Bright Young Things

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘So it’s official business then. Come along up. There’s a fire lit in my study – we’ll be more comfortable there.’

  Obediently they climbed the stairs to where Caxton was waiting and followed him into a room at the front of the house. Mickey looked about with interest. The walls were lined with books. Books that looked well-thumbed and appreciated, not the sort procured by the yard, just for effect. A large desk stood off to one side and a comfortable looking sofa had been placed by the window with a small table close by on which rested a book and a glass.

  He wondered what their host had been reading.

  Caxton must have registered his curiosity because he said, ‘It’s a treatise on microscopy that was published in 1667.’

  Mickey’s interest was piqued further. ‘Robert Hooke’s Micrographia? I have a very tatty but much-loved copy that my wife found in a second-hand bookshop. Microscopy is a big interest of mine, though my microscope is not such a grand instrument as yours.’ He had noticed on a table by the window a rather smart brass microscope and an extensive selection of slides in a box.

  ‘May I see?’

  ‘Of course. Please do. It’s good to meet a fellow enthusiast.’

  Henry’s irritation was palpable. ‘We did not come here to talk about slides and old books,’ he said impatiently.

  Mickey and Caxton exchanged a look. Caxton shrugged. ‘Your superior has spoken,’ he said, ‘but Henry, Chief Inspector, I’m sure it won’t take both of you to question me, so perhaps your sergeant could have a moment or two to review my handiwork.’

  The pride in his voice was unmistakable. ‘You mount your own slides?’ Mickey asked.

  ‘Of course, I don’t believe in doing half a job. If you are to do a thing, then it should be done properly.’

  On the drive here they had discussed strategy. Henry was in a temper, and Mickey knew that he would be unlikely to cool down even by the end of the lengthy drive. His annoyance and impatience, not having to be faked, would play its part in this interview. Mickey’s role had been less certain but it seemed that he had found it now. The conversation was interrupted by a polite knock, followed by the elderly retainer they had met on arrival entering with a tray. He placed this down on a stand and asked if anything further might be required. Mickey took the opportunity to move across to the microscope and slides. He caught Caxton’s expression as he saw this; he looked, Mickey thought, like a cat who’d got the cream, a cat whose policy was also to divide and conquer, Mickey added to himself, quite enjoying the mixed proverbs. His pleasure at examining the scientific instrument did not have to be feigned. He’d not lied when he avowed an interest in the subject.

  ‘It’s a fine instrument,’ he said, ‘by Negretti and Zambra.’

  ‘I don’t care how fine it is, Sergeant,’ Henry snapped. ‘That is not what we came here for.’

  The look of annoyance on Caxton’s face was unmistakable. He’s easily rattled, then, Mickey thought. For all his slickness.

  Obediently, Mickey came back to where his boss was standing and withdrew his notebook, murmuring what might be construed as an apology.

  ‘So what did you come here for, Chief Inspector?’ Caxton asked coldly.

  ‘We had a visit, yesterday, from an employee of yours. One Mr Victor Mullins—’

  ‘Who, I told you when we met before, is no longer in my service.’

  ‘He tells me otherwise. He also directly implicates you in the car crash that injured Mr Malcolm Everson and killed an unknown woman that everyone believed at the time was Miss Faun Moran.’

  ‘That’s absurd. Mullins is a fantasist. What am I supposed to have done?’

  ‘He also states that you were witness to the events that did eventually cost Miss Moran her life and that you commissioned him to dispose of the body.’

  Caxton stared in disbelief and then he began to laugh. ‘Oh, Henry,’ he said. ‘Do you honestly believe any of that? Look, I dismissed Mullins because he was getting to be a liability. He caused trouble with the staff. He couldn’t seem to leave the younger women alone and he had no discretion about it either. He seemed to think that because my father and I both showed him favour he could get away with anything he liked. Mullins is a liar and a thief and a cad and I don’t want a man like him about the place.’

  ‘He seemed very certain of his facts.’

  ‘His facts? What facts?’

