A Restless Evil

by Ann Granger

  He found himself mildly embarrassed. ‘We’ve been house-hunting. I had no idea it would turn out so stressful. We can’t seem to find the right property and then, unfortunately, Meredith stumbled across a body. It’s triggered a murder investigation.’

  ‘That’s a bit of rotten luck.’ Ursula put down her glass. ‘She must be upset.’

  He reflected. ‘I think, in a way, she’s more annoyed. But yes, of course she is upset, too. The victim was an apparently blameless lady of a certain age, a retired teacher.’

  Ursula sat back in her chair and surveyed him. ‘This isn’t the murder case reported on the local news? The one which happened at Lower Stovey, where the bones came from?’

  ‘That’s the one. The victim’s name is Hester Millar. There’s no obvious motive, and there’s no connection as yet with the bones, in case you’re wondering. Not one we’ve found, anyway. Hester was unmarried and lived with an old friend, Ruth Aston. We had hoped Mrs Aston would know of the next-of-kin. But it seems Hester wasn’t in touch with any relatives, if she had any. Her parents died years ago. There were never any tell-tale Christmas cards, that sort of thing. She was one of those people who don’t have any family and seems to have had precious few friends and acquaintances apart from Ruth. There are any number of middle-aged women like that around the country. What a typical example like Hester could possibly have done which would make someone else want to kill her, is beyond me. I really think we’re going to be up against it on this one.’

  Ursula said slowly, ‘I think she may have had at least one relative.’

  Surprised, he stared at her.

  She flushed. ‘Someone I work with mentioned the murder this morning. He’d heard it on the news. He said he thought that Hester Millar might have been related to Dr Amyas Fichett, the distinguished historian, you know.’

  ‘To my shame, I don’t know. But what gave your colleague this idea?’

  ‘Oh, well, he – Peter, my colleague – has a wife who visits Dr Fichett. He, Dr Fichett, is ancient and has been retired for yonks. He rattles round on his own in an old house not far from here. He’s got a woman who comes and cleans and does his shopping. Otherwise he’s only got Peter’s wife, Jane, who calls in once a week, just to make sure he’s all right. They were neighbours once and she always got on well with the old boy. The reason Peter connected him with Hester is that from time to time, Dr Fichett gets out old photograph albums and reminisces with Jane about the people in the snaps. Jane is sure he called one of the little girls pictured his niece, Hester Millar, his sister’s daughter, and said he believed she lived near Bamford though he wasn’t in contact. Jane offered to get in touch for him, apparently. This was about a year ago. But he said there wasn’t any point in it. He can be obstinate so she let it go, though she thought it a pity as he hasn’t anyone else.’

  ‘Right,’ said Markby, trying to keep the excitement from his voice. ‘Could you ask Jane where he lives? He does look as though he might be next of kin.’

  Ursula pursed her mouth then dived into her bag, pulling out a mobile phone. ‘The old chap must be ninety. Even if he wasn’t in touch with Hester, it’ll be a shock to hear of her death. I doubt he’s heard already. The modern world and all its works, according to Jane, stop at his front door. It would be best if I call Jane and arrange for you to meet up with her first. She can take you along and introduce you to Dr Fichett. It’s likely he’d refuse to see you, otherwise, and it really would be best if Jane were on hand when you break the news to him.’

  As she waited to be connected, the mobile pressed to her ear, she leaned across the table and whispered, ‘I always hate it when people use mobile phones in pubs, don’t you?’

  Markby chuckled. The scampi arrived as she was speaking to Jane. Ursula put the phone away and picked up her fork. ‘All fixed. I’ll take you to Jane right after lunch.’

  ‘I’m really grateful, Ursula. We probably wouldn’t have got on to the old fellow, otherwise. Good job I came to see you!’

  ‘Anything I can do.’ She looked up from her meal, transfixing him with those startling blue eyes. ‘I owe you and Meredith a lot.’

  ‘No, you don’t. Would it be tactless of me to ask if you’ve someone special in your life now?’

  She shrugged. ‘I’m not good at relationships. I think my judgement is probably at fault. Look at that disastrous one I got into with Dan. Since then, I’ve met nice enough blokes, but I don’t know … Perhaps my line of work doesn’t help. It would be nice,’ Ursula said, ‘to meet a man who doesn’t spend his day with mementoes of the dead, whether it’s bones or fossils or preserved bits of things. I spend a lot of time,’ she finished calmly, ‘in the company of bones.’

