by Ann Granger
‘It’s the first day of the year and I’ll do you the courtesy of ignoring the implication in that remark.’
‘No offence intended!’ Deanes said hurriedly. ‘But neither of us wants to take this any further, I fancy. The boy won’t do it again.’
‘I trust not. His behaviour could be construed as likely to provoke a breach of the peace. And leaving aside the legalities – it was extremely tasteless.’
‘He was very sorry afterwards.’
I bet! thought Markby grimly. ‘Did you actually see him into his house?’
‘Yes, I did. I sat him down in his kitchen, made him some coffee and talked to him like a Dutch uncle. As I say, he regretted it. I left him there about, oh, a quarter to two in the morning.’
‘Had his friends come home?’
‘No, they hadn’t. I had rather hoped they would, but Simon said they intended all going on from the pub to a party somewhere.’
‘What about him? Wasn’t he going to this party?’
‘No, I gather he wasn’t invited. The boy is rather a sad case, you know. He needs encouragement, a friendly interest taken in him.’
‘Quite possibly he does, but in the meantime he’s got to restrain his instinct for stirring up trouble!’
‘I think you’re being unfair, you know.’
‘Yes, I know you do. I’ll see you around, no doubt. Best wishes for the year and so on.’
‘Oh, yes. Happy New Year.’
Markby put down the receiver. What was the betting that as soon as Deanes had left him, Simon got his revenge on the world he saw as against him and provided salve for his humiliation at The Bunch of Grapes, by glueing together another foul letter and going out and pushing it through the Master’s door? It would take Pardy about half an hour, perhaps less at that time of the morning, to walk from Jubilee Road to the Master’s house. Deanes left him at about two, the letter was delivered at about four. Plenty of time. He would have to have another word with Pardy. But first of all, he had to drive out and see Tom.
He stopped off on his way down to the stables at Rose Cottage. He wondered first of all if he would be disturbing her and she, like Deanes, might be sleeping in. But then he saw that the curtains were drawn back and looking down the pathway running down the side of the cottage, he saw something flapping. He got out of his car and made his way round the cottage and into the back garden.
She was pinning up washing on the line. She wore navy-blue cord pants, a red cotton shirt and a navy-blue cardigan. The wind caught at her dark brown glossy hair and tossed it playfully around in a way he would dearly loved to have done but was unlikely ever to be given the opportunity to do.
‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you poaching on Mrs Brissett’s preserve?’
‘I can wash out my own smalls. Anyway, I’ve got nothing else to do. Hang on a jiff – I’ve nearly finished. Do you want to go in the kitchen? It’s warmer.’
‘I’ll wander round the garden if it’s all the same to you.’ He strolled past her and with his hands in his pockets, inspected the back garden of Rose Cottage in a leisurely fashion. Like many cottage gardens it had been intended originally to feed a labourer and his family. It stretched back a remarkable length and, although most of it was now laid to lawn, it was not difficult to imagine where the vegetable beds had been. Soft fruit bushes still grew there, no more than pruned-back stumps at the moment, imprisoned in a chicken-wire cage to protect them from the depredations of blackbirds and thrushes. There was the remains of a strawberry bed but no one had prepared it for the coming season.
Meredith joined him. ‘You’d like to get your hands on this garden, wouldn’t you?’
‘Not half.’
‘You’re welcome to come out and dig it up while I’m in residence. I don’t mind picking my own strawberries and blackcurrants provided someone else has organised them.’
‘I doubt you’ll get many strawberries out of this bed, not good quality ones. You might get the jam sort.’
‘What on earth makes you think I know how to make jam?’
‘I tried growing strawberry plants in one of those special earthenware pots,’ he remarked wistfully. ‘But the snails decided it was a highly desirable residence and moved in.’
‘Oh, Alan . . .’ she said suddenly and fell silent. He looked up, surprised, and she added quickly, ‘Are you coming in for a cup of coffee?’
‘Much as I’d like to, I really don’t have time. I’m on my way to see Tom and I’ll have to take him into Bamford to pick up his car. And I’ve already stopped off and had a glass of sherry with the Master.’ He hesitated. ‘He’s had a letter.’
