Stately Homicide

by S. T. Haymon

  Jane Coryton cried: ‘Not you, Charles! Never!’

  Jurnet had a suggestion to make.

  ‘Quite sure, having got yourself dressed, you didn’t go over to the curator’s flat to do just that very thing?’

  The other brushed aside the question impatiently.

  ‘I had more important things to do. I bathed Mike’s wounds. I bandaged them. I comforted him –’

  ‘Da-da-da, did-da-da-da –’ Botley broke into a phrase from Hearts and Flowers. ‘You’ll have the Inspector weeping into his pinny. All you did, you silly old sod, was slosh disinfectant around like I was a bunged-up S-trap. It’s a miracle I got any skin left.’ The young man spoke with a calculated cruelty which plainly afforded him enjoyment. ‘Your bloody bandages either came undone in five minutes, or else they nearly strangled me –’

  The potter bowed his head, moved his hands gently over the mound of clay.

  ‘We’ll take a trip, darling. Anywhere you say. That Club Mediterranée brochure you showed me –’

  ‘Mr Botley won’t be travelling anywhere yet awhile,’ Jurnet cut in. ‘Not for pleasure, at least.’ To the young man: ‘I must ask you to accompany Detective-Sergeant Ellers here to our incident room in the west wing, so that you can make a full statement, which will be typed, which you can read through, and which you can then sign, once you are satisfied it’s a faithful transcript of what you have just told us. There are a good many other questions which have to be asked, and Sergeant Ellers will then drive you to Headquarters at Angleby. You will, of course, be cautioned that anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence.’

  ‘You mean, you’re charging me?’

  ‘I mean exactly what I say,’ Jurnet returned smoothly. ‘Call it helping the police with their inquiries. The duty of every citizen.’

  Charles Winter put in anxiously: ‘Will you be keeping him there overnight?’

  ‘It’s conceivable.’

  ‘I’ll pack a few things.’ The potter rubbed his hand against his slacks, trying, not very successfully, to dislodge the clay. He moved away from the wheel, towards Mike Botley, and put a loving arm round the young man’s shoulders. ‘Your tooth brush. Socks. A shirt. There’s that slab of chocolate in the fridge –’

  ‘Stick it up your what’s-it.’ Botley reached up and pushed away the hand resting on his right shoulder. With an irritated gesture he brushed some clay from his T-shirt. ‘Stick the toothbrush and the socks and the shirt there as well, while you’re about it. They can’t hold me. I done nothing. All I was, was the victim of an unprovoked attack. They’ll be lucky if I don’t go for them for Criminal Injuries, the way that louse roughed me up.’

  ‘I’ll find out who’s the best solicitor –’

  ‘Don’t bother yourself. Let them lay one on. They want to play games with me, let them bleeding well pay for it.’

  ‘Phone me,’ Charles Winter implored, ‘and I’ll drive in to fetch you right away.’

  Mike Botley said: ‘You must be joking! If you think I’m coming back to this stately dump, you need your head examined.’

  ‘Mike!’

  The two detectives watched silently as the young man, tight-jeaned, flaxen-haired, his face the face of an angel who had somehow got himself involved in a pub brawl, derisively surveyed his clay-encrusted lover. Jane Coryton, too, watched; waited, her lips a little apart, her eyes bright with hope.

  ‘Darling Mike, don’t you mean?’ Botley inquired, parodying the other’s agony. ‘Don’t forget the darling! Well, let me tell you, darling, just in case you haven’t guessed, darling, that darling Mike’s been ready to move on for a good six months now. You bore me, darling Charlie. You disgust me. You never wash, you never want to stir out of this pigsty, all you’re good for in bed is to get crumbs of clay on the sheets. Know what? The Inspector’s done me a favour. From what I hear, there’s some dishy guys in the nick. Never know where I may end up! I’ll let you know where to send my things.’ To Jurnet, with an expression of depraved innocence: ‘OK if I take my drag?’

  After Sergeant Ellers had left with the young basket maker there was a long silence in the pottery. The dust motes in the shaft of sunlight, agitated by their departure, bumped about in the air for a little, before settling once more into their former, slow, down-drifting indolence.

