Magpie Murders (26 page)

‘You need have no concern. I asked him to leave. Mrs Weaver and my husband went with him. I told him I would walk over to the Queen’s Arms with you as soon as you were feeling well enough.’

‘I am feeling a little better already.’

With Dr Redwing’s help, Pünd got himself into a sitting position and fumbled for the pills that he carried in his jacket pocket. Dr Redwing went to get a glass of water. She had noted the name – Dilaudid – on the packet. ‘That’s a hydromorphone,’ she said. ‘It’s a good choice. Very fast-acting. You have to be careful, though. It can make you tired and you may experience mood changes too.’

‘I
am
tired,’ Pünd agreed. ‘But I have found my mood to be remarkably unchanged. In fact, I will be honest with you, I am quite cheerful.’

‘Perhaps it’s your investigation. It’s probably been very helpful to have something to concentrate on. And you were saying to my husband that it’s gone well.’

‘That is true.’

‘And when it’s over? What then?’

‘When it is over, Dr Redwing, I will have nothing left to do.’ Pünd got unsteadily to his feet and reached for his walking stick. ‘I would like to return to my room now, if you would be so kind.’

They left together.

7

On the other side of the village, the police divers were emerging from the lake. Raymond Chubb was standing on the grassy shore, watching as they dumped what they had found in front of him. He was wondering how Pünd had known it would be there.

There were three dishes, decorated with sea-nymphs and tritons; a flanged bowl, this one with a centaur pursuing a naked woman; some long-handled spoons; a piperatorium, or pepper-pot, which might actually have been used to store expensive spices; a scattering of coins; a statuette of a tiger or some similar creature; two bracelets. Chubb knew exactly what he was looking at. This was the treasure trove that had been stolen from Sir Magnus Pye. Every item had been described by him when he had called in the police. But why had someone stolen the treasure simply to discard it? He understood now that they must have dropped one piece – the belt buckle that Brent had found – as they made their way across the lawn. They had then reached the edge of the lake and thrown the rest in. Had they been surprised while they were trying to make their getaway? Could they have planned to have come back and retrieve the loot another time? It made no sense.

‘I think that’s it,’ one of the divers called out.

Chubb looked down at the separate pieces, all of it silver … so much silver, glinting in the evening sun.

SIX

Gold

1

The house was close to Caedelyn Park in Cardiff, backing onto the railway line that ran from Whitchurch to Rhiwibina. It was in the middle of a short terrace, three identical houses on either side, all of them tired, in need of cheering up: seven gates, seven square gardens full of dusty plants struggling to survive, seven front doors, seven chimney stacks. They were somehow interchangeable but the green Austin A40, with its registration number, FPJ 247 parked outside the middle one, told Pünd immediately where to go.

A man was waiting for them. From the way he was standing there, he could have been waiting all his life. As they pulled in, he raised a hand not so much in welcome as in acknowledgement that they had arrived. He was in his late fifties but looked much older, worn out by a struggle that he had actually lost a long time ago. He had thinning hair, an untidy moustache and sullen, dark brown eyes. He was wearing clothes that were much too warm for the summer afternoon and which needed a wash. Fraser had never seen anyone who looked more alone.

‘Mr Pünd?’ he asked as they got out of the car.

‘It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr Blakiston.’

‘Please. Come in.’

He led them into a dark, narrow hallway with a kitchen at the far end. From here, they could look out over a half-neglected garden that sloped up steeply to the railway line at the end. The house was clean but charmless. There was nothing very personal: no family photographs, no letters on the hall table, no sign that anyone else lived here. Very little sunlight made its way in. It had that in common with the Lodge House in Saxby-on-Avon. Everything was hemmed in by shadow.

‘I always knew the police would want to speak to me,’ he said. ‘Will you have some tea?’ He put the kettle on the hob and managed to start a flame with a third click of the switch.

‘We are not, strictly speaking, the police,’ Pünd told him.

‘No. But you’re investigating the deaths.’

‘Your wife and Sir Magnus Pye. Yes.’

