Stately Homicide (30 page)

‘Girls usually have more than one handbag.' Even though it felt like whipping a puppy, Jurnet said what had to be said. ‘I'm sorry, Steve, but if Jessica – for what, I'm bound to say, on the basis of this letter, seems to me ample reason – decides to call it a day, that's strictly between the two of you. It's not a police matter, and you ought to be glad she's not prepared to stay on and risk letting it become one.' He put a hand on the other's arm, despising his facile consolations even as he uttered them. How would
he
feel if he suddenly discovered that Miriam was within the forbidden degrees? ‘When you've calmed down and had time to think, you'll understand she's done the only thing possible in the circumstances. One day you'll thank that girl for having sense enough for both of you.'

Steve Appleyard pushed the hand away.

‘What's sense got to do with it? We're two halves of a whole. Can't you get that into your head? You can't cut yourself in half because of a word.' He darted past Jurnet to the window; stuck his head out, and shouted: ‘Jess! Jess darling, where are you?'

Rooks rose squawking out of the beeches. Jurnet crossed the room and, again, put an arm round the young, bony shoulders. The boy twisted himself free.

‘Let me go! If you won't do anything, I'll find her myself!'

He ran from the room, down the hallway, past Sergeant Bowles and PC Bly standing uncertain in the doorway of the incident room.

Jurnet called out: ‘Let him go!' Below, the door clanged to and shook the building. ‘Not a bloody thing we can do.'

Sergeant Bowles stood looking down the stairs.

‘Those lovely kids.'

He shook his head, and went slowly into the kitchen to pour himself out a cup.

Elena Appleyard said, with delicately raised eyebrows: ‘Not
more
questions! I begin to understand why they gave Socrates the hemlock.' She looked at Jurnet imperturbably, and settled a square of patterned chiffon about her shoulders.

Jurnet, who had already refused a seat, stood, grim, in front of the fireplace.

‘No more, I promise you, so long as you'll give me the answers without my asking.' He held out Carla Chalgrove's letter, and watched closely as the woman took it with polite incuriosity. ‘Read that –' after a perceptible pause – ‘if you haven't already.'

‘I haven't read it,' she replied equably, ‘but I hardly think I need to. The handwriting is very distinctive – a little vulgar, wouldn't you say? – like Carla herself.' With a humorous pursing of the lips: ‘And that absurd name! Laz always said her mother must have been frightened by a performance of “The Gipsy Baron” by the Angleby Operatic Society.' Miss Appleyard put the letter down on a small table at the side of her chair without further examination. ‘Perhaps
I
should be the one asking questions. My first would be to inquire how a confidential family matter going back the best part of twenty years could possibly have anything to do with the death of Mr Shelden.'

‘The answer to that –' Jurnet spoke carefully, holding down the anger he felt rising within him – ‘is, firstly, that a letter which you had already handed over for incorporation in what would almost certainly have been a best-selling biography, can hardly, by any stretch of the imagination, any longer be described as confidential; and secondly, that
any
information which enables us to know more about the occupants of Bullen Hall than we did before is germane to our inquiries. Thirdly, even if this were not the case – for God's sake!' – the detective's sudden explosion was not entirely without guile – ‘how, knowing what you must have known, could you positively encourage those two children to fall in love with each other?'

‘There – you see!' the woman exclaimed, with a childish glee that the detective found at once ravishing and deeply disturbing. ‘You couldn't keep away from questions! And what an idiotic one, if you'll forgive my saying so. As if those two needed any encouragement!'

‘I'll put it another way. Why didn't you do everything you could to discourage it?'

‘But I did exactly that! I knew nothing for certain, you understand, but I knew that somewhere among Laz's personal papers which, let me make it quite clear, I have not gone through in any detail – it seemed an invasion of privacy only excusable in a total stranger – there could well be something about his affair with Carla. I gave Jessica the indexing job fully aware of what she might come upon – indeed, half hoping she would.' With superb effrontery: ‘It hardly seemed fair to saddle the poor girl with a Richard Chalgrove for a father when she might possibly have the pride of discovering herself an Appleyard. Ferenc wanted me to vet the correspondence first, and take out anything which gave the game away. Whatever he may have said to you, that's what he was trying to do when you came upon him in the curator's study soon after the murder.

