Souvenirs of Murder

by Margaret Duffy

  His sergeant brushed past us with a brief smile – or at least, bared teeth – and the door of the room was practically slammed in our faces.

  ‘Yes, the English were particularly nasty to William Wallace,’ Patrick said to the grubby paintwork. He turned to me. ‘So it’ll have to be the canteen and sticky buns.’

  ‘We’ve just bought sandwiches,’ I reminded him.

  ‘They won’t chuck us out for eating those in there as well, will they?’

  The information contained in the file was a neat and thorough record of all evidence gathered during house-to-house enquiries, interviews with witnesses – that is, Mrs Crosby and me – the murder victim’s wife, neighbours and a couple who were described as ‘friends’. There were scenes-of-crime findings – predictably the fingerprints of what was probably half of north Somerset had been found in the church, the results of DNA tests – again representative of possibly hundreds of people with no pattern. No useful evidence of any kind was on the vacuum cleaner nozzle other than that pertaining to the victim, blood and saliva, which suggested that the killer had worn gloves.

  Patrick exhaled noisily. ‘All of this adds up to sweet FA,’ he muttered.

  ‘James did tell you he’d run into the wall with it,’ I said.

  ‘Which means that we’ll have to start from the beginning again. What d’you reckon was going on just now?’

  ‘Between James and Lynn? Heaven only knows. Nothing probably. Just tempers getting frayed under the pressure of work.’

  ‘We’d better go and solve this one for him then – starting with the wife.’

  ‘May I make a suggestion?’

  ‘As always I treasure every contribution of yours,’ the man in my life said, looking up from stowing papers back in the file to flutter his eyelashes at me.

  ‘Fool. Someone nicknamed Morticia probably deserves it. I suggest you let her stew for a while.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose we ought to regard her as a suspect.’

  ‘Or perhaps I’m merely being horrible.’

  ‘Um.’

  Miss Ann Trelawney was a surprise. Expecting for some reason to find a somewhat frail lady of a certain age with the saintly aura of one who communes with nature and has a cellarful of seething home-made ginger beer, wine and yoghurt we came upon a lanky person under the bonnet of an elderly Land Rover.

  ‘You know what?’ she said, having obviously heard our vehicle’s arrival and turning to look at us with a splodge of oil on her chin. ‘This thing is an utter, utter bastard.’

  ‘But when they do go, they’re with you to the death,’ Patrick observed.

  She fixed him with a dark-eyed stare. ‘I agree. But what the hell is one supposed to do the rest of the time?’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘It won’t start. It’s almost impossible to find people to fix things like this these days. They say there’s no money in it.’

  Patrick peered into the engine compartment. ‘There’s a guy called Pete in the village who lives and breathes Land Rovers. He’d look at it for you. Meanwhile though –’ here he performed a little tweaking – ‘one of the leads on your battery was loose. Now try.’

  The engine roared into life.

  ‘Thanks, but it’s terribly corny,’ said Miss Trelawney when she had stepped down from the driver’s seat and we had introduced ourselves. ‘Like a detective story on the box. The sleuth comes along and fixes the heroine’s car and they murmur sweet nothings over the cylinder head gasket. I take it you want to talk about Melvyn – only one had to call him Squadron Leader, of course.’

  She was around forty-five, with hair as dark as her eyes, and had a round face with a snub nose. I deduced the clothes she wore were the ones she was hoping to go out in when we had left and not those she had put on to try to fix her car. Whatever their purpose they were pricey; immaculate white slacks and a deep orange sweater, brown leather moccasins, a bag to match on the passenger seat.

  So why run an old car like this?

  Because she loved it, that’s why.

  ‘The man wasn’t friendly, you understand,’ Miss Trelawney said, unprompted by a question. ‘I don’t think anyone really got to know him.’

  Patrick said, ‘Even though he and his wife joined so many clubs and groups?’

