‘Of course I don’t think that,’ I said.
‘Then if you’ve got nothing else to ask me, I think Joanne’s right and you should leave.’
Neither of them moved. I stood up, feeling quite breathless. ‘I’ll show myself out,’ I said.
‘Yes. And please don’t come back.’
‘This isn’t over, Martin.’ I wasn’t going to let him intimidate me. ‘The truth will come out.’
‘Goodbye, Susan.’
I went. To be honest, I couldn’t wait to get away.
* * *
Had Martin just confessed to the murder of Frank Parris? ‘I killed my brother-in-law because I didn’t want to have to sell the house.’ He had spelled it out for me and in truth it was exactly what I had been thinking. From what I had discovered so far, and working on the assumption that Stefan Codrescu was innocent, nobody else had any motive to kill Frank Parris. No one at the hotel had even known who he was. But Martin and Joanne had a bona fide reason that they had done their best to keep hidden from me. What was more, Martin had lied about the marquee and when I had challenged him just now he hadn’t even tried to think up a reasonable explanation. He and his wife had both threatened me in different ways. It was almost as if they wanted me to know what they had done.
I got into my car and drove slowly out of Westleton until I found the house I was looking for – about a mile down the road. It was called The Brambles, a tiny, pink Suffolk cottage that looked as if it had been there for ever, standing on its own next to a farm, separated from it by a low wooden fence.
It was exactly the sort of house I would have expected Derek Endicott, the night manager, to live in. He had told me he lived close to Westleton and I had got the address from Inga before I left the hotel. It had probably belonged to the same family for generations. The clues were there in the old-fashioned television aerial on the roof, the outside toilet that hadn’t been torn down or converted, the glass in the windows that had trapped the dust of centuries. The doorbell might have been added in the sixties. When I rang, it chimed out a tune.
After what seemed like an eternity, the door was opened by a very old woman wearing a loose-fitting floral dress – it was actually more of a smock – and supporting herself on a walking frame. Her hair was grey and tangled and she had hearing aids behind both ears. Lawrence had told me that Derek’s mother was ill but I must say that on first appearance she looked quite sprightly and alert.
‘Yes?’ she asked. She had a strained, high-pitched voice that reminded me a little of her son.
‘Are you Mrs Endicott?’
‘Yes. Who are you?’
‘My name is Susan Ryeland. I’m from Branlow Hall.’
‘Are you here for Derek? He’s still in bed.’
‘I can come back later.’
‘No. Come in. Come in. The doorbell will have woken him up. It was almost time for his lunch anyway.’
She turned her back on me and, leaning on the walking frame, edged herself into the single room that made up much of the ground floor. It was both a kitchen and a living room, the two jumbled together haphazardly. All the furniture was antique but not in a good way. The sofa sagged, the oak table was scarred, the kitchen equipment was out of date. The only nod to the twenty-first century was a widescreen TV, which perched uncomfortably on an ugly, fake wooden stand in the corner.
And yet, for all that, it was a cosy place. I couldn’t help but notice that there were two of everything: two cushions on the sofa, two armchairs, two wooden chairs at the table, two rings on the hob.
Mrs Endicott lowered herself heavily onto one of the armchairs. ‘Who did you say you were?’
‘Susan Ryeland. Mrs Endicott . . .’
‘Call me Gwyneth.’
She had become Phyllis in Alan Conway’s book but I could already see that the two women had almost nothing in common. I wondered if Alan had come here. I doubted it.
‘I don’t want to be in your way if you’re about to have lunch.’
‘You’re not in the way, dear. It’s only soup and shepherd’s pie. You can join us if you like.’ She paused to catch her breath and I heard a painful wheezing as the air entered her throat. At the same time, she reached down and for the first time I saw the oxygen cylinder that had been concealed beside the chair. She held a plastic suction cap to her mouth and breathed several times. ‘I’ve got the emphysema,’ she explained, when she had finished. ‘It’s my own silly fault. Thirty cigarettes a day all my life and it’s finally caught up with me. Do you smoke, dear?’
‘Yes,’ I admitted.
‘You shouldn’t.’
‘Who is it, Ma?’
I heard Derek’s voice before I saw him. A door opened and he came in, wearing tracksuit bottoms and a jersey that was a little too small for him. He was obviously surprised to see me sitting there, but unlike Joanne Williams he didn’t seem put out.
‘Mrs Ryeland!’
I was quite impressed that he remembered my name. ‘Hello, Derek,’ I said.
‘Have you got news?’
‘About Cecily? I’m afraid not.’
‘Mrs Ryeland is helping the police find Cecily,’ he told his mother.
‘That’s a terrible business,’ Gwyneth said. ‘She’s a very nice young woman. And a mother too! I hope they find her.’
‘She’s the reason why I’m here, Derek. Would you mind if I asked you a couple more questions?’
He sat down at the table. There was only just enough room for his stomach. ‘I’d be happy to help.’
‘It’s just that there was something you said when we met at the hotel.’ I continued carefully, making it easier for him. ‘Cecily had read a book that had upset her. And about two weeks ago – it was a Tuesday, about the same sort of time as now – she rang her parents in the South of France to talk about it. She said there was something in the book that suggested Stefan Codrescu might not have killed Frank Parris after all.’