  Henry gestured to Mickey who opened his notebook and relayed all that Vic Mullins had told them the evening before. By the end of it Ben Caxton was laughing harder and, Mickey guessed, Henry did not have to feign discomfort.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, Henry,’ Caxton said, ‘let me call my secretary and I’ll prove to you that Victor Mullins is a liar.’

  Caxton tugged gently on an embroidered bell pull and they sat in silence until a maid arrived, maintained the silence while she went to fetch the secretary. Mickey took the opportunity to scrutinize the shelves of books, trying not to be obvious in his desire to take a closer look. He knew that Caxton noticed anyway and that Henry did too, but the chief inspector sat still as stone and looked at neither Mickey nor their host.

  The secretary was also an older man. Mickey remembered what Caxton had told Henry about inheriting most of the staff and guessed that this was part of that legacy.

  ‘Clarke, can you find the diary entries for January of this year and … what was the date of the party?’

  Mickey told him.

  ‘Ah yes. And the pay books, please. I could find them myself,’ he added as Clarke opened a doorway in one of the bookcases and went through into a little anteroom, ‘but Clarke will lay hands on them so much more quickly.’

  Silence again while they waited, then the books were brought. Caxton flipped through pages of an account book. ‘Here, you see, I struck his name from the payments. My accountant would verify this, should you ask him. Mr Mullins was paid on the quarter days, as are all of my employees. As are my creditors and merchants.’

  He dropped the book on the floor at Henry’s feet. Henry made no move to pick it up.

  ‘And here, the date of the party last year. Mullins and I were in Yorkshire. I was attending a funeral, an old friend of my fathers. We then spent a few days at a hotel and spent time walking and fishing in the Ribble Valley. There’s some fine fishing up that way if you’ve a mind. Clarke will supply you with the details. And in early January of this year I was again away from home. I had been invited to spend the whole of the festive season with friends. The Philpots, a family who reside in Kent. I had arrived on Christmas Eve and remained until twelfth night, isn’t that right, Clarke?’

  Clarke nodded. ‘As you do most years, sir.’

  ‘Philpot and I were at school together, we’ve been friends ever since. Clarke will provide you with what details you might need. Where Mullins was, I’ve no idea, he’d left my employ by then. But I can assure you I was nowhere near Miss Moran, dead or alive.’

  He rose. ‘Now if that’s all?’

  ‘There was another thing,’ Mickey said tentatively, glancing at his boss and then back to his notebook. ‘Mullins said there was a box of stuff we should take a look at.’

  ‘A box of stuff, Sergeant. What box? What stuff?’

  Mickey peered closely at what he had written. ‘A sixteenth-century carved chest that you keep in an unused part of the house. He said there would be evidence in it.’

  ‘Evidence. Evidence of what?’

  Mickey shrugged. ‘I’m not sure, sir.’

  ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake. All right, Sergeant, I know the chest he must be referring to. Clarke, kindly find the addresses Chief Inspector Johnstone requires and then be so good as to show Sergeant Hitchens the old oak chest in the small ballroom.’

  He glanced at his watch. ‘Now, if that’s all, gentlemen, I have better things to do with my time.’

  Caxton left, Clarke disappeared once more into the anteroom and Henry shifted position so he could watch as Clarke carefully inscribed both names
and addresses on a sheet of blue writing paper. Mickey took the opportunity to examine the bookcase at the opposite end of the room that mirrored the entrance to the little office. The latch was very hard to see, concealed inside the frame and opened by inserting a finger into a small, oval aperture. Mickey’s little finger would just fit, he lifted the latch, met resistance. Some kind of lock, he supposed.

  The idea of secret rooms appealed.

  Clarke came back to find both visitors standing in the centre of the room. He handed Henry the sheet of paper. ‘I’ll take you two gentlemen to the small ballroom,’ he said.

  ‘Sergeant, you go. I propose to wait in the car.’ Henry’s tone was icy.

  ‘He doesn’t like not getting his own way,’ Mickey muttered as they watched Henry march back down the stairs.

