Rules, Regs and Rotten Eggs (A Harriet Martens Thriller Book 7)

by HRF Keating

  ‘The trustees?’ Harriet jumped in. ‘Can you tell me who they are?’

  ‘Well, I could. But — But, you see, they’re both dead now. They died quite a time ago. Just after Mr Robert left Cambridge it was.’

  ‘I see.’

  Harriet thought for a moment. And ventured.

  ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘could I have a quick look at the bedroom Mr Roughouse used on that recent visit of his? You see, it’s possible he left something there, a letter or something, anything of any sort. Something that might give us a clue to why someone carried out that attack on him.’

  But, instead of agreeing, the old woman blushed once more, a deeper shade than before.

  ‘You know, it may be really important,’ Harriet said quickly. ‘And if I have to take anything away, I’ll show you what it is, and, of course, give you a receipt.’

  Nanna shook her head in perplexity. Then she straightened her back and gave Harriet a straight-in-the-eye look.

  ‘Well, you see, miss,’ she said, ‘the fact of the matter is I’ve never got up there to make the bed and straighten things out.’

  ‘I perfectly understand,’ Harriet replied, beginning to suspect what might be making Nanna so reluctant. ‘And I promise I won’t take any notice of whatever — er — untidiness there may be. But I really must see if there’s anything there that would help me.’

  ‘Oh, if you think there might be something really useful, miss, I’ll show you up.’

  In the big bedroom, as Nanna baulking at entering hovered outside, Harriet’s rapid search — drawers jerked open, quick digs down between chair cushions and glances underneath — revealed no carelessly left-behind letter, nor anything else at all helpful. All she saw, flicking a look as she ducked to see under at the wide unmade bed with its flung-aside pillows, was what she had guessed Nanna had not wanted her to find, the marks she herself rather liked to call by the charming French name, traces d’amour.

  All right, she thought as they drove away, if Charity Nyambura’s as intimate with Roughouse as those stains indicated, she’s likely to know a good deal about him. I really must get to see her.

  ‘Pull in a moment,’ she said to Bolshy. ‘I want you to phone Charity Nyambura and fix a definite time tomorrow for me to see her. Make it a little after midday, if she can manage that. Or any time in the afternoon.’

  ‘Don’t need to pull in, use the mobile,’ Bolshy answered. ‘I can drive, you know.’

  ‘Nevertheless, DS, while I’m in a car with you we’ll stick to the rules of the road as recently laid down. You don’t drive and use a mobile at the same time, not unless you’ve got a fixed handset.’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  She sat, turned away while Bolshy, pulling over to the verge, took his time about reaching Charity.

  Damn him, she thought, I should have made the call myself. No need for me, sitting in this seat, even to have had the car halted.

  She pulled a face.

  All right, the reason I didn’t make the call was because I was ashamed, in front of this damn man, to take out the only mobile I’ve got with me, the bright-coloured toy that belonged to Graham. Bloody Bolshy would make plenty of it if he’d seen the famous Hard Detective using a kid’s plaything.

  Damn, I’ve not been listening to him. Isn’t he being rather long. Is he making some sort of a mess of finding a time for Charity to see me? Didn’t he label all black women as stupid bitches? He’s going to alienate her. I know he will.

  For an instant she contemplated reaching over and cutting his call.

  I’ll use my mobile. Hell with its toy-like look.

  But she was saved from the humiliation. Bolshy was now stuffing his phone away.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t at home. But I remembered where she goes to train. Conies of always having a good read of the sports pages. Got hold of her there, just off the track an’ puffing away like a sodding steam-engine. Said she’d be free tomorrow afternoon. I made it for three o’clock. Want me to drive you down to the Smoke then?’

  Knowing there was nothing Bolshy liked better than getting out of any hard work by driving anywhere at all, usually at top speed, Harriet was tempted to say she intended to go down by train. But a lazy thought checked her. Being swept away to London by a first-class driver was altogether more tempting than making a weary train journey with at the end of it a battle with public transport.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You can do that. But … But, yes, you can go down to Chelsea when you’ve dropped me in Notting Hill and see what you can find out about that service flat Roughouse has. I’ll buzz you when I’ve finished at Colville Road.’

