by Ann Granger
‘He’d always had them. Well, they were his dad’s. Ages ago when it was a proper church and had a vicar, it had a bell-ringing team and Norman’s dad was the captain. He had the keys so that they could all get in there and practise. When it stopped being a proper church, there was no more bell-ringing, but no one asked Norman’s dad for the keys, so he kept them. When he died they were among his stuff and they’d been lying round in a drawer at the pub for years. One of the keys lets you into the tower. There’s a little room at the top. So when I wasn’t working at the Drovers’, he’d give me a call on my mobile, and I’d slip over to the church and wait for him there. As soon as he could get away from Evie, he’d come over and open up the tower and we’d go up there. At first it was really cool.’
‘It was downright disgusting!’ said Mrs Spencer.
‘When?’ asked Pearce. ‘When was the last time you and Stubbings rendezvoused in the tower?’
Cheryl was nonplussed by the term ‘rendezvous’ and enquired if that meant having it off?
‘In your case,’ said Pearce, ‘it probably does.’
‘Ooh, sarky!’ retorted Cheryl. ‘Is that why they made you inspector? Because you knew some long words?’
‘Stick to the point, Cheryl,’ advised Holding hastily.
‘The last time I met Norman in the church – rendezvoused — was before that old woman got stabbed. At least two weeks before that. We’d stopped using the tower. Evie had got so suspicious, he found it harder and harder to get away. He said we should vary our routine, that’s what people should do if they’re being watched, and he said we shouldn’t go there again. I didn’t mind because by then I’d gone off being in the tower. It was fun at first, you know, exciting. But after a bit I got fed up with hanging around in the churchyard with all those graves, and when I could get inside, it was worse. It’s not much fun being on your own in an empty church with all those stone carvings looking at you. I didn’t mind it when Norman was there with me. But on my own, it gave me the creeps. Norman said not to worry, he’d think of somewhere else.’
‘And did he?’
‘Yeah, Norman’s clever, he thought of the old shed at the back of the car park.’
‘Which,’ said Mrs Spencer, ‘was where I found them last night. I knew that girl was up to something. I heard her muttering on that mobile phone of hers. She’s always got it glued to her ear. I knew she was up to no good from the sound of her voice, whispering all excited. I followed her and I caught ’em at it. Norman, the little toad, he ran off. I made our Cheryl tell me everything. In the church, I ask you. Then I reckoned we ought to come and tell you, because you’ve been investigating in that church. Evie, she’s a spiteful cow, not but what she’s got good reason for it. But she might go telling you she’d seen Cheryl going in there. Just to get her own back, see?’
‘You did quite right, Mrs Spencer and you, Cheryl.’
Cheryl took a fresh stick of gum from her pocket and unwrapped it. Popping it in her mouth, she observed, ‘Norman’s not going to like this.’
Mrs Spencer assured them in bloodthirsty tones that you bet Norman Stubbings wasn’t going to like it, not one bit.
Pearce went back to Markby and gave him the news that the mystery of the tower’s visitors had been solved and it didn’t appear to have anything to do with Hester’s death.
‘By the time Hester was killed, Stubbings and the girl had given up meeting in the tower. They were using some old shed. That Mrs Spencer’s a real old battleaxe. If we find Norman Stubbings with a knife sticking out of his back, we’ll know who did it!’ Dave concluded.
He then drove out to Lower Stovey and proceeded to give the landlord a wretched half-hour.
It was always nice when one could tie up loose ends and Pearce went home happy. Tessa, also in a good mood, proved surprisingly obliging when asked if she’d like to make a few discreet enquiries of her sister regarding Becky Jones. In fact, she was alarmingly keen to do a bit of detective work, as she put it. Pearce was afraid she might get carried away and watched her depart for a visit to her family with some trepidation. He wished the superintendent appeared more interested in who had murdered Hester Millar and less in catching the rapist after twenty-two years. Pearce still doubted the offender had remained in Lower Stovey, if he’d ever lived there. He certainly didn’t believe the Potato Man had come out of retirement after so long simply to stab Hester Millar.
