Stately Homicide (29 page)

It was as an act of homage to the retired burglar that, arrived back at the Hall, Jurnet, for all his preoccupations, did not make straight for the west wing and the continuing saga of finding out who had done for Chad Shelden. Instead, he passed over the bridge between the rampant bulls, crossed the courtyard, and entered the house, which had just that moment opened for business. The elderly woman busy replenishing the picture postcards in the revolving stand turned towards him moist-eyed: ‘Terrible about Mr Toller, isn't it?'

Well aware that, in the country, news – especially bad news – travelled faster than the speed of light, the detective knew better than to ask how she had come by the information with so little delay. He inclined his head slightly as he passed by, and murmured, as was expected of him, ‘Terrible!'

Yet strangely, once in the Library which had been Percy Toller's bailiwick, it did not seem as terrible as all that. Some echo of the little man's artless enthusiasm seemed to hang in the air, another ghost to add to the many who already populated the place.

What a naive delight the ex-burglar must take at finding himself one of such exalted company! Jurnet glanced up at the portrait over the fireplace, and fancied that even that dour and dyspeptic face looked a little happier. Could it be, at that very moment, in some dark cranny between space and time, a spectral Perce was eagerly exclaiming to George Bullen, Viscount Rochford, that he was the spitting image of a chap he used to know, a certain Detective-Inspector of the Angleby CID?

Setting such fancies aside, the detective moved slowly along the ranks of books, peering through the gilded grilles and scanning each tier with an attention which plainly aroused doubts in the volunteer – a thin man, with a military manner – called in as an emergency replacement. The man crossed the room to where Jurnet, stretching his neck, was trying to check that there were no books missing from a top shelf; coughed to get the other's attention, and then delivered himself of the fairly dispensable remark: ‘Books.'

Jurnet agreed. The books were packed close together, all present and correct. Mollie could have that much consolation, at least.

‘A lot of them,' the man said.

‘Yes. A lot.'

From the Library, the detective found his way to the Appleyard Room; and this time, despite the heat already beating down through the glass roof, found himself – now that he knew it was all a load of old cobblers – actually enjoying the reverential display. Though the handsome blonde giant whose shrine it was was even less to his taste as a scoundrel who traded in men's lives than as the hero of a fairy story, at least he had stepped out of the photographs into three dimensions. A real villain, a real man.

By contrast, the photographs of Elena Appleyard as a child produced an exactly contrary impression. The child clasping her brother's hand, the young girl seated on her pony, glowed with a flame the years had long since extinguished. The pallid woman who had been Laz Appleyard's wife and Ferenc Szanto's lost love stared out at the room with eyes which saw nothing but the wasteland of her own life. On his father's shoulders, with perfect confidence in the arms clasped round his chubby knees, Istvan Appleyard – young Steve – frolicked gleefully.

As on his earlier visit, the detective left the great glass bubble by the exit on the north side of the house, and made his way round to the west wing. Away to the right, as before, a solitary swan balanced on its reflection in the water.

A fake, Jurnet decided: the whole landscape a stage set. Everything in its place, preprogrammed, waiting for the curtain up. Cast assembled in the wings, even the murderer awaiting his cue.

If only Benjamin bloody Jurnet could remember what it was. Something, someone, was not going according to the script. As Jurnet made his way along the west front, divided from him by the darkly gleaming line of the moat, a slender figure ran across the little bridge that led from the curator's flat: Jessica Chalgrove, her ponytail flying, her blouse and skirt billowing with the speed of her going. Solitary, she ran as if pursued. Halfway across the lawn, one of her white sandals came off. To the detective's surprise, she did not stop and pick it up; instead, kicked off its fellow and ran on. Even when she came to the end of the grass there was no slowing as the soles of her bare feet met the gravel underfoot. On she ran and vanished among the rhododendrons.

Thoughtfully, Jurnet diverged from his route, crossed the lawn to where the shoes lay, and picked them up, still warm from the girl's feet. In the flat he found Sergeant Ellers standing on the landing. The little Welshman looked puzzled.

