Stop Press Murder

by Peter Bartram

  She slid into the Riley and seconds later the headlights flared, the engine roared, and the car raced away down the road.

  Everything had happened so quickly I hadn’t had time to plan my next move. I certainly couldn’t follow the Riley. By the time, I’d run back to the MGB, Venetia would be three miles down the road. She would lose me in the maze of byroads and farm tracks which criss-crossed this part of Sussex.

  Besides, it looked as though the main business of the evening had been transacted. The package behind the phone box, I assumed, contained the pay-off. Was the blackmailer even now lurking in the woods on the other side of the road waiting for a safe moment to collect? That seemed unlikely. He – or could it be a she? – had clearly pre-arranged for Venetia to come to this spot. He had made the call to the box from a safe house, perhaps miles away. So now he’d be making his stealthy way to pick up his loot.

  The MGB was parked back down the road, round the curve, and out of sight on a farm track. I was reasonably sure, when he finally approached the phone box, the blackmailer would be unaware that Venetia had had company. Perhaps we could nab him in the act. At some point, he’d have to show himself to collect the package. And when he did I had a surprise for him.

  Before I’d left the Chronicle, I’d paid a call on Freddie Barkworth, the paper’s chief photographer. I wanted the loan of a camera. He’d asked me what it was for and I’d told him to snap somebody who didn’t want to be pictured. He’d thought about that for a bit and handed me a Nikon F with flash attachment and automatic rangefinder. Perfect for surveillance photography, he’d said. I’d asked him for some advice on using it.

  “Simple,” said Freddie. “Just press the button – then run like hell if your victim comes after you.”

  I’d laughed.

  Here, in the darkness of Ashdown Forest, it didn’t seem so amusing.

  I hurried back through the forest the way I’d come. I crunched over twigs. Cursed as brambles snagged me. Fanny was pacing around the car when I came out into the clearing made by the forest track.

  “You’ve been an age. I heard a car drive off,” she said.

  “Venetia.”

  “Then why aren’t we following?”

  “She’s made the drop.”

  “And you did nothing?”

  I frowned. “If I’d tried anything, Venetia would have seen me. But I think we have a chance of catching the blackmailer.”

  Now Fanny’s eyes were gleaming with excitement. “How?”

  “I have a plan.”

  I opened the MGB’s boot and retrieved the camera.

  “Will this work?” Fanny asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I think it’s the best chance we have.”

  Fanny and I were hiding in the same spot from which I’d spied on Venetia. We’d worked our way through the forest to avoid being seen from the road.

  I said: “It seems logical that the blackmailer will come out of the forest on the other side of the road. He’ll be able to keep under cover until he reaches the layby. Then he’ll be in the open for only ten yards. At that point we rush in a pincer movement – you to the right, me to the left.”

  Fanny looked doubtful. “He could be violent.”

  I shrugged. “It’s possible but unlikely. Blackmail is the coward’s crime.”

  I glanced around. Part of a broken tree branch was lying on the ground nearby. I picked it up, hefted it in my hand. “Take this. Use it like a cudgel. But not too fiercely. We want him alive to answer questions.”

  Fanny took the branch and looked at it thoughtfully. “I’ll pretend it’s a rounders bat and I’m trying for a quick run.”

  I grinned. “Just don’t put his head into the next county.”

  We nestled down behind the tree like a couple of old tramps settling in for the night.

  “We could be in for a long wait,” I said.

  “Hours or days?” Fanny asked.

  “I think hours. He’s chosen a quiet spot to pick up his booty but, sooner or later, someone will come to use the telephone and discover the package. He’ll want to collect before that happens.”

  I glanced at my watch. It was quarter past eleven.

  “It will help if we hear which direction he comes from,” I whispered. “So let’s be quiet.”

  But for the next hour there were few sounds. The breeze continued to rustle the leaves. At midnight, I heard the distant chime of a church clock sounding the hour. Nearby, an owl hooted. Behind me, I heard a rush of wings and a desperate squawk as a small rodent died. A rabbit flushed from the undergrowth dashed across the road. A car flashed by, its tyres fizzing on the rough road surface.

