Stop Press Murder

by Peter Bartram

  “I believe it’s known as the Lady Chatterley’s Lover syndrome,” I said.

  Henrietta frowned. “In any event, Lady Piddinghoe seemed to be taking a more kindly attitude towards us, at least. Perhaps she’d felt some pangs of guilt about the accident which killed

  Father. But I don’t know.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  “It was only the second day that the builders were working on the roof – they were still erecting the scaffolding. It’s engraved in my mind – the Tuesday of Holy Week. Mama came back from the big house with a frown of her forehead as deep as Devil’s Dyke. She hardly said a word as she prepared my tea – I pressed her to tell me what was wrong. But all she would say is that she’d seen a photograph she wished she hadn’t. In the end, I crept up to my bedroom and tried to read my book. But I cried myself to sleep that night.”

  “And you never found out what it was your mother saw?”

  “She never told me. But the following day I asked Tommy Troughton, who was the son of one of the footmen. He said the goings-on had been the talk of the house among the servants. It turned out that Marie had come to tea a second time. I guess Mama must have known about that but perhaps not until shortly beforehand. But the scandal was that the two – that’s Marie and Lady Piddinghoe – had had a tremendous row in the blue drawing room which ended with Lady Piddinghoe throwing the sugar bowl at Marie who tossed the teapot at the Marchioness.”

  “That’s no way to treat Earl Grey,” I said.

  “By all accounts, it wasn’t a matter for levity, I can assure you. The teapot caught Lady Piddinghoe on the temple and laid her out. Tommy told me that the talk among the servants was that my Mama had been first into the room after the row. According to Tommy, she found Marie looking down at her sister on the floor. After that, Marie stormed from the room, left the house and was never seen again. Apparently, Mama organised for Lady Piddinghoe to be taken up to bed and the room cleared up.”

  “Was Lady Piddinghoe seriously injured?”

  “It seems not. Tommy told me that she regained consciousness within a few moments and that my Mama had stayed with her for nearly an hour. I would have taken this all as an exciting story had I not been worried about the effect it had on Mama. For the rest of the week, she was clearly worried. She wouldn’t talk about it. In fact, she hardly said a word. And then the worst happened.”

  I leant forwarded and topped up Henrietta’s glass. She took a strengthening sip.

  “On Good Friday, we always went to the Stations of the Cross service at the parish church. The whole village would be there – and the family from the big house. But on this Friday, Mama said she would be staying behind because she had a migraine. She had taken some tablets and was going to rest. So I went to the service with the Troughtons. And they brought me back to the cottage. A good deed which haunted them for the rest of their lives.”

  “Because Susan was dead?”

  Henrietta swallowed hard. Tears welled in her eyes. But she was determined not to cry.

  “Yes,” she said. “But it was worse. We found Mama hanging from the pulley arrangement on the scaffolding at the back of the cottage.”

  “She’d committed suicide?”

  “That was the coroner’s verdict.”

  “Which you don’t agree with?”

  Henrietta shrugged. “I know Mama had been worried but I don’t believe she’d have left me alone. No matter how desperate she was, she simply wasn’t that selfish to put herself before me. And, even if she was so desperate that she felt there was no other way, I’m sure she would have left me a note. Something to explain. To say how much she loved me.”

  “And it was a report of the coroner’s inquest you found this morning in the morgue,” I said.

  Henrietta nodded. “It was the shock of finding it after all these years. Of course, when I first came to the Chronicle, I looked in the morgue for anything about Mama’s or Father’s deaths.”

  “But found nothing filed under Houndstooth.”

  “No. The report of the coroner’s inquest had been filed under Piddinghoe. I’d have never done that.”

  “Sloppy work,” I said. “And what have you done with it?”

  Henrietta looked towards the open window. There was a crack as ball hit bat and a cry of “Catch it!”

  She turned back to me. “I’ve refiled it,” she said.

