Stately Homicide

by S. T. Haymon

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

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  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/sthaymon

  Contents

  S T Haymon

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  S. T. Haymon

  Stately Homicide

  S T Haymon

  Sylvia Theresa Haymon was born in Norwich, and is best known for her eight crime fiction novels featuring the character Inspector Ben Jurnet. Haymon also wrote two non-fiction books for children, as well as two memoirs of her childhood in East Anglia.

  The Ben Jurnet series enjoyed success in both the UK and the US during Haymon’s lifetime: Ritual Murder (1982) won the prestigious CWA Silver Dagger Award from the Crime Writers’ Association. Stately Homicide (1984), a skilful variation on the country house mystery, was praised by the New York Times as a ‘brilliantly crafted novel of detection … stylish serious fiction’, and favourably compared to the work of Dorothy L. Sayers.

  Chapter One

  The scream rent the midsummer air, demanding attention. Out of the trees behind the house rooks rose in protest. On the great lawn in front, a child let go the string of its balloon and ran, crying, to its mother. The helium-filled heart wafted lazily across the rose-red frontage, surmounted the stone balustrade, and drifted away in the direction of the lake, its metallic crimson flashing signals not to be deciphered.

  Detective-Inspector Benjamin Jurnet, on his way through the pleached alley that led to the Coachyard, grinned. Anywhere else, a sound like that would have had him burning up the tarmac before it had even stopped, his heart pounding as he wondered what it was this time: mugging, rape, or bloody murder.

  As it was, he emerged unhurriedly from the shade of the limes into the scorching yard, and gave a commiserating nod to the peacock perched on the rim of the stone basin in the centre that had once been a fountain. As one who had just that minute abandoned as hopeless his place in the queue outside the refreshment room, the detective felt he knew exactly how the bird must be feeling. He’d be screaming like that himself if his gullet weren’t as dry as a packet of soup-mix.

  The peacock cocked its head to one side and regarded the detective with a red and challenging eye; then jumped down to the ground and walked away, its train drooping tiredly over the blistering cobbles. Again, Jurnet knew the feeling. The jacket he was carrying had grown steadily heavier, in direct proportion to the sun’s implacable trudge up the cloudless sky. He had taken off his tie and rolled up his shirt sleeves, to no avail. The heavy stuff of his trousers rubbed his inner thighs: his Y-fronts were sticking to him as if they had designs on his virtue. What the hell had possessed him to put on a suit instead of sports shirt and slacks? If Miriam had been at home she would never have let him out of the house, in that temperature, got up like he was going to a funeral or an interview with the Chief Constable. But that was just it, wasn’t it? Miriam wasn’t at home.

  The yard, incongruously for Norfolk, had the look and feel of a Mexican pueblo at siesta time. The air trembled above the red-pantiled roofs. The flats over the converted stables had their blinds down against the glare. On the door of one of the coach houses which took up the only side of the yard where there was any shade, a notice lettered with a rather too nice regard to typography explained that the craft workshops would reopen at two-fifteen.

  It was just on two o’clock.

  Jurnet hesitated: momentarily contemplated rejoining the refreshment queue, then crossed to a door in the north-west corner. There, he banged on the black-painted knocker which, fashioned in the shape of a bull’s head with a ring through its nose, was identical to that affixed to every other door in the yard. He had to knock several times before he heard a step on the stair within, and then a voice which he did not at first recognise: ‘Stop that, blast you! You’ll wake up my little boy!’

  Jurnet said: ‘I’m sorry, Anna. It’s me – Ben.’

  ‘Oh, God!’ There was a pause. Then the voice inside said: ‘You’ll have to wait. I’ll go and put something on.’

  The detective heard the footsteps recede, and waited, wondering what was the matter with Anna March’s voice, what was the matter with Anna March. That she had forgotten their arrangement was obvious – which meant, more than likely, that the earrings still weren’t ready. Which, in the circumstances, wasn’t the end of the world. To a man trained to detect signs of stress and distress, it hardly seemed enough to account for a voice like that.

  Returning, the footsteps sounded louder. Anna must have put on shoes, or mules more likely, to judge from the heels clonking down the uncarpeted stair. Jurnet braced himself for the encounter. Anna March was not one of his favourite people.

  ‘No need to take on about the earrings –’ he began, the instant the door opened. ‘Miriam’s having such a fabulous time, she’s decided to stay on a bit longer. The chances are she won’t be back by her birthday after all.’ He did not feel it necessary to add that the chances were she would not be back, ever. ‘Take all the time you need.’

  ‘I should have phoned. Bringing you all the way out here for nothing –’ Anna March pushed her long, dark hair back from her forehead. She looked unwell, the purple-patterned kaftan she had put on throwing up reflections that deepened the shadows under her eyes. As Jurnet had guessed from her voice, she had been crying.

