Stately Homicide (11 page)

‘A good bit further back than that. You tend to think of it as a little bit of grass because the scale of the house is so great it dwarfs it. If it was your back garden you'd think it quite a fair size. I reckon Mr Shelden must 've landed there, and not in the moat at all; and – not knowing what he was doing, most likely – started to crawl across the grass, and rolled down the slope into the water.'

‘Poor devil!'

‘Yes, sir. We had a look at the roof as well. Acres of it. It's like another world. Shelden must have shot the bolts on his front door last thing, after the party. We had to get up there the long way round, through the main house.'

‘Party?' the Superintendent inquired sharply. ‘Are you suggesting Shelden may have been the worse for drink?'

‘I wouldn't have said so. He certainly drank a lot of wine, and I suppose it could have made him forget it wasn't safe to lean on the parapet, but it didn't seem to affect him –' Jurnet added with calculation – ‘that I could see.'

‘You mean you were there? I didn't know you were friends with the Appleyards of Bullen Hall.'

‘No more I am.' Jurnet had no heart to prolong the tease. ‘Never set eyes on 'em till last night. I just happened to be over there to see some friends of mine who live in the Coachyard, and Mr Coryton, the retiring curator, asked me along.'

‘Oh.' Coldly: ‘Enjoy yourself?'

‘Very interesting, thank you, sir. In the course of the evening Mrs Coryton happened to mention that she and Mr Coryton, when they'd occupied the curator's flat themselves, often used to sleep out on the tiles on summer nights. She said she'd left behind an air bed for Mr Shelden, in case he ever fancied doing the same. And, sure enough, we found the bed on the roof, pumped up, with a blanket and a pyjama top on it. So I reckon Shelden went over to the balustrade to admire the night view before turning in; leaned against it without thinking, and had the whole caboodle give way under him.'

‘Hm. Sounds probable. Soon as we hear what Colton's proposing to tell the Coroner we'll get out a statement for the Press. Well-known literary figure, the media 'll be down in droves. Didn't I read somewhere he was going to do a life of Appleyard of Hungary?' That was a funny thing. They had come, he and Ellers, down from the roof by the stair which led to the minstrels' gallery and so into the room where Anne Boleyn and her brother had once danced in passionate partnership; and from there across the little landing into the flat proper. In a room plainly intended as a study they had found Ferenc Szanto, the Hungarian, in the act of loading a number of files and cardboard boxes on to a metal trolley.

The man had shown no dismay at the detectives' sudden appearance; greeted Jurnet as an old friend, and acknowledged his introduction to Detective-Sergeant Ellers with a handclasp that made the little Welshman wince.

‘Good to see you again, Inspector!' Then, rearranging his broad features into an expression of appropriate gravity: ‘Though for such cause as I guess it must be – dreadful, dreadful! Last night so full of life, so full of plans, and this morning –!' The man threw out his hands in a gesture more Asiatic than European. ‘We are indeed the playthings of fate, alas!'

‘Alas it is and no mistake,' Jurnet agreed. ‘May I ask how you came to know about Mr Shelden?'

‘Elena told me, is how. Is why else am I here?' The Hungarian looked at the detective with a childlike confidence that nothing he said would be taken amiss. ‘Elena says to me the police are bound to come and poke about, and they are so clumsy they will mess up all the papers she has put into proper order with so much trouble. So I am to go quick and bring them all back to her before the police arrive, and she will put them away until she finds another writer to write the life of Appleyard of Hungary.' He finished: ‘Myself, I think she will have to wait for a long time.'

‘I should have thought people would be falling over themselves applying for the job.'

‘Elena does not want just people. She looks for somebody special who may not be there to be found.' The Hungarian lifted a box off the desk which was the principal piece of furniture in the pleasant, oak-panelled room. ‘You permit me to remove, as Elena wishes? They have, after all, been here for one day only. They cannot, as you say, be evidence.'

