Corpse in a Gilded Cage (14 page)

The children's bedrooms, which they came to next, were no more interesting.
Toys, colouring books, dirty clothes. Very dirty clothes. Even the nightdresses and pyjamas were dusty. But then, Chetton was a stupendously dusty house.

Dixie's bedroom was four doors down.

‘Not
next door,' commented WPC Hillier. She peered into the bedroom next to the children's and said: ‘No reason why she shouldn't have chosen that.'

Dixie's room gave many more signs of occupation. For a start the dressing-table contained a formidable array of bottles, jars, compacts and boxes, and enough deodorants to make a polecat fit for polite company. Whereas the Countess, it seemed, was beyond any preservation order, Dixie was not, however much she might be in need of plastering. They went through her wardrobe, and WPC Hillier pronounced Dixie's clothes ‘a bit much'.

‘Flouncy,' agreed Hickory. ‘Don't know much about these things, but I'd have thought that with her size . . .'

They looked at the bed.

‘Only one slept here last night,' pronounced WPC Hillier. ‘Unless it's been remade this morning, and then got back into.' She went over and looked at the pillow. ‘On the other hand, I'd be willing to bet there's been two in this bed at some stage.'

‘I wouldn't be surprised,' said Hickory. ‘The Countess referred to the West Indian as “Dixie's boyfriend”, with a great sniff. Still, we aren't here to discuss their morals, which is as well because it might take an awful lot of time.'

Superintendent Hickory sent his assistant back to the stairwell and proceeded heavily—groaning, like the Countess, at the distances involved—to the further reaches of Chetton Hall.

•   •   •

When Sergeant Medway reached Phil's hut, he found his fellow inmates having their supper. They gave him a wry but not unfriendly welcome: it was like old times, they said, being questioned by the fuzz. Inevitably, and probably truthfully, most of them claimed to have been asleep when Phil came in from the Governor's. Medway had to admit it was perfectly reasonable that they should be. He was more sceptical, in fact, of the two men on either side of Phil who claimed to have woken up.

‘Came in at twenty minutes to two,' said the embezzler in the bed on his left. ‘Caught his toe on the leg of the bed, and was effing and blinding so much he woke me up. He'd had a few.'

‘That's right,' said the bigamist on Phil's right. ‘I'd been reading, and I'd only just put my light out.'

‘I see,' said Peter Medway, his serene, boyish face showing none of the scepticism he felt. ‘Did he go straight to bed?'

‘Went to the lav. Then we chewed things over for a bit, then he put out his light and went to sleep.'

‘What did you talk about?'

‘Guv'nor's little card party, what else? Phil—His Lordship, I should say—he thinks the Guv'nor's a right berk, like we all do. Phil said if he could get him to the poker school he runs at the Queensbury Arms in Stepney, they'd clean him out in thirty minutes flat and have him out on the streets in nothing but his Y-fronts.'

That, at any rate, had the ring of truth—reluctantly Peter Medway had to concede it. He was just beginning to conclude that Everybody's Pal might indeed have a respectable alibi when the embezzler said:

‘Look, mate: if it's a question of Phil bumping off his old man, you might just as well forget it. It's not in character.'

‘Right,' said the bigamist. ‘If you'd met him you'd know he just wasn't the type. Everyone'll say the same about Phil. He's—'

‘I know,' said Medway. ‘He's one of the best.'

•   •   •

Slowly, ponderously, Superintendent Hickory heaved his rural bulk along to the suburbs of Chetton Hall. On the borders of the old and the newer parts of the house was the bedroom once occupied by the young Earl that Trevor and Michele had commandeered on their first day. Still on guard there was the young policeman to whom Michele had so memorably revealed herself. When Hickory did his search he took the young man in with him.

It was a difficult room to search, since it was not clear what was the property of the young Earl, and what Trevor had brought with him. Once quality would have told them, but not any longer. The records were doubtless the Earl's, but whose were the silk shirts, the brief male underwear (or was it female?), the sex-shop products, the pornography, the joints? The tastes of the two sets of occupants were obvious, and so similar that neither had put a personal stamp on the room. They went through it with a fine-tooth comb, and the young constable's eyes popped out as he examined some of the contents, but they came away with nothing of interest. (The search, however, did yield results some days later, when the constable met his girlfriend on his first day off, but those results are not of interest here.)

