The Killings at Badger's Drift (12 page)

At a window above their heads Phyllis Cadell turned abruptly away. She switched on the television set and slumped into the nearest armchair. Voices filled the room. On the screen a couple, mad with ecstatic greed, were struggling to embrace a mountain of consumer durables whilst an audience, hardly less ecstatic, screamed abuse and encouragement. Wearing a fixed insane grin, the woman slipped, dislodged a can and brought the whole pyramid crashing to the ground. Phyllis pressed her remote control and got a besotted duo in love with each other’s breakfast cereal. Button three activated a bucolic scene showing an elderly couple saturated with contentment reading their golden wedding telegrams, surrounded by their loving family. Button four brought an old black and white movie. Two men were holding a third by the arms while Sterling Haydon battered him to bits. A left to the jaw, then a right. Smack. Crunch. Then two to the belly, breath sucked in, an agonizing whistle. Then a knee to the groin and a punch in the kidneys.

Phyllis settled back. She seized the box of fudge and started cramming the gritty, fluff-embellished cubes into her mouth. She packed them in fiercely and without a break as if making an assault on her jaws. Tears poured down her cheeks.

‘I expect the wedding’ll be a posh do. Marquees and all that?’ Troy looked to the horizon as he spoke, casting a green eye on Henry Trace’s assets. Miles and miles and miles of waving money.

‘No doubt.’ Barnaby turned left as they walked away from Tye House, making for the terraced cottages. Troy, not wishing to receive another put-down, did not ask why his chief was going in for a bit of mundane door-to-door. But in the event Barnaby chose to enlighten him.

‘That bungalow’ - he nodded towards the end of the terrace - ‘is what interests me. There’s someone there keeping a very sharp eye on things. I’m interested to hear what the neighbours have to say.’

‘I see, sir,’ was all Troy could think of in reply, but he felt warm with satisfaction on receipt of this small confidence.

The first cottage was empty, the occupants, as a very old lady next door informed them, being outsiders from London who hadn’t been down for at least a month. And the man in the last cottage was out till six every weekday teaching in Amersham. Troy took his name for the evening checkers. The old lady was taciturn about her own affairs, simply saying she hadn’t been out at all on the day in question. Then she jerked her head over the neat box hedge at cottage number three.

‘You want to ask her where she was on Friday. She’d poison her grandmother for a haporth o’ nuts.’ Next door a window slammed.

‘And the bungalow . . . ?’

‘Don’t know nothing about them.’ She shut the door firmly.

‘That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’ said Troy as they walked down the path. ‘A tiny place like this and she doesn’t know anything about the people two doors down.’

‘It is indeed,’ replied Barnaby, arriving at the next cottage, lifting a grimacing pixie by the legs and letting go smartly.

An even older lady appeared and gave them roughly the same spiel, the only difference being that here the blood money came out as two pennorth o’ cheese. Then she laid a freckled bunch of weightless bones on the chief inspector’s sleeve. ‘Listen, young man,’ she said, suddenly appearing to him much the nicer of the two old ladies, ‘if you want to know what’s going on - or what’s coming off either’ - she gave a dry chuckle, shockingly lewd through withered lips - ‘you have a word with Mrs Rainbird next house down. She can tell you what’s in your hankie after you’ve blown your nose in the pitch dark behind locked doors. Spends all her time up in the loft with a pair of binoculars. Says she’s a ornyowzit. Camouflage.’ She repeated the word, tapping him on the lapel. ‘In my young day you hung over the gate and gossiped in the open. I don’t know what the world’s coming to and that’s a fact.’ She then confided that Mrs Rainbird had a son in the box and casket trade. ‘And a slimy little wart he is an’ all. They reckon he keeps his knickers in the fridge.’

Sergeant Troy snorted and turned it into a cough. Barnaby, having met Mr Rainbird, could only assume that they were right. He thanked the old lady and withdrew.

The bungalow was called Tranquillada. Barnaby thought this suggested a slightly relaxed version of the Spanish Inquisition. The name suspended from the neck of a large ceramic stork killing time on one leg by the front door. There was quite a large garden, beautifully kept and full of ornamental shrubs and roses. The silver Porsche was parked in the drive. Sergeant Troy chose the bell rather than the knocker and got a brief shrill earful of the dawn chorus. Dennis Rainbird appeared.

