by Joyce Porter
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
Joyce Porter
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Joyce Porter
A Meddler and her Murder
Joyce Porter was born in Marple, Cheshire, and educated at King’s College, London. In 1949 she joined the Women’s Royal Air Force, and, on the strength of an intensive course in Russian, qualified for confidential work in intelligence. When she left the service in 1963 she had completed three detective novels.
Porter is best known for her series of novels featuring Detective Inspector Wilfred Dover. Dover One appeared in 1964, followed by nine more in a highly successful series. Porter also created the reluctant spy Eddie Brown, and the “Hon. Con”, the aristocratic gentlewoman-detective Constance Ethel Morrison Burke.
Chapter One
The Honourable Constance Ethel Morrison-Burke paused in her efforts to clean a dead fly off the pane with spit and peered out of the bedroom window. She had an uninterrupted view across the back garden, over the end of those unspeakable bungalows, past the corner of the Urquhart residence and straight into Sneddon Avenue.
It was the unwonted activity in Sneddon Avenue which had caught her eye. All those cars at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning? The Honourable Constance, popularly known as the Hon. Con, climbed down from her chair with a grunt and stumped over to the tallboy. A surprising number of people in this gracious residential area of Totterbridge kept a pair of binoculars ready to hand, though few could boast of anything as high-powered as the field-glasses which the Hon. Con was fishing out of her sock drawer. She huffed thoughtfully on the lenses and polished them up on the corner of her Balaclava helmet before returning to the window.
Holy, suffering cats! The top end of Sneddon Avenue was positively crawling with policemen! What the dickens could be going on? The Hon. Con steadied herself on her chair and counted. No less than five police cars of assorted shapes and colours, one with a flashing light going round and round on its roof. Golly! Even as the Hon. Con watched, another car drove up. A big, black limousine. The driver was in uniform but the two men getting out were dressed in smart, if sober, civilian suits. The Hon. Con’s lip’s pursed in a noiseless whistle. The CID were moving in!
What was going on?
The Hon. Con threw decency to the winds and opened the bedroom window but, crane as she might, she still couldn’t quite see where the two newly arrived detectives were actually going. The roof of the Urquhart garage was blocking her view. Had there been an accident? She couldn’t see an ambulance anywhere and, in any case, you wouldn’t get the plain clothes boys turning out just for an accident. Yet another car arrived on the scene, coming round the comer from Old Arbour Road. Only one man in this and a uniformed policeman hurrying across to open the door for him. Little black bag.
The doctor!
The Hon. Con could stand it no longer. She got down from her chair again and, tugging off the Balaclava as she went, crossed over to her dressing-table. The Hon. Con’s toilet was ever a touch on the perfunctory side and today it took even less time than usual. First of all, though, she had to fold the Balaclava up neatly and put it back in its box of mothballs. This might have seemed rather a lot of trouble to take over a couple of square feet of badly knitted khaki wool but, as the Hon. Con would have been quick to point out, here was no ordinary Balaclava. This Balaclava had gone right across North Africa with the Eighth Army. It had served with Montgomery and the Hon. Con, for one, would have been proud to wear it to Buckingham Palace, if needs be. Some people however, had no sense of history and some people had extracted a promise from the Hon. Con that this particular garment should not appear in public again. Some people, thought the Hon. Con, were too damned pernickety for words, and as she had remarked to Miss Jones at the time, it was a good thing that our brave lads in the desert hadn’t been so blooming fussy.
At the moment, though, the Hon. Con was not concerned with apologias for surplus army clothing. She was too busy tarting herself up to go out. A couple of quick passes with her silver-backed military hair brushes, a smut rubbed off the end of her nose with a dampened finger, the duffle coat dragged out of the wardrobe – and she was ready.
Miss Jones was half-way up the stairs. Thankfully she rested the heavy vacuum cleaner on one of the steps and looked up at the Hon. Con. ‘Have you finished already, dear?’ she asked in some surprise.
‘Eh?’ The Hon. Con was momentarily disconcerted, having hoped to get out of the house without being spotted.
‘The windows, dear,’ said Miss Jones with a mildness that might or might not have been deceptive. ‘Have you finished them?’
People were never quite sure what Miss Jones’s position was in the Hon. Con’s establishment. Ambiguous was the word they generally applied to it. Was her status that of friend or servant? The Hon. Con, reputed to be as rich as Croesus, certainly footed all the bills at Shangrilah, 14 Upper Waxwing Drive, while Miss Jones undoubtedly performed the lioness’s share of the domestic chores but the relationship between them was not quite that of master and man. On occasions Miss Jones could assert herself with a vehemence that had the Hon. Con buckling at the knees and the current confrontation was one which she would have been happier to avoid. With spring-cleaning in full swing, this business with the windows was just the sort of thing that got Miss Jones seeing red. For some reason best known to herself, the Hon. Con didn’t classify window cleaning as women’s work and Miss Jones, forced to be thankful for what assistance she could get, was likely to be doubly annoyed at this apparent shirking.
‘Er – not quite,’ admitted the Hon. Con warily. ‘Just popping out for a couple of shakes. Finish the windows when I get back.’
