Rack, Ruin and Murder

by Rack, Ruin

  At the moment he, Carter, was there and Tansy, lacking any other target, had decided to have a go at him. ‘You should tell us who it was. Isn’t it a crime? Are you doing anything about it, now you know who they are? Aren’t you charging anyone?’

  ‘We’ll inform the owner, Mr Bickerstaffe, of the intruder’s identity, in due course,’ Carter said firmly. ‘What action is taken, if any, will rather depend on him, the householder. He habitually left the door open when he left the house, so there was no forced entry. There was apparently no vandalism and, as yet, no items have been reported missing, so no theft.’ Tansy hissed in exasperation and opened her mouth, but Carter continued inexorably, ‘So at the moment we are left with trespass and that is a civil matter, rather than a criminal one.’

  ‘You mean it’s OK for whoever it was to waltz in here and make use of a bedroom?’ Incredulity replaced the arrogance.

  ‘Not OK, but difficult to prosecute through the courts. There was no confrontation between Mr Bickerstaffe and the person or persons concerned, no threats were made, no violence offered and even if there had been…’

  Tansy dismissed all this legal quibbling with a sweeping gesture. ‘My mother will sort it out!’ she said firmly.

  Carter had already forewarned Pascal of that possibility, but he said nothing. It was better to let Tansy think she had had the last word.

  They retreated downstairs.

  ‘I’m just going to walk around the garden,’ Carter told her.

  She nodded and fell into step alongside him, although, truth to tell, he’d rather have searched out there alone. He briefly considered telling her so. On the other hand, she could act as his guide and he soon realised he needed one.

  ‘Whew!’ he exclaimed when he realised what a tangled mass of neglected and unchecked growth the garden had become. ‘We could do with a machete!’

  ‘There is a path down here…’ Tansy led the way, pushing aside undergrowth that tumbled and sprawled across the route forward.

  Sure enough, the remains of a crumbling brick-paved walk lay beneath their feet. An arched pergola had once spanned it but most of that had fallen, rotted away, and only a few mossy uprights remained. It was no longer possible to tell where flowerbeds had been. The lawns, too, were muddy, weed-infested patches fighting a losing battle with encroaching undergrowth. At the edges of one such patch Carter noticed fresh-looking footprints – a male shoe. Monty’s? Or could Taylor have made them during his surreptitious visit? But if the prints had been here when the search team combed the grounds, their presence would have been marked for investigation. Most likely one of the search team was responsible.

  Tansy squeaked and Carter was startled to see a mocking face leering at them from between damp foliage. Then he saw it belonged to a statue trapped in a prison of interwoven branches. It was lichen-covered and its scabby, bearded features grinned evilly at them.

  ‘It’s poor old Pan,’ said Tansy with a little laugh. ‘I’d forgotten him. So he’s still here. There are some other statues about the place. They’re probably hidden now, just as poor Pan is.’

  ‘Garden statuary, particularly Victorian examples, fetch a good price now,’ Carter remarked.

  It was the wrong thing to have said. Tansy rounded on him. ‘Why must everything have a price? Uncle Monty wouldn’t sell Pan or any of the others. I wouldn’t sell them! They belong here. People now are – are horrid. Everything must have a price tag. It’s sordid.’

  ‘Not everyone can afford such high-minded principles,’ Carter told her.

  Her face reddened. ‘And I’m a spoiled wealthy brat, is that it?’

  ‘I certainly didn’t suggest that, nor would I,’ he protested. ‘I don’t think it.’

  ‘Your Inspector Campbell thinks it.’

  Surprised, Carter protested, ‘I’m sure she doesn’t.’

  Tansy’s ire subsided. ‘I wouldn’t blame either of you. I’m not poor. My father’s a rich man. He makes me a generous allowance.’ There was a pause. Then she added sadly, ‘It’s not always a blessing, you know.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it is,’ he said sincerely. ‘Tell me, I know you said the house wasn’t all that well maintained, but was it still a beautiful garden when you came here as a child? When you could see all the statues and plants in all their glory?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, it had run pretty wild, even then. It must have been stunning in Victorian times, even for quite a long time after that. I think the rot set in about the nineteen fifties. By the time I came here with my mother to visit it had long gone to rack and ruin. Uncle Monty and Aunt Penny kept just the bit round the house tidy. Uncle Monty pushed a squeaky old mower up and down the lawn. If I were here I’d help, scooping up the cuttings to add to the compost heap. Mummy always grumbled because I’d get green grass stains on my clothes. Aunt Penny had a few vegetables growing in the kitchen garden – behind that wall.’

