Death in the Coverts

by Roderic Jeffries

  ‘The world, Wagner, Götterdämmerung, Fawcett, or what?’

  ‘You’re not to laugh at me, Julian, as I’m not in the mood to be laughed at. I can’t think what we’re going to have for supper. The Danellis have left absolutely nothing in the larder. I’ve always said the Italians are an utterly feckless race.’

  ‘How they can put up with working here for what we can afford to pay them, I can’t think and I’ll bet the store cupboard is bulging with tins.’

  ‘You know I don’t like eating food from tins. I was always taught that that’s the most slovenly form of cooking.’

  ‘When you were taught cooking, there were always half a dozen cooks around so that there wasn’t any need for tins.’ Julian stubbed out a cigarette he had left to bum in the ash-tray.

  ‘I do hope Barbara knows how to manage a house, dear?’

  ‘It’s only two days since you told me how wonderful she’d be.’

  ‘Is it?’ Lydia Decker looked astonished.

  ‘Then it will be all right and she’ll manage wonderfully. Now come along and have your coffee and cheer up Fawcett. The pain’s bad and that always makes him think of nasty things. If Mr what’s-his-name was stupid enough to shoot himself, it really isn’t up to Fawcett to worry. Of course, one feels sorry for the children…’

  ‘Rafferty hasn’t any.’

  ‘Then things have worked out very well and we can forget the children. Now do come along, Julian.’

  He followed her out of the study, through the hall, and into the red withdrawing-room.

  *

  Doherty drove up to Crispin Comer at 11.30 Sunday morning and waited for a gap in the traffic. When it came, he turned on to the main road. A char-a-banc overtook his car and two children, kneeling on the back seat, pulled faces at him: he stuck out his tongue at them and they became open-mouthed from astonishment.

  Fine rain began to fall and he switched on the windscreen wipers. Each time the right-handed one reached the end of its arc, it squeaked and invariably he promised himself he’d get the garage to cure it, but he never remembered. Peggy said he forgot on purpose, so that he could suffer: she claimed the Irish needed to suffer to be able to enjoy life.

  He wondered what the pathologist and the gun expert would have to tell him. So far, the whole thing was no more than a series of hints which refused to be pinned down. After a few years, any detective worth his salt developed an instinct where crime was concerned, but if the same detective was utterly frank he would admit that that instinct could be very wrong from time to time. Was his instinct wrong in the present instance when it said that somewhere along the line something was false?

  An E-type Jaguar went streaking past the Hillman on a bend, using up the whole of the middle lane and careless about the possibility of another car being in the middle lane. Doherty waited for the harsh and brutal sounds of metal ripping into metal, but there was none. One more driver was escaping his just deserts. Was one of the guns at Hurstley Place hoping to escape his just deserts?

  At the by-pass roundabout outside Ashford, Doherty took the second entrance into the town. He followed the road round the World War One tank, now housing electrical transformers, and then, cursing the one-way system drove round the town to the police station. He parked in front of a police ‘No Parking’ sign. Being in a ‘foreign’ division, he went into the station and had a word with the duty inspector, an old friend, before leaving and driving on to the morgue.

  Rafferty lay on a marble slab in the dissecting room. Doherty stared at the body and thought, as he always did in similar circumstances, how strange a thing was life and death and how little separated one from the other. It was not an original thought, nor was it a cheerful one. He lit a cigarette and morbidly wondered whether the cigarette was hastening him towards his marble slab.

  Williams, the gun expert, arrived as the pathologist, dressed in green gown and wearing green rubber gloves, entered the dissecting room. Williams studied the body, had a few quick words with the pathologist, and then asked for the gun. Doherty gave it to him and he went into one of the small rooms to the right.

  Half an hour later, the pathologist gave Doherty a plastic bag with a large number of lead pellets in it. Doherty carried them through to Williams, who had divided the gun into its three component parts and then removed the detachable sidelocks.

