Hall of Mirrors

by Christopher Fowler

  17

  * * *

  TWIST AND SHOUT

  Bryant left Fruity Metcalf at the gatehouse and went back into Tavistock Hall, where he found that most of the guests had drifted off to bed. Ever alert to movements in the house, Alberman appeared from the gloom to inform him that Lord Banks-Marion had headed down the garden to his ashram. Bryant cocked his ear and heard the twangling of poorly played sitars emanating from what appeared to be a Mongolian yurt. He smelled cigars, perfume and incense.

  As he passed the door of the library he saw that May was sharing an immense overstuffed sofa with Vanessa Harrow. Leaning in, he beckoned. ‘John, I mean Jack, could I possibly tear you away for a moment?’

  ‘What do you want?’ whispered May, stepping outside the door. ‘I was getting on well there.’

  ‘What makes your hormones override your common sense?’ asked Bryant, amazed. ‘You do realize she’s a millionaire’s mistress? He could pay to have your legs broken.’

  ‘It was all very innocent,’ said May. ‘She was offering to take me around the delphiniums.’

  ‘I imagine that at this time of the night they’re past their best, as indeed are you. How many whiskies have you had? Technically speaking we’re still on duty.’

  ‘Relax,’ said May, holding up the decanter, ‘I’ve been doing some research. Let’s find somewhere quiet.’

  Slipping into Lavender, they found that the dining room had been cleared and the tables polished and separated. They located a pair of whisky tumblers and dragged two badly stuffed armchairs from the corner where they had been hiding a section of damp, rotted wallpaper.

  ‘Monty seems to have survived his ordeal intact,’ said May. ‘He’s furious about his room. You could have left it tidy. I’ve got Alberman and Parchment patrolling past his bedroom door, just to make sure that nothing else happens to him. You were right by the way: the old lord didn’t like his servants to have difficult names. Parchment’s real name is Prabhakar. You don’t think the gargoyle could have accidentally come loose, do you?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ said Bryant. ‘That thing weighed a ton. Nothing would have blown it over. Someone had been up there, though. What about the rest of the guests, what are they about? This designer fellow, Slade Wilson, do you have any idea where he fits in?’

  ‘I think he’s just another butterfly attracted by the colour of money,’ said May, pouring drinks. ‘Burke’s lawyer, Toby Stafford, is going to be managing the day-to-day finances of the new business institute. He’s staying over at the Red Lion in Knotsworth.’

  ‘So he wasn’t invited to stay at the hall?’

  ‘He was but chose not to. He’s not keen about having to socialize with Harry, given that the negotiations are still ongoing.’

  ‘I got the impression that the deal had been finalized.’

  ‘For the property, yes, but they’re arguing over the inclusion of all the fittings. The wording on the initial document wasn’t clear. You may have noticed some fine paintings on the staircase. Lady Banks-Marion wants to get some of them excluded. Harry, in his eagerness to sell the house, signed them away.’

  Bryant sipped his whisky, thinking. ‘I’m more interested in Donald Burke. Why would Norma allow her husband’s mistress under the same roof, do you think?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a bit of a puzzler, isn’t it? I’m told the wife’s fiercely loyal. Of course she stays in the background and leaves the finances to him, but she’d have to be very dense not to realize that Vanessa Harrow is being kept by him. Apparently it’s been all over the scandal rags. Burke’s considerably older and used to getting his own way.’

  ‘A regular captain of industry, then.’

  ‘According to Harry, Burke simply announced that he would attend with his mistress. Perhaps he wasn’t expecting the wife to trot along.’

  ‘That would explain the tension in the room. I don’t care much for whisky. Are there any beers?’ Bryant managed to reach a bottle and an opener without leaving his armchair. ‘What about the novelist, Hooter?’

  ‘Claxon. I think she’s an ally of Mrs Burke’s. Her books are in the library and I saw Norma Burke reading one of them.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve ploughed through them too. As for the vicar …’

  ‘I suppose there’s always a vicar.’ May examined his cut-crystal glass. ‘It’s a country house tradition, isn’t it? He has the local parish at the bottom of the hill, St Stephen’s. He’s after money, too. As soon as everyone heard that Burke was visiting for the weekend I imagine they appeared like flies on a dunghill.’

