Never, ever, ever again, I’d vowed then, and I’ve had no difficulty keeping that promise. Anything remotely cider-like still sends my stomach into its super-spin cycle.
And yet I’d smelt it somewhere else. And recently. Not just the cider, but the whole thing, even down to the engine oil. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t been able to identify it at the time.
It was in the old barn. And now, it was here. But why? Why would the inside of this tumble-down stable smell like the inside of Abe Compton’s cider barn? I took a deep breath and tried not to inhale again as I went in after Prescott.
There was a pile of old rags in the far corner and he was burrowing so deeply into it that the only bit of him still visible was his stubby little tail, which was going like a supercharged windscreen wiper.
Still holding my breath, I crept towards him, intending to grab him before he saw me. But before I could do so, my phone rang.
“Dog-napper!” an angry voice shrieked. “Where are you? And, more to the point, where’s Prescott?”
“It’s all right, Elsie, he’s with me. I’m up at the Manor. But where have you been? I’ve been—”
“Never you mind about me, you dog-napper. I got your ransom note but I’ll tell you now I’m not paying you a single penny. And if you harm one hair of his little head…”
“But I told you in my note,” I began, but at that moment Prescott backed away from the rags and started barking. Elsie screeched, “Dog-napper!” again and slammed the phone down.
I was in the middle of calling her back when the sound of footsteps made me whirl round.
“Are you going to shut that bloody dog up, or am I going to have to shoot it?” asked a voice behind me.
I expected to see hatchet-faced Jenkins scowling at me. But it wasn’t Jenkins. Only it took my confused brain a little while to compute that.
It was John Duckett-Trimble.
He was standing in the doorway, the loaded shotgun in his hand pointing straight at me. He looked every inch the genial English country gentleman, out for an afternoon’s sport.
Except his expression wasn’t terribly genial. In fact, his face was cold. Unsmiling.
“H-hi,” I stammered, trying really hard to keep my voice from drying up completely under that icy stare. “I bet you’re wondering what I’m doing in here, aren’t you? And yes, I know that technically I am trespassing. But, you see, the thing is the – the dog slipped his lead. He does that quite often, the little hooligan, and he – he came in here. I was just getting him. I’m really, really sorry.”
“Well?” he demanded and turned the gun from me to Prescott. “Shut him up or I shoot him. Your call. I can’t bear yapping dogs.”
Neither could I. We had that much in common, at least. I grabbed Prescott by the collar and went to pick him up. But as I did so, he made a lunge for the pile of rags and, as I lifted him up, he had what looked like an old green fleecy jacket clamped between his jaws. I took it out of his mouth but quickly dropped it, as it was obviously the source of the foul smell.
I held him so close I could feel his little heart hammering. Or was that mine? Amazingly, for once in his life, he didn’t wriggle or snarl but lay there, in my arms, as the truth of what that jacket was doing here hit me. I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to work it out.
“He’s all quiet now,” I said, praying he would stay that way. “But would you mind moving your gun? I’m sure you’re very safe with it but I have a thing about guns. I’m afraid I have something to tell you that’s going to come as a shock. And I’d prefer you weren’t pointing that in my direction when I do.”
“And what would that be?” he asked as, to my enormous relief, he lowered the gun.
“It’s about Jenkins. I-I think… look, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I think he killed your wife.”
“How do you work that one out?”
“It was the smell. It’s on this old jacket. I smelt it earlier in the old barn on Longmoor Drove and I think Jenkins put it there.”
He frowned. “I don’t follow you. How does that connect with my wife’s death?”
“It can only have come from Abe Compton’s barn. Believe me, once you’ve smelt the inside of that place, you never forget it. I’m afraid Jenkins must have been wearing this jacket when he killed her. And then he hid it in the barn. Only when he saw me there this morning, he panicked and moved it to here. He tried to kill me as well, you know. He almost forced me off the road and into the rhine. If a car hadn’t come along when it did, I probably wouldn’t be standing here now.”
