Bones of the Buried

by David Roberts

  ‘And miss all the excitement!’ she exclaimed indignantly. ‘I’m feeling better every day. The doctor says I can go home the day after tomorrow so long as I promise to stay in bed and rest.’

  A pleasant police captain, who spoke very good English, came to talk to her about what she remembered of the attack but she could tell him no more than what she had told Edward: that a tall dark figure had loomed over her just as she was opening her bedroom door.

  The policeman confirmed what Edward had already established for himself – that there was no sign of a forced entry to the apartment but that meant little. The simple lock to the front door could have been picked by a child of ten. Hester and Verity had nothing worth stealing except for Hester’s camera and a little money, so they had never worried much about security. If you weren’t a political activist, Madrid was one of the safest cities in Europe. Rape was almost unheard of and murder was rare and usually the result of a husband finding his wife in bed with a lover. It was clear to Edward that the Spanish police, though curious as to why Verity had been attacked, had no idea how to go about investigating it.

  By the middle of May Edward confessed to Verity that he was now reasonably sure who the murderer was. He thought she had been attacked because the murderer was frightened she knew, or almost knew, his or her identity and was enraged to see her wearing the ring which had some special significance.

  ‘The list you drew up – where everyone was at the time of the three deaths – was useful. I’m not quite sure about motive yet but I am pretty sure the answer lies back in England, at Eton in fact.’

  ‘At Eton?’ Verity asked in surprise. ‘But . . . but none of our suspects went to Eton.’

  ‘No,’ Edward agreed cheerfully, ‘but nevertheless that’s where all this terrible violence has its source. So you see, V, I need to go back.’ He saw her face fall. ‘Not for long – probably just a couple of weeks – but I want to get this whole horrible business cleared up.’

  ‘But . . . who do you . . .’

  ‘I’m almost certain you have nothing to fear,’ he carried on, disregarding her half-asked question. ‘The attack on you has put you out of action, so the murderer won’t feel he has anything to fear from you, but you must be very careful. As you know, I’ve had the locks on your doors changed and strengthened but you must discourage visitors, and what’s more, you must pretend to be iller than you really are.’

  ‘That won’t be difficult!’

  ‘It would be too suspicious to lock you away in isolation but you need to keep the lowest of low profiles for as long as I’m away. Sorry to be so damn mysterious but . . .’

  ‘But what about you, Edward?’ Verity said, grasping his hand. ‘Are you safe?’

  ‘I can look after myself,’ he said with more confidence than he actually felt. ‘You see, I know who to look out for.’

  ‘But you won’t tell me?’

  ‘Not for the moment. I think it’s safer you don’t know. That way, you can’t give anything away by look or word which might rouse our man – or woman – to do something silly.’

  ‘You think it could be a woman?’

  ‘I have to ask just a few more questions before I answer that.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I need to ask Hester about being a Jew in Denver for one thing.’

  ‘Hester! But . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry, V. You know I wouldn’t leave you alone with someone I suspected of being a murderer.’

  ‘No . . . I know Hester would never want to hurt me but, please Edward, hurry back.’

  Edward asked his questions of Maurice, Tom Sutton and Hester who told him what he wanted to know with a laugh and a shrug of her shoulders. She drove him to the airport in the morning. Harry Bragg was waiting for him or rather he was munching his way through a substantial cooked breakfast. He had made quite a few friends at the airport owing to the frequency of his visits, most particularly Ferdinando Diego – Hester’s friend Ferdy – who was in charge of passport control and customs. It was a powerful position and he owed it to having a cousin in the government. Ferdy ought to have become rich on bribes and no doubt his cousin had counted on it but, in fact, he was too honourable – or, as he said, too lazy, to take advantage of the opportunities he had for ‘doing favours’.

  Shortly after take-off, Harry started complaining of stomach cramps. ‘Sorry, old man,’ he shouted over the engine noise. ‘Ferdy insisted on my having the mushrooms even though I said they tasted funny. They must have been poisonous or something. I’m a damn fool. I say, I think I’m going to have to find a field to land in.’

