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

by HRF Keating

  ‘Yes, I was afraid of that, DI. But thank you all the same.’

  ‘Pipped to the post,’ she said to Bolshy. ‘Seems the wife’s a stunner, and a liar.’

  ‘Old Fledge our prime then?’

  ‘Not necessarily. There could be a dozen other reasons why he didn’t want to tell me the truth. A reason, for instance, even more stunner-like than his wife.’

  ‘As per usual.’

  ‘If you like.’

  *

  Lady Margaret Tredannick was all that her two distinguished addresses indicated she might be. Pale face, cool on its frame of ‘good bones’ — Harriet felt a dart of envy — well adapted to looking down a Roman nose from a considerable height even as she sat there in her high-backed chair.

  ‘Really, I cannot see how my private entertainment can possibly be any business of the police from — where was it, Birchester?’ she said as soon as Harriet had told her she wanted to establish whether Mr Valentine Drummond had been down in Kent at the party for her son’s coming-of-age.

  ‘However, I am afraid that Mr Drummond’s presence there is a matter for us.’

  ‘Then can’t you come back at some other time? I have just rung for my tea.’

  ‘Lady Margaret, I have come down from Birchester in furtherance of inquiries into the murder of Mr Robert Roughouse, which you may have heard about, and all I need from you is an answer to a simple question. Was Mr Drummond present at your party?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Robert. Poor, poor Robert. I knew him, of course. A good friend from the younger set. It seems no one is safe nowadays.’

  None of which answers my question.

  ‘That is as may be,’ Harriet said. ‘But I need to ascertain Mr Drummond’s whereabouts that evening, together with, let me say, the whereabouts of a number of other people.’

  ‘Frankly, I cannot see that Tigger Drummond’s presence or not at my party at Ravenham can have anything to do with Robert’s death.’

  Harriet suppressed a sigh of frustration.

  ‘The particular reason for my inquiry is, as you will appreciate, a confidential police matter. But I can assure you that what you can tell me is of vital importance.’

  ‘Of vital importance?’ Lady Margaret allowed the finely traced eyebrows on her frost-pale face to rise a little. ‘Superintendent, do you know how many people there were at my party?’

  ‘No, madam, I do not. But, may I say, if you cannot give me your personal assurance that you spoke to, or even simply saw, Mr Drummond that evening, I shall have to ask for the complete list of your guests.’

  ‘Indeed? And you believe you are entitled, somehow, to make such a request?’

  ‘If you cannot prove to me by any other means that Mr Drummond was at Ravenham House that evening, then, yes, I will ask you for that list.’

  ‘Suppose there isn’t a copy of it? A private person does not necessarily indulge in the filling-in in triplicate nonsense that seems to be the way the police investigate crime these days.’

  Too much of a wriggle, surely.

  ‘Lady Margaret, I am formally requesting a copy of your guest list for the party that took place at your address, Ravenham House, last Saturday.’

  She was rewarded by a plain, unaristocratic look of fury. But an answer came.

  ‘Very well, Superintendent, I will let you have that list. But let me tell you: your request may be within your powers as a police officer, though I shall consult my legal friends as to that, but it is, beyond doubt, a violation of the accepted rules of hospitality.’

  ‘That may be so. But, if it is, then I must violate those undefined rules.’

  She almost held out her hand for the list. But Lady Margaret had more to say.

  ‘Now that I remember, Superintendent,’ she went on, with an angry little breath of a sigh. ‘I believe I did see Valentine during the course of the evening, or rather of the night, because the party went on, naturally for an occasion of such importance, until almost dawn. I cannot say that I particularly spoke to him — there were so many other people it was one’s duty to pay some attention to — but I can assure you Valentine was definitely present.’

  Then an obviously sudden new thought.

  ‘Oh, and, if you are not satisfied, there is someone else who could quite simply confirm his presence. She’s the writer of a column in that rather new magazine everybody is talking about, whatever it’s called. The daughter of an old friend from my time at Roedean, who married one of the Morgan-Woods. Daphne the girl’s name is, though of course she doesn’t use it in the magazine. She’s Debra Delaville there. I suppose you could talk to her, if you want.’

