More Deaths Than One

by Marjorie Eccles

  “Is there no one who can help you?”

  “Only my mother, and she doesn’t approve of – of the way I like to live my life, and everything.”

  “Perhaps you could get her to come and stay with you for a while, all the same.”

  “Oh, no! Although maybe she would come, now.”

  He stood up. “In the circumstances, I’d appreciate it if you’d let myself and Sergeant Kite take a look at Mr. Fleming’s belongings.”

  “You’re welcome, but you won’t find anything. He believed in travelling light.”

  “What about his writing things – his typewriter and his briefcase?”

  “No, not even that. He always carried them with him.”

  But neither had been in his car, Mayo reflected, as they sifted through the few things he had kept at the cottage. They found nothing except items of clothing, a few books which charted the unsteady progress of his life ... handbooks on photography, insurance selling, and, concealed under some sweaters, one or two magazines which he felt sure Bryony didn’t know about, and of which Kite took charge.

  “Would you like to see the pottery?” Bryony asked as they were leaving. Mayo had no desire to, the thought of it depressed him, but Kite, giving the girl his nicest smile, surprised him by announcing that he certainly would. Mayo knew what it would be like and was in no way surprised. The usual kiln and a couple of wheels and a few shelves on the back wall displaying the wares for sale. Competently thrown, but unoriginal and decorated in the usual drab shades of earth. Though he couldn’t imagine what he was going to do with them, he bought a couple of mugs and a small bowl, and Kite bought a thing like a cremation urn that she said was a pot-pourri container.

  They drove off and Kite said, “Would you credit it? Two homes, two women. Some blokes have it made.”

  “Nice turn of phrase you have, Martin.”

  Kite intercepted the look flashed at him and paused to think about what he’d said. “Sorry. I should be more careful how I choose my words, shouldn’t I? What I should’ve said was, ‘Some women seem to cop for everything and Fleming was a bastard who had it coming to him, one way or another.’ ”

  “Better. I reckon that about sums it up, in fact.”

  They drove in silence for some time until Kite said, “We assumed, didn’t we, that Fleming was given the barbiturates in the alcohol. Which is funny because she – Bryony – just said he didn’t drink much ...”

  “Everybody breaks their own rules occasionally, especially in times of stress,” Mayo answered absently, glancing at his watch as they reached the main road and the Morvah Pottery was left behind. “Talking of which, let’s see if we can find somewhere for lunch. I need something to take the taste of Bryony Harper’s coffee away.”

  “Unbelievable, wasn’t it? It’s an art, knowing how to make coffee as bad as that. But the biscuits were worse.” Kite thought a moment and then said he knew a pub they could go to. “Nice little place called the Woodman, they have smashing Cornish pasties, home-cooked and not all potato like some.”

  “I’ll accept your word as a connoisseur. What about the beer?”

  “That’s not bad, either. It’ll mean a detour, but not more than a mile or two, and it’s worth it.”

  In a few minutes, Kite turned off the main road into a lesser one and the car began to climb. The landscape here was of rolling hills, where the soil was red and friable, and wide agricultural vistas spread to either side.

  As they reached the summit of the hill Mayo, having orientated himself, said, “Pull in when you can, will you? That’s Scotley Beeches down there, and I’d like to take a look. We should get a bird’s-eye view from up here.”

  Having found a gateway a few yards ahead, Kite drew in to the side, off the road. They left the car and stood looking over the forest, extensively spread below them, gradually thinning as it climbed the folds of the hills rising opposite from the valley bottom. Down below, the orderly buildings and the manor house that comprised Fiveoaks Farm lay to the left, with a tractor and a Range Rover parked outside one of the barns. A footpath emerged from the forest, crossing the valley behind the farm and coming out onto the Lavenstock Road by way of a small coppice. Upper Delph could be seen, sitting at right angles, with its ridge of trees rising behind it and its long drive winding down to meet the main road. From here, too, could be seen something that was hidden from anyone arriving via the drive – the extent of the abandoned quarry, the little lake with its skiff moored at the edge, and the daffodils under the birches.

