A Very Private Murder

by Stuart Pawson

‘We are,’ I replied. ‘You do your measurements, or whatever, and I’ll sit on a stone and cogitate. It’s that way.’

  We strode off along the lane I’d followed Toby down, nine nights earlier. The freshness of the morning was turning into a warm day, and the burbling of a distant lawnmower explained the smell of cut grass that followed us.

  ‘It was the Enclosures Act did it,’ Dave informed me.

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Got rid of the people. Back in the sixteenth century all the peasants had their own little allotments and got on as merry as pigs in muck, give or take the odd plague or Black Death. They grew wheat and had home-made bread every day. Delicious.’

  ‘For every meal,’ I suggested.

  ‘Well, yes, but they got by. Then Mr Brutal Landowner worked out that he’d make a lot more money out of keeping sheep, without all the unpleasantness of collecting taxes from the common people. So he drove them off the land and bulldozed their cottages.’

  ‘They had bulldozers, back then?’

  ‘Very primitive ones.’

  ‘Of course. Left behind by the Romans, perhaps.’

  ‘Could be. So now only a couple of families were kept on, to work as shepherds, with no land of their own, and the landowner was freed of all the hassle he’d had before. And nobody was snaffling his deer and pheasants every night.’

  ‘They had pheasants?’

  ‘Hmm, possibly not. Rabbits, though.’

  ‘They definitely had rabbits. If we meet Mr Curzon you’ll try not to bring up the depopulation of the countryside, won’t you, please? It could be a touchy subject.’

  ‘I’ll try not to.’

  ‘Good. Turn left, through that gate.’ It looked benign in the sunshine; had lost the air of spookiness that enveloped it on my last visit. ‘This is it,’ I said.

  Dave was impressed. Most of the ones he’d seen were simply grid references on a map, with little to show that a community had once lived, played, argued and dreamt there. They’d been moved on and then the very stones they’d owned were taken away to build a bigger house for the master, and stables for his horses and cattle. When he’d cast his expert eye over the place I said: ‘The rabbits are through there. It’s called Coneywarren Field.’

  ‘This way?’ He pointed to a narrow path that cut through the overgrown strip of wood that separated the two fields.

  ‘Yep.’ I stepped after him, dragging through the brambles that covered the track, dodging the odd branch that he let fly back. Suddenly he stopped and raised an arm. ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘I can hear voices.’

  I could hear them too. Or perhaps one voice, muttering something unintelligible, over and over again. I gestured for him to move on, and in a few seconds we were on the edge of the clearing known as Coneywarren Field.

  Toby was wearing cut-off dungarees and a T-shirt that made her look like a hillbilly. Her back was towards us and she was attacking the ground with a garden rake. After a while she dropped the rake and gathered up a bundle of rubbish that she’d produced, and all the time she was muttering to herself: ‘Bastards, bastards’ – word I didn’t catch – ‘bastards.’ She shoved the rubbish into a bin liner and picked up the rake again.

  ‘Toby,’ I said, but she didn’t hear me. ‘Toby!’ Louder this time, and she spun round, her empty expression turning to shock as she recognised me. I walked over to her, Dave following, and put my hands on her sparrow-boned shoulders. Her face was distorted with hatred and betrayal, her bottom lip trembling, and she’d aged thirty years in the few days since I’d last seen her.

  ‘What is it, Toby?’ I asked. ‘What’s upsetting you?’

  ‘Look,’ she replied. ‘They’ve trashed it. Look at all the rubbish. And they’ve pulled Mummy’s tree over. What will I tell Daddy? He mustn’t see it like this. He mustn’t.’ She started to cough, and we both gave her tissues, but there was little else I could do for her except watch, helplessly, willing her to pull through it, paralysed by my inadequacies.

  Dave did better. He enveloped her in his arms and told her she’d be all right. ‘Take it easy,’ he whispered. ‘You’ll be OK. Everything is fine. Breathe through your mouth. That’s the way. Big breaths … in … and out … in … and out.’ After a few minutes the convulsions subsided and Toby looked more like her old self. Dave relaxed his grip on her.

