by Peter Helton
‘Superintendent. Want to hazard a guess as to the age of it?’
‘What, the deceased? Yeah, I might.’
‘Actually, I meant the burial, but go on.’
‘Well, it’s a male and I’d say he was in his twenties. As for the burial, I’d say fifty, sixty years ago.’
‘Please make that sixty, then I don’t have to investigate it.’
‘Are we sure it’s murder yet?’ I objected.
‘No, not certain,’ Needham said. ‘But it’s the wrong depth for an official burial and there’s no coffin. That says to me “shovels at midnight”.’
Andrea agreed.
‘Amazing that a biscuit tin lasts that long,’ I mused.
‘Not that much oxygen down there,’ she said. ‘If you left it above ground it would all but disappear after twenty years or so.’
Soon the forensics people turned up and shooed us all away. ‘Do you mean to say,’ I needled Needham, ‘that if forensics say he was murdered but that it was sixty years ago, you won’t look into it?’
‘Absolutely. Brilliant, isn’t it? If he’s sixty years dead I get to go home since the killer is likely to be dead as well. Work it out. If your killer was thirty then he’d be ninety today. No point. Let the Almighty have a go.’
‘So if you do kill someone then it really is worth digging a deep enough hole.’
‘Oh, definitely,’ Needham agreed. ‘That’s where a lot of murderers go wrong. They go to all that trouble of killing someone and then they can’t be arsed to dig a decent hole. Of course, if you bury someone in your own back garden there’s always a chance that someone’ll come along and dig him up. Laying a pipe, digging a drainage ditch or hunting for treasure. We will have to have a word with Mrs Cunningham in a minute, since it obviously happened while she was living here, and I’ll need some convincing that she had nothing to do with it.’
‘It’s a big place. It doesn’t necessarily follow that she knew about it.’ But even while I was saying it Olive Cunningham’s vehement opposition to the Time Lines dig seemed to take on a more sinister motive.
One of the SOCO team stood up and waved. ‘Superintendent?’ Needham went across, had a five-minute conversation with the officers, then came back.
‘Definitely murder. Shot through the head, in one end, out the other.’
‘Any clues in the tin?’
‘None at all. They lifted it and the bottom had rusted away and the content eaten by mice or whatever, though they think it may have contained papers, letters, perhaps.’
‘Superintendent?’ The SOCO called Needham back once more. He jogged over, looked into the grave, nodded and came back.
‘They found a weapon as well, a World War Two Webley .38. I seem to remember you keeping one. Illegally.’
‘Told you, it dropped into the sea in Cornwall.’
‘I wouldn’t believe that if I’d heard the splash. Now where do you think we might find Mrs Cunningham?’
I led the way along the right shore of the reed-fringed lake where I had last seen Olive Cunningham walk away pensively into the less-explored corners of the Stone King’s realm, a realm that for most of her life of course had been her own. I imagined the life she would have led, growing up here during the war, playing pirates perhaps on the little island, and still here today, powerless to stop the place being invaded, surveyed, changed or dug up. It was a pleasant walk along the lake, with trees on the right, the water on our left where reed beds alternated with grassy banks and rocky outcrops that looked too picturesque to be real.
We found Olive at the western end of the lake, looking across the water, sitting on a large willow trunk placed near the water’s edge for just that purpose. Both her hands rested on top of her walking stick, the other end forming an equilateral triangle with her feet, firmly planted on the ground in their sensible black shoes. We sat down either side of her and for a while no one spoke, until Olive said: ‘Why couldn’t they just leave things alone?’
‘I can imagine you would rather the body had not been found,’ Needham said.
‘All of it! I mean all of it. The Roman villa, what difference does it make? This is the twenty-first century, what does it matter? The beastly Romans with their hideous square houses, their war machine, their right angles and their fussy food.’
I felt I should try and defend the Romans at least a little. ‘They had a tremendous influence on British culture, for instance . . .’