  As they watched, Culver came out of the house with the brown and white dog at his heels. They saw him walk across to one of the outbuildings and open the door. Presently, a large Volvo Estate was reversed out, the door opened for the dog to jump in, and Culver drove off.

  “I think that gives us our cue to go and see Mrs. Stretton,” Mayo said. “Come on.”

  “Hey, what about my cornish pasties? I haven’t eaten since breakfast and I was just working up to them.”

  “They’ll keep. We shouldn’t be all that long, anyway, and I’d like to see Mrs. Stretton alone.”

  She answered the door with a pair of rubber gloves in her hands, suds still clinging to them. “I’m sorry, you’ve just missed Mr. Culver.”

  “It’s you we wanted to see, Mrs. Stretton.”

  Her eyes widened. “Excuse me, I was just finishing the washing up. Come in to the kitchen, will you?”

  They followed her along the wide, through passage to the kitchen at the back of the house. Like the gun room opposite, it had windows facing the back premises and the woods which rose behind the house. It was an enormous kitchen by modern standards, Kite reckoned two and a half times the size of his own at least, heated by the big Aga found in most country kitchens and still warmly redolent of pastry and roasted meat, sharply reminding him of the hollow in his stomach. Despite its size, it was comfortable and homely and equipped with all the gadgets nowadays considered necessary to maintain life, from a washing machine down to a dishwasher, though Mrs. Stretton, evidently one of the old school, had been washing up out by hand.

  She picked up a drying-up cloth and continued working as she spoke to them, having first provided them with cups of tea. Mayo sometimes thought he could die of tannin poisoning, the amount of tea he’d drunk in the course of his professional life. She told them she’d left the house on the previous Monday at half past four sharp, as she always did, because her husband met her with his car at the main gate, unless it was very bad weather, in which case he’d drive up to the house. “He’s semi-retired, see, with just a little part-time job. Keeps you in trim, having something to do besides watching the flowers on the wallpaper grow. Same reason I’ve stayed on here as long as I have. I’ve been here a long time and I enjoy it. Mr. Culver’s easy enough to work for ... he has his funny ways, I don’t deny, but I speak my mind and he does the same and it seems to work. I come at eleven, cook him his main meal so he doesn’t have to bother with anything much at night and then see to whatever’s to be done in the house. He takes the dog out every afternoon, regular as clockwork, and I leave his tea ready and if he isn’t back by half past four I just go.”

  “Leaving the door open.”

  She pursed her lips. “We won’t say too much about that! I keep telling him there’s some real funny folk about nowadays but he won’t listen. Doesn’t want to be bothered thinking about taking his keys with him every time he goes out, he says. Maybe he’ll listen to me a bit more now, though how anybody got into the gun room without breaking the door down, I don’t know, because he always keeps that key with him.”

  Polishing the last plate and putting it away with the rest, she rinsed her hands, hung her drying cloth over the rail above the Aga and came to join them at the table.

  “Anything else you remember about last Monday, Mrs. Stretton?”

  “Nothing special about Monday,” she answered, rubbing rose-scented hand cream carefully into her hands, “but Tuesday, yes. It was his seventiet
h birthday, you know. Never said a word to me, mind, or I’d have got him a bit of a present and a card, cooked him something special. It’s not every day you’re seventy, is it? I wouldn’t have known at all, if it hadn’t been for Georgina coming. And about time, too, and so I told her. First time she’d set foot here since she married that chap of hers. I used to tell her it wasn’t right, but she never did listen to any advice, any more than her father does.”

  “It sounds as though you knew Mrs. Fleming before she married.”

  “Bless you, of course I did! Long before. I came here when she was a little girl, no more than eleven or twelve she’d be. And what’s more, I’ve kept in touch with her since she left. I don’t hold with all this bickering between families and whatnot, life’s too short and so I used to tell her. But they’re too much alike, those two, needed their heads banged together if you ask me. You’d never credit it – Georgina ringing me up and asking me how her father was, making me swear not to tell him ... and him pretending he didn’t want to know when I let fall a few snippets about her – but with his ears flapping all the time like a donkey’s! Stupid, it was, don’t you think?”

