by Mal Peet
‘May I ask why?’
Martin took a deep breath and gasped it out. ‘He was so bloody sad. And … and frail. And cut off. Do you know what? I’ve worked for him for nearly a year now, and in all that time he’s not had a single visitor. Unless you count the doctor. I used to think, Dear God, don’t let me live that long if that’s how you end up.’
‘Yes, indeed. I couldn’t agree more.’ Sheepstone studied the lino again, as if the demarcations of his own mortality were recorded on it. Then he looked up, brightened a little. ‘As you say, a very lonely man. But not alone. He had Mrs Maunder and Miss Luscombe. And you, of course. He was clearly very fond of you.’
Martin, frowning, said, ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, considering that, as you say, you’ve only been with Mr Godley for less than a year, you’d obviously become quite close.’
Martin felt the worm of fear hibernating in his heart stir. ‘I wouldn’t say that. What gave you that idea?’ His eyes swivelled between the three policemen. They hadn’t moved but seemed closer to him somehow. ‘Is that what Annie told you?’
‘No,’ Sheepstone said. ‘No. We just assumed that, well, your relationship with Mr Godley was rather more than just employer and employee. That perhaps he had paternal feelings toward you.’
The worm lifted its head. Martin’s left leg jittered. ‘What on earth makes you say that?’
‘Well,’ Sheepstone said, ‘apart from anything else, the fact that he made you a beneficiary of his will.’
‘What?’
‘That he left you an amount of money. Quite a generous amount, as it happens.’
The worm rose thick into his throat. He struggled to speak. ‘Did he?’
‘Yes. Would you like to know how much?’
‘I … I suppose so.’
‘A little over a hundred and eighty thousand pounds,’ Sheepstone said levelly. ‘In cash and bonds. Plus Burra Hall. Oh, and the Rolls.’
Shock lengthened into silence. The worm became a noose. The trap door beneath him creaked. Reeve wore a hangman’s sorrowful face. Oh, Jesus.
‘No. That’s not … That can’t be true. It’s some sort of mistake.’
‘No, Martin. There’s no mistake. I’ve spoken to Mr Godley’s solicitor. The one he did not, in fact, have an appointment with on Wednesday.’
‘I don’t understand. I couldn’t … He …’
‘You’re a rich young man, Martin. Unless, of course, Mr Godley is still alive. But I think we both know he’s not, don’t we?’
Martin fumbled for his cigarettes, but his hands couldn’t manage the packet. It fell onto the table. He leaned forward on his elbows and covered his face with his hands.
DS Panter said, ‘So what did he do? How did he spend his time?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Well, you know. What’s an average day in the life of Burra Hall like?’
Annie humphed an amused little sound. It seemed to Panter intimate. He pushed his Senior Service across the table.
She shook her head. ‘No, ta. Well, I get up at half six and get that moody bugger goin.’ She aimed a thumb at the range. ‘Half seven, I take him his breakfast up, along with hot water for his shave and that. Put his clothes out and so on. He’ll come down about half eight. Then if the weather aint too bad he’ll go outside for a stroll about. Maybe have a word with Mr. Gates about the garden and such.’
‘He was all right on his legs then, was he?’
‘Oh, yes. He liked a bit of a walk. He used that stick, but he didn’ need to, you ask me. He mostly used it to point at things with.’
‘Right.’
‘Then Auntie Peg, Mrs Maunder, comes in about ten. Sets about makin lunch, then the dinner for later. Mr Godley liked to be in here with her. He’d sit where you are. He liked listenin to Peg’s gossip.’
Panter said, ‘And where would Martin be, all this time?’
‘I dunno. Doin this and that.’ Annie leaned back in her chair and levelled a look at him. ‘We keep comin back to Mr Martin bloody Heath, don’t we? D’you know somethin about him I don’t?’
‘No. I’m just, like I say, trying to get the full picture.’
She hummed sceptically, but resumed. ‘So, we’d have lunch …’
‘Together?’
