by Granger, Ann
‘How?’ asked Jess crisply. There were more holes in this story than a sieve. ‘You didn’t have any transport to get home.’
‘I knew I could come here, to the Colleys’ place. Don’t forget . . .’ Bridget’s tense features were unexpectedly softened by a brief smile. ‘I’m a Bickerstaffe. I’ve known the Colleys all my life. I’d tell them I’d been on my way to Balaclava House intending to check the place over. My car had broken down. I’d say I’d phoned Seb Pascal and he’d come with his tow-truck to take my car away. I’d ask Dave to drive me home, or Gary. Even if they didn’t quite believe me, I could trust the Colleys not to ask questions. It’s all quite feudal really, Bickerstaffes and Colleys. It always has been. It’s really weird in this day and age. But once you step into the world of Balaclava House, you’re not in the present day, you know. You’re stuck in some benighted past.’
‘So that’s what you did?’
‘Not quite. You see the blighter died on me just as I turned into Toby’s Gutter Lane.’ Bridget’s voice grew vicious. ‘He just coughed up a load of vomit and pitched forward as far as the seat belt would allow and stayed like that. I nearly did crash the car, with both of us inside it! It was quite disgusting. I nearly threw up myself. I pulled over and got out of the car for fresh air. Then I began to think, I could still carry on with most of the plan. I could still crash the car at the bottom of Shooter’s Hill. But the experts are so damn clever these days and they’d realise, at a post-mortem, he was already dead when he crashed. My fingerprints were all over that car, too. I only then thought about that. Something so elementary and I’d forgotten that, can you believe it? It was because I was in such a panic to get him away from my house. Then I had a bit of luck. There’s a field there, where the lane starts, and as I stood by the car, Gary Colley came towards me over the open land with a shotgun broken over his arm. The Colleys always did shoot anything with fur or feathers.
‘I called out to him. I told him the basic truth: my passenger had died in the car. I wanted to get rid of the car and the body because I didn’t want to get involved in a court case. Gary appreciated that argument. I also remembered that Balaclava House was never locked in the daytime and there was a good chance Uncle Monty hadn’t got back from his daily walk into town.’
‘You suggested putting the dead man in your uncle’s house, for the poor old man to find?’ Jess asked incredulously, forgetting her resolution not to interrupt. ‘The shock might have given him a heart attack!’
‘Uncle Monty? Not likely, he’s as tough as old boots. Don’t waste your sympathy on him. He led Aunt Penny a dreadful life. She adored him, too. In the end even she couldn’t take any more and left. Do you know? The miserable old brute wouldn’t even attend her funeral! If you want to know the truth, the image of him stumbling in with his shopping bag full of clinking bottles and finding a stiff, well, it would serve him right. It even amused me and I needed a laugh after all I’d gone through that day.’ Bridget scowled.
Jess stared at her nonplussed. There was something wrong with all this but she couldn’t put her finger on it. It made sense with a dreadful logic, except that . . .
‘You drove the car to Balaclava House, I take it, with Gary as passenger?’
‘Gary drove. I didn’t fancy getting back into the driver’s seat beside Taylor so I got into the rear seat. We actually drove past Balaclava to the Colleys’ and parked here. Gary fetched his father. Dave and Gary partly carried and partly dragged Taylor through the grounds to the house and left him inside. Then they came back and put Taylor’s car in this barn.’ Bridget pointed down at the wooden floor beneath their feet. ‘Out of sight, in case Pete Sneddon decided to call by. He does, from time to time, usually to complain about something to do with the pigs.’
Damn! thought Jess furiously. I should have got a search warrant that first day and come here to the Colleys’ with it. I’d have found the car in this barn before they ditched it later that night.
‘The Colleys drove the car down to the quarry that night and torched it?’ she asked.
Bridget nodded. ‘Yes, they said they’d do that. It would take care of any fingerprints or DNA, linking me with it.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘I’ll come with you now and make a statement, if you like.’
