by Faith Martin
Trudy heard the underlying question in the final sentence and stared at him. ‘You think that’s what she really thought and wanted? Or is that just what he said she thought and wanted. And said it so often that he made her believe it?’
Clement shrugged helplessly. He understood her anger, of course, and the fact that her youth allowed her to feel so outraged by such injustice made him want to applaud her. In stark contrast, he himself felt jaded and every one of his fifty-eight years. When he’d listened to his friend describing his patient’s hopelessness, it made him almost glad that he was no longer in medical practice.
‘Did Thomas Hughes ever say outright that he wouldn’t fund the treatment for his wife?’ Trudy demanded.
‘Not in front of James or the hearing of the other doctors, no. But then, he wouldn’t, would he?’ Clement said.
Trudy shook her head, and for a moment stared out of the windscreen, as Clement concentrated on parking the car. ‘You know,’ she finally said, shoulders slumping slightly, ‘I simply can’t understand someone like that. I mean … if he’d been a poor man, someone like my dad, who just didn’t have the money available, you could understand it. But to be that rich and still say “no”. What an absolute bastard!’
Trudy heard herself say the swear word, and inwardly flinched. Had she been at home, she’d never have dared use it. But here, in the car with the coroner, she felt she could express her anger without restraint.
And, as if to confirm her belief, she heard Clement Ryder say mildly, and without a touch of rebuke or censure, ‘Yes. Wasn’t he just?’
Trudy slumped back in her seat. ‘It’s becoming clearer and clearer the more we learn about him, that Thomas Hughes wasn’t a very nice man at all, isn’t it? He let his wife die when he could have helped her. He didn’t care a fig that people lost their savings in some of his get-rich-quick schemes, so long as he was all right and his money was never at risk. He treated his family like … well, I don’t know what. It almost seems as if that fire …’ She trailed off, not quite able to say what she was thinking.
Clement, who had no such scruples, smiled sardonically. ‘Was Nemesis catching up with him?’
‘Who?’ she asked, puzzled.
‘The Greek goddess of retribution,’ Clement supplied. ‘You’re thinking that he deserved what he got, are you?’
Trudy nodded. Not that she’d ever wish anybody dead, of course. But still.
‘Do you think that if someone did knock him on the head and deliberately set fire to the shed, leaving him to burn to death, that that someone should get away with it? Because the man who died wasn’t a nice man?’ Clement asked quietly.
Trudy flushed. ‘No. Of course I don’t.’
‘All right then,’ Clement said. ‘So let’s go and talk to another one who was present at that bonfire. And one, moreover, who’s just learned that he’s not getting his fair share of his father’s fortune either. He should have something interesting to say, don’t you think?’
Trudy didn’t need asking twice!
Chapter 16
Godfrey Hughes was a tall, lean man, with brownish hair fast going grey at the temples and light brown eyes. Trudy took in his smart dark blue suit and blood-red tie as he opened the door in answer to their knocking, and wondered if he wore the suit in honour of the reading of his father’s will or if he intended to go back to work in the afternoon.
She knew that he was a teacher at St Swithin’s from the preliminary research she’d done on him, and also remembered several members of the Hughes family commenting on the fact that he had never married.
He had the air of a well-groomed, slightly fussy cat, and Trudy could well imagine her old gran calling him one of life’s perennial bachelors.
‘Mr Hughes? I’m WPC Loveday, and this is Dr Clement Ryder. He held the inquest into your father’s … er … passing. Could we have just a few minutes of your time please?’ she began pleasantly.
She saw the man’s eyes widen slightly at this, and he visibly hesitated. For a second he looked from her, to Clement, then back to her again, and for a moment Trudy thought that he was actually going to saying ‘no’ and bar them from his residence. Then he gave a slight shrug and took a step backwards.
‘Very well, but I’m due back in school at three o’clock, so I don’t have much time. I was about to make myself a sandwich for a late lunch.’ He sounded both slightly petulant and rather weary, and she gave him a sympathetic smile.
