A Killing in the Family

by David W Robinson

  “Ah. Right. You’re that Douglas Ballantyne.” The penny having dropped, Joe eased his brusque manner. “Look, if you’ve been threatened, you really should go to the cops.”

  “There are reasons why I won’t do that.” Sir Douglas smiled, and gestured at the empty table adjacent to Sheila and Brenda. “Can we talk?”

  On the far side of the room, the van driver stood and left. With nothing better to fill his time, Joe pushed the beaker across the counter. “On the house.”

  ***

  “I received the first of these about two weeks ago,” Sir Douglas said, digging into his inner pockets and coming out with three A4 sheets. “They came in this order.”

  He unfolded and spread each sheet out on the table, pushing them across to Joe who read them in turn.

  You will not live to see Lammas.

  You will breathe your last on Lammas Eve.

  Prepare to meet your god before Lammas.

  The words had been formed from letters cut from newspaper headlines and glued onto the paper.

  “Don’t spell any too good, do they?” Joe commented, passing the sheets to his two lady friends. “There’s only one ‘M’ in lamas.”

  “Lammas, Joe,” Sheila told him. “Neo-pagan festival. July thirty-first, which is—” Sheila checked the calendar behind the counter. “—this coming Friday.”

  “Congratulations, my dear,” Ballantyne said. “You have it spot on. One of my daughters is a historian, and paganism was one of her areas of study at one time. We also live near to Sabden. It was the home of the Pendle Witches, you know.

  “Was it?” Joe asked, feeling slightly at sea. “So this is referring to the coming weekend?”

  “My seventy-fifth birthday is on Saturday. August first. According to these threats, I’ll not live to see it.”

  “So whoever sent this obviously knows something about you,” Joe said.

  “It was sent by a member of my family or the household.”

  Joe considered the information. “How do you know? Was there no postmark on the envelope?”

  “There was no envelope.”

  Joe ran his mind’s eye through the various scenarios this presented. Picturing a well-to-do detached house, with its own lawns and curved driveway, he could see a shadowy figure sneaking up to the front door. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean it was someone in the house, does it? It could have been anyone just passing by. Someone trying to wind you up by dropping it through the letterbox.”

  Ballantyne shook his head. “The front door, as you call it, is a quarter of a mile from the road. The property is secured, the main gates are electronically locked and covered by CCTV, and no one has been seen to climb over them or the walls, and these were placed on the hall table with the morning mail. They were folded in half and, as you can see addressed to me.” He took one sheet back from Sheila, turned it sheet over and on the rear was scrawled, Sir Douglas Ballantyne. “No, Joe, this is from someone in the house.”

  The vision in Joe’s head dissipated to be replaced by an English castle, its boundaries secured by the wall and gates. The shadowy figure still lurked, but now he emerged from secret passages, and sneaked along between suits of armour, beneath overlarge landscape paintings and deer heads set into oak-panelled walls.

  Sheila passed the sheets back to Joe who handed them straight back to Sir Douglas. “Take them to the police, Mr Ballantyne. They have specialist techniques for lifting fingerprints, DNA and what have you.”

  A thin, almost cruel smile crossed the old man’s lined features. “I don’t want the police involved. I want someone to pinpoint the culprit and I’ll handle the matter from there.”

  “Hanging people, even members of your own staff and family, is illegal you know,” Joe quipped.

  “Credit me with the ability to be able to deal with my own family.”

  Joe was surprised. “You’re taking the threat seriously?”

  The old man shrugged. “A few moments ago, your friend suggested I take this to the police.”

  “Yes, because it’s a threat,” Joe said. “Making such threats is illegal. But if you know it came from your family, or maybe your staff, I wouldn’t have thought you’d take it so seriously.”

  “Family, not staff.” Sir Douglas sipped on his tea and frowned. “Good God, I haven’t tasted anything this rough for years.”

  “Remind me to recommend Ballantyne Mail Order to my enemies.” Having made his blunt point, Joe drew the conversation back on track. “You’re so sure of your staff, are you?”

