Stately Homicide
Page 29
‘Oh ah.’ Then: ‘Last week we had a bloke up in court for having sex with a five-year-old kid.’
‘You know what I mean! So long as it does no hurt.’
Jurnet said: ‘All love hurts.’
Again the woman insisted: ‘You know what I mean! Really! You’re like Procrustes with his bed – you construct a model of the world the way you’d like it to be, and then snip off all the bits that don’t fit.’ Demonstrating that she, too, could be cruel, she ended: ‘Is your girl back from Greece yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘She will, soon. The season’s over. The weather over there will be breaking up any day now.’
‘Very flattering.’
Not one to sustain spite, Mrs Coryton said with a sad smile: ‘Haven’t you learnt yet, Inspector, to be thankful for what you can get?’
‘Not yet,’ Jurnet said again; and, because his nature was less forgiving than hers, added: ‘I saw Mr Coryton in the Norfolk and Angleby. I thought he was looking very chipper.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed bleakly. ‘Very.’
At the forge, the jeep was gone, the fire was out. Jurnet was not sorry to find Ferenc Szanto away from home. What was he expected to say to the blacksmith? Apologise for having suspected him wrongly? The bugger was lucky not to find himself on a charge of attempted murder himself.
He came out of the yard, crossed the rutted track which led to the back entrance, and entered the belt of trees on the further side. Beyond lay the field that, as on that first day at Bullen, divided him from the river. It was still full of sheep, their young fleeces grown a little shop-soiled. A few of them stared at him in a mindless manner as he followed the chain-link fence to the gate beside the hedgerow oak where Jessica Chalgrove had hanged herself.
The gate was padlocked and he climbed it doggedly, concentrating on keeping his jacket and slacks clear of the new strand of barbed wire along the top. Safely over, he did not look back; crossed the field with an uncaring directness that scattered the baaing ninnies to left and right: climbed a second gate, and dropped down to a strip of grass patterned with yellowing leaves that had fallen from the willows along the river bank.
The little stream, replenished after the summer drought, slid down its invisible gradient with the calm deliberation common to all Norfolk rivers. Were it not for some leaves travelling unhurriedly with the current, it would not have been immediately obvious which way lay the sea.
The detective turned upstream. Past the willows, the grass gave way to rushes and cabbage thistles, the withered umbels of hemlock and wild angelica. Burrs and feathered seeds attached themselves to Jurnet’s clothes: morsels of stalk found their way into his shoes. Intent upon every step, it came as a surprise, when at last he raised his head, to discover that he had rounded a bend of the river. The mill loomed ahead of him.
It came as even more of a surprise to find Elena Appleyard sitting on a fallen tree trunk, looking out at the river.
She wore a dress of fine grey woollen, long-sleeved and effacing, and she sat so still and quiet that, for a moment, until she turned her head, and her body with it, and regarded him, neither welcoming nor forbidding, Jurnet thought he must be imagining her. Easy to accept ghosts in that setting: – the mill on the opposite bank, a shell of black brick, pierced with door-and window-holes out of which poked bushes and saplings and clumps of rosebay willowherb; the partly collapsed sluice gate, a length of metal tubing that had once done service as handrail for the catwalk along its top, trailing rustily in the water. Where the river, its path still narrowed by the obstruction, pushed through the dam opening with uncharacteristic noise, the jagged remains of a centre board hung crazily above the water.
Appleyard of Hungary’s guillotine.
Elena Appleyard said: ‘Surely not still looking for clues, Inspector?’
Feeling unaccountably embarrassed by the encounter, Jurnet replied: ‘Just that I never had a chance to come down here to the mill before.’ As the woman made no comment, he floundered on: ‘From the look of it, it won’t be here much longer.’
‘Do you think so?’ she said then. ‘It looked exactly the same when Laz and I were children. Those stone steps – do you see them? We used to climb all the way up to the top floor. The stairs inside are still there, just as they used to be; and still quite safe, so long as you know where to put your feet.’
Jurnet stared.
‘You don’t mean to say you still go inside there?’
‘Frequently.’ She smiled for the first time. ‘Everyone needs some private place, don’t you think? The mill is mine. Though how much longer –.’ Miss Appleyard turned her face away from a contemplation of the mill towards the detective. ‘You’ve visited Steve in hospital. Did he tell you what he intends to do once he’s well again? He says he’s going to Australia, he and Ferenc. He says he’s never coming back to Bullen, not even to say goodbye.’
Jurnet began awkwardly: ‘He did say something –. About going to a place that has no history –’
‘Can you understand it?’
‘Frankly, yes: given what’s happened –’
‘But an Appleyard!’
Her calm assumption that Appleyards were not as other mortals made Jurnet bite his lips to suppress a grin. But then, how right she was.
Aloud, he said: ‘I’m sure you understand that Bullen Hall could hold memories Steve can’t bear to –’
Elena Appleyard cut him short.
‘Memories! Don’t you suppose that I too have memories, Inspector, when I come here, to the mill?’
‘You’re made of sterner stuff than he is.’
She considered this for a moment, head a little to one side. Then agreed: ‘Yes, that’s true.’ She stood up, a little stiffly, as always, raised an arm with a lovely grace, and pointed. ‘Do you see that window on the second floor? There, to the left of the grating?’ And when she was satisfied that the detective had pinpointed the spot: ‘That’s the one room which still has a proper floor. They used to store the sacks of grain there, so I suppose it had to be specially strong.’ She looked at Jurnet brightly. ‘That’s where Laz used to take Carla Chalgrove.’
