Skeleton Key

by Robert Richardson

  ‘Not with me, but there’s one in the office. We don’t usually keep it locked.’

  ‘Well, lock it now,’ Dunford instructed then turned to Tess and Maltravers. ‘I must go and tell Lord Pembury about this, but I’ll see you out first.’

  All of them went back upstairs to the main entrance hall where York went into his office to collect the cellar door key and Dunford let his visitors out through the huge front door: great panels of oak studded with iron heads of nails the size of crown pieces.

  ‘May I ask you to keep this to yourselves for the time being?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Maltravers agreed. ‘Although if Bostock doesn’t turn up pretty sharpish, won’t you have some difficulty in keeping it quiet? You’ll have more tourists arriving tomorrow expecting to see him.’

  ‘We’ll keep the cellar closed and put them off somehow,’ said Dunford. ‘There’ll be complaints, but we can handle that.’ He held out his hand. ‘It’s been a great pleasure meeting you both. I’m sorry we haven’t had the opportunity to talk more about your career, Miss Davy. Perhaps we’ll be able to at the party after the match tomorrow? I’ll see you then.’

  ‘Thank you for showing us your home,’ said Maltravers. ‘It was fascinating, even without the disappearing skeleton. Incidentally, how do we get out of the park at this time of night?’

  ‘There’s a small door with a Yale lock cut into the Bellringer Street gate,’ said Dunford. ‘Just make sure it’s secure behind you.’

  He smiled and closed the great door, leaving them at the top of the wide semicircle of steps that fell like the train of a gown from the terrace on to the gravelled drive. Residual luminescence from the vanished sun washed the night sky with mother-of-pearl, with silhouettes of pipistrelle bats flickering across it, their high-pitched squeaks the only sound in the gloaming stillness.

  ‘Interesting evening,’ Maltravers remarked as they walked away from the silent purple-shadowed mass of the house, footsteps on the crisp foam of the gravel path loud in the silence. ‘I thought body snatching went out with Burke and Hare.’

  ‘That’s just a stupid joke,’ Tess said dismissively. ‘What was much more interesting was Susan’s behaviour when Simon appeared. I still can’t get over that.’

  ‘She certainly didn’t make much effort to hide her feelings, whatever was causing them,’ Maltravers agreed. ‘Or perhaps they were so strong that she was unable to control them. Peter just looked confused about it. Anyway, unless she wants to talk about it, it’s none of our business.’

  They passed under the arch of the Bellringer Street lodge through the door in the gate. From the top of the hill they could see the tangled skeins of orange street lights of the New Town, but Old Capley was dark under the stars, the drop of the street illuminated only by two pools of light cast by ancient lampposts. Just out of synchronisation, the clocks of St Barbara’s church and Edenbridge House sent out twenty-four answering strokes to mark the hour. When they entered the Penroses’ kitchen they found a note from Susan on the table.

  ‘Sorry about tonight,’ they read. ‘I don’t know what was the matter with me. You know where everything is if you want to make yourselves a drink. See you in the morning. Love, Susan.’

  ‘Are we back to pre-natal tension then?’ asked Maltravers.

  Tess looked at the handwriting, scribbled and agitated, a hasty and duty note of apology to explain away an embarrassing indiscretion.

  ‘If Simon thinks I’m that simple, he’s out of his tree,’ she replied caustically. ‘That was his explanation but don’t ask me to believe it.’

  They went quietly upstairs and Maltravers was in bed reading when Tess returned from the bathroom.

  ‘By the way,’ he said casually. ‘I gained the distinct impression that the heir to the Edenbridge millions was making a pass at you earlier this evening.’

  ‘Was he?’ Tess smiled and blinked with exaggerated innocence. ‘Well, I’m afraid he’s not the first one, darling. Do you mind?’

  Maltravers looked back at her sardonically. ‘I see. The prospect of being the mistress of Edenbridge House appeals, does it?’

  She stared at him for a moment then slipped her nightdress off her shoulders, letting it fall to the floor before climbing into the bed beside him.

  ‘For an intelligent man, you can be amazingly stupid sometimes,’ she told him. ‘Come here.’