  I sat for a moment trying to digest the story. I looked at Henrietta. She’d been tense when I’d arrived. Now her face had relaxed as if telling the story had been a kind of catharsis.

  I said: “That was a terrible thing to happen to an eleven-year-old child. What happened to you?”

  “For a few months, the Troughtons looked after me. But that plainly couldn’t last for ever. And then in mid-August, one day when I was strolling down a footpath towards the River Ouse, I came across the Marchioness. She’d been out walking by herself. We got to talking and Lady Piddinghoe told me that they – I assume she meant Lord Piddinghoe and herself – had decided to send me to a boarding school. I’d had so many unpleasant surprises in my life I don’t think I reacted much. I still didn’t really care what happened to me. So that September, I started a new life.”

  “Where did Lady Piddinghoe send you?”

  “To a public school in Brighton. St Mary’s Hall.”

  I’d heard about it. It had been set up in the nineteenth century as a seminary for the refined daughters of impoverished clergymen. By the nineteen-thirties, I’d heard, there was a shortage of impoverished clergymen – or it may have been of refined daughters – and they were letting in anyone who could pay the hefty fees.

  “Posh school,” I said.

  “It changed me as a person,” Henrietta said. “It’s why people can’t believe I’m the daughter of servants.”

  “Did you ever ask Venetia whether she had a theory about why your mother committed suicide?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Why was that?”

  “Because I still cannot believe that Mama would have killed herself – no matter how depressed she was.”

  “Depressed people do irrational things,” I said.

  “Not Mama,” Henrietta said.

  “Did you ever ask Lady Piddinghoe why she sent you to St Mary’s Hall?”

  “No. She is not the kind of person you question about her motives.”

  “Did you ever get the chance to ask Marie what her row with Venetia had been about?”

  “No.”

  “And I’m assuming you’d not have asked Venetia because you’d have realised that she’d have dismissed any enquiry without a thought.”

  “Correct.”

  A child – even one as strong-willed at Henrietta – would never have confronted such a formidable figure as the Marchioness of Piddinghoe.

  “So Lady Piddinghoe has some serious questions to answer,” I said. “It’s about time someone asked them.”

  Henrietta looked at me pityingly. “In that case,” she said. “I think you better have another large gin.”

  Chapter 6

  Piddinghoe was a tiny village not so much lost as mislaid in time.

  It occupied a sleepy fold of the Downs, midway between Lewes and Newhaven. A sunken street of whitewashed and flint-napped cottages straggled down a narrow lane that hadn’t changed for two hundred years. It was the kind of place where you half expected to see a yokel sucking a straw and leaning on a five-barred gate. Or a milkmaid labouring home with pails of milk suspended from a yoke around her shoulders.

  I drove my car – a white MGB I’d bought a year ago with a legacy from a generous uncle – into the village and switched off the engine. I needed a moment to think.

  After I’d left Henrietta, I’d rung Piddinghoe Grange from a call box and asked to speak to the Marchioness. A man with the kind of high-pitched upper-class whine I’d always imagined for Lord Snooty in The Beano had told me her ladyship was not receiving callers. I told him I was a journalist
planning to write a story about the sad death of Marie Richmond, née Sybil Clackett and would very much like to speak her twin sister, the former Venetia Clackett. That got the Marchioness on the line. In a voice about as warm as the polar ice-cap she’d told me she could spare me ten minutes before cocktails. Not during, I noted. I suspected I was about to be offered the bum’s rush rather than a martini (whether shaken or stirred).

  The Grange, the stately seat of the Piddinghoes since the seventeenth century, was situated a mile away from the village down a winding track with high hedges towering on either side. The road suddenly emerged into a flat plain with views towards the river Ouse. And there was the Grange, a gothic nightmare of towers, turrets, high chimneys and mullioned windows.