  I cast a glance over the place and saw what she meant. Someone had held a party, complete with bonfire, takeaway pizzas, and copious quantities of Foster’s and alcopop. The evidence was spread about for all to see. Not content with having a good time, they’d pulled over the substantial silver birch tree that had been growing in the middle of the clearing. As I looked I realised we were standing in the middle of a stone circle, a miniature version of Avebury. The tree, I remembered, was planted over Toby’s mother’s final resting place. No wonder she had murder in her heart; I was feeling the same.

  ‘Let’s sit down,’ I said, and led her over to the same log we leant against before. ‘Don’t worry about your daddy,’ I told her. ‘He’ll be more upset to see you like this. He’ll be OK, I promise you. Don’t worry about him.’

  Dave had followed us. ‘This is Mr Sparkington,’ I said. ‘He’s a detective, too.’

  Toby held out a solemn hand and big Dave shook it. ‘Are you Charlie’s boss?’ she asked.

  ‘Only on a Thursday,’ he told her.

  ‘That’s today.’

  ‘I know. That’s why he’s so grumpy.’

  ‘Ah! You’re having me on.’ There was just a flash of the old Toby as she jousted with him. ‘Have you ever done a hundred and twenty-five in a cop Volvo?’

  ‘No. That’s too fast for me.’

  They were getting on well, so I drifted off out of earshot and dialled Curzon’s mobile. He was in the greenhouse, planting up hanging baskets, and thought Toby was in her room.

  ‘What days does she go to school?’ I asked, after I’d filled him in with the morning’s bad news.

  ‘She tries to go Monday, Tuesday and possibly Wednesday, but doesn’t always make it. Apart from anything else she can’t run about like the other kids, and it frustrates her. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays she has a tutor for an hour or two. It’s maths for her this afternoon. She’s doing well, keeping up, no bother. Toby’s a competitive little devil, doesn’t like being beaten.’

  ‘I need to talk to her, with your permission and in your presence, if that’s OK. We’ll keep it light, won’t put her on the spot.’

  ‘That’s fine, Charlie. When were you thinking of?’

  ‘In about twenty minutes? In your kitchen?’

  ‘Oh, as soon as that. Right, we’ll see you there. Um, can I have a word with her first, just to reassure her?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Grizzly joined us in the kitchen, which was a pleasant surprise. Toby had gone to fetch her father and we sat in silence for a while, after I’d described what we’d found and told her how upset Toby had been, and how worried she was that her father would see the clearing in its trashed state. I sipped my coffee and wished I had a big comfortable kitchen like this one, with a rocking chair and top-notch hi-fi system, and an American fridge filled with cheap white wine and frozen curries. I could get used to this, I thought.

  I said: ‘Are you working at the hospital today, Miss Curzon?’

  She gave me a sideways look that I interpreted as: ‘What’s with this “Miss Curzon”?’ What she actually said was: ‘Yes, Inspector Priest. I’m on the mid-afternoon shift all week.’

  I told her about Dave’s interest in vanished villages, courtesy of Sophie, and she suggested he bring her along sometime, to see what she could tell them about it. The local history society wanted to excavate the site but their expertise was questionable and a competent job couldn’t be guaranteed. James Curzon came in, with Toby, and we made room for them at the end of the refectory table. Dave jumped up and introduced himself.

  When our coffees were replenished, with orange juice
for Toby, I said, looking at Curzon: ‘We were discussing the medieval village but I couldn’t help noticing that there’s a stone circle in Coneywarren Field that could be much older. Is it genuine Neolithic?’

  ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m sorry, Charlie, but you’ve been duped. It’s early Victorian, probably built to provide some work during a bad time. Soldiers returning from the Napoleonic wars, something like that.’

  ‘Or to ease the landowner’s conscience,’ Ghislaine suggested, ‘after they’d turfed all the peasants off the land.’

  Toby told us it was a folly, and the twelve stones represented the twelve Apostles, or the numbers on a clock face, or they just happened to have available twelve stones of the right size, depending on your beliefs.

  ‘We turfed nobody off the land,’ Curzon told us, ‘although you’d have difficulty convincing some of the villagers of that. The house came into Curzon hands in about 1890, at the market price.’

