Murder in the Museum (Fethering Mysteries)

by Brett, Simon

  ‘Listen, Jonny, it’s not as simple—’

  But that was as far as she was allowed to get with her explanation. Brenda Tyson came hurrying over the brow of the garden towards them. And the expression on her face suggested she was announcing something more weighty than the readiness of Sunday lunch.

  ‘Jonny, you are popular today. Some other people have arrived who want to talk you.’

  For the first time Jude saw petulance in his face as he said, ‘I don’t want to talk to anyone else. I want to have my lunch.’

  Though pained by the situation, this time his mother could not let him have his own way. ‘You’ll have to talk to them, Jonny. The people who’ve arrived are from the police.’

  Jude’s first thought was that she’d got there only just in time.

  Her second was more compassionate. She prayed Jonny Tyson’s next interviewers would be as gentle with him as she had been.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Carole Seddon was so absorbed in the papers on her sitting room table that she didn’t hear the cab driving up to Woodside Cottage. The first she was aware of Laurence Hawker’s return was when the bell rang and there he was standing on her own doorstep.

  He looked thinner and more haggard than ever. As ever, a lighted cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth, defying the attempts of his coughing to dislodge it. He was dressed in his usual black with the leather jacket – what Carole regarded as the complete poseur’s kit.

  ‘Ah. Good afternoon. Is Jude not there to let you in? I do have a key, so, if you like—’

  ‘No. She gave me a key.’ He smiled the boyish smile which rarely failed to thaw the most frosty of women. It had no effect on Carole.

  ‘What I actually wondered was whether you’ve got any whisky . . .?’

  ‘Whisky?’ she echoed.

  ‘Yes. I drank the last of Jude’s Friday night. I meant to pick some up at an off licence over the weekend, but, what with one thing and another . . .’ He shrugged helplessly.

  Carole was torn. Her first instinct was to deny his impertinent request and close the door in his face. But the atavistic middle-class tradition of good manners told her that one should be polite to friends of one’s friends, even if one didn’t particularly care for them.

  Breeding won. ‘I believe I may have some left over from Christmas,’ she said primly.

  ‘If I’m not depriving you of supplies . . .’

  She knew how prissy she sounded when she said, ‘I’m not a habitual whisky drinker. It’s in the cupboard in the sitting room,’ she went on, and was then faced by another social dilemma. She wanted just to get the bottle, hand it over and close the door on him. But the entrenched middle-class rules about how one treated guests were too strong. She stood back from the doorway. ‘Won’t you come in?’

  He lounged after her into the sitting room, coughing again.

  ‘So how was your weekend?’ asked Carole, punctiliously polite as she opened the drinks cabinet.

  ‘Not so dusty,’ he drawled. Which seemed a strangely archaic reply. And, given the fact that he’d spent the night with a woman other than Jude, an inadequate one.

  The bottle was nearly half-full. Carole had bought it three Christmases before. She very rarely drank spirits, just the occasional glass of white wine (though, since she’d met Jude, the occasions had got closer together). She held the whisky bottle out towards Laurence Hawker.

  ‘Great.’ He looked at it wryly. ‘Keep me going for a couple of hours. Jude can get some more when she comes back.’

  He didn’t say that walking any distance was becoming increasingly difficult, so that the stroll down to Allinstore, the supermarket in the High Street, would have been beyond him. For Carole, the impression of his cavalier male chauvinism was reinforced.

  With no attempt at concealment of his interest, Laurence Hawker was looking at the photocopies spread over the table. By Carole’s middle-class standards, such behaviour came under the definition of ‘nosy’.

  ‘Esmond Chadleigh memorabilia,’ he observed, compounding his offence, revealing that he had actually read someone else’s papers.

  ‘Yes.’ Carole’s curt monosyllable was meant to precede her suggestion that, now he’d got his whisky, perhaps he’d like to return to Woodside Cottage and consume it. But another thought came into her mind. Her own perusal of the documents had revealed nothing; she didn’t have the background knowledge of Esmond Chadleigh and his world to make them meaningful. But she did actually have in her sitting room an academic, who – although she had considerable reservations about him as a person – would know a lot more. She remembered the details he’d filled in for them on the Bracketts Guided Tour.