The silly man, he keeps saying he wants Steve to know his father whole, as he puts it – but then, when it actually comes to the point, he's always wanting to make exceptions – remove anything that might hurt Steve too much. It wasn't my idea at all. What I said was, let's leave it in the lap of the gods.' Pleased with her analogy: ‘It was, you might say, a very Greek situation.' Adding kindly, at the look of incomprehension on the detective's face: ‘Ancient Greek. Oedipus and Jocasta. Theseus arriving back in Attica with a black sail hoisted, when it should have been a white –'

‘You had another alternative –' Jurnet persisted, refusing to be diverted along unfamiliar paths. ‘You could have told both of them the truth before it even started, and nipped the whole thing in the bud.'

Miss Appleyard sighed.

‘My dear man! They set each other alight the moment they set eyes on each other. Do you think, without concrete evidence, they'd have taken notice of anything I said, when every atom of their beings urged them irresistibly into each other's arms?'

‘Mr Chalgrove would have borne you out –'

‘Richard! He'd have called me an evil mischief-maker. He's already offered me money to keep the entire Carla thing out of the biography. On other days, when he's had enough to drink, he threatens me with libel proceedings. He can't bear to have it known that Laz hung the horns on him.'

‘His best friend, I understand.'

‘How moral we are!' she mocked. ‘Let me tell you, my brother, for all his womanising, was a great deal more moral than that poor, cuckolded nincompoop, to whom nothing matters more than salvaging his own vanity. Richard was so frightened that people might put two and two together if he fell out with Laz that, despite, everything, he went on being his “best friend” to the day Laz got killed. And after,' she ended, her eyes bright with amusement, ‘he was chairman of the appeal fund for Hungarian refugees started in Laz's memory. Which was really such a joke –' her young laughter bubbled up from that unquenchable source deep within her – ‘because if there's one thing Richard can't stand, it's foreigners.'

Jurnet reflected aloud: ‘The Chalgroves couldn't have been sleeping together during the time Jessica was conceived, or Mr Chalgrove could never have been so sure it wasn't his child.'

More laughter.

‘Oh, he could have been sure! Richard's impotent.' The dismissive contempt in her voice, Jurnet felt quite sure, advertised knowledge that was more than second-hand.
You've tried a toss with him yourself, you bitch, you witch.
Elena Appleyard went on: ‘So far from doing him wrong, Laz did Richard an enormous favour – established him in the eyes of the world as the one thing he wanted to be taken for above everything else – a virile man.'

Miss Appleyard got up from her chair with that suspicion of infirmity which, even through his outrage at what he saw as the woman's criminal irresponsibility, made the detective eager to assist her, though he knew better than to try. She stood austerely in the empty spaces of the room, furnishing it with her beauty. She said: ‘I'm sorry to hear that Jessica took it so badly.'

‘I thought she took it very well, all things considered. A clean break. Hard, but the best thing, in the long run.'

The other shook her head, light catching the silver among the black hair strained away from the worn, lovely face.

‘Disappointing. One wouldn't have expected Appleyard of Hungary's daughter to take the easy way out.'

‘The only possible way out.' Jurnet made no attempt to hide his disapproval. ‘But then – those of us who aren't lucky enough to boast an Anne Boleyn in the family can't be expected to take your indulgent view of incest.'

Elena Appleyard smiled, unoffended.

‘What a snob you are, Inspector!' She stood quietly a moment, then said, without challenge, a simple statement of position: ‘Let me say that if the purpose of your visit is to make me feel either guilty or repentant, you're wasting your time. All love walks a thin edge between dangers. When I think of the suffering that girl's desertion is bound to cause Steve, I can only deplore her provincial narrow-mindedness in allowing an outworn taboo to come between her and happiness.'

Outside in the hall a telephone rang. The teetering footsteps of Maudie the maid sounded on the oak floor.

‘If there's nothing else, Inspector –' Miss Appleyard had begun when the maid entered without knocking. She spoke to her mistress, ignoring the detective completely.

‘There's someone asking for the policeman.'

