Murder on the Short List

by Peter Lovesey

  PETER LOVESEY

  (Photograph by Kate Shemilt)

  MURDER ON THE SHORT LIST

  Peter Lovesey

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2009 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  eBook edition first published in 2012 by Severn Select

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2008 by Peter Lovesey.

  The right of Peter Lovesey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & patents Act 1988.

  ‘The Field’ was first published in Green for Danger (The Do-Not Press, 2003); ‘Bullets’ in The Mammoth Book of Roaring twenties Whodunnits (Robinson 2004); ‘Razor Bill’ in Sherlock, 2004; ‘Needle Match’ in Murder is My Recquet (Mysterious Press, 2005); ‘A Blow on the Head’ in I.D.Crimes of Identity (Comma Press, 2006); ‘The Munich Posture’ in The Rigby File (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989); ‘The Best Suit’ in this edition; ‘The Man Who Jumped for England’ In Mysterious Pleasures (Little, Brown, 2003); ‘Second Strings’ in The Strand Magazine, 2004; ‘Bertie and the Christmas Tree’ in The Strand Magazine, 2007; ‘Say That Again’ in The Ideas Experiment (Paw Paw Press, 2006); ‘Popping Round to the Post’ in The Verdict of Us All (Allison & Busby, 2006); ‘Window of Opportunity’ in Sunday Express, 2003; ‘The Case of the Dead Wait’ in Daily Mail, 2004.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Lovesey, Peter

  Murder on the short list

  1. Detective and mystery stories, English

  I. Title

  823.9'14[F]

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0055-6 (epub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6746-9 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-108-9 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  The Field

  Bullets

  Razor Bill

  Needle Match

  A Blow on the Head

  The Munich Posture

  The Best Suit

  The Man Who Jumped for England

  Second Strings

  Bertie and the Christmas Tree

  Say That Again

  Popping Round to the Post

  Window of Opportunity

  The Case of the Dead Wait

  A Peter Lovesey Checklist

  FOREWORD

  Writers get used to being asked where they get their ideas from. If you’re a crime writer, as I am, the question is loaded. Do I have personal experience of disposing of bodies and evading the police? And when I give my truthful answer, that my ideas come from numerous sources, I sense the questioner thinking that’s a cop-out, a typical piece of evasion from someone up to his ears in crime.

  Short stories such as these do sometimes have a clear origin enabling me to give straight answers. “The Field” was inspired by the sight of a crop of oilseed rape dominating the landscape and completely obscuring the ground it sprang from. What else was it hiding, I wondered? Wild life, children at play, lovers in flagrante, or a corpse?

  “Bullets” was suggested by an old man who told me he’d once won a large amount of money in a newspaper competition to add up to four witty words to a given phrase. His win had created lifelong jealousy in his family. Intrigued, I started researching these “Bullet” competitions just at the time I was asked to contribute a story with a twenties setting to an anthology.

  “Second Strings” jumped out from a newspaper report of the theft of a valuable harp that later turned up in someone’s garden. I couldn’t believe a harpist would steal someone else’s instrument and I couldn’t think of anything more difficult to carry off than a harp. It became a challenge to create a story that fitted the facts.

  My wife Jax watches tennis on TV by the hour. She sees patterns of play that elude me. I find myself getting more interested in the officials than the players. There’s a story in every one of them, the umpire, the line judges and the ballboys. When I was invited to write a tennis story I thought it would be interesting to tell the whole thing from the viewpoint of a ballboy, and that became “Needle Match.”

  Who hasn’t heard the phrase “window of opportunity”? It is a modern cliché, reduced now to just “window,” as in, “I’ll see if I have a window some time next week.” Having heard it once too often from some trendy on the radio, I decided to have fun with the kind of person who uses it, and that gave me a theme as well as the title of a new story.

  “Say That Again” was a deliberate exercise undertaken with two writer friends, Liza Cody and Michael Z. Lewin. We took a newspaper cutting about geriatric crooks and each agreed to use it as a trigger for a story. This became a booklet called The Ideas Experiment and launched as a panel at a conference called Left Coast Crime. I drew heavily on memories of visiting my mother in her retirement home and listening to the residents discussing each other and the staff. Who would shape such a group into effective criminals? It had to be a military man, eager to lead one last campaign, and of course the motive had to arise from one of the infirmities of old age.

  For “Razor Bill,” I wanted to give an outing to the two Victorian detectives I used in my first novels back in the seventies. Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray featured in eight books and a TV series but had lain dormant for twenty-five years. Razor Bill is active in 1882, six years before Jack the Ripper terrorised London, and it has to be dear old put-upon Thackeray who acts as the decoy.