‘Poppycock. As soon as they left we went back to our own ways. We dismantled their houses and used them to repair our sheds. We didn’t even make pots for a few hundred years. We didn’t start cooking like the Romans again for another twelve hundred years and half of us still don’t have central heating. They were only here for the tin, gold and silver and if they could have done they’d have taken everything they brought here with them when they left. And if they had, then people wouldn’t go and dig up hundred-year-old lawns to gawp at their old bathroom tiles.’
Needham was getting impatient with this chat. ‘I’ve not really come to discuss the Roman legacy in Britain, Mrs Cunningham.’
‘No, you’ve come to talk about Bertie.’
‘You are referring to the remains found today?’
‘That’s Bertie. I knew he was around there somewhere, but the hedges have changed and the statuary got moved about and I forgot. And grass is marvellous of course but it does all look the same. Did you know that each blade of grass is a separate plant?’
‘Can’t say I’ve given it much thought. Who was Bertie?’
‘Herbert Brush. He was a farm worker on the estate. We were lovers, for a very, very short time.’ Olive spoke without great emotion. Her voice was saying: it was a very short time and it was a very long time ago, so why are you bothering me with it?
‘What happened?’
‘It was the summer of 1957. My husband was away on business in New York, my idiot brother Charles was in the house, to keep me company. Chaperoning me, I imagine. Didn’t do too good a job. He surprised Bertie one night as he was leaving after making love to me, thought he was a burglar and fired at him with Daddy’s army revolver. He said he never meant to actually hit him but it was quite dark. He was quite dead by the time I came down into the drawing room.’
‘And you didn’t report it?’ Needham said incredulously.
‘Of course not – what would have been the point in that? Even then shooting people through the head because you happened to find them in your sister’s drawing room wasn’t considered the done thing. It would all have come out about me having an affair, my husband would have divorced me, I would have lost the house, I couldn’t have kept it up without him, and I might have seen my brother go to prison.’
‘And your brother played along with it.’
‘Didn’t need much persuading. There was only one domestic here at the time who witnessed the aftermath. My brother bought him off.’
‘Did no one miss your dead lover?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t people wonder what had happened to him?’
‘No. As it happened some money had gone missing on the farm. People assumed he had taken it and run away. That’s what the police and the papers assumed then.’
‘And you buried him in the garden.’
‘My brother did. Did I mention he was an idiot? I expected him to bury Bertie in the woods but the wheelbarrows were locked away. He had to carry him and when his arms gave out he buried him where he had dropped him. He did quite a good job in the end. When my husband came back three months later you couldn’t tell.’
‘What was in the tin?’ I asked.
‘Just a few notes and the few letters we had exchanged. Sentimental things. Nothing of earth-shattering importance.’
‘Is your brother Charles alive?’
‘Died in 1980.’
‘Your husband?’
‘Died in ’86.’
‘The domestic?’
‘No idea, Inspector; he would be in his nineties now.’
&nbs
p; ‘It’s Superintendent, actually.’
There was a long pause while we were all busy thinking it through.
‘Well?’ she finally asked. ‘Are you going to arrest me now?’
‘I’d certainly like you to come down to Manvers Street police station and make a statement.’
‘Isn’t that what I have just done?’
‘A proper statement; we’ll record it and get you to sign it afterwards.’
She stood up. ‘Very well, then.’
‘It was quite understandable, then,’ I said as we walked slowly back, ‘that you weren’t happy about the excavation going on around here.’
‘I just knew they would dig Bertie up. For a while it looked as though he might be safe but then those treasure hunters started digging holes all over the place. It was only a matter of time.’
‘And you began sabotaging the dig.’
‘Just a little bit,’ she said, wrinkling her nose with pleasure.
‘The digger?’
‘I remembered my husband telling me about putting sugar in the German’s petrol tanks. Ruined their engines. I didn’t want to ruin them. So I used water. Quite spectacular, all that smoke, I never expected that.’
‘The urn that nearly flattened Mr Middleton?’