‘I liked Stefan,’ Derek said.
‘Did I meet him?’ Gwyneth asked.
‘No, Ma. He never came here.’
‘When I was talking to you about Cecily, you said something to me. ‘I knew something was wrong when she made that phone call.’ Were you talking about the same phone call, Derek? The one she made to her parents?’
He had to think about that, untangling his memories of what had happened and also their possible implications for him. ‘She did phone her parents,’ he said, finally. ‘I was at the reception desk and she was in the office. I didn’t listen to what she said, though. I mean . . . I didn’t mean to.’
‘But you knew she was upset.’
‘She said he didn’t do it. She said they’d got it all wrong. The door doesn’t shut properly so I could hear some of it through the crack.’
‘Why were you at the hotel, Derek? It was midday. I thought you only worked nights.’
‘Sometimes, if Mum’s had a bad week, I switch over with Lars. Mr Treherne is very kind like that. I can’t leave her alone all night.’
‘It’s the emphysema,’ Gwyneth reminded me. She smiled at her son. ‘He looks after me.’
‘So you were there during the day. Was anyone else nearby when Cecily made the call?’
He pursed his lips. ‘Well, there were guests. The hotel was quite busy.’
‘Was Aiden MacNeil there? Or Lisa?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. Then his eyes brightened. ‘I saw the nanny!’
‘Eloise?’
‘She was looking for Cecily and I told her she was in the office.’
‘Did she go in?’
‘No. She could hear Cecily talking on the phone and she didn’t want me to disturb her so she asked me to say she’d been looking for her and went off.’
‘Did you talk to Cecily?’
‘No. After she finished the phone call, she came out of the office and I don’t know where she went. You’re right that she was upset. I think she’d been crying.’ His face fell as he said that, as if it w
as somehow his fault.
‘Did you tell the police all this?’ Gwyneth asked.
‘No, Ma. The police didn’t ask.’
I was beginning to feel uncomfortable, trapped in this small room between the invalid mother and her son. I felt a spurt of anger towards Alan Conway for manipulating them, turning them into caricatures in his book – but at the same time I knew that I had been complicit. I could have been more critical of Derek Chandler with his club foot and his schoolboy perversion, but I had gone ahead and published. And I hadn’t complained when the book became a bestseller.
There was something else I had to ask. I didn’t particularly want to do this either. ‘Derek,’ I began. ‘Why were you upset on the day before the wedding?’
‘I wasn’t upset. There was a party for the staff. I didn’t go but everyone looked as if they were having fun and that made me happy too.’
That wasn’t what Lawrence Treherne had told me. In the lengthy statement he had written, he had mentioned that Derek had been in a strange mood, ‘as if he’d seen a ghost’.
‘Was there someone who’d come to the hotel who you recognised?’
‘No.’ He was scared. He knew that I knew.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I don’t remember . . .’
I tried to be as gentle as possible. ‘You may have forgotten. But you knew George Saunders, didn’t you? The man who asked to change rooms and went into room sixteen. He was your headmaster when you were at school at Bromeswell Grove.’
It had taken me an hour on the Internet to get the information that I needed. There are dozens of websites that help old school friends reconnect: Classmates.com, SchoolMates, and so on. Bromeswell Grove also ran its own very active message board. I had been interested that a retired headmaster had been booked into the room where Frank Parris was killed and, almost on a whim, I had decided to check out if he had any connection with any of the staff or guests who had been at Branlow Hall at the time of the wedding. Derek’s name had very quickly leapt onto my screen.
Reading the posts – and then cross-referencing them with Facebook – it was obvious to me that Derek had been viciously bullied at school (‘fat’, ‘retard’, ‘wanker’) and that decades later he was still being trolled online. Saunders didn’t get off lightly either. He was a bully, a bastard, a paedophile, a pedant. As far as his ex-students were concerned, he couldn’t drop dead soon enough.
Alan Conway used to say that the Internet was the worst thing that ever happened to detective fiction – which was one of the reasons why he set his own stories back in the fifties. He had a point. It’s hard to make your detective look clever when all the information in the world is instantly available to everyone in the world at a moment’s notice. In my case, I wasn’t trying to look clever. I was simply searching for the truth. But I’m sure Atticus Pünd wouldn’t have approved of my methods.
‘Why are you talking about George Saunders?’ Gwyneth asked. ‘He was a horrible man.’
‘He was at the hotel,’ I said. I was still talking to Derek. ‘You saw him.’
Derek nodded miserably.
‘Did he see you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he say anything.’
‘He didn’t recognise me.’
‘But you recognised him.’
‘Of course I did.’
‘He was a horrible man,’ Gwyneth repeated. ‘Derek never did anything wrong, but the other boys ganged up on him and Saunders never did anything about it.’ She would have gone on but she had run out of breath and had to reach for the oxygen cylinder again.
‘He always picked on me.’ Derek continued where his mother had left off. There were tears in his eyes. ‘He used to make jokes about me in front of all the others. He said I was useless, that I would never have any future. It’s true. I was never good at that stuff – school and everything. But he said I’d never be a success at anything.’ He cast his eyes down. ‘Maybe he was right.’
