The Best British Mysteries 3 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  But Khan’s trial for murder didn’t start again at two o’clock or at any other time. I was toying with a plate of steak and kidney pie and a pint of Guinness in the pub opposite the Old Bailey when I saw the furtive figure of Sam Ballard oozing through the crowd. He came to me obviously heavy with news.

  ‘Rumpole! You don’t drink at lunchtime, do you?’

  ‘Yes. But not too much at. Can I buy you a pint of stout?’

  ‘Certainly not, Rumpole. Mineral water, if you have to. And could we move to that little table in the corner? This is news for your ears alone.’

  After I had transported my lunch to a more secluded spot and supplied our Head of Chambers with mineral water, he brought me up to date on that lunch hour’s developments.

  ‘It’s Sue the secretary, Rumpole. When we told her that she’d have to go into the witness box, she panicked and asked to see Superintendent Gregory. By this time, she was in tears and, he told me, almost incomprehensible. However, Gregory managed to calm her down and she said she knew you’d get it out of her in the witness box, so she might as well confess that she was the one who had made the telephone call.’

  ‘Which telephone call was that?’ Soapy Sam was demonstrating his usual talent for making a simple statement of fact utterly confusing.

  ‘The telephone call to your client. Telling him to go and meet the senior tutor.’

  ‘You mean...?’ The mists that had hung over the case of Khan the terrorist were beginning to clear. ‘She pretended to be...’

  ‘The senior tutor’s secretary. Yes. The idea was to get Khan into the building whilst Glossop...’

  ‘Murdered his wife?’ I spoke the words that Ballard seemed reluctant to use.

  ‘I think she’s prepared to give evidence against him,’ Soapy Sam said, looking thoughtfully towards future briefs. ‘Well, she’ll have to, unless she wants to go to prison as an accessory.’

  ‘Has handsome Ricky heard the news yet?’ I wondered.

  ‘Mr Glossop has been detained. He’s helping the police with their enquiries.’

  So many people I know, who help the police with their enquiries, are in dire need of help themselves. ‘So you’ll agree to a verdict of not guilty of murder?’ I asked Ballard, as though it was a request to pass the mustard.

  ‘Perhaps. Eventually. And you’ll agree to guilty of making death threats in a letter?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I admitted. ‘We’ll have to plead guilty to that.’

  But there was no hurry. I could finish my steak and kidney and order another Guinness in peace.

  * * * *

  ‘It started off,’ I was telling Hilda over a glass of Chateau Thames Embankment that evening, ‘as an act of terrorism, of mad, religious fanaticism, of what has become the new terror of our times. And it ends up as an old-fashioned murder by a man who wanted to dispose of his rich wife for her money and be free to marry a pretty young woman. It was a case, you might say, of Dr Crippen meeting Osama Bin Laden.’

  ‘It’s hard to say which is worse.’ She Who Must be Obeyed was thoughtful.

  ‘Both of them,’ I told her. ‘Both of them are worse. But I suppose we understand Dr Crippen better. Only one thing we can be grateful for.’

  ‘What’s that, Rumpole?’

  ‘The terrorist got a fair trial. And the whole truth came out in the end. The day when a suspected terrorist doesn’t get a fair trial will be the day they’ve won the battle.’

  I refilled our glasses, having delivered my own particular verdict on the terrible events of that night at William Morris University.

  ‘Mind you,’ I said, ‘it was your friend Gerald Graves who put me onto the truth of the matter.’

  ‘Oh really.’ Hilda sounded unusually cool on the subject of the judge.

  ‘It was when he was playing Father Christmas. He was standing in for someone else. And I thought, what if the real murderer thought he’d stand in for someone else. Hussein Khan had uttered the death threat and was there to take the blame. All Ricky had to do was to go to work quickly. So that’s what he did - he committed murder in Hussein Khan’s name. That death threat was a gift from heaven for him.’

