Murder in the Museum (Fethering Mysteries)

by Brett, Simon

  ‘Why was he given the job in the first place?’

  ‘Because he was the obvious person. A relative, obsessed with Esmond, with easy access to all the papers – and a good Catholic.’

  ‘Is Jonathan Venables Catholic?’

  ‘No, but that doesn’t matter. He’ll do a workmanlike job.’

  ‘I still don’t quite understand why Graham was appointed to write the biography . . .?’

  ‘Because it flattered his vanity . . . mostly. Also, I thought it would give him a big project, something to do . . .’

  ‘Keep him out of your hair?’

  ‘Yes. That was another reason.’

  ‘You sound as if you didn’t much care whether his book ever got completed or not.’

  The tall woman looked down at Carole. There was an uncompromising honesty in her eyes. ‘All right. To be quite honest, I didn’t. I was keen on anything that might raise the profile of Esmond and Bracketts, but I wasn’t convinced the biography would make that much difference. Maybe, coinciding with the centenary in 2004, but . . . I wasn’t really that bothered . . . until Marla Teischbaum came on the scene.’

  ‘Right.’

  For a second the outside world was illuminated by a flash of lightning. The thunder now followed hard on its heels.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask if you’re Catholic, Sheila?’ Carole didn’t like the woman; she didn’t mind if she sounded nosy.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why . . .?’

  ‘Why have I devoted my life to this place?’ Sheila Cartwright’s dark blue eyes suddenly focused on the pale blue of Carole’s.

  ‘All right. Why?’

  The rain fell as though an overhead sluice had suddenly been opened. The two women looked at the spatters of water bouncing up from the ground outside.

  When she spoke, Sheila’s voice was barely audible above the roaring of the weather. ‘The reason I’m obsessed with Bracketts is very simple. Comes down to one poem. Esmond’s most famous poem. I’m sure you know it.’

  ‘ “Threnody for the Lost” . . .?’

  The tall woman’s head nodded once. ‘Nearly twenty years ago, I was all right. Happily married, one teenage son. Nick. My husband had a good job, I didn’t need to work. Just spent the time ministering to my menfolk. Cooking dinner parties for my husband’s friends, ferrying Nick from pillar to post. Squash court to rugby club to hockey pitch to Yacht Club . . .’

  She was silent for a moment. ‘Nick was drowned in a sailing accident. He was fourteen. His body was never found.’

  ‘Like Graham Chadleigh’s?’ asked Carole softly.

  Another single nod. ‘I was devastated. We were both devastated, my husband more than me. He’s never really recovered. He’d invested so much hope in Nick, in Nick becoming a sportsman, in Nick achieving things he’d never achieved himself. It was a bad time.’

  Only the persistent drumming of the rain filled the silence.

  ‘I tried everything,’ Sheila went on, ‘that might bring me comfort. Religion . . . therapy . . . antidepressants . . . Nothing worked. The pain just got worse. And then, for the first time, on the recommendation of a friend, I read “Threnody for the Lost”. At last I’d found something that spoke to me, somebody who had shared and empathized with my pain. So I started to read more of Esmond Chadleigh’s work, to read about his life. I discovered that this house was no longer in the family and falling into disrepair and –’ the shrug of her shoulders seemed to encompass everything ‘– that’s how an obsession was born.’

  ‘And your husband? Was he involved too?’

  A brisker shrug. ‘No, I said he went to pieces.’ Like the way she hadn’t graced him with a name, this dismissal confirmed her husband’s irrelevance in her life.

  ‘You mean he’s hospitalized?’

  ‘No, no, he’s at home. But he’s had nothing to do with Bracketts.’

  That seemed to be all she had to say on the subject of her husband. And the brief moment of vulnerability brought on by the mention of her son had passed too. Sheila Cartwright moved briskly to the doorway and looked out at the sheeting rain.

  ‘It’s not going to let up. We’d better make a dash for it.’

  ‘You’ll get soaked through,’ said Carole dubiously, feeling slightly smug for having brought her Burberry with her from the Renault.