Blakiston nodded, then ran a hand over his chin. He had shaved that morning, but with a razor he had used too many times. Hair was sprouting in the cleft underneath his lip and there was a small cut on his chin. ‘I did think about calling someone,’ he said. ‘I was there, you know, on the night he died. But then I thought – why bother? I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything. It’s got nothing to do with me.’

‘That may not be the case at all, Mr Blakiston. I have been looking forward to meeting you.’

‘Well, I hope you won’t be disappointed.’

He emptied the teapot, which was still full of old leaves, washed it out with boiling water and added new ones. He took a bottle of milk out of a fridge that had little else inside. At the bottom of the garden, a train rumbled past, billowing steam, and for a moment the air was filled with the smell of cinders. He didn’t seem to notice. He finished making the tea and brought it to the table. The three of them sat down.

‘Well?’

‘You know why we are here, Mr Blakiston,’ Pünd said. ‘Why don’t you tell us your story? Begin from the beginning. Leave nothing out.’

Blakiston nodded. He poured the tea. Then he began to talk.

He was fifty-eight years old. He had been living in Cardiff ever since he had left Saxby-on-Avon twelve years ago. He’d had family here; an uncle who owned an electrical shop, not far away, on the Eastern Road. The uncle was dead now but he had inherited the shop and it provided a living – at least, for the sort of life he led. He was on his own. Fraser had been right about that.

‘I never actually divorced Mary,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why not. After what happened with Tom, there was no way the two of us were going to stay together. But at the same time, neither of us was ever going to get married again, so what was the point? She wasn’t interested in lawyers and all that stuff. I suppose that makes me officially her widower.’

‘You never saw her again after you left?’ Pünd asked.

‘We stayed in touch. We wrote to each other and I called her now and then – to ask her about Robert and to see if there was anything she needed. But if she’d needed anything, she would never have asked me.’

Pünd took out his Sobranies. It was unusual for him to smoke when he was working on a case but nothing about the detective had been quite the same recently and Fraser had been desperately worried since he had been taken ill in Dr Redwing’s surgery. Pünd had refused to say anything about it. In the car, on the way here, he had barely spoken at all.

‘Let us go back to the time when you and Mary met,’ Pünd suggested. ‘Tell me about your time at Sheppard’s Farm.’

‘That was my dad’s place,’ Blakiston said. ‘He got it from
his
dad and it had been in the family for as long as anyone can remember. I come from a long line of farmers but I never really took to it. My dad used to say I was the black sheep, which was funny, because that’s what we had – a couple of hundred acres and lots of sheep. I feel sorry for him, looking back on it. I was his only child and I just wasn’t interested so that was that. I’d always been good at maths and science at school and I had ideas about going to America and becoming a rocket engineer which is a bit of a laugh because I worked for twenty years as a mechanic and I never got any further than Wales. But that’s how it is when you’re a kid, isn’t it. You have all these dreams and, unless you’re lucky, they never amount to anything. Still, I can’t complain. We all lived there happily enough. Even Mary liked it to begin with.’

‘In what circumstances did you meet your wife?’ Pünd asked.

‘She lived in Tawbury, which was about five miles away. Her mother and my mother were at school together. She came over for lunch one Sunday with her parents and that’s how we met. Mary was in her twenties then and as pretty as you can imagine. I fell for her the moment I saw her and we were married within a year.’

‘And what, I wonder, did your parents make of her?’

‘They liked her well enough. In fact, there was a time when I would say everything was pretty much perfect. We had two sons: Robert first, then Tom. They grew up on the land and I can still see them, racing around, helping my dad when they got back from school. I think we were probably happier there than we ever were anywhere else. But it couldn’t last. My dad was up to his eyes in debt. And I wasn’t helping him. I’d got a job at Whitchurch Airport, which was an hour and half away, near Bristol. This was the end of the thirties. I was doing routine maintenance on planes for the Civil Air Guard and I met a lot of the young pilots coming in for training. I knew there was a war on the way but in a place like Saxby-on-Avon it was easy to forget it. Mary was doing jobs in and around the village. We were already going our separate ways. That’s why she blamed me for what happened – and maybe she was right.’

