Ann Granger

by That Way Murder Lies

  ‘There isn’t much, is there?’ Toby said morosely. ‘Poor old Jerry will be waiting, hoping we’ve turned up something interesting. But we didn’t even manage to find Mrs Travis. Luckily we did find Barnes-Wakefield and I’ve definitely got my eye on him!’

  ‘But we don’t tell Jeremy that!’ Meredith said firmly. ‘Not until we’ve spoken to Alan. We don’t know what Jeremy might do. Alison’s been afraid he’ll do something irrational. I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to tell Jeremy we drew a blank.’

  There was normally little traffic on this lonely road but now, suddenly, a police car swept past them, driving in the opposite direction, towards Bamford.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Toby asked incredulously. ‘Harry Stebbings was in that car.’

  But Meredith was overtaking a cyclist who, head bent, helmeted and goggled, was pumping his legs up and down again the increasing incline. She hadn’t seen the passenger in the police car. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked, when she had negotiated the obstacle.

  ‘Of course I’m sure.You can’t mistake Stebbings. What’s going on? Could they have arrested old Harry?’

  ‘If they have, Jeremy will know,’ Meredith told him, still not really believing it.

  They reached the gates of Overvale House and turned in. As they drew up before the front porch in a swirl of gravel chips, Jeremy Jenner came hurrying out to greet them. There was an expression almost of panic on his face and when he saw who had arrived he looked momentarily bewildered and then relieved.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Toby asked, scrambling from the passenger seat. ‘We’ve just seen Stebbings in a police car, heading for Bamford. Or I saw him, Meredith didn’t. It was definitely Harry.’

  Jenner put a hand to his forehead. ‘Yes, it was Harry.You won’t know it, but there’s been another death.’

  They stared at him in horror.

  Toby whispered, ‘Who? Not – not Alison?’

  ‘Alison’s safe. No, not her, thank God.’ Jenner shook his head as if to clear it of a haze. ‘One oughtn’t to be grateful for being spared if it means someone else has suffered. But of course I am. The death is of Harry’s boy, Darren. He’d gone missing and this morning he turned up dead.’ Jenner waved a hand in the general direction of the countryside. ‘Mike Fossett found him. It’s a hell of a business. It just keeps getting worse. Come in, come in …’ He gestured towards the door.

  ‘I won’t, if you don’t mind,’ Meredith said hastily ‘I need to go home and unpack. I’ll call back later, if I may.’

  The news had shocked her deeply. Stebbings wasn’t a likeable man and his actions had been consistently obstructive, but how had this happened? How did Darren, of all people, fit into the scheme of things? She had a mental image of the youth as he’d arrived at the lakeside where they’d surrounded Fiona’s lifeless corpse. Pale, scrawny, acne-plagued, wearing well-worn jeans and a much-washed T-shirt, he’d been scared out of his wits at the sight of the body. Above all, he hadn’t appeared to be any threat or even likely ever to become one. He was just a youngster going through that awkward age between boyhood and adulthood when your hormones are treacherous and the world generally seems to be against you. It’s an age of self-obsession. That Darren could play any part in any of this just seemed so unlikely as to be unbelievable.

  She wanted to get back home and hear what Alan had to say, although she might not be able to contact him until the evening. With this new death to add to present inquiries, he’d be busy all day.

  Toby was giving her a reproachful look which said she was abandoning him in his hour of need. She steeled her heart against it. Toby could tell Jeremy about the Cornish visit without her help. To be frank, their journey west now took on the appearance of supreme self-indulgence. What had they hoped to achieve, she and Toby, on their amateur fishing trip? Here, at Overvale, was where the mystery lay and the answer to it. Toby was looking glum. But he was going to have to cope on his own. Echoing Alan’s opinion on the subject, she found herself thinking: Toby doesn’t need me. He’s perfectly capable.

  The same could hardly be said of Jeremy Jenner. The man looked ill, his face gaunt and grey. He was already a shadow of the confident man she’d met for the first time only recently. Had the general strain done this, or was it Darren’s death coming so soon after Fiona’s? Two bodies found on his land. That wasn’t something Jenner’s long years in the business world had equipped him to cope with.