  Bolshy looked grudgingly pleased.

  Worthwhile? We’ll see.

  Chapter Six

  What matters most at this point, Harriet thought as she reached for the bell-push at Mathew Jessop’s pretty Notting Hill house, is not discovering what in Robert Roughouse’s life caused him to become the victim of that purple egg but finding out just why Roughouse was taken away from a first-class hospital like St Ozzie’s and swept out to the Masterton Clinic. Almost certainly Jessop, there after all when Roughouse was hit by the bomb, will at least have had a hand in arranging that high-speed transfer. If Matthew Jessop and Roughouse were friends since school and all that — think those were his exact words there in the dark — he may even have been one of the dawn raiding party, along with that surgeon, Edge-something.

  The door in front of her opened almost as soon as the bell inside had tinkled out a pretty little tune, and Matthew Jessop stood there, looking very different from the man in the portico of Gralethorpe’s shabby town hall kneeling beside blood-covered Robert Roughouse. The all-over-the-place thatch of pale hair, his only physical feature that had made any impression, was now brushed neatly into place. It gave his whole face, straight little nose, pair of pink ears pinned close to the head and almost rosebud mouth, an air of compactness. They were set off, too, by a fresh laundry-white shirt with at its neck a carefully knotted club tie in white and earth-red stripes.

  ‘Detective Superintendent Martens,’ he said. ‘So we meet again.’

  ‘We do. But in rather different circumstances. I could hardly make out anything of you in the darkness there, with the jagged remains of that bomb all around. And now here you are looking as spruce, if I may say so, as if you’d just come from your barber’s.’

  Jessop laughed.

  ‘So I’m spruce, am I? I hope that goes further than just having had my hair cut.’

  ‘It does. That’s a very nice tie there.’

  Harriet had intended the compliment as being nothing more than a way to increase the friendly atmosphere and get her questions freely answered. But it had an altogether different effect.

  For an instant Jessop’s neatly featured face looked sharply disconcerted.

  ‘It — It’s an old-school tie, as a matter of fact,’ he brought out at last. ‘The Zeal School, you know. I — I dare say what caught your eye were the tiny black circles on each of the red stripes. They’re just a little addition indicating membership of a sort of club some of us have. But come in, come in.’

  With some haste he led the way — it left her without a moment to account for that sudden change of attitude — along a narrow hallway, past a slim polished table holding a folded copy of the pink Financial Times, completed crossword uppermost, and into the room immediately to the right.

  But the glimpse of the crossword prevented her, momentarily, from conducting the swift clockwise inspection which customarily told her more about the owner of a house than any number of questions. Instead, she found buzzing in her head the absurd crossword clue that had baffled bright-eyed Tonelle. Up with a tent for not quite a blonde and, yes, east not zero leads to something. Right, to dug-out. Must remember to ask John what the answer was, or it’ll bug me for ever.

  But, now, start observing. Look all round, and without in the least showing it.

  OK, white-painted double doors leadin
g into a back-room that — Yes, a work-station and a bookcase full of untidy-looking volumes. Office or study uncompromisingly devoted to business. Now, on the wall facing me, elegant fireplace with no sign of a fire. Along the mantelpiece a row of silver objects — christening mug, eighteenth-century card case, former tea-caddy — with three, no, four, invitation cards. All too tucked away to be read, damn it. Softly coloured Chinese carpet over parquet flooring, French windows looking on the street, white-painted shutters half-concealed by narrow-striped plum-coloured curtains. Pale grey sofa in inlaid wood and a button-back nursing chair in the same grey material. Finally, just beside me, rather out-of-place against that mock eighteenth-century wallpaper of nesting game-birds, two large photographs in stark black-and-white. One a village street in some dusty country, and the other — same location, I think — a man with his back to the camera holding, in a noticeably stagey manner, a pistol.

