Whoever Has the Heart

by Jennie Melville

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment, and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

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  Contents

  Jennie Melville

  Epigraph

  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

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jennie Melville

  Whoever Has the Heart

  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.

  Epigraph

  ‘By tradition, whoever has the heart gets the rest of the body.’

  Unnatural Death , Michael Baden M.D. with Judith Adler Hennessee

  Chapter One

  The small house was in a state of polite but decided disarray, like an elderly lady of breeding who had lost her way and wanted to find it again. The house stood back from the village street with a few modest flowerbeds in front and a walled garden set against the grounds of the manor house behind. Across the way was the church with its squat Norman tower and well-filled graveyard.

  Yesterday I had watched a man fall apart, and bloodily die. That was yesterday, the house was today.

  I stood looking over the wall into the garden, just as run-down as the house with more weeds and rank grass than flowers, but you could see a desperate pansy fighting upwards. I felt like that pansy.

  Nice house. I couldn’t afford it, I shouldn’t have it, but I wanted it desperately.

  I meant to have it.

  I went back to the village pub where my friend Mary Erskine was drinking gin and tonic by the leaping wood fire.

  ‘The roof looks a bit dodgy,’ I said. ‘And where can I park the car?’

  ‘Have a drink.’ A glass of dry sherry appeared as if by magic. Bill the barman at the Red Dragon was, needless to say, a friend and admirer of Mary Erskine. Some of the magic brushed off on me. ‘There’s a lane at the back, you have an entrance to a garage.’

  I supposed she meant the kind of shed I had observed.

  ‘How long’s it been empty?’

  ‘About nine months, but Aunt Bea neglected it for years. She couldn’t get about, you see. It’s not as bad inside as you might think.’

  ‘I haven’t seen that yet.’

  ‘And she left some very nice rugs around that you could buy. I believe there’s a Flemish tapestry on one wall too.’ She saw the surprise on my face. I didn’t move in a world which hung tapestry on the wall. Policewomen don’t. ‘She did live in a castle at one time, you know. Castle Derelict it may have been but it was genuine, like the tapestry.’ Mary Erskine gave a little giggle. ‘She had it up there to hide the damp.’

  ‘Thanks for telling me.’

  ‘You’d smell it as soon as you went in … Want the key?’ She pulled it out of her pocket, a great black object, which looked as old as the house.

  Mrs Armitage had died almost a year ago, or so I had been told. I wasn’t clear if Lady Mary had been left the house in her aunt’s will, but she seemed to be in charge of it. If anyone was.

  ‘How did you get the key?’

  ‘I’ve had it for years. Aunt Bea gave it to me. I used to call about once a week when she was immobile. She died in her sleep, more or less, sitting up in a chair in the kitchen. Not a bad way to go. Small stroke, the doctor said, he’d been looking after her for weeks.’ Mary swigged some more gin and took a deep breath. ‘I miss the old lady more than I can say. She kept me on an even keel.’

  Then she had a job, I thought. Mary Dalmeny Erskine was the charming, feckless, impecunious daughter to an aristocratic family of some lineage and no money. She had a house not far from where I lived in the royal borough of Windsor. Lately, I had felt that I had been handed over the job vacated by Aunt Bea.

  ‘When did she die?’

  ‘Just under a year ago. She’s buried in the churchyard, beneath the yew tree, across the road from the house. She said she wanted to be in sight of the house and near the pub.’

  That told me something about Beatrice Armitage.

  I took the key and let myself into the house. It did not smell of damp, as Mary Erskine had said, but of old furniture and dust. An open window or two would remedy that, I thought.

  A room on either side of the front door, a hall running through to the back where a narrow staircase curved upwards in simple elegance. The tapestry covered this wall. It was dark and in bad repair but I could make out a female warrior in a breastplate and a helmet with a lion by her side. She was standing in a wood; small animals peered around the trees. A squirrel, a hare, a startled deer, and a white hound. No doubt it was Flemish, I had seen something in that style in the Louvre in Paris.

  There were indeed some rugs on the floors, and they might be valuable if cleaned. There was no furniture, all had been sold, and only its ghostly presence remained in the scent of lavender and beeswax. But in the kitchen was the oldest refrigerator that I had ever seen. It was so old that it could even be new art, since most of its workings were on its outside, like the Pompidou Centre in Paris or the subject of some operation who had had all his organs arranged on his head. There was also a great black stove that looked as though it ate coal.

  Upstairs were three empty rooms and a surprisingly comfortable-looking bathroom. Above were attics. I climbed the very narrow stairs but found the attic door locked. Disappointed, I went back downstairs and sat on the window seat looking out on the flower garden, which was overgrown and neglected like all else.

