Bright Young Things

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘That’s a long time ahead when you are only nineteen.’

  ‘It is, but aren’t these trusts often broken if marriage comes first? What if Faun Moran would come into her money when she married?’

  ‘What makes you think that is the case?’

  ‘Because of something her older sister said. Pat Moran, as she was, has only just turned twenty-five. She was married at twenty-one and from what she inferred – unless I misunderstood – she had already received her legacy before she reached the age of twenty-five.’

  Henry pulled the telephone towards him and asked for a call to be placed to Pat Clifford. She was surprised to hear from him twice in two days.

  ‘Yes, you are quite right,’ Pat told him. ‘I came into my money when I was twenty-one, just after my marriage. My father wasn’t happy about it, but our mother’s family had ensured that he could do nothing about it. That was always a sore point with our father, that our maternal grandfather had made this provision before our mother married. When we were all born some kind of codicil was added that divided the money from her family’s estate equally between us. Grandfather died a few years ago and big chunks of the estate went in death duties, of course, but that trust fund was separate and not affected, I suppose because it had been set up so long ago.’

  Henry thanked her and then asked, ‘What do you know about Titus Imports? Your father and Ben Caxton seem to have been directors of that company for a short while.’

  ‘Titus Imports,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Was that the diamond mining thing?’

  ‘Diamond mining?’ Henry looked at Mickey, who shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It ended around the time that your engagement to Ben Caxton was announced.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That. He had no right to make that kind of assumption. He told me that my father had suggested it to him, that my father implied I’d not be able to say no if he’d already announced it. Well, he was wrong about that. There was hell to pay; my father told me I’d not get another penny out of him unless I agreed to the wedding. I went off to stay with my great aunt. My mother’s Aunt Laura, until things cooled down. Aunt Laura was a suffragette, so you can guess whose side she was on!’

  ‘A useful ally,’ Henry agreed, thinking that this probably explained a lot about Pat. Perhaps Faun should have been sent to stay with Aunt Laura, if she was still around.

  ‘Do you think he’s taken some kind of revenge because of a broken engagement that never was?’ Pat asked quietly. ‘Would Ben Caxton do that?’

  ‘I couldn’t say,’ Henry told her, ‘but we will find out. I promise you that.’

  He replaced the receiver and relayed to Mickey those parts of the conversation that he had missed.

  Mickey sat back in his chair, hands crossed over his waistcoat and surveyed his boss thoughtfully. ‘He’s our man, I’m certain of it.’

  ‘But our man for what? For arranging the accident that almost certainly wasn’t an accident? For killing Faun Moran and that other poor scrap of a girl? For what?’

  ‘All or any of the above,’ Mickey said confidently.

  ‘So how do we prove that? He’s a slippery customer and a rich one. A man with friends and influence and you know how much that complicates things.’

  ‘And we’ve never yet let that stop us before,’ Mickey told him. ‘So we won’t this time.’

  SEVENTEEN

  They were about to leave for the evening when a message came for Henry that someone called Victor Mullins had come to the reception looking for him and was saying that he wanted to talk about Faun Moran.

  ‘The plot thickens,’ Mickey said.

  His first sight of Vic Mullins impressed upon Henry that the witnesses who had seen him on the beach had been correct. This was an uncommonly big man, both in height and breadth and Henry could understand why they had felt intimidated.

  ‘I’ve come to confess,’ Mullins said.

  ‘Confess to what?’ Henry asked him.

  A slow smile spread across Mullins’ face. ‘To putting the body on the beach,’ he said. ‘And maybe one or two other things.’

  They took him into an interview room and Henry sat down opposite Mullins, Mickey a little to the side, with his notepad and pen. The oddness of the situation had struck them both, as had the confidence and swagger of Vic Mullins when they had taken him upstairs and settled down in this bare, utilitarian space with its scrubbed wooden table and uncomfortable chairs.

  ‘Perhaps you should start at the beginning,’ Henry said.

