by Granger, Ann
‘Not yet, but we’ll get there.’
‘Really?’ Tansy stared at him.
‘Oh, yes, really,’ Carter assured her.
She didn’t look reassured.
Chapter 16
Bridget and her daughter were quarrelling again. Monty had retreated to his bedroom, out of the way, and lay in the semi-darkness, listening to the rise and fall of their increasingly strident voices. It wasn’t the first clash he’d overheard since coming to the Old Lodge. The two women seemed to be constantly at loggerheads. This time they were really going at it, hammer and tongs. He gathered Tansy had been over to Balaclava to check out the place and had encountered a senior police officer there. Tansy was upset that the police were taking no action over someone having used one of the bedrooms. He thought he heard her say that the police now knew who it had been. Monty didn’t want to know the identity of the intruders. Just so long as they didn’t come back; that was all he cared about.
Then Tansy and Bridget must have realised Monty could hear them, because they’d lowered their voices and hissed at each other like a pair of venomous snakes. So he’d missed all the next bit. Not that he was interested. All new information threatened to disturb his peace of mind. Gradually their voices had risen and now they were back to storm force and yelling again.
Penny and I didn’t row like that, noisily, thought Monty. She would get annoyed with me and say a few sharp words. She knew how to pick ’em. She didn’t need to shout. I used to ignore her. It seemed the easiest way and eventually she’d give up. One day, after so many long and acrimonious years together, she’d really given up and walked out.
‘Serve you right,’ Monty told himself aloud.
He was sorry Penny hadn’t lived on long in her new life, free of him, after that, but had gone early to her grave. He hoped he hadn’t driven here there, but accepted he’d done his bit. She’d deserved a few decent years after all the time spent with him. All those things that had gone wrong and for which he felt responsible to a bigger or lesser degree; all of them stood like ghosts at his bedside, pointing accusing fingers.
A violent slam of a door signalled one of the quarrelling pair, probably Tansy, had stormed out and gone to her room. His mother and father hadn’t argued loudly like that, either. They would have considered it ill bred, a vulgar way of carrying on. Theirs had been a cold, bitter silence of things unsaid. Perhaps it would have been better if they’d yelled a bit more instead of letting resentment simmer. Perhaps then his mother wouldn’t have taken her revenge in so deadly a way.
Monty had said nothing to his mother on that grim Christmas Day, after the doctor’s departure. Nor had he spoken during the days that followed, or even after the ghastly funeral lunch, when the small band of mourners had sat down to eat the Christmas turkey. Not having been cooked when intended, due to events, the turkey had lingered ripely in the fridge until the day of the burial. It was a wonder they hadn’t all got food poisoning.
It wasn’t until the following spring that Monty broached the subject. He was home again, this time for the Easter holiday. He came upon his mother on her knees at the flowerbed by the front door. She was energetically digging out weeds. He looked down at her, wondering at the ferocity of her attack on the groundsel and couch grass.
‘You didn’t call the doctor during the night, last Christmas,’ he said. ‘Dad thought you were phoning him. I went into his room and spoke to him and he told me so. But you didn’t call the doc until the next morning.’
He didn’t say it accusingly. He hadn’t even intended consciously to say it at all. He had added it to the list of secrets, never to be spoken of. But it came out, just like that, as a simple statement.
She paused in her onslaught on the weeds, sat back on her heels and wiped a gardening glove over her brow, leaving a dirty smear. She didn’t look up.
‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Of course I called him.’
‘I spoke to the doctor, too. He said he came as soon as you called him, before breakfast on Christmas Day.’
‘I called him!’ she said sharply. ‘You were confused, Monty. It was a very stressful time.’
There was a silence. She still had not looked up at him. Now she indicated the bed with her trowel. ‘I thought geraniums might do all right in here. It gets very dry but they don’t mind.’
Monty didn’t mention the subject again. There was nothing to be gained. Didn’t he carry his own burden of guilt for that night? He had gone back to bed so tamely; instead of going downstairs and waiting for the doctor to arrive. He could have hopped and hobbled down to the hallway where the phone was, then he would have known, he would have called the doc again himself . . . But no, back to bed he’d gone and – he couldn’t understand this even now – he’d fallen asleep again until early morning. He’d woken to the grey light and the figure of his mother standing over him, still in her dressing gown, to inform him his father had passed away.
‘Your father’s just gone,’ she’d said, as if Edward Bickerstaffe had decided to get up, dress, and take himself off for a short time to attend to some business.
‘Gone where?’ Monty had asked foolishly.
But she had already turned and was leaving the room.
He’d married Penny six years later.
‘Congratulations, Monty,’ his mother said to him drily at the wedding breakfast. ‘You couldn’t have done better.’
He understood the true meaning of her words. She believed he had married Penny to be revenged on her. He had foisted on her, as a daughter-in-law, the flame-haired daughter of her old rival. They were all in the wedding group photo. His mother stood stone-faced, in a tweed suit and sensible shoes, at one end of the line-up; Penny’s mother, faded but still pretty and wearing a feathery hat, at the other. The spirit of his father seemed to lurk somewhere above their heads. No, he couldn’t have taken a better revenge.