‘What's got into young Jessica?' Jurnet demanded. ‘Just saw her streaking across the grass like the bloodhounds were after her.'

‘Exactly what I was wondering myself. She barged into me as I came out of the door. Never so much as said she was sorry, let alone offer to kiss it better.' He finished, with all the assurance of a married man: ‘Reckon she just remembered she forgot to turn the light off under lover boy's dinner.'

Jurnet set the sandals down side by side on the old oak chest in the hall. He made his way into the incident room, his subordinate following.

‘I suppose you've heard about Percy?'

‘Everybody back in Angleby's feeling real cut up, even the Super. He particularly said to tell you how sorry he was.'

‘Oh ah.' The detective fiddled with some papers on the table. He said: ‘I want you to go and see Mollie. Ask if there's anything we can do. Find out where her nephew Lionel lives and get him over, if somebody hasn't fetched him already. Tell her,' he finished, ashamed of his own cowardliness in putting off the encounter, ‘I'll be along soon as I can.'

‘Want me to go right away?'

‘If you've nothing further to report on Mike Botley.'

‘Depends what you want to know. Last time I had word he was threatening to complain to the European Commission on Human Rights. Otherwise, he sticks to his story that Shelden, after slobbering him with love and kisses, suddenly goes off into a blinding rage, and beats him up like a three-egg omelette.' The little Welshman eyed his superior officer. ‘Think he's telling the truth?'

‘Let's say I don't disbelieve. Botley's a devious little bugger, but I don't believe he's clever enough to invent a balled-up character who first gives in to the homosexual side of his nature, but then draws back at the brink, because the other half – maybe it was more than half – wants to be straight.' Jurnet was silent. Then he said: ‘I could begin to feel sorry for Mr Chad Shelden, and not just because he ended up in Bullen Hall moat.' Voice hardening: ‘But then he has to go and take it out of that noisome little punk when it's himself he's angry at, really.'

Ellers commented cheekily: ‘Thereby forfeiting your good opinion of him, once and for all!'

‘That'll be enough of that, Sergeant!' Jurnet laughed, and felt better. Even the Mike Botleys of the world had their uses. At last he was getting upon terms with his current corpse. ‘Did Botley have anything else to say?'

‘Only what time did the next train leave for London, and would I please ask Mr sodding Winter to put together a small pack with his necessaries.'

‘Nerve!'

‘No sweat delivering that particular message, anyhow. The poor prick's been hanging round the duty desk like a lost soul ever since we took Botley in.'

Love
! thought Jurnet, with a sudden pang that could just as well have been the last knell of that bloody octopus.

At one o'clock, Sergeant Bowles, who had been into Bersham to stock up the larder, came into the incident room with some tongue sandwiches and a cup of tea. He looked worried.

‘Seen Miss Jessica, sir?'

Jurnet, looking up from the file he had been working on, saw no reason to add to the good man's anxieties.

‘Just a glimpse. Why? Doesn't she always go home, these days, to fix a midday meal for young Steve?'

‘It's the way she left her room.' Leading the way down the hallway, rightly confident the detective would follow. ‘It's not like her to leave a room like that.'

Jurnet took in the papers strewn about the floor.

‘Not as bad as it looks,' he pronounced, disguising the fact that he had caught some of the other's foreboding. Why had the girl gone haring off in that way? ‘It's only one box. She could easily have knocked it off the desk as she got up to go, and not even noticed what had happened.'

Sergeant Bowles visibly brightened. He said indulgently: ‘She's always got her eye on the clock these days.'

Jurnet again omitted to report that it had been not much past eleven that he had seen Jessica Chalgrove running from the house. The Sergeant bent over and began to scoop up the papers. Jurnet said: ‘I'd leave them where they are. It's none of our business, and she knows where everything belongs.'

‘Right, sir.' The other straightened up unwillingly. Below them, the outer door opened and shut with a clang that reverberated through the ancient structure.

‘PC Bly's back early,' the Sergeant remarked with disapproval. ‘He'll have that door off its hinges. If I've told him once, I've told him a dozen –'

But the footsteps on the stairs did not sound like a constabulary tread. Jurnet came out into the hall, in time to collide with a wild-eyed boy who shouted: ‘Jessica! Is she here?'

