Died and Gone to Devon

by TP Fielden

  I ought to phone the office, Miss Dimont thought lazily. She stretched and turned towards the fire, the idea escaping her brain the second it had been formulated.

  ‘So what is it you wanted to ask me about, Geraldine?’

  ‘A murder, dear. A murder long ago. One which touched the royal family and could have created an unprecedented scandal, had it ever become known.’

  ‘Good Lord!’

  ‘It happened around Christmas time, I suppose that’s what put the thought in my head. I’d forgotten all about it – but sitting here, seeing them putting up the decorations, getting out the punchbowl, brought it all back.’

  ‘How fascinating, Geraldine.’

  ‘I was there, Judy. I was there and it has puzzled and worried me ever since. I want you to solve it. I need you to solve it!’

  Two

  Temple Regis, a mere twenty miles from the edge of Dartmoor, was enjoying very different seasonal weather. Here, the maritime climate meant that as the day faded, the darkening sky revealed its precious jewels one by one, stars so sharply defined you could almost pluck them and wear them round your neck. The evening was beautiful.

  ‘Shall we go for a walk?’ said Auriol Hedley, looking at the elegant old gentleman sitting in her kitchen chair, his legs neatly crossed and the shine on his brogues sparkling in the lamplight. ‘The air’s crisp, but if you wrap up warm it should be invigorating. We could go to the pub.’

  ‘I say,’ said her companion, ‘what a wonderful idea!’ as if nobody had ever thought of going to a pub before. Miss Dimont’s uncle Arthur was like that – still a boy through and through, though the occasional arthritic twinge was a reminder that he no longer was.

  ‘Come on, then.’ Auriol was already in her ancient fur coat and whizzing Arthur’s hat across the room. He caught it neatly and jammed it on his head. They let themselves out of the Seagull Café and set off through the deserted harbour just as the moon rose to light their way.

  Out in the dark you could hear the crack of lines against the boat masts, and the sloosh of water slapping the sides of the craft anchored against the harbour wall. Towards the mouth of the estuary a few red lights moving slowly inland showed there was still life on the water, but otherwise it was silent.

  ‘So glad you’ve come for Christmas, Arthur, always a joy to see you.’

  ‘My final attempt to put Hugue and her mother together again,’ he said, using the family name for his niece. ‘After that I’ve pledged never to say another word.’ Both shared a love for Miss Dimont, both were concerned at her evasion tactics when it came to Madame Dimont, Arthur’s sister – both seemed powerless to intervene.

  ‘Did Grace ask you to do something about it?’

  ‘You know what she’s like,’ said Arthur, linking his arm through Auriol’s. ‘Grace is as difficult in her way as Huguette – two opposing forces. Grace says, My daughter never sees me, and then finds an excuse when I try to put them together. Huguette is naughty – never replies to her mother’s letters and is always on a story or solving a murder or something, just when it looks like the two of them might meet.’

  From across the harbour the old man and his companion suddenly heard the piping voices of young choirboys singing, in descant, a melodious chorus of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’.

  ‘Cynical little brutes,’ said Auriol briskly, stepping up the pace.

  ‘I say, steady on,’ panted Arthur. ‘That’s the spirit of Christmas you’re giving a kicking! Where are the tidings of comfort and joy in your heart?’

  ‘You don’t know. I had them knocking on my door last night. When I opened up they were wearing choirboys’ ruffs and had a candle in a milk bottle. Such innocence, such sweetness!’

  ‘Well,’ said the old boy, pulling his leather gloves tighter into his palms, ‘think yourself lucky. In London I get nobody knocking on my door this time of year. No point in leaving a mince pie on the doorstep when you’re on the eleventh floor of a mansion block. Personally, I think it’s charming.’

  Auriol did not agree. ‘They stand there, singing and singing, looking at you with goo-goo grins, begging with their eyes to give them a hefty tip. And when you do, they don’t stop singing, they keep on going in the hope you’ll give ’em a bit more.’

  ‘Good heavens, Auriol, are you by chance related to Ebenezer Scrooge?’