  ‘I reckon they joined so he could run them. It was a substitute for the RAF. Never happy unless he was bossing people about – getting them to fly in formation. He came over here one day and told me he wanted my trees felled. Just like that, no discussion, no nothing. I told him they couldn’t possibly be causing him any loss of light as they were roughly to the north of his place. He wouldn’t listen. Cut them down, or else.’

  ‘Did he actually threaten you?’

  ‘With solicitors. Oh, and he was going to write to the council about them. You know, this business of over-tall boundary hedges being deemed a nuisance. I sent him on his way, I can tell you! Boundary hedge! As though my beautiful trees were wretched Leylandii.’

  ‘May we have a look?’ I asked, ever ready to be nosy.

  She smiled delightedly. ‘Of course.’

  The house was the middle one of a group of three that formed a tiny hamlet just off the road from the village to the junction with the main Bath to Shepton Mallet road. Patrick had told me on the way there that they had been built on the site of a market garden some time in the late eighties. The business of planning permission for the development had always been a matter of controversy, the general feeling in Hinton Littlemoor being that certain favours had been involved but it was best not to ask. The properties themselves were ordinary but pleasing, three or four bedrooms, I guessed, and all seemed to have large gardens.

  ‘So that’s the Blanches’ house?’ Patrick enquired, indicating the roof of the house next door that could be glimpsed to the left above a neat beech hedge.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Miss Trelawney. ‘The Taylors live on the other side. You can’t see their place from here as the house is slightly skewed and behind that evergreen oak.’

  She led the way down the garden, which, even in winter, was like an illustration from an upmarket homes magazine. At the end, through a little wicket gate, was her ‘collection’ as she called it. She rattled off a lot of Latin names for the trees within the copse we found ourselves in but they were lost on me: I just stood there entranced: despite most of the branches being bare, it was indescribably charming. There was nothing pretty-pretty here, just somewhere where you could sit all day and dream the stuff of lost legends. If it were mine I would defend it to my last breath.

  ‘Miss Trelawney, I understand you’re on the church cleaning rota,’ Patrick said, bringing me down to earth with a thump.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ said the lady, looking him right in the eye. ‘But I didn’t kill the horrible man. I can’t kill anything. Not even bluebottles, and they’re about the filthiest things that have ever flown that aren’t planes.’

  ‘So where were you on that particular Saturday, the first of last month?’

  ‘Here. I don’t go out much. I was knocked down by a car in London, and nearly died, before coming to live here and it put me off venturing very far. It’s one of the reasons I have the old Land Rover, I feel safe in it.’

  ‘Were you alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And on the Friday evening?’

  ‘I went to a recital in the village hall. Everyone saw me.’

  ‘Were the Blanches there?’

  ‘No – at least, I didn’t see them. But they might have come and then gone away again without me noticing. It wasn’t a very good recital – they hadn’t practised enough.’

  ‘I take it you weren’t on the cleaning rota that week.’

  ‘No, but someone asked me if I’d swap. Pauline and I did it on the Thursday so we can’t help you really.’

  ‘Pauline Harrison?’ I queried.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Wasn’t she down to do the flowers?’

&n
bsp; ‘Yes, but most people do them on Friday or Saturday so they’re at their best for the Sunday services. You pick up your flowers when you’re in Tesco’s or wherever doing the weekly shop. But as you probably know, Pauline had to drop everything and drive up to Cambridge when her father was taken seriously ill.’

  ‘Have you any idea why Melvyn Blanche should have gone to the church and into the vestry that Saturday morning?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘No, he was on the PCC but with no actual portfolio, as it were. I imagine he would have resigned soon – there’s no controlling that. The rector’s too strong a personality.’

  Oddly, she appeared to have made no connection between him and the man to whom she was speaking.

  ‘I understand Blanche somehow jockeyed himself into the job of stage-managing the summer play. Are you involved with that?’

  ‘We call ourselves the Hinton Littlemoor Players. I write the plays. I should imagine his behaviour over that caused more bad feeling than all the rest of the things he did put together.’

