by Granger, Ann
Despite all this, his father hadn’t given up smoking, as an ashtray of squashed remains testified.
‘Perhaps you ought to pack this up for a bit, Dad,’ suggested Monty, indicating the evidence. ‘Help your chest.’
‘Won’t do me any ruddy harm,’ wheezed his father. Seeing that Monty was really concerned, he added, ‘I’ll be all right for Christmas Day.’ But he didn’t look all right.
As for Monty’s broken ankle, his parents’ reaction was much the same as the bus conductor’s.
‘Bad luck, old chap,’ gasped his father. ‘Daft thing to do, wasn’t it?’
‘Honestly, Monty,’ complained his mother, ‘why on earth did you have to do it now?’
The Bickerstaffes were not ones for seeking a doctor’s advice. Monty hobbled painfully down the lane with the aid of a crutch and asked Jed Colley, elderly but still active, if any of his clan was going into town and, if so, could he or she bring back a bottle of whisky. Jed had promptly produced one from his own stock of booze, and pressed it into Monty’s hands.
Monty had tried to pay for it. They had the money now. But Jed wouldn’t hear of it.
‘Merry Christmas, you tell your dad and mum,’ he said.
So Monty hobbled back with the bottle in his jacket pocket and his mother began brewing up hot toddies.
‘That’ll see me right,’ wheezed his father.
Two days before the Day, he took to his bed, something unheard of, and the doctor was finally called.
He said it was influenza, complicated by a chest infection, and he wanted to send Edward Bickerstaffe into hospital.
Edward and his wife reacted with horror and refused. Well, said the doctor reluctantly, the hospitals were all filling up with the victims of seasonal ailments. Edward could stay at home provided he slept in a separate room, in which a fire had been lit, and received only essential visitors. But they must let him, the doctor, know immediately if things got worse. ‘And don’t forget about the fire!’ repeated the doctor on leaving. The temperature in the bedrooms at Balaclava was always arctic.
‘That means you stay away from your father, Monty,’ ordered his mother, when the required fire had been lit, causing a downfall of soot and bits of bird’s nest into the hearth. It made the sick man cough more and, as the room dried out, you could feel the dampness evaporating on the walls.
‘I don’t want you catching it. It’s bad enough you had to go and break your ankle.’ She was busy polishing up the remnants of the family silver, brought out for the annual Christmas display, as she spoke. She sat at the kitchen table, rubbing away with wadding soaked in some cleaning fluid that turned her fingers black.
Monty painfully hauled himself upstairs and along the corridor to stand outside his father’s door.
‘How’s it going, Dad?’ he called.
‘Bloody awful!’ croaked the invalid. ‘Go away!’
So Monty went away.
Late on Christmas Eve, he awoke with a start to hear his father coughing hideously. Then came his mother’s footsteps hurrying along the corridor. He got out of bed and hopped to his door, opening it a crack and peeping through. His mother was coming back from the sickroom, wrapped in her old towelling dressing gown. She didn’t see Monty and went downstairs.
Monty disobeyed orders and made his way to the sickroom. It was lit by a single bedside lamp, with a dusty and faded pleated pink silk shade. Monty could see it clearly now, in his mind’s eye, with its china base of a girl, a twenties ‘flapper’, holding the leash of a couple of greyhounds. Lending a little more light were the glowing coals of the fire lit in the vain hope of encouraging the sick man’s recovery. His father sat up in bed, propped on damp pillows, sweat pouring down his face. He was drawing great painful breaths, only to expel them in a splutter and with a groan.
‘I feel a bit strange, old chap,’ he managed to gasp.
Monty, frightened, said, ‘I’ll go down and phone the doc to come out at once – or an ambulance. Perhaps that would be best.’
‘No need,’ returned his father. ‘Your mother’s gone downstairs to phone. He’ll be here soon. You get back to your room. You’ll catch this bloody thing.’ He stretched out a hand and gestured feebly. ‘Go . . .’ he managed before another coughing fit overtook him.
So Monty, to his everlasting shame, hobbled back to his room.
The doctor didn’t arrive until nine on Christmas morning, but by that time Edward Bickerstaffe was dead.
‘Why the hell didn’t you come at once?’ Monty demanded angrily, trapping the doctor on the first-floor landing beneath the stained-glass window of Jezebel. ‘I know it’s ruddy Christmas, but he was your patient. You knew he was ill. You should have come when my mother phoned!’
‘I did come at once!’ snapped the doctor. ‘Your father should have been in hospital! Of course, I knew how ill he was! He’d been ill for years, a physical wreck. I tried to get him to cut down on the cigarettes and see a heart specialist. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t fight the influenza; his body didn’t have the weapons any longer. When your mother rang, I realised what it meant. I just grabbed my bag and came! I haven’t even had my breakfast!’
‘But she—’ began Monty.
Then he broke off. Of course, she hadn’t. She hadn’t rung the doctor in the middle of the night. She’d gone downstairs – but she hadn’t phoned. If he, Monty, hadn’t meekly returned to his bed, but had made his awkward injured way down to the hall, he’d have made sure she rang. But she had waited until she knew it was too late.