  ‘Don’t take up with a copper, then,’ he advised.

  ‘Now, before I take you to see him,’ Jane Hatton said, ‘I ought to tell you that he can be a very naughty old man.’

  ‘Good grief. In what way?’ Markby asked.

  Mrs Hatton was a plump young woman with a great deal of frizzy blonde hair. When Markby had arrived at the house, he’d found her surrounded by a lively brood of infants, but these had been shooed away in the care of an au pair and he had been installed in a very old and rickety armchair in order, he had discovered, that Jane might interrogate him.

  ‘I need to know what sort of person you are,’ she’d told him frankly. ‘Before I take you to Amyas.’ After a lengthy question and answer session, she said, ‘When Ursula said you were a policeman I was rather fearing the worst. But you’re very nice and sensible and he’ll like you. I’ll take you.’

  ‘I’m much obliged and much relieved,’ he’d replied and she had burst into hearty laughter.

  It had faded almost at once as she’d added, ‘I’ll give him a ring and let him know we’re on our way. I’d be going anyway because someone’s got to tell him about his niece and I suppose it’s got to be me. I doubt he’s heard about it yet.’

  Now she clasped her hands and adopted a deeply earnest expression. ‘In answer to your question, I don’t mean he chases me round the parlour. I mean he can act up. Sometimes he pretends he’s deaf. He’s not. Or he pretends he can’t remember. He can. He is really the most frightful old gossip. The only thing is, having been shut up in that house on his own, more or less, for years, all his gossip is out of date. He knows all the scandal in the University of forty years ago. He can tell you all any number of stories about Famous Persons who were here as undergraduates. He rarely watches his television, though he knows who people in the news are, I mean like the Prime Minister or an Olympic Gold Medallist, but I’m afraid he finds the modern world tedious. He gave up taking a newspaper because there was never anything in it he wanted to read about. All the people he was ever interested in are dead, or nearly dead, poor old boy.’

  ‘He sounds,’ said Markby, ‘very like my late Uncle Henry.’

  The other thing about which Jane warned him on their way to see Dr Fichett, was that his house was ‘a real museum’. It was certainly that. Whereas most of the huge rambling nineteenth century properties in the area had been turned into something else, language schools, B & B’s or places like where Ursula worked, Amyas Fichett was still living in his almost comically over-large accommodation. Jane had a doorkey and let them in, calling out as she did to warn the old man of their arrival. In response came a squawk from near at hand.

  ‘He’s in his study,’ whispered Jane and led the way down a gloomy corridor and into a dark, book-lined, high-ceilinged room which smelled fusty and was filled with a jumble of furniture. The curtains were half-drawn, which made matters worse. There was illumination of sorts, a green-shaded desk lamp. But when Markby looked towards it, he found that the contrast with the surrounding darkness made anything beyond the reach of the lamp impossible to see at all. So when, from the shadows behind it, a voice piped up, he was startled.

  ‘To what do I owe the honour?’

  ‘This is the gentleman I phoned you about, Amyas. You know you haven’t
forgotten.’

  Jane Hatton had gone to the window as she spoke and yanked the curtains apart allowing daylight to seep into the room. Markby found himself looking at a tiny figure, a little bird of a man, with a bald pink dome surrounded by a fringe of white hairs and a look which really was very like that of a naughty child. Dr Fichett rose from behind the desk and came round to Markby’s side of it. He moved with a curious bobbing gait.

  ‘Sit down, sit down!’ he trilled at them, indicating a pair of massive Victorian armchairs. When they were seated he took a seat in a worn velvet chair of the Queen Anne model, and beamed at them. ‘Company,’ he said. ‘How very delightful. We shall have tea.’

  ‘I’ll make it,’ said Jane, rising from her chair.’

  ‘Biscuits in the tin!’ he called after her as she went out, giving Markby a conspiratorial look as she did.

  Alone with him, Markby relaxed in his vast chair, crossed his legs and observed, ‘It’s very good of you to see me, sir.’

  ‘Jane tells me you are a police officer.’ Dr Fichett squinted at him. ‘You must therefore keep fit.’

  ‘Er – yes. It’s a requirement,’ Markby said.

  ‘I myself keep very fit. I jog round my garden, twenty times round, every morning.’