“Jenkins told me someone had been nosing around in the barn. That was you?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say I was nosing around…”
“And what would you call it? You see, I call it trespassing. Like you’re doing now.”
“Yes, I know. And I’m sorry. But I explained that, didn’t I? I really think you should call the police. And put that in a safe place until they get here.” I pointed at the jacket. “They’ll need it as evidence.”
“But first, tell me, what were you doing in here? And don’t give me that nonsense about trying to find the dog.”
I decided it was better to tell him the truth. “Tanya had written something about the stables in her notebook and I was curious to follow it up.”
“Tanya?” He frowned.
“My aunt. You probably don’t know this because you’ve been away. But she was murdered as well. But the thing is, I think there’s a link between your wife’s death and hers. I can only think that Jenkins killed them both.”
“Why?”
That was the bit I hadn’t thought through.
“I don’t know.” My brain was racing as things were beginning to fall into place. “What I do know is that Tanya and your wife were planning on going into business together. But, of course, you probably knew that. But what I don’t get is why Jenkins would want to stop that? I thought maybe he had something illegal going on in the barn, or maybe these old stables – both places that they’d considered for their spa. But both are almost derelict. There’s no way either could be used as an upmarket beauty salon. Which only leaves…”
I stopped.
“Go on.” His face looked as if it had been set in stone. His eyes cold.
“Which only leaves your house.” As soon as the words were out, I regretted them, as his stony expression turned to full-on granite. I went into a bit of rapid verbal back-pedalling: “Only I expect that was just Tanya doing a bit of wishful thinking. She was very big on wishful thinking.”
But then I thought of the way she’d looked when she’d hurried off to meet someone that Sunday afternoon, just before she died. She wouldn’t have primped and giggled like that for Jenkins.
It was him. She was going to meet John Duckett-Trimble.
Which could only mean…
Chapter Twenty-Two
OMG. Time for a quick exit.
“Anyhow,” I said brightly, holding Prescott tightly and beginning to sidle towards the door. “I’ll let you get on. I can see you’re busy. I’ll – I’ll just head off now and leave you to it.”
“You’re going nowhere,” he snapped as he levelled the gun. He nodded towards an old wooden tack box in the far corner. “Over there. Sit down.”
“But I won’t tell anyone, I promise,” I said, horribly conscious of his finger hovering over the trigger. Conscious, too, that I was beginning to babble. Because that’s what I do when I’m frightened. Words come tumbling out of my mouth before I even know I’m saying them. Words that have completely by-passed my brain. At least, the sensible part of my brain.
Because, while that part was frozen with fear at the sight of the gun, the other part was clicking away, as the cogs began to fall into place.
“Tell anyone what?” he asked quietly. “What is there to tell?”
To my horror I heard myself say, “It was you, wasn’t it? Tanya was going to meet you on Sunday afternoon.” Click. Click. “There’s no w
ay she’d have rushed off like that to meet Jenkins.”
“Go on.”
“Then there’s the smell.” Click. Click. “You must have got cider and oil on your clothes when you were in Abe’s barn.” Click. “At first you hid them in the old barn, but now you’ve moved them here, because Jenkins told you I was nosing around this morning and may have seen them. Which I hadn’t. But I smelt them. And recognised the smell. Although I couldn’t make the connection. Until now.”
Click. Click. Click, went the only part of my brain that was working. The other part, the bit that covers self-preservation, had shut down the moment he pointed that gun at me.
“And that is?” His voice was dead quiet. And calm. Like we were standing here, discussing the increase in the price of potatoes.
But still that didn’t stop me. In fact, it made me worse.
“That it wasn’t Jenkins who killed Margot. It was you. Then you dumped her body in the cider vat.”
“Clever little thing, aren’t you?”
No. No. Nooooo. Not clever at all, a voice inside my head screamed as the self-preservation part of my brain finally woke up. Too late. Very, very stupid.