  Silence descended again.

  We waited.

  Minutes passed.

  My eyes felt heavy with sleep. My head nodded forward.

  Then yards away in the forest a twig snapped.

  I sat upright with every muscle tense.

  “He’s coming,” I whispered.

  Fanny was leaning heavily on the tree. Her eyes were closed. They opened. Quietly, we stood up.

  “I hear nothing,” Fanny said.

  “Towards the south-east. Rustling among the bushes. He’s trying to be quiet, but it’s impossible in undergrowth this thick.”

  Fanny tensed. “Now I hear it.” Her hand closed tightly around the makeshift cudgel.

  There was a loud shriek. A woodland bird disturbed. Then a bush on the fringe of the forest shook as the blackmailer pushed his way closer.

  “Get ready,” I said.

  We crouched like a pair of sprinters preparing to run the hundred yards dash.

  “Now,” I said.

  A cocker spaniel broke through the foliage and ran towards the phone box. It had a long low muscular body. Its flappy ears trailed along the ground. Its body was black but its head was distinctively patterned. A black patch around the right eye, white around the left. For a few seconds it snuffled around the box, its nose twitching at the smells. Then it lifted the package into its mouth as gently as if it were retrieving a dead partridge.

  Fanny and I had stopped – stunned in our tracks. But when the dog snaffled the package we dashed forward. I raised the camera as I ran and pushed the shutter wildly. The flash strobed through the trees. It cast eerie shadows.

  But the sudden light spooked the dog. It turned and raced into the forest.

  Fanny and I came up hard in the middle of the road.

  I looked at Fanny. Her mouth had dropped open. She gaped in disbelief.

  “I wasn’t expecting that,” I said.

  “We’ve been outfoxed,” I said.

  “It was a dog,” Fanny said. She was gawping at the impenetrable blackness of the forest on the other side of the road.

  “It won’t be coming back,” I said.

  “That was cunning,” Fanny said. “Nobody could catch a dog scrabbling through undergrowth that thick.”

  “What I want to know is where the blackmailer got it and how he trained it to pull off that scam.”

  “It couldn’t have been a random dog just exercising in the forest.” Fanny’s tone was halfway between a question and an answer.

  I took her arm and guided her back to the side of the road. “No point in us staying here,” I said. “We’ve seen the action for tonight.”

  We started to walk back to the car.

  “We should have collected the package after Grandmama had left it,” Fanny said. “We could have looked inside and seen what it was.”

  “It was a wad of money. Hard cash. The only thing we don’t know is how much.”

  “And now never will.”

  “We’ve confirmed that there is a blackmail threat,” I said. “But we don’t know whether the threat is against Venetia or your father.”

  “And we don’t know why. And probably never will,” Fanny said. I could hear the despair in her voice.

  We reached the car. I unlocked the doors and we climbed in.

  Fanny turned to me
. Her face was bleak. “What do we do now?”

  I fiddled with the ignition key for a while. I needed some time to think this through. I’d felt confident that we’d unmask the blackmailer and that – one way or another – I’d find a way to write a front-page story. It wouldn’t have pleased the Piddinghoes. It would have made Fanny angrier than a spitting cobra. But my job was to find stories for the paper.

  Now I had nothing to write – apart from an inconclusive caper on a dark night in the heart of the countryside. I also had a demoralised Fanny on my hands. I’d got her into this – and now I had a duty to help her find a way out. Besides, I still believed that somewhere in this convoluted trail there was a link between a package grabbed by a gun-dog, the theft of Milady’s Bath Night and the murder of Fred Snout.

  I reached over and laid a hand gently on Fanny’s shoulder. “I think you have to tell your father and grandmother what you know and ask for an explanation.”

  “And destroy the trust between us?”

  “Haven’t they already damaged that by their actions?”

  Fanny nodded. “I suppose so. In a way.”

