by Granger, Ann
Rack, Ruin and Murder
ANN GRANGER
headline
www.headline.co.uk
Copyright © 2011 Ann Granger
The right of Ann Granger to be identified as the Author of
the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN : 978 0 7553 8375 7
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
To Tony and Pat Davey,
remembering many travels together,
and looking forward to many more
Chapter 1
Monty Bickerstaffe lurched along with his distinctive gait, his arms swinging by his sides. The movement endangered the bottleshaped bulge in the sagging plastic carrier bag dangling from his right hand.
His presence in the supermarket had emptied the drinks aisle of any other shoppers. A very young junior manager had eventually come up to him. Prefacing his request with a polite, ‘Can I help you, sir?’ he had made it clear Monty’s presence in the store was not welcome.
‘Snotty little twerp!’ observed Monty to himself now in a growl. ‘I’m a customer, same as any other!’
He’d told the young man that. He’d told the senior fellow who’d come along to back up the young one. He’d told the store’s security guard. He’d told this last one rather more.
‘I shall lodge a claim of wrongful arrest!’ he’d threatened. ‘You don’t know I’m not going to pay for it! I haven’t left the store. Until I leave the store, the presumption is I fully intend to pay for it, which I do. What’s more,’ he concluded, ‘you can’t search me, even then. You’re not a copper. You have to fetch a proper copper.’
‘I know the law,’ said the store security man wearily.
‘Not as well as I know it, old son,’ said Monty to him.
‘Yeah, I know, Monty. Give us all a break, why don’t you?’
They stood over him while he paid. The girl on the till shrank from him when he handed her his money as if she didn’t want to touch it. It was contaminated by contact with Monty’s hand.
‘Don’t he ever take a bath?’ he heard her ask her colleague in the adjacent aisle as he moved away.
‘All right, don’t shove!’ he’d ordered the security guard. ‘I need a plastic bag. I’m entitled to a plastic bag and I’m not paying for it. I’ve paid enough for my whisky.’
‘Store policy,’ chipped in the young manager unwisely, ‘is for customers to pay for bags. It’s not much, only five pence. It helps the environment.’
‘How?’ snapped Monty.
‘It cuts down the number of bags out there.’ The youth – he was, in Monty’s eyes, little more than a schoolboy, or looked it – waved towards the plate-glass window. ‘People throw them away anywhere.’
‘How do you know I’m going to throw mine away? I should like to point out,’ continued Monty, ‘that should this bottle slip from my hand – due to my not being provided with a plastic carrier bag – then it will smash, leaving broken glass and causing a lot more problems for the environment.’ He bared his teeth in a smile from which they all recoiled. ‘What’s more if, when I try to pick up the pieces of the broken bottle because I want to protect the environment, I should cut my hand . . .’
‘Give him a carrier, Janette, for crying out loud,’ the senior manager said wearily.
They escorted him outside and stood there in a row, watching, as he set off homewards. Monty made his way out of the shopping precinct, then past a scattering of small businesses, through one of the town’s untidy residential areas, then through a slightly better later development of cottage-style homes (‘rabbit hutches!’ snorted Monty), and eventually came out, via a hole in a hedge, at the side of a petrol station on the ring road.
He ambled past the garage forecourt, ignoring the friendly wave from a man by one of the petrol pumps, and veered off across the road, this time oblivious of hooting car horns and yells of rage from drivers. Now he was heading into the countryside and it always made him feel better. He walked along the verge until he came to the turning and set off on the last leg of his journey down the lane known as Toby’s Gutter.
No one knew any more who Toby had been, but the lane had been called that since time immemorial and was even marked as such on an eighteenth-century map. It ran downhill to join the main road. To this day, when it rained very heavily, excess water drained from higher ground and ran down the lane in a stream, just as it would in a gutter. At the point where it met the road, a sizeable pool formed in particularly wet months and spread right across the highway. Motorists, caught out unawares, wrote to the council about it every winter.
Monty passed the road sign bearing the name. It lurched drunkenly to the right, having been knocked sideways in a collision with Pete Sneddon’s tractor two or three years earlier. Since then it had been slowly sinking earthward and would, eventually, fall flat.
‘I’ll write to the council myself!’ announced Monty to a horse in a field alongside the lane. He owned the field and adjoining one but didn’t use the land. It was part of his buffer against the outside world. The horse belonged to Gary Colley. Pete Sneddon occasionally moved some sheep down to graze the other field. As Monty saw it, this was quite enough use for the land and allowed him to give short shrift to anyone enquiring about it.