‘I’m sorry sir, we won’t be long,’ she promised – not altogether truthfully. ‘As you may be aware, a local newspaper has made certain innuendoes about your father’s death, and it behoves us to investigate the case a little further.’ She found herself slipping into a more formal way of speaking, probably influenced by the fact that the man was a teacher.
‘That rag!’ Godfrey sniffed. ‘My study is through here.’ They were standing in a tiny hallway, with just enough room for a hat and coat stand and a tiny console table, upon which rested a telephone.
He opened a door to his immediate left and Trudy went inside, then stopped so suddenly that Clement, following on behind her, actually walked into her back. He muttered an apology and then his eyes too, widened, as they took in the contents of the room.
Trudy, with the words ‘my study’ still echoing in her mind, had stepped into the room with the preconceived idea that a room lined with books would await her. Maybe a gentleman’s desk, and a set of those green-leather button-backed armchairs that seemed to find their natural habitat in libraries and snugs the length and breadth of the land.
Instead, she found herself in a square shaped room painted pure white, with pale wooden floors and not a book in sight. There were many shelves, however, all of them lined with …
Her eyes, which had swivelled to her left, focused on the closest object to her. It was a small wooden statue, maybe twenty inches in height. It had an almost abstract shaped head, all planes and angular facets for cheekbones, but with an oddly contrasting, smoothly rounded belly. And jutting out beneath it, stretching out horizontally almost as much as the statue was tall, was a huge … well … man’s thing.
Trudy blinked, her eyes not quite believing that she was seeing what she thought she was seeing. Obviously, it was a piece of art, and looked tribal. Hastily she tore her eyes away from it. But there was not much respite wherever she looked.
On another shelf, behind a small, very pedestrian-looking desk, was a vase, depicting two figures moulded in plaster of Paris. The origin of this one seemed classical Greek to her, with probably mythological figures dancing in a very odd way. Their position was …
No. Not dancing. Trudy gulped. Definitely not dancing.
She was aware of heat flooding into her face, and she tried desperately to assume a casual expression.
Seemingly totally unaware of her predicament, Godfrey Hughes walked to the desk, pulled out an old wooden chair that looked as if he’d stolen it from one of his own classrooms, and sat down.
‘Please, won’t you be seated?’ He indicated two further, mismatched chairs that were placed in front of the desk. ‘I was just catching up on some marking.’ He looked towards a pile of blue schoolbooks that were set in a pile on one corner of the desk.
Clement sat down, careful not to meet Trudy’s eye. His own gaze met those of a wooden, extremely pregnant female, with long pendulous breasts, and guessed that she came from somewhere in the Congo – or maybe from one of the Polynesian islands. Trudy finally managed to meet his amused gaze with one of superb indifference, and he slowly transferred his gaze once more to the man in front of him.
Trudy, without a word, took out her notebook. This interview, she decided generously, could be all Clement’s.
Her silence left the coroner groping for an icebreaker. ‘Do you enjoy being a teacher, Mr Hughes?’ he asked eventually, producing a somewhat bland smile.
Godfrey sighed softly. ‘Education is a noble cause, of course. And I was always an industrious child and
enjoyed school myself. Naturally, too, I needed a profession, but failed to inherit my father’s habit – or love – of acquiring wealth. So teaching seemed as good a profession as any.’
He spoke carefully and precisely, as if he was in a schoolroom right now. But Trudy, refusing to look up from her notebook, didn’t care to think what the subject might be in a classroom that was littered with objects such as these.
‘Was your father disappointed by your choice of academia?’ Clement asked, thinking that Mary Everly had probably been right on the button when describing her late brother’s attitude to his eldest son. ‘I imagine he’d have preferred that you followed in his footsteps?’ he mused, careful to keep his voice non-judgemental.
