Death and the Chaste Apprentice

by Robert Barnard

  Des’s research for the festival took in heavier tomes. From the Ketterick Public Library he had borrowed a thick book on Donizetti by William Ashbrook and a volume on Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy. The latter had been much renewed, with dates handwritten in. The former was a new borrowing, with a return date ten days hence. They both sat on a small table by the biggest armchair. Charlie took them up and skimmed through the sections on Adelaide and The Chaste Apprentice.

  Iain Dundy was over by the sideboard, getting whiffs of Des’s personality. There was a pile of old records there—Mantovani, James Last and the Beachboys—but the record player did not look as if it had been touched since they had moved in. The Mirror and the Sun of the day before were beside one of the easy chairs, and some old Penthouses were stacked under a coffee table. The racing pages of the newspapers were marked for possible bets. In one of the papers something was cut out; it seemed to be the regular medical column. Iain Dundy raised his eyebrows and went on.

  Win’s influence seemed mainly to consist of dainty linen and lace mats on the dressing tables, sideboards, and occasional tables, such as the one on which the knife had lain. Probably also hers were the antimacassars on the backs of easy chairs and sofa. Leaning against the sofa, Dundy found that the covering was slightly damp. The furniture in the room was all solid, capacious and worn, and had no doubt served “dear old Arthur” for years, until it had now gained this light accretion of alien personality from the new managers. No doubt it was like this when a stately home was taken over by new stately owners.

  The body had by now been taken away, though chalk marks and tapes marked where it had been, and Iain Dundy could remember it very well. The sitting room in the manager’s flat was a large one, with the main bedroom leading off at one end, kitchen and second bedroom leading off from the other. The sofa and the easy chairs were clustered around a fireplace, with a small dining table and two chairs positioned by the window that overlooked Ketterick High Street. This left a goodly space at one end, where the stairs down to the ground floor and the door out to the corridor were. It was in this open space that Des’s body had been found. It had pitched forward, its head towards the door into the corridor, its back decorated by a knife between the shoulder blades. The table on which had rested the knife had been in that open space too, just behind the sofa. One could still see the imprint left by the handle of the knife on the embroidered table mat it had rested on. Anyone, on an impulse born of overwhelming nausea or provocation, could have taken it up and stabbed the loathly Des with it on the spur of the moment.

  Did the position of the body tell one anything? Could Des have been starting towards the door when he was stabbed from behind? Possibly. Equally, he could have been standing in thought, facing in that direction, and propelled sprawling forward by the force of the blow from behind. There was nothing particular to look at on that wall apart from the door and a reproduction of Morris’s Queen Guinevere beside it. But a man in thought does not need anything to look at, and Des, Dundy suspected, was a man with a variety of projects demanding thought.

  Did he, Dundy wondered, keep all these projects in his head, or did he keep some written record, however vestigial?

  Dundy and Charlie spent over an hour circling the flat warily, like two animals careful not to invade the other’s territory. Then Nettles came up after a not very rewarding session with the domestic staff, and inevitably they all settled down to an interim comparing of notes. Dundy came out at once with the question of Des’s projects and his thirst for scraps of knowledge.

  “I don’t think there can be any doubt,” he said, “that he was a man who loved information. First of all, just information. Have you met people like that? Do they still exist in your generation? They’ll bring it out anywhere, anytime: the age of the pyramids, the average number of eggs a chicken lays a year, the estimated population of China in the year 3000. Totally out of the blue they’ll come out with it—some real conversation stopper. And like as not they’ll just think they’ve floored you and congratulate themselves on their cleverness.”

  “I know that sort of bloke,” agreed Nettles. “The sort who makes you slope off to the saloon bar if you hear his voice coming from the public. But in his case it shades off into something much more nasty, doesn’t it?”

  “Apparently. But I think it starts off as this sort of desire to accumulate out-of-the-way information. The sort of fact you got in the old Ripley “Believe It or Not” column or as a little paragraph in the Reader’s Digest. That sort of interest is rather boring but totally innocent. When it spreads itself out and becomes a desire to collect information about living people, that’s when it becomes dangerous. And so far as we can see, Des’s magpie instincts about information also embraced people—the guests at the hotel and very probably the staff at the hotel as well.”

  “What I’m trying to get a handle on,” said Charlie, “is the point of it all. I mean, with some people it can be just accumulation for the sake of accumulation. I wouldn’t think it was that way with Des Capper, would you?”

  “No,” said Dundy emphatically.

  “Then was it for pure, straightforward blackmail? Was it for chuckling over and poking ribs—as in Frank’s story about the man who’d brought his bird here? Or was it something more subtle than either?”

  “Yes, that is the question, isn’t it? I suppose the murder gives us the answer to that, if we’re on the right track.” Iain Dundy paused and scratched his ear. “But perhaps it’s not completely clear-cut, not as neat as you put it. You say: Did he accumulate grubby bits of information just for the sake of it, did he chuckle over it, or did he use it for blackmail? Perhaps the answer is: All three. It’s not necessarily either/or. If the information was not usable, he just enjoyed having it. If it was usable, he had to decide what use to make of it.”