  ‘Who’s normally stage manager?’

  ‘Stewart Macdonald. He was in Scotland when it happened. To be fair though – and I have to say I don’t want to be – he had seemed a bit reluctant to do it again this year.’

  I said, ‘I would have thought one needed a bit of experience in that line.’

  ‘Blanche didn’t have any. He actually said that it was something any bloody fool could do.’

  ‘Is Macdonald back from Scotland now?’

  ‘God, yes, he was only away for a week.’

  ‘Where does he live?’

  ‘In the old smithy, with his partner, Cindy Crane. He’s actually a woodcarver by trade.’

  ‘Have you any theories about this, Miss Trelawney?’ Patrick enquired after a short silence.

  ‘I’m sure the answers will be found in Blanche’s past. And your murderer’s a man. No woman would think of using a vacuum cleaner nozzle as a funnel in order to try to kill someone.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Patrick asked me when we were heading back towards the car. ‘Would you?’

  I pondered. ‘I’m not sure. Did the cleaning fluid come out of a bottle stored in the vestry?’

  ‘That’s a good point.’ He hurried ahead, opened the vehicle and found the file. ‘Yes,’ he reported, reading. ‘Jeyes. Which was removed and now presumably Exhibit B.’

  ‘A spur of the moment thing, then. Having hit Blanche on the head with the hammer, whoever it was realized he wasn’t dead, and decided to be nastily creative in finishing him off. I think we’re looking for a man and a woman.’

  Patrick wilted against the car. ‘As James said, this is turning out to be a can of worms. We have the list that Mum gave us of people who had had words with him, plus another of the folk on the cleaning list who know where the vestry key is hidden and had some of the tools to hand, just about everyone in the local clubs and groups, the whole village come to think of it. No, we’ll have to go and talk to the widow. Miss Trelawney may be right and it’s someone from his past who caught up with him.’

  A female minder opened the front door and, without introducing herself, haughtily informed us that Barbara Blanche had been interviewed already, twice, and in the circumstances could not be further disturbed.

  Patrick assumed his MI5 persona. ‘Mrs Blanche is perfectly within her rights to refuse to see us. I should just like to hear it from her personally.’ He refrained from adding, ‘And not from some bossy cow on the doorstep,’ but, really, his expression has a way of saying everything.

  She went away leaving the door open, defeated but resentful, and we waited. Patrick’s mobile rang and he walked away for a short distance to answer it, returning very quickly.

  ‘He was killed in the vestry,’ he whispered. ‘Tiny spots of his blood on a wide area of the carpet. The pathologist reckons he died some time between ten and eleven.’

  ‘After the sexton had unlocked the church door then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  We carried on waiting. We could hear them whispering. Then, finally, when I knew Patrick was on the verge of barging in anyway, the woman put her head around the doorway in the entrance hall through which she had disappeared.

  ‘You may come in.’

  ‘This is an intrusion,’ said the woman who must be the murder victim’s widow. ‘I resent it.’

  ‘May we sit down?’ Patrick asked.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Yes, I suppose you’d better,’ she said grudgingly. ‘This is my sister, Felicity, in case you were going to ask. She’s staying right here.’

  ‘And this is my assistant, Miss Langley, who will take notes,’ Patrick batted back at her, glancing up from extracting the case file from his briefcase. ‘I have been seconded to Bath CID to help Detective Chief Inspector James Carrick who is seriously overloaded with work. You must have met him. Your sister didn’t listen too closely when I showed her my ID so I’ll tell you that I actually work for the Serious Organized Crime Agency and I am normally based in London. Your husband’s murder is a serious crime and I expect your full cooperation. Do I have it?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Barbara Blanche said. ‘But if I’m going to be asked exactly the same questions all over again . . .’ She shrugged.