  But Harriet, during the lengthy explanation, had had ample opportunity to fasten her attention on Lady Margaret from top to toe. And she had seen, not any tightening of long-fingered hands but a small wave pass across the shimmering material of the silken skirt of her white dress that told of the tension in the legs below. A lie had been uttered.

  But nothing to be gained from directly accusing Lady Margaret without any real evidence. A woman with legal friends, as Lady Margaret had been at pains to make clear she had, could at the least make a noisy fuss.

  ‘Then let me say that you have been of considerable assistance to our investigation. If you would send me that list — here’s my card — I won’t need to trouble you any further. Thank you.’

  Oh, yes, she thought as she left the house, you have ‘been of assistance’ all right, Lady Margaret. I rather think now Tigger Drummond, though invited to your party, may never have shown up.

  And I think I can see a way to prove that.

  Chapter Seventeen

  In the car, Bolshy threw onto the pavement the end of the cheroot he had been sloppily smoking. Harriet did nothing to rebuke him. She had fixed on her next necessary move.

  If Lady Margaret has put herself out to feed me the name of ‘Debra Delaville’, she must have meant me to contact the young lady to be told by her that, yes, Tigger Drummond was there at the party.

  ‘Get on the Net fast,’ she snapped to Bolshy, ‘and find out the name of a classy women’s magazine with a lady called Debra Delaville on its staff.’

  How many times, she asked herself as she waited boiling with impatience, have I met with vagueness and mystification in the course of this now you-see-it now-you-don’t investigation? Quite enough anyhow to make me determined this time to push my way through to the truth of at least something.

  It took Bolshy scarcely longer than she had hoped to produce the information that ‘Debra Delaville’ had her column in a magazine called All the Way Round, its address in a street just north of Piccadilly.

  ‘Right, get there,’ she said. ‘And to hell with the thirty miles-an-hour rule, just like every other driver on the road. A rule no one holds to is no rule at all.’

  ‘Law’s an arse, right?’ Bolshy shouted, as the car already went over that limit.

  ‘The word’s ass. Charles Dickens’ rules.’

  Barely ten minutes later Harriet entered the smarter-than-paint premises All the Way Round.

  ‘Yes, Debra’s in. Who shall I say wants to see her?’

  Blessing the fact that she was not in uniform and that Bolshy had not parked the evident police car directly in front of the building, Harriet simply replied ‘I’ve just got a message for her, from Lady Margaret Tredannick. But it’s rather a complicated one I’m afraid, so I’d better see her.’

  She listened hard for the words she heard then coming from the phone the receptionist had picked up. If they indicated in any way that ‘Debra Delaville’ had already spoken to Lady Margaret, then, however fast Bolshy had driven, she would be too late. But, it seemed, thank goodness, that Lady Margaret’s afternoon tea had taken priority over phoning her old schoolfriend’s daughter.

  In a moment the receptionist said she could go up. She rapidly made for the lift — was the teacup being finally put down on its saucer? — and in its narrow, wardrobe-like interior was whirred up to the fourth flo
or.

  In the three minutes since entering Debra Delaville’s office and being waved to a chair while she took a call Harriet had had an excellent opportunity to assess a witness she hoped would give a plain account of Lady Margaret’s party. Daphne Morgan-Woods, as Harriet soon began to think of the blonde blue-eyed columnist, was an impressive young woman. No doubt she must have been helped into her bizarrely influential job through some old-boy, or old-girl, network, but the longer the conversation had gone on the plainer it had become that she was no simpering fool.

  So Harriet was quick — that phone might ring again at any moment — to speak as soon as the receiver was put back down.

  ‘Miss Morgan-Woods, I am here to ask you something about the party at Ravenham House on Saturday which, I understand, you attended.’

  ‘A duty, and a pleasure. I used to date Toby Tredannick once. A nice boy. But, for God’s sake, not Miss Morgan-Woods. It’s Daphne, if not Daff.’

  ‘Daphne, then. And what I’ve come to find out from you — I should say I’m inquiring into the murder of Robert Roughouse at the Masterton Clinic in Birrshire on Saturday-Sunday night — is how much you saw of Val Drummond, or Tigger as I believe his friends call him, when you were at the party?’

  She got a sharply inquiring look from those wide blue eyes.