Tessa, while her husband was meditating on these things, was sitting in her sister’s bedroom. She had listened patiently to a long tale of Jasmine’s dramatic break-up with her latest boyfriend, and now that Jaz had got that off her chest, Tessa made her move.
Staring in the dressing-table mirror, she tugged at a strand of her long, pale yellow hair and announced, ‘I’m thinking of dyeing it red.’
‘What, your hair?’ asked Jaz, momentarily distracted from her broken heart. ‘What for?’
‘For a change. Why not? It might suit me.’
‘Dave wouldn’t like it,’ said Jaz sapiently.
‘Don’t see why he shouldn’t.’ Tessa clutched her hair and piled it on top of her head. ‘I want a new look.’
‘Most people want to be blonde,’ said Jaz enviously, studying her own mousy locks, reflected over her older sister’s shoulder.
‘But there are fewer red-heads,’ argued Tessa. ‘How many girls at your school have really red hair or ginger hair? I bet, not many.’
Jaz considered this and said, ‘Michele King has and she hates it. She’s got the freckles that go with it and she can’t sunbathe or anything. She goes bright red. When her family goes on holiday to Spain, she has to cover right up, long sleeves and everything. She wore a bikini one year and she said she ended up looking like a lobster.’
‘But I haven’t got that sort of skin, have I? Anyway,’ said Tessa, ‘not all red-heads have that problem. Isn’t there another kid in your class, Becky something or other, with reddish hair?’
Jaz frowned. ‘The only Becky is Becky Jones and she hasn’t got red hair. It’s light brownish, sort of a bit like mine.’
‘Oh, right, I’m thinking of someone else, then. Anyway, I think I’ll have my hair cut really short.’
‘You’re barmy,’ said Jaz.
Markby was on a trail of his own. Among the photographs on Old Billy Twelvetrees’ mantelshelf stood one of the late Mrs Twelvetrees and three children. He’d seen Dilys. Sandra he’d no idea where to find and wasn’t much bothered. He was interested to find, if possible, young Billy Twelvetrees, the eldest of the trio of glum infants in the picture. Dilys was of an age with Ruth, who was, he knew, fifty-seven. Young Billy must now be in his early sixties. Which meant that twenty-two years ago, he’d have been just on forty. But there was no record of an interview with him in the file on the Potato Man. Since every other man in the village had been quizzed, how had they missed Young Billy? If he hadn’t been in the village, where had he been?
Tracking down Young Billy wasn’t difficult, as things turned out. The surname was unusual and its owner hadn’t moved far. He lived in Bamford. The house was a narrow terraced one with a pocket-sized front garden which was obsessively neat. Everything in it was to scale, that is to say, small. The principle, Markby supposed, was that you thus could get in everything a bigger garden might have. Bonsai-sized shrubs surrounded a tiny square of grass in the middle of which was a stone basin not bigger than a large dinner plate, filled with pebbles over which dribbled an amount of water you’d be pleased to clean your teeth with. A row of miniature red tulips stood like toy guardsmen in a strip of earth which could hardly be called a bed. It looked more like a tyre-track. On one side of the front door was a Grecian pot the size of a milk saucepan in which was planted a miniature rose. On the other side of the front door crouched a small stone frog, painted green. Markby felt like Gulliver among the Lilliputians.
The door was opened, unsurprisingly, by a small neat woman without a hair out of place. William, she told him, was in the back garden
. Markby was invited to just walk through.
By now as curious to see the garden and the gardener, Markby walked down the narrow hall, through the pint-sized but amazingly tidy kitchen and out on to a patio. At least, he supposed that was what it was meant to be. The back garden wasn’t much bigger than the front one but obviously designed by the same hand. Thus the patio was four small paving stones long and three wide. On it stood two tiny uncomfortable-looking white plastic garden chairs. The rest of the back garden was laid out in immaculately-hoed square plots, each handkerchief-sized. In each a label announced what kind of vegetable would shortly be poking its head above ground, except for one which was laid out mathematically with onion sets. At the furthest point from the house, reached by Markby in half a dozen strides, a man was carefully arranging six bamboo canes in a wigwam shape.
‘For my beans,’ he informed Markby as the visitor came up. ‘When I get ’em planted. I got ‘em under glass at the moment, waiting for ’em to shoot.’
