Skeleton Key

by Robert Richardson

  On Sunday evening, Joanna York became aware that her husband was staring at her as she embroidered tiny, meticulous stitches into a pattern of leaves on a linen tablecloth. Feeling the weight of his eyes across the room, she looked up inquiringly.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, and when the stony expression on his face did not change, she felt apprehensive. Somehow she had displeased him and her best defence would be not to argue, which would only inflame his displeasure into terrifying, crushing temper. She could not imagine what she might have inadvertently done.

  ‘I was just thinking how well you’re controlling your feelings,’ he said.

  ‘My feelings?’ she said cautiously, looking down as she started to weave her needle in and out of the cloth again. ‘What about?’ Her mind was racing, trying to work out what he meant.

  ‘About the death of your lover, the handsome Lord Dunford.’

  The needle twitched and a spot of blood dropped on to the emerald stitching. It was a reaction of shock and amazement, but York regarded it as proof; it took him less than an hour to break her.

  *

  A few doors away in Bellringer Street, Maltravers and Tess felt that they were stepping with extreme care around a great hole as Peter and Susan gingerly probed the gaping wound that had appeared in their marriage. The difficulties caused by almost every casual remark carrying suspected overtones had been curiously relieved by Dunford’s murder; gently telling Timmy and Emma that Uncle Simon was dead was actually preferable to trying to behave normally before the children went to bed. Maltravers turned on the television and the four of them saw Luke Norman’s face staring from the screen as the voiceover said that police were still looking for him.

  ‘Have they released Oliver then?’ Peter wondered.

  ‘Well they certainly haven’t charged him,’ said Maltravers, ‘or they wouldn’t be looking so hard for Luke. It looks like they have two high-level suspects and spot the red herring. Even if they have released cousin Oliver they can always pull him in again. It will all depend on what Luke has to say when he turns up.’

  ‘Which one do you think it was?’ Susan asked.

  Maltravers shrugged. ‘My first instincts were that it was Luke because of what we knew, and his disappearance tends to convince me I’m right. But I’m not about to produce brilliant Marpellian theories about stolen ties and missing cricket balls which will neatly explain everything.’

  ‘You must have thought about them though,’ said Tess. ‘It’s like some obscure crossword clue that would appeal to you.’

  Maltravers produced one of the rare smiles seen in the house that evening. ‘All right, I’ve tried. I have the feeling that if those odd matters could be explained a lot more would become clear. But I’m sure the police will sort it out with mundane questioning and procedures. Eccentric speculation will play no part in it. I know truth can be stranger than fiction, but most of the time it’s much less interesting.’

  *

  Drained by her own denials, Joanna York sat numbed and defeated, driven almost to believe the lies that had warped her innocence into guilt. She sat like a rabbit in the shadow of a great dog as York loomed over her.

  ‘That’s better’ he said quietly. ‘I knew you’d confess it in the end.’

  Her head shook feebly; she had confessed nothing because there had been nothing to confess. In her weary submission, she felt a final flicker of defiance as her sense of shame became intolerable. She summoned up some last reserve of anger.

  ‘No!’ she cried bitterly. ‘No, no, no! It wasn’t like that! He only…Oh God, I hate you!’

  Alister York hit her. Not in rage but with the casual indifference a man would use to swat a fly. As the shocking sting of the blow crashed through her head, the last glimmer of Joanna’s resistance died.

  ‘You’re lying,’ he said dismissively. ‘Aren’t you? Admit it.’

  As her spirit crumbled, Joanna York actually began to believe that she might have been lying. The warm memory of Dunford paying her attention and being kind before that meaningless kiss under the Christmas mistletoe at Edenbridge House had become twisted into something shameful and dirty.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whimpered. ‘I didn’t mean…’ The remnants of her voice faded. It will stop now, she thought, now I’ve admitted it. Don’t let him hit me again.

  ‘Very well,’ said York. ‘It’s time we went up to bed.’ It had not stopped, it had only just begun.

  *

  It was half past three in the morning when Maltravers gave a series of Cro-Magnon grunts as Tess urgently shook him awake.

  ‘Gus!’ she insisted. ‘Wake up!’

  Maltravers’ consciousness began to emerge hazily through a further collection of inarticulate sounds.

  ‘What is it?’ he demanded tetchily.

  ‘The baby. It’s on the way. Get up. I’m going back to help.’

  Satisfied she had roused him beyond retreat back into sleep, Tess left the room and Maltravers blinked owlishly at the ceiling for a few moments before rolling out of bed and pulling on his dressing gown. He had grasped the situation and did not like it. He paused on the landing where the sound of anxious voices and mysterious activity from Peter and Susan’s room convinced him that his presence there would be both useless and inconvenient. Downstairs in the kitchen he filled the electric kettle, turned it on and was listening to its rising murmur with growing misgivings as Tess reappeared.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’

  ‘Boiling water of course,’ he said. ‘I’ve never known what it’s for, but I understand it’s required in large quantities at such times.’

  ‘Well, if you want to scald the poor thing to death it might be useful,’ said Tess. ‘Don’t you know anything about babies?’

