by Granger, Ann
‘But I wasn’t sure. I just kept thinking how horrible it was, the body being found, and how we could so easily have been there, Seb and I, when it happened, whatever it was. When that poor man died, I mean. I knew we couldn’t ever meet there again. Truth to tell, I didn’t want to meet Seb again anywhere else, ever! I think Seb knew it, too. We’d sailed very close to the wind and we’d nearly got mixed up in something really bad.
‘Then there was the boy, Alfie. I was sure he was on to us. He came up to talk to me one morning when I was at the garage and Seb not there. I didn’t need more petrol, but I went down just hoping to see Seb and find out if he knew anything more. Alfie was trying to find out what I knew, too. He wouldn’t go away. He kept grinning at me, like he already knew something and thought it was funny. He more or less said he knew I’d only come to see Seb. I knew there was only one thing to do, besides put a stop to the affair. I had to tell Pete about it, confess the lot. It would be hard to do and Pete would be so upset. But it would be worse if he found out from someone else. That Alfie, he might make trouble. The more I thought about it, the surer I became that Alfie had found out. He might try and blackmail Seb or me. I know he’s been in quite a lot of trouble. Maureen told me about it. Alfie is her nephew. Even she says Alfie is a bad lot.’
Rosie sighed, ‘So, I did tell Pete . . .’ she finished her story lamely. ‘I knew he’d be angry and hurt – hurt more than angry – but I didn’t know he’d go crazy and grab the old shotgun.’
A girl with straggling blond hair and a metal pin through one eyebrow was operating the till for the petrol station/minimart when Carter walked in. She was taking money from a motorist and there was no sign of Pascal. Carter stared up at the plastic sheet taped over the hole in the ceiling while he waited for the customer to leave. He wondered if Pascal was there or if he was too afraid now to step into his own place of business, even though they still had Pete Sneddon in a cell. The farmer would appear before a magistrate later and the case would certainly be referred to a Crown Court. Whether Sneddon would later be given bail was another matter. Given his responsibilities to his farm and the animals, he might. They’d confiscated his shotgun. At the moment the unfortunate Rosie Sneddon had to run the place alone with the help of a retired farmer who lived in the area. Nobly he had creaked out of his comfortable bungalow and peaceful retirement to take up a working life again, plodding about in mud.
The motorist left at last and Carter approached the counter to show his ID and enquire if Pascal was there. The girl first stared at the ID blankly and then, just as unresponsively, at him. At last, with great effort, she said Seb was in his office.
‘I’ll just go and find him, then,’ said Carter, thinking that Pascal must be desperate to put this girl in charge of anything, let alone a till.
Mild panic crossed her face. ‘It’s private,’ she said.
‘I’m on police business,’ said Carter as clearly as he could.
‘I dunno about that,’ said the girl.
‘I do,’ said Carter.
Pascal received his visit with a look of doleful resignation touched with not a little nervousness.
And well you might be nervous! thought Carter. It’s no thanks to you that Phil Morton isn’t gravely wounded or even dead.
As if he read Carter’s mind, Pascal asked, ‘How’s the other chap, the sergeant?’
‘He’s OK,’ Carter told him briefly.
‘I didn’t know Pete was going to come storming down here looking for me with a ruddy shotgun!’ Pascal’s nervousness gave way to whining defiance. ‘I don’t know whether the insurance company’s going to pay for that hole in the ceiling out there, either.’
Carter ignored this and, indicating the girl outside in the minimart with a jerk of his head, asked, ‘That young woman isn’t Mrs Wilson, I take it?’
Pascal looked even glummer. ‘No, Maureen’s handed in her notice. She says she can’t imagine ever working here again. She wouldn’t feel safe. I told her, look, Pete’s locked up at the moment and the cops have taken away his gun – and it’s not like he was trying to rob the place. It was purely personal. But she wouldn’t have it. I’ve had to take on someone else – in a hurry,’ he added, in justification for any poor opinion Carter might have formed of his new staff member.
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Carter. ‘It was a very hairy moment. We’re fortunate no one was hurt.’
Pascal, his mind still running on his staff shortage problems, observed wistfully, ‘Perhaps Maureen will change her mind when she’s had a bit of time to get over her fright.’ He didn’t look as if he had much faith in his optimistic forecast.
Carter, in any case, had no interest in Pascal’s staffing problem. ‘You and Mrs Sneddon,’ he said briskly, ‘have been using Balaclava House for a series of meetings while the owner, Mr Bickerstaffe, was away from the place.’
‘Yes – and I’d like to know who put you on to us!’ Pascal rallied, prepared to defend his actions.
‘Information received,’ said Carter expressionlessly.
Pascal glowered at him. ‘Who from? Nobody knew. Well, one of the Colleys might have seen us, but they wouldn’t go to the police.’ He chewed his lower lip. ‘It was that bloody useless nephew of Maureen’s, young Alfie, wasn’t it?’