  ‘I see you’re looking at my photographs,’ Matthew Jessop said.

  Caught out, Harriet thought, and before I’ve quite completed my survey. He must be pretty alert. I like to think people never notice that I’m sussing out their way of life.

  ‘They’re yours? Your work?’ she said. ‘Excuse the way I was staring, but they’re both rather unusual, besides being so striking. Where was this street scene? It doesn’t look like anywhere in this country.’

  Once again Jessop stood in silence, looking almost in a trance at the photograph in which a scatter of dirty-faced children were playing in the dust of a tumbledown sunlit street. His silence began to go on so long that Harriet wondered if she should break into it. But, just as she was scrabbling in her mind for something innocuous to say, he turned away.

  ‘It’s a still from a little film I made,’ he said. ‘Both those photographs are, in fact. Films are my business, actually. In a comparatively small way.’

  He came to a momentary halt again. Then he gabbled out a burst of words, as if he felt he ought somehow to account for his silence. ‘It — It’s a street in a place called Transabistan, one of those almost unknown, little breakaway countries in the Caucasus. I was filming there to get some publicity for Rob’s book, Marching Through Georgia. Did you ever read it?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. But, now you mention its title, I think my husband —’

  But Jessop ignored her.

  ‘Funny place, Transabistan,’ he torrented on. ‘Ruled by a cross between a politician and a — well, a brigand, to be frank. Chap called Olengovili. Total dictator, of course.’

  Harriet could make little of all the outpouring, except to ask herself why Jessop was so ill at ease.

  ‘You said you are a comparatively small film-maker,’ she put in, attempting to calm him a little. ‘How small is that, if I may ask?’

  The change of subject did bring back something of a smile to Jessop’s neat features.

  ‘Good question,’ he said. ‘And not altogether easy to answer. I began, of course, in the smallest of all possible ways, little more than as an amateur with a single cine-camera.’

  ‘Another Satyajit Ray,’ Harriet put in quickly, thinking of those first films of his that had so enchanted her, and counting on the comparison to calm the nervy fellow to a point where she could get coherent answers to her questions.

  ‘Well, a little like Ray’s early days, if you like. But I don’t claim to be any sort of a film genius. No, I’ve risen to the point of having made — produced, that is — one full-length feature. It was directed, in fact, by someone I hope one day is going to become a name in British cinema. But, otherwise, I’ve just made a few documentaries, with some success I think I can say. At least I’ve learnt a lot working on them, even such simple things as the need for organisation on set. Rules about where things are to be put, and kept. Absolutely vital when everything around is bound to be chaotic.’

  Does the extreme neatness about him account for that insistence on order, Harriet wondered. Bit of a fusspot about his personal appearance, too? Golly, how it must have upset him to be in such a mess crouching there with the remains of that grenade all round and his friend of old covered in blood almost from head to foot.

  ‘But, look, can I give you some sherry? Not much too early, I think.’

  Harriet accepted. She was still far away from asking her questions about the dawn raid on St Ozzie’s. But go roundabout towards that.

  ‘So are you making a film at the moment?’ she asked, taking a sip of the sherry, something she recognised as being distinctly out-of-the-common.

  ‘Indeed, I am. It’s why I couldn’t find a time to meet you till now. I was up all hours yesterday on a night shoot. I’m using that same young, well, youngish director. But this time, I’m happy to say, I’ve got a really bankable star, and I like to think an interesting story.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  Jessop gave a bark of a laugh, half-deprecating, half-proud.

  ‘It’s the basic tale of that long Tennyson poem Maud,’ he said. ‘Of course, most people, if they know it at all, know only those verses made into that drawing-room song, Come into the garden, Maud. Much mocked. But the actual story is a cut above that, a considerable cut. It’s in fact an account of the circumstances leading to a duel to the death, at a time when duelling had just been made strictly illegal in this country but when fighting one was still seen, in some reaches of society, as an obligation of honour. So, you see, there’s a lot of tension there. Statute law versus an older code of expected behaviour. And, of course, it reflects on aspects of society today, clashes between the laws and what people think they’ve a right to be able to do. Much really what lies behind all the agitation over making hunting illegal.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harriet said, hardly finding this a way-in to asking about the dawn raid on St Ozzie’s. ‘Though I must admit I haven’t been following all that very closely. Too busy devising ways of stopping drunken hooligans disturbing the Queen’s Peace.’

