‘There’s only me and the woman who comes to do the flowers, sir,’ said the verger, appearing from the shadows just as Bryant was about to wander off down the nave.
‘What happened here?’ Bryant called back, his voice muted by the thick walls. ‘Where are all the wall hangings?’ He pointed to the lighter panels on the walls, and the rectangles free of dust where tapestries had once hung. The church had been stripped of all adornment.
‘Everything’s been sold off,’ said the verger. ‘There’s not much of a congregation left.’
‘Did the diocese agree to it?’
‘I don’t know, sir. I suppose the reverend had to pay the bills somehow.’
‘I don’t care how broke he is, it shouldn’t look like this,’ said Bryant. ‘When did it happen?’
‘In the spring, sir.’
Bryant had seen parishes in London’s East End which had been bombed and looted, and they looked healthier. ‘Can you take me to the sacristy?’
The verger mumbled a complaint, but led Bryant away. They were gone for a few minutes. When the detective re-emerged, he was dusting himself down.
‘This gets more interesting by the minute,’ he told Fruity. ‘Our vicar isn’t quite what he seems.’
‘He steals,’ said a wavering high voice from the rear of the church. An old woman in a tattered brown coat and knitted tea-cosy hat finished praying and unfurled herself from her pew to regard the detective. She pointed at the wall. ‘The vicar. I’ve seen him do it. He takes things when he thinks nobody’s looking.’
‘What does he do with the things he takes?’ Bryant asked.
‘Don’t listen to her, she’s always in here, she’s crazy,’ said the verger.
‘He takes them away in his car, a sports car, red, the chariot of the Devil.’ She crossed herself and scurried away before the verger could lash out.
‘Wait, where does he take them?’ Bryant called after her, but the door swung shut behind her.
Bryant ran out into the churchyard. The parishioner was making her way between the gravestones, dislodging crows. ‘The Devil is here,’ she cried. ‘The Crowshott Grym will come for him.’ With a squawk of alarm she trotted around the corner buttress and was gone.
‘Well, that was a rather Shakespearian exit,’ said Bryant, amused. ‘What was she talking about?’
‘Just a local superstition, sir,’ said the verger, following him out. ‘The Crowshott Grym is a mythical beast. I wouldn’t worry about it. Every village in these parts has a few folk tales attached. We still have plenty of old Victorians living around here.’
In the distance a barrage of gunfire sounded like thunder.
‘And what’s Crowshott’s folk tale?’
The verger shook his head dismissively. ‘A variation on all the others. The Devil takes the form of a creeping black beast that lives in the trees near Tavistock Hall. It was set there to guard the house. They say that if the hall should fall, the beast will come down from the darkness within the branches and bare its long fangs, and will tear out the throat of anyone who sees it. It’s just a children’s story.’
‘I’d hate to hear the adult version,’ said Bryant.
‘Nothing changes here,’ said the verger. ‘The past is the present. The more you Londoners try to change the world, the less it affects us. People are people and beasts are beasts.’
Something that sounded like a baby in distress cried out in the bushes behind them. Bryant shivered and pulled his jacket a little tighter. He waved Fruity over. ‘Let’s get back before anything else happens.’
‘You can’t keep us all here against our wills,’ warned Pamela Claxon. ‘Even Inspector Trench wouldn’t do that.’ The guests had moved to the more comfortable surroundings of the reception room, Iris, but there was no disguising the fact that they were prisoners.
John May sorted through the alibi postcards and felt none the wiser. The narratives were vague and randomly ordered. Out in the hall he heard Bryant coming in. His partner appeared in the doorway looking windswept.
‘I hope you got on better than I did,’ he said, shucking off his coat. ‘It looks like we’ll have to manage by ourselves for a while. Are those the testimonies? Let me have a shufti.’ He flicked through the cards. ‘What did you ask them to do, write essays? This is no good. Let me have a go.’ With a sigh, May stepped aside.
Bryant strode into the middle of the room to address the group. ‘All right, you lot, let’s keep it simple. Who left the house this morning?’