Perversely, because well as he understood Miss Appleyard's strictures on the police he could not, for that very reason, let her off scot-free, Jurnet said, in his best TV cop manner: ‘Nothing must be taken away, sir, till we've completed our inquiries. In the circumstances, I won't ask you to unload that trolley. Just stick it over there, in the corner. Leave everything else exactly as it is. And tell Miss Appleyard we shan't poke about a minute longer than we can help.' The detective looked appraisingly at the large, lumbering figure in front of him. ‘About that life of Appleyard. Aren't you the one should be doing it by rights? You were with him in Hungary. Coming from you it'd be first-hand.'

‘Words!' Ferenc Szanto exclaimed, as if the other had just demanded of him something utterly preposterous. ‘I am a blacksmith. If I have bad iron I throw it away, but who throws away bad words? I am afraid of words that tell falsehood and deceit.'

‘Words don't have to be lies. They can be truth as well.'

‘Then I am even more afraid.'

‘I wonder who they'll get instead,' the Superintendent ruminated aloud. ‘The book should be a sure-fire bestseller, judging by some of the stories about Appleyard of Hungary one still hears going the rounds. What they say about him in Budapest I've no idea; but here in Norfolk, if a quarter of the tales they tell are true, King Solomon and Don Juan put together weren't in the same league. Some of the women must still be alive, though. So it probably couldn't be published, anyway.'

‘Miss Appleyard, his sister, seemed to think Mr Shelden's was to have been the definitive biography.'

‘She may not have had a clue as to what her brother was up to.'

‘Shouldn't have thought, myself, there was much escaped Miss Appleyard.'

‘Ah,' said the Superintendent sourly. ‘I'd forgotten you'd met the lady.'

The phone rang, and the Superintendent, taking it off the hook, listened a moment; and then signalled to the other two, who were moving unobtrusively towards the door, to stay.

‘Yes,' he said quietly into the mouthpiece, and occasionally: ‘I see.' As the one-sided conversation prolonged itself, he printed the words GRASS and then BLOOD in capitals on his desk blotter, embellishing them with scrolls and curlicues. ‘Fracture dislocation at level C 5-6. Right –' He wrote that on the blotter, too. When, after a final ‘Yes', he hung up, he sat for a little in silence, looking down at his handiwork.

At last he said: ‘Colton says Shelden died from drowning – but only just. If he hadn't drowned, he'd have given up the ghost within minutes from the multiple fractures and internal injuries – the details of which I'll spare you for the moment – which, until you turned up with that fingertip and Forensic confirmed that it was Shelden's blood on the grass, Colton assumed to be the result of falling from a considerable height into a body of water nowhere deeper than four feet six.'

He paused, positively inviting Jurnet's inevitable question: ‘What were Dr Colton's second thoughts?'

‘Submersion in the moat for some hours – Colton estimates the time of death to be between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. – coupled with the voracious and undiscriminating appetite of the eels, have between them, as the good doctor was at pains to stress, not made his task any easier –' The Superintendent broke off again; added some extra decoration to the word BLOOD.

Jack Ellers offered: ‘With Dr Colton there's always something.'

‘Agreed. But today, I'd say, wouldn't you, that he had a point. He says the man's spinal cord was fractured. If I follow him correctly, cervicle 6 had been slipped completely across cervicle 5, which, in layman's English, as Dr Colton was at pains to translate, means that Shelden must have been completely paralysed by the fall.' The Superintendent waited to let the full consequences sink in; then, in a voice carefully devoid of nuance, spelled them out nevertheless. ‘It would have been absolutely out of the question for Shelden, in the condition he was in as a result of that fall, to get himself across that stretch of grass and into the moat.'

‘Then –'

‘Quite right,' the Superintendent pronounced encouragingly. ‘Then somebody must have done it for him, mustn't he?'

‘I've just had an idea,' Sergeant Ellers announced, as he turned the Rover out of the road, through the magnificent entrance gates of Bullen Hall, and slowed down to a walking pace to accommodate the sightseers, bedecked with cameras or encumbered with small children, who surged backwards and forwards across the gravelled driveway. ‘What say we go to the National Trust and make them an offer? They lay on the stately home, and for 20% of the increased takings we provide the corpse. What do you think?'

