by Granger, Ann
Carter narrowed his gaze and Jess was uncomfortably aware of the stare of his hazel-green eyes. ‘But the cleaner says there is no sign of anyone having been in the house? I’m thinking that, if the murderer took the house keys, he might have meant to use them. Maybe there is something incriminating there, or the murderer might think there is.’ He raised his eyebrows and waited.
Jess realised she was expected to play devil’s advocate and did so.
‘He might also be too worried about being seen to risk going there. The house is on a busy thoroughfare. It has no front garden, just a railing about a metre from the front wall. There may be no rear access. It’s something I have to check. But anyone would have to walk up to the front door and let himself in in full view of the street and the neighbours.’
Carter leaned back in his chair. ‘How thorough do you think that cleaner is?’
Jess smiled. ‘Frankly, she’s had virtually no work to do. She tidies the kitchen and bathroom, probably the bedroom. Those are the rooms in daily use. The other rooms, well, she doesn’t have to do more than put a vacuum cleaner over the carpets.’
‘We know,’ Carter pointed out, ‘that Burton didn’t share the house and the murderer may well have known it, too. So, he would know that once the cleaner left, he wouldn’t be disturbed. If he were tidy about his search and concentrated on, say, the study, then Mrs – what’s it – Pardy? Mrs Pardy might not realise anyone had been there.’ He stood up and came round the desk. ‘We’ll both check the place out.’
They stood in the street before Lucas Burton’s house, as Jess had already done once that day with Phil Morton. It seemed an age ago, not eight hours. Unlike Phil, Carter made no comment as he stared up at the façade. As for Jess, the frontage was already familiar to her and mindful of her own words to the superintendent about the interest of neighbours, she found her gaze sliding sideways, up and down the pavement.
A chill evening breeze had sprung up and the light was fast fading. One or two leaves rattled along the paving stones, rolling over and over in orange and red cartwheels. A woman hurried past, gripping her coat together over her chest with one clenched hand. She didn’t look their way, but she must have been aware of them. From the opposite direciton a man came strolling along with a small fat white dog on their evening promenade, getting in the exercise before it got properly dark. An elderly man and clearly a resident, he had seen them and he didn’t hide his interest. There were no Neighbourhood Watch posters in the windows in this street, but Jess was sure the residents operated an informal system of their own. Or possibly, after she and Morton left earlier, Mrs Pardy had spread the word of their visit. The street knew the police had been and now they were back again. From a door further down a young man in a leather jacket sprang into the street. The door slammed. He walked briskly to a car parked by the kerb, got into it and drove off. Just coincidence, perhaps, or also, just possibly, he’d spotted them from his window and didn’t want to be at home if the police came knocking on doors and asking questions.
Whatever it was, she and Carter were too obvious, loitering here. There was a palpable quality to the darkness gathering around them and the street lighting would be on soon.
‘Sir?’ Jess murmured.
Her voice seemed to jolt Carter from whatever reverie he’d sunk into. ‘What? Oh, yes. Got the cleaner’s key there?’
She unlocked the door and let them in.
Walking into Burton’s elegant house a second time felt odder than it had the first. At least on that occasion, Jess reflected, the cleaner had invited her and Morton in. This time she and Carter entered alone and uninvited. The house felt cold and unwelcoming without even Mrs Pardy’s grudging presence and her cups of tea. Its blue and yellow perfection closed out any interloper. Carter paused by the hall telephone to examine the console table on which it stood. The top was of marquetry, the design one of swirls and flowers and fruit. It was beautiful and no doubt expensive and very old. The modern telephone on it looked awkward and out of place, just as they must do standing in the hall. Jess glanced up towards the first-floor landing, almost as if she expected to see someone there, watching them from above. But it was eerily silent and suddenly she didn’t envy Mrs Pardy her easy job. To spend several hours here, in this empty perfection, three times a week, the silence only broken by a distant slam of a car door or muted roar of an engine, that was plain spooky.