  I pulled up outside two wrought-iron gates, firmly closed, which blocked the entrance to the main driveway to the house. Evidently, the Piddinghoes didn’t believe in rolling out the red carpet for visitors. So I drove on and turned into a cart track at the side of the grounds. I found an entrance into what looked like a stable yard, drove in, parked by a loose box and climbed out of the car.

  On the other side of the yard was the wall of a large barn. A heap of old farm machinery had been piled up against it. I used my profound knowledge of agriculture to identify a thing with blades, a thing with rollers and a thing with prongs. All of it was rusty and some of the bits had fallen off. This was a farm where not a lot of cutting, rolling or pronging went on.

  As I quietly crossed the yard, I heard voices coming from inside the barn.

  “How many shot today, Hardmann?” said a fruity voice.

  “Twenty-two,” said a voice with coarser vowels.

  “Usual form?”

  “All laid out on the trestle and waiting for your inspection, my lord.”

  My lord? So the voice with a mouthful of plums was Lord Piddinghoe.

  I crept closer to the old farm machinery to listen.

  There’s an art to eavesdropping – a skill you acquire almost without trying in journalism. The trick is to get close enough to earwig the conversation while providing yourself with a credible excuse for being there if you’re caught.

  So I stooped down to tie my shoelace. To be strictly accurate, I untied my shoelace first, so that I could start to tie it if anyone came around the corner from the barn and wanted to know what I was doing.

  “All ready for the butcher’s boy, are they?” Piddinghoe said.

  “They’re as good as hanging in old Dundard’s window.”

  “Yes, well the blighter hasn’t paid me for the last lot yet. If he holds out any longer, the rabbits won’t be the only things hanging in his window.”

  Hardmann chuckled.

  “We may need to add debt collecting to your duties, Hardmann.”

  “It will be a pleasure, my lord.”

  “Just as long as my old ducky, the dowager, doesn’t find out about our little pocket-money scheme.”

  “I’ll be discreet when I hand you the payment.”

  “Damned woman was complaining about the amount I spend on brandy again last night. I mean to say, a fellow’s got to have a hobby.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Just because the woman gave birth to me, she thinks she can behave like my mother.”

  “She is your mother, my lord.”

  “Well, that’s no excuse. She ought to get over it.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “I suppose I better take a look at those rabbits. You go and find out what’s happened to the blasted butcher’s boy.”

  There was movement in the barn. I retied my shoelace, stood up and turned the corner just as Piddinghoe and Hardmann stepped out of the door.

  Piddinghoe was a short man with a florid face, hooded eyes, and a walrus moustache which badly needed a trim. He had a beaky nose and the kind of thick lips that do a lot of sneering. He was wearing plus fours and a hacking jacket made out of some thick hairy tweed which looked as though it could just as easily have been turned into a stair carpet. A monocle swung from a thin leather strap around his neck.

  He strode over to a trestle that had been set up outside the barn. Two rows of rabbits were laid out on it. He started to count them.

  Hardmann stood to attention beside the table. He was taller than Piddinghoe with a thin whippy body that moved easily. He had the kind of brown wrinkled face which comes from spending a lot of time out in all weathers. He was wearing grey army fatigues and a brown beret with a military badge I didn’t recognise.

  “What’s this?” Piddinghoe pointed at one of the rabbits. “Hardmann, this blighter’s still twitching. You must have only winged it. See to it at once.”

  “Immediately, my lord.”

  Hardmann picked up a large stone flint from the side of the barn. He crossed to the table and picked out the rabbit. His arm moved like a blur as he crashed the flint onto the bunny’s head.

  He turned to Piddinghoe and grinned. “Ready for the butcher’s window, my lord.”

  Piddinghoe turned. He spotted me and said: “You the butcher’s boy come for the rabbits?”

  “I’m after different game,” I said.

  “What’s the fellow talking about?” Piddinghoe asked Hardmann.

  “No idea, my lord. But he’s not the butcher’s boy. He ain’t wearing an apron. And there’s no blood on his shoes.”

  “I’m here by appointment. To see the Dowager Marchioness.”

