Murder in the Museum (Fethering Mysteries)

by Brett, Simon

  ‘You don’t sound certain, Jude . . .’

  ‘Oh no, I know it’s happened, but . . . The confession was from Mervyn Hunter.’

  ‘The one who I saw break down when the body was discovered?’

  Jude nodded.

  ‘But you said you didn’t know anyone locally called Mervyn.’

  ‘I lied.’

  It was said with disarming honesty, but Carole wasn’t disarmed. ‘For heaven’s sake. What is this, Jude? I thought the whole point of our discussions about cases like this was that we shared information. I don’t hold stuff back from you, and I’m pretty angry to hear that you’ve been holding stuff back from me!’

  Carole Seddon’s skin was very thin. Only the smallest friction was required to lay bare her subcutaneous insecurity. She was quick to imagine slights, but in this case did not need recourse to her imagination. Her supposed friend had deliberately withheld material information from her.

  Jude tried to ease the situation. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I felt there was an issue of confidentiality between me and Mervyn . . . because I’ve met him through the prison.’

  ‘Through the prison? What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’ve met Mervyn Hunter at Austen Prison. He’s a lifer finishing off his sentence there.’

  ‘Jude, how on earth do you come to make the acquaintance of lifers at Austen Prison?’

  Jude sighed. Her reticence on the subject had a perfect logic for her, but she knew Carole wouldn’t see it so simply. The last thing Jude wanted to do was antagonize her friend, and yet, given the personality involved, it was all too easily done.

  She started out on the laborious process of fence-mending. ‘The last few months I’ve been doing some sessions at Austen Prison.’

  ‘Sessions? On what?’

  ‘Alternative stuff. Alternative therapies, alternative ways of looking at life.’

  ‘Oh.’ The frost in the voice said everything about Carole’s views on such matters. She reckoned trying to lead a straightforward normal life was quite difficult enough, without complicating the issue by offering alternatives.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jude hurried on, ‘in the course of these sessions I have met Mervyn Hunter.’

  ‘And does he seem like a murderer to you?’ asked Carole, thinking of the skeleton at Bracketts.

  ‘Well, I know he is a murderer, so what he seems like is a bit irrelevant. But no, in the accepted sense, he doesn’t seem like a murderer. And, indeed, I’d be very surprised if he were ever to commit a second murder.’

  ‘The first one being the one he’s in Austen for?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So who was that? Who did he kill before?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘But surely that was the first question you asked?’

  ‘I can assure you, Carole, as an outsider inside a prison, that’s the last question you ask. If a prisoner wants to volunteer information to you about his crime, fair enough. If he doesn’t, don’t go there.’

  ‘Oh.’ The response remained frosty. The fence was still by no means mended.

  ‘Anyway, I’ve talked to Mervyn a bit, mainly in group sessions, but occasionally had the odd word with him on his own.’

  ‘You knew he’d been working up at Bracketts?’

  ‘Yes. He mentioned it.’

  ‘Apparently there’s been quite a history of that, with men from Austen. Set up by Sheila Cartwright. For the right sort of prisoner, who’s interested in gardening, or even in the heritage side of the place, it’s worked very well.’

  ‘And from what Mervyn told me, it was working well for him too. He’s a very wound-up kind of character, really needs the right sort of opening when he gets out of Austen. Somewhere like Bracketts is ideal for him.’

  ‘I’m sure it would be,’ said Carole huffily, ‘if he didn’t go on murdering people.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ protested Jude, uncharacteristically testy. ‘You don’t think he did it, do you?’

  ‘Well, he’s told the police he did. If Mervyn himself doesn’t know what he’s done, then who does?’

  ‘I’m absolutely certain he didn’t do it. I think he only confessed because he thought he ought to.’

  ‘What!’ But further expansion of Carole’s disbelief was stopped by her phone ringing.