“I won’t tell a soul,” I whimpered. “I promise.”
“Damn right you won’t.” He was still speaking in this dead ordinary voice, which somehow made it all a million times more scary. “I came out here to burn down this stable block. A nice little insurance claim, plus I get rid of the clothes which, as you so rightly surmise, I wore when I killed my wife. She made a bigger splash than I’d anticipated. Damn cider went everywhere.”
“T-terrible stuff,” I stammered, hanging on to Prescott like he was a lifebelt and I’d just abandoned ship.
“So on the bonfire they go,” he went on, still in the same quiet voice. “You, too. When they search the rubble, they’ll find the char-grilled remains of you and your annoying little dog, who were both trespassing and got trapped inside. Maybe it was you who started it? Do you smoke?”
“No. Please…” I whispered, as I prepared to grovel.
“So isn’t this the bit where you tell me why I did it, and I say it’s a fair cop and come quietly?”
I should have made out I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Instead, I said: “Because she was having an affair?”
He shook his head. “She could have had every man in the village for all I cared. She wasn’t really my wife. I’ve got more sense than to tie myself down, particularly to someone like her. I needed someone who could play the part of the lady of the manor for a while, which she did to a tee.”
I thought of the conversation Jules had overheard when Margot had talked about wanting everything out in the open. She hadn’t been talking to Gruesome Gerald. But to John, her supposed husband.
“How do you mean, play a part?” I asked.
“This country squire thing was a good cover for a while but it’s time to move on. Particularly now I’ve got a buyer for the place.”
“Good cover? You mean you’re not…?”
“John Duckett-Trimble? Something big in the City?” he laughed. “Dear old Maggie, that’s Margot to you. She loved pulling that one, didn’t she? Of course my name isn’t John Duckett-Trimble. That was just something I made up. And sure I’m big in the city, only the city’s Bristol and I’m big in betting shops and massage parlours, among other things. The country manor pose was a cover for a nice little money-laundering scam I had going on which, I’m glad to say, has just come to a very successful conclusion. I’ve just sold the entire Much Winchmoor Estate, as we liked to call it, to a very rich Albanian who thinks he’s buying in to a little bit of English aristocracy. Which is why it’s time to move on. Only Maggie didn’t want to.”
“You killed her because she didn’t want to move?”
“I killed her because she thought she could get what she wanted by threatening to shop me,” he snapped. “Nobody does that.”
“No, of course not,” I agreed feverishly.
“She was a good actress, was Maggie, which was why I picked her in the first place. But, the problem was, she began to believe this lady of the manor nonsense. It all came to a head during a dinner we were hosting to sell the whole country estate thing to the Albanians.” His face darkened. “The silly mare only announced, in the middle of the main course, that while I’d been away setting the deal up, she’d actually agreed to stand for the parish council in this little rat-hole of a place. I was livid. There was no way I was going to let her do that.”
“Chances are, she wouldn’t have been elected,” I said.
“Couldn’t take that chance, could I? Even when I explained to her that the first thing that would happen, in the unlikely event of her getting elected, was that she – and that meant me as well – would have to complete the Register of Members’ Interests. Every busybody from the local council would go over her finances, and mine, with a magnifying glass. And I couldn’t have that happen, not while the Albanian deal was so finely balanced. Once they’d signed on the dotted line, I’d be out of here, and out of this bloody country, faster than a rat down a drain pipe. But in the meantime, I told her she had to withdraw from the election. Then she refused. Said she was in too deep to do so.”
“But you didn’t have to kill her,” I said.
He shrugged. “Course I did.” He gave a laugh which I didn’t feel like joining in with. “And she wasn’t the only one who was good at putting on an accent. ‘This be Abe Compton speakin’, Mrs Duckett-Trimble,’” he drawled. “Not a bad Somerset accent, don’t you think?”