  ‘Enough to recognise one at fifty paces which had always seemed a safe distance,’ he replied, then waved uncertainly at the kettle. ‘Anyway, don’t things have to be sterilised or something?’

  ‘It’s too late for that,’ Tess told him. ‘Junior’s arrived.’

  ‘Arrived?’ Maltravers looked round in alarm, as though expecting the diminutive Penrose to appear through the kitchen door at any moment with demands of post-natal attention. ‘Where’s the ambulance? Why hasn’t she been taken to hospital?’

  ‘It’s a bit late for that. He’s here and he’s fine.’ Tess kissed him on the cheek. ‘Anyway, you can make us all a cup of tea. I do love you when you’re being helpless.’

  Peter and Susan’s third child had arrived with what Maltravers later held to be indecent haste. When Susan had punched her husband awake about half an hour earlier to say the baby was coming, he had automatically got up and started dressing to take her to Capley General Hospital. He had just pulled on his underpants when Susan had sharply added that she had meant exactly what she had said—the baby was not only coming, he had virtually arrived. Having witnessed the births of both his other children and with an ability in practical matters which Maltravers did not share, Peter had grabbed towels from the airing cupboard and set to work. Woken by the disturbance, Tess had joined in with encouraging noises and her hand had been squeezed very tightly as the population of Old Capley increased by a male child, weighing, as it later transpired, a healthy seven and a half pounds.

  Maltravers entered the bedroom carrying a tray with some trepidation, anxious lest he should tread in something unidentifiable and probably slippery. Back in bed from her delivery on the floor, Susan was clutching the baby protectively in a blanket with Tess sitting beside her. Peter had gone downstairs to telephone the doctor.

  ‘Come and see him, Gus. He’s beautiful,’ Susan said.

  Maltravers cautiously crossed the room and looked down at a tiny head which appeared to have been carved from a beetroot by a reasonably accomplished child and wondered if so much hair was usual.

  ‘Beautiful,’ he repeated obediently.

  Susan was making no effort to hold back her tears and there was relief and joy in her voice as she l
ooked at her second son.

  ‘He’s Peter’s,’ she said. ‘It looks just like him. You can see that, can’t you Gus?’

  Maltravers recalled that when Lewis Carroll was asked for an opinion by doting parents of the very young, he would peer intently into the bassinet then announce, ‘Ah, now that is a baby’, an anodyne formula that appeared to satisfy everyone.

  Normally he would personally venture no further, but when Susan looked at him he knew what he had to say.

  ‘Yes, it looks like Peter. Does he have a name?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Susan. ‘I haven’t thought about that, just about…’ She broke off and gulped emotionally. ‘Perhaps we’ll call him Augustus. After all, you were here when he was born.’

  ‘Hardly,’ Maltravers contradicted. ‘I was taking evasive action. Think about it later.’

  Susan’s eyes flashed past him to the door as Peter returned.

  ‘Doctor’s on the way,’ he announced. ‘He’s arranging an ambulance to take you both to hospital but I’ve told him everything’s fine. How is he?’

  He crossed to the bed and Susan held the baby towards him and he took the bundle of warm, fluffy towel from her.

  ‘Daddy didn’t make a bad job of helping you arrive, did he?’ he said.

  It was, Maltravers felt, a singularly happy place to be as Peter cuddled his son and tears of anything but unhappiness ran down his wife’s face. Their marriage was on the mend and there was no more sleep for any of them that night.

  Joanna York did not sleep either, but for very different reasons.

  8

  On Monday morning, his inappropriately smiling photograph staring from the front pages of some fifteen million copies of national newspapers, Luke Norman’s face was temporarily among the best known in Britain. Awareness of him was constantly multiplied by regional evening papers and inescapable, repeated flashes on television screens. Unbelievably, more than twenty people failed to recognise him as he left a flat in Chiswick and walked the hundred yards to his car. The flat belonged to one of his former lovers who was on holiday and to whom Norman had omitted to return the key when their affair had ended; it had been a secure, brief sanctuary while he tried to sort out the turmoil in his mind.

  The previous evening he had sat and watched the television with a sense of numbed disbelief as he looked at his own face and half heard the news reporter describing his appearance and his car. The bare essentials of the police wanting to question him about Simon’s murder were all that remained in his memory; the shots of the closed antique shop and the carefully phrased comments on his life and sexual tendencies he had forgotten as unimportant. Now he wanted nothing more than to go somewhere where he could be alone with his torment. The police would certainly be tracing his known associates, so the flat would have to be abandoned. As he drove round the M25 circling London towards the M4 and the West Country, the dead man he had loved was a spectral presence in the passenger seat; in the car’s glove compartment was a programme for La Cage aux Folles, a heart-twisting reminder of a night out together.

  The motorway unwound before him, a tedious strip of streaming road as successive southern counties approached and retreated. He stopped for petrol and to buy some sandwiches at Leigh Delamere service station—another group of people who looked at him with indifference if at all—then he drove on through Somerset and Devon and into Cornwall as if only the final end of land would make him stop and face the nightmare of it all. The simple act of driving was an escape into another escape until there would be no more escape left.

