A New Lease of Death (3 page)

‘Bit of a tartar, was she?’

‘She was what God and her background had made her,’ Wexford said gravely but with the faintest suspicion of irony in his voice. ‘I never saw her till she was dead. She was stubborn, a bit mean, what nowadays is called “reactionary”, inclined to be an autocrat and very much monarch of all she surveyed. I’ll give you a couple of examples. When her son died he left his wife and kids very badly off. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but Mrs Primero was quite willing to help financially provided it was on her terms. The family was to come and live with her and so on. Still, I daresay she couldn’t afford to keep up two establishments. The other thing was that she’d been a very keen churchwoman. When she got too old to go she insisted on Alice going in her place. Like a sort of whipping boy. But she had her affections. She adored the grandson, Roger, and she had one close friend. We’ll come to that later.

‘As you know, there was an acute housing shortage after the war and a hell of a servant problem too. Mrs Primero was an intelligent old woman and she
got
to thinking how she could use one to solve the other. In the grounds of Victor’s Piece was a coach house with a sort of loft over the top of it. The place for the coach was used to house the aforesaid Daimler. No one had driven it since the doctor died – Mrs Primero couldn’t drive and, needless to say, Alice couldn’t either. There was precious little petrol about but you could get your ration, enough to do the shopping and take a couple of old dears for a weekly jaunt around the lanes.’

‘So Alice was that much of a friend? Burden put in.

Wexford said solemnly, ‘A lady can be accompanied by her maid when she goes driving. Anyway, Mrs Primero put an advert in the Kingsmarkham
Chronicle
for a young able-bodied man, willing to do the garden, perform odd jobs, maintain and drive the car in exchange for a flat and three pounds a week.’

‘
Three pounds?
’ Burden was a non-smoker and no lover of extravagant living, but he knew from doing his wife’s weekend shopping what a little way three pounds went.

‘Well, it was worth a good bit more in those days, Mike,’ Wexford said almost apologetically. ‘Mrs Primero had the loft painted up, divided into three rooms and piped for water. It wasn’t Dolphin Square but, God, people were glad of one room back in 1947! She got a lot of answers but for some reason – God knows
what
reason – she picked Painter. At the trial Alice said she thought the fact that he had a wife and a baby daughter would keep him steady. Depends what you mean by steady, doesn’t it?’

Burden shifted his chair out of the sun. ‘Was the wife employed by Mrs Primero too?’

‘No, just Painter. She’d got this little kid, you see, she was only about two when they came. If she’d worked up at the house she’d have had to bring the child with her. Mrs Primero would never have stood for that. As far as she was concerned between her and the Painters there was a great gulf fixed. I gathered she’d hardly exchanged more than a couple of words with Mrs Painter all the time Painter was there and as for the little girl – her name was Theresa, I think – she barely knew of her existence.’

‘She doesn’t sound a very nice sort of woman,’ Burden said doubtfully.

‘She was typical of her age and class,’ Wexford said tolerantly. ‘Don’t forget she was a daughter of the lord of the manor when lords of the manor still counted for something. To her Mrs Painter was comparable to a tenant’s wife. I’ve no doubt that if Mrs Painter had been ill she’d have sent old Alice over with a bowl of soup and some blankets. Besides, Mrs Painter kept herself to herself. She was very pretty, very quiet and with a sort of deadly respectability about her. She was a bit scared of Painter which wasn’t hard to understand, she being so small and Painter such a great hulking brute. When I talked to her after the murder I noticed she’d got bruises on her arm, too many bruises for her just to have got them through the usual kitchen accidents, and I wouldn’t mind betting her husband used to knock her about.’

‘So, in fact,’ Burden said, ‘they were two completely
separate
units. Mrs Primero and her maid living alone at Victor’s Piece, the Painter family in their own home at the bottom of the garden.’

‘I don’t know about “bottom of the garden”. The coach house was about a hundred feet from the back door of the big house. Painter only went up there to carry in the coal and receive his instructions.’

‘Ah,’ said Burden, ‘there was some complicated business about coal, I seem to remember. Wasn’t it more or less the crux of the whole thing?’