Over the border into the Blenheim Wing was the neat, square bedroom where Digby and Joan had made themselves at home. Joan had even gone out and picked herself a pink rose, and placed it in a toothmug on the dressing-table. So sweet! All their clothes—they had brought stacks—were hung neatly in the wardrobe, and their nightclothes were folded away under the pillow. By their beds were paperbacks. Digby was reading Jeffrey Archer; Joan, Mary Stewart. On the cupboard lay the Wandsworth Public Library copy of the magnificent coffee-table book on Chetton that Mr Lillywaite had used as a bait in his talk with Phil. The room was neat, neutral and decorous. All the searchers found of individuality was a notebook: it contained nothing but figures.

There was a larger notebook in Sam's room further down the corridor. Sam's haversack, labelled Sam Barton, had been dropped near the door, and not fully unpacked. Near it was a little pile of dirty clothes. By his bed was a turned-down copy of
Brideshead Revisited,
as well as the notebook and several pencils. There were figures in this book too, but they appeared to be not money but measurements. The bulk of the book consisted of diagrams and sketches: the West Front of Chetton, with approximate lengths and heights, and placement of windows; the Green Drawing-Room, with estimated proportions; a sketch of the Gibbons carvings in the Dining-Room. The sketches were atmospheric, accomplished. Hickory looked at the constable, raised his eyebrows, and popped the book into a plastic bag.

Chokey's bedroom was hard to find. He had told Sergeant Medway where it was, but his description had been far from clear. It turned out to be a small, musty room at the end of the first floor of the Blenheim Wing. Was he wanting to be some way away from the rest? Or was it his way of proclaiming humility? Or perhaps the big rooms gave him agoraphobia. There were no books, few clothes, no notebooks, no signs of personality. The only written material was a letter from Phil, written from Daintree six months before. It seemed of little interest, but Hickory popped it into a plastic bag.

The room occupied by Parsloe and Nazeby was easy to find, but it contained nothing—no signs whatever of their occupancy. At the end, if only then, they proved themselves the perfect self-effacing servants.

Hickory trailed back along the neat, regular corridors of the Blenheim Wing, at long last arriving back at the Jacobean House. I should get mileage on this case, he thought. But though he walked heavily, his eyes were active, going everywhere. Somewhere in this magnificent warren the vital
clue must lie. In the dreary inner corridor between two rows of bedrooms, not far from Trevor and Michele's, he paused. Something wrong. Around one of the pictures the wall covering was darker, greener. No, that wasn't it. That happened elsewhere in the house, even in the Long Gallery. Pictures were from time to time rearranged and rehung. He scratched his head. It was something else. The pictures along the corridor were varied: portraits, landscapes, religious
motifs.
But they were all, surely, of the time of the house's heyday: or, as he put it in his mind, they were all ‘class' pictures, the real McCoy. This little landscape was pretty clearly of this century: it had a water-tower in the background. And it was a daub, even he could see that. By one of the family's amateur artists, perhaps. Hickory made a mental note, and passed heavily on.

‘I wonder if you'd take a look at this, sir.'

WPC Hillier was still at the top of the stairs, but obviously she had been tempted to prowl around in so far as she could without deserting her post. From the landing stretched to the left the Long Gallery, but to the right there was only a little runt of a corridor leading to the north side of the house, a matter of a few yards. Two little rooms of no obvious purpose opened off from it. What Constable Hillier pointed to in the corridor was a clump of earth. No particular significance in that, but—

‘What I noticed,' she began, ‘was—'

‘I can see, lovey. The floor around's dusty, but the earth doesn't seem to be . . . Recent, then . . . There's been someone here, and not so long ago. Look, those are your prints, but
here . . .
and
here . . .
there are prints of other feet, which have got a film of dust over them already. Get a measurement of them, so far as you can, will you?'