  ‘Not to worry. Nothing else on.’ Which was true enough. What else was there to do on your day off when your girl had taken herself off to some grotty island in the Aegean crawling with young fishermen with the bodies of Greek gods and the morals of alley cats? The detective put aside his own inner preoccupations and looked at the young woman with a compassion only slightly diluted with impatience. Anna had always been a bit too intense for his taste; but that was Danny’s business, not his. Since it was inconceivable that Danny March could be the cause of his wife’s trouble, the detective inquired cautiously, not really in the mood for doleful confidences: ‘Tommy OK? I hope I didn’t really wake him up.’

  The woman managed a smile at that.

  ‘I shouldn’t have gone for you. Tommy’d sleep through an artillery barrage, you know that.’ She pushed her fingers throug
h her hair again, and tears, of which she seemed unaware, took their leisurely way down either side of her rather sharp nose. ‘Bit on edge myself, that’s all –’

  ‘This heat! Enough to give the sun a thirst!’ Jurnet paused hopefully. It did not seem the moment to ask for a drink outright. When no offer was forthcoming: ‘Only sorry I bothered you.’

  ‘I should have phoned,’ she repeated. ‘Look –’ making a palpable effort to pull herself together – ‘since you’re here, why don’t you give me an hour or so to see what I can do? It could save you another journey. You could go round the house while you’re waiting – I’ll give you a pass, if you like. Or would that be too boring? You and Miriam must have done it a million times.’

  Jurnet shook his head.

  ‘Miriam, not me. She’s the culture hound. I usually opt for a snooze on the grass down by the lake. Or a drink,’ he added, not expecting anything to come of it.

  ‘But that’s terrible!’ Her eyes, for all her misery, widened in professional disapproval. You could tell she had once been a schoolmarm, and no mistake. ‘One of the most historic houses in the eastern counties and you haven’t –’ She broke off, then finished: ‘You mean, you haven’t even been into the Appleyard Room?’

  ‘I’m not much of a one for heroes,’ the detective replied truthfully. ‘Still, I’ll do it today, if it’ll get me back into your good books. And I’ll pay for my ticket, thank you very much for your kind offer. What time d’you want me back?’

  ‘Give me a good hour. After that, whenever you’re ready. Stay and have tea, if you’ve nothing better to do. Danny’ll be back by then – he’s gone into Angleby to pick up some wood. Tommy will be up too –’

  For no reason that the detective could fathom, the tears began to fall faster.

  ‘Look –’ he proposed, genuinely concerned – ‘why don’t you let me take you and Danny out for a meal tonight? There’s a new place in Shire Street – cheer you up if you’re feeling off-colour, and with Miriam away, you’ll be doing me a favour. What do you say? Can you get someone in to babysit?’

  ‘We can’t, not tonight. There’s a do on here – official, sort of. Not that I’ve decided to go –’

  Now the woman was crying unashamedly. Awkward on the doorstep, the sun burning his shoulder blades, Jurnet harboured briefly the uncharitable thought: could it be all the fuss was over a new kaftan for the occasion, a poncho, djellabah, or whatever was the right word for those ballooning draperies in which, for reasons best known to herself, Anna March chose to engulf her spare shapeliness?

  Wishing he had never thought to commission the bloody things, Jurnet said soothingly: ‘Forget about the earrings. Why don’t you go and put your feet up for a bit? Do you the world of good.’

  ‘Nothing will do me any good,’ Anna March announced drearily.

  ‘Don’t you believe it!’ Jesus, the other thought, poor old Danny! For a moment Jurnet even found it in his heart to think fondly of Miriam who, whatever other deadly weapons she kept in her arsenal, never resorted to female vapours. ‘A bit of a kip and you’ll be wondering what all the carry-on was about.’

  ‘I’ve got to open up.’ With an effort Anna March stemmed the flow. ‘Sorry about that. Conduct unbecoming. In front of a police officer too! You’ll be wondering what on earth I’ve been up to. Come back to tea and I promise you’ll find me my usual scintillating self.’ The woman ended, with more intensity than the words seemed to warrant: ‘Don’t say anything to Danny.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  Jurnet became conscious of noises behind and about him: shutters being folded back, doors opening. Wheeling about, he discovered that whilst his back was turned the place had completely changed character, from a pueblo to a touchingly improbable version of Merrie England, well-heeled and deodorised.

  Open for business, the one-time stables revealed themselves as workshops where craftsmen who appeared never to have heard of the Industrial Revolution pursued their ostentatiously labour-intensive crafts, or set out their not all that essential wares for sale. There must, thought Jurnet, be a limit to the number of corn dollies the trade would bear.

  Wrought-iron trivets and weather vanes festooned one set of doorposts; clusters of baskets another where a young man in frayed jeans and T-shirt, his face shadowed beneath a hat of coarse straw, sat recaning the seat of a Victorian chair. From a third stable came the whirr of a potter’s wheel. In yet another, a pallid woman, draped in what looked like recycled sacking, sat at a loom, her fingers moving hypnotically among the threads like a harpist’s among the strings of her instrument. Somebody had thrown back the double doors of the great coach house, letting out the sweet smell of wood shavings.

