by Granger, Ann
Chapter 19
Jess turned into Long Lane and pulled up on the verge. Mullions, behind its chicken-wire gate, loomed like a film set for a haunted house. The single sign of life was a spiral of smoke coming out of its chimney, but she noticed no other indication of human presence or activity.
She got out of the car, wondering if Muriel would hear the slam of the door. Jess let herself through the gate, careful to close it as requested on the notice, and walked up to the front door. Within the house she heard Hamlet bark, but no Muriel appeared. Jess pressed the rusty bell-push and, hearing no ring within, knocked loudly on the door for good measure. Hamlet’s barks increased and became louder. He must now be in the entrance hall.
Jess risked pushing open the letter box flap and shouting through it. ‘Muriel? It’s Jess Campbell!’
In response Hamlet, on the other side, leaped up and threw himself, snarling, at what he could see of the trespasser who dared to demand entry. His teeth snapped within an inch of Jess’s nose. She jumped back in alarm and let the flap fall. Hamlet, deprived of the sight of his quarry, threw himself in rage against the door panels. They shuddered beneath the force. His claws scraped at the woodwork.
Muriel wasn’t there, Jess decided. But she seldom went out without Hamlet. Perhaps she’d taken the car? Jess walked round the side of the house to investigate the garage. Hamlet, tracking her from within, moved round to the side also. His furious face appeared at a window, working in rage, like an old-fashioned country squire bellowing an order at her to get off his land.
His cries followed her to where the car stood idle in the garage. Muriel couldn’t have gone far. The last time Jess had called, Muriel had been busy cooking up bran mash in the kitchen but there was no smell of it now. Jess approached the kitchen windows. They were free of steam and nothing moved on the other side. She was reluctant to go right up to them and press her nose against the panes because of Hamlet who, rightly divining she was just outside, was hysterical. If her face appeared staring right at his with only the width of a glass pane between them, she wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t have some sort of fit.
Jess was now beginning to be concerned. How long had Hamlet been alone? Had Muriel fallen somewhere on the property? Was she lying on the damp ground, unable to get up unaided? If so, the most likely area would be in the overgrown garden with its obstacle course of untrimmed bushes, discarded tools and wire netting. She decided to investigate. The hens were at the rear of the premises, pecking about. The cockerel rushed at Jess and flew up at her face. She clapped her hands and shouted at him. He retreated but took up position on a water butt and flapped his wings at her. Between Hamlet and the cockerel, Jess thought wryly, Muriel had no need of a burglar alarm.
But Muriel wasn’t in the garden. Jess walked back towards the house and her eye fell on the garden shed. It was the only other place she could check. If Muriel wasn’t in there, she would drive down to Ivy Lodge to see if by any chance Muriel had gone to visit Poppy Trenton.
The shed wasn’t locked. Indeed the door was swollen and distorted and couldn’t be properly shut. Jess hauled it open and peered inside. As before, she was struck by the motley collection of tools and junk. Muriel had claimed her family had lived here for a hundred and fifty years. It appeared that during that time, little had been thrown out. Curiosity led Jess to go inside and investigate. The fishing rods propped in the corner must have belonged to Muriel’s father. When he’d died they’d stayed there, never moved again. Thick cobwebs swathed them. Jess’s gaze moved from them to the back wall, above the workbench, covered in a cloth of ancient sawdust and dirt. Some tools she recognised: rusty spanners, hammers and chisels. But what was that?
Jess reached out her hand and took down a curious implement, a wooden stick thick enough to be grasped comfortably in the hand, culminating in a heavy metal head. She peered at it, trying to work out what might be its purpose. It was then she saw, smeared on the metal head, dark stains and tiny fragments of what appeared to be hair.
Careful not to touch the head, Jess took an evidence bag from her pocket with her free hand and slid the metal head into it.
‘Put that down!’ ordered a brusque voice behind her. ‘It belonged to Father.’
Jess turned casually and saw Muriel in the doorway, glowering at her.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
Muriel blinked. ‘It’s a priest. Father was a fisherman. You hit a trout, or whatever you’ve caught, on the head with it, kill it quickly. Or if you’ve got a rabbit or something like that, you give it a whack to send it off into whatever next world awaits animals. You perform the last rites, you see? That’s why it’s called a priest.’
