Hung in the Balance (Simpson & Lowe Detective series Book 1)

by Ormerod, Roger

  ‘Indoor work, Nel,’ I assured him. ‘And in your favourite location.’

  ‘Bed?’

  ‘No, you fool. I know you’re probably half dead with jet-lag…’

  ‘Me? Never!’

  ‘But I want you to spend the evening in the bar, and if necessary spend a lot of money.’

  ‘Put it in expenses?’

  ‘If you like. I know the Treadgolds fancy a good knees up.’

  ‘Knees up? What the hell’s that?’

  ‘An English phrase for getting merry and legless on drink, Nel.’

  ‘Thank you. Knees up. Why don’t the Brits speak proper English?’

  ‘Habit, Nel. Now listen, I want you to get in with that crowd. Not too obvious, but feed ’em drink. If I remember the Tonkins, they’ll lap it up. But keep ’em here, Nel. All of them. I’ll get back as quickly as I can to rescue you.’

  ‘Rescue? I’m gonna drink ’em clear under the table. Here, this you’re doin’ — it’s dangerous, huh?’

  ‘Only if you don’t succeed, then it could get tricky.’

  ‘Better if I’m with ya then. Don’tcha think?’

  ‘Eat your pudding, Nel. It’s getting cold.’

  ‘It’s bloody ice cream.’

  ‘Warm, then.’

  ‘I don’t like this, y’ know.’

  ‘The ice…’

  ‘Not the bloody ice cream,’ he said heavily. ‘You goin’ off into the night. You never know what’s out there.’

  ‘This is England, Nel. Nothing’s out there.’

  And that, perhaps, was the disturbing thought, all that nothingness and silence that was never silent, the movements in the shadows and the creeping rustles. Oh, how I longed for the never-ceasing hustle of New York.

  ‘Huh!’ he said. He scooped up the remains of his melted ice cream. ‘I’ll have my eye on that clock, cherub, an’ if it runs past eleven…’ He nodded emphatically, his huge head bobbing.

  ‘I know, you’ll get a posse out. Please may I stay out late, poppa? It’s the graduation ball.’

  He grinned, waved his spoon, licked it, and said, ‘God’s speed, my little chickadee!’ And laughed so loudly that even Henry looked affronted.

  ‘Now,’ I said, ‘I’ll slip out before you. Give me a few minutes so that we don’t get connected up. See you later. And behave, Nel. Don’t let it go over the top. You know what I mean.’

  I patted him on the top of the head, and left for my room.

  It was all laid out ready for me, my two-piece jogging outfit in dark grey knit, the running shoes with the cleated soles, and the black furry jacket because it was probably going to be a cold job. And my briefcase. Empty.

  Then I took a shower. I wish I could cure myself of this perversity, as I was going somewhere dusty, and I’d need a shower and to wash my hair afterwards. But I had a shower before I changed. I felt better, externally, even if I was feeling worse and worse inside with every second.

  Then, bag on one shoulder, briefcase in the other hand, I sneaked down the stairs as unobtrusively as possible. I didn’t want anybody wondering why a jogger should be carrying shoulder bag and briefcase. Especially at night. Especially, I realized, from a glance through the lobby door, when it was raining again.

  I couldn’t resist a glance into the bar. Nel was already warming up, toasting the Brooklyn Bridge and President Bush. At the moment the clientele were watching him with amusement. I sneaked out the back way into the car park.

  The Peugeot started first touch. A good omen. It slid me out on to the slicked streets, now extraordinarily quiet, but its wipers were sticking. I cursed the wipers in Yankee language, and they began to behave.

  Then suddenly it was a ridiculous adventure that was going to be fun, fun, fun.

  The turning off the Mattock road and up the lane to Hawthorne cottage wasn’t fun at all. The surface was even worse than on my previous visit, and now I was beginning to grow nervous. In effect, I was cut off. It needed only one vehicle in the lane behind me, and my only way out would be on up the lane and past the farm, and hopefully down the old approach road from the farmhouse. Which Oliver Simpson had described as difficult.

