The Plantagenet Mystery

by Victoria Prescott

  ‘You could add twenty grand to the value easy with a bit of work,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t afford it, don’t want the bother, and don’t need a fancy kitchen and bathroom.’

  ‘And those locks you’ve got on your front and back doors wouldn’t keep a six year old out.’

  ‘They’re all right.’

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if you lived on the Greenway. Bars at the windows, deadlocks and chains on the doors, is what people have there.’

  ‘Is that where you live? Anyway, if someone’s determined to get in, they’ll get in. Emily’s got plenty of locks and bolts on her doors, and they still got in there.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right, I s’pose.’ Chris leaned back and put his feet up on Rob’s coffee table. ‘We’re a couple of sad bastards, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘Saturday night, we should be out on the town with a couple of good looking women, and here we are, indoors with takeaway.’

  ‘I can’t afford a woman, good looking or otherwise,’ said Rob, squeezing ketchup over his chips.

  ‘Me neither. You’ve got to take them out – ’

  ‘Have decent clothes – ’

  ‘Buy them flowers and stuff – ’

  ‘Taxi fares – ’

  ‘Not me. I’ve got the van.’

  ‘You wouldn’t expect any woman to ride in your van!’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Nothing – for carrying builders’ supplies. But you wouldn’t expect your girlfriend to ride in it when she’s all dressed up for a night out. Or maybe you would. You know, I think I’ve found out the real reason why you don’t have a girlfriend!’

  ‘And the real reason you don’t have a girlfriend – they can’t take all that weird stuff you’ve got in your head. I bet you use that surname stuff as a chat-up line.’

  On Sunday afternoon Rob telephoned Emily’s house to ask for news. Claire Leighton answered.

  ‘They’ve sent her home. She’s still a bit shaky, but she insists she doesn’t want to stay with me, and she doesn’t want Laura to come and stay here. I can stay tonight, but I really need to be in the office tomorrow morning, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to get back here.’

  ‘I can call in and see Emily tomorrow,’ Rob offered.

  ‘Could you?’ Claire Leighton’s relief was evident. ‘I’d feel much happier, knowing someone was here, and honestly I think if I stay we’ll drive each other mad. She’s fussing over that family history of hers. As if that mattered! She’s trying to work out if anything’s missing. Really, why would anyone want to steal any of it? But she seems to mind about that more than she minds being hurt herself.’

  ‘I can help her sort it out – put her mind at rest about it,’ Rob said.

  ‘I wish you would. Oh, and I need to thank you for getting the chap to fix the back door. Auntie Emily couldn’t have come back here if that hadn’t been done. You’d better tell me how I can get in touch with you, by the way, in case I need to.’

  Rob gave his address, phone numbers and e-mail address. Remembering Chris’s account of how she had stood guard while he repaired Emily’s back door, Rob wondered if Claire was going to run some kind of check on him. Well, she was welcome to; he had no dark secrets in his past.

  Rob arrived at Emily’s in time for lunch on Monday. He brought food from the supermarket which only needed to be microwaved. Emily told him that Claire had left at seven that morning to catch a train to London, hoping to be in her office by nine. She had left her office, home and mobile numbers prominently displayed on the hall table and on the kitchen calendar.

  Emily, Rob thought, looked dreadful. The bruising on her face had come right out, she moved stiffly, as if she had more bruising on her body, and her hair had still not been washed or set. However, she was delighted to see him.

  ‘Laura and Claire are very good girls, but neither of them is interested in the family history. Laura wanted to tidy it up for me, but I’m glad Claire wouldn’t let her. She wouldn’t know if anything was missing, or what order everything’s supposed to go in.’

  After lunch, Emily rejected any suggestion that she should rest. The two of them sat down in the dining room and began work on the family history. Emily did have a list, Rob found, of the contents of the shopping trolley – handwritten, compiled over many years, the older pages yellowing. As Emily read out each item, Rob found it in the jumbled heap on the floor, it was ticked off on the list and replaced in the trolley. Emily sighed with relief when they had finished.

