Change For The Worse

by Elizabeth Lemarchand

  Katharine reacted vigorously, realising that he was probing.

  ‘I don’t think so. You are legally dead, and your French death certificate is with my solicitor. By the time you have succeeded in establishing your identity in an English court, and your claim to parental rights has been heard — I should contest it, of course — Alix will be of age.’

  ‘Dead men do tell tales sometimes,’ Geoffrey Parr replied urbanely. ‘This would be a good one, full of human interest for the Sunday papers. I admit that I walked out on Helen with no intention of going back. It was a case of hopeless incompatibility once the first fine careless rapture had faded. And she was so bloody obstinate about asking her father for an allowance. I decided that a clean break was the only solution. I changed my name — I’m George Palmer, by the way — acquired an appropriate passport, and discreetly faded out. Naturally I wasn’t in the least anxious about Helen. All she had to do was to return here to affluence and the role of deserted wife with a poor little child. If she was bloody-minded enough to starve in a bedsitter, well, it was up to her, wasn’t it? How she must have enjoyed the melodrama of blotting me out by identifying some poor bastard who turned up in the Seine as me.’

  ‘Suppose you come to the point about this visit?’ Katharine suggested in an expressionless voice.

  ‘Obviously, it’s a recce.’ He studied his fingernails for several seconds. ‘When I left France I headed for South Africa. A delightful country in many ways. The going was pretty good at first, Lines like respectable agencies for this and that, and of course well-known possibilities on the side. The trouble is that people interested in them are apt to go over the edge and their friends get involved. Being in some respects a fly chap I thought recently that I’d better get out. So here I am, back in the Old Country, rootless and short of cash, and naturally my thoughts turned to Fairlynch and my son or daughter. I hitched a lift to Wellchester, got myself genned up on the situation out here, and boarded the Spireford bus.’

  Geoffrey Parr paused again. This time he looked steadily at Katharine with malicious amusement.

  ‘My impression of young Alix is that she’d be sympathetic. A serious-minded lass with the popular social conscience. We had quite a long chat at the ticket booth. I wonder how she’d get on with my current girlfriend? And of course she’ll be coming into money quite soon, won’t she?’

  Appalled by his astuteness Katharine managed to fight down her rising panic by sheer willpower.

  ‘How much do you want to clear out for good?’ she said bluntly.

  ‘Oh, come,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you being a shade crude? I suggest a little accommodation to suit us both. Let’s be realistic. You can’t surely believe that I want to be saddled with a nice pure-minded young girl like Alix? Suppose we say five thousand, with a cast-iron guarantee on my part to get out and stay out this time? Not necessarily in a lump. Of course, you’ll want a little time to think it over. You hold a few cards yourself, don’t you? I suggest that we give it a week. As I know your address there’s no need for you to know mine. But meanwhile —’ he gave a mock- deprecatory gesture — ‘I do happen to be a bit short at the moment.’

  For the first time Katharine fully registered Geoffrey Parr’s worn duffle coat and cheap mass-produced shoes. Without speaking she got up and walked across the room to her bureau, conscious of his eyes following her. He’s really broke, she thought. Surely I can turn that to account?

  ‘This is most helpful of you,’ he remarked, still in the same tone of light irony. ‘Not, of course, a cheque just at the moment. Notes for small amounts, if you can manage it. Although I suppose even tenners are in that category these days.’

  Without speaking she counted out one ten pound, two five pound and ten one pound notes and held them out to him. He had risen to his feet, and on taking them from her, flicked through them.

  ‘You still bank with the Southern Counties, I expect?’ he asked, stowing the money in an inside pocket.

  ‘I do,’ she replied briefly.

  ‘Well, thank you. I feel we understand each other very well, don’t you? Perhaps it would be as well if I made my exit from the back door on this occasion. As I’ve paid the whacking admission charge, though, I’ll just have a look round for old times’ sake before I push off.’