  “They’ve been with me a good, long time. I trust them implicitly. I regret, I cannot say the same about my family. We all live under the same roof and inevitably there are stresses and strains. I don’t believe for one moment that any member of my family would carry out these threats, but I have to say there are one or two who would be quite happy to see me shuffle off my mortal coil.”

  Joe clasped his hands around his beaker and sank into his thoughts, wondering which way to take the debate. He had enough on his plate trying to make the newly opened Lazy Luncheonette pay its way, and he did not want to be distracted by a murder case, particularly a murder which had not yet happened and which, from his limited point of view, appeared to be some sort of sick joke.

  “Could it be your grandchildren taking the mickey?”

  Sir Douglas denied it. “My grandchildren don’t figure. It may be the summer break, but they are not at The Sorting House.”

  Joe felt glad of the distraction. “The Sorting House?”

  A broad smile crossed Sir Douglas’s face. “The name of my little country home. Mail order is my business, remember.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I remember. So if the grandkids are not there, where are they?”

  “Summer holidays, Joe, and they’re all in their late teens. They’re away with their university friends.”

  “Spending their inheritance?”

  Sir Douglas laughed with genuine pleasure. “Probably. Dave Kane told me you were blunt and to the point. It’s quite refreshing. Most people are too busy sucking up to me, crawling and greasing their way into my good books to dare speak like that about me or any member of my family.”

  “Yes, well, to be honest, you don’t have anything I want. Not even your money. Look, Sir Douglas—”

  “Just plain Douglas, please.”

  “All right, Douglas. I’m up to my neck in problems here, and you’re asking me to abandon ship to track down a potential killer on the basis of a few idiotic notes.”

  “What sort of problems?” Sir Douglas asked.

  Joe’s confusion showed in a furrowed forehead. “I don’t know about your problems.”

  “No. You said you had enough problems of your own. What sort of problems?”

  “Nothing you could do much about.”

  “You never know. Tell me about them.”

  “Trust me, you can’t help,” Joe said. “Not unless you can buy out a company called Gleason Holdings, sack the managing director, and get me a spot on that new parade they’re building over the road.”

  “Hmm. Tall order. Why would you want the managing director fired?”

  “He burned down my old place.”

  The moment he said it, Joe knew Sheila or Brenda would respond, and he was not disappointed.

  It was Brenda who spoke up. “Now, Joe, you can’t go making accusations like that. We know that Gerard Vaughan was in Blackpool when the old place caught fire.”

  Sir Douglas agreed with Sheila. “Seems a little extreme, accusing him like that. Especially if you know where he was and he was nowhere near the place. I take it all this happened because he wanted to buy and you wouldn’t sell?”

  “Correct… well, no, not correct. I would have sold at the market price if he’d have guaranteed me a place in the new parade, but he refused, so I went out of my way to make life difficult for him. I held up his precious development as long as I could.”

  “And you didn’t go to the police when the old place
burned down?”

  “Yes, I did. Several times. But they want trivia like proof.”

  The old man shrugged. “Yet you say I should go to the police with my problem. The fact is, Joe, I have no trivia like proof, either.”

  Joe sighed. Confronted with a problem he had suffered for many years, finding it difficult to resist a challenge, he knew what he wanted to do: follow Sir Douglas back to his home and get stuck into solving the matter. But with the new Lazy Luncheonette struggling…

  “What is it you want me to do?”

  The old man’s smile was broader, warmer this time. “That’s better. It’s my birthday on Saturday. The family will all be there for the weekend. No trips out in classic cars, no golf tournaments.” Sir Douglas’s words puzzled Joe once more, but the old man offered no explanation. “We will all be there… grandchildren excepted. I’d like you to come along, too. I’ll introduce you as an old friend. From there, I’ll make sure you have access to whatever information you may need, and hopefully, by the time we get to Sunday evening, you’ll be able to point me in a specific direction. I’ll handle things from there. The only other condition I’ll insist on, is that no one should know why you’re there. As far as my family is concerned, you’re a friend who helped us out at the Blackpool depot.”