  I turned to his younger daughter. ‘How are you feeling now, Toby?’ I asked. ‘You had us really worried, back there.’

  ‘I’m all right. Thank you for looking after me.’

  ‘That was my trusty assistant.’ ‘Did you have your medication with you?’ Ghislaine asked.

  ‘No. I haven’t needed it for ages. It was only because of … because of …’

  I said: ‘Because you were upset by what you found.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Which brought us neatly round to where we wanted to be. I said: ‘It looked as if there’d been a party. Were you invited?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘Was it your friends who held it?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘The badger protection people?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘But they didn’t invite you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So how did you learn about it?’

  ‘Aspen told me.’

  ‘Aspen?’ I queried.

  ‘Aspen lives in the village,’ Ghislaine told us. ‘She’s a school friend of Toby’s, although she’s a couple of years older.’

  ‘She’s fifteen,’ Toby confirmed.

  ‘So when did she tell you about the party?’ I asked.

  ‘Last night. After I was in bed. She texted me wondering why I wasn’t there. Then she phoned and said she was coming home because a load of Newt’s uni friends had arrived and they were drunk. They were messing about and she was scared. And she had to be in by eleven.’

  ‘Was Newt there?’

  ‘Yes. She used to fancy him, but she said he was drunk and she’s gone off him. It was supposed to be his birthday party so she’d bought him a present, but he just laughed at it and wasn’t nice to her. She was frightened so she came home.’

  ‘It looks to me as if it all got out of hand,’ I said, and Toby nodded, staring down into her glass of orange juice.

  After a silence I said: ‘Aspen sounds as if she’s a good friend.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Toby agreed.

  ‘We like her,’ Curzon added.

  ‘Did she tell you anything else?’ I asked.

  Toby was still gazing intently into her glass, pretending she was on another planet and if she concentrated hard enough we’d all go away. Ghislaine put her arm around her sister’s shoulders, pulling her closer, and whispered something in her ear. Toby took a sip of her drink and placed the glass back on the table with studied care, as if it were a phial of some exotic brew that could burn its way to the centre of the Earth if spilt.

  ‘I phoned her just now,’ she informed us, ‘and asked if she knows Newt’s proper name.’

  ‘And does she?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did she tell you it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He’s called Oscar. Oscar Sidebottom. Stupid, stupid name.’

  We didn’t bother writing it down.

  Dave and I stuffed some evidence bags in our pockets and went back to have a more professional look at the crime scene. Curzon came with us. He very politely asked if he could and we couldn’t really refuse. He owned the place, after all, and he was interesting to talk to.

  We put on a show, just for his benefit, crouching over discarded lager cans, lifting them carefully between fingertip and thumb, looking for footprints leading into the bushes. Dave felt the temperature of the ashes, where they’d had a fire, which I thought a bit over the top.

  We gave most attention to the silver birch tree. It had been pulled over until the roots came out of the ground and it was lying almost horizontal. We decided that it might recover if it were pulled upright again and held by three or four substantial stakes. Curzon told us that the silver birch had been his wife Laura’s favourite tree and her ashes were buried somewhere under it. I wondered if Newt and his gang hadn’t known the full story and had been after her skeleton. In their drunken states it would have sounded like a merry jape to them, no doubt, but I didn’t mention it to her husband.

  As we set off back to the car Dave hung back, to have a pee in the bushes, he said, but really to leave me alone with Curzon. He caught up with us at the house and we shook hands and said our farewells. The tennis players could still be heard in the distance.

  ‘Learn anything, Tonto?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. It was a bit of an orgy. No wonder Aspen left early. I found a used condom near the path, and a needle. We’d better inform Curzon about the risk of needles before they do a clean-up. Did he tell you anything new, Kemo Sabe?’

  ‘Only that those tennis players we can hear are the sixth-form girls from the comprehensive.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Honest injun.’

