by Rack, Ruin
Carter was waiting for them, standing behind his desk and aligning pens and other desktop items with concentrated care. He looked up when they came in and said, ‘Glad you’ve both got a minute.’
Is he being sarcastic? Jess wondered briefly. Probably not but it did sound a little like it. Beside her, she sensed Phil bridle.
‘I called in at Balaclava House yesterday,’ Carter went on. ‘Tansy Peterson was there.’ He gave them a résumé of his conversation with Tansy. ‘There are fresh male footprints in the gardens. I think someone has been wandering around up there within the last day or two, certainly since it rained. It could just be a sightseer. Or even the local press, I suppose, gone to take a photo or two. But if anyone is taking an interest in Balaclava House, I want to know who it is.’
‘I can phone the local rag and ask if they’ve sent anyone over there,’ Morton offered.
Carter nodded his approval. ‘It’s made me think rather more about that place, the house and the land. The fact both are in a dismal state of neglect doesn’t mean the whole estate isn’t worth quite a bit. Monty could be a rich man if he sold up.’
‘Who’d want it?’ Morton asked gloomily.
‘A developer would,’ Carter told him briskly. ‘And by coincidence, or not, Billy Hemmings is a property developer. We ought not to overlook any little bit of knowledge we have, even if it seems unrelated to the inquiry. Jay Taylor is altogether too much of a man of mystery. I don’t believe Taylor being expected at Hemmings’s house for a dinner party on the day of his death is a coincidence. You told me, Jess, that you believed Balaclava House is at the centre of this business. I think you could be on to something. They haven’t left for Marbella, as you feared, Jess. I’m going to talk to Hemmings today. I rang his home. He wasn’t there but I spoke to his wife. He’s got an office in Gloucester and will be there all day. I’m driving over there shortly and if he’s been hanging round Balaclava House, I intend to get it out of him.’
‘Monty wouldn’t sell to a developer!’ Jess said promptly.
‘Neither would Tansy,’ Carter said with a brief smile. ‘She made that very clear to me!’
Phil Morton, his hands jammed in his jacket pockets said moodily, ‘She thinks she’s the old bloke’s heir, does she? That it’s going to be up to her to sell or not? Or it should be “heiress”, I suppose, if you want to be picky.’
He was unprepared for the silence that followed his suggestion, and looked up, taking his hands from his pockets as if he expected to be reproved.
Jess said slowly, ‘It’s a distinct possibility. Monty’s fond of Tansy. He’s got to leave Balaclava to someone.’
‘He might not have made a will,’ said Morton quickly, preempting any objections to his new idea. The last time he’d produced a theory, they’d knocked it down, after all. ‘Look at the people who don’t make wills, even people with plenty to leave.’
‘Oh, I think Mr Bickerstaffe will have made a will,’ Carter decided. ‘He’s an educated man of middle-class upbringing and professional background. The Bickerstaffe family must always have made wills. They owned property and used to own a business. Of course, any will Monty made during his wife’s lifetime will have needed to be redrafted after her death. Monica Farrell made no mention of a divorce. I think Penny Bickerstaffe just packed her bags and left. She may still have been in the old will. I’m fairly sure he would have made a new will when she died or, if there was a divorce, after that. That property has been in his family since it was built in the eighteen sixties. He’d make arrangements for it in the event of his death. He’d be very conscious of the necessity and see it as a duty. What’s more he’d be very keen to leave it to a family member who might, who knows, one day restore it. Bridget Harwell sees the place as a burden to be unloaded. But Tansy doesn’t. Tansy loves the old place. She’s the obvious person to inherit it.’
Jess said slowly, ‘I’m remembering something he said to me, when I drove over to Bridget Harwell’s house to talk to him. He said something about not having any money to leave Tansy. That’s true. He doesn’t have cash but he does have the house and property. The fact that he talked about leaving anything at all to Tansy shows he does have the situation after his death in mind; and he wants to leave something to her. He can’t stand Bridget Harwell. But Tansy is a different kettle of fish.’ Excitement was growing in her voice. ‘Yes, I bet he has left Balaclava to Tansy. What’s more, I believe she knows it. That’s why she was there, checking the place out, when you met her, sir. That’s why she spoke so strongly about it in her conversation with you. She already regards it as hers!’