Even the least observant could have seen that Miss Jones didn’t care for the sound of this. ‘But you know I want to do the bedrooms this morning,’ she protested. ‘It’s no good me going to all that trouble if you’re going to come in afterwards and make your usual mess cleaning the windows. Can’t you go out after you’ve done them? And, in any case,’ – Miss Jones eyed the Hon. Con suspiciously – ‘where are you going?’
‘Oh, just – out,’ said the Hon. Con with an unhappy attempt at nonchalance.
Miss Jones said nothing and there was a moment’s silence while they both stood and listened to the rain sheeting down outside.
The Hon. Con sighed. Caught on the hop like this, her mind had gone a complete blank and she couldn’t for the life of her think of any excuse which Miss Jones would accept as even vaguely plausible. Oh well, she’d just have to tell the truth and shame the devil. ‘There’s the dickens of a lot of activity in Sneddon Avenue,’ she explained gruffly. ‘Just thought I’d toddle out for a sec and see what was going on.’
‘Activity?’ echoed Miss Jones incredulously, knowing the habitual sepulchral calm of Sneddon Avenue and not having h
ad the benefit of the Hon. Con’s field glasses. ‘What sort of activity?’
The Hon. Con examined the ceiling. ‘Oh, just – activity.’
‘Do you mean somebody’s removing or something?’
‘No,’ said the Hon. Con.
Miss Jones racked her brains. ‘Has somebody been knocked down?’
‘Don’t think so,’ said the Hon. Con and shuffled her feet.
Her obvious embarrassment gave Miss Jones the clue she’d been angling for. ‘Are the police there, Constance?’ she asked in a voice dark with foreboding.
‘Sort of,’ muttered the Hon. Con and braced herself for the dust-up.
The trouble was that the Hon. Con lacked occupation. Blessed as she was with considerable wealth and impeccable breeding, it was not to be expected that she should engage in any form of remunerative employment. Even in these egalitarian days, noblesse does after all oblige. Most women in her unfortunate situation would have found an outlet for their surplus energy in the distractions of caring for a husband and children but the Hon. Con was an unplucked rose, and likely to remain so. It would have helped if she had been unintelligent or lazy, but she was neither. It would have helped even more if she had been one of those good-natured, easygoing people who get on well with their fellows, but she wasn’t that either. She was bossy, self-opinionated, totally blind to the feelings of others but highly sensitive where her own were concerned, and inclined to tackle any and every of life’s little problems with the delicacy of a Centurion tank. As a result, her efforts to carve a niche for herself in the community had been crowned with one disaster after another. There is no need to go into sordid detail. Suffice it to say that Totterbridge – the town in which she lived – was full of social, cultural, sporting and charitable organizations into whose bosom the Hon. Con had at one time or another been welcomed only to be expelled, sooner rather than later, with even greater enthusiasm. These were the lucky ones. Other bodies had simply not survived the Hon. Con, as china shops do not survive rampaging bulls.
A few months previously things had come to such a pass that the Hon. Con had run clean out of wrecking material. Only St Saviour’s Men’s Bible Society and the Association of Indoor Chrysanthemum Growers remained intact and they were known to have their black balls polished in readiness. It was at this precise moment, in what might have been the Hon. Con’s darkest hour, that she accidentally discovered her true vocation: she was one of nature’s private detectives!
The Hon. Con was never one to do things by halves and in the twinkling of an eye she had solved her first murder case. This brilliant success was naturally not achieved without leaving a few scars. Mostly on poor Miss Jones. The Hon. Con had the constitution of a solid rubber ball but her chum was less resilient. The mere thought of the Hon. Con getting near a policeman was enough to bring on her migraine these days.
‘Now, Bones,’ warned the Hon. Con while she still had a chance to get a word in edgeways,’ there’s no need to go into your Cassandra act!’
‘But, Constance, you can’t have forgotten what happened last time!’
‘Oh, stuff! Just a bit of a misunderstanding, that’s all.’
‘You call being sentenced to fourteen days in prison a bit of a misunderstanding?’
‘Well, didn’t actually go, did I?’
‘Only because you appealed. And I hope you haven’t forgotten how much that cost you.’
The Hon. Con hadn’t. She scowled and changed the subject. ‘Now look, Bones, stop letting your imagination run riot! I’m just going to potter round into Sneddon Avenue and see what’s cooking, that’s all. There’s nothing for you to get in a muck sweat about. Suppose there’s been a burglary or something? Well, it might be our turn next and we’ll need all the information we can get so’s we can take precautions.’
Miss Jones, even more terrified of burglars than she was of policemen, hadn’t thought of this. She weakened. ‘Well,’ she said, moving the vacuum cleaner quickly to one side as the Hon. Con plunged joyfully down the stairs, ‘perhaps it mightn’t be a bad idea if … But, Constance, dear,’ she screamed before the slam of the front door cut off further communication, ‘ do try not to get involved in anything!’