Markby supposed ‘under glass’ referred to a shoebox-sized cold frame. Even the enterprising Young Billy – or William, as his wife preferred – hadn’t yet found a way to squeeze a greenhouse in this garden. Give him time and he probably would. It was odd to be thinking of a man of sixty-one or two as ‘young’ but Markby could see why people found it necessary. Young Billy bore a remarkable resemblance to Old Billy, being short and square. He was still muscular whereas his father’s muscle mass had atrophied, and still had a countryman’s weather-beaten skin. It looked as though whatever jobs he’d held in life, they’d all been out of doors. A battered flat cap was wedged on his head, a fringe of white hair showing round it. He wore an aged but clean showerproof bomber jacket over a hand-knitted pullover. His hands, deftly securing the canes, were large and knotted.
‘Good idea,’ said Markby of the bean seedlings. He held up his ID. ‘Mind if we have a chat?’
Young Billy squinted at the ID and said, ‘I ain’t got my glasses. You’ll have to tell me what it says.’
‘It says I’m Superintendent Markby. I’m from the Regional Serious Crimes squad.’
‘Oh, ah?’ Young Billy was engrossed in winding string round the bamboo canes.
‘You come from Lower Stovey, I understand, Mr Twelvetrees.’
‘Oh, ah. When I was a boy. I ain’t lived there for more than forty years.’
‘We’re investigating certain matters in Lower Stovey.’
‘Woman got stabbed, I heard.’
‘Yes. Do you visit your family there?’
‘No. Never got no cause to.’ Young Billy shook his head.
‘You don’t visit your father and sister?’ Markby asked.
‘Them?’ Young Billy finished tying up the bamboo canes to his satisfaction and turned his attention fully to his visitor. ‘Last time I saw the old boy was Christmas. I don’t have no car, no more does he. But my neighbour was going out that way and give me a lift. Our dad hadn’t changed. He’s the same miserable old devil he always was. Don’t know how our Dilys sticks it. She pops round to see us sometimes when she’s shopping in Bamford. That woman she cleans for, Mrs Aston, she gives her a lift in. She don’t change, Dilys, either,’ reflected Billy. ‘She was always a great lump. Good worker, mind.’ This last was added in case Markby should think he sounded disloyal.
Markby didn’t think Young Billy was disloyal. He was realistic. You can choose your friends but not your relatives, as the saying went. But poor Dilys did seem singularly unappreciated by her family.
‘I was in Lower Stovey years ago,’ he said in a conversational way. ‘We were investigating some attacks on women in and around the woods.’
Young Billy squinted up at the sky and then at Markby. ‘That’ll be the old Potato feller.’
‘Yes, you remember, I see.’
‘My wife wrote me about it. It was in the papers, she said. Made Lower Stovey famous, that did!’ Young Billy chuckled hoarsely.
‘Wrote to you? Where were you living then?’
‘I were on the high seas.’
‘What?’ Markby was surprised into exclaiming.
‘I were working on the cargo boats at that time. I liked that, you know. I like being at sea. Lizzie wrote me all about it and I got the letter when we reached the Windward Islands. Bananas, we took on board there. Thousands of ’em.’
Young Billy paused and ruminated on that lost period of his life. ‘I liked it, but not my Lizzie. She didn’t like me being away so much. When I left Lower Stovey I took a room as lodger in Lizzie’s parents’ house. That’s how I met her. We got married at eighteen, just as my dad and mum had done. But we turned out happier than they did, thank goodness. We’ve had our Ruby Wedding. Not bad, is it?’
Markby agreed, wondering whether he and Meredith would ever celebrate any anniversary.
‘Anyhow,’ said William Twelvetrees, ‘because she didn’t like it, I gave it up and came ashore. I got a job down the quarry. I still got a job down there, watchman, though I don’t work full time now. But I don’t mind that. It gives me time for this.’
During his time afloat Young Billy had probably learned to stow things neatly in small spaces and it might explain his ingenious use of his garden. It also deleted him from the Potato Man enquiry.
‘Right,’ said Markby heavily. ‘Thank you. I’ll leave you to your gardening.’
