by Granger, Ann
Kit went to the window and peered out. ‘Bother, it’s the woman with a funny-looking dog. I think it’s that dog you’ve agreed to do a portrait of, Petra.’
Petra put a hand to her mouth. ‘I forgot! I arranged that Muriel Pickering would come today with Hamlet, so that I could do some preliminary sketches!’
Jess cursed mentally.
A heavy hand bashed the brass horseshoe against the door. Kit went to open it. Petra smiled at Jess and whispered, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve met Muriel Pickering? She lives locally.’
‘I have, as it happens,’ Jess replied in a similar low voice.
‘I don’t have to prepare you, then! I hope you like Muriel because she really is very good hearted … Come in, Muriel!’ Petra raised her voice. ‘Good dog, Hamlet! Let’s have a good look at you!’
The pug dog came in first, grunting to itself. Its slightly bandy legs gave it a rolling, nautical walk. It gave Jess a suspicious look, ignored Kit and went to Petra. It sat down in front of her and looked expectant.
‘He’s waiting for a biscuit,’ said Muriel’s voice from the door. ‘You gave him one last time and Hamlet never forgets.’
She appeared in the room. It was the first time Jess had seen her not dressed in her yellow oilskins. She wore corduroy trousers and a hand-knitted sweater with holes in both elbows. Without her yellow hat, her hair could be seen to be iron-grey and irregularly chopped into a sort of pageboy, probably by her own hand. A thick fringe reached down to the rims of her glinting spectacles, through which she fixed a belligerent gaze on Jess.
‘Hello,’ she said, ‘you again. You pop up everywhere.’
‘I might say the same thing of you, Mrs Pickering,’ said Jess.
Muriel blinked at that and retorted ungraciously, ‘I suppose you’re still investigating, but you certainly leave no stone unturned, do you?’
‘That’s the idea,’ Jess told her. From the corner of her eye she thought she saw Kit Stapleton exchange a wry look with her sister. ‘I might even come and visit you at Mullions, Mrs Pickering.’
‘Welcome, I’m sure,’ said Muriel carelessly.
Now, thought Jess, is that the first lie that’s been told to me during my visit here? Or have I been comprehensively led up the garden path from the start?
Kit followed Jess out into the gravelled forecourt, leaving Muriel to expound on Hamlet’s finer points to Petra.
‘I hope you can sort this out quickly,’ she said, ‘because until you do, Gervase Crown is going to hang around. Nobody hereabouts wants that and certainly my family doesn’t.’
‘He seems to be aware of his unpopularity, or that’s the impression I got when I spoke to him,’ Jess told her.
Kit pulled a face. ‘He’d be even thicker skinned than I thought him if he wasn’t. I’m not surprised he didn’t stay here to live in Key House. He wouldn’t have been made welcome in the community.’
‘But he didn’t sell it,’ Jess returned to the matter of the non-sale of Key House. ‘I still find that hard to understand.’
Kit shrugged. ‘So he didn’t sell it. Perhaps he’s just hung on to it to annoy us all. I don’t know. Who knows what does go on in Gervase’s mind? Anyway, I’m not his greatest fan so don’t listen to me …’ She put her head on one side and smiled at Jess. ‘I didn’t attack that unfortunate guy with the Italian name because I thought he was Gervase. I didn’t burn the house down.’
‘I haven’t accused you of either crime,’ Jess told her mildly.
‘No, but you must be compiling your list of suspects. I noticed, when you showed us that photo of the victim back there, that the poor chap looked a little bit like Gervase. I wasn’t going to say so in front of my sister, in case I was the only one who thought it. I didn’t want to worry her. But Petra noticed it too anyway. You’ve seen Gervase. Do you think it? Does he look like the victim?’
‘It did strike us that there is a similarity,’ Jess had to admit. ‘But we’re not reading anything into that yet.’
‘Really?’ asked Kit disbelievingly. ‘Well, good luck with your enquiries.’ She gave a laconic wave and turned to go back into the cottage.
Jess got into her car and drove away slowly. Since she was so close to the murder scene, it would be a good idea to go and take another look at it, if only to check that sightseers hadn’t been trampling across it.