  In a similar way, I put Bertie, the Prince of Wales, through his paces in “Bertie and the Christmas Tree,” a seasonal story commissioned by The Strand Magazine. The germ of this one was the widely repeated but mistaken belief that Bertie’s father, Prince Albert, brought the first Christmas tree to Britain. I believed it, too, but a little investigation soon informed me otherwise. Still, the notion of using a Christmas tree in a royal murder mystery fired my imagination.

  In 2006, the distinguished crime writer H.R.F. Keating celebrated his eightieth birthday and I was asked by his wife Sheila to edit a volume of short stories by members of the Detection Club, of which Harry was President for many years. It was a happy task because his colleagues were delighted to write stories in his honour. Each tale had a link of some sort to Harry. In my letter to would-be contributors I suggested various elements in Harry’s life and fiction they might wish to explore. This left me with a problem: what could I write about that I hadn’t already suggested? In the end I looked up the great man in Who’s Who and found that he lists his occupation as popping round to the post and that delivered the gift I needed.

  You now know where some of my ideas came from. Not all, you’ll say. And I will admit that I can’t remember how the others dawned on me. Maybe it was while I was digging a grave in the woods.

  THE FIELD

&nb
sp; A field of oilseed rape was in flower, brilliant in the afternoon sun, as if a yellow highlighter had been drawn across the landscape. Unseen by anyone, a corpse was stretched out under the swaying crop, attended only by flies and maggots. It had been there ten days. The odour was not detectable from the footpath along the hedgerow.

  Fields have names. This one was Middle Field, and it was well named. It was not just the middle field on Jack Mooney’s farm. It was the middle of his universe. He had no life outside the farm. His duties kept him employed from first light until after dark.

  Middle Field dominated the scene. So Jack Mooney’s scarecrow stood out, as much as you could see of it. People said it was a wasted effort. Crows aren’t the problem with a rape crop. Pigeons are the big nuisance, and that’s soon after sowing. It’s an open question whether a scarecrow is any deterrent at all to pigeons. By May or June when the crop is five feet tall it serves no purpose.

  “Should have got rid of it months back,” Mooney said.

  His wife May, at his side, said, “You’d have to answer to the children.”

  From the highest point at the top of the field you could see more than just the flat cap and turnip head. The shoulders and part of the chest were visible as well. After a long pause Mooney said, “Something’s happened to it.”

  “Now what are you on about?”

  “Take a look through the glasses.”

  She put them to her eyes and adjusted the focus. Middle Field was all of nine acres.

  “Funny. Who did that, I wonder?”

  Someone had dressed the thing in a raincoat. All it was supposed to be wearing were Mooney’s cast-off shirt, a pair of corduroy trousers filled with straw and his old cap.

  “How long has it been like that?”

  “How would I know?” Mooney said. “I thought you would have noticed.”

  “I may go on at you for ignoring me, but I’m not so desperate as to spend my days looking at a straw man with a turnip for a head.”

  “Could have been there for weeks.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “Some joker?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m going to take a closer look.”

  He waded into his shimmering yellow sea.

  Normally he wouldn’t set foot in that field until after the combine had been through. But he was curious. Whose coat was it? And why would anyone think of putting it on a scarecrow?

  Out in the middle he stopped and scratched his head

  It was a smart coat, with epaulettes, sleeve straps and a belt.

  His wife had followed him. She lifted the hem. “It’s a Burberry. You can tell by the lining.”

  “I’ve never owned one like this.”

  “You, in a Burberry? You’re joking. Been left out a few days by the look of it, but it’s not in bad condition.”

  “Who would have chucked out a fancy coat like this?”

  “More important,” his wife said, “who would have draped it around our old scarecrow?”

  He had made the scarecrow last September on a framework of wood and chicken wire. A stake driven into the earth, with a crosspiece that swivelled when the wind blew, giving the effect of animation. The wire bent into the shape of a torso that hung free. The clothes stuffed with straw. The biggest turnip he could find for a head. He wouldn’t have troubled with the features, but his children had insisted he cut slits for eyes and the mouth and a triangle for the nose.

  No question: the coat had been carefully fitted on, the arms pulled through, the buttons fixed and the belt buckled in front.

  As if the field itself could explain the mystery, Mooney turned and stared across the canopy of bloom. To the north was his own house and the farm buildings standing out against the skyline. At the lower end to the south-east were the tied cottages, three terraced dwellings built from the local stone. They were still called tied cottages by the locals, even though they had been sold off to a developer and knocked into one, now a sizeable house being tarted up by some townie who came at weekends to check on the work. Mooney had made a good profit from the sale. He didn’t care if the locals complained that true village people couldn’t afford to live here at prices like that.

  Could the coat belong to the townie? he wondered. Was it someone’s idea of a joke dressing the old scarecrow in the townie’s smart Burberry? Strange joke. After all, who would know it was there unless they took out some field-glasses?