  ‘That depends where you think the beginning should be.’

  It was very clear, Henry thought, that this man was enjoying himself. Henry was not prepared to indulge him. ‘January the fifth,’ he said. ‘Sunday. You were seen on Bournemouth beach carrying the body of a young woman. The body of Miss Faun Moran. You waited until you were noticed and then you laid her body on the shingle and you walked away.’

  Mullins nodded, clearly unconcerned. ‘That’s about the size of it, yes.’

  ‘Her neck was broken.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘And were you responsible for her death?’

  ‘I was not.’

  This was becoming irritating, Henry thought. ‘And so how did she die?’

  ‘She slipped, she fell, she hit her head and her neck broke. Sad, but that’s the way things go sometimes. She was an unfortunate young woman all round, was young Miss Moran. You couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. For what it’s worth, I liked her very much. I think she made some bad judgements, but she didn’t deserve to die, not even by accident.’

  ‘And where was this and how did you come to be there?’

  Mullins grinned, a self-satisfied grin, a suggestive grin, Henry thought. He waited.

  ‘I wasn’t there when it happened. I was just charged with taking the body, making sure that she was seen and found.’

  ‘Then why not take her back to her family?’

  ‘Ah yes, that would have been the most sensible idea. I walk up to Caius Moran’s door and I drop her on the doorstep and tell him, here’s your kid back. Fat chance I’d have had of getting away after that. Moran would have had me shot!’

  ‘And yet you walk into Scotland Yard and you give yourself up.’

  Mullins leaned across the table and stared into Henry’s eyes and said, ‘I’ve got a conscience. Things happened to this young lady that I’ve got a conscience about. That’s why I wanted her found, you see. That’s why I waited until those people saw me, and then I put her down and I walked off when I was sure that they would take care of her.’

  Henry blinked. He felt as though he was in some kind of surreal play. ‘So who told you to dispose of the body? Did they tell you to dump her on a beach?’

  ‘Not exactly. Mad as hell when I told him what I’d done.’

  ‘Who was?’

  ‘My employer.’

  ‘And that would be?’

  ‘Don’t play games, Chief Inspector. You know who it is.’

  ‘Mr Caxton told me that you were no longer in his employ.’ It was the first time Mickey had spoken. Mullins turned to look at him.

  ‘Well, he lied about that, didn’t he?’

  ‘And why would Mr Caxton be in possession of Miss Moran’s body? Did he kill her?’

  Mullins frowned. ‘I told you it was an accident.’

  ‘An accident you said you did not witness.’

  ‘I was there just after. He called me in, said she’d slipped in the bathroom on the tiles, fallen and hit her head against the bath and the blow twisted her neck and she was dead.’

  ‘And how is it that Mr Caxton was present?’

  ‘Ah now, that is difficult. Mr Caxton has been good to me. His father was good to me before that, but Mr Caxton does not always behave like a gentleman should behave, at least not where the young ladies are concerned. You have to understand, Miss Moran was in a bit of a pickle and Mr Caxton helped her out.’ He paused as though considering what to say next but seemed in no hurry to w
ork it out.

  ‘Miss Moran was believed to have died in June of last year, so who was the young woman in the car? What happened when the car went off the road? Where has Miss Moran been for these last months?’

  ‘Well, you have a number of questions there,’ Mullins told him. ‘I don’t know the identity of the young woman in the car. Why should I? I know only that Miss Moran was unhappy and did not want to be at home. That her father was pressuring her to do something she did not want to do and she came to Mr Caxton for help, seeing as how he’d been a close friend of her older sister.’

  ‘And why did she not go to her sister for help?’

  ‘I suppose because she thought her sister would tell their father where she was, or her sister’s husband would.’ He sat back, evidently relaxed, and said, ‘The idea, as I understand it, was that she would lie low for a while and then when she and Mr Caxton had tied the knot she would reappear, a married woman, no longer under Daddy’s thumb and all would be sweetness and light.’

  ‘But then she had an accident and she died.’