  ‘The only other thing is the book I lent you, Rob. Such a relief to know everything’s here. But I still can’t imagine why they would want to throw everything out like that. They don’t seem to have gone upstairs or looked anywhere else in the house at all. They must have thought I was one of those dotty old ladies who carries all her valuables around with her all the time.’

  Rob had his head down, copying out Emily’s handwritten list so he could type it into a spreadsheet for her; he hoped she did not see him smile at this remark.

  Emily made tea and produced a packet of biscuits from the pantry. When they were sitting at the kitchen table, Rob raised the subject of the break in again.

  ‘Have you remembered anything more about what happened?’

  Emily shook her head.

  ‘Not really. And it might not be very helpful, but I don’t really want to remember. And it’s all so jumbled up in my head anyway. I mean, it’s so silly, but when I came to, going round and round in my head, was a line of poetry. At least I suppose it’s a line of poetry, I don’t know what it is, something I learned at school, I expect. Oft have I travelled in the realms of gold. Now why do you suppose I would wake up thinking of that?’

  ‘I suppose concussion does funny things to the brain,’ said Rob.

  Rob left Emily as afternoon was shading into evening. She thanked him for his company and his help with her papers, but insisted that she was not at all nervous at the prospect of being alone in the house overnight. All he could do was leave his phone number and urge her to call him at any time, day or night, if she wanted company. He left the house with a new respect for her. He had always liked her for her kindness and her enthusiasm. Now he admired her courage and her determination not to let the invasion of her home change the way she lived her life.

  The van was parked outside Chris’s house, and the lights were on inside. Rob dropped in to say hallo. Chris was working away again that week, he said, but they’d knocked off early and he’d driven back to put in a couple of hours’ work.

  ‘It’s costing me money all the time,’ he said ‘The longer it takes to get it finished, the less profit I’ll have at the end.’

  Rob helped Chris knock tiles off the bathroom wall for an hour or so, then once again they ended up at his house with takeaway meals. Chris asked after Emily.

  ‘Physically, she still looks bad – a lot of bruising,’ said Rob. ‘She seems fine in herself. I’m just worried that the shock hasn’t properly hit her yet.’

  ‘Some of these old dears are tougher than they look,’ said Chris. ‘Any chance they’ll catch the little s.o.b.s?’

  ‘I doubt it. Emily can’t give any kind of description, and apparently they didn’t leave any fingerprints. So unless any of the neighbours saw anything useful, the police haven’t got anything to go on. And it’s not the sort of thing they spend a lot of time on these days, is it?’

  ‘She’s lucky they even bothered to look for fingerprints, I reckon.’

  ‘She did remember something else, but it doesn’t help much,’ Rob said.

  ‘What?’

  Rob repeated what Emily had told him.

  ‘Realms of gold? What does that mean?’ Chris said.

  ‘She thinks it might be a poem she learned at school. I was going to look it up.’

  Rob put his empty plate down on the coffee table, went through to the back room and switched on the computer. He typed the lines Emily had quoted into Google.

  ‘Oh,
it’s Keats.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The poem. Written by John Keats, lived around 200 years ago, died young of tuberculosis.’

  ‘Doesn’t help much, does it?’

  ‘No. The poem’s called On First Looking into Chapman’s “Homer”’

  ‘Homer?’

  ‘Yes. Greek poet, lived about – ’

  ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘Who? Keats and – ’ Rob was still contemplating classical and Romantic poets.

  ‘No. The two who did the old lady’s house. What did they look like?’

  ‘She didn’t see their faces. One was tall, the other smaller, they both wore hoodies, one spoke, but she doesn’t remember what he said.

  ‘Wayne Simpson.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Wayne Simpson. Lives on the Greenway. Got plenty of form for doing over shops and houses. His mates call him – ’

  ‘Homer. I get it. You think he was one of them?’

  ‘I’d put money on it. It’s just the sort of thing he’d pull.’

  ‘So it was the other one who spoke, and he called Homer by his nickname.’

  ‘Probably said Leg it, Homer when he saw the old lady.’