‘Not quite yet,’ Jess said. ‘First I’ll wait for Tansy to come back.’
‘We don’t need Tansy!’ Bridget said furiously. ‘Leave her out of it.’
‘I can’t, Mrs Harwell. I need a statement from her, too.’
‘She wasn’t there!’ Bridget almost howled at her.
‘But, you see, I think she was,’ Jess said. ‘I think you and she cooked this up together. You may have gone to London the day before, as you said you did, but I doubt you saw Taylor there. He lived in Cheltenham and only went to London on business. You’d have arranged to meet him in Cheltenham if anywhere. Why didn’t you say all you had to say while in Cheltenham? Why invite the man to lunch at your house the very next day? What’s more, I don’t think he’d have accepted such an invitation so easily, without smelling a rat. He may have suspected he’d arrive to find every man in the family you could round up there to confront him. But he would accept an invitation from Tansy. The only reason he’d accept would be if Tansy were going to be there.
‘Besides, it took two of you to manhandle him into the car. He was a big, heavy guy. I might have been able to do it alone because I’m a police officer and very fit. I’ve had training in how to get a recalcitrant detainee, possibly drunk into the bargain, into a squad car. But you alone, Bridget? No way. You didn’t meet him in London or anywhere else. Tansy rang him up. What did Tansy say to him? That you’d given in and wanted to discuss it all, just a cosy threesome?’
‘Yes, that’s what I did say to him,’ said a new voice.
There was a movement to Jess’s left and Tansy Peterson stepped out from behind a stack of crates.
‘No, Tansy!’ Bridget cried out. ‘Leave this to me! We agreed!’
‘There’s no point,’ Tansy said bleakly. ‘She isn’t buying the explanation the way you told it, Mum. Even if I went along with it and said I was away from The Old Lodge that lunchtime, Inspector Campbell here would ask me for witnesses who could put me elsewhere at the time, an alibi, wouldn’t you?’ She looked full at Jess.
‘Yes,’ Jess confirmed, ‘I certainly would, because you’ve been lying to us all along. The only moment you nearly betrayed yourself was when I told you that someone had been using one of the upstairs bedrooms at Balaclava. You were extremely distressed. You realised that person or person might have been there when you, your mother and the Colleys were putting Taylor’s body in the drawing room. You could have been seen.’
‘I wasn’t there for that,’ Tansy objected. ‘Dave and Gary did it between them. I’d helped get Jay into the car at The Old Lodge, as you guessed, but my mother drove off with him alone. She wouldn’t let me come along. I thought it had all gone according to plan, with the car crashing at the bottom of Shooter’s Hill, as we decided it should. I didn’t know the plan had had to be changed until my mother came back. I wouldn’t have let Gary and his father put Jay in Balaclava for Uncle Monty to find. I was furious when I found out what they’d done. I love Uncle Monty. He’s a wonderful old man! But after my mother drove off I didn’t know what happened until she returned and told me. It was too late to do anything about it then. I didn’t want Jay near Balaclava House dead or alive, much less actually in it!’
‘But why,’ Jess couldn’t help but ask curiously, ‘did you want to kill Jay Taylor? You were in love with him. Your mother was in a blind panic over it. You spoke of marrying him. You and Mrs Harwell fought over it.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Tansy said bitterly. ‘Jay and I discussed marriage. I’m over eighteen and, whatever my mother thought about it, I’d have married him. Then I found out that it wasn’t me he wanted. He wanted Balaclava House. I’ll be Uncle Monty’s heir and had stupidly let Jay know it, all about Balaclava and how Unc
le Monty lived there all on his own and the place was falling down. But it would be mine one day and I planned to restore it. It would be beautiful and I’d live there.
‘Jay had checked the place out, just from curiousity. When he saw the size of it and how much land was attached, it gave him his big idea. He thought he’d marry me; Uncle Monty wouldn’t last much longer, and wow! He’d get his hands on Balaclava.’ Tansy voice grew incredulous. ‘Do you know what he planned to do with the house? He and some developer pal of his were going to pull it down! Raze Balaclava to the ground and put a lot of brick boxes all over the land!’