‘I’d like to take it with me and examine it, Muriel.’
‘Well, you can’t!’ Muriel retorted. ‘Why are you poking about in here? You’re trespassing.’
‘Originally I was looking for you. I tried the house, but only Hamlet was there and he got very upset. So I looked in the garage and garden. This was the last place I checked. Where were you?’
‘I walked over to the farm, across the fields. I don’t take Hamlet with me. He doesn’t get along with the farm dogs.’ Muriel paused. ‘I cut through the coppice. That little rotter, Alfie Darrow, has been setting his snares again on the edge of the rabbit warren. If I find one, I always unhook it and toss it in the nearest nettle bed.’ She pointed at the priest in Jess’s hand. ‘It doesn’t matter where I was. You still can’t take the priest with you. It’s an antique; and it’s not yours. Put it back.’ There was a wild glitter in her eyes behind the spectacle lenses.
‘You know I’m not going to do that, don’t you, Muriel?’ Jess said as calmly as she could.
‘Snooper!’ yelled Muriel. ‘I knew you for a snooper when I first clapped eyes on you!’
‘It’s what I do, Muriel, I told you that.’ Muriel stood silent and sullen, so Jess continued, ‘Muriel, did you strike Gervase Crown on the head with this?’ She held up the priest.
‘What if I say I didn’t?’ asked Muriel, still sullen.
‘Then I take it with me for forensic examination and before you start telling me that I can’t, let me assure you that I can. I’m a police officer, Muriel. I believe this priest, as you call it, to be evidence.’
Muriel’s response was to dart to one side with surprising athleticism and grab an implement leaning against the wall just inside the shed by the door. She raised it threateningly and Jess saw, to her alarm, that it was an old-fashioned pitchfork. Its still-sharp tines were now pointed at her.
‘Put it back!’ Muriel’s rage now mirrored Hamlet’s back at the house earlier. Her complexion had turned purple, her eyes bulged, red veined, and her voice had risen to a shriek. ‘You can’t have it! It’s mine! It was Father’s and now it’s mine!’ She jabbed the tines in Jess’s direction and Jess was forced to jump back out of the way.
‘Just put that down, Muriel,’ she suggested, trying not to show her alarm.
‘No! I won’t! Go away, go away! This is nothing to do with you. If you won’t put down that priest, I’ll stick this in you! Don’t think I won’t!’ The tines threatened Jess again. Spittle flew from Muriel’s lips.
‘Won’t attack me? As you attacked Crown and before him, Matthew Pietrangelo?’
‘Got it all worked out, have you?’ asked Muriel with a sneer and another jab of the pitchfork towards Jess. She had lowered her head like a defiant horned beast, ready both to charge and to repel a charge. She no longer shrieked but her voice was hoarse and had deepened to almost a male pitch. ‘What do you know about anything, any of you? I told you just now what that priest is for. It’s to dispatch your quarry humanely when you’ve got him. Thump, thump on the head and it’s gone. Gervase Crown was my quarry. I cornered him and I was going to dispatch him, nice and quick. I would have done, too, if that interfering old duffer Roger Trenton hadn’t come along. But I’ll deny it if I’m asked in front of a witness or your little recording machine.’ Muriel
raised her face and smiled triumphantly. ‘And without that priest you can’t prove it, so just put it back where you found it, go on!’
‘And if you spear me with that pitchfork? What explanation are you going to give for that?’
‘No problem at all,’ retorted Muriel, hunching her shoulders in a shrug. ‘I’m on my own here and I’m not young. I believed there was an intruder in my shed, and I was right because you were there. But I didn’t know it was you, so I grabbed this pitchfork for self-protection and approached the shed. Then you threw open the door, ran out and speared yourself. Terrible accident, of course.’ Muriel sighed. ‘Just as that fellow with the Italian name was a terrible mistake. But accidents happen and sometimes they are fatal. So there,’ finished Muriel. Unexpectedly she smiled in triumph. ‘It would have served you right for being such a snooper.’
There was no denying she meant what she said. Crazy as it might seem to anyone else, to Muriel it appeared quite logical. What now? wondered Jess. She couldn’t leave the priest behind. Muriel would dispose of it, or clean it up so thoroughly any DNA would be either eradicated or contaminated so severely as to be useless in a court of law. Why, wondered Jess, hadn’t Muriel already got rid of the priest? But Jess knew the answer to that instinctively. Because it had belonged to Muriel’s father and, like all the rest of this property, house, garden, ramshackle shed and its contents, it was part of Muriel’s inheritance.
