The Accomplice

by The Accomplice (retail) (epub)

  She leaned over to display a new picture for Tom. She had given him a book of old photographs of the town and the strange familiarity of some of the pictures may have been what held his attention for slightly longer than usual on each page. As she smoothed the central partition of the pages her hand, drawing itself over the right-hand photograph, revealed St Michael’s Square in which a corner of Asshe House was clearly recognizable. St Michael’s Square after the V2 in 1945, read the caption.

  “Do you see,” she said, “that’s Yevgenia’s old house and there’s the churchyard in 1945. It looks very dilapidated then.”

  Tom was no longer interested. The gurgling started again; this time he made it rhythmical, stopping just at the moment when he sounded as if he were about to choke and beginning again.

  Zita gave up. Research was an utterly thankless and time-wasting task. She would not be surprised to learn that historians made up most of their facts because of the impossibility of being able to discover anything of interest. She had learned nothing and infuriated Tom.

  That evening at the concert as she sat trying to concentrate on the music, she wondered why her first efforts had not been directed at the papers in her own keeping, the deeds of Asshe House, which she recalled seeing among Yevgenia’s files when she had been doing the conveyancing for her new house. She had brought them out in case Yevgenia wanted to transfer the ownership into Marcus’s name, something that she still had not done. Zita had pointed out that she should do so in order to minimize liability to inheritance tax. Like many elderly people, Yevgenia was capable of behaving with great generosity in handing over her possessions for use by the younger generation, but she was reluctant to give up ultimate control of what was hers. She had listened to what Zita had said and then waved a dismissive hand.

  “Too late for that. I shan’t survive long enough, so there’s no point.”

  “Yevgenia, you’re only seventy-five, you’re good for another fifteen years,” Zita had responded robustly. “I really advise you to think about this. Anyway,” she added practically, “it works on a sliding scale; seven years isn’t the once for all cut-off point.” Yevgenia had not been convinced.

  She could visualize the deeds now, a squarish bundle secured with pink tape, containing the thick legal papers of a century earlier, folded, sealed, stamped. She had not examined them at all. She suddenly longed to open out the packages of paper to read the names of former owners and tenants, as if one of them would suddenly reveal himself as a child murderer by the combination of letters on a page. The decision was taken in the concert. After dinner, farewells said, she set the car on the road to Broad Woodham, but when she reached the outskirts of the town, instead of taking the by-pass towards home, she drove into the town centre to her office. She parked in her usual space in the empty car park and let herself in by the back door. She deactivated the alarm, but, in order not to alert patrolling policemen, she did not turn on the lights as she mounted the fine staircase to the archives on the fourth floor. The street lights from the square and the floodlighting of the church lit up the familiar space in an unfamiliar way. She moved along the passages between the metal racks until she reached L. She was able to identify by touch the parcel of old documents which included the deeds to Asshe House.

  The church clock struck the half-hour and she glanced automatically out of the window to check the time on the tower. As she did so, she saw a light go on in one of the ground-floor rooms of Asshe House on the north side of the square. A second later it was extinguished.

  She stared at the house, wondering if she had really seen what she knew she had seen. The windows, glazed with builders’ dust inside, like eyes with cataracts, stared blankly back at her, reflecting the street lights, revealing nothing of what was within. A burglary? But there was nothing inside to steal, at least, nothing that could be taken without a removal van. Furniture that Yevgenia had allocated to Ivo, Rosie or Marcus and Naomi was stacked in the first-floor drawing room; but there was nothing there to interest a casual thief, no money, silver, small objects, electrical gadgets.