  ‘You understand the situation perfectly.’

  ‘I don’t actually think I do. Perhaps you’d explain to me what the car crash had to do with this and why a young woman like Faun Moran, who by all accounts is a very pleasant sort, would put her family through so much anguish. And what do you mean by Miss Moran and Mr Caxton intending to tie the knot?’

  ‘A pleasant sort. Is that what you think? A pleasant young woman who colluded in staging her own death.’

  Henry had the distinct impression that he was being played, but he knew he had to humour this man if he had any hope of getting to the truth. ‘Staging her own death?’

  ‘The car crash. You see, what happened was my boss gave us something to slip into that young man’s drink so that he would go woozy, pass out, and then he said he would drive them to where the crash was going to be, tip the car over the side, chuck that young bloke’s body down the hill, so everybody would assume he’d been in the car and then thrown out. Then they’d make like it was Faun’s body in the car, burned up in the fire. I’d follow on in Ben’s car and pick them both up.’

  ‘And you are claiming that she colluded in all of this?’

  ‘Of course she did. The girl liked a bit of an adventure. My boss persuaded her that nobody would be hurt by this, and sooner or later she could come out of hiding and everybody would be just so relieved she was still alive, and married, of course, that they’d forgive her. They’d go to Scotland to be wed, I expect. No one gives a damn up there. Job done.’

  ‘And the girl in the car?’

  ‘Dead already so what does it matter?’

  ‘It would matter to her family.’

  ‘The family won’t know about it, will they? What they don’t know can’t hurt.’

  ‘There is a family somewhere missing a daughter. Of course it matters.’

  ‘Well, I know nothing about that. I don’t know who she was or where he got her from, or who helped him obtain a body. But it sure as hell wasn’t me. I only found out about all this after the event, you understand that.’

  ‘Rather you only found out that Faun was dead after that happened and then you helped your boss cover it up.’

  ‘Quite so. I admit to helping get her dressed and taking her to the beach, which is not what my boss intended at all.’

  ‘And what did he intend?’

  ‘Well, he reckoned least said soonest mended, in a manner of speaking. The family already believed that she was dead and gone, so why would they be bothered? He told me to bury her and have done with it.’

  ‘And so you dressed her in a very expensive gown, combed her hair and decorated it with a headband. That seems unlikely if you are going to bury the body.’

  ‘But that wasn’t what I intended, was it, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.’

  ‘You said you helped to get her dressed,’ Mickey interrupted. ‘So who did you help? Your boss?’

  ‘No, he didn’t want anything to do with it. Like I say, I had a conscience. She was a respectable young woman and needed to go back to her family.’

  ‘And so who helped get her dressed?’

  ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘And why did you dress her in somebody else’s clothes?’ Mickey wanted to know.

  It was only a second, but Henry saw that Mullins was momentarily disconcerted.

  ‘The shoes were too big,’ Mickey continued, ‘the underclothes too big, the dress several sizes too large. Though you might be forgiven for not realizing that as the heavy beading would have made it hang closer to her body, even though the size was wrong. The style anyway is meant to be loose. But the rest, that was careless, especially the shoes. Which leads me to another question. Who did those clothes belong to?’

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ For the first time Vic Mullins was clearly disconcerted.

  ‘And you admit to nothing else, just to dumping the body on the beach?’

  ‘I did not dump the body!’ Vic was suddenly on his feet. ‘I laid her where she would be seen and found.’

  ‘Sit down, Mr Mullins, or do I have to get the constables to make you?’

  Vic’s eyes narrowed dangerously, but he resumed his seat. ‘I came here to confess to taking the body and making sure that she was seen. Maybe you’d rather I dumped her in some shallow grave somewhere.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘I told you. I’ve got a conscience.’ He was on his feet again. ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he said. ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Henry told him.

  ‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’

  ‘We’ll start with preventing a proper burial,’ Henry said, ‘and we’ll take it from there.’