  The motorway ended and he went on westwards, through market towns and villages, brushing past holiday resorts, across moors and between low, swelling hills. The road took him into Penzance with St Michael’s Mount glowing like terracotta in the early evening sunshine, then he followed the narrowing way along the final ragged edges of the peninsula, through Newlyn and Mousehole, now taking every dwindling turn that offered him the promise of further road. He dropped down the steep approach to Lamorna Cove and finally stopped in the little car park overlooking the sea. He had been driving mindlessly for so long that the enforced cessation of movement momentarily confused him and he sat with the engine still running, staring blindly at the shallow waves of the Atlantic lapping softly over the stones on the beach. He was four hundred miles from Bellringer Street but there was no deliverance. As a hawking seagull landed on the wall in front of him and turned its cruelly-beaked face towards the car, Luke Norman leaned against the steering wheel and wept.

  *

  Despite their apparent health, Susan and the baby had been taken into hospital for checks and Tess had volunteered to take on the household while she was away. As Maltravers walked with her down Bellringer Street to the butcher’s shop in the square, complete strangers, somehow already aware of the news, stopped them with constant questions. The innocence of a new baby was balm to the wounds of shock, distaste and discomfort Old Capley was feeling in the light of that morning’s papers. Trying to remember a whole series of names of people sending congratulations, they joined the queue in the shop. Maltravers smiled and said good morning to Joanna York who was a couple of places in front of him, but she ignored him.

  In an age of anonymous meat sealed in shining plastic wrappings, the Old Capley butcher still displayed his red and cream joints and carcasses on cold marble or hung from steel hooks. Such offerings remained a matter for discussion and critical appraisal and the woman at the front of the queue was examining a piece of silverside like a judge at Cruft’s assessing a potential best in breed. Tess found it restful and rather quaint; Maltravers was mentally recording the conversation as the sort of dialogue that he rarely heard.

  As the butcher waited, patient and attentive, the piece of meat was weighed in the hand, its fat content criticised, its capacity to serve six people questioned, its pedigree as first-class beef put under suspicion. Perhaps there was something else? A hand of pork? Possibly a crown roast? The butcher smiled and produced further offerings; it was not a shop for people in a hurry. Tess picked up a leaflet from a display stand and was asking Maltravers if he could think up an ingenious slogan—in not more than ten words—about the joys of eating sausages so that they could win a holiday in Florida, when Joanna York cracked. Everybody in the shop looked surprised as the girl whirled out of her place in the queue and almost ran out of the door, stifling a cry. Other customers seemed startled, even offended at such excessive public behaviour, but Maltravers and Tess glanced at each other in alarm then went after her as she hurried across the square back towards Bellringer Street. Maltravers caught her up within half a dozen paces and touched her shoulder.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  Tess reached them both as Joanna York turned to face him, tears pouring from eyes haunted not by grief or shock but what looked like stark terror. In an ordinary young woman outside a parade of shops on a summer’s morning, it was like seeing death in a child’s nursery.

  ‘Go away! Please!’ Joanna York choked out the words as she shook Maltravers’ hand off her shoulder and turned away, now running as fast as she could up Bellringer Street. They stood and watched her as she reached her house and fumbled with the key, then the sound of the slamming door came down the empty street to them.

  ‘What the hell’s the matter with her?’ said Maltravers. ‘She looks as though she’s going mad.’

  ‘I’m going after her,’ said Tess.

  ‘No.’ Maltravers took hold of Tess’s arm to prevent her. ‘We hardly know the woman and if she’s that upset, she’s not going to welcome strangers turning up on her doorstep.’

  ‘But we can’t just leave her like that,’ Tess protested. ‘We’re not strangers. You told me you talked to her at the party. For God’s sake, Gus, she looks ready to kill herself! We’ve got to—’

  ‘Just take your angel-of-mercy hat off for a moment and we’ll compromise,’ Maltravers interrupted. ‘Go and see her later on. She’s too upset at the moment, but s
he may have calmed down in a while.’

  Tess looked back up the hill, fighting her instincts.

  ‘All right,’ she said finally. ‘But we don’t leave it too long.’

  ‘No, we don’t,’ Maltravers agreed. ‘There’s something very wrong there and I’d like to know what it is.’

  *

  Anticipating various combinations of death, there were several defined lines of inheritance for the Pembury estate. Both of Lord Pembury’s brothers were dead and his sister was unmarried and past child-bearing, leaving his nephew the only direct descendant after his son on his side of the family. Thereafter various members of Lady Pembury’s family could inherit, but a direct male line stretching back to the return of the Stuarts was not to be broken unless absolutely unavoidable. In the circumstances, Sir Gerald Piers-Freeman found it most unsatisfactory that Oliver Hawkhurst should remain under police suspicion.

  ‘Obviously your nephew could not inherit should he be found to be in any way implicated in Lord Dunford’s death,’ he told Lord Pembury. ‘While clearly his innocence is presumed at this stage, it makes the position somewhat…delicate.’