Scandal at Six (Lois Meade Mystery) (20 page)

Thirty-eight

H
alfway down the long straight track,
J
ustin slowed the
F
iat down to twenty miles an hour, and looked around him.
N
othing, no hedges, no trees.
A
s his father used to say, “
M
iles and miles of bugger-all!”
A
nd now his father was gone, soon to be lowered into the cold, cold ground.
N
o more jokes, no more hair-raising stories of his youth, or romantic, embarrassing accounts of when he courted
J
ustin’s mother.

“Poor Mother,” he said aloud, and thought to himself that she would miss her husband terribly. After the funeral was over and all the legal stuff sorted, she would be really miserable. He should stay for at least another week. But could he do that? He thought ahead, and realised that he actually could, for once. He had no more assignments to do for Uncle Robert nor was he needed at the local theatre at present. He had checked with the hospital, and they had said Mr Pettison would be at least three or four weeks in their care.

He had been to see the vicar, and arrangements for the funeral were completed. Tomorrow morning, at eleven, his father would be . . . He stopped mid-thought. “My father,” he said aloud, “will be buried, and I shall never see him again.”

With a sudden burst of anger directed at nobody in particular, he put his foot down on the accelerator, and arrived at the farm with a screech of brakes.

“Justin? Why so fast? You should join me in this very strange mode of transport, slow and careful.”

Justin stared. It was Pettison, in a wheelchair and snug in layers of rugs, being lowered from the back of an ambulance, and attended by anxious paramedics.

*

W
hen they were settled in front of a fire in the farmhouse, Justin’s mother explained. “Robert rang soon after you left,” she said. “Insisted that he should be at your father’s funeral, and asked if we could put him up overnight. Well, as you know, we still have the hoist we got for Dad, and so I said yes, we could certainly manage. Wasn’t it wonderful of him? Goodness knows how you persuaded the hospital,” she added now, addressing a grinning Pettison.

“Charm, my dear, charm,” he said. “Amazing what one can do with a silver tongue. The ambulance will be back for me tomorrow afternoon, after the wake. I shall meet some old friends, I expect, Justin. You see, I had to come and say farewell to a good old friend.”

Of course, thought Justin. Brothers-in-law. He thought some more, and then was very sure that he hadn’t heard the whole story. With Pettison, there was always an ulterior motive.

“Right,” he said. “Well, we’d better get the bedroom ready, Mother. It’ll have to be the ground floor quarters, I’m afraid, Robert. We’ll never get you upstairs in that wheelchair!”

“Can you spare a moment, Justin, for a little private chat? A matter of business, my dear,” he added to Mrs Brookes, who smiled, added another log to the fire and tiptoed out.

“Wonderful mother you have, Justin. I am sure in some ways the death of your father must have come as a relief.”

“I don’t think we can know that,” said Justin coolly. “My parents had a form of silent communication, developed over fifty years of happy marriage. I hope I shall be able to say the same one day.”

“Remarkable!” said Pettison. “So now, just reassure me that the little people are still safe and well.”

“If you mean the latest consignment of endangered animals, then yes, they are perfectly well, and being looked after until you return. Do you have a customer for them?”

“Oh yes, a very noble customer! Titled aristocracy, no less. He should know better than to keep such people as pets, but who am I to quibble? I run a business, and ask no questions.”

“You’ll be answering some, one of these days,” said Justin gloomily. “I reckon your time is running out. The sooner you get back into harness, the better.”

“Ah, now there’s the thing. They say I have to stay in hospital, with occasional forays back home, for another three weeks. Even then, I shall still be in a wheelchair, possibly for good. So I wonder, when you get back, whether you could take over for a short while. You know the ropes at the zoo, and with Margie—and, I understand, the dreaded Dottie Nimmo—and the new keeper, things should go on pretty well. What do you think? There’ll be suitable rewards, of course.”

“What sort of rewards?” asked Justin, suspiciously. He imagined a cage full of rare parrots, or some such.

“Money, my dear chap. What else?”

Justin remembered his dream of running a proper, untarnished zoo, and said that in that case, he would do as his uncle suggested. “You’ll have to send a message to say I’m coming. Best send it to Margie. I must stay here for another week, and then I’ll return.”