  ‘I’ll borrow one of these.’ Sheila took down a ‘Brack-etts Volunteer’ waterproof from the pegs by the door. ‘We’ve got plenty of them.’

  ‘Some sponsorship deal, was it?’

  ‘Yes. Very promising one. Didn’t last, though. Company got taken over by one of the insurance big boys, and the new owners weren’t interested in sponsorship at this level. Wanted to entertain their corporate clients at golf tournaments, not writers’ houses,’ she concluded bitterly.

  ‘Still, the coats are good,’ said Carole.

  ‘Oh yes, got something out of it,’ Sheila agreed, zipping up the front and pulling the hood over her head.

  ‘Shouldn’t we lock up?’ asked Carole.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Sheila Cartwright. ‘Gina’s the Director. That’s her job.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  As they walked towards the car park, the rain pounded down. Carole envied Sheila’s hood, and wished she’d brought an umbrella or some kind of hat, as her hair was flattened down against her head. The rain splashed up so much on hitting the ground that Carole’s tights and shoes were instantly drenched.

  ‘A good example of the Pathetic Fallacy,’ Sheila shouted over the din.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘When inanimate objects reflect people’s emotions. Literary device Esmond used to use quite a lot. Him and the Romantic Poets. So you have this rain and wind echoing the storminess of the Emergency Trustees’ Meeting.’

  ‘You were the one who made it stormy,’ Carole couldn’t help saying.

  ‘Unavoidable, I’m afraid. Where the survival of Bracketts is concerned, any means are acceptable.’

  The moment of sympathy Carole had felt when Sheila talked about her dead son was once again replaced by irritation. The woman was nothing less than a bully; all she cared about was getting her own way.

  Suddenly the path around them was flooded with light. Long slanting lines of rain became solid in the beam. Carole looked up for the flash in the sky, but the light continued.

  ‘Security lamps,’ Sheila explained. ‘Triggered by anyone walking towards the car park.’ Then her attention was distracted. ‘What the hell . . .?’

  Carole followed her eyeline. They were walking along the wall of the kitchen garden, whose gates, locked since the day of the skeleton’s discovery, now hung open on their hinges.

  ‘What’s been going on?’ asked Sheila angrily, as she stepped forward into the the space designated for the Bracketts Museum.

  Carole saw no lightning flash, but there was a sharp crack of what she took to be thunder. In front of her Sheila Cartwright shuddered and stood rigid for a moment. Then slowly, she toppled forward, face-down, on to the ground.

  Carole Seddon moved quickly towards her. From the tall body on the ground came a guttural gurgling.

  The white beam of the security lamp caught on the ridges of brown mud by the woman’s head.

  And also on the red blood that was spilling from her hidden face.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Carole ran to the Administrative Office to summon the police. It was empty, no sign of Gina. The motherly voice on the other end of the line asked her if she was sure the woman in the kitchen garden was dead. Instinctively, Carole said yes. She was told not to touch anything, but wait until someone arrived. It shouldn’t be more than ten minutes. There was a patrol car in the Fedborough area; wouldn’t take long to get to South Stapley. Bracketts, the big house, right. Near the car park, fine. If Mrs Seddon wouldn’t mind waiting by the entrance . . . assuming of course that the weather wasn’t too bad.

  In fact the rain had stopped, as suddenly extinguished as the life
of Sheila Cartwright. When Carole returned, the body was completely still, and the pool of blood seemed to have stopped increasing.

  The beam of the security lights now showed another gleam of blood, on the dark wetness of Sheila’s ‘Bracketts Volunteer’ waterproof, right between her shoulder blades. Only very little had spilled through the small hole in the fabric; presumably a lot more had spread inside, between the coat and her punctured flesh.

  It must have been a bullet. Nothing else could have made such a mark and had such an effect. Carole tried to remember exactly where Sheila had been standing when she had been hit, and from what direction the shot had been fired. Definitely not from the car park. The bullet had come from the cluster of buildings, Bracketts itself, the converted stable block which housed the Administrative Office, and Graham Chadleigh-Bewes’ cottage. Or maybe the killer had been standing in the open somewhere between them. There was still no sign of anyone, apart from Carole and Sheila’s body.