  Anxiously, Edward stared out of the window, looking for some patch of grass flat enough and long enough for the Rapide to land in safety, but they were passing over a rocky landscape without even a road or track worth the name. The aeroplane began to shake and judder as Harry was convulsed by agonising pains. Edward had never flown a Rapide but it was becoming increasingly obvious that he was going to have to now. With startling speed, Harry’s condition worsened until he was groaning pitifully. In a few moments, Edward decided, he would be unconscious. He had no time to consider whether he was competent to fly the machine. It was much more advanced than the ‘knitting machines’, as Harry had called them, which they had flown in Africa. The Rapide was a modern machine capable of carrying six passengers and flying long distances at speed.

  With the utmost difficulty, he climbed over the seats and hauled at the pilot, who was now moaning and semi-conscious. As Edward discovered, unstrapping the body of a man from a cramped seat and tipping him to one side in the confined space of the cockpit while the aeroplane bucked like a bronco, was almost impossible. However, knowing his life depended on it, he drew on reserves of strength he had no idea he possessed and finally, the sweat running off him as if someone had left a tap running, he obtained sufficient leverage to push Harry away from the stick. He made a grab at it, almost turning the machine over on its back. Harry’s body was half in and half out of the pilot’s seat and, in the end, Edward could do no more than crouch in the lap of the unconscious man. The Rapide was making every effort to spin out of control, diving and swooping across the sky, sometimes so high his ears popped and sometimes so low that the taller peaks threatened to end its journey in a fiery ball. For five long minutes, which Edward never forgot, he struggled with the plane as if it were a living thing and, when he finally gained control, he was vomiting, his stomach protesting vigorously at being tossed about like a pancake. The sweat salted his eyes so that he could hardly see and he had an ache in his back which he thought must mean he had pulled a disc.

  He checked the fuel gauge and heaved a sigh of relief. There was plenty of fuel. He tried to find a map or chart and eventually discovered what he wanted stuck underneath Harry’s left foot. With some difficulty, he prised it away. He knew he was only about twenty minutes from Barajas airport but, in the cavorting about the heavens, he had quite lost his sense of direction. He climbed as high as he could but saw nothing – no landmark, no river or recognisable mountain. Finally, he took hold of himself and, using chart and compass, worked out where he must be. With a heartfelt prayer, he turned the Rapide in what he believed to be the direction of the airport. After fifteen minutes of flying, it was with enormous relief that he recognised the outskirts of Madrid and then, shining like a beacon in the sun, the control tower.

  When he was over the airport, he flew in front of the tower and waved at the astonished Ferdy, who recognised him in the cockpit. It crossed his mind that either Ferdy had not eaten the mushrooms he had pressed on his guest, or Harry’s poisoning was caused by something quite different. He had no way of alerting Ferdy, or anyone else, that he had no idea how to land the Rapide but they seemed to understand his predicament all the same. When he had made another circuit of the airport, he could see several figures running around on the tarmac waving their hands and signalling wildly. Edward grinned. Presumably they knew what they wanted him to do, but he hadn’t the fogg
iest idea. However, the landing strip was clear so, taking a deep breath, he reduced speed and height.

  It was a close-run thing. He landed much too fast and hard, careering well beyond the end of the runway and jerking to a halt on the grass a few yards from some bewildered-looking sheep. With his last remaining strength, he pushed open the door and almost fell on to the blessed earth – blessed even though he had chosen to fall on a pile of sheep droppings. He was soon surrounded by a dozen or more men who raised him to his feet and lifted out the unconscious Bragg, exclaiming the whole time in a mixture of English and Spanish.

  ‘Is there a doctor?’ he asked, when he could make himself heard. His voice sounded unnaturally hoarse and his throat felt as dry as the landscape he had been flying over. ‘He has eaten something . . . poisonous.’