  ‘Hello, is that Carole Seddon?’ The voice was vaguely familiar, slightly effete and, at that moment, deeply anxious.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘This is Graham.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Graham Chadleigh-Bewes,’ he said peevishly. ‘I gather from that Gina at Bracketts that you’re going to be meeting the Great American Predator.’

  ‘Well, there was some talk of—’

  ‘It’s very important that you come and see me before any such meeting.’

  ‘I’m not sure that it’ll be possible for me—’

  ‘You have to. I have some papers that you must give to Professor Teischbaum. You must come.’

  Carole was getting a bit sick of the way everyone connected with Bracketts ordered her around.

  ‘What papers are these?’

  ‘Some material about Esmond.’

  ‘Do you mean you are going to co-operate with her, after all?’

  ‘No.’ He chortled. ‘I’m going to fob her off with some unimportant stuff.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I’m not sure that I want to be a party to any kind of—’

  ‘The importance of your doing what I say cannot be overestimated,’ Graham went on in his prissy academic’s voice. ‘Particularly in the circumstances.’

  ‘What circumstances?’

  ‘The circumstances of a skeleton having been found in the kitchen garden at Bracketts.’

  So much for Lord Beniston’s need-to-know policy amongst the Trustees, thought Carole.

  Chapter Nine

  By the time Jude returned from High Tor to Woodside Cottage that evening, a second bottle of white wine had been consumed and the fence had been, if not fully mended, at least temporarily repaired. She felt sorry for Carole, whose reticent personality was always going to require much bridge-building and fence-mending. There was no element of superiority in her pity. Jude just felt blessed to have been born with a more direct approach to life; the differences between them had never, from her point of view, offered any threat to their friendship.

  Amidst the draped and cluttered chaos of her sitting room the red light of the answering machine blinked. There were two messages.

  ‘Hello. Voice from the past. It’s Laurence. Love to talk to you. Love to meet, come to that. I’ve actually come sufficiently into the twenty-first century to get myself a mobile. Let me give you the number.’

  She felt a remembered warmth as she wrote it down. A few of Jude’s affairs had ended in ‘I never want to see you again!’ acrimony, but she was still in occasional touch with most of her lovers, and her recollections of Laurence Hawker were almost entirely benign. She wondered if he was still an academic, still researching in the English Department at the university in Prague, still as irresistibly attracted to all those stunningly beautiful Czech girl students. But for that predilection of his, and the way it encroached on their time together, Jude’s relationship with Laurence would have been near perfect. Be good to see him again.

  The second message was from Sandy Fairbarns. ‘Need to talk to you urgently, Jude. If you can get back to me tonight before twelve, be great. If not, at Austen in the morning, as soon after nine as possible.’

  It was two minutes before midnight. Jude keyed in the mobile number. Sandy sounded as bright and enthusiastic as ever. Loud music sounded in the background, but it wasn’t referred to. Sandy’s private life remained private.

  ‘Jude, thank you so much for getting back to me. It’s about Mervyn.’

  ‘Anything wrong with him?’

  ‘I don’t know. He never did talk to me.’

  ‘He’s back at Austen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  �
�Any charges?’

  ‘I don’t know. Basically, Jude, I want you to see him.’

  ‘But I’m not scheduled to do another session till—’

  ‘I know. I’m suggesting you come and visit him. If I get it to the Governor first thing in the morning, I can get a VO for you for tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘Sorry? VO?’

  ‘Visiting Order. Can you do tomorrow?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Good. Because Mervyn seemed to respond in your sessions. I think he might open up to you.’

  ‘I’ll do my best. But what’s his problem?’

  ‘I don’t know, Jude. But I’m worried about him.’

  Chapter Ten

  Graham Chadleigh-Bewes’ house was symbolic of his life. From childhood it had been dominated by his famous grandfather, so there was a logic that his home should be almost in the shadow of Bracketts too. The cottage had once housed an estate worker, and though firmly separated by its own fence, still gave the impression that it was part of the grounds. A rather tart notice by the front gate read: ‘THIS HOUSE IS PRIVATE PROPERTY. VISITORS TO BRACKETTS SHOULD ENTER THROUGH THE CAR PARK 100 YARDS DOWN THE LANE.’ An arrow showed them the way.