The Hon. Con stood in the porch and pulled the hood of her duffle coat over her head. The rain had slackened off into a heavy drizzle. The Hon. Con watched it without animosity – rain water being good for the complexion and much cheaper than all that cosmetic muck – while she worked out her first problem. Which way should she go to get to Sneddon Avenue? She could go the top way along Old Arbour Road or the bottom way via Lyme Lane. Old Arbour Road was a bit longer but Lyme Lane meant going past that row of nasty new bungalows which had been built right across the bottom of her garden. The Hon. Con had fought those bungalows tooth and nail when they were mere scribbles on a drawing board, on the grounds that they would infringe her privacy, reduce the value of her property and lower the tone of the neighbourhood, but they had been built just the same. And had sold faster than hot cakes. The Hon. Con smoothly transferred her fury to the purchasers and, what with erecting ten foot high fences, stoking compost heaps and shying tin cans at trespassing cats, feelings were now beginning to run a bit high. Although tact was far from being the Hon. Con’s middle name, she decided that it might be better not to provoke further trouble by walking past the bungalows in broad daylight
Hey-ho for Old Arbour Road, then! The Hon. Con hitched up her slacks and, whistling cheerfully, squelched off through the puddles.
She soon discovered that there were even more police cars than she had been able to see from her bedroom window. Jolly dee! She quickened her step. So many police cars in fact that they had spilled out of the top of Sneddon Avenue and were parked along the far end of Old Arbour Road. It didn’t take the Hon. Con’s trained eye long to discover that the centre of all this attention was the biggish house, standing in its own grounds, on the corner.
The Hon. Con frowned. What were the people called who lived there? She didn’t actually know them to speak to but she did know of them, in the way one does. Hades? Haddon? Something like that. No – Hellon! That was it. The Hon. Con broke off detecting for a jiffy to congratulate herself on her photographic memory. By golly, you needed total recall all right if you were going to get anywhere in the world of private eyes! A Mr and Mrs Hellon and, if she wasn’t mixing them up with somebody else, a baby Hellon, too. She didn’t worry her head about the infant. That sort of routine detail could easily be established later.
A uniformed policeman was standing damply and impassively by the little gate which led to the Hellons’ back door. The Hon. Con walked slowly past on the other side of the road, casing the joint and rather conscious that the policeman was watching her from beneath the dripping brim of his helmet. She rounded the comer into Sneddon Avenue and duly noted the second policeman who had been stationed on guard on the front gate. Hm, interesting! Apart from these two stalwarts of the law, however, there wasn’t much else to be seen. The front door of the house was firmly shut and somebody had drawn all the curtains in the downstairs rooms. Most of the police cars were empty, except for a couple where the encased drivers were peering gloomily out through their streaming windscreens.
The Hon. Con was a mite disappointed but she crossed the road and joined the knot of onlookers who had, presumably, gathered there out of mere vulgar curiosity. The Hon. Con disapproved of such sensation seeking but she swallowed her professional pride. After all, they might know something.
She cleared her throat. ‘What’s going on?’
All five of them turned to look at her. Two housewives who’d paused on their way to the shops, a teenage boy leaning on a bicycle, a young woman with a pram and an elderly man accompanied by a fat asthmatic spaniel. For a moment nobody spoke. Then, as all eyes swung inexorably back to the house, the young woman with the pram vouchsafed an answer.
‘They do say as how they’ve all been massacred in their coal shed. With an axe!’
�
��Fancy!’ murmured one of the housewives to the other.
The face of the boy with the bicycle fell. ‘I thought they was raiding ’em for drugs!’ he said indignantly. ‘It’s what this crummy dump wants, you know – a bit more life in it. Something for us kids to do of an evening like. Oh well,’ – he shook his bicycle irritably – ‘ I’m not hanging round here in the cold for some lousy massacre.’ He flung one leg over the cross-bar. ‘And, if you asks me,’ he added defiantly before pedalling off, ‘ the bloke who done it – he deserves a bloody medal!’
‘Young lout!’ observed the elderly man. He edged himself and his dog nearer to the Hon. Con and, after a moment’s hesitation raised his hat. ‘Actually – er – madam, I understand that the police have uncovered one of these Communist spy rings. You know!’ He looked round carefully before concluding his evidence in an almost inaudible voice. ‘Chinese, of course. They’re the ones we’ve got to be on our guard against these days. You see that car?’ He inclined his head delicately towards the big black limousine. ‘Special Branch!’
‘Go on!’ breathed the Hon. Con, much impressed. Then she bethought herself. ‘But, if it’s a spy ring, what do they want a doctor for?’
‘Suicide,’ explained the elderly man with undiminished confidence. ‘Capsules full of cyanide stuck behind their back teeth. They stop at nothing, you know. Ah!’ He broke off as a battered little Fiat rattled up. ‘I see the Press has got on to it. Special Branch won’t like that!’
The Press, in the shape of a rather plump young man, struggled out of the Fiat and hurried over to the policeman on the front gate.
The group of onlookers strained every ear but they were unable to catch a word of the ensuing conversation. The plump young man got his notebook out and wrote something down while the policeman watched him solemnly. The plump young man apparently asked a further question but received only a stern shake of the head. When he persisted, the policeman’s attitude became less friendly and he began waving the reporter away.