  ‘Yes, Tigger. Well, I must —’

  The phone rang. And another pouncing conversation followed, lasting to Harriet’s fury, rather longer than three minutes, although she had to concede Daphne seemed to have used the extra time well.

  But at last she put the receiver down.

  ‘Sorry, bloody thing keeps ringing. Mostly people eventually calling back, I’m afraid. They do that for me. But you were asking about Tigger.’

  And, yes, Harriet registered, all the while you were listening to that call, interrupting and questioning whoever you were talking to, you’ve had ample time to decide that if I’m inquiring about Tigger Drummond you may have to be guarded in your answers.

  ‘Yes, Mr Valentine Drummond,’ she said. ‘I want to know if you saw him, or, better, if you spoke with him during that evening.’

  ‘Tigger. Yes. OK, I don’t want to —’

  The phone once more. But this conversation was very short.

  ‘Aunty M? Look, sorry but I’m desperately busy just now. Got a —’ Voice dropped to an exaggeratedly confidential tone. ‘Got none other than a royal’s equerry here with me. Can’t …’

  And, despite a squawking sound from the far end, the receiver gently replaced.

  Right, no doubt about who that call was from, even if ‘Aunty M’ was the name mentioned. Lady Margaret Tredannick must have finished her tea and had now attempted to make the call she had planned.

  But, hey, who had Daphne claimed was actually in this room with her? A royal equerry. Very clever, very quick. No other visitor would have taken precedence. So in an instant did Daphne guess — perhaps Lady Margaret had just said something that gave her a clue — why she was being called? And has she realised there’s something this police officer from Birchester is not meant to be told?

  So, what now?

  The answer, which came straightaway, was extremely surprising.

  ‘No,’ Daphne said, ‘I never did see Tigger Drummond at the party, let alone did I talk to him.’

  She gave Harriet an unblinking look from those dazzling blue eyes.

  ‘I think you can take it, Superintendent,’ she said, ‘that he absolutely wasn’t at Ravenham House on Saturday night. I was there from start to finish, doing my journalistic duty, and I keep my eyes very well open at a do like that.’

  Harriet sat there, hardly daring to believe that she had heard a plain and unequivocal declaration that Tigger Drummond, member of the Cabal, off-hand tosser-out of an alibi for the time of Robert Roughouse’s murder, had been telling a plain lie when he had said he was down in Kent. It came to her then — in a topsy-turvying fresh look — that the nickname Tigger, which from the moment of first hearing it she had thought must be that of someone from the world of Pooh Bear, Piglet and pessimistic Eeyore was nothing of the kind. Bouncy, yes bouncy, ever-active and ready-to-go Tigger was a man who had made a great deal of money from manufacturing the enormously successful Tiger Man toy. He was the boy at the Zeal School who had shown his friends the original, homemade tiger toy he had cleverly constructed. He was a man who surely would have been capable of making with his own hands a contrivance to send an egg-sized grenade flying over a distance as long as that from Gralethorpe’s Methodist chapel to its dingy old town hall.

  Was it him even who had fired the shot Percival Pidgeon had said sounded like a fowling-piece?

  No, she thought. No, no reason at that time for anyone in the Cabal to have risked their life when, with all the money they seemed to have they could have found a man to hire.

  ‘I’m glad, very glad, you’ve told me what you have,’ she said to Daphne. ‘I think the end of all this is not so far off now.’

  ‘Yes, I can see it might be.’ A pause, well-glossed cherry-red lips pushed forward in an O of churning thought. ‘And I think I’ve got more information you ought to have.’

  But then nothing followed.

  Is she still in a quandary over what to tell me? Or how much?

  All right, let her sit thinking for a few moments more. At a point like this one over-insistent question can dry up a source for ever.

  Almost a minute passed.

  ‘Superintendent, have you ever heard of something called the Cabal?’

  The Cabal. Harriet’s heart gave a leap. So right to the centre of it. Surely I’ve been correct all along in my suspicions, half-suspicions, floating-away suspicions, insistently recurring suspicions, on little evidence or none.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have indeed —’

  And the phone rang again.

  Daphne picked it up, barked ‘Call back’ and plunged it on to its rest.