  She moved closer to inspect the kitchen garden gates. There was no sign that they had been forced open. Someone had used a key.

  As yet, Carole didn’t speculate as to who that someone might have been. She was still too numb, too much in shock, to think of attributing blame for Sheila’s murder. And, even though logic dictated that the weapon which killed her had been an old service revolver, Carole did not let her traumatized mind form the thought.

  Uncertain what she was expecting, she looked fearfully towards the spot where the skeleton had been unearthed less than a fortnight before. There was nothing to see. No boxing-in with fabric structures, no police tape. So far as she could tell in the gloom of the wall’s shadow, the ground where the body had lain had been neatly raked over. Whatever official investigations were still going on into that death, they were no longer taking place at the scene of the crime.

  Sheila’s great triumph, she thought, had been delaying the announcement of that little titbit to the hungry press.

  But as Carole Seddon turned to face the approaching headlights of the police car, she didn’t somehow think any amount of influence with the Chief Constable was going to allow Sheila Cartwright’s own murder to be kept quiet for long.

  The police were very calming, and tried the make the process of questioning as gentle as possible. Carole was taken back to the Administrative Office, where Gina Locke had reappeared. The small, dark woman seemed to have grown in stature, a model of efficiency as she showed round and answered the questions of the investigating officers. The news of her predecessor’s death had lifted a cramping shadow from her, instantly providing her with the space into which she could expand in her role as Director of Bracketts.

  It was Gina who suggested that the police take over the outer office used by her secretary as a temporary centre for their operations, and it was there that Carole Seddon was questioned. She had the sensation of only being half-there. The death of Sheila Cartwright felt as though it had taken place in a different existence, and yet Carole’s watch told her less than an hour had elapsed since she had made her call to the police.

  There was a plain-clothes male detective and a uniformed WPC. They punctiliously gave their names, but the information did not take any grip on her shaken mind. She was in serious shock, and a part of her consciousness seemed to detach itself to observe the phenomenon. Come on, you’re Carole Seddon, it urged, you’re the ultimately sensible person. In your Home Office career, you were respected for your control and objectivity. You shouldn’t be disoriented by the sight of a little blood.

  But she had been. Of that there was no doubt. And the detached part of her wondered whether her agitation might have been caused by her proximity to Sheila Cartwright at the moment of death. Had the bullet strayed only a couple of feet to the left, it would have been Carole Seddon lying face-down in the mud. Perhaps that knowledge had caused the coldness and the involuntary trembling that twitched through her body?

  All she knew, as she went through the basics of her name, address and other personal information, was that she was not in control of the situation. Or of herself. And Carole hated not being in control.

  The questioners, whose names she had so carelessly lost, asked her to describe the moment of Sheila Cartwright’s death, and her answers felt dismally inadequate. Why hadn’t she been concentrating? Why hadn’t she noticed the exact direction in which the victim had stumbled? Why hadn’t she looked back after the shot? Why hadn’t she run back towards the house to see if there was anyone about? Why hadn’t she listened for the sounds of a departing vehicle?

  To be fair, this guilt-inducing tone of questioning was all her own. The police were much less hard on her, careful of her emotional state, grateful for the meagre titbits of recollection she could provide for them.

  They took her gently back from the moment of murder to the events of earlier in the evening – the Emergency Trustees’ Meeting, the reasons for its calling, and the topics which had been discussed during it.

  When asked to describe the business of the meeting, Carole felt an instinct for caution. Sheila Cartwright’s overbearing manner had been particularly insulting to Gina Locke and Graham Chadleigh-Bewes. Wasn’t giving the police a blow-by-blow account of this tantamount to providing them with two murder suspects?

  But Carole was too traumatized to cope with duplicity. She could only tell the unspun truth. And, after all, she was giving information which the police would be getting soon enough from some other source. What did it matter?