  Bryant took a swig of beer. ‘Do you think any of Harry’s guests could actually have been hired to attack Monty?’

  ‘It seems far-fetched. And if there’s a rotten apple, I have no clues so far,’ said May. ‘Harry’s father was the fourteenth in his line, a true Edwardian and greatly admired. He had high hopes for his son. Harry went soft in the head. His mother blames the Beatles. He was kicked out of Charterhouse and Sandhurst, then dropped out of his social engagements calendar in order to launch some kind of manifesto for world peace that involved him running around naked in body paint waving sparklers. He ended up in a Calcutta hospital suffering from an overdose of LSD. Meanwhile, the hall was falling apart. The ceiling in the master bedroom caved in and one of the bathrooms subsided, taking half the plumbing with it. Most of the staff walked out. The old man’s lifetime addiction to claret and laudanum finally got the better of him and he was carted off to St Stephen’s churchyard. Who do you think presided over his remains?’

  ‘Let me guess, the Vicar of Stiffkey himself, the good Reverend Trevor?’

  ‘Right, and that’s when Harry persuaded his grieving mother to sell the pile. The big surprise is that Donald Burke isn’t planning to boot him off the property. Americans always have an exaggerated respect for the English aristocracy. I can’t imagine why. He probably thinks Harry is charmingly unconventional.’

  ‘Maybe he senses a fellow eccentric,’ said Bryant.

  ‘Do you have any idea why Burke would send for six pairs of white cotton gloves?’ May explained what he’d seen.

  ‘Not a clue. You know how men get when they become rich. Nobody denies them anything.’

  ‘According to Norma he wanted to buy the place sight unseen – sent the wife and lawyer over to check it out. The plan is to hack away the damp and dry rot, put in new plumbing and remove the most damaged walls, but there’s a row going on about what should be saved from the historic interior, which is why Wilson is here, to fight in Burke’s corner against the conservationists.’

  ‘You managed to gather quite a bit of intel while I was downing pints with Fruity,’ said Bryant, impressed. ‘Do you think someone tried to kill Monty?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell,’ said May. ‘I’d like him to stay with the group as much as possible, but he has a habit of slipping away.’

  ‘Then let’s take a walk through the house, just to make sure that he’s safe where he is,’ said Bryant. ‘Come with me. I’d better take off my tap shoes. I don’t think creeping around after dark is encouraged. Alberman’s already got his beady eye on me.’

  ‘I wanted him guarding Monty, but the family keeps putting him on the main staircase.’

  Tavistock Hall had bedded down for the night. Somewhere a hot-water pipe clonked. In the first-floor passageway the edge of a tapestry flapped, and dried leaves fluttered in an amphora. Even the floorboards were stretching out and ticking back into place.

  Removing their shoes, the pair headed for the stairs and made their way up in the gloom, past a dozen grim portraits of ancestors. The wind had risen and was moaning faintly through the warped frames of the lead-light windows. A few lights showed under bedroom doors. Most of the hall bulbs had been removed, presumably to save money. A threadbare runner lay over the polished planks of the corridor, which creaked like a ship’s cabin as they walked across them.

  ‘I told Monty to keep his door locked tonight,’ said May. ‘Just in case.’<
br />
  Bryant pulled a crumpled page from his jacket and used his lighter to illuminate some pencil lines. ‘I think he and I have had the same thought,’ he said. ‘We both counted the number of windows from outside.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the bedroom doors don’t match up. I traced a plan of the house from a book in the library earlier. This can’t be correct. The right-hand corridor has four doors, the left five. Each room has three windows, two in the bedroom, one in the loo, which would make 27 windows in total, right? Alberman told me all the bedrooms are identical in size. But there are 28 windows, arranged in two sets of 14.’

  ‘How old is that plan?’

  ‘Mid 1920s.’

  ‘There you are. The house has probably been altered a lot since then.’

