by Granger, Ann
Gervase glanced at Jess with a faint smile, as if to say, ‘Not everyone dislikes me!’ Then, soberly, he told Monica, ‘I’m sorry about the dead guy, not sorry about the house.’
‘Millie and I are about to treat ourselves to a hot chocolate in the lounge here,’ Monica said. ‘If either of you can join us?’
‘Not me, thanks,’ said Gervase. ‘I’ve seen more than enough of The Royal Oak’s lounge this morning. I’m just about to drive off seeking a spot of lunch somewhere else, well away.’
‘I’ll put my head round the door before I leave,’ Jess promised Millie.
Monica and Millie departed, Millie casting a farewell warning glare at Gervase over her shoulder.
‘You see?’ Gervase smiled wryly at Jess. ‘Miss Farrell aside, I’m cut out to be unpopular. She was the local schoolteacher. She’s programmed to see something positive in the most unpromising subject. She’s in the minority. Even your boyfriend’s kid doesn’t like me.’
‘He’s not my boyfriend!’ insisted Jess. ‘He’s – he’s a colleague.’
‘Oho! A copper, eh? Well, whatever, no sweat.’ Gervase waved a nonchalant hand in goodbye and strolled off towards his hired blue BMW, parked in a corner of the yard.
Millie and Monica were in the far corner of the lounge. Millie had obviously been waiting for Jess to join them and bounced up to wave vigorously. ‘We’re over here, Jess!’
‘I’m glad I’ve seen Gervase,’ said Monica placidly. ‘I’ve been keeping an eye open for him, knowing he was staying locally. I didn’t fancy actually calling round here to see him on purpose because he might think I was being inquisitive. You know he really does look like a— he does look as Stephen Layton described him to me. I told Ian about it. Stephen met Gervase outside the front door here, on the night he arrived from Portugal. Ask Ian how he described him.’ Monica gave a slight nod of the head towards Millie, indicating she did not want to repeat it for youthful ears. She needn’t have worried. Millie had already made up her own mind about Gervase.
‘I think he looks like a murderer,’ said Millie.
Gervase himself, having declared his intention to drive out and find a decent-looking place to lunch, had decided that he’d better do it. If the red-haired inspector came back to the yard and saw his car still parked there, she’d be looking for him again.
‘Sod this,’ said Gervase mildly to himself, ‘I’ve had enough of the police.’ He glanced around him. ‘And enough of Weston St Ambrose.’
He got into the rented BMW as Jess went into the back entrance of the hotel, and pointed it towards the arched way out into the main road. The exit was blind, any car having to cross the pavement before it got to the street. Aware of pedestrians on the footpath, he looked carefully from side to side and, as a result, almost failed to spot a middle-aged woman on an old-fashioned bicycle in the road ahead of him. In the nick of time, he braked. The bicycle wobbled, a couple of books in the wicker basket on the front fell out; and its rider put a foot to the ground and glowered at him.
Gervase opened the car door, half got out and called, ‘Sorry, you OK?’
‘That is a very dangerous exit,’ said the woman. ‘You should take more care.’
‘I was taking care,’ returned Gervase unwisely.
‘Not enough!’ snapped the woman. She clambered from her bicycle. Under her quilted jacket she wore what looked like some sort of uniform.
Gervase realised she intended to retrieve the books on the ground and hurried to do it first, but she beat him to it. She stood there with the books – they had the look of library books about them – gripped in her hands. There was something vaguely familiar about her but he couldn’t place her. She, too, was studying him.
‘Gervase Crown,’ she announced at last. ‘My husband told me you were back.’
‘Good grief,’ Gervase said, ‘Mrs Layton, if I’m not mistaken. Have you, er, been to the library?’
‘Yes. Our local library is now staffed by volunteers. The cuts, you know.’
‘Cuts?’
‘Government cuts. It’s disgraceful, of course, but we’ll keep our library going as long as we can.’ She peered at the books. ‘Although it won’t help if the books are damaged!’
‘Are they?’ asked Gervase. ‘I’ll replace the damn things if necessary.’ They were, he noticed, both volumes of crime fiction.
‘They’re all right!’ she said sharply. She dusted the jackets off before turning to replace the volumes in the wicker basket. ‘How long do you intend to stay?’ she asked.
‘Until matters relating to my house are sorted out.’
‘Can’t Reggie Foscott handle that for you?’
Gervase said icily, ‘I can handle my affairs myself, thank you.’
‘Mm, I suppose you can.’ Mrs Layton climbed aboard her aged metal steed. ‘Don’t pile yourself up in that car, too,’ she said, nodding at the BMW, and pedalled away before he could retort.
‘This,’ Gervase informed a pair of late-season tourists emerging into the street from the hotel, ‘is the village from hell.’
They looked understandably alarmed.
On leaving the lounge a little later Jess hesitated for a moment in the entrance lobby of the hotel. She had left Monica and Millie still sitting over their hot chocolate, and discussing the bar menu. She had excused herself from sharing their meal. The waiter, in any case, now appeared to have given up on ever persuading her to order anything, and had ignored Jess. Her car was in the courtyard car park at the back; but Jess turned to the front entrance and stepped out into the street. Three minutes earlier and she’d have seen Gervase drive away. As it was, all she saw were two tourists, husband and wife, peering cautiously around them.
What she was now doing, she told herself as she walked along, was checking out the story Gervase Crown had told her. But she knew in her heart it was blatant curiosity. She glanced at her wristwatch. Half an hour, so Gervase had said. That’s what it took him to walk to the churchyard, find his father’s gravestone, and walk back to The Royal Oak. He hadn’t hung about.
The church loomed up ahead. It stood almost opposite Monica Farrell’s cottage. Its churchyard was dark, shaded by ancient trees and overgrown with a thick tangle of vegetation. Only the very latest burials, few in number, were clustered together and an attempt made to keep the area tidy. As for the rest, it was a wildlife paradise, undisturbed and given over to nature. Sebastian Crown’s ashes had been placed here some years ago. The spot would be marked not by an upright but by a flat stone and that, Jess stared around in despair, would be somewhere in this jungle.
But someone had been here before her and recently, treading down the grasses and making a narrow footpath twisting towards a far corner. Gervase? He would have known where to look. Jess followed this narrow trodden route. All around was a strong smell of earth and decay and a stillness as of time suspended. It was hard not to feel that the eyes of those who rested here were upon her. Birds flew up into the overhanging branches at her approach. A grey squirrel sitting atop a lichen-encrusted Victorian urn ran down it, dashed across the narrow track and up the nearest tree trunk. Small creatures scuttled about unseen in the long grass and insects buzzed around her. Even with prior knowledge of its location, she wondered that Gervase had found his father’s memorial at all. But suddenly she came upon a flatter area in a far corner, where someone had chopped inefficiently at the grass in an attempt to keep it down and the area respectable. Here a plot had been set aside for the reception of ashes. Rows of small square stones in the grass marked the locations. A couple were quite recent, but dirt and moss had encrusted most of the stones rendering the words illegible. However, at one of them someone had recently scraped the grime away. Jess stared down. This was Sebastian Crown’s last resting place. His stone was engraved simply with his name, his year of birth and that of his death.
This is it, then, thought Jess. Shelley’s Ozymandias’s broken statue emerging from the sand could not have said it better. Here wa
s all that remained on earth of a wealthy, powerful, strong-willed and – towards his wife at least – violent man. Just this: one small square of stone, green with moss, the incised inscription filled with dirt. She glanced at her watch again and noted the time. Gervase would probably have spent a few minutes here, remembering his childhood, and then he would have set off back to the hotel. The timescale was about right. She had no reason to doubt his account.
Jess left the churchyard and began to walk back to The Royal Oak. But before she reached it any sober meditation on life and death she might be tempted to make was driven out of her head. Coming towards her she saw a vaguely familiar form. It defined itself as a young man, scrawny in build, narrow faced, and wearing only a thin short-sleeved T-shirt with his jeans, even in this chilly weather. The shirt had lettering on it, but Jess couldn’t make it out at this distance.
The young man had seen her now, and recognised her too. He swung about to make off in the direction from which he’d come but Jess had remembered his name and called it loudly.
‘Alfie! Alfie Darrow!’
Alfie stopped in his tracks at the sound of the law calling his name. When she reached him he was still standing there, head down, refusing to meet her eye.
‘Hello, Alfie,’ said Jess pleasantly. ‘I thought I’d recognised you. Even though you’ve started to grow a beard since we last met.’ She was being generous. Alfie’s beard clung to his chin in ragged patches and resembled the lichen adorning the gravestones, rather than hair. She wondered why he’d decided to adopt a fashion that she would not have thought appealed to him. Was he trying to change his appearance? If he was, why?
‘Yeah,’ muttered Alfie, ‘I know you an’ all.’ He raised his head. ‘You ain’t looking for me, are you? Because I haven’t done anything.’
‘No, I wasn’t looking for you,’ she reassured him.
Alfie required more reassurance than that. ‘You got that sergeant with you?’
‘Sergeant Morton? No, I’m here on my own. How are you getting on now, Alfie? Not got into any more trouble selling drugs around your mates, I hope?’
‘You won’t find nothing on me!’ burst out Alfie with sudden passion. ‘I’m clean. You can search me and you won’t find nothing! Not unless you plant it there.’
‘Why would I do that? Search you, I mean. I’m glad to hear you’re not dealing any more. Don’t be tempted to go back to it.’ As if advice from me would make any difference! thought Jess ruefully.
‘I haven’t done anything!’ Alfie howled. ‘You coppers are all the same. Someone gets in your black book and you try and nail him for everything that happens. I haven’t done anything, right?’
More starkly expressed, this echoed what Gervase had said in the yard of The Royal Oak. As for Alfie? No, Jess had already decided, you’ve done nothing I know about, but you are very jumpy. She could now make out the faded lettering on his shirt. All Property is Theft, it read. Did this go with the attempt to grow a beard? Had Alfie taken up politics? ‘Have you got a job?’ she asked.
‘Naw.’ Alfie scowled at her. ‘I lost that and all, didn’t I?’
‘There can’t be much going in Weston St Ambrose,’ commiserated Jess. ‘Perhaps you should try somewhere bigger, Cheltenham or Gloucester. You’d have to move out of here and live there.’
‘I had a place to live in town, didn’t I? Not a job, but I had a place to live. Only I had to leave it. So now I’m living back here with my mum. Only temporary,’ Alfie finished.
‘Well, good luck, anyway, Alfie,’ she wished him.
Alfie took this as dismissal and scuttled away down the street.
Whatever it is he’s into now, thought Jess, the police will hear about it sooner or later. Hope it doesn’t land on my desk.
Chapter 14
‘So, what do we make of this, Jess?’ Carter asked.
The note, in its transparent envelope, lay on his desk. Morton, who had been called in for the discussion of this new piece of evidence, said mistrustfully, ‘I don’t buy it.’
‘How about you?’ Carter prompted her.
‘It’s certainly odd,’ she admitted. ‘Why not just use a computer? Who nowadays uses newsprint and glue for this sort of thing?’
‘Someone who hasn’t got access to a computer,’ Carter said. ‘Or wants us to think so.’
‘Got access to a photocopier, though,’ Morton growled.
‘Coin-operated copiers are available all over the place,’ Jess put in. ‘Whoever composed this note knew that we’d test it for fingerprints and DNA. A newsprint and glue job would have provided masses of evidence pointing at whoever made it. So, having made it, the writer took it along to a copier and made a copy. The copy emerges untouched by human hand from the machine and the author, whoever it was, only handles it with gloves – or picks it up with tweezers, something like that. I didn’t handle it. Gervase says he didn’t show it to anyone at the hotel. The only fingerprints or DNA on that will turn out to belong to Gervase Crown.’
‘So, is the author of the note being very clever?’ Carter asked them.
‘For my money,’ Morton had made up his mind already, ‘Crown made that thing up himself. He’s getting worried that we’re going to finger him for being responsible for the fire. OK, he didn’t go to the house himself with a can of petrol and a box of matches. But he organised someone else to do it. It wasn’t Pietrangelo; I admit I went down the wrong road there. No, it’s someone else and Pietrangelo turns up unexpectedly just as the fire-raiser is going to do the business. He gets bopped on the head. The fire-raiser strikes his match and leaves the house and the unconscious Pietrangelo to burn.’
‘I’m sure Crown would find his way to a computer,’ Jess objected. ‘I just don’t see him sitting there, painstakingly cutting up newspapers. Although the hotel puts out a daily paper in the lounge, generally a tabloid. Crown mentioned that himself. So he would have a source of old newsprint to hand. I still think it’s strange the letter was composed that way. It’s – it’s old fashioned.’
‘Not so old fashioned that the author is unaware of modern forensic procedures,’ Carter pointed out.
‘It’s all part of Crown’s game,’ was Morton’s opinion. ‘He’s smart. He hopes we won’t think he did it, because it’s an old-style threatening letter as would be composed by someone who doesn’t have a computer; and either can’t be bothered with punctuation or doesn’t understand how to use it. Crown wants us to think this is someone without much education, not a public-school man like himself. But,’ Morton raised a forefinger to mark his next point, ‘he also realises we might just conclude that he’s out to trick us like that. So, he photocopies the original as a hint to us that the composer isn’t just a simple, old-fashioned nut. It leaves us not knowing what to make of it. Also, any traces leading back to him on it are put down to his handling it as it is now, not to his sticking the letters on to the paper. He’s running rings round us, or trying to.’
‘I think you’re on to something there, Phil,’ Carter agreed.
Morton looked startled at having one of his ideas approved at long last.
‘Someone is certainly trying to put us off the scent. But is it Crown himself? You could say Crown’s a manipulator. He’s manipulating us, right now. Or he’s on the level and he really did find the note in his room. What do you think, Jess?’
Jess took her time replying as the other two waited. At last, she said, ‘I think Crown was a worried man when we spoke. He put up a good front, but he was genuinely rattled. At the end of the day, there was a dead man in the ruins of his house. Perhaps he thinks we aren’t taking the threat to his personal safety seriously enough. So it is possible he created that note to make us do more than we are to protect him. But if it is real, then someone is using that to frighten him. Someone wants him to leave Weston St Ambrose. By the way, he was very keen I should understand that Kit Stapleton couldn’t be responsible. He discounted Petra Stapleton and the sisters’ mother, as well.
&n
bsp; ‘I agree that Petra’s in a wheelchair and couldn’t have got upstairs at The Royal Oak. They don’t run to a lift. Also, a wheelchair is noticeable. None of the hotel staff would have paid any heed to a local person who came in to the hotel this morning on their own two feet, but someone would have noticed a wheelchair – or a person using crutches as Petra does to move out of her chair. Kit Stapleton has already been there once to tell Gervase to stay away from her sister. Kit’s a tough nut, very determined, in my judgement. If Gervase shows no sign of going, she might do something to encourage him.’
‘Like this?’ Carter indicated the note.
Jess looked unhappy, ‘I wouldn’t have thought it Kit’s style. But who knows? She’s tried direct confrontation with Crown. He’s brushed that off. She could be trying something else.’
‘Mother Stapleton?’ he suggested.
‘Too much of a lady, in Gervase’s view.’
‘It might be worth having a word with her, even so.’
‘Send Stubbs,’ suggested Morton. ‘He’s very good with old ladies. They make him tea and feed him biscuits and get out the family photo album.’
‘DC Stubbs it is, then. Tell him to get along there. Also, we mustn’t forget the Foscotts,’ Carter murmured, looking down at the note again.
‘Reggie?’ Jess was astonished. ‘He’s Gervase Crown’s solicitor, and his wife is Crown’s cousin.’
Ian Carter had an answer for that. ‘Families have been known to go to some extraordinary lengths to preserve a good name. A threatening letter isn’t the worst. Crown caused a lot of grief when younger. His lifestyle suggests he might still be a loose cannon. It might suit the Foscotts to have cousin Gervase back in Portugal where he can’t cause any trouble here.’
‘Or they suspect he was behind the fire at the house,’ Morton clung to his theory. ‘Foscott’s reputation as a solicitor might be clouded by an association with a fire-raiser.’
‘There is another possibility, admittedly an outside one but it ought not to be overlooked.’ Carter paused and they looked at him expectantly. ‘Reggie Foscott is Gervase Crown’s solicitor, as you reminded us, Inspector Campbell. That means he will almost certainly have drawn up Gervase’s will. He must know what it contains. It does not appear to be an extensive family. Serena Foscott is Gervase’s cousin. Gervase is a rich man.’