Cricket Farm had been spooky, too, yet there could be no greater contrast between this and Cricket, a house she and the superintendent had also entered uninvited. The atmosphere at Cricket had been one of misery and toil, above all of agricultural poverty. It might not have been a happy home but it had been a home. Burton’s place spoke of money but absolutely nothing else.
As they moved from room to room the feeling that they were unwanted and that there was something inherently wrong about the whole place grew on Jess. It was elegant, gracious and all too perfect. This wasn’t due to the housekeeping skills of Sandra Pardy. It was due to the personality of its dead owner.
At last she had to speak. ‘It’s – it’s like a stage set.’
Carter turned his head towards her, his expression mildly surprised and enquiring.
‘It’s as if Burton decided on the impression he wanted to make and set about presenting this house so that it gave it. Perhaps he was like that as a person, too.’
Carter made no reply and seemed to be waiting for her to expand her theme. She hastened on, ‘Somehow it’s not real. When we went into the house at Cricket Farm, it had been shut up for nearly thirty years and yet, even so, there was a feeling real people had lived there, with emotions and worries. It told us a lot about them and their lives. This tells us nothing about Lucas Burton except that he had a lot of money and operated as a loner.’
‘My feeling exactly,’ Carter said unexpectedly. ‘The interesting thing will be to learn how he made his money. I think we can take it he was at Cricket Farm last Friday afternoon. But we don’t know why he went there. We are assuming it was because of Eva Zelená, perhaps to hide her body. Perhaps she accompanied him alive and he killed her there. If she was ever in that Mercedes, alive or dead, she’ll have left some trace. But if he killed Eva, then who killed him?’
He shook his head. ‘We could also be haring off down a false trail. Some other business took Burton to Cricket that day. He found a body and panicked. His murder could be unrelated, the result of falling out with a business associate. We don’t know if we have one linked investigation here or two quite separate ones.’ He heaved an irritated sigh.
By the time they reached the study the failing daylight obliged them to turn on the electric substitute. Now anyone who looked this way would know they were here. If the murderer had been here, he would not have been able to switch on the light, drawing attention. He had either to come in daylight: risky, or at night with a torch.
Jess looked about her. Superficially, at least, the study was as tidy as the rest of the house. The screen of an open laptop computer on the desk turned its blank face to them, like the hall telephone a jarring note of modernity in the carefully harmonised antique whole. Carter went to it.
‘The IT specialists will have to look at this.’
Jess joined him at the desk and, first slipping on thin plastic gloves, tried the centre drawer. There was a lock-plate in it, although no key, and she was expecting it to be secured. But it slid out easily.
‘I would have thought,’ she said, ‘that he would have locked away anything personal because he was out of the house much of the time, and Mrs Pardy had free rein to go snooping if she was inclined.’
‘Or the murderer has the desk key, along with all the other keys he took from the body,’ Carter said. He came to stand by her and look down into the drawer. The contents – letters, bills, scribbled notes – were jumbled together in an untidy heap. ‘This doesn’t look like the way our man would keep his private documents, even in a drawer,’ the superintendent added. He pointed downward and
indicated a bulldog clip. ‘What’s the betting some of these papers were originally held together with this?’
Jess looked round the room. On one wall a watercolour seascape hung slightly askew. Carter, following her gaze, crossed to it and lifted it down with gloved hands. There was nothing behind it on the wall, and nothing attached to the back of the picture. He replaced it.
‘That one’s crooked, too,’ said Jess, pointing at a companion seascape on the other side of the room.
Carter checked that one, too, without finding anything. ‘That bookcase is out of position,’ he observed, turning back to the room and pointing at a pretty glass-fronted set of shelves. ‘It must have stood flat against the wall, now it’s at an angle.’
‘Mrs Pardy with her vacuum cleaner?’ suggested Jess.
