Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
Jennie Melville
PRELUDE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Jennie Melville
Footsteps in the Blood
Jennie Melville, a pseudonym for Gwendoline Butler, was born and brought up in south London, and was one of the most universally praised of English mystery authors. She wrote over fifty novels under both names. Educated at Haberdashers, she read history at Oxford, and later married Dr Lionel Butler, Principal of Royal Holloway College. She had one daughter, who survives her.
Gwendoline Butler’s crime novels are hugely popular in both Britain and the United States, and her many awards included the Crime Writers’ Association’s Silver Dagger. She was also selected as being one of the top two hundred crime writers in the world by The Times.
PRELUDE
After the hottest summer for years, it was a wet autumn. Rain falling like tears on the brown leaves in the Great Park of Windsor.
Charmian Daniels called it the worst autumn of her life. She was a highly successful policewoman who had had a lot of publicity together with great success. She thought some, if not all, the terrible things that happened that autumn were due to the very fact of her success. She had attracted attention, and that was dangerous.
As soon as a woman is successful, puts her head above the parapet, she comes under fire.
It had happened to other women, she could names names.
Now it was her turn. Hers, and that of two other young and successful women.
The first victim in the terrible happenings was a woman, too. Well, a girl still, and not much of a success. She deserved better than a death, though. She deserved time.
Charmian thought she could place the very moment when it all started to happen.
It was the day after her biggest triumph to date. Or at least, the most publicised, involving, as it did, a touch of royalty. The day she had been photographed wearing an Anne Klein skirt with a (Katherine Hammett shirt and a Marks & Spencer blazer. A drugs case, a porn-ring case involving children, a sickening beast of a case where she had helped trap most of the guilty men, if not all.
It was a good photograph.
Admit it, she said to herself, I looked better than I usually do, photographed better than I should have done. I’d actually had my hair cut and kept my lipstick in place. I was in luck, and I suppose that was maddening.
To the wrong person, literally so.
The photograph showed the outer woman: a confident, strong woman who took the eye. Of course, inside her was the usual bag of doubts and insecurities but these did not show.
The photograph was important as a spur to action on the part of someone, Charmian was right about that.
However, there was one other episode that was crucial that she knew nothing about.
Early on that autumn, packing to come home after a bruisingly hard spell of work across the Atlantic, she had paused for a glance in the mirror of her hotel room.
She looked at herself. If I didn’t know it was impossible at my age, I would say I’d grown about an inch.
But it wasn’t that she’d grown, she had just lost weight. You shouldn’t lose weight like that, should you? Was it dangerous, a bad sign?
What a thought to come home with.
Chapter One
Thursday, October 5
It was the worst-attended funeral of the year. And in a town which prided itself on its good turnout at funerals. Windsor liked a funeral, royal if possible, but others would do.
Just two young women and a huddle of policemen. The huddle was because of the rain. One of those soft, pervasive autumnal rains which get everywhere. No day to be buried.
The two young women stood side by side as the coffin was lowered into the grave. One was wearing a sensible brown tweed suit which, in a fit of unsuitable frivolity, she had teamed with a blue satin blouse. The other young woman was dressed in black suede: skirt, jacket and a kind of cloak, all of which looked exceedingly expensive and not particularly funereal. They were the only mourners except for the professionals: those from the funeral parlour and from the police. One of the girls, she in the tweeds, was a police detective herself, and understood exactly why the police were there and whom they were watching. Her. And her friend.
One, or both, of them might be in danger; she knew that too.
‘I hate funerals,’ the tall girl in brown tweed was on the point of saying aloud, when she was checked by the sound of earth falling on the coffin. ‘ Especially when it might have been my own.’ She kept this thought inside her too, giving a brief look at her companion.
The person they were burying had been a young woman too.
A wet windy October day in the royal riverside town of Windsor with the sovereign’s standard fluttering over the castle and the river gleaming like dark silver.
The churchyard was in the old part of the town, beyond the complex of shops in Peascod Street and Sheet Street. St Saviour’s Church was a red-brick Victorian structure, somewhat Italianate in style and with its churchyard well filled with ornate memorials. The present corpse was lucky to find a bit of spare land, but it was in a less favoured, scrubby stretch of ground beyond which the railway ran. Not a smart area. But she hadn’t been a smart girl. Not socially or intellectually.
It was the quietest of funerals. Certainly the press would have been there in great numbers if the time and place of the interment had not been kept secret, for the girl who was buried had died with brutal violence.
The two young mourners deposited their flowers on the newly turned earth and then moved away. White violets from one, she was rich, and white carnations from the other, who was not rich and did not like carnations but it was all the florist had that morning.
‘I hate funerals.’ This time it was said aloud.