  Piddinghoe shot Hardmann a worried glance.

  “Then why didn’t you come in the main gate? Shouldn’t be skulking around my barn like a poacher on the prowl.”

  “The main gates were closed. Probably because the drive to the front of the house is full of potholes.”

  Piddinghoe shrugged. “See what you mean.” He turned to Hardmann. “Take the fellow round to the main entrance. Make sure Pinchbeck deals with him. And get those front gates opened. Can’t have unwelcome visitors weaselling round the back way.”

  Hardmann crossed the yard. “Follow me,” he said.

  I fell in behind. When I looked back, Piddinghoe was counting his rabbits again.

  The Lord Snooty I’d spoken to on the telephone turned out to be the butler Pinchbeck.

  He showed me into a large drawing room.

  “Her ladyship will be with you presently,” he said. “If you would care to be seated.” He made it sound more like a punishment than an invitation.

  I sank into a deep armchair that almost swallowed me whole and had a good look round. The walls were covered with blue wallpaper and hung with portraits. There was a guy in a white tie with a waxed moustache and row of medals. There was a bloke in a naval uniform with a telescope in his hand. There was a biggame hunter type with a rifle over his shoulder.

  But all of these faded into the background compared with the portrait above the fireplace. It showed a young woman in a three-quarter pose. The artist had cleverly caught how her strength of character accentuated her beauty. Her head was held high, her neck slender, her eyes haughty, her smile just a brush-stroke short of condescending. She was dressed in a white ball-gown. Her left hand was resting lightly on her right breast, her fingers slender and straight. And on the ring finger a stunning engagement ring. The ring was a gold hexagon set with diamond clusters in four of the sides and emeralds in the other two. The clusters surrounded a huge diamond at the centre. I stood up, walked over and peered closer at the signature at the bottom of the painting: Orpen. William Orpen had been the portraitist of choice for Edwardian society.

  I was admiring the painting when I heard a door open behind me. I turned and Venetia, Dowager Marchioness of Piddinghoe strode into the room.

  “I see you are studying your quarry, Mr Crampton.”

  Many years had rolled by – and two world wars – since Orpen had caught the haughty young woman showing off her engagement ring. But the woman who now faced me was still beautiful. True, her skin was now criss-crossed with a fine tracery of lines, rather like the tiny cracks on old porcel
ain. But her high cheekbones and strong chin meant she would retain a regal beauty until the day she went to her coffin.

  I said: “I rarely have such elegant quarry in my sights.”

  Venetia nodded to acknowledge the compliment. “I posed three days for Mr Orpen. Sir William, as he later became.”

  “It sounds very trying,” I said.

  She gestured towards the chairs and we sat.

  “Not as trying as unwanted interviews with reporters,” she said.

  I was going to have to watch my step with this sharp-tongued ladyship.

  So I said: “May I convey the Chronicle’s sympathy for the sad loss of your sister?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Spare the crocodile tears. I always do. You’re here to see what dirt you can dig up.”

  “Marie Richmond was a celebrated film star and actress of the early part of this century. It is only natural that we should want to record her passing in our columns.”

  “And you propose to do that by dragging my name in the mud.”

  “There will be no mud and no dragging,” I said. “Not by me. I’d just like to ask a few questions.”

  Venetia sighed. “Very well. But you realise that I haven’t seen my sister for a good many years.”

  I said: “Why was that? After all, you lived not far from one another.”

  “I expect you’ve already dug up the fact from some gossip-monger that we’d fallen out.”

  “Would you care to tell me why?”

  “No, I would not.”

  “When did you last see your sister?”

  “Before the war.”

  “Were you in contact in any other ways – letter or telephone, for instance?”

  “No.”

  “What did you think about her career as an actress?”

  “My views are not for publication?”

  Tight-lipped didn’t even begin to describe her ladyship. I’d had more information from speak-your-weight machines. It was time to see whether I could provoke an indiscretion.