  Later, when she came to look back on the events of the summer, Zita was to observe a growing tendency within herself to act in opposition to her reason, or rather to act simultaneously in reasonable and unreasonable ways. The first example was her persistence beyond the call of duty in pursuing the identity of the skeleton child. Her behaviour this evening was another. She reacted immediately as a responsible citizen. She ran rapidly down to her own room, obtained an outside line and dialled the local police station. Even as she did so, however, she knew that she could not leave it there. She reported what she had observed to the officer on duty, replaced the receiver and, carrying the parcel of deeds by their pink strings, she relocked her office. On the ground floor in the secretaries’ office she opened a small cabinet and selected a bunch of keys. She carefully reset the alarm and let herself out of the building, by the front door onto the square this time. Her progress across the cobbles in her high heels (an old and favoured pair of red leather with a open toe) was necessarily slow and gave her plenty of time to notice the paradox of her lawyerly precautions with locks and alarms and the recklessness of what she was about to do. On the face of it, she was about to act in such a way that if her own corpse turned up in Asshe House garden she would not have the right to be surprised. She was able to hold this knowledge in her head at the same time as a conviction that she was not going to find a burglar.

  Without attempting to silence her movements or conceal her presence she walked up to the front door and inserted the large, old-fashioned key. She opened the door which fell back slowly on its hinges under its own majestic weight, and put her hand out to turn on the light.

  Yevgenia’s chandelier, an absurd confection of bronze flower petals and tear-shaped drops, had been taken down and a single harsh bulb illuminated a scene of builders’ devastation. One floor board had been lifted and a tangle of wires was exposed, like guts in a slashed belly. The formerly smoothly polished parquet was encrusted with dust onto which splashes of water or plaster had fallen like a blood trail from a wounded animal. Allowing her footsteps to sound on the boards, she walked firmly to the foot of the stairs and turned on more lights. She hesitated a moment. Her impulse had propelled her thus far; it slackened sufficiently for recognition of her recklessness to return. She listened attentively: only silence.

  She was more cautious now as she turned towards Yevgenia’s old sitting room, from where she judged the light to have come, moving as quietly as she could. She placed her hand on the door knob, turning it silently, easing the mechanism out of its groove as she applied the pressure of her arm to open the door inwards. The room showed only the same scene of building works: the plaster stripped off the wall under the window, more floor boards up, narrow-bore pipes lying along the skirting board, a pile of tool boxes and, on top of them, a pair of discarded dungarees. This was where the light had come from: the light switch turned on and off for a moment for someone to orientate himself. Zita looked around for the sign of a presence. There were footprints in the dust, but whether they were the workmen’s or the intruder’s it was impossible to judge.

  She slipped off the high-heeled shoes and made her way back across the hall barefoot, feeling the gravelly dust under her soles. She stopped again at the foot of the stairs. She could hear nothing. The police would arrive soon and she would be able to tell them herself that she had wasted their time. She entered the old study which looked out over the garden, and went over to the window; cupping her hand against the glass, she peered out into the darkness.

  Suddenly, above her head, she heard very distinctly the sound of a heel on the wooden floor.

  She first found her shoes. It was a mistake to face an intruder without them; shoeless, she was defenceless. Then she walked up the stairs, without attempt at concealment, and opened the drawing-room door. She was not surprised to see him there when she turned on the light. She had already, instantaneously, recognized his f
orm as a bulk in the darkness; indeed, she was expecting him, for who else was as interested as she in Asshe House?

  “Are you a cat, Superintendent? Can you see in the dark?”

  He was standing looking out at the garden and only half-turned as she came in, as if he, too, had known who it was moving around in the empty house at almost one in the morning.

  “How did you get in?” she asked.

  “As you did, with a key.”

  “Mine,” she said tartly, “is a legitimate one. I should like to know where yours comes from.”

  “From Wilson, the builder.”

  “So what are you doing here, entering if not breaking, without permission, at a totally bizarre time?”

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “So you could, and I have a very good explanation which I have ready to give to the police when they arrive to investigate the presence of an intruder which I reported to them about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “You did? Not very speedy, are they. The phone’s downstairs; I’ll let them know there’s no need to come.”