  ‘There have clearly been some cosmetic changes but I can’t see anything structural. It’s odd, though. There’s supposed to be another door.’ Bryant ran his hand over the wood panelling. On one side of the corridor two of the bedroom doors were more widely spaced. ‘The panels look original to me, but there’s definitely a space behind here. Feel.’ He put his hand to the spot where the joints joined and could feel the draught that caused the tapestry to stir.

  ‘Why do you always have to make a mystery out of everything?’ asked May. ‘Someone’s done a surreptitious bit of DIY, OK? It was probably—’

  A door creaked behind them. The Reverend Patethric stuck his head out. ‘Oh, it’s you, Mr Askey. I thought I heard something. These old houses—’

  ‘Just off to say my prayers, Reverend,’ said Bryant hastily. ‘I’ll say one for you.’ As the door shut, he turned to May. ‘Why is he staying here? Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’

  They made their way further along the corridor. ‘That’s Burke’s room at the end,’ said May. ‘He and his wife have the corner suite but there’s no extra window in the end wall.’

  ‘But that’s for a different reason,’ Bryant pointed out. ‘One of the earlier manor houses on this site was erected during the reign of William III, so it was probably bricked up. The window tax lasted for more than a century and a half, so I guess when the house was rebuilt it kept to the revised number of windows.’

  ‘You’ve been down in the library, haven’t you.’

  ‘Part of the job.’

  ‘You didn’t nick anything?’

  ‘Not this time, no.’

  They stopped before the door and listened. No sound came from within, but a shadow passed in the strip of yellow light beneath the door.

  ‘Nothing going on here. Let’s see if we can spot anything from the outside,’ Bryant whispered.

  Heading downstairs, they stepped out on to the back patio and walked across the lawn, looking up at the house to where the balcony ran past the bedrooms on the first floor. Outside the end suite they watched as the figure with long grey hair stepped out on to the balcony, pacing back and forth. He left a trail of cigar smoke behind him. A transistor radio was faintly playing an old Beatles song: ‘Twist And Shout’.

  ‘It’s funny,’ whispered Bryant, ‘Trev the Rev told me that Burke hated other people smoking.’

  Burke suddenly threw his cigar from the balcony and began dancing.

  ‘What on earth is he doing?’ asked May.

  ‘The twist, I think,’ said Bryant.

  Norma Burke came to the window in a pale blue quilted nightdress. ‘Come back inside, Donald,’ she said, her voice carrying on the clear night air. ‘Before somebody sees you. I told you not to drink so much.’

  ‘I’m going in,’ said May. ‘You’re watching the wrong one. It’s not Burke who’s at risk, it’s Monty.’

  Bryant remained on the lawn to watch the peculiar spectacle of the twisting millionaire.

  18

  * * *

  SUSPICIOUS MINDS

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Monty demanded of Bryant. He dragged the pair aside just as May was forking kidneys on to a plate. ‘Somebody violated my room last night.’

  ‘Oh dear. Was anything taken?’

  Monty’s mouth opened and shut again.

  The three of them were the first ones down to breakfast on Saturday morning, which had been laid out in Primrose, the south-facing breakfast room. A dozen silver tureens set along the sideboard offered a substantial start to the day. Monty was bandaged under his shirt, as stiff and lopsided as the Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

  ‘I told you I was being stalked. At first I assumed that the maid had left the window open and my papers had got all blown about, but it appears to have been the work of an idiot. All my documents had been taken out of my bag and simply strewn around. They’re trying to put the wind up me.’

  Bryant wasn’t really interested in Monty’s complaints. His concentration had been monopolized by the buffet. ‘Why would anyone do that?’

  ‘It’s an act of industrial espionage. And there’s this.’ Monty opened his hand and revealed a loop of silver thread. ‘It must have come from someone’s sleeve.’

  ‘Slade Wilson was wearing a jacket with a silver trim last night,’ said Bryant, keen to shift the blame. ‘Why would he search your belongings?’

  ‘It’s obvious,’ Monty replied. ‘I’m a witness for the prosecution. He was looking for my trial notes.’