But Key House was as she’d last seen it, standing desolate and in ruins. The smell of charred wood still hung in the air. Puddles spotted the scene where the fire brigade had returned to dampen down the site as a precaution against a hotspot breaking out again in flames. Gervase Crown would not be rebuilding this, she thought, and no one could reasonably expect him to.
Her mobile phone jangled as she climbed back into her car. She put it to her ear. ‘Phil?’
‘Just to let you know,’ came Morton’s voice, ‘that Gervase Crown flew in to Heathrow late on the day immediately following the fire, on an Air Portugal flight. The ashes of his house would still have been hot, so he didn’t waste time. He picked up a hire car, a BMW, at the airport and drove straight down here and took a room at The Royal Oak that night.’
‘So he didn’t set the fire himself,’ Jess murmured.
‘What’s that, ma’am? Oh, that’s right. He didn’t start the fire. He could still have hired someone to do it. He might even have hired Pietrangelo. Didn’t Pietrangelo’s girlfriend tell you that he had no work in hand at the moment and new commissions were slow coming in for him? They wanted to buy a house. He needed to earn a few quid.’
‘We’d have to establish that Crown knew Pietrangelo. When I showed him the photograph of the victim he denied it. If he hired him to set the fire, then of course he would deny it. But his reaction struck me as genuine at the time. However, it’s a thought, Phil. We’ll add it to the list of possibilities. Oh, and we now know that on the morning following his arrival, Crown’s first action was to go early to what was left of Key House and check it out. After that he paid a call on Petra Stapleton, the young woman so badly injured in the car crash that resulted in his being given a prison sentence. It left Petra in a wheelchair. In the afternoon he came to see us.’
‘What did he go and see her for?’ came Morton’s voice, incredulous, in her ear. ‘I’d have thought he’d be, well, ashamed.’
‘Petra says she thought he was in shock and wanted someone to talk to. The opinion of Petra’s sister, Kit, is that he is thick skinned and quite possibly bone headed as well. That’s quite interesting because I got the impression from the brief conversation I had with him that he’s neither. Certainly not the second. As to the first? Well, possibly he’s thick skinned to some extent. But not to the degree Kit Stapleton would have us believe. Nor do I buy that she thinks he’s stupid. Both sisters, incidentally, remarked unprompted on a physical similarity between Gervase Crown and Pietrangelo. Can you find out something about Kit Stapleton, Phil? Just background. There’s something going on there, but I don’t know what.’
‘Will do,’ promised Morton.
‘And even if Crown is just lacking in normal sensitivities, it still doesn’t explain why he went to see Petra Stapleton. There’s something in that set-up, something private to the people concerned. Whether it has to do with the burning of the house is another matter. I’d like to know what it is, even so, because at least we can then discount it.’
She clicked the phone off and sat with it silent in her hand at the wheel of her stationary car. She was still thinking about Kit Stapleton. Kit was so insistent that she disliked Gervase and she certainly had good reason. But she did keep repeating it. ‘Yes, I think the roots of all this go back a long way,’ Jess confirmed to herself aloud. ‘Kit wants me to accept an edited version of events as she gives them to me. But I’ve got to keep talking to people. Someone must know something.’
She started up the engine and, as she did, her eye fell on the narrow turning a little further down the road. Muriel Pickering’s house, Mullions, was down there. P
hil had already interviewed Muriel and Jess had had a couple of chats with her. But she was a long-time local resident and it might be worth talking to her again. To be sure, Muriel wasn’t the chatty sort, but if Jess kept up the pressure she might eventually come up with something.
Muriel would still be at The Barn, anxious to direct the artist’s attention to Hamlet’s squashed features. It would be a good moment to take a look at Mullions in its owner’s absence. Jess drove slowly forward and turned off where Muriel had indicated. A battered road sign, suggesting past collision with some large vehicle attempting to turn, told her this was Long Lane. The lane was narrow and twisted in a serpentine progress indicating its origins as a path between fields. Jess wondered just how far it ran and where it came out. There was woodland another half a mile or so ahead. Perhaps it stopped there? One more twist and she was obliged to brake. She’d come upon Muriel’s home.
