by Granger, Ann
Copyright © 2013 Ann Granger
The right of Ann Granger to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP in 2013
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN: 978 0 7553 8376 4
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
About the Book
About the Author
Also By
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
About the Book
The third Cotswold village mystery featuring Inspector Jess Campbell and Superintendent Ian Carter reveals a ruthless killer and a case of mistaken identity.
In the cold light of dawn, a dead body is found entombed in the smouldering remains of a burnt-out Cotswold manor. Key House has stood empty for years, but its owner, Gervase Crown, is rumoured to have been seen in Weston St Ambrose prior to the blaze. Could he be responsible for the fire and the tragic death that followed, or was he in fact the intended target? As Inspector Jess Campbell and Superintendent Ian Carter begin their investigation it becomes clear that Gervase wasn’t the most popular and his return reawakens old memories, not all of which are good.
About the Author
Ann Granger has lived in cities all over the world, since for many years she worked for the Foreign Office and received postings to British embassies as far apart as Munich and Lusaka. She is married, with two sons, and she and her husband, who also worked for the Foreign Office, are now permanently based in Oxfordshire.
By Ann Granger and available from Headline
Campbell and Carter crime novels
Mud, Muck and Dead Things
Rack, Ruin and Murder
Bricks and Mortality
Inspector Ben Ross crime novels
A Rare Interest In Corpses
A Mortal Curiosity
A Better Quality of Murder
A Particular Eye for Villainy
Fran Varady crime novels
Asking For Trouble
Keeping Bad Company
Running Scared
Risking It All
Watching Out
Mixing With Murder
Rattling The Bones
Mitchell and Markby crime novels
Say It With Poison
A Season For Murder
Cold In The Earth
Murder Among Us
Where Old Bones Lie
A Fine Place For Death
Flowers For His Funeral
Candle For A Corpse
A Touch Of Mortality
A Word After Dying
Call The Dead Again
Beneath These Stones
Shades Of Murder
A Restless Evil
That Way Murder Lies
To John and Diane Boland
The New Zealand Connection
‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said, gravely, ‘and go on until you come to the end: then stop.’
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Chapter 1
Sooner than the fire-raiser might have wished, a crimson haze seeping across the night sky gave warning of flames below. Glowing cinders dusted the rosy cloud with sparkling points of gold like a tiny firework display. Woken by the wail of the fire engines, people living up to a mile away hung out of their upper windows and told each other, ‘That’ll be Key House.’
‘You mark my words,’ declared Roger Trenton, ‘this will turn out to be the work of squatters. Haven’t I said it, time after time? That place was a regular tinderbox, just sitting there, empty, not properly secure, waiting for something like this to happen! I blame the council.’
‘Not the council’s fault,’ muttered his wife, climbing back into bed. ‘They didn’t go up there and put a match to the place.’
Her husband turned his head in her direction. ‘They might just as well have done!’ Against the pink sky his wispy hair stuck up in a disordered halo above his glistening, balding brow. ‘A high forehead, that’s what I’ve got,’ he was wont to say. ‘I’ve still got plenty of hair, but I’ve inherited a high forehead from my father.’
He was bald, too, thought Poppy Trenton, burrowing down among the pillows. High forehead be blowed! I remember his father being bald when Roger first took me home to meet his family. I should have studied my future father-in-law more closely. If I’d realised that Roger would turn out just like the old blighter, I might’ve broken off the engagement, there and then. Look at him! He even wears the same sort of pyjamas as his father, striped flannel with a draw cord at the waist, and corduroy slippers.
‘Ho, ho, ho!’ cried Roger. He raised a hand and shook a triumphant finger at the distant fire. ‘Told you so!’
His wife peered over the duvet towards the window where her husband stuck to his station. It was a wonder he didn’t start capering with glee. Aloud, she said crossly, ‘Even if squatters are responsible for the fire, I hope no one is trapped.’
‘Plenty of windows – they’ll have got out if they needed to,’ retorted Roger. ‘Got out the way they got in. None of the windows properly boarded up, you know. Door with a lock a child could probably pick. I’ve written to the council about Key House, if you remember, several times. You can read my letters yourself. The copies are all in my file of correspondence with the council. It’s blighted the landscape, that’s what it’s done. No need for it, no need at all. A fine old house just left to decay. I told that young fellow at the council, they should get in touch with the present owner and make the fellow do something about it.’
‘Gervase Crown,’ mumbled his wife. ‘He went to live in Portugal.’
‘I know that!’ snapped Roger. ‘Ruddy playboy, I suppose it was never any use expecting him to do anything. Pain in the backside.’
‘His father was very handsome,’ murmured Poppy unguardedly.
That caused Roger to spin round from his observation post. ‘Whose father?’
‘Gervase’s father, Sebastian Crown.’