Dolly Barstow was Sergeant Barstow of the local CID and the officers on the other side of the grave were known to her. They recognised her, could be said to be watching her but weren’t saying anything. Dolly felt she had aged ten years in the last two weeks.
‘We owe her this. Coming here today,’ answered Kate Cooper, she who had donated the white violets and who did her mourning in a black suede suit from Ungaro. ‘ We killed her.’ Kate did not look at Dolly but stared straight ahead.
A pause. Dolly was not accepting that. ‘No, by God, we didn’t.’ She took Kate by the arm. ‘ Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ve done our bit.’
Kate let herself be led off. Dolly was right in a way, but if they had listened … only listened …
‘We did listen,’ said Dolly.
‘Not properly, we didn’t take what she said seriously.’
‘I don’t kno
w about that,’ said Dolly. She had felt very serious.
‘It was us she threatened and demanded money from. First me and then you. Said there was a man after us, and if we paid her, she’d tell us who. We laughed. First you, then me.’
‘Not quite laughed,’ said Dolly.
‘And then she ended up getting shot on our doorstep. Of course I feel guilty.’
‘I shouldn’t say that too loudly.’
‘You mean one of your colleagues will arrest me?’
The two of them lived above each other in small apartments in a block with a distant view of the castle and in sight of the river. The girl they had just buried had died in front of that apartment block in Merrywick, a smart residential area between Eton and Windsor. Spilling out her guts on the small patch of grass between them and the road.
‘There was Charmian. We could have told her. I’ve always been able to tell her everything. Or nearly everything. We ought to have told her.’
‘She knows now.’
Charmian Daniels, Chief Superintendent in the Metropolitan Police in London, head of a special unit, was Kate Cooper’s godmother. Kate had always been able to call on her in times of trouble. In many ways, Kate was closer to Charmian than to her own parents. Annie Cooper was a well-known artist, and Jack – what was Jack? He had been hobbled, his daughter thought, by having neither the talent nor the inherited money of his wife.
‘I don’t like the way they are looking at us.’
Dolly rather agreed with Kate there, but she thought it was Kate they were looking at. Any person who gets too close to a violent death is liable to earn such scrutiny, and the lovely Kate was well worth looking at.
One of the police officers strolled over.
‘Miss Cooper? I’d like to talk to you if I may.’
Kate felt her throat go tight; she swallowed. ‘Here?’
‘At your home, if I may.’ He was a tall young man, Sergeant Bister, known by name to Dolly Barstow, but not someone she had worked with. Naturally, she thought, it would have to be an officer who had had no contact with me. An aggressive, ambitious young man if reports were true.
‘I have answered a lot of questions already.’ To her horror Kate found herself being defensive. ‘I don’t think I know anything I haven’t told you.’
Dolly took a step nearer Kate, lining herself up by her friend. Bister looked at her. Keep out of this, Barstow, his eyes said, or your turn will come. If you hadn’t been out of the town when Nella Fisher got hers, you’d have had the treatment already. You may yet.
‘All the same, Miss Cooper, there are some other questions to be asked.’
Kate felt all the air go out of her lungs as if a great hand had squeezed her. ‘All right, when?’
‘At your convenience.’
Kate did not answer. What was convenient? Never.
‘Now, then, this very hour,’ he said briskly. ‘Get it over with. Always better. I’ll drive you.’
Kate looked across at her low black Saab. ‘We came in my car.’
‘Sergeant Barstow can drive that for you.’
Kate made an irresolute half-turn: ‘Dolly?’
‘Yes, I’ll follow you, Kate.’
Kate handed her car keys over. ‘Watch it,’ she said to Dolly in a hollow voice. ‘Power steering.’ She got into his car beside Sergeant Bister. It was unmistakably a police car, with another officer inside as well.
I think I’m going to be arrested, she thought. It can’t be happening to me. It’s a nightmare.
Her own private nightmare.
She sat huddled next to him, while he drove her speedily to Number 33A, Didcot Square, Merrywick. Dolly Barstow lived above in 33B.
Dolly followed close behind them, not letting them out of her sight. There were some nasty elements in this case, as she was well aware. Police corruption being one of them.
The cars stopped, one behind the other. They had arrived in the neat prosperity of Didcot Square. Two small blocks of flats surrounded by grass and gardens.
Where the whole dirty nightmare had started.
There was a car parked at the kerb. A small but powerful-looking car with one woman sitting at the wheel. With relief, Kate recognised both car and passenger. She saw Sergeant Bister give it a startled look.
As the two cars drew up, Charmian Daniels got out, and advanced towards them, ignoring Bister and concentrating on Kate and Dolly. She did not look pleased.
‘You’re a hopeless pair,’ she said. ‘Trying to handle this on your own. Why didn’t you call for help?’