  ‘Do you have them with you?’

  ‘Of course I do! I’m rehearsing with them over the weekend.’

  ‘You don’t think Wilson was recruited by Sir Charles Chamberlain?’

  ‘You’re the copper, you tell me.’ Monty poked him in the chest with a fat finger. ‘Find out what he’s up to. If anything happens to me, you and your pal are finished.’

  ‘Is there anything you haven’t told us?’ asked Bryant, wary that the older man could have him removed from the unit if he complained to Farthingshaw.

  ‘Certainly not.’ Not a muscle twitched as he stared Bryant in the eye. ‘If it wasn’t espionage it must have been those filthy hippies, looking for money to buy drugs. They’d fumbled through my clothes and my balcony had bits of branch all over it.’

  Bryant found himself quite enjoying Monty’s discomfort. ‘But why would they only target your room?’

  ‘Because I’d left the window open and there’s a vine outside. They must have climbed up.’ Monty blanched. ‘Or it could have been someone sending me a warning not to appear at Monday’s trial, someone I’d never suspect.’ His eyes swivelled madly. ‘That bloody vicar.’

  ‘The vicar?’

  ‘Well, clearly he’s not a real vicar, he’s bogus. Nobody can look that cheerful all the time. You have to find out. Question him on bell-ringing or something.’

  ‘I think you should be the one to do that,’ said Bryant, looking at Monty’s hunched shoulder.

  ‘You’re making jokes at a time like this? I tell you I saw him lurking in the passageway when I went to the bathroom.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘Nothing much, but he was still hanging around outside his door a few minutes later, when I came back.’

  ‘It’s not a very effective way of silencing you, is it?’ May made a move towards the sausages but was beaten to them by Bryant, who had piled his plate with kedgeree, eggs, mushrooms, beans, bacon, toast, butter and marmalade.

  ‘You two aren’t taking this very seriously, are you?’ Monty hissed. ‘It could be “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” all over again.’

  ‘I think that was rather an outré death even by Conan Doyle’s standards.’ Bryant waved him aside with a sausage. ‘I mean, how could Grimesby Roylott be sure that the snake was going to bite his victim?’ It was typical that Bryant would remember the name of the villain in a Sherlock Holmes story but not his own alias.

  ‘Look here, up until now I’ve been very patient with the pair of you, but I want some proper protection. Since you got here all you’ve done is stuff your faces and drink vintage wines.’

  ‘We’ve had some excellent brandies too,’ Bryant pointed out. ‘Funny, he didn�
��t want us around before, did he, John?’

  ‘I seem to recall he told us to buzz off,’ May agreed.

  ‘Before we can protect you we have to understand where the danger lies.’

  ‘And what have you identified?’ Monty demanded to know.

  ‘As far as I can tell there are a number of high risk factors, not the least of which’ – Bryant paused to check his watch just as a loud explosion rattled the windows – ‘is that one.’

  ‘What the hell was that?’ Monty cried, looking up in alarm as the chandelier swayed above them.

  Bryant held up a folded rectangle of paper. ‘Alberman brought me a telegram. It’s from our unit. There’s a French major general visiting the local barracks to take part in a military exercise; that noise we heard last night was the starting cannon. Owing to an administrative cock-up they marked this area down as enemy territory. Army HQ mistakenly thought Tavistock Hall was empty, so they closed the road. It doesn’t look like anybody’s going to be leaving the house for a while. It’s possible that somebody here knew you would be trapped.’

  Monty looked horrified. ‘What do you mean, trapped?’

  ‘There’s only one road connecting Crowshott to Knotsworth, and it’s going to be shut for the next twenty-four hours,’ Bryant explained. ‘Normally that wouldn’t be much of an inconvenience to anyone around here, but nobody told the army that the Banks-Marions were hosting a weekend party. You weren’t the only one lured by the thought of pitching a business opportunity to an American millionaire. Any of the other guests could have found out that you were staying for the weekend and decided it would be the perfect opportunity to get rid of you. Then there’s Harry.’ Bryant bit the end off a mustard-smeared sausage and chewed thoughtfully.