  “Besides, how could you live with them now knowing they’re keeping a huge secret from you?”

  “I couldn’t. I’d have to move out.”

  “But they’d want to know why,” I said.

  “I’d say I wanted to get a flat in town with friends.”

  “But they’d know it wasn’t the real reason. Because you wouldn’t be able to hide your true feelings. If I can see the despair in your face, they’ll notice it the instant you walk through the door.”

  “I know leaving home is not perfect, but it’s the only way to preserve some kind of trust.”

  “You can’t build trust on a lie. And that’s what you’d be trying to do. It’d be like building a fortress on a sand dune. Sooner or later, the sand would slip away and everything would collapse.”

  Fanny shook her head. “I simply don’t think I can face them alone. Not after what I’ve seen tonight.”

  “I could come with you.”

  “Papa would never agree to see you.”

  “But your grandmother would. Especially if I tell her that I’ve discovered she’d set you up to spy on me.”

  “She wouldn’t like that.”

  “Perhaps not. But it would give you the perfect excuse for having spied on them. You could say that when I discovered what was happening, I threatened to expose you in the Chronicle unless you helped me. I could say you let slip you’d heard a compromising conversation and I forced you into tonight’s adventure.”

  Fanny gave a mirthless laugh. “She’d throw you out.”

  “I don’t think so, because she’d be worried I’d write a story based on what I already know. She wouldn’t look good – especially the bit about setting her granddaughter to do the dirty work.”

  “I wish I’d never agreed to it in the first place.”

  I gave her shoulder a comforting squeeze. “One must remember one is a scion of the aristocracy,” I said. “Regrets are for the peasants. Where is that stiff upper lip?”

  Fanny managed a thin smile. “Above the quivering lower one,” she said.

  “They both look good to me,” I said. I leant forward and kissed her. For a moment she responded warmly and then we broke apart.

  She smiled again, this time more brightly. “I know you meant that like a caring brother,” she said.

  “Let’s go,” I said. I turned the key in the ignition, put the car into gear and we took off.

  Right now, the last thing I wanted was to be enrolled as an honorary member of the Piddinghoe family.

  Chapter 17

  There was a lone light burning in the porch when I circled the MGB round the carriage drive at Piddinghoe Grange.

  I pulled up next to the Riley Venetia had been driving and looked at Fanny.

  “Are you ready for this?” I asked.

  Her shoulders shivered. She took a deep breath, composed herself and gave a solitary nod.

  We climbed out of the car. I looked at the house. The nooks and crannies of its rambling Jacobean façade cast sinister shadows. A bat detached itself from the ledge of an upper window and flapped languorously into the blackness of the night. It was a setting worthy of a heart-rending melodrama. And perhaps we were going to get one when we went inside.

  I took Fanny’s hand and we walked up to the door. She let us in with her key.

  We stepped into an oak-panelled hallway lit by a small chandelier. The place would have made a funeral parlour seem like the palace of varieties.

  Fanny gave me a worried glance and said: “This way.”

  We walked quickly down a long corridor hung with fading landscapes. There were gaps where some had been removed. Our feet echoed on the bare boards like drum beats. At the end of the corridor a band of light filtered from under a carved oak door.

  “They’ll be in the blue drawing room rather than the one we use for grand occasions,” Fanny said. “It’s where the first Marquess collapsed and died. Ever since, it’s been a place where the family come to talk about their troubles.”

  And handy to have more than one drawing room if visitors unexpectedly call, I thought. So embarrassing to show someone in when there’s a dead body on the carpet and you’ve run out of air freshener.

  Fanny opened the door and we stepped inside.

  It was the same room in which I’d originally met Venetia.

  Nothing much had changed. The Orpen portrait of her still hung over the fireplace. The first Marquess cast a disapproving eye over proceedings from his wall at the far end of the room. There was no sign of a snake in the grass. But, perhaps, that was because I’d only just walked into the room.

  Venetia was over by the drinks table pouring herself a knockout measure of scotch.

