‘Good evening, Miss Grant,’ he said. ‘It’s Superintendent Pollard. I hope I’m not disturbing you.’
In the gathering dusk it was difficult to see her expression clearly, but he sensed sudden expectation followed by disappointment, and also some embarrassment. She regained her self-possession swiftly, however.
‘Superintendent Pollard!’ she exclaimed. ‘Why, what a surprise! Wait just a minute and I’ll let you in.’
Rather a long moment, he thought, listening to sounds of hurried movement inside the room. Then he could hear the dog being reassured, and a bolt shot back. The front door opened to reveal Davina Grant holding a golden Labrador by the collar.
‘Won’t you come in?’ she said rather breathlessly. ‘Don’t mind Rex. He’s not in the least savage once he sees we know people.’
Pollard tactfully admired the Labrador, remarking that it was good sense to have a guard dog in an isolated country house.
‘And what a lovely house it is, Miss Grant,’ he added, looking round the panelled hall and at the elegant curve of the staircase.
She gave him an arch little glance.
‘Well, we think so, you know. Actually it’s listed Grade Two. Not that we bother about that sort of thing, but when your family’s lived in a house for over two hundred years, you begin to feel part of it somehow. But do come into the drawing room.’
Amused by the Edwardian designation he followed, and got an instant impression of a beautiful room, also panelled, and with graceful alcoves on either side of the fireplace housing displays of china. He saw that an upright chair had been thrust back from a bureau piled untidily with papers. Beside it was an overflowing wastepaper basket. There were portraits, presumably of past generations of Grants, on the walls, and some fine pieces of period furniture about the room, but also a rather surprising amount of miscellaneous litter.
‘Do sit down.’ Davina Grant indicated an armchair, and sank into another facing it. ‘How nice to meet again, isn’t it? I do apologise for all this mess in the room, but it’s the Summer Fete of the Friends of Cattesmoor in a fortnight, and I’m simply submerged. It’s always held in our grounds, you see. Naturally I’m carrying on the tradition.’
‘The late Miss Heloise Grant was a prominent figure in the neighbourhood, I gather?’ Pollard asked.
‘Oh, yes. She was involved in endless things: the Bench, Church affairs, the W.I., the Museum and so on. And very much with the work of the Friends of Cattesmoor. She left the money for the opening up of the Possel Way, you know. It’s all left me with such a lot of responsibilities. It’s so fortunate that the Friends have a simply wonderful secretary in George Akerman — I mentioned him before, I think. I really don’t know how I should have coped with the Fete without his help. I shall certainly try to simplify things next year, but we both felt it would be more tactful to leave the organisation unchanged this year, as it’s my first in charge...’
As she talked on, flushed and bright-eyed, Pollard observed her with interest. Her pose was ungainly as she sat leaning forward with hands gripping one knee, and suggested determination and tension, he thought. And unless I’m very much out she’s in love with this Akerman chap, and for a moment thought he’d turned up unexpectedly when I arrived at the door just now…
He took advantage of a brief pause to ask if the portrait in front of them was the late Miss Grant. The change of subject was obviously uncongenial.
‘Yes, it is,’ Davina replied briefly. ‘It was done when she was much younger, of course.’
Hardly the portrait of a young woman, Pollard reflected. The face was squarish and strong, with shrewd eyes and a humorous mouth, but somewhat lacking in sensitivity. Apparently Davina did not take after the Grant side of her family.
‘Well, I mustn’t waste your time when you have so much on hand,’ he said, as she remained silent. ‘It was really your brother I hoped to see. There is a small matter where we think his help might be useful.’
He watched her as he spoke, and saw a sudden sharp focusing of her attention.
‘He’s out at a dance, and won’t be back until late. Can I give him a message?’
‘I’ll just scribble a note on one of my cards, asking him to look in at the police station in the morning,’ Pollard said.
As he wrote he was aware of her satisfaction.
‘I’ll make sure he gets it. I’ll put it out on the hall table, so that he’ll see it when he gets in. And now you simply must let me give you a drink or some coffee. It’s quite a way out here from the town. Did you leave your car up at the gates?’