  ‘And Emily’s subconscious associated Homer with the poem she learned at school.’ Rob thought about it. ‘It’s not enough to go to the police with, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And I don’t think Emily’d want to try to explain it to a policeman. I think she just wants to forget about it. I’m afraid if it was him, he’s going to get away with it.’

  Chris said nothing. Rob looked at him.

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘Well, they shouldn’t get away with it, right? But there’s nothing the police can do, right?’

  ‘Right. So you’re thinking – ?’

  ‘If you’re up for it, I was thinking we could – go after them ourselves? Not do them any damage, that’s not your style. Just shake them up a bit, make them think twice before they do it again. What d’you think?’

  Rough justice was not Rob’s style, Chris was right about that. Regardless of any moral or legal considerations, he didn’t have the necessary physique, being tall but not broad and muscular. But he thought it wrong that the people who had hurt Emily should escape any kind of retribution. And there were a couple of questions he very much wanted answers to.

  ‘All right,’ he said to Chris. ‘Let’s do it.’

  ‘OK.’ Chris drained his mug of coffee and stood up. He looked at Rob, who was still wearing the trousers, shirt and jacket he had worn to Emily’s. ‘You’ll need to get changed.’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Yes.’ Chris looked as if the words ‘You chicken?’ were on the tip of his tongue.

  ‘All right,’ Rob said.

  Chapter Five

  Greenway was a particularly inappropriate name for the collection of bleak concrete blocks, dilapidated lock up garages and boarded up shops. Rob had never been there before, but he knew it had a reputation for anti-social behaviour; bus drivers refused to drive through it in the evenings. It was dark when he and Chris got there. Groups of young people, from early teens to early twenties, were gathered in bus shelters, on open spaces, and outside the few shops that were not closed and barred with steel shutters.

  Chris drove slowly, looking carefully at any older boys they passed. Suddenly he swerved to the left and up on to the pavement, in front of a youth who was walking towards them, hands in the pockets of his top, hood pulled forward over his face. When he realised his path was blocked, he looked up, startled. If he thought of running, he was too late; Chris was out of the van, and had seized him, twisting one arm behind his back, forcing him to his knees.

  ‘Get the back doors,’ he called to Rob. Rob took the keys from the ignition and hurried round to the back of the van. Fumbling slightly, he unlocked and opened the doors. Chris hauled the youth up, threw him into the van, and jumped in after him.

  ‘Can you drive the van?’ he asked Rob.

  ‘Um, yes, I suppose so,’ Rob said. He hoped he could; he had a licence, but it was a good while since he’d actually driven anything, much less something as big as Chris’s van.

  ‘OK. Shut the doors and let’s get going.’ Chris had the youth down on the floor of the van, and seemed to be keeping him there without too much effort. Rob slammed the back doors, retrieved the keys from the lock and hurried round to the driver’s side.

  ‘Where should I drive to?’ he asked as he slid the door shut and started the engine.

  ‘Somewhere quiet,’ Chris replied. ‘So we can have our little chat without any interruptions.’

  That was not much help, Rob thought. He was not even sure he could find his way off the estate. When, after a fair bit of struggling with the gears, he finally did get back to a road he recognised, they were some way out of Wynderbury, on the way to a picnic site on a hillside overlooking the city. He drove there, assuming there would be no-one else there at that time of the evening.

  Rob parked the van in the empty car park and went round to open the back doors. Their captive was sitting huddled up on the floor, as far away from Chris as he could get in the confined space. Rob decided not to ask what Chris had said or done to him during the ride there. The van’s interior light did not reveal a very impressive specimen of humanity. The youth was about seventeen, pale and weedy, his hair shaved close to his head.

  ‘Is this Homer – Wayne?’ Rob asked.

  ‘No. This is Jason. But if Wayne was there, you can bet Jason was too. Wayne’s little shadow, he is. Everywhere that Homer goes, Jason goes too, don’t you Jason? Come on, out you get.’

  Jason stumbled out of the van and stood, looking around fearfully. Chris jumped down behind him.