‘Well hullo again.’ He seemed delighted to see Barnaby. ‘And you’ve brought a friend.’ He gave Troy a radiant smile which bounced off the sergeant’s stony countenance like a ping-pong ball off a concrete slab. ‘Come in, come in. Mother,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘it’s the constabulary.’ He prounced it consta
bew
lery.

‘Oh but I was expecting them.’ A gentle fluting from some distance away.

The bungalow seemed much larger than the outside suggested and Dennis led them past several open doors before reaching the lounge. A kitchen that gleamed, a bedroom (all white and gold) that glittered and a second bedroom adorned with lots of red suede and shining brass.

‘I’m in the lounge, Denny,’ carolled the voice. It managed to sound every vowel the word possessed, then generously tossed in another O for good measure. As they entered Mrs Rainbird rose from her downy cushions as if from a nest.

She was very, very fat. She spread outwards and towered upwards. At least a quarter of her height seemed to be accounted for by her hair, which was a rigid pagoda-like structure: a landscape of peaks and waves, whorls and curls ending in a sharp point like an inverted ice-cream cone. It was the colour of butterscotch instant whip. She wore a great deal of makeup in excitable colours and a lilac caftan, rather short, revealing bolstery legs and tiny feet. The chief inspector fielded her welcoming glance, direct and sharp as a lancet, and introduced himself.

‘I knew you were on your way. I saw a car drive by whilst I was studying some swallows on the telephone wires. Such a charming arrangement. Quite like notes of music.’

‘Ah . . . perhaps it was you I glimpsed the other morning when I was in Church Lane? In your loft I think. An excellent vantage point.’

‘Hide is the term we ornithologists prefer, Mr Barnaby.’ A nip in the air. Barnaby begged her pardon. She waved a sparkling hand. ‘Won’t you sit down?’ Barnaby sank into an armchair thickly barnacled with bumps of crochet.

‘And what about you, dear?’ Dennis danced around Sergeant Troy. ‘Don’t you want to take the weight off those legs?’

Bristling with machismo, Troy selected the hardest chair, sat in it bolt upright and produced his pro-forma pad. A piercing whistle filled the air.

‘Denny? Pot to kettle.’ As he disappeared she said to Barnaby, ‘You’ll need to be fed and watered.’ Then, overriding his protests, ‘Now, now. Don’t tell me you’re not absolutely exhausted asking all those people all those questions. It’s quite ready.’

And so it was. Moments later, a gentle rattling preceding him, Dennis entered wheeling an overwrought trolley built along the lines of the altarpiece at the Brompton Oratory. This was loaded with tiny sandwiches in the shapes of playing card symbols and rich creamy cakes. Mrs Rainbird filled a plate for Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby and handed it over.

‘Now you mustn’t refuse, Mr Barnaby.’ (She addressed him as Mr Barnaby throughout their conversation, perhaps believing that policemen in the higher echelons were, like their medical counterparts, titularly civil.) ‘The inner man, you know.’

Her son poured the tea, his bloodless white fingers flickering over the crockery. He popped an apostle spoon with a large purple stone embedded in the handle in a saucer and handed it, with the cup, to Barnaby. Feeling slightly repelled, the chief inspector took it and leaned back rather uncomfortably on his crunchy support.

Dennis dealt an anchovy club, a salmon-spread spade, a potted-meat diamond and a marmite heart on to a plate, added a meringue erupting with chestnut-coloured worms, and swayed over to Sergeant Troy. He put everything on an occasional table, brought over the tea then swayed back to his mother. They beamed at each other then he plumped up her cushions before sitting, appropriately enough, on a pouffe at her feet. Finally Barnaby spoke.

‘We’re making inquiries into an unexplained death -’

‘Poor Miss Simpson of course,’ interrupted Mrs Rainbird. ‘I blame the parents.’

‘- and would be glad if you and your son could give me some idea of your whereabouts on the afternoon and evening of last Friday?’

‘Myself doing the flower arrangements and plants in the village hall. No doubt you’ve heard about the gymkhana?’ Barnaby indicated that he had. ‘I left around four-thirty with Miss Cadell of Tye House. One of the last as always. I’m afraid I’m one of those dreadful people who has to have everything just so.’ A little preen. A smug smile. She had a mouth like a goldfish which, even in repose, had a pushed-forward pouty expression. ‘“Delegate, Iris, delegate!” is my constant cry, but do you think I ever can? Where was I?’

