Troubled Waters

by Elizabeth Lemarchand

  Pollard glanced at Toye who was composedly taking notes and wondered how he was reacting.

  ‘Have you any views on who was responsible for Edward Tuke’s death, Mrs Kenway-Potter?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘Why, yes,’ she replied, once again with the spontaneity that he had previously found convincing. ‘Now that he’s dead I don’t mind saying that it seems obvious to me that Leonard Bolling was — unintentionally. He’d already vandalised the longstone, and would see the notice just as another bit of my husband’s property he could smash up. I can only suppose that the police know something that absolutely clears him of doing it, just as the football fans were cleared. The fact that they didn’t take any action against him was one of the things that made me so worried about my own position.’

  Pollard let a couple of moments elapse and then abruptly shot his final question at her. ‘Just exactly what was the link between the late Edward Tuke and yourself, Mrs Kenway-Potter?’

  ‘I am ready to state on oath, Superintendent that I didn’t even know of his existence until we met that morning in the Green Man,’ she replied composedly.

  He knew that she had anticipated the question and had her answer in readiness.

  ‘I only wish,’ he said, getting to his feet, ‘that you had been completely frank with me. I must add that I am not prepared to leave the matter as it stands.’

  As he went out of the room followed by Toye, Rodney Kenway-Potter emerged from his study with an enquiring glance.

  ‘Want to see me as well?’ he asked.

  ‘Not this time, thanks,’ Pollard replied.

  ‘Have you got this ghastly affair at Bridge Cottage on your plate as well?’

  ‘Not at present, I’m glad to say. It’s on Littlechester’s at the moment.’

  ‘Well, I hope to God they get it cleared up quickly. There seems to be an absolute hoodoo on this village.’

  ‘Have you any personal views on what happened?’ Pollard asked as they made their way to the front door.

  ‘I feel pretty sure that things weren’t meant to go as far as they did,’ Rodney Kenway-Potter said, ‘and that the explosion was simply an accident. I don’t believe that whoever fired the place knew that there was paraffin or bottled gas just inside the kitchen. I suspect the idea was to give Bolling a damn good fright and see he got out all right. He was highly unpopular in the village as you know, and people were furious about his digging up Old Grim when the story got round. I didn’t — perhaps wrongly, with hindsight — keep it to myself. There are one or two chaps who’d be quite capable of taking drastic action when roused. No doubt Littlechester will get on to it in due course.’

  ‘At the moment the forensic experts are waiting to be allowed in to sift the wreckage,’ Pollard told him. ‘I think we’ll stop off and show a spot of interest.’

  ‘It’s a ghastly mess, and the house is beyond repair. I’ve no idea what the legal position will be, but I’ve decided to try and buy the whole property back. It was part of the estate until quite recently. Turn it into woodland again, probably. We can do without a momenta of the last couple of years,’ Rodney Kenway-Potter added, escorting Pollard and Toye to their car.

  A few minutes later they drew up at the roofless blackened ruin that was all that remained of the former attractive little early-nineteenth-century house. The back wall had partly collapsed and was being shored up to make it safer for the forensic experts. The roof and most of the upper storey had collapsed into the ground-floor rooms, forming a tangled mass of debris. The fire officer in charge was pessimistic. It would have to cool off overnight, he said, before anybody could start shifting it. Runnels of dirty water were still trickling from the open and badly scorched front door, turning the path into a mass of trampled mud. The garden was littered with broken tiles and bricks and masses of blackened paper, the remains of Leonard Bolling’s library. At intervals gusts of wind blew charred fragments into the river to be carried away under Lower Bridge by the current.

  Looking through a rectangular opening that had once held a ground floor window, Pollard and Toye identified the twisted metal skeleton of an armchair. Some bookshelves hung at drunken angles from a wall.

  ‘There was nothing we could do by the time we got here except keep the blaze from spreading to the woods,’ the fire officer said who had come up behind them. ‘We hadn’t wasted any time getting off and had a record run on a clear road. We slowed down for about ten seconds when we’d turned into the village road. The call was to Bridge Cottage, and we weren’t sure which bridge was meant. But there wasn’t any sign of life at the bungalow or the cottage on the right as you go in, and we spotted a glow further on and stepped on it. Nearly ran down a fool of a woman running like mad to see the fun. But we beat Littlechester to it, anyway.’

