth it, though. The boy had come awake, a damaged ghost under the dimmed light; but he had responded to being questioned with avidity, almost with a kind of pleasure that there were other things to remember than the death of Jessica Chalgrove.

  Yes, as a matter of fact, he had noticed something different about the jeep when he went over to the forge to pick it up the morning he found Percy in the river. He had thought at first it must have sprung a second leak overnight, because there were two patches of oil instead of the single one he had got used to seeing on the concrete standing. But then he had realised it was the same old leak after all. All that had happened was that somebody – so far as he was concerned, it had to be Ferenc – had either moved the vehicle a few feet, or else taken it out and then reparked it in not quite its former position.

  ‘An essay on Jane Austen, a computer print-out, and a patch of oil under a jeep,’ the Superintendent enumerated. ‘Sherlock Holmes couldn’t have done better!’

  Jurnet said simply: ‘Don’t know about that, sir. I know I should have, sooner. Trouble was, I’d been looking at Percy’s death the wrong way. So long as it was accepted as an accident, it didn’t seemed to matter, from the police point of view, that his famous essay had gone for a Burton. Swept away by the flood water just as you’d expect, and that was that. But taking a different perspective – saying to oneself, suppose there was something fishy about the whole business, after all – why then, the disappearance of that essay was something that had to be accounted for, like every other detail in a murder investigation. Percy, you could be sure, would never have left his precious homework naked to the elements when he could have packed it in his swanky briefcase to make sure it arrived at its destination fresh and clean. But there was only a notepad and some pencils in the case when we found it. Which – still thinking the worst for the sake of argument – could only mean that somebody had taken the essay out before throwing the case into the river.’

  ‘Why should anyone want to do that?’

  ‘That was the 64-dollar question. “From Pamela to Sense and Sensibility” – it had to be something to do with books. To do with the books in the Bullen Hall Library. It was then I began to put two and two together. I remembered what Mollie had said about Percy being mad to get his hands on them; and how there they were, row upon row, and nobody reading anything but the title on the spine.

  ‘When is a book not a book? That was the thought that came into my mind – and since it was all to do with Jeno Matyas the bookbinder, the thought that came next was something Jack said about the fire: – how Matyas had taken a few steps to follow his pal into the burning house, and then fallen flat on his face. Supposing he’d forgotten the pretence in the stress of the moment, and only remembered just in time? In other words, when is a cripple not a cripple?’

  ‘God knows what the DPP’s going to make of it.’ The Superintendent did not sound all that eager to play guessing games. He got up from his desk and stood glowering out of the window. ‘And don’t tell me Matyas has made a full confession. We still have to go into court on a solid basis of evidence.’

  Sergeant Ellers took a calculated risk and spoke up.

  ‘You’ve got to give the bugger a little credit, sir! After all, it’s thanks to him we’ve traced the shop in Cromer where he got the keys cut. We’ve recovered Shelden’s cuff links, and got Percy’s essay. The lab’s got so many bits and pieces of his jacket and slacks out of that hedge he went through, it’s a wonder Percy didn’t take to his heels at the sight of him. And that’s to say nothing of him giving the game away at Hoope, prancing along the beach like a bargain basement Nureyev.’

  ‘Exactly as the Inspector planned it, of course!’ The Superintendent was not yet ready to abandon his ill humour. ‘Getting Miss Appleyard to telephone the other Hungarian with some nonsense about intruders in the Library, and then making sure he got a sight of those fudged books –’

  ‘It worked, sir, didn’t it?’ the little Welshman persisted. ‘Ben knew if anyone could flush Matyas out, get him walking, it would be his pal Szanto –’

  ‘Hold on!’ Jurnet nevertheless smiled gratefully at his mate. ‘Don’t have me knowing all the answers. First go off, I thought the two of ’em were in it together. It certainly wasn’t any part of my plan to have Szanto take along his horsewhip to make sure Matyas got on to his own two feet and no two ways about it.’

  The Superintendent remarked sourly: ‘It’s no offence I know of to pretend you can’t walk when you’re perfectly able to. So far as I’m aware, Matyas was neither soliciting alms, claiming disability allowance, nor making bogus demands upon the National Health Service.’

  ‘He is now,’ Jurnet pointed out sombrely. ‘Not bogus. The latest is that one leg may have to come off.’

