by Rack, Ruin
Bridget uttered an expression of disgust and waved a hand to dismiss this outlandish idea.
‘Come off it,’ Jess told her. ‘I’ve seen a photo of them at a nightclub, very pally. I thought at first you were making for Balaclava House, but when I didn’t find you there, I guessed you’d come here. Tansy was friendly with Gary Colley when they were children, wasn’t she?’
‘My daughter,’ Bridget said coldly, ‘has a talent for picking unsuitable friends.’ After a moment’s hesitation, she added, ‘Perhaps she inherited it from me. I pick unsuitable men, too. But a mother always does blame herself when things go wrong for her child, as if that child were still a schoolgirl. Tansy is a woman. She’ll be nineteen in two weeks’ time. But she is still a child in her attitude. She has no idea of the world, no knowledge that men like Taylor exist. I think she met him at a party somewhere in London. I won’t dignify the emotion she felt towards him as falling in love. As far as I was concerned, it was just a massive schoolgirl crush. She thought he was wonderful. He told her a load of nonsense about loving her and she believed every word.’
‘You met Taylor?’
‘Oh, yes, I met him. As soon as I got wind of what was going on, I sought him out. I wanted to see who this fellow was she was talking of marrying. Marrying! She was supposed to be going to university, spreading her wings, finding out a little about life. When I met Taylor, all my worst fears were confirmed. He was much too old for her, very experienced in the world, and an out and out chancer. I didn’t know what he wanted from Tansy – apart from the obvious and he didn’t need to offer her marriage to get that! She was falling into his arms! I told him to stay away and he told me, as cool as a cucumber, that it was between him and Tansy, and nothing to do with me. Her mother! I was supposed to stand back and let him ruin her life?’
‘So when you looked at his dead body in Balaclava House, you recognised him. You said at the time you didn’t.’
‘Of course I recognised him. I was responsible for his being there.’
There was a silence.
‘Perhaps you could explain that?’ Jess prompted.
‘Why not?’ Bridget returned coolly. ‘It’s pretty straightforward. I got Tansy out of the way for the day and invited the wretched Taylor to come down to The Old Lodge for lunch with me, to talk things over. I made the invitation the day before, when I went up to London.’
‘You were confident he’d accept your invitation? He knew you disapproved of his friendship with your daughter?’ Jess asked.
Bridget gave a knowing smile. ‘I knew he’d accept. His vanity made him do that. He thought he’d won. He thought I was going to give up my opposition and I had invited him down to talk terms. He didn’t know me if he thought I would just throw in the towel like that. I wasn’t about to let him have Tansy and I had to do something to stop that happening, stop it for good! I’m going to the States soon to get married myself.’ She grimaced. ‘I suppose I ought now to say that I was going. At any rate, I wouldn’t be here to protect her. So I did what I had to do. I would make her safe from him.’
‘And remove an obstacle from your own life, too? If you wanted to keep to your schedule in travelling to the USA.’
Bridget gave a satisfied nod. ‘Of course. He had to go, however you look at it. The wretched man had just made himself a complete inconvenience. It was stupid of him. But I counted on his being stupid. So he came down to The Old Lodge and I cooked him a first-rate lunch, if I say so myself.’
Jess didn’t want to interrupt Bridget but she was worried about how close the woman still stood to the edge of the hayloft and the open hatch behind her.
‘Perhaps,’ she suggested as calmly as she could, ‘we could talk more comfortably. There’s an old sofa over there. It doesn’t look too dirty.’
‘We’re quite all right as we are!’ Bridget snapped. ‘I’ll stay here and you stay right there and we’ll be fine.’
‘OK.’ Jess didn’t think it was fine at all, but the other woman’s nervous tension fairly crackled through the air between them. I need to calm her down, Jess thought. If I let her go on with her story, she might relax a bit. Then I’ll have another go at persuading her to come with me, or at least move away from that opening.
‘I crushed up a bottleful of sleeping tablets and mixed them in with the wine sauce,’ Bridget said. ‘It was coq au vin. I usually do that for lunch parties. We’d had a couple of drinks before we ate and a bottle of decent red with the meal.’
‘You thought that would kill him?’