  ‘Choirboys?’ came the snorted reply. ‘Extortionists!’

  They pushed their way into the saloon bar of the Belvedere. Inside, there was a sense of repressed celebration – this was, after all, Bedlington, lordly neighbour of Temple Regis where beer is served only in half pints (and then with some disdain) while there were at least half a dozen different kinds of sherry on offer.

  ‘Sherry?’

  ‘Good lord, no!’ said Arthur. ‘A nice glass of whisky to keep the cold out, if you please. And you, Auriol?’

  ‘Same.’

  Since her retirement from Naval Intelligence, Auriol Hedley had made her home, and a thriving business, in the Seagull Café, perched enchantingly on the edge of Bedlington Harbour, and a magnet for the more genteel seaside visitor.

  Auriol had put on a pound or two since her uniform days, but it suited her. ‘La patronne mange ici,’ she explained airily to friends who came to try out her lardy cake and Welsh scones – and anyway, who was counting calories?

  In winter, and especially around Christmas, there was little trade and plenty of time to think of other things.

  ‘That’s why I’m glad you’re here, Arthur,’ she said as her companion returned from the bar. ‘I wanted to ask you about Sir Frederick Hungerford.’

  ‘Freddy? We’re both old Seale-Haynians, you know. Haven’t seen him for years. He’s your MP, isn’t he?’

  ‘Not for much longer. Standing down at the next election. Been here for yonks. You’re not friends?’

  ‘Far from it. We met only briefly, forty years ago, when I came back from the Front. Seale Hayne was an agricultural college but it was used as a hospital for chaps suffering from shell-shock. Well, we both had a bit of that. Freddy and I spent a few weeks in bath chairs lying next to each other, though we didn’t get on awfully well.’

  ‘Rich, truculent, and litigious said one newspaper when he announced his retirement,’ said Auriol.

  ‘Obviously no friend of yours either, then,’ laughed Arthur.

  ‘Well, he’s charming enough when you meet him, that I will say. But soon to be replaced by an absolute poppet. It’ll be something of a relief to have a real person as our MP instead of that…’

  ‘Shall we have another?’

  ‘Bit soon for me – you go on.’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about Huguette before she gets here. Keen to ask your advice. If we’ve finished with Freddy?’

  ‘Well, that can wait. What about her?’

  ‘You know her better than anyone.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Her closest friend.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Auriol, she’s going round in circles. Her life seems to have become one long chase after the next sensation. It’s this story, it’s that headline. It’s this crime and that murder. I feel she was made for better things.’

  ‘Well, Arthur, I wonder whether I can agree with you about that. She distinguished herself in war service. She had a second career during the Cold War. She found a third career down here, working in local newspapers, away from the combat zone you might say. You might argue she has a fourth career solving the crimes she has since she started working on the Express. Is there something wrong with that? I should have thought you would have been proud of her.’

  ‘Well, old girl, I am, I am! But…’

  ‘Aha! This is Madame Dimont talking, Arthur, isn’t it? You’ve been nobbled!’

  Arthur looked at his empty glass and then up at the bar. He looked at the glass again but made no attempt to get up.

  ‘Look, Auriol,’ he said, ‘you know that one day Huguette will be very well off. Her fath
er left everything to her mother when he died, but she is the eventual heir – after all, when Monsieur Dimont became ill she took over the diamond business and did wonders with it. Wonders! You might almost say she made more money than her father, and he was a shrewd one.’

  ‘She knows all that. She doesn’t need money, Arthur, she needs peace of mind. She found it working at the Riviera Express. She’s got her cottage, her cat, her career.’

  ‘Grace wants her to change her life. Give up the journalism business. Go to live in Essex and enjoy what is rightly hers.’

  ‘Not Essex, Arthur!’

  ‘You’ve been there, it’s a lovely house. Right on the edge of the marshes. It needs to be lived in, have some life brought back to it.’

  ‘But it’s huge. She doesn’t need all that – how many bedrooms, for heaven’s sake!’

  ‘Grace hates the thought of it going out of the family. She always hoped Hugue would marry.’