  One of our usual silences fell between us, and then Hilda said, ‘I don’t know why you call Mr Justice Graves my friend.’

  ‘You got on so well at Christmas.’

  ‘Well, yes we did. And then he said we must keep in touch. So I telephoned his clerk and the message came back that the judge was busy for months ahead but he hoped we might meet again eventually. I have to tell you, Rumpole, that precious judge of yours does not treat women well.’

  I did my best. I tried to think of The Old Gravestone as a heartbreaker, a sort of Don Juan who picked women up and dropped them without mercy, but I failed miserably.

  ‘I’m better off with you, Rumpole,’ Hilda told me. ‘I can always rely on you to be unreliable.’

  <>

  * * * *

  Judith Cutler

  Living with the Gilt

  Simon de Rougemont reined in his horse the better to gaze with pleasure upon his newly acquired domain. It was his reward for services rendered to William the Bastard. Every prospect pleased: the rich pastures, the wooded slopes teeming, no doubt, with game, and the glittering river promising fine fishing. And the settlement, of course. He sighed. Only man, in the form of his reluctant tenantry, was vile.

  Beside him, Claude Villeneuve, the interpreter foisted on him by necessity, sniffed audibly. ‘To think that they call this a village!’ Claude’s finger led his lord’s eye to the cluster of low wooden huts, reed-thatched, from the roofs of which smoke meandered through more orifices than the builder had presumably intended. ‘Animals!’ the young man added tersely ‘In fact, worse than animals, which know no better.’

  Simon raised a minatory hand. ‘Only think how much greater will be the joys of civilising them. First of all, we will build a church worthy of the name of the Almighty. And then we will introduce them to a proper legal system —’

  ‘Fortifying your castle is the best way of civilising those beasts.’

  Simon chose to ignore the interruption. Somehow this invasion - no, this just retrieval of lands willed to William - had contrived to bring to the fore men who would never in earlier days have achieved any prominence. Some of his fellow barons were behaving in the most ungodly ways, in the interests, they insisted, of the rapid subjugation of their English cousins. To Simon’s mind, they were little better - and sometimes regrettably worse - than the savage Saxons whose confiscated fiefdoms they had been granted.

  ‘Not just wooden palisades,’ Villeneuve continued. ‘Good stone walls. The sort of building to show who’s boss.’ He dropped his whip ostentatiously. ‘Oy! You. You there!’ he slipped off his right glove to click his fingers.

  A broad-shouldered man in his early twenties walked unsmilingly, and unhurriedly, towards them. He picked up the whip, reaching up to restore it to Villeneuve’s grasp. If he did not expect largesse, he certainly would not have expected the vicious cut across the cheek to which Villeneuve treated him. But he neither flinched nor swore, merely stepping back a pace and regarding his assailant steadily, as if to fix Villeneuve’s face in his memory.

  ‘Enough of that,’ Simon said sharply, as even their escort of soldiers shifted uneasily. ‘Law enforcement is one thing, brutality another. We are here —’

  ‘I know, to civilise and secure. But they’re like dogs, my lord - they need to be shown who’s in charge.’

  ‘So you say. With undue frequency, if you will permit the observation.’ Simon raised an acid eyebrow. He was Villeneuve’s senior not just in rank but also in age: Why should the wretched man not show him due respect?

  Villeneuve was unmoved. ‘Now, how about that for a game piece?’

  He pointed with the offending whip at another villager.

  ‘For God’s sake, man, can you think with nothing but your fist or your pizzle?’

  The young woman in question, t
hough, like all the villagers, thin to the point of emaciation, was extremely pretty, and her shabby, shapeless gown couldn’t conceal her magnificent breasts. But her occupation declared itself all too clearly as her charges trotted in front of her.

  ‘You’ll be forbidding access to the forest, no doubt, my lord?’ Villeneuve suggested.

  It would be pleasant to believe that Villeneuve had only good husbandry in mind.