‘I walked out. It’s a lovely evening, and I wanted some exercise.’
‘Walked!’ Davina exclaimed with exaggerated amazement. ‘But of course you really are a walker, aren’t you? Why, we might never have met otherwise.’
She was on her feet, looking down at him with a provocative teasing expression. He rose politely.
‘No, I don’t suppose we should,’ he agreed prosaically. ‘Thank you, a cup of coffee would be very acceptable.’
She turned and went out of the room, followed, to Pollard’s relief, by the Labrador. Making a grimace he moved quickly and silently over to the wastepaper basket.
At the top, and spilling over on to the floor, were roughly cut pieces of semi-transparent glossy paper. They were pale blue and appeared to have formed part of an architect’s plan. He hunted for bits with lettering on them and stuffed them into his pockets. Listening for the first sounds of Davina’s return, he hastily rearranged the contents of the basket, and then turned his attention to the bureau. A large pair of scissors, like one at home strictly reserved for Jane’s dressmaking, lay on the top of the heaps of letters and papers, but before he could examine these in any detail he heard a distant chink of china which sent him back to his chair. The next moment he rose politely once again as a trolley with coffee and cake was wheeled in.
He realised that to get the information he wanted it would be necessary to allow a cosy conversational atmosphere to develop, and endured being coyly fussed over as he was provided with refreshment. It was not difficult to introduce the subject of domestic problems in the seventies.
‘Oh dear, no, I’ve no resident staff,’ Davina told him. ‘There haven’t been any at the Manor for — let me think — six years, since an old retainer was pensioned off. But I’m lucky enough to have a real treasure of a daily. She’s called Mrs Broom! Isn’t it delightful? She comes for three hours every day, except at weekends. Of course she has to be fetched and taken home, but my brother and I manage between us.’
‘You certainly are lucky, Miss Grant,’ Pollard agreed, accepting a second cup of coffee. ‘I suppose you have to do quite a lot of entertaining, don’t you?’
She made a moue with her tight little mouth.
‘Not nearly as much as I should, I’m afraid, for anyone in my position, but I’m trying to step it up. Between ourselves, my brother isn’t much help to me. He really isn’t interested in anything but sport, and at the moment he’s simply absorbed in his engagement. Unfortunately Kate Ling hasn’t had any experience of normal social life, as you’ll have gathered for yourself, of course, so that doesn’t help either.’
Pollard made a non-committal remark while deciding how best to extricate himself. He fell back on the time-honoured expedient of looking at his watch and exclaiming at the lateness of the hour.
‘I must be starting off again,’ he said. ‘Inspector Toye will be wondering where I’ve got to.’
To his dismay Davina announced that she would walk up to the gates with him. As they set off, accompanied by Rex, he began to comment on the garden, and was astonished at the vehemence of her response.
‘It’s my worst headache,’ she said. ‘I can’t find the time to work in it myself, and anyway I’m no good at gardening. And all the help I can get is a tiresome old man for two days a week. But it’s got to be tidied up before the Fete. I’m not going to have people saying the place is going to pieces. I’ve
had to get hold of a firm that sends round teams of gardeners, and it’s going to cost the earth.’
Judging it expedient not to enquire about Heloise Grant’s gardening activities, Pollard held forth at some length on the difficulties of getting gardening help in Wimbledon, managing to make the topic last until they arrived at the gates. To his alarm Davina seized his hand.
‘It’s been wonderful to meet again,’ she told him with intensity.
Pollard contrived both to shake her hand briskly and detach his own.
‘And many thanks for your hospitality, Miss Grant,’ he replied cheerfully, ‘and for giving me a chance to see inside your lovely house. Goodbye.’
He strode off down the hill with a sense of relief, and did not look back. So immature and gauche, poor girl, he thought, and pathetic, too. Sex-starved and status-starved... But as he began to assess the results of his visit, she dropped out of his mind.