  ‘You’re the Wynford Brigade?’ Pollard asked.

  ‘That’s right. Littlechester turned up quarter of an hour later. They’ve a more powerful engine, but it’s ten miles further. Not that it made much difference. The local chaps had managed to get a ladder up to the old gent’s window but the smoke and heat drove them back. We managed to get the body out about midday. The ambulance men said fumes and the shock of the blast would’ve put paid to him, and it was very unlikely he’d have known a bloody thing about it.’

  Pollard and Toye went round to the back of the premises and found a police car parked in the yard. They learnt that the burnt-out house was being kept under observation overnight at the request of the forensic experts.

  ‘And local people might come pokin’ around an’ get hurt,’ the Sergeant added. ‘We’re not sayin’ anythin’ official about arson yet, but it stands out a mile to my mind.’

  ‘Well,’ Pollard said, ‘I suppose we may as well push on. Hardly a cheerful scene, and what a foul stink a fire makes. Hope you’ll soon be relieved, Sergeant.’

  He received a respectful salute and returned to the Rover with Toye.

  ‘I could do with a cuppa, couldn’t you?’ he said. ‘Several, in fact. Let’s head for Littlechester.’

  After they had been driving for several miles Toye asked him if he believed it was possible that Mrs Kenway-Potter hadn’t known that Mrs Fordyce had it in for her.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that myself,’ Pollard said. ‘At first it seems incredible, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s quite possible that it’s never got through to her. While she — Mrs K-P — isn’t at all the sort of caricature of a snob you’d see on the stage, she’s very conscious of being the Lady of Woodcombe Manor for all that. From what her husband said she seems pretty well to run the place. Didn’t you pick up her remarks about working in with people over village affairs, and not being thought patronising when she tried to help anybody who was in trouble? All a variation on the Them and Us theme, you know. I don’t suppose it’s ever dawned on her that anybody as obviously Them as Mrs Fordyce could think herself on an equal footing with Us at the Manor.’

  Toye, while asserting that the finer points of class distinctions were a bit beyond him, agreed that there could be something in all this.

  ‘As I told the A.C.,’ Pollard said discontentedly after several further silent miles, ‘what makes this bloody case such hard going is all the different motives that seem to be mixed up in it. Mrs K-P may have been afraid of something in her past coming out through Tuke which would jeopardise her family relationships and local status. Anyway, she felt strongly enough about the risk to attempt suicide. Mrs Fordyce, because of frustrated social ambitions, quite probably wrote the anonymous letters which drove Mrs K-P to try to kill herself. She’s limited enough to believe that if Mrs K-P were out of the way she’d automatically become the Queen Pin of Woodcombe herself. James Fordyce may have decided to eliminate Tuke so that the commission to investigate his family history would lapse, and something Mrs K-P would want kept dark need never come out. It could be that Rodney K-P had also acquired this knowledge, and that he and Fordyce were in it together with a common motive. Fordyce ma
y have wanted to protect Mrs K-P because he adores her silently from afar. Also, because he’s the sort of bloke who would take marriage vows seriously and remembers taking on his wife for better and for worse. If he suspects her of writing the anonymous letters he realises that worse could be pretty bad for her. And he may have another motive for clamming up on us: plain, professional pride. If he went off leaving highly confidential information about Tuke, a client, lying about, I’m sure he’d hate to admit it.’

  ‘And then there’s Bolling,’ Toye contributed, ‘maybe getting mixed up in Tuke’s death by accident because he was dead set on getting even with Kenway-Potter over losing the case. Not to mention village thugs with the motive of paying out Bolling for digging up that stone affair and being antisocial generally.’

  Pollard consigned everyone mentioned to perdition. ‘Too much to hope that anything will have come through from Hildebrand, I suppose,’ he added gloomily.