‘No he wasn’t. I went to school with him. There was nothing handsome about the fellow at all. You do talk some nonsense, Poppy. But he was a good chap, Sebastian, very sound. Never had any luck, though, not with his wife and not with that useless wretched boy. Good thing young Crown left h
ere and took himself well away.’
‘Funnily enough,’ Poppy began, ‘the other day I—’
Roger had already turned back to the window and Poppy let her sentence remain unfinished. Roger would only say it was nonsense. But at the time she really had believed it. And now the fire … It was worrying. Perhaps I should ring Serena, she thought.
‘Aha!’ crowed Roger from the window where, with his comb of pink-glowing hair, he did resemble some demented overlarge cockerel. ‘Do you know what wouldn’t surprise me a bit? They might find a body in the ashes when the fire’s burned itself out.’
‘Oh, no!’ Poppy, shocked into wakefulness, gave a convulsive twitch and sat upright. ‘Don’t say that, Roger!’
‘Oh, go to sleep, Poppy,’ said her husband.
The fire had done its utmost, but Key House was not easily destroyed. It was a stone-built construction dating from the early 1700s. Its first residents moved in while Queen Anne still ruled. The Hanoverians were poised to take the throne on her death, and exiled Stuarts plotted to deny them the prize. Key House saw them and future generations come and go, weathering all storms until now. Its walls were nearly three feet thick at the base, tapering as they rose to less than a foot in width beneath the eaves. It had been roofed with some of the twenty-six sizes of traditional Cotswold roofing slate, each with its own name and allotted position on the roof. They had cascaded into the interior and now lay, higgledy-piggledy, below: long and short bachelors, becks and wivutts. They would be salvaged eventually because they were of value and, if not used to re-roof this building, be used for another.
The rest, oak staircase with turned banisters and ornately carved newel post, floorboards, joists, beams and age-darkened panelling in the entrance hall, study and dining room, was all gone. The remains of the beams were still recognisable; they had been fashioned from ancient tree trunks. They smouldered, badly charred and blackened, broken into irregular lengths. But they still showed the knotholes and the occasional gouge where the carpenters, fashioning them by hand, had scored too deeply.
It was mid-afternoon before it was realised that a body lay beneath the rubble in the area that had been the kitchen, where the remains of modern fitted cupboards hung blackened from the walls. Roger Trenton would soon learn he had been right.
Inspector Jessica Campbell was a late arrival on the scene, in the wake of the grim discovery. She watched the steam and smoke billowing from the defiant shell and felt on her cheeks the heat being given off in palpable waves from the once-mellow blocks of Cotswold stone. Now soot-blackened and still too hot to touch, they, too, were survivors. She put her cold fingers to her face and felt them absorb the warmth and the tips tingle.
It had been a mild month until recently. But over the last couple of weeks winter had announced itself in uncompromising fashion with the strengthening winds and first frosts. The mechanical hedge-trimmer did not venture down this lonely road so the trees and bushes around offered up a dishevelled display of skeletal arms. The fallen leaves piled in drifts and filled the ditches. Any trees still sporting growth did so with an air of defiant apology. It was as if they knew the few shabby scraps of foliage clinging on were no substitute for the reds and yellows of their autumnal glory days, even less the verdant shades of spring to come.
Dry leaves had floated across the neglected lawns of Key House, forming mulch between the tangled blackberry bushes that had escaped from the hedgerows around and invaded the garden. Over years they had colonised it, creeping almost up to the building. The activity of the firefighters had flattened some of the spiny tentacles and the water from their hoses made the leafy blanket glisten. When the human presence had left again, the blackberry bushes would shake off the temporary rebuff and resume making their remorseless inroads. The leaf mulch would moulder down to crumbling brown tilth. If no one rebuilt Key House, the undergrowth and bushes would enter through the gaping holes left in the stonework by broken windows and burned-out doors.
Now the wrecked house seemed of a piece with the withered nature around it. Jess entertained a moment’s fancy in which the whole thing disappeared in a riot of tentacles and thorns, like Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Her reverie was broken by the voice of the doctor, standing beside her.
‘Druggies,’ he opined laconically. His name was Layton and he was a tall, stooped, middle-aged man, perhaps not far off retirement. His greenish tweed suit was well cut and made, but old fashioned in style and hung on his frame in a way that suggested he’d once had a more burly figure. As he spoke he was attempting, with little success, to brush a powdering of soot from his sleeve. Finding that he’d created a black smear in its place, he gave a grunt of annoyance. ‘You wouldn’t believe the number of times they render themselves unconscious and then something like this happens. Oh, well, perhaps you would, Inspector! You’ll have seen this sort of thing before, I dare say.’
Layton gave her an apologetic nod. His grey hair, worn a little long, became more disarrayed.