  Tansy pointed. They had reached a tall mellow red-brick wall, pierced by an arched gateway. The wrought-iron or wooden gate that must once have stood in it had gone, leaving only its hinges to mark its presence.

  Carter went through the arch and stopped in surprise. This had once been a real kitchen garden, a Victorian gardener’s pride and joy. There were even the collapsed, ivy-grown remains of a hothouse, with a brick-built furnace room attached. Add this area to the area of the other garden, he thought, and you’ve got quite a bit of land here. But who could possibly restore it all to its former glory? The cost, the work involved, and the maintenance afterwards… it was prohibitive. An idea occurred to him.

  ‘Aren’t there two fields belonging to the estate? Between here and the road, I think.’

  Tansy shrugged. ‘They’re pretty small and not much use. Gary sometimes grazes his horses in them – or Pete moves his sheep down there.’

  ‘Mr Bickerstaffe might not want to sell the house and gardens, but he could raise some cash selling the fields…’

  Tansy expelled breath in a hiss and glared at him. ‘Are you thick or what?’ she asked. ‘Uncle Monty wouldn’t sell. He’s right.’

  ‘No, of course he wouldn’t,’ Carter agreed. ‘It would let the outside world in and your Uncle Monty is determined to keep it out. I’m sorry I suggested it. I don’t admit to being thick, as you put it, but my mind was wandering for a moment there.’

  Tansy blushed. ‘No, you’re not thick and I was very rude to say that. Sorry. You are probably quite horrifyingly intelligent. I’m not, you know. I am rather dopey. Always have been.’

  ‘Now then,’ he said severely, ‘don’t put yourself down. Perhaps you haven’t yet tackled the right sort of challenges. You may surprise yourself at how well you’d manage.’

  ‘I’ll have to manage when my mother goes to New York.’ She gave him a wicked grin. ‘But I have a let-out, you see. If the worst comes to the worst, I can go and live in Jersey with my father.’ She frowned. ‘Although that might give him a shock, cramp his style a bit. He has glamorous girlfriends.’

  Poor kid, thought Carter. She’s been made to feel an inconvenience, probably when she was quite young. It’s stayed with her. I don’t suppose either of her parents intended it. I hope Millie never feels this way about her mother and me. I don’t think she will. But I can’t say now, after listening to Tansy Peterson, that it won’t be on my mind.

  He looked down at the earth. There were more footprints here. If they had been left by the late Jay Taylor, he’d certainly covered every inch of this place. But the marks were too fresh to be Taylor’s. Pascal and Rosie Sneddon had seen him here during the long dry spell when the earth had been baked hard. They might be Gary Colley’s footprints as he spied on the police. Carter told himself they must have been left by the search team. But then he dismissed this conclusion, feeling annoyed with himself. His mind really must be wandering. Both Colley’s prints and those of the search team would have been made before the recent rain. These, pressed clearly into the mud, had been made post-rain. Some later vis
itor had been taking a look at the place now it was in the news. There was nothing like a suspicious death for attracting sightseers. Or was someone else still interested in Balaclava House for whatever reason had brought the late Jay Taylor here?

  He didn’t want Tansy to notice the prints. She was sharp enough to draw the same conclusion he had. The idea that even more interlopers had trespassed on the hallowed soil of her beloved Balaclava House would send her ballistic. He moved away from the incriminating evidence.

  They left the garden and returned to the front of the house. ‘Are you going back inside?’ Carter asked Tansy.

  She shook her head. ‘No, I’ll lock up now and go home. Unless you want to go indoors again?’

  ‘No, I have to get back to my office.’