  “You know what I reckon?” May said. “Kids.”

  “Whose kids?”

  “Our own. I’ll ask them when they get back from school.”

  The birdsong grew as the afternoon wore on. At the edge of the field closest to the tied cottages more disturbance of the oilseed crop took place. Smaller feet than Mooney’s led another expedition. They were his children, the two girls, Sarah and Ally, eleven years old and seven. Behind them came their mother.

  “It’s not far,” Sarah said, looking back.

  “Not far, Mum,” Ally said.

  They were right. No more than ten adult strides in from the path was a place where some of the plants had been flattened.

  “See?” Ally said.

  This was where the children had found the raincoat. Snapped stalks and blackened fronds confirmed what the girls had told her. It was as if some horse had strayed into the crop and rolled on its back. “So the coat was spread out here?”

  “Yes, Mummy.”

  “Like somebody had a picnic,” Ally added.

  May had a different, less wholesome thought she didn’t voice. “And you didn’t see anyone?”

  They shook their heads.

  “You’re quite sure?”

  “We were playing ball and I threw it and it landed in the field. We were on our own. When we were looking for our ball we found the coat. Nobody wanted it because we came back next day and it was still here and we thought let’s put it on our scarecrow and see if Daddy notices. Was it Daddy who noticed?”

  “Never mind that. You should have told me about the coat when you found it. Did you find anything else?”

  “No, Mummy. If they’d wanted to keep the coat, they would have come back, wouldn’t they?”

  “Did you look in the pockets?”

  “Yes, and they were empty. Mr Scarecrow looks nicer with a coat.”

  “Much nicer,” Ally said in support. “Doesn’t he look nicer, Mummy?”

  May was not to be sidetracked. “You shouldn’t have done what you did. It belongs to someone else.”

  “But they didn’t want it, or they would have come back,” Sarah said.

  “You don’t know. They could still come back.”

  “They could be dead.”

  “It would still be wrong to take it. I’m going to take it off the scarecrow and we’ll hand it in to the police. It’s lost property.”

  A full three days later, Mooney escorted a tall detective inspector through the crop. “You’ll have to be damn quick with your investigating. This’ll be ready for combining soon. Some of the pods are forming already.”

  “If it’s a crime scene, Mr Mooney, you’re not doing anything to it.”

  “We called you about the coat last Monday, and no one came.”

  “A raincoat isn’t much to get excited about. The gun is another matter.”

  Another matter that had finally brought the police here in a hurry. Mooney had found a Smith and Wesson in his field. A handgun.

  “When did you pick it up?”

  “This morning.”

  “What – taking a stroll, were you?”

  Mooney didn’t like the way the question was put, as if he’d been acting suspiciously. He’d done the proper thing, reported finding the weapon as soon as he picked it up. “I’ve got a right to walk in my own field.”

  “Through this stuff?”

  “I promised my kids I’d find their ball – the ball that was missing the day they found the coat. I found the gun instead – about here.” He stopped and parted some of th
e limp, blue-green leaves at the base of a plant.

  To the inspector, this plant looked no different from the rest except that the trail ended here. He took a white disk from his pocket and marked the spot. “Careful with your feet. We’ll want to check all this ground. And where was the Burberry raincoat?”

  “On the scarecrow.”

  “I mean, where did your daughters find it?”

  Mooney flapped his hand in a southerly direction. “About thirty yards off.”

  “Show me.”

  The afternoon was the hottest of the year so far. Thousands of bees were foraging in the rape flowers. Mooney didn’t mind disturbing them, but the inspector was twitchy. He wasn’t used to walking chest-high through fields. He kept close to the farmer using his elbows to fend off the tall plants springing upright again.

  Only a short distance ahead, the bluebottles were busy as well.

  Mooney stopped.

  “Well, how about this?” He was stooping over something.

  The inspector almost tumbled over Mooney’s back. “What is it? What have you found?”

  Mooney held it up. “My kids’ ball. They’ll be pleased you came.”

  “Let’s get on.”

  “Do you smell anything, inspector?”

  In a few hours the police transformed this part of Middle Field. A large part of the crop was ruined, crushed under the feet of detectives, scenes of crime officers, a police surgeon, a pathologist and police photographers. Mooney was depressed by all the damage.

  “You think the coat might have belonged to the owner of the cottages across the lane, is that right?” the inspector asked.

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “It’s what you told me earlier.”

  “That was my wife’s idea. She says it’s a posh coat. No one from round here wears a posh coat. Except him.”

  “Who is he?”

  Mooney had to think about that. He’d put the name out of his mind. “White, as I recall. Jeremy White, from London. He bought the tied cottages from the developer who knocked them into one. He’s doing them up, making a palace out of it, open plan, with marble floors and a spiral staircase.”