He walked over to it, stooped and stared at it, then shook his head. ‘Someone’s been here,’ he said, ‘but not the cleaner. He’s had the books out, and although he’s put them back, he hurried over it. Look, volumes one and two of The Count of Monte Cristo here together – and volume three on the next shelf down. Peter the Whaler upside down! Early twentieth-century English editions as read by Edwardian schoolboys . . . do you think our man was a reader of the classics? Or did he buy these books in some second-hand bookshop for decorative purposes, to match the bookcase?’
Carter straightened up and turned back, brushing dust from his hands.
‘Whoever our searcher is, he’s tidy and methodical by nature but on this occasion, rushed. I’d say he’s a thinker. He’s far too clever to tip the contents of that drawer all over the carpet and leave the mess to announce his visit – or pull these books out and leave them in a heap. But, because he was in a hurry, he tossed the papers back in the drawer and pushed it carelessly shut, forgetting to lock it again. He put back all the books, but didn’t have time to make sure they were in order.’
Feeling she should say something and that, somehow, she was still expected to present some argument against his reasoning, Jess observed, ‘Isn’t there still a possibility the cleaner made a search the moment Phil Morton and I left? She might have looked round for money or some small valuable object to slip in her pocket. She knew, once we’d been, her employer wasn’t going to walk in again. She’s worried about her week’s wages. She would probably argue she was entitled to compensation.’
His reply was prompt. ‘She wouldn’t be interested in personal papers or the contents of a bookcase. She’d help herself to some little trinket; a snuffbox or something she could take to an antique shop and claim her auntie left her. For my money it’s the killer, using the keys he took from the body. We’re too late. He’s searched and taken away anything that might have led to him. He left things outwardly as he found them, but for minor details. He didn’t take the computer, perhaps because it would be missed, signalling his visit. Or he’s tried to wipe its memory? Well, that’s easier tried than done.’
‘He was looking for a wall-safe,’ Jess said quietly, pointing at the crooked seascape.
‘Yes, but did he find it? If it’s here, we have to find it, too.’
But they found nothing.
‘We’ll get it dusted for fingerprints tomorrow,’ Carter said with a sigh. ‘But whatever the results they’ll be meaningless until we get a suspect. Send DCs Stubbs and Bennison over here to box up the contents of the desk drawers and any other private papers, the laptop too, for further examination.’
They both stood for a moment in the hall, looking around them. Then by mutual consent they turned and silently left the house to hug its secrets to its cold, private bosom.
It was late when Jess heeled the door of her flat shut behind her. Small, stuffy and dusty, it was real and it was her home and she fancied it was pleased to see her back. The flat wasn’t a mausoleum like Cricket Farm or even, in its own way, like Burton’s place. She took out the enlarged group photograph of the Foot to the Ground’s staff and dropped her little green rucksack on the floor. Then she propped up the photo carefully alongside the family photograph of herself, her brother and parents, and stood back to study it.
‘Two family pictures,’ she murmured. Westcott and his staff did form a family of sorts. How could they not? They spent their days together. The girls had slept under the same roof as the Westcotts. In the photo, the Westcotts inevitably acted the parental role; the older handyman, Bert, that of some elderly uncle. And the three youngsters? David Jones had his own real parents nearby. Had the Westcotts felt in any way that they stood in loco parentis to the girls? No, not according to what Bronwen Westcott had told Phil Morton. She had been an employer, she’d been at pains to point out, not a guardian angel. But now she felt guilty of some omission of trust.
Family pictures told the observer a lot. Was that why Eli had removed all the photographs from Cricket Farm, though he’d left everything else?
Jess peered more closely at the group. Eva Zelená and David Jones stood next to one another. Had the photographer arranged them like that? Was it chance? Or had David manoeuvred himself into that position? He was leaning slightly towards Eva, whereas she stood straight, looking directly at the camera. His stance was both protective and proprietorial. He was associating himself with her. But Eva, in this line-up, somehow stood alone.
Jess knew she’d have to go back to the Foot to the Ground and talk to David Jones again.