One thing seemed clear. There had been no resident servants in April 1975. Assuming there were no visitors, the household had consisted only of Heloise Grant, Peter and Davina. This could only suggest that Davina was a likely writer of the anonymous letter about the cleaning of Peter’s car during the night of 1 April. There was obviously tension between the brother and sister, but all the same, what could her motive have been? And there was also the point that much of the tension might be recent, arising from the engagement.
Pollard was suddenly struck by an idea. Suppose Davina had been hacking up plans for the subdivision of Upway Manor into two houses or flats, perhaps drawn up by Peter himself? It would be a sensible way of sharing their inheritance, providing each of them with a home. But it was easy to see that Davina would see in it a loss of her personal status. All the same, it really did seem far-fetched to suggest that she might be trying — very clumsily — to remove him from the scene by getting him involved in a homicide charge...
Anxious to see if the fragments in his pockets actually were plans, Pollard walked purposefully back to Stoneham, his long legs covering the distance so rapidly that several people stared as he passed. At the police station he sat down and began to fit the pieces together. His instinct to snatch up the bits with lettering on them seemed to have paid off. He was still staring at part of the mutilated heading of the plan when Toye came in.
‘If your wits aren’t completely addled after an evening at the movies, come and look at this,’ Pollard said, ‘I fished it out of Miss Davina Grant’s wastepaper basket while she was making me some coffee.’
‘Ethulon,’ Toye remarked, looking down at the table.
‘Come again?’
‘It’s the paper stuff architects draw out their plans on. I’ve got a brother-in-law working in an architect’s office.’
‘Quite right. And I swear that it’s a plan for converting Upway Manor into two units, to use the planners’ jargon: one for Peter Grant and his bride-elect, and one for Davina. And obviously she isn’t on. I listened outside the window to her chopping up the plan with a dirty great pair of scissors.’
‘What would the legal, position be, seeing the place was left to them both?’ Toye asked.
‘This is it. I suppose it would depend to some extent on the wording of the aunt’s will. I don’t know that it’s really very important from our point of view, after all. From what I gathered tonight she and her brother aren’t on the same wavelength, especially over his engagement to Kate Ling, but somehow I can’t see her writing that letter. If he’s mixed up in our chap’s death it’s bound to be darned unpleasant for her: not at all right for the Lady of Upway Manor image she’s cultivating so hard. On the other hand it doesn’t seem very likely that anyone besides the aunt and Peter and Davina Grant were in the house on 1 April.’
‘That throws us back on somebody snooping from the gate, then?’
‘Yes. We’ve only got to check up on everybody in the neighbourhood and all the Easter holiday crowd. We don’t seem to be making much headway, do we? Still, Peter Grant’ll turn up here at twelve tomorrow. I left him my card with a polite but very definite request. And I’ll be surprised if that old bastard Geoffrey Ling doesn’t make a move, so we ought soon to get that loose end tied up. If he hasn’t contacted us by the time we’ve had breakfast, we’ll get on to Akerman, just for luck.’
Toye looked at his suddenly dispirited superior, and suggested a return to their hotel for a beer before going to bed.
Chapter 7
When Pollard and Toye went round to the police station after breakfast on the following morning they found a good deal of activity in progress. Official and civilian cars were entering and leaving the car park, while inside the building purposeful footsteps echoed in the corridors. The door of Superintendent Crookshank’s office was half open, and he was visible in deep discussion with the chief constable. Round a corner they ran into Inspector Hemsworthy.
‘Fight at a back-street pub,’ he told them. ‘We get one every so often. Thugs from Wintlebury come over on their bikes spoiling for a punch-up. Two of our chaps were hurt this time, and one of ’em’s still in hospital.’
Pollard commiserated, and went on with Toye to their room. No messages had come through, so he proceeded to ring George Akerman. A quiet, rather dry voice replied by repeating the telephone number.
‘Mr Akerman? Superintendent Pollard here, in charge of the enquiry into the finding of the skeleton at Starbarrow. Could you spare me a few minutes this morning? I understand you’ve a very detailed knowledge of Cattesmoor, and it could help us to clear up one or two points. I can come along and see you, if that’s convenient.’