Steve Appleyard pushed past the detective into the study. His eyes took in the papers on the floor, the overturned box, and the neat stacks waiting along the wall. At the sight of the empty room he burst into sobs that were painful to hear; not because it was a man crying, but because it wasn't. They were the sobs of a frightened child.

‘Jessica! Oh my God!'

Sergeant Bowles, because he could think of nothing better, hurried off to get a nice hot cup of tea. Jurnet, arm round Steve Appleyard's shoulders, half-pushed, half-dragged the distraught boy to a chair.

‘Turn it in!' the detective commanded, in a voice that contrived to combine authority with concern. ‘What's all this in aid of?' He cupped a hand under the young man's chin, forced the fair-lashed blue eyes to look into his own. ‘What's happened?'

The eyes shut. Tears trickled down the suntanned face. The mouth, soft and defenceless, opened and closed again.

Jurnet said softly: ‘Take your time.'

The young man shuddered. He stuffed a hand into a jeans pocket and brought out a paper – two papers – which he thrust at the detective. The action seemed to use up the last of his strength. He slumped back into the chair, and put his head in his hands.

Jurnet smoothed out the crumpled sheets, which consisted of a letter handwritten on blue paper and, stapled to the back of it, a strip of lined paper torn roughly out of an exercise book. The printed letterhead said Chalgrove Manor, the date was in 1966.

‘Laz, you wretch,' the detective read,

‘No, I will
not
get rid of it! Keep your dirty little addresses for the next gullible goose you get into trouble. I don't want them.

‘And yes, you were quite right – get myself in the family way deliberately. If that mooncalf Mara can bear your child, so can I! I want you to know that I am wildly happy and that there is absolutely nothing for you to worry about. Even if it turns out to be the image of its pa (which is what I hope) the most people can do is gossip. Let them! As for Richard, who cares what
he
thinks? One thing's certain. Even if it turns out to have two heads,
he
won't talk.

‘Don't
worry
! Nothing, I promise you, is going to interfere with your lovely, lecherous life style. Everything will go on the way it always has, except for the couple of months when I shall be, so to speak,
hors de combat
– and I know you too well not to know you'll soon find someone to stand in – or do I mean lie down – for me, until I'm once more ready for the fray. You see how I'm a woman after your own heart – how I don't make a perpetual hoo-ha about being faithful, like some I could name. I love you for what you are, you gorgeous bastard – which is why, however many women you may make use of in the course of your misspent life, I'll always be the one you'll come back to.

‘Your Carla.'

On the strip of paper was scrawled in a different hand: ‘I've been to see my “father” and it's true. Goodbye, Steve. I love you.' The apostrophes enclosing the word ‘father' were heavily impressed.

The boy raised his head and saw that Jurnet had finished reading. In an exhausted voice, he demanded, less of the detective than of the world at large: ‘If you don't feel like you're brother and sister, how can it matter if you are or if you aren‘t?'

‘It seems to matter to Jessica.'

‘Only because she's heard that policemen like you put people in prison for incest. What's incest? A word. She ought to be glad to know the same blood's running through our veins, the same people going before us, shaping the way we are.'

‘If Jessica felt like that, she'd never have taken herself off.'

‘Just because she's hiding herself away somewhere, doesn't mean she's gone.' The blue eyes were brimming again. ‘She can't go. Now that she knows Laz Appleyard's her father too she's as much bound to Bullen as I am. Besides –' a look of artful triumph came into the stricken young face – ‘if she'd left, she'd have taken her things, wouldn't she? And they're all there, back at the flat. Everything her father – I mean, Mr Chalgrove – had sent over from the Manor. Even her bag's on the dressing table, exactly as she left it this morning, with her money in it, and all her bits and pieces. Girls never go anywhere without their handbags.' The young man thrust his face close to the detective's. ‘You'll find her for me, won't you, even if incest
is
something you're against? It's the police's job to find people –'