Corpse in a Gilded Cage (19 page)

‘Except for the intelligence,' said Medway. ‘Without that, I can't see her as the moving power behind the murder.'

‘Can't you?'

‘She hasn't got a brain in her head. She's so bloody ignorant she probably thinks Marco Polo invented the mint with the hole.'

‘You shouldn't confuse ignorance with unintelligence. Oh—I'm not saying she did it, but she has got plenty of intelligence, the sort that shades off into animal cunning. Notice how she got the point about the boy at once: where's he been recently? where was he on Saturday night? She didn't need time to get her ideas organized. Before very long we're going to have to ask him the same questions ourselves . . . What a pity we can't be flies on the walls at the cosy reunion chat of father and son.'

•   •   •

‘Well!' said Phil, as the thundercloud began to lift from the courtyard of Chetton, ‘you'd better meet the others.' He led Raicho over to the group on the lawn. ‘This is your Aunt Joan and Uncle Digby. This is your Uncle
Trevor, but since he's only four or five years older than you I should think that just Trev would do. This is Michele. This is Sam, and that there is Chokey. Old friends of the family.'

Raicho went round, silently shaking hands with one after another. His reception was mostly tight-lipped, though Trevor seemed to think it a great giggle, and carried it off good-humouredly. If Raicho registered that his reception was less than rapturous, he gave no sign. Perhaps he had expected nothing else.

‘Your grandma's in the house,' said Phil. ‘Having a zizz if I know the old girl. Well, Raicho: fetch your bag and we'll find you somewhere to kip. This place has got more bedrooms than the Hilton, though not so many mod. cons.'

‘Are you sure it's all right?' asked Raicho. His accent was pure Canadian, but his voice was low and unstrident. He was gazing round at the stupendous pile that was Chetton, apparently unable to take it all in except in stages.

‘ 'Course it's all right. This place has seen worse family rows in its time than this one, I can tell you. One of the Victorian Earls shot his son in the shoulder in a quarrel about gambling debts. Charming lot we spring from. Anyway, the place is so big you and Dixie never need cross each other's paths again. Might be a good idea to go in by the side bit, eh?'

So while the others evaported into the main block, in little knots, whispering, assessing the situation, and conspiring, Phil and Raicho fetched his bag from over by the lawn and made for the Blenheim Wing. The police contingent in the house had been stepped down, but a constable watched them as they prospected round, and he saw that Raicho's dark eyes were wide as saucers as he took in the immensity and pompous self-assertion of the place. Finally they settled on a large bedroom not too far from Sam's and Chokey's, an imposingly gloomy room once used by the seventh Earl (who had wanted to get as far away from his wife as possible, and who had dreamed here of his overmastering passion, which was to harry Mr Gladstone out of public life). Phil stood by the window, while Raicho unpacked with the practised skill of the young who travel light.

‘Most of it's just been washed,' he said. ‘I'd only recently got back home.'

‘See that,' said Phil, when the young man had put his basic travelling wardrobe in place, and had come over to the window; ‘it's all ours—' he pointed—‘practically to the horizon over there. All ours till the Chancellor of the Exchequer sends in his bill.'

‘Who's the Chancellor of the Exchequer?'

‘You mean you haven't got a Chancellor over there? Bet you've got the same thing under a different name. He's the money man in the government.'

‘Oh yes, we've got one of those.'

‘Well, he's got his beady little eyes on this place. Like to stroll around the ancestral acres while they're still ours?'

‘Sure I would. But aren't you tired after all that gardening?'

‘So-so,' said Phil, and then added: ‘Anyway, I don't fancy meeting up with Dixie just at this moment. If I keep out of her way she'll have to come off the boil. Should be nice in the cool.'

So they walked the estate in the early evening sun, to the chagrin of Peter Medway, who had hoped they would settle down in a room by whose door he could station himself. As they walked Raicho told his father about himself.

‘Mum married again—but I guess you know that,' he said. ‘It was when I was ten. He's an army guy: a bit rough, but we get on OK. I didn't change my name, though. I'm still Spender. Mum had another kid—a girl called Sally. She didn't want to saddle the next one with a Bulgarian name. I used to get ribbed. Anyway Mum herself has practically forgotten the language.'