‘One of the obnoxious variety, I suppose. How did he get it? There’s no post surely.’
‘Pushed through his letterbox in the early hours, of the morning. He lives just on the edge of town.’
‘So the writer could be living in town or in the country?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ll call by this evening.’
‘Fair enough.’
He drove off as she stood by the front gate, her arms tightly folded against the chill breeze, and watched him. He wished he could sit and drink coffee with her. As it was he faced a probably acrimonious exchange with Tom. He pulled off the lane and parked on the grass verge beneath the notice reading ‘Pook’s Stables’.
Markby got out, wondering if Tom had heard the engine or the slam of the door. The yard appeared deserted as he opened the gate and let himself in. Underfoot was trampled mud, dotted with puddles, scattered with straw and imprinted with hoofmarks. A galvanised bucket, kicked into a weird metal sculpture by a contrary hoof, lay abandoned by a loose-box door. But the midden steamed in the cold air, indicating Tom had been up and at work, and from within the loose-boxes, the top half of all the doors open, came various stamping noises and snorts.
‘Anyone home?’ Markby called.
Two intelligent equine heads appeared over loose-box doors, ears pricked enquiringly, to see who the visitor was. From a third interior came the sound of a man swearing softly. The door opened and Tom appeared in the aperture, scowling. He was wearing aged blue jeans and gumboots, with an open-necked check shirt under an ancient sweater with holes in both elbows and a check cap was pulled down over his black curls. His left cheekbone was swollen and reddened.
‘Good morning, Tom,’ said Markby. ‘Got time for a word?’
‘Going to arrest me for disturbing the peace last night?’
‘Think yourself lucky I didn’t. Give me one good reason why you shouldn’t be up before the magistrates tomorrow morning with the rest of the local lager louts.’
An angry red flush crept over Fearon’s swarthy features. Then he shrugged. ‘Fair enough. I asked for that. But it got my goat to hear that weedy little bastard gloating over what he’d done to Harriet.’ Tom came out into the yard, closing the lower half of the loose-box door behind him. The horse inside followed him to the doorway and now put its head over the bottom half door.
‘Blazer . . .’ said Markby, recognising the horse.
Tom turned and put up a hand to stroke the chestnut’s white-streaked nose. ‘Yes, poor old bugger. He knows something’s wrong. They always do. He keeps throwing up his head and listening for—’ Tom turned back to Markby. ‘Come up to the house.’
To describe Tom’s kitchen as untidy would have been the understatement of all time. A single man himself, Markby appreciated the difficulties, but Tom seemed to have abandoned all attempt to organise his domestic arrangements. Unwashed crocks were piled on the draining board. A rubbish bin overflowed. There was a broken bridle hanging over the back of a chair and on the table were scattered a roll of twine, a tin of dubbing, feed bills and other correspondence, a tin of odd tacks and nails, a pair of clippers and one odd glove.
Tom went to the fridge and brought out two cans of beer. He cleared a space by carelessly sweeping aside some of the bric-à-brac and put a can before his visitor. Then he took the seat opposite and jerked open the ring pull of his own can. He h
ad kicked off his mud-encrusted gumboots at the door and now, as he leaned back and propped one foot on the other knee, a large hole in the end of his sock came into view.
‘Not got anyone to do for you, Tom?’ Markby enquired, raising his can of beer in salute. ‘Happy New Year.’
‘No, I can manage. Prefer my own mess to some old woman fussing round with a vacuum cleaner, putting everything away where I can’t find it. Cheers and sod the New Year.’
A moment’s silence while they both drank.
‘I’m hoping you can help me, Tom. I’m trying to put together a picture of Harriet’s last movements, over the Christmas period.’ Markby set down his can and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
A gleam of humour showed briefly in Fearon’s dark eyes as he raised his can to his lips. ‘Oh yes? That should prove interesting.’
‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum!’ said Markby. ‘I haven’t come to dish the dirt.’
‘Like hell you haven’t!’
‘Okay, then. I have. I’m a policeman. I frequently behave in ways of which my mother would not have approved.’