  Afterwards, as they lay half-awake, they heard footsteps of someone walking down the hill past the house, whistling softly; Alister York was going home.

  *

  ‘Now what the hell’s happened?’ demanded a mystified transatlantic voice. ‘The guy didn’t even hit the goddamned ball and those little bits of wood are still standing up. Why’s he out?’

  ‘Lbw,’ Maltravers explained.

  ‘L. B. who?’

  ‘Leg before wicket. His leg stopped the ball hitting the stumps.’

  ‘I thought that was the general idea.’

  ‘It is, but you can’t just stand there with your legs together to prevent it happening.’

  Milton Chambers II looked further confused. In the six months he had lived in England, occupying a house in Bellringer Street owned by the British satellite of a Philadelphia engineering company, his natural anglophilia had flourished. He had traced his family ancestry back to a village within a hundred miles of Boston Stump (virtually next door by American standards) and the hallowed shades of the Pilgrim Fathers, and was now contemplating paying several thousand pounds to acquire the title of Lord of the Manor of Compton St Peter in Dorset, a distinction which would have allowed him to graze his sheep on the ancient Lord’s Pasture had not the county council inconsiderately run the village bypass straight through it. But such efforts, he was convinced, would be seriously deficient unless he somehow managed to comprehend the curious summer game which obsessed the true Englishman. He knew what was not cricket—making a pass at another man’s wife, cheating at cards in the club—but the rules and occult subtleties of the real thing eluded him. He was attending the Town v. Estate match in the manner of an eager novitiate and had attached himself to Maltravers, obviously an advanced expert.

  ‘Legs together,’ he repeated. ‘Is that something to do with that maiden thing you were telling me about? Hell, I didn’t realise sex came into this.’

  ‘A maiden is an over—that’s six deliveries of the ball from either end—in which no runs are scored,’ Maltravers repeated patiently. ‘Lbw is something the batsman does wrong which means he is out. There is no sex in cricket.’

  ‘You said something about goolies,’ Chambers reminded him suspiciously.

  ‘Googlies,’ Maltravers corrected firmly and hastily. ‘That’s an off break delivered with an apparent leg break action or vice versa, like that chap just bowled. There is also a Chinaman which is an off break from a left-handed bowler to a right-handed batsman.’ He smiled at the American sympathetically. ‘But I don’t think you’re ready for that yet.’

  Chambers, who was finding the whole course of instruction as incomprehensible as Sanskrit, silently agreed. Maltravers privately recalled the story of the great Groucho Marx sitting in the Long Room at Lords having the game explained to him while a match was in progress. He showed a ready grasp of the basic principles then surveyed the proceedings for several minutes before demanding: ‘So when do they start?’ Maltravers had experienced similar difficulties with the rules of American Football, a game which appeared to him to be some manner of semi-organised public riot.

  ‘What’s the score?’ Chambers inquired; the combination of seemingly unrelated numbers on the scoreboard made no sense to him.

  ‘Twenty-seven for one,’ Maltravers replied. ‘The two batsmen in now are Lord Dunford and Alister York, who are the best in the side, so we ought to start seeing some action.’

  ‘What about you?’ Chambers asked, convinced that anyone who could talk about the game so expertly must be a gifted player as well.

  ‘Merely a replacement
brought in at the last moment,’ Maltravers said dismissively. ‘With a bit of luck, I won’t even be called upon to bat.’

  Maltravers had felt it polite to offer to go in at number eleven, hoping to avoid having to do very much. The tension round the waistband of his white flannels was a permanent reminder that several summers had bloomed and faded since he had last played. As he stretched out in a deckchair under the mottled shade of a copper beech tree, Tess lay face down on the grass beside him, absorbed in a book. When she had first fallen in love with Maltravers, she had wanted to show an interest in all his passions and had spent an entire day with him at the Oval suffering a rising sense of total disbelief. When told that the proceedings would continue for another two whole days—and already looked like ending in a draw—she had smiled nervously and announced that she really had to go and see her aunt in Broadstairs. Maltravers later discovered that such duty visits were only marginally less disagreeable to her than cleaning the oven and had drawn his own conclusions. Even the prevailing circumstances of a blazing Saturday afternoon and an almost lyrically perfect setting for the game—wide swathe of smooth grass against a backdrop of variegated jade trees with the square tower of the parish church peeping above—were not enough to engage her attention.

