The Skeleton in the Grass

by Robert Barnard

  “The friend might not be very bright.”

  “Barry Noaks,” said Sarah, her voice flat, but with something like hope in it.

  “Is he the idiot boy from Chowton?” Dennis thought for a few moments. “It’s possible.”

  “But why in any case bring a gun?” Sarah asked. “Were they planning something else?”

  “You mean direct violence against one of us? It doesn’t seem to go with the practical joke.”

  “Barry Noaks seems to be obsessed with dead things,” said Sarah, shivering. “He seems to enjoy the idea of blood.”

  “We mustn’t jump to conclusions. The police will have all the scientific means to find out, and the experience. If it’s possible to get at the truth, they’ll get there, and we must leave it to them . . . And if I’m not mistaken, this will be them now.”

  A black Morris Oxford was driving through the gates, and up towards the entrance to Hallam.

  “I’ll go and talk to them,” said Dennis. “Will you take charge of Chloe and shield her from some of this? I think it would be best if she didn’t have breakfast with the family. We can hardly avoid the subject.”

  Best she didn’t have breakfast in the kitchen either, Sarah thought. Mrs. Munday and Pinner would regard it as a dreadful intrusion into their discussion of the subject. Constantly busy though they were, they did dearly love to chew over a piece of gossip, if one came up. When she got back upstairs she found that Chloe had already dressed herself, so Sarah installed her in the little schoolroom and fetched a light breakfast for the two of them on a tray. She found it was as much as she could do to toy with a piece of toast, and Chloe, bright as always, noticed her lack of appetite.

  “Desks are for writing on, not for eating breakfast on,” she announced. “Why are we eating breakfast here?”

  “To keep out of everybody’s way,” answered Sarah.

  “Why today? Why do we have to keep out of everybody’s way today?”

  “There’s been a spot of bother.”

  Chloe bided her time. She could be a thinking, watching, waiting child when she wanted to be. When the tray had been put outside the door, and Sarah had set her to copying sentences from a spelling book, she was ready to attack again.

  “What sort of bother is it there’s been a spot of?”

  The very complexity of the sentence showed her to be a Hallam. Sarah was standing at the window watching the little knot of men at the far end of the lawn. Only two had come in the Morris Oxford, but now they had been joined by more—trilby-hatted men, one of whom was setting up tripods and unloading photographic equipment. Sarah thought how very unglamorous police detectives were. Then she thought: She’ll have to be told something soon.

  “There’s been an unfortunate accident,” she said carefully.

  “What sort of accident? A motor accident?”

  “No, not a motor accident.”

  “What sort, then?”

  “There was a young man trespassing in the grounds last night.”

  “While we were at the Waddies’? Tres-passing is when you go on other people’s land, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Tres-passing is not an accident.”

  “Unfortunately the young man had an accident.”

  “Is he dead? Or is he just wounded?”

  Sarah believed in telling the truth to children.

  “I’m afraid he’s dead.”

  Chloe took it quite calmly.

  “I know all about death. Grandmother Fawcett died, and Uncle Edward in the Great War. That was before I was born. But I know about dying.”

  She seemed entirely satisfied, though it would probably not be long before she had thought up more questions. Now, at any rate, she was concentrating on her copying, and Sarah took the chance to skip downstairs.

  When she walked into the breakfast-room she found the Hallams slumped over the table in gloomy conversation. She had never known them so dreary. Even Elizabeth was quite without sparkle. They had never gone in for the lavish country house breakfast, but today they seemed to have eaten practically nothing. They accepted Sarah as a natural part of any family conference.

  “I’ve talked to Sergeant South,” said Dennis. “He confirms that it is Christopher Keene.”

  “Yes,” said Sarah flatly. “I thought it was. I knew he was involved in these silly pranks, but when I saw him at the pictures—” she struggled to explain—“he seemed . . . such a lively young man. Very bright. It’s quite dreadful.”

  “I’ll go and visit his mother,” said Oliver quietly. “I know her a little. I helped her fill out a form to get money from the Foresters when his father died.”

