Murder to Music - Libby Sarjeant Murder Mystery Series

by Lesley Cookman

  ‘We only went to find Rosie,’ said Libby, in a voice that still held the suspicion of a shake.

  ‘I thought she might be here,’ said Fran. ‘We didn’t know anyone else would be there. You weren’t answering your phone.’

  Ian sighed. ‘All right. I should really take you both back to the station and question you, but Maiden can come and take a statement from you both here, then you can go home. All right?’

  They both nodded, and waited, huddled together in the back of Renault until DS Maiden’s fresh and cheerful face appeared at the window.

  ‘You do get yourselves into some messes, ladies, don’t you?’ he said as he settled himself in the front seat. ‘Now just tell me everything in your own words. I’ll stop you if I need to.’

  Halfway through the recital the house was suddenly lit up like a stage set. Through a confusion of police uniforms and yellow jackets they could see Weston and Vindari being escorted to the two police cars. Ian turned and gave a thumbs-up in their direction and disappeared.

  ‘Now,’ said DS Maiden as the account of the evening’s adventures petered to a halt. ‘I’ll just get you to sign this – yes, each page, please – and you can get off home. I’m sure DI Connell will need to speak to you again, but he knows where to find you.’

  ‘Always,’ said Libby wearily. ‘Thank you, Mr Maiden.’

  The both got out of the car and stretched.

  ‘Are you OK to drive?’ asked Fran.

  ‘I’ll have to be,’ said Libby, wondering if she could.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Fran nodded over her shoulder. ‘The cavalry’s coming.’

  The big 4X4 stopped behind them and Guy and Ben leapt out.

  There was a confusion of ‘Are you all right?’, ‘What the hell did you think?’, and ‘Bloody women’, and both women were held in bear hugs.

  ‘Let’s get you home,’ said Guy. ‘You look as if you need a drink.’

  ‘Is there time to get to a pub before closing?’ said Ben.

  ‘Just.’ Guy peered at his watch. ‘What’s the nearest?’

  ‘The Fox at Creekmarsh,’ said Fran and Libby together.

  ‘Is there a pub in the county you two don’t know?’ said Ben.

  ‘Very few,’ said Libby smugly.

  Ten minutes later they were sitting in The Fox with drinks before them. Fran and Libby didn’t know the barman, which Guy said was a good thing.

  ‘Come on then,’ said Ben. ‘Tell us what was going on.’

  Once again they told their story in tandem, this time with far more condemnatory comments than before.

  ‘So what do we think was happening?’ said Libby.

  ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘Murder is what was happening,’ said Guy. ‘It sounds as though Weston had been killing women as a sort of hired killer for Vindari.’

  ‘So they were honour killings. Just not committed by the families themselves,’ said Libby.

  ‘That way the families could all have alibis,’ agreed Ben.

  ‘But what was Rosie doing there? Did Weston take her? Or did she go on her own?’ Libby looked at Fran.

  ‘I’m sure she went on her own. I think she’d remembered. I’m sorry she had to go through all that. And I can’t understand why Ian wasn’t worried about her.’ She sighed. ‘I trusted her, even though she’s turned out to be a bit of a –’

  ‘Flake?’ suggested Libby.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Fran with a smile. ‘I know I’ve been wrong before, but never that wrong. And what about Andrew?’

  ‘What about him?’ said Libby. ‘A poor deluded soul like the rest of us? I think he’s genuinely fallen for her. She’s played him like an old boot, though.’

  ‘Your similes are quite without parallel,’ said Ben, patting her arm. ‘But yes, it would appear she’s not been entirely open with poor Andrew.’

  Libby sniffed. ‘Serve him right. I hope he remembered to feed Tybalt.’

  ‘Talbot,’ said Fran.

  ‘And him, too. Come on, I’m cold and wet and fed-up with speculating.’

  She wondered why the other three laughed at her.

  Libby was awake early on Saturday morning. She and Ben had arrived home damp and dejected, had a large whisky each and gone to bed. Libby had thought she wouldn’t be able to sleep with everything that had happened that day churning over and over in her mind, but in fact she had slept almost immediately, and it was now that yesterday’s events were dominating her thoughts. She carefully slipped out of bed and padded downstairs.

