The Property of Lies

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘When I spoke to those girls, they mentioned Catherine Leyland,’ he said, pushing his plate away and waving off pudding. The shepherd’s pie had been good – for Ellen. She wasn’t a brilliant cook and he didn’t want to push his luck with the rice pudding, although it had the burnt skin on it that he liked. It could be warmed up for tomorrow, or there was always Tolly, the canine dustbin, to dispose of it. ‘She’s in with that group, but I’m not sure how far.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Catherine? Are you sure?’

  ‘That’s what they said.’

  ‘Well, if you say so. But I wouldn’t have thought it. She’s not the sort to get up to silly antics like that. She seems to be a very steady girl. Very clever, way ahead of her peers.’

  And one of that clique, those so-called Elites, as he’d just been told. He remembered seeing her, just after Josie had been found. He’d been walking along a quiet corridor when he’d noticed a girl in earnest conversation with Miss Draper at the end of it. She might even have been crying, and Miss Draper had given her a hug, smoothed her hair back and sent her on her way with a gentle kiss on her forehead. ‘The child’s a little upset about Josie,’ she’d told Reardon, knowing he’d seen. He’d wondered if such tender care was standard procedure in all boarding schools, or if it was just Miss Draper’s kind nature.

  Yesterday, I watched that flashy, vulgarly yellow limousine purr away up the drive, and felt nothing but thankfulness to see the end of Avis Myerson, finally able to admit that it had been a bad decision on my part, right from the first, to take that troublesome girl. Mistakenly, I fancied that the quietly regulated routine of Maxstead, mixing with girls like Josie Pemberton and Catherine Leyland, in a healthy, wholesome atmosphere, would bring out the best of her qualities. Whereas … well, I can only hope it wasn’t Maxstead which had precisely the opposite effect, and pray that her influence here will not be lasting.

  She is cleverer than I gave her credit for. Sly, rather. After the inspector spoke to her and Nancy Waring, she managed to steal a march on me, sobbed down the telephone to her silly mother about how unhappy she has been here, and of course her mother responded like one of Pavlov’s dogs, rushing here immediately to snatch away her blameless daughter before I could punish her for doing nothing. And, incidentally, leaving the other girls concerned to take the rap.

  Nancy Waring, I still have to deal with, and Josie too. Catherine, of course, is a little more of a problem. I would not have expected her to have truck with such childish nonsense as secret societies, and I have yet to find out how Antonia Freeman was mixed up in all of this. It seems they were all involved in what happened to Josie, one way or another, as well as in that spate of inexcusable mischief and bullying which has so disrupted the school. Since I am convinced that too originated with Avis Myerson, the problem is halfway solved. And yet …

  Inspector Reardon is not telling me everything he has discovered. I don’t entirely blame him. I had reasons for not wanting to question the girls myself and he obliged me by doing so, though I don’t for one minute think it was entirely altruistic. He knows I am not a fool and that I am well aware he’s keeping much of what he’s found out to himself. So be it, the facts will out, sooner or later. At the present, it suits me to turn a blind eye. What exactly went on there, in the east wing, I refuse to contemplate, but then I think of the dangers involved, and what happened to Isabelle Blanchard here …

  It stands there, that building, always there, like a silent reproach. The sooner it is razed to the ground, the better, and I can forget. Perhaps. I haven’t yet come across a way of preventing the subconscious, the mind, and perhaps the heart, from going their own way.

  PART TWO

  THIRTEEN

  ‘Everything comes to he who waits. We’re in luck, at last.’ Gilmour was still feeling chuffed after his visit to Wetherby, and the subsequent foray to Melia Street.

  Luck? Maybe, thought Reardon. And maybe the harder you worked on something, the luckier you got. If Gargrave hadn’t given up too easily on his visits to the taxi firm, this information would have been available sooner. His ambition hadn’t yet taught him that the lowlier, more boring jobs were a necessary adjunct to becoming a high-flyer. Young Pickersgill knew this. He was steadier, not so showy, but in the end would go further.

