Magpie Murders (3 page)

‘You’re not going to die. Not any time soon. Now, go upstairs and get dressed.’

‘All right. All right. You bully!’

She leant over him and he felt her breasts, soft and warm, pressing against his neck. She kissed him on the cheek, then hurried out, leaving her breakfast on the table. Robin Osborne smiled to himself as he returned to his address. Perhaps she was right. He could cut out a page or two. Once again, he looked down at what he had written.

‘Mary Blakiston did not have an easy life. She knew personal tragedy soon after she came to Saxby-on-Avon and she could so easily have allowed it to overwhelm her. But she fought back. She was the sort of woman who embraced life, who would never let it get the better of her. And as we lay her to rest, beside the son whom she loved so much and whom she lost so tragically, perhaps we can take some solace from the thought that they are, at last, together.’

Robin Osborne read the paragraph twice. Once again, he saw her standing there, in this very room, right next to the table.

‘
I heard you were having trouble with wasps
.’

Had she seen them? Had she known?

The sun must have gone behind a cloud because suddenly there was a shadow across his face. He reached out, tore up the entire page and dropped the pieces into the bin.

3

Dr Emilia Redwing had woken early. She had lain in bed for an hour trying to persuade herself that she might still get back to sleep, then she had got up, put on a dressing gown and made herself a cup of tea. She had been sitting in the kitchen ever since, watching the sun rise over her garden and, beyond it, the ruins of Saxby Castle, a thirteenth-century structure which gave pleasure to the many hundreds of amateur historians who visited it but which cut out the sunlight every afternoon, casting a long shadow over the house. It was a little after half past eight. The newspaper should have been delivered by now. She had a few patient files in front of her and she busied herself going over them, partly to distract herself from the day ahead. The surgery was usually open on Saturday mornings but today, because of the funeral, it would be closed. Oh well, it was a good time to catch up with her paperwork.

There was never anything very serious to treat in a village like Saxby-on-Avon. If there was one thing that would carry off the residents, it was old age and Dr Redwing couldn’t do very much about that. Going through the files, she cast a weary eye over the various ailments that had recently come her way. Miss Dotterel, who helped at the village shop, was getting over the measles after a week spent in bed. Nine-year-old Billy Weaver had had a nasty attack of whooping cough but it was already behind him. His grandfather, Jeff Weaver, had arthritis but then he’d had it for years and it wasn’t getting any better or worse. Johnny Whitehead had cut his hand. Henrietta Osborne, the vicar’s wife, had managed to step on a clump of deadly nightshade –
atropa belladonna
– and had somehow infected her entire foot. She had prescribed a week’s bed rest and plenty of water. Other than that, the warm summer seemed to have been good for everyone’s health.

Not everyone’s. No. There had been a death.

Dr Redwing pushed the files to one side and went over to the stove where she busied herself making breakfast for both her and her husband. She had already heard Arthur moving about upstairs and there had been the usual grinding and rattling as he poured himself his bath. The plumbing in the house was at least fifty years old and complained loudly every time it was pressed into service, but at least it did the job. He would be down soon. She cut the bread for toast, filled a saucepan with water and placed it on the hob, took out the milk and the cornflakes, laid the table.

Arthur and Emilia Redwing had been married for thirty years; a happy and successful marriage, she thought to herself, even if things hadn’t gone quite as they had hoped. For a start, there was Sebastian, their only child, now twenty-four and living with his beatnik friends in London. How could he have become such a disappointment? And when exactly was it that he had turned against them? Neither of them had heard for him for months and they couldn’t even be sure if he was alive or dead. And then there was Arthur himself. He had started life as an architect – and a good one. He had been given the Sloane Medallion by the Royal Institute of British Architects for a design he had completed at art school. He had worked on several of the new buildings that had sprung up immediately after the war. But his real love had been painting – mainly portraits in oils – and ten years ago he had given up his career to work as a full-time artist. He had done so with Emilia’s full support.