The horse snickered amiable approval or was, perhaps, only laughing at him, because even it knew the council had higher priorities than Toby’s Gutter Lane (and Monty).
In this way, the whole walk taking him almost an hour, Monty reached his own home. Time was, he reflected, he could have done it in half the time or less. He fancied the arthritis in his knees was getting worse. Even the whisky didn’t dull the pain now. But the last time he’d visited the doctor’s surgery, the receptionist had been worse than that young fellow at the supermarket. What was more, a slip of a girl in jeans and showing a bare tattooed midriff, had accused him of bringing in diseases.
‘This is a doctor’s waiting room, my dear,’ he had informed her. ‘This is where you come to catch diseases.’
At that, every other patient had shuffled along the rows of chairs to put a good distance between himsel
f and the next sufferer. They’d all put a good distance between themselves and Monty.
‘Live and let live!’ said Monty aloud, cheering up now he was home. He pushed his way through the rusted iron gateway. The hinges were set solid, so the gates no longer either shut or opened any further than the gap big enough to allow the passage of a single human being. Convolvulus twined over the bars obscuring a fine example of nineteenth-century wrought-ironwork. They obstructed access to a weed-infested drive to the front door of Balaclava House, which had once been an attractive house in Victorian Gothic revival style. Its brickwork was now crumbling. Above the front porch a crack shaped like a lightning bolt ran up to the first floor. It split in two an armorial shield invented by Monty’s great-grandfather to suggest some entirely imaginary noble connection.
Monty had not climbed the stairs to the upper floors in years. His knees didn’t like it and he wasn’t interested to see the degree to which the bedrooms had fallen into ruin. He lived on the ground floor. He certainly had enough space there. A cloakroom was attached to a spacious entry hall, there was a well-proportioned drawing room, a large dining room, a butler’s pantry and a vast kitchen, together with a back lobby and a small room off that, called by Monty ‘the gunroom’. It no longer housed any sporting guns. The police had taken those away some years previously because he held no licence. They’d been his father’s guns and Monty had resented being deprived of what he considered to be family property. Now Monty kept his empty bottles in the former gunroom and, lacking the transport to take them to the bottle bank, he had pretty well filled it.
His family had lived in this house since they had built it, way back in the late 1850s. But its slow decline had begun in the 1950s, long before Monty had inherited it, when domestic help had become hard to find and expensive. At about the same time the family business became less profitable. Monty remembered both his father and his mother resorting to surreptitious little economies. On his father’s part, this had meant emptying cheap wine into bottles with better labels, occasionally adding a slug of port to help things along. His mother had her own ways of saving. Meals concocted from leftovers dominated Monty’s memories of holidays at home. They’d also figured large in term-time at school. As an adult, Monty had occasionally reflected that he had grown up entirely fed on rehashed scraps. The cotton sheets on his bed had often been turned ‘sides to middle’ when they began to wear out. This had resulted in a long seam down the centre of the sheet, which chafed any bare skin coming into contact with it. The house had always been cold. But in Monty’s opinion it had ‘toughened him up’.
He limped down the echoing hallway, oblivious of the dust lying thick on all the furniture, pushed open the door to the drawing room and headed for the sideboard in which he kept his glassware. Monty opened one of the doors and, finding no clean glasses in there, tried the other side. Still no luck. He’d have to do some washing-up again and he’d only cleared the last lot three or four days ago. Considering he was the only person here, you’d think once a week would be enough.
Monty set down the newly acquired bottle with great care, sighed and set off back towards the door into the hall and the kitchen at the end of it. It was then he saw he was no longer the only person there. He had a visitor, and a stranger.
At first he thought it was his imagination. Hardly any stranger had come here since early in the year when some woman claiming to be a social worker had turned up. It seemed some interfering busybody had reported that there was ‘an elderly gentleman, not quite right in the head, living in squalor all on his own in an unheated house.’
To be fair, the woman had not used the words ‘not quite right in the head’. What she had actually said was, ‘Perhaps we are getting a little confused?’
‘I was not aware I was getting a visit from Her Majesty,’ had been Monty’s reply. ‘I take it you are using the royal plural, referring to yourself when you speak of being confused? You may well be so. In fact, you give every sign of being it, if you think you are the Queen. I, however, am perfectly clear in my mind.’