  Joe hesitated. Sheila and Brenda did not.

  Beaming encouragement on him, Sheila insisted, “Go on, Joe. We can look after this place.”

  “And the break would do you good,” Brenda maintained. “Get away from your worries for a few days.”

  He grunted by return. “You two just want me out of the way.”

  “So we can have a proper knees-up,” Brenda agreed with a broad grin.

  With a sour face and an air of resignation, Joe turned his attention back to Sir Douglas. “No deal.” The announcement hit all three as a shock, causing Joe to smile at their reaction. “I say no deal, but there is a way we can reach a deal.”

  “I’m listening,” Sir Douglas promised.

  “These two come with me.” Joe pointed at Sheila and Brenda as he spoke, his index finger wagging between them.

  The old man was obviously uncertain. “It’s not that we haven’t room, Joe, but I disapprove of, er, shenanigans.”

  Sheila’s lips were pursed in disapproval. “And so do I, which is why we won’t be coming with him.”

  “Speaking for myself,” Brenda declared, “I like the odd bit of shenaniganing, but—”

  “I meant they should have their own room,” Joe interrupted.

  “Joe, The Lazy Luncheonette—”

  As he interrupted Brenda again, Joe gazed meaningfully around the empty room. “Lee can cope. Isn’t that right, lad?”

  “Wassat, Uncle Joe?” Lee called from the kitchen.

  “You can manage the café from Friday until next Monday?”

  “No worries. I’ll bring our Cheryl in and her mate, Pauline. We’ll see to it.”

  “There y’are.” Joe leaned forward to stress his next point. “Listen, Douglas, on their own, these two couldn’t detect an empty petrol tank in a rusty car—”

  “Joe…” There was a warning edge to Sheila’s voice.

  He ignored it. “But they have a way of looking at things, which often points me in the right direction. In fact, it was these two which gave me the final hint in the killings at your Blackpool depot. You want me to look into these things, I need Sheila and Brenda with me.”

  Sir Douglas wasted little time thinking about it. “And if I say yes, you’ll go for it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’s agreed. You two ladies can enjoy a weekend at my place along with Joe.” Sir Douglas reached once more into the pockets of his jacket and came out with more A4 sheets. “Photocopies of the documents I’ve received,” he said, and handed them to Joe. “I thought you may need time to work over them.”

  “They may not tell me much, but okay. Now, how do I get there and when do you want to see me?”

  “How well do you know the Pendle area of Lancashire?”

  “About as well as any Yorkshireman is likely to know his way round Lancashire,” Joe replied. “I’ve always been of the opinion that the only good things to come out of Lancashire are the roads to Yorkshire.”

  Sir Douglas frowned. “Do you know, we Lancastrians say exactly the same, only the other way round.”

  “Enough War of the Roses,” Joe suggested. “Pendle. Burnley way, isn’t it?”

  “To the north of Burnley. Pendle Hill is quite prominent when you drive along the M65. Anyway, you should follow the road from Whalley to Sabden. About a mile and a half before you get to Sabden, you’ll come to the house. You can’t mistake it. High walls and wrought iron gates. Just press the buzzer and announce yourself.”

  “What time?” Joe asked.

  Sir Douglas was less definite to begin with. “Everyone is expected for dinner by seven, but I’d like you there earlier, so I can spell out who’s who, introduce you to them individually, and give you a little background on them.”

  “Two o’clock, then?”

  “How about one o’clock?” Sir Douglas suggested. “We could have lunch on the terrace.”

  “Fine. One o’clock Friday it is.”

  Chapter Two

  “If you didn’t want to come, you should have said so.”

  The traffic lights changed, Joe pulled away and accelerated along the road from Accrington to Whalley.

  From the back seat, Brenda protested, “You insisted. You made it part of the deal. Anyway, I didn’t say we didn’t want to. I just said you needn’t have made out that you absolutely needed us.”