I stood up. I was feeling ashamed, as if I had joined the trolls and the bullies by coming here. ‘It’s not true at all, Derek,’ I said. ‘The Trehernes think the world of you. You’re part of their family. And I think it’s wonderful the way you look after your mother.’
God! How much more patronising could I sound? I made my excuses and left as quickly as I could.
As I got back into my car, I reflected on what I had learned. I kept going over and over one thought in my mind. Just about every student who had been at Bromeswell Grove had disliked George Saunders. They’d all wanted him to drop dead. Just the sight of him had been enough to reduce Derek Endicott to a jabbering wreck.
But it had been Frank Parris who had died.
Katie
I’d phoned ahead and told Katie I was coming but for once I wasn’t looking forward to seeing her.
She was in the garden when I pulled into Three Chimneys, pottering about with gardening gloves and a pair of secateurs, deadheading the roses or pruning the marigolds or whatever else it was that would make her perfect house just that little bit more perfect. I love Katie. I really do. She’s the only line of continuity running through the haphazardness of my life, even though there are times when I’m not even sure if I really know her.
‘Hello!’ she greeted me brightly. ‘I hope you don’t mind a scrap lunch. I’ve bought it in, I’m afraid. Quiche from Honey + Harvey in Melton and a salad I’ve thrown together.’
‘That’s fine . . .’
She led me into the kitchen, where the lunch had already been laid out, and took a jug of home-made lemonade out of the fridge. She has a recipe where you mush up whole lemons with sugar and water and of course it tastes a whole lot better than anything you’ll get out of a can or a bottle. The quiche had been warmed in the oven. There were even proper cloth serviettes in metal rings. Who does that anymore? What’s wrong with a square of kitchen roll?
‘So how’s it all going?’ she asked. ‘I take it the police haven’t found Cecily Treherne.’
‘I’m not sure they ever will.’
‘You think she’s been killed?’
I nodded.
‘That’s not what you said the last time you were here. You thought it might just have been an accident, that she could have fallen into a river or something.’ She considered what I’d just said. ‘If she was killed, then you think that she was right and Stefan Whatever-his-name-was was innocent after all?’
‘That about sums it up.’
‘So what’s changed your mind?’
It was a good question. At that moment I didn’t have a clue – and I mean that in every sense. I’d talked to people, I’d made pages of notes, but nobody had slipped up; nobody had said anything or done anything that obviously pointed the finger at them. All I had, really, were vague feelings. If you’d asked me to draw up a list of suspects in order of likelihood, it would have looked something like this:
Eloise Radmani
Lisa Treherne
Derek Endicott
Aiden MacNeil
Lionel Corby
Eloise and Derek had both overheard the fatal telephone call. Lisa Treherne had serious jealousy issues with Cecily and had been jilted by Stefan. Aiden was married to Cecily and despite all appearances to the contrary, he still remained the most obvious suspect. Lionel was the least likely – but I hadn’t liked him when I first met him and I thought there was something about him that just smelled wrong.
So where was I exactly?
In Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, the two deaths happen for very different reasons and, of course, it turns out that there are two killers. I was almost certain that what I was dealing with was simpler, that Cecily had been silenced for exactly the reason that her parents had suggested to me. She knew too much. She had rung them from a public place and she had been overheard.
She knew who killed Frank Parris because she’d read the book. I’d read it too, and even though I must have seen what she’d seen, for some reason it had completely passed me
by. I was beginning to realise that I should have asked more questions about Cecily, her likes and dislikes, her preoccupations; I’d have had a better idea of what might have registered with her.
‘It’s just a feeling,’ I said in answer to Katie’s question. ‘Anyway, I’ve only got today and tomorrow. Lisa Treherne has asked me to leave.’
‘Why?’
‘She thinks I’m wasting her time.’
‘Or maybe she thinks you know too much.’
‘That thought had occurred to me too.’
‘You can move in here if you like.’
I would have liked that. I wanted to be close to Katie. But in view of the conversation we were about to have, I knew it wouldn’t be possible.
‘Katie,’ I said. ‘You know how fond I am of you. I’d like to think we’re close.’
‘We are close.’ She smiled at me but I could see the fear in her smile. She knew what was coming.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about Gordon?’ I asked.
She tried to brazen it out. ‘What about Gordon?’
‘I know about Adam Wilcox,’ I said.
Five simple words and I saw her crumple. There was nothing dramatic: no tears, no anger, no exclamations. It was simply that in that one second all the pretence with which she’d surrounded herself – the flowers, the exotic salad, the home-made lemonade, the quiche from some fancy deli in Melton – was revealed to be exactly that, not real, and as it evaporated the desperate sadness that had been lurking behind it all along came bursting through. I would have seen it earlier if I hadn’t been so obsessed with a crowd of people who had absolutely nothing to do with me. Oh yes, I’d picked up on the dead bush, the typos in her email to me, Jack’s smoking, his motorbike, but I hadn’t allowed them to make any emotional connection. I’d treated them like clues in a secondary crime story, something to be solved rather than taken to heart.
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