  They walked to her car. Tansy patted the roof and said, ‘People wonder why I don’t buy a new one. But I like this one. I told Inspector Campbell so.’

  Carter glanced back at Balaclava House and then at the ageing car. ‘This isn’t a joke – I’m quite serious – have you ever thought of working in the antiques world?’

  She looked surprised. ‘I’m not bright enough.’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ he reminded her, ‘not to put yourself down.’

  Tansy studied him for a moment. ‘I think it’s possible,’ she said slowly, ‘that you are a nice man.’

  ‘Don’t run away with that idea,’ Carter advised her. ‘Remember, I’m a policeman.’

  ‘One who doesn’t do anything about whoever has been walking in and out of my uncle’s house, using one of the rooms.’ She wasn’t going to let him get away with that.

  ‘I explained that,’ he said patiently. ‘We will discuss with Mr Bickerstaffe what he wants to do.’

  ‘Then, are you close to arresting anyone for anything? For killing that man who was found here?’

  ‘Not yet, but we’ll get there.’

  ‘Really?’ Tansy stared at him.

  ‘Oh, yes, really,’ Carter assured her.

  She didn’t look reassured.

  Chapter 16

  Bridget and her daughter were quarrelling again. Monty had retreated to his bedroom, out of the way, and lay in the semi-darkness, listening to the rise and fall of their increasingly strident voices. It wasn’t the first clash he’d overheard since coming to the Old Lodge. The two women seemed to be constantly at loggerheads. This time they were really going at it, hammer and tongs. He gathered Tansy had been over to Balaclava to check out the place and had encountered a senior police officer there. Tansy was upset that the police were taking no action over someone having used one of the bedrooms. He thought he heard her say that the police now knew who it had been. Monty didn’t want to know the identity of the intruders. Just so long as they didn’t come back; that was all he cared about.

  Then Tansy and Bridget must have realised Monty could hear them, because they’d lowered their voices and hissed at each other like a pair of venomous snakes. So he’d missed all the next bit. Not that he was interested. All new information threatened to disturb his peace of mind. Gradually their voices had risen and now they were back to storm force and yelling again.

  Penny and I didn’t row like that, noisily, thought Monty. She would get annoyed with me and say a few sharp words. She knew how to pick ‘em. She didn’t need to shout. I used to ignore her. It seemed the easiest way and eventually she’d give up. One day, after so many long and acrimonious years together, she’d really given up and walked out.

  ‘Serve you right,’ Monty told himself aloud.

  He was sorry Penny hadn’t lived on long in her new life, free of him, after that, but had gone early to her grave. He hoped he hadn’t driven here there, but accepted he’d done his bit. She’d deserved a few decent years after all the time spent with him. All those things that had gone wrong and for which he felt responsible to a bigger or lesser degree; all of them stood like ghosts at his bedside, pointing accusing fingers.

  A violent slam of a door signalled one of the quarrelling pair, probably Tansy, had stormed out and gone to her room. His mother and father hadn’t argued loudly like that, either. They would have considered it ill bred, a vulgar way of carrying on. Theirs had been a cold, bitter silence of things unsaid. Perhaps it would have been better if they’d yelled a bit more instead of letting resentment simmer. Perhaps then his mother wouldn’t have taken her revenge in so deadly a way.

  Monty had said nothing to his mother on that grim Christmas Day, after the doctor’s departure. Nor had he spoken during the days that followed, or even after the ghastly funeral lunch, when the small band of mourners had sat down to eat the Christmas turkey. Not having been cooked when intended, due to events, the turkey had lingered ripely in the fridge until the day of the burial. It was a wonder they hadn’t all got food poisoning.

  It wasn’t until the following spring that Monty broached the subject. He was home again, this time for the Easter holiday. He came upon his mother on her knees at the flowerbed by the front door. She was energetically digging out weeds. He looked down at her, wondering at the ferocity of her attack on the groundsel and couch grass.

  ‘You didn’t call the doctor during the night, last Christmas,’ he said. ‘Dad thought you were phoning him. I went into his room and spoke to him and he told me so. But you didn’t call the doc until the next morning.’