  ‘In that case, do you think we should check that there are no undesirable middle-aged men paying them too much attention?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  They were a bit older than Toby, almost swinging themselves off their feet with rackets that were too big for them. Four were on the court, with a tracksuited gym mistress, and four more were standing outside the cage, watching the action. I didn’t notice Toby for a while. She was standing a little way away from the other spectators, with her back to us, her face against the wire and her fingers hooked into it as she watched them play. I remembered what her father had said: She can’t run about like the other kids, and felt as if I’d been run through with a bayonet.

  We had a swift half and a sandwich in the Alice, but a busload of tourists arrived before we could have a chat with the landlord and we left him pulling pints of Speckled Hen as fast as his arms would go. Down the road the vet, Martin Chadwick, was riding on his big lawnmower, cutting the grass around his immaculate ranch-style house. I parked off the road and we went to meet him. Chadwick killed the engine, removed his ear defenders and climbed off the fearsome machine.

  ‘That looks fun,’ I said, and introduced him to DC Sparkington.

  ‘My favourite job, chopping the daffodils down. How can I help you, Inspector, or is it a social call?’

  ‘A bit of both. We’ve just been to Curzon House and while we were in the district we thought we’d see if you wanted to apprise us of any sparkling insights you’ve had.’

  ‘Ha! I’m a bit low on sparkling insights, lately, but I make a decent instant coffee.’

  We declined a coffee but I told him about the trashing of Coneywarren Field and he was horrified. ‘Poor James,’ he kept saying. ‘Poor James.’

  ‘I believe you said you’d known the Curzons all your life,’ I reminded him.

  ‘That’s right. My parents were good friends with them. They were very kind to me. I was a promising tennis player but I had to go to York to practise, so James had the bright idea of building a tennis court adjoining the house.’

  ‘So it’s really the Martin Chadwick Court,’ I suggested.

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far. I played in the Wimbledon Juniors qualifying rounds a couple of times, but never got past the first round. There to make the numbers up, like most of us. Then, when I w
as fifteen, I started putting on weight and lost interest.’

  Dave said: ‘But you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren that you played at Wimbledon.’

  ‘Unfortunately not. The qualifying rounds are at Roehampton.’

  ‘Oh. In which case, forget I said that.’

  ‘It’s in good use at the moment,’ I told him. ‘The comprehensive school are practising there. Maybe your influence will trickle down and produce us a champion, one day.’

  ‘One day,’ he echoed, ‘and I’ll be making a fortune treating pigs injured in flying accidents.’

  We had a chuckle and bade him goodbye. In the car Dave said: ‘Sounds as if he was about as good at tennis as we were at football.’

  ‘Don’t remind me. What time do schools finish these days?’

  ‘All over the place. Why?’

  ‘We need Oscar’s phone number, then you can check the records, see if he’s had any contact with his father in Portugal. If that’s where he is. There’s a pecking order in the badger group: Toby’s on the bottom rung; her contact is Aspen. Aspen may have a number for Oscar. There can’t be that many rungs.’ I hit the brakes and dived into a lay-by. James Curzon answered the phone straight away. I didn’t go into details; just told him I’d like a talk with Aspen and was wondering if he knew her surname.

  ‘She’s called Smethick,’ he said. ‘Aspen Smethick. They live in the village, on Main Street, but I don’t know the number.’

  Ten minutes later we were entering High Ogglethorpe, driving slowly past the Boar’s Head, or the Whore’s Bed as it was known locally. You might not know the number, I thought, but I do. Number 22. Who’d live in a small village?

  Phoenix Smethick was bare-legged and bare-footed, wearing voluminous layers of silken kaftan held together by beads and bangles. Her hair was black and unkempt, falling loosely about her shoulders and a twisted strand of plaited wool sliced off the top of her head. She was a big woman, and the riot of colour added to her impact.

  ‘Mrs Smethick?’ I asked, wondering why she’d stayed with such a mundane surname.

  After the formalities and reassurance that her daughter was in no trouble she invited us in and the interior of the house was a surprise. It was normal. There was a three-piece suite with a traditional Chesterfield, a unit holding glassware, a bookcase and coffee tables. No widescreen television. Only the cloying odour of potpourri and perhaps something more exotic gave a clue to the tastes of the householder. The pictures on the wall were 3D collages constructed from natural objects and flotsam, made, I guessed, by her ladyship herself. And they were good.