  Anyway, by luck or otherwise, they now possessed the precise date Isabelle Blanchard had returned to Maxstead, plus the reasonable assumption on why she had made her summary departure from there. But the question of why she had felt it necessary to go back at all after leaving was still giving Reardon a headache. He couldn’t see any rational reason for her return. Since she had taken the taxi from the insalubrious area around Melia Street to get there, it seemed to suggest that was where she’d been staying, up to the time of her death. Unless Deegan was lying, which of course he might well be, he had left her at the station, believing she was taking a train to Birmingham, but he hadn’t stayed long enough to see her board that or any other train. And although Miss Ainsworth had sworn there was no woman living next door to her, that wasn’t necessarily so, either. If Isabelle, and this man Newman, had wanted her whereabouts to remain hidden, keeping out of sight wouldn’t have been any great problem. Only going out at night. Remaining indoors. Slipping out via the back entrance. Until she had been picked up by Vic Wetherby’s taxi on that fateful night.

  Who was Newman? If he did have some connection with Isabelle Blanchard, it followed he might also have been the mystery man who had called on Phoebe Catherall. And maybe he was the man Edith Hillyard had been fighting with on the steps of her school, the one who had passed Ellen in a fury? For a moment, Reardon’s pulse quickened, but only for a moment. Just as one swallow did not a summer make, neither did the dubious appearance of two, or even three unknown men – if you counted ‘Nol’ in the murder picture – make a certainty. Even if they had been the same man. And speculation was useless, unless at least one of them could be traced; one who might, possibly, be this Nol to whom Isabelle had been writing?

  ‘There’s a woman out front, Sergeant Longton, a Miss Doris Ainsworth,’ Pickersgill announced, popping his head round the door of the back room and interrupting the desk sergeant’s elevenses. ‘She’s asking for Sergeant Gilmour. I’ve told her he’s not here, but she says he gave her his card and it’s something he’ll want to know. He saw her yesterday.’

  ‘Yes, I know. All right, I’ll see her.’

  Longton finished his tea in a leisurely swallow, took his feet off the desk, heaved his not inconsiderable bulk upright, brushed the last crumbs of a bacon sandwich from his tunic, and went out front with an air of martyrdom to do his duty.

  He found Miss Ainsworth sitting on a bench in the front office with a large parcel on the chair next to her, looking put out not to have found Gilmour there. She’d made time to come in on her way to deliver some sewing to Baxendale’s Emporium, just around the corner in Market Street, and she was in a hurry, she said. ‘He did say I was to come in if there was anything more I could tell him.’

  Longton gave her his ponderous look and told her he was quite au fait with the situation, that DS Gilmour had given him a full account of what had transpired at their meeting yesterday, so that he would know what it was all about if Miss Ainsworth came in when he wasn’t there. Longton would make a note of everything she had to say and pass it on as soon as he came in.

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Somewhat mollified, she came to the point. ‘Well, I don’t know if this matters, but the rent man came round yesterday, and we got talking about my neighbour, you know, the one Sergeant Gilmour was enquiring about.’

  Longton knew all about that, too, having been roped in to set in motion local enquiries about this Newman, according to the details Sergeant Gilmour had given him. Nothing at all had emerged at present, but there was no need for anybody, least of all him, Longton knew, to break into a sweat trying to find him. If there was anything known about Newman, he was confident it would soon emerge. Nothing remained hidden
for long in Folbury, especially when it involved a stranger, reputedly handsome, and owning a car, what was more. Cars weren’t yet so common in the town that they would pass unnoticed (though the accidents Longton recorded testified to the increasing hazards of crossing the ever busier roads) and anyone who was well off enough to own one would have been marked down by someone or other, sure as eggs. ‘Mr Newman, that’s the name, right?’

  ‘Yes, only it turns out his name’s not Newman – leastways it is, but it’s his Christian name.’ She sounded affronted. Longton remained impassive. ‘But you know,’ she went on, justifying her mistake, ‘he did introduce himself as Newman – and when I said, “Pleased to meet you, Mr Newman,” he smiled, but he didn’t correct me.’ She looked even more put out, obviously feeling she’d been made to look a fool.