“Ah, that brings me to the second thing,” said Pettison. “Your mother and I were having a chat, and she confided that she hoped to go away and stay with her old friend in Spalding for a week or two, more or less straight after the funeral. The old boy who works on the farm is quite willing to take over. Not much happening at the moment, he has said. So you can return to Farnden, and take over at the zoo without delay.”

They talked for a few more minutes, settling how the latest creatures were to be delivered to the buyer, and then Justin left Pettison to have a snooze by the fire while he helped his mother in the kitchen.

*

“
W
atch the milk in that saucepan, will you,
J
ustin. It mustn’t boil, so tell me when it is about to.”

“How will I know when it is about to?”

“When there’s tiny bubbles and a skin forming on the top. Something like that. Anyway, you’ll just know. Is Robert all right in the front room? There’s not been a fire in there all winter, so it felt a bit damp.”

“It’s fine, Mother. You must have been surprised to hear from him.”

“Yes indeed. And to come all that way in a wheelchair! The ambulance will come and fetch him and take him back to the hospital tomorrow. Don’t ask me how he organised it! All he would say was “Friends in high places,” and silly things like that.”

“It’s boiling. Shall I take it off?”

“Of course! Now, what are you going to do? Supper will be in an hour or so.”

“If there’s nothing more I can do to help, I think I’ll go and make a few phone calls. Check up that all is well back at the flat. Give me a shout when supper’s ready.”

“Thanks for all you’re doing, dear. Oh, and I have decided to go and see my friend Vera after we’ve settled Father safely . . .” She paused, and wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron. “So you go back, Justin, and get on with things again. I shall be all right, and we’ll keep in touch. I might get a computer and one of those things where we can talk face-to-face. Off you go now, dear.”

Justin retired to his bedroom, and sat for a while, staring out of the window at the dark, cold fenland. He did not really want to talk to anyone. He felt a stranger in his own home, and realised that the presence of Robert Pettison in the house was disturbing. He fell into a light doze in his chair, and dreamed that his uncle was wheeling himself miraculously upstairs, and finding his way into his bedroom, gun in hand. He awoke with a start, hearing his mother’s voice calling him for supper.

*

B
ack in
F
arnden,
L
ois sat in her office, waiting for
D
ot Nimmo to call. Gran and Derek were watching television, and she had retired to take the call. There had been a message on the phone, and when she had tried to call back, Dot had been engaged. Lois’s thoughts were far away, up in the fens of Lincolnshire, where she had never been, but imagined as looking something like the tulip fields of Holland. Justin would be very out of place there, surely, she thought. How did the son of a tulip farmer get to be a swinging young actor in the Midlands. She supposed his parents had decided on private education, and then university, in order to give him a broad education, but had succeeded only in producing a smooth young man, like many other smooth young men, with ambitions to make enough money to live in a luxury executive dwelling, somewhere in a leafy suburb.

But was Justin really one of them?

“We know nothing about him,” she said aloud, and then continued to remember exactly what they did know. His father had died, and he had a strange preference in his choice of pets. Pets? She stood up suddenly. Of course they were not pets, nor were they Justin’s! He was an intermediary and an actor, and of course she knew who was boss.

Her phone rang, and it was Dot. “Thanks for ringing back, Mrs M,” she said. “Just checking that it’s all right for me to work at the zoo tomorrow.”

“As it happens, yes. We’ve lost a couple of baby elephants and you may be able to help us find them.”

Thirty-
n
ine

J
ustin padded over to the window to draw his curtains back, and was relieved to see a clear blue sky and a brisk wind blowing the few trees in the farmhouse garden.
H
e had been dreading a wet day for his father’s funeral, but now, with any luck, they should be able to smile a little, and welcome guests who had come to mourn the loss of a loved one.

That’s what Pettison had said! An old friend, not a distant relative, nor a colleague. No doubt he would want that forgotten. Looking back, Justin remembered that his mother had never shown to him any curiosity about the barn where he had occasionally housed animals in transit. And Pettison had always been around, ever since he was a child. He had taken him for granted, and Father had talked of him as a business associate. Had Mother known all along what his father and Pettison, old school chums, were up to? Father must have told her, years and years ago. She would expect Robert to be here.