  “And there was one other possible use for it,” said Charlie thoughtfully.

  “What’s that?”

  “Revenge.”

  Dundy nodded.

  “There is also this question of how he got appointed here,” said Nettles. “It’s something the staff keep bringing up. He wasn’t just awful; he was the wrong type.”

  “We’ll have to start looking at that,” agreed Dundy. “If he was as unsuitable as Frank and everyone else imply, then the question of blackmail must surely arise there.”

  “And if it arises there, then the chances are that it has arisen again now,” said Nettles.

  “Yes, though let’s remember one thing: That would be blackmail for personal advancement. It could be done very subtly. Just a whisper and a nod. It could be done so indirectly as hardly to be blackmail at all.”

  “Though not by this Capper character, surely, sir, if what we’ve heard of him is to be believed?” objected Charlie. “Hardly a subtle character, by all accounts.”

  “Probably you’re right. But still, it is one further step to blackmail for money. A further and a very dangerous one. But if he was blackmailing one of the festival guests here, what else could it be but blackmail for money?”

  Charlie coughed. “What the class newspapers call ‘sexual favors,’ sir?”

  “Well, maybe,” said Dundy. “I haven’t had a very strong sexual whiff from this case yet. More a matter of sheer black bile, as far as Capper is concerned. But we’ll have to talk to people and find out if that was one of his interests. I presume there are some reasonably attractive women around connected with the play in one way or another. His wife would be the last to know—or, on the other hand, she could be leading us on in a big way, don’t forget. Still, I would like something just a little more definite than sexual favors.”

  “There’s nothing written down, is there, sir?” asked Nettles. “No kind of record of the little things he found out?”

  “That’s what I’ve been wondering. Nothing’s been handed over by the technical experts, and we haven’t come across anything today. I wonder if he was the sort to write things down. What impression do you get?”


  The other two frowned, then shook their heads.

  “No impression, sir,” said Charlie regretfully. “Could have been a real little Samuel Pepys. Could have kept it all in his head.”

  “The sheer amount he seems to have accumulated might be a hopeful sign,” said Nettles.

  “Yes, and at least that generation’s more likely to write things down than a younger one,” said Dundy hopefully. “Youngsters these days need a keyboard connected to a screen if they want to remember anything. I suppose the first thing is to organize a search of all the obvious places—desks, drawers, sideboards, and so on. You take the big bedroom, Peace, you take the small one and the manager’s office downstairs, Nettles, and I’ll take this room and the kitchen. If we get no results, we’ll start thinking of hiding places.”

  And so they got down to it. But of results in the obvious sense, there were none.

  There were just a few things that they thought it worthwhile to collect up and mull over afterward. Des had apparently eaten All-Bran for breakfast and taken Ex-Lax regularly. He had used a mouth spray against bad breath, and an antiperspirant. His teeth were his own, but he used a toothpaste designed to remove heavy stains. There were many used packs of playing cards and a backgammon set. There were road maps with routes laboriously marked out, perhaps by Win. The routes, mostly from Carlisle, had not taken them to well-known beauty spots or places of tourist fame, not to Wordsworth’s Cottage or Castle Howard. They had been exclusively to towns. When Dundy compared them to a leaflet downstairs on the reception desk, he found that they were all towns that boasted hotels in the Beaumont chain.

  No harm in that, of course. Doubtless the Cappers would have got a reduction on their stays. But the fact that most of the routes were from Carlisle made Dundy wonder if they had been prospecting during Des’s previous job, deciding which of the hotels they—or rather he, surely—was going to blackmail himself into the managership of.

  On a personal level the only haul they got was a few letters and postcards. There was little any of them could make out of the postcards: one of the Alhambra with “Fantastic place—Kevin” on the back; one of Michelangelo’s David with “Christ what a nancy boy, eh? Jacko.” The postmarks were from the fifties, and they were addressed to hotels in Parkes and Coonabarabran, New South Wales. The only reason the policemen could see for keeping them had to be the pictures.

  The letters were marginally more revealing. Three of them were from Des’s mother. The latest, very feeble and practically without meaning, was addressed to Des and Win after their move to Britain in 1974. The earliest had also been addressed to Des in Britain—in fact, to a street in Pimlico. The date was December 1945, and it expressed the wish that he had waited until things were more settled before going “home”:

  But then you always did what you want, but I hear such dreadful things on the wireless and wonder and with everything so short there are you getting enough to eat?

  The other was addressed to Private Capper, of the Second Borderers, serving in India, apparently stationed near Bombay. So Des’s army career had begun after the Second World War. Not the impression he had given Frank, the doorman. The letter expressed bewilderment as to why he had joined up:

  You always were a mystery to me, but one blessing youll be nearer home so when the three years are up you can come back, this is where you really belong son I hope you’ve learnt that by now with all love Your Ever Loving Mum.