  On arriving at the Littlechester police station this prediction turned out to be depressingly correct. No message from any source awaited them. Toye collected a tray of tea from the canteen.

  ‘Well,’ Pollard said, pouring himself out a cup and pushing the teapot across to Toye, ‘we’ve interviewed every single person known to have been connected with this enquiry. We’ve waded through reams of gen. Now I’m simply pinning my hopes on old Hildebrand’s unearthing something about Tuke’s forebears that’ll link up with Mrs K-P. I’m convinced that’s where the root of the matter is. And I’m not sure that we aren’t making a mistake in concentrating so much on the Tuke side and not nearly enough on hers.’

  The words were hardly out of his mouth when the telephone bleeped. He picked up the receiver. Toye, watching with interest, saw him suddenly alerted.

  ‘Put him through, please.’ He looked at Toye, and eyebrow raised. ‘Hildebrand,’ he mouthed. ‘Hallo! Pollard here. Anything for us?’

  ‘Not what you asked for,’ came the reply, ‘but something I thought you might feel was worth following up. I decided to work on the Longshire births from 1917 to 1924 to cover the 1919 date you gave me. I unearthed something rather unexpected. On May the twelfth, 1923, Paul George Tuke, stationer, of 81 High Street, Waldenhurst, and Emily Jane, nee Simpson, his wife, produced a son. He was registered as George Thomas Tuke on May the fourteenth. Any good?’

  ‘It’s a lead. Possibly a valuable one. Stout work on your part.’

  ‘Elementary, my dear Watson. Want me to carry on to see if your John Frederick Tuke’s birth turns up? Perhaps I’d better go forward and back a bit prior to ’23.’

  ‘Yes, do keep at it a bit longer. Anyway until we’ve been down to Waldenhurst and done a spot of fieldwork. If we have any luck I’ll contact you at once, and then you can tackle the Amaryllis Hartley job. Did you get on to anything about those two chaps we’re interested in?’

  ‘Not much. The donnish type is quite well-known and called Fordyce, as you doubtless know already. He seems to have been working on a number of searches in the last six months, so I gave up at this point, thinking that you’d rather I got on with the Tuke business. Nothing definite about the country gent. He can’t go in much, from the sound of it.’

  They exchanged a few pleasantries and rang off. Toye, on being given the gist of the conversation, remarked temperately that it could be a breakthrough.

  ‘At any rate it’s given us something to do,’ Pollard said, beginning to stuff papers into his briefcase. ‘You go along to the hotel and tell them we don’t want a room for tonight after all. Pick up our bags and I’ll meet you at the car when I’ve let the people here know what we’re doing.’

  Superintendent Martin admitted to feeling envious. ‘At any rate you’re on to something that may lead somewhere,’ he said. ‘Deeds is out at Woodcombe trying to keep the Press at bay on the arson issue, and making phoney enquiries about whether everything possible was done to get Bolling out as a means of checking on who was around. It’s pretty hopeless, he says. Practically the whole village was milling about in the street and on the Marycott road in a matter of minutes.’

  Pollard was sympathetic. ‘Keep going,’ he said. ‘If you should come across anything that links up with our job you know where to find us.’

  Chapter Nine

  ‘Quite right to go down to Waldenhurst yourself,’ the A.C. said on the following morning after listening to Pollard’s report. ‘This Paul George Tuke the bookseller could quite well still be alive if he married young, and only too pleased to natter to somebody about another son called John Frederick who emigrated after World War Two and just faded out. Anyway, George Thomas, born 1923, should still be around or traceable. Waldenhurst has grown a lot but older residents have long memories, and names over shop windows impress themselves unconsciously on people’s minds, don’t you think? Once you’ve established that John Frederick Tuke really existed and wasn’t just a name on a faked passport, there’s a reasonable prospect of finding a link with somebody in Woodcombe... What do you make of this fire-cum-fatality down there? I’ve been expecting a formal application from Robert Gregg for you to take it over.’

