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

by HRF Keating

  ‘Yes, I went off with DS Woodcock as soon as I’d finished talking to Nurse Smithson, just leaving the Scene of Crime people with you. I needed to come down here pronto to see various people.’

  ‘Check alibis, that it?’

  Smart girl.

  ‘Yes, something of that sort. But I thought no one might have told Charity, and it’d be better if she didn’t hear the news on the radio or something.’

  ‘That figures. Always thought there was a kind heart somewhere under those new-every-morning shirts of yours. Yeah, an’ that reminds me. You do buy some funny things.’

  ‘Buy?’ she asked, momentarily baffled.

  ‘That shopping-list on the back of your note.’

  So Bolshy had handed it over after all.

  ‘Oh, that. Yes, John has a particular liking for semolina pudding. The shopping-list happened to be the only bit of paper I could find when I sent DS Woodcock to ask if anyone called at the Clinic last evening. Anyone with questions.’

  ‘Yeah. An’ I told him. There was this bloke who said he wanted to know if our rooms were suitable for a friend of his. Friend he didn’t happen to say anything else about. But, soon as I told that to old DS What’s-his-name, he just said Thank you — almost polite for once — and took himself off.’

  ‘Did he indeed?’ Harriet said sharply. ‘Didn’t he ask you for a full description of this caller?’

  ‘Not really. Not everything about the full outfit the guy was wearing. Suit-and-tie type, even though he didn’t have the tie. Open-neck shirt, white I think. Yes, white definitely, may have had a bit of a blue stripe in it. Couldn’t see much else. He was a big feller, in a big coat, sort of riding-mac, pockets stuffed with stuff. Oh, an’ I forgot. Most noticeable bit. He wore one of them brown felt hats, like you see at the races on telly.’

  ‘Yes, DS Woodcock did tell me about that.’

  Another example of de rigueur dress, she thought. But no one ever actually laid down a law that hats like that had to be worn at the races. Why were they then? Answer, of course, copycatting, nothing more.

  ‘Hey,’ Tonelle breezed on, ‘thank you for what you wrote on the other side of that shopping-list. I was still worrying over it, all that east and zero business. See now what it meant. Can sleep o’ nights. But, listen. Charity, is she all right? I mean …’

  ‘Well, no. No, she isn’t all right. How could she be just after hearing what I had to tell her? She’s stunned. Yes, that’s it. Stunned.’

  ‘Should I come to her, down to London? I could. Tell old Fishface, stuff her job and just come.’

  ‘No. No, honestly, I don’t feel there’s any need for that. If I’m right in thinking Charity is —’ She looked down at the crouching, balled-up figure in the small chair. ‘That she’s a pretty tough lady?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, she’s tough all right. You should’ve seen her battling her way through when she was down here.’

  Harriet jerked her head up in surprise.

  And at once made herself think coolly and rationally.

  Is this suddenly the answer to that niggle of doubt I had when I was here before? The tiny fly-spot on the open surface of Charity’s personality, that unaccountably long silence when I asked why she had been at the Masterton? Yes, the one dark spot on the shining exterior of that on-and-on, up-and-up life.

  ‘Tonelle,’ she said, turning her back on Charity’s lost-in-grief figure and keeping her voice low, ‘Tonelle, tell me exactly why Charity was in the clinic.’

  No immediate answer. But one came soon enough.

  ‘She told you it was a sports injury, did she? Generally does if anyone asks. But she shouldn’t have tried to hide that from you, not when you were there to find out if she knew anything about Rob Roughouse that might get you to who shot that thing at him. No, believe me, in this place they wouldn’t know a tendon from a toenail.’

  ‘So, why was she with you?’ Harriet almost breathed into the phone.

  ‘Drugging. Used to give herself a little extra when she had a race to win.’

  The implications began to go clicking through Harriet’s head. She turned and glanced at Charity. She was already beginning to look up.

  ‘OK,’ she said to Tonelle. ‘Listen, I ought to be looking after Charity. I’ll speak to you later, all right?’

