Rattling the Bones

by Ann Granger

  Jessica looked miserable. ‘Explaining this to Henry . . . he is a sick man, you know. He’ll take it badly.’

  ‘All the more reason for you to be the one to tell him. We’ll spend the night keeping watch downstairs. Alice knows you? She trusts you? She’ll let you in?’

  Jessica took a decision. ‘Yes, Alice knows me. She also knows who I am.’

  ‘What?’ I yelped. ‘She knows you’re Henry’s daughter?’

  Jessica pulled a rueful grimace. ‘I didn’t tell her. The sort of job she’s had looking after Henry she’s done before in other families. I imagine she’s seen it all. She recognised a resemblance between Henry and me. There was something in my attitude when I was with him, she told me. She guessed I was his daughter.’

  Alice looked relieved when she saw us. We needn’t have doubted she would let us in. She practically pulled Jessica through the front door and I trotted in behind her.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Davis, I am glad you’re here! The police have phoned and said they are sending over two officers to stay in the house. They seem to think someone may try and get in and harm Mr Culpeper. What is going on?’

  Jessica patted her arm. ‘It’s all right, Alice. I’m going to stay, police presence or not, and so is Fran. You remember Fran?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ The gaze Alice turned on me was far less welcoming. ‘Mr Culpeper hasn’t been the same since you came to see him. He had a really bad night last night, hardly slept. This morning I sent for his doctor. He came about an hour ago and said Mr Culpeper was stressed. I should say he is! He keeps talking about someone called Edna. He keeps saying he must see Edna. Who is Edna? Was she his wife?’

  ‘Is anyone with my father now?’ Jessica demanded.

  ‘He’s asleep, Mrs Davis. The doctor has given him something to settle him and what with being awake nearly all night, he just went off to sleep like a baby. It’s the best thing.’

  ‘Then we can’t talk to him - or the police, they can’t either?’ Jessica demanded.

  ‘Believe me, Mrs Davis, he’s out for the count. No one will be able to talk to Mr Culpeper before tomorrow morning, that’s my guess.’

  I caught Jessica’s eye. ‘Perfect for Adam . . .’ I muttered. ‘The old boy is lying up there unconscious.’

  She looked frightened.

  ‘Are there any other staff in the house?’ I asked Alice.

  She shook her head. ‘I sent Mrs da Souza, the cook, home. She comes in daily and clearly she wouldn’t be needed today. If Mr Culpeper had wanted a snack, I could have prepared it for him but the doctor’s pills have just put him out. The only other staff member is the cleaner. She comes in twice weekly and today isn’t one of her days.’

  I thought that Alice had a pretty enviable job. A lot of responsibility, of course, but she didn’t cook or clean and she lived here in luxury. She had a strong interest in preserving her employer safe and sound. Nor was Mrs da Souza overburdened. There wouldn’t be many dinner parties here to cook for, just old Henry and Alice with the occasional family lunch when the grandchildren visited. I bet the twice-weekly cleaner didn’t suffer repetitive strain injury in her dusting arm, either.

  ‘Is there a gardener?’ I asked, remembering the immaculate view from Henry’s window.

  ‘Landscaping firm does it,’ said Jessica. ‘They come every six weeks and just keep it ticking over.’

  Another set of people doing nicely out of Culpeper. If you’re rich, you can buy all you need, but it struck me these people were a little like parasites.

  The two officers turned up about half an hour later. Morgan didn’t let grass grow under her feet. They were a man and a woman, and neither of them was pleased to see Jessica and me. They suggested we go home and leave this to them.

  Jessica insisted she wouldn’t leave her father and she wanted me there for moral support. She exhibited an unexpectedly steely attitude and eventually, after telephoning for instructions, they gave in. They told us to stay downstairs and should there be any trouble ‘which we are not anticipating. This is purely a precautionary exercise,’ we must keep out of the way.

  Jessica went upstairs with the woman police officer and cautiously looked in on her father. He was still asleep.

  It was a funny sort of afternoon. Alice fixed us something to eat at one point, ham sandwiches and sponge cake, but I didn’t eat much myself. Neither did Jessica. The two cops tucked in placidly. It was just another job to them. I found some books and started to read but my mind wasn’t on it. I wondered if it would be in order to phone Ganesh but realised it wouldn’t. No one was supposed to know we were here.

  From time to time either Jessica or Alice checked on Henry but he slept on. The pills must have been strong enough to knock out a horse.

  The unreality lasted until about ten that night when Alice, after producing a second lot of ham sandwiches, went up to bed. Two different officers replaced the original ones, both men this time. They sat in the kitchen reading tabloid newspapers, eating the fresh lot of sandwiches and drinking endless cups of tea. Occasionally one of them would take a walk round the house checking windows and then go back to his mate. Eventually, even they switched off the lights and found themselves armchairs in a sitting room to snooze in.

