Classic Mistake (9 page)

The Pits, usually a source of economic anxiety because of its importance and the mortgage, became an escape route. The Alvis had departed and ceded its place to a 1950 Jowett Jupiter sports. This had arrived ignominiously on a low-loader, having defied the efforts of its owner and several specialists to diagnose why it refused to come out of its garage. To join discussions with Len and Zoe over their new patient was far preferable to following up dead ends in the Carlos case. Indeed, even Melody became an escape route compared with Eva’s problems, and I launched myself with some pleasure into following up the hunch, even if it was pure fantasy on my part.

Considering the May Tree’s name and despite my previous visits, I still harboured a childish image of lads and lasses in smocks frolicking in the sun under a blossoming tree on the green and once again was childishly disappointed at reality as I arrived at the pub. No Shangri-La today, only spitting rain, empty tables, and a huge council recycling collection lorry looming up behind the chestnut tree, which looked damp and bedraggled and was fast approaching the end of its bloom. Tomorrow June would arrive, but there was a lack of cheer over the fast approaching summer. As I went inside the pub I saw a few lads and lasses in casual twenty-first century gear (not a smock to be seen), but I did spot Justin emerging to clear tables. Unfortunately, he spotted me too and immediately swung round to scuttle away – until I hailed him. He turned reluctantly round.

‘Hi,’ he said warily. ‘Any news?’

‘No. Have you?’

‘Me? What do you mean?’ No doubt about it, the lad was jittery.

‘Huggett’s barn,’ I reminded him. ‘Has Melody reappeared yet?’

He looked on more certain ground. ‘Wouldn’t expect her to, would you?’

‘Actually, I would.’ I took my gamble. ‘It
was
you who ran off with Melody in the first place, wasn’t it?’

Justin turned red, then white, then truculent as he managed to announce in one easy gasp: ‘Dunnowhatyermean.’

‘Come off it,’ I said amiably. ‘It was you who stole her.’

I’d never seen a jaw drop so dramatically. ‘Not here,’ he squeaked. ‘I’m busy.’

Progress at last, and not a soul was taking any notice of us. ‘So am I. Here.
Now.
’

He gave in. ‘I didn’t
steal
it,’ he said mutinously.

‘Took it then,’ I agreed. ‘Why?’

The poor lad seemed desperate, but as his eyes were so busy inspecting the ground he could find no answer for a while. Then: ‘It’s me and Daisy, see,’ he muttered at last. ‘I want to go serious.’ His eyes, full of young hope, finally met mine.

‘And that silly girl doesn’t?’ I prompted him.

His confidence increased slightly. ‘She says I’m not her sort and she wants to see the world.’

‘And so …’ I prompted him again when he fell silent.

Then it came in a rush. ‘I thought if I pinched Melody, I could, like, hunt for her, find her and bring her back to Daisy. Then she’d be grateful and we could go serious. I didn’t steal it. I wanted to
find
Melody for her, but not with you around.’

Sometimes my hunches work. ‘Right,’ I said briskly. I quite understood why he hadn’t wanted a third person present at Huggett’s barn or wherever while the touching scene took place. ‘That’s understandable. So where is Melody now?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘
What
?’

He looked as if he was about to burst into tears. ‘Daisy went to the Old Bill, didn’t she, so I got nervous. Couldn’t take the car back just like that, so I put her in the car park at the Black Lion on the Canterbury road. A mate of mine works there, and if anyone asked he’d say it was his. I left one of the number plates in Huggett’s, so as to make it all more mysterious and Daisy and me could talk over where Melody might be. Then I’d pretend to find Melody and drive her over to Daisy’s in style.’

‘So?’ I asked grimly, when he came to a halt. ‘What went wrong?’

‘She’s been nicked.’

I felt like howling in frustration and banging my head against a brick wall. I know the Black Lion. Its car park is a large one and all too accessible to anyone who fancied pinching a Morris Minor. Melody, it transpired, had disappeared only a few days after she had taken up residence there. Justin had abducted her on the ninth, handed her over to his chum four days later, and four days after that she had vanished again.

I pulled myself together, however, and offered to be peacemaker with Daisy. It was an offer Justin gratefully accepted, and so I called in at the Burchett Bakery on my way back to Frogs Hill. Daisy looked even lovelier at work. Clad in white overalls and surrounded by Chelsea buns, eclairs, pasties, loaves and jam tarts, she looked like Mother Earth’s daughter – the object of every man’s desire and the rewarder of none. I steeled myself to tell her the truth as soon as the shop was empty of customers, then duly broke the news to her and waited for an explosion of outrage. It didn’t come. Instead she went dewy-eyed.

