Murder by Numbers

by Eric Brown

  Maria and Pamela ate a late breakfast in the great hall on their second morning at the Grange. The hall was vast, with a high vaulted ceiling crisscrossed by oaken beams, its walls hung with hunting prints and landscapes depicting the surrounding countryside. They sat at a big oak table before the window, warmed by the winter sunlight slanting through the tiny leaded panes.

  Maria tried to forget about the events of two nights ago, but the image of Holly Beckwith curled up in the corner of the room, blood-soaked and defenceless, kept returning to haunt her.

  She looked around the hall, at the dozen or so empty tables, and recalled the place as it had been in the summer when she and Donald had stayed here. The Grange had been full then, and they had spent an idyllic weekend walking through the nearby woods and along the riverbank. She smiled as she remembered what Donald had said the previous night: that when all this was over, they’d have a few days away from everything.

  Pamela ploughed her way through a plate piled with bacon, sausages and fried eggs, but Maria could only nibble on a slice of toast.

  ‘Where do you get such an appetite?’ she asked. ‘For a slim girl, you eat a lot.’

  ‘Always have done,’ Pamela laughed. ‘My old dad always said you shouldn’t start the day on an empty stomach.’

  ‘Even at the best of times, I can take only a slice of toast and a cup of coffee.’

  On cue, a waitress crossed the great hall from the kitchen, bearing another pot of coffee. ‘Here you are; I thought you’d like a fresh pot. Now can I get you anything else? More toast?’

  ‘I think we have everything, thank you,’ Maria said.

  The girl hesitated, looking from Pamela to Maria. ‘I was wondering … I hope you don’t mind me asking?’

  Maria smiled. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, me and cook, we was wondering – are you and Miss Pamela film stars?’

  Maria’s first impulse was to laugh. ‘Film stars?’ she said, shaking her head in bemusement.

  ‘Only, you see, we had some actresses staying here last year – they were shooting an Ealing comedy over at Malthorpe Hall – and they had a couple of men with them who me and cook reckoned were bodyguards.’ She nodded through the window to where Sergeant Sheppard was standing beside an ornamental flower urn in the drive, smoking a cigarette. ‘And what with these two hanging around, all suspicious like, and the young chap spending all night on the landing upstairs, we was wondering …’

  Maria was trying to think of a convincing cover story when Pamela said, ‘We’re location scouts, researching a few possible venues for a film.’

  ‘A film at the Grange?’ the waitress gasped.

  ‘Well, possibly. We haven’t decided yet. And Dennis – the young one – has terrible insomnia.’

  ‘Wait till I tell cook!’ the girl said, hurrying back to the kitchen.

  Maria laughed. ‘Quick thinking!’

  ‘I couldn’t honestly tell her the truth, could I?’

  ‘It must look strange, you and I doing nothing all day but mooning around, and Dennis and Sergeant Sheppard patrolling the place.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m sorry about all this, Pamela – dragging you away from work.’

  ‘What do you mean? This is work, isn’t it? Remember, I asked Donald if I could be promoted, and here I am, protecting you.’

  Maria smiled. ‘Protecting?’

  ‘The other night, in the back of his car, Ralph told me to guard you with my life.’ She nodded defiantly. ‘So I am.’

  Maria smiled. ‘That’s very kind of you.’

  Pamela finished her breakfast and Maria poured another coffee.

  ‘Anyway, what do you think of Dennis?’ Pamela asked a little hesitantly.

  Maria tipped her head and regarded the young woman. The previous day she’d seen Pamela and the constable chatting in the ornamental garden, and in the evening, on the pretext of going outside for a cigarette, Pamela had spent half an hour in his company before turning in.

  ‘I can’t say I’ve spoken to him.’ She smiled. ‘But he is rather good-looking, isn’t he?’

  ‘I’ll say, and do you know what?’

  ‘Let me guess. He’s asked you out to dinner?’

  ‘Well, to the pictures when we get back to London.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Ra-ther,’ Pamela said, affecting the posh tones that always made Maria laugh.

  The young woman finished her coffee and said, ‘Scrabble or a stroll?’