For all the loneliness of this minor road, they were not the only spectators. It never ceased to puzzle Jess how people turned up to watch a disaster or its aftermath, even in such a spot. The audience was admittedly few in number. There was a tall, lean elderly man in a waxed jacket, a fringe of grey hair standing up around his balding pate like a halo. Where on earth had he come from? Further away were a pair of younger men of weather-tanned complexion and slightly furtive attitude who were surveying the scene from a discreet distance. Jess put them down as travellers, probably speculating whether it would be worth returning later when all had left the scene, to see if there was anything to scavenge in the metal line.
Nearest to Jess stood a bespectacled elderly woman clad in a woolly hat pulled down over her ears and a bright yellow canvas coat and trousers designed to make her visible on this footpath-less road as she walked her dog. The dog in question looked disgruntled. Its walk had been interrupted. It had no interest in the fire. It was of pug type, stocky in build with bandy front legs, but larger than the breed usually is, hinting at an intruder from another breed in its ancestry. But it had inherited the standard squashed features. Jess speculated that its pop eyes probably always had that resentful expression. Or perhaps it was just an example of people looking like their pets. Certainly the pug’s owner looked on fiercely, as if the blaze had been a personal affront.
Layton was speaking again. ‘You’ll find the fellow who was dossing in there shot up some vile substance, passed out and a candle fell over and started the fire, or something like that. Electricity to the house was disconnected, I know that much. Gas sealed off, too. It’s been empty since Sebastian Crown died. His son probably still owns it but he never comes near the place. Shame, really, because it was an attractive old building. There will be needles lying about in the ashes. You’ll have to watch out!’ he called suddenly, turning away from Jess.
His advice was addressed to the fire inspection officers who stood nearby and those smoke-and soot-stained firefighters who were still at the scene, damping down. They would be coming back for several days on the same task. A fire may appear to be out; but it can spring to life without warning in some hot spot, Jess knew.
‘Go right through your boots, those bloody needles,’ called the nearest fireman. Everyone nodded.
The charred body still nestled unmolested in its bed of cinders and ash, huddled in a foetal position, face twisted towards the floor. The fallen beams had formed a kind of tent over it and it was uncrushed. The arms were raised and crooked in the attitude typical of bodies found at the scenes of fire, fists clenched in a grotesque parody of boxing stance, as if taunting the crackling flames with, ‘Come on, then!’ A figure dressed in a protective suit was making a filmed record of the scene from a prudent distance.
‘No doubt about that,’ Layton summed up. ‘He’s dead, all right. No need to mess about examining him now, even if it were possible to get close enough. Besides, the remains are probably brittle, likely to snap apart like a biscuit. I
wouldn’t want to be responsible for that before the body is autopsied.’
He had been anxious not to make himself even filthier, rolling a blackened corpse over and prodding it, burning his hands in the task. Besides, he might encounter one of the discarded needles he’d warned of. Jess sympathised. Layton was not a regular police surgeon called in for such tasks. He was in private practice, but had been the nearest available at the time and they’d turned to him occasionally before. Give the man his due, he had come without demur and had done his job, certifying death.
Perhaps because this was a little outside his usual medical experience, he could not resist speculating a little. ‘It’ll be up to your pathologist, of course, to decide the exact cause of death and whether he’d been taking drugs. The contraction of the muscles suggests to me he was alive when the fire broke out. But he was probably too deeply unconscious to help himself. There will also be smoke deposit in the lungs, if he was alive. But he wouldn’t have known anything about it. He’d have been unaware, mark my words, and the smoke probably killed him, not the fire.’ Layton grew brisk. ‘I should be on my round. I’ve got housebound patients to visit.’ He put a hand to his untidy grey locks and smoothed them back.
She accompanied him to his car and asked, ‘You say you know the family who owns the place?’
The question seemed to surprise him and he stared at her for a moment as if she’d made some social gaffe. Then, perhaps recollecting she was a police officer and this was the beginning of an investigation into a fatal incident, he began a cautious reply.
‘I knew Sebastian – the previous owner – as a private patient. Oh, years ago. He’s been dead a good while. He was one of my first patients when I came here to practise, that’s why I remember him. There are still people who prefer alternatives to the NHS. I was his doctor for twenty years. I can hardly say I knew Gervase, his son. Not as an adult, that is. I knew of him. He was away at school much of the time and giving his father the usual headaches. Perhaps the school’s doctor treated him for any illness. I never did when he was a teenager as I recall, and certainly never saw him professionally when he was adult. His mother brought him to see me a few times when he was an infant, usual preventive jabs and baby problems. After that, don’t ask me what he did for medical advice. He may have registered as an NHS patient with another practice. I don’t think I saw Gervase once in my surgery. His father used to grouse about him as people do about their teenage kids.’