  They agreed that it was, then Mayo asked what time Mrs. Fleming had come to the house on Tuesday and was told it had been just as Mrs. Stretton was leaving.

  “Half past four?”

  “Or thereabouts.”

  “I see. When are you expecting Mr. Culver back, Mrs. Stretton?”

  “I couldn’t say. Said he’d a bit of business to attend to, but he’d be back before I left, that’s all I know.”

  “All right then, we’ll leave you to get on with your work, but I’d like to take a look at the wood behind the house before we go. No need to bother yourself, we’ll go out of the back door here and see ourselves off when we’ve finished. Can you get out onto the main road down through the wood?”

  “Oh, you can get through, I daresay, but it’ll be a rough old struggle, and muddy. There’s no proper path till you get down into the valley, and it’s a fair walk right round and back up the drive.”

  “That’s all right, we keep boots in the back of the car, and the sergeant here enjoys a good walk.”

  “Bloody hell,” muttered Kite as they went out into the courtyard at the back and climbed the wall into the wood, seeing the prospects of his lunch fading into suppertime.

  There was a path of sorts, but so choked and overgrown with what seemed like an impenetrable barrier of brambles, thorns and long trails of ground ivy that they might never have found it had they not been carefully looking for it. Mayo plunged into it, pushing vegetation aside with scant regard for his clothing. A pheasant started in front of them. Startled wood pigeons clattered away overhead. Kite reluctantly followed, cursing as he dodged the spiteful backlash of the bramble tentacles Mayo had pushed aside. Pausing to suck a bleeding scratch on the back of his hand, he saw daylight ahead, and a few paces more brought him level with Mayo, who was standing at the edge of this little wood, looking down at the barely discernible footpath that led down and behind Fiveoaks Farm and ended in the little coppice by the roadside.

  “This is the way he came, whoever pinched the gun,” he said.

  “Nothing easier. All he had to do was to come up here, hide himself in the woods and watch for his opportunity and just walk into the house, between Mrs. Stretton leaving and Culver coming back in.”

  “If he pinched it. If it wasn’t Culver himself who killed Fleming. And it doesn’t explain, either,” said Kite, breathing heavily, “how he got into the gun room.”

  “Nor does it,” Mayo agreed. “But look, that footpath down there, the one which runs behind the farm, is in direct line from the spot in the forest where the Porsche was.” He was frowning as he spoke, thinking things out. “Anybody who knows the area, or who’d sussed it out, would’ve known about it. What’s the betting there was a car hidden behind the coppice ready for a smart getaway? I want somebody to take a careful look at it.”

  “I think you’re right. I’ll have it seen to,” Kite promised.

  “Come on then, let’s get back.”

  “Back? The way we came?”

  “Unless you want to miss your lunch. It’ll take at least three quarters of an hour to walk all the way down into the valley and back up by the drive. We might just get to the Woodman before they close if we hurry.”

  SEVEN

  “This dangerous bridge of blood! Here we are lost. ”

  THE FIRST THING Alex noticed was that the window displays of Lois’s shop had been changed since she last called. The one facing onto the Cornmarket was now set out as an elegant study, exhibiting dark rich fabrics and masculine wallpapers, and the other, round the corner in Butter Lane, had been arranged to show off a display of Chinese art: pictures which were merely a few delicate brushstrokes, different-coloured jade carvings and porcelain in lighted niches, with a yellow-washed silk carpet dominating the display. She stood looking at the windows for some time before going in, admiring her sister’s flair, as others must, since Lois was so far from being short of commissions that she was looking for a sympathetic partner. Proving, she said, that one didn’t need to be in the King’s Road to make an impression.

  “Sorry I haven’t been around,” Alex apologized as she closed the door behind her. “The whole strength’s been up to the ears with this Fleming case, and you were out the one evening I called.”

  “Darling,” Lois answered, flicking rapidly through a new sample wallpaper book which had just arrived, “just because we live in the same town doesn’t mean we have to be in each other’s pockets all the time. Sometimes I think it’s a mistake to live too near one’s family.”

