Written in Blood (45 page)

‘Bit of a blind alley, then?’

Barnaby shrugged and put down his pencil. Troy had been quite wrong in thinking that the chief superintendent’s sarcastic volley had been easily put aside. Though years of practice and a reasonably equable temperament enabled Barnaby to maintain an imperturbable facade he was, in fact, not unperturbed at all but experiencing the beginnings of a dark depression. A grey dried-upness of the mind.

The reason for this was not unknown to him. He had been indulging in the very thing against which his warnings to others had always been so stringent. Ever since the interview with St John - which meant virtually from the outset - his perception of the case had been subtly narrowing. Whilst giving lip service to this or that possibility he had, gradually, become convinced that it was with Jennings alone that the solution lay.

Either Max had killed Hadleigh and run away or he possessed some knowledge that would provide the key that could unlock the mystery. In any event Jennings’ capture and the conclusion of the case had, in Barnaby’s imagination, become so powerfully intertwined that he was now finding it extremely difficult to accept the fact that the first was quickly seeming to have little or no bearing whatsoever on the second. Which left him precisely where?

Well, once he had accepted that Jennings was telling the truth, there were three options. The first, that Hadleigh had been murdered by a passing opportunist who had then left with a suitcase full of women’s clothing but without a Rolex watch worth thousands seemed barely credible.

The second was that he had been killed by someone known to him either in his feminine persona or casually as a homosexual partner. Remembering Jennings’ description of the dead man’s view of sex as an itch to be scratched in degrading places with degrading people this idea was depressing in the extreme. It meant they could be looking at someone who’d known Hadleigh for five minutes, maybe followed him home from some impersonal encounter, sussed the set-up and returned at a later date to see what was in it for him.

The length and breadth - not to mention the expense - of setting up the sort of open-ended investigation required should this be so meant it had virtually no chance of being undertaken. The case would remain a matter of record and permanently unsolved unless, and it could be years later, some sharp-eyed operative had their memory jogged and spotted a significant-looking connection or heard an echo. Sometimes it happened.

Option three, you worked further on what you’d already got, which was massively less complicated. If the door-to-door results were anything to go by, Hadleigh had remained aloof from village matters, received no visitors and mixed socially only with members of the Writers Circle, one of whom was in fruitless love with him. Barnaby scribbled their names beneath his primroses.

Brian Clapton. He could be further leaned on, which procedure would no doubt bring about some pathetic smutty little confession involving after-dark peepshows and furtive onanism.

Of Rex St John’s innocence Barnaby was convinced. His story of Hadleigh’s visit was confirmed by Jennings’ revelations regarding their past connection. And St John’s distress and remorse - intensifying daily, if Mrs Lyddiard was to be believed - was surely further verification. And he was an old man. Pretty fragile to have delivered that series of immensely forceful blows.

Although fully aware of the dangers of allowing sympathy for any particular personality to cloud his judgement, Barnaby was still inclined to view both Sue Clapton and her friend Amy as completely uninvolved.

Honoria Lyddiard was something else. Physically more than competent to carry out the attack she was also psychologically capable, having the conviction, common to all fanatics, that their every thought, speech and action stemmed directly from some fundamental holy writ. Once a necessity for punishment had been established her sense of duty would allow her to inflict it without a qualm. But this crime - Hadleigh’s mashed-up skull was suddenly, vividly present - was not some cool affair of obligation. This was red-hot rage, way out of control.

Which left him with Laura Hutton who believed herself to have been betrayed. A motive there all right. One as old as time. Barnaby recalled his two interviews with her; the anguished wails of pain and tears of sorrow. Could this flood of misery have been partially instigated by remorse? He decided to talk to her again . As far as he knew she was still unaware of Hadleigh’s homosexuality and that her supposed rival did not really exist. These two revelations, if delivered in the right way at the right time in unfriendly, unfamiliar environs, could well bring about a genuine result. For it would surely take a much harder nut than Mrs Hutton to remain impervious in the face of the knowledge that she had committed a spectacularly gruesome murder for nothing.