‘He did that for me?’ she breathed with awe.

‘Yes.’

‘Justie thought that up himself?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, the daft moron,’ she said in loving tones.

‘I’m afraid Melody really has gone, Daisy,’ I warned her, taken aback at this unexpectedly mild reaction.

‘But Justie loves me.’

‘Seems so,’ I said, and assured her that my best efforts would continue. Then I tiptoed out in order not to break her idyllic dream of her future.

Women!

Frogs Hill brought me back to stark reality and failed to offer its usual comfort when I returned. One look at Len and Zoe made it clear that all was not going well with the Jowett. Probably that was because, as I belatedly took in, Rob Lane was there. Zoe’s on-off boyfriend is the thorn in the Pits paradise but I don’t enquire the current status of their relationship. All I know is that he, as far as the Pits is concerned, is not paradise but its counterpart.

‘Sorry about Eva, Jack,’ he told me condescendingly, leaning against a freshly painted Sunbeam bonnet.

‘So am I,’ I replied neutrally.

‘Anything I can do to help?’

An unusual offer from Rob so I bit back my instinctive snarl, since he is a bull in a china shop in any situation. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Not at present though.’

‘Met your daughter at the weekend,’ he told me casually, with the result that Zoe’s suspicious head immediately popped up above the bonnet of the Jowett.

‘Cara?’ I gaped at him. ‘Where?’

‘Through the Oate-Smiths. They farm out Stalisfield way. They know Harry Bolting, so we dropped in there for the day.’

I always forget that for the agricultural community, which spreads its net far and wide, Suffolk is no great distance from Kent in respect of who knows who.

‘Let me know if anything crops up.’ Rob strode off grandly.

‘I’m looking for a pinky-grey Morris Minor,’ I called after him.

He stopped in his tracks. ‘About time you got rid of that heap of useless metal called a Gordon-whatsit.’

I managed (just) to hold my peace, but only because I didn’t want to delay his departure, much as I longed to hasten it with a well-placed boot. He continued his march as if he were the boss of the whole place. And if some work didn’t get done round here soon, he well could be.

‘Mortgage,’ I said firmly to my trusty staff, neither of whom took the slightest bit of notice. After all, they had a Jowett to admire and diagnose.

‘Meant to say, Jack—’

‘Later, Len. Later. Unless it’s important.’

He was already back studying the Jowett, however. The Jupiter had a horizontally-opposed flat 4 engine which unlike the VW and Porsche was water-cooled and this was clearly the focus of Len’s attention. Far more important than what he’d meant to say to me.

Having done my duty by Melody for the moment, I was free to put one hundred per cent of my effort into the Carlos case, conscious that every hour I delayed could mean another hour in Holloway for Eva. I shut my mind to the possibility that whatever I found out might make no difference at all to Brandon’s damning evidence. I made myself a coffee, took it into the Glory Boot, which is the best place of all for medi-tation, chewed at a prawn baguette from Daisy’s bakery and thought through where I was with the Charros.

I reasoned to myself that if Carlos agreed to meet someone in the late evening at a lock on the River Medway, and then strolled along a towpath with him (or her), it had to be someone he knew well and trusted. Either that or
he
made the arrangements – perhaps, I speculated, with the intention of killing his companion at that lonely place. If so, his plan had gone amiss. Was that likely? He would have had to take his gun with him – OK, he could have brought it with him – but why would his then murderer not have left the gun at his side?

What was clear was that Carlos knew the person who killed him and, given that he was newly returned to the area, that meant it was probably someone from his past. Back to the Charros again. It was also possible that there was indeed a floozie involved and Eva’s suspicions had been well founded. Or, I had to face it, it was possible it was Eva herself, guilty as charged. But a romantic stroll along a towpath didn’t seem Eva’s style, especially if she had actually planned to murder him. If she had followed Carlos in a jealous rage, however, I could see why Brandon believed he had a strong case. Bearing in mind that truth to Eva is a variable quality and that her story about remaining in the hotel the whole evening had been superseded by her new version, it could well be that this current tale for the police in which she dashed to Allington Lock but found no trace of Carlos was also untrue. Her ‘true’ story would depend on what put her in the most dramatic light at any one moment. Including, I thought grimly, the dock.