  ‘Now if you’re a good boy and answer our questions we’ll take you home. If not, we’ll leave you here to find your own way. It’s a long walk, Jason, all by yourself in the dark.’

  ‘What do you want? I don’t know nothing. I haven’t done nothing.’

  ‘Oh yes you have,’ said Chris. ‘You and Homer broke into an old lady’s house, didn’t you?’

  ‘And do you want to know how we know it was you?’ Rob put in. ‘It’s because you called Homer by his name when you saw the old lady. Homer isn’t going to be very pleased with you when he finds out it’s your fault he was caught, is he?’

  Chris glanced at Rob, surprised and approving, then said to Jason,

  ‘And then you knocked her down on your way out, didn’t you?’

  ‘That’s assault. Aggravated burglary. Actual bodily harm. You can go to prison for a long time for any of those,’ Rob said.

  ‘She had to go to hospital, you know. And you never know with these old biddies. Something like that can make them pop off, just like that. It’s the shock. What would that make it?’ Chris asked Rob.

  ‘Manslaughter, at least. Murder, maybe. That’s life in prison, Jason.’

  ‘I didn’t – I didn’t – I didn’t touch her! It was Homer! It was Homer’s idea! He said the old girl would be out!’ Jason stammered, a note of panic in his voice.

  ‘What were you looking for?’ Rob demanded.

  ‘I dunno what you mean.’

  ‘Don’t mess us about,’ Chris said. ‘The two of you was going through the old lady’s things. What were you looking for?’

  ‘A book. Homer said it was a book.’

  ‘What book?’

  ‘I dunno. Homer didn’t say. He just said an old book.’

  ‘Come off it. What would Homer want with a book?’

  ‘I tell you, I dunno. Homer didn’t say. He just had a bit of paper with writing on, and he said that was the name of the book.’

  ‘Why that book? What was special about it?’ Rob asked.

  ‘I dunno!’ Jason wailed. ‘Homer said someone told him about it, they was going to pay him if he got the book. He was going to give me a share.’

  ‘But you didn’t get the book, so Ho
mer didn’t get the money,’ Chris said.

  ‘I dunno. Homer said he was going to tell them what happened, and tell them we should get paid anyway, ’cos it wasn’t our fault like. We waited till the old girl went out, like we was supposed to. It wasn’t our fault she came back! He went off that evening, and I ain’t seen him since.’

  They dropped Jason on the main road near the estate, then drove back to Rob’s house. Over beer and chips, they considered what they had learned.

  ‘You knew all along they was looking for a book, didn’t you?’ Chris said.

  ‘I didn’t know for certain. I wondered, when I helped Emily put everything back in the bag, and nothing was missing. The bag was the only thing they touched, and they emptied it right out. Why would they, if they weren’t looking for something in particular?’

  ‘So what was the book? Where is it, if they didn’t get it? And what’s so special about it, that someone would pay to have it nicked?’

  Rob took the book off the shelf and handed it to Chris.

  ‘This is the book. I don’t know what’s special about it.’ He sat down at the computer and made a few quick searches. ‘The county library doesn’t have a copy, but the British Library and the Bodleian both have it. Anyone who just wanted to read it could get it there. There’d be no need to steal Emily’s copy. And there doesn’t seem to be anything special about the content, from what I’ve read so far.’

  Chris looked at the book and handed it back to Rob.

  ‘I’ll take your word for it. The tv page and the sports pages is about all the reading I do. How come you’ve got it, anyway?’

  Rob explained, showing Chris the handwritten notes that had been made in the book.

  ‘So if there’s nothing special about the book – ’ Chris began.

  ‘It must be whatever’s written in it,’ Rob finished. ‘Yes. That’s what I was thinking.’

  ‘I’m thinking two things,’ Chris said, when they were each on their second beer.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who else knows you’ve got this book?’

  ‘Well, anyone might have seen Emily give it to me that evening. Apart from that, I’ve only told you. I don’t know who Emily might have told. But anyone who knows I’ve got it would have sent Wayne and Jason here, not to Emily’s house.’