  The only other letter of interest was from India, dated 1947, and addressed to Corporal Capper, stationed in Hong Kong. After jocose preliminaries, it said:

  You lucky bastard, getting out before it all turned nasty. My God, the things I’ve seen, but I expect you’ve heard from some of the boys, and you can believe it. Don’t write and tell me you’re living the life of Riley in H.K., Des, because I don’t want to know. You always were the kind of crafty bastard who could slip out from under.

  Not this time, thought Dundy.

  “Well,” he said, shaking his head and looking at the meager haul. “This is the sum total of finds of interest, and I can’t say it gets us much further. No written notes of discoveries, no written evidence of any blackmail attempts. What does that mean? That he didn’t write anything down?”

  “Could be,” said Nettles. “If he was a serious blackmailer, it would be much the wisest thing.”

  “Yes . . .” said Dundy. “Somehow the vibes I’m getting from this man don’t suggest that he would always do the wisest thing. . . . But maybe I’m getting him entirely wrong.”

  “I may be wrong, too, sir,” said Charlie, “but the vibes I’m getting suggest that he was a very obvious man, for all his cunning. As I said before, not subtle at all. Awful in an obvious way . . . obvious minded, somehow.”

  “Sort of second-rate brain?” suggested Dundy.

  “Yes, or third. You know, the sort of person who thinks it’s true because he’s read it in the papers. Quotes Reader’s Digest as if it were the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

  “Oh, God, yes.”

  “That’s how I see him. And I wonder—if he’s taken notes of any sort, then it seems to me he’s probably hidden them in a very obvious place. I mean the sort of places old ladies hide things, the places that are always the very first ones that the experienced burglar looks in.”

  “Kept under the geranium pot, do you mean?”

  “Yes. Laughable, and a bit pathetic. Where in the house do old people hide their little bits of money, their pension books, their savings certificates?”

  “The backs of cushions,” said Nettles promptly. “Behind the books in the bookcase. Under the sofa cushions. Under the mattress. In the tea caddy. On top of the kitchen dresser.”

  “That’s the sort of place. I just wondered, sir, whether it might be worthwhile looking there.”

  In the event, Charlie turned out to be right about the obviousness of Des’s mind. Des and Win had gone in for Scandinavian-style beds, with the (hard) mattress laid straight onto a board. Good for the back, as Des would no doubt have told many a bar customer at length in his time. His notebook was pushed under the mattress, on top of the board. Apparently Win Capper had not had the aristocratic sensibilities of the princess who could not sleep on a pea. The notebook was on her side.

  But there was no doubt it was Des’s. Dundy took it downstairs and compared the handwriting with his entries in the hotel register. It was Des’s hand, all right. Or fist, more likely. Because the little notebook, bound in green plastic, was mostly a jumble of jottings in no particular order and dubiously legible in places. These ill-spelled notes were aides-mémoires in the strictest sense. They seemed to be scribbled down pretty much anywhere, just as he felt the urge to commit things to memory. So that “Geary—gin?” came two or three pages after another note that read: “Geary—ten half bottles in six days known.” There was, then, no sequence or continuity, and Dundy and his two assistants had to get from it such isolated nuggets as they could. If they were baffled, it had to be said that Des was frequently, too. His bafflement expressed itself in such diagrams as:

  Underneath the diagram there was scrawled the question “What gives???”

  Question marks, in fact, were very frequent. There were “Gillian S.—Ronnie Wimsett??” There was “Fortnum—Natalya R—phone calls—where?—expensive—what’s up? Defecting?” Later, presumably connected with this, there was “Why Mallory not involved?” Mallory also appeared in “Mallory—Singh???” Underneath which was written: “Where?”

  But there was one page in the book where there seemed to be some sort of organization, where the information seemed grouped around one central figure. There was a note that said: “Girls—young.” Then he had added: “Constant supply—recruited by bodyguard. Bodyguard paid by the girls? Age?” This last word had been underlined many times. At the bottom of the page there was an enigmatic “HAD 9.” What could that mean? That he’d had nine such assignations with classical music groupies to Des’s knowledge? But there w
as a shaky arrow leading to the side of the page that suggested that this entry related to something on a previous page. In any case, it was overshadowed by an entry in red: Stretching from the bottom left hand corner to the top right, misspelled but sharp in impact, in letters that bit deep into the page as if they had been scrawled in a fury, there was the legend:

  GET GOTLIEB

  “I think we may have struck gold,” said Iain Dundy.

  Chapter 12

  People Talking

  FOR THE ACTORS it should have been a day of delicious anticlimax. It should have been a day for reading the early reviews, letting off a bit of steam, of shopping for unnecessaries. But it wasn’t like that at all.

  Reviews there were, luckily. Reviews that praised the “tireless energy” of the Apprentice cast, the “mature warmth and humanity” of Carston Galloway’s Ralph Greatheart, and “the sense of a send-up of a parody” behind Ronnie Wimsett’s chaste apprentice. The music critics had done their bit, too. There was acclaim for the “incredible and flamboyant richness” of Singh’s voice and for the “golden opulence and vivid femininity” of Natalya in the letter scene. All these were lapped up, swapped, discussed, and disputed, though not by Clarissa Galloway, whose Melinda Purefoy was not mentioned at all.