The Skeleton in the Grass

by Robert Barnard

  ‘We had intended you to be

  The next prime minister but three’

  —that sort of thing.”

  “Maybe Oxford seems in some way irrelevant to Oliver, after what has happened.”

  “Oh God, yes. I was really shocked when I heard. I should have said something to him, but I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t sound trite . . . Did I hear him say he was going to Mrs. Keene’s?”

  “Yes. It’s very good of him.”

  Roland opened his mouth, and then shut it again.

  “What were you going to say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t be silly, Roland. I could see you were.”

  He was a very decisive young man, but he became suddenly hesitant, almost shuffling, as they stood there in the centre of the village.

  “I was just going to say . . . that I wasn’t sure that was wise . . . That it might be better . . . if the Hallams laid low for a while.”

  Sarah stared at him in outraged disbelief.

  • • •

  There were voices on the other side of the cottage door. Oliver hesitated when he came up to it, then knocked louder than he otherwise would. There was an immediate silence on the other side, then a firm “Come in.”

  Oliver ducked his head as he lifted the latch and went through the front door. It opened straight into the room that served Mrs. Keene as kitchen and dining-room. It was a room that was warm with fire and humans and animals. On the hob a kettle was beginning to sing. It should have been a happy, hospitable scene, but the two women seated at the table did not make it so. Mrs. Keene, as Oliver had said, was a comfortable figure, but, though she was dry-eyed, her mouth was set in a downward curve of pain. Her friend—in an old dress and apron, like Mrs. Keene—looked at Oliver with a sourness that amounted to hostility.

  “Mrs. Keene . . . Mrs. Dunnock, isn’t it? . . . I felt I had to come and say how sorry we all are about Christopher’s death . . .”

  Oliver was conscious, when he faltered to a full stop, that he was expecting Mrs. Keene to say how kind it was of him to come, perhaps how much she appreciated it. Awful of him, but there it was. Instead there was silence in the stuffy little room until Mrs. Keene, seeming to pull herself together with an effort, said:

  “Well . . . I’m not saying you haven’t been good to me, Mr. Oliver. You’ve helped, and I’ve welcomed your help.”

  Mrs. Dunnock, gazing dourly down at the table, with its check cloth and cups waiting to be filled, muttered something that Oliver, to his horror, decided was: “They ought to be ashamed.”

  “I hope you’re beginning to get over this now,” Oliver stumbled on. “This must have hit you very hard.”

  “I spent all my tears when my husband was gassed,” said Mrs. Keene. “I’ve had to be hard since then.”

  “We were all very upset for you. Particularly as it happened at Hallam . . .”

  It was patently the wrong thing to say. Oliver realized that as soon as the words began to issue from his mouth. He felt painfully his youth.

  “Well, you would be upset!” Mrs. Keene was now openly combative. “Very inconvenient for you! But I’m not going to apologize for him being there.”

  “Mrs. Keene, I didn’t mean—”

  “He was a good lad, and a bright one. I’m not saying he didn’t get up to some silly tricks, and do things I wouldn’t go along with. But he didn’t deserve this.”

  “Of course he didn’t, Mrs. Keene. We all feel that.”

  “Oh, do you? Well, that’s nice to hear, and I wish I could believe it.”

  Now Mrs. Dunnock showed herself as the real troublemaker, the stirrer of resentment. She raised her head and said with deadly explicitness this time: “They ought to be ashamed.”

  Oliver looked from one woman to the other.

  “Mrs. Keene, you surely can’t think—”

  He spluttered to a halt, and there was a moment’s silence in the hot kitchen.

  “What can’t I think Mr. Oliver?”

  “That one of us . . . killed your son.”

  A lifetime of deference to the family at The Hall reasserted itself. Mrs. Keene, like Mrs. Battley, had been glad, on occasion, to stand in for the regular cleaning women at Hallam, and had in truth never received anything but kindness while she was there. Bringing her implied accusation out into the open put her on the defensive. She looked down at the tablecloth.