  Maria had her manuscript to read but baulked at the thought of ploughing through another hundred pages of undergraduate angst. ‘I need a little fresh air. Shall we walk up to the folly?’

  ‘Let’s,’ Pamela said.

  ‘Better clear it with Sergeant Sheppard,’ Maria said as they left the great hall.

  While Pamela fetched her coat, Maria crunched across the gravel to where the burly policeman was still smoking. He extinguished his cigarette in the flower urn on her approach and raised two fingers to his forehead in an oddly formal salute. ‘Morning, ma’am. Enjoyed your breakfast?’

  ‘The coffee certainly woke me up,’ she said. ‘Pamela and I were thinking of strolling up to the folly.’

  ‘Very well, ma’am, but the same as yesterday, if you will. The folly and no further, and always keep the house in sight. I’ll come round the back so I can see you at all times. And if you see anyone approaching who looks suspicious …’

  ‘Back to the house lickety-split,’ she finished.

  Sergeant Sheppard saluted again. ‘Okey-dokey, ma’am.’

  Maria fetched her coat, hat and gloves from her room and met Pamela in the hallway.

  They walked around the house and climbed the gravel path that wound through the rockery at the back of the building, then ascended the steep greensward rising to the high knoll that afforded a wonderful panorama of the surrounding countryside. On its crest stood a seventeenth-century folly, a semi-circular colonnaded stone building with a cupolaed roof.

  Halfway up the incline, Maria turned to admire the winter landscape.

  The countryside, a combination of woodland and farmland, rolled away in every direction. A low mist obscured the horizon, and in areas still sheltered from the mid-morning sunlight, the land was silvered with frost. There was not a breath of wind; smoke rose vertically from a handful of cottages and the occasional wood pigeon set up a throaty, muffled cooing.

  Far below, Sergeant Sheppard appeared around the end of the hall, sat on a boulder in the rockery and lit up another cigarette.

  Maria shivered and turned her collar up against the icy chill.

  They reached the circular folly and sat on the cold stone seat, facing the Grange. At the far end of the long drive that snaked away from the building, an unmarked black police car stood by the gates. The young constable, Dennis, leaned against the bonnet and gazed down the lane.

  Maria scanned the land falling away on either side, and the surrounding woodland beyond. Even if Maxwell Fenton and his accomplice had somehow learned of their whereabouts, she thought, they would find it difficult to approach the hall without being seen.

  The odd thing was that despite the evidence of what Fenton had done to date, she did not feel threatened; it was as if she was inhabiting a dream in which the threat was nebulous and directed at someone else. She wondered if this was because she found it almost absurd that Fenton had magnified out of all proportion the slights committed against him. The Fenton she had known had been vain and egotistical, but he had not been insane: that had come later, and with it the desire to seek vengeance.

  She thought of the actor, tricked into shooting himself, Dr Bryce and the Goudges and Holly Beckwith …

  ‘Strange,’ she said, more to herself.

  ‘What is?’ Pamela said, lighting a cigarette and inhaling deeply.

  ‘I was thinking about Maxwell Fenton. The odd thing is I would like to meet him, or rather to confront him. I’m angry. I want to know if he is insane. Or if he is quite rational and genuinely th
inks he has the God-given right to take the lives of innocent people.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what would be worse, Pamela: to find that he is mad or sane.’

  ‘Sane,’ Pamela said upon reflection.

  ‘Yes, you’re probably right.’

  Pamela pointed. ‘We have company,’ she said.

  Maria jumped, surprising herself, then saw with relief that Pamela was pointing to a big car that had stopped by the gates to the Grange. Someone climbed from the driving seat and spoke to the constable stationed there, then returned to the car and drove up the winding drive to the house.

  ‘Reinforcements?’ Pamela said.

  From this angle, they had a partial view of the gravel turning area to the left of the Grange. The car halted and the driver climbed out again, along with another man: they both had the brisk, no-nonsense air of policemen. The driver opened the saloon’s back door and a third figure emerged. This one, by complete contrast, had a diminished, skulking aspect as he scuttled to the entrance of the house clutching a small bag to his chest.

  ‘I wonder who …?’ Pamela began.

