Stately Homicide (28 page)

‘He'll be a Ph.D. yet!'

The woman did not deign to comment.

‘By then, too, it was coming down cats and dogs, and I thought, he's taken shelter somewhere that hasn't got a phone, and that's why he hasn't let me know.' Mrs Toller took a deep breath. ‘At eleven on the dot I phoned Miss Grant. Got her out of bed, but she was ever so nice about it once she knew who I was. She told me Percy hadn't turned up for his tutorial at all, something that had never happened before. She also said what a pleasure it was to coach him, and how one student like him made her whole job worth while. Wasn't that nice?'

‘Very nice,' Jurnet agreed. He noticed that Mollie had begun to tremble slightly, as if with cold. WPC Frampton, who had noticed it ahead of him and left the room, came back with a blanket which she draped round the plump little shoulders. The detective said: ‘You should have got in touch with me earlier.'

‘If he'd had an accident, I thought, the hospital would have been in touch. He always carried his Bullen Hall card in his pocket, the one they give out to the volunteers, so anyone who found him would know who he was.' After a pause: ‘If, on the other hand, he's out on a job, I thought, I can't help him.'

‘You know he's finished with all that!' Jurnet found himself coming heatedly to the absent Percy's defence. ‘Besides, I told you. Nothing's come up of any break-in with his signature on it.'

‘It was when I thought about the break-ins that might not have come up that I got on the phone to you.' The woman looked at Jurnet stonily. ‘Since we came here to “Pippins”,' she said, ‘Percy's become very handy with Do-it-yourself. Plumbing, rewiring the electricity – saved us I don't know how much.' After allowing time for the implications of this last to sink in: ‘I think after all these years he's learnt at last how to disconnect a burglar alarm without having the whole police force come down on him like he'd rung for the butler.'

‘You're only guessing.'

‘That's right.' Mrs Toller inclined her head in agreement. The trembling had become more pronounced. ‘Guessing that I see him lying with a broken neck under a skylight, or fallen down some cellar stairs, and nobody knowing a thing till they come to work in the morning. He may have learnt about electricity, but he was still the same old Perce, never put a foot right when you can put two wrong.'

Jurnet went over to the trembling little woman, and took her cold hands between his own.

‘What a carry-on!' he chided gently. ‘Look, Mollie, you know me. Whenever I caught Percy up to his tricks I ran him in – right? And much as I like him personally, if I were to catch him at them again I'd run him in again without thinking twice about it. But the way I've heard him talking lately – so respected, so proud to be at the Hall; studying for the Open University and all that – he'd never throw away all you've built up here for a few watches, a bit of silver he can't get tuppence for. Give the man the benefit of the doubt, for Christ's sake.'

Mollie Toller went on dully: ‘You know that clapped-out old van he used to run about in? When it fell apart and I came into my Auntie's money, he wanted us to get a car, something with a hatchback, but I said no: what do we need a car for? Actually, I'd have loved it, living out here, a mile and a quarter to the bus. But what I'd really decided was, you need a car to be a villain. You can't pull off a job and then ride off on your bike with the pickings clanking away on the carrier. I didn't want to put temptation in his way.' She considered what she had just said, and then amended it with a painful honesty. ‘What I really mean – don't I? – is, I didn't trust him.' Bleakly: ‘If you're right and all that's happened is he's fallen off his bike and hurt himself, it'll be my fault for not letting him buy that Volkswagen he'd set his heart on.'

‘Don't talk daft!' Jurnet's tone was warmly jocular. He was sorry to have to follow it up with: ‘But there
was
something, wasn't there, Mollie, not quite kosher, or you wouldn't even be thinking along those lines. I noticed it the day you gave us tea, and again this afternoon – yesterday afternoon now – when I ran into Percy at the Hall. I've never known him out of temper before. He didn't seem to want to look me straight in the eye.'

Mollie Toller heaved a tired sigh and said: ‘I suppose you still want to know why we didn't turn up at that party.'

‘Yes. I still want to know.'

‘It's simple, really. Perce mentioned he'd heard that the alarms in the state rooms were going to be switched off for the night.'