‘Oh, no,’ Annie said, as if the idea was rather shocking. ‘Mr Godley took his meals in the dining room. Me and Peg – and Martin, sometimes, to save you askin – had ours in here. Then he’d – Mr Godley, that is – have a little nap on the day bed in his study. A couple of times a week Martin’d take him out in the Rolls. He did love that. He loved that car.’ She seemed on the verge of tears again. She sniffed, lengthily.
‘Where did they go, Annie? Do you know?’
‘Just here and there, I think. Not very far, on account of how it drinks petrol. A gas-guzzler, Martin calls it.’
‘Yes,’ Panter said. ‘I dare say it is. What about the evenings?’
Annie puffed her cheeks out and expelled air. Pewf.
It made Panter smile.
‘What?’
‘Evnins,’ she said. ‘That’s when I don’t know what to do with myself. Can I change my mind about that fag?’
‘Help yourself,’ he said.
He lit her up. She inhaled, blew out a plume of smoke. Picked a fleck of tobacco from her lower lip.
‘Just out of interest,’ he said, ‘when’d you last have a night out?’
‘Why? Are you offerin?’
‘I don’t think Irene would approve.’
‘The wife.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
She looked steadily at him for a second or two before she tapped ash into the dish. She said, ‘After dinner Mr Godley usually goes back into his study. He’ve got the wireless in there and sometimes he’ll listen to that. Or read the paper. Or write in his journal. Then—’
Panter interrupted her. ‘Journal? What, like a diary?’
‘I dunno. His journal is what he called it.’
‘That’s interesting, Annie. Where’d he keep it, do you know?’
‘In his bureau.’
She gave the word a posh inflection, as if she were proud of it.
Sheepstone stood up and went to Martin and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘We’ll leave you alone for a couple of minutes, Martin. This has obviously come as something of a shock. I’ll get someone to bring you another cup of tea. All right?’
Martin took his hands from his face and put them flat on the table. He didn’t raise his head. He said, ‘I didn’t know. I don’t understand it. He never said anything.’
Sheepstone said, ‘Sugar?’
Martin nodded. ‘Please.’
When he looked up he was alone in the room. He groped for his lighter.
Reeve and Buller were waiting in Sheepstone’s office. Sheepstone closed the door behind him and said, ‘Well, John?’
Reeve said, ‘If he knew, he’s the best fucking actor I’ve ever seen. Knocks Charles Laughton into a cocked hat.’
‘Archie?’
‘I agree, sir. He went white as a sheet. I don’t know as you could fake that.’
‘I thought he might actually pass out on the spot,’ Reeve said, dryly amused.
‘Yes,’ Sheepstone said. ‘But the question is why? Because he was genuinely shocked? Or because he realised we’d found a motive?’
‘For murder, Ivan? I still can’t see it. The evidence for suicide is pretty damn conclusive, if you ask me, body or no body. I’ve met some bloody good liars in my time but I’d bet my house on Heath not knowing about Godley’s will. In which case …’
‘I know,’ Sheepstone said and stuffed his hands into his pockets. ‘Damn it.’
‘It was worth a try, though,’ Reeve said.
‘Yep, I suppose so.’ The detective inspector sighed. ‘I don’t know, John. There’s a smell comes off this one. I can’t get it out of my nostrils.’
The phone rang.
‘Yes? Hello
, Ray.’
Sheepstone listened without speaking for a whole minute then said, ‘All right. Aye, bring them in. What? For God’s sake, Ray. It’s none of her business. Tell her we’ll do her for withholding evidence if you have to. No. Inconclusive, I’d say. Yeah. Bye.’
He lowered the hand piece onto the cradle and gazed at it for a moment as if it were a disappointing grandchild.
He said, ‘You might as well take Mr Heath home, Archie.’
6
The light in the flat diminished suddenly; at the same instant rain flurried against the window. Sheepstone reached up and switched on the standard lamp beside his armchair. He added another inch of Johnnie Walker to his glass.