  ‘Only if my land agent recommends it. But there is nothing like pigs for keeping down undergrowth: I welcome them back in my estates in Beaune.’ He almost expected Villeneuve to protest that those were French porkers, these merely swine. ‘And remember the pig’s nose for truffles.’

  ‘I have a nose for something else,’ Villeneuve declared, swinging down from the saddle, contriving, as he landed in the mud, not to hear his lord’s rebuke. He set off briskly after the swineherd, slipping an arm round her to pull her face to his. His free hand was ready to pull her shift from her breast.

  Simon swore in exasperation. There was no law to say a soldier couldn’t kiss pretty damsels. Kiss and more. It was almost de rigueur. Young men had appetites. And many a girl had a gown to her back and food in her belly she’d have lacked but for the generosity of the man who’d bedded her. But Villeneuve, old enough at twenty-five to know better, didn’t differentiate between a supposedly welcome frolic and what was seemly in the confines of the stockade, for example. At least in his lord’s sober company, however, he must no doubt show a little restraint.

  Simon swore again, but this time with anger. Restraint! Well, if Villeneuve didn’t show it, at least the young woman did. Even from where he sat, Simon could see her pull back her hand to strike the face now so offensively close to hers, but hold off from the final blow. Not, Simon thought, from cowardice - though she could have been excused for fearing that she would not strike a conqueror with impunity - but, from the expression on her face, distaste at the prospect of having her wrist captured, as inevitably it would be. However thin and ragged the woman - and what Saxon after the long campaign would be sleek and smart? - and however lowly her function, she possessed a dignity that appealed to the older man, and he spurred his horse forward to deal with Villeneuve. But he was not the only one. One of the pigs, almost as if responding to the girl’s choked cry, turned sharply and, head down, charged, its evil little eyes like blazing beads. Villeneuve was too absorbed in extracting a kiss to notice. But the young man who might have been expected to relish a terrible injury to the Norman stepped swiftly forward, bringing down the shaft of his axe hard enough to stun the pig in mid charge. It reeled drunkenly away. Simon dismounted, elbowing Villeneuve sharply back to his mount. He dipped into his purse. The coins he proffered needed no interpretation, nor did the silent doffing of the man’s cap as he accepted them. But for all the goodwill in the world, Simon could not frame in the man’s own tongue the words of gratitude he sought, and he was a man of few gestures. At last the young woman stepped forward, pointing at the pig and making from her own breasts to the bottom of her belly a sign they all understood - the pig was in fact a sow and was enceinte. She waved her hands vigorously from side to side, pointing back to the sow. This, she gave Simon clearly to understand, was not the moment to upset a female.

  Villeneuve was, alas, too highly born for Simon to condemn him to a public beating for disobeying orders. But he had to endure a veritable tongue-lashing, and lost his privileges for many days. Simon would have sent him home in disgrace immediately had he not needed him so much: to discuss the plans for the improvement of the stockade, to find the best timber, locate the purest springs. And to recruit - if that was not too mealy-mouthed a term - the local workmen. Simon was entitled to enslave the entire populace and work it to death if so he wished. Many of his brother barons certainly did. But he was a soldier, not a slave master, and though he didn’t think anyone had ever accused him of lax discipline, he preferred to temper force with fairness. And, like every good soldier, he prided himself on knowing not just every man in his command but also what that man’s function was and where he might be found at any time.

  Most of the men were serfs, unskilled men with little to commend them except their numbers and their - enforced -willingness. But others - the scaffolders, the carpenters - had an expertise that Simon found himself respecting. One of the latter was the young man who’d saved Villeneuve from the pig. They would greet each other with a silent nod. Simon had no desire to encourage insubordination; no doubt the carpenter - Beom - didn’t want to toady. At least, however, it was a greeting. Perhaps, Simon reflected, it wasn’t just his new hilltop castle that was being built, looming over the countryside with threatening grandeur. Perhaps a bridge was being slowly built between the rulers and the ruled.