  Accompanied by the drowsy chatter of the spectators, Dunford and York settled down to build the foundations of a decent score and for a quarter of an hour garnered runs almost as they pleased. Then York rashly slashed at a delivery turning away from him, clipping it into the grateful hands of first slip (a piece of field-placing terminology which had caused Chambers much fascination) who had been placed there precisely for such an indiscretion.

  ‘Silly bugger,’ someone sitting near them remarked feelingly. ‘He should have left it alone.’

  York appeared to share the same opinion, pulling his gloves off angrily as he left the wicket and hurling his bat to the ground by the boundary rope before walking away. Out in the field, the Town captain encouraged his side with shouts and handclaps; all he had to do now was keep the bowling away from the experienced Dunford and pick off the rest of the side like a sniper. Maltravers watched gloomily as wicket after wicket fell to the most hapless of batting. He buckled on his pads as number nine went in and survived only three balls; number ten, a petrified, pimply youth, was clean bowled by the next delivery, his stumps splayed out like a broken fan, and Maltravers walked out with the bowler on a hat trick to finish the Estate innings. As he reached the wicket, Dunford strolled across and spoke to him.

  ‘Two balls left in this over,’ he said. ‘Try and block him and I’ll keep strike after that.’

  Maltravers nodded, then went to the striker’s end and took guard, casually glancing round as the field moved in like wolves on wounded prey. Twenty yards beyond the opposite stumps, the Town’s pace bowler polished the ball on his flannels with quiet, deliberate menace. Maltravers settled, tapping the end of his bat softly on the ground and looked straight at him as he thundered in.

  Anyone who thinks cricket is a slow game should experience facing a fast bowler in full cry. No sooner do you see his arm arcing through his delivery action a mere twenty-two yards away, than a very hard missile is suddenly in your immediate neighbourhood, unnervingly hissing past your head if the pitch is firm and the bowler is in an unfriendly frame of mind. Not that anything so hostile as a bouncer was called for on this occasion; on a hat-trick, confident that the final Estate batsman would prove as incompetent as his predecessors, the bowler felt that simple speed and accuracy on middle stump would be elementary overkill. Dunford looked uneasy as he raced in. He was a bare couple of paces short of releasing the ball when Maltravers dropped his bat and turned away, clasping a gloved hand to his face.

  ‘Sorry!’ he shouted.

  Thrown off momentum, the bowler lost his direction and the ball streaked harmlessly through to the wicketkeeper as Maltravers tugged out a handkerchief and applied it to his eye which contained nothing more than a wicked glint. Dunford suddenly found the face of his bat strangely interesting. The bowler glared down the pitch as Maltravers replaced the handkerchief, retrieved his bat and waved an apologetic acknowledgment.

  ‘All right,’ he called down the pitch. ‘Sorry about that.’

  As their bowler stalked back to his mark, the Town fielders exchanged suspicious glances; Maltravers had either bottled out or used an old trick of gamesmanship (the morals of cricket were sometimes not quite so squeaky clean as Chambers felt them to be). But it would not work a second time—and the hat-trick was still on. Even Tess, who had condescended to watch while Maltravers was batting, could sense the gathered hostility now concentrating on his tall, tense figure.

  By any standards, the next delivery was an excellent one, hurled at maximum speed, low and laser straight on Maltravers’ stumps. Jerking up his right elbow as he stretched forward, he met it with the full face of his bat and it bounced harmlessly into the covers. The Town side deflated with disappointment as Dunford looked at Maltravers then turned away, intrigued and slightly surprised.

  Furious at being thwarted, the bowler failed to notice what Dunford had seen; Maltravers’ classic forward defensive stroke had revealed an unexpected touch of real quality. The final ball of the over had a fatal additional anger about it which flawed its control, causing it to turn just fractionally to leg. Maltravers stepped smoothly back and right and whipped the blade of his bat at it, hooking it viciously straight at the head of short square leg, who dropped to the ground, seemingly determined to examine the grass at his feet as closely as possible. Maltravers’ caustic nod at him as he straightened up and the streaking ball banged against the metal scoreboard, the umpire somewhat academically signalling a four, advised him to find a safer place to stand. As the field changed over, the Town side looking at Maltravers guardedly, Dunford walked down the wicket and spoke to him again.

