Stately Homicide (20 page)

If he hadn't bared his ruddy great teeth at me – the horse, I mean, not the eyebrows – I'd have asked him to do the same for me.'

‘Hm.' With his eyes on the house, Jurnet digested what he had just heard – or rather, allowed it to seep without conscious thought into that makeshift reservoir where random droplets of information accumulated like water draining off a roof into a cistern. One day, with luck, there'd be enough of the stuff to be useful.

In the brilliant light of late afternoon it seemed to the detective that he could count every single brick of the great south front of Bullen Hall, had he a mind to. The stone mullions round the windows shone white, the glass reflected patterns of cloud polished to as high a shine as the goblets set out on the sideboards within. Thistledown drifted down the air, and motes of dust that might, or might not, be all that was left of Appleyard of Hungary. Beyond the stone bridge that crossed the moat the shadowy courtyard hinted at mysteries.

A plaything, an outsize toy. Come time for bed, every one of those bricks must be put back in their box ready for another day's play. How Nanny would carry on if she found some of them still strewing the nursery floor after lights out!

Jurnet came out of his reverie and started across the gravel. Behind him, Sergeant Ellers was still limping. Contrite, Jurnet waited.

‘First Aid box in the car, Sergeant.'

The little Welshman grinned.

‘Only doing it to make you feel bad.'

In perfect amity the two moved towards the west wing of Bullen Hall.

Jack Ellers asked: ‘What's next on the list?'

‘We're going to ask Rapunzel to let down her hair.'

The elderly maid with the crustacean corset was not pleased to see them, and took no trouble to disguise it.

‘Madam is engaged.'

‘We'll wait,' Jurnet returned. ‘Please let Madam know we're here.'

‘Can't do that. And I'm sure I can't say how long she'll be.'

‘Then we'll just have to wait and find out, won't we?'

She showed them into a small room off the hall, and went away with an ill-tempered flounce of sateen, and a long, meaningful look round, as if making a mental note of the whereabouts of anything which might be worth pinching. Since the room was as bare of ornament as the rest of Elena Appleyard's apartment, it was a symbolic gesture merely.

Jurnet sauntered over to the window, pushed the casement open, and stood looking down at the moat immediately below. In shadow, the water looked impenetrable, black with a glaze of grey-green, like mould on old jam.

The detective made a face.

‘You'd never get me living in a house with a moat.'

‘Not to worry,' Ellers returned reassuringly. ‘Who ever heard of a moated semi?' He joined the other at the window. ‘I suppose, in the old days, they needed them for protection.'

‘Pongs a bit.' Jurnet wrinkled his nose and shut the window. ‘Now they've got us instead, eh? Police force, the modern moat. Not much cop at stopping you getting yourself pushed off the roof, but smells a whole lot sweeter.' He padded about the room a little, then demanded of nobody in particular: ‘Who's she got in there, for Christ's sake, she can't be disturbed?'

They were soon to know. At the end of the corridor a door burst open. A man's voice shouted: ‘Might have known I'd be wasting my time!' Angry steps stumped along the oak floor. Then the same voice again, nearer. ‘All I'll say is, you've had your chance. From now on I'll deal with this my own way, and to hell with the lot of you!'

Jurnet opened the door of their anteroom, just in time to find himself face to face with a square, tweed-suited man with an ancient tweed hat rammed down over grizzled hair, a nicotine-stained moustache, and a complexion whose probably natural floridness appeared enhanced well beyond danger point.

The man raised the heavy blackthorn stick he was carrying, and pointed it menacingly at the detective.

‘And who the hell are you?' he demanded.

Without waiting for a reply or slackening his pace, he pushed past to the front door: wrenched it open, and would doubtless have banged it shut after him, had not the maid, corset creaking, materialised from somewhere and gained command of the big brass knob without apparent effort.

She said, in the neutral voice of the well-trained domestic: ‘Good afternoon, sir.'

Whence, then, did Jurnet get the strong impression that the woman's voice was full of a triumphant, derisive mirth?

‘And to hell with you too!' cried the visitor, disappearing from view as the door shut behind him.