  Zita stood aside to let him pass. He lumbered down the stairs and she heard him talking in Yevgenia’s sitting room. His voice, rapid and authoritative, spoke briefly. She turned off the light and walked slowly down to the ground floor, disconcerted by his lack of embarrassment. From the sitting room she heard the surge of an electric kettle and found him squatting beside the clutter of tools, his back to her.

  “Tea?” he asked. “It’s all they’ve got. Not even Nescafe.”

  “All right.” She was annoyed to hear that her voice betrayed irritation and discomposure in contrast with his calm. “All right. I’ll have some tea. And you can tell me what the bloody hell you’re doing here.”

  The kettle clicked; the steam clouded the air behind the stooped figure. “It’ll have to be Russian tea. No milk, no lemon, only sugar if you want it.”

  “No thanks.” She refused to let herself be diverted by the disparaging way he described the tea. He fished the tea bag out of a mug and put it on a stained saucer. “The mug’s clean. Now, you tell me first what you are doing here.”

  “I was in my office when I saw a light go on in here. Naturally, thinking there had been a break in, I rang the police.”

  “And equally naturally, thinking it was a break in, you decided to walk over to see who was doing it.”

  Zita said nothing. She had noticed before how quick he was to focus on the weak point in a story. “And you?” she said. “What were you doing? Don’t tell me, let me guess. You were on duty, coming back from some little incident of domestic violence or late-night mugging when you passed Asshe House and, happening to have a key in your pocket, you decided to get out your magnifying glass and do a quick check for any clues left from thirty years ago.”

  Propped up on the carpenter’s work bench, he sipped his tea. “Well, more or less, that’s right.”

  “And the key? Why the key? You could have got in any day when the workmen were here and you still wouldn’t have had to ask the owner’s permission.”

  “I could have done, of course. But I preferred to be here without them. I just wanted to have a look around on my own.”

  “And I spoiled your plan.”

  “No, no, it’s quite all right. I’d been here long enough before you arrived.”

  “Just what is it about this case?” she said, her voice rising in frustration.

  “We need some certainty,” Stevens said. “We’re looking for the proof.”

  “Proof that it was Eddie Cresacre that was buried out there?”

  “Yes, and if it is, it’ll prove what I always knew. Petre didn’t do it. I was sure he didn’t do it. The whole thing was a travesty. He gave himself up, you know, Petre; it wasn’t the police who found him. He confessed; then he withdrew his confession, claimed it had been beaten out of him." He stood up and turned towards the grimy sheen of the window; the darkness repelled the eye. “He was beaten up, but it was after he confessed, not before. You couldn’t blame them. They thought he was a child-killer. But he wasn’t. He was completely cracked, Petre; you could see it. But he wasn’t a murderer, you could see that too. I could see it, at any rate.”

  “And now you can see Jean Loftus is?”

  “I saw her right at the start.”

  “But what evidence is there? At the moment you look, not to mince words, as much of a nutter as Petre. You’re convinced, without evidence, that the skeleton is Eddie Cresacre’s. You’re convinced, without proof, that my client is…” Zita could not bring herself to say that Yevgenia was a murderer. “… is involved. You break into her house at night. This isn’t reasonable behaviour. As far as I can gather, the only firmly based accusation you have against her is that she is Russian by birth. All this seems to suggest a lack of balance in your judgements, to say the least.”

  Stevens was not put out by Zita’s analysis; there was none of the fury with which he had reacted to her suggestion at the station that he had been upset by his youthful involvement in the Cresacre case. He simply commented, “Your own actions this evening have been about on a par with mine, I’d say, as far as common sense was concerned.”

  “I knew it wasn’t a burglar here. I knew it would be you.”

  “You knew it, did you? On what basis? You were working a hunch, were you? As far as evidence goes, I can do much better than hunches for Mrs Loftus. She knew Eddie Cresacre very well. A middle-aged childless woman, she made friends with a number of local kids, was very kind to them. He was one of them. She had no way of accounting for herself for the time of his disappearance. She claimed to be at home, but we had another witness who saw her, or someone very like her, walking her dog by the river where Eddie Cresacre’s bicycle was eventually found.”