Chapter 13
Cricket Farm had a visitor. It was late, just the moment before day turns abruptly into night. The horizon was rimmed by only the faintest red glow, marking the sinking of the sun. The moon had emerged like an invalid from the sickroom, pale and lacking luminosity or substance, but still emitting enough light to enable anyone to pick his way across the yard.
But the visitor avoided the open space. He moved slowly around the perimeter, sheltering in the lengthening shadows. In this way he reached the open-fronted cowshed and slipped inside. Here it was really dark but he had his bearings. The layout of the barn was imprinted in his brain. Above his head the corrugated-iron sheeting of the roof rattled and creaked in the stiff breeze. It was cold up here on top of the hill. It must always be cold, even in summer. In winter it must be icy. This thought ran through his mind as he moved slowly but confidently around the interior, putting out a hand from time to time to make contact with the wooden barrier of a stall, until he came back to the entrance where he stood for a long time, just inside, where the body had been discovered. Eventually he stooped and touched the ground, his fingers brushing against mud and straw.
He stood up and moved back into the yard. The moon had cast off its unhealthy pallor and was a vital, glowing ball, ruling the earth beneath. Small fluttering dark shapes swooped and dived across its surface. The bats had emerged from the attics of the house. The shadows around the yard were draped like sable velvet curtains either side of a stage. The open ground between was bathed in the moon’s silvery light. Between gaps in the boards, the glass in the upper windows of the house glittered – and a point of light moved behind them. The man, who had been in the barn, frowned. He was not the only visitor to the farm that night.
Someone was over there inside the apparently barred house. The watcher in the yard withdrew into the shadow of the heap of scrap metal to wait.
The telltale light disappeared occasionally and then reappeared unexpectedly in a different place. The person in the house was moving from room to room, but it wasn’t always possible to predict his progress from the yard. The intruder wasn’t being cautious. He thought he was alone and unobserved. But where one window was more successfully boarded up than another, the glow of his torch would be shielded and then it was guesswork where it would next appear.
After ten minutes or so the pinpoint of light vanished altogether, and moments later the watcher’s ear caught a faint distant noise. It seemed to be coming from the back of the house. Thump! Someone had struck a blow against, probably, a wood surface. Thump! Another one. The watcher allowed himself a brief smile as he identified the act
ivity. The visitor to the house had gained entry by removing the plank freshly nailed across the back door. He was now replacing it, making it look to a casual observer as if no one had broken in.
Footsteps crunched towards him. From the side of the house a dark figure emerged and walked across the open yard. In the moonlight it was no more than a silhouette; no features could be made out. It appeared tall, gangling and awkward, the moonlight and shadows distorting its frame. Its clothing was baggy and concealing of sex. The anonymous figure left the farm and turned right. About five minutes later the watcher by the scrap-metal heap heard the sound of a car engine starting up. The vehicle had been parked over the brow of the hill on the far side. He heard it drive away.
Now it was safe for him to leave, too. Cricket Farm was left to the bats and other creatures of the night.
‘A Sergeant Gary Collins of the Met is on the phone,’ said DC Bennison, poking her head, braids swinging, into Jess’s office on Monday morning. ‘Will you speak to him?’
‘Sure, put him through.’ Nothing new had emerged over the weekend and Jess’s private prayer that something – anything – might turn up at the beginning of the new week would seem to have been answered. She grabbed for the phone as Bennison, braids still bouncing around as if possessed of a life of their own, disappeared.
‘Gary Collins here,’ said a voice in her ear, ‘that you, Inspector Campbell? Right, well, I thought you’d like to know: we went over to that address you sent us, the flat in Docklands. Expensive pad. Perhaps if I win the lottery, I might buy a place over there with the city boys.’
‘You managed to get a look inside it?’ Jess asked impatiently, wondering if she was speaking to the Metropolitan Police’s equivalent of Phil Morton, chip on shoulder firmly in place.