  ‘As captain of this side, I must formally reprimand you for your trickery with that first ball,’ he said, poker-faced. ‘However, I also want to know what the hell you’re doing coming in at number eleven.’

  ‘I’m only a guest player,’ Maltravers reminded him. ‘It seemed discourteous to go in ahead of the regular team members.’

  ‘Well, it’s a relief to have you here at last.’ Dunford glanced across at the scoreboard. ‘Eighty-three with nine overs left. Let’s see if we can top the hundred, shall we? They’ve got to bring their spinners back in a couple of overs which will help.’

  In the following hectic three quarters of an hour, the final fifty-four balls produced a further hundred and twenty runs, the spectators cheering constantly as the two men mercilessly slaughtered the bowling, skilfully altering their tactics to outwit the permutations of defensive fieldings tried by the increasing frantic Town captain. Maltravers considerately took only a single off the penultimate delivery, allowing Dunford the pleasure of cavalierly leaping down the pitch to meet the final ball, bat swinging like a broadsword, to send it soaring back over the dejected bowler’s head for a last, satisfying six. As the Town side joined the applause rattling all around, Dunford threw his arm round Maltravers’ shoulders as they walked off.

  ‘Not one for the purists, but bloody marvellous!’ he exclaimed. ‘All right, where did you learn to bat like that?’

  ‘My father,’ Maltravers replied with a nostalgic smile. ‘He got his cricket Blue at Oxford as well and turned out for the Gentlemen against the Players a couple of times. But frankly I’m out of practice.’

  Dunford nodded in agreement. ‘You were damned lucky with a couple of those square cuts. Anyway, you’ve given us the first chance of winning this match that we’ve had for years. You’ve earned a beer.’

  They joined the rest of the players at the trestle tables bearing barrels and sandwiches, which had been set up under the trees.

  ‘Any news about the skeleton?’ Maltravers asked quietly as they turned away with their drinks. Dunford shook his head as he lowered his face towards the sun-sparkling foam bubblin
g over the rim of his glass.

  ‘Not a thing,’ he replied, withdrawing from the froth and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘None of the guides saw anything and, as you know, it was not the most organised of days. We’ve contacted various coach operators, but no luck there either.’

  ‘So are you going to tell the police now?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Dunford. ‘We’re still taking the view that it’s just some sort of joke and he’ll turn up fairly soon.’

  ‘Do you think anyone might demand a ransom for him?’ Maltravers asked unexpectedly. Dunford stared at hire in amazement.

  ‘What an extraordinary idea…still, I expect it’s just possible. After all, someone stole poor old Charlie Chaplin from his grave for the same reason, didn’t they? But I can’t see it. My father would be very disinclined to pay money to get Tom Bostock back.’

  ‘But Lady Pembury might think differently,’ Maltravers observed. ‘As I understand it, she feels it’s a matter of family honour that Tom Bostock should be properly buried. That could be a persuasive point if he’s been…’ He frowned briefly. ‘Is kidnapped the right word in this situation?’

  Dunford looked at him thoughtfully for a moment.

  ‘You know, you may have a point,’ he said finally, then shook his head in immediate rejection. ‘But it’s ridiculous. At the moment not all that many people know what was being planned about the funeral, and I can’t accept that any of them would do what you’re suggesting. The trouble with you is that you’ve got the hyperactive imagination of a writer.’

  ‘I’ve also got the experience of a journalist,’ Maltravers added. ‘And that taught me there are few things—however bizarre—that somebody will not actually do.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Dunford. ‘In the meantime, I’d still like you to keep it to yourself. It may leak out eventually, but we’d much rather keep it quiet and hope that he just turns up again. Excuse me, I must go and talk to the visiting captain.’

  As Dunford walked away, Maltravers became aware of someone hovering at his side. He turned to see a young woman, strikingly like a pretty, timid bird, offering him a plate of sandwiches.