‘Oh yes, and he never got tired of telling me so,’ Godfrey said, his voice cool but perfectly controlled. He watched Clement without any obvious signs of curiosity or impatience, which Trudy noted, but didn’t quite understand. Most of the other members of his family had at least shown signs of being made indignant at having to answer their questions. Some, she suspected, had been angry whilst others had been worried. But none had shown this utter lack of animation.
‘Of course, Matthew made up, somewhat, for his disappointment in me,’ Godfrey Hughes swept on. ‘But even then, having risen only so far as to become a manager of a department store – and not even his own – meant that he was not always the golden boy.’
Although his tone of voice didn’t alter by a fraction, Trudy and Clement were left with the distinct sense that this fact was a source of much satisfaction to the other man.
‘I see. Yes, we’ve heard a lot about the … er, eagerness with which your father amassed his fortune, Mr Hughes,’ Clement said, deciding it was time to get down to business. ‘I hope you don’t mind my being so blunt?’
‘Oh, not at all,’ Godfrey said with aplomb. ‘I’m well aware that my father, to be just as blunt, was as rapacious as a herd of Visigoths when it came to business, Dr Ryder. He dedicated his whole life to the accumulation of money and power. He certainly had no time to indulge in any of the finer things in life, such as art.’
So saying, he waved a hand in the air indicating the objects around them, and Trudy, unable to help herself, took another quick look at the shelves, her eyes falling on a piece of jade. It was a beautiful green colour, and for a moment, it looked like little more than a mound of weirdly sculpted bumps and lumps. It took her puzzled brain a few seconds to realise that what she was seeing was at least four separate human bodies, all male, all naked, and all doing things that must surely be physically impossible.
She turned her eyes once more to her notebook.
‘Yes. It’s a quite remarkable collection of erotica that you have here,’ Clement agreed. ‘You’re obviously a dedicated collector. Is that a pre-Colombian piece of pottery you have over there?’
Trudy, by now, was wise enough not to look.
‘Yes. I know a man in Panama,’ Godfrey said, with false modesty. Clement, who thought the quote sounded as if it belonged in a third-rate spy thriller, bit back the smile that wanted to leap to his face.
‘Such a collection must take up a lot of your time. And funds?’ he added casually.
‘Oh yes. All my spare time – school holidays and what have you, I spend abroad, searching for my treasures,’ Godfrey admitted, again with patently false modesty.
Clement nodded. ‘I take it your father had no time for your collection?’
‘Not him! Philistine,’ Godfrey said. But again, without any obvious sign of heat. It was as if his father’s indifference had long since ceased to register with him. ‘I regularly have people from the Ashmolean come to look at one or other of my Babylonian pieces. And I have a very rare carving of obsidian, for instance, that brings professors from all over the world to my door.’
‘That must be gratifying. And now that your father’s gone, I take it you’ll have no trouble in acquiring more pieces? They can’t come cheap, I’m sure,’ Clement added craftily.
For a moment, a flash of genuine emotion seemed to cross Godfrey Hughes’s face. But whether it was hate, anger or even twisted humour, it came and went too fast for either Trudy or Clement to identify it.
‘I’ve never used my father’s money to acquire my collection,’ he merely said, then added, ‘and I never shall.’
Of course, both Trudy and Clement knew that he would now never have the chance. It was now perfectly obvious to them why the dead man had made sure that his eldest son wasn’t given any lump sum in his will, but rather a pension, to be meted out in dribs and drabs. Thomas Hughes had wanted to make sure that his son didn’t spend good money on pornographic art.
‘If we could just go over a few points on the night your father died, Mr Hughes,’ Clement said quietly. ‘Did you see your father actually go into the shed?’
‘I don’t believe so, no.’
‘But it was you and your brother-in-law Kenneth, your sister Alice’s husband, who started the bonfire?’
‘Yes. It was wet and we had to use some paraffin from the shed to get it alight.’
‘Did you fetch the paraffin?’
