by Nicola Upson
Outside, the loud, rhythmic pull of the tide on the shingle below was strangely comforting. Penrose looked round the rest of the room, noticing that the sheets on the other bed were also disturbed, bundled up and twisted as if someone had spent a restless night there. Everything else was tidy: Westbury’s watch and wallet were placed side by side on the dressing table, next to the decanter that Donovan had mentioned; his clothes—a dinner suit and a variety of golfing outfits—hung neatly in the wardrobe; and the Victorian mahogany desk of which Mrs Bessall had been so proud was troubled with nothing more than a blank blotter and a bottle of ink. The drawers of the desk were empty, but Penrose found the work that Westbury had brought with him in a travel trunk at the foot of the bed, together with a portable typewriter and a couple of Crime Club thrillers. None of the paperwork seemed to have any bearing on Westbury’s murder and Penrose closed the lid impatiently, frustrated not to find any clues—no matter how obscure—which might help him link the scene to Laxborough’s death or Angerhale Priory. As a last resort, he checked through all the pockets in Westbury’s clothes and felt gently under the pillow, but the search revealed nothing of any use. For the first time, he began to doubt the connections which had previously seemed so obvious.
Mrs Bessall was in the room next door, changing the beds. As he came out onto the landing, Penrose could hear the crisp snap of sheets being shaken out, then vigorously smoothed down. ‘My ladies have left already,’ she explained when she saw him in the doorway. ‘They were so upset. Those two sisters have been coming here for years, ever since Mrs Oliver was widowed. I don’t expect we’ll see them again now.’
Penrose sympathised with her. The Bath Hotel, it seemed, catered for a clientele who wanted the illusion of an unchanging world; they returned again and again, staying in the same rooms, eating the same food, safe in the knowledge that everything would be exactly as it was the year before and the year before that. But death had destroyed the fantasy, bringing with it an inconvenient reminder that there was ultimately no refuge from time, not even in Marjorie Bessall’s lovingly created world. ‘No one else was staying in Mr Westbury’s room, were they?’ he asked.
‘You mean the sheets on the other bed? No, I can’t explain that. He was the only one who slept there.’
‘What about other visitors? Did he see anyone while he was here, or meet up with any of the locals? A regular golfing partner from the club, perhaps?’
‘He knew a lot of the members, certainly, and occasionally he’d bring one back here for dinner or a drink, but not this time. He did have one visitor, though—yesterday lunchtime, it was, and he was a bit put out about it because the chap just turned up out of the blue. They went to eat at the club in the end. Mr Westbury said he didn’t want to put me to any trouble. He was always very considerate like that.’
‘Did Mr Westbury mention his name?’
‘Yes, he introduced me. Mayhew, I think. Definitely something beginning with an “m”.’
‘Moorcroft, perhaps?’ Penrose suggested hopefully, and his heart leapt when Mrs Bessall nodded. ‘Tall, with light brown hair and a ruddy complexion?’
‘Yes, that’s right. They were gone for a couple of hours or so.’
‘And what happened after that? Did they come back together?’
‘Mr Moorcroft dropped Mr Westbury off, but he didn’t come into the hotel again. Mr Westbury spent the rest of the afternoon working in his room.’
‘Did he say what his friend wanted, just turning up like that?’
‘No, he didn’t mention it again.’
‘And how did he seem last night?’
Mrs Bessall thought for a moment. ‘Distracted, I suppose. He only picked at his dinner, even though it was one of his favourites. Come to think of it, though, he was like that at breakfast yesterday, too.’ She paused again, as if trying to decide whether or not something was important.
‘Please tell me anything that comes to mind,’ Penrose said encouragingly, ‘even if it seems trivial.’
‘It’s probably nothing, but he always went for a walk after dinner no matter what the weather was like—twenty minutes along the beach, or the cliff path if the tide was in. He said it helped him to sleep and stopped him worrying about his work, but last night he went straight up to bed, even though it was a fine evening. I can honestly say it’s the only time I’ve ever known him do that for as long as he’s been coming here. I told the other policeman that, but he was more interested in the night before.’
‘Why? What happened then?’
‘Mr Westbury went out for his walk as usual but when he came back he was all out of breath, as if he’d been running. I met him in the entrance hall and the bottoms of his trousers were wet and covered in sand, and his hand was bleeding where he’d grazed it climbing over one of the groynes. He said a wave had caught him, but it seemed to me that there was more to it. He seemed . . .’
‘Yes?’ Penrose said impatiently, wondering if DI Donovan had shared this information with Fallowfield or if it had conveniently slipped his mind.
‘Well, he seemed frightened. That’s the only word for it. I offered to get him something for his hand but he told me not to bother, and then he stood in the residents’ lounge for a long time, just staring back down the beach.’
‘As if someone had been following him?’
Mrs Bessall shrugged. ‘I don’t know. That’s what I thought, but I couldn’t see anybody out there. Eventually, he gave up and went to bed.’