‘How did you find that out?’
‘The developer he was going in with, I think he’s called Hemmings, went to the local planning office to see if there would be any objection, any difficulty getting permission. He mentioned to them that he would be in partnership with someone called Taylor. Well, a friend of mine works in that office. He shouldn’t have done it, I suppose, but he got in touch with me at once to warn me. He knew about me and that I stood to inherit Balaclava, and that my relative was the owner and still living in it. So alarm bells had rung when a complete stranger turned up talking about developing the site. As soon as I heard the name “Taylor” mentioned, I just felt cold all over. I knew in my guts it was Jay. I thought I would be sick. How could he do that to me? Everything he’d said about loving me was a lie. I faced him with it, demanded to know if he was the Taylor in partnership with this man Hemmings. I was furious, screaming at him. He didn’t bat an eyelid, just listened to me with a smirk on his face. It made me even madder, he was so – so cool. He didn’t even try to deny it. He admitted he was in cahoots with Hemmings, and told me what a good idea it was. I should be pleased because I’d be part of it, too, and we could both make a mint.
‘For a minute or two I couldn’t speak, I was so angry. The words piled up in my throat and choked me. When I could speak, I told him to get out of my life. I said he was a sneaky, treacherous snake in the grass. He’d tried to use me. I wasn’t going to stand for that. I assured him I’d scotch any chance he and Hemmings had of developing the land. Over my dead body, I said. He was never going to get Balaclava House.’
Tansy drew a deep breath. ‘Then he said he had a right to Balaclava. A right! Because he was a Bickerstaffe, too! ’
This astounding statement had barely left Tansy’s lips when there was a sudden loud crack from the hayloft hatch. Bridget gave a stifled shriek. Both Jess and Tansy whirled round. But the window frame was empty. Bridget had disappeared.
Chapter 19
Tansy let out a piercing scream and started towards the empty window frame. Jess grabbed her arm and wrestled with her to prevent her going closer.
‘No, Tansy! The floor is rotten! Look!’ She pointed to the broken board that had given way under Bridget’s foot, unbalancing her and toppling her backwards. ‘Stay here!’
Jess turned and raced back down the flight of wooden stairs to the ground floor. Tansy, ignoring the order to stay where she was, panted along on her heels. Jess dashed across the barn floor and out into the yard.
Dave and Gary stood in frozen horror above the sprawled motionless form of Bridget Harwell. The remaining members of the Colley family were running from their cottage towards the spot. The oldest woman was waving her arms above her head. The youngest, overweight, lumbered beside her, mouth gaping and badly dyed scarlet hair flying. Between the two extremes of age came a middle-aged third who must be Maggie Colley. She was shouting a string of obscenities. The words tumbling from her lips were not, Jess was able to realise despite her own shock, aimed specifically at her. They were Maggie’s automatic reaction to the horror of the moment; the only vocabulary at her disposal in which to express her dismay. At the same time, in her ear, Jess could hear Tansy screaming, ‘Mummy, Mummy!’
The dogs were loose and milled about excitedly. That’s where Gary went, to let the dogs out! The realisation flashed through Jess’s mind. What did the idiot think? That the animals would keep me penned in while the women made some kind of escape? The dogs crept closer and began to circle the inert form. Gary moved at last, swearing and kicking out at them to drive them back. Into Jess’s head leaped the image from the stained-glass window at Balaclava House. Jezebel: the treacherous woman . . .
‘I’ve spoken to the hospital this morning,’ Ian Carter told Jess the following day. ‘Bridget has been very fortunate. The recent heavy rain helped. It turned the Colleys’ yard into a sea of soft mud and she landed on that rather than on hard ground. She has a broken leg and broken pelvis, concussion and of course considerable bruising. But she’s escaped internal injury. She will recover and eventually, we trust, be fit enough to stand trial. Her fiancé is on his way from America. We don’t know what the outcome of that will be but I doubt she’ll be getting married to him now, not if he wants to see his wife other than on visiting days.’