‘But she wouldn’t sell it and the land for development,’ Carter reminded her. ‘She made that clear to me.’
‘She might have no choice,’ contributed Morton. ‘I know she’s got money and her dad is rolling in it, but just think of trying to put that crumbling old ruin in order and the cost of its upkeep afterwards! It’s huge. She couldn’t live in it. So, she’s got a sentimental attachment to the place. If she owned it, she’d have to face facts, be practical. I mean, she’s not much more than a kid now. She might have all sorts of dreams about fixing the place up and so on. But real life—’
‘All the more reason for me to talk to Billy Hemmings,’ Carter interrupted him. ‘To find out if he does have any interest in Balaclava House and whether he’s approached any family member about it. Not Monty himself, perhaps, but what about Bridget Harwell? Mrs Harwell is not the sentimental sort. She’d see Balaclava as a liability to be unloaded as soon as possible. I think you’d better talk to Bridget again, Jess. I’ll tackle Hemmings.’
‘Where does Taylor come into it?’ Morton asked.
There was another silence. ‘Blowed if I know,’ said Carter at last. ‘But it’s high time we found out!’
Chapter 17
As Jess walked back to her office, her mobile phone chirruped, letting her know she had received a text message. It was from Tom Palmer, following up his earlier missed phone call. Restored to conventional spelling it read:
Call by my office. Something here you might like to see.
She needed to drive over to The Old Lodge and see Bridget again, but she could make it to Tom’s office first. It would stop him bombarding her with messages. Besides, she was curious. She had assumed that he’d wanted to make an arrangement about going out to eat tonight. Apparently this wasn’t the case. She puzzled over the few words on the screen. What had Tom found now? Surely he hadn’t conducted a second post-mortem. There had been no request for one. If he had done so, and found something he called ‘interesting’, Jess hoped it wasn’t now in a glass jar and she would be required to study some gory section of human internal organ. Tom had the blessed ability to distance himself as a human being from the remains he dissected. ‘A lung is a lung…’ he’d once cheerily informed her. ‘Doesn’t matter if its human or animal. You cook, don’t you? Well, sometimes you do, anyway. You’ve chopped up meat?’
Jess had viewed enough corpses not to be squeamish in general. But she had never managed the trick of dissociating her own mortality from the sad remains on the slab. ‘What I cut up comes neatly cling-film wrapped in a polystyrene tray!’ had been her reply. ‘And it never looked like me or you.’
At least Tom wasn’t in the morgue itself, when she got there. He was, as he’d said he’d be, in his office. That lessened the possibility of bits in jars considerably.
‘Ah!’ said Tom smugly, when she walked in. ‘Bet you don’t know what all this is about? It took me three-quarters of an hour to find it. My time is valuable, I’ll have you know. I ought to send you a bill.’
‘What are you on about?’ Jess asked. ‘All I’ve got is a cryptic message. My time is valuable, too. You’re not wasting it, I hope? I’ve got an important interview to conduct.’
Tom looked hurt at this less than gracious reply. ‘You can’t expect me to spoil my surprise by putting it all in a text message? Anyway, it would be too long.’
‘W
hat is it?‘ Jess burst out.
Tom pulled open a drawer in his desk and pulled out a very tattered copy of a glossy magazine. ‘Ta-ra!’ he heralded this unpromising object. ‘I told you; it took me three-quarters of an hour to find it. You’re lucky. She was just about to throw them all out.’
‘Who was? Throw what? Stop talking in riddles, Tom. OK, I’m surprised, if that’s what you want. I am, actually, I didn’t have you down as reading that sort of stuff. But what about that one am I expected to be surprised at?’
‘The receptionist at the dental surgery was going to throw them out. Now then, you remember I told you I thought I’d seen the corpse you sent me recently before? In life, I mean, not on a slab.’
Jess’s impatience turned to eagerness. ‘Yes, I do. Have you remembered?’