  Alex, who wasn’t normally a touchy sort of person, felt bereft of speech for a moment. Whose fault was it they lived so close to each other? Had Lois conveniently forgotten that she was the one who had pressed Alex to have herself transferred to Lavenstock in an effort to start a new life, to put her disastrous affair with her married Irish lover behind her? Who had reminded her that Gil Mayo, an old friend whose wife had recently died, had also made the switch from the north of England? Advice that Alex had acted upon – thereby setting up a whole new set of problems for herself, and incidentally for Gil too, though this wasn’t the time to brood on that.

  Anyway, to say they lived in each other’s pockets when they saw each other at most a couple of times a week was one of Lois’s outrageous exaggerations and best ignored.

  She took a deep steadying breath. “How’s the production going?”

  “Frankly, I’m beginning to wish I’d never got myself involved.”

  “I thought you were enjoying it.”

  “I was.”

  “What’s gone wrong?”

  Lois shrugged, without replying. Oh Lord, Alex thought, what now? The Lavenstock Thespians were an amateur group whose status had risen considerably over the last couple of years, ever since the appointment by the Town Council of an ex-actor called Ashleigh Cockayne who was known as a Community Drama Director, an umbrella title that covered drama in schools, theatre workshops and the running of a community centre in the town. Since his appointment the Thespians had won several awards in dramatic festivals up and down the country and now played to nearly full audiences whenever they staged a production. Lois had become involved initially through agreeing to supply certain props for their current production, and then by helping with the sets.

  The unaccountable waning of her original enthusiasm seemed part and parcel of everything else that was the matter with her at the moment, Alex thought, sighing inwardly. There was a new petulance in her tone as she wandered around, rearranging things unnecessarily, and the amused irony with which she regarded herself and life in general seemed to have completely disappeared. Lois happy was a joy to all, but Lois miserable was glum indeed. “It was interesting at first,” she admitted after a few moments, “but the last two rehearsals have been such an utter shambles, all they can talk about now is that – that man who was
supposed to have shot himself. But now it’s murder, isn’t it?”

  Her back to Alex, she stood in front of a mirror at the end of the shop. Alex could see her reflection, poised and guarded. She was as immaculately turned out as ever, but the smart polished ebony of her short new haircut went hard with her small, piquant pale face.

  Her eyes, looking for Alex’s reaction, were watchful and wary and Alex noticed new small lines that had appeared round the corners of her mouth. Then all of a sudden she understood what Lois was saying, what had been going on these last few weeks. Two and two came smartly together and her irritation with her sister began to disperse.

  “I’ve been a fool,” she said quietly. “I should’ve guessed. I’m sorry, Lois.”

  “How could you have guessed?” Lois turned and faced her and didn’t bother to pretend that she didn’t understand Alex. “And I’m the one who’s been the fool. I knew the whole thing was a disaster from the start but I couldn’t stop myself.” Her lips twisted. “At my age you’d think I’d have learned more sense.”

  “I suppose we shall all still be saying that when we’re ninety.”

  Alex wanted to reach out and draw her sister to her and tell her to have a good cry, but years of helping Lois over the various crises in her life had taught her better. “What you need’s a stiff drink,” she announced briskly, in her best police sergeant manner.

  “Darling, any more and you’ll be bringing out your little breathalyser! What I’d really like’s a good cup of hot tea.” She looked at her watch, which said twenty minutes to closing time, then walked over to the door and turned the Open sign to Closed. “What the hell. Come on upstairs.”

  She was changing the room round again, Alex saw as they entered the flat’s sitting room. A sure sign she was unsettled. Instead of the fashionable country house clutter which had been her current obsession, the room looked bare, as if being stripped for action. What would it be this time? Art Deco? Or back-to-medievalism Arts and Crafts? Probably the Oriental Look, if the Butter Lane window was anything to go by, but what a shame, Alex thought, to get rid of all that pretty knick-knackery, the little French clock Gil admired so much, the gold-framed watercolours and the charming collection of old scent bottles, snuff boxes and the like, all the small, valuable antiques that Lois, with her nose for a bargain, had picked up over the years.