Clearly, the birth of his son had prompted Harold Godley to embark upon his journal. The handwriting was bold, cursive, pleased with itself. It was the first entry in the first of the fourteen volumes heaped on the low table alongside Sheepstone’s chair. Of these, twelve were quarto-sized hard-covered notebooks with marbled endpapers. Two – the final two, covering the years 1940 to the present – were cheaper affairs: coarser and thinner paper into which the ink had sometimes leached, between indigo cardboard covers. In these, the now withered writing had set off across the page at unpredictable angles, often coming to a halt mid-sentence. The volumes were labelled I to XIV.
Ray Panter had returned to the station and lugged the books up to Sheepstone’s office.
‘They took up both the lower drawers in the desk,’ Panter said. ‘This is the one – excuse me, sir – you’d be interested in, I think. I reckon the last entry was written just before he disappeared. It’s a bit difficult to read.’ He took one of the blue-bound books from the top of the pile, licked his forefinger and turned the pages back.
Sheepstone and Reeve leaned down, frowning, deciphering.
Ten minutes later Reeve straightened up, grimacing, his hand on the small of his back. ‘That does it for me, Ivan. Not exactly a suicide note, I grant you. But good as. I’d say we can put this one to bed.’
Sheepstone had been forced to agree. But, later, he’d got Panter to give him a lift home and help him carry Godley’s journal up to the flat. He’d made a late lunch – a corned beef sandwich with pickled onions – then settled himself in his armchair and begun to skim through the dead man’s life. A life, it gradually emerged, that had promised to be a walk through a pleasant meadow; but the meadow had been strewn with tripwires and mines.
Technically, of course, it wasn’t a journal. The entries were continuous on the page, but chronologically sporadic, their dates often separated by months, even years. At first, Godley had written a few sentences almost every day, recording the minutiae of Julian’s development, anxieties over his and his mother’s health, and so forth. After a year and a half, these obsessive observations became admixed with other matters that had equal or greater claim on his attention. By 1900, references to J had become intermittent and, more often than not, anxious. Nor did Julian feature frequently in Volume VI and the first part of Volume VII, covering the years 1914 to 1918, despite the fact that Godley must have lived in a continuous state of dread; his son had joined the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and gone to war just two months after graduating from Magdalen.
One entry had caught Sheepstone’s eye:
But despite the calamities in France that threatened to deprive him of his son, Godley, in his journal, had restricted himself almost entirely – obsessively – to mundane and mostly domestic matters: his finances, the difficulty of finding able-bodied men for his tenanted farm or to maintain the house, problems with servants, vagaries of the weather. The written equivalent of a man whistling in the dark, Sheepstone thought.
And to no avail.
Nothing further for eighteen months. Then, in unsteady writing:
The next entry reached almost to the bottom of a left-hand page.
The right-hand page had been ripped out. A thinning triangle of paper closest to the binding had survived. Of the date, 5th of Ma had survived. Studying the letters on the rest of the remnant, Sheepstone came to the conclusion that Godley had scrawled Eleanor over and over again. Then torn her out.
It was at this point in his reading that Sheepstone had gone to his kitchen for the bottle of whisky. He was himself a widower who had lost a child.
Godley had not resumed his journal until August 1922. The brief account of his pilgrimage to where his son had died was peculiarly flat, mechanically descriptive. The landscape was ‘dreary, rather like parts of Lincolnshire’. The auberge he’d stayed in was ‘clumsily restored, the food ghastly’. The only touch of bitterness was in his mention of the local agriculture ‘going on as if nothing had happened’.
This same emotionless, neurasthenic tone characterised the rest of the journal. Until the last volume, anyway. Unless his cars were mentioned. He’d perked up, then. He’d written a whole page about the Rolls-Royce Twenty he’d bought in 1926.
Who the hell were you, Harold Godley?