  Doherty put the pellets down on the laboratory bench. Williams looked up. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the mechanism of this gun. Best quality, regularly checked, with everything in good working order.’

  ‘Was the safety catch working properly, sir?’

  ‘I’ve just said everything was.’ Williams had a brusque manner that often became rude. When he spoke, he clipped many of his words short.

  ‘With the safety catch on the off position, is the gun likely to go off on its own account?’

  ‘If you’re fool enough to drop it on the ground, it may go off. If you’re a bigger fool and drop it from a bigger height, it may go off even with the safety catch on. The safety mechanism locks the trigger blade and prevents trigger movement: it doesn’t prevent the striker falling.’

  ‘Can you suggest how near to his head the gun was when it went off?’

  ‘It clearly wasn’t a contact wound because there’s no scorching. Although the angle of the shot means we can’t be definite, there doesn’t seem to have been any spread of shot: that means under six feet, since it was the right barrel that was fired and this is an improved cylinder boring. Naturally, I’ll be conducting various tests with this gun, but it’s almost safe to say that tattooing always stops at three feet. As there was some tattooing, I’m prepared at the moment to put the distance at eighteen inches.

  ‘The gun has twenty-five-inch barrels and a short stock. This means that if the dead man rested the butt on the ground and leaned his head forward, his head would be about eighteen inches above the gun. That, of course, is the only conceivable position in which he could have received the wound, if self-inflicted. Was there any depression in the ground to mark the recoil of the butt?’

  ‘No, sir, but the ground was dry and there was quite a bit of dead bracken lying around.’

  ‘The report says he was known to be careless with a gun and someone even saw him once rest the butt on the ground and the muzzles against his stomach. The man was a bloody fool. Well, Inspector, at the moment all I can tell you is that on the face of it, it could have been an accident. He might have been standing upright, with head tilted forward, and he might have dropped the gun when the safety catch was off or have caught the triggers with something.’

  ‘Is there any significance in the fact that the gun was facing outwards and not inwards?’

  ‘The jolt of the recoil might throw the gun over and against its balance so that the muzzles end up pointing away from the body and not, as you’d expect, towards it. I’ll have to conduct experiments on that point, of course.’

  ‘Then as far as you can say, sir, it could have been an accident, but if so, it was an odd one?’

  ‘If it was his gun that killed him, yes. One of the alternatives you mustn’t overlook is that he was killed when someone else’s gun accidentally fired.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that other person have come forward?’

  ‘If he were an experienced gun, he might be too ashamed to admit to being so grossly careless. A first-class shot is a touchy man: I can conceive that a kind of pride might keep him silent.’

  ‘Is there anything to suggest it wasn’t murder, sir?’

  ‘Nothing. The muzzle of the weapon that killed the man was about eighteen inches from his head and pointing at an angle of about seventy degrees. Those facts support several possibilities.’ Williams picked up the bag of shot and rolled several pieces on to the palm of his hand. Then, he put them down and went to his bag and brought out three pieces of measuring and weighing equipment. For the next ten minutes, he measured and weighed pellets.

  ‘Number five shot, Inspector,’ he said. He pick
ed up the used cartridge that had been in the gun and looked down at it. ‘The dead man was using five shot. It’s a pity some of the charge escaped the body since I can’t therefore tell you anything about the bore of the cartridge.’

  ‘Could you have?’

  ‘Different bores use different weights of shot. There’s considerable overlapping, but sometimes one can say definitely that only a twelve, sixteen, or twenty bore, fired the shot. Was anyone using anything but a twelve bore?’

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t checked, sir.’

  ‘You should have done so.’

  Doherty watched Williams put the three parts of the gun into a leather case on which, stamped in gold, were the initials W.R.

  ‘I’ll give you a full report as soon as possible,’ said Williams.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ And a fat lot of good it looks as if that’s going to be, thought Doherty gloomily.