The woman came back into the room, so dour, so poker-faced, that it was unthinkable she could ever have been anything else.

‘Miss Appleyard will see you now.'

‘Well, Inspector –'

There was no heightening of Miss Appleyard's colour. The explosive departure of her recent caller appeared not to have disturbed one whit of that sequestered calm which was itself the most disturbing thing about her. As always – or so it seemed to Jurnet – an invisible sheet of glass interposed itself between her and the rest of the world.

The detective introduced Sergeant Ellers, who bent over her proffered hand in a way that would have had the boys back at Headquarters falling about, except that they would have done exactly the same themselves, given the chance.

‘Ah,' she remarked, when, her two visitors accommodated in the strange deckchair-like seats which were so seductively comfortable, she saw the little Welshman take out his notebook, ‘my words are to be taken down and may be used in evidence, is that it?'

‘Nothing like that,' Jurnet assured her. ‘It's purely a matter of getting one or two things straight so that we can go on from there.'

‘I can't say I'm conscious of having anything useful to add to what I've already told you; but naturally, if there
is
anything –' She broke off and regarded the detective with a cool, yet somehow secret, amusement. ‘Aren't you both bursting with curiosity to know the meaning of Mr Chalgrove's extraordinary behaviour just now?'

‘That wasn't Miss Jessica's father?'

‘It was. Richard – though, judging from what you've just witnessed, you may find it hard to believe – is an old and dear friend of the family. When he and my brother were boys together, they were quite inseparable.'

Jurnet suggested: ‘An English version of Mr Szanto.'

‘Ferenc has been talking to you about Kasnovar.' Miss Appleyard considered this intelligence before appearing to decide there was no harm in it. ‘I suppose he was – taking into account, of course, the difference in social background. Even in those childhood days my brother was a natural leader. Wherever he happened to be – Bullen or Hungary – there were always children to follow him about like the pied piper – into mischief, more often than not, I'm bound to say.' She touched her hair in a gesture that, in any other woman, Jurnet would have called coquettish. ‘Poor Richard. He's so behind the times. He's furious with me because I've given Jessica a job. He thinks it – demeaning. He can't forget his ancestors came over with the Conqueror.'

‘Poor Jessica, I should have thought.'

‘Would you really?' The woman's wide-spaced eyes examined the detective's face unhurriedly. To his chagrin he reddened under the inspection. ‘Jessica loves and is loved by a young man who is good-natured, handsome, moderately intelligent, and will, one day, be comparatively well-to-do. I can't honestly feel her to be in need of pity.'

‘I meant, as regards her father's attitude to her working. The anger – threats, you might say – it all sounded a bit excessive in the context.'

‘It must have – to an outsider who doesn't know what the context is. Whenever Richard sees me – which is seldom enough these days – he never seems able to restrain his anger for long. The fact is – it's too foolish, almost, to speak about – he's an old suitor who has never forgiven me for turning him down. Jessica is merely one more excuse for punishing me for the blow to his self-esteem. Quite absurd! After all, until comparatively recently, he hardly ever saw the child. Her mother, as you may not know, died giving birth to her, and Richard handed her over to his sister in Gloucestershire, an appalling woman.'

‘Did Mr Chalgrove never remarry, then?'

‘Richard? Oh no, never!' The idea appeared to amuse Miss Appleyard. Her youthful laughter tinkled dismayingly. ‘After Carla died his old nanny came back to look after him. He's always been her Master Dickie who can do no wrong. It's only because she's grown too frail to cope that he's finally brought Jessica back to live at the Manor, to carry on where Nanny left off. So, Inspector –' Elena Appleyard crossed her lovely legs with that hint of effort Jurnet found so poignant, and looked at the detective with calm anticipation – ‘now I've reassured you that Mr Chalgrove's childish tantrums are nothing to do with the death of Mr Shelden, perhaps we can get on to those “one or two things” which still appear to be troubling you.'

‘Right!' Jurnet marshalled his thoughts with some difficulty, wondering if Elena Appleyard had the same effect on other people she had on him. ‘About Mr Shelden – could you tell me this? If he
had
lived to write his biography of your brother, and, when you read the manuscript through, you found out it said some very nasty things about Appleyard of Hungary, would you have made him take them out?'