‘Thank you, Maudie. And you can bring in the tea now.'

‘For two?'

‘For one.'

The maid's heavy features lit up with a rare smile. She left the room, her stays creaking. Jurnet was about to follow her out when Elena Appleyard said: ‘You may use the phone in here, if it isn't private.'

‘Thanks.'

Jurnet picked up the receiver, and listened to what Sergeant Bowles had to tell him; then answered carefully, no giveaway in his voice. ‘You've been on to Headquarters, of course. Get Jack back from Bullensthorpe. Tell Hinchley and Bly to cordon off … yes … that's OK … I know the place –'

The detective returned the receiver to its cradle.

‘I'll put the one in the hall back on as I go out.'

The very lack of inflection seemed to trouble Miss Appleyard a little; or, perhaps, arouse her curiosity.

‘Nothing wrong, I hope.'

‘Not a thing,' said Jurnet, ‘except that somebody just fell off the thin edge.'

Jessica Chalgrove hung naked from the oak tree where Jurnet had caught his first glimpse of her, leaning back against the trunk with Steve Appleyard's body pressed against hers until, in the green shade, the two had melted into an image of love delightful in its innocent abandonment. Now, naked and dead, she hung with a perfect modesty, her long-thighed, small-breasted body a pleasure to the eye; the face, head tilted to one side, not unsightly. On the grass, with a stone on top to prevent them blowing away, the small pile of her clothes lay folded, as if ready to be put away in her chest of drawers: and she had managed her death with similar neatness.

A hangman, Jurnet thought, could have been proud of the noose the girl had fashioned for herself, the length of drop nicely calculated, the neck that must have broken quickly and easily, no slow asphyxiation to turn death into an obscenity. Only some purple striations, showing where twigs and rough bark had reached out for her young flesh as, naked, she had climbed upward to her doom, marred the utter restfulness of the sight which greeted the detective as he arrived back at the gate to which, a short time and an eternity ago, the lovers had hitched their horses.

The girl hung naked from the tree. The boy clung to the girl, his hands clutching her buttocks, his face buried deep in the gulf between her legs, eyes shut in ecstasy.

It should have been disgusting. It was, thought Jurnet, breathless from more than the haste of his coming, sublime. Sacred. Here there was grief, certainly, even agony: but, beyond it and yet part of it, a terrible joy. To have loved like that, Jurnet thought humbly, shaken for once out of his selfpity, was something to give thanks for.

The boy dropped to his knees, setting the body swinging gently. He bowed his head to the ground, making no sound. The girl's feet brushed against his hair two or three times, and then were still again.

Jurnet let him stay as long as he could. Flies on iridescent wings had already begun to assemble. Their mounting buzz of excitement only intensified the silence. By the time the team arrived from Angleby, cars and vans bumping over the grass, the transcendent moment had long passed. Steve Appleyard lifted his head, saw the approaching caravan, and sprang to his feet. Ran off without a further glance at the carrion hanging from the tree in a mist of flies.

Sergeant Ellers began: ‘I sent PC Hinchley over to Chalgrove Manor to tell her father –'

‘Except that he isn't, poor sod. Still –'

‘Sod's about right. Bob Hinchley came back boiling. Seems the gentleman wanted to make a bargain. He'd go along to the mortuary so long as he got an undertaking nothing would be said at the inquest to bring his paternity into question. Otherwise, so far as he was concerned, the police could find somebody else to say it was or it wasn't the ungrateful little trollop he'd been misguided enough to give his ancient name to.'

‘Did he agree, finally?'

‘Oh, he agreed – soon as Bob mentioned the newspapers. Just the word, casual-like. Could have been something to wrap his skate and chips in, but it did the trick.' The Sergeant looked at his superior officer a little uncertainly. ‘Madam in the east wing wasn't all that better. Gave me a look when I was shown in like I was selling brushes and she didn't want any. Then, when she'd heard what I had to tell her, said “How very unfortunate!” in that frost-bitten voice of hers, and had the maid show me out without another word. Know something?' Jack Ellers finished. ‘Somebody ought to give that one a bit of padding for Christmas – inside as well as out. Foam rubber'd be better than nothing.'