  There was no doctor but one of the men in uniform seemed to have some medical training. He tried to make Harry vomit and succeeded in rousing him enough to make him throw up some of his breakfast. Then they carried him to a car and drove off at high speed.

  ‘But you must go back to the city and rest,’ Ferdy was saying. Edward lay exhausted in Ferdy’s armchair in the control tower, sipping gratefully at black coffee laced with brandy.

  ‘I’ve got to get to London. I think I’ve got the hang of the Rapide now,’ he said, trying to sound confident.

  Ferdy was horrified. ‘No, no, meelor, I forbid it. You cannot fly. It is not possible.’

  ‘I don’t see why not. There’s nothing wrong with the machine as far as I can see. My landing was a bit rough, I admit, but practice makes perfect.’

  Edward had considered trying to find out how Harry had been poisoned but really, what was the point? He didn’t believe Ferdy was involved. The latter had taken it for granted that the poisoning had been accidental and it would be unforgivably mean-spirited to rub his nose in the reality. Someone in the airport kitchen had been suborned into eliminating Lord Edward Corinth and, if it meant killing someone else as well, it wasn’t going to hold him – or her – back. It rather pleased Edward to feel that he was so close to the truth he had got his murderer worried enough to try and bump him off. He never doubted for one moment that the same hand had also been responsible for the attack on Verity and the murder of Godfrey Tilney. And yet, paradoxically, he still believed he would discover what lay behind the murders in England rather than in Spain.

  ‘We shall send to Madrid for another pilot.’

  ‘No, Ferdy, old lad, no time for that. Just do us a favour and top up the tank and I’ll be away. I think I’ve got navigation and landing licked but I don’t want to do either in the dark.’

  He wanted to be off before his enemy could try anything else to stop him getting to England.

  ‘The English! You are mad,’ Ferdy responded, shrugging his shoulders to indicate admiration mixed with exasperation. His surrender was absolute and he went over the charts with Edward, pointing out the difficulties he might face. The Rapide was refuelled and Ferdy watched with apprehension as Edward taxied it across the grass to the beginning of the runway. He had to close his eyes as the aeroplane roared down the tarmac and then sighed with relief as it climbed into the sky and disappeared towards France. He decided to telephone his friend the Baroness. She would want to know what had happened. Edward had absolutely forbidden him to tell Verity how close he had come to ending his life over the ochre plains of Léon but he had said nothing about not communicating with Hester Lengstrum.

  23

  At Croydon, he was met by Fenton in the Lagonda and was driven not to London but to Mersham Castle.

  ‘A good flight, my lord?’ Fenton inquired, as he accelerated through Croydon.

  ‘Not bad, thank you, Fenton. Harry Bragg got taken ill so I flew the bird myself. Easy to master, I’m glad to say. Got lost just the once and almost had to land in the Champs Elysées but saw the Eiffel Tower . . . in time, thank goodness.’

  ‘Indeed, my lord!’

  ‘Just my little joke, Fenton.’

  He had, in truth, had some extremely anxious moments over Paris and some minutes later a passing seagull might have heard him abusing the Almighty for the width of the English Channel as he watched his fuel gauge drop perilously close to the red. He considered that, for an idle aristocrat with more money than sense, he seemed to be busier than many of his friends who took the nine-five from Sevenoaks each morning and spent the day behind an office desk.

  ‘Ned, you look tired out. Was the flight exhausting?’

  ‘Not particularly, Connie. Just getting old.’

  ‘How is Verity?’

  ‘On the mend, but it was a near thing. The blow on her head was meant to kill.’

  ‘How dreadful! You must be so worried. I have written to her.’

  ‘Yes, that was good of you, Connie.’

  ‘Come and have tea in the gun room. Gerald is itching to hear what you’ve been up to.’

  ‘Gerald’s up and about then? That’s very good news.’

  ‘Yes, he’s almost his old self – complaining about the weather, the food, and blaming it all on the government.’