  As always happens when you’re nervous, you become tense, and you over-react. My driving deteriorated. No longer was the progress smooth, and when a hare stopped in mid lollop and stared at me in the centre of the track, I nearly had the car climbing a tree. Then the idiotic thing bounded away in the headlight beam, seeming to be trapped by it, and I drove a quarter of a mile with my foot poised to jab at the brake, and abruptly he was gone and the cottage was right ahead.

  It was then that I realized I had to make a decision. I couldn’t leave the car on the extended area outside the cottage, where it was possible to back and turn round. Perhaps Nel would fail, and I didn’t know by what means Anna would be returning. Between that crowd there was sure to be at least one vehicle. Perhaps they would drive her home. Perhaps she had them all staying with her!

  This thought prompted me into driving a little way ahead up the lane, and walking back. Keeping my options open.

  I still had my front door key. That realization prompted the thought that I’d perhaps subconsciously always left open the possibility that I would return, some day, to Graham. Well…so I had. I opened the door and reached for the light switch — and snatched my hand away. No lights!

  Keep your mind on it, you fool, I told myself. No wandering thoughts. I fished out the torch and used it sparingly.

  Fortunately, I knew every inch of that cottage. I was banking on the hope that Anna did not.

  Harvey would have come here for the paperwork that would assist him in clearing Graham’s estate. What he’d found had not, clearly, been the full extent of it. I believed I knew where the rest was hidden, though there was the uneasy thought that if it was, then Graham must have had a good reason for hiding it. I wished to find it, but not necessarily to discover that reason.

  My torch led me through the living room and up the old staircase in the corner. This led me on to a tiny landing, from which opened two rooms, the main, front bedroom, which Graham and I had used, and the rear one, which had always been left empty.

  It was not empty now, I found. There was a small desk in one corner. Yes — this must be where Harvey had found his documents. The desk was new to me. Perhaps Graham had needed it, once he’d begun to sell his work.

  What my interest centred on was the rudimentary ladder in the corner, which led up to a trap door, which wasn’t a door at all but a square lid that rested in the opening. I’d put my head in there, the first day I’d moved in, wondering why it had been necessary to put a permanent ladder there. The loft was boarded and naked, the rafters and the undersides of the pantiles visible, but I supposed it would’ve been possible to sleep the excess children there, if their numbers grew without our modern controls to contain them.

  Up there, I wanted to go. No…needed, not wanted. Suddenly I wanted desperately to be in the warm, lit bar with Nel, with a few drinks inside me.

  I struck a snag. While I’d been dreaming my thoughts I’d climbed the ladder, but with briefcase and torch in one hand, and thus with only one hand for grabbing hold frantically and lifting the hatch, I was stuck. The hatch didn’t even shrug at my efforts with one hand, and I wobbled dangerously.

  I went down again, laid the briefcase on the floor, and perched the torch against it. Then I went up again, got two hands to it, and up it lifted. I eased it sideways out of the way, and went down for torch and briefcase. Simple. All it’d needed was a bit of thought and the forceful suppression of a tremble of panic.

  My joggers were silent on the boarded floor. The spiders had been active up there for around a hundred years, and their festooned webs would have tangled me into hysteria. I don’t mind spiders. I happily lift them from out of baths. But for some reason I cringe at webs. Then I saw, waving the torch light around, that a path had been hewn, possibly with a machete, through the grey, hovering pall of them, a
nd in the direction I wanted to go.

  This was minimally heartening. The torch light was now unsteady. I cursed myself, but I was still shaking when I reached the corner, low under the tiles. The hiding place was there, and the area was comparatively clean.

  I’d found this years before, when I was younger and more adventurous, and with Graham leading me by the hand. Four short planks in the flooring were loose. Deliberately so. Lift them up, and underneath was the space between two of the joists, eight inches deep and two feet by three. Previously, it had been empty. Now it held a black japanned metal box. Kneeling, I reached down and lifted it out. Not without effort, and with the torch lying beside me and helping not at all.

  The catch was unfastened. Inside there was all I’d hoped for. I could do no more than glance at a few of the items, but it was clear that there were bank statements on seven separate accounts, in seven sheaves with rubber bands round them, and cheque book stubs, paying-in books, and an account book. Eureka! I’d struck gold.