‘No!’ Bridget grew irritable. ‘Of course that wouldn’t kill him. Or it wasn’t likely. I couldn’t have relied on it and I didn’t. I knew it would make him very sleepy and then I could make my next move. I thought it would be an hour or a bit more before the pills and booze had any real effect. My idea was to have him leave before that, drive away. I thought he’d crash on the way home, just another drunk driver cut from the wreckage. Add him to the statistics.’
‘He could have killed other people, innocent people!’ Jess broke in angrily, unable to stop herself.
Bridget shrugged. ‘I didn’t think of that. I was only thinking of Tansy. I told you, I did it for my daughter. That was all that mattered to me; the only thing I had on my mind. I had to kill the bastard – or arrange for him to kill himself – because he’d left me no other choice. Blame him!’
‘So how did he end up on a sofa in Balaclava House?’
‘I’m coming to that!’ Bridget was beginning to sound exasperated. ‘Stop interrupting.’
I’m not doing a very good job calming her down, Jess told herself. Shut up, Jess, whatever she says. Let her finish. But I’ve got to get her away from that opening.
Bridget looked discontented. ‘It was a good idea but it started to go wrong at once. The pills and wine worked more quickly than I’d judged they would. We hadn’t even finished our meal and he was already dozing off over the cheese. I’d misjudged how powerful they’d been. I began to be afraid he’d pass out right there in my house, flat out on the carpet. He mumbled he didn’t feel well. I told him I’d drive him home. He was confused and clumsy but I managed to get him to his feet and out of the house, into his car. He slumped in the passenger seat and hardly appeared to be breathing. He closed his eyes and I thought he’d gone to sleep. Fine, that suited me. I’d planned for him to crash and he was still going to, only I’d have to organise it differently.
‘First of all, we had to get away from my house. I remembered Shooter’s Hill. That would be ideal, steep, lonely, no one to see what happened. I’d stop at the top of the hill and manhandle him somehow into the driver’s seat. Then I’d release the brake, give the car a bit of a push, and off he’d go, rattling down Shooter’s Hill to pile up at the bottom. Sooner or later someone would find the wreck, either Pete Sneddon or a walker. But I’d be long gone, well away.’
‘How?’ asked Jess crisply. There were more holes in this story than a sieve. ‘You didn’t have any transport to get home.’
‘I knew I could come here, to the Colleys’ place. Don’t forget…’ Bridget’s tense features were unexpectedly softened by a brief smile. ‘I’m a Bickerstaffe. I’ve known the Colleys all my life. I’d tell them I’d been on my way to Balaclava House intending to check the place over. My car had broken down. I’d say I’d phoned Seb Pascal and he’d come with his tow-truck to take my car away. I’d ask Dave to drive me home, or Gary. Even if they didn’t quite believe me, I could trust the Colleys not to ask questions. It’s all quite feudal really, Bickerstaffes and Colleys. It always has been. It’s really weird in this day and age. But once you step into the world of Balaclava House, you’re not in the present day, you know. You’re stuck in some benighted past.’
‘So that’s what you did?’
‘Not quite. You see the blighter died on me just as I turned into Toby’s Gutter Lane.’ Bridget’s voice grew vicious. ‘He just coughed up a load of vomit and pitched forward as far as the seat belt would allow and
stayed like that. I nearly did crash the car, with both of us inside it! It was quite disgusting. I nearly threw up myself. I pulled over and got out of the car for fresh air. Then I began to think, I could still carry on with most of the plan. I could still crash the car at the bottom of Shooter’s Hill. But the experts are so damn clever these days and they’d realise, at a post-mortem, he was already dead when he crashed. My fingerprints were all over that car, too. I only then thought about that. Something so elementary and I’d forgotten that, can you believe it? It was because I was in such a panic to get him away from my house. Then I had a bit of luck. There’s a field there, where the lane starts, and as I stood by the car, Gary Colley came towards me over the open land with a shotgun broken over his arm. The Colleys always did shoot anything with fur or feathers.
‘I called out to him. I told him the basic truth: my passenger had died in the car. I wanted to get rid of the car and the body because I didn’t want to get involved in a court case. Gary appreciated that argument. I also remembered that Balaclava House was never locked in the daytime and there was a good chance Uncle Monty hadn’t got back from his daily walk into town.’