  Edward laughed. ‘And Elizabeth? She’s gone back to the hospital?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know that she has. She was supposed to. She’s been wanting to leave for some time but we’ve pressed her to stay on. Finally, at the end of last week, I had to agree that Gerald was well enough to manage without a hospital nurse. The trouble is, of course, she’s become essential to him – to us both. She’s been a true companion and I really don’t know what I’m going to do without her. Gerald is already beginning to play up. That’s one reason why I’m so pleased you’re here. He is better of course – much better – but he’s still not quite right. He gets very tired and he’s irritable. He likes to be entertained.’

  ‘Sounds to me like he’s got very selfish,’ said Edward bluntly.

  ‘Oh well, I’d just say he’s got used to being the centre of attention and being waited on hand and foot.’

  ‘Looks to me as if he needs to be shaken up a bit.’

  ‘Part of the problem is that he feels so useless. He reads The Times and gets depressed by the news and feels he can’t do anything about it. You know how badly it hit him when he had to give up those dinners.’

  The year before, the Duke had planned a series of dinners at which influential people from all sides of the political spectrum could meet important Germans informally to exchange views and seek ways of cementing Anglo-German relations. Unfortunately, the poisoning of General Craig at one of these occasions had made it impossible for them to continue, even though the murder was in no way connected with politics.

  ‘You do look tired, Ned. Can’t you take a holiday?’

  ‘I can’t take a holiday because I’m not one of the world’s workers, am I?’ he answered cheerfully. ‘As Verity’s always telling me, I’m a fully paid-up member of the idle rich.’

  ‘But you must rest from all this travelling. What are you doing anyway? I thought David Griffiths-Jones was no longer in prison.’

  ‘No, but I have still to find out who killed Stephen Thayer and who knocked Verity on the head. The same person perhaps – but then again, perhaps not.’

  ‘But can’t you leave that to the police, Ned? You’re not . . . you’re not Sherlock Holmes.’

  ‘Spanish police, bless them, have other things to worry about. As for the egregious Chief Inspector – I have absolutely no faith in him whatsoever. Charles wants to know the truth about his father’s murder and I gave him my word that I would find out. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound simple.’

  ‘But tell me more about Elizabeth. I don’t quite understand. Why hasn’t she gone back to the hospital now Gerald doesn’t need her?’

  ‘I’m not sure she’s ever going back. I’m rather worried, actually. I wondered if you could go over and see her and find out what the problem is. I felt she and I could talk about anything but, after you left for Madrid, she
. . . changed. She couldn’t have been sweeter. I don’t mean her manner to me changed except that she wouldn’t confide in me. Did you upset her in some way before you went? I may be wrong but I think it’s to do with you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Did you say something to upset her?’

  Connie had had hopes of Elizabeth Bury but something had happened which had made her fight shy of Mersham. She guessed it was to do with her brother-in-law because she had first talked about leaving soon after she had returned from London when she had had dinner with him. It was all most unfortunate: Gerald had behaved like a spoiled child when she insisted on leaving and Connie had had moments when she could cheerfully have strangled them both.

  ‘I thought you might like to invite her to the Fourth of June. Gerald feels he’s well enough to go and, to be honest, I think either he or I will burst a blood vessel if he doesn’t get out of here soon. Anyway, I know Frank is counting on you being there.’

  She wondered if she was being too direct. Would her brother-in-law feel he was being manipulated and shy away from taking up with Elizabeth again? To her relief, Edward said, ‘Good idea. She hasn’t got a telephone, has she? I’ll walk over to Lower Mersham and surprise her.’ Elizabeth had a cottage in the village, which was hardly more than a hamlet, about three miles away. ‘Of course, she may not be there.’

  ‘As far as I know, she is. I had a rather cross call from the matron at the hospital almost accusing me of kidnapping her but I explained it was nothing to do with us . . . I am right, aren’t I?’ she added, looking at her brother-in-law questioningly.