  He didn’t say it accusingly. He hadn’t even intended consciously to say it at all. He had added it to the list of secrets, never to be spoken of. But it came out, just like that, as a simple statement.

  She paused in her onslaught on the weeds, sat back on her heels and wiped a gardening glove over her brow, leaving a dirty smear. She didn’t look up.

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Of course I called him.’

  ‘I spoke to the doctor, too. He said he came as soon as you called him, before breakfast on Christmas Day.’

  ‘I called him!’ she said sharply. ‘You were confused, Monty. It was a very stressful time.’

  There was a silence. She still had not looked up at him. Now she indicated the bed with her trowel. ‘I thought geraniums might do all right in here. It gets very dry but they don’t mind.’

  Monty didn’t mention the subject again. There was nothing to be gained. Didn’t he carry his own burden of guilt for that night? He had gone back to bed so tamely; instead of going downstairs and waiting for the doctor to arrive. He could have hopped and hobbled down to the hallway where the phone was, then he would have known, he would have called the doc again himself… But no, back to bed he’d gone and – he couldn’t understand this even now – he’d fallen asleep again until early morning. He’d woken to the grey light and the figure of his mother standing over him, still in her dressing gown, to inform him his father had passed away.

  ‘Your father’s just gone,’ she’d said, as if Edward Bickerstaffe had decided to get up, dress, and take himself off for a short time to attend to some business.

  ‘Gone where?’ Monty had asked foolishly.

  But she had already turned and was leaving the room.

  He’d married Penny six years later.

  ‘Congratulations, Monty,’ his mother said to him drily at the wedding breakfast. ‘You couldn’t have done better.’

  He understood the true meaning of her words. She believed he had married Penny to be revenged on her. He had foisted on her, as a daughter-in-law, the flame-haired daughter of her old rival. They were all in the wedding group photo. His mother stood stone-faced, in a tweed suit and sensible shoes, at one end of the line-up; Penny’s mother, faded but still pretty and wearing a feathery hat, at the other. The spirit of his father seemed to lurk somewhere above their heads. No, he couldn’t have taken a better revenge.

  But his mother was wrong. He’d married Penny because he loved her. He really did. Later, he found that loving someone and being a halfway decent husband were two different things.

  Later that day, when he and Penny studied the photos alone, Penny said, ‘Your mother do
esn’t look very happy in any of them. She must be sad at losing you.’

  He wanted to speak the truth for once and say, ‘No, she doesn’t give a damn about me. It’s having to hear you called “Mrs Bickerstaffe” that bugs her.’

  What he actually said was, ‘She probably drank a couple of gins too many before the ceremony, and she never liked having her photo taken.’

  Thus he discovered, right at the start of his marriage, that he would have to keep on telling little white lies, adding to the cairn of secrets of which the first stone had been laid so many years before, on a sunny summer’s day when the lark sang.

  Footsteps tapped along the passageway past his room. He heard a sharp tap at a door and Bridget’s voice. ‘Tansy! We can’t just leave it like that. You have to be sensible.’

  There must have been some reply missed by Monty because the next thing he heard was Bridget saying, ‘We’ll talk again in the morning.’

  She tapped past his door again. The Old Lodge was silent.

  * * *

  The following morning the sun was shining and Jess came in to find a note on her desk, informing her that Tom Palmer had phoned and asked that she call him back. She picked up the scrap of paper and sighed. She supposed he wanted to go out again that evening and eat somewhere or have a drink. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. She liked Tom’s company but she didn’t want these outings to take on a regular pattern. She even felt mildly resentful that Tom should assume she had nothing else to do in her evenings, no one else to meet. For that reason, she decided not to phone him back at once but to wait until later. She had more important things to do than discuss the pros and cons of various spaghetti houses or country pubs.

  Also, Phil Morton walked in at that moment and said, ‘The super wants us in his office.’

  Tom would have to wait now. Jess sighed. Ian Carter no doubt wanted them to thrash out some plan of action. A case conference was inevitable, with all that had happened. But the fact was, the mystery of the ultra-clean bedroom at Balaclava and its secret visitors had now been cleared up. That left them back at square one, with very little to go on by way of new leads.