‘What do you take me for, young man? Can you see me climbing around on the roof in a thunderstorm? Mr Middleton is a revolting specimen by all accounts but I wouldn’t risk catching cold just to break his head.’
‘By all accounts? Whose accounts?’ Needham said sharply.
‘There’s no casual chatting with you, Inspector, is there? Every female who has had the misfortune of having been left alone with him, I should think.’
‘Any more sabotage attempts? The ballista?’
‘Didn’t go near it.’
‘Hitting the cameraman over the head?’
‘No, that’s not where I would have hit him.’
‘The food poisoning?’
‘Not my style. Try the boy who helps his aunt in the catering van. I saw him picking herbs that day along the stream near the tents and not all of them make good eating.’
‘The drawing with the horse’s head?’
‘Guilty. I was hoping that if I could scare the presenter away that might make them give up.’
‘Eerie green torch light on a stick?’
‘You found that?’
‘I was hiding in the pantry.’
She sighed. ‘We used to have such fun in this house. You can get into Mr Middleton’s room from the servant’s stairs and through the back of his wardrobe. My grandparents were great practical jokers. They liked to pretend there was a ghost. I carry on the tradition.’
Needham looked unimpressed but didn’t say anything until we were once more on the lawns below the hall. ‘If you would like to get your things, Mrs Cunningham, I’ll drive you to the station. I’ll be waiting by my car.’
‘What things, Inspector?’
‘I don’t know, jacket, keys, handbag, those kind of things. It might take some time. We’ll arrange for transport back.’
‘You’re a confounded nuisance,’ she said and crossed the verandah towards her end of the house.
‘You do realize,’ I told Needham when she had gone, ‘that if she doesn’t show up in the car park it could take you days to find her in that house if she doesn’t want to be found?’
Needham shrugged and walked off. ‘I’m not even sure I’d want to.’
FOURTEEN
I stepped through the French windows and could hear that there was a lively discussion in progress in the dining room next door. I went to join it. Nearly the entire crew was sitting around the table, minus camera operator and sound man, who were outside, filming every move the police made from the top of the cherry picker. The assembly barely gave me a glance as I entered. Stoneking sat at the top of the table, looking like he was once more enjoying himself. The crew were discussing dates, delays, insurance, as well as airing their grievances. Cy’s hand now sported a theatrical bandage where I was sure a sticking plaster might have sufficed. Middleton sat quietly and morosely, staring at something in his hand. He looked dishevelled, as though he had given up looking after himself. He also looked drunk. ‘It’s the ghost,’ he whined when there was a lull in the discussion. He held up a little glass phial, the ghost bottle from the library. Middleton had checked on the imprisoned ghost and had found it gone. ‘Look.’ He sought my eyes and held up the bottle in evidence. ‘It really was a ghost in my room. Look, someone let it out.’
‘Put it in the recycling box, Guy,’ I told him. ‘There’s no ghost. The old lady did all that to spook you.’ I then told the rest of the room what I had learned from Olive Cunningham.
Cy was delighted. ‘It makes a fabulous story, a real Time Lines special; we must interview the police, the old woman, people in the village. And there is still all that mystery about who shot Morgan with the ballista and who hit Paul over the head. It could end up a two-parter, with a cliff-hanger at the end of part one.’ There were groans around the table and Andrea was resting her head in her hands in a gesture of despair.
When I left the room to find Annis and share the news, Stoneking came with me. ‘I must admit I was getting bored with archaeology but maybe I’ll take up an interest in forensics. But seriously,’ he said, looking worried, ‘do you think they’ll charge Olive with anything?’
‘Don’t know. “Preventing the rightful burial of a body” springs to mind. I’m sure they could make her life difficult but I doubt the Crown Prosecution Service will see much chance of a conviction.’
‘They won’t put her in jail, or anything?’
‘I doubt it. Not if she’s been telling the truth.’
