The Death of Kings

by Rennie George Airth

  ‘He prospered, I’m happy to say. Billy Styles is his name. He’s a detective-inspector at the Yard now and he sends his regards.’

  Although Madden and his wife had visited Canterbury more than once to stay with a cousin of Helen’s who was married to a local solicitor, they had not done so since the end of the war, when the couple had moved away, and Madden was shocked by what he saw as the taxi he had taken at the station bore him through the city. Accustomed as he was to the sight of bombed-out buildings in London, where the snail’s pace of post-war reconstructions had left much of the city still in ruins, he had not expected to see damage on a similar scale in the much smaller confines of Canterbury.

  ‘The Germans used us as a target for any bombs they failed to drop on London,’ Derry explained to him later. ‘Canterbury was on their way home and they just unloaded whatever they were still carrying before they crossed the coast.’

  Luckily the famous cathedral, like St Paul’s in London, had not been touched and Madden had turned to look at its imposing spire rising above the town as they set off for their destination.

  ‘You might be interested to see the spot where the murder took place,’ Derry had suggested. A widower now, like Sinclair, he had provided his visitor with a cup of tea on his arrival and handed him a buff-coloured folder.

  ‘That’s a copy of the file the Canterbury police have in their records. They were kind enough to make one for me after I raised the issue with them. I put the letter I got in there. I expect you’d like to read it.’

  Madden had removed the envelope from the folder and taken out the letter, which was typed on cheap note paper and addressed to ‘Chief Inspector Derry’.

  ‘I have reason to believe that the jade pendant accompanying this letter is the same one that disappeared from Miss Portia Blake’s body in August 1938.’

  It had started without ceremony.

  ‘Rather than tell you why I suspect this I will leave it to you to establish the truth of the allegation. It should not prove difficult. As you may have noticed there is a slight flaw in the stone. That should be sufficient to identify it.

  ‘Since the piece could not have been stolen by the man who was hanged for Miss Blake’s murder, the question arises: who else could have taken it?

  ‘And why?

  ‘I leave the rest to you.’

  The letter was unsigned.

  ‘Chief inspector?’ Madden had examined the piece of note paper closely to see if it had a watermark. ‘Was that your rank then?’

  Derry nodded. ‘Either the writer knows that or he got it from newspaper files.’

  ‘Could I have a look at the pendant?’ Madden had asked.

  They were sitting facing each other in armchairs in Derry’s small parlour, and without replying the former superintendent had reached into his pocket and pulled out a velvet bag tied with a drawstring. Turning it upside down he had leaned across and emptied the contents into his visitor’s hand. He had watched as Madden held the stone up to the light. Deep green in colour and suspended from a gold chain, it was carved in the shape of a seated Buddha.

  ‘Yes, I can see what he means about its being flawed. Mind you, it’s hardly visible. And it doesn’t spoil the look of it.’ Madden had pointed to a line in the plump stomach hardly wider than a hair and paler than the dark green around it. ‘How do you plan to check whether it’s the same pendant? Is there someone you can ask?’

  ‘Not really. Both her parents died when she was still quite young and she was brought up by an older sister who lives in Ipswich. It was she who collected Portia’s things after she died. I spoke to her on the telephone, but she wasn’t able to help. She didn’t know anything about any pendant.’

  Derry shrugged.

  ‘But there is one other possibility. Miss Blake had a flatmate called Audrey Cooper; another actress. I found her address and phone number in the file and rang her. Unfortunately she was out of town, but I managed to get hold of some other woman—a flatmate, I gathered—who told me Miss Cooper was on tour in the provinces with a theatrical company. She’ll be back in London next week. I thought I’d wait until then to talk to her.’

  ‘But this pendant resembles the one Portia Blake had?’

  ‘Oh, yes. We were given a description of it. She was wearing it at dinner the night before she was murdered and the housemaid who saw her as she was leaving the house next day said she had it on. I can confirm it wasn’t among her effects when we searched her room later.’

  Madden had studied the note again.