Miss Appleyard responded frostily: ‘That would be a very vulgar thing to do. Believe me, Inspector, I'm as well aware of my late brother's weaknesses as of his virtues; and I know which outweighs the other. My arrangement with Mr Shelden was for a biography which would portray Laz Appleyard as he was. As to what that was, I'm quite content to let history decide.'

A little overawed by her majestic certainty, Jurnet nevertheless persisted.

‘But suppose you came upon something for the first time, something you'd never even dreamed of? Something which might alter the whole picture you yourself have formed of the man? What then?'

Miss Appleyard thought for a moment, her gaze intent on her elegant sandals, bands of navy and white leather that complemented her simple dress of navy linen with a touch of white braid at the neckline. Her face, when she looked up, was young and mischievous, divested of the years.

Jurnet thought,
the woman's a witch!

Elena Appleyard decided: ‘It has to be something that happened in Hungary – something written in Hungarian, and never translated. I've been through all the papers in English. I know the best – and the worst – about my brother. Or so I've thought. Ferenc has been talking to you,' she said again. ‘Whatever could Laz have been up to?'

‘You could always ask Mr Szanto.'

‘So I could!' The window between herself and the world came down again, a little of the mischief trapped on Jurnet's side of the glass. ‘I've often suspected the Hungarian material might well contain what the newspapers' – a delicate curl of the lip – ‘like to call revelations. But it must surely have occurred to you, Inspector, that if I
had
been concerned to doctor the record, it would have been far less trouble to remove and destroy the tell-tale evidence than to remove and destroy Mr Shelden.'

‘I couldn't agree more,' Jurnet said. ‘Here's another of those little things. As I recall, you told me you took your little walk in the grounds at about 3.30 a.m.'

‘I did.'

‘Are you quite sure of the time? Could it possibly have been half an hour earlier – say three o'clock?'

‘It could not. The clock in the hall chimed for 3.30 as I unbolted the door, and it is an exceptionally reliable timepiece.'

‘Right. Next question. Were you still wearing the dress you wore at the party?'

‘No.' The woman expressed no surprise at being asked. ‘I had undressed and put on a housecoat.'

‘Could you please describe it?'

At that, she rose with the stiff grace which was her unique characteristic, crossed the room to the marble fireplace and pulled a bell-pull at the side. When the maid appeared, pointedly ignoring the presence of the two police officers, her mistress ordered: ‘Maudie, my housecoat – the Liberty's one. These gentlemen wish to look at it.'

From the time it took to fetch, Jurnet reflected, it might have been stored in some closet three courtyards away instead of, presumably, in Miss Appleyard's wardrobe, somewhere close at hand. When it finally arrived, it was worth waiting for. Even Maudie, the iron maiden, handled the cloth with something approaching tenderness, spreading the garment out on a chair where it lay in lovely folds of peacock and plum touched with light. The billowing sleeves and the square, low-cut neck could have come straight out of one of the Tudor portraits on Bullen Hall walls.

‘Was your hair up or down?'

This time Elena Appleyard commented lightly: ‘What a very odd thing to ask! My hair was down.' She raised her arms to the back of her neck, plucked out a pin or two, and her hair, heavy and lustrous, fell about her shoulders. ‘Like this.'

‘Thank you,' Jurnet said, shaken. The woman's beauty was almost beyond bearing. ‘The reason I ask is that we've had some reports of a woman with long hair seen crossing in front of the Hall at about 3 a. m.'

‘Oh,' she returned comfortably, ‘is that what all this is in aid of? That would have been Anne Boleyn.'

‘You don't really believe that.'

‘Don't I?' Elena Appleyard considered. ‘She does it most nights when there's a moon, so why should she leave out that particular one?'

‘I meant, a person of your intelligence. You can't possibly believe in ghosts.'

‘Of course I don't!' she agreed, with more animation than was usual with her. ‘Anne Boleyn, I said. In the flesh: not some ridiculous apparition.'