‘Now you want to know, don’t you?’ Tom smiled happily at her. ‘It bugged me, you see, that I couldn’t place the chap. You asked about newspapers and I knew it hadn’t been in a newspaper. Then, last night, I remembered. I went for my annual dental check-up a couple of weeks ago. I had to sit around in the waiting room for a while and, as you know, they always have piles of ancient magazines. So I started looking through them. That’s where I’d seen Taylor, in a magazine, one of those topical gossip glossies – showing us what glamorous lives some people have, unlike our humdrum daily toil. So I went back this morning first thing, straight through the door as they opened up. The receptionist thought I had an emergency tooth problem. I explained I needed to look through the magazines and might want to take one away. “Take the lot,” she said. “They’re so out of date no one wants to look at them. I’m going to put them out for recycling today.” So I had to sit down there and then and leaf through them. Blooming boring it was too, I can tell you. But I found it. Here it is.’
Tom opened the magazine in question and turned it on the desk surface so that it faced Jess right way up. ‘See? That’s him. That’s Taylor. Full of life and grinning away, I grant you, but that’s the joker I autopsied for you.’
He tapped the well-thumbed page. Jess bent over the desk to study the photograph. It had been taken in a well-known nightclub. It showed a party of revellers. They were, the text said, celebrating the success of a racehorse belonging to one of them. Certainly champagne bottles were much in evidence. The horse’s owner – and his female companion – were well enough known to the readers of this kind of gossip machine to be of interest. The caption stated the celebrity pair was having a night out ‘with friends’. One of the friends was clearly and unmistakably Jay Taylor.
Poor Jay, thought Jess. There he is, as Tom said, full of life and hobnobbing with the sort of people he wrote about and longed to be like. Also just a little flushed and the worse for drink, grinning his head off at the paparazzo who had snapped this shot. He had a proprietorial arm around the shoulders of a girl who was leaning against him. She, also, looked rather the worse for champagne. Her face shone and one strap of her party dress had slipped off her shoulder and rested on her upper arm.
‘Any use to you?’ asked Tom hopefully. ‘Probably doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already know. But I thought you’d like to see it.’
‘I would, I am interested, very much indeed,’ Jess told him. ‘Thanks for this, Tom, really very, very much! Yes, that’s Jay Taylor… and I know her, too, the girl he’s very pally with.’
Jess tapped the image of the girl with the slipped bodice strap. ‘Tansy Peterson! Well, well, well… I’m just on my way to talk to her mother. Now I need to talk to her, too, and urgently.’
* * *
But neither Bridget nor Tansy were at home when Jess reached the Old Lodge. Monty was wandering around the garden, whisky glass in hand. He looked quite happy.
‘Both gone out!’ he announced. ‘Marvellous! They left me here all alone and Bridget didn’t remember to lock the drinks cabinet.’
‘Did they say where they were going?’ Jess asked.
‘No and I didn’t ask. They didn’t go together. They went separately.’
Jess frowned. That sounded as though mother and daughter had set off in different directions.
Monty had noted her frown and interpreted it as disbelief. ‘I know it sounds potty. But first Tansy shot off in her old banger of a car and then Bridget went chasing after her in that little blue job she drives.’
So the two women may have been heading in the same direction, after all. Something had happened.
‘Monty,’ Jess said, ‘please try and remember anything at all. I must find them. What about last night? Did either of them mention last night they might be going out this morning?’
‘Oh, last night,’ returned Monty with a sniff of disapproval. ‘Last night they had a bally awful row, a real ding-dong battle. They row all the time, mind you, so it probably meant nothing.’
‘What were they rowing about?’
‘Dunno,’ mumbled Monty. ‘Tried not to listen. I was in my bedroom. I could still hear them, though, when they didn’t remember to whisper.’
‘Monty!’ Jess urged. ‘Do try! It is important. I think it’s important to Tansy. I know you don’t care about Bridget, but you do care about Tansy, don’t you?’ Jess took a plunge. ‘Is she your heir?’
Monty blinked at her, astounded. ‘Blimey,’ he said. ‘You’re sharp, you are. Yes, she is, for what it’s worth. I haven’t got any money. She knows that. I’ve left Balaclava to her in my will and that’s likely to be more of a burden to her than a blessing.’