  ‘My heart bleeds,’ said the Superintendent. He came back to his desk and picked up the copy of Jeno Matyas’s confession, turning the pages to the closing sentences, about the little girls and their dolls’ prams, which he read, slowly and with a close attention, as if reading them for the first time. Then he raised his head from the typescript and said in a quiet voice that conveyed more than invective: ‘These people who talk about nations, the fate of nations, all mankind – they’re the really depraved ones. There is no all mankind or anything else – only one and one and one, and one, and so on, ad infinitum.’ He looked directly at Jurnet, and said, with a simplicity the detective longed to believe in: ‘Well done, Ben!’

  Jurnet offered, with a certain diffidence: ‘There was one other small pointer, once its significance dawned on me. I’m still not sure Percy wasn’t trying to pass me a message in code – telling me something without actually shopping a fellow-villain in so many words. His quotation for the day, that last time I saw him at the Hall, was just one line: “Rob me, but bind me not, and let me go.” Bind me not,’ Jurnet repeated, then, pronouncing the surname and the Christian name of the poet so that they rhymed: ‘It’s by a geezer named John Donne.’

  The Superintendent corrected him kindly: ‘You mean John Donne’– pronouncing it Dunn, the bastard.

  But then, thought Jurnet, he would, wouldn’t he, bless his heart.

  If asked, Jurnet would have been hard put to it to produce a convincing reason for driving back yet again to Bullen Hall. Surely he had seen enough of the place to last a lifetime!

  With the passing of summer’s heat, the great lawn in front of the house was greener than ever. The world had rolled round a little since that broiling day when the detective had heard the peacock scream. Now the sun, so mellow on the old brick, gilding afresh the little pennons atop the turrets, packed beneath its benign exterior a spiteful undercurrent of chill. The trees had a slatternly look, the rookeries exposed by the thinning leaves.

  Nothing stayed the same, Jurnet reflected, accepted: things changed even as you looked at them. All the same, he felt a need to fix the place in his memory, set it in jelly like one of Rosie Ellers’ celebrated moulds in aspic, every slice of cucumber in its appointed place.

  The Coachyard was moderately crowded. Considering the time of year, the shops were doing good business. Anna March, in the middle of selling a pair of earrings to a hard-faced woman in her sixties, suddenly looked up, saw the detective watching her, and turned back to her customer. Her expression, which signalled the end of the relationship – the relationship with Danny, that is – upset Jurnet less than the sight of the merchandise she was flogging. Did the woman have to sell that raddled old bag earrings which were the exact replicas of the ones she had made for Miriam?

  A brisk young woman had taken over Mike Botley’s basket business. The shutters were fastened over the bookbinder’s place, but a few doors away a new shop had opened, an art gallery, full of Broadland landscapes. Outside the shop, a couple in their mid-forties were
supervising the efforts of a young man – their son, Jurnet guessed – to attach a red-and-white striped awning to some hooks high up on the fascia. The father held the ladder firm, his wife smiled upward, a little anxious whenever the ladder teetered on the cobbles. The three formed a pleasant, self-contained unit among the moving throng, at ease in each other’s company.

  The young man, who was scarcely more than a boy, was amazingly handsome – golden tan, a cap of shining chestnut hair, a neat body that moved with little of the unsureness of youth. In this day and age, Jurnet was quite certain, it was inconceivable that a boy could reach that boy’s age and be unaware of his natural advantages, and of the power they gave him. So that the detective was not all that surprised to see Charles Winter, still wearing his grubby yellow sweater, leaning over the stable door of his workshop, watching the boy: nor to read, in the way the boy tilted his head and moved his shoulders, that he was well aware of the other’s scrutiny, and of all that it implied.

  A voice said: ‘Alan and Mary Loring.’ The detective turned to find Mrs Coryton at his side, bright-eyed and indomitable in a tweed suit subtly tailored to combine high fashion with just a soupçon of dowdiness. Her face was completely healed. ‘Their son’s called Christopher. They ought to do well. They’ve got some very nice stuff.’

  ‘Windmills and yachts,’ Jurnet commented disparagingly. ‘You’d think that was all Norfolk was made of.’

  ‘Oh come! Even you wouldn’t want sugar beet or a natural gas terminal on your living room wall!’ Changing tone as she observed the detective’s gaze unshiftingly intent on the silent communication between Charles Winter and the boy on the ladder: ‘I’d hoped I’d convinced you that all forms of love are equally precious.’