Chapter Two
A backward look at Thursday, September 7, and
then a return to the day of the funeral
Merrywick, situated on the edge of Eton, with its face directed firmly towards the royal town of Windsor and its back resolutely turned on the industrial belt of Slough, called itself a village.
Merrywick had a church, a school, a post office and a village green. It also had a smart hairdresser who did beauty treatments, several boutiques selling expensive clothes, and an antique shop. There was a small employment agency which doubled as a delivery and messages service. You could go in there and fax documents out, or you could get them delivered by hand by a messenger boy on a bicycle as in olden days. This last service, although fashionable and much used by the nouveaux riches of the district, was distinctly the most expensive, as was to be expected. Merrywick was a thoroughly modern village.
A half-dozen Victorian cottages, where farm labourers on the nearby Merry Farm had formerly worked, lined up in a neat terrace along one side of the village green. Each cottage was now a valuable property, hiding in its carefully reconstructed interior a modern kitchen and several bathrooms, while outside was a carefully paved and planted garden with, possibly, a conservatory of Victorian design. The cottages were charming but would have surprised their original inhabitants. There was one old-time resident whose run-down home and unpainted front door had for some time been a subject of criticism and even hostility from the newcomers, but feelings had swung in her favour lately. Mrs Beadle was now cherished as a genuine relic, proof that Merrywick was a real village.
Behind the green lay crescents and squares of newish, large houses which looked as prosperous as they were. And beyond these lay a cluster of houses in their own grounds. The owners of these houses were rich, and on their way to being even richer. When that happened they moved away to Gloucestershire or Wiltshire, to ‘real country’, and bought a ‘place’ which was called The Manor House, or The Old Rectory, although there was no requirement that the manor should ever have had a lord or the rectory an incumbent.
The owners of these large Merrywick houses never shopped in the boutiques for clothes, or had their hair done in the village; they were, indeed, rarely seen locally, but their big cars – the Rollses and the Porsches – swishing through were a much appreciated local sight. It indicated that Merrywick had quality.
Tucked away at the back of all these glories, but suitably near the church, was the undertaker’s office with his chapel. This did good business because death was a fairly frequent visitor to Merrywick. It was a tough, competitive world these prosperous householders lived in and the casualties were not few. In fact, their average expectation of life was about the same as the farm labourers and artisans whom they had dispossessed.
If you drove out of the Merrywick in one direction you soon came to Eton, a village dominated by one institution and that one a school: the King’s College of our Lady of Eton Beside Windsor, founded by that most devout of English kings, Henry VI. If you drove on further yet, then you came to the very town of Windsor about which all else clustered, with its castle, home farms and parks. The royal castle was a town in itself containing communities of clerics serving the great Chapel of St George, units of soldiers on guard duty, and the delightful houses of the Poor Knights of Windsor, a charity founded by Henry VIII, and now reserved for distinguished retired officers. And at the centre of all, the Court, which comes and
goes as fashion and the season demand: always there at Ascot and Christmas, never there when the grouse fly in Scotland.
Industrial and commercial Slough had the most convenient railway station and the best buses, but Merrywick usually chose to travel via Windsor. A better address.
Why didn’t we talk to Charmian? Kate asked herself as she walked up the path behind her godmother. Because she wasn’t here for one thing. In New York attending a police conference on inner-city crime.
Why didn’t I telephone Chairman? thought Dolly Barstow as she parked her car. I knew where she was. I could have made contact. But I was too proud. Didn’t want help. Wanted to manage on my own. There was another reason too, of course, but for the moment, her mind circled that darker thought and did not dwell on it.
Too late now to ask for help in a dignified way for either Kate or herself. Better leave it. She wasn’t sure if she herself was in danger either of physical attack or arrest, but she felt pretty sure that Kate was.
The procession went up the garden path. First Kate Cooper with Charmian Daniels – Chief Superintendent Charmian Daniels – then the two local CID officers, and finally Dolly Barstow herself – Sergeant Dolly Barstow – also of the local CID.
Behind them was the patch of grass on which the girl they had just buried had died.
Up the stairs to the front door of Kate’s apartment. Inside to her small but beautiful sitting room. Its beauty was sparse and bare, Kate was into minimalism, but she had inherited her mother’s good taste and got it right.
They all trailed in. The two policemen were wetter from the rain than anyone else and as no one asked them to take off their coats they did so unasked and dumped them in the hall.
Charmian turned round.
‘I want to talk to Miss Cooper. May I have a minute, Sergeant Bister?’ She had his name pat, he noted sourly. Had done her homework before she got here. Trust her. With her rank and friends, all things were made easy. Or easier, he told himself, not meaning to make it absolutely pain-free if he could help it. ‘You can sit in if you like.’
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