Vanessa Harrow and Toby Stafford raised their hands. ‘I went to the village for breakfast, as Mr March knows,’ said Harrow. ‘Sorry, he’s May, not March, isn’t he? And Mr Stafford was waiting for Donald.’
‘Miss Harrow, you were seen near the barn,’ Bryant pointed out.
‘It couldn’t have been me.’ She blew her nose. ‘Poor Mr Burke, what an awful end.’
‘Inspector Trench would work this out by a simple process of elimination,’ said Claxon.
‘I seem to remember that in one of your novels the victim was hit by a meteorite,’ Wilson reminded her. ‘Your inspector isn’t real, darling. He’d probably come up with the kind of theories you mystery writers always favour, death by poisoned pots of marmalade, trained monkeys and electrical cables hidden in bedsprings.’
Claxon was dismissive. ‘Inspector Trench uses his intuitive skills. I can’t bear Hercule Poirot, always judging people by their looks. He even complains about the shape of their heads. And Miss Marple’s worse. She never thinks the killer is a stray burglar. It’s always a duchess or a tycoon. And this ghastly obsession with ways of egress; she’s forever enumerating paths, roads, doors and windows. Why would any cop worth his salt let the nosy old cow into a crime scene? All she does is gossip about shifty-looking foreigners in the village.’
‘Last month in California five people were butchered by members of a cult for no reason that makes a shred of sense,’ Wilson reminded her. ‘There were no poisoned trifles or rifles hanging out of windows on bits of string there, were there?’
‘You have to admit the situation we’re in does feel like something from one of Miss Claxon’s murder mysteries,’ said the reverend.
‘And it will require the same approach to its investigation,’ said Claxon with determination. ‘A murder mystery is a construct that relies on anagnorisis, the sudden revelation that reveals the true situation.’
‘So it’s like cheating,’ said Wilson.
‘No, it’s technique. We mystery writers use many other devices: red herrings, unreliable narrators, deus ex machina, peripeteia – that’s reversal of fortune. Then there’s Chekhov’s gun, in which a minor character is revealed to be of major importance.’
‘But it isn’t how real life works, Pamela,’ Wilson reasoned. ‘Only a madman would do something like this.’
‘Except that none of us is mad,’ said Claxon. ‘Are we?’
‘Miss Claxon, he – or she – may show no outer symptoms,’ said May. ‘You know what they’re saying about Charles Manson? He doesn’t wake up each morning thinking he’s crazy. He wakes up each morning thinking you’re crazy.’
‘I thought you two were supposed to be police detectives,’ said Claxon. ‘Can’t you do something?’
‘Then it’s time to play the truth game,’ said May, looking at his partner. But Bryant didn’t reply. He was too lost in admiration for Pamela Claxon.
26
* * *
YOU’RE NO GOOD
‘Very well, let’s get this over and done with,’ said Lady Banks-Marion.
She sat in the centre of the room, steely and calm in a straight-backed chair, beside her son. Harry was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his beloved piglet. Malacrida had been rinsed of bloodstains and was still smiling, but now there was something ghastly about that permanently upturned mouth.
‘Could somebody ask Alberman to join us?’ said May.
‘What, the butler did it?’ Monty snorted down his nose unple
asantly. ‘The butler never does it.’
‘I’ll go,’ said the reverend.
While they waited, May turned to the group. ‘As this is an official police interrogation you are required to answer as you would in a court of law.’ He wasn’t sure about that, but it sounded good and was worth a try. ‘When I collected the details of everyone’s whereabouts I found I had ten cards instead of nine. This was the extra one.’ He held it up so they could all see the card that read: ‘They are all guilty’.
He let that sink in for a moment. ‘Note it says “they”, not “we”. It was written by somebody who knows you all and considers themselves innocent. Hard to imagine the killer writing it. So who did?’
He let them discuss the question with each other for a minute.
‘Next.’ He displayed a pair of white gloves. ‘Yesterday morning Donald Burke had six pairs of these taken up to him. What for?’
