No Human Enemy (Suzie Mountford Mysteries) (16 page)

The caution appeared to have gone from John Lees-Duncan; in its place was the bluster with a hint of bully. ‘Suspicious? You said it was a bloody doodlebug.’

‘The man was found dressed as a novice of the order of St Catherine of Siena.’

‘Wha—’

‘Found in a cell that had been demolished following a V-1 flying bomb exploding in the vicinity…’

‘There! Enemy action.’

‘The man was not killed by the explosion, sir. His throat had been cut.’

This brought Lees-Duncan to a halt, as though brakes had been applied. ‘You mean…?’

‘I mean, sir, that this is a murder inquiry and in all likelihood we’ll have to take you back to London with us so you can identify your son’s body. Then we’ll have to talk to you at length, find out what you know about your son’s movements…’ She stopped, remembering words he had spoken earlier. ‘You said just now, Mr Lees-Duncan, something about an unhealthy relationship. I wondered what you meant.’

Lees-Duncan frowned, smiled but said nothing.

‘I wondered who you were talking about: your son? your daughter? Dulcimer Tovey?’

‘Most likely all three,’ he said, leaving them none the wiser.

Suzie looked at him wishing she understood, then said they had better go and see Mr Tovey. So off they went, Lees-Duncan leading the way, followed by Dennis with herself just behind and the lawyer, Howard Baldwin flapping around at the rear.

As they crossed into the garden she asked, ‘Mr Lees-Duncan, when did you last hear from your son, Michael?’

‘Nineteen thirty-nine, when he walked out of here with his brother. May of that year.’

‘You haven’t heard from your two sons since ’39?’

‘What did I just say? Difference of opinion with the pair of them. May, ’39. Walked out, both of them.’

‘And you had no idea where they’d gone?’

‘Friend of mine saw Michael in New York later that year. I caught sight of Gerald in the Troc in ’42. He didn’t see me. Or didn’t want to see me. Ask Willow if you don’t believe me.’

A wide gravel path ran along the side of the lawn, within half a dozen paces of the narrow French windows. In front of them, at the far end of the lawn, lay the rose garden, formally laid out, the roses past their best, the place where Suzie had first glimpsed Willow in her flowing dress, big hat and trug, cutting roses, the wide-brimmed hat reminding Suzie of the lady who appeared as a kind of moving colophon for Gainsborough Pictures. She had seen a Gainsborough production only a few weeks ago –
Millions Like Us,
Patricia Roc, Anne Crawford, Eric Portman and Gordon Jackson, the message of which, she reckoned, was that everyone – from those in the front line to those making tiny components for aircraft, ships or guns – were winning the war. Millions of little people fought for victory each in his or her own way.

To their left was a long flowerbed – good old staples, lupins and delphiniums and poppies at the back, antirrhinums, snapdragons, with neatly spaced pansies at the front, flowers looking a shade rough as summer took its toll. The flowerbed was backed by a weathered red-brick wall. Halfway down the bed there was a break to allow access to a door in the wall, green paint, blistered and cracked but secure, with an iron thumb-latch. The door led into a long, blossoming kitchen garden, a greenhouse to the left, sticks for peas and beans, lettuce, a broad potato patch, carrots, some fading large cabbages, tomatoes and cucumbers jungling the greenhouse. Everything neat and ordered, a cinder path running straight through to a small orchard behind which Suzie glimpsed a solid grey stone cottage.

The path took them straight into the little orchard – no more than a stand of trees, apples, plum and a few raspberry bushes protected with netting to the right – up a slight grassy rise to the rear of the cottage. Lees-Duncan stopped, gestured with his hand. ‘You’ll find him up there, Tovey.’

‘You come and introduce us.’ Suzie thought she didn’t have to be a psychiatric wizard to see that Lees-Duncan was reluctant to talk to his gardener.

Baldwin, the lawyer, stayed back as though he wanted nothing to do with what was going on.

The cottage’s back door was open leading, it seemed, straight into a kitchen where a short, wiry man – a grey man, Suzie thought – was slicing up carrots on a chopping board by the sink, while a stew simmered on the gas hob, smelling like something Mum used to make.

Suzie rapped on the door and the man looked up. He wore old working trousers, an open-necked shirt with a waistcoat. His grizzled hair was cut short and he had a droopy growth of grey bristles on his upper lip, below a small nose. You couldn’t tell if the bristles meant he was growing a moustache or if he had simply not bothered to shave for a couple of days. This was Tovey, and Suzie caught a full glare from his clear blue eyes. The look was of disinterest coupled with arrogance.