  The thunderstorm had cleared the air, and everything outside was sparkling under a clear blue sky. She fed Sidney, made a cup of tea and went into the garden to sit under the cherry tree, taking her phone with her. At six-thirty it was a bit early to ring anybody, but she thought she might send Fran a text.

  However, it was a text from Ian she received first, at just before seven.

  ‘I’m going to sleep. Do not call me. I’ll buy you all a drink at your pub this evening.’

  She called Fran.

  ‘Yes, I’ve had it, too. What should we do?’

  ‘Try and call Rosie?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Fran.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Libby, exasperated. ‘I suppose we just wait until summoned. Did Ian mean the pub here?’

  ‘Yes. Shall we eat there, too? And we’ll bring Sophie shall we?’

  ‘Ad will be working at the caff, but he can join us afterwards. I think they need to know all about it, too.’

  Libby tried to spend Saturday as normally as possible. Ben didn’t go to work, but did go up to the Manor briefly to explain why he’d taken the Land Rover the previous night. Libby pottered down to the eight-til-late and the butcher and popped in to see Flo and Lenny in Maltby Close, and Peter to say sorry for disturbing his meeting with Ben.

  ‘If you’re about tonight, I don’t suppose Ian will mind if you sit in on the revelations,’ she said. ‘You’ve been there every time before!’

  ‘He does like his little Poirot gather-them-in-the-library moments, doesn’t he?’ said Peter.

  ‘Except it’s only explanation not accusation,’ said Libby.

  ‘Your time might come,’ said Peter, pointing a long finger. ‘Give me a call when it’s appropriate.’

  It was almost eight o’clock before Ian made his entrance into the snug, where his audience was assembled.

  ‘Yes, please,’ he said to the chorused offer of drinks. ‘Peter has kindly offered me the spare bedroom, so I can.’

  ‘I sent him a text,’ said Peter. ‘I’ve still got his private number from last winter.’

  ‘Well, tell us,’ said Libby, when Ian had been provided with a pint of bitter and a whisky chaser. ‘We’ve all been on tenterhooks. What’s Rosie guilty of?’

  Ian smiled round at his listeners. ‘If I’m going to tell this, it will have to be in my time and my words. It’s difficult enough to understand forwards, impossible if you take it out of sequence.’

  Baffled, Libby shook her head. ‘So were none of our conclusions right?’

  ‘I said, Libby, let me tell it.’

  Libby subsided under a chorus of ‘Shhh!’

  ‘We have to start with the Princess Beatrice sanatorium. Willoughby Weston, Master of Foxhounds, Justice of the Peace and general VIP, was on the governing body. Despite the NHS, fairly new in those days, people paid to go there. But the incidence of TB was lessening, and antibiotics were proving effective. In the fifties the NHS began sending patients there, but that meant less money. Weston was approached, as far as we can make out, by a drug company who had a new drug they wished to try out. Weston agreed, and they paid him. However, the drugs, which our forensic anthropologists have managed to isolate, proved fatal to the patients.’

  ‘See, I said so!’ said Libby and received another round of ‘Shhh!’

  ‘Yes, Libby, you were right.’ Ian gave her a grin. ‘So they buried these poor unfortunates in their back garden and u
sed old gravestones from the graveyard of the chapel that belonged to the estate, I suppose to deflect attention.

  ‘Then the sanatorium closed and Paul Findon, who’d been doing his bit as a former patient by raising funds performing charity concerts, bought it and returned it to a private dwelling.’

  ‘What about the barn?’ asked Fran. ‘Sorry to interrupt.’

  ‘As far as we can tell, the barn was used for isolation purposes, and Paul Findon, if he knew about it, did nothing with it at all,’ said Ian. ‘It was at this time that Findon’s sister Sheila and he began to see each other again and she used to bring young Rosie with her. As we gathered, he introduced her to music, Debussy in particular.

  ‘And then, one day, Weston came to pay a visit with his son, Hugh.’

  There was a subdued rustle from the audience.