Two steps forward, one step back. But somewhere he was on the right lines, he was sure of it. He just couldn’t see where. It would be difficult, but he had to speak to Linda Jones.
The train rocked slowly out of London. Meredith found herself trapped, cramped in a corner seat, next to a sweaty young man reading a paperback novel. The jacket illustration depicted people living in some mythical past when clothing consisted either of rags or elaborate armour and no one had invented anything in the line of smart casual. As the young man read he chewed gum and breathed through his mouth at the same time, no mean achievement. Meredith had tried to ignore him and concentrate on the Evening Standard crossword but that had been difficult because she couldn’t move her arms. Nor could she move her feet which were imprisoned against the side of the train by the formidable boots worn by a long-legged tough-looking girl sitting opposite. The girl was reading too, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. The fourth occupant of their quartet of seats was a middle-aged man in a business suit who’d fallen asleep the moment the train started.
Well, at least it was Friday once again. The weekend had come around almost before the previous one had gone out of mind. At least it meant two train-journeyless days. What, she wondered idly, did these people do at the weekend? What about the Amazon with the romantic heart? And what about Chewing-Gum-Man here? He wore a wedding ring so it was a fair guess part of his weekend would be taken up with the family weekly shop. As for the business type over there, his head now lolling in a familiar way on the oblivious shoulder of the tough girl, no prizes for guessing he planned a round of golf. And me? she thought. Do any of them wonder about me and what I’ll be getting up to during these precious two days of freedom? Some freedom. I shall spend it viewing undesirable properties with Alan, both of us getting tetchier by the minute. She sighed. That was when her mobile phone began a frenzied rendition of the opening notes of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
Meredith scrabbled in her briefcase and retrieved it. Mobile phones had been going off all over the carriage since they’d started but hers caused a minor stir among her immediate companions. The tough girl became aware of the businessman’s shoulder and pushed his head away. He woke up, harrumphed, and stood up to take down his coat from the overhead rack. The gum-chewer put away his paperback and made similar moves indicating he was getting off at the next stop.
‘Hello?’ Meredith asked the mobile.
The caller was Ruth Aston, which surprised her mildly, before she remembered she’d given Ruth the number of her mobile at the close of the visit she and Alan had paid to The Old Forge. ‘Give me a call if you want to chat,’ she’d invited and Ru
th had taken her up on it.
‘I was wondering, Meredith. I dare say you and Alan have plans for the weekend, but if you had time, would you like to come to tea tomorrow? The thing is, Hester made a lot of cakes which are sitting in the freezer. I can’t eat them alone. I can’t throw them out. I’ve given a couple away but it made me feel guilty. So, I thought, if you and Alan have a hour to spare around half-past three or four, say?’
Ruth’s voice tailed away on a hopeful note. It couldn’t hide the underlying despair. She’s been crying to herself over Hester, guessed Meredith. She wants the company.
‘Of course, we’ll come,’ she said. ‘Or I will, anyway. I’ll have to check with Alan.’
Ruth was embarrassingly grateful.
‘I couldn’t refuse. I did tell her to ring me,’ Meredith said, twisting her head in the crook of his arm to look up at him. His head was propped on the sofa back and his eyes closed.
‘It’s all right,’ he mumbled. ‘I’ve got to go out to Lower Stovey sometime, anyway. I want to check on something at Greenjack Farm. Why don’t I drop you at Ruth’s at three-thirty? I’ll go on down to the farm and come back to Ruth’s when I’ve finished there. I shouldn’t be long.’
Meredith said hesitantly, ‘Ruth may expect you to report some progress. How’s Dave Pearce getting on?’
Alan opened his eyes at that. ‘Slowly. But James Holland at least will be a happy man.’
‘You’ve found the missing tower key?’ Hastily she added, ‘Am I not supposed to know about it? James told me.’
‘I didn’t tell him not to. Quite the opposite, I asked him to check everywhere he could to find the key. Half Bamford must know about it. In the end, we turned up a complete set of keys about which the church authorities had known nothing.’
‘Who had them?’
‘Would you believe it? Norman Stubbings, landlord of the Fitzroy Arms. Seems he’s the local Don Juan and was in the habit of taking his latest conquest to the tower to have his wicked way.’