What to do next was settled for her.
‘Come on, now, Miss Pickering,’ said a calm male voice behind Muriel and, with immense relief, Jess saw Ian Carter loom into view.
‘This is nonsense. You don’t want to harm Inspector Campbell. Besides, that dog of yours is going frantic up at the house. You ought to go and calm him down.’ Carter stretched out his hand towards the pitchfork. ‘Why don’t you just let me take care of that?’
Muriel turned slowly towards him still holding the pitchfork but now, Jess saw to her immense relief, the tines pointed downward. ‘She was in my shed.’
‘Yes, yes, but now you know who it was there.’
‘I don’t care. She was trespassing on my property. What’s more, she’s taken Father’s priest.’ Muriel appeared suddenly near to tears.
‘Believe me, Miss Pickering,’ Carter told her sympathetically. ‘We’ll take great care of it.’
‘You’re as bad a snooper as she is,’ Muriel told him in the same morose tone. ‘You’ve been there a while, listening to what I said to her. Did you hear it all?’
‘Most of it. I don’t think, by the way, that a jury would accept Inspector Campbell ran on to the pitchfork with such force that she speared herself. You’ve got to face up to it; all things come to an end, Muriel. This is the end of this very nasty business. Call it Fate, if you want.’
‘Oh, all right, then,’ said Muriel sullenly, throwing down the pitchfork. ‘If you want the priest, then take the bally thing.’
She stalked past him and paused to stare towards the house. Hamlet’s barks had turned to doleful howls that floated on the air towards them.
‘Poor old fellow, he doesn’t like being left. I’ll have to go and calm him down,’ said Muriel, her expression changing. ‘You can come along too, if you want to keep me in sight.’
‘How will Hamlet take that?’ asked Carter. ‘He’s not going to attack either of us, is he?’
Muriel turned and treated him to a look of disgust. ‘Of course he won’t. Not when he sees you’re with me.’
‘I don’t know about this,’ whispered Carter as they set off after Muriel. ‘You never know. It’s moot point which of the two of them is the more unstable, dog or owner. Should I take the pitchfork in case we need to fend him off?’
‘Don’t joke about it,’ Jess whispered back. ‘But I don’t think it will be necessary. He barked a lot the last time I called, but once Muriel said I was all right, he subsided. Muriel’s not as potty as she sounds. She won’t set him on us and I don’t think he’d do anything but bark if she did.’
‘He’s full of sound and fury?’ Carter met her gaze and smiled.
Jess smiled back uncertainly. ‘Pretty well, I think. I’m prepared to risk it.’ She raised the evidence bag with the priest in it. ‘I think this may be our murder weapon.’
Hamlet greeted his mistress with ecstasy and his visitors with a ferocious growl. However, after Muriel had instructed him to ‘shut up, old chap!’ he appeared to grant them grudging acceptance.
Muriel’s dingy sitting room had changed little since Jess’s previous visit. The potted plant was a little more shrivelled and had dropped a couple of brown leaves on to the carpet where they remained, along with sundry other bits of debris. One of the seascapes had received a knock and had tilted to an angle. As a result the fishing smack on a mountainous sea that it depicted now appeared about to plunge with all hands down to Davy Jones’s locker.
Carter sat in the worn Queen Anne style armchair, laconically indicated to him by their hostess with the words: ‘Best chair – Father’s.’ Jess had retaken her former seat by the expired plant. Hamlet had taken up a position directly in front of Carter and fixed him with an unwavering stare of his pop eyes.
‘Elderflower?’ enquired Muriel politely.
Equally politely, they declined. Muriel sat down heavily beneath the slanted seascape and gazed at them thoughtfully. She had taken off the gumboots she’d worn for her walk to the farm. Her feet were now clad in purple woolly socks and thrust into an ancient pair of mules whose once-velvety finish of plush had rubbed almost completely bald over the years.
‘Funny thing,’ she said. ‘When things start going wrong, they carry on going wrong, only more so, if you see what I mean? All the wrong things pile up …’ Muriel waved at an untidy heap of newspapers by way of illustration. ‘You start with one and you end up with dozens, all making one big heap; and all of ’em wrong, through and through.’
