Jane Hetherington's Adventures In Detection

by Nina Jon

  “Triads come from China, Jack, and Mr Kim Moo-Hyun is Korean,” Jane reminded him. “More trifle?” she asked.

  “No, I’m full,” he said.

  “Charity can take the rest with her when she collects you,” Jane said, rejoining him at the kitchen table. “If you’re finished you can tell me all you know about the type of boys who keep snakes.”

  “Charity mentioned it,” Jack said leaning back in his chair, his arms behind his head. “The only person I know who keep snakes is Alfie. He’s the coolest boy in school.”

  “So keeping snakes is cool is it?” Jane asked.

  “I’ll say. Got to treat a snake with respect. Everyone wants to be friends with Alfie.”

  “Could I meet Alfie? I know of a young boy who’s apparently being bullied at school because he keeps snakes, and maybe Alfie could tell me more about why that might be,” Jane sad.

  “Can’t see that being the reason, myself,” Jack said. “But if I tell Alfie you’re a private detective, he’ll definitely want to meet you. He thinks private detectives are cool. Can I watch TV?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE COOLEST BOY IN SCHOOL

  Alfie was in the sixth form of Jack’s school. He was sixteen and lived with his divorced mother, Margaret. When Jack told him a private investigator required his services, he immediately invited the private investigator in question to meet him at his mother’s house. Margaret and Alfi e lived in a hall-entrance terraced house, about a twenty-minute drive from Jane’s house. Jane arrived on time and was met by Margaret, dressed in a vibrant multi-coloured silk dress and draped with gold jewellery. After showing her indoors, Margaret left Jane in a hallway as colourful as its owner, and went to get her son, Alfi e. Jane looked around: the narrow hallway was lined with bright orange wallpaper. A vividly patterned curtain, folded back into an elaborate drape and tied back with thick gold cord, hung over the front door, and a very large gold mirror in the shape of a seashell took up most of one wall. It wasn’t long until Margaret reappeared with her son. While Jack was small for his age, Alfi e was already taller than his mother and very handsome, thought Jane.

  “He’s a heartbreaker my boy, yes?” Margaret asked Jane.

  Alfie didn’t appear to be the slightest bit embarrassed, nor did he have reason to be, because it was true. Introductions over, Alfie led Jane to a conservatory, at the rear of the house. This was where he kept his snakes. Jane gave a shudder when she walked into the room. There were four snakes inside as many glass tanks, and photographs of snakes lining the walls. Snakes gave her the creeps, but she knew she would have to overcome this if she were to help Dawn’s son. Jane forced herself to walk around the room admiring each photograph in turn, as though she was in an art gallery. The pictures, she had to admit, were very professional. In one, an emerald Boa had risen up on its coiled body and was staring straight into the camera lens. Beside that photograph hung another. In it, a sand-coloured snake, described in the nameplate beneath it as a Desert Horned Viper, side-winded its way across the sands of its desert home. The snake would have been almost invisible, but for the tracks it left behind in the sand.

  “That’s the mouth of a Puff Adder,” Alfie said, pointing to a photograph of a snake’s wide-open mouth, its fangs clearly visible, complete with dripping venom.

  “Those fangs are so long, they’ve got hinges at their base, enabling him to fold them back into his mouth,” Alfie explained. Next, he led her to a series of motion photographs taken seconds apart. In the first, a green snake was wrapped around a tree stalking a frog, which was oblivious to the snake, almost entirely camouflaged by the foliage. In the second photograph of the series, the snake’s upper body was pulled back into an ‘s’ shape, as it readied itself for the kill. The penultimate picture of the series captured the snake striking its prey. In the final picture, the snake was pictured dining with the unfortunate creature now a large lump in its throat.

  “My favourite photograph, so far,” Jane said.

  “Yeah?” Alfie replied. “This is mine,” he said pointing to a photograph of an Anaconda coiled around and around an alligator, slowly suffocating the life out of the poor creature.