  “Wasn’t his father a bit of an invalid?” asked Helen.

  “Yes. He’d been gassed in the War. He did farm work, but he’d never really recovered. I know Mrs. Keene had some help from the British Legion too.”

  “Do go and talk to her,” said Dennis. “But perhaps not yet. There’ll be an awkwardness, in the circumstances. It beats me how a lively boy, and one whose father was ruined by war, could fall victim to a charlatan like Major Coffey.”

  Sarah remembered Roland’s remark, and adapted it a little.

  “Perhaps he offered a bit of excitement. A sort of escape from the humdrum. There’s not much for a lively young person in a village, even in these days.”

  “No . . .” Dennis thought. “Perhaps we should have understood that. Perhaps we live too much in books.”

  “Is it known when it happened?” asked Sarah. “Was it when we were at the Waddies’?”

  “We’ll have to wait for the police doctor’s report before we can know that,” said Oliver.

  “Well, in fact I think we can have a good idea,” said Helen. They all looked in her direction. “I’ve been talking to Mrs. Munday. You know it was Pinner’s night off last night, so she was in the house alone until well after the pubs closed. She was going to listen to a light music programme with Gwen Catley at ten, and she said Bounce began to get restless just before that. Barking, wagging his tail, going to the door—‘let me get at them,’ you know the way he is. Finally she let him out, and he went out on to the parapet above the lawn and barked into the darkness—down towards the river. As usual, as soon as he’s allowed to get at them he doesn’t dare to. Eventually, she called him in, but he was very restless for the rest of the evening. I think that must have been the time when . . .”

  Her voice faded into silence.

  “Very likely,” agreed Dennis.

  “But not conclusive,” said Elizabeth. “It could have been a stray cat, or a squirrel.”

  “Did she hear a shot?” asked Sarah.

  “No. But her hearing’s not very good, and it was some way away from the kitchen, and on the other side of the house.”

  “If it agrees with the police doctor’s conclusion,” said Dennis, “then we can be pretty sure that was when it happened, or about then. But the doctor may not be at all definite. If he had seen the body earlier he probably could have been, but—what?—twelve hours or more have gone by. Knowing doctors, I suspect he will probably be very vague.”

  The prospect of the police doctor being quite open about the time of the murder, of the whole period of their visit to the Waddies being in question, maybe even the nighttime after their return home, depressed the Hallams still further, and made them silent. Sarah murmured that she must see to Chloe, and slipped out and upstairs. As she went she was thinking: ten o’clock. What was I doing at ten o’clock? She must have finished the game of croquet with Simon Killingbeck. Was she playing Murder? Or was she talking to Elizabeth and Dennis over the array of nursery foods? That at any rate would mean that three of them were out of the running. Except that it might have been a cat or a stray squirrel.

  And what on earth did she mean—out of the running?

  • • •

  Out on the lawn, a little way away from the posse of men in trilby hats and raincoats, Sergeant South was talking in l
ow tones to Inspector Minchip.

  Minchip, to an outside observer, was much the less impressive figure of the two. Three or four inches shorter, lean almost to the point of weediness, he had a ferrety face and a straggling moustache that did nothing for it. Only a steely glint in the eyes and an air of being accustomed to command might suggest that he was a man very much on top of his job. His clothes would have suggested that this was a job which, at the time, Society did not feel called upon lavishly to reward. Notwithstanding that, Sergeant South treated him with immense respect.

  “Dr. Bailey isn’t committing himself,” Minchip was saying. “He never does if he can help it, not at this stage—and precious little later on. All I’ve got from him so far is that he doesn’t think it could have been committed much later than two a.m. As to the earlier time, he’s holding out entirely. So let’s say he was killed some time in the evening, or the early part of the night. Now, continuing on from your account of these daft tricks, why was he here? The family didn’t walk to Beecham Park, and apparently had never said they intended to.”