  Lord Piddinghoe, grandson of the bloke on the wall, had his back to the fireplace. He nursed a large brandy snifter and puffed on a thick cigar.

  He’d been saying something to Venetia as the door opened but abruptly stopped as Fanny appeared. His expression switched from guilty grin to angry scowl as I walked in behind Fanny. He put down his snifter, removed the cigar from between his lips and said: “Frances, what is this? …” There was a pause while he searched for a word. Decided he couldn’t find anything that matched his contempt for me and continued: “… this, er, newspaperman doing here.”

  Venetia had frozen, her lips parted in shock. Then she recovered, looked at the half-full glass of scotch she’d poured, picked up the bottle and added an extra measure.

  Fanny said: “I’ve got something important I have to talk to you about.”

  Piddinghoe advanced across the room. “Then perhaps your, er, acquaintance would withdraw.”

  “No, Papa, Colin has seen what I’ve seen and he needs to hear this, too.”

  Venetia took a generous gulp of the scotch. “It’s late, darling. You’re missing your beauty sleep. Go to bed and let’s talk about this in the morning. Whatever it is, I’m sure it can wait.”

  “No, Grandmama, it can’t wait.”

  “In that case, I think we all better sit down.” Lord Piddinghoe retreated to a wing chair and put his snifter on a side table. Venetia slumped into a deep armchair. Fanny and I perched uneasily on the edge of a brown-leather Chesterfield.

  “Now, what seems to be the trouble?” Piddinghoe said.

  “Yesterday, Papa, Grandmama asked me to play a deception on Colin. I was to pretend to be a secretary, worm my way into his confidence and find out what he knew about Marie Richmond.”

  Piddinghoe looked baffled.

  Venetia held her head up defiantly.

  Fanny continued: “Anyway, one is obviously not cut out for deception and Colin found out what I was doing. I must say he’s been awfully sweet and hasn’t written anything about it in his newspaper.”

  “Not yet,” I confirmed. I didn’t want the family thinking this was an off-the-record session.

  “But th
at’s not the only reason I’ve asked for Colin’s help,” Fanny said. “I know you’ve both been worried about something for the last few days.”

  Piddinghoe and Venetia exchanged anxious glances. Venetia opened her mouth to speak.

  “No, don’t deny it,” Fanny said. “I’ve seen it in your faces. Heard it in your voices. Even watched it in the way you walk with sagging shoulders and drooping heads. Do you think you can live years with people you love and not recognise every shift in their mood – joy, sadness? And fear?”

  “You’re talking rot, girl. And not for the first time.” Piddinghoe’s face disappeared behind smoke from his cigar.

  “Don’t speak to me like that, Daddy. I’m not a Roedean girl in pigtails any longer. And I know when something’s troubling the people I love most.”

  Piddinghoe waved an apologetic hand. “I’m sorry. Speak your piece – and be done with it.”

  Fanny stood up, crossed to the fireplace and warmed her hands. She turned to face Piddinghoe and Venetia.

  “Well, it’s like this,” she said. “I knew that something was going to happen this evening. I’d overheard a conversation between you both – something about ‘making a delivery’. No, don’t bother to deny it. It’s true and that’s all that matters.

  “I’ve been worried sick about what’s going on – and so when Colin penetrated my mask as an amateur spy, I asked him to help. The fact is, Grandmama, we followed you this evening.”

  Venetia tensed. “Deceitful girl. How could you?”

  “How could you recruit me to be your unwilling spy? And without telling me the whole truth.”

  Piddinghoe said: “So you followed Venetia on her evening drive. Perhaps there’s no harm in that.”

  Fanny turned on her father. “But it wasn’t just an evening drive, was it, Daddy?”

  He looked away guiltily.

  “As I thought, you knew all about it.” Fanny was getting into her stride. “Colin and I watched as Grandmama left a package behind a telephone box in Ashdown Forest and saw it collected.”

  Venetia’s hand flew to her mouth. “My God!”

  “Not the deity,” I said. “Unless He’s turned himself into a cocker spaniel.”