‘Does she know? Have you told her you’ve left her Balaclava?’
Monty shrugged. ‘I did say something or other to her. She seemed pleased at the time, poor kid.’ He eyed Jess thoughtfully. ‘Tansy in trouble or some sort?’
‘I need to talk to her urgently, Monty, that’s all.’
‘Mm…’ Monty gazed into the now-empty glass in his hand. Perhaps the need to refill it before Bridget got back decided him. ‘They might have gone over to Balaclava. I think that’s what they were arguing about. You cops know who’s been using that bedroom upstairs there, don’t you? Well, it’s got Tansy’s goat that you’re not doing anything about it. Don’t explain it to me. I don’t bloody care.’
* * *
Billy Hemmings ran his business from a small first-floor office in the area of Gloucester Docks. A modest brass plate gave no indication of what kind of business it was, but presumably people who wanted to conduct it with Billy knew all about it. A secretary, a small dark woman radiating energy, presided over a cramped outer office at the top of the steep flight of stairs. She appeared to be the only staff.
‘Superintendent Carter!’ she said briskly. ‘He’s been expecting you. Go on through.’
Carter smiled wryly. The phone line between Weston St Ambrose and this office had been busy. Unfortunately, though unavoidably, Terri had had plenty of time to forewarn his husband and Billy had had plenty of time to prepare for his visit. But perhaps Billy had been waiting for this interview from the beginning… if he indeed had an interest in Balaclava House, that is. He must be shrewd enough to have realised the police would make a link, sooner or later. It was going to be interesting to hear him explain his lack of frankness on the subject.
The brisk receptionist/secretary was still indicating the narrow door with a frosted glazed panel in it.
‘Thank you,’ Carter said to her and ‘went through’, as directed.
Beyond it Hemmings was waiting for him with a smile fixed in place on his fleshy lips. It didn’t quite reach his eyes.
‘Hello, then, we meet again!’ he hailed his visitor with false jocularity. He was rising to his feet as he spoke and holding out his hand.
‘Thank you for seeing me so promptly,’ Carter returned, not to be outdone in the matter of civilities. He shook the proffered hand as briefly as he could.
‘Oh, well, as soon as Terri rang here to say you’d been on to her, I was waiting for your call. I’ll get Amanda to bring us in some coffee.’ He leaned forward and called i
nto the intercom on his desk, ‘Coffee, Amanda!’ He leaned back again. ‘What can I do for you this time? Found out who did for poor old Jay yet?’
‘No, not yet, not quite yet,’ Carter admitted, lowering himself into a shiny new armchair of modern design, all tubular steel and black plastic. It looked like an ejector seat and felt about as comfortable. He was reminded of scenes in James Bond films; and wondered if Hemmings had a button under his desk to get rid of unwanted callers. They were in the former docks here, after all. Perhaps, he thought with a moment’s amusement, a trapdoor would open and he, Carter, would plummet neatly down into the water.
His suppressed smile had been noted by the other man and interpreted differently.
‘That’s a designer piece,’ said Hemmings proudly, indicating the chair with a wave. ‘I paid good money for that chair. That cost me more than all the rest of the office furniture put together.’
Carter hastily murmured something to indicate he was impressed. Then he got to the subject that had brought him.
‘Actually,’ he began, ‘I’d like to talk to you about Balaclava House.’
Amanda chose that moment to appear with the coffee. From her boss’s point of view, she couldn’t have timed it better. Carter wondered if she were listening over the intercom, out there in her cubbyhole office.
‘Ah, coffee!’ Hemmings beamed, as if he hadn’t just asked for it. He opened a lower drawer in his desk and took something out. ‘Would you like a drop of something in that, Superintendent?’ He held up a brandy bottle.
‘I’m on duty, I’m afraid,’ Carter refused the offer with a smile.
‘Of course you are.’ Hemmings returned the bottle to its hiding place and sat back again. ‘Balaclava House, you say? Where Jay was found? I think I remember you telling me that.’