‘Tell me about your children,’ Pünd said.

‘I loved those boys. Believe me, there isn’t a day when I don’t think about what happened.’ He choked on his words and had to pause for a moment to recover. ‘I don’t know how it all went so wrong, Mr Pünd. I really don’t. When we were up at Sheppard’s Farm, I won’t say it was perfect but we used to have fun. They could be right little sods, always fighting, always at each other’s throats. But that’s true of any boys, isn’t it?’ He gazed at Pünd as if needing affirmation and when none came he went on. ‘They could be close too. The best of friends.

‘Robert was the quiet one. You always got the impression that he was thinking about something. Even when he was quite young, he used to take himself off for long walks along the Bath valley and there were times we’d get quite worried about him. Tom was more of a livewire. He saw himself as a bit of an inventor. He was always mixing potions and putting things together from the insides of old machines. I suppose he might have got that from me and I’ll admit he was the one I used to spoil. Robert was closer to his mother. It was a difficult birth. She nearly lost him, and when he was a baby he had all sorts of illnesses. The village doctor, a chap called Rennard, was always in and out of the house. If you ask me, that’s what made her so overprotective. There were times when she wouldn’t let me come near him. Tom was the easier boy. I was closer to him. Always, him and me …’

He took out a packet of ten cigarettes, tore off the cellophane and lit one.

‘Everything went wrong when we left the farm,’ he said and suddenly he was bitter. ‘The day that man came into our life, that’s when it began. Sir Magnus bloody Pye. It’s easy enough to see it now and I wonder how I could have been so blind, so stupid. But at the time what he was offering seemed an answer to our prayers. A regular salary for Mary, somewhere to live, nice grounds for the boys to run around in. At least, that’s how Mary saw it and that’s how she sold it to me.’

‘You argued?’

‘I tried not to argue with her. All it did was turn her against me. I said I had a couple of misgivings, that’s all. I didn’t like the idea of her being a housekeeper. I thought she was better than that. And I remember warning her that, once we were there, we’d be trapped. It would be like he owned us. But the thing was, you see, we didn’t really have any choice. We didn’t have any savings. It was the best offer we were going to get.

‘And at first it was fine. Pye Hall was nice enough and I got on well enough with Stanley Brent who was the groundsman there with his son. We weren’t paying any rent and in some ways it was better to be on our own as a family, without my mum and dad around all the time. But there was something about the Lodge House that rubbed us up the wrong way. It was dark all the year round and it never really felt like home. We all started getting on each other’s nerves, even the boys. Mary and I seemed to be sniping at each other all the time. I hated the way she looked up to Sir Magnus, just because he had a title and so much money. He was no better than me. He’d never done a proper day’s work in his life. He only had Pye Hall because he’d inherited it. But she couldn’t see that. She thought it made her special in some way. What she didn’t understand was that when you’re cleaning a toilet, you’re still cleaning a toilet and what difference does it make if some aristocratic bum is going to sit on it? I said that to her once and she was furious. But the way she saw herself she wasn’t a cleaner or a housekeeper. She was the lady of the manor.

‘Magnus had one son of his own – Freddy – but he was still very young and he was quite surly. There was no real love there. So his lordship started interesting himself in my boys instead. He used to encourage them to play on his land and spoil them with little gifts – three pence here, sixpence there. And he’d get them to play practical jokes on Neville Brent. His parents were dead by then. They’d been killed in a car accident and Neville had taken over, working on the estate. If you ask me, there was something queer about him. I don’t think he was quite right in the head. But that didn’t stop them spying on him, teasing him, throwing snowballs, that sort of thing. It was cruel. I wish they hadn’t done it.’

‘You couldn’t stop them?’

‘I couldn’t do
anything
, Mr Pünd. How can I make you understand? They never listened to me. I wasn’t their father any more. Almost from the day we moved into that place, I found myself being pushed to one side. Magnus, Magnus … that was all anyone ever talked about. When the boys got their school reports, nobody cared what I thought. You know what? Mary would get the boys to take them up to the main house and show them to him. As if his opinion mattered more than mine.