Barnaby’s attention was caught by a strange scraping sound as Troy cleared his throat preparatory to speech.

‘Either cough, speak or sing, sergeant. I really don’t mind which. That sounds like someone swinging on a rusty bog chain.’

‘Just that it’s twenty-five to, sir.’

‘I’ve got eyes.’

Troy opened the door and a murmurous buzz from the incident room filled the corridor. Barnaby heard it without enthusiasm. Thirty men and women awaiting instruction. Inspector Meredith would be present: sharp-eyed, snake-hipped, snake-headed, with his painted-on black hair and golden origins. Listening. Falsely respectful, offering ideas with mock tentativeness. Biding his time. Youth and high-riding ambition on his side.

‘Right,’ said the chief inspector. He picked up the SOCO file, dropped the pencil in his frog mug and got heavily to his feet. ‘Let’s go and pool our ignorance.’

 

Brian was still in a state of shock. His hands and feet, even his skin, felt numb. He had a throbbing pain behind his eyes that came and went with the force of a blow, as if his skull was being rhythmically struck. Getting out of the car, propelling himself, zombie-like, to the staff cloakroom where he now stood, he realised he had no recollection of driving to school at all.

He had been like this, more or less, since the photographs arrived. Since Sue had gone upstairs to find unwanted socks and he had torn the envelope half across in his eagerness to get at the contents.

At first, impossible as it might seem given the appallingly explicit clarity of the pictures, Brian had not understood quite what was going on. For just a microsecond he had stared at Edie’s face, which peered fearfully back at him over someone’s bare shoulder, without recognition. Her eyes were wide and staring and her teeth sank into her bottom lip as if to trap a cry. Brian, even while feeling touched that she should have sent him a likeness of herself, could not help feeling slightly disturbed at the dramatic intensity of the pose.

Explanation quickly followed. The next picture showed white buttocks mooning high, if a trifle flatly, in the air. A third displayed Brian’s profile grinning in an exultant, wolfish way as he apparently forced the thin, childish figure trapped beneath him. There were half a dozen more. The last was the worst. It showed Edie sitting on the very edge of the settee in an attitude of absolute despair, her face buried in her hands. Brian, naked in the attitude of a conqueror, stood over her.

He cried out then, awful, unclarified terrors confusing his mind, and dropped them all. Swept the photographs from the table on to the floor. He remembered that moment. He had been about to reach out and comfort her. How could such a gesture of compulsive consolation be made to look so threatening?

At that point Sue came clogging down the stairs. Galvanised by the fear of discovery, Brian scrabbled up the photographs, lifted the lid of the Aga and stuffed them inside. Knowing they must burn, he still stood there until they caught fire, blazed up, then folded softly into pale grey flaky layers. By the time Sue came in he was back in his chair and feeling as if a ten-ton truck had driven straight through him, leaving a jagged great hole behind.

Later, alone upstairs, Brian made some attempt to struggle out of the swamp of alarm and revulsion that was paralysing all coherent thought. It proved amazingly difficult, perhaps because he already had an inkling of the conclusion to which a rational assessment of the situation must inevitably lead.

All this while he was reliving the evening at Quarry Cottages. Kept seeing himself as through the camera’s eye, drinking, prancing about, disporting his body with amorous abandon. For all he knew they had photographed him writhing in agony during his riveting struggle with the jeans.

Which brought him to the all important question, who did he mean by ‘they’? Someone had been hiding with or without - oh God, please surely without - Edie’s knowledge. The pictures jumped gleefully to mind again. Untruthfully violent, unspeakably obscene. They had not been ordinary snapshots. There was something blurry and one-dimensional about them, rather as if someone had been photographing a television screen. The paper on which they were printed was different too.

Brian didn’t know whether to be more or less devastated by the fact that the envelope had contained no letter, directive or mention of further contact. In all the films he had seen featuring any sort of blackmail those on the receiving end had been given strict instructions to remain close to the phone and on no account to contact the police.