  Charles Winter, watched by Jane Coryton with an intensity of love Jurnet had never before seen on a woman’s face, removed the cover from the lump of clay reposing on the potter’s wheel, carefully folding the tattered cloth and placing it to one side. With his long, strong fingers he first prodded the clay, then kneaded it like dough, the hands caressing even as they pummelled. Jurnet, albeit with a certain native cynicism, awaited with interest the moment when the wheel would be set in motion, the hands at present so domestically engaged come into their own as instruments of creation; wheel whirring, hands shaping a masterpiece born out of the struggle of one man’s hands against the centrifugal forces of the universe.

  Instead, with a sudden deft movement, Winter scooped the clay off the board, hefted it in his right hand, and threw it out of the door into the Coachyard.

  A cry sounded from without; and a large pugnacious face thrust itself in at the door.

  ‘What the hell d’you think you’re playing at?’

  ‘I’m so terribly sorry!’ Mrs Coryton hurried forward, radiating middle-class charm. ‘I’m a learner, you know. I can’t think how it possibly happened. Do forgive me! Have I ruined your lovely shirt?’

  ‘Nothing that a visit to the laundrette won’t put to rights,’ declared the face, mollified.

  ‘You are kind to take it so well! I shall have to leave potting to Mr Winter here in future, shan’t I? Have you seen the display of his work in the house? Don’t miss it, whatever you do – quite ravishing! It’s the room on the left at the end of the entrance hall–’

  To murmurings of mutual good will, the face withdrew. Jane Coryton laughed, pleased with herself. She moved back, away from the door and the sunlight, into the gloom where Charles Winter stood, face blank, arms hanging limp at his sides. She touched his left arm, on the bare skin, beneath the rolled-up sleeve; and when he made no response, ventured softly, in a voice full of tenderness: ‘Charles?’

  At that he raised his right arm and hit her brutally across the face.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Jurnet parked his car on the forecourt of his block of flats. Nothing had changed, except that the black plastic bags left out for the dustman had begotten young. Next to them someone had put out an oddly shaped carton that looked as though it might have contained a coffin. Jurnet locked his car and, being a copper, went over to reassure himself that the carton really was empty. As he lifted the flap a bony cat, black as the plastic bags but a good deal less well filled, streaked out with an imprecatory hiss and vanished over the low wall into the street.

  ‘Welcome home!’ Jurnet said aloud.

  He climbed the stairs, holding his breath until he was safely behind his own front door. To no avail. The assorted stalenesses of the building had foregathered there, awaiting him. In a kind of dispirited rage he hurried from room to room, flinging open windows; only to discover that the outside air – and who could blame it? – hung back reluctant to accept his invitation to enter.

  There was no letter from Miriam.

  Never mind. He had enjoyed his own little bit of Greece that evening, courtesy of the Acropolis Taverna in Petergate: – if, indeed, enjoyed was the right word. Taramasalata and all that muck. For the fact that, even at that moment, his guts were still engaged in a fretful dialogue as to the best way to deal with the foreign bodies forced upon them without notice, he had only the Superintendent to thank. Driving home from Bullensthorpe in the tender light of evening, there had been no problem. Open a can of beans, and then, if he felt like it, pop out to the late-night delicatessen for a block of ice cream. Maybe even go mad and treat himself to a packet of wafers to go with it.

  The sigh
t of the Superintendent, beautiful in dinner jacket, preparatory to attending a dinner of his lodge, had put paid to that. Here, obviously, was a man privy not only to the childish secrets of freemasonry, but to those far more mysterious ones which taught you how to arrange the business of living so that it became, like entryphones and central heating, a provided service included in the rent, instead of an H.P. agreement on which you could never quite keep up the payments. As always, in the man’s presence, Jurnet felt at once enhanced and diminished; as proud of the piercingly white shirt and the impeccably tied bow tie as if they were his own, yet reminded with additional force of his own end-of-the-day dishevelment.