  She returned from letting him out through the kitchen and for a few moments stood in the middle of the sitting room seeing nothing before sinking into her chair by the fire. Through a kind of sifting process her thoughts began to arrange themselves in layers. On the surface was the immediate preoccupation of how to explain her disappearance from the Manor. It must have been noticed by now, and someone would track her down. The second priority was to get out of the supper date with the Gilmores, which she simply could not face. The excuse of a chill from standing about in the gardens on the top of being overtired after a gruelling week seemed a reasonable explanation to offer, she decided.

  With this settled Katharine began to consider the much more fundamental problem of the menace of Geoffrey Parr’s reappearance and attempted blackmail. Should she tackle the situation alone or consult someone whom she felt she could trust? Her solicitor, David Greenhalgh, for instance? He was an old friend and had been a tower of strength at the time of John’s death. Would she be able to make him understand that at absolutely any cost Alix must be prevented from knowing that her father had turned up, because of the unpredictability of her reaction? The child’s whole future was at stake... Sudden tears of desperation sprang to Katharine’s eyes. Then, hearing running footsteps coming down the drive, she hastily dashed them away and tried to compose herself as the front door burst open. The next moment a flushed Alix with windblown hair was staring at her in dismay.

  ‘Gran! Are you O.K.? When I came up from the gate Francis and everybody were asking where you were. Nobody’d seen you for ages.’

  ‘It’s nothing really, darling,’ Katharine reassured her. ‘I must have got a bit of a chill inside. Such a nuisance, but I simply had to come home. I hope everything’s gone all right?’

  ‘Jolly well, Francis says. A lot more people than he expected. Except for a type who managed to get upstairs and nose round who had to be rounded up, it all seems to have gone like a bomb... But look here, you’d better go to bed and keep warm. I’ll go and switch on your electric blanket. Of course I shall stay and look after you, and not go to the Gilmores.’

  With some difficulty Katharine persuaded her that this was quite unnecessary, but allowed herself to be hustled off to bed and supplied with a variety of remedies.

  ‘I shan’t be late back, of course,’ Alix said, appearing later at her bedside after a hasty toilet. ‘They’ll all understand, and be frightfully sorry you couldn’t make it. Now, are you sure you’ve got everything? Malcolm’s car’s just gone up to collect Francis.’

  Five minutes later the car was heard on its return journey, and Alix ran downstairs. Her voice came floating up from outside as she explained the situation. A car door slammed and the sound of the engine quickly died away.

  Katharine relaxed at the relief of being alone with her thoughts. They immediately reverted to the pros and cons of consulting David Greenhalgh. An impulsive idea of packing Alix straight off to Canada flashed through her mind and was discarded as quite impracticable. She was slowly coming round to a decision to ring his office first thing on Monday morning and ask for an appointment when she drifted into an exhausted sleep. The returning car woke her, and she saw with surprise from the luminous dial of the clock on her bedside table that it was nearly half-past ten. Feigning sleep, she did not stir when Alix tiptoed in and stood for a moment looking down at her. Her bedroom door closed quietly. Not long afterwards the car passed the house once more. Silence descended and she slept again.

  Tom Basing, who had worked in the Fairlynch gardens from boyhood apart from the war years, was an autocratic head gardener, but one who believed in taking turns with his chaps at unpopular chores. On the following morning this involved
him in riddling the central heating boiler at the Manor and checking that its self-feeding mechanism was delivering the correct quantity of solid fuel.

  This was a job which he preferred to get over and done with before his enjoyable leisurely Sunday breakfast. He and his wife lived in a cottage in the village, and soon after seven he emerged, stood for a moment sniffing the morning air and assessing the weather prospects, and set off for the Manor. He passed the lodge, noting that the bedroom curtains were still drawn, and walked on up the drive, looking suspiciously from side to side for signs of depredations by the previous afternoon’s visitors. Finding none, and being obliged to admit that the daffodils were coming along nicely, he went on and passed round the east end of the house to the stable yard at the back, taking a bunch of keys from his pocket as he did so. As he unlocked the boiler house door acrid fumes greeted his nostrils. He reflected that they were always worse when the wind was in a northerly quarter, and that it would be a darned good thing when the new boiler was put in. Less work for them all, too.