One of his works hung in the kitchen, on the wall beside the Welsh dresser, and she glanced at it now. It was a portrait of herself, painted ten years ago, and she always smiled when she looked at it, remembering the extended silences as she sat for him, surrounded by wild flowers. Her husband never talked when he worked. There had been a dozen sittings during a long, hot summer and Arthur had somehow managed to capture the heat, the haze in the late afternoon, even the scent of the meadow. She was wearing a long dress with a straw hat – like a female Van Gogh, she had joked – and perhaps there was something of that artist’s style in the rich colours, the jabbing brushstrokes. She was not a beautiful woman. She knew it. Her face was too severe, her broad shoulders and dark hair too masculine. There was something of the teacher or perhaps the governess in the way she held herself. People found her too formal. But he had found something beautiful in her. If the picture had hung in a London gallery, nobody would be able to pass it without looking twice.

It didn’t. It hung here. No London galleries were interested in Arthur or his work. Emilia couldn’t understand it. The two of them had gone together to the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy and had looked at work by James Gunn and Sir Alfred Munnings. There had been a controversial portrait of the Queen by Simon Elwes. But it all looked very ordinary and timid compared to his work. Why did nobody recognise Arthur Redwing for the genius that he undoubtedly was?

She took three eggs and lowered them gently into the pan – two for him, one for her. One of them cracked as it came into contact with the boiling water and at once she thought of Mary Blakiston with her skull split open after her fall. She couldn’t avoid it. Even now she shuddered at the memory of what she had seen – and yet she wondered why that should be. It wasn’t the first dead body she had encountered and working in London during the worst of the Blitz she had treated soldiers with terrible injuries. What had been so different about this?

Perhaps it was the fact that the two of them had been close. It was true that the doctor and the housekeeper had very little in common but they had become unlikely friends. It had started when Mrs Blakiston was a patient. She’d suffered an attack of shingles that had lasted for a month and Dr Redwing had been impressed both by her stoicism and good sense. After that, she’d come to rely on her as a sounding board. She had to be careful. She couldn’t breach patient confidentiality. But if there was something that troubled her, she could always rely on Mary to be a good listener and to offer sensible advice.

And the end had been so sudden: an ordinary morning, just over a week ago, had been interrupted by Brent – the groundsman who worked at Pye Hall – on the phone.

‘Can you come, Dr Redwing? It’s Mrs Blakiston. She’s at the bottom of the stairs in the big house. She’s lying there. I think she’s had a fall.’

‘Is she moving?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Are you with her now?’

‘I can’t get in. All the doors are locked.’

Brent was in his thirties, a crumpled young man with dirt beneath his fingernails and sullen indifference in his eyes. He tended the lawns and the flower beds and occasionally chased trespassers off the land just as his father had before him. The grounds of Pye Hall backed onto a lake and children liked to swim there in the summer, but not if Brent was around. He was a solitary man, unmarried, living alone in the house that had once belonged to his parents. He was not much liked in the village because he was considered shifty. The truth was that he was uneducated and possibly a little autistic but the rural community had been quick to fill in the blanks. Dr Redwing told him to meet her at the front door, threw together a few medical supplies and, leaving her nurse/receptionist – Joy – to turn away any new arrivals, hurried to her car.

Pye Hall was on the other side of Dingle Dell, fifteen minutes on foot and no more than a five-minute drive. It had always been there, as long as the village itself, and although it was a mishmash of architectural styles it was certainly the grandest house in the area. It had started life as a nunnery but had been converted into a private home in the sixteenth century then knocked around in every century since. What remained was a single, elongated wing with an octagonal tower – constructed much later – at the far end. Most of the windows were Elizabethan, narrow and mullioned, but there were also Georgian and Victorian additions with ivy spreading all around them as if to apologise for the indiscretion. At the back, there was a courtyard and the remains of what might have been cloisters. A separate stable block was now used as a garage.

But its main glory was its setting. A gate with two stone griffins marked the entrance and a gravel drive passed the Lodge House where Mary Blakiston lived, then swept round in a graceful swan’s neck across the lawns to the front door with its Gothic arch. There were flower beds arranged like daubs of paint on an artist’s palette and, enclosed by ornamental hedges, a rose garden with – it was said – over a hundred different varieties. The grass stretched all the way down to the lake with Dingle Dell on the other side: indeed, the whole estate was surrounded by mature woodland, filled with bluebells in the spring, separating it from the modern world.