  The reservations were put on hold. ‘Would you like to have a look at the material, Laurence?’

  He agreed with relish, drew up a chair to the table and, without asking permission, lit up another cigarette.

  ‘I think I’ve got an ashtray somewhere,’ said Carole tautly.

  But Laurence Hawker was uninterested in such domestic details. ‘If you happened to have a glass too and could pour some of the whisky into it, that would help enormously.’

  Biting her lip – if Jude wanted to be treated like a doormat by this man that was up to her – Carole did as he suggested. She put a full glass and the bottle to his left, and an ashtray to his right. Taking alternate sips and puffs, except for the regular coughing, Laurence Hawker was silent while he read through the documentation. Carole Seddon quietly drew a chair up to the table, feeling like a visitor in her own sitting room.

  After about twenty minutes, he sat back, and let out a cough even louder than the previous ones. When he’d recovered his breath, he said, ‘Interesting. Where did you get this stuff from?’

  ‘Graham Chadleigh-Bewes. I was to deliver it to Professor Marla Teischbaum.’

  Laurence let out an ironical laugh. ‘That makes sense.’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘By reputation. In the academic world you hear about what most people in the same field are up to. I know Marla Teischbaum’s working on a biography of Esmond Chadleigh. And I think hers will have rather more intellectual rigour than the one written by Graham Chadleigh-Bewes –’ He tapped the photocopies on the table ‘– in spite of his delaying tactics.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Carole remembered the word Marla Teischbaum had used on the telephone. ‘Are you saying that this stuff has been doctored?’

  ‘Yes. Not very subtly either.’

  ‘When she last rang me, Marla Teischbaum accused Graham of doing it.’

  ‘I should think she’s right. You said he issued the material, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. What kind of “doctoring” has been done, Laurence?’ The longer he was there, the easier she was finding it to use his name. She still disliked and disapproved of him, but she couldn’t fault his intellect.

  ‘There’s been a bit of fiddling with the dates. Don’t know why.’ Instinctively, and without asking, Laurence Hawker topped up his empty whisky glass. ‘I suppose he just hoped Professor Teischbaum would publish the misinformation in her book, and then be discredited for getting her facts wrong. But she’d be too canny to fall for that. I’m not even an expert on Esmond Chadleigh, and yet I saw instantly what had been done. No, I’m afraid all this stuff does is to show up the sad incompetence of Graham Chadleigh-Bewes. Incompetence as a forger, certainly – and probably incompetence as a biographer too.’

  Carole moved closer to the table. ‘Can you show me exactly what you’re talking about?’

  Proximity strengthened the smells of cigarette smoke and whisky, but she was starting to find them less offensive as her interest in the documents mounted.

  ‘Well, take a look at this.’ He picked up the photocopy of the letter from ‘Pickles’ to ‘Chadders’. ‘Perfectly ordinary schoolboy letter, thanking his friend for letting him stay at Christmas. Dated “29 December 1917”. And yet there are a whole lot of references in it that make that date
sound wrong.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Look at this.’

  Her eyes followed his finger to the sentence in which ‘Pickles’ referred to his aunt: ‘I don’t think she likes anyone – certainly not me or Mr Lloyd George, so she’s in an even sourer mood than usual.’

  ‘OK, Lloyd George was still Prime Minister in 1917, but he actually took over the job in December 1916. Wouldn’t his appointment be what made the aunt “sourer than ever”?’

  He raised a hand to curb objections. ‘All right, that one’s arguable, but these two references to the Somme seem very odd.’

  Again his finger found the relevant passages.

  ‘I’d like to get a bit of revenge for all those chaps Strider lost on the Somme. He seemed raring to go back, didn’t he, champing at the bit to get back and finish the job?’

  and

  ‘Did you hear, incidentally, that old “Rattles” Rattenborough, School Captain of a couple of years back, has died of wounds he sustained during that Somme fixture? Bit of a damper when you hear about chaps you know, but it seems to be happening all too often these days.’