  It was as he stepped over the threshold that he saw a body lying on the floor with its back to him, close to the inner door which opened on to a passage leading to the kitchen, and which at the moment was shut. Immobilised for a moment in sheer stupefaction, to his horror he recognised Francis Peck. Within seconds he had dragged his employer out into the yard and was giving him artificial respiration. But even while he did so he knew that his efforts were futile. He had done an ambulance man’s training and realised the significance of the blue lips and heightened colour...

  After a time he abandoned his efforts. Acting on a deep-seated instinct for seemliness, he fetched some sacks from a shed and covered the body. Then he stood staring into the boiler house, baffled by what appeared to be a large black polythene bag and a length of cord which had been lying between the body and the inner door. He finally decided against touching them or trying the door, remembering from films he had seen on the telly that the police didn’t like people mucking things about, and this looked like an inquest job if ever there was one.

  There was nobody in the house, he knew, Mrs Peck having been called away to her mother, the poor lady. He turned, and began to run with the heavy pounding tread of a man in his late fifties, heading for the lodge.

  Chapter 4

  ‘The chap’s dead all right, and what with the theft of the pictures, it’s a damn funny business,’ Inspector Rendell of the Wellchester CID reported over the telephone to Superintendent Maynard. ‘The local doctor’d been sent for, and he and Doc Wheatley agreed at once that it was carbon monoxide poisoning from the boiler fumes in a small unventilated space. Off the cuff, they put the probable time of death as not earlier than midnight and not later than three o’clock this morning. It’s Mr Francis Peck, the warden put in by Heritage of Britain when they took over the place. On the floor of the boiler house, near the door leading into the house, there’s a black polythene bag — the sort of thing people put out their rubbish in — and a length of cord. It looks as though he was trussed up and dumped and managed to free himself but couldn’t get out. We haven’t tried the inner door yet in case there are dabs.’

  ‘Who found him?’

  ‘The head gardener, a sensible sort of bloke called Basing. He went to see to the boiler about seven-thirty. He dragged Mr Peck clear and tried the kiss of life and whatever, but it was no go, so he belted down to the lodge to phone, where Mrs Ridley lives now with her granddaughter.’

  ‘Wasn’t anybody else sleeping in the Manor?’

  ‘No. Mrs Peck was sent for yesterday to her mother, who’d met with an accident. There’s no resident staff.’

  ‘How did you get in?’

  ‘A side door had been unbolted on the inside and left just latched. We went through the house and there were no signs of forced entry as far as we could see, but somebody’d got into the library where there’s an exhibition of pictures, and you can see that some of ’em have gone. There was a pair of steps by one of the walls. Mr Peck could have heard a noise and come down to have a look around. His flat’s on the first floor. No signs of disturbance there or anywhere else in the house. Workmen seem to be making alterations and redecorating in some of the rooms.’

  There was a pause as Superintendent Maynard digested this information.

  ‘If it wasn’t a break-in, somebody must have stowed away in the place,’ he said. ‘Easy enough with the summer season opening yesterday. I saw in the Evening News last night that they’d had quite a crowd. The house not being in normal occupation and a lot of builders’ stuff about would make it even easier.’

  ‘Whoever it was must have got hold of a key to the library, then,’ Inspector Rendell argued. ‘The lock wasn’t forced and the door was half open, but no sign of a key anywhere.’

  ‘It was probably hanging on a nail by the door,’ Superintendent Maynard commented acidly. ‘You know as well as I do how bloody daft people are. Did you get anything from Mrs Ridley and the granddaughter?’

  ‘They said they’d heard nothing in the way of footsteps in the drive or a car going past. There’s a dog, but it hadn’t barked.’

  ‘Plenty of other ways of coming away from the house on foot, of course, if you know the lie of the land. I take the wife over there every summer to see the gardens. But there must have been a car around somewhere if pictures were being lifted. I’ll get an enquiry going right away. Anything else?’

  ‘The granddaughter seems to have been one of the last people to see the deceased. Mr and Mrs Gilmore — he’s the Gilmore Constructions chap — live about a couple of miles away, and had asked the Pecks and Mrs Ridley and the girl to supper last night. Mrs Ridley had a chill, so in the end only Mr Peck and the girl went. Mr Gilmore fetched them by car, and brought them back about ten-thirty. He dropped her at the lodge, ran Mr Peck up to the Manor, and she says she heard the car return about five minutes later.’