‘Tovey,’ Lees-Duncan greeted him. ‘People to see you. Tell you about Dulcie. Not good news.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Complete apathy.

Suzie stepped in, introducing herself and holding out the photograph of Dulcie, posing as Winifred Lees-Duncan at the Convent of St Catherine of Siena in Silverhurst Road taken in 1940. ‘Is this your daughter, Mr Tovey? Your daughter, Dulcimer?’

Tovey raised his head and glanced at the photograph. ‘That looks like her when I last saw her, yes. What you want to know for?’

‘She has been living as a novice nun, a sister of the community of St Catherine of Siena.’

‘Always bothering God, that one. What’s happened now?’

‘Mr Tovey, I’m sorry. Dulcimer was killed on Sunday. A flying bomb.’

Tovey gave a little laugh. ‘Well, good riddance to bad rubbish is what I say, Inspector.’

It took Suzie’s breath away.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘Mr Tovey, I understand your difficulties, but…’ There Suzie paused, frustrated. Paused to get her breath and gain a little time because she really didn’t understand why Eric Tovey was taking such a stance, not cooperating, not even treating her questions seriously, distancing himself from the real matter in hand, the death of his daughter.

‘But … you
have
to give me some reasons, some answers. Whatever happens you’ll be expected to come to London with us, if only to formally identify your daughter’s body; and maybe answer more questions as well.’

‘Can’t
he
do it?’ Tovey snapped at her. ‘Can’t the God almighty John Lees-Duncan do it? He knew her as well as I did. Maybe better’n I did.’

Tovey had a distinct country burr to his voice, a quiet, nice, lilting accent that may well have been Gloucestershire. Suzie didn’t know, wasn’t good at accents, couldn’t tell a Norfolk from a Berkshire – well, that wasn’t quite true because she knew the Norfolk reasonably well with its distinctive stress on the aspirates. The only one she could be certain of was Mummerset, because an actor had once explained this hybrid ooh-aar bumpkin-like mode of speech to which actors resorted when they weren’t conversant with the speech of a certain area. ‘Hampshire and Berkshire are loud,’ he’d told her, this elderly actor who was a spear carrier in Gielgud’s accident-prone production of what he spoke of as ‘the Scottish play’, at the Piccadilly Theatre a couple of years ago. One of the Witches and their Duncan had died on tour, the Banquo became seriously ill, and there were unseemly arguments and clashes of temperament about the sets and costumes. Tommy had dragged her to a party where she had met the actor, and she remembered him saying, ‘If you haven’t mastered a particular county accent, and you’re playing the second gravedigger in
Hamlet,
then you’d most naturally play it in Mummerset.’

(Spear Carriers. That’s what Tommy called the Squad. ‘My Spear Carriers,’ he used to say, arm stretched out, moving from left to right, a grand sweeping gesture. Proud of the Spear Carriers.)

‘Boring old queen,’ Tommy said about that actor on the way home.

‘Possibly,’ Suzie agreed, ‘but I’ve learnt about Mummerset, and a lot of other things.’

‘Feller was showing off.’ Tommy was rarely happy about the fraternity whom he referred to collectively as ‘that happy band of buggers’; didn’t have time for them; rarely showed them any sympathy, and certainly believed the law was correct; didn’t lose any sleep over charging them with lewd and perverted acts, getting them banged up in pokey for several years at a stretch, followed the current thinking,

After she’d broken the news to Tovey, Suzie stayed in the narrow kitchen with him, watching him chop the vegetables for his stew, making the right noises, she thought: asking if she could do anything, saying how sorry she was to bring this sad news. He hardly took any notice, was monosyllabic, disinterested, and Suzie remained shocked by his ‘good riddance to bad rubbish’ remark; couldn’t credit a father saying that of his daughter.

Lees-Duncan slipped away; she watched him walking straight-backed, striding through the small orchard, kicking a windfall apple, sending it broken apart sailing down into the kitchen garden, Howard Baldwin walking slowly in his wake looking lost and out of place, Sancho Panza to his Quixote.

Dennis Free stood just outside the kitchen: Dennis with his thick hair, impossible to keep tidy, parted on the left but raised in a great kind of coif, a mound, on the right which had a tendency to flop down over his eyes. Dennis claimed his hair was the most difficult part of his body. At school there had been jokes about it, and one master in particular used to get a laugh by telling him, ‘Free, get your hair out of the ink.’ The same master had caused jollity when, on the last day of a term, Dennis, the would-be dandy, wore a white-spotted blue bow tie, and was asked, ‘What’s the matter, Free? Got a sore throat?’