  Jessica and I remained wide awake. The place was creepily quiet.You wouldn’t have believed you were in the middle of London, or not far off the busy heart. We had retreated to what Jessica told me had been Henry’s den before the operations on his legs had left him marooned upstairs. There was a big old leather chesterfield sofa in it and I clambered up on that. Jessica took a reclining chair. Neither of us spoke much. I knew she was awake, although I couldn’t see her, and she knew I was sleepless.

  Once she whispered, ‘No one can get in, Fran.’

  ‘The burglar alarm is off,’ I pointed out. ‘Otherwise we or those two coppers would set it off, moving around downstairs.’

  ‘But the security grilles are over all the downstairs windows and the main gate is shut.’

  ‘Adam has a remote control to operate the gate.’

  ‘Well, yes. But we’d hear it. The gate squeaks and it’s so quiet now. I think we’d know if he operated it. And even though the burglar alarm is off, the security lights outside are working. If anyone is out there, they’ll switch on automatically.’

  ‘What about the river edge of the property?’

  ‘There’s an electronic trip. If anyone passes through the beam all hell breaks loose.’

  It was what I’d expected. But something still worried me. I wished I knew what it was.

  The air was warm and stuffy. The leather of the chesterfield had a soporific odour all of its own. Eventually I dozed off.

  I don’t know what wakened me. It was no more than a creak of wood. Overnight as temperatures change and cool, wood settles and emits its own range of muted sounds. But this was a sharper sound. I opened my eyes.

  ‘Jessica?’ I whispered.

  A faint snore answered me.

  I slid off the chesterfield and crept to the door, letting myself out into the hall. I couldn’t hear either of the cops but possibly the sound I had heard came from one of them doing the rounds, checking. The creak came again. It was overhead and if I was right in my orienteering, it came from the corridor leading to Henry’s bedroom, adjacent to the day room in which I’d visited him.

  ‘Our protection squad, Fran, just doing their job,’ I told myself, ‘patrolling the house.’

  Outside the house no security lights had come on but I still went to the window and peered out between the diamond lattices of the security grille. The garden was bathed in silvery moonlight, as bright as day except that all colour had been bleached out. If any prowler had been out there I’d have seen him. Even so it would do no harm to check indoors.

  I moved slowly up the staircase, keeping to one side to minimise any creaks caused by my own progress.

  On the upper corridor the same bright moonlight shone in through a window at the far end. By it I
could see that the door of Henry’s bedroom was ajar.

  I told myself it had been left like that so that either of the officers could check on the room’s occupant without disturbing him, but I still didn’t like it.

  I tiptoed softly towards it and on reaching it, put out my hand and gave it a little push.

  Henry’s curtains were drawn back. The silver moonlight bathed the room, the bed and its occupant - and something else standing by Henry’s bed and bending over him.

  For a second I froze in horror. I couldn’t tell what it was my terrified gaze fixed on, only that it appeared the kind of monster you are sure you will see in your bedroom when you are a kid, if you are rash enough to pull your head from beneath the bedclothes. It wasn’t tall but it was bulky, strangely misshapen, a Quasimodo of a figure, partly human but animal-like in its curious bulk. It hovered there filled with silent menace.

  The paralysis which seized me lasted only that second. I let out a purely involuntary yell and at the same time threw out my hand and switched on the light.

  It showed me Becky Ferrier. Her hands gripped the large pillow which had given her outline the strange bulky shape. She was standing by the bedside of her grandfather, crouching forward ready to place the pillow over the face of the sleeping man.

  She stared at me open-mouthed, the blue doll’s eyes wide in shock. Her horror at seeing me was as great as mine had been a few instants earlier on beholding her. Then she flung the pillow at me and as I automatically put up my arms to ward it off, she barged across the room and full into me, striking me in the midriff.

  The muscles of my diaphragm went into a sickening spasm, the air whooshed out of my lungs and I folded up on the floor, gasping. Somehow I managed to throw out a hand and grab at her ankle. A rib-crunching kick was the response and she had freed herself.

  Old Culpeper was stirring, struggling against his medication to wake up. But my yell had been heard below. Stout police footwear pounded on the stairs and along the corridor behind me. I rolled over onto my hands and knees, although what I thought I could do in that position I had no idea. I crawled into the corridor, drawing painful breaths, determined to be a part of whatever happened next.

  Becky had started to run down the corridor towards the head of the stairs but stopped, seeing the phalanx of opposition, both protection officers and Jessica hard on their heels, bearing down on her. She turned back towards me. But this time I wasn’t letting her escape. I wrapped my arms round her legs and hung on.

  There was a confused mêlée in which I managed to avoid, by the narrowest of margins, being trampled by police footwear. Then a male voice shouted in my ear, ‘All right, all right, we got her! You can let go now!’

  I released my grip and managed to stagger to my feet. Becky was held fast between the two police officers and squealing on a high long note, like a small mammal in the grip of a hunting owl. It was unearthly and I could only stare at her in horror.

  Jessica showed more presence of mind and ran past us into her father’s bedroom. I blocked out the sound of Becky’s wail and followed Jessica. She had crossed to the bed and was leaning over it. The old man was struggling against his drugged state, moaning and rolling his head back and forth as if aware of the disturbance but unable to locate it.