  Meredith’s eye caught a movement at an upstairs window and glimpsed a face before the person up there stepped back out of sight. Chantal was still present. That couldn’t be helpful. But it’s not my problem, Meredith told herself. I’m not a member of this family. If Jeremy is breaking down, it’s for Toby and Alison to take care of him.

  She drove out of the gates and turned on to the rough road which led to the main road. It took her past Stebbings’ cottage and she slowed to look at it. It appeared deserted, despite the fact that washing flapped on the clothes line. She remembered the woman they had seen pinning it up on their first visit to Overvale. Mrs Stebbings, the bereaved mother, where was she? What awful effect must this have had on her? The person who has done these things, Meredith thought, is very wicked. Yet this stretch of countryside was so beautiful and appeared so peaceful it seemed that evil deeds must be an anachronism, some sort of historical mistake. That, though, failed to take account of human nature which can also appear serene and at peace but, at the same time, harbour violent emotions.

  She had reached the main road and pressed her foot on the accelerator. Almost at once, however, she was forced to brake. There was an obstruction in the road ahead. A bicycle lay on its side, wheels spinning. There was no sign of the rider. Meredith drew up and got out.

  As she neared the spot she could hear muffled groans coming from the roadside ditch. She hurried towards the sound and peered down into the tangle of hedgerow plants. The cyclist was sprawled in the bottom among the dank nettle roots and rotting debris. With his helmet and goggles he looked like some sort of spaceman who’d made an unscheduled earth landing. Seeing a concerned face looking down at him, he gasped, ‘Give us a hand!’ and reached up as he spoke.

  His voice was familiar. Meredith scrambled into the ditch and began to assist him to rise. He scrambled out and got unsteadily to his feet. As she watched he unbuckled the helmet and took off the goggles. It was Ted Pritchard.

  ‘Ted?’ exclaimed Meredith in astonishment. ‘What are you doing out here? What happened?’

  ‘Bloody bird!’ muttered Ted. ‘I was riding along, enjoying a bit of fresh air, and it came swooping down right in front of me. Sparrow-hawk, I reckon. It saw something in that ditch and just dived for it like they do. It skimmed my nose, I felt its wings.’

  He was dusting himself down as he spoke. His solid muscular frame was clad in cycling shorts and figure-hugging Lycra jersey but didn’t appear to have suffered any grazes or cuts despite lack of any protection. Landing in the ditch had at least been a soft landing. He picked up his bicycle and began to examine it anxiously for damage.

  ‘What are you doing out here at this time of day?’ Meredith asked him again. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’

  ‘It’s my lunch hour, isn’t it?’ Ted defended himself. ‘I don’t go cycling every lunch hour, mind. But sometimes, when it’s a nice day like today, I go home, get the bike out and just ride round for a bit. Otherwise I don’t get fresh air at all, you know. Steve and me, we work round the clock at the business. You’ve got to, when you’re working for yourself. There’s no one else to do it. I spend the best part of my day breathing in sawdust, stuck inside the workshop.’ He gave the bicycle an experimental push back and forth. ‘Something’s buggered,’ he observed gloomily.

  ‘Look, where do you live?’ Meredith asked. ‘We can put the bike in the boot of my car, tie it in somehow, and I’ll give you a lift home with it.’

  He brightened. ‘Thanks, that’s nice of you. I appreciate that.’

  To get the
bicycle in the boot they had first to take out Meredith’s suitcase and put it on the back seat. They then struggled to wedge the bicycle in the boot and secure it with the tow-rope Meredith kept in there.

  ‘Expensive bike, this!’ gasped Ted as they finished the job. ‘I’ll have to strip it down completely.’

  ‘Where do you live?’ she asked, when they were both in the front of the car.

  She expected him to give an address in Bamford, but instead he said, ‘I’ll show you. Easier that way. I’ve got this place out in the country here. I bought it cheap, pretty well a ruin, and I’m fixing it up. Go on down here about a mile and turn left.’