  ‘Understandable mistake. I’ve never heard Newman as a first name,’ Longton said, making it sound as though, since he hadn’t, it wasn’t possible.

  ‘I have to admit he did seem to like a joke, but he shouldn’t have let me go on thinking that, should he?’ The neighbour she’d invested with glamour had definitely gone down in her estimation.

  Longton agreed that he shouldn’t, but he’d been under no obligation, had he, to tell her?

  ‘I suppose not.’ She didn’t look as though she agreed.

  ‘What is his last name, then?’

  ‘The rent man said it was Liptrott, Newman Liptrott.’

  Longton licked his pencil and wrote it down. After a moment, she said, ‘He’s in trouble, isn’t he?’

  ‘We don’t know that yet.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry if he is. I still think he’s all right, even though he did have me on.’

  ‘This landlord of yours, who is he, then?’

  ‘Oh well, it’s Shefford’s, isn’t it,’ she said, naming the pop-bottling factory that abutted on to the backs of the Melia Street houses, and then, forgetting her hurry, went on to air what was obviously a long-standing grievance. ‘They own all three houses, the ones that are left, that is, bought the whole street years ago, and they want us out, you know, to knock ’em down like they’ve pulled down the rest of the street, but they can’t just turn us out because they want to expand, or so they say, can they? We have rights – old Mr Dawson, my other neighbour, has made enquiries. They won’t do any repairs or anything and they think that’ll make us throw in the sponge, but it won’t. We’re staying put.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Longton. He offered nothing further and silence ensued.

  ‘Well, that’s it, then,’ she said at last. ‘I’ve said what I came for.’ She picked up her parcel from the chair.

  Longton was overweight and didn’t care for bestirring himself, but he was good-natured. He thanked her for coming in and asked if he couldn’t get somebody to help her with her parcel; he could spare one of his constables for a few minutes and Baxendale’s was only round the corner, after all. She told him she could manage, though she looked pleased at the offer.

  ‘What’s the name of the man who collects the rents, by the way?’

  ‘Oh, it’s Shefford himself that comes round, so he can keep an eye on what’s going on. It’s not a lot of trouble for him to do that, with only three houses left,’ she said bitterly as she departed.

  ‘Newman Liptrott, you couldn’t make it up,’ Gilmour said when he came in to Reardon’s office with Miss Ainsworth’s information.

  ‘Well, it has a certain ring to it, you have to admit.’

  ‘You could say that, but I’m wondering. What if he has a middle name? Oliver say, or Oscar, or anything else beginning with an O.’

  ‘So he calls himself Nol?’

  Gilmour grinned. ‘Who wouldn’t, saddled with a name like that? And Nol could still be Olivia, couldn’t it?’

  ‘Even if it is, it doesn’t get us much further.’ Reardon thought a bit. ‘A word at Shefford’s wouldn’t come amiss, if he’s been living in one of their houses.’

  ‘Right,’ said Gilmour, and went to find Gravy. ‘Job for you,’ he told him when he saw him. On second thoughts, remembering the boy wonder’s not altogether successful questioning at Woodman’s taxis, he said, ‘I’ll go myself, and you can come with me.’

  Shefford’s bottling factory wasn’t a big outfit. It employed about fifty people, and in its entirety comprised only a collection of low, shed-like buildings that had seen better days, and a red brick-built edifice resembling a public convenience that was the office.

  Gilmour sniffed the sickly, fruity sort of smell that pervaded everywhere and pulled a face. There were two lorries in the cobbled yard, one being unloaded of the carbon dioxide cylinders that gave the pop its fizz, the other being stacked with crates of bottles intended for delivery: dark-brown bottles of dandelion and burdock, lemonade that was unlikely ever to have made even nodding acquaintance with a lemon, sarsaparilla. And what was in that was anybody’s guess.

  The man superintending the loading wore a brown smock and held a clipboard in his hand, and was too occupied to pay them much attention. He ticked off another crate as it was loaded, not bothering to raise his eyes when Gilmour asked for Mr Shefford, just jerking his head towards the brick building. They left him to it and walked across. The door opened on to a brown tiled vestibule, taking the municipal look even further. Here they waited patiently after obeying the pencilled instructions drawing-pinned to a wooden flap in the wall that ordered tersely, ‘Knock and wait.’