‘You suggested putting the dead man in your uncle’s house, for the poor old man to find?’ Jess asked incredulously, forgetting her resolution not to interrupt. ‘The shock might have given him a heart attack!’
‘Uncle Monty? Not likely, he’s as tough as old boots. Don’t waste your sympathy on him. He led Aunt Penny a dreadful life. She adored him, too. In the end even she couldn’t take any more and left. Do you know? The miserable old brute wouldn’t even attend her funeral! If you want to know the truth, the image of him stumbling in with his shopping bag full of clinking bottles and finding a stiff, well, it would serve him right. It even amused me and I needed a laugh after all I’d gone through that day.’ Bridget scowled.
Jess stared at her nonplussed. There was something wrong with all this but she couldn’t put her finger on it. It made sense with a dreadful logic, except that…
‘You drove the car to Balaclava House, I take it, with Gary as passenger?’
‘Gary drove. I didn’t fancy getting back into the driver’s seat beside Taylor so I got into the rear seat. We actually drove past Balaclava to the Colleys’ and parked here. Gary fetched his father. Dave and Gary partly carried and partly dragged Taylor through the grounds to the house and left him inside. Then they came back and put Taylor’s car in this barn.’ Bridget pointed down at the wooden floor beneath their feet. ‘Out of sight, in case Pete Sneddon decided to call by. He does, from time to time, usually to complain about something to do with the pigs.’
Damn! thought Jess furiously. I should have got a search warrant that first day and come here to the Colleys’ with it. I’d have found the car in this barn before they ditched it later that night.
‘The Colleys drove the car down to the quarry that night and torched it?’ she asked.
Bridget nodded. ‘Yes, they said they’d do that. It would take care of any fingerprints or DNA, linking me with it.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘I’ll come with you now and make a statement, if you like.’
‘Not quite yet,’ Jess said. ‘First I’ll wait for Tansy to come back.’
‘We don’t need Tansy!’ Bridget said furiously. ‘Leave her out of it.’
‘I can’t, Mrs Harwell. I need a statement from her, too.’
‘She wasn’t there !’ Bridget almost howled at her.
‘But, you see, I think she was,’ Jess said. ‘I think you and she cooked this up together. You may have gone to London the day before, as you said you did, but I doubt you saw Taylor there. He lived in Cheltenham and only went to London on business. You’d have arranged to meet him in Cheltenham if anywhere. Why didn’t you say all you had to say while in Cheltenham? Why invite the man to lunch at your house the very next day? What’s more, I don’t think he’d have accepted such an invitation so easily, without smelling a rat. He may have suspected he’d arrive to find every man in the family you could round up there to confront him. But he would accept an invitation from Tansy. The only reason he’d accept would be if Tansy were going to be there.
‘Besides, it took two of you to manhandle him into the car. He was a big, heavy guy. I might have been able to do it alone because I’m a police officer and very fit. I’ve had training in how to get a recalcitrant detainee, possibly drunk into the bargain, into a squad car. But you alone, Bridget? No way. You didn’t meet him in London or anywhere else. Tansy rang him up. What did Tansy say to him? That you’d given in and wanted to discuss it all, just a cosy threesome?’
‘Yes, that’s what I did say to him,’ said a new voice.
There was a movement to Jess’s left and Tansy Peterson stepped out from behind a stack of crates.
‘No, Tansy!’ Bridget cried out. ‘Leave this to me! We agreed!’
‘There’s no point,’ Tansy said bleakly. ‘She isn’t buying the explanation the way you told it, Mum. Even if I went along with it and said I was away from The Old Lodge that lunchtime, Inspector Campbell here would ask me for witnesses who could put me elsewhere at the time, an alibi, wouldn’t you?’ She looked full at Jess.
‘Yes,’ Jess confirmed, ‘I certainly would, because you’ve been lying to us all along. The only moment you nearly betrayed yourself was when I told you that someone had been using one of the upstairs bedrooms at Balaclava. You were extremely distressed. You realised that person or person might have been there when you, your mother and the Colleys were putting Taylor’s body in the drawing room. You could have been seen.’