The tyres crunched on the gravel as Dr Redwing came to a halt and saw Brent, waiting nervously for her, turning his cap over in his hands. She got out, took her medicine bag and went over to him.

‘Is there any sign of life?’ she asked.

‘I haven’t looked,’ Brent muttered. Dr Redwing was startled. Hadn’t he even tried to help the poor woman? Seeing the look on her face, he added, ‘I told you. I can’t get in.’

‘The front door’s locked?’

‘Yes, ma’am. The kitchen door too.’

‘Don’t you have any keys?’

‘No, ma’am. I don’t go in the house.’

Dr Redwing shook her head, exasperated. In the time she had taken to get here, Brent could have done something; perhaps fetched a ladder to try a window upstairs. ‘If you couldn’t get in, how did you telephone me?’ she asked. It didn’t matter, but she just wondered.

‘There’s a phone in the stable.’

‘Well, you’d better show me where she is.’

‘You can see through the window …’

The window in question was at the edge of the house, one of the newer additions. It gave a side view of the hall with a wide staircase leading up to the first floor. And there, sure enough, was Mary Blakiston, lying sprawled out on a rug, one arm stretched in front of her, partly concealing her head. From the very first sight, Dr Redwing was fairly sure that she was dead. Somehow, she had fallen down the stairs and broken her neck. She wasn’t moving, of course. But it was more than that. The way the body was lying was too unnatural. It had that broken-doll look that Redwing had observed in her medicine books.

That was her instinct. But looks could be deceptive.

‘We have to get in,’ she said. ‘The kitchen and the front door are locked but there must be another way.’

‘We could try the boot room.’

‘Where is that?’

‘Just along here …’

Brent led her to another door at the back. This one had glass panes and although it was also securely closed, Dr Redwing clearly saw a bunch of keys, still in the lock on the other side. ‘Whose are those?’ she asked.

‘They must be hers.’

She came to a decision. ‘We’re going to have to break the glass.’

‘I don’t think Sir Magnus would be too happy about that,’ Brent grumbled.

‘Sir Magnus can take that up with me if he wants to. Now, are you going to do it or am I?’

The groundsman wasn’t happy, but he found a stone and used it to knock out one of the panes. He slipped his hand inside and turned the keys. The door opened and they went in.

Waiting for the eggs to boil, Dr Redwing remembered the scene exactly as she had seen it. It really was like a photograph printed on her mind.

They had gone through the boot room, along a corridor and straight into the main hall, with the staircase leading up to the galleried landing. Dark wood panelling surrounded them. The walls were covered with oil paintings and hunting trophies: birds in glass cases, a deer’s head, a huge fish. A suit of armour, complete with sword and shield, stood beside a door that led into the living room. The hallway was long and narrow with the front door, opposite the staircase, positioned exactly in the middle. On one side there was a stone fireplace, big enough to walk into. On the other, two leather chairs and an antique table with a telephone. The floor was made up of flagstones, partly covered by a Persian rug. The stairs were also stone with a wine red carpet leading up the centre. If Mary Blakiston had tripped and come tumbling down from the landing, her death would be easily explained. There was very little to cushion a fall.

While Brent waited nervously by the door, she examined the body. She was not yet cold but there was no pulse. Dr Redwing brushed some of the dark hair away from the face to reveal brown eyes, staring at the fireplace. Gently, she closed them. Mrs Blakiston had always been in a hurry. It was impossible to escape the thought. She had quite literally flung herself down the stairs, hurrying into her own death.

‘We have to call the police,’ she said.

‘What?’ Brent was surprised. ‘Has someone done something to her?’

‘No. Of course not. It’s an accident. But we still have to report it.’

It was an accident. You didn’t have to be a detective to work it out. The housekeeper had been hoovering. The Hoover was still there, a bright red thing, almost like a toy, at the top of the stairs stuck in the bannisters. Somehow she had got tangled up in the wire. She had tripped and fallen down the stairs. There was nobody else in the house. The doors were locked. What other explanation could there be?