‘So?'

‘I didn't dare for us to go. I knew in all that jam of people I'd never be able to keep my eye on him every minute. The only way I could be certain was for the two of us to stay home in front of the telly till it was time to go to bed.'

‘You aren't telling me he was planning to steal from Bullen Hall!' The detective did not hide his disbelief. ‘Every item catalogued and photographed a dozen times over!'

‘It depends what you mean by stealing.' Mrs Toller was crying a little now, the detective noted with relief. WPC Frampton unobtrusively produced some tissues and pressed them into the woman's hand. Mrs Toller blew her nose into one of them, regained a precarious equilibrium, and lamented: ‘And I had to put the Open University into his head!'

‘How's that again?'

‘Books, Mr Jurnet. Once he signed on and started in on the foundation course all I heard was books. Especially old ones, antiquarian. You'd think they'd just been invented. It was like a madness. “A book's the words inside,” I used to tell him, “not the year it was printed.” But he'd say no: to hold an old book in your hand was to hold history and literature at one go. Perce wasn't lying to you when he said he'd given up the kind of thieving you used to pick him up for. Anyone try to knock off a postage stamp at the Hall, he'd have been on to them like a tiger. But books were different. I think he'd have whipped out every book in the Bullen Hall Library if he'd thought he could get away with it. Not to sell. To keep. He said it was shameful the way they were kept there, nobody doing anything but read the titles on the spines, caged up behind bars like wild animals, unable to live the life they were meant for.'

‘And you were afraid that, if you went to the party, he might seize the opportunity to slip away and liberate a few?'

‘He said it'd be an act of charity. He said, even when they came to take the inventory, they didn't let them out of their cases. One of the clerks just read off the title, and the other ticked it off his list. And he said they were packed so close together nobody would notice if he took one or two.'

Jurnet demanded: ‘Why the hell didn't you tell me when I asked before?'

‘He wanted you to think he was an honest man.'

Daybreak took him by surprise. ‘D'ye ken John Peel' sounded on the door chimes, and there on the step was a young police constable, rosy as the light inching minute by minute into the eastern sky. The rain had stopped, the battered annuals along the path were picking themselves up and getting their act together again. High above the trees, a scrap of blue promised felicities.

Jurnet was sure he had not slept, even though he had no recollection of how he had passed the unaccounted-for hours. Mollie still sat upright on the chrysanthemum-covered sofa, her hair-do impeccable, WPC Frampton in her facing chair bent forward in unflagging vigilance.

The young policeman's name was Ledbetter, and his mother was the Bullensthorpe postmistress.

He had a message for Mollie.

‘I told Ma about Mr Toller. She says, if there's anything she can do –' The plump little figure on the couch made no acknowledgement. Red with earnestness, the young PC promised: ‘We'll find him, Mrs Toller! Don't you fret yourself.'

To Jurnet, in the hall, out of earshot of the silent woman, he was less sanguine.

‘What a night, eh, sir? What a blooming night!'

‘I've known better.'

‘I'd look out at the bridge, sir, if I was you. The water's almost up to the top of the arch, and it's well over the carriageway either side. That Rover of yours is a bit low on the ground.'

‘Thanks for the warning. I'll take care. Tell your Ma there
is
something. Anyone she can get to come in and stay with Mrs Toller? Someone she knows and likes?'

‘I'll pop in and tell her. She'll know. She'd come herself, if she didn't have to open up the shop.'

Jurnet accompanied the PC as far as the garden path, and stood there for a little after he had gone, breathing the sweet, cleansed air. Leaving the door open, he went back in, into the bathroom; found Percy Toller's shaver, and thankfully took off the dark stubble which, every morning, to his unfailing disgruntlement, did its best to distort the unremarkable image to which he aspired.

He switched off the shaver and became aware of a louder noise coming from the road; and, pushing open the opaque glass window, was in time to see Steve Appleyard drive past in the jeep. The young man looked bronzed, muscular, smiling.

When the happy young man, his clothes soaked, his boots leaking mud over the floral carpet, came bursting through the front door of ‘Pippins' not many minutes after, the smile had gone. Even the tan seemed to have paled.