‘I feel responsible,’ Jess said dully. ‘She was being interviewed by me when she fell out of that opening. I saw she was in danger. When I couldn’t get her to move away from it and sit on that old sofa to talk, I should have made a grab for her and dragged her away.’
‘There will have to be an inquiry, of course,’ Carter told her. ‘But I am quite confident you’ll be cleared of any responsibility, Jess. It wasn’t your fault she fell. She was in a highly excitable frame of mind. You tried to persuade her to move away from the open window and she wouldn’t. She wanted to keep your attention on her so that you wouldn’t realise her daughter was hiding up there in that loft. You were quite right not to move towards her. She might have stepped backwards automatically and then fallen. That’s a hundred-and-fifty-year-old floor up there and it’s not been well maintained. It gave way under her weight. If you and she had both been standing on it, you’d both have fallen. No one can be surprised at what happened; or put it down to anything you did or didn’t do.’
‘I still feel I screwed up somehow,’ Jess argued. ‘If I’d got a search warrant for the Colleys’ pig farm on the day of the murder, we’d have found Taylor’s car, complete with his fingerprints and DNA and Bridget’s.’
He interrupted her briskly. ‘On what grounds would you have requested a search warrant then? As far as we were concerned, the Colleys were neighbours of Balaclava House and that was all. There was no indication at that time they’d been involved.’
Jess was still unconvinced. ‘Phil and I both realised at the scene that at least two people had carried the dead man into the house; and that they’d come through the shrubbery. That means they came from the general direction of the pig farm. At least one of those two people must have known that Monty would be absent in town and would have left the door unsecured.’
‘Not necessarily. Given the state of the place, anyone could be excused thinking it was empty, and decided to dump the body there for that reason. It’s easy to be wise after the event, Jess. Come on, let it go . . . I wouldn’t have put you down as someone given to wallowing in self-reproach!’ was the severe reproof.
‘I’m not!’ said Jess indignantly.
Carter grinned. ‘Good. That’s more like it. Now, let’s go and get the rest of the story from Miss Peterson. It should be very interesting listening.’
‘I always thought,’ said Tansy with muted fury, ‘that Jay and I met for the first time by accident at that party. But it wasn’t like that. He had been seeking me out. He got me to talk about myself. I was such a fool, prattling away to him about my family . . . I should have realised he was pumping me for information. The more he learned, the more his big idea grew. He thought he could get Balaclava House through me and he had a crackpot belief that he was somehow entitled to get his hands on it!’
She sat with her solicitor on one side of the table in the interview room. Carter and Jess faced them. Phil Morton lurked by the door. Above their heads the fluorescent strip emitted a faint hiss. Tansy’s fair skin looked bleached in this light. Her fair hair resembled a tangled sweep of drift weed. It al
l lent her the appearance of a marble angel above a Victorian tomb, albeit an avenging one.
‘OK, Tansy, take it easy,’ Jess advised. ‘Why don’t you explain to us why Taylor thought he was entitled to get hold of Balaclava House?’
Tansy stopped scowling down at the table top, sat up, pushed back her curtain of hair and turned to her solicitor. She fixed him with a minatory glare very like her mother’s and demanded, ‘I have to tell them all this or what?’
‘You’d better tell them about Taylor’s claim,’ said the unfortunate young man whose job it was to give this simmering time bomb of a client advice. ‘But that’s all you need to say at this moment.’
He clutched his briefcase against his chest with both hands as if were a shield. Tansy’s father, Peterson, had arranged his presence. He represented an old and well-respected legal partnership. However, they might have done better thought Jess, to give the job to a senior partner. Perhaps they had mistakenly reckoned there would be more empathy between legal adviser and client if there were less of an age difference.