  Yet the room felt comfortable. The house was run-down, in need of all sorts of repair, but it was a happy house. Generations of people had lived here and had liked their home. Like a child or an animal that had always been well treated, it had responded.

  I needed that house. And the house needed me.

  Houses may not live in the way animals do, but they can certainly die, and this little house was very near to death. If someone did not repair the roof and attend to the stonework it would die. Rot would come creeping down from the roof and up from the cellars (was there a cellar? Bound to be in a house of this age) and some developer would knock it down and run up a clump of hideous new houses.

  The sun came in through the window and warmed my back, a winter sun, but there was heat in it. The light showed up the dust on the floor and on the paintwork. There had been a lot of furniture in the room once, I could see the m
arks on the walls. A big cabinet or bookcase over there, a looking-glass above the fire, and many pictures. All gone.

  I took a piece of paper out of my pocket and started to work out figures. What I would need, how much I would have to borrow.

  It was an envelope with my name and address on it: Charmian Daniels, Maid of Honour Row, Windsor.

  I would keep on that small establishment, I was required to live in Windsor, but I was too close to my job there and I needed a distance. For over two years now, I had been head of SRADIC: Southern Register, Documentation and Index of Crime. I co-ordinated all the records of crime for all the southern Forces, not including London, but the Met had an obligation to liaise with me. My unit was based in Windsor, with a sub-office in Slough. I had also recently been given the go-ahead to set up my own small investigating unit, for already it was clear that there were going to be occasions when I would want to initiate my own independent enquiries. I had certain other more secret duties which I did not talk about. I was a high-ranking police officer and a powerful lady.

  It went without saying that I was also, on occasion, an overworked and anxious one. As they say: it went with the territory. I had friends and allies but I also had enemies. I wanted space away from them all.

  I also had a lover. Humphrey Kent, a powerful figure in his own right. I needed space from him as well.

  I got up and paced the room: it was a good size. I had been on my own too long now to be able to join up easily with another person. Humphrey had his own house in Windsor and an inherited country place, very lovely, rather grand in its own way. If we married, these would be my homes.

  But I wanted my own base. Meant to have it, said a voice inside me.

  We would marry, we both desired it, I could see it coming quite soon, but I was not a sharer. I might have to give up Maid of Honour Row, I could see that coming too, but this house I would have.

  Besides, there was something in my bones that ached for this house. I felt as though it would pick up my past and knit it to my future, making everything a whole. My life had been fragmented by various things, like death, and ambition.

  I walked back to the pub where Mary Erskine was sitting by the fire, her eyes closed, her face looked pinched and tired. I knew well that she brought her troubles on her own head, and sometimes involved me in them, but I always forgave her.

  ‘Is there a cellar?’ I asked.

  She opened her eyes. ‘ Yes, but you have to go outside to go down to it.’

  ‘Inconvenient.’

  ‘I think when the house was built the manservant used to sleep down there.’

  ‘Was the house big enough for a manservant?’

  She yawned. ‘Oh, yes, girls up in the attic, and the men outside. A primitive form of birth control. Not that it always worked.’

  I sat down beside her. ‘I shall buy it.’

  ‘Oh, good. I like to think of you having it.’

  ‘If the price is right.’ The mortgage might be tricky to arrange.

  ‘You old Scot. I shall see it is. The best thing that’s happened all week, bringing you here.’ There was real feeling in her voice.

  I laughed but not unkindly, I could afford to show sympathy. ‘What’s up? I can see something is.’

  ‘Just parted for ever with my best young man.’ She stood up. ‘Oh, what the hell, he’s a soldier without a penny and I haven’t got anything.’

  ‘You’ve done that before and he’s always come back.’ I liked her young man.

  ‘No, this time it’s for good.’

  ‘Is money so important?’

  ‘You can’t get married on minus nothing. I can’t take my debts into the marriage bed.’

  I looked at her thoughtfully. Lack of money had never so far stopped my lady doing anything she wanted. And wasn’t all this talk about the marriage bed a bit archaic? They’d probably been in and out of bed countless times already. There must be something else.

  But aristocrats like Mary could go archaic on you at times, you never could be sure when you would scratch the skin off a scab that really mattered. I felt quite smug: a graduate of a Scottish university, brought up in a more egalitarian world, had no need to keep class rules.

  Mary gave the fire a vicious poke.

  ‘You’re not doing the fire any good.’

  She put the poker down. ‘Actually, he’s chucked me.’ She saw my questioning look. ‘ He found out that Billy Damiani asked me to go to the Ritz in Paris with him.’

  ‘And you went? You are a fool, Mary.’

  ‘It’s known as being my own worst enemy,’ she said dolefully.

  ‘He’s a snake, that man.’

  ‘He has great charm,’ said Mary. ‘And of course, he’s enormously rich.’