An old friend and business associate. Was that it? Justin began to shower and dress, and all the while he was thinking how he could get Pettison to tell him the truth. He reckoned that his father had not become an associate willingly. He had been a strictly law-abiding person in every other respect, and a regular churchgoer. But Pettison had exercised a hold over him in some way. That was his specialty!

“Justin! Breakfast’s ready!” His mother’s voice brought him back to the present, and he vowed to find out from Pettison exactly what the relationship with his father had been.

*

T
he church path was lined with wreaths and floral tributes, and when the coffin, with its spray of white lilies, was taken from the hearse, Justin, with his mother on his arm, followed slowly behind. The organ played some of his father’s favourite Mozart, and every pew was full.

“Dad must have been popular,” he whispered to his mother, and she nodded, unable to speak.

The service went smoothly, with Father’s friends stepping forward and giving short tributes to his loyalty, his kind heart and steadfastness. Justin was the last to speak, and he delivered the encomium in a shaky voice.

Pettison was in his wheelchair at the back of the church, well wrapped up against the cold, and Justin could hear his voice singing hymns in a loud voice. Hypocrite! Just you wait until we’re back in Tresham, he thought angrily.

Now it was time to lower the coffin into the grave, and Justin and his mother threw in handfuls of earth with a last prayer. “Rest in peace, Dad,” he said to himself. “Rest in peace.”

*

“
S
o when is
J
ustin coming back?” asked
J
osie, sorting out new stock to go on the shelves.

Lois had arrived early, saying that she needed more porridge oats. “Don’t you know, dear?” she replied.

“I’ve heard nothing, and I’m glad. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to tell him we no longer have the shrews. If that’s what they were.”

“I suppose we could make up a story about them being collected, and leave it at that,” said Josie.

“Collected by who?” said Lois. “He’s bound to be suspicious.”

“Well, that’d be better than having to admit they were stolen. He did ask us to look after them.”

“Which we did, to the best of our ability. Not our fault if the shed got broken into.”

“It didn’t, Mum. Don’t you remember? I unlocked it in the usual way with the key. I suppose we should tell the police? I haven’t even told Matthew yet. I keep remembering Justin saying we were not to tell anyone.”

“But we told Cowgill, and his niece. They know the poor little things have gone.”

“Well, let’s hope Dot finds them in the zoo. I must say it’s the last time Justin uses the shed for his weird pets! It’s the funeral today, so he could be back here tomorrow, or even later on today.”

Lois paid for her porridge oats, and said they would keep in touch. “And you be careful, my duckie,” were her last words as she left the shop.

*

I
n
T
resham,
B
etsy
B
rierley was struggling from the car to her front door, carrying four heavy bags of shopping from the supermarket. As she approached, the door opened and Ted stood there, holding out his arms to help.

“Phew! I don’t know, Ted, we seem to get through an awful lot of food. Just dump them in the kitchen, and I’ll sort them out later. I’m dying for a coffee, if you’ve got the kettle on.”

When she had taken off her coat and settled down with a hot drink, Ted, who had up to then been silent, began to speak.

“Betsy, we shall have to be a bit careful, you know. My hours at work are being cut. The current economic situation, an’ all that. So perhaps we’ll give up the luxuries for a bit.”

“What luxuries? A bit of cream and a couple of peaches is hardly luxury living, is it.”

“No, dear, of course not. But you know what I mean. Oh, and by the way,” he said, on his way out to the kitchen, “I found a strange-looking mousetrap in the washhouse, and a couple of dead mice in it. Funny-looking mice, but anyway, as they were very dead, I put the whole thing in the bin. Must have been our neighbour’s. They weren’t Pettison’s were they? He looks after his stuff too well. I know you’re not partial to mice so I thought I’d get rid of them. They were rather pathetic, actually, curled up together as if they’d frozen to death.”

“Ted Brierley!” said Betsy. “You have just thrown away two and a half thousand pounds! Of course they were Pettison’s. I had to collect them from Farnden. Still, if they were dead, they were no use anyway. Make sure you cover ’em up with plenty of rubbish. The bin men come today, don’t they? Right. Now, can I have another dollop of cream in this coffee, or would that count as luxury living?”