Murder Among Us (30 page)

"Hang on!" said Meredith. She got up and fetched one of the smaller pieces of wood from a basket by the hearth and pushed it into the flames. After a moment it caught, crackling and sending up a little Mount Etna of sparks. Meredith prudently pulled the mesh fireguard across. "There, that's better. I'm sure they won't mind us burning another log and it's quite safe."

"You see, you're practical," said Leah moodily. "You're a useful person. I mean that as a compliment."

1 Thanks, but it does make me sound a bit of a workhorse."

"Don't scorn it. It's better than being a useless ornament like me!" The speaker's voice was unexpectedly bitter.

"Come on," said Meredith gently. "You're just feeling down in the dumps because you're worried about Denis. You must be tired. You ought to go to bed, really. Take an aspirin. I've got some if you haven't. Sleep and stop thinking."

"I've got pills, thanks. But I don't want to stop thinking. I want to work it all out and get it straight in my mind!" Leah sighed. "I don't know why Denis didn't confide in me that he had troubles. I really don't understand it. Why did he feel he couldn't tell me? Am I an ogre?'' She raised dark-ringed eyes in her pale beautiful face, fixing Meredith with a questioning and embarrassingly direct gaze.

"No. I don't know what's wrong but I am sure he loves you. I expect he wanted to protect you."

Leah's clenched fists beat on the arms of her chair. "I don't want protecting! I'm not a bit of Dresden china! I'm not stupid, incapable of understanding! But that's what people think when they see me, isn't it? Just another rich bitch, thick as two planks. A clothes' horse, drenched in French perfume, tricked out with expensive gems, incapable of earning a living or standing on her own two feet. Always kept by a rich man. Someone whose status is midway between a decorative statuette and a pet pug!"

Meredith couldn't help laughing. "That's rubbish!" At the same time she couldn't help recognising the element of truth in what Leah said. Of course no one expected anything of her. And, yes, one did notice the clothes, the jewellery, the perfume. Meredith could smell it now. It was a shame: Leah was an intelligent woman. She'd never really given herself a chance.

"It isn't rubbish, it's true!" said Leah calmly. "You know it is. I can see it in your face. No, don't argue. I don't mind. I've never made the slightest effort to achieve anything in my own right. I was Bernie's wife, Marcus's wife, now Denis's. That's it. Someone's wife."

"I'm not laughing at you, only at the words you used." Meredith hesitated. "Being a successful wife is an achievement too. I don't know I could fulfil that role."

"You haven't tried. Marry your policeman and then you'll find out, not before. As for me, I'm not a successful wife to Denis or he wouldn't have felt he needed to keep secrets. He was afraid to tell me, that's it. I'm not proud of myself."

"Look," Meredith began. "We don't yet know why Alan wants to talk to Denis at the station. It may all be cleared up by tomorrow morning."

"Cleared up or not," said Leah with sudden vigour, "Denis will be out of police clutches! Our solicitor is

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coming down first thing in the morning. He wasn't free to come this afternoon, he had to be in court, and with fog and poor driving conditions forecast for tonight, he thought it best to leave it till tomorrow. But he'll be here and get Denis released well before the time when, as I understand it, they'll have to let him go anyway if they can't show good reason for holding him! The solicitor is quite sure there will be no problem and he's a good man, a friend of Marcus's. He won't let us down."

Marcus. Dead but not forgotten. Poor old Denis, married to Marcus's wife, spending Marcus's money and living in Marcus's house, now to be sprung by Marcus's lawyer. Meredith commiserated with Fulton even though she did find him a rather irritating man.

"Leah," she asked, feeling a little ashamed of herself. "What was Marcus Keller like?"

"Marcus? A good man, very successful, tough in business but honest. Devoted husband. Generous to a fault, spoiled me. Never wanted me to be anything but a doll. Perhaps if we'd had children. . . but we didn't. My daughter, Lizzie, is Bernie's child. Bernie was my first husband and is still around, remarried with more children from his present union. All I've got is Denis. I don't want to lose him."

"You've got your daughter," Meredith pointed out.