‘I saw your car outside when I came past just now,' he began breathlessly. ‘I thought you must be here. There's a big branch caught up under the bridge. It was holding back the water, so I thought I'd better have a go at getting it free.' He slowed down, made a determined effort to regain his composure, and achieved, even, a travesty of a grin. ‘I seem – don't I? to be developing quite a gift for finding drowned bodies. It must be like dowsing. Only this time, at least –' a shudder of remembrance and relief shook the taut young form – ‘there aren't any eels.'

Colton, in the suspicious way he had with the spoken word, distrusting any which was not written down and, for preference, enclosed in triplicate in an official folder, said: ‘You'll have to wait for my report to the coroner. I'll let you have a copy. The most I'm prepared to say is that at the moment – at the moment, mark you – I can see nothing inconsistent with a verdict of accidental death. That damn bank –' the police doctor leaned over the parapet of the little bridge and scowled at the drop down to the river – ‘slippery as glass. That PC, the local one, says, what with the oil and the hot weather, the road surface lately hasn't been much better. I'd have been in the water myself if he hadn't grabbed hold of me. Someone ought to have a word with the Highway Authority. Extremely dangerous, the way that opening falls away directly down to the river, without so much as a strand of wire to stop a vehicle that's come off the road.'

‘I understand the village kids use it all the time to go fishing for tiddlers.'

‘Oh, do they? In that case, it's only a matter of time before one of
them
breaks his neck.'

‘Is that what happened to Percy?'

‘Have to wait till we get him on the table, won't we? His neck certainly is broken, along with both legs and one arm, but any or all of those injuries could well have been caused after death by being caught up in that branch, and banging about against the arch all night long. My guess – and, mind you, that's all it is – is that a blow on the left temple was what did for him – or at least rendered him unconscious, so that he couldn't pick himself up and scramble out of the water.'

‘All nine inches of it. Ledbetter says that's all it could have been when Percy came along. It didn't start raining till after nine.'

‘More than enough to drown in, if you've just knocked yourself out – maybe on a stone, maybe on your own handlebars – and have the bad luck to land face downwards.'

‘Yes.'

On the further side of the bridge, men were stripping off rubber suits and overalls, and packing them into polythene bags. They had already parcelled what remained of Percy Toller's bicycle, and put it into the back of their van. Jurnet himself had retrieved the dead man's briefcase, a bit of pseudo-executive nonsense in which, the detective guessed, Percy must have taken great pride. It had contained a sodden notepad, a plastic mac still neatly folded, and a small bundle of pencils, freshly sharpened, only one or two points broken.

While the detective and the doctor watched, the mortuary van, which had been parked on the grass verge, reversed, making a turn in the road which took it perilously close to the gap which had been Percy Toller's undoing. As it mounted the hump of the bridge, the two men pressed themselves against the old brickwork to allow it room to pass, the driver saluting cheekily.

In a minute or two more they were all gone, Colton included, leaving Jurnet still staring down at the water. He raised his head, and found to his surprise that Steve Appleyard had joined him.

‘Yes?' he enquired abruptly. Then with more kindness, seeing the young man falter: ‘What can I do for you?'

Steve Appleyard said: ‘I heard Jim Ledbetter talking about oil on the road, and I wanted you to know … What I mean is –' making a fresh start – ‘the jeep's been leaking – not much, but a bit – so I wanted to say this is the first morning I've brought it round this way. I've been working in the Hundred Field up the road, and always taken the track that goes through the wood. The back drive's in such a state you take your life in your hands. It's only because, after last night's rain, the wood's a bog, that I came along here at all.'

‘No need to answer an accusation that hasn't been made. Enough cars use this lane without your contribution.'

The young man looked relieved nevertheless.

‘Percy knew how it was, that's the funny thing. People never take their own advice, do they? Couple of days ago, when I'd stopped by the gate for a bit, he came by, pushing his bike. I asked if he'd got a puncture, but he said no: only that the lane was a blooming death trap, and he didn't fancy breaking his neck.'