  ‘None of them ever do,’ Clarke agreed.

  He led Mickey across the landing and through a small door. A spiral staircase led downward. ‘This is the quickest route,’ Clarke said. ‘Otherwise it’s back down and through the dining room, and into the east wing through the long gallery. And all of that’s locked up just now so I’d have to fetch the keys. The master keeps the small staircase unlocked because it’s easier for the servants to come up and down without disturbing him.’

  ‘This place is a maze,’ Mickey said. ‘You have a long gallery? I thought this house would be the wrong date for something like that?’

  ‘Oh, parts of the house go back to the 1500s. You’d never know it from the outside, of course, successive generations of Caxtons built on and up and sideways and every which way. But it is at least a house of character.’

  ‘Do you have any priest holes here?’ Mickey asked eagerly.

  ‘There are two. The second was only discovered in the late Mr Caxton’s time. It’s off the long gallery but it’s quite small and insignificant as these things go.’

  ‘I can imagine the games of hide and seek this house must have seen over the years.’ Mickey’s tone was wistful.

  ‘Oh yes, indeed. In old Mr Caxton’s younger days, but young Mr Caxton doesn’t like the bother of big house parties.’

  Mickey was not sure if Clarke was saddened by that or relieved. If Clarke and the butler were examples of the staff, Mickey thought, they’d be more inclined to want to doze the afternoon away in a fireside chair than to prepare for guests on a grand scale.

  The narrow staircase emerged into a narrow corridor. Mickey heard sounds that sounded like food preparation and a briefly opened door released the scent of cake. So that way to the right led to the kitchen. They went left, emerging from another small door into a very large room that was, according to Clarke, the grand ballroom. It was now an empty space, the polished floor mostly concealed beneath drop cloths and the pier glasses covered by dust sheets.

  Another door, a small dining room and a chamber off and then a corridor and another entrance into, ‘the small ballroom,’ Clarke announced. ‘The box you want is, I think, over there.’

  This space was used for storage, Mickey assumed. A mountain of furniture had been covered with dust sheets and a row of tea chests stood against one wall. Clarke uncovered what he thought might be what Mickey was looking for but that too was just a tea chest. They rummaged for a while and eventually found the oak six-panelled box under yet another dust sheet. The key was in the lock; Mickey turned it. Inside there was only an elaborate lock and a lot of empty space.

  Clarke, peering over Mickey’s shoulder, huffed in disappointment. ‘Nothing there,’ he said. ‘Not even moths.’

  He stepped back to give Mickey space to get up and did not notice as Mickey scooped something from the corner of the chest.

  ‘Empty,’ he agreed. ‘But it’s a lovely old chest. What a beautiful lock and as smooth as it must have been back in the day.’

  ‘Indeed it is,’ Clarke said. ‘Now I’m going to take you out by the rear entrance, you’ll have to walk around the side of the house. I hope you don’t mind that?’

  Mickey said that he did not.

  Clarke led him out through the small ballroom and into what he guessed must have once served as a cloakroom or perhaps small withdrawing room. Then down a service corridor and out through a door at the rear of the house, facing the stables Mickey had glimpsed as they drove up. Clarke gave him directions and then closed the door.

  Mickey paused for a moment before following the line of the house around to the front drive. He took out a clean handkerchief and wiped fresh oil from his hand. Then from where he had pressed it beneath his thumbnail, a tiny scrap of thread and a single bead. These he folded into a twist of paper torn from his notebook.

  It could have come from anywhere, but Mickey would be willing to bet his pension that it would match the beading used on the dress Faun Moran had been wearing when her body had been left on Bournemouth beach.

  From an upstairs window Ben Caxton watched Mickey round the corner of the house and make his way back to the car. Clarke knocked gently on the door. ‘I showed him the box, sir, though it did take us a while to find it. Someone had moved it into the far corner instead of where it had been beneath the window.’

  ‘Things get moved all the time,’ Ben said vaguely, though that was not exactly true. There were pieces of old furniture stored in that room that had been there for the best part of the last decade.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Clarke said and removed himself, as silently as ever.