  ‘Yeah. OK.’

  The sound of a replaced receiver at the far end.

  Yes, a very bright girl, Tonelle. Catching on quickly as can be. But what to do about Charity now? Now that I know her secret. For a possible future Olympic medallist to have a record as having run races with a drug in her bloodstream, it would be a storm shadow almost impossible to survive. All right, at some time in the past, before any random drugs test had caught her, she must have realised she was hooked. And, yes, she would have confided in Rob Roughouse, and she had been lucky. Not only would a man taught from his schooldays to be entrenchedly loyal have at once decided to keep her secret come what may, but, as someone with a house not far from Birchester, he must have known about the Masterton, refuge of rich idiots with drink or drugs problems, and got her in there to be cured. Which is how she came to be friends with her fellow black, Tonelle.

  But Charity, should I tell her what I’ve learnt, this very minute? With the state she’s in she won’t be able to hide anything from me now. I’ll have the truth about that drug out of her in no time, and then I may go on to learn from her things about the man she loved that she’s felt it would be disloyal to him, lying unconscious, to tell me.

  Disloyal. The word sent up in her a picture of Robert, just recovered from unconsciousness, and muttering that word, almost impossible to make out, loyal.

  Yes, it must have been that. Not royal, or spoil, but loyal. I see it now, now that I’ve learnt what Kailash Gokhale told me, that Robert’s loyalties to the other members of the Cabal he founded were under strain.

  ‘Charity,’ she said, her mind having in an instant made itself up. ‘Charity, it’s up to you now, despite this horrible thing that’s happened, not to slip back into — into the way you were when you had to go into the Masterton.’

  Charity’s eyes suddenly flashed into terrified life.

  ‘How — How do you know that?’

  Harriet looked at her.

  ‘That was Tonelle on the phone just now,’ she said.

  ‘She told you? Tonelle?’

  ‘Yes, she did, and she told me, too, that she wished you hadn’t tried to hide it from me when I saw you before. You know, truth’s best. It almost always is, in the end.’

  A long silence.

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I suppose that’s right. Not telling you probably put all sorts of ideas in your mind.’

  ‘It did. And they got in the way of me finding out enough about Robert to get a line on why someone shot that thing at him. On why, now, he’s been murdered.’

  ‘All right, yes. Yes, I’ll tell you anything more I can.’ She looked up suddenly from her little chair. ‘But there’s one thing I’d like to say straightaway. It’s this. Once I’d got out of that mess I was in — And it was easy enough to slide into it in the days when I just had to win every race I’d entered for — I swore I’d never touch anything like that ever again. And I haven’t. I haven’t.’

  ‘I believe you, Charity. I really do. But, listen, is there anything you didn’t think I should be told when I was here last? It’s time you told me everything you possibly can. You owe that much to Robert.’

  She leant intently over Charity, willing her to sift her memory, to speak.

  And she did.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, there is something. Something I thought was private between me and Rob. Rob when he was alive. When I thought, with time, he was going to be OK.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a bit stupid really. It didn’t seem to matter then, when you were here last, and Rob … Rob was going to be well again.’

  ‘But tell me now, Charity. Whatever it was, tell me. All right, it may be, as yo
u said stupid. But you should let me be the judge of that. You really should.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, OK. OK, it was just this. It was something he said when we were in bed together the night before he went down to that place, Gralethorpe. To make that speech, about how fox-hunting was part of the great tradition of being British. How it meant much more than it seemed to. He believed in that, you know. It was … it was somehow what made him the man he was.’

  For a moment Harriet saw again Roughouse, dressed in his full hunting kit, brick-red coat, white stock at the neck, white breeches above gleaming brown boots, as he put all the effort he was capable of into convincing that angry crowd that hunting was worth preserving. Into showing them the man he was.

  ‘Tell me, Charity. Whatever it was, tell me.’

  ‘It was just this. It wasn’t really much. But some time in the night, God knows when, it was still dark, pitch-dark, something woke Rob. Or it didn’t quite wake him. But he stirred and moaned. I think that was what must have brought me to the surface, too. Because I don’t think I was awake before …’

  She lapsed into reminiscent silence.