Dennis looked a bit lost outside the back door and Suzie wondered if he was missing Laura Cotter, off with Tommy’s team in Sheffield. Word was they had a thing going, Dennis and Laura.

He had come into the cottage, Dennis, when she finally got Tovey’s attention and they moved from the kitchen into the main body of the building.

Suzie now sat at a table in Eric Tovey’s small front room, neat as his kitchen garden, old daguerreotypes of relatives on the walls, a framed looking glass over the little mantel, a stuffed sofa and two armchairs, blue geometric-patterned carpet, heavy dark curtains and the table at which they sat covered by a thick blue cloth. Dennis Free stood in the doorway.

It was in this setting that Suzie broached the question of why Dulcimer Tovey had entered a religious order under the name of Winifred Lees-Duncan.

‘You’d have to ask her,’ Tovey said. ‘And it’s a mite too late for that. She was always a tricky girl. Used to get ahead of herself.’

‘She left you here on your own, though. Why was that?’

He did not answer straightaway. Then.

‘She was her mother’s daughter, that’s why. Her mum left when Dulcie were ten year old, left her here for me to look after and I did my best. That’s what Katie did. Walked out. I did my best.’

Suzie nodded encouragingly.

‘But my best was obviously not enough. Not for her and not for her mother before her.’

‘Can you give me any reason for her mother leaving and why…?’

It was this that set off Tovey’s refusal to answer further questions. ‘That’s my business. Private. Personal, like my own thoughts on the matter. Not for any airing: not to you, miss, nor anyone else. They both left. I behaved proper but that made no difference. Katie left first, then her daughter ups and leaves when she reckons she’s old enough.’

Her daughter.

‘Your daughter as well, Mr Tovey.’

‘I suppose.’

‘There’s a doubt?’

‘She were her mother’s daughter. I’m not going to answer any more questions.’

‘I need to talk to you about her relationship with the others involved. With Michael Lees-Duncan and Winifred – Willow – Lees-Duncan?’

‘You can ask, but I may choose not to answer.’

‘Mr Tovey you’ll be obligated to answer. It’ll be a legal matter. You’ll be put on oath and you’ll have to answer. Possibly at an inquest. Maybe at a murder trial, I’ve no way of telling yet.’ She looked up, straight into his face, saw the grey, placid eyes and the strained muscles at each end of his mouth. She saw the cloud pass behind his eyes and thought she could detect a sudden defeat as his lips parted then closed again. Resignation?

Finally he gave a small, sad smile. ‘They spent a lot of time together,’ he began. ‘Young Michael and Willow and my girl, Dulcie. Kath wanted her named Dulcimer because that’s musical, even though Kath never knew the difference between a harp and a handsaw. I went in to see her down the Cottage Hospital and she said she were going to call the child Dulcimer ’cos it sounded melodic. But there wasn’t much harmony about Dulcimer, nor much melody come to that. There was a lot of screeching.’

‘This was when she was born?’

‘August, 1913. Next year it was the war – the first one. Mr John was Young Mr John then. He went, all spruced up in his uniform marching off to do battle for King and country, like they sang – “We don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go.” I ’ad flat feet but plenty of others went and never come back. Mr John come back all right. Came back a captain then a major, must’ve been all of twenty, twenty-one, round there somewhere. Don’t think he saw much action in the trenches, but he got some action in bed, ’cos young Gerald were born, what? ’14? Then Miss Willow, ’15 I reckon. Michael a year before that child of mine. Dulcie about the same age as Gerald. Then Willow.

‘She were stunning, a smasher, Isabel Lees-Duncan, Isabel Hurst as was. Barely eighteen when she had Michael. Such a pity. Michael, Gerald, then Winifred-Winnie-Willow.’

‘So what went wrong, Mr Tovey?’

‘He come back a major, young Mr John. What went wrong? My Kath went wrong, miss.’ He closed his mouth as though that was an end to it, shook his head, then nodded. ‘About the size on it, Kath went wrong. Eventually like.’

A rapping at the kitchen door broke the moment and Suzie cursed to herself, wondered if she’d sorted it out properly in her head. Dennis nipped away, returning with a red-faced young uniform. ‘PC Biswell, ma’am, up from Gloucester nick with a PC and another WPC. Sarn’t Cox sent him over.’