  The car drove away and Caxton found he was remembering another car arriving unexpectedly, this time on a rainy, treacherous night. Faun had driven too fast along the lane and skidded to a halt in front of the house. He had heard the car arrive and then heard Vic’s voice in the hall, talking to the girl.

  She had been distraught. Another argument with her father had led to her storming from the house and she had come here. To him. To the man she counted as her dearest friend. The man she wanted to be far more than that.

  You’re too young for me, he had told her. Your father doesn’t like me at all. He told you that.

  All reasons for her to want him even more.

  He said the most hateful things. That you are a cheat and a liar and cost him money and reputation when you reneged on some business deal or other. But I don’t care about any of that. I just want to be with you.

  It’s all true, my dear.

  No, no, it’s not, I won’t believe anything like that of you. I know you and I know what you truly are.

  No, he had told her. No, you don’t.

  In the end she had understood and in the end she had hated him for it. Wanted to run from him as she had once run from her father. The trouble was, he thought, as he saw Henry Johnstone’s vehicle round the bend and disappear, by then the world had thought her dead and buried so she had nowhere left to run and no one left to care if she tried.

  Vic

  Lying on his back on the too-short, too-narrow bench in the small and dimly lit police cell, Vic remembered.

  He had told the truth – he had no idea who the dead girl was but then neither had the mortuary. She was an unknown, picked up off the street after a collision with a car. It had taken him nearly a month to find the right body; right height and weight and approximate build, but it was simply happenstance that she’d not had anything with her to confirm identity.

  The mortuary attendant he had bribed to keep him informed told him that if she’d had a handbag then it had not been handed in. In all likelihood someone had picked it up at the scene of the collision and either kept it or, if they had been honest, it would have then found its way to a lost property office somewhere. Either way, the connection with the dead girl was unlikely to be made. Once the right body was found, the rest was easy.

  The Belmont party just happened to offer opportunity, but the truth was, there were always going to be parties and young men with cars available to a girl like Faun Moran and Vic had explored a number of options. It seemed like fate had a hand, though, when his most favoured one had presented itself.

  Faun ha
d played her part to perfection. She had made an already confused and woozy Mal Everson pull over into the trees on the edge of the Belmont estate. Vic had loaded the dead girl into the passenger seat of Mal’s car and put Faun and the boy in the back of his. The girl’s body had a silk scarf draped around the head and neck as though to protect the hair from being blown about. It also partly covered the face. Which was just as well, considering what the application of an iron bar had done to it. He had removed the body of the girl from the car before Faun had arrived, concealing it behind bushes and then ensured that Faun saw nothing of the dead woman.

  Mal Everson was well out of it, Vic remembered. He remembered Faun Moran’s face too as the reality of the situation suddenly hit home.

  ‘I don’t want to do this, Vic. I’m scared.’

  ‘Too late to back out now, princess. You should always be careful what you wish for; didn’t your mother ever tell you that?’

  ‘But I thought you were funning. I didn’t think you meant to do any of it.’

  He had driven them to the chosen location, following Ben who was now driving Mal’s car. Vic had parked some distance away and then, carrying the still unconscious Mal Everson, had gone to help Ben. Together they ensured the dead girl was securely pinioned in the seat and then removed the scarf. Vic remembered the shrill scream and realized that Faun must have followed after. She had, he realized, seen the mess he’d made of the head and neck. She had begun to scream, a shrill, frail sound, as though she’d been too shocked even to make a solid fist of that.

  ‘Shut it,’ Vic had told her. He poured petrol over the body and the seat and then handed her the can. She took it automatically, her fingers gripping but seemingly confused as to what she was holding. Her face was white, horrified.

  The car had rolled easily. Ben and Vic thrust it over the lip of the gorge and watched, satisfied as it tumbled down the slope. Vic threw Mal’s body after, then Ben had taken her arm, and holding her tightly so she could not run, he had led her back to his own car.