  ‘Now the Somme Offensive started in July 1916 and, OK, it was dreadful, left deep scars on the country. But by December 1917, the Third Battle of Ypres – all the horrors of Passchendaele – had happened. Surely those’d be more in the mind of a war-watching schoolboy than the events of nearly eighteen months before? And can you really believe that it had taken eighteen months for “Pickles” to hear about the death of a school captain?’

  ‘Ah, that one’s not certain,’ Carole pointed out. ‘He died of “wounds sustained during that Somme fixture”. We don’t know how long that process took.’

  ‘Take your point.’ Laurence Hawker nodded in appreciation. Then his finger moved quickly to another line. ‘But look at this. This is the clincher.’

  Carole read, ‘Now our boys have got those newfangled tanks out there, it shouldn’t take long.’

  ‘British tanks were introduced to the Battle of the Somme in September 1916. Surely fourteen months later our schoolboy wouldn’t be describing them as “new-fangled”? Three months later, maybe.’

  Coughing lightly, he sat back with an air of triumph, and took a long drag from his cigarette.

  ‘So what are you saying, Laurence?’

  ‘I would stake my reputation as an academic – or even something of real value,’ he interpolated with a self-deprecating grin, ‘that the date on this letter has been changed from “1916” to “1917”.’

  ‘But why would Graham Chadleigh-Bewes want to do that?’

  ‘Don’t know . . . unless, as I said, it was a feeble attempt to make Professor Teischbaum’s research look iffy.’ He reached forward. ‘But this is designed to have the same effect.’

  What he picked up was the photocopied page from Felix Chadleigh’s diary, which began: ‘12 November 1917. The Lord and all the Holy Saints be praised! After all the exhausting uncertainty of the last few months, we did finally today take possession of Bracketts.’

  ‘This is an even cruder forgery,’ said Laurence. ‘I don’t know who Graham Chadleigh-Bewes thought he was going to fool with this. He’s just written in “1917” over that blotch of ink.’

  ‘And are there internal inconsistencies?’

  ‘Yes. If this was written only a fortnight after his son’s death at Passchendaele – I think we can assume the family would have heard the news by then – saying “Here we will put our griefs behind us” seems somewhat understated.’

  ‘Yes. And you think Graham Chadleigh-Bewes did this for the same purpose as the other one?’

  ‘Must’ve done. For some reason best known to himself the authorized biographer of Esmond Chadleigh was trying to make the unauthorized one believe that the Chadleigh family moved into Bracketts a year later than they actually did.’

  At that moment their researches were interrupted by a ring at the doorbell. It was Jude.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Carole ushered her neighbour into the sitting room. Laurence Hawker didn’t rise from his seat or acknowledge Jude with more than a casual wave. He was preoccupied by the photocopies on the table. There was anxiety in Jude’s face as she looked at him – hardly surprising, thought Carole. Any woman would look anxious if she knew her lover had just spent the night with another woman.

  Laurence looked up for a moment. ‘I came round because your house is completely devoid of whisky.’

  ‘How disastrous for you.’ To Carole’s mind, the remark should have been said more sardonically; and then Jude compounded the offence by saying, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll go down to Allinstore and get some later.’

  Carole knew her neighbour had taken many roles in her relationships with men, but never imagined that one of them would be that of doormat. Why did Jude seem to be in thrall to this man who – even though Carole had warmed to him a little over the previous half-hour – remained an egocentric poseur?

  ‘Since we’re all having a drink . . .’ Jude hinted.

  Carole didn’t point out that in fact only Laurence was having a drink so far, but went to open a bottle of white wine. She didn’t entirely condone the concept of drinking through a Sunday afternoon, but then Jude was her guest . . .