  ‘I’d like to know where he got that name from. And I wish I knew where they came from.’ He had a sister whom one saw around. ‘I’ll try to find out. He might be worth study.’

  ‘You wouldn’t!’ She was shocked, in her world one did not investigate a chum. Not even a risky one like Billy Damiani.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Not today, please. He’s coming over to give us lunch, the food’s frightfully good here.’ She added, ‘And very expensive.’

  I stood up. ‘ Count me out. I’ll get a sandwich.’

  ‘But he specially wants to meet you.’

  ‘He has met me.’

  ‘Not properly.’

  ‘You set this up,’ I said. ‘I’m really angry.’ I think I was.

  Lady Mary smiled. ‘Oh, go and walk it off.’

  I walked out and was preparing to bang the door behind me when the childishness of this struck me, and I slowed down.

  ‘Come back just before one o’clock,’ Mary called after me. ‘We’ll settle the business about Bea’s house before he gets here, Billy’s always late.’ She took a step towards me, looking for something from me of understanding and sympathy. ‘I do love my soldier boy.’

  Funny way of showing it, I thought, but I was not shocked or even surprised. Mary Dalmeny Erskine’s code of behaviour was not mine but I accepted it as part of her world. Tough on the soldier boy, who obviously felt plain sexual jealousy, and who could blame him? Still, years in the police had taught me something about the range of human behaviour.

  I walked down the village, turning towards the church. I had already visited Brideswell several times before so I knew the layout. It was a remarkably beautiful village, set in a wooded valley through which ran a narrow, rushing river. As a village it was unusually complete, it still had a school, a post office, and a baker’s shop. Needless to say all were under threat as uneconomic but had survived because most of the village was part of the estate of the family that owned the manor. There was a butcher but fish came round in a van once a week. If I bought Muff here for a visit then I would have to consider the fish supply.

  The main street was narrow with the houses facing each other very closely, although Mrs Beatrice Armitage’s house was set back from the road behind its slip of front garden.

  I saw the parson hurry down the path from the church and leap on to his motorbike. He was responsible for two other parishes so he was a busy man. A bachelor, a theologian on his way up to a bishopric, he gave me a wave as he passed. He was gone before I could wave back. I walked through the lich-gate into the churchyard. A weather-beaten board informed me that I was approaching the church of St Edwin the Martyr in the parish of Brideswell; The Rector: the Reverend Thomas Baxter, MA. Churchwardens: Ermine Sprott and Jack Bean. I dragged my coat closer around me, the usual chill March wind was blowing, damp and with a hint of snow.

  In this part of the churchyard the graves were immemorially old, the inscriptions eroded by age, and some had disappeared completely, but nearer to the road all the graves were newer. I could see a man putting flowers on one of these graves.

  There was the yew tree, dark and sturdy. I walked towards it thinking that Mrs Armitage had chosen her burial site well.

  I had no dif
ficulty in finding her grave since Aunt Bea lay in solitary state underneath the yew, but the tomb itself was plain enough, still starkly new. She had been dead only nine months, but the stone was even newer.

  Beatrice Alice Armitage, widow of

  Lt. Colonel Earnsly Armitage

  Widow also of the Earl Finden of Ladlaw in Ross

  And of le Duc de Caze de La Tour.

  Quite a woman, I thought. She had moved in several different worlds before dying in this quiet Berkshire village. I bent down and put my hand on the marble. ‘ You might see me in your house, Mrs Armitage, if you can look across.’ Some needles from the yew were spattered across the stone and I brushed them gently aside.

  I stood up and walked towards the other graves, lined up in neat rows. The man with the flowers was standing watching me. I suppose strangers were rare in the village.

  My gaze was attracted to three graves, side by side, plain white stones with a small angel sitting on each; except for this decoration they looked stark and uncompromising.

  A husband, wife, and daughter were buried here. Arthur, Hilda, and Angela Beasley. They had been buried within the last year and they had died within a few days of each other.

  An accident, I decided. Car crash or a fire at home.

  The man of the flowers was approaching me. He was tall and thin, about forty, wearing dark tweeds. His face was tanned as if he spent a lot of time in the open air. He was hard to place, he could have been a farmer or a poet.

  ‘Quite a death rate in this village,’ I said absently.

  ‘Oh, them.’ He shrugged, but offered no information.

  ‘Was it an accident?’

  ‘Illness of some sort,’ he said. ‘Visiting, are you?’ I nodded. ‘Visiting friends?’

  ‘Just visiting.’

  ‘Saw you looking at the Duchess’s grave.’

  ‘Mrs Armitage? Didn’t call herself Duchess, did she?’ Not claiming a title after remarriage was one of the social rules Lady Mary’s class did keep. Liberal about sex, strict about titles, that was how it went.