  ‘It’s all right, Henry. Everything is all right,’ Jessica soothed him, placing her hand on his forehead. ‘It’s me, Jessica, I’m here.’

  That seemed to get through to him and he stopped rolling his head in that distressing way.

  Behind us, out in the corridor, Becky had stopped the eerie screeching to attempt a justification of her presence. ‘I only wanted to see Gramps. I wanted to make him more comfortable . . .’

  Her plaintive voice tailed off as the protection officers frog-marched her away. I heard the trio clattering downstairs and then Alice’s voice, sleepy and frightened, asking what had happened. Jessica looked up and my gaze locked with her wild stare.

  ‘Is he all right?’ I asked.

  She nodded but still looked white-faced and bewildered. There was no trace of her former self-possession. ‘She . . . little Becky . . . Not Adam . . . She was going to use that pillow, wasn’t she?’ Jessica pointed at the pillow lying on the floor between us. ‘How did she get in?’

  ‘She was in the house all the time,’ I said bitterly. ‘Bet my last penny on it. Adam must have phoned her on his mobile and let her know what happened at Lottie’s house. They’ve always worked together. Adam told her it was too risky for him to come and do the deed himself and she had to do it. She came over here - she must have a remote for the gates too - slipped in either before we got here or the cops arrived. She must know every inch of this house. She’s tiny and could easily hide in something like a cupboard. Or she could have concealed herself somewhere in the grounds first and got indoors later while we were all here with the alarm off and before Alice locked up for the night.’

  An image of the little gazebo came into my head. Had that been her hiding place?

  Jessica shivered. ‘Little Becky . . .’ she repeated.

  It had not been so difficult for Becky Ferrier, so Morgan explained the following morning when Jessica and I went to see her. Morgan had calmed down and was prepared to overlook my rummaging at the Records Office and my dash out to Teddington. Overlook it for the time being, anyway. I dare say the next time I upset her she’ll bring it up. Les Hooper was right in saying that coppers have memories like elephants.

  ‘Adam had phoned her immediately and she hurried to her grandfather’s house, letting herself in through the front security gate with her own remote control and hiding, as you guessed, Fran, in the gazebo. She was in place before our people got there. They checked the house but she waited until later and when the protection teams were changing shift, slipped in through, of all things, a narrow disused coal chute into a cellar, a legacy of the house’s Victorian past. As children she and her brother had often come and gone secretly by that route and Becky is still tiny enough to squeeze through it. The burglar alarm was off in the house. The outside defences had never been triggered.’

  ‘We were worried about Adam Ferrier,’ added Morgan ruefully. ‘We forgot his sister.’

  One always did forget little lisping Becky with the baby-doll eyes and apparent complete absence of working brain cells. Just goes to show.

  ‘They had always worked together, just as I told Jessica,’ I said to Ganesh later. ‘Becky was the hoodie kid I saw in the street and Edna had seen earlier, the one who set us both up for the onslaught by the motorcyclist. With her slight build, to disguise herself as a young boy was simple. She pretended to fiddle with a mobile phone and lured me out into the road by sprawling headlong. Good Samaritan that I am, I ran out to help as they knew I would. In Edna’s case the hoodie attracted her attention in some other way.

  ‘It must have been his sister to whom Adam gave the keys Les had dropped in the pub. It was Becky who phoned Susie and invited her to go out to Richmond to see about a job. It was Becky, not Lottie, who got to Susie’s office first and opened the door to make it look as if Susie was inside and then left. Later it was Becky who returned the lost keys to the barman with the tale of having picked them up in error. I should have realised that immediately because the barman didn’t speak to me as though he had recognised the girl. But if Duane drank regularly there, then it’s a fairly sure bet that Lottie had been in there with him from time to time. The barman would have known her.

  ‘Lottie knew about it all. I’m sure of it. They wouldn’t have dared risk any of it if Lottie hadn’t been on side. She’d have pulled the rug out from under them. She’s swearing blind she didn’t know a thing, of course. Who was it wrote that the female of the species is more deadly than the male?’

  ‘Rudyard Kipling,’ said Ganesh. He’d recently added a book of quotations to his reference library. At least it wasn’t a collection of football trivia.

  Chapter Twenty

  In one way, Jessica Davis had been more
correct in her predictions made in Lottie’s kitchen than I had been in mine. As we later discovered, not daring to go to his grandfather’s house himself, Adam had phoned his accomplice, his sister, to set up her murderous attack. For himself, he’d set off driving hell for leather in that company car of his, heading towards the south coast. But, as Jessica had foreseen, he hadn’t got very far, although it wasn’t lack of cash which did for him. He seems to have intended to cross to the Continent. But he piled himself up in a motorway smash on the way. He had to be cut out of the wreckage by the emergency services. He’s still in hospital at the time of my writing this and it will be a very long time before he stands trial. Becky is pleading duress. Her brother dominated her and she was scared of him etc. She’ll have a job persuading a court. I saw her standing there with that pillow ready to smother a defenceless old man. However, I suspect Becky can be very persuasive.