Carter asked, ‘If we look in the pile of newsprint, Muriel, shall we find some lettering has been cut out?’
‘I haven’t got to that yet,’ said Muriel resentfully. ‘I haven’t begun.’
‘Before you do,’ he told her, ‘I feel I must caution you. You are not obliged to tell us anything now, but if you don’t tell us something you may later rely on in court, it may harm your defence.’
‘With a caution like that, you can’t lose, can you?’ Muriel retorted with her customary asperity.
Carter smiled at her.
She blinked. ‘Good-looking fellow, aren’t you?’ she remarked, assessing him.
‘You’re too kind, Miss Pickering,’ he told her.
‘No, I ain’t. I’ve never been kind. Are you married?’
‘No, I once was.’
‘Divorced, eh? That’s it, people walk away from bad situations nowadays.’ Muriel frowned. ‘I never have. I should have done, perhaps, but I never did. That’s why I’m sitting here and you’re sitting there and everything’s gone to hell in a handcart, as Father used to say.’
Jess had taken out her little tape recorder. Muriel made no comment on that other than a snort of derision.
‘Take your time, Muriel,’ Jess prompted her.
‘Time? Time doesn’t mean a thing. Nothing ever really changes. That’s what makes it so difficult to say when things start. In a sense they’ve always been there. They just grow, like plants from seeds, do you understand what I’m saying?’
Jess found herself shifting in her seat beneath Muriel’s sharp eyes. ‘Yes, I think so,’ she managed to say. She felt Carter look at her. ‘Shall we say it all started with Sebastian Crown – or before that, with your father?’
Muriel scowled. ‘Sebastian Crown? Yes, you’re right there. An awful lot of what’s happened is down to him.’ Unexpectedly, her weather-beaten features lit up in a smile. ‘I danced on his grave,’ she said.
‘I can understand you weren’t sorry to hear he’d died.’
‘No, no, you misunderstand me!’ Muriel said crossly. ‘I wasn’t s
peaking metaphorically; I’m not that sort of fancy speaker. I was speaking literally. I did dance on his grave. I went down to the churchyard in Weston St Ambrose and jumped up and down on that stone they put over his ashes. I did it when no one else was around, of course.’
Carter passed a hand over his mouth. Hamlet stiffened and peered at him suspiciously.
‘Muriel,’ Jess invited her, ‘Why don’t you tell us about the day Warwick was injured?’
‘Heard about that, have you?’ Muriel nodded at her. ‘I must say, you don’t miss much. As snoops go, you’re an expert, aren’t you? It was that young blighter Gervase Crown’s doing, of course. Wherever Crown men go, they cause trouble and grief. It’s like sowing dragon’s teeth. Gervase was about nineteen at the time, maybe twenty. He was young, but not innocent or harmless. He’d been at the bottle, too, I afterwards learned. I was out walking Warwick, my dog back then. He was quite an old dog and stiff in the joints, so we never walked far and always slowly. But he liked to be out and about, have a good sniff round.’
Muriel’s voice and eyes were sad. ‘The road was empty, everywhere peaceful, birds singing, all that sort of stuff. Then, like a bat out of hell, young Crown roared on to the scene, driving like a maniac all over the place. I leaped to safety and got tangled up in a mass of blackberry bushes. Poor old Warwick wasn’t nimble enough. He was knocked clean off his feet, poor old chap, flew right up in the air. Gervase careered on down the road and a few minutes later caused a pile-up of cars. But I learned about that afterwards. I didn’t see it and I couldn’t now tell you whether I even heard it. I should have done, but I was concentrating on trying to free myself from the brambles and cussing Gervase fit to bust. Warwick was lying in the road. I thought he was dead. Then I saw he was breathing but blood was coming out of his nose. He never regained consciousness. I managed to pick him up and carry him home here. He weighed a ton. I thought my arms would drop off. I put him in my car and drove him to the vet. But there was nothing he could do. So it was curtains for poor Warwick.’ She paused. ‘I told the vet it was a hit and run. That bit was true. I didn’t tell him whose car it was. Don’t ask me why. I wasn’t protecting young Gervase. I just wanted the vet to concentrate on Warwick.’