  “An Anaconda can grow up to eighteen feet long,” Alfie informed her. “They can eat an antelope whole, the constrictors can. A dead one was found recently with an alligator half in and half out of its mouth. It got greedy.”

  “Please don’t tell me you have any here?” Jane asked, rather alarmed and casting a glance over her shoulder at the sedentary snakes lying coiled up in the tanks behind her.

  “Relax, Mrs H,” he replied with a grin. “I’ll have to wait until I leave home for one of those. Mum won’t let me have one in the house. Tell me about the boy.”

  “Can we move to somewhere where there are fewer snakes, first?”

  “Sure Mrs H, sure.”

  The weather was pleasant enough to allow Margaret, Alfie and Jane to sit outside in the back garden, although they did need to wrap up warmly in thick coats before venturing outside. Margaret made them a jug of hot apple juice. The garden was quite large and stretched back further than Jane had expected it to, with two thirds converted into a football pitch. While Alfie poured the apple juice, Margaret read Dawn’s email.

  “Alfie was always a popular boy,” she said. “His love of snakes just made him more popular.”

  Alfie nodded in agreement and Jane had no reason to doubt either of them.

  “He obviously prefers snakes to the other children,” Margaret said of Iain.

  “Why shouldn’t he? I prefer snakes to some people,” Alfie announced. “All snakes are proud and brave, and they’re the attributes I most admire. Pride, courage and independence. You’ll always find all three in a snake, but not in all people. Here, I’ll get you a present to give to the boy,” Alfie suddenly said, somewhat to Jane’s alarm. As she watched him hurry to the house, she sincerely hoped he wasn’t going to return with a snake.

  “I hated being a kid,” Margaret said. “On my first day at school, I crossed swords with a girl in my class who turned out to be the school’s dominant female and from that day on, she made my life hell. My God!” she closed her eyes and shook her head. Before she could continue, her son returned to the table with a rolled up poster under his arm. “Give him this from me, Mrs H.,” Alfie said, unrolling the poster, to reveal an image of a Cobra. The snake had been photographed side on, its body raised up high, its hood wide open, spitting at unseen prey.

  “Something I’d like to do to one or two people,” Alfie said, rather maliciously. “Spit poison in their eyes.”

  “I think the best thing I can do is to meet Iain and try to gauge the situation for myself,” she said.

  As soon as she got back home, she e-mailed Iain’s parents, and asked if she could visit them for a few hours to meet their son. Dawn replied by inviting Jane for lunch that weekend.

  ‘That way you can meet Iain and my husband.’

  Jane hadn’t anticipated that her new job would involve so much eating and drinking. As the invitation wasn’t until Saturday, Jane decided she’d visit Phil’s ancestral home, Hamilton Hall, between times and immediately after accepting Dawn’s invitation, telephoned Hugh’s sister, Ginny.

  Ginny and her husband Trevor (an architect by profession), had amassed a fortune over the years through successful property developing. Although the couple had sold their business at the height of the property boom and retired, Jane knew that property remained her sister-in-law’s passion. She was sure Ginny would enjoy accompanying her on a tour of Hamilton Hall.

  “I’d love to come, Jane,” Ginny said. “I think I read about the place in some architectural magazine. Hasn’t it recently undergone major restoration work?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Jane said.

  “I’m sure it has. The architects won some award for it. Went hopelessly over budget, I’ll bet. These things always do. Particularly when architects win awards.”

  CHAP
TER TWELVE

  SUCKLING PIG AT HAMILTON HALL

  I

  By the time Jane and Ginny met up at Hamilton Hall, the eighteenth century Palladian country mansion which was Phil’s ancestral family home, it was late after- noon. As the two women stood in the car park, Ginny pointed to the hall’s surrounding farmland, and explained that once this would have generated an income large enough to maintain the house, some- thing, Ginny reasoned, probably took upwards of fi fty thousand pounds a year. However, she pointed out, with most of the land long since sold off, there was now noth- ing left to support the building, except for the building itself. “This kind of thing is quite common,” Ginny said to Jane. “It preserved the life style of the forebears okay, but it completely screws their descendants.” Jane waited by the car, while Ginny went to get a parking ticket, lighting up a cigarette on the way. Jane gave a quick, despairing shake of her head. Giving up smoking only to start again a few weeks later was the story of her sister-in-law’s life.

