Murder in the Museum (Fethering Mysteries)

by Brett, Simon

  A solid iron rod stretched the whole width of the ceiling. It was fixed in place by huge metal fittings whose ornate working, picking up the rose motif carved on the beams, suggested they dated from the time of the house’s construction. A very simple, but neat and effective feat of engineering.

  Though not given to flights of the imagination, Carole couldn’t help wondering how many Catholic priests had quaked down here in desperate prayer, listening as the sound of searching footsteps boomed around the house. Her excitement was diluted with uneasiness.

  Nor could she quite suppress a shudder of claustrophobia. Locked down here, she thought, you’d be completely at the mercy of someone else. When the floorboards were back in place, the locking mechanism could only be released from above. The cell would be the perfect place in which to immure an unwanted visitor. She wondered if its history had encompassed the slow death of some unfortunate who had offended one of Bracketts’ owners.

  To displace such uncomfortable thoughts, Carole turned the beam of her torch on to the far wall, to reveal a collapsing bookcase loaded with cardboard storage boxes. They were of antiquated design, probably thirties office equipment, and over them the dust lay as thick as felt.

  Carole wished she had gloves, but they were in the pocket of her Burberry, and she was too excited to bother going up to fetch them.

  She reached forward to one of the cardboard boxes, lifted the lid, and shone her torch inside.

  It was full to the brim of hand-written papers.

  The paper was unlined, and the further down the page the small awkward handwriting progressed, the more its lines tended to drift upwards to the right.

  Whatever Carole was looking at had been written by Esmond Chadleigh.

  Miss Hidebourne riffled through a neat box-file of letters, one of many, each labelled with dates and details of its contents. When they were finally handed over to the County Records Office, the papers would be in excellent order.

  ‘The same theme recurs in many of the letters, amidst a certain amount of Bracketts domestic trivia and news of old Oxford friends.’ The old lady held one out to Jude. ‘This’ll give you an idea of the sort of thing, Miss Nichol. Dated 1933, the year before Hugo Strider died. Read that paragraph.’

  Jude obediently followed the swollen-knuckled finger.

  I know I keep harping on about this, Gerard, but I do still feel huge guilt about Graham Chadleigh’s death. I have never been to confession about what I did. I know I should have done, and I know the confidentiality of the confessional is supposed to be absolute, but some deeds are too dreadful to be spoken. (A betrayal of my mental state, perhaps, that I, who have lost the faculty of speech, should use the word ‘spoken’.) It is not just the terror of the confessional that holds me back in this matter. There is also a promise I gave to F, that I would never breathe a word about it to another human soul. I cannot disobey. For so many reasons, F has power over me. He is perhaps the only one who knows the magnitude of the crime that I have committed.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ asked Jude, ‘that you have any idea of the nature of the crime which Lieutenant Strider committed.’

  The small, white-haired head shook. ‘No idea that I can prove, no. But it’s clearly nothing venial, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And in the heat of the battle, in a hell on earth like Passchendaele, with men armed to the teeth, all kind of things could have happened, couldn’t they? With nobody any the wiser?’

  ‘Are you suggesting that Lieutenant Strider murdered Graham Chadleigh?’

  ‘Well, it’s a thought, isn’t it?’ said Miss Hidebourne with a sweet smile.

  Carole was sitting with her back against the wall of her cell. Around her spread a litter of open, dusty boxes. She was totally absorbed in the riches she had unearthed.

  She focused torchlight on to a letter in the neat copperplate handwriting of Felix Chadleigh.

  Dear Esmond,

  I am writing this in confirmation of what we agreed last night. Your sisters will be receiving similar letters, and I want you to keep them in a safe place for ever. When I am dead, you will still be able to look at this, and remember the vow you made last night.

  We all know what the truth is, the new truth, the truth we will all stand by. Hugo, after some misgivings, has agreed to support that truth too.