  ‘That’s very good indeed.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it? I eat healthily. No meat. I haven’t eaten meat for years. Fish, yes. Eggs, yes. Do you eat meat?’

  Markby admitted that he did.

  Dr Fichett shook his head in sorrow. ‘You are making a great mistake. My dear boy, do consider giving it up. What is it you wish to see me about?’

  The move from one subject of conversation to another was so sudden it disconcerted his visitor who realised that this was exactly the object of the exercise. Dr Fichett, as Jane had warned, was beginning to ‘act up’.

  ‘I’m afraid I have some not very good news for you, sir. But perhaps we should wait until Mrs Hatton comes back.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Dr Fichett. ‘You’re the bringer of ill-tidings, are you? It was customary once, in some cultures, to kill the man who brought bad news.’ His sharp little eyes glittered at Markby in malicious glee.

  Markby, who’d been worried about bringing bad news to a nonagenarian, decided that the old man would take it fairly well when it was broken to him. He was a tough old bird. Nevertheless, he waited for Jane to come back, which she did almost at once, carrying a tray with the tea things which were made up of assorted mugs and a brown-glazed teapot with a chipped spout.

  ‘Now then, my young fellow,’ said Dr Fichett when they each had a mug of tea and a chocolate Viennese Whirl. ‘Out with your bad news! Are the barbarians at the gates, eh? Has Rome fallen? Has the council complained again about the oak tree in the garden? It is perfectly safe. I won’t have it trimmed.’

  ‘Amyas,’ said Jane. ‘This is serious. You may not have heard this, but someone, a woman, has been found dead in a church at Lower Stovey.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ he asked, biting off a piece of Viennese Whirl and showering crumbs down his waistcoat which seemed to have already had a collision with egg earlier that day.

  ‘Near Bamford. You remember telling me you thought you had a niece who lived near Bamford? Hester Millar?’

  He gave them a mistrustful look and mumbled, ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Amyas, you do. Please,’ Jane begged him. ‘Don’t tease. Not at a time like this. Oh, this is dreadful.’

  Intelligence gleamed in the elderly eyes fixed on her face. ‘Are you trying to tell me that this unfortunate woman was Hester?’

  As he spoke, Dr Fichett froze, half a biscuit in one hand and a pottery mug emblazoned with the coat of arms of Ramsgate in the other. ‘Little Hester? Are you telling me she’s dead?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, Amyas. I’m awfully sorry.’

  Dr Fichett meditated briefly on the news and appeared to slot it into some revelant pigeonhole in his memory as he chewed thoughtfully on the rest of his biscuit. ‘Dear me. Strange news indeed. How old was she?’

  ‘Fifty-seven,’ Markby told him.

  ‘I dare say she ate meat,’ said Dr Fichett.

  ‘She didn’t die naturally, sir. She – er – she was stabbed,’ Markby found himself forced to say.

  ‘In a church?’ Dr Fichett sounded a little like Lady Bracknell. ‘How extraordinary, like the unfortunate Becket. Who stabbed her?’

  He darted a sudden keen look at Markby who thought that sitting in a tutorial with Dr Fichett in his active days must have been a disconcerting business. He fully realised the old fellow was using tricks on them he’d once practised successfully on hapless undergraduates. On the other hand, these same tricks helped this aged person cope with distressing news.

  ‘We don’t know yet, sir. It seems you are her only relative and next-of-kin.’

  ‘I don’t know that I care to be that!’ Dr Fichett said immediately and shook his bald head. ‘No, no, that won’t do at all. You’ll take care of it for me, won’t you, Jane?’ He gave her a coaxing sideways glance.

  ‘Your solicitor would be better, Amyas. I’ll call by and tell him about it.’

  ‘Just so long as I’m not required to go anywhere. I won’t go to any inquest.’ His voice, already high-pitched, rose to shrillness.

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ Markby reassured him as Dr Fichett had begun to show signs of genuine distress, not at the news, but at the idea of leaving his own property. Markby wondered when he had last done that. ‘What I was hoping was that you could tell me something about your niece.’

  ‘Not a thing, dear fellow.’ The old man relaxed at the assurance he wouldn’t be required to venture out into a modern world he despised and did his best to ignore. ‘I last saw her when she was, oh, about thirty, if that. She was always a very plain girl. Jane, do bring me the album, won’t you, my dear?’