  Chapter Five

  Doherty parked in front of Hurstley Place, climbed out of the car, and stood in the drive. The drizzle of the morning had turned into rain. In the bad light and the wet the mansion to him looked like a mausoleum.

  He went up the steps, between the pillars of the porch, and across the flagstones to the front door. He knocked on the door.

  Lydia Decker opened it. ‘Good afternoon,’ she said.

  ‘Detective Inspector Doherty, madam,’ he answered.

  ‘I’m glad to say I both recognised and identified you on sight. My sons, no respecters of age, say that I never remember anyone, but it isn’t so. Come in, Mr Doherty, out of this terrible weather. It’s the kind of day that makes me feel blue and blue is such a terrible colour. It makes me think of that horrible woman, Clytemnestra. Do you find that?’

  ‘Not quite, no.’ He stepped inside.

  ‘But you’re Irish, surely?’ She closed the door.

  ‘I am, but…’

  ‘I have Irish blood in me and am very proud of the fact. It’s my Irish blood which makes me so responsive to colours and I’m surprised you’re not the same. How long ago?’

  ‘How long ago what, madam?’

  ‘I simply cannot stand being called madam. It makes me think of brothel keepers.’

  Doherty failed to hide his startled surprise.

  ‘Aren’t they called madames?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought so. They say such people make a great deal of money and, of course, they don’t pay any income tax. Income tax is a wicked thing when it’s as penal as it is in this country. Do you see that pistol over there?’

  Doherty, struggling to keep abreast of the sense of her conversation, looked across the hall at a percussion cap pistol which hung on the wall between two displays of Scottish claymores.

  ‘A Decker wore that in eighteen forty-eight in the Irish uprising following one of the potato famines. He was only an ensign, but when they told him to order a charge on the starving rioters, he refused. His senior officer tried to disgrace him, but in those days if you were a Decker you could twist a few tails. Do you see that duelling pistol a little farther on? That belonged to a Decker who fought a duel and was badly wounded: it’s supposed to have given his wife a fatal distemper, but I’m sure women were built of stouter material than that. It’s his coat of arms over there: his wife was a Bassett. Heraldry is a fascinating subject and so very frank. You can hardly hush up a family scandal if the shield tells everyone all about it. I’m boring you, Mr Doherty.’

  He was so startled by this abrupt change of subject that it was some time before he hastily told her he was not in the least bored.

  ‘I’m an old woman with more memories than I like to admit to. I’ve always been fascinated by private history and whenever I walk in this house I see the Deckers of all the past centuries. My maiden name was Awcott and the Awcotts are distantly related to the Deckers so that I’ve always felt that their history is mine. Are you interested in history?’

  ‘It all depends…’

  ‘Last time we met I’m sure you thought that this kind of history and a family who’s lived in one place for so long is rather comical?’

  ‘I… er…’ said Doherty weakly, unable to find a reply to this accurate description of his feelings.

  ‘This is a very big house and it seems to have become immoral these days to live in a big house. But I don’t think we really do anyone any harm by living here. Do you think we do?’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t.’

  ‘It’s kind of you to say that. But why are we standing here in this draughty hall? Come into the green withdrawing-room: it may be just a little warmer in there. That’s the room in which the Decker had a fatal stroke when he learned his wife had been cuckolding him. His ghost is supposed to haunt the room, but I’ve never seen it. If I did, I’d tell it precisely what I think on the subject. If he couldn’t look after her, he was a nincompoop and deserved what happened. He’s that mournful man in the painting by the carriage clock in the other room. He has very long hair which makes him look like a… What do they call those long haired boys and girls?’

  ‘Beatniks?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Lydia Decker led the way into the smaller of the two withdrawing-rooms and as soon as she was inside she pointed to a framed sampler. ‘That was done by Amanda Decker at the age of nine. It’s quite monstrous and must have ruined her eyes. No wonder she never got married, but gave herself over to good works. When did your family leave Ireland?’