Leah shrugged eloquently. "She doesn't need me. In more ways than one she's Bernie's daughter! Bernie was always utterly self-sufficient. If he could have managed to have babies by himself he'd never have bothered to marry me! He wanted a son, of course, and I couldn't give him that. We parted amicably enough. I left him free to try again for a son with someone else. He was correspondingly generous in our divorce settlement."

They sat in silence for a while, watching the log Meredith had put on the fire as it was slowly consumed by the flames.

"I wish ..." said Leah quietly.

"Wish what?"

"Just that. I wish. Are you one of those people, Meredith, who believes in reincarnation?"

"That we've all been here before?"

"Rather that we'll all be here again, get another chance."

"Not really," confessed Meredith. "Anyone who ever admitted those sort of views to me seemed to believe they were Cleopatra or Julius Caesar. None of them believed they were previously a complete nonentity. It's comforting, I suppose, to think we'll get another crack at life. Most of us think we've messed up this time round."

"Yes. That's why I hope it's true, the reincarnation theory," said Leah. "Then perhaps I'll do better next time. I hope I do." She smiled suddenly, her wide beautiful smile which Meredith recalled had been so striking when she had first met Leah. "It's late. I think I will go to bed, go to sleep and stop thinking. Yes, you're right. Goodbye, Meredith."

"Goodnight," said Meredith. "Sleep tight."

"Oh yes, I'll do that." Leah got up and walked across the lounge. At the door she hesitated but then, without looking back, turned the handle and walked out. A faint aura of perfume lingered in the air, a testament to her presence. Meredith frowned.

Markby tapped on his niece's door and put his head round. "Your mum sent me up to say it's time to stop reading and settle down."

Emma was sitting up in bed, pink as a freshly boiled shrimp from her bath, frowning over a venerable tome with yellowed pages.

Markby came in and sat down on the rather uncomfortable beanbag on the floor. "What's the book?"

She held it up silently.

"Oh, Black Beauty, about a horse, I should have guessed! That looks like a pretty old copy."

"It was Mummy's when she was a little girl."

"Oh, yes, I seem to remember it. It made her cry."

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"That's because it's sad." Animation entered Emma's tense little face. 'They were horrible and cruel to cab and carriage horses in the Victorian days!"

Markby laced fingers and said gently, "Being horrible and cruel is sadly part of human nature sometimes. But only a part. Humans also do lots of fine and good and beautiful things."

"Zoe does lots of good at the Rest Home."

"Yes, she does. But you know how some of the animals there have been damaged by bad handling in the past? That can happen to humans, too. If so, it's much better if it's dealt with straight away and put right."

She looked away, back at her book, but she wasn't reading. Her mouth quivered.

"It's better to talk about it than think about it all alone, Emma."

"I don't want to."

There was a silence and then he said, "I think your mum coloured in the frontispiece of that book."

Emma turned back to the picture facing the title page, luridly crayonned purple and green by a childish hand. "Vicky does that to my books. She does it to Matthew's as well. She mucks things up."

Markby, well aware of his younger niece's predisposition to wreck everything, sighed. "I know. She'll grow out of it."

"He was sort of ill, wasn't he? The man in the woods."

"Yes. 111. An unhappy person. Do you dream about it?"

"Only once, the first night after I got back home."

"We all have bad memories of one kind or another, Emma. The thing to do is to let them go. It's not easy. But it can be done. Just think of them being like boats. You untie them and let them float away out of sight."

"It's already a funny fuzzy sort of memory. I never saw his face. But I don't like the dark much. I imagine shapes in it. Will you light that little lamp for me? I leave it on all night."

"Sure/* He got up and switched on the little lamp with its lower-wattage bulb. Then he turned out the main light. "Good night, sweetheart. Sleep tight. Even in Black Beauty, things all turned out all right in the end/'

"Yes, I know. Good night, Uncle Alan."

Laura waited at the foot of the stairs. "Did you switch the lamp on?"

"Yes, yes. Don't fret. She's a sensible kid. It will take a little while but she'll get it out of her system eventually. It's a pity she's reading such a lachrymose book— Black BeautyF '

"She only reads about horses." Laura rubbed her forearms.

"You too," her brother said. "You'll get over it."