‘My old lady,’ said Tom reminiscently, ‘was generally too plastered to approve or disapprove anything I did.’
‘I remember your family. I particularly recall your maternal grandmother. She lived out there on the common in a caravan, wore a man’s cap and boots and smoked a pipe. As a kid I was scared stiff to walk over the common in case I met her. She was like the old witch in the gingerbread house. I thought she’d cook and eat me.’
‘Oh, the old ’un!’ said Tom appreciatively. ‘She was a true Romany, born on the road. She’d never have harmed a child. I used to go and hide out with her when things got rough at home. She was a marvellous story-teller. She used to sell spells locally, a shilling a time. When she died, nigh on a hundred of her relatives came from all over the British Isles to attend her funeral. There were so many wreaths and flowers it looked like the Chelsea Flower Show. They gave her a real gipsy send-off and when it was over they went up on the common, piled all her belongings into her caravan and set fire to it, Romany tradition. And do you know what happened? Some busybody saw the smoke, phoned the fire station and Bamford fire service came charging along, bells clanging, and put the whole lot out.’ Tom stretched his arms above his head and grinned, his white teeth gleaming in his walnut-hued face. ‘Now I, Alan my old china, represent the respectable branch of the family!’
‘God help us!’
‘So what makes you think,’ Tom asked, ‘that I know Harriet’s shady secrets?’
‘Come off it, Tom,’ Markby said mildly. ‘You and she were “very good friends”, as the old Sunday newspapers used to put it, from the day she arrived in Pook’s Common.’
‘Possibly. I Wasn’t the only one. She had a number of very good friends.’
‘Let’s start with Christmas Day,’ Markby said. ‘Did you see her then?’
‘No.’
‘You told me when you telephoned about the horses that you were made late for Christmas lunch with a woman.’
‘Yes. The woman in question wasn’t Harriet, if that’s what you mean.’
‘You know, don’t you, Tom,’ Markby said, suddenly hating all of this. That in the normal course of events your word would be good enough for me. But this is a police enquiry. I have to ask for the name of the woman.’
‘Ask away!’ Tom retaliated sourly. There was a pause and he relented. ‘If you must know, it was my ex-wife, Julie. You can check with her. I usually spend Christmas at her place, not because I give a toss whether or not I ever see her again, but because of my kids. I want to be with my children at Christmas.’
‘I see.’ Markby shifted in his chair. ‘I understand. How old are they, Tom?’
‘Girl’s seven and the boy is nearly nine.’
‘I’m divorced too,’ Markby said to him. ‘Rachel and I had no children which is just as well. It made things a lot easier. We could make a clean break.’
Fearon drained the last of his beer and sat silent.
‘All right!’ Markby began again briskly. ‘You didn’t call by to see Harriet in the evening?’
‘No, and I wasn’t there all night either. I’ll answer that one before you get to it and save you the trouble.’
‘Then let’s move on to Boxing Day. The horses –how did you take your horse and how did Harriet take hers to the meet?’
‘I drove both horses there in my horse-box.’
‘Harriet go along with you?’
‘No. She came over to the stables early, about six-thirty in the morning, to help get the horses ready.’
‘Did you breakfast together?’ Markby asked, feeling deceitful.
‘No. She left about seven-thirty, seven forty-five, to go back to her place, bath and get ready and so on. Breakfast too, I suppose. I finished up in the yard, came in here—’ Tom waved a hand at his higgledy-piggledy kitchen, ‘fried up a pan of bacon rashers, cleaned myself up, changed, loaded the horses and drove to Bamford. Harriet made her own way there. That’s where I met her again.’
‘How was she early in the morning here, mucking out? Well? Cheerful?’
‘About as cheerful as anyone can be, mucking out nags at six-thirty on a winter morning in the freezing cold and dark, trying to plait manes and tails while the brutes plant their great muddy hooves on your feet and trying to keep upwind of them in case they behave in anti-social fashion.’
‘Anti-social?’ Markby asked without thinking.
‘So would you on a diet of grass.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘She wasn’t ill!’ Fearon said abruptly. ‘She wasn’t the way she was at the meet.’