‘But you are all on your own, dear,’ said the social worker, ‘in this great big house, and you don’t appear to have any central heating.’
‘I like my own company!’ Monty had thundered at the wretched woman. ‘That I am alone is the only detail in which you are correct, madam! My mind, I repeat, is perfectly in order. I do not consider the state of my housekeeping to be any of your concern. My home looks all right to me. I have heating. I have a fire in the drawing room. I have plenty of wood around my garden and outbuildings to feed it. It costs me nothing and means I pay less for electricity. I am not connected to the gas mains any more. They replaced them in the lane a few years ago and wanted to dig up my garden to run the new pipe to the house. I refused so they routed the main pipeline right past my front door – ’ he pointed beyond the woman’s shoulder – ‘but cutting me off. I do pay an extortionate amount for something called council tax for which I receive virtually no council services. Go away.’
She had gone away, leaving behind a selection of leaflets about help for senior citizens. Monty had promptly thrown them on the fire to join the crackling remains of his garden shed.
Few people had passed this way since. But today was different. Today there was yet another uninvited interloper.
Monty was outraged. Was a householder to have no privacy? At least the intruder had not made himself comfortable on the chaise longue further back against the wall, which Monty used as his bed. That was a small consolation. But the stranger had taken possession of the Victorian horsehair-stuffed sofa, not so much sitting on as flopped out on it, propped up on the mouldering cushions at one end. He appeared to be fast asleep. Monty didn’t know him from Adam. He was a well-nourished fellow in mid-brown corduroy trousers, an open-necked blue-checked shirt and a suede leather jacket. He wasn’t a youngster but he wasn’t that old. He looked, in Monty’s opinion, a flash type.
‘Who the blasted heck are you?’ snapped Monty. ‘This is a gentleman’s private residence!’
The chap didn’t answer. Monty edged a little closer, but not too close. He noticed to his disgust that the fellow had been dribbling and the spittle had dried on his skin. It had left a narrow silvery trail such as snails made. What was worse, the chap had had an unfortunate accident. It had all but dried off, leaving a damp patch at the crotch from which rose a distinctive smell.
Monty wrinkled his nose. ‘Been drinking, have you, old fellow? Believe me, I understand. But you can’t stay here, you know.’
There was no response. Monty cleared his throat loudly and ordered the visitor brusquely to wake up. The visitor slumbered on.
Monty, growing anger overcoming his caution, reached out and shook one suede sleeve, to no avail. The figure remained still, far too still. Movement of the clothing had increased the sour smell of dried urine.
Monty let out a long, low whistle. He glanced towards the door and saw with a spurt of relief that it was open and he could, if his knees permitted, make an escape. At the same moment it occurred to him that the door was always open. He never closed any internal doors because it only meant he had to open them again. But the drawing-room door had definitely been closed, shut fast, when he’d come home. He remembered opening it to come in here, just five minutes ago. The fellow sitting there must have closed it.
Or possibly someone else had done so, after depositing the man on Monty’s sofa, because this chap showed worrying signs of being dead. The dribble-stained shirt-front didn’t rise and fall as if he breathed. He seemed to have vomited a little, too, and that had also dried.
‘Hey!’ he addressed the visitor once more, without much hope of a reply.
His voice echoed emptily around the room.
‘Bloody hell!’ he muttered, edging away.
This put a different complexion on the whole affair. If the fellow had been alive, Monty could have told him to bugger off. But he couldn’t do that with a stiff and he couldn’t ignore
the blighter. Monty sidled past the blank face and out of the room. He hurried down the corridor to the kitchen, grabbed a dirty glass and rinsed it under the tap, and then returned, at rather slower speed.
He had secretly, and quite illogically, hoped his visitor might have disappeared as inexplicably as he’d appeared in the first place. But no, he was still there. Monty skirted the sofa and reached the whisky bottle. He poured himself a generous measure and sat down on a chair facing the corpse to think over what he should do.
He toyed briefly with the idea of dragging it outside and burying it in his overgrown garden. But apart from the labour involved and his dratted knees not letting him do anything even mildly athletic, he knew he had to inform the authorities. He could walk back into town . . . but his knees gave a sharp twinge just at the thought of it. Or he could try and use that damn mobile phone he’d been nagged into buying in the spring. It was young Tansy, on her last visit, who had done the nagging. She’d turned up one day as unexpectedly as that fellow on the sofa there, driving up in a rattling old car, and strolled in.