  Do not let me down. Any of you. I am not so melodramatic as to talk in term’s of father’s curses, but if anyone in the Chadleigh family lets me down in this matter, he or she will earn my eternal hatred, a hatred which will instantly cut through all ties of parental affection and which – believe it or not – I guarantee will continue from beyond the grave.

  Your Father.

  What on earth could it mean? What was he talking about?

  Carole riffled through the contents of the latest box. She found another unlined sheet in Esmond Chadleigh’s distinctive hand. There were scratchings-out and words inserted, a draft of something he was working on.

  She read: ‘I’m writing to you at the request of my commanding officer who had a request from Lieutenant Strider for anyone who witnessed what happened to his men . . .’

  Carole heard a sound from the main Priest’s Hole above. Her heart leapt in shock, as she looked guiltily upwards.

  The beam of a strong torch invaded her hideaway, coming to rest on her face, blinding her.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Jude was thoughtful as she left Miss Hidebourne’s flat and stood waiting for her taxi. The old lady had, reasonably enough, not allowed her to take any of the letters with her, but given permission for further research visits if required. If he was fit enough, Jude wanted to get Laurence to come and look through the material. Though the image of him dripping his cigarette ash over the neat surfaces of Miss Hidebourne’s flat was incongruous, his instinct for research would quickly lead him to what was important.

  Jude had found some useful detail in the letters, and pieced together a kind of chronology for Lieutenant Strider’s life in 1917. Writing to Gerard Hide-bourne, he had told how he’d used his influence from out in Flanders to get a commission in his own regiment for the eighteen-year-old Graham Chadleigh. There were a few mentions of the young man’s officer training, details passed on in letters Strider had received from Felix Chadleigh, and the Lieutenant’s clear view that such minimal preparation was inadequate for someone about to face the horrors of the Ypres Salient.

  Then, at the beginning of October 1917, Strider wrote to his friend from Bracketts. He’d been given two weeks’ home leave and, since he had no close living relatives, the natural course was to spend that time with his old friend Felix Chadleigh and his family.

  Jude recalled how the letter had captured the atmosphere of suppressed tension in the house.

  Felix and Mrs Chadleigh are understandably anxious about what the future holds for Graham. I, knowing the full horror of some of the possibilities, exercise great control over what I say, trying to infuse into them a spirit of optimism about the War which I cannot really claim to feel myself. The younger children are in a state of high excitement, running round the house in endless games of mock-battles, in which Esmond is always the British hero, overcoming incalculable odds, while his poor sisters are conscripted into the thankless roles of Boche soldiers. I would find it charming, were I not constantly comparing their innocent play to the reality that lies across the Channel.

  There is no escaping the War, though some try. The son of the housekeeper at Bracketts, a lad called Pat Heggarty who worked as a stable-boy here, received his papers last week. Stories he had heard from the Front put the boy into such a blue funk that he ran away . . . the Lord knows where to. Living rough up on the Downs, I imagine, maybe with a rabble of other cowards who refused to answer the call of King and Country.

  The incident has put poor old Felix into a serious quandary. Mrs Heggarty has been with the family many years. She’s a devout Irish Catholic and a good worker; neither Felix nor Mrs Chadleigh has ever
had cause to reprimand her about anything. And yet can they continue to employ a woman whose son has offended against every moral principle that exists? Felix has not yet made up his mind, though I do not see how he can possibly keep Mrs Heggarty on under the circumstances.

  The days pass quickly and soon I will be back in Hell. At the weekend Graham comes home for two days with his family . . . oh dear, how nearly I wrote two last days with his family. I devoutly hope that is not the case, and yet when you have seen as many comrades as I have die horribly before your eyes, pessimism is a difficult trap to avoid.

  Graham and I both travel back to France on Monday. I doubt we will be in the same transport, but being in the same regiment, we will undoubtedly meet up on the other side.