Jurnet, not knowing the right response to this piece of information, mumbled something unintelligible.
‘Do you know?’ – with a trill of amusement – ‘she said it was too uncomfortable, making love on the bare boards. She made poor old Laz bring a mattress down from the house. How ineffably bourgeois, don’t you think? That’s how I first found out what was going on. And that –’ Miss Appleyard continued, in a tone which, for her, was almost chatty – ‘is how I came to kill him.’
Her words took Jurnet’s breath away, as no doubt she had intended they should. Before he had time to regain it she went on, as if in answer to a question he had put to her: ‘Oh – because he loved her. I can’t think why. She was no different from all those other brainless women he went to bed with. But Laz thought she was. And I couldn’t have that.’
Jurnet said, tense and still unwilling to believe: ‘But I understood she died when Jessica was born. By the time your brother met with his accident, she’d been dead for years.’
‘His accident! How charmingly circumspect you policemen are! While she lived, I never realised the true nature of their relationship. And when I did –! Laz died the day he told me that what he had felt for Carla he had never felt for any other woman. Including me.’
‘You were brother and sister!’
Elena Appleyard looked at the detective with something like disappointment.
‘And I’d fancied you were a man to understand something at least of the nature of love!’ Her voice, for the first time in their acquaintance, became dark and intense. ‘How can you hope to discover the boundaries of love except by going beyond the boundaries?’
‘I suppose I’m a bit of a bourgeois myself.’ Jurnet pulled his thoughts together. ‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’
She nodded shyly. An unexpected blush made her look sud
denly young and unsure of herself. ‘I’ve always wanted to talk to someone. Justify myself, even boast a little. When I arranged for Mr Shelden to do the biography I had, just for a moment, a crazy idea of adding an epilogue to explain what had really happened. But of course that would have been quite impracticable.’
‘Not much more practicable to let on to a police officer.’
‘What can you do about it, Inspector Jurnet? What evidence do you have, other than my word? If you do try to do anything, I shall throw up my hands in amazement, and say the man must be out of his mind.’
Defeated, Jurnet attempted nothing more. Raising her arm to point again, the woman went on: ‘We had made love that day in that same room, on the bare boards. A splinter from the floor stuck in my shoulder blade, but he never knew, until we’d finished. Even then, he couldn’t understand how I could be glad about the splinter, glad of the blood; that it was a sacrament, a symbolic act. He dragged the old mattress out of a corner, and said we should have used that. It was mouldy with damp, and mice had made a nest in it; and when he saw that, he suddenly began to cry. Real tears! That was when he told me that Carla was the only woman he had really loved. That stupid tart!’ Miss Appleyard looked at Jurnet wide-eyed, inviting the detective to share her astonishment.
‘As always, after we had made love at the mill, Laz went for a swim, diving straight from one of the windows into the water above the dam. It was deeper in those days. With the sluice gate shut you could build up quite a head of water. The centre board rested on little projections at either side – that was when you wanted to let the water through. Otherwise, you could let it right down to the river bed. There was a kind of long-handled fork which you hooked into a slot at the top, and with that, you could raise it or lower it as much as you liked.’ She leaned over the water, frowning. ‘I threw it in afterwards – the fork thing. If it hasn’t disintegrated, it ought to be down there, somewhere.’
‘You didn’t go swimming, too?’
‘Not that day. I didn’t want to wash the blood away, not for a little.’ A small smile of reminiscence played about her lips. ‘We used to open the sluice just before we were ready to go in – yank up the centre board as high as it would go, so that all the pent-up water could come plunging through, and we could plunge with it. Glorious! I remember, that afternoon, I stood on the catwalk naked, with the sun warm on my body. I couldn’t believe that any woman could be more desirable than I was at that moment, even though I was no longer young. And then I took the fork and raised the centre board. Only, instead of propping it in the notches, as usual, I held it well above the water, balanced on the fork, and waited for Laz to come through. I had to get the timing exactly right or I might have maimed him instead of killing him, and I needed to have him dead.’
Jurnet said, between gritted teeth: ‘You damn near took his head off.’
‘It seemed a good way for an Appleyard to die.’
After a moment Jurnet demanded: ‘You’re sure this isn’t some fantasy you’ve dreamed up over the years?’
Elena Appleyard looked at him calmly.
‘A fantasy’s a device for accommodating truths we’re otherwise afraid to acknowledge. I’m proud to acknowledge what I’ve done. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to talk about it.’
Jurnet took a deep breath and moved a little away. He could not bear to stay near her.
‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I reckon you aren’t the first, nor won’t be the last, murderer to get away with it. Nor yet the first nor last who, once it was done, would’ve given anything in the world to undo it.’
For a moment longer she looked at him, her face contorted. Then, she put up her hands to cover it: veined, elderly hands covering the face of a moaning old woman. He left her there to do what she would, made his way back to the front of the house, got into his car, and drove home.
The phone was ringing as he came through the flat door. He lifted the receiver off the hook, and a great thankfulness flooded through his whole being as he heard Miriam’s voice.
He hardly took in what she said to him. It was enough to know that she was in touch, that she was back in England. Something about being in London, at her mother’s. Couldn’t wait to see him. Something about, was he off duty tomorrow?
Jurnet forced himself to concentrate, slow the beating of his heart.
‘Yes,’ he answered, determined so to arrange it, even if he had to resign from the Force to do so. ‘I’m off all day. What would you like to do?’
‘The weather’s so lovely,’ Miriam said. ‘Why don’t we take a run out to Bullen Hall?’
Copyright
First published in 1984 by Constable
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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Copyright © S T Haymon, 1984
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