by Nicola Upson
‘Yes, although it’s far more common than you might think. He certainly wouldn’t be the only one in this graveyard if we looked hard enough.’ Spilsbury opened the battered old Gladstone bag which accompanied him everywhere and took out a fingerprint kit, a measuring tape and a pair of rubber gloves, proceeding to place these and various other items on a nearby headstone where he could access them easily. ‘I’ll tell you something interesting—when they closed Les Innocents cemetery in Paris and moved the bodies out to the Catacombs, they found enough skeletons buried face down to convince them that premature burial was widespread. People were quite literally turning in their grave.’
‘Is that supposed to comfort me?’
Spilsbury smiled. ‘I think we’re beyond comfort, Archie, don’t you?’
As the pathologist began to examine the body more closely, Penrose knew that any urgent questions he had would either have to be asked now or go unanswered until later: Spilsbury hated to be distracted while he worked, partly from diligence and partly from a deep-rooted respect for the dead and a determination to give them his best. ‘Is it naive of me to wonder that he couldn’t get out?’ he said, thinking out loud. ‘I know he’s not as young or as well built as Wilson, but people do extraordinary things when they’re desperate and the adrenaline alone might have given him a strength that he didn’t know he had.’
‘Perhaps that’s what the padlocks are about,’ Fallowfield suggested. ‘The slab might have been weighted down with something.’
Penrose considered the idea. ‘That would have drawn attention to the grave, though, and presumably attention was the last thing the killer wanted—at least until he was ready to expose the body. As it is, he ran the risk of someone hearing Laxborough cry out for help. The grave’s well away from the main path and that’s probably why he chose it, but people wander all over this churchyard.’
‘We don’t know that it was the killer who exposed the body,’ Fallowfield said thoughtfully.
‘True, but it’s more likely than any other explanation. If an innocent man had moved it—for whatever reason—surely he would have alerted someone? Or are you suggesting that Laxborough shifted the stone a little way but didn’t have the strength to do any more?’ Penrose paused, aware that he and Fallowfield could go round in circles indefinitely without an expert opinion. ‘What do you think, Bernard?’
The pathologist gave him a weary glance. ‘I think I’ve said as much as I’m going to say before I’ve had a chance to examine the body properly.’
Penrose conceded defeat. ‘Bernard’s right. We’re wasting time here when we could be finding out more about the victim. I’ll get his address and see if I can track down his housekeeper. In the meantime, Bill, get enough men down here to make the churchyard properly secure. The press will be all over this when they get wind of it, and we don’t want any wild speculations flying around until we’ve got a better idea of what we’re dealing with. As it is, we’ve already got five people who’ve seen the body, and at least two of them look like they move in some very sociable circles.’
‘Would you like me to have a word with them?’
‘Yes. Find out if there was anyone in the church community who knew Laxborough better than the Reverend Turner. Did he belong to any musical associations or play for any other choirs? Perhaps he gave piano lessons. The man must have had some friends or associates, and we need to find out what changed on Sunday to force him to cancel his appointment after evensong. At the moment, that’s the last sighting we have of him alive, but his housekeeper might say different. And at least his home should tell us something about his habits and his background.’
Penrose took a last look at Stephen Laxborough’s body, then headed to the church to find the Reverend Turner, but Spilsbury called him back. ‘Hang on a minute, Archie. You’ll want to see this.’ He retraced his footsteps and peered at the fragment of paper which the pathologist held out to him—a black-and-white photograph, ripped in half. ‘It was in the grave. I thought he might have torn it himself while he was clawing at his clothes, but I can’t find the other piece anywhere.’
The image was of a manor house, set in parkland—typically Jacobean in style, and pleasant but unremarkable to look at. Penrose took the fragment carefully between gloved fingers and turned it over, noticing that there was a handwritten inscription on the back; the important letters were missing, though, and all it told him was that the house was a priory whose name ended in ‘e’, and that it lay in the county of ‘____shire’. ‘That’s helpful,’ Fallowfield muttered. ‘Berkshire? Oxfordshire? Gloucestershire? Couldn’t be in bloody Devon, could it?’