  The Superintendent said: ‘Didn’t want to shove off till I’d had a word.’ Then, with a look of concern which warmed the other’s heart, even though, as ever, he could not feel absolutely convinced of its sincerity: ‘You’re looking fagged, Ben. I know only too well how you are when you’ve got a case on your mind – forgetting to take on fuel until you’ve got it sewn up. Where are you eating tonight?’

  ‘I thought of going to the Acropolis, in Petergate,’ Jurnet had answered unblushingly. It was the first name that had occurred to him. Miriam had taken him there one night, shortly before she left, ‘to get the feel of Greek food’. On that occasion he had sat transfixed by the sight of the octopus on his plate; and even more by the way Miriam had tucked into her portion of the rubbery horror with every appearance of enjoyment.

  ‘They’re very good.’ The Superintendent had looked surprised. ‘Glad to hear you’re broadening your gastronomic horizons. Nobody in Angleby does octopus like they do.’

  ‘That’s right!’ his subordinate agreed wholeheartedly.

  ‘I’ll be thinking of you tonight with my mouth watering,’ said the Superintendent, ‘when I’m working my way through my boring old beef and two veg. Now, what about our young Mr Botley? I had a look in on him, and Jack brought in his statement as he’d signed it. Have we or have we not got our man?’

  Jurnet said: ‘It must’ve been him the Hungarian chap saw crossing the lawn crying, with her – his – hands up to his face. Naturally he thought it was a woman, got up like that.’

  ‘Not the ghost of Anne Boleyn after all, eh? What a disappointment!’

  ‘Must have been her night off. Matyas says it was just after three, and Winter confirms three, or just after, as the time Botley arrived back home.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I had a word with Dr Colton. And what he says is that if Shelden was in fact pushed off the roof at around three, there’s no way he could possibly have survived until three-thirty, when Miss Appleyard came upon him, in extremis but still alive. Ten minutes, he says, would be an over-generous allowance, taking his injuries into account.’

  The Superintendent sighed.

  ‘It also doesn’t explain how Shelden ended up in the moat, does it? Unless, when he got home, Botley blurted out what he’d done, and Winter went running to cover up the traces as best he might.’

  ‘Or unless Winter took one look at Botley’s face, and went out gunning for Shelden for roughing up lover boy.’

  ‘Hm. In which case we’re holding the wrong man.’

  ‘Oh, we’re going to have to let him go, in any event. I know that. What I’m still banking on, if it was Winter, now that the two have broken up, Botley may, out of sheer malice, give us a lead.’

  ‘Just as likely, from what I saw of him, to concoct a tissue of lies.’

  ‘So long as it’s a tissue, not a blanket. Something you can see through, to the truth behind.’

  The truth, Jurnet thought later, standing under the shower, considerably lighter in weight as in wallet, was that English stomachs weren’t made for Greek food. If Miriam could keep the stuff down it must be because she was Jewish, member of a race which could never have made it down to the present day if, in their wanderings, they hadn’t persevered with the local nosh. Or had he got it wrong, and they’d defended their digestive systems against anything they didn’t like the look of simply by branding it tref, forbidden? The water trickling pleasurably down his chest and between his shoulder blades, he wondered desultorily if octopuses were kosher. He doubted it. They certainly hadn’t cloven hooves, and he thought it unlikely that they chewed the cud, the only tests of acceptability he could remember from his course of instruction with Rabbi Schnellman.

  To become a Jew, the Rabbi constantly warned him, if you weren’t privileged to be born one, was to set out on a long, lonesome road to a distant goal only to be achieved by study, determination, and a disinterested love of the One God, blessed be He. Perhaps, Jurnet thought, his spirits also lighter now that his body had rid itself of alien infiltrators, his stomach had cottoned on to the idea ahead of the rest of him, and from far down that long, lonesome road was beckoning to his heart and mind to get a move on, for Christ’s sake.

  The phone rang as he turned off the taps, and he ran to the bedside table dripping, on the chance it was Miriam reversing the charges.

  It was Mrs Coryton. Knowing her to be a woman of energy and resource, Jurnet did not enquire from whom she had contrived to obtain his ex-Directory number.