‘I can answer that,’ said Norma Burke, glancing at the others. ‘He couldn’t bear the thought of touching anyone. He had a phobia about germs. He didn’t like to speak about it and neither did I. It made him look weak. He’d left his glove case in the car.’
‘Then – forgive me, Mrs Burke – if he had a fear of disease what made him enter a sewage treatment plant?’ asked May. ‘Did he see Miss Harrow go in ahead of him?’
The singer shot May a look of betrayal. ‘So now I’m a siren who lures men to their doom in cesspits? What kind of a girl do you think I am? I didn’t go anywhere near there.’
‘That’s odd,’ said May, ‘because one of Lord Banks-Marion’s ashram pals, a girl called Melanie, says she saw you enter just before lunchtime. She gave us a description that only fits you. Were you there, Miss Harrow? Truthfully?’
‘I thought I saw Donald in the garden, so I may have passed close to the ashram. But I didn’t go inside the barn, I swear.’
‘Why should anyone believe you?’ said Monty. ‘You’re nothing but a common tart.’
The room exploded into uproar. Even the vicar said something colourful.
‘She’ll tell you she’s a nightclub singer,’ Monty shouted, ‘but this is who she really is.’ Removing his wallet from his jacket, he unfolded a photograph and held it up between his thumb and forefinger. It showed a heavy-set girl in a split-sided skirt and heavy eye make-up standing in a Merseyside backstreet. ‘Her real name is Brenda Miles. She once spent a month in jail for soliciting. She had to work hard to get rid of those extra pounds, and her Liverpool accent.’
‘It wasn’t how it looks.’ Vanessa’s face crumpled. ‘Why would you have that? Why?’
‘To remind you of your place, which is not here among decent people.’ Monty turned to the others. ‘Her meal ticket didn’t want anything more to do with her so she came back to me, didn’t you? I was down near the barn before lunch, quietly having a smoke. She came and found me. And this time I turned her down. Well, you’re out of a job now, so I imagine that next week you’ll be under the arches at Piccadilly Circus with the other girls.’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time a whore has slept under these rafters,’ said Lady Banks-Marion unhelpfully. May was about to step in, but Bryant held him back.
Vanessa looked younger somehow, and frightened. ‘I didn’t want to be here. I had nowhere else to go. I thought Mr Burke would be kind. I’m not his – I don’t belong to him. I never went to bed with him. I never even got to meet him.’
There was another pause while everyone digested this latest confession.
‘So you lied about going out with Mr Burke in London?’ asked Bryant.
‘I heard his name mentioned at the club, that’s all. I was in financial trouble and Toby got me the job there—’
‘It’s true that I wrote to Mr Burke, asking him to employ Vanessa,’ said Stafford. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’
Monty would not be placated. ‘Admit it, Brenda, you slept with the owner.’
‘No, Monty, I only slept with you,’ she said lifelessly, ‘and that was a dreadful mistake. Donald called me and was kind. He gave me advice, and that’s all he ever gave me.’
She looked over at Norma, who nodded imperceptibly, as if she had known all along. ‘He told me to stop relying on men of bad character. He meant you, Monty. That’s why he was avoiding you. He’d heard enough about you not to trust you.’ She turned to each of them. ‘You can call me indecent, but you’re the indecent ones. You did this between you, behaving so hypocritically. You created this whole poisonous situation.’
‘I’m afraid something else has come to light,’ said May, studying the assembly. ‘Your ladyship, perhaps you’d repeat your allegation?’
‘I am being blackmailed.’ Lady Banks-Marion sounded as if she scarcely believed it herself. Everyone stared at her blankly. She held up the letter that had been under her hands. ‘This is an amendment to the purchase contract for Tavistock Hall stating that the house is to be sold with all its existing furniture, fixtures and fittings – a clause my son was coerced into inserting without my permission, which I did not approve. A short while ago Mr Stafford told me that he has power of attorney for Mr Burke, and that the clause will stand.’
‘I’m afraid it’s a legal statement of fact,’ said Stafford, his briefcase propped against the leg of his chair.