‘One of the last to leave.’

‘Ah yes. I believe only Miss Thornburn, our dear Akela, remained.’

‘Did you happen to notice what time Miss Lacey left?’

‘A few minutes before four o’clock.’

‘Are you sure?’ Foolish question. He already felt he was in the presence of something oracular rather than merely observant. Mrs Rainbird obviously had the eye of an eagle and, almost as important, an eagle’s Olympian lack of interest in the welfare of its prey.

‘Quite sure,’ resumed Mrs Rainbird. ‘She slipped away, in my opinion,
in a very furtive manner indeed
.’ She deigned to glance at Sergeant Troy on the last few words to make sure he was noting them down. ‘But I’m rather curious as to why we’re being asked about the afternoon. I understood that Miss Simpson died much later.’

‘We’re not sure exactly when she died.’

‘Well she was definitely alive around five o’clock because I saw her.’

‘You saw her!’

‘Certainly I did.’ She basked for a moment in the warmth of his reaction. Dennis screwed his head round and gave her an approving smirk. ‘I just happened to be in the hide at the time, charting the flight of a waxwing. Emily came hurrying along Church Lane from the direction of the woods. She stopped once, holding her side. I wondered if she were ill and had almost decided to run over when Denny arrived for his tea. Didn’t you, pet?’ Did her hand tighten on his shoulder? Certainly the sparklers were activated into instant life.

‘Mm.’ He laid his cheek briefly against her knees. ‘I usually get home about five-thirty but that night -’

‘If you wouldn’t mind, Mr Rainbird. We’ll take those details in a moment.’

‘I can hardly wait.’ Dennis bit his lower lip, pink with delight at being the recipient of such masterful instructions. He smiled at Sergeant Troy, a smile as sweet and sickly as the vanilla slice he was consuming. ‘I don’t think the sergeant likes his marron
Lyonnaise
, Mother.’

‘Press him to a frangipane, then. Yes’ - she turned her attention back to Barnaby - ‘I was definitely concerned. In fact I’d almost decided to visit her after supper but then we got involved in a game of Monopoly and I felt it could wait till morning. She had a telephone after all and Miss Bellringer was close by. So we didn’t go out at all, did we, pet?’

‘No. Little home birds we.’

‘And who won all of Park Lane?’

‘Me, me!
And
a big chunk of Piccadilly.’

‘I saw Katherine Lacey again, though. Around eight o’clock time.’

‘Really? Wasn’t that a little late to be pursuing your hobby, Mrs Rainbird? What on earth is on the wing at that hour?’

‘Owls, Mr Barnaby.’ A very sharp look.

‘Ah.’

‘Denizens of the night.’

‘Quite so.’

‘We had taken a little break from the game, Denny was making some coffee and I just happened to glance out of the window.’

‘I see. Did you notice where Miss Lacey went?’

She leaned forward dramatically and, as she still had her hand on her son’s shoulder, so did he. What a macabre double act they were, thought Barnaby. He was unaccountably reminded of the Joe Orton play his wife had been in last month. They would have fitted a treat into that.

‘
She was turning into Church Lane
.’

‘Do you think she was calling on someone?’

‘I couldn’t see. The road curves sharply to the right almost immediately. She’d got one of the beagles with her. And a letter in her hand.’

‘So she may have been simply going to the post box?’ Mrs Rainbird lifted an eyebrow like a crayoned new moon. It said that if he believed that he’d believe anything. ‘And did you see her return?’

‘I’m afraid not.’ Her voice thickened with chagrin. ‘Mrs Pauncefoot rang. Wanted some more
Lilium regale
for the judges’ platform. If only I’d known’ - she punched her palm with her fist - ‘I would have kept watch.’

Her expression was far more than just peevish. She seemed to seethe with frustration at this reminder of an opportunity missed. She obviously couldn’t bear not to know what was going on between everyone, everywhere, all the time. Charting the flayt of a waxwing my backside, thought Barnaby, and turned to question her son.

‘At work all afternoon, which my partner will confirm, left around quarter to five, drove straight home and stayed there.’

‘I didn’t realize you were a partner in the business, Mr Rainbird.’

‘Mother bought me in on my twenty-first. I’d been there three years by then and just knew I wasn’t ever going to want to do anything else.’ He hugged his knees boyishly. ‘I absolutely adore it. You understand?’