Jurnet in the passenger seat looked about without committing himself. Whatever else you could say about murder, it was certainly good for business. Good for fish, too, judging by the family groups hanging perilously over the moat, hoping to tempt the eels from their lairs with offerings of everything from half-eaten sandwiches to worms dangled on a string. Good for newspaper men enjoying a day out in the country; and for telly reporters posed fetchingly against ancient walls and speaking to camera in the slightly breathless voices they affected when they had nothing to report except the fact that there was nothing to report.

Good for everybody, except the poor bugger lying in the morgue. Jurnet frowned. If truth were told, he hadn't taken much of a shine to Chad Shelden, alive. Dead was another matter. Someone had to protect the dead man's interests. He certainly wasn't in any position to do it himself.

‘Why the hell did that blasted handyman and the cleaning lady have to let on about the eels? The papers have had a field day.'

‘Only human nature. Keep something like that bottled up inside you, you'll end up in the loony-bin. You have to let it all come out. Very cathartic. Like Syrup of Figs.'

‘Thank you, Dr Freud!' Jurnet gave his colleague an ironic pat on the knee, released his seat belt, and got out of the car. A little girl holding a completed daisy chain looked up at him and asked: ‘Can you lift me up, please? I want to put it on the cow.'

Jurnet obediently picked up the child and held her while she carefully worked the floral necklace over the head of one of the pair of bulls guarding the bridge over the moat.

‘There! Doesn't she look pretty?'

‘Beautiful!' The detective lowered the child to the ground. ‘Are you going to make a chain for the other one, as well?'

‘I haven't time.' The little girl smoothed down her smocked dress, and made sure the ribbon in her hair was in place. ‘As soon as Daddy comes back with the lollies we're going to look at the eels which ate a man up.' She bent her brows in charming thought. ‘I wonder what he tasted like.' She ran off, calling back in childish glee: ‘I bet he tasted horrible!'

Elena Appleyard said: ‘I really am put out about my papers.'

‘You'll have them back,' Jurnet assured her, ‘the minute our people have finished. They're quite safe, I promise you.'

‘So I keep telling myself,' the woman came back, her calm presence contradicting the agitation to which she laid claim. ‘Yet I feel very uneasy not to have them in my hands, now that the flat's unoccupied. It isn't as if there are any copies.'

‘Your Hungarian friend was a bit glum we turned up when we did.'

‘Ferenc?' She uttered the name in a tone which made plain both her dissatisfaction with the man and with the status the detective had accorded him. ‘It was all his doing they were there in the first place. I had intended to give Mr Shelden a few days to settle in, before unloading them on to him, but Ferenc persuaded me –'

She crossed her long, elegant legs, and uncrossed them again. With the midday sun full on her face, Elena Appleyard looked older than she had the night before. Older and more beautiful: every line a positive statement to the effect that, however it might be with others, she was imperishable.

A lesser mortal, thought Jurnet, a woman especially, would have chosen a chair out of the light. Elena Appleyard sat in its full glare, as if to show that she had no vanity.

Unless it were a subtle form of vanity, to make such a point of having none.

The conviction that he would never understand this extraordinary woman made the detective feel clumsy and ill at ease; and the room in which she received him completed his disorientation. Shown in by an elderly maid encased in a dress of some shiny black material which highlighted every whalebone and suspender of her old-fashioned corset, he had expected to find himself among the chintzes and little tables loaded with photographs in silver frames which, over the years, he had come to associate with country-house living. Miss Appleyard's sitting room at first shocked, and then pleased, by its almost complete emptiness. It was, one might say, furnished with space, as fastidious as its owner. Such pieces as there were – and there were few enough of those – were modern Scandinavian. A number of seats, resembling up-market deckchairs, were propped, folded, against a wall.

One such had been placed ready for the detective. That, to his surprise, he found it superbly comfortable, in no way allayed his feeling of being far from home.

As if she sensed his discomfort, Miss Appleyard said smilingly: ‘It isn't really so out of keeping. The Appleyards who first used these rooms, like everybody else four hundred years ago, went in for very little furniture. A bed, a trestle table, a few stools … How very sensible!'