  “What else am I to think?” she muttered.

  “Mrs. Keene—we were all away from Hallam, at a party.”

  “We know all about the silly doings at Beecham,” said Mrs. Dunnock. “It’s less than a mile by them lanes.”

  “And it’s news to me anyone knows when my Chris was killed,” said Mrs. Keene, regaining spirit with the support of her friend. “They do say you was all home by midnight.”

  “Mrs. Keene, do please think. Think what my father and mother have done for peace. All their lives devoted to it. Have they—have any of us—ever struck you as violent people?”

  “As to that, I wouldn’t know. My Chris thought all that was unpatriotic, and I don’t know as he wasn’t right. My husband wasn’t afraid to fight for his country. There’s others who couldn’t say the same. And there’s some as would be scared stiff in a battle but mightn’t be averse to killing if there was no risk to themselves . . .”

  “Mrs. Keene, you can’t—”

  “Can’t I? All I know is, my boy was playing pranks on your family. I don’t excuse him, but he paid heavily, didn’t he? You can’t pay heavier than he did. And I ask myself: who else had cause to kill my Chris? Answer me that. Who else would go and do it?”

  • • •

  Sarah was sorry her meeting with Roland went the way it did. When they were on the verge of a quarrel she realized just how much she liked and respected him, and pulled herself back. They spent some minutes retreating and patching-up, and by the time they parted she had promised to investigate the possibility of having a day in Oxford some time during the next eight weeks of term-time. Away from Chowton they would surely be able to put the murder out of their minds for a bit.

  Cards were to be had in the all-purpose shop whose Happy Families packs Chloe had so approved of. It was primarily a newsagent’s, and on the counter were two or three copies of the Daily Express, the Mail and the Herald. Sarah wondered whether any of them had reports on the murder at Hallam. She suspected it had not, fortunately, caught the popular imagination. There had been virtually nothing in the Manchester Guardian.

  “Cards,” she said, smiling at the proprietor, and went over to the rack where they were displayed.

  It suddenly struck her that she would have to write to her father. She had written briefly after she got back to Hallam, hoping the new domestic arrangements were working out satisfactorily. Since, she had not written at all. It was like sending thought into a void down a black, bottomless well. But now, if he had not read about the death at Hallam, somebody would have told him. Villages were like that the world over. And he would be worried . . . Or feel that he ought to be worried?

  Sarah repressed the thought. No doubt her father loved her in his way. But it was not a way to evoke any response in the object.

  She was conscious of being watched. As she flicked through the cheap and inappropriately sentimental cards, she knew that eyes were boring into her. She covertly looked up, into a mirror on the wall that advertised Gold Flake cigarettes. The man had his hands resting palms down on the counter, and he was regarding her with a faint, unpleasant smile which played around his lips as if he was relishing something. He was meagre of body, sunken of face, his hair was over-long and unwashed, and his jowls were shadowed with stubble.

  Sarah bent her eyes back to her task. She found a card which kept its feet on the ground emotionally, though its metrical feet were distinctly wobbly. Her father would not notice this: he had no feeling for poetry. He read the Psalms as if they were Times leaders. She took the card briskly over to the counter a
nd began rummaging in her purse.

  “That’ll be twopence ha’penny, miss.”

  Unluckily she had nothing less than sixpence. The man took it meditatively, and was in no hurry to put it in his till.

  “Got trouble up at the Hall, ha’n’t you, miss? So it says in the papers.”

  He gestured towards the popular dailies on his counter.

  “I’m sure you had no need to wait for the papers to hear about it,” said Sarah shortly.

  “Ah, but we associate the Hallams with newspapers,” the man said, with a shaft of cunning in his eyes. “It’s how we learn their fine notions, reading them in the papers.” He put the coin with infuriating deliberation into the till, and began to count out threepence ha’penny. “Funny sort of accident,” he said, as he put it into Sarah’s outstretched hand. “Unlucky with guns, Mr. Hallam always was.”

  And he snickered into her face.