Penrose had to smile at his sergeant’s lack of enthusiasm. ‘Look on the bright side, Bill. It’s the most tangible thing we’ve been offered so far, and think of the satisfaction you’ll feel when you’ve narrowed it down. Thanks, Bernard—anything else?’
‘Not so far, but wait a minute while I check his pockets. Turn him over, lads.’ Wilson and another officer stepped forward to do as he asked, and Penrose tried to concentrate on how gently and respectfully they handled Laxborough’s body, rather than on the injuries which underlined the agony of his final hours. Spilsbury lifted the tattered lapel of what had once been a finely tailored blazer and felt carefully inside the breast pocket, and his smile suggested that they were in luck. Slowly, using a pair of tweezers, he withdrew his prize, and Penrose shone his torch down onto the small piece of parchment paper. ‘“What is this that I have done?”’ he said, reading the single scrawled sentence aloud.
‘What the hell does that mean?’ Fallowfield demanded, his patience already tested by the photograph. ‘Doesn’t even sound like a proper question.’
‘I can’t imagine what it means,’ Penrose said, ‘but I have a feeling that if we find the answer to this, we’ll find the answer to everything.’
2
He left his car by the church, preferring to walk the short distance to Stephen Laxborough’s house. Setting off up Holly Walk, he was grateful for the encroaching darkness which limited his view of the extended burial ground running parallel with the lane; churchyards, even noble ones, had lost their appeal for him. The air was cold and he turned the collar up on his coat, trying as he walked to sift the facts of the case from the guesswork and speculation that had crowded his mind from the moment the death was reported. Turner, who claimed to know the victim’s writing well, had dismissed both the label on the photograph and the enigmatic quotation as being in his hand, and he could offer no enlightenment on the location of the priory or the nature of its connection to his colleague. So what certainties were they left with? A respected musician had been the victim of a particularly sadistic murder—and that was it; everything else was conjecture. Even in the early stages of a case, it was unusual to be fumbling quite so haphazardly in the dark.
‘Archie?’ The voice sounded uncertain, and he looked up from his thoughts to see a familiar figure walking towards him, her features briefly illuminated by the light from a street lamp. ‘It is you. I wasn’t sure from a distance.’
‘Marta! How nice to see you. I thought you’d left Hampstead already. Josephine said you’d sold the house.’
‘Yes, but there was a delay at the other end so they gave me a few days’ grace. I’m actually leaving tomorrow, so I was just having a last walk round. I’ll miss these streets.’
‘But no regrets?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Sentiment, perhaps, but not regret. What brings you here? Are you on your way to see Bridget?’
Archie’s lover, Bridget, divided her time between Cambridge and Hampstead, where she rented a studio in the Vale of Health. ‘I wish I were. No, this is business, I’m afraid, and about as far from pleasure as it’s possible to get.’
‘Oh?’ She looked intrigued, but was too discreet to ask for any details of his work.
‘Yes. If I were you, I wouldn’t venture too much further in that direction—not if you want your memories of quiet, leafy Hampstead
to stay that way. My lot have rather taken over the church.’
‘Ah, I see. Thanks for the tip.’ They fell into step, with Marta walking back the way she had come. ‘How is Bridget? You’d think we’d bump into each other all the time, but I haven’t seen her for months.’
‘She’s very well—working out of town at the moment, so I haven’t seen much of her myself. An old friend of hers from the Slade has come into some property in Devon, so they’ve been working on frescos there over the summer. It’s a lot of work, but they’re determined to get it done before they lose the weather completely.’
Marta shivered. ‘I think she’s missed the boat on that one. Autumn’s here with a vengeance.’
‘Apparently it’s warmer in the west.’ He smiled. ‘And between you and me, she’s quite enjoying playing Giotto.’
‘So things are all right between you?’
He looked at her curiously. ‘Yes, of course. Why do you ask?’