When Carter made no reply, Pascal went on. ‘You don’t have to tell me. It had to be him, spying on me most likely. I only took him on because Maureen asked me. She told me he’d been in trouble and she thought if he had a steady job, he’d mend his ways and make something of himself. But you’ve picked him up again, haven’t you, for selling his happy pills and hash? He hasn’t dared to show his face here again. Still, I’ll catch up with him. He lives in Weston St Ambrose, same as me. He can’t avoid me for ever!’
‘If you’re thinking of violence, Mr Pascal, I advise you strongly against it,’ Carter warned him.
‘Much as I’d like to beat the little sod to a pulp, I won’t,’ said Pascal. ‘But I can still make his life a misery.’ He stared at Carter. ‘We weren’t guilty of breaking and entering, you know, at Balaclava House. Monty leaves the front door unlocked. Anyone could walk in. And we didn’t take anything. We were trespassing, admittedly, but that’s all.’
‘You’ve been giving it some thought,’ said Carter drily. ‘Had some legal advice, have you? The day the dead man was found in the house, it was searched and we found the room you’d been using.’
Pascal sighed. ‘Yeah, I know. Rosie realised you must have done and got on the phone to me about it at once. She was dead scared you’d trace us somehow. She wanted me to go back to the house and get in there and check out the room to make sure we’d not left anything – and give the place another clean round. I told you, she was out of her mind. I couldn’t get back in, even if I wanted to, not with police all over it. Even if I could, I couldn’t move anything in that room not one inch. You’d have photographed it, right? You’d notice the slightest thing out of place.’ Pascal shook his head. ‘She was panicking, you see. I was worried about it myself, honest truth.’
‘I’m afraid you’d left it all rather late to be worried, Mr Pascal. However, I’m not here about your affair with Mrs Sneddon. I’m here about a visitor whom, she claims, you saw in the grounds of Balaclava House once day when you were both there. He was a stranger, she said.’
Pascal nodded and looked relieved that he hadn’t to defend his activities at Balaclava House any more for the moment. ‘Yes, that’s right. We heard a car draw up and my first thought was it might be Mrs Harwell. She does drive over from time to time to check on Monty. I don’t know why she bothers, except that I suppose the old chap has got to leave his estate to someone. He’s stony broke, of course, but there are antiques, stacks of them, in that house. Must be worth something.’
‘Mrs Sneddon has made the same observation.’
‘We didn’t take anything, I’ve told you that once!’ Pascal snapped. ‘We could’ve done, anyone could’ve. It’s a miracle that plac
e hasn’t been burgled. But Rosie and I never even picked up anything to look at it.’
Because you didn’t want to leave prints . . . Carter thought sourly.
‘Mrs Sneddon was afraid of a burglary and of being blamed for it,’ he said aloud to the garage owner. ‘And when you saw a stranger apparently casing the place, she feared that was his intention.’
‘So did I.’ Pascal nodded. ‘He was up to no good, creeping around. I don’t know if he tried the front door. I reckon he didn’t, because, if he had, he’d have found it was unlocked and walked in. When I looked out of the window upstairs, I could see him below me, peering in the kitchen window. But then he started off walking all over that jungle of a garden. It’s a pretty big area and it took him twenty minutes at least. He kept appearing among the bushes and disappearing again. Rosie was freaking out. I didn’t know whether to worry more about her than about him! I thought she might have hysterics or something. Thank goodness he eventually took himself off.’
‘You never saw him again?’
‘No, never. He didn’t call in here and if I had seen him at the house again, I might have gone downstairs and asked him what he was doing.’
Carter raised his eyebrows. ‘You were hardly in a position to do that.’
‘If I walked round the corner of the building and confronted him, he wouldn’t have known I’d come out of the house,’ Pascal said. ‘He might have assumed I had, but he wouldn’t have seen me. He was at the back. Rosie and I used the front door.’
Carter put a hand to his inside jacket pocket and produced the photograph taken at the races, showing Taylor and Terri Hemmings. Silently he handed it to Pascal.
Pascal hesitated but took it and stared at it frowningly. ‘That’s the bloke,’ he said at last. ‘He was dressed a bit differently, but that’s him. I took the trouble to remember his face because I thought he might turn up again or stop by my place here.’ He returned the photo and looked thoughtfully at Carter. ‘So, is he the dead ’un? That’s why you’re carrying his photo round with you?’
‘Yes,’ Carter said. ‘It would appear so.’
Pascal thought again. ‘Funny, that,’ he observed.
Funny meaning ‘peculiar’, thought Carter, observing Pascal. Not funny meaning ‘comical’, I suppose. Though he’s got a sort of grin on his face now. He thinks he’s away clear, but we’ll see about that . . .
‘Did you, with or without the help of Mrs Sneddon, take the victim, this man in the photograph, alive or dead, into Balaclava House and leave him there on a sofa?’
Pascal’s grin vanished. He gaped foolishly, staring at Carter first in surprise and then in horror.
‘Me? Us? No, we weren’t there that day! We had nothing to do with any dead body!’
‘Let me ask you again. Think carefully, Mr Pascal. You didn’t find him outside the house as you were leaving? You might only have thought him very ill. You were chiefly concerned with protecting your reputation and that of the lady. So you took him inside and left him there for the owner to find on his return.’