  Harriet waited. Until her patience came to its end.

  ‘Yes, what happened then?’

  A weak, wavering smile appeared on the boot-polish brown face in front of her.

  ‘Yeah, this is what was stupid about it. And Rob wasn’t silly. Dead serious Rob was. I used to think I’d try and cure him of that. When we were married. Because we’d agreed that one day, one day soon, we would —’

  And the tears sprung from her eyes, coursed down those shining brown checks, made the wide-lipped mouth gulp and gulp.

  Harriet stood there, waiting. Nothing else that could be done.

  Then, at last, Charity lifted up her head.

  ‘Sorry. Sorry, shouldn’t have … No use crying, isn’t that what they say, over spilt mil — over spilt blood. Spilt blood. But I … I couldn’t help it when it all came back.’

  ‘Of course, you couldn’t, love. Of course, you couldn’t.’

  ‘But it’s over now. That’s over now. Let me tell you what he, what Rob, said then.’

  ‘Yes. If you can.’

  ‘It wasn’t so much said as, I dunno, murmured, muttered.’

  ‘Yes? What was it?’

  ‘This. This. He muttered, kept muttering I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go to that place.’

  ‘Just that? No more?’

  Yeah, just that. But you should have heard the — the agony. Yes, that’s what it was. The agony in his voice when those words sort of came out of him. You know, even at the time, I thought he’s saying more, something more, than just that he didn’t want to go down to that demo, try to convince a lot of idiots there’s some good in hunting. But in the morning, when he said nothing at all about having woken up, and when he seemed to be his usual — No, might as well say it. When he made love to me again. Then I thought that must after all have been what he’d been trying to say. That it was just going up to — what’s it? Gralethorpe — to make his speech that he didn’t want to have to do. This was when I was lying beside him after … afterwards, you know, like you do if it’s been good …’

  ‘Yes,’ Harriet put in quietly. ‘I know what you mean. And it was then, when you were relaxed, dreamily relaxed, that you thought Rob must have simply been worried about going up to Gralethorpe, that he had a sort of uncharacteristic reluctance to face — well, the enemy. Some enemy.’

  ‘Yeah, that was it. That was exactly it. But, when you were here before, I thought I couldn’t tell you anything about it. It — It sort of showed Rob as weak. What’s it they call them? Yes, a weakling. I thought it showed Rob as being a weakling, and he wasn’t. He wasn’t at all. He was strong. He wouldn’t knuckle under. He never would knuckle under to anything.’

  ‘Yes, I can believe that. Just in the little I saw of him there in Gralethorpe that night he certainly wasn’t knuckling under. But, tell me, where was it, do you think now, that he was so reluctant to go to? Can you put your finger on it?’

  Charity was silent for a few moments. And when she spoke she sounded more than a little unsure of herself.

  ‘It’s hard to say. I mean, you notice things, just little things sometimes. And then, because they don’t seem to amount to much, you sort of forget all about them. But … but, yes. Yes, here’s one thing. He — He had a row once, not all that long before that night, with one of that Zeal School lot, the ones that call themselves the Cobbles. Is it?’

  ‘Well, I think it’s actually the Cabal. Cabal’s a not very common word for a secret club. I seem to remember it was originally made up of the initial letters of the five members of a group of politicians, though I’ve not the remotest idea who they were or even when they existed.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, that was it. The Cabal. Rob didn’t ever talk much about it, so I never really cottoned on. But that was what he said: the Cabal.’

  ‘And he had a row with one of the members? A bad row, when he wouldn’t knuckle under about something?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, it was with a man called Fledge. Morris Fledge, I think. I only met him once, just for a few minutes, so I don’t know all that much about him.’