  Searchers after symbols might have seen that too as an expression of Graham Chadleigh-Bewes’ semi-detached relationship with Bracketts, half-loving and half-resenting the connection.

  They could have seen symbolism in his surname as well. The anonymous Mr Bewes, whom Sonia Chadleigh had married in 1945, had been half-erased by a hyphen, so that his son would retain the famous literary name.

  As she approached the cottage door on the Tuesday morning, Carole Seddon again reflected on how bossy everyone involved with the place seemed to be. And how meekly she continued to submit to their bossiness. Graham had quickly rejected her suggestion that they should meet on neutral ground, a café or pub somewhere midway between Fethering and South Stapley. ‘No, no, I’ve got all the papers here. You’ll have to come to me.’ But Carole sensed that it was not simply a matter of convenience. Graham Chadleigh-Bewes felt insecure off his own territory. He gained strength from his home environment, so close to the splendour of Bracketts.

  It was raining heavily. The brightness of the last few days had been suddenly eclipsed, and the water sheeted off Carole’s precious Burberry.

  To her surprise, the cottage door was opened by Belinda Chadleigh, who had only just come in herself. She was swamped in a huge, dripping blue waterproof coat which bore the same ‘Bracketts Volunteer’ labelling and logo that had been on the overalls Carole had seen in the kitchen garden.

  At first Carole Seddon’s name seemed to mean nothing to the old lady. The Trustees’ Meeting, during which they had sat at the same table only a few days previously, might as well not have happened.

  But when Carole said she’d come to see Graham, a kind of recollection entered the faded eyes. ‘Oh yes, of course. He said someone was coming. He’s very busy, as ever. You know, with the biography. And it’s not just that. You wouldn’t believe all the demands there are on Graham’s time, just the day-to-day dealing with the estate.’

  ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t,’ said Carole politely, but she was beginning to wonder how much work was actually involved. Belinda Chadleigh’s manner confirmed her previous impression of Graham Chadleigh-Bewes, that he was basically rather lazy, but kept going on about his workload and surrounded himself with people who endorsed his self-image as the impossibly stressed keeper of Esmond Chadleigh’s flame.

  His aunt was evidently a willing partner in this conspiracy. The way she behaved suggested that she lived in the cottage, even acted as a kind of housekeeper to the tortured genius who was her nephew. Her offer of tea or coffee, when she ushered Carole into the great man’s presence, was both automatic and practised. Carole said she’d like a coffee, and Graham conceded that he could probably manage another one too. With the subservience of a housemaid from another generation, his aunt went off to make the necessary arrangements.

  There was a chaos about Graham Chadleigh-Bewes’ study which might once have been organized, but had long since got completely out of control. He sat on an old wooden swivel chair in a recess backed by small cottage windows, against which that morning the rain rattled relentlessly. In front of him was a structure which logic dictated must be a desk, but the surface was so crowded with papers and the sides so buttressed by books and files that no part of it was visible. All available wall-space was shelved, and books were crammed in double ranks, some hanging precariously off the edges, others stuffed in horizontally over ranks of the unevenly vertical.

  Hanging slightly askew from a nail on one shelf end was a small crucifix with an ivory Christ. Atop one of the peaks of the desk’s topography perched an old black telephone with a white dial and nubbly brown fabric-covered wire. There was no sign of fax, photocopier or computer – indeed no technology invented in the last fifty years.

  Graham himself, poring importantly over some papers, did not even rise to greet Carole. Having rather grandly given his coffee order to his aunt, he waved his guest to a chair from which she had to remove a pile of flimsy carbon copies. ‘Be careful with that lot,’ he admonished, without looking up. ‘Mustn’t get them out of sequence.’