  While she waited for Ginny to get the ticket, Jane studied the house and gardens. Hamilton Hall was clearly doing all it could to draw in visitors. In the gardens to the rear of the property, there were signs indicating regular displays of archery and falconry, while the hall itself had been turned into a costume museum. These attempts seemed to have been quite successful. The car park was fairly full, and there were lots of people milling around. Jane watched two little sisters play a game of tag on one of the lawns. The girls chased themselves onto the wide gravel driveway, which swept across the front of the hall. One of the children tripped and fell, using her hands to break her fall, as she slid across the gravel. Oh dear, thought Jane, while the child ran screaming back to her mother, bleeding hands held out.

  “Do you know how much they charge for their parking?” Ginny muttered, car park ticket in hand. “It’s extortionate!” Despite her personal fortune, she liked to keep an eye on the pennies.

  “What did Trevor say when you started smoking again?” Jane asked.

  “He doesn’t know – he still thinks I gave up five years ago!”

  “If you say so, Ginny. Shall we begin indoors with the tour of the house?”

  The two traipsed up the stone stairs, and through what Ginny described as a “Greek-revival-style six pillared portico.” On their way into the grand hallway, Ginny gave one of the pillars a deft kick. Plaster fell out. “This is exactly what I mean,” she said. “If it’s not crumbling pillars, it’ll be a leaking east wing, if it’s not a leaking east wing, it’ll be a collapsing neo-classical folly.”

  Jane imagined what Hugh would’ve said had he been there. “If it’s not the collapsing neo-classical follies, it’s the ruddy visitors kicking in the portico!”

  They walked inside the building. Jane gave a little gasp. The grand hallway befitted its name. Columns encircled it and stucco plasterwork and gilding covered its walls and ceiling. While Ginny slowly walked around the hall, taking in the architecture, her heels clicking on the marble while she walked, Jane moved to stand under the ceiling’s centrepiece – a wooden framed glass dome, through which sunlight poured to create a cross-work pattern on the marble floor below – and looked up, bathed in January sunlight. Her circuit of the hallway complete, Ginny stood beside her.

  “It’s beautiful,” Jane remarked.

  “But expensive to maintain,” her sister-in-law reminded her.

  “We’d better move on,” Jane said, leading her sister-in-law over to the first room on the tour, the Queen’s Drawing Room.

  The room was very nicely turned out as an Edwardian Drawing Room. It was lined with primrose yellow wallpaper. A Sheraton square dining table sat under the window. A pair of tables, inlaid with mother of pearl and embroidery, four Chippendale mahogany chairs with white silk seat covers, and a rosewood bureau finished the staging. The most magnificent aspect of this room was the life-size, life-like waxwork models, dressed in authentic Edwardian clothing, which inhabited it. A male waxwork, wearing a morning suit, sat cross-legged by a fire, reading a paper, while at the other side of the room, his waxwork wife, in her Edwardian lace dress, perched on a couch, as the family’s waxwork maid poured tea from a silver pot.

  “It’s like a still from Upstairs Downstairs,” said Ginny.

  A small motif placed on the ground, just in front of the cord rope used to fence off the rooms, stated that the models were a recent acquisition to the property. The sign went on to remind visitors that only part of the house was open to the public, because the restoration work was still ongoing.

  From there they followed arrows directing them from room to room. Each scene was as authentic as the last. A room lined with dark wooden panelling containing waxwork models dressed in Jacobean clothing, led into a room where a couple of waxwork flappers danced the Charleston. In an 1850s Victorian bedroom, a nanny tucked a child up in bed. In an inter-war living room, a couple and their children, gathered by the family’s radio, listened to Churchill broadcasting to the nation, as the actual broadcast played in the background.

  The tour ended in the hall’s enormous flagstone Tudor kitchen.