It was a pretty rubbish one, actually. But that’s not something you tell a guy who’s waving a shotgun at you, is it?
“She’d been droning on for ages about this yokel’s cider-making and how she was going to ‘introduce him to the basic elements of hygiene’. So, I put on this accent, pretended to be him and left a message on the landline asking if she’d come up to the barn later that evening, ‘to tell I where I be goin’ wrong.’ I said for her to be there by 7 o’clock and got Jenkins, who, you may have noticed, can look remarkably like me given the right clothes, to travel to Spain, using the passport in my John Duckett-Trimble name. The perfect alibi, eh? Not only that, I made sure her phone was dead when she set off that evening. She never did remember to check it and the battery was always going on her. I didn’t want her shining a light on me and spoiling everything. Not when I’d planned it so carefully.”
I shuddered as I realised I was stuck in this smelly old stable with a shivering dog and a cold-blooded, calculating killer.
“It all went exactly to plan. I knew she couldn’t resist that message from the yokel, any more than I could resist creeping up behind her in the dark (my eyesight was always better than hers), banging her on the head and heaving her into the vat of cider. And do you want to know why I chose to do that?”
I shook my head. I really, really didn’t want to know. But I had a horrible feeling he was going to tell me.
“When she was showing off to my Albanian guests that night at the dinner party, she told us how someone had offered her some of the cider for her guests, and she had retorted that she wouldn’t be seen dead drinking the stuff. Really proud of herself, she was. So I thought it was a fitting end for her. What you might call rough justice. Get it? Rough cider? Rough justice? Rough and deadly, more like.”
I felt sick and pulled Prescott closer to me. He couldn’t have been feeling himself either, because he turned and licked my face.
“I’m sorry they found her so quickly, though,” he went on. “That was the only bit that didn’t go quite to plan. The regulars in the Winchmoor Arms were saying one night how rough cider would strip the meat off anything. Margot didn’t have much flesh on her. It would have been interesting to see how long it took. But now we’ll never know. Pity about that. Still, enough chat. I’m going to tie you up, bang the dog on the head, then stand back and enjoy the bonfire.”
“But what about Jenkins?” I was gras
ping at straws now. “He saw me come up here.”
He laughed. “Nice try. But Jenkins is on his way to Spain once more, as we speak, with the passport in the name of John Duckett-Trimble. Only this time he’s not coming back. I’ve paid him off. He doesn’t have the stomach for this kind of thing.”
This kind of thing? Jenkins had seemed to me to have the stomach for a bit of grievous bodily harm. I remembered the way he’d driven behind me, edging me closer and closer to the rhine where Tanya’s body was found.
And that was when the last of the pieces clicked into place. But this time, I didn’t blurt it out. This time I thought I could use it to buy me and Prescott a bit of a chance.
“I have evidence linking you to the murder,” I said.
“Nice try, but I know what you’re doing.”
“You do?” I said, though I thought it was pretty obvious what I was doing. I was shaking in my shoes.
“You’re trying to keep me talking, thinking that if we stay here long enough, the cavalry will come charging in to the rescue. Well, sorry, sweetheart. That only works in the movies.”
“You also killed Tanya, my aunt. She was going to go into business with Margot. You killed them both, didn’t you?”
“I said the time for talking is over,” he snapped. “I’ve got things to do and you’re beginning to get on my nerves.”
“But you won’t get away with it. Tanya kept a notebook where she wrote it all down. All about meeting you on Sunday afternoon. And about the business plan she and Margot had put together. And, before you ask, it’s already with the police. I handed it over this morning when I found it.”
For the first time, there was a flicker of doubt in his eyes. Then it cleared.
“I don’t believe you. Anyway, one of the advantages of living under an assumed name is that I don’t exist. I can disappear in an instant, and I have some very good friends on standby to help me do just that, as soon as I’ve finished here.”
Rough And Deadly (A Much Winchmoor Mystery Book 2) Page 22