  ‘Well,’ said Auriol, ‘you can tell her all this yourself when she gets here.’

  The old boy looked shyly at his companion. ‘I was rather hoping you’d say it for me. I do so hate rubbing her up the wrong way,’ he said.

  ‘And you – awarded the military Order of the British Empire!’ laughed Auriol, planting an imaginary medal on his lapel. ‘Sir Arthur Cowardy Custard!’

  The old soldier rose to his feet and headed towards the bar looking perhaps a trifle green round the gills.

  Hector Sirraway made quite a fuss when he first arrived in the public library on Fore Street. It was a small building, no bigger than the size of a large terraced house, but perfect for the needs of Temple Regis – during the summer months the residents were far too busy serving their guests, refugees from less attractive parts of Britain, to sit around reading. And in winter they were too busy repairing, and preparing, for the next season.

  To say Temple Regents weren’t bookish would do them an injustice, but it followed that their modest library needed only the smallest area reserved for reference work – and even then its one desk remained empty most of the year. Was it any surprise that this is where the Christmas tree should be placed when Advent came around?

  Given their modest budget, Miss Greenway and Miss Atherton had done a wonderful job, lavishing the lofty conifer with love and, it might be said, the necessary splash of vulgarity. Everyone said what a marvellous sight it presented, with the exception of Mr Sirraway.

  ‘What have you got that thing there for?’ he asked starchily when he first showed up a month before Christmas. ‘Can’t you get rid of it?’

  Since then, he’d been in every day, and his temper never seemed to improve. Miss Greenway had offered him her desk if he needed somewhere to sit, and even made him a nice cup of tea. But nothing budged Mr Sirraway from his hatred of the tree.

  Or it could have been something else that bothered him, it was hard to tell. Tall, white-haired, with a pinched face and a permanent dewdrop at the end of his nose, it emerged from the few sentences he uttered that he was researching a book on the industrial buildings of Dartmoor.

  ‘Fine time to come in and make a nuisance of himself,’ muttered Miss Atherton on the fourth day. ‘Why couldn’t he wait till after Christmas?’ But Miss Greenway loved to see her library used, whether by schoolchildren, housewives or scholars like Mr Sirraway. In fact, she especially liked Mr Sirraway’s presence because very few asked much of the library, apart from a light novel or a Jane Austen and the occasional Shakespeare.

  ‘We must show him what we’re capable of,’ she told her assistant, and so they did.

  The two librarians watched with interest the growing pile of books their visitor ordered from the shelves. From an ancient leather satchel he drew large sheets of paper which looked like plans of some kind, spreading them out on an adjacent table, grunting and whispering to himself and only occasionally remembering to reach for a handkerchief for his nose.

  Miss Greenway was inclined to look up to him – she adored learned people! – but Miss M had taken against.

  ‘Rude, secretive – and you can tell he doesn’t have a wife. Look at those socks!’ One red, one grey – what wife would allow their man to go out dressed like that?

  Mr Sirraway was oblivious to these whisperings. Though he originally demanded books on buildings from all over the moor, he seemed after the first couple of days to be concentrating on an area towards the eastern edge, nearest to Temple Regis. His interest stretched from tin mines to corn mills to peat cutting and even granite blasting – for such a large and barren place as the moor, it was extraordinary how many different ways there were to earn a living from it. He’d even demanded, and got, a book on warrening, the mass farming of rabbits.

  But he remained unimpressed with the raw material he was being fed. ‘Look at these charts – crude, outdated, and frankly inaccurate,’ he barked, waving a lanky finger at some ancient roll of papers Miss Greensleeves had unearthed after considerable effort. ‘How can you possibly present a case – an important case – using erroneous data like this?’ But he seemed more to be arguing with himself than complaining about the service the librarians provided.

  Over by the desk the occasional last-minuter would wander in, returning books before they collected a penny-ha’penny fine, but nobody lingered over the shelves – they were far too busy preparing for the festive season. As each one entered there would come through the door a mournful sound offering a reminder of the approach of Christmas.