  Turning left took them on to a dark, tree-shadowed track worse than that which led to Overvale. Nobody but himself lived down here, said Ted, which Meredith could well believe as they made bumpy progress along it. The cottage, when they reached it, was a single-storey stone building, one end of which had crumbled into a heap of blocks. Trees and undergrowth had encroached on the premises until leafy fingers scraped at the walls. It would have been easy to assume no one lived here if one end hadn’t been restored after a fashion, curtains at the window and the door freshly painted. Rusticity’s white van was parked at the cottage’s side.

  She helped Ted unload his bicycle from the boot. He pushed it to the side of the road and propped it against an untrimmed hedge. With his back to her, rummaging in the saddlebag, he called cheerily, ‘Come on in and a have a cup of tea or something!’

  ‘Thanks, but I’ve only just got home after a couple of days away. I need to unpack. I won’t, if you don’t mind.’ She moved back to the car.

  But Ted had turned towards her and advanced a few steps, his round, imp’s face still wearing a cheery smile. Automatically Meredith paused and waited.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to come in. I insist.’

  That was when she saw the sharpened screwdriver in his hand.

  The inside of the cottage was uninspiring. Ted’s work of restoration hadn’t got beyond the exterior walls and roof. The room they were in served both as living room and kitchen. There was a rusting wood-burning iron range in the hearth, long disused. A simple gas cooker fed by a butane gas bottle provided Ted’s needs. Nor did he appear to have electricity. There was a paraffin lamp on the rickety pine table. The impression was not so much that he lived here as that he camped out. He had, however, made a partial effort to brighten the place up with pictures. They were a mix of sketches and watercolours, carefully framed in pine, and dotted haphazardly about the walls.

  ‘I haven’t got round to doing anything much in here,’ said Ted, still affable and smiling. ‘I want to get the outside of the place fixed up first. So if it’s not quite Homes and Gardens, you’ll have to excuse it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Meredith, not knowing quite what else to say. He was still holding the screwdriver pointing towards her. She didn’t want to look at it but her eye was drawn to its dull gleam and wickedly sharpened tip. She asked carefully, ‘What’s all this about, Ted?’

  ‘Oh, you know what it’s all about, I think,’ he returned. ‘Because you’re the bright sort and you hang around with a top-notch copper. A working man like me is good with his hands. Not that I haven’t got quite a good brainbox of my own. But I’ve always said, if you want really smart, look for a woman. Women can’t knock a nail in straight or fix a bit of electrical wiring, but give them a problem to chew on and they’ve got it solved in no time at all. Sit down, why don’t you? That chair there is the best.’ The screwdriver wavered as it was used to point at the piece of furniture.

  Meredith obediently sank down into a worn armchair. It wasn’t very comfortable. She could feel the springs beneath her. But that was the least of her worries. Ted pulled up a wooden chair and sat down before her. The sharpened screwdriver was steady again in his hand.

  ‘I saw it was you when you overtook me in your car. You had that fellow with you, the one who’s been staying at Overvale, and I reckoned you must be headed there. So, when I heard a car coming towards me, I thought I might be in luck, you’d just dropped him off and you were coming back. There’s never much traffic on that stretch. I put the bike on the road and jumped in the ditch. You’ve been on a little trip with your gentleman friend, have you?’ he went on in his friendly way. ‘Been down to Cornwall, I hear.’

  ‘Hear from whom?’ snapped Meredith.‘I’ve only just got back.’

  ‘George Melhuish, he gave me a call. He said you and the other chap were down there poking around. Staying in the old Kemp cottage and asking about Miss Kemp. George hadn’t told you anything but he knew you were still asking other people. I wasn’t worried about the other chap but I was worried about you. You’re the bright one and you’ve got that copper boyfriend. You and he might go talking over what you’d heard in Cornwall. That’s why I threw the bike in the road to stop you. I just don’t want you and that copper putting your heads together.’

  Meredith said nothing. She was thinking furiously. Ted was watching her in an amused way, as if waiting for her to come up with the answer. Seeking inspiration, Meredith stared at the collection of pictures on the walls. It struck her that there was something familiar about them and she began to take a closer look, all the while aware of Ted’s amused yet chilling gaze. Yes, that was surely the wide sweep of the beach at Polzeath and that was Stepper Point across the estuary. Those were the ruins of Arthur’s castle at Tintagel. That was the tiny habour at Padstow crammed with boats of all kinds. It all began to click into place.