  The male detective indicated the end of the interview by saying, ‘Thank you very much, Mrs Seddon. You’ve been most helpful, and we much appreciate your frankness, at a time which must be very difficult for you. I’m afraid, inevitably, as our investigations continue, we will need to talk to you further, and I apologize for that now. Given the circumstances of the Emergency Trustees’ Meeting you’ve just described, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you to avoid discussion of this evening’s events with any member of the press. All media contact will be handled by the police.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Finally, Mrs Seddon, there’s one thing I do have to ask you. Though we await forensic confirmation, it would appear that what you witnessed tonight was a violent crime against Mrs Cartwright. Can you think of anyone who might possibly have had a motive to kill the lady?’

  Given the direct question, some of Carole’s customary circumspection returned. ‘Sheila Cartwright had a very strong personality. She had her own ways of doing things, particularly so far as Bracketts was concerned. She seemed to regard this place as her personal fiefdom. As a result, she did tend to put a lot of backs up. But whether annoyance at Sheila’s manner would be a sufficient reason for someone actually to kill her –’ Carole shrugged ‘– I have no idea.’

  ‘No. Well, thank you very much indeed, Mrs Seddon.’

  ‘Now do you think you feel all right to drive yourself home?’ asked the WPC solicitously.

  ‘Yes. I was very shaken, but I feel a lot better now.’

  ‘We could easily make arrangements for . . .’

  ‘No. No, thank you, I’ll be fine.’

  As the detective led her to the door, Carole could feel in his body language the urgency to be rid of her and move on to the next interview, but that didn’t stop her from asking, ‘Would you imagine there’s a connection between Sheila Cartwright’s death and the discovery of the body in the kitchen garden?’

  He smiled indulgently. ‘Mrs Seddon, even if I knew the answer to that question, you know I wouldn’t tell you. We are very early into the investigation of tonight’s tragic event. Far too early to be making the kind of connections you suggest.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course,’ said Carole, as she left the Administrative Office.

  But there was no doubt in her own mind that there was a connection between the two deaths.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  In the short time she had been talking to the police, the area around the kitchen garden gates had been transformed. Floodligh
ts, a battery of vehicles and equipment now surrounded the scene. And a white, tent-like structure had already been erected over the dead body of Sheila Cartwright.

  A polite policeman in a bright yellow waterproof escorted her to the car park. This was only partly, she knew, from solicitude. His main purpose was to make sure that she did actually leave the premises.

  Carole Seddon was a habitually cautious driver, but that night the white Renault went even slower than usual on its way back to Fethering. The trembling had left her body, but still threatened to flicker back into action at any moment.

  Very cautiously, she reversed into the garage at High Tor. Then, as she crossed to her front door, she looked across at Woodside Cottage. She desperately needed to talk to Jude, to share the shock of the evening, and to feel the healing calmness of her neighbour’s reaction.

  The lights were still on, both downstairs and upstairs. Carole hesitated for a moment.

  Then she heard the distinctive sound of coughing from the front bedroom.

  Grimly, Carole Seddon put her key in the lock of High Tor.

  ‘God, why didn’t you come round last night?’

  ‘Well, I . . .’

  ‘You must’ve seen the lights on. Laurence and I were talking till really late.’

  Carole couldn’t think of anything to say. Jude had come bustling round from Woodside Cottage as soon as she’d seen her neighbour bringing Gulliver back from his early morning walk and, hearing of Sheila Cartwright’s murder, couldn’t believe that she hadn’t been told about it the night before.

  ‘I . . . I suppose I felt a bit shaken,’ said Carole inadequately.

  ‘All the more reason to come and see me. I would have poured white wine into you until you calmed down.’

  ‘Yes. I know, but . . . Well, anyway, I felt I needed to be on my own.’ There was no way she was going to reveal the real reason why she hadn’t gone to see Jude, the threat to their intimacy posed by the presence of Laurence Hawker . . . even the danger that a late-night ring on the doorbell might interrupt something intimate. The thought of breaking in on some act of passion between her neighbour and her boyfriend . . . If ‘boyfriend’ was the word . . . The man seemed to have moved pretty fully into Woodside Cottage, so the assumption was reasonable that . . .