  “As to that,” said South, “I doubt this was where he intended laying the thing out. That would have been by the front door, or somewhere else where they’d have been bound to see it when they drove home. Either he stopped for a rest—because this skeleton contraption would be very difficult to carry in the dark without damaging it—or he was stopped in his tracks by the dog, and put this little bit o’ horror down carefully to avoid damaging it.”

  “Fair enough,” agreed Minchip. “Or just possibly was stopped in his tracks by someone whom he had every reason to believe was a friend. Now, we take it, do we, that he was taking the river path from the village rather than the road? And that he was coming that way because there was little or no chance of his being seen?”

  “That’s it, sir. Deserted at that time of night it would have been. There was a torch in his pocket which he probably stopped using once he got in sight of the big house.”

  “You say there was moonlight.”

  “There was, sir. Near a full ’un.”

  “So he was on his way to the house, and for one reason or another he paused—laying that silly skeleton out to avoid damaging it. Next question: was he alone?”

  “That’s a big one, isn’t it, sir?”

  “You’re going to have to make use of all your contacts in the village, South.”

  “Aye, sir. But you know what villagers are like. A bit of gossip gets round like wildfire, but if they want to protect one of their own, they can clamp up like they had padlocks on their silly mouths.”

  “You think they’ll want to protect their own?”

  “Couldn’t say, sir. I’ll find out soon enough. Unpredictable, that’s what folk around here are. My guess would be, anyway, that he was on his own. Or thought he was.”

  The Inspector turned, interested.

  “Why do you say that?”

  South pondered, in his slow way.

  “Seems to me, sir, these pranks were something in the nature of an initiative test. Each lad given something to do. And I think it’d be on his own. That way it’d be much less likely to be brought home to the real instigator.”

  “Coffey?”

  “Oh, I don’t have much doubt about that, personally.”

  “Yes. We’ve got a file on him—mostly stuff sent to us from the Metropolitan Police, about his activities in London back in the ‘twenties. Seems like he’s pretty good at wriggling out from under.”

  “Even if he warn’t on his own, there’s no guarantee it was the other one who did it,” South pointed out. “If they were . . . confronted, like, the other could have panicked and run.”

  “Confronted by someone with a gun?”

  “Maybe,” said South hesitantly.

  “These landowners are pretty protective still, even in these days.”

  “Hardly the Hallams, sir. The present Mr. Hallam has often refused to prosecute poachers caught on his farms. Some of the tenants are quite bitter about it. Anyway they were all at Beecham Park.”

  The Inspector raised his eyebrows.

  “The bridge over the river is not more than a hundred yards away.”

  “But to come from Beecham with a gun, sir. The Wadhams are not sporting people . . . Though the young chap there has done a bit of shooting, now I come to think about it.”

  “And any country house has guns. There’s always been a sporting man there in the past. Whether in good nick or not is another matter. At the moment I can’t see for the life of me why Christopher Keene should have had a gun with him. Damned awkward thing to carry, if he was on his own, and had the skeleton as well.”

  “As to that, sir, the Major’s a military man, and he probably presented these tests to the boys as something in the nature of a military manoeuvre. Sort of incursion into enemy territory.”

  “Bloody fool. But you’re probably right. Sound suggestion.”

  Sergeant South glowed, mildly. He had another idea as to why Chris Keene should have brought a gun, but for the moment he was keeping it to himself. He had, in many ways, the soul of a villager.

  CHAPTER 10

  “I offered him a room in this house to use,” said Dennis suddenly during breakfast next morning.

  “Sorry. Offered who what?” said Helen, looking up from crumbling her toast.

  “I offered the Inspector—what’s his name?—the use of a room in this house for the investigation. Of course he refused.”

  “Why ‘of course’?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Because we’re suspects.”

  “Oh come, Father,” protested Oliver.

  “I should have realized. We must get used to the fact. Naturally we’re under suspicion. We were being persecuted, and we fought back. That’s one of the possibilities the Inspector has to consider.”

  “Nobody who knew us could believe that,” said Helen.

  “The Inspector does not know us—and it’s quite right that he shouldn’t. I should hardly like to be exonerated by someone who’s a family acquaintance. In point of fact he was quite short with me when he turned down my offer. Obviously I had offended against police etiquette in some way or other.”