Hickory straightened up. The short, aborted corridor took on a new interest for him. Was there anything else which seemed to have been disturbed? Yes: under a small portrait of Lord Portsea, later the eighth Earl, aide-de-camp to the Earl of Lytton, Viceroy of India, stood a small oak table, and on it was a heavy brass jug, Benares ware. On this, unlike the rest of the objects in the corridor, the dust sat very lightly indeed.

Hickory wrinkled his forehead, stood for a moment in thought, and then made his stately way down Sir Philip's Staircase.

•   •   •

Sergeant Medway met Phil briefly that evening, after he had decided to accept the Governor's offer of a bed for the night. Phil had just come through the pre-release programme, and he had been friendly but subdued. He had remarked, though, that he'd asked how to get his daily whack for
attending the House of Lords, and they hadn't been able to tell him. Peter Medway fixed nine as a starting time next morning, and he had spent the rest of the evening listening to the fatuities which were the wisdom the Governor had culled during his recent years in charge of Daintree.

The next day, Monday, it was shaping up to be another warm July day when they all pitched up round the police car. Phil, though, was wearing a collar and tie and dark trousers. He still seemed preoccupied. He and Medway got into the back seat, and the constable drove off, ears a-twitch: what he wouldn't give to be able to sell this conversation to the Sunday papers! Why was it only
Chief
Constables that seemed able to do that? As the car drove through the gates of Daintree, two on-the-ball reporters, standing by their cars and clearly waiting for them, took photographs of the pair in the back seat. In the evening papers of London and Manchester that day was to be seen on the front page a photograph of Peter Medway staring meditatively ahead, with the caption underneath ‘Gaolbird Earl Released.'

Phil sat for some time, silent and thoughtful. His big hands were lifeless in his lap, his face without expression. Eventually he said:

‘Can you tell me what happened?'

Peter Medway gave him a short, simplified account. Phil winced, and his face looked troubled and unhappy.

‘Poor old Dad. That it should happen to him . . . I didn't do it, you know.'

‘No one's accused you.'

‘What those two in the hut said about when I got back was right. All right—if I'd had a car—'

‘Quite,' said Medway.

‘ “Home, James, and don't spare the horses: I have a date to murder my old Dad.” . . . Oh, skip it. I know you've got to look into every possibility. I'm not complaining.'

‘I've registered that it's a pretty tight schedule,' said Medway. ‘We can't rule out the unlikely until we've nabbed someone for it, or at least got hold of a more likely prospect.'

‘Any sign of a break-in at Chetton?'

‘Not that we've discovered. When you've seen the place you'll realize it's not so easy to check for that kind of evidence. And then there's another factor you probably haven't heard about.'

So Peter Medway told Phil about Parsloe and Nazeby, and their hideout in the Blenheim Wing. It was calculated to appeal to Phil's sense of humour,
and he showed for the first time that day the perky self that seemed to endear him to so many.

‘What a caper!' he said, smiling broadly. ‘ “If you're going to squat, squat in style” must be their motto.' His face became serious again. ‘Still, murder's something different, isn't it? Knocking off a few choice items I could imagine them doing, but why would they murder?' Medway noticed how different Phil's reaction was from the rest of the family's. Phil seemed almost at once to put them on one side as possible culprits. ‘Who else was in the house? All the family, I suppose?'

‘I think so. Your sister and her husband—'

‘Digby Ferguson, rising star of the insurance world, the genius of the small print and the excuse for not paying out. Nice that the family has some respectable members in it.'

‘Your brother Trevor and a girl called Michele Bargate.'

‘Willowy, silent, hard as nails and not a stitch of underclothing? No, I don't know her. He always goes for the same type. Conservative as they come is our Trevor.'

‘Apart from the family there's someone called Sam Barton.'

‘Never heard of him. Who's that?'

‘He's a West Indian, I think. Arrived with your wife and—'

Phil laughed out loud.

‘Boyfriend of Dixie's, eh? Then he'll probably fade out of the picture as soon as I arrive.'

‘Not this one, he won't. Everyone's to stay put at Chetton.'

Sergeant Medway looked sidelong at the new Lord Ellesmere. His hands were quite still in his lap, and his face was wreathed in a relishing, ironic smile. Was Phil that paragon of feminist theology, the unpossessive male? Peter Medway reserved judgement.