Phil looked at his son. Short, self-contained, with the beginnings—young as he was—of a sort of toughness which Phil knew he himself had not had at that age. Not ruthlessness exactly, but still, Raicho was the sort of young man who would get what he wanted. Phil did not know what his son wanted, but he thought he might suit his immediate purposes.

‘What have you been doing these last few years?' he asked, as they walked down past the fountain (watched, had they known it, by Peter Medway, as well as by several members of the Spender family from the windows of the house). ‘I kept up for a bit, when I sent the payments, like. But they sort of dropped off, so I lost touch. Wasn't even sure of your address.'

‘Mum never complained about the payments. She was married by then. I finished school a year ago, and I'm planning to go to university—to major in computer sciences. I've taken a year off in between—sort of sabbatical. I've been working, then travelling since April. I had six weeks in Bulgaria. Mum had made contact with some relatives there. Great place, marvellous bathing. Then I took the ferry to Turkey, then on to Greece. It was fantastic—another world from Canada.'

And Raicho told Phil about his early years, his mother's working in a department store to keep them, her marriage, the moving around from army base to army base.

‘I'm not blaming you,' he said carefully. ‘But somehow I never seem to have had a settled home.'

‘Ever thought of trying England?'

‘Not till now.'

They were now at the end of the Countess's Mile, and it was perhaps not a change of subject when Phil stopped and pointed around him to draw his son's attention to the rolling acres on all sides.

‘It's all ours to right and left, far as the eye can see. Straight ahead there's bits that aren't ours. According to old Lillywaite (who's the lawyer chappy, and dry as last week's bread rolls) there was some sort of legal to-do in the last century, but we never got our greedy little hands on it. See those two scruffy types taking photographs? They're reporters, here on account of your grandad's murder that the police told you about. The land they're on isn't ours. Otherwise it's all Spender country. Sounds like a bloody John Wayne film, doesn't it?'

Raicho surveyed the expanse for some time, his eyes hooded, withdrawn. Then he could not resist asking:

‘What are you going to do with it?'

Phil smiled secretly. One more asking that question.

‘According to old Lillywaite, I haven't got any choice. He's probably right—he must know his onions. Still, I might manage a bit of fun before the Whitehall vultures descend. Whatever happens, I'll keep you informed. And talking of fun—I'm in the mood for a bit of fun now.'

And without warning, like an arrow from a bow, he strode out over Parson's Field in the direction of the reporters. For a moment or two, uncertain, Raicho stood and watched. The two reporters seemed unable to believe their luck. For a second they too stood immobilized, then one of them began frenziedly clicking his shutter while the other leaned across the hedge and voiced pathetic appeals to Phil to come and make a statement for his readers. It was an appeal that Phil showed every sign of responding to. It happened so fast that it was a moment before Raicho noticed that, from the adjoining meadow, the figure of a police constable had suddenly materialized, walking rapidly in the direction of the Earl, apparently convinced that he was going to leap over the hedge and attempt a getaway across country. Had Raicho looked behind him he would have seen Peter Medway running towards them with the same idea in his head.

But when Phil got to the hedge that divided Spender country from land not so blessed, all he did was extend himself over it and shake hands with the two reporters. The police constable stopped in his tracks, and so did Peter Medway. There was, presumably, no law against an earl talking to reporters on his own land. The constable lingered some yards away, his large country ears a-twitch. By the time that Raicho had strolled, somewhat uncertainly, over to them, Phil was on perfectly chummy terms with the two reporters, as was his wont.

‘What's it like to come straight out of gaol to this?'

One of the reporters was small and ratty, with uneven teeth and bleary eyes; the other was gaunt and clad in a disreputable raincoat, in spite of the sunshine. Both of them were indulging in an ecstasy of shorthand, flicking over page after page of their pads.