‘Painter was supposed to chop wood and carry coal,’ Wexford continued. ‘Alice was past carrying coal and Painter was supposed to bring a scuttleful at mid-day – they never lit a fire before that – and another one at six-thirty. Now, he never objected to the gardening or the car maintenance, but for some reason he drew the line at the coal. He did it – apart from frequent lapses – but he was always grumbling about it. The mid-day duty cut across his dinner time, he said, and he didn’t like turning out on winter evenings. Couldn’t he bring two scuttles at eleven? But Mrs Primero wouldn’t have that. She said she wasn’t going to have her drawing room turned into a railway yard.’

Burden smiled. His tiredness had almost worn off. Given breakfast, a shave and a shower down, he would be a new man. He glanced at his watch, then across the High Street to where the blinds were going up on the Carousel Café.

‘I could do with a cup of coffee,’ he said.

‘Two minds with but a single thought. Root someone out and send them over.’

Wexford stood up and stretched, tightened his tie and smoothed back the hair that was too sparse to become untidy. The coffee arrived in wax cups with plastic spoons and little cubes of wrapped sugar.

‘That’s better,’ said Wexford. ‘D’you want me to go on?’ Burden nodded.

‘By September 1950 Painter had been working for Mrs Primero for three years. The arrangement appeared to work pretty well apart from the difficulties Painter made about the coal. He never brought it in without complaining and he was always asking for a rise.’

‘I suppose he thought she was rolling in money?’

‘Of course, he couldn’t have known what she’d got in the bank or in shares or whatever it was. On the other hand it was an open secret she kept money in the house.’

‘In a safe, d’you mean?’

‘Not on your life. You know these old girls. Some of it was in drawers stuffed into paper bags, some of it in old handbags.’

With a feat of memory Burden said suddenly, ‘And one of those handbags contained the two hundred pounds?’

‘It did,’ Wexford said grimly. ‘Whatever she might have been able to afford, Mrs Primero refused to raise Painter’s wages. If he didn’t like the set-up he could go, but that would mean giving up the flat.

‘Being a very old woman, Mrs Primero felt the cold and she liked to start fires in September. Painter
thought
this unnecessary and he made the usual fuss about it …’

He stopped as the telephone rang and he took the receiver himself. Burden had no idea from Wexford’s reiterated, ‘Yes, yes … all right,’ who it could be. He finished his coffee with some distaste. The rim of the wax cup had become soggy. Wexford dropped the phone.

‘My wife,’ he said. ‘Am I dead? Have I forgotten I’ve got a home of my own? She’s run out of housekeeping and she can’t find the cheque book.’ He chuckled, felt in his pocket and produced it. ‘No wonder. I’ll have to nip back.’ He added with sudden kindness, ‘Go home and have a bit of shuteye, why don’t you?’

‘I don’t like being left in the air,’ Burden grumbled. ‘Now I know how my kids feel when I break off in the middle of a bedtime story.’

Wexford began bundling things into his briefcase.

‘Leaving out all the circumstantial stuff,’ he said, ‘there isn’t much more. I told you it was straightforward. It was the evening of September 24th it happened, a cold wet Sunday. Mrs Primero had sent Alice off to church. She went at about a quarter past six, Painter being due to bring the coal at half past. He brought it all right and departed two hundred pounds to the good.’

‘I’d like to hear the circumstantial stuff,’ Burden said.

Wexford was at the door now.

‘To be continued in our next,’ he grinned. ‘You can’t say I’m leaving you in suspense.’ The grin faded
and
his face hardened. ‘Mrs Primero was found at seven. She was in the drawing room lying on the floor by the fireplace in a great pool of blood. There was blood on the walls and on her armchair, and in the hearth was a blood-stained wood chopper.’

2

When sentence is given upon him let him be condemned … let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.

Psalm 109, appointed for the 22nd Day

THE NAP WEXFORD
had prescribed for him would have been attractive on a dull day, but not this morning when the sky was blue and cloudless and the sun promised tropical heat by mid-day. Moreover, Burden remembered that he had not made his bed for three days. Better have that shower and that shave instead.

After a canteen breakfast of two eggs and a couple of rashers of the greenback he liked, he had made up his mind what he was going to do. An hour could easily be spared. He drove northwards along the High Street with all the car windows down, past the shops, over the Kingsbrook Bridge, past The Olive and Dove and out on the Stowerton road. Apart from a new house here and there, a supermarket
on
the site of the old police station, and aggressive road signs all over the place, things had not changed much in sixteen years. The meadows, the tall trees burdened with the heavy foliage of July, the little weatherboard cottages were much the same as when Alice Flower had seen them on her shopping trips in the Daimler. There would have been less traffic, then, he thought. He braked, pulled in and raised his eyebrows at the youth on a motorbike who, overtaking the oncoming stream, had missed him by inches.

The lane where Victor’s Piece was must be somewhere about here. Those circumstantial details Wexford had been so tantalizing about were coming back to him from his own memory. Surely he had read about a bus stop and a telephone box at the end of the lane? Would these be the meadows he remembered reading that Painter had crossed, desperate to conceal a bundle of blood-stained clothing?

Here was the phone box now. He indicated left and turned slowly into the lane. For a short way its surface was metalled, then it petered out into a track ending in a gate. There were only three houses: a white-plastered semi-detached pair and opposite them the late Victorian pile he had described as ‘a hideous dump’.

He had never been as near to it as this before, but he saw nothing to make him change his opinion. The roof of grey slates had been constructed – tortured almost – into a number of steep gables. Two of these dominated the front of the house, but there was
a
third on the right-hand side and out of it grew another smaller one that apparently overlooked the back. Each gable was criss-crossed with timbering, some of it inexpertly carved into chevrons and all painted a dull bottle green. In places the plaster between the wood had fallen away, exposing rough pinkish brickwork. Ivy, of the same shade of green, spread its flat leaves and its rope-like grey tendrils from the foot of the downstairs windows to the highest gable where a lattice flapped open. There it had crept and burrowed into the mealy wall, prising the window frame away from the bricks.

Burden observed the garden with a countryman’s eye. Never had he seen such a fine selection of weeds. The fertile black soil, cultivated and tended for many years, now nourished docks with leaves as thick and glossy as rubber plants, puce-headed thistles, nettles four feet tall. The gravel paths were choked with grass and mildewed groundsel. Only the clarity of the air and the soft brilliance of sunlight prevented the place from being actually sinister.

The front door was locked. No doubt this window beside it belonged to the drawing room. Burden could not help wondering with a certain wry humour what insensitive administrator had decreed that this scene of an old woman’s murder should be for years the home – indeed the last refuge – of other old women. But they were gone now. The place looked as if it had been empty for years.

Through the window he could see a large shadowy room. In the grate of the amber-coloured marble fireplace someone had prudently placed crumpled
newspaper
to catch the drifts of soot. Wexford had said there had been blood all over the fireplace. There, just in front of the copper kerb, was where the body must have lain.

He made his way round the side, pushing through a shrubbery where elders and strong little birches were threatening to oust the lilac. The panes in the kitchen casement were blurred with dirt and there was no kitchen door, only a back door that apparently opened off the end of the central passage. The Victorians, he reflected, were not too hot on design. Two doors with a straight passage between them! The draught would be appalling.

By now he was in the back garden but he literally could not see the wood for the trees. Nature had gone berserk at Victor’s Piece and the coach house itself was almost totally obscured by creeper. He strolled across the shady flagged yard, made cool by the jutting walls of the house, and found himself skirting a conservatory, attached apparently to a kind of morning or breakfast room. It housed a vine, long dead and quite leafless.

So that was Victor’s Piece. Pity he couldn’t get inside, but he would, in any case, have to get back. Out of long habit – and partly to set a good example – he had closed all the windows of his car and locked the doors. Inside it was like an oven. He drove out of the broken gateway, into the lane and joined the traffic stream on the Stowerton road.

A greater contrast between the building he had left and the building he entered could hardly have been found.
Fine
weather suited Kingsmarkham Police Station. Wexford sometimes said that the architect of this new building must have designed it while holidaying in the South of France. It was white, boxy, unnecessarily vast and ornamented here and there with frescoes that owed something to the Elgin marbles.