  While she was in the kitchen, she could hear a whispered exchange between Jude and Laurence . . . well, she could hear that there was a whispered exchange, though frustratingly she couldn’t make out any of the words. Jude’s tone was concerned rather than – as it should have been – admonitory, and Laurence’s replies were weighed down with his customary languor. Carole wondered what was going on. Whispering was out of character for Jude.

  She came in with the open bottle of wine and two glasses on a tray. (Trays were another of the inescapable legacies of her middle-class upbringing. Food or drink should be carried into a room on a tray – and then, in an ideal world, placed on an individual small table beside the chair of each guest. Carole still felt a slight frisson of audacity in dispensing with the individual small tables.)

  ‘Has Laurence been telling you about his detective work?’ she asked as she poured the wine.

  ‘No. Why, what’s happened?’

  Laurence lit up another cigarette, and let Carole provide the recap on his discoveries.

  ‘ . . . so the biggest question we’re left with,’ she concluded, ‘is why Graham Chadleigh-Bewes would want Marla Teischbaum to believe that the Chadleigh family moved into Bracketts a year later than they did?’

  ‘Yes . . .’ Jude gave the problem a moment’s thought, and then shook it out of her mind, setting the blonde bird’s nest of hair quivering. ‘Sorry, I can’t think about that. My mind’s too full of what I’ve been doing this morning.’

  ‘Yes, I wondered where you’d been,’ said Carole, not quite managing to iron all of the reproof out of her tone.

  ‘I had a call from Sandy Fairbarns, my contact at Austen Prison . . .’

  ‘Has Mervyn Hunter been found?’

  Jude raised a plump hand. ‘All in good time. She put me in touch with a friend of Mervyn. Down’s syndrome boy called Jonny Tyson, who works as a Volunteer up at Bracketts.’

  ‘I remember meeting him. He was the one who actually uncovered the skull in the kitchen garden.’

  ‘Right, Carole. That’s him. Anyway, Sandy thought Jonny might have some idea where Mervyn was, so I went to see him.’

  ‘And did you get anything useful?’

  ‘Nothing absolutely definite, but I’m pretty certain Mervyn spent last Thursday – and quite possibly Friday – at Bracketts.’

  ‘If he was there on Friday . . .’

  ‘Exactly, Carole.’ Jude grimaced. ‘Maybe Graham Chadleigh-Bewes has to relinquish his Prime Suspect status.’

  ‘But I thought you said you couldn’t imagine—’

  ‘Oh no, I’m sure Mervyn didn’t do it, but I’m not sure the police are likely to be so imaginative. They tend to think in pretty straight lines. If you have a convict
ed murderer at a scene of crime – and you happen to know that that murderer has a particular dislike of the victim . . .’ She completed the logic with an eloquent shrug.

  As the revelations built up, a gleam of excitement grew in Carole’s grey eyes. She had almost forgotten Laurence Hawker was in the room. She and Jude were together again on an investigation. ‘So where did Mervyn hide at Bracketts?’

  ‘Don’t know. Jonny wouldn’t tell me. Or, to be more accurate, I don’t think he actually knew.’

  ‘The Priest’s Hole?’

  ‘I know it was designed as a hiding place, but it’s a pretty obvious one. Every visitor to Bracketts has it pointed out to them.’

  ‘But the house was closed on Thursday and Friday, after the press got hold of the story of the body in the kitchen garden.’

  ‘I know that, Carole, but there were still staff and people around. Maybe Mervyn could have actually spent the night there, but during the daytime he must’ve been somewhere else.’

  ‘Anyway . . .’ Jude sighed wearily, ‘it may all turn out to be academic. From our point of view at least. If they’re interested, I’m sure the police will be able to persuade Mervyn to tell them himself where he spent the time.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They’ve caught him.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. Had a tip-off from someone who’d seen a suspicious figure skulking round a remote barn up on the Downs. Mervyn Hunter’s back in custody.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘The police were only just behind me in visiting Jonny Tyson. I was just leaving when one of the detectives took a call on his mobile. It was the news about Mervyn’s recapture.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He didn’t make any trouble, apparently. Gave himself up as meekly as a lamb.’