  ‘Ted,’ she said at last, slowly. ‘That’s the abbreviation for Edward. But some people might use it as an abbreviation for Edmund, a less popular name. Was Pritchard your stepfather’s name?’

  He nodded delightedly. ‘That’s it! I knew you’d work it out. My mother married old Dougie Pritchard and we left Cornwall, went off to live in Dorset first of all, then Kent, and eventually we finished up living in Lewisham, outskirts of London.’

  ‘You lost your Cornish accent along the way,’ Meredith observed. ‘But you kept in touch with George Melhuish?’

  ‘Oh, he was my best mate at school, was George, pretty well the only friend I had.Yes, we’ve kept in touch all these years, just the odd letter, you know, Christmas card, that sort of thing. George has always said, I ought to go back home, as he calls it, and go into business with him in the garage line. But my stepfather, he was a carpenter, and I followed him into that trade.’

  ‘Where did you meet Steve Poole?’ Meredith had no idea what she was going to do about this situation but it made sense to keep him talking. At the moment he was prepared to chat. He wanted to find out what she knew. After that he’d kill her. He’d killed Fiona and Darren and after a while, she supposed, it became almost an automatic reaction to a problem. There was no doubt she wasn’t to be allowed to walk out of here alive.

  ‘Prison,’ said Ted casually. ‘Well, not proper prison, it was a young offenders’ institution. They were very keen on teaching you a trade there and I was already by way of being a carpenter, seeing as I’d been working with my stepdad. So I enrolled on the course to get a certificate to my name. Steve, he was on the same course. Like me, he was in the institution because of a spot of burglary. We decided, when we got out, we’d go into business.’

  ‘But Ted!’ Meredith couldn’t help exclaiming. ‘What you’re telling me is a success story. Both you and Steve got into some sort of trouble as boys, but you got out of it, started a proper legitimate business. Why would you do anything to endanger that?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ted, pointing the glittering tip of the screwdriver at her. ‘I’m not going to let you endanger it, that’s for sure.’

  For one awful moment she believed he was going to lunge at her with it, there and then, and to distract him she blurted, ‘You always had a bike, didn’t you? Eileen Hammond said you had a bike.’

  Ted looked surprised and then gave her a nod of approval. ‘So you found Miss Hammond, did you? I’m surprised she’s sti
ll around. She must be over eighty.Yes, I had a bike, rusty old thing. The other kids laughed themselves sick at me over it. But when Dougie married my mum, he bought me a proper new bike. He wanted to get me on his side, see? He didn’t want me making any trouble because he could see me and my mum, we were close. He was an oldish chap already, Dougie, and he’d married my mum because he wanted someone to cook and clean for him. She knew that. She reckoned it was a fair enough deal.’

  ‘Is your mother still alive?’

  This was an unwise question. Ted’s cheery expression faded and was replaced by a scowl. Now Meredith could see the sullen child described by Alison Jenner. ‘She’s alive. We’ll leave her out of this.’

  ‘You wrote those letters to Alison,’ Meredith said.

  Ted looked aggrieved. ‘I printed them out on our computer in the office back at Rusticity. But I didn’t make up the words. She told me what to say.’

  Meredith’s spine tingled. ‘Fiona Jenner?’

  He nodded. ‘See, I recognized Miss Harris straight away when she came to the workshop about the garden table and chairs. She was Mrs Jenner now, living in that big house, lots of money. But I knew she was old Miss Kemp’s niece, Alison. She hadn’t changed, looked much the same. She’d always known how to find someone with money to look after her. She used to come down and visit her auntie and more often than not, every time she did, the old lady would give her some money or agree to pay for something for her. My mum told me so. My mum reckoned it was shocking, the way Alison used Miss Kemp.’

  ‘So where did Fiona come into it?’

  ‘I went up to the house, delivering that garden furniture they’d ordered from us. Nice set of furniture, that.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Meredith agreed. ‘That’s why I want to order some like it.’

  Ted’s eyes glowed with suppressed mirth. He didn’t intend Meredith to be ordering anything. Meredith was to be, what? Buried under the floor of the ruined part of this cottage and a new concrete floor laid over her? That, thought Meredith, is what I’d do, if I were Ted.