  ‘I think it might be better,’ she said, as if there had been no break in the conversation, ‘if you told me, first, all you yourself know about the Cabal.’

  ‘Right. To begin with, it’s a group, a small group and, I think, getting smaller, of men who were all at the Zeal School at much the same time, with perhaps one older newcomer. In fact, I gather from what I’ve been told, that it started out as just an informal arrangement to meet — to dine and no more — every now and again. I think Robert Roughouse himself put forward the idea.’

  ‘A typically Rob thing to do,’ Daphne said, in a touched-in aside. ‘Starting something up, and then finding it’s too much for him.’

  ‘And, if I’m not mistaken, it then grew, perhaps over some years, into something more? Something distinctly business-like. And now …’

  She hesitated, looked at Daphne to see if they were still travelling on the same line.

  ‘Now,’ she went on, reassured, ‘I believe the Cabal has some project in hand that goes rather beyond the boundaries of everyday business.’

  ‘Not to say that it’s probably highly illegal,’ Daphne put in. ‘OK. You’re in the picture.’

  ‘I’m encouraged to find you think so. But now let me hear what you know.’

  ‘With some names, I think. You know a girl — OK, an attractive girl — who keeps her eyes and ears open can learn a lot of things she isn’t supposed to know. So, how about Sir Marcus Fledge, chairman of Pettifer’s?’

  ‘And, from what I gathered, more or less, when I went to see him a man perfectly willing to break the rules, provided he can cover up doing so. Something not as difficult as one might expect if you’ve almost unlimited money to play with.’

  ‘All right. But do you know anything about Pettifer’s as a concern?’

  Harriet was about to say that she hardly did when a recollection from her long wait in the lobby of Pettifer House came back to her.

  ‘They make earth-shifting machinery,’ she said. ‘It seems to be the big thing with them.’

  ‘You’re near the
nub of it there, I think. If what I’ve sort of had at the back of my mind is true, my sort of wondering whether I was just indulging in some hare-brained fantasy —’

  ‘No,’ Harriet broke in sharply. ‘No, Robert Roughouse, once the leading spirit in the Cabal, has been murdered. Murdered at a second attempt.’

  ‘Yes, and there was that first extraordinary business. Where was it? Near your part of the world, I think.’

  ‘In Gralethorpe. And, yes, extraordinary enough. So extraordinary, so odd, that it actually points, in a way, to something almost childishly conspiratorial. Like the Cabal.’

  ‘You’re right. But, yes, there’s nothing at all childish about what happened to Rob Roughouse. When, of course, Tigger Drummond was not, definitely not, at the party for Toby Tredannick.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  About to step into All the Way Round’s wardrobe-like lift again, Harriet abruptly changed her mind. The last thing I want now, she thought, is to find myself sitting in a swirl of cheroot smoke next to grumbling Bolshy. No, what I want is somewhere quiet where I can sit and think. So, a back-exit. Must be one.

  She glanced round.

  Yes, stairs. Unlit. Just what I want.

  She took them at full speed, clatter, clatter, clatter. And there in the basement she saw in the dim light what she was looking for. A heavy door with a push-bar to open it.

  Out into a narrow area. A flight of gritty iron steps leading up to street-level. Up, up.

  At the top, breathing hard, she looked to left and right. No street-name to be seen, though a One Way sign stood out. Never mind what the street’s called, must run parallel to where Bolshy’s waiting for me. As good a spot as any. And, yes, there at the far end what looks like a coffee shop.

  Seated in a narrow mustard-coloured leather armchair next to the window, a cup of something-or-other on the low table in front of her, she pulled out her notebook and began haphazardly jotting.

  Tigger not at the party. The Number One fact. So does that prove he’s the man in the race-goers’ brown felt hat who talked to Tonelle? No. But it certainly can have been him. Tall, well-built, right accent, if what Bolshy said about pooftahs wasn’t one of his undirected baseless jibes. And, at that one brief meeting I had with Drummond I was conscious, I realise now, of a vague dislike he had for the police, the way he simply dismissed my saying I knew nothing about the party down in Kent with that casual if you don’t, you don’t. Or perhaps it was his deep-seated disdain for the conventions which I unconsciously noted. Amoral, that was the word that came to me there in that flat high up above Parliament Square.