Marta shrugged. ‘No reason in particular. I just assumed she’d want to be nearby while you were convalescing. She nearly lost you in that shooting, and I know how badly it affected her.’
‘Actually, I encouraged her to go—we needed to get back to normal. Bridget was treating me like a piece of china, and I don’t make a very gracious invalid. And it certainly doesn’t suit her to agree with me all the time. She was so busy trying not to raise my blood pressure that all we ever talked about was the weather.’ He smiled to himself, sufficiently distanced from those dark times now to be able to joke about them. ‘And we had our first disagreement on the telephone last night. Admittedly, it was about how many hours I’ve been working, but it’s a start.’
She laughed. ‘You did frighten everyone half to death, you know. Josephine swears her grey hairs are down to the night she spent with you in hospital. I haven’t the heart to tell her they were there long before that.’
The lane narrowed as the graveyard gave way to a terrace of attractive Georgian buildings, and they mingled briefly with a group of stragglers on their way to evening mass at the Catholic church. ‘She’s coming down to help you get settled, isn’t she?’ Penrose asked when they were on their own again.
‘Yes, she’ll be in Cambridge next week. You must come and see us if you’ve got time.’
There was an awkwardness about the invitation, and Penrose wondered if it stemmed from the fact that he and Marta had once been rivals, even enemies. Marta’s love for Josephine had hurt him at first, particularly when it became obvious to him that her feelings were reciprocated, but he thought that those jealousies had been left behind long ago. Before he could answer, she stopped outside a house in Holly Place. The lights were on downstairs, and he could see through the open curtains that the rooms looked bare and deserted. ‘I’ll be pleased to be gone now,’ Marta admitted. ‘There’s something depressing about a house you’ve turned your back on. It makes you pay in those last uncomfortable hours.’ She smiled, and looked affectionately up at the windows. ‘I owe this one a lot, though. It kept me sane, but it’s time to move on. Or back. I still can’t quite decide which it is.’
‘How long is it since you last lived in Cambridge?’
‘Twenty years or so. I was there until just after the war.’
‘It draws you back, doesn’t it? I can’t think of any other town that does that, not even Oxford. It’s the same with Bridget. Almost all her work is in London now, but she can’t quite bring herself to leave Cambridge completely.’
‘That’s where you first met, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ The clock from St Mary’s struck the hour, and he smiled apologetically. ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go. Can I ask you something first, though—in confidence?’
Again, there was that awkwardness, but Marta nodded. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘Did you go to church while you were here?’
She laughed, both surprised and relieved, and he wondered what she thought he had been going to ask. ‘No, I can’t say I did—not often, anyway. I fell out with God a long time ago.’
‘So you don’t know a man called Stephen Laxborough?’
‘The pianist?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’ve heard him play a few times, but I don’t know him personally. Why?’
‘He lived just round the corner. I thought you might have met him.’
The slip didn’t go unnoticed. ‘No, I’m afraid not, and it sounds as though I’ve lost my chance.’ Penrose nodded. ‘What a terrible shame. He was very good.’
‘Will you keep his death to yourself, though—at least for now?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She took a key out of her pocket and kissed him goodbye. ‘I’d better face up to the rest of the packing and let you get on. I’ve got to the sentimental clutter now, and I can’t believe how much of it there is. It’s just as well I’ve had a few extra days.’
He smiled. ‘Good luck, then, and I hope the move goes well. Give Josephine my love.’
‘I will. And Archie?’
‘Yes?’
‘I meant what I said about coming to visit. Don’t leave it too long.’