  She was not to be reassured on that subject but I was a little disappointed that Patrick had not given her our condolences before launching into the questioning. Even under pressure he usually retains common politeness and I could only think that he was far more stressed about the prospect of the following day than I had imagined.

  He said, ‘You’ve already intimated that you had no idea why your husband had gone to the church that morning – and it has just been established from forensic evidence that he must have died in the vestry between ten and eleven. His body was discovered shortly before midday. Did he say anything to you before he went out?’

  ‘I didn’t know he’d gone out. But Melvyn could be a bit like that, not always saying what he was going to do. I had stayed in bed, I didn’t feel very well.’

  ‘Are you aware of anything particular that was on his mind?’

  ‘No.’

  She was far younger than I had expected, at least fifteen, or even twenty years younger than her late husband, who had been sixty-one. Grief, strain, and anger made her appear pale and drawn – she wore no make-up – but discounting that she was still unattractive and frumpily dressed. Her sister was a slightly older version, with the frumpiness times two.

  ‘Did you go to the recital at the village hall the night before he died?’ Patrick enquired.

  ‘Yes, we had tickets. But we didn’t stay long. It was terrible – they hadn’t a clue how to play Brahms so we didn’t risk the rest of the programme.’

  ‘Did you come straight back here?’

  ‘No, we went for a walk. We were rather disappointed and didn’t want to come home just then.’

  ‘Was it a mutual decision to leave?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I ask because it would appear that your husband was a controlling type of person. There seems to have been a certain amount of resentment caused by his—’

  ‘People always resent a clever man!’ Barbara Blanche butted in with. ‘Melvyn was clever. He believed in showing how things should be done. He couldn’t bear the second-rate. If people resent that it shows how small-minded they are.’

  ‘That’s only a matter of opinion,’ I was stung to say. ‘I’m married to a clever man but people don’t resent him, they admire him. He wouldn’t dream of imposing himself on people. Bath CID have statements from a large proportion of the local residents, a good percentage of whom, I have to tell you, are professional people, and at least twenty of them stated that your husband was insufferable. That, Mrs Blanche, can be the basis for murder.’

  She opened her mouth to take issue with me but I swept on. ‘Whether you accept it or not he must have made at least one real enemy, either now, or in the past. Was there anyone in Hinton L
ittlemoor with whom he’d had a serious argument?’

  She glowered at me, then said, ‘I thought you were here just to take notes.’

  ‘Please answer the question.’

  Stiffly, she said, ‘There had been a few tiffs with people who didn’t like what he was doing. It was inevitable.’

  Patrick said, ‘So he didn’t take the hint and back off a little?’

  ‘No, why should he? Melvyn was brave as well as clever. He used to fly bombers.’

  Well, that would figure, I thought.

  ‘Was there anyone in his past who might have borne a severe grudge?’ Patrick said.

  ‘No one that I can think of.’

  ‘Please pause to think for a few moments. It’s very important.’

  ‘No, no one,’ came the immediate reply.

  ‘How long had you been married?’

  ‘Fifteen years. Really, I don’t see how—’

  ‘But why was he in the church?’ Patrick persevered. ‘Neither of you was on the cleaning or flower rotas, and no parish documents are kept in the vestry.’

  ‘I have no idea why he should have been there.’

  ‘Did he know where the key to it was kept?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did your husband do before he went in the RAF?’

  ‘He gained entry when he left school. In those days you didn’t have to be a graduate. It was something he’d always wanted to do.’

  A truly crazy idea hit me. I quickly wrote on my pad and passed it across to Patrick who read what I had written and gave me a brief, quizzical stare.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said slowly to Barbara Blanche, ‘Do you know anyone who lives down on the small estate where the railway station used to be?’

  ‘I – er – think a couple, no – er – two couples we’ve met at quiz nights, or something like that, live in that direction,’ the woman stammered. ‘But I really wouldn’t describe them as friends.’

  ‘Have you been to their homes?’

  ‘No, hardly, as they’re not friends of ours.’

  ‘Not for meetings?’