  ‘Crispin Proudfoot,’ Maria said. ‘Another one of Maxwell Fenton’s potential victims.’

  Pamela finished her cigarette and crushed the butt with the toe of her two-tone shoes. She peered at the policeman stationed by the distant gate.

  ‘Do you think Dennis would like a bit of company?’ she asked Maria with a grin.

  Maria laughed. ‘From a pretty young girl who thinks he’s quite a dish? I think he just might.’

  ‘Would you mind awfully if I abandoned you?’

  ‘I really should be getting some reading done,’ Maria said.

  They left the folly and descended to the house, and Pamela continued along the drive with the purposeful stride of a young woman with only one thing on her mind. Maria collected the manuscript from her room and moved to the library, where a blazing log fire warmed three big sofas positioned around the hearth. She curled up and began reading.

  She was surprised when a knock at the door brought her back to the real world. She looked at her wristwatch: an hour had passed in no time at all. She wondered if it might be the waitress, come to see if she would care for refreshments.

  The door opened and Crispin Proudfoot inserted his diffident head. ‘Oh, there you are, I was wondering … I hope you don’t mind my interrupting. Sergeant Sheppard said you were here. If you’re working, I can … Only it would be nice if we could talk, perhaps?’

  He had the manner of a jerky, defective clockwork toy coupled with a chronic shyness that made Maria uneasy in his company. There was something at once pathetic and annoying in his diffidence, and she was torn between wanting to tell the young man to pull himself together and hugging him as if he were a needy child.

  She smiled and indicated a sofa. ‘Not at all. Please, join me.’

  ‘That’s awfully good of you.’ He hurried across the room and seated himself on the edge of the cushion as if he might at any second leap up and sprint off.

  ‘The police have obviously decided that there’s safety in numbers,’ Maria said, smiling.

  He gave a sickly smile. His hands lay on his corduroy lap, his fingers trembling. He was not, Maria decided, an appealing individual, with his long fingernails, hatchet face, white eyelashes and spittle-flecked lips.

  ‘I saw your husband yesterday. It’s thanks to him, I think, that the police decided to move me here. The place I was renting in Muswell Hill … Well, Sergeant Sheppard said it was a death trap.’

  Startling her, he leaned forward suddenly, almost as if he were about to leap into her lap. ‘Donald … he told me that Fenton’s behind all this. He’s killing us all one by one, first poor Doctor Bryce, then the Goudges, and then—’

  ‘Crispin, we’re safe here; please believe me. Fenton cannot have traced us here, and we have excellent protection.’

  The poet shook his head, almost appealing to her. ‘But are we safe? Fenton traced the actress, Beckwith – he knew where she’d fled to! How can you be sure he doesn’t know where we are?’

  His lips trembled as he spoke, and he clutched and unclutched the material of his trousers, comically lifting the turn-ups to reveal lengths of sallow, ginger-haired shin.

  ‘The police have the place surrounded,’ she said, excusing her exaggeration. ‘Even if by some miracle Fenton knew where we were, he couldn’t possibly get through, believe me. And the police are working all hours to capture him. It’s only a matter of time.’

  A knock sounded at the door, and Proudfoot gave a whinny and almost shot from his chair.

  The door opened and the waitress appeared. ‘I thought I saw you come in here. All cosy, are we? Now, would you be wanting anything in the way of tea or coffee?’

  Maria said that tea would be wonderful, but Proudfoot shook his head as if she were offering hemlock.

  Later, Maria sipped her tea and wondered how she might put the young man at his ease.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  At the Wheatsheaf Arms in Witton, a couple of miles south of Great Dunmow, Langham and Ralph each enjoyed a pint and a ham-and-mustard sandwich.

  At five to one Langham consulted his notebook. ‘The Old Rectory, Duck Pond Lane.’

  Ralph finished his beer. ‘Don’t think she’s a vicar’s wife, do you?’

  Langham smiled. ‘I very much doubt it. She has the same name as she had back in the thirties, when she was seeing Fenton. My guess is she never married. Maybe her experience with Fenton put her off men for life.’

  Langham asked the publican for directions to Duck Pond Lane, and they returned to the car.