  Later in life, as the wife of a top civil servant, Sarah gained great expertise in how to deal with all varieties of brashness and impertinence. At twenty she had no such armoury to protect her. She gazed at him speechless for a second, then turned and ran from the shop.

  • • •

  “It was absolutely horrifying,” said Oliver.

  Sarah had waited for him on the stile beside the road that led from Chowton to Hallam. She could see as he came up that he was shattered.

  “She blames us, that’s clear,” he went on. “But, not only that: she thinks one of us is guilty. She—and her friend—made that quite clear.”

  “But why? What are her reasons?”

  “The same as Father gave when he said we had to be counted as suspects. We were having pranks played on us, and we fought back. The way she put it made it sound particularly vicious: a punishment out of all proportion to the offence. When I offered her our help she practically exploded.”

  “Of course she’s his mother,” hinted Sarah.

  “Yes. I should have realized how bitter she would be. The bitterness seemed to be fuelled by that friend of hers, Mrs. Dunnock, who was with her. Please God they are alone.”

  “I . . . I don’t think they are,” said Sarah. Hesitantly she told him what had happened in the newsagent’s. She found she could tell Oliver, though she knew she would never be able to tell Dennis. She shrank from the look of pain and betrayal she would encounter. Even now she found she could not ask Oliver what precisely the man had meant. When she had finished Oliver sighed.

  “That’s Nuttall. I’ve always thought him an unpleasant man. But you’re right. It must be more general. I should have known. People were twitching their curtains to look at me as I came down the street.”

  “Like Chan,” said Sarah. “They did that to Chan.”

  “Now I know what it feels like to be an outsider. But Chan was an exotic. I’m an outsider in my own village.”

  “It won’t last,” urged Sarah forcefully. “It can’t. They’ll find who did it, and it will all die down.”

  “Please God they do. But what if they don’t? The longer the investigation lasts, the less likely it is there’ll be an arrest . . . I only hope we can keep it from the parents.”

  Sarah thought bleakly of how unlikely that was. Already Hallam had been boycotted by two of the daily helps. That wouldn’t last, probably, but what of their demeanour when they did come? Hopelessly, with a solidarity born of their common experience, they jumped down from the stile to resume the journey home. Suddenly Oliver put his hand on Sarah’s arm.

  “Look.”

  They looked back towards the main street. Inspector Minchip was coming down it, obviously from the Police Station. As they watched he stopped at the gate to an unattractive little cottage.

  “Major Coffey’s,” said Oliver.

  CHAPTER 12

  What else could you expect, Inspector Minchip thought gloomily, of a party where adults gathered to play kids’ games, apparently to amuse a family of aristocratic halfwits?

  He was gazing discontentedly at a large sheet of paper on the Souths’ dining-room table. On it he had tabulated, in so far as he was able, the movements of the Hallams on the night of the murder.

  Then suddenly he reversed his thought. Games, as a rule, were things that demanded the participation of several people. Would one not expect that the Hallams’ time would have been amply documented by the people they had played with? Yet there seemed little prospect that this would be the case.

  The people whose movements were best accounted for were the two girls. Sarah Causeley had played croquet, eaten with Dennis and Elizabeth Hallam, then played Murder. This would have to be carefully checked with the other participants to make sure that, for example, there was not a much longer gap between finishing eating and joining the Murder game than she had allowed. But Minchip shook his head dubiously: checking wasn’t going to be easy. As Dennis quite rightly said: nobody would have kept looking at his watch at a party of this sort.

  Elizabeth had played Sardines, eaten, then played Murder. She was best accounted for of all. She had said there was one time, during the game of Sardines, when it was an awfully long time—frighteningly long, she had said—before she was found. But it could hardly be long enough, surely?

  As to the others . . . The gaps in Dennis Hallam’s evening were glaringly obvious. Even if people had seen him wandering around during the early part of the evening, the whole period after his scratch meal with his daughter and nursery governess was unaccounted for.