  ‘Francis is out walking the dog,’ she began, her voice unwontedly subdued, ‘and it occurred to me, in case you should happen to run into him at the Hall, that I ought to let you know I told him I’d tripped over the crazy paving, and that’s how I hurt my face.’

  ‘Crazy paving’s as good an alibi as any, I suppose.’ Jurnet spoke coldly, putting a slight but significant stress on the ‘crazy’.

  ‘That,’ she explained, recovering some of her accustomed humour, ‘is what is called taking the war to the enemy. Francis put the crazy paving down before we moved in here, and made a terrible hash of it. Bits of it keep jumping up and clipping you on the shins. While I was being a liar I thought I might as well go the whole hog and be a bitch as well. I’ve made him feel horribly guilty, poor man, and now he can’t wait for daylight, to start all over again, and lay it properly this time.’

  Jurnet made no comment. At the other end, Jane Coryton waited a little, and then she said: ‘You do understand why I’m phoning, don’t you? To ask you – to beg you –’ the voice sounded less supplicatory than surprised at what it was saying: not the voice of one practised in the shoddy arts of domestic deception – ‘not to let on to Francis that it was Charles.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ answered Jurnet, his resentment rising to the surface, naked as his wet body: the chagrin of a police officer who has seen an arrestable offence committed in front of his eyes and been unable to do a bloody thing about it. ‘Mr Winter. The gentle one who couldn’t hurt a fly.’

  ‘No need for sarcasm, Inspector. It was all my fault. What I did was unpardonable. I was so eager to prove Charles couldn’t possibly have beaten Mike up that I didn’t stop to think –’ She broke off abruptly. When she resumed, her voice was under careful control; arid, sexless. ‘Well, it’s done now. No use crying over spilt milk, except that I don’t think I could face losing both props of my life at one fell swoop. If you think about it, Inspector, you’re the only one to come out of this in the black. I’ve cleared up one at least of your squalid little mystifications, haven’t I? So I see nothing wrong in asking for a quid pro quo. Will you promise not to tell Francis?’

  ‘I’m a police officer, Mrs Coryton. I can make no such promise. Mr Winter’s behaviour has been duly noted: also that you refused to press any charge against him. If it should ever prove necessary to bring the fact of his assault upon you to the notice of a court of law, it will be so brought, together with any other relevant evidence. Meantime, however, I may say that I have no plans to go out of my way to inform your husband of what happened in the pottery. But if he asks me a direct question, I am not prepared to say that, so far as I know, it was the crazy paving.’

  ‘Ah, well. I suppose that’s as much as I’ve any right to expect. More than, after what I did. By rights, Inspector, I’m the one should be locked up in your pr
ison cell. In irons, if you have any handy. Whoever murdered Mr Shelden killed a body. I murdered a soul. Bless you!’ Jane Coryton said harshly, and rang off.

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Anna March hadn’t blessed him – far from it – when he had emerged, fuming and frustrated, into the Coachyard, leaving Winter and Mrs Coryton – the one ashy-grey, the other banded with purple across nose and cheek, staring at each other as though each were seeing a new species. Afterwards, the detective decided that she must have been looking out for him, the door to her workshop ready locked, the security shutter in place. At the time, watching her bearing down on him, sibylline in her draperies, his only thought had been: ‘Christ – not now!’

  ‘Hi, there!’ he greeted her, overcompensating.

  There was no returning smile.

  ‘I really do think,’ she began, in that hectoring tone he had, upon no evidence whatever come to associate with low church and high fibre, ‘that you might at least have had the decency to come yourself and let me know about Mike Botley having taken my earrings, instead of leaving it to Jane Coryton to tell me.’

  ‘Give us a chance!’ Jurnet protested. ‘I’ve just this minute found out myself.’

  ‘Oh –’ the woman looked taken aback, but only for an instant. That she should be put into the position of needing to apologise appeared to be only additional cause for dissatisfaction. ‘Our wonderful police force! I must say it seems funny you had to get Jane to do your work for you.’