  Jane, who seemed well-acquainted with all the arrangements in the house, obediently fetched a large leather-bound album from a shelf. Fichett turned the pages slowly until at last he found what he wanted.

  ‘Here you are.’ He tapped the photograph with a wrinkled finger. ‘It will have been taken the first year Hester was up at Oxford. The other girl is a young friend who was holidaying at my sister’s house.’

  The album was passed to Markby. It was so heavy he almost dropped it. The photograph had been taken in high summer. It showed two young women in light dresses. One was unmistakably a very young Hester. She had been plain though not without a healthy kind of attractiveness. Both girls had that innocent glow which marks those who’ve just left school and ventured into a new world, in their case the exciting one of the university. They were leaning against a drystone wall but he couldn’t place the location.

  ‘It will have been taken,’ said Dr Fichett, as if he could follow Markby’s mind, ‘in the Yorkshire Dales. That is where my sister lived. Don’t ask me why.’

  But Markby had glanced at the girl with Hester. He peered more closely at the photo. The other girl was pretty, very pretty, but fragile-looking. That prettiness had faded with the years but enough of it remained to make him sure he’d seen it recently. He held the album open under Dr Fichett’s nose.

  ‘Can you identity the other girl?’

  The old man glanced at the photo and looked up at Markby. His eyes were sparkling again with that malicious glee.

  ‘Oh my, yes. That’s little Ruth Pattinson, the vicar’s daughter! You know the rhyme, Superintendent? There was a little girl and she had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad — she got into trouble!’

  And Dr Fichett laughed so much he choked and had to have first aid rendered by both his visitors.

  ‘A baby?’ Pearce looked surprised then shrugged. ‘It happens all the time, I suppose.’

  ‘We’re talking about 1966, Dave, and the girl came from an ultra-respectable clerical family. The father of the child had declined to marry her. It w
as the year before the Abortion Act came into being and even if it had been in force, I doubt Ruth Pattinson with her religious upbringing would have sought a termination under it. An illegal abortion would have been dangerous and she probably wouldn’t have known where to go to get one. Just as well. She couldn’t turn to her own parents. They would’ve been deeply shocked and disappointed in her, especially her father who’d have considered that a vicar and his family should set a good example to the rest of the parish. So, at all costs, she wanted to keep the knowledge from them. One wonders what she’d have done if Hester and her mother hadn’t offered her a home in that difficult time for her. Would she have been driven to face her own parents, after all? Or would she have been unable to do that and taken some desperate action?’

  Markby shook his head. ‘I was warned that Dr Fichett was a real old gossip. He’s just that. The point is, all his gossip is old. He might have forgotten about his niece’s young friend, along with a lot of other ancient history, if anything else had happened to interest him in the last thirty years. But he lives in the past and it’s more real to him than the present.’

  ‘Who was the father?’ asked the practical Pearce.

  ‘Ah, that we don’t know. All we know is what Dr Fichett can tell us. Ruth Pattinson became pregnant during her last year at university. Somehow she managed to conceal it until the end of the university year, sitting her final examinations meanwhile. However, faced with going home she panicked and confided in her best friend, Hester Millar. Hester had the solution. She took Ruth to Yorkshire with her where Hester’s mother, who was of an understanding nature, agreed that the girl could stay with them until the baby was born. I don’t know what they told the Reverend Pattinson and his wife to explain Ruth’s continuing absence. I dare say the two girls cooked up some story. That Hester’s mother was ill, for example, and the two of them were looking after her. The child was born in Yorkshire and Dr Fichett believes was adopted immediately. Ruth went home and nobody was the wiser. The old chap knows about it because his sister did have a few doubts about the deception and asked his advice. Amyas Fichett was wise in the ways of undergraduates and the scrapes they got themselves into. He also had some slight acquaintance with the Reverend Pattinson who, apparently, was apt to fire off long letters about his researches into myths to any unfortunate historian whose address he could get hold of. Amyas considered him a crank. He told his sister that informing the Pattinsons of their daughter’s predicament would, to use his words, “only make matters worse.” Better Ruth had her child secretly and the Pattinsons were left in blissful ignorance. Mrs Millar, satisfied once her brother had supported her decision, was happy enough to go ahead and let Ruth stay with her. Amyas, incidentally, put forward another reason to me for his attitude. “A very bright girl who’d just achieved a good degree,” he said. “No need to let her mess up her life at that stage”.’