  ‘I do, as a matter of fact,’ Harriet put in by way of encouragement. ‘If we’re talking about the same man, and I think we are. He’s actually called Sir Marcus Fledge and he’s chairman of that huge firm, Pettifer’s, very rich, even by the standard of the rich guys who’ve been at the Zeal School. He’s richer than any of them, I got the impression. Rich, but dull, someone called him. A dull fellow.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s him. Didn’t seem to have a word to say for himself when we met for those few minutes. Just stared at me when Rob introduced us, sort of like a big fat red-faced pig, and just muttered the one word Pleased … And a Goodbye then when he went.’

  ‘But Robert, Rob, he had some sort of row with him? Was it about him having to go somewhere? Not to Gralethorpe, but to somewhere quite different?’

  ‘Yeah, I think it was. Or it may have been. When we came back here after, Rob was blazing. I’ve never seen him so angry. And he does get — oh God, he did get angry at times. Even with me, though we made it up quickly enough. But with — what’s it? — Sir Marcus Fledge, he wasn’t going to make it up, not at all. And that’s when I knew he hadn’t knuckled under to something which that great big fat pig-face wanted him to do.’

  ‘Something? Did Rob give you any idea, even a hint, about what that something was? Was it that Sir Marcus Fledge wanted him to go somewhere and he was determined not to?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know at all. I asked. I asked Rob, though I knew he wasn’t going to say anything. But he was so angry about it all that I really wanted to know why. But, no. No, he just said there were things he was bound not to say a word about, and that this was one of them.’

  ‘So you never got to know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And do you think, now do you think, that the way Rob muttered the night before he went to Gralethorpe was because he was badly worried about this, whatever it was?’

  ‘Oh God, I don’t know. It might have — oh, it might have been anything, anything. But, yes. Yes, I suppose I do think it was to do with pig-face Fledge. It was the agony behind Rob’s voice that made me feel what was troubling him was more, much more, than that stupid — brave all right, but stupid — idea of confronting those — were they miners? It was as if he had some awful decision to make. Yes, that was it. A decision that was tearing him apart.’

  ‘But you don’t know what that actually was? If it was that at all, those muttered words in the middle of the night?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t know. Oh God, I wish I did. I wish Rob had told me about whatever it was. I could have — I could, sort of perhaps, helped him.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Harriet would not let herself immediately consider the fact — no, the tantalising half-fact — that Rob Roughouse had been desperately unwilling to resp
ond to some demand made on him, possibly by the chairman of the world-ranking Pettifer heavy machinery company. If this really was at the root of the nightmare Roughouse had before he went to Gralethorpe, it would affect the whole direction of her investigation. But, until she had time and space to work out its every last implication, she was not even going to think about it. One thing, however, she did know. Sooner or later she was going to have to confront the pig-faced — Charity’s word — chairman of mighty Pettifer’s.

  As she made her way out, after contacting a Romanian girl athlete two floors below who, Charity had said, was ‘a sort of friend’, there came back into her mind that one almost incomprehensible word Robert Roughouse had managed to mutter as she had sat beside his bed at the Masterton. Loyal. Yes, I see now he must have been caught between two loyalties. Loyalty — was it? — to his fellow members of the Cabal, which he had himself brought into being, and loyalty to — to what? To his duty even to uphold the laws of his country?

  Yes, it’s certainly beginning to look possible that, for some unknown reason, the Cabal, as it now is, may have wanted to ensure Roughouse’s silence about something they are planning. But can that really be? That a little group of ex-public schoolboys actually hired a hitman to use that grenade-throwing device? And, after the failed attempt, has the Cabal hired another paid killer, or used the first one again, finally to put an end to Roughouse’s life? Or …? Or has one of the group perhaps taken the matter into his own hands and committed murder? And, yes, from Tonelle’s description of the man who had come to the Masterton asking questions, he could really have been someone who might belong to that rich men’s secretive club.

  So, yes, right or wrong, it’s imperative now to see every member of the Cabal I know about, or can find out about, and make sure where they were last night.

  Bolshy, she found, had moved the car to double yellow lines a little further along the street from where he had been parked. No doubt for the simple pleasure of telling a traffic warden to bugger off. She got in beside him and snorted out the cheroot smoke that had immediately begun to invade her throat.