  Oliver had played Happy Families with the little ones early on, then a couple of games of draughts with someone who had vouched for this fact on the telephone. But from then on, apart apparently from a conversation with Lady Wadham, he had merely observed, and had had a long walk in the garden. In the dark? said Minchip to himself sceptically.

  Conversely the first part of his mother’s evening was unaccounted for. She claimed to have wandered round seeing that everyone was happy and occupied, but there was so far no corroborative evidence. And she was not a woman nobody would notice. From about nine onwards she was playing Monopoly, and no doubt that could be checked.

  Considering the party was specifically a game-playing one, the Hallams had spent a large amount of time sitting out, or being spectators. But there again, that might be a comment on the kind of people the Hallams were. If it was, Minchip rather sympathized with them.

  He pushed back his chair. A game was in prospect for him too. He could no longer delay visiting Major Coffey. He looked forward to the encounter not because he expected to like or respect the man, but rather in the spirit of an angler anticipating with relish a session with a particularly tricky trout. The Major, he knew, was a man who had tangled with the police very often in the past, and had never been significantly worsened.

  As he walked through Chowton on his way to the Major’s cottage, Minchip noticed two of the young people he had interviewed the day before, standing deep in conversation beside a stile. The set of their shoulders was disconsolate. He wondered if they had just been made aware of the direction that the village feeling was taking. He himself had been informed of this by Sergeant South, that most sensitive of barometers. He felt sorry for the young people. He knew the dark depths and irrationality of rural passions. Fifty years ago the family at the Hall, and perhaps even their servants, would have been shielded by habits of deference. That was much less the case today. He thought cynically: I’m sure Dennis Hallam greatly disapproves of deference.

  The cottage was square and unattractive, though in excellent repair. Even the front garden was given over to vegetables, apart from one or two elderly shrubs. The Major preparing to feed himself in the next war, thought Minchip. Or maybe it was just that the Major was not particularly well off. He screwed round the little handle that rang the bell, and waited.

  The Major, when he opened the door, was a shadowy figure. The cottage had a poky hallway, but there was no light in it. The Major stood back to let him in.

  “Ah, Inspector,” he said. “I’ve
been expecting you.”

  “Expecting?” Minchip queried, crossing the threshold.

  “But naturally. I was at the Wadhams’ gathering. And you will no doubt have heard that Christopher Keene was one of my little group.”

  So frankness was to be the opening gambit, thought Minchip, as he was ushered into the sitting-room.

  “You will have a cup of coffee?”

  Minchip had had coffee not half an hour before, but he accepted. He was willing to bet the Major employed no maid, and it would give him a chance to examine the room.

  It was a larger room than he had expected. The cottage was in fact two cottages knocked together—as was usually the case when gentry bought themselves a rural retirement home. This room represented the whole ground floor of one of them. The furniture was old, angular, and—as Minchip was soon to find out—uncomfortable. Inherited, no doubt. Probably the furniture Major Coffey had grown up with. In a wooden box under the window were dumbbells and Indian clubs. The bookshelf was a meagre affair. Army manuals, books on guns and gun lore, memoirs of army men and Empire Builders, some of them personally dedicated. The only overtly political work was Herr Hitler’s My Struggle.

  On his brief visit inside Hallam, Inspector Minchip had inevitably become aware that books dominated the house. Here it was guns. He had not noticed that immediately, because Coffey had not switched on the light. The cases containing them were down the far end of the room, much in shadow, but a miniature chandelier showed that in the evening they would be the focal point of the room. There was one case attached to the wall containing rifles, another glass display case containing pistols and Service revolvers. This was not a collection of antiques and curiosities. These were all recent weapons that had seen service.

  Minchip only had time to take in the major salient points of the collection when Coffey came in, bearing a tray.

  “It’s a dreary sort of day,” he said, in his soft voice with the suggestion of a lisp. He switched on the light. “Ah, you are examining my collection.”

  “Yes, indeed. Everything except a cannon.”

  Coffey laughed mirthlessly.