  I bundled it all into the briefcase, didn’t trouble to put the box back, and began the return journey. It was then that the light fell on something that had evaded it on the way in, lying directly beside the opening as though it had been lifted inside and then pushed as far as it would go.

  A suitcase. Clean, no dust on it, no cobwebs. I laid down the briefcase and examined the suitcase. Fastened, but not locked. I lifted the lid.

  It was full of Graham’s unframed paintings. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to choke back tears for her. Anna had clearly salvaged what she could. These, no doubt, had been hidden away since my previous visit. She’d said he’d been selling them, so they were worth something. Good luck to her, that was all I could think. There were perhaps thirty.

  I closed the lid gently. Was that all she could expect to rescue from more than two years living with him as his wife? And the cottage. I’d said she could have the cottage, but if it’d been portable she’d probably have thrown that at me, too.

  Damn! I thought. Double damn. And there was I, scrabbling around to discover a moral right to a quarter of a million. It didn’t taste pleasant in my mouth.

  Slowly I lowered myself down the ladder, then repeated the balancing act with the torch in order to replace the lid.

  Feeling, now, considerably less nervous, but miserable when I thought of Anna, I went out on to the little landing. And stopped.

  The lights were on in the living room and they shone up at me, spilling all over my feet. I jerked back, only just holding back a small, ‘Eek!’

  Think, I told myself. The alternatives? Hide in a rear bedroom until the coast was clear, or brazen it out? Yet it was strangely quiet. Anna, if she’d returned so early, wouldn’t have had time to reach the passing-out stage on drink. No sound though. Humming or cursing, you’d expect something like that.

  I ventured an eye around the edge and peered down the stairs. There, clearly visible at the foot of them, was my shoulder bag. It hadn’t been visible when I’d dumped it there. In it was the small pistol. Philip Marlowe wouldn’t have hesitated. He’d have dived down there headfirst, got the gun out, and shot himself free. If he’d had a shoulder bag. But I was only Philipa Lowe, and I was scared rigid. All right then — brazen it out. Sail down there. ‘Ah, there you are, Anna. I’ve been waiting for you.’ With a briefcase in my hand? I had to get rid of that to start with.

  So I crept back into the rear bedroom and had a close look at the window. It was small. It had been rotting itself into its surroundings for a long while. I tried the latch, which came off in my hand, then leaned on the window. Nothing happened. I couldn’t thump it, though I was so furious with it that I felt like attempting a high kick. I tried again. It groaned. I put my weight against it, and with a creak of disintegrating wood it swung open on rusted-solid hinges. I leaned out and shone the torch downwards. There was a very wet mass of shrubbery beneath me. It would do to receive the briefcase, anyway. I dropped it. The noise it made was sufficiently twiggy and slurpy to indicate that I was not going to be able to drop myself after it.

  To prevent a draught from revealing my activities, I shut it as far as it would go. Then I stood back and reconsidered my situation.

  There was nothing to decide. Making the best of it, I walked sturdily down the staircase, and found Oliver Simpson sitting in front of the dying embers of the fire.

  ‘Ah — there you are,’ he said. ‘Is that your torch, Philipa?’

  I stared at it in my hand. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Entering enclosed premises — and after dark — bad enough. Taking anything from them only exacerbates the offence.’

  ‘Exacerbates? Heavens, Oliver, we are going it, aren’t we!’ I was feeling light-headed and hysterical with relief, though his attitude was far from encouraging.

  He sat there, all hunched up, frowning at his feet. ‘It seems to me I ought to put you away in a cell, if only for your own good.’

  Irritated, I said, with a certain amount of precision, ‘I have a key, so I’ve broken nothing getting in.’ Getting the briefcase out, yes, but it was not breaking and entering.

  ‘You have no right…’

  ‘This place is mine. The legal stuff hasn’t gone through, but it’s as good as mine.’

  ‘Someone else is living here, and you might not become its owner. And in the meantime…’

  ‘Well, now you’ve caught me — shall we leave?’

  He heaved himself to his feet heavily. ‘And in the meantime she is not even your tenant.’