‘No. I believe it was Kenneth. Or maybe he sent Matthew to get it. I wasn’t really paying much attention.’
At this, Trudy sighed over her notebook. Wasn’t it remarkable that, with all those people at the bonfire party, not one of them seemed to have noticed anything useful? For a moment, she allowed herself to mull over the delicious idea of a family conspiracy. What if they were all in on it? What if, at some point, all of the dead man’s children had got together and decided to kill their father, and in such a way as the evidence would all go up in smoke, and they could be each other’s alibi?
It was fast becoming clear that the victim was not the sort of man who had been universally loved, not even by his nearest and dearest.
But she knew what DI Jennings would say to her if she foolish enough to present him with such a theory! Evidence, WPC Loveday, she could hear him thundering. Bring me evidence!
Clement carried on doggedly talking over the events of that night, from the first sign of fire in the shed, to the time the fireman left, when the shed was no more than a mound of smoking ruins. But if Godfrey Hughes had seen or heard anything suspicious, he was not about to tell them.
Finally, when his voice, which had been eerily emotionless throughout, tapered off, Trudy thanked him for his time and rose from her chair with alacrity. Careful to keep her eyes on her feet, she left the study, with all its artfully copulating humans behind her, and once she was safely out in the hallway, gave an obvious sigh of relief.
Godfrey Hughes closed the door firmly behind them.
As she walked down the set of wooden stairs into the communal foyer, Trudy paused on the threshold of the front door to observe the cold, wet and near-dark afternoon outside, struggling to find something to say to her companion.
Clement, once again sensing her predicament, said sotto voce, ‘Well, that was interesting.’
Trudy burst out laughing.
Chapter 17
Since the weather was so grim, and it was nearly fully dark already, they decided to wait until Monday to talk to Matthew Hughes.
It was still rather dim and grey, as mid-morning, Clement drove them along the High Street, parking in one of the city’s many winding, narrow, medieval lanes that lead off it.
On a prime spot not far from the bridge over the river, Blewitt & Sons (established 1821) sold any number of items to its discerning customers. Spread over three storeys, it could offer diverse items ranging from toys to ladies’ underwear, confectionery to bathroom taps and carpets to lawnmowers – thankfully, not all in the same department.
It didn’t take them long to learn that Mr Hughes managed the ironmonger’s department on the top floor. There was an antiquated lift, but neither Clement nor Trudy quite trusted the ill-fitting contraption, and both opted to take the stairs instead.
They found the newly created millionaire in a secti
on of gardening equipment, checking that a shipment of rakes and spades were being displayed properly. As Trudy approached him, she wondered if the man had already written out his notice, for she couldn’t imagine anyone worth nearly a million pounds, remaining in his humble job at a department store.
‘Mr Hughes?’ Trudy recognised him from his likeness to his father, whose photograph adorned Clement Ryder’s case file. Like his father, Matthew was tall and thin, with the same brown hair and rather square chin. The only thing he hadn’t inherited was his father’s rather big nose. Eyes that were hazel, like those of his sister Alice, turned to look at them, and then narrowed slightly as Trudy introduced herself and Clement.
With a muttered word or two to the shop assistant who was working on the display he turned and led them towards the back of the long, open-plan floor, where a series of offices overlooked an uninspired view of air vents, garages, and rubbish bins.
He smiled vaguely as he offered them a seat – of which there were only three in the room, taking the one behind the small desk for himself.
‘Yes, both Alice and Godfrey have told me about this, er, further investigation into Father’s accident,’ Matthew said, ‘and that I should expect a visit.’
Trudy knew from her notes that Matthew was thirty-seven years old, but he looked older to her. There was a bluish-grey smudging beneath his eyes that gave mute testimony to the fact that he hadn’t been sleeping well lately, and his suit, respectable thought it was, seemed to hang on him oddly, as if he’d lost weight recently.
Was it possible that they’d finally found someone who actually mourned the loss of his parent?