  ‘At the time, Paul was in his little music room, the cellar, with Rosie. She stayed there while he went up to talk to Weston. She heard them arguing. Then she saw her uncle toppling down the stairs. He caught the edge of the door, which slammed shut, locking her inside.’

  There was a collective indrawn breath.

  ‘We gathered that yesterday,’ said Libby, and shuddered. ‘Just thinking about being shut up down there gives me the horrors. So she remembered at last?’

  ‘She remembered. Things were beginning to come back, you realised that. It was her screaming that finally alerted her mother, who had been away overnight and came back to find her daughter, as she thought, missing. Rosie, as you can imagine, was thoroughly traumatised and was even in hospital for a time. She had completely expunged the whole thing from her memory, though, except for a terror of cellars. Sheila wanted nothing to do with the house, and left it to a local agent, Riley and Naughton, to rent out.’

  ‘And Weston was a partner?’ said Fran.

  ‘A director. He put money in at around the same time. Also around the same time, young Hugh was sent off to school.’

  ‘He would have seen what happened!’ said Ben.

  ‘He did.’ Ian nodded. ‘As far as we can work out, talking to Hugh and from other sources, killing was a necessary part of living. Willoughby was a military man, had seen active war service and Hugh went straight into the school army corps and from there straight into the army. But one thing apparently stayed with Hugh. Paul Findon had taught him to play the piano.’ Ian shook his head. ‘I don’t know what part that played in his extraordinary psyche, but it affected him.’ He looked up at Fran. ‘He actually used to go there – to White Lodge – in the middle of the night and play the piano. No wonder the rumour spread that it was haunted.

  ‘But back to the house. The people who rented it turned it into a hotel – not a very grand one, I think, and they wanted to put an extension on the back. It was during excavations for the foundations of this that the body of the poor TB victim was unearthed.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ said Libby. ‘You said Uncle Paul fell down the cellar steps, so presumably Willoughby pushed him. But why?’

  ‘We can only assume that it was something to do with the deaths from the poisonous medications. Perhaps there were records left somewhere. The police saw the other gravestones hidden in the undergrowth and assumed they were all victims of workhouse and sanatorium, reburied the little body –’

  ‘Was it –? interrupted Libby.

  ‘No. They buried the body in a new grave, not the one you saw when you first went there.’

  Libby subsided.

  ‘Then there were reports of a ghost being seen either inside or outside the house. No one quite seems to know where these came from, but we think Willoughby Weston must have paid a maid at the hotel to say she’d seen something, or sent anonymous tip-offs to the media. Anyway, the story spread, the hotel people gave up and left and that was that. Willoughby made sure that the details of the property never made it into the current files of the agency.

  ‘When he died, his whole estate went to his son, including his interest, now a controlling one, in what had now become just Riley’s. Weston won’t say how much he knew of his father’s misdeeds, but he’s hardly as pure as the driven snow himself.

  ‘A year or so ago, a new manager came to Riley’s. Being a good, decent, hard-working sort, he went through the files and came across what he saw as a very decent property, updated the details and put it on the website and in the local paper.

  ‘Weston saw this and, thinking quickly, because he had been in comms –’

  ‘What?’ said Fran.

  ‘Communications,’ said Peter, ‘which means he was probably a bit of an electronics whizz.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Ian. ‘He went and rigged up his Debussy – he knew all about Findon, you see – and then set about bricking up the cellar, where the equipment was.’

  ‘Why didn’t he just make sure the house details went back into the vaults or wherever they were?’ asked Guy.

  ‘He did, but they’d been out there already and somebody might have seen them and asked to view. Which in fact they did. Rosie wasn’t the first.’

  ‘But why? Just because of the mistakes his father had made? Or had he already started killing women for Vindari?’ asked Guy.

  ‘Luckily Maiden gave me your report before we started questioning Vindari and Weston,’ Ian told Fran and Libby, ‘so we knew roughly what had happened.’

  ‘What?’ said several voices together.

  ‘Weston – in Vindari’s terms – defiled a female member of his family and unfortunately killed her in the process.’

  There was another collective gasp.