With a sick feeling in his stomach, he realised at once why she’d done it. She’d known all along about the affair with Penny’s mother. How could he, Monty, have been so naïve as to think she – the deceived wife – hadn’t found out – hadn’t known by some instinct? That she hadn’t read all the little signs like an archaeologist deciphering some ancient runes? All the time they had been poor, the affair hadn’t threatened her own position, because neither she nor his father had any choice but to live on together, husband and wife, in this cold, cheerless, loveless house. But now that their financial position had changed his father might have begun to think of divorce; to dream of beginning anew with the woman he loved. But this was all his mother’s life held: Balaclava House and her position as its mistress, as Mrs Bickerstaffe. She’d skimped and toiled here without proper domestic help or a decent household budget for years. Was her reward for all that to be cast aside? No, she wasn’t the sort of woman to let that happen.
So now Monty said to the doctor apologetically, ‘Yes, of course you came at once, and it’s Christmas Day, too. I’m sorry I snapped your head off like that. I’m upset. My mother and I appreciate all you’ve done.’
‘Naturally you’re shocked and upset, old fellow,’ said the doctor, patting his shoulder. ‘I’m very sorry it ended like this.’
But it didn’t. How could it? Life had to go on. His life, his mother’s life, their lives together as parent and child, how could they lead these now that he knew? What was he going to do? Was there never to be any end to it?
Chapter 11
Jess was driving out to Weston St Ambrose for a second time, but this time alone. They had been optimistic, after finding Taylor’s flat, of tracing his family, friends and business acquaintances.
They were having reasonable success in doing this, but so far had not turned up anything significant enough to give them a lead as to who might have wanted the man dead, or where he had been setting out to when Hopkins saw him leave the house on the fatal morning.
Taylor had been a networker of experience, a racing man, with a wide range of acquaintances, a party animal. Yet Jay Taylor had also been a highly professional writer, dissecting the minutiae of celebrities’ lives and lifestyles, admittedly at their request in a joint enterprise, but getting uncomfortably close to them in doing so. Perhaps that had made a lot of people wary of him.
The celebs whose confessions he’d ghosted had not been the hardest to track down; but tryi
ng to make an appointment to see any of them was another matter. They had full diaries and travelled widely. One was in the USA promoting a music album. Another, nearer to home, was in the Priory Clinic. But Carter and Jess managed it. Interviewed face to face or down a phone line between engagements (sporting, television or photo shoots), all of them were decently shocked to hear of his murder. But they shrugged their shoulders when asked about the man. They agreed he had interviewed them. He had got them to talk about themselves and their lives in detail. Jess’s impression was that, in most cases, that wouldn’t have been difficult. In other cases it must have meant hours of patient and skilled coaxing. Just as some presented themselves to the public in airbrushed pictures, others would have liked to present airbrushed lives. To Taylor’s credit, he hadn’t allowed them to do that. Whatever he found, he promised to handle ‘tactfully’ and generally they agreed he had kept his word.
They – the stars – had not encouraged Jay to talk about himself. There was no necessity. That had not been the purpose of the exercise. It had been a business arrangement.
His publishers were kinder about him and regretted his loss to his profession. One of them, interviewed by Carter, summed it up.
‘Jay was one of the best, a damn good writer. Yes, he earned pretty good money; but he was a bit of a bon viveur, that’s the impression we all got. It wouldn’t surprise anyone here to learn he spent it as fast as he earned it. He wasn’t one of those chaps who turn up for lunch wearing jeans and a scruffy old jacket. He had a fondness for designer suits. We didn’t know anything about his private life, apart from that. We’ll miss him, certainly. You could always rely on Jay. He always did a thorough job and turned in a manuscript on time.’
So Carter and Jess ended up knowing little more about the man himself than they had at the outset. They had decided that Taylor, like many people, was neither popular nor unpopular, hovering somewhere in between. He had been generally liked, or at least not actively disliked. (The exception being by Miss Jeffrey.) Hopkins had perhaps not quite approved of his tenant’s way of earning a living; but Taylor had paid his rent on time, and Jess imagined that was all that really mattered to the landlord. For others with whom Taylor had come into contact it had been a social or work-related kind of liking, not an emotional one.
Billy and Terri Hemmings, on the other hand, had considered him a friend and appeared genuinely upset. But they still insisted they knew little about his background. Other racing acquaintances said ‘they hadn’t really known him that well’. No one admitted to having disliked him. ‘Very pleasant sort’, they said of him. They were all quite clear about that. After all, the poor guy had been murdered, hadn’t he?
Had the motive for murder stemmed from Taylor’s financial situation? Although Hemmings told them Jay was good at picking winners, Jess and Carter soon found out their man had had lean days too, when the money had vanished on the heels on losing nags. This raised the possibility that he had owed money within the betting world. So far there was no evidence of this. His bank account was in the black, if not generously so. It had rarely gone into the red, his bank manager told them, though it had teetered on the brink a few times. Mr Taylor compared favourably with some other of the bank’s clients. So the dead man had been a gambler, but not a reckless one. Taylor hadn’t fallen into the debt trap. But had he fallen into another? That was the question.