  Shefford had presumably heard the knock, and he made them wait, as per instructions. Eventually he stuck his head through the flap and bade them enter the door next to it. A very short, stocky man, with a red face, small sharp eyes, a comb-over hairstyle and a trick of bouncing from one small foot to the other, like a boxer. It made him look as though he was stretching up to make himself look taller, and perhaps that was why it had become a habit. After introducing himself and shaking hands, he offered them chairs, while he perched on a high stool that was drawn up to a sloping desk, swivelling it round so that he had the advantage of looking down on them.

  ‘We’re a growing concern here,’ he responded self-importantly, when Gilmour introduced the subject of the houses on Melia Street. He spoke with a strange accent, his vowels strangulated, a shot at gentility. ‘And we’d like to rebuild and develop, but to do that we’d have to pull down what’s left of that row, you understand.’

  Presumably this was the royal ‘we’, since Shefford Soft Drinks was this Reginald Shefford himself, son of the father who had started the factory, and who was now sole owner. But develop? A more likely scenario was the prospect of a profitable sale on a vacant parcel of land for the council houses waiting to be built when times improved.

  ‘Which we shall, sooner or later,’ Shefford went on confidently. ‘They’re slums, falling down and of no use to anybody.’

  Except to the poor sods who live in them, thought Gilmour. And if Shefford considered them slums, which Gilmour didn’t, whose fault was it that they were in disrepair and falling down? He hadn’t liked Mr Shefford at first sight and he wasn’t improving with acquaintance.

  ‘We’ve offered the tenants other accommodation,’ Shefford added self-righteously, ‘but they’re being damned stubborn and won’t accept.’

  Gilmour had a good idea what sort of accommodation that would be and saw every reason why they wouldn’t accept. He put such thoughts aside and addressed the real reason for being there. He asked him about Liptrott and was pleased to see Shefford’s face darken as he asked, ‘If they’re going to be pulled down, what was the point of letting the empty one?’

  ‘Only short-term renting, it was. Furnished accommodation. No point in leaving it unoccupied after the old cove who lived there died. I put an advert in the Herald and Liptrott answered straight away. And now he’s buggered off owing me a month’s rent!’ Reminded, his face became even redder as he contemplated the crime. As though it was a king’s ransom the absent tenant owed, when it was probably not more than a few pounds, at mos
t, regardless of whether Shefford classed it as furnished accommodation or not. ‘Just let me know when you find him! What’s he been up to, then?’ His accent was slipping, becoming broader by the minute.

  ‘Nothing that we know of,’ Gilmour said truthfully. ‘It’s a friend of his we’re trying to connect with. But since we can’t get hold of him and there seems to be no indication when he’ll be back—’

  ‘Back? You’ll be lucky! He’ll not be coming back this side of the millennium. Take it from me, he’s done a moonlight. I went in there yesterday and had a good look round, to check the inventory. You can’t trust folks. But I have to say he’d taken nowt but his own stuff with him.’ He seemed disappointed to have to admit that.

  Inventory? It was all Gilmour could do not to laugh. ‘Didn’t you ask for credentials when you took him on as a tenant?’ he asked instead, being deliberately provocative, and got the look from Shefford the man obviously thought such a stupid question deserved. He would have rented the house to Vlad the Impaler if he had been alive and well and living in Folbury – providing he had the wherewithal to pay the rent.

  ‘And besides,’ Shefford went on, adding up the grievances, ‘I wanted my keys back. But the bastard’s gone off with them.’

  ‘Did you know he had a woman living with him?’

  ‘What? No, I didn’t!’ For a moment that had caught him off balance, but he was quick to cover up. ‘Well, I suppose it was his own business if he did. No skin off my nose.’

  ‘We’d like to take a look around the house, if that’s all right with you,’ Gilmour told him. And even if it wasn’t, his tone implied.

  Shefford said testily, ‘I can’t go round there just now. I’m too busy. And there’s nothing to see.’