  “Is that bacon I can smell?” Ginny asked, as the two sister-in-laws walked down a spiral stone stairwell. Through a stone archway which led into the mediaeval kitchen, they glimpsed a suckling pig crackling on a cast-iron spit over a roaring wood fire.

  “Hope that tastes as succulent as it smells,” Ginny said.

  The kitchen took up the whole of the hall’s stone basement. At one end of the huge kitchen, a woman dressed in the garb of a Tudor kitchen maid, gave a demonstration of Tudor cooking utensils – some cast iron, others copper – to a group of young children. At the other end of the room, a youngish man, dressed in doublet and hose, stood by the fire, cutting and serving slices of the pork sandwiched between slices of bread to visitors. Unlike the other characters they’d come across throughout the house, these two weren’t waxworks, but real people.

  “I’ve got to go outside for a cigarette,” Ginny announced. “Get me a sandwich will you? The smell’s making me hungry.”

  “Try and track down the builders? See if you can find out more about the restoration work,” Jane said.

  “No probs,” Ginny said, heading for the exit, cigarettes at the ready.

  Jane turned her attention back to the young man by the fire. She watched him sharpen a carving knife on a knife sharpener before cutting more slices from the joint. The meat almost fell off the pig, whetting her appetite as much as her sister-in-law’s. A pewter serving dish, suspended from chains over the fire, served as a warming plate. Once the meat was sliced, the Tudor chef laid the slices on the plate to keep warm and gave the spit a turn, whereupon the kitchen filled with a furious hissing thrown off by the flames.

  Jane thought he looked not dissimilar to Phil. I wonder, she thought. He realised she was watching him.

  “Can I tempt you?” he asked her.

  “Please,” she said. “Two, thank you.”

  He selected some of the slices of the still-warm meat from the pewter plate for her sandwiches, laid them on a smaller plate, and carried it over to a long oak table, where a long loaf of bread waited to be sliced. Jane seized the opportunity to engage him in conversation.

  “How long have you worked at the hall?” she asked him, as he sliced the bread.

  “Since I sold it. Before that I owned it,” he replied, buttering the bread.

  “You’re Phil’s brother?” Jane asked, not entirely surprised at this.

  “You know Phil?” he asked, laying the meat between the slices of bread and wrapping them in baking paper.

  “I know his fiancée, Sam,” she replied. “Sam didn’t mention the hall having been sold.”

  “No?” he said indifferently. “Well, Phil’s not told her then, has he? Maybe that’s because it’s none of her business, is it?”

  He finished wrapping her sandwiches, and handed them to her perfunctorily, the conversation over. She paid for the sandwiches, and lef
t him carving slices of the meat for a hungry family, while she went in search of her sister-in-law.

  “I spoke to the builders at length. It was as I suspected,” Ginny said, as they made their way back to her car. “The building is Grade II* Listed. It’s the star that did for the owners. They couldn’t even wipe their arses without getting the Listed Building Officer’s permission in triplicate. Delays happened, as they always do, and the restoration work became more and more expensive. Much more than they reckoned. Every time they discovered one thing and dealt with it, something else happened. The whole roof was rotten through, the wiring lethal. They stripped the plaster from the walls only to discover dry rot. Time that’s discovered it’s always too late. That’s the trouble with these old houses, they’re money pits. That’s why only Russian oligarchs and premiership footballers can afford them. They ran out of money before the work was finished, and the bank wouldn’t give them any more. A consortium has come to the rescue and is buying the hall. They thought the original family still living there would give the place more class, so they gave the owners a leaseback of the annex for life, in exchange for which the new owners can still call the place Hamilton Hall. Phil and his brother will be the first Hamiltons not to pass the hall on to their heirs. Imagine that,” she said. “But at least the building will live on, although its owners will be a company, not a family. It’s all very sad, really.”

  “So the family owns it in name only?”

  “Seems so. That’s probably why Sam’s quite certain Phil’s family still own it. The best laid plans, as they say.”

  By now, Jane figured she had pretty much the whole picture. She was glad she did, because she believed she might actually be able to do some good.