  ‘Vindari found out and, not particularly interested in the outdated mores of his fellow countrymen, nevertheless spied an opportunity. The barn made a perfect hiding place for girls who had, according to their families, transgressed. He organised the imprisonment and death. He forced Weston to bury the girl in the barn, and then blackmailed him into killing the other girls. Which Weston was well suited for.’ Ian shook his head. ‘It was this that Weston needed to cover up. He had to keep people away from White Lodge.’

  ‘So the hauntings began again.’ Libby looked across at Fran. ‘But not proper ones.’

  ‘No. Then it was easy to tell the staff it was a complicated probate sale and not to push it. Because Weston actually had no idea who owned the estate.’

  ‘And then Rosie came along,’ said Fran.

  ‘Yes, and she was telling the truth, you know. But fragments of memory had begun to return and she was getting scared. So she recruited you, thinking she ought not to appear in the business herself, although she wasn’t quite sure why.’

  ‘Hang on – what was the connection with Rachita?’ asked Libby. ‘Is there one?’

  ‘Think about Rachita’s story,’ said Ian. ‘Where did she meet the young man she ran off with?’

  ‘At her uncle’s, and Mr Vindari was there.’ Fran nodded.

  ‘And he’d organised work previously for Kiran and his friend.’

  ‘The cellar!’ shouted Libby, and the whole of the pub turned to look.

  ‘Right. It was Kiran and his friend who had been recruited to brick up the cellar. When we came to break into it, we found it hadn’t been done skillfully, and it looked as if it had been done in a hurry. The more we found out, the more interest there was in White Lodge, the more dangerous things were becoming. So Kiran and his friend had to go.’

  ‘What about Rachita?’ asked Fran.

  ‘She really did run off with Kiran, but there would have been no chance for her if Vindari had found her before her father. The boys were killed to stop them talking about bricking up the cellar and revealing a connection between Weston and Vindari.’

  ‘Who killed them?’ asked Guy.

  ‘They are each saying the other,’ said Ian. ‘We’ll probably never know.’

  ‘What about Rosie, Ian?’ asked Fran. ‘What was she doing there last night? And why did she disappear?’

  ‘Her memory had fully returned by now and she went to see if she
could find any sort of proof that Willoughby Weston had killed her uncle.’

  ‘Why didn’t she tell anybody where she was?’ asked Fran.

  ‘Because she thought if Weston got to know he’d come after her.’

  ‘Why weren’t you worried about her?’ asked Libby.

  ‘Because she told me she was going away to think things out,’ said Ian. ‘I should have known she would be up to something.’ He looked at Libby and Fran. ‘She knows you two.’

  ‘But she’s all right?’ persisted Libby.

  ‘She’s perfectly all right, and Professor Wylie is staying with her. She wants to see you both, but I said to give it a day or so. We’ll have more questions for her.’

  Silence fell around the table.

  ‘And Weston and Vindari?’ asked Peter after a moment. ‘What will they be charged with?’

  ‘Murder and whatever else we can dig up.’

  ‘Ian,’ Fran said suddenly. ‘Whose was the reburial in the new grave?’

  Ian smiled. ‘I wondered when you’d get round to that. According to Weston, it was the maid who said she’d seen the ghost. When he found her body – and we don’t know where he found it – possibly somewhere in his own home – she was wrapped in something of his father’s and he put two and two together. He decided, for what reason we don’t know, but with some kind of idea of doing it for his father, that she should go back to the garden. So he buried her. His downfall, or one of them, was keeping the grave clear.’

  ‘And putting flowers on it.’ Fran nodded.

  ‘Why did Rosie stay behind when we left her at Ashton Court?’ asked Libby.

  ‘She says she was looking for proof. Photographs of his father, anything. I’m not sure she really knew herself.’ Ian shook his head. ‘Her main idea was to get to White Lodge without anyone knowing.’

  ‘She did use us a bit, you know, Fran,’ said Libby.

  ‘She did.’ Fran sighed. ‘I’m not sure I want to go on with the creative writing classes now.’

  ‘Oh, go on with you,’ said Peter standing up. We want you to write down all your adventures. Think! You’ve got material for loads of books. Anyone want another drink?’