Brian’s tormentors need have no fear of that. At the very thought of an official interrogation his viscera, already jelly-soft, started sliding and slopping uncontrollably about. He felt sick and cold and also very angry. Schooled though he was in the repression of all emotion, but especially any of an anti-social nature, Brian wept with frustration.

Eventually he dried his face and beard. It was then nearly six o’clock. There was no way he could sit there and sit there then go down and have his supper and watch the television and go to bed and lie there and lie there. He would go mad. He had to
do
something. To take, however briefly and spuriously, the reins of his wretched existence back into his own hands. He dragged on an old jacket, the one he used to clean the car, and his hat with the let-down fleecy ear flaps, then ran downstairs, shouted something incomprehensible to Mandy through the sitting-room door and left the house.

Outside it was dark and foggy. Footsteps rang out on the hard ground some time before the walkers themselves loomed and melted away almost in the same instant. Commuters edged their cars homeward, searching in the foglamps’ glare for a familiar landmark or driveway. The lights around the Green were visible only as pale little smudges hovering in midair. The moon was a disc of dirty ice.

Brian was surprised afterwards with what a quick certainty his feet made their way to Quarry Cottages. Only once had he stumbled, falling into the gutter. A move which struck him as so symbolic of the whole sorry situation that he almost started to cry again.

When he could dimly see the outlines of the cottages Brian slowed up and approached the area where he guessed the paling fence to be. He walked on tiptoe. Every room in the Carters’ house had the lights on. The windows, honeycombed by many little panes, glowed. Four square yellow eyes watched him out of the fog. Next door was dark.

Brian recalled standing there twenty-four hours ago - no, tell a lie, twenty-one. The emotions he had felt then faded to nothing beside the despairing lack of fortitude and terrible giddiness that engulfed him now. His mouth filled up with a sour liquid and he spat into his handkerchief. Quietly, so as not to disturb the dog.

Having arrived he had no idea what to do. Edie would be in there if, as was usual, she had travelled home on the school bus. And perhaps Tom. But what of the muscularly advantaged Mrs Carter? Conine the Barbarian.

How little, Brian now realised, he knew of the family’s domestic arrangements. Did Edie’s mother go out to work? Maybe she was a victim of the recession and had lost her job. Could such a misfortune conceivably be behind what Brian was now forced to view as a mere twisted parody of romantic dalliance? If so, what could the reason be but to make money?

Momentarily this understanding made Brian feel better. Self-preservation he could understand. It was certainly a kinder motive than wanton sport. And he could see how the idea that his interest in Mrs Carter’s daughter was perhaps a little more personal than was strictly proper could have arisen.

For instance, it was possible that, in spite of constant vigilance, he had let the mask of professional director slip at some time. Anyone as perceptive and intelligent as Edie would certainly have noticed and Brian could just hear her, quite understandably, boasting a little about it afterwards.

Mrs C might well have put two and two together, creatively accounted the result as five and spotted an opportunity of sticking a nought, or even two, on the end. It certainly wouldn’t be much more. They were small-time, sad people - low achievers, without vision.

Even so, assuming the worse (i.e. five hundred), it would not be easy to raise. Brian ran over his options. He could abandon his car and claim the insurance. But that meant notifying the police and they would probably find it and let him know, then he’d be committing fraud if he persisted. Perhaps he could damage it. Or leave it on a railway line.

Startled at the speed at which he seemed to be desecrating the Claptons’ twin icons of law and order, Brian turned to the less dodgy notion of borrowing against the house. He had a thirty-year mortgage with twenty still to go, had never been behind with his payments and, as far as the Abbey National were concerned, must surely seem like a good bet for a top-up.

Option three: his parents. Brian, instantly a small boy again, rehearsed his mother’s opening lines.

‘You’re not in any trouble are you, dear?’

And Brian, standing roughly in relation to trouble as might a pebble to the Boulder Dam, would reply, ‘Of course not, Mummy.’