Penrose listened, intrigued, and suddenly he knew exactly what the hotel and the state of Westbury’s room reminded him of. ‘I’d like to have a look at the beach, Mrs Bessall. Is there a way down from your garden?’
‘Yes, we’ve got private access going down to Cobbold’s Point.’
‘Where Mr Westbury walked?’
She nodded and took him out to the garden to show him. ‘Is it all right if they come and get him now?’ she asked hesitantly. ‘I’d like to get the room back to normal—not that we’ll be getting any guests, I don’t suppose, but for my own peace of mind.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Penrose suspected that Marjorie Bessall might be surprised by the demands on her rooms when news of her guest’s murder hit the papers; a small crowd of onlookers had already been gathering by the mortuary van when he and Fallowfield pulled up outside. ‘Tell Inspector Donovan that he’s free to go ahead.’
The wooden beach steps were narrow and overgrown, and a bank of teasels caught at his coat as he made his way down to the shingle. It was after six and the light was already fading, bringing a bleak, desolate quality to the deserted beach, the intense melancholy of a seaside town turning its back on another summer. To the south, the twinkling lights of the pier defied the mood a little but there were no lights to the north, just a ribbon of shingle stretching out in front of him, bordered on the left by a low cliff and intersected at close intervals by wooden groynes, dark and sodden from the sea. At beach level, the roar of the wind was relentless; it hurt his ears and he was glad to turn his back on it and walk away from the hotel and up the beach towards the distant silhouette of a Martello tower, hunkered low against the blast. There was a line of upturned rowing boats chained to metal posts, and—wary of being caught by the incoming tide—he watched the waves licking them gently, as if to prove they could take them if they wished.
It was hard going on the shingle and he turned back at the first groyne, but he had seen enough to know that this stretch of coastline and the hotel where Westbury had died provided the setting for one of M. R. James’s most famous ghost stories, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. It was the one that he had heard all those years ago at King’s and he had read it again after buying the book, a tale of solitude and terror in which a Cambridge professor retreats to a hotel on the east coast, where he unearths an ancient whistle from a sacred burial site and, by blowing it, summons a terrifying apparition with ‘a face of crumpled linen’. He was sure that James hadn’t actually named Felixst
owe in the story, but every detail he could recollect was identical: the lonely stretch of shingle and groynes; the welcoming but old-fashioned guesthouse; the twin-bedded room with sheets mysteriously disturbed on both beds; the professor’s waking nightmares, pursued by the apparition along the beach; and most chilling of all, James’s typically understated description of the ghost’s face—an unwitting premonition, surely, of the way in which Westbury had died.
He hurried back to the hotel and was relieved to find that Fallowfield had been left on his own downstairs while Donovan supervised the removal of the body. There was no easy way to moot the idea that someone had staged Westbury’s murder to echo an old ghost story, but at least his sergeant knew him well enough to make allowances. ‘What do you think?’ he asked, when he had finished outlining all that he had learned. ‘It supports the idea that the murders are linked back to King’s College—if not to Dr James himself, then at least to the time that these men were all there. I bet if I go back through that book, I’ll find a story that references Stephen Laxborough’s death, and probably Giles Shorter’s as well.’
Fallowfield looked doubtful. ‘That’s all very well, sir, but where exactly does it get us?’
It was a reasonable question, but not one to which Penrose had an answer. ‘I’m not sure yet, Bill, but Moorcroft is key to all this. He knows a lot more than he’s letting on. Why else would he have come here yesterday? He came to see Westbury because he thought they were both in danger or because he needed a good defence lawyer. Either way, we need to speak to him.’
‘Or he could have come simply to kill him, sir. We don’t know that he went back to Cambridge when he dropped Westbury off here.’
‘No, we don’t, but he’s got an alibi for the Hampstead murder.’
‘Only his wife. You’re not telling me she wouldn’t lie for him, surely? And so would the servants if they were paid enough.’
‘But you’re forgetting the clues with Laxborough’s body. Why would Moorcroft incriminate himself by leaving a photograph of his own house at the scene?’
‘Perhaps it was an accident. Did you find any funny stuff like that in Westbury’s room?’
Penrose was forced to admit that he hadn’t. ‘I wonder if he’s got a car here?’ he said, realising suddenly that he had no idea how Westbury had arrived at the hotel. ‘Will you check with Mrs Bessall while I go and tell Donovan where we’ve got to?’
He returned a few minutes later to find Fallowfield standing in the entrance hall, grinning like the Cheshire cat. ‘I take it all back, sir,’ he said, holding up an envelope with a London postmark which was addressed to Simon Westbury at his chambers. ‘He has got his car here and I found this in the glove compartment. What did you say that story was called?’
‘“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”.’
‘Yes, I thought it was something like that. Take a look in there.’ Penrose put on his gloves and felt inside the envelope, gently taking out an old police whistle. ‘I think someone’s having a laugh with us, don’t you, sir?’ Fallowfield said. ‘And it gets better—there’s something else in there as well.’