  Superintendent Maynard grunted. ‘O.K. I’ll send off the mortuary van and usual support, and be along myself as soon as I can make it. Go ahead on the usual lines.’

  Detective Chief Superintendent Tom Pollard heard of Fairlynch Manor for the first time late that same evening. A free Sunday had been enjoyably spent getting away from it all on his brother’s farm in Sussex. The family had not returned to their home in Wimbledon until eight o’clock, with the car loaded with country produce and the twins, Andrew and Rose, grubby and fast asleep in the back. After the latter had been bathed, fed and got to bed, Pollard and his wife Jane settled down to a leisurely snack in their sitting room. Afterwards they relaxed over the Sunday papers.

  ‘Better hear some of the news, I suppose,’ Pollard said suddenly, getting up and switching on the television set.

  It had already started. An obvious reporter in a raincoat appeared on the screen in conversation with an equally obvious senior police officer.

  ‘It’s understood that the police are treating the death of Mr Francis Peck as a case of homicide, Superintendent,’ the reporter suggested hopefully.

  The police officer’s large rectangular face remained impassive. He cautiously admitted that this assumption was correct.

  ‘Could you tell the public the circumstances which led to this conclusion?’

  ‘At the present stage of the enquiry this would be inadvisable.’

  Pollard grinned. The reporter tried a different tack.

  ‘I believe I’m right in saying that Mr Peck’s body was found at about seven-thirty this morning in the boiler house of Fairlynch Manor. Have the police made any progress so far in tracking down those responsible?’

  ‘I am prepared to say,’ replied the Superintendent, giving the impression of being about to make an enormous concession to his interlocutor, ‘that enquiries are proceeding.’

  Both figures vanished.

  ‘Our reporter talking to Superintendent Maynard of the Wellchester CID,’ the newscaster informed viewers cosily.

  ‘Poor devil,’ Pollard remarked, switching off
and returning to his chair.

  ‘The late Francis Peck?’ Jane asked. ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘Never heard of the bloke until now. No, poor old Super Maynard. I can just picture the sort of day he’s had.’ Pollard replied with a gigantic yawn.

  ‘We’d better turn in. You’ve got a hefty day yourself tomorrow.’

  ‘True. There’s mass of loose ends to tie up in the Glanford case. I’ll probably have to go down there.’

  During the next three days Pollard was too preoccupied to be more than marginally aware that the demise of Mr Francis Peck was attracting the attention of the Press in a big way. On Thursday morning he arrived at his desk with a reasonable hope of finishing with the Glanford affair for the time being, and was annoyed to find that he was urgently required by his Assistant Commissioner. On arriving at the latter’s office it was obvious that storm signals were lying. To his astonishment he was greeted by an outburst against conservationists in general and Heritage of Britain in particular. He was conscious of an almost audible click in his mind.

  ‘Where do we come in on this, sir?’ he asked, realising that the answer was a foregone conclusion.

  The Assistant Commissioner slammed some typewritten sheets down on his desk.

  ‘We’ve no bloody business to be coming in at all,’ he retorted. ‘It’s this affair at one of the Heritage people’s properties near Wellchester. Fairlynch Manor, it’s called...’

  Pollard gathered that the regrettably influential top brass of Heritage of Britain had bullied the Chief Constable of Wynshire into calling in the Yard, having apparently expected an arrest within hours of the discovery of Francis Peck’s body. Even more outrageously, they had managed to pull wires at the Home Office, and a message had come through from the highest levels suggesting that an experienced officer should take over the case.

  ‘I suppose you’d better go,’ the Assistant Commissioner concluded. ‘You’ll be resented and probably obstructed by the local chaps every step of the way, of course. I don’t blame them, either. It looks a straightforward local job they could handle perfectly well. Still you’ve nothing on hand at the moment, have you, except the tail end of the Glanford case? Push it on to somebody else, go down to this Fairlynch Manor and get things cleared up as quickly as possible, that’s all. You’ll want Toye, I suppose?’