  ‘I was half afraid it would have come in already, sir,’ Pollard replied. ‘It would have if the decision had been up to Superintendent Martin. I gathered from what he just didn’t say that it was Mr Gregg who wanted Littlechester to handle the job. I think he — Mr Gregg — has felt a bit sore that they missed out on clearing the football fans over the warning notice being taken down.’

  ‘I expect you’ve seen this morning that the Press has gone to town on the fire, with broad hints about arson thrown in? The fishing rights row has been resurrected, but they’ve been careful to make the point that the Kenway-Potters weren’t in residence that night... Who do you think was responsible — if it really was arson?’

  ‘Speaking without any detailed knowledge of local feeling, sir, I think there’s something to be said for the theory that outraged village patriotism was behind it, and that it got out of hand. Cumulative outrage at the way Bolling had behaved since he came to live in Woodcombe finally exploding over the fishing rights business and the vandalising of the longstone.’

  ‘H’m,’ commented the A.C. ‘Rum places, villages. Well, you’ll want to push off to Waldenhurst. Hope you strike lucky and arrive at last at the motive to end all motives.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Pollard replied gravely.

  Meanwhile Toye had been doing some homework on Waldenhurst. As they drove down, he told Pollard that it looked like being quite a hopeful place for picking up some gen about a family that had owned a bookshop there in the nineteen-twenties. The present day population was only just over twelve thousand, and it must have been a good bit smaller in those days. Small enough to be a community, in fact. Not on a motorway or main trunk road at all. More like the market town and shopping centre for quite a big rural area.

  Pollard agreed that all this seemed promising and asked about the police situation.

  ‘There’s a station,’ Toye told him, ‘down as not being continuously manned. They’re in the Rockwater area. I rang there when there was no answer from Waldenhurst and they were very helpful. There’s a sergeant and a couple of constables in police houses at Waldenhurst, but they provide routine cover for quite a wide area. Rockwater are sending an Inspector Forth over to meet us. I said we ought to make it by two o’clock.’

  Pollard gave an affirmative grunt and relapsed into silence. On the face of it the day was off to a good start. It was a perfect June morning. A recent rainy spell had freshened trees and hedges, and once clear of London’s tentacles you could catch intermittent whiffs of new mown hay and roses as the Rover swept past fields and gardens. Back at the Yard the A.C. had been in a good mood, and Toye’s researches gave ground for hope that the beginning of the end might be located in Waldenhurst. Pollard shifted his position at this point in his thinking. It was the prospect of what the end could turn out to be that was taking the edge off things. Perhaps the discovery of a link
between Amaryllis Kenway-Potter and Edward Tuke’s family startling enough to give her a really strong motive to put an end to his search for his forebears and surviving connections. It was undeniable that she could have slipped out of the Manor during the later afternoon of April the twenty-third and removed the warning notice on the old footbridge. And this was equally true of her husband. As Pollard visualised them both their context suddenly changed into one of a squalid sequence of arrest, trial and prison sentences. Not for the first time he was seized with a violent distaste for his job. He pulled himself up sharply. Edward Tuke had a right to live, hadn’t he? Toye was saying something — ‘...Waldenhurst once we get to the top of this hill.’

  ‘Fine,’ Pollard replied, a shade heartily. ‘We’ve made good time.’

  Toye, an experienced map-reader, was quickly proved right. As they came over the crest they saw a small town not much more than a mile ahead. It nestled cosily at the southern foot of the next ridge of downland, dominated by a fine church tower gleaming in the strong sunlight. The oldest part of Waldenhurst was clustered round it, indicated by close-packed roofs. Down the centuries the town had grown to east and west with larger houses and more open spaces. The expansion of the second half of the twentieth century was shown by terminal planned housing estates and a few larger buildings which could house light industries, Pollard reflected. They drove in through this recent development at the eastern end, and were directed to a street flanked by pleasant eighteenth-century houses. One of these had been adapted to serve as a police station. As Toye drove into a reserved parking space outside a tall burly man in uniform appeared in the doorway and came up to the car.

  ‘Detective Chief Superintendent Pollard, sir?’ he asked. ‘I’m Inspector Forth, over from Rockwater, and very glad to have this chance of meeting you.’