  “And where does police etiquette say that the inquiry should be held?” asked Elizabeth.

  “In the police station at Chowton. It will be very cramped and inconvenient. It’s also Sergeant South’s home, after all. Haven’t the Souths got children?”

  “Two, quite young,” said Oliver.

  “Well, no doubt something will be improvised. Anyway, at some point in the day he will want to see all of us.”

  “Including me?” asked Sarah.

  “Oh yes. All of us who were at the Waddies’. So let’s all try and remember as much as we can about the evening, what we were doing, and what other people were doing. And please let’s not try to prevaricate or sidestep the truth. We have to get to the bottom of this ghastly business as soon as possible.”

  Everyone nodded, Sarah among them, and as Dennis threw down his napkin Mrs. Munday put her head around the door.

  “Is it all right if I clear away now, Mrs. Hallam? I’ve got a lot of cleaning and dusting to do this morning. Mrs. Puncheon won’t be coming in today.”

  Mrs. Puncheon was one of the three cleaners who came in on various days of the week to keep Hallam looking presentable.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Helen. “Is she ill?”

  “She sent her apologies,” said Mrs. Munday, busying herself at the table. “She’s a friend of Mrs. Keene’s.”

  At the time her words produced only the faintest of clicks in Sarah’s mind. Later she was to see them as her first intimation of the start of something.

  “That was the beginning of the end for your parents,” she said one day in 1967, during one of her regular lunches with Chloe in La Bella Isola, in Romilly Street. Chloe, plump and mini-skirted, was smoking between her soup and her main course.

  “I’ve always hated villages,” Chloe said,
puffing as she looked around to see who was there. “God, how I hated Poolton Lacey. Richard insisted that we rent his aunt’s cottage there, while he wrote his thesis on Robert Musil. My God—the looks, the gossip, the narrowness! It was that village that broke up my marriage.”

  “Probably,” Sarah ventured, “the marriage wouldn’t have lasted for ever.”

  “Heavens above! I should hope not,” Chloe giggled, a sound like champagne going down a plug. “I don’t think I was made for marriage . . . Probably I was made for adultery.” She looked down at her ample expanse. “Nowadays I’m not even made for that.”

  It was that rapturous giggle, filling all corners of the little restaurant, that reminded Sarah of the child Chloe.

  “As a matter of fact you loved Chowton when you were a girl,” she said. “And knew all about it.”

  “Villages are fine for small children,” said Chloe, stubbing out her Rothmans as the veal approached. “As their minds expand, they need expanded surroundings. I’ve never liked Chowton whenever I’ve gone back to it. Give me Hampstead village any day!”

  Sarah, who still, after three decades, felt herself perched uncomfortably in London, wished she could agree.

  At the time Mrs. Munday’s words caused only the faintest of reverberations in her brain. As the cereal bowls and toast racks were cleared away, the family began dispersing for a difficult day. Things became no easier when, in the hall, Pinner handed them another postcard from Will in Barcelona.

  • • •

  The headquarters that Inspector Minchip had set up in Sergeant South’s square, bare, ugly little council house was indeed inconvenient. Sergeant South’s normal office, where people from the villages came to notify him of lost dogs or bicycle lamps, cheeky children and stripped fruit bushes, now served as a waiting-room. Sergeant South’s living-room now became the interview room, and under the Sergeant’s supervision his wife had removed from it as far as possible all traces of family life, so that it looked bare and comfortless. She had lodged the children for the time being with her sister in Hatherton, and she felt sorely tempted to decamp there herself, if the case was to go on for long.

  Inspector Minchip did not sigh for headquarters in some little-used corner of Hallam. Quite apart from the unorthodoxy of the suggestion, he would not have felt at home there. His professional life was spare, chill and cheerless, and he was perfectly happy for his physical surroundings to suit. His imaginative life revolved around colourful historical novels such as Anthony Adverse and Captain Hornblower, but his imaginative life cast no shadow over his professional one. He was never tempted to buckle a swash.