"No, never!" Laura said fiercely and tossed back her long fair hair. She looked for a moment very like her own little daughter. "Alan, did I hear right that you've hauled in Denis Fulton?"

"You legal eagles have wonderful ears. But he isn't asking for legal aid. He's got his own solicitor coming down from London tomorrow."

"You take care!" she warned. "You can't mess around. You have to follow all the rules, Alan!"

"Dear little sister, I'm well acquainted with the Police and Criminal Evidence guidelines! I can hold him for twenty-four hours. I am obliged to fetch his solicitor once he requests him and I may not ask him any questions till that solicitor arrives. If I want to hold him longer, I have to get authority from above and if I want a yet further extension I have to get it from a magistrate. But it won't come to that. Twenty-four hours will do it."

"It won't come to that because Fulton's legal adviser won't let it!" Laura opened the front door and a swirl of fog drifted into the hall. "Ugh! Thickening fast. Drive carefully and mind how you go!"

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Springwood Hall and its gardens slept in a silent cocoon. Down at the Alice Batt Rest Home the animals hardly stirred. The distant pine plantation was wrapped in eerie gloom. The whole countryside was held motionless as if suspended in time.

Only one creature was wakeful. He kept a lonely vigil, yet comfortable enough because he'd broken into the building housing the swimming pool. Inside, warm and safe from the unhealthy mist, he relaxed on one of the poolside recliners with his hands behind his head. Occasionally there came a gurgle from the pool's pipe system. Odd creaks and rustles sounded among the potted palms and the cooling central heating system. A tap dripped in the shower by the changing rooms.

He waited patiently. He even dozed off for an hour but awoke at an inner reveille call set into motion by his own pent-up excitement. He consulted the illuminated dial of his wristwatch. Twenty to three in the morning. An excellent time to make his move. He got up, stooped to retrieve the plastic bag which stood by his chair and set off with it for the hotel.

As he quit the pool building the cold dank night air struck his face and the intrusive fog filled his nostrils. But he didn't mind. The murk could only help him. Marooned out here in clammy cottonwool amidst invisible fields, the Hall was at his mercy and any help summoned from Bamford would be hampered by the poor visibility and slow in arriving. He counted on that.

The ground plan of the whole place, Hall and gardens, was imprinted on his memory, the result of endless visits here during the period of the Hall's conversion to hotel. He turned his steps confidently towards the Hall and when he reached the spot he judged the corner of the building, he stopped and stretched out his hand. His fingers made contact with rough masonry. No more than he had expected but all the same, he smiled to himself in the darkness, a smug, self-congratulatory smirk of satisfaction because everything was going according to his plan.

270 Ann Granger

Now it was easy. He had only to follow the wall of the house along to the next corner, turn right, along past the kitchens, turn right again—and now he was on the further side of the house alongside the dining-room windows.

A desire to keep the character of the old house had led to retaining the original frames and windows. Modern ones might have given him more trouble. Historical accuracy and old world charm have their price. Reflecting censoriously on this, he set down his bag and felt inside it, withdrawing a glass cutter and a roll of heavy duty sticky tape. He used the glass cutter to incise a neat circle in a pane by a window latch. Careful, now. Cautiously he picked up the sticky tape and affixed it to the pane covering the scored circle. A single sharp tap in the centre and the glass circle came away but, held in place by the sticky tape, did not fall. With infinite care he peeled away the overlapping ends of the tape and it lifted out the glass circle intact. He laid it on the grass, reached through the hole in the pane and released the catch.

Noiselessly and painlessly, he had obtained entry to the house, and taking a large bottle from his bag and holding it clasped to his chest, he climbed in.

He was in the dining room. This he knew but he took a flashlight from his pocket and splayed the beam around. There were two sets of doors. One led into the kitchen for staff use; the other, admitting the diners, into the corridor which ran to the front entrance hall and main staircase. The tables were ready, set with crisply ironed damask cloths and napkins. He unscrewed the top of the bottle and splashed the paraffin it contained freely across a line of table linen to the doors into the corridor. These doors he then propped open using a dining-room chair.

Stepping through them into the corridor, he was confronted by a small staircase, the former servants' back stairs. He ignored it and set off down the ground-floor corridor, splashing paraffin as he went. Half way down