  Notwithstanding the ever-increasing number of people about in the yard, trade, Jurnet noticed, seemed to be on the slow side. Keeping the twentieth century at bay didn’t come cheap. Anna’s productions were distinctly pricy, as were both the potter’s vases and the luminous tapestries filled with shapes ambiguous and erotic which the pallid Lady of Shalott, for all her flat-chested gentility, conjured from her consenting loom. The Angleby Argus had carried an article recently on the Hungarian bookbinder on the east side of the yard; and Danny March’s furniture, so satisfying in its uncompromising honesty, like Danny himself, was being bought by museums – none of which, the detective decided, could give much satisfaction to visitors eager to take home souvenir mugs and tea cloths with a picture of Bullen Hall on them. Baulked of their desire, they moved from workshop to workshop with the thrifty conscientiousness of visitors to the Zoo determined to miss none of the outlandish creatures they had paid to see; and, the chore accomplished, moved away thankfully towards the lake and the illusory coolness of the surrounding parkland.

  Jurnet, who accepted the world as it was, plastic tat and all, reflected that it was lucky for the craftsmen that – as Danny had confided to him – they got their workshops and living accommodation rent-free from the trust which administered the Bullen Hall estate. He returned his attention to Anna, who had opened up her shop, and now sat at her work bench, absorbed, the wretchedness eased from her face. Because he no longer felt her to be making emotional demands on him, he prompted gently, concerned for the wife of a friend: ‘Care to tell me about it?’

  Instantly hag-ridden all over again, Anna March jerked her head up from her work and stared at the detective with a blank-visaged hostility.

  ‘Tell you about what, for Christ’s sake?’

  Chapter Two

  In the great house, across the moat where giant carp moved sluggishly through the sun-warmed water, the blinds were two-thirds down to protect the precious furnishings. They excluded the worst of the heat but substituted for it a depleted atmosphere in which Jurnet, for one, found it hard to concentrate on the pictures and the furniture, the Persian carpets and the magnificent china, the carved cornices and the painted ceilings which the guide book he had purchased along with his ticket unrelentingly instructed him to admire. He felt himself seized with a monumental ennui. How on earth had the Bullens and the Appleyards, who had once owned the house, and whose dead, demanding faces stared out at him from every wall, managed to survive beneath the sheer weight of their possessions? For the first time in his life Jurnet felt that he understood why archaeologists had to dig for their booty. Century by century this tonnage of high-toned jumble must be sinking down, drawn by the inexorable pull of gravity, until not even the little gilt flags on the pepper-pot turrets outside would be showing above the enveloping turf.

  And a good thing too.

  ‘George Bullen, Viscount Rochford, the original builder of Bullen Hall,’ said a voice at his side in the Library. ‘Brother of Queen Anne Boleyn, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Jurnet agreed absently, discovering that his eyes, all unseeing, had been directed towards a dark expanse of canvas out of which a man with black hair and a long, lean face above a collar of exquisitely painted lace glowered with an air of moody disdain. ‘Funny thing –’ the
voice went on – ‘seeing you here, alongside of him. When I saw you come through the door I couldn’t hardly believe my eyes. If I’ve told Mollie once I’ve told her a hundred times, that there picture of His Nibs is the spitting image of Inspector Jurnet.’

  Jurnet swivelled round, his face warm with annoyance. That Tudor ponce! Why the hell couldn’t he, Ben Jurnet, look like everybody else? Then: ‘Good Lord! It’s Percy Toller!’

  The little man who had spoken jigged with pleasure at being recognised. He carefully put down the catalogue of the room’s contents which he had been carrying importantly under his arm, and seized the detective’s right hand in both of his.

  ‘Mr Jurnet! It’s a pleasure to see you! It really is!’

  ‘Good to see you too, Percy,’ said Jurnet, meaning it. ‘But –’ face darkening with sudden suspicion – ‘here? What’re you doing here, Percy?’

  The little man laughed.

  ‘No need to take on, Mr Jurnet. I’m retired. Done me last job I don’t know when. Been drawing my pension three years an’ more. You ha’nt seen me for three years, Mr Jurnet – now, have you?’

  ‘Could be you’re just getting cleverer.’

  ‘Me?’ The little man burst out laughing again. ‘Never! You know me, Mr Jurnet. Could just as well have rung you up an’ told you the address and where to pick the stuff up while I was about it. Saved a lot of time an’ trouble. Born to be caught, that was me.’

  Jurnet smiled down at the small, spruce figure with real affection.

  ‘If it’s any consolation, all of us over at Headquarters were always properly grateful. The Superintendent often said where would our figures for convictions obtained be, if it weren’t for good old Perce?’

  The little man’s face glowed with pleasure.

  ‘Did he say that?’ With a shake of the head: ‘All the same, I should ’a’ listened to my Mollie. “Percy Toller,” she always said, “you’re as much cut out for a burglar as I am to be Miss World.”’