  ‘There’s old Wilf, left behind again,’ said Miss Greenway to Miss Atherton. ‘I’d better take him a cup.’

  The noise, like a cow calling for her calf, also wafted through the high window and irritated Mr Sirraway no end, but it wasn’t likely to cease any time soon – Old Wilf was a stalwart of the Salvation Army silver band, whose gentle harmonies stirred up the Christmas spirit in the marketplace and encouraged everyone to dip into their pockets.

  Wilf was old and lame now, and could no longer wander through the town with his bandmates, so they would set him up on a chair outside the library with his euphonium and leave him to it. Somehow ‘Away In A Manger’ tootled through his silver tubes lacked joy and encouraged sorrow. You could get tired of it pretty quickly.

  ‘Thank heavens,’ sighed Mr Sirraway finally, pushing his plans and his books away from him. ‘That’s that done!’

  ‘Have you finished, sir?’

  The scholar leaned back in his chair, stretched his legs and put his hands behind his neck. ‘Finished.’

  ‘Is there anything else we can get you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Well, I hope we’ve been of service.’ Miss Greenway wouldn’t have minded if her little library got a mention in the author’s acknowledgements when Mr Sirraway’s book came out, but was too shy to ask what its title would be.

  ‘Well, I’ll be wishing you a Happy Christmas, then. May I ask when your book will be published?’

  ‘I don’t think a fir tree covered in tinsel has a place in an establishment of learning,’ replied Sirraway, and with that walked out. As he opened the door they got a blast of Wilf’s ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’. It sounded more like someone sitting on a whoopee cushion.

  ‘He’s left a carrier bag behind,’ said Miss Greenway later, tidying up the desk and taking the books back to their shelves. It was all a bit of a let-down, it had been quite exciting having someone so – well, academic – about the place.

  ‘Let him come back for it, the miserable so-and-so,’ said Miss Atherton. ‘I’m not chasing after him.’

  Miss Greenway was unconvinced. Maybe, too, she was still thinking about that mention in the acknowledgements. She picked up the carrier bag and put it on the desk. ‘I’ll just look and see if there’s an address. Though you could tell he’s not local.’

  ‘Not with those manners.’

  There was little to give away the identity of the man who had colonised their small w
orld over the past four days. Because he was conducting research and not taking books away from the library, there was no requirement for him to provide a driving licence or similar. And all there was in the bag was a large notebook with no name inside and a folder containing a large number of press cuttings.

  ‘Mostly about Sir Freddy Hungerford,’ said Miss Greenway, leafing through them. ‘Maybe he works for him. Oh, and look, quite a few on Mirabel Clifford.’

  ‘The one who’s going to take over from Sir Freddy?’

  There’d been quite a lot in the Riviera Express about Mrs Clifford. The decision to field a female candidate in the forthcoming general election had been a controversial one, mainly because women were rarely allowed to stand in winnable parliamentary seats. There were plenty of no-hope constituencies where they could go and stand on a soapbox, if that was their thing.

  But the Liberal candidate, Helena Copplestone, had made a huge impression on a populus that was growing tired of a self-congratulatory MP with a preference for the cigar and brandy to be found in his St James’s club; and there were real fears that when he retired, the Liberal would win the seat.

  ‘She’s prettier,’ Miss Atherton said one lunchtime. ‘She’ll win it.’

  ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that,’ countered Miss Greenway, though with precious little authority to back up her argument, for she had never voted. ‘Think of all the good things Mirabel Clifford has done for Temple Regis!’

  ‘Well,’ said Miss Atherton, who could take a bleak view when she wanted, ‘I can tell you if there are three women contesting this seat, it’ll be a fight to the death. The death!’

  Three

  There was something faintly ridiculous about Terry when he put a hat on. Obviously he never looked at himself in the mirror or he wouldn’t do it.

  The item in question was a deerstalker and he was wearing it with the flaps down. Out in Widecombe it had caused little comment – moorland folk have no dress code and offer little in the way of advice to incomers – but back in the office it was greeted with hilarity.