It was another image of Angerhale Priory, an engraving this time, with some words in Latin scribbled across the picture. ‘“Quis est iste qui venit”,’ Penrose read out loud.
‘What does that mean?’
‘It translates as “Who is this who is coming?”,’ Penrose explained, ‘and it’s from the same story, inscribed on the whistle that the professor finds buried in the sand.’
‘That sounds like a threat,’ Fallowfield said.
‘Yes, it does.’ He turned the envelope over in his hands and noticed that it had been posted in the week of the Hampstead murder. ‘Someone is taunting these men before their deaths,’ he said. ‘We thought that Stephen Laxborough might have been sent something that troubled him—that’s when he told Hilda Pryce to leave. And I think you were right, Bill—this is just the beginning. All of the men on that list are in danger. The killer might be one of them or it might be someone else altogether, but if we’re ever going to stop this we need to understand why it’s happening. Simon Westbury’s next of kin might be helpful—any friends or family that know about his past. And as Angerhale Priory seems to be at the centre of everything, I suggest we go back there.’
Fallowfield nodded. ‘If I were Robert Moorcroft, I might just be frightened enough to talk to us now.’
‘So would I, Bill,’ Penrose said. ‘Let’s go and see, shall we?’
9
Angerhale Priory was couched in a brooding darkness by the time they arrived, a darkness which not even the myriad stars of a fenland sky could lift. The heavy iron gates had been forbidding enough when they were open; now, locked and chained, they were an impressive deterrent to any intruder and Penrose wondered if Robert Moorcroft had taken other precautions to safeguard his family in the last few days. He got out of the car, struck by the intense silence of the countryside at night, and announced his business at the lodge, then waited impatiently while a skilfully uncooperative gatekeeper phoned through to the house for guidance. Grudgingly, the chains were removed and Fallowfield followed the route that Penrose had taken the other day, the light from his head-lamps picking out features of the parkland and gardens like a series of stills from a film. They pulled up by the side entrance, and Penrose noticed that the Jaguar which had been parked there on his last visit was missing.
‘Not a bad pile,’ Fallowfield muttered as they walked up to the door. ‘Not sure I’d want the heating bill, though.’
‘It’s even more impressive once you get inside,’ Penrose said. ‘You can see why Robert Moorcroft thinks he’s above the laws that govern the rest of us.’
‘You’ve taken quite a shine to this chap, haven’t you, sir? I’m looking forward to meeting him.’
But Fallowfield’s hopes were soon dashed. ‘Mr Moorcroft’s not at home,’ the housekeeper explained, a statement of fact rather than an apology, ‘but Mrs Moorcroft will see you.’ She led them past the comfortable sitting room and down a long corridor to one of the oldest parts of the house. ‘You’ve come just as we were serving dinner.’
Her tone was as critical of Penrose’s timing as Moorcroft’s had been two days before, and he apologised. ‘Will Mr Moorcroft be gone long?’ he asked, regretting now that they had not telephoned in advance. ‘It’s very important that I speak with him.’
‘That’s not for me to say. In here, please.’
The dining room obviously dated back to the building of the original priory. It was a remarkable space, beautifully proportioned, with a vaulted stone ceiling supported by octagonal marble pillars, and a tiled floor whose red-and-black patterns offered a welcome contrast to the pale grey walls. Compared to other parts of the house, the furniture was sparse and restrained, and paid homage to the medieval origins of its setting. A refectory table, fifteen to twenty feet long, was decorated with an impressive collection of silverware, the centrepiece being a large, elaborate fruit bowl whose contents looked sculpted rather than arranged. Candles and the fire itself supplied the only lighting, and the room was so alien to the modern age and had changed so little since it was first built that Penrose could almost see the cloaked, monkish forms huddled in the shadows. Instead, sitting alone at the table was the woman he had seen so briefly on his last visit. She put her knife and fork down as soon as they came in, and something in her expression reminded Penrose of Miss Havisham at her wedding breakfast, still young but already disillusioned. ‘I’m sorry to call at an inconvenient time,’ he said.
‘It’s all right. I wasn’t hungry anyway.’ Virginia Moorcroft pushed the plate disdainfully away from her, the food barely touched, and it was immediately removed. The housekeeper disappeared through another door, leaving the three of them alone in the room. ‘I know you wanted to see my husband,’ she continued, ‘but I’m afraid he’s out.’
‘So I understand. We weren’t formally introduced the other day, Mrs Moorcroft. I
’m Detective Chief Inspector Penrose from the Metropolitan Police, and this is my colleague, Detective Sergeant Fallowfield. When will Mr Moorcroft be back?’
She shrugged, as though she had no more right to question her husband’s whereabouts than her housekeeper. ‘I don’t know. Maybe tonight, maybe in the morning. Sometimes he’s gone for a couple of days. It depends if he’s on a winning streak or not. Would you care for a glass of wine?’
‘No thank you, but perhaps we could ask you a few questions now that we’re here?’