  Except that even as he turned to inspect the next section of bailey, he could see Villeneuve still going his best to chop the imaginary bridge off at the foundations, harrying, striking, cutting with his glove. Would he never learn?

  ‘Enough!’ Simon shouted. ‘If you spent more time on your own function, less on interfering with others’, I should be better satisfied. I said, enough! Present yourself to me tomorrow morning, after prayer.’

  * * * *

  The animals were hungry. Well, the people were hungry, and devoured scraps which would normally have been the swines’ almost by right. So Aedburgha had let her charges wander deeper than usual into the forest, rooting through beech mast and snuffling for acorns. Aedburgha could still hear them, would be able to gather them together when dusk came. She sat against the south face of an oak tree, huddling in what little sun penetrated the gloom, and wished that there was more bread. Not that she was unhappy. She was handfasted to Beom, a good man seemingly well respected up at the castle. And now she was with child - her breasts and latterly her belly assured her this was so - they would soon be married. As for living - well, he would build them their own place as soon as he had the chance. And the few groats the Normans doled out would help.

  Maybe if Beom spoke well of her, she might find work up there herself. But when she asked if he’d done so, he always found some excuse, and the village rumours suggested he was right. Better be poor with your pigs for company than poor with unruly hands to fend off. But there were other more welcome hands. She smiled to herself. It was about this time that Beom would be making his way back through the forest. He told his masters he was discussing with the forester which trees to fell next, which would season well. And because he was an honest man, she was sure he did. At the end of the day he would help her gather the swine together and herd them back to shelter. But between the forestry and his herding, there was time for the sort of moment that made her lean back against the tree, a smile softening her face.

  * * * *

  She was waiting for him. Look at her: not so much waiting as positively inviting. Villeneuve’s eyes relished her face as he imagined pushing apart those soft lips. But the lips weren’t his target. Oh no. Much lower down. Which would he do? Take her by surprise? Or enjoy the thrill of the chase, see her eyes flare, see her run from him, falling as he caught her and watch her face contort as he took her? Some men said women liked force. Like it or not, that was what she was going to get. He thought with his fist or his pizzle, did he? Well, as he slipped from his horse, he knew just what he was thinking with today.

  * * * *

  No one up at the castle took much notice when Villeneuve was late for the evening meal. It wasn’t the first time, probably wouldn’t be the last. Not unless Simon chose to make a real example of him. Yes, this time he must. The man’s swaggering insolence set a bad example to men all too ready to follow it. As for his fornication, the Lady Rosamunde, who would be joining Simon as soon as the living quarters were ready for feminine company, would demand an end to that. She’d been ready to embrace a contemplative life when her father had preferred a more earthly union for her, and she brought to Simon’s circle an air of delicacy and refinement he could see was sadly lacking now. Tomorrow m
orning, then, Villeneuve would be flogged and sent on his way. If Simon himself still found it impossible to get his tongue around the agglomeration of alien diphthongs these Saxons insisted on calling a language, many of his men had devised a rough lingua franca which enabled them to communicate. Another interpreter they would surely need, but they could make shift - wasn’t that the term he’d heard Beom using? - until the replacement arrived. Tomorrow. So be it.

  How dare the wretched man disobey a direct order? There was no sign of him at the time Simon had appointed. When asked, his colleagues shuffled awkwardly. Perhaps he was dealing with a thick, mead-filled head? For whatever reason, he hadn’t appeared in the chapel, nor had he broken his fast with the others, either in the hall or in the guardroom, where he was wont to boast of the previous night’s amorous adventures. It wasn’t the first time his servant had to admit that his master had not returned at all - perhaps he had found a congenial bed to wait in till curfew was lifted. Rutting when he should have been begging his lord for mercy? Simon slammed his fist into his palm with anger. When noon had come and gone, however, he despatched search parties. A Norman - even one intent on dalliance - did not go far without armour, but all Villeneuve had taken, his servant admitted, were his helm and his hauberk.