Sheepstone picked up the lapsed passport that Panter had also found in Godley’s desk. It had been stamped only once, by the Douane in Calais on the nineteenth of August 1922. The photograph showed a middle-aged man wearing a stiff collar and a tie. Prominent forehead, receding hairline. Narrow face with high cheekbones, thin lips, deep lines between the wings of his nose and his jaw, eyes blanked by camera flash. A man already, a quarter of a century ago, on nodding terms with death.
Sheepstone, the son of a miner, had grown up in a cluster of low cottages on a wind-strimmed hillside. His family had shared an outdoor privy with their neighbours. He had acute memories of queuing for a shit in the cold hard rain. As that boy, the idea that the rich suffered tribulations would have been incomprehensible. As a man, the knowledge that they did had sometimes afforded him a certain satisfaction.
It did not do so now. He felt dismayed.
7
SHEEPSTONE WENT to the window and drew the curtains over his unwelcome reflection. The room was chill. He considered lighting a fire, but the messiness of the business and the poor quality of his coal deterred him. He fetched his dressing gown from the bedroom and wrapped himself in it. He returned to his chair, drank from his glass and reached for Godley’s final volume. He brisked through it until Heath made his first appearance in the spring of last year.
The next entry was dated 17th May, same year. It had been many years, Sheepstone had noted, since Godley had recorded anything during the earlier part of May.
Like J? Was that what the old man had intended to write but veered away from the thought? If so, he couldn’t stop himself returning to it, repeatedly and, in the end, obsessively. In August – by which time ‘Heath’ had modulated into ‘Martin’ then simply ‘M’ – Godley had written
But you did go mad, didn’t you, you poor old sod? Or something like it. Although you were too proud to let it show.
Sheepstone drained his glass, then poured another measure while telling himself not to.
Had Godley lost his marbles before he’d changed his will? Browning had judged him to be in his right mind, despite having every reason and inclination for testifying otherwise. And Godley’s brief account of that meeting almost nine months after taking Heath on was cogent enough.
Thereafter, few entries. But they made for hard reading in more senses than one. Sheepstone recalled with displeasure Ray Panter licking his finger before turning the pages.
Godley’s underlinings had pierced the paper.
A space on the page and a slight change in the handwriting suggested to Sheepstone that Godley had resumed the next day or later, although under the same date.
The last entry was brief.
Sheepstone closed the book and sat with it on his lap for some time. Then laughter from the street prompted him to look at his watch. Almost nine o’clock. He felt a sudden spasm of anxiety, or fear. He could not remain alone with Godley’s ghost a moment longer. He put on his coat and hat and hurried to the pub, towards light and h
uman voices.
8
SHORTLY AFTER TWO in the morning, Martin left the coach house via the tack room. The sky had cleared. A wash of moonlight glazed the wet cobbles of the courtyard. He re-entered the house by the scullery door and followed the weak beam of the electric torch up the main stairs.
Annie had been deeply asleep when he’d eased himself out of bed almost an hour earlier but now, despite his caution, she stirred.
‘Martin?’
‘Ssh. It’s OK.’
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Thought I heard a noise. I went to look around but I must have imagined it.’
‘What time is it?’
‘No idea. Go back to sleep. I’m sorry I woke you.’
He sat on the edge of the bed and removed his shoes. Then he was immobilised by the things whirling in his head. He felt the mattress shift, then Annie’s warm hand running up his back.
‘Martin? What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. It’s all right.’
‘You sure? You’re not …’
‘No. I’m all right, honestly.’
‘Get back into bed then, you daft sod.’
He laughed and turned to her. Her face was ghostily silvered by the faint light from the uncurtained window.
She tugged at his shirt. ‘Come on.’ She exaggerated a shudder when his body was against hers. ‘Oof, you’re freezing.’
‘Sorry.’
She turned away from him and he shaped himself against her back. She took his hand and guided it to the soft heat between her legs. ‘You’re sure you’re all right?’