  Mickey got to his feet and opened the interview room door. Two constables entered and Henry ordered them to escort Mullins to a cell. ‘You can’t do this,’ Vic protested. ‘I did nothing wrong,’ But Henry got the distinct impression that Mullins felt himself on safe ground now. That detention was expected and did not trouble him overmuch. He still had the strangest impression that Mullins was enjoying himself; that he was still controlling the situation – or thought he was.

  Mullins paused in the doorway. ‘I got the dress from a chest he keeps in the small ballroom. He reckons it’s old, the chest – sixteenth century, carved oak or some such. It’s a room that don’t get used any more in the locked-up part of the house. You look in there. You’ll find other things. Things from other women. He’s completely off his head – everyone knows that. Has been since the war. Thinks he can get away with anything and he doesn’t give a damn who he hurts in the process, I’ll tell you that for nothing.’

  ‘Where in the house do you claim Faun Moran was kept all this time?’ Mickey asked him but Mullins just scowled and shook his head. ‘You find that trunk,’ he said. ‘That’s all I’m saying now.’

  ‘So, what do we make of all that?’ Henry asked when they had adjourned back to the office.

  ‘He’s lying to us, but about what? Is Ben Caxton at the back of this … was the girl directly involved? What was Mullins’ part in all of this? And, more importantly, do you think we’ll get a warrant to search the Caxton place?’

  Henry drew the necessary forms across the desk and set to work. ‘We can but try,’ he said. ‘Best get a message to Belle that you might be late tonight.’

  EIGHTEEN

  Tuesday 21 January

  No warrant, Henry had been told. What evidence did he have? Just some cock and bull story told by a disaffected ex-employee.

  ‘He admits to leaving the body on the beach,’ he told the assistant commissioner.

  ‘So charge him – suspicion of murder. Whatever else you can make stick. Ask yourself, would a man like Mr Caxton involve himself in something as bizarre as this?’

  ‘The fact remains that it was not Faun Moran’s body in that car.’

  ‘So go and question Everson about it. Perhaps some othe
r young woman tagged along. Perhaps that’s just another fact he can claim not to recall.’

  Henry had given up. The assistant commissioner had been adamant. There was nothing to support the issuing of a search warrant.

  ‘Because Ben Caxton is such a fine upstanding citizen,’ Henry complained to Mickey.

  ‘So are we going to pay him a visit anyway?’

  ‘Damn right we are.’

  Cynthia and her husband were still in London and Henry had arranged to borrow their car so they arrived at Ben Caxton’s place in some style. It had occurred to Mickey that he might not be home, but he had said nothing as Henry was not in the mood to hear and Mickey comforted himself with the thought that they could at least question the servants even if the master was away.

  Ben Caxton’s house was impressive. It was large in front and clad with pale stone that looked ghostly on a winter’s day. It had drizzled with rain all morning and the sky was overcast and heavy and miserable.

  The long driveway curved as they drew close to the house and Mickey could see that the main building was extended into two long wings. Another block behind presumably housed stables although somehow this did not look like a place where people rode or walked in the grounds or even enjoyed themselves very much. It had a melancholy air to it, Mickey thought, although it had undoubtedly once been an impressive pile.

  The door was opened to them by an elderly man who seemed a little shocked by their presence, as though spontaneous visitors were not commonplace. He had just asked them to wait in the hall when a man’s voice called out from above.

  ‘Henry, what are you doing here? Or are you here as Chief Inspector Johnstone today?’

  Mickey looked up. Ben Caxton stood on the landing, leaning over the balustrade and looking down at them, his expression curious and, Mickey thought, a little amused.

  ‘I saw the car arrive and I couldn’t think who you might be. I’m assuming it’s not police issue? I doubt the police could afford such a decent vehicle.’

  ‘Most definitely not,’ Henry agreed. In contrast to Caxton’s outward friendliness Henry’s tone was flat. Mickey felt himself tense and guessed that this next scene was not going to be played out with any level of subtlety or conciliation.