  ‘Something that needs to be done,’ Jessop chimed in. ‘At least that’s what I think. My upbringing, I suppose. You know, the Zeal School, where Rob and I were, may have been a little unorthodox, but, morally speaking, it was absolutely conventional, what even nowadays might seem distinctly old-fashioned. As you’d probably expect from a place where the fees are rather higher than Eton’s.’

  She remembered Jessop saying there in the dark at Gralethorpe that anyone who, like Roughouse, aspired to run a pack of foxhounds had to be rich, and that rich was a word it was not quite the done thing to use unless filthy, deprecatingly, was put in front of it.

  Am I at last getting somewhere, she wondered. Isn’t he talking now about a stratum of society where there’s a huge amount of money about. And money, real money, has its own ways of doing things. So can there have been some reason for taking Roughouse off in that private ambulance altogether more weighty than a simple wish to avoid publicity? Was Roughouse shot at, not by some Animal Rights maniac, for heaven’s sake, but for some quite other reason? One not easy for your average citizen to conceive of? Something even that’s altogether beyond the law? Or even above it? His Innovation Party, could it somehow have been seen as a threat to some secret organisation with a great deal at stake?

  All right, let’s go on a bit. But circuitously.

  ‘The Zeal School?’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t actually heard of it.’

  ‘No, not everybody has, by any means. The founder, Dr Jakob Kettner, made a point of avoiding any sort of publicity. Not because there was anything secret about his regime, but because he believed outside interference would affect his theories.’

  ‘But the regime there was — you said — unorthodox?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it was. Dr Kettner put much more emphasis on rigorous character-building, as it used to be called, than on the academic or even on religion. We were held to a totally strict timetable from five a.m. till an early, exhausted bedtime. Physical testing to near breaking-point, cold baths, long runs, hard-played games.’

  ‘Yow,’ Harriet felt o
bliged to put in.

  ‘Oh, yes. We even had something you’ll no doubt think totally bizarre, called the Clamber, a fierce competitive trial under, I quote, the unarguable rules of gladiatorial combat. Boys, paired one against another, had to climb an appallingly jagged rock-face and be first to touch what was supposed to be the scroll of the Ten Commandments held out by bearded old Moses.’

  ‘So the Zeal School,’ Harriet asked, ‘is named from the huge amount of zeal that’s expected of its pupils?’

  ‘You’re not entirely wrong there, though actually it’s called the Zeal School simply because it’s near a place called Zeal on the northern edge of Dartmoor. But, oh yes, zeal was expected. It still is. Long after one’s left the place. We’re called Zealots, us old boys, and things are always being demanded of us.’

  Harriet, when Jessop smiled disarmingly as he brought his account to an end, found she had a new idea in her head about how to find out why really that raid on St Ozzie’s had been launched. Since Jessop wasn’t on any night shoot when he had been accompanying his school friend of old to Gralethorpe, he would have had ample opportunity at dawn the day after to accompany that surgeon — Yeah, Jackson Edgeworth — in the private ambulance.

  Can I just ask him outright? Act the Hard Detective? I’ll have to ask, sooner or later. So, here goes.

  ‘Tell me, were you one of the people who went to St Oswald’s Hospital in Birchester and had Robert Roughouse transferred to a place called the Masterton Clinic?’

  Matthew Jessop hesitated, but for only an instant.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I was. It’s true. We took Rob to the Masterton because we thought he’d do better there. Have a quieter time, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I see,’ Harriet said, though she hardly saw this as any sort of a reason for moving a patient in as fragile a state as Roughouse had been.

  All right, another question.

  ‘But wasn’t that move made with somewhat excessive haste? I mean, it must have been a risk for someone that badly injured.’