But his mother was wrong. He’d married Penny because he loved her. He really did. Later, he found that loving someone and being a halfway decent husband were two different things.
Later that day, when he and Penny studied the photos alone, Penny said, ‘Your mother doesn’t look very happy in any of them. She must be sad at losing you.’
He wanted to speak the truth for once and say, ‘No, she doesn’t give a damn about me. It’s having to hear you called “Mrs Bickerstaffe” that bugs her.’
What he actually said was, ‘She probably drank a couple of gins too many before the ceremony, and she never liked having her photo taken.’
Thus he discovered, right at the start of his marriage, that he would have to keep on telling little white lies, adding to the cairn of secrets of which the first stone had been laid so many years before, on a sunny summer’s day when the lark sang.
Footsteps tapped along the passageway past his room. He heard a sharp tap at a door and Bridget’s voice. ‘Tansy! We can’t just leave it like that. You have to be sensible.’
There must have been some reply missed by Monty because the next thing he heard was Bridget saying, ‘We’ll talk again in the morning.’
She tapped past his door again. The Old Lodge was silent.
The following morning the sun was shining and Jess came in to find a note on her desk, informing her that Tom Palmer had phoned and asked that she call him back. She picked up the scrap of paper and sighed. She supposed he wanted to go out again that evening and eat somewhere or have a drink. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. She liked Tom’s company but she didn’t want these outings to take on a regular pattern. She even felt mildly resentful that Tom should assume she had nothing else to do in her evenings, no one else to meet. For that reason, she decided not to phone him back at once but to wait until later. She had more important things to do than discuss the pros and cons of various spaghetti houses or country pubs.
Also, Phil Morton walked in at that moment and said, ‘The super wants us in his office.’
Tom would have to wait now. Jess sighed. Ian Carter no doubt
wanted them to thrash out some plan of action. A case conference was inevitable, with all that had happened. But the fact was, the mystery of the ultra-clean bedroom at Balaclava and its secret visitors had now been cleared up. That left them back at square one, with very little to go on by way of new leads.
Carter was waiting for them, standing behind his desk and aligning pens and other desktop items with concentrated care. He looked up when they came in and said, ‘Glad you’ve both got a minute.’
Is he being sarcastic? Jess wondered briefly. Probably not but it did sound a little like it. Beside her, she sensed Phil bridle.
‘I called in at Balaclava House yesterday,’ Carter went on. ‘Tansy Peterson was there.’ He gave them a résumé of his conversation with Tansy. ‘There are fresh male footprints in the gardens. I think someone has been wandering around up there within the last day or two, certainly since it rained. It could just be a sightseer. Or even the local press, I suppose, gone to take a photo or two. But if anyone is taking an interest in Balaclava House, I want to know who it is.’
‘I can phone the local rag and ask if they’ve sent anyone over there,’ Morton offered.
Carter nodded his approval. ‘It’s made me think rather more about that place, the house and the land. The fact both are in a dismal state of neglect doesn’t mean the whole estate isn’t worth quite a bit. Monty could be a rich man if he sold up.’
‘Who’d want it?’ Morton asked gloomily.
‘A developer would,’ Carter told him briskly. ‘And by coincidence, or not, Billy Hemmings is a property developer. We ought not to overlook any little bit of knowledge we have, even if it seems unrelated to the inquiry. Jay Taylor is altogether too much of a man of mystery. I don’t believe Taylor being expected at Hemmings’s house for a dinner party on the day of his death is a coincidence. You told me, Jess, that you believed Balaclava House is at the centre of this business. I think you could be on to something. They haven’t left for Marbella, as you feared, Jess. I’m going to talk to Hemmings today. I rang his home. He wasn’t there but I spoke to his wife. He’s got an office in Gloucester and will be there all day. I’m driving over there shortly and if he’s been hanging round Balaclava House, I intend to get it out of him.’
‘Monty wouldn’t sell to a developer!’ Jess said promptly.
‘Neither would Tansy,’ Carter said with a brief smile. ‘She made that very clear to me!’
Phil Morton, his hands jammed in his jacket pockets said moodily, ‘She thinks she’s the old bloke’s heir, does she? That it’s going to be up to her to sell or not? Or it should be “heiress”, I suppose, if you want to be picky.’
He was unprepared for the silence that followed his suggestion, and looked up, taking his hands from his pockets as if he expected to be reproved.
Jess said slowly, ‘It’s a distinct possibility. Monty’s fond of Tansy. He’s got to leave Balaclava to someone.’
‘He might not have made a will,’ said Morton quickly, preempting any objections to his new idea. The last time he’d produced a theory, they’d knocked it down, after all. ‘Look at the people who don’t make wills, even people with plenty to leave.’