‘You could remove it,’ said Lady Banks-Marion. ‘You could act like an honourable man. But instead you imply …’
‘What did he imply to you, your ladyship?’ asked May.
‘My son – my son …’ She faltered, her confidence evaporating.
‘Your son enjoys the company of very young ladies,’ said May. ‘In fact, the girl he married in India—’
A ripple of shock passed around the room.
‘Riya was given to me when she was fourteen,’ said Harry, jutting his chins defiantly. ‘She had been in the paid service of various uncles since the age of nine. I rescued her from that life and paid for her education.’
‘You also married her in an illegal ceremony,’ said Beatrice angrily. ‘You exchanged her prison for one of a different kind. Did you never consider that our name would be dragged through the mud?’
‘Wait, you have a wife?’ said Pamela Claxon, catching on later than everyone else.
‘In India, Pamela,’ Wilson explained as if talking to someone who was profoundly deaf.
‘Your son made no secret of his proclivities,’ said Stafford sanguinely. ‘I have my own reputation to protect.’
‘What reputation? You’re a lawyer,’ Beatrice spat back.
‘Did you imply that Lord Banks-Marion would be exposed unless the revised contract was allowed to stand?’ May asked Stafford. ‘If you did, it makes you a blackmailer.’
‘This has nothing to do with the matter at hand,’ muttered Stafford.
‘Actually it does,’ said Bryant, stepping in. ‘It gives Lady Banks-Marion and her son a motive for getting rid of Mr Burke. Presumably you assumed that without him there could be no sale.’
‘That is an outrageous suggestion,’ cried Beatrice. ‘We had no forewarning of the power of attorney.’
‘I’m sorry, Lady Banks-Marion,’ said Norma distractedly. ‘I didn’t know about this. Toby, you have to withdraw from the negotiations.’
‘Before we proceed any further,’ said May, ‘does anyone else have anything to confess?’
‘I’m afraid I saw Vanessa too,’ said Slade Wilson, raising a timid hand. ‘Sorry, Vanessa, I saw you coming back from the barn.’
‘What time was this?’ May asked.
‘It must have been right before lunch, at around a quarter to one. She stopped on the patio to clean some of the mud off her shoes.’
‘All right – I did go there,’ Vanessa burst out suddenly.
‘Then why did you lie?’
The guests collectively held their breath. For a moment all that could be heard was the rain at the windows, until a distant boom pulsed the panes.
‘I know you won’t believe me,’ s
he said. ‘I found a note in my bedroom from Donald. It asked me to meet him in the barn at noon.’
Claxon rolled her eyes in disbelief.
‘Do you have the note now?’ asked Bryant.
‘No, I don’t know what happened to it. I’m not lying to you this time, I swear.’
‘What happened when you got there?’
Vanessa appeared increasingly panicked. ‘I heard some kind of machinery running. I had no idea what it was. I looked in through the door but couldn’t see Donald. I didn’t want to stay there because it was noisy and smelly and I was wearing my luncheon dress. So I left. That’s all that happened.’
‘You’re lying,’ said Monty. ‘You followed him out there, and found him on the walkway. Men like Burke are always fascinated by machinery. He went up to take a better look. You followed him up there and he said he wasn’t going to pay for your little Mayfair flat any more. And in your anger you shoved him. You’re a harlot and a murderess.’
‘No, it’s not true.’ Vanessa seemed determined not to cry. She carefully rose to her feet. ‘I don’t care which of you did it because whoever wrote that note was right: you’re all bad people. Whatever happens from this point on is your fault.’ She walked unsteadily towards the door. The guests watched her go in damning silence. May wanted to stop her, but decided to allow her a dignified exit. There was, after all, nowhere she could go.
‘I think you’ve said enough, Monty,’ warned Bryant. ‘Unfortunately there is something else we have to discuss.’ He held out his right hand. The others craned their necks to see what was in it. ‘I found these on the way back from the village, lying on the pathway near the patio. They are the exact match of one I found among the reverend’s things at St Stephen’s.’
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