I was about to open the door to the pool house when it was opened from the other side. It was Annis in her multicoloured, be-spattered painting gear. ‘Oh, there you are. I was just coming to find you.’ She held up the local newspaper, the Bath Chronicle. ‘Mark here gave me a few papers to wipe my brushes on. Look at this article.’
MOTORCYCLIST CRITICAL AFTER TRACK DAY CRASH was the headline. I read it out for Mark’s benefit. ‘A motorcyclist who crashed his superbike on the way home from a track day is in intensive care at the Royal United Hospital. Thomas Dealey, 36, is in a critical condition after crashing his Hayabusa motorcycle, the fastest production bike for sale in the UK, after having attended a public track day at Castle Combe race track. No other vehicle is thought to have been involved.’
Annis tapped the picture. ‘That’s your wheelchair man’s brother, isn’t it? It was the make of the bike under the picture that caught my eye.’
‘Yes, the family are bike nuts,’ I agreed. Stoneking looked mystified so I quickly explained who the Dealeys were. ‘I watched him drive a car and thought afterwards that if he rode his bike like that then he’d come a cropper.’ There was a picture of the mangled Hayabusa; it was unrecognizable. ‘Nothing fake about this chap’s injuries, I expect. His brother will want to be at his bedside.’
‘Might be a good opportunity to get close to him,’ Annis said.
‘Yes, I think I can feel a hospital visit coming on.’ I left Stoneking to tell Annis all about Olive’s dead lover and made for the car.
The RUH car parking charges looked challenging, to say the least. I did quite enjoy the ‘up to twenty minutes FREE’ challenge to visitors and wondered if anyone had yet managed to get to a loved one’s hospital bed and back to the car in that time. I didn’t really want to visit Tom Dealey in intensive care and listen to his life support bleep. I doubted they would let me, and what would be the point? But I had spotted his brother’s red Honda in a ‘disabled’ space, so I hung around near the exit for a while. I was good at hanging around, half a lifetime of watching paint dry had prepared me well for it, though my boredom threshold had begun to crumble a little with age. Wasn’t there something more meaningful I might do with my life than stand behind a concrete pillar and wait for Mike Dealey to show up a
nd do something even remotely interesting?
Apparently not. It took him forty minutes to make an appearance. I had to sprint to my car since his was parked close to the exit and he was well-practised in getting into it from his wheelchair. I caught up with him just as he turned right out of the car park into the main road. I hung back a little but never let the red car get out of my sight. One problem with hanging back a little is that traffic lights can throw a serious spanner in the works and lose you your target for good if you’re unlucky. But my luck held as I squeezed behind Dealey across a junction just as the light changed and he drove his car west out of town. It soon became clear that he was driving to his brother’s house in Paulton, perhaps to check that nothing needed doing or securing at the house. Since I was pretty sure where we were going I could let a couple of cars get between us and relax. By the time we got to Paulton and near his brother’s house the other cars had peeled off so when Dealey turned into his brother’s street I carried on out of sight and parked, then walked back. But I had left it too late – by the time I had sight of the house the front door was just closing behind him. I carried on nevertheless and strolled past, holding my mobile against my ear as though engaged in a phone call and thus obscuring part of my face, until I got to the next corner. Then I looked back at the house and seriously regretted having given Dealey all that breathing space. In front of his brother’s front door sat a big fat doorstep, at least eight inches high. Who had helped him up across that with his wheelchair? I had seen the front door close, though only just. Was someone else in the house who had helped him up that doorstep? Maybe. Was I going to stand here all day and wait until he came out? Unlikely. I had a good squint at the step and decided that he would probably be able to come down it unaided; it was just how he had gone up it that was the mystery. Next time; I would catch him next time. I took a picture of the house and car on my mobile and sent it to Haarbottle, which might brighten his gloomy life. On my way back to the car I called PC Whatsisname and left a message for him: Could he give me any information on Tom Dealey who had just crashed his Hayabusa? Then I drove back to Tarmford Hall.