Jess had imagined that, if they ever tracked down any relatives, these would show more grief. But it was not to be so. Gerald ‘Jay’ Turner’s medical records contained the fact that his next of kin was a Miss Bryant. She was, it turned out, his only surviving relation, an aunt and retired civil servant. She lived in an aggressively tidy bungalow just outside Bristol. Jess visited her there to bring her the sad news and, with luck, learn something more personal about the dead man.
She need not have worried Miss Bryant would be too distraught to be interviewed. She was a stocky, bespectacled, grey-haired woman wearing a pleated tartan skirt and a crisp white blouse under a beige woollen gilet. Sitting bolt upright in a chintz-covered armchair without a crease in it, she eyed Jess with disapproval and announced, ‘Naturally it’s a pity my nephew has died. But I’m not surprised to see the police involved. Even as a child he was secretive . . . pah!’
The elderly, overweight dachshund with which Miss Bryant shared her home looked as if it might also have shared its mistress’s opinions. Curled in a dog basket, it kept its baleful stare on Jess and twitched its greying muzzle from time to time in a canine sneer.
Miss Bryant, for all her disapproval, was more than willing to talk but, from Jess’s viewpoint, had little to tell – and nothing about her nephew’s recent movements. She had last seen him ten to twelve months earlier, when he’d turned up ‘out of the blue, showing no consideration, as usual. He sat there where you are, in that chair, and started reminiscing in a maudlin sort of way, about his mother and father and his childhood. I thought it quite possible he’d been drinking.’
Miss Bryant leaned forward. ‘He borrowed a photograph album of mine. He had no early photographs of himself, he said, and he wanted to make some copies. He didn’t return it. If it’s among his effects, I want it back immediately.’
‘I think there was one,’ Jess told her, ‘I’ll look into it.’
Other than that, Miss Bryant had received an annual Christmas card and, very occasionally, a brief phone call. Gerald, as she continued to call him, had been a ‘bright little boy and really, quite a good student’. But then things had rather fallen apart, in her view. She described his lifestyle as rackety, and confirmed he had never married.
‘A wife wouldn’t have put up with it!’ she said grimly.
She had never known anything about his girlfriends.
‘All rather a waste. Deirdre would have been disappointed.’ The grimness was still in her voice but also a touch of satisfaction. Miss Bryant had been proved right.
‘Deirdre?’ enquired Jess.
‘My late sister, Gerald’s mother.’
‘I see, what about his father?’ There had been, as Jess recalled, no male figure constant in the family snaps album they’d found in Taylor’s flat.
At this question, Miss Bryant’s eyes flashed. ‘Lionel? He took himself off when the baby was still in its cradle. I wasn’t surprised. He was a rackety sort, too. I suppose Gerald took after him. I warned Deirdre when she married him, but she wouldn’t listen to me. Lionel was what they used to call a charmer. Deirdre never heard from him again; and she didn’t know where to begin to look for him. He’d quitted his job. He had no family she could contact. He’d been brought up by some people called Taylor; that was where he got his surname. They’d adopted him as a baby and were both dead by the time Deirdre met Lionel. He had no other relatives, or so he told her. Certainly no one turned up at the wedding. It was a registry office affair with about six people present, all on Deirdre’s side. His whole background may have been a complete fabrication. It wouldn’t surprise me. So there you are. Or rather, there poor Deirdre was, with a babe in arms and no man to support her. Lionel Taylor might just as well have been a will-o-the-wisp. He probably had half a dozen wives up and down the country.’
Miss Bryant leaned back and surveyed Jess thoughtfully. ‘I suppose I’ll be Gerald’s heir, then? To his estate, I mean?’
‘I can’t give you legal advice, Miss Bryant, I’m afraid. I’d see a solicitor about that, if I were you. All I can say is that, so far, we’ve found no will.’
‘Then it’s mine. There’s no one else. I suppose it’s modest,’ said Miss Bryant discontentedly. She brightened. ‘There’s a flat in Cheltenham, you say?’
‘Only rented, I’m afraid. The landlord is anxious for it to be cleared so he can decorate the place and relet it.’
‘Huh!’ exclaimed Miss Bryant. ‘Typical of Gerald. No provision made for his future!’
Or for Miss Bryant’s future, either.
‘I suppose,’ she said discontentedly, as Jess left,
‘I’ll be expected to pay for his funeral out of whatever he’s left . . . and I’ll have the inconvenience of clearing that flat, as well. It’s Gerald all over. Like father, like son. Feckless!’
The dachshund uttered a canine rumble of confirmation.
Jess drove away with a feeling of relief.
But at least Miss Bryant was able later to give a positive identification of the dead man. She did so in a matter-of-fact way, showing no more distress than she had earlier. Jess felt relief at seeing her depart in a taxi. ‘Awful woman,’ she said unguardedly.
Phil Morton took an unexpectedly positive view. ‘Look at it this way; it’s a good job we’ve got a family member to identify him before the inquest opens. The coroner wouldn’t be impressed if only given an assurance about identity by Billy Hemmings!’