‘Well, it's a cut above Maidstone, I can tell you that,' said Phil, whose cockney accent, even to Raicho's unaccustomed ears, seemed miraculously to have thickened, as if he were auditioning for Mr Doolittle. ‘Though Daintree was a bit of a preparation. I used to dine now and then in the gracious apartments of the Guv'nor. Landing in the clink rather runs in our family, you know. The fourth Earl did a stretch in Newgate. Nothing serious—slight case of GBH, I believe.'

‘What are you going to do with the place?' asked the ratty little representative of the
Daily Grub.

‘Everyone's asking me that. Naturally I'm not making any decisions yet. Not with me poor old dad still on a slab in the police mortuary.'

‘But you hope to keep it on?'

‘That's up to them bloodsuckers in Whitehall, so far as I can make out. It's a crying scandal if you ask me. Three deaths within three months, and the Chancellor gets his seventy per cent cut every bleeding time. Dracula was never so thirsty. You ask your readers if they think that's fair. This house has been in my family since sixteen-something, and now it's got to go to some Yank millionaire, just because the Chancellor insists on his whack three times over. No—wait a bit: make that “some fat German industrialist”. Your readers would hate that even more.'

‘Your father was done in, wasn't he?'

‘Mind your language, mate. I've got my feelings. The police are treating it as a case of murder.'

‘Who do you think done it—did it?'

‘Naturally I can't talk about that. It's out of the q. that one of the family could have done it. The police are keeping me fully informed, and I'm
leaving it in their hands. They're a competent body of men, as I'm in a position to testify.'

‘Do you intend to take your seat in the House of Lords?' asked the cadaverous reporter, who was crime specialist of the
Daily Telegram.

‘You bet. Natch. I've always enjoyed a good show.'

‘Which party?'

‘Haven't decided yet. I'll give them all the once-over before I make up my mind. Might be a cross-bencher if it's not too uncomfortable.'

‘You wouldn't feel . . . out of place there?'

‘No, 'course I wouldn't.' Phil got expansive. ‘I think I've got a lot to offer their Lordships. Experience most of them don't have. I bet they debate the crime figures regular, and tut their lordly tut, but none of them's ever been in jug. Except one or two of Harold Wilson's pals, perhaps.'

The man from the
Telegram
laughed loudly.

‘So you think they ought to welcome you there?'

‘Why not? If you mean they'd be too toffee-nosed for me, you're out of date, mate. They're a mixed bunch there, and no mistake. Scouses, cockneys, and all sorts of scum like me. The only title that means anything any longer is Dame, and no one's offered me that.'

‘From what you said it sounds as if you think a lot about your family.'

‘The kids? Oh yeah, we get on fine.'

‘I meant the Spender family.'

‘The hancestors, so to speak? Well, naturally. We've been here a hell of a long time. Not that we've been all that distinguished—not like the Chur-chills and that lot. Not statesmen and the like. In fact, we've probably robbed the country blind in our time, and given bugger-all in return. Still, when you start thinking about it, here they've been—
we've
been—for centuries: Earls of Ellesmere, Lord Portseas. And then finally it comes to us . . . to me and my son.'

Phil turned to the sallow, good-looking figure at his side.

‘This is my eldest, by the by. The new Lord Portsea.'

Quick as a flash the reporters had their cameras out again, the shutters clicking, the spools whirring. Ten, twenty, thirty versions of the new Earl of Ellesmere and his son and heir Lord Portsea, to decorate the breakfast tables of the nation next morning. As they waited for them to finish, Phil, in a dignified, suitable sort of way, looked pleased with himself. And Raicho, very quietly, seemed to be purring.

•   •   •

Back in the Pink Damask Room the Superintendent was on the phone.

‘Yes . . . yes . . . That was it: white, pretty ancient model, I believe . . . Yes . . . Both of them? . . . And they've
what?
 . . . Oh Lord: it couldn't be better . . . What do we do? We send a man over, that's what we do!'

He put down the phone, and when Sergeant Medway came in a few minutes later to give an account of the Earl and the reporters, he found the weather-beaten old face of his superior wreathed in smiles.

‘Did you ever hear me abuse the Garda, my lad? Did you ever hear me suggest that the Irish police were not the most intelligent, conscientious, dedicated body of men and women in the world?'