‘Sure of that?’
‘Swear it on a stack of Bibles.’
It was at breakfast then, for sure, thought Markby. It was at breakfast someone slipped her the tranquillisers.
‘Did she have a drink here with you, early on? Alcohol, I mean.’
‘No – we brewed up some tea in here. I dare say she had a snifter before she left home to go to Bamford. And since your prurient mind seems to be running on sex, I might as well add that we were far too busy with the horses for anything in that line. I didn’t even pinch her backside. We were both working.’
‘You said she had other close friends—’ Markby began.
Fearon interrupted. ‘Yes, but I’m not naming anyone for you. Ask someone else. You’ve had my information. I’m not a stool pigeon.’
He meant it. Tom had served due notice he would now clam up and to question him further would be pretty well useless. But Markby did have one last question, even so.
‘Okay, Tom – but just one other thing, on another subject. Have you heard of anyone else getting any letter like the one pushed through your door on Christmas Eve?’
Tom took off his check cap and studied the lining of it. ‘I fancy one or two have. Ask around the hunt subscribers.’
‘It may interest you to know the Master has. He got another this morning. You haven’t had any more?’
‘No.’ Fearon ran a hand over his curly black mop. ‘All I’ve got is a bruise on the back of my head. Someone brained me last night in that pub.’
‘One of the girls hit you with a tin tray.’
‘That’s what it was . . . peculiar couple of girls, weren’t they? All that black leather and studs in their noses and muck all over their faces.’
‘Modern youth, Thomas. You and I are getting old.’
‘Speak for yourself. I hit that creep Pardy and then those two females came at me. Gave me a heck of a shock. I thought I was being attacked by the Undead.’
‘It doesn’t seem to have done you any harm. Come on, I’ll take you back with me to Bamford and you can pick up your Merc.’
‘All right, wait while I find some shoes.’ Tom tipped his check cap to the back of his head and tugged it forward, resettling it. He disappeared into another room and came back with a pair of shoes in his hand. Propping his foot on the c
hair to tie up his laces, he said, ‘There’s something you can tell me. Frances – Harriet’s cousin – is she still staying at The Crossed Keys?’
‘As far as I know, yes. But she’s lunching today with the Master.’
‘Good – I’ll give her a buzz on the phone.’
‘Tom . . .’ said Markby reproachfully.
He had made a mistake and saw it at once. Tom looked up quickly from his shoe. His swarthy features had harshened and an unfriendly glint entered his dark eyes. For a moment his seventy-five per cent Gorgio blood seemed to have drained away and left only the twenty-five per cent Romany he had inherited from his grandmother.
He said evenly, ‘I understand she is Harriet’s executor. As such she’ll probably be selling Blazer. I’d like to buy him. He’s a good horse and I feel I owe it to Harriet to look after him.’
‘I apologise, Tom,’ Markby said with sincerity. ‘My mistake. I spoke out of turn.’
Fearon relaxed, put his foot to the floor and straightened up. ‘I think,’ he explained more mildly, ‘Harriet would have been pleased to know old Blazer could stay on in his familiar stable with people he knows around him.’
‘Yes, I’m sure she would, Tom.’
They walked out of the door and Tom turned to lock it behind him. ‘Never bothered to lock it at one time,’ he observed. ‘Not a soul around in Pook’s Common. Now even I am getting jittery. You know . . .’ They were now crossing the stable yard and Tom indicated surrounding buildings as he spoke. ‘. . . I wanted Harriet to come in with me, in the business, build the place up – extend it. But she wouldn’t take me up on it.’
Markby glanced at him wryly. ‘Perhaps it was your lifestyle, Tom, which put her off.’
‘Perhaps. But as things turned out, she could have done worse than take me on, couldn’t she?’
Markby stopped, his hand on the handle of the car door. ‘Meaning just what?’ he asked sharply.
‘Come on,’ Tom said, ‘You’re not snooping around for nothing. Asking a load of questions about where I was, she was – who was – what was . . . You think someone slipped Harriet those pills, don’t you?’
‘I don’t know, Tom. But we are looking into it.’