The Package Included Murder (22 page)

The Hon. Con was grateful that Miss Jones wasn't here to listen to these dreadful revelations. ‘Are you sure?'

‘Of course I'm sure! Norman and I must have put it to the test in practically every hotel we've ever stayed in.'

The Hon. Con's eyes grew round. ‘You mean you go around opening other people's doors just to …'

‘I mean nothing of the kind! Don't be sillier than you need be, dear! It's simply that I am often in bed and fast asleep by the time Norman decides to come to bed. You know what he's like. He'd sit up drinking and talking all night with the cat if that's all the company he could find. Well, naturally he knows better than to wake me up at all hours to unlock the door for him and so, rather than disturb the hotel staff and get the pass key, he borrows the key of whichever layabout he happens to be with at the time. You'd be surprised how often it works.' Mrs Beamish broke off for a moment to permit herself a complacent smile. ‘ Oh, I've got him pretty well trained over the years! There's no dropping of boots or banging of doors with my Norman! Most nights I don't even hear him come in at all, and it's only when I see him in the morning that I know for sure he's not still out on the tiles.' She preened herself. ‘If there's one thing I will not stand, it's an inconsiderate husband. What I say is, why ask a girl to marry you, if you're not prepared to …'

The Hon. Con, down to nearly her last lick of ice-cream, wasn't widly interested in hints on the upbringing of husbands. ‘And the floormaid didn't see him because she was off getting herself that cup of tea.' She looked at Mrs Beamish with some respect. ‘By jove, I think you may have solved that little problem!'

‘Glad to have been of help, dear.' Most of Mrs Beamish's mind was on the feasibility of a third ice-cream. ‘ Of course, whatever happens now, I don't think I shall ever risk another package holiday. This one was Norman's idea, of course, though I did point out at the time that you simply would never know who you'd be rubbing shoulders with. And how right I was! Of course,' she added kindly, ‘people like you and Miss Clough-Cooper from good families are in quite a different category. It's those dreadful …'

‘Hang on a sec!' the Hon. Con broke in. ‘Look, I know anybody with half an eye can see that old Penny Clough-Cooper is as blue-blooded as they come, but just for a minute there you sounded as though you
knew.
'

Mrs Beamish looked up in surprise. ‘Well, I do, dear. Oh, I see what you're getting at! Well, as I told you, I've never met Miss Clough-Cooper before but, as a matter of fact, I do know her father. A perfect gentleman if ever I saw one! My own dear old Daddy thought very highly of him when they were associated together on that legal case. ‘ Some doctors,' Daddy always says, ‘are professionally and socially little better than butchers. Clough-Cooper is one of the shining exceptions!' Of course,' – Mrs Beamish picked up her spoon with a little moue of pleasure – ‘he was instrumental in saving Daddy a simply enormous sum of money.'

‘When did all this happen, for heaven's sake?' demanded the Hon. Con, feeling aggrieved.

‘Oh, years ago, dear. Eight? Ten? Something like that. I don't recall all the sordid details but Daddy was showing a prospective buyer over a house and he – the client, that is – fell though the staircase. Dry rot, I think. Well, he – was he called Wilberforce? – finished up in the cellar. It was quite a nasty fall, I grant you, but there was nothing broken. Apart from a few bruises and a bit of shock, he was as right as rain, really. Daddy was terribly upset and drove this man all the way home in his car and even sent him half a bottle of whisky as a ‘‘get-well'' present. You can imagine how surprised and
hurt
he was when, a day or two later, the solicitor's letter came. This Wilberforce brute was threatening to sue Daddy on the grounds that the fall had damaged his back for life. And the money he was asking for! You simply wouldn't credit the …'

The Hon. Con made a spunky effort to cut the cackle. ‘Where does Penny Clough-Cooper's father come in?'

‘That's what I'm trying to tell you, dear!' Mrs Beamish's voice had quite an edge to it. ‘Daddy got Mr Clough-Cooper to examine this Wilberforce crook and he said that there was absolutely nothing wrong with him and he was just putting it on to extort money out of us. Well, Daddy was simply furious …'

The Hon. Con's eyes glazed over as they sometimes did when she was thinking. She let Mrs Beamish rabbit on. There were a number of questions she would like to have asked, such as why the Wilberforce man was suing Mrs Beamish's father and not the owner of the house, but she let them go. There was another jigsaw puzzle that she was trying to put together in her head. Insurance claims, bad backs, Penny Clough-Cooper's father – it all added up to something somewhere.

‘Would either of you ladies like a lift back to the hotel?' Roger Frossell, sent across by his mother, was rather over-doing the courtesy bit. He waved a hand, which lacked only a hat with feathers in it, to where the remaining members of the party were piling recklessly into a whole fleet of taxis. ‘There is, apparently, room for a couple of little ones.'

In spite of this cheeky approach, neither Mrs Beamish nor the Hon. Con was going to pass up a bargain offer lightly. Hurriedly they lapped up the last drops of their ice-creams and called for the bill. There was much muted and anxious discussion about tipping. In spite of the fact that they were nearly at the end of their holiday, neither lady had yet come up against this problem. Was it, they asked each other, ‘done' to tip in the Soviet Union. In spite of much evidence to the contrary, they both decided it wasn't and carefully paid over the exact amounts before making a dash for it to the waiting taxis. A two-fingered gesture from the comrade waitress followed them.

‘Thank heavens!' said Mrs Withenshaw with heavy sarcasm. ‘I began to think you were never coming!' The Hon. Con was delighted to discover that nobody else had wished to share the back seat in her taxi with Penny Clough-Cooper and she flopped down happily beside her. ‘Get your shopping done all right?' she enquired breezily.

Penelope Clough-Cooper stared out of the window. ‘Yes,' she said stonily. If it had been possible to snub the Hon. Con, this monosyllable would have done it.

But it was not possible to snub the Hon. Con, especially when she was having a few twinges of conscience at having abandoned Penny Clough-Cooper for so long in favour of an ice-cream. From now on, she promised herself cheerfully, she would stick to the girl like the proