Enter Pale Death

by Barbara Cleverly

  “Lavinia was accepting of his ambition. She shared it. She was already planning to do over the accommodation at number ten Downing Street. Ghastly thought! No—it was his other activities that roused her resentment.”

  “His philanthropic and academic interests?”

  “Yes. Begun by his grandfather, continued by his father and lately vastly extended by James—at his wife’s expense. Lavinia fancied she saw her money being poured into support for university research into subjects she hadn’t the slightest interest in. ‘Long-haired, socialist riff-raff’ were having their pockets filled with her family’s hard-earned cash and encouraged to while away three years of their lives making stinks in laboratories and downing pints in pubs.”

  “Many people would say she had a point.”

  “And many people would say you’re trying to start an argument, Commissioner. They might even add you’ve got your own dark horse entered in this mad steeplechase over hedge and ditch.”

  “I never bet on the outcome, Hunnyton. I’ve been surprised far too often in this game. It’s one of my faults, perhaps. I keep an open mind for too long. I extend the benefit of the doubt until the moment I’m looking down the barrel of a gun in the hand of someone I’ve been doubting since the whistle blew.”

  Hunnyton began to gather up the dishes. “Well, watch yourself up at the Hall. They’re not short of firearms of one sort or another. There are people up there barmy enough to use them and you’re barmy enough to provoke them.”

  The mild insult was accompanied by a sudden intensification of warmth in the Saxon eyes. Joe had noticed that Hunnyton was confident enough of their relationship to neglect due deference to rank when it suited him.

  The superintendent looked at the clock. “Better be off.” He handed Joe some pencilled sheets from his pocket. “Here’s some bumf I prepared for you. Plan of the Hall in case you need to run away in the night. Names of the senior staff. Map of the grounds, distances marked. Over the page, I’ve drawn a plan of the stable lay-out. I’ll walk you round the out buildings but leave you to it inside the moat. Oh, by the way, the drawbridge is pulled up at sunset. Traditionally and actually.”

  “Drawbridge?” Joe questioned, suddenly alarmed. “Where are you sending me? Doubting Castle? The lair of the Giant Despair?”

  “Drawbridges, in fact. One in front, one in the rear. Both in good working order. Most nights they remember to hoist them up and lower them at dawn. Guests from London enjoy that sort of thing. They write home about it. Take my advice—before you do anything else, ask the lad on the gate to show you where the levers are—anybody with two hands can work the mechanism.”

  “Drawbridges! I loathe the things. They’re responsible for more death and injury than the enemy they’re supposed to be keeping out. Why the hell does Truelove feel he needs a moat in this day and age?”

  “Moats are no big deal out here in Suffolk. Cattle troughs mostly, nowadays. Every farmhouse of any size has one, fed by underground springs. It was the main water source in the past. They’re not for defensive purposes, though perhaps in the Middle Ages they might have been. The great houses keep them for show and entertainment. Some stock them with fish. Truelove keeps his weed-free and crystal clear—a sight more healthy than Byron’s Pool in Grantchester, I can tell you. Everyone in the village who can swim learned to do it in that old moat. Younger guests like to splash about and squeal in the summer. Don’t worry—you won’t be expected to perform—it’s been far too cold a season so far and the water’s like ice still.”

  Joe pocketed the plan and looked Hunnyton in the eye. Time for a bit of aggression, he calculated. “So far, so good. It’s all working out for you, isn’t it, Superintendent? You’ve got your man on the inside for a couple of days potentially, by personal invitation of the dowager, welcomed within the drawbridge by various members of the family for reasons that wouldn’t bear close inspection. I’d guess you don’t intend me to leave unless I’m dragging some fiend behind me in handcuffs.”

  Hunnyton grinned broadly. “Not too fussed about the cuffs, sir. I just want you to ferret out the truth. I want you to know the truth. Nothing wrong with that, is there?”

  There wasn’t. Joe sensed that he and Hunnyton shared the same instinct for ferreting and could well understand why the man wanted to get to the bottom of his Phoebe’s death. A mate of Joe’s had taken a bullet in a fleshy part of his body in the war. It healed over and for years he was able to ignore the metal he was carrying around with him. But one day it seemed to have decided of its own accord to burrow its way painfully to the surface again. Surgery was required. Impossible to cut into one’s own flesh. You call in a steady hand to perform the extraction for you. He laid this out for Hunnyton, who nodded his understanding.

  “But Cecily Truelove?” Joe questioned. “She seems to think she also has booked an operating slot with the same surgeon at the same time. I’m sure she has no concern for little Phoebe Pilgrim—if she even remembers her. No, Cecily would appear to be calling for an invasive procedure to be carried out dangerously close to her family’s heart. Why would she do that?”

  “It can only be that she knows Lavinia’s death was managed and she thinks she knows who’s responsible. She must have every confidence that the prime suspect—who, in anyone’s book, must be her own son, James, the victim’s husband—is in the clear. Otherwise she wouldn’t countenance your presence within fifty miles. The guilty party must be someone she regards as untouchable by her—someone with influence—or even perhaps very close to her. She wants the guilty party removed by an impartial police officer with sufficient authority to effect that removal.”

  “This gathering she’s organising …” Joe said, casting a fly on the water. “She’s re-creating the April house-party, isn’t she? She’s re-enacting the whole show for my benefit. It’s a trap for some poor bugger. Thanks to her careful arrangements, the murderer will be tethered here at Melsett for the next few days, drawbridge up, ready for the strong hand of the Law to feel his collar. He’ll not have dared to turn down the invitation for fear of arousing suspicion. He’ll be giving me a rictus grin over his sherry glass and nervously muttering, ‘So, they tell me you’re a policeman …’ ” He looked searchingly at Hunnyton. “I do wonder why she couldn’t just have had recourse to the Cambridge detective division. To you, Superintendent.”

  “Thought you’d get there if I waited long enough. I could go on about prophets in their own country having no respect. Home-grown boy, regrettably intertwined with the family and all that. But the real reason—I’ll say it now I know you’ve worked it out—is that you’re looking at the murderer.” He cast a swift glance at Joe, looking for something in his reaction and fiddled with his pipe in the annoying way pipe smokers have, using the time for thought or emphasis or just to annoy. “In her eyes, I’m the bloke who killed Lavinia, and she’s going to do her level best to prove that. It’s a risk for me but it’s one I’m prepared to take to get you in there. This boil needs lancing.” He waved a nonchalant hand around the room. “If you have to run for shelter from the outfall, remember the door’s never locked. Consider this your retreat—your bunker if you like. You may like to know I keep a pair of guns loaded and ready up there in my bedroom. Purdeys.”

  “Purdeys, eh?” Joe waggled his eyebrows.

  “His own guns. Made to measure. He had long arms like me. They were the old man’s gift when he died.”

  A valuable legacy but could it ever have been appreciated by the man’s oldest-born son, who had to stand by and watch the estate moving over to his younger, legitimate brother? Hunnyton showed no sign of teeth-gnashing resentment.

  “Well, thank you for the offer!” Joe grinned. “Sharing a redoubt with killers—it’s what I’m used to. I know how to watch my back as well as my front.”

  Fair warning, he thought.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Lagonda stopped at the bottom of the lime avenue at the point where some ancient landscape artist had calcul
ated the visitor was best placed to be impressed by what, as Hunnyton had hinted, was one of the loveliest houses in England. Or anywhere.

  The eye was led by the geometry of the row of sentinel trees straight over an expanse of deer-cropped grass, rising upwards to the bridge over a hidden moat and beyond, the grand façade. Hunnyton turned off the engine and they looked in silence.

  “Towers and battlements it sees

  Bosomed high in tufted trees,

  Where perhaps some beauty lies,

  The cynosure of neighbouring eyes.”

  Hunnyton’s voice was quiet, as though speaking to himself.

  “Milton had something entirely more medieval in mind, I think,” Joe said. “It’s bosomed high all right, and those tufted trees framing it look very like thousand-year-old oaks to me, but the house itself isn’t very battlemented. No towers or crenellations … no martial intent whatsoever, I’d say. Jacobean? You’d expect it. No one feared being attacked by the neighbours any longer by that time. The Count of the Saxon Shore had long ago sheathed his sword or beaten it into a ploughshare. The nearest you get to martial is those pinnacles either side of the gatehouse, and they remind me very strongly of the ones we passed this morning on King’s College Chapel.”

  Hunnyton nodded in agreement. “It gets even more collegiate inside. It’s built in a square shape with an interior quadrangle complete with storey-high oriel window leading to the great hall.”

  “A house for a scholar rather than a soldier, would you say?”

  “It’s had its share of both,” murmured Hunnyton. “But the shape lends itself to comfortable living. There’s a very generous kitchen block to the northeast of the hall so the food doesn’t take forever to reach the table. There are company rooms on three sides on the ground floor, with different aspects. On the east there’s what they call a ‘summer parlour’ and on the sunnier south side another one called the ‘winter parlour.’ Oh, by the way, Sandilands, they don’t have anything so common as a ‘breakfast room.’ When you come yumming down for your devilled kidneys in the morning, you’ll find they’re being served in the east-facing summer parlour …”

  “Don’t worry,” Joe interrupted. “I’ll just do what I usually do and follow my nose.”

  Joe wondered again what thoughts were going on behind those deceptive eyes. Here was the firstborn (according to his own evidence) of the old lord’s sons. Disqualified from ever taking possession of the pile before him by the lowliness of his mother’s birth. Yet, by his situation, tied to the place. A tie at first of necessity but now of love, Joe judged from a fleeting expression on the man’s face. An emotion which was quickly corrected by the irony in his speech. Joe, a second son, although from much more modest circumstances, could begin to understand the envy, the anger, that the younger in line could feel. His own chagrin at the inevitable loss of his family home had been tempered by his complete lack of interest in farming and his older brother’s instinctive ability for it. But what if it had been the other way around?

  “I’ll walk the rest of the way from here. Get acclimatised. I’ll just take my notebook and a pencil.”

  “Good thought. Better not to arrive together, mob-handed like,” Hunnyton commented. “Some of the guests may be there already. They wouldn’t want to think a posse of lawmen was forming up to put a damper on their high jinks. I’ll leave you then. You can find your way through the stable block over there.” He waved to the right. “You won’t have time to stop for a chin-wag though or you’ll be late for lunch. The old girl is very punctual. You’ve got twenty minutes before she shakes out her napkin. I’ll drop your luggage off with the butler and then, Commissioner, you’re on your own.”

  As he started up the engine again he called over his shoulder to Joe: “Watch out for the green man! If you catch him, do everyone a favour and drown him in the moat.”

  JOE FROWNED AS he watched the Lagonda disappear. “Drown the green man,” had he said? He tried to make sense of it. Some medieval country custom? Or: the Green man? A lawyer who’d annoyed him? A bad-tempered chap who cut the lawns? He smiled and shook his head.

  Joe didn’t want to be seen marching alone straight down the centre of the lime avenue. Too exposed. He preferred to come crabwise at buildings, at people, down trenches. There was no glory and no sense in a strutting advance across open ground into the teeth of the cannon. He’d learned that much. He’d saved his own skin and that of hundreds of his men, he reckoned, by simply not hearing orders of a suicidal nature passed down the line. Others had taken the same precautions. There were more effective ways of achieving your aims. Joe had learned far more from rear offices than he ever had from façades, he reckoned.

  A quick glance at Hunnyton’s estate map that he’d tucked into his pocket gave him his orientation and he set out across the open ground to his right, heading for an intriguing incursion into the landscape of what looked like several acres of ancient woodland which had been left untroubled to serve as an element of the framework of the Hall and as a screen for the stable block. A group of three tall elms, outliers of the wood, stood on guard. To welcome or repel? Joe made straight for them across the close-cropped grass, using them as a marker.

  As he approached, he picked out oak, ash, hazel, much tangled hawthorn and a concentration of lower-growing shrubbery. Tantalisingly, Hunnyton had marked in the centre of this wilderness a tiny building he’d labelled TEMPLE OF DIANA. On a sporting and sociable estate like Truelove’s there was bound to be a temple to a classical god and Diana was most suitable. Diana the Huntress, eternally young and lovely. An appealing challenge to the sporting male ego since she had dedicated herself eternally to a state of virginity. Joe had always thought it odd that her other attribute was a mismatched concern for fertility. Denying it in herself, she loved and encouraged it in women. Those who wanted to become pregnant sought her intercession and when the moment came, this goddess would even help them through a painful childbirth.

  Follies, hermitages (occasionally still with hermit in residence), marble temples, they were thick on the ground in English country seats, usually put up at the whim of eighteenth-century young English gentlemen recently returned from their Grand Tour. They came back from the continent, travelling boxes stuffed with architectural designs of a classical style or Italianate nature. Some, more adventurous, brought along the architect himself if he were of cool classical style or hot Italianate nature.

  Joe enjoyed harmless whimsy. He approved of follies—they made useful trysting places or a refuge from boring company. A place to retire to with a good book minutes before someone’s aunt called for a fourth at bridge. He had fond memories of kisses snatched, surprising intimacies allowed, in his youth; he had less fond memories of a corpse he’d been called in to attend to, hideous flesh and blood polluting the white marble beauty. He reckoned he had time to take in Diana on his way to the stables. He hoped there’d be a statue of some sort, for choice a scantily clad Grecian lady on whose lips he could plant a chaste kiss. Sculptors quite often went into flights of erotic fantasy when chiselling out a Diana. He’d make off to the house before she could turn him into a wild animal or a bush of some sort. He remembered Diana had a quick temper and a short way of dealing with unwanted romantic overtures; her admirer, Actaeon, even her male priests had all come, one after the other, to a sticky end. Better treat her with respect when he found her. Still—a guest who took the trouble to stop off and make a votive offering to the goddess of the place on his way up to lunch might just soften the heart of the Dowager. It would certainly get the conversation going.

  The heat of the open parkland changed within a few strides to cool shadow as he entered the wood. He paused for a moment to let his eyes grow accustomed to the gloom and he breathed in deep forest scents laced with the intoxicating sharp top note of the elderflower that frothed in abundance, creamy-white amongst the dark foliage. He wished he could spend the afternoon here, alone with his thoughts.

  Some yards to his right, a twig
snapped. A small animal? Joe moved on briskly into the heart of the wood, seeking for a rise in the ground for that would be where a temple would be sited. The trees now crowded overhead, blotting out any external pointers like the tall bell tower of the distant chapel he’d lined up his sights on. If he kept his back to the sun he couldn’t go far astray—the whole grove couldn’t be much more than a couple of hundred yards wide. He stopped as, again, a twig snapped, to his left this time, and slightly behind him. Could be a poacher? Joe thought not. Those fellers didn’t go about snapping twigs so carelessly. Joe was used to tracking—and being tracked. Even allowing for the still air and the smothering effect of the thick tree canopy, that snap had been too loud. Not accidental. He could have sworn someone had picked up a stick and broken it with gusto. To attract his attention? Warn him off? Frighten him?

  All senses alert, he continued on his way more slowly. A rustling in the undergrowth kept pace with him. A low growl raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Not an animal, he thought. But what human would be making hostile noises at an innocent visitor in broad daylight? He’d try to lure it into view. Joe took his notebook from his pocket and, humming a snatch from The Mikado, went to stand in the shade of a particularly gnarled oak tree and affected to be drawing a sketch of the writhing outline. A very ancient specimen he decided and tentatively reached up and tugged at one of the lower branches, testing its resilience.

  He leapt to one side a split second before a log of wood crashed down, grazing his cheek, and thumping to the ground at his feet. He turned and caught a flash of green and brown behind a thick hazel only feet away. With a hideous cackle some being began to crash its way through the undergrowth, running away from him.

  Joe set off in pursuit, anger and outrage and a stinging face urging him on. In ten strides he had caught up. He launched his weight at it in a high tackle learned on the rugby pitch, automatically reaching for a human right arm and, to his relief, finding one. He hauled it up behind the creature’s back, shouting a dire caution in a police voice. When he sensed that resistance had stopped, he flipped his victim over onto his back and immediately recoiled in disgust. A stench of sweat and fear wafted up from the leather-clad body of a man. A wiry man, smaller than Joe but well muscled. His face was obliterated by a green mask, his head hidden under a cap of knitted wool woven through with oak and ivy leaves to produce an extravagant mass of greenery. Joe stared in astonishment. The mask was no amateur, papier maché, village-hall-drama-club attempt at stage costume. It was Venetian in quality, dark green silk, a full face mask, with embroidered slanting holes for eyes and a red-lined slit for the mouth. The eyes were dark and venomous, the teeth bared in a growl were grey and rotting.