  ‘The wording’s strange, isn’t it?’ he remarked. ‘“I have reason to believe . . . Rather than tell you . . . the question arises . . . I leave the rest to you.” If he or she had any information regarding the case, why not just come forward and say so? What did you make of it?’

  Derry shrugged.

  ‘My first thought was that the writer was playing the fool with us. But although the tone is odd, he seems to know something; or wants us to believe that he does. I say “he”, but you’re right. It could be a woman.’

  ‘But what is he after, I wonder?’ Madden frowned. ‘It seems clear that he wants the case re-opened. But if so, why not point a finger at someone? He’d be far more likely to get the police interested if he gave them a name.’

  It was at that point that Derry had suggested they drive out to the village of Burnham near where the young woman had been killed.

  ‘You’ll understand what’s bothering Angus and me better when you’ve seen the actual murder site.’

  Derry had assured his visitor their journey wouldn’t take long—the village was only a few miles from Canterbury—and soon after they left the outskirts of the city Madden found they were in the midst of open countryside, a gently rolling landscape which in other parts of England might have been covered with wheat or barley but here was planted with field after field of hops. He saw that the normally green plants had turned yellow, a sign that they were ready for harvesting.

  ‘This is the time of year, the same month, in fact, when the Blake woman was murdered.’ Derry gestured at the land on either side of them. ‘The fields around here were full of hop pickers, just as they are now. Owen Norris, the man convicted of the murder, was one of them. He was an itinerant farmworker; he’d come here for the harvest, same as the others. At the time I thought it was a crime that was unpremeditated; that Norris had come on Miss Blake by chance.’

  He glanced at Madden.

  ‘Now I’m not so sure.’

  • • •

  ‘That’s where she left the garden.’

  Madden followed the direction of Derry’s pointing finger and saw a green wooden gate set in a high brick wall overhung with trailing creepers.

  ‘You can’t see the house from here. We’ll have to wait until we get higher up into the wood.’

  They had left the car in the village half a mile away and walked along a narrow road flanked by the same wall until they reached the field they were crossing now on a path that branched off from the road. Ahead of them was a wooded hillock which Derry had already identified as the spot where Portia Blake had met her end.

  ‘There’s another path that leads from the gate.’ Again Derry pointed. ‘It joins with this one farther on and it’s the one she took. The strange thing is there were people around when she was killed and quite nearby, too. If there was someone waiting up there in the wood to do her in—and that’s only speculation, mind—then he was certainly taking a chance.’

  ‘People?’ Madden glanced inquiringly at him.

  ‘Hop pickers. A party of them had walked here from the village. It was a Sunday, not a working day, and they had been having a drink at the pub and must have crossed this field at almost the same time as Portia Blake came out of that gate. They walked up through the wood and out the other side to where they were camping. Norris had also been at the pub, and
drunk too much as usual, or so the landlord said. He’d wanted another drink at closing time but been sent on his way after an argument. He followed the same route as the others—the one we’ve just taken—but they were some way ahead by this time and he never caught up with them.’

  Derry paused to lend significance to his last words.

  ‘Might he have seen Portia Blake entering the wood?’ Madden asked.

  ‘He might . . . though he said not.’ Derry shrugged. ‘Let’s go on, shall we?’

  They continued, crossing the field and passing the point where the path Portia Blake had taken joined the one they were on, and then walking up the slope to the wooded knoll. When they came to the first of the trees Derry stopped and turned round. Madden followed suit.

  ‘There—now you can see it. That’s the house. It’s called Foxley Hall. It was bought by one of Jessup’s forebears in the last century from a family that dated back to the conquest. Originally it was a Norman manor, one of the oldest in the country, but it was sacked and burned during the Civil War and then rebuilt in the Dutch style; or so my architecturally minded friends tell me.’

  Madden grunted. He shaded his eyes. It was after midday and the overhead sun was bright. It glinted on the many windows at the front of the house and brought a glow to the red brickwork, which was topped by a line of triangular gables, all clearly visible now above the tall garden wall. They were high enough so that he could also see the flagged terrace in front of the house, and below it, descending in shallow steps, several other terraces decorated with lawns and flower-beds, one of them containing a wide lily pond.

  ‘She went out by a side door—that’s where she was seen by the maid—and must have come down that yew alley you can see at the edge of the garden.’ Derry’s pointing finger had shifted. ‘She wouldn’t have been spotted walking down—the hedges on either side are trained at the top to form a tunnel—so it doesn’t look as though anyone in the house could have noticed her.’

  ‘Is the house empty now?’ Madden asked. He could see that the ground-floor windows were shuttered.

  Derry nodded. ‘Sir Jack died here in ’39, shortly after the war started. The lady he lived with moved out soon afterwards. He only had one child, a son named Richard—Sir Richard now—and he was away on active service for most of the war. When it was over he decided he didn’t want to live here and the house was let to tenants. Lately he’s decided to sell it and I’m told it’s going to be turned into a school. Apart from a caretaker no one lives here now. You can see that the garden’s been allowed to go.’

  Madden nodded. He had divined as much from the untrimmed hedges and empty borders.

  ‘The lady Sir Jack lived with, you say?’

  ‘A Mrs Castleton, she was, Adele Castleton.’ Derry smiled. ‘I wouldn’t say she was notorious exactly, but she’d certainly had her name in the papers often enough before she hooked up with Jessup. He was still married, but his wife wouldn’t give him a divorce. I believe he and Mrs Castleton had been together for some time, living as man and wife, but not legally hitched. I must say I thought her a damned attractive woman when I met her. Not young anymore, but I could understand any man losing his head over her.’ He shook his head in rueful memory.

  Madden had turned from studying the house to listen to him. ‘I’d be interested to know who was staying with them that week-end,’ he said. ‘Do you still have the names?’

  Derry nodded. ‘They’re in the file. We interviewed them all briefly. Initially we just wanted to know where they were when the murder took place. We were going to question them again, in detail, but when Norris was arrested—that was only two days after the murder—the investigation was wound up and we never got to do it. They weren’t a particularly interesting bunch. But one in particular did catch my eye: a Mr Stanley Wing. I don’t mind admitting I didn’t like the look of him. He was a business associate of Sir Jack’s, some kind of oriental; not pure Chinese; a half-breed, I would say. He certainly had a touch of the tar brush. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but the Jessup family fortune was made in Hong Kong.’

  Madden nodded. ‘Jessup’s is one of the great trading companies—hongs, they’re called. You were telling me about this man Wing . . . ?’

  ‘There’s not much to tell.’ Derry shrugged. ‘As it happened I interviewed him myself. He said he had come down from London for the week-end at Sir Jack’s invitation and had brought Portia Blake with him. There was nothing to tie him to her murder, no obvious motive. But as I say, I had a feeling about him. He seemed to me the sort of man you wouldn’t put anything past.’

  ‘Were they together, he and Portia Blake—as a couple, I mean?’ Madden frowned.

  ‘I don’t believe so.’ Derry shook his head. ‘You can check it in the file, but my recollection is he simply said they were acquainted and that he had driven her down to London at Sir Jack’s invitation to spend the week-end.’

  ‘Where was he when she was murdered?’

  ‘In his room, resting, he said. So were most of the other guests. As I told you we never got around to checking their alibis.’

  ‘What was it about him that you didn’t like? Was it something he said?’

  Again Derry shook his head.

  ‘No, it was the man himself. He didn’t seem bothered by Miss Blake’s death. In fact, he didn’t show any emotion at all. He just stared at me with those black eyes of his.’

  He clicked his tongue in irritation.

  ‘The trouble is this all happened ten years ago. The people who were in the house that week-end, staff and guests, are mostly scattered; and as you’ll see from the file, some of them are dead.’

  • • •

  ‘Here we are, then.’