‘I wasn’t there for that,’ Tansy objected. ‘Dave and Gary did it between them. I’d helped get Jay into the car at The Old Lodge, as you guessed, but my mother drove off with him alone. She wouldn’t let me come along. I thought it had all gone according to plan, with the car crashing at the bottom of Shooter’s Hill, as we decided it should. I didn’t know the plan had had to be changed until my mother came back. I wouldn’t have let Gary and his father put Jay in Balaclava for Uncle Monty to find. I was furious when I found out what they’d done. I love Uncle Monty. He’s a wonderful old man! But after my mother drove off I didn’t know what happened until she returned and told me. It was too late to do anything about it then. I didn’t want Jay near Balaclava House dead or alive, much less actually in it!’
‘But why,’ Jess couldn’t help but ask curiously, ‘did you want to kill Jay Taylor? You were in love with him. Your mother was in a blind panic over it. You spoke of marrying him. You and Mrs Harwell fought over it.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Tansy said bitterly. ‘Jay and I discussed marriage. I’m over eighteen and, whatever my mother thought about it, I’d have married him. Then I found out that it wasn’t me he wanted. He wanted Balaclava House. I’ll be Uncle Monty’s heir and had stupidly let Jay know it, all about Balaclava and how Uncle Monty lived there all on his own and the place was falling down. But it would be mine one day and I planned to restore it. It would be beautiful and I’d live there.
‘Jay had checked the place out, just from curiousity. When he saw the size of it and how much land was attached, it gave him his big idea. He thought he’d marry me; Uncle Monty wouldn’t last much longer, and wow! He’d get his hands on Balaclava.’ Tansy voice grew incredulous. ‘Do you know what he planned to do with the house? He and some developer pal of his were going to pull it down! Raze Balaclava to the ground and put a lot of brick boxes all over the land!’
‘How did you find that out?’
‘The developer he was going in with, I think he’s called Hemmings, went to the local planning office to see if there would be any objection, any difficulty getting permission. He mentioned to them that he would be in partnership with someone called Taylor. Well, a friend of mine works in that office. He shouldn’t have done it, I suppose, but he got in touch with me at once to warn me. He knew about me and that I stood to inherit Balaclava, and that my relative was the owner and still living in it. So alarm bells had ru
ng when a complete stranger turned up talking about developing the site. As soon as I heard the name “Taylor” mentioned, I just felt cold all over. I knew in my guts it was Jay. I thought I would be sick. How could he do that to me? Everything he’d said about loving me was a lie. I faced him with it, demanded to know if he was the Taylor in partnership with this man Hemmings. I was furious, screaming at him. He didn’t bat an eyelid, just listened to me with a smirk on his face. It made me even madder, he was so – so cool. He didn’t even try to deny it. He admitted he was in cahoots with Hemmings, and told me what a good idea it was. I should be pleased because I’d be part of it, too, and we could both make a mint.
‘For a minute or two I couldn’t speak, I was so angry. The words piled up in my throat and choked me. When I could speak, I told him to get out of my life. I said he was a sneaky, treacherous snake in the grass. He’d tried to use me. I wasn’t going to stand for that. I assured him I’d scotch any chance he and Hemmings had of developing the land. Over my dead body, I said. He was never going to get Balaclava House.’
Tansy drew a deep breath. ‘Then he said he had a right to Balaclava. A right! Because he was a Bickerstaffe, too! ‘
This astounding statement had barely left Tansy’s lips when there was a sudden loud crack from the hayloft hatch. Bridget gave a stifled shriek. Both Jess and Tansy whirled round. But the window frame was empty. Bridget had disappeared.
Chapter 19
Tansy let out a piercing scream and started towards the empty window frame. Jess grabbed her arm and wrestled with her to prevent her going closer.
‘No, Tansy! The floor is rotten! Look!’ She pointed to the broken board that had given way under Bridget’s foot, unbalancing her and toppling her backwards. ‘Stay here!’
Jess turned and raced back down the flight of wooden stairs to the ground floor. Tansy, ignoring the order to stay where she was, panted along on her heels. Jess dashed across the barn floor and out into the yard.