  ‘I am here,’ I said distantly, staring at his large left ear, ‘as a representative of my solicitor. He wasn’t able to get all the documents. I came here —’

  ‘Does he know you’ve come here, this solicitor of yours?’

  ‘No, but he would be grateful —’

  ‘Did he ask you to come here?’

  ‘No. Now you mention it, not in so many words. But I could arrange for a retroactive dispensation…’

  ‘You’re not Perry Mason,’ he interrupted. ‘So please cut out this legal twisting and turning. You’re Philip Marlowe, without the mister, and as such I wouldn’t trust you an inch, Philipa. Not an inch.’

  We stared at each other in simmering anger for a moment, then I got a fit of the giggles, and we both burst into laughter. ‘Oh, come on,’ he said, when he’d recovered. ‘Grab your bag and let’s get out of here. Before anybody comes.’

  Taking my arm, he eased me out ahead of him, putting off the lights as we went. He watched me lock up, and from that moment we were at last on the right side of the law.

  ‘Legal aspects apart,’ he said quietly, when we were out in the lane, ‘you came here at this time when you knew Anna was at the hotel, in order to do what you had in mind to do. So you knew she wouldn’t welcome you in the cottage. So you were intruding on someone’s privacy. Look at it how you like, that isn’t the behaviour I’d expect from the daughter of a senior police officer.’

  ‘Yes, Oliver.’

  ‘Think about it.’

  But I didn’t need to do any thinking. He was quite correct, of course, and now it was over I was beginning to feel terrible about it. I wished I’d stayed in Zurich. This business in England kept revealing to me aspects of myself I didn’t wish to face. I was going to finish up hating myself, and when you get to that stage there’s nothing for it but a high bridge over the river or a length of rope.

  Rope! ‘I knew there was something I wanted to tell you,’ I said.

  We were standing beside his car, the overhanging trees dripping solemnly on the roof.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘I know how it could’ve been murder, down that slippy slope with the car.’

  He groaned. ‘You’ve been thinking again! Don’t you ever think those harmless womanly thoughts, dreaming about the ideal man and marriage and babies…or is that all somewhat old-fashioned?’

  ‘You must stop reading that sort of fiction, Oliver. And this isn’t something I thought up myself.
’

  He looked round. It was almost solidly dark there, what with the surrounding trees and the heavy sodden sky. I got the impression he was looking for escape. I could no longer see his expression, but his voice was heavy, and there was no hint of enthusiasm.

  ‘Can’t we discuss this somewhere else?’ he suggested. ‘Back at your hotel, or a pub bar somewhere. Or was it your intention to drag me up to Corry’s Head, just to demonstrate another flight of fancy? You’re determined not to let it rest, aren’t you! I had to show you the watch and the ring before you’d even believe it could be Graham. And now you’ve thought something else up. Philipa, I do believe —’

  ‘Hush. Hush now.’ I placed a hand over where I’d heard his mouth to be. ‘This isn’t my idea. It’s my partner’s.’

  ‘That American clown I saw in the bar?’ He was dismissive. ‘He didn’t strike me as bright enough to get ideas.’

  I laughed. Poor Nel! ‘Don’t underestimate him — and that’s good advice. I told him the set-up, and how you’d proved it couldn’t have been murder, and in two minutes he’d got it. Two minutes! And I’d nearly scrambled my mind to bits over it.’

  I was thinking about that briefcase, now lying behind the cottage, and there was just a chance that my news might send Oliver haring back to his office to get a squad going on finding proof of Nel’s theory. Or wasn’t it as simple as that?

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We go back there, and let him tell me.’

  ‘I can tell you. Now.’

  ‘Must it be now?’

  ‘Why not? It’ll only take a minute or two. Now listen. Are you listening? I can’t see any expression, so I don’t know.’

  ‘I’m listening. And my feet are sinking in the mud and I’m cold. Say it, for pity’s sake.’

  So I said it. How the tow rope could’ve been used to restrain the car…etc.…etc.… But it didn’t send him dashing off. It didn’t seem to do much at all.

  ‘Hmm!’ he said. ‘It’s a possibility.’

  ‘Possibility? When there was a tow rope in the boot of the Volvo? It lived there. Was there one when they got the car out of the quarry? Was it in the inventory?’