  Needless to say, I have promised the boy’s father and mother that I will ‘keep an eye’ on him, though they cannot know how ineffective would be a whole battalion of guardian angels in the mud of Flanders. They are proud of Graham, as they should be. They hope he will cover himself with glory, and return home a victorious hero. My ambition for the boy is more modest – the hope that he will survive. I used to have the same lofty ambition for myself, but now I am so sick of the sight of death, so bone-deep weary, that at times I hardly care.

  I’m sorry, Gerard, an unworthy thought. Our religion warns us especially against the counsels of despair, and thank God my faith is still strong. If it had not been, my will would have been broken by the horrors I have witnessed during these last three years . . .

  After that letter, there had been a long gap in the correspondence between Lieutenant Strider and Gerard Hidebourne. It was not resumed until March 1920, by which time the doctors had done all they could for the crippled man and he was staying as a permanent invalid at Bracketts.

  From the moment this new stream of letters started, the guilt was in them. Jude had read a few more, but they hadn’t added a lot to the first one Miss Hidebourne had shown her. Hugo Strider was deeply troubled by something dreadful he had done, something so dreadful he could not tell his closest friend, so dreadful he could not even breathe the secret in the anonymity of the confessional. And the crime was in some way related to the death of Graham Chadleigh.

  ‘You’re not meant to be down there,’ said the owner of the torch. ‘Nobody’s meant to go down there.’

  ‘But I’m a Trustee,’ protested Carole. In the circumstances her assertion sounded rather feeble.

  ‘I’m coming down,’ said Graham Chadleigh-Bewes. And, with considerable puffing and wheezing, he lowered himself down the rungs into the cell below.

  His wide torch-beam sought out the opened boxes around Carole. ‘You shouldn’t be looking in those.’

  All Carole could think of was to repeat the fact that she was a Trustee, but there didn’t seem much point.

  ‘This material’s all secret. It’s been down here since Esmond died. No one’s allowed to look at it.’ He sounded as if he was repeating a formula learnt by rote, a pupil in detention reciting the school rules.

  ‘Do you mean even you haven’t looked at it, Graham?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s forbidden.’

  ‘Is this the first time you’ve been down here?’

  ‘Yes. I heard rumours of the existence of a second Priest’s Hole, but I’ve never been here.’

  ‘Well, as Esmond’s biographer, I think you should have been.’ Carole gestured towards the boxes. ‘I’ve only glanced through it, but the little I’ve seen suggests that a revisionist view of Esmond Chadleigh is at least a possibility.’

  ‘Esmond was a good man. He did his best, according to his lights . . . according to the values with which he was brought up. He never harmed anyone.’

  ‘He may not have harmed anyone, but he was certainly involved in covering something up.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Carole held out the letter from Felix Chadleigh to his son. Graham Chadleigh-Bewes’s fat face showed the struggle between two conflicting intentions. Then he made his decision. ‘I recognize the letter,’ he said.

  Suddenly he snatched it from her, together with some of the other papers she had been looking at, and stuffed them into his pocket.

  ‘You mean you have been down here?’ asked Carole. ‘You have seen all this stuff?’

  Caught out in his earlier lie, he nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’re still not planning to include it in your biography?’

  ‘Some skeletons are best left undisturbed.’

  ‘Some of them refuse to stay undisturbed, Graham. That one in the kitchen garden that Jonny Tyson uncovered, that refused to be undisturbed, didn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. But nobody seems to know who it belonged to. It was nothing to do with the Chadleigh family.’

  ‘No? That’s certainly what you wanted people to think. You wanted people to think the body was buried before the Chadleighs moved here. Which is why you falsified the documents you gave to Professor Teischbaum, to try to put her off the scent.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said sourly.

  ‘I think you were overreacting, Graham. Forensic science isn’t accurate enough to say exactly whether a body was buried in 1916 or 1917, so what you did was only going to cause a temporary confusion. The truth would have come out pretty quickly. All you achieved by your crude tampering with the documents was to reveal that you knew something about the body in the kitchen garden. And that you knew the body did have something to do with the Chadleigh family.’

  ‘Well, if it did, it was most likely the housekeeper’s son. Pat Heggarty. He went missing around that time.’