It was not only its sudden appearance that was surprising about Mullions. Jess had been imagining a cottage, once belonging to a shepherd or gamekeeper. But Mullions was an imposing old house, tall and narrow, with attic windows gazing out over the countryside around. At the very top, in the middle of the roof, it had a funny little turret that might once have been a dovecote. It suggested a former rectory or a local landowner’s dwelling more than a labourer’s home. The whole place had a neglected look. The garden was overgrown, the house unpainted. Jess pulled up on to the verge in the unlikely eventuality that any other vehicle came down this way and wanted to pass, and got out.
The entry to the property was barred by an unlovely construction consisting of a wooden frame filled in with chicken wire. It hung on rusting hinges between posts and bore a notice. PLEASE SHUT GATE. LIVESTOCK. Jess looked over it. There was no sign of any animal life. She lifted the rope loop that fell over a post and cautiously opened the gate.
‘Hello!’ she called, just in case. She was presuming that Muriel lived alone but perhaps she didn’t. No one showed him or herself in reply. She dropped the rope loop back over the post, keeping the gate closed as desired by the property owner, and walked up to the house. Shielding her eyes, she peered through the window of what must be a sitting room.
‘Phew!’ she said aloud. ‘What a dump!’
The room was cluttered with dark, battered furniture. Some dingy oil paintings, indiscernible in subject, hung on the tobacco-coloured walls. Crumpled sheets of newspaper, books, what looked like used crockery left from a meal, lay scattered like fallen leaves across the surfaces of various small tables and seats, and the carpet. The interior of Mullions, all this suggested, was as poorly maintained as the exterior. Jess thought she could make out a zinc bucket by the hearth, containing wood chunks for the open fire.
She left the window and walked slowly round to the back of the house. A corrugated-iron garage stood ahead of her, doors open and empty. Suddenly she came upon the livestock. A gaggle of hens set up a cackling and fled before her down the length of the back garden. They were soon lost from sight among the undergrowth. Only a belligerent and scruffy cockerel remained. It flew up on to a wooden sawhorse and perched there, from time to time giving her a malicious squawk, accompanied by a flap of the wings.
‘OK, buster,’ said Jess to him. ‘I’m not after your wives.’
Someone had been sawing firewood on the horse. Chippings and sawdust covered the surrounding area. A couple of fallen tree branches lay nearby, suggesting they were next for dismemberment. Beyond, to the left, stood a large wooden shed once painted green, but with only peeling flakes of colour remaining. It had one grimy window and a rain-barrel stood outside the door. Jess went to inspect the shed further. It wasn’t locked. She pulled the door open and took a look inside. It was no tidier than the house, filled with every sort of implement and rubbish. There were fishing rods in their canvas jackets stacked in one corner, thick with dust and obviously never used by Ms Pickering. Jess wondered who had been the fisherman. There was a wooden bench piled high with tools, some appearing old enough to be donated to a local museum, and empty flowerpots. Others hung on the wall beyond, together with a net on a pole presumably designed to scoop out the catch from the river. All suggested a lifestyle long gone.
She closed the door and walked back to her car, carefully closing the gate. The brief tour had depressed her. No wonder Muriel was so ungracious, waking up to this every morning. No wonder, too, that she thought so highly of Hamlet who shared this desolation. Jess drove away.
Carter, too, was paying a visit. In his case it was on Serena Foscott. The Foscotts lived in a large house in the architectural style known as Mock Tudor. The outer walls were pebble dashed and a dirty brown. The wooden fretwork applied to the exterior and meant to suggest the sixteenth century now needed a lick of paint. It was a style of house he’d never cared for, although in its heyday – which Carter guessed had been in the 1920s or thirties – it probably had looked very smart and the latest thing. It sat in the middle of a garden laid almost entirely to lawn surrounded by trees, and was approached by a weed-strewn gravel drive. Other houses strung out along one side of the same road were of much the same type, if slightly better kept. It was difficult to tell. Most owners had chosen to put tall trees between themselves and the highway. All the properties were, he was sure, worth a lot of money. The other side of the road was still occupied by fields. ‘Secluded’ was what estate agents usually called that sort of situation and it put the price up.
‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ said Mrs Foscott, eyeing him up and down as if he might have had a ‘For Sale’ tag hung round his neck. She was a small, wiry, weather-beaten woman who gave the impression of reserves of unspent energy fizzing for release. But not in order to do housework, it seemed. As she spoke, she removed a pile of unironed washing from the depths of an armchair and stood with it in her arms, looking vaguely round the room for somewhere to deposit it. Eventually she solved the problem by lobbing the load towards another chair in a far corner. Most landed on the target, some on the floor where Mrs Foscott ignored it. She indicated the freed chair to Carter who sat down in it cautiously. It twanged under him.
‘Springs going,’ said Serena casually. ‘My husband knows you. You went to see him.’ In contrast to her tone, her body language was wary.
‘Indeed, he does, Mrs Foscott.’ Carter looked round the room, seeking an opening that would lead to Serena Foscott letting down her guard. As on Reggie’s desk at work, there was a photograph of a child on a pony near at hand. ‘Your daughter?’
Serena glanced at it. ‘Yes, that’s Charlie. We got rid of that animal. It was useless. It never would have made it in competition. It couldn’t step over a pole on the ground without tripping, let alone jump a fence. Charlie kept falling off it. We’ve bought a better animal now. Charlie’s doing much better. Blue rosette last time out.’
‘Oh, I’m pleased to hear that. My daughter is staying with me at the moment.’ Carter registered the common interest. ‘Normally she lives with her mother and stepfather. But they’ve got asbestos in her school. She looks about the same age as – Charlie.’
Serena Foscott assessed him. ‘Divorced?’
‘Er, yes.’
‘Bad luck,’ said Serena kindly. ‘You’re looking into the business of the fire, I suppose, and the stiff. Rum business, that. You never know what’s round the corner, do you?’
‘You don’t indeed,’ Carter agreed with her. ‘The police are investigating and that means we ask a lot of questions, some of which turn out irrelevant. Occasionally we hit the mark. We make nuisances of ourselves to a lot of people. I’m sorry to trouble you, Mrs Foscott, as I’m sure you’re busy.’
‘Always,’ confirmed the lady of the house. ‘Never get a moment to myself. Would you like some tea?’
Carter hurriedly held up a hand. ‘Oh, please, no. I won’t stay long. I came to call because I understand you are Gervase Crown’s cousin.’
‘That’s right. Haven’t seen much of him over the years. But we weren’t cl
ose as kids. He was a few years younger than me; and Amanda, that was his mother, she was a cold fish. So was his father, Sebastian. So there wasn’t much visiting back and forth between our families.’
‘Let’s see,’ said Carter, ‘are you related on his mother’s side or on his father’s?’
‘Sebastian Crown was my mother’s brother. They were never close, either.’ Serena paused and added, as if to underline the connection, ‘That means she was a Crown. She married my father, whose surname was Mayhew, and so I was a Mayhew before I became a Foscott.’
Carter filed this scrap of ancestral tree in the back of his memory but did not allow it to distract him. ‘So you would have known Key House, even if you didn’t visit it very often.’
‘Certainly. Are you sure about the tea? Won’t take a jiff.’
The repeated offer to make tea suggested to Carter that his visit wasn’t altogether unwelcome. Perhaps Serena was glad of a chance to sit and talk, instead of doing the ironing. He said, well, if she insisted …
Serena strode out of the room in a purposeful manner and could be heard rattling and clanging things in the kitchen with what seemed unnecessary zeal. Carter took another look round the room. The furniture was good, even if old and in need of a polish and some repair here and there. He fancied there was a faint smell of horses about the place, or perhaps only about Serena. The television set looked new. A note propped against a vase on the mantelshelf above the tiled Art Deco fireplace read: Dentist!!! Carter smiled. It was untidy but it was a family home. Suddenly he found himself envying Reggie Foscott.
Serena was back, carrying a mug in either hand. She put one down on an occasional table by his chair and retook her own seat on a large chesterfield that seemed to have strayed into the room from some London club or a stately home. ‘I haven’t got any biscuits. I did buy some but Charlie must have filched them to feed that pony. Is that what you want to talk about, Key House? Or about my cousin?’