  Sequence? As Carole sat down and looked around the room, she couldn’t see much evidence of sequence anywhere.

  After dutifully watching Graham read for a couple of minutes, she decided she’d had enough. He was the one who had summoned her, after all.

  ‘Could we get on, please?’ she said. ‘I don’t have all day.’

  He looked up from his letters with some hurt, as at a philistine interruption of the creative process. His expression was calculated to make her feel like the visitor from Porlock, breaking Coleridge’s flow on Kubla Khan, but if he thought it’d have that effect on Carole Seddon, he’d got the wrong woman.

  ‘I gather you want to give me some kind of briefing, before I speak to Professor Teischbaum.’

  ‘In a way.’ Reluctantly, he added the letters he was reading to the refuse tip on his desk. ‘I have to say, I’m not in favour of your meeting this frightful Yank, anyway.’

  ‘I’m not that keen on it myself, but Gina is very insistent that I should. When I agreed to be a Trustee, I took on certain responsibilities, and this is just one of them. If we clam up completely and refuse to let anyone talk to Professor Teischbaum, she’ll just think we’ve got something to hide.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose I see the logic of that.’ He didn’t sound convinced. He still reckoned, if the Bracketts hierarchy completely ignored his rival biographer, then she’d go away. ‘But I don’t think Gina should be the one to decide who talks to the woman.’

  ‘Gina is Director of this organization. I would have thought this was exactly the sort of decision that she should make.’

  ‘Yes, I know she’s Director . . .’ He dismissed the title as an irrelevance, ‘but she doesn’t really know Bracketts. She hadn’t even read any Esmond before she mugged him up for the job interview. And though she’s absolutely fine as a kind of office manager, she shouldn’t be making decisions about important things like this.’

  ‘So far as I can gather, her thinking in suggesting that I talk to Professor Teischbaum is that I know relatively little about Bracketts, and therefore won’t be able to give much away.’

  Graham Chadleigh-Bewes pulled at his fat lower lip disconsolately. ‘It still should be someone aware of the issues at stake.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting you should talk to the Professor, are you? Rival biographers meeting at dawn? Who’d have the choice of weapons?’

  ‘No,’ he replied testily. ‘The obvious person to do it is Sheila.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she knows Bracketts. She knows everything about the place, everything about Esmond. She would see this woman off with no problem at all.’

  ‘But, as I understand it, Graham, Sheila no longer has any official role at Bracketts. She certainly isn’
t the Director. I gather she isn’t even a Trustee.’

  ‘Oh, that’s just office politics.’

  ‘What, do you mean she was voted off by the other Trustees?’

  ‘No, no, no. She went entirely of her own accord. Sheila had been wanting to reduce her commitment to Bracketts for some time. She’s put so much into the place, she wanted to have a bit of time to herself. Who can blame her?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Of course not. So eighteen months ago, she resigned as Director – for which, incidentally, she was never paid – and she became a Trustee. Then after six months, she resigned as a Trustee.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She didn’t want to affect the freedom of the Trustees to take new initiatives. Sheila knew the management of Bracketts had to change. She was the one who suggested advertising for a professional Director, for heaven’s sake. She said she didn’t want to outstay her welcome, like Margaret Thatcher. She wanted to give whoever took over from her a completely free hand and, as for herself, just withdraw gracefully.’

  If Sheila Cartwright’s behaviour at the recent Trustees’ Meeting had been an example of her graceful withdrawal, Carole had even more sympathy for the impossible position into which Gina Locke had been placed. The new Director’s power was only theoretical. Every decision she made was going to be scrutinized – and quite possibly countermanded – by her predecessor.

  The Board of Trustees, the regulatory body with the mandate to control such behaviour, seemed to be so awed by – or possibly in love with – Sheila Cartwright, that they gave Gina Locke no support at all. And since the discovery of the skeleton in the kitchen garden, no one even attempted to maintain the illusion that Sheila had taken a back seat.