  ‘So how did Pat Heggarty come to have a bullet-hole in his head? Did one of the Chadleighs shoot him?’

  ‘No, of course not!’ Graham sounded flustered and confused.

  ‘All right. Let’s put that on one side for the moment. What about the other skeleton that refuses to stay undisturbed? Sheila Cartwright?’

  He shook visibly at the mention of her name.

  ‘What about her? Who killed her, Graham?’

  ‘The police have arrested this convict, haven’t they?’

  ‘They’ve recaptured him. They’re holding him in Lewes Prison. But, so far as we know, that’s just because he escaped. They haven’t charged him with murder.’

  ‘Only a matter of time.’

  ‘Do you think so? Did you know, incidentally, that the convict, Mervyn Hunter, actually hid down here after he escaped?’

  ‘Really?’

  Carole indicated the rug and candles. ‘He left those.’

  ‘Good God. How did he know the place existed?’

  ‘From some book he read in the library here, I think. But presumably you know the contents of the Bracketts library inside out . . .?’

  ‘Well . . .’ he prevaricated, ‘I can’t claim to have read everything.’

  ‘Tell me, Graham,’ said Carole, suddenly direct, ‘what did you do immediately after storming out of that Emergency Trustees’ Meeting on Friday?’

  ‘What the hell do you mean?’ He was full of a weak man’s ineffectual bluster. ‘Are you accusing me of murdering Sheila?’

  ‘I’m asking you what you did straight after the Emergency Trustees’ Meeting? If you have nothing to hide, I see no reason why you shouldn’t tell me.’

  ‘Because it’s none of your business!’

  ‘I may be being nosy, Graham, but I’m not accusing you of anything. If on the other hand, you don’t answer . . . well, that would make me suspicious.’

  There was a silence, then he put his hand against the suspended floorboards in the middle of the cell, and mumbled truculently, ‘I went back to the cottage and straight to bed. I was very upset. Anyone’d be upset if they’d just had their life’s work rejected.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Are you sure you went straight up to bed? You didn’t go into any of the other rooms in the house?’

  ‘No . . .’

  Carole pounced on the slight hesitation in his voice. ‘Did you go into the study, Gr
aham?’

  ‘Why should I have done?’

  ‘That’s where you had Graham Chadleigh’s service revolver.’

  ‘No, I didn’t go in there,’ he snapped.

  ‘So you went straight upstairs to bed?’

  He wilted under the ferocity of her gaze. ‘Well, no . . .’

  ‘Where did you go, Graham?’

  ‘Only into the kitchen. I got a tin of biscuits. I get very hungry when I’m upset.’

  Looking at the girth of the pathetic child-man in front of her, Carole Seddon could well believe that.

  ‘But tell me, when did you . . .?’

  Her words trickled away. A new panic fluttered her heart.

  There was a sound of footsteps on the floor above them. And of voices.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Jude got home to find that Laurence had suffered another haemorrhage. Since he was unconscious, he couldn’t argue about being hospitalized.

  She sat anxiously in a corridor, waiting for the news that he’d come round. Though in theory she knew the seriousness of his condition, the haemorrhage had brought home its implacable reality. The threat to the life of someone she loved took priority over the deaths at Bracketts.

  Jude’s mind was too full to think about the case. And if anything urgent came up in that connection, Carole had got her telephone number.

  The voices from above were those of Belinda Chadleigh and, surprisingly, Marla Teischbaum. Even more surprising, there seemed to be an atmosphere of considerable cordiality between them.

  ‘This is very good of you,’ the Professor was saying, as they approached. ‘I’d really given up hope of ever getting any co-operation from anyone at Bracketts.’

  ‘I think you have to be realistic.’ Belinda Chadleigh’s voice sounded much more focused than before. The vagueness had gone, to be replaced by a brusque practicality. Observing the displaced floorboards, she said, ‘Well, goodness me, not the first visitors of the day. Graham, are you down there?’