  Sat alongside Joe, her window open against the raw heat of the summer, Sheila agreed with her best friend. “It’s not like you rely on us that heavily, Joe.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” Joe said. He was about to explain further, but a set of temporary lights, where workmen were digging up the road, caused him to concentrate on his driving.

  Once through them, he accelerated again, and almost without warning, the houses and businesses lining either side of the road ended. There was no gradual thinning, no hint that they had reached the edge of town. Everything simply came to an abrupt end and there was nothing to see but miles and miles of forest and moorland. As they drove on, they passed the occasional pub or farmhouse, buildings detached not only from other properties but from civilisation itself so it appeared. Pendle Hill rumbled and rose on their right in the far distance, while closer to them, lower hills yielded an artificial horizon several miles ahead and several hundred feet higher up.

  “Beautiful country,” Sheila sighed. “It reminds me of Ilkley Moor. We used to take the boys there during the summer months.”

  “It’s a part of the same landscape.” Joe pointed to his right, due east. “Ilkley Moor is over that way in a nice, straight line from here.”

  Fanning herself with a road map, Brenda asked, “What were you saying about things being a bit more complicated, Joe?”

  The abrupt change of subject brought Joe’s thinking back to the problem which had been on his mind since the beginning of the week when Sir Douglas had visited. Putting his foot down and letting the car pick up speed, he said, “It occurred to me the moment he asked me along. This is a family affair. I’m a stranger. If anything really does go wrong, who are the family gonna blame? Me. That’s who. The nearest interloper. I needed you two along as witnesses to my innocence.”

  Brenda laughed sharply. “Innocence? Do me a favour. It’s not what the environment people said when they found that chip fat dumped on Croft Lane.”

  “And it served you right for dropping one of your hand rolled cigarette ends there,” Sheila said. “Talk about incriminating yourself.”

  Joe tutted and diverted the conversation back along its intended route. “You know what I mean. I’m the outsider here, and if things go base over apex, I’m the one with his head on the chopping block.”

  As he eased his speed a
gain for another set of traffic lights at a complex four-way junction, Sheila asked, “Surely you’re not taking these threats seriously?”

  “No, I’m not, but… which way from here, Brenda?”

  Brenda stopped wafting the map in front of her face, and hurriedly consulted it. “There’s a narrow lane off to the right. About the one o’clock position. You need to be up there.”

  Joe spotted the turning, half right from their point of view, and moved over to the right hand lane. It was a troublesome task getting across. Oncoming traffic split between the road they were on and another main road which led off to Burnley behind and to their right. The lights were changing again before Joe could make his turn, much to the annoyance of traffic coming from Burnley now trying to join the main road.

  And when he made the lane, he understood Brenda’s use of the word ‘narrow’. Surrounded by high hedgerows on both sides, it was not much wider than the car. He kept his speed down, and his awareness on high alert, ready for a prompt stop should anything appear round the bends. Five hundred, incident-free yards further on, they came to a T junction. Following Brenda’s directions, Joe turned right onto a slightly wider, but still unclassified road, and picked up his speed again.

  “It’s about a mile along here, Joe,” Brenda told him. “On the right.”

  “Right. Now what was I saying?”

  “You were not taking the threats seriously,” Sheila reminded him.

  “Oh. Yeah. I don’t think there’s any danger of Sir Douglas being snuffed out. Even he said so. And if we can finger the joker, I’m sure the old man can deal with it. But there’s always that outside chance, isn’t there? And if anything does happen, I want someone there to corroborate my story.”

  “Corroborate it in what way?” Sheila demanded.

  “You heard the old man say no one should know why we’re there. We’re complete strangers to the rest of the household, and if anything does happen, they’re gonna look at us. At least you two can verify that he called to see us on Monday.”

  The land around them was as rolling and yet featureless as before, save for the odd farmhouse. Lined by drystone walls, the pastures and woodland a flood of summer greens, as they rounded a gentle left hand bend, the bulk of Pendle Hill appeared ahead, still several miles distant, yet dominating the skyline.