  ‘How are we going to play this, Don?’

  ‘We don’t mention that Fenton is dead,’ Langham said. ‘We ask her about his friends and acquaintances, and if she’s had any contact with him of late.’

  ‘She doesn’t live that far from Winterfield,’ Ralph said. ‘You never know, they might have got back together again.’

  Langham grunted. ‘More fool her, if so.’

  They passed the church, turned left down Duck Pond Lane and drove on for fifty yards until they came to a substantial thatched cottage set back in an extensive lawned garden. A wrought-iron sign bearing the legend ‘The Old Rectory’ was screwed to the timber gatepost.

  Langham pulled into the drive and climbed out.

  Ralph rang the doorbell and it was answered almost instantly by a tall woman in her early fifties, her blonde hair turning to grey and swept back from a high forehead. She regarded them with slate-grey eyes and the kind of tight, reserved smile that polite gentlefolk reserve for guests whom they would rather not entertain.

  As the nearby church bells tolled the hour, she said, ‘Mr Langham, are private detectives always so punctual?’

  He smiled. ‘More through luck than good judgement, this time.’

  He introduced Ralph, and she gestured for them to follow her along the hall to the rear of the house and into a conservatory heated by winter sunlight.

  She indicated a pair of wicker seats. ‘Would you care for tea?’

  Langham was about to decline, saying that they wouldn’t keep her long, but Ralph said, ‘Don’t mind if I do. Mine’s white with three.’

  ‘Just black for me, please,’ Langham said.

  She left the room, and Ralph said, ‘Nice place. Wonder how she came by a pile like this?’

  ‘Notice the Bible on the table in the hall, Ralph? And the crucifix on the wall? For a second, I wondered if you’re right and she is married to a vicar.’

  ‘And kept her own name?’ Ralph sounded dubious.

  She returned with a tea-tray and sat opposite them on a wicker sofa. She poured three cups of tea and sat back with a china cup held in both hands before her chest, regarding her guests dispassionately.

  Langham said, ‘I’m sorry to intrude on your time like this—’

  She interrupted. ‘You mentioned you were attempting to trace Maxwell Fenton, Mr Langham. I take it that you’v
e tried looking for him at Winterfield?’

  He nodded. ‘Without much luck, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What is this about? Is Maxwell in trouble?’

  ‘We’d like to speak to him regarding an investigation,’ he said. ‘Were you in contact with Mr Fenton recently?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. No, I wasn’t.’

  ‘When was the last time you did see him?’

  She looked past him and stared at the vale falling away behind the house, a slight frown creasing her high forehead. She smiled distantly. ‘That would be a long time ago, gentlemen.’

  ‘Before the war?’

  ‘Yes, long before the war.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t be able to tell me much at all about his recent activity? His current friends, acquaintances, lovers? You haven’t happened to hear anything on the grapevine, so to speak?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, no. Our contact ceased more than twenty-five years ago, and we certainly have no friends or acquaintances in common.’ She sipped her tea, looking from Langham to Ralph and back again.

  Ralph finished his tea with a gulp, replaced the cup on the saucer, then said, ‘We understand you and Fenton were close, back then?’

  ‘I knew Maxwell Fenton in the thirties, yes.’

  ‘You were lovers?’ Ralph asked.

  Langham could tell, from the sudden set of her jaw, that she resented the question.

  ‘Gentlemen, I would really like to know what this is all about—’

  ‘As Don said,’ Ralph interrupted, ‘we’d like to trace Fenton regarding an ongoing investigation.’

  ‘And how can anything I have to say about what happened way before the war have any bearing on your enquiries?’

  Ralph smiled. ‘That’s for us to work out.’

  Sensing her barely restrained exasperation, Langham said, ‘We’re working on a murder enquiry. A number of murders, in fact. We believe that the person responsible might be an acquaintance of Maxwell Fenton.’

  ‘Murder?’ Her eyes widened fractionally and she set her tea cup aside. ‘But is Maxwell in danger?’

  Langham hesitated. ‘It’s too early to say, yet. But everything we can learn about Maxwell Fenton might assist us in tracing him and bringing the killer to justice.’