‘No! ’ Pascal almost shrieked the word. ‘We weren’t there that day!’
Carter believed him. So much for Morton’s theory. Jess had never gone along with it but Carter himself had thought Phil’s idea a possibility. But it hadn’t happened that way.
‘Thank you, Mr Pascal,’ he said. ‘We may be in touch again – or Mr Bickerstaffe may be.’ Carter smiled. ‘Or more likely, Mrs Harwell, on Mr Bickerstaffe’s behalf.’
Pascal put his hands over his face. ‘Oh, Gawd . . .’ he moaned.
Chapter 15
Carter sat in his car outside the petrol station for a few moments, pondering his next course of action. He was only a couple of minutes’ drive away from Balaclava House, and was curious to retrace Jay Taylor’s steps, the day Pascal and Rosie Sneddon had seen him from the window, wandering about the former gardens. It also occurred to him – as it had done earlier to Jess – that he should check that no one had tried tampering with the scene in any way or done any damage to the building. Empty premises attracted vandalism.
He drove off towards Toby’s Gutter Lane, watched, he knew, by a miserable Seb Pascal through the window of the minimart.
The house stood in lonely crumbling decay and yet today, when Carter got there, it was not quite deserted. An elderly Ford Fiesta was parked outside. There was no sign of its occupants.
Carter got out of his car, pushed his way through the rusted gates and approached the house, hoping he wasn’t about to discover another body on a sofa. The front door was ajar. It should have been locked and sealed with a strip of blue and white tape, but the plastic ribbon lay tangled on the ground. Was he too late? Had the place already been ransacked? There would be hell to pay if it had. He pushed the door open and listened. Within, all was quiet.
He stepped into the hall, pausing to glance round its gloomy splendour and up the staircase, to where the dull light still made patches of colour play across the landing from the stained-glass window. The silence was oppressive but he wasn’t alone. He could sense another presence. He stood still, waiting, ears straining. Then he heard, from the direction of the kitchen, the chink of china or glass and the scrape of a chair.
‘Police!’ Carter called out loudly.
He fancied he heard an inrush of breath but possibly that was imagination. The kitchen door, at the far end of the hallway, opened and a woman stepped into the hall. The light was behind her and she was only a dim outline, slim, with long hair and some kind of loose, coat-like garment.
‘Who are you?’ Her voice was loud, confident and educated. It was also young.
‘Superintendent Carter,’ he replied, and reached for his ID. He held it up, open towards her.
She came briskly towards him and now he could see her clearly. She was no more than twenty. The hair was fair and very straight so that it lay on her shoulders in a pale gold waterfall. As for features, he thought her pretty in a sharp-faced kind of way. The coat-like garment was a long knitted cardigan with geometric patterns. Carter still held up his ID and when she reached him, she studied it carefully.
‘Doesn’t do you justice,’ she commented. It was a simple observation, delivered in a matter-of-fact tone.
‘It isn’t meant to be flattering.’ He put the ID away, obscurely nettled.
As he did, she asked, in that same cool, disconcerting way, ‘What are you doing here?’
‘This is the wrong way round,’ Carter told her mildly. ‘That’s what I ask you.’
‘It’s my uncle’s home. I’m checking everything’s OK.’
‘Ah,’ said Carter, ‘you’re Tansy Harwell.’
‘No,’ her voice was colder. ‘I’m Tansy Peterson.’
Damn, yes, of course. Bridget Harwell was much married. ‘I apologise,’ he said.
‘There’s no need for you to apologise. It’s my mother’s fault for having so many husbands.’ She pulled a wry grin. ‘Uncle Monty is at our house, but you know that. Mum’s concerned about Balaclava standing empty, so I drove over to take a look at it. I’ve got Uncle Monty’s keys.’ She took them from a pocket of the knitted coat and jangled them. ‘Mum got them off him.’
‘You didn’t bring Mr Bickerstaffe with you, to see his home for himself and that everything’s OK?’ Carter asked. ‘How is he coping, by the way?’
‘Come off it. If I brought him here I’d never get him to leave again. He’d just move straight back in. He’s coping well enough with the thought of finding a dead body. It wouldn’t put him off returning here. It’s staying at our house that he’s not coping so well with. To be frank, he hates it.’ Tansy raised her eyebrows questioningly. ‘I was just making a cup of tea. Would you like one?’
‘Thank you, that would be very nice.’
Minutes later, they were seated in the kitchen, either side of the table, and Tansy was pouring tea from a chipped brown glazed earthenware teapot into a couple of cups with odd saucers.
‘Do you take s
ugar? If so, I haven’t found any yet, but I dare say there is some – somewhere . . .’ She gazed round at the untidy, cluttered dresser and array of cupboards.
‘I don’t take sugar, thanks.’
She was prettier, now that he had a chance to view her better, and she was more relaxed, than he’d first judged. The sharp look had probably been due to tension and perhaps the chill temperature. She had cupped her hands round her teacup as if using the hot liquid to warm them. They were small hands, with neat, clean, well-polished nails and looked more like a child’s than an adult’s. But she was nineteen, or almost nineteen. He knew that because Jess had told him.