‘Quite convenient, Superintendent. I shall be working in my flat all the morning. It’s in the house on the works site in Old Bridge Street.’
Pollard thanked him, and said that he expected to be along within the next hour.
‘Misleading things, voices,’ he remarked to Toye after ringing off. ‘Akerman doesn’t sound in the least like a chap who tramps all over the countryside, or a successful businessman either. Oh, good morning, sir,’ he said, getting up as the chief constable’s head came round the door. ‘Sorry to hear you’ve got the aftermath of a Saturday night pub brawl on your hands.’
‘Rather a nasty business as a matter of fact,’ Henry Landfear replied as he sat down heavily. ‘We’ve got the ringleaders, though, and there’s a special sitting of the Bench at eleven. Would to God I were Home Secretary... However, you’ve troubles of your own. How’s it going?’
Pollard summarised the developments of the past few days.
‘It’s an unsatisfactory sort of case,’ he concluded. ‘I feel all the time that there are undercurrents which I haven’t managed to identify so far. We’re having a go at Peter Grant later this morning. I’m hoping Kate Ling will have done a bit of spadework there.’
Henry Landfear grunted. ‘For what it’s worth I can’t see young Grant being mixed up in this business. Not in character. Of course one can be devastatingly wrong about people.’
‘What do you make of his sister, sir?’ Pollard asked.
‘I’ve hardly come across her. My wife thinks she ought to have gone off to a job and struck out on her own. Bit overshadowed by her aunt at home. Not that Heloise Grant would have meant it. She was damn good to both of ’em. Their father died about ten years ago. And they’ve come in for a packet now she’s gone. No, even if the girl’s digging in as mistress of the house and whatever, writing anonymous letters to put us on to her brother seems a bit improbable.’
‘This is all very helpful, sir. Can you give us a line on Mr Akerman?’
‘Akerman?’ George Landfear paused to assemble his ideas. ‘He’s one of these conservationists: National Trust, Preservation of Rural England — the lot. Quite a big noise on the area committees. Locally he runs the Friends of Cattesmoor, especially now that Heloise Grant’s gone. All this is in his spare time. He owns and runs a thriving printing works in the town, called Letterpress. It used to be a one-horse show which he bought when he moved d
own here about 1960, I think. It’s a mystery how he gets so much done. Partly because he’s a solitary sort of bloke, I suppose.’
‘Is he married?’ Pollard asked.
‘Rumour has it that his wife walked out on him and he divorced her. He lives on his own down at the works. Well, I suppose I’d better be getting back to our squalid thugs. Glad to have had a word with you. You seem to have some useful irons in the fire. Let us know if you want any odd jobs done, of course.’
Henry Landfear lumbered to his feet and departed. After consulting a plan of Stoneham, Pollard and Toye went out to their car and set off for the Letterpress works. They found them in an area of small factories engaged in light industry on the north side of the town. The gates on to the site had apparently been unlocked for them, and they drove in past a small modern factory building to an adjoining and very ugly house of dingy red brick. The ground floor of this seemed to be occupied by offices, but a side door had a card inscribed ‘G. R. Akerman’ over a bell push. Pollard rang, and almost at once there was a sound of footsteps coming downstairs. The door was opened by a tall man in a pale blue drip-dry shirt.
‘Superintendent Pollard?’ he queried. ‘I’m Akerman. Come along up.’
Pollard introduced Toye, and they followed up a short flight of stairs to a first-floor flat, and into a large living room which occupied the full width of the house. Its main windows faced west with a superb view across to Cattesmoor.
‘You know, there’s a lot to be said for living right on the job,’ George Akerman remarked, as if reading Pollard’s thoughts. ‘It’s timesaving, and quiet as the grave here at nights when the lads have knocked off. Not a fashionable neighbourhood admittedly, but at any rate there’s room to move in these old-fashioned houses.’
Suddenly While Gardening Page 9