  Once again, Doherty had to jerk his mind along to keep up with the change of conversation. ‘During the great potato famine. They went to America.’

  ‘Perhaps they were some of the people Peverill Decker refused to slaughter. After all, stranger things have happened. The Decker history is a long one, Mr Doherty, but I’m scared it’s not going to last very much longer. My husband thought estates would always last, but I didn’t and that’s why I persuaded him to give Hurstley Place to a trust in nineteen-fifty-four to escape the death duties which would have ruined it. He died just two days after the five year period was up and because the lawyers had for once done what they were told to, the estate escaped death duties. Just afterwards, of course, the Conservative Government made the five year period less rigid, but I can never remember what they did. Now the estate’s in trust for my elder son, provided he reaches thirty-five and accepts it. He’s very ill, of course, and that’s why the conditions are there. The law is so terribly complicated, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is.’

  ‘Can I offer you something to drink, Mr Doherty?’

  ‘No, thank you very much.’

  ‘Julian has worked so very hard to make the estate pay, but it’s terribly difficult. There’s always something that needs money spent on it. It’s like this house which is forever producing some kind of rot or woodworm. Do you know anything about wood beetles?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Julian spends a lot of time squirting nasty smelling stuff into the holes, but they seem to resist rather well. Did you want to speak to my son? He’s having luncheon with his fiancée at her house. Miss Harmsworth is a charming girl and I know she’ll look after this house most wonderfully.’

  ‘As Mr Julian Decker’s away, I wonder if I could have a word with Mr Fawcett Decker?’

  ‘He’s not very well today. It’s such a horrible illness he suffers from. If only it attacked people’s brains as well as their bodies so that they didn’t realise what was happening to them. It’s an impossible penance to be tied to a wheel-chair and yet to retain an active brain. I’ve always said that if a person is stupid, he can put up with almost anything.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’m very sorry, Mr Doherty, but I must hurry away. It’s so nice of you to call and do please come again and tell me more about your ancestors. I feel positive that they were some of the people Peverill Decker refused to kill. If only we had a photograph of the scene we could tell, but I suppose no one had invented photography by then. It’s so annoying it took so long. I’ve always wanted to k
now what Cleopatra really looked like because I’m sure she wasn’t so very beautiful: it’s just that men sometimes become so foolish.’

  Within ninety seconds, Doherty had been shown out of the house. He walked to his car and was about to open the driving door when he turned and looked up at the house once more: it was still a large, and mainly graceless, conglomeration of bricks and mortar, but now he could see it as a small slice of history. All old houses had housed a succession of people, but the people of this mansion were known. The Deckers could point to a painting and say that that was the Decker who had had his head chopped off in good Queen Bess’s day, or had fought against Cromwell and hidden in an oak tree. A man would find importance in himself if he were a Decker, not because of the name or the fortune, but because he was the living example of an endless tradition.

  Doherty climbed into the car, started the engine, and drove round the circular lawn and out of the garden into the park. On the right, a tractor was ploughing, turning a stubble field into an ocean of miniature frozen brown waves: on the left, a flock of sheep grazed. He thought, with quick amusement, of how Mrs Decker had not stopped talking whilst he was in the house and, because he had encouraged her, how she had unwittingly answered so many of the questions he had needed answering.

  As he slowed down for the road, his mood of self-congratulation suddenly went when he wondered whether she was quite as stupid as he was thinking. He remembered how she had so correctly pin-pointed his previous feeling of light, amused, even sarcastic tolerance for a family like the Deckers. That made him review all she had just told him and, being perfectly self-honest, it soon became rather mortifyingly clear that all she had done was to give him information he could have learned from others and then very neatly bundled him out of the house before he had a chance to ask anyone anything about the shooting.

  He brought the car to a halt between the wrought-iron gates as he waited for an oncoming car to pass. He had not been dealing with a rather foolish, garrulous old woman: he had been dealing with a highly intelligent woman who had taken his measure with no trouble at all.