  Derry took off his hat and wiped his bald pate with a handkerchief. Their walk from the village along the road and across the sun-bruised meadow had been warm work.

  ‘This is the spot. She was found lying inside that ruin; so whoever murdered her—whether Norris or some other man—must either have killed her there or else dragged her body inside with the idea of hiding it. But it turned out to be visible from the path; it was spotted through the doorway by these young boys. They were the ones who raised the alarm.’

  The former superintendent paused to give his companion time to take in the scene. Madden looked about him. Out of the bright sunlight now, they stood in the dark shadow cast by trees in full summer leaf. Hard beside them was an old stone wall, part of a ruined structure that had once been a small hut, though little remained of it apart from the walls and the uneven bricked floor. They had followed the path through the wood until they had reached the crest of the knoll, at which point Derry had veered off it and Madden had spotted the ruin through the trees.

  ‘These lads—there were three of them—had come from the opposite direction; they were on their way to the village and one of them saw something lying just inside the doorway.’ Derry pointed to the dark recess. ‘He was curious enough to come over and have a look to see what it was. As I say, her body was lying inside the hut but close to the doorway. It must have been her face that he spotted; it was pale enough to show up in the dark.’

  ‘The killer was careless, then.’ Madden frowned. ‘If he’d taken the trouble to drag the body into a corner it probably wouldn’t have been found for hours, not until after a search for her had been made. That sounds more like the man you arrested, more like the act of a casual killer rather than someone who was lying in wait for her.’

  ‘True.’ Derry nodded. ‘But it could be that these boys forced the killer’s hand. They told us they had been chatting as they came up through the wood; and being young lads they were probably making a racket. The murderer, whoever he was, would have heard them and he may have decided to get moving while he still had a chance to escape unobserved.’

  He put his hat back on and then paused to reflect.

  ‘Let�
��s look at this first from the point of view of Norris being the killer,’ he said. ‘Let me explain how we came to arrest him and charge him so quickly. We knew by calculating how long it would have taken him to walk from the pub that he would have been a few minutes behind Portia Blake when she began walking up the path into the wood. It’s possible he could have spotted her from the road and quickened his pace to catch up with her. We also know that Miss Blake got no farther than this ruined house; if she had gone on the boys coming up the hill from the fields on the other side would have seen her. So if Norris killed her it must mean he caught up with her at the top of the hill and probably dragged her off the path and into this hut. We believed that he meant to rape her and was probably trying to silence her by choking her, using her scarf to do it. But he’d overdone it, we reckoned, and killed her by mistake, after which there was nothing he could do but make himself scarce.’

  He glanced at Madden, as if to gauge his reaction.

  ‘I expect Angus told you, but the reason we were able to arrest him so quickly—it was only two days after the murder—was because he tried to sell some earrings Miss Blake was wearing to a Canterbury jeweller. They were also made of jade, carved in the shape of dragons, but paler in colour than the pendant, and we knew they were missing from the body because the maid who had spotted her going out remembered she was wearing them. Norris was trying to sell the earrings to the jeweller together with the girl’s wristwatch, which was also missing. We’d already put out a description of the earrings and the jeweller simply got his assistant to call the police and kept Norris there long enough for them to turn up and arrest him.’

  Madden pondered.

  ‘Am I right in thinking he denied the murder at first?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s correct.’ Derry nodded. ‘His story was that he’d spotted her body from the path just as the boys had and simply stolen the stuff off it; nothing more. Well, we didn’t believe him for a start, and even less so when we checked with Central Records at the Yard and discovered he’d done time for attempted rape. He’d been caught in the act of assaulting a young woman near Bangor, in Wales. There was no doubt about it, either; he’d torn off most of her clothes and was on top of her when her cries were heard by a couple of farmworkers who came to her rescue. Norris was given eight years. He’d only been out for a few months when this happened. We reckoned he must have been ready to try again after all that time in stir. But as I say, he denied murdering her or trying to rape her. He would only cough to the theft at first. But after we’d interrogated him for a day or two he changed his mind and signed a confession.’