  “You’re struggling, Superintendent. You must have had half a dozen people with similar vague connexions with the child who could not produce alibis.

  Stevens shrugged. It was clear he intended to argue no further.

  Zita put down her mug. “Well, even if you find the Cresacres you’ve a long way to go to prove that Jean Loftus did it. You’ve got to produce more than a mad fixation to reopen the case.” She patted her jacket pocket to locate the keys. “Now, if you’ve finished your empathizing with events thirty years ago, if that’s what you were doing, I’d like to go home to bed and to leave my client’s property secured before I go.”

  19

  For the next few days there was a lull. Zita heard nothing more from Stevens, either in explanation or apology for his behaviour on Saturday night. She had hardly expected it as he had evidently seen nothing exceptionable in what he had done. She rang Reskimer about the bones, several times. He was always out of his office, lecturing, administering, digging, whatever it was that professors of archaeology did. Her persistence was only rewarded with a message delivered by the departmental secretary that the bones were looking younger rather than older at the moment, which she did not wish to hear. She decided to pursue him no further for the time being.

  From the old leases, conveyancing documents and an estate rent book she composed a list of Yevgenia’s predecessors as owners and occupiers of Asshe House. She had taken as her starting point the purchase of the house in the mid-1860s by a family called Hibberdine, who had occupied it for some twenty years and then, in 1885, had given it on a sixty-year lease to a certain Geoffrey Gamble, who had been mayor of Woodham at the time. This dignity did not last long. After about ten years the Gambles moved out and, although they retained the head lease, they had sublet and it appeared that the house had even fallen into multiple ownership for a time. The Hibberdines had sold the freehold after the First World War to a family called Juxon, who apparently had never lived in it. During their ownership the house had deteriorated even further, both materially and socially. It had been let on a series of short leases until, in 1938, it had been taken by a family called Dryburn. They had left in 1945 when the head lease had expired and the house had lain
empty, unlet and for sale, until Yevgenia bought it and renovated it four years later. Simply having a list of names of owners and tenants was, Zita felt, an achievement, which she summed up on one side of paper.

  1864-1890: Simon Hibberdine

  1890-1912: John Hibberdine

  1912-1921: Maurice Hibberdine

  1921-1949: Daniel Juxon

  1949-1992: Jean Loftus

  1885-1896: Geoffrey Gamble

  1896-1897: James Whimster

  1897-1898: Paul Woodruff

  1898-1901: Arthur Morris

  1901-1907: Mitchell/Winchester

  1907-1912: Selwyn Allan

  1912-1922: Gavin Peel

  1912-1922: John Jump

  1922-1928: Clive Peerless

  1928-1938: Charles Crane

  1938-1945: Matthew Dryburn

  She concentrated particularly on the names of the tenants, which was depressingly long. Given the range of scientific estimates of the age of the skeleton, any one of them, from Geoffrey Gamble onwards, could have been involved, or at least in residence, at the time of the burial. She had been hoping for a non-English name somewhere on the list. Pigot had said that the skull’s shape was Caucasian, but not necessarily English, in type. There was no help from the surnames. If the wives or grandparents of the owners or tenants had supplied the genetic characteristics noted by Pigot, the legal documents gave no hint.

  It occurred to her as she studied her list that there might be information on either owners or tenants in the files of her own practice and in the lunch hour one day took herself up to the archives room again. She tackled the job alphabetically. No Allans with an A; no Cranes. She was passing on to Gamble when the name Cresacre leapt out at her from the stacks. This was not what she was looking for, not what she wanted to find, but she could not pass it by. She took off her shoes (imitation crocodile today) to stand on the wobbly booster stool to reach the Cresacre box. Then she sat on the stool to lift off the lid and look at the spare pile of its contents. On the first paper she opened she saw a vigorous signature, K. Loftus, witness. This must be the right family. Reluctantly, she sifted through what she had found until she came upon what Stevens needed: an address.