‘I won’t, I promise.’ Penrose left her to the mercy of an empty house and continued on to Mount Vernon. The buildings here were uniformly smart—classic, early nineteenth-century terraced townhouses with three storeys and a basement, opening directly onto the pavement and differing only in the colour of their curtains and the amount of attention paid to their window boxes. He checked the number that Turner had given him, but could just as easily have guessed which house was Laxborough’s: it was the only one in darkness. He pressed the bell without much hope of an answer, wondering where the housekeeper was and why she hadn’t thought her employer’s absence significant enough to report. The peal rang defiantly through the empty hallway as Penrose tried again, frustrated to be blocked in his only logical line of enquiry. In vain, he looked up and down the street for a passage or alleyway which might lead to the rear of the property, but the terrace ran in an unbroken line and he suspected that the only way of gaining access to another entrance would be to find the house and garden that backed onto it. As a last resort, he lifted the front door mat, hardly expecting Stephen Laxborough to be the type who left a key where anyone could find it, but there he was wrong. Offering up thanks for Hampstead’s honesty and the day’s first piece of good fortune, Penrose let himself in.
The hallway smelt heavily of pipe tobacco, and he traced its source to a well-worn tweed jacket which hung on a coat rack just inside the door, obscuring the light switch. He called up the stairs, just in case he was wrong about the house being empty, but the only response was the heavy, hollow ticking of a grandfather clock. There were two rooms on the ground floor, as well as a door leading down to the basement, and Penrose chose the one at the front to search first. He drew the curtains and switched on a lamp; the subdued yellow light fell on a sparsely furnished room, devoted to a single purpose. Most of the space was taken up by a Bechstein grand piano. The instrument was a work of art in itself, elegantly modelled with a black lacquer finish which contrasted dramatically with the pale colours of the walls and carpet. Penrose had no doubt that it would be the envy of any musician, amateur or professional. The lid was open and he played a few notes, appreciating the distinctive tone which transformed even his clumsy efforts into something melodic and beautifully clear. There were no distractions in the room, he noticed—not even a picture on the wall; the only other pieces of furniture were directly related to the piano—a trunk full of printed scores under the window and a decorative Victorian music stand, inlaid with mother of pearl. The stand and the rack on the piano itself were both empty, and Penrose found himself irrationally curious about the last piece of music that Laxborough had played before he died.
The room at the back was smaller, and—by contrast—pleasantly cluttered. It had obviously been used as a study, and Laxborough had placed his desk carefully to make the most of French windows leading out to the garden.
A gramophone stood on a table in the corner—an old horn model, scratched and battered and obviously loved—and one of the walls was taken up with the largest collection of gramophone records that Penrose had ever seen. There was an extensive library, too, and a quick glance suggested that the shelves were evenly divided between biography and contemporary fiction. He sat down at the desk and looked through the drawers, but they revealed nothing of any interest except a few financial papers relating to shares and investments, and an appointments book. Penrose flicked back through the last few weeks and saw that a handful of names were repeated at regular intervals—piano lessons, perhaps, or something to do with the church. Noting that the handwriting was indeed different to the two examples found with Laxborough’s body, he turned to the entry for the preceding Sunday, trying to find an appointment which would explain why the organist had cancelled his meeting with Turner, but the page was left blank. In fact, the only thing that was remotely useful to Penrose was the record of a meeting with a firm of solicitors in Fleet Street back in July. Feeling increasingly thwarted, he jotted down the name and address and continued his search.
The basement told him little except that Laxborough’s housekeeper, whoever she might be, kept a well-ordered kitchen. There was some milk going off in the refrigerator and a half-drunk bottle of claret on the table; the cork had been replaced, and a single wine glass stood upside down on the drainer. Everything else was neat and tidy. Penrose was just on his way upstairs again when he heard the sound of the front door closing and a woman’s voice in the hallway. ‘Dr Laxborough? Dr Laxborough, are you there?’
He called out to reassure her, not wishing to alarm her any more than he could help, and she looked at him in surprise as he appeared at the top of the basement steps. Stephen Laxborough’s housekeeper—assuming he had guessed correctly—was a homely-looking woman in her late forties, with straw-coloured hair under a felt hat and a dark green coat that had not been ‘best’ for several seasons. She stood just inside the front door, her hand still on the latch, as if she were uncertain whether to stay or go, and Penrose noticed a small suitcase on the floor by her side. ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Penrose from Scotland Yard,’ he said, fishing in his inside pocket for his warrant card. ‘This must seem like a dreadful intrusion and I’m sorry to startle you, but—’