‘Oh, I think Mr Bickerstaffe will have made a will,’ Carter decided. ‘He’s an educated man of middle-class upbringing and professional background. The Bickerstaffe family must always have made wills. They owned property and used to own a business. Of course, any will Monty made during his wife’s lifetime will have needed to be redrafted after her death. Monica Farrell made no mention of a divorce. I think Penny Bickerstaffe just packed her bags and left. She may still have been in the old will. I’m fairly sure he would have made a new will when she died or, if there was a divorce, after that. That property has been in his family since it was built in the eighteen sixties. He’d make arrangements for it in the event of his death. He’d be very conscious of the necessity and see it as a duty. What’s more he’d be very keen to leave it to a family member who might, who knows, one day restore it. Bridget Harwell sees the place as a burden to be unloaded. But Tansy doesn’t. Tansy loves the old place. She’s the obvious person to inherit it.’
Jess said slowly, ‘I’m remembering something he said to me, when I drove over to Bridget Harwell’s house to talk to him. He said something about not having any money to leave Tansy. That’s true. He doesn’t have cash but he does have the house and property. The fact that he talked about leaving anything at all to Tansy shows he does have the situation after his death in mind; and he wants to leave something to her. He can’t stand Bridget Harwell. But Tansy is a different kettle of fish.’ Excitement was growing in her voice. ‘Yes, I bet he has left Balaclava to Tansy. What’s more, I believe she knows it. That’s why she was there, checking the place out, when you met her, sir. That’s why she spoke so strongly about it in her conversation with you. She already regards it as hers!’
‘But she wouldn’t sell it and the land for development,’ Carter reminded her. ‘She made that clear to me.’
‘She might have no choice,’ contributed Morton. ‘I know she’s got money and her dad is rolling in it, but just think of trying to put that crumbling old ruin in order and the cost of its upkeep afterwards! It’s huge. She couldn’t live in it. So, she’s got a sentimental attachment to the place. If she owned it, she’d have to face facts, be practical. I mean, she’s not much more than a kid now. She might have all sorts of dreams about fixing the place up and so on. But real life—’
‘All the more reason for me to talk to Billy Hemmings,’ Carter interrupted him. ‘To find out if he does have any interest in Balaclava House and whether he’s approached any family member about it. Not Monty himself, perhaps, but what about Bridget Harwell? Mrs Harwell is not the sentimental sort. She’d see Balaclava as a liability to be unloaded as soon as possible. I think you’d better talk to Bridget again, Jess. I’ll tackle Hemmings.’
‘Where does Taylor come into it?’ Morton asked.
There was another silence. ‘Blowed if I know,’ said Carter at last. ‘But it’s high time we found out!’
Chapter 17
As Jess walked back to her office, her mobile phone chirruped, letting her know she had received a text message. It was from Tom Palmer, following up his earlier missed phone call. Restored to conventional spelling it read: Call by my office. Something here you might like to see.
She needed to drive over to The Old Lodge and see Bridget again, but she could make it to Tom’s office first. It would stop him bombarding her with messages. Besides, she was curious. She had assumed that he’d wanted to make an arrangement about going out to eat tonight. Apparently this wasn’t the case. She puzzled over the few words on the screen. What had Tom found now? Surely he hadn’t conducted a second post-mortem. There had been no request for one. If he had done so, and found something he called ‘interesting’, Jess hoped it wasn’t now in a glass jar and she would be required to study some gory section of human internal organ. Tom had the blessed ability to distance himself as a human being from the remains he dissected. ‘A lung is a lung . . .’ he’d once cheerily informed her. ‘Doesn’t matter if its human or animal. You cook, don’t you? Well, sometimes you do, anyway. You’ve chopped up meat?’
Jess had viewed enough corpses not to be squeamish in general. But she had never managed the trick of dissociating her own mortality from the sad remains on the slab. ‘What I cut up comes neatly cling-film wrapped in a polystyrene tray!’ had been her reply. ‘And it never looked like me or you.’
At least Tom wasn’t in the morgue itself, when she got there. He was, as he’d said he’d be, in his office. That lessened the possibility of bits in jars considerably.
‘Ah!’ said Tom smugly, when she walked in. ‘Bet you don’t know what all this is about? It took me three-quarters of an hour to find it. My time is valuable, I’ll have you know. I ought to send you a bill.’
‘What are you on about?’ Jess asked. ‘All I’ve got is a cryptic message. My time is valuable, to
o. You’re not wasting it, I hope? I’ve got an important interview to conduct.’
Tom looked hurt at this less than gracious reply. ‘You can’t expect me to spoil my surprise by putting it all in a text message? Anyway, it would be too long.’
‘What is it? ’ Jess burst out.
Tom pulled open a drawer in his desk and pulled out a very tattered copy of a glossy magazine. ‘Ta-ra!’ he heralded this unpromising object. ‘I told you; it took me three-quarters of an hour to find it. You’re lucky. She was just about to throw them all out.’
‘Who was? Throw what? Stop talking in riddles, Tom. OK, I’m surprised, if that’s what you want. I am, actually, I didn’t have you down as reading that sort of stuff. But what about that one am I expected to be surprised at?’
‘The receptionist at the dental surgery was going to throw them out. Now then, you remember I told you I thought I’d seen the corpse you sent me recently before? In life, I mean, not on a slab.’