The only feedback I got through Dave was that no one at the lock or the pub had any recollection of seeing Carlos that evening, but I bore in mind that the lock-keeper was only on call for most of the evening, not physically present, and that pubs are crowded. Moreover this one had an outside seating area, so if Carlos himself had not bought the drinks he would not have attracted any attention.

Dave was also lukewarm on the Melody situation. ‘Great,’ he said unenthusiastically when I told him the news about Justin and the fact that Melody really had disappeared. ‘So the Pink Panther is still at large. Well, Jack, you’re on your own now. Budget.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, equally unenthusiastically. I wondered how I could pass that message on to Daisy. I had a vision of that beautiful angelic face dissolving into tears of disbelief that I could be thinking of abandoning her. With a heavy heart I realized there was no way I could do that, and nor could I let her pay for my services.

I was stuck – with Melody as the albatross around my neck.

I pulled myself together. If avenues were closed on Melody, there were certainly lanes aplenty on Carlos. Whatever their claim that they had all moved on, the band members were surely the key to his death. Nevertheless, something had brought him to Maidstone in the hope of money, and this dream seemed unlikely to be realized from the creation of a new band or a reunion of the old. Even if he could have been sure of a welcome from the Charros, its possibilities of success would have been limited. Time had moved on. But that annual lunch stuck out like a sore thumb. I’d heard explanations of why it was held, but I still was not convinced. For all Jonathan claimed that there were other reasons for Neil’s suicide than the collapse of the band, a doubt remained. If, for instance, Neil’s death had been because he and Jonathan had split up, it became understandable, but if that were the case then why should Jonathan, Clive, Matthew and Josie have an annual get-together, not to mention Belinda Fever and Betty Gibson? I had to find out and the sooner the better. I had a terrible vision of Eva growing old in prison, her once infuriating vibrancy sapping away.

It was time for the next step: Josie Gibson.

Gran Fever must have put in a good word for me, or perhaps the House of Lamb’s phones had been busy, because Josie didn’t sound surprised to hear from me.

‘You’ll have to come here,’ she said somewhat belligerently. ‘I’m looking after Dr Fairbourne.’

‘Is he housebound?’

A pause. ‘Could say that.’

Kent is a county full of surprises. One can be amongst sunny flat fields at one moment and plunged into the creepiest of woodland the next. Wychwood House was in the latter. It was near the hamlet of Delstead, about three miles north of Tickenden and six from Burchett Forstal. A single lane road snaked through the wood, and from that a gated track branched off to Wychwood House. I almost missed the gate because of the dense bushes and undergrowth shielding it, and I then drove past a mass of trees on either side of the track which kept the sun firmly at bay. The trees were aggressively green, flaunting their new summer leaves, and if someone had told me that Walt Disney’s nastiest vultures were peering down at me I would have believed them. Even though I was in the Alfa, the heavy silence percolated through to me, as though everything and everyone were watching me, waiting to pounce. Then I turned a corner – and there was Wychwood House.

The name Wychwood means a dwelling place in the wood and has nothing to do with witches. You could have fooled me. Granted, it would have to be a fairly rich witch to choose to live here, but at first sight the house was Disney gone crazy. There seemed no rhyme or reason to its gables, pinnacles, turrets and roof lines, which were all set at odd angles as though the builder had begun with a straightforward square building and then built on pieces higgledy-piggledy as the fancy took him. The red roofs with the black-and-white mock timbered house beneath gave the whole building a crazy, yet somewhat exotic appearance. Welcoming it was not.

There was a VW Polo parked in front of the house which I took to be Josie’s, but no other car was visible, although there was a single garage to the right of the house where the owner’s car might be.

I walked up to the house, already with a sense of unease about this visit. The night has a thousand eyes, as the poet says, and so it seemed did Wychwood, each one of them peering evilly out at me as I approached the door. When it was opened, my first thought was that Josie Gibson could have passed for a student witch quite easily, and I had to discipline myself to rid myself of such unfair assumptions. I could see that once she had been beautiful, with her dark hair and dark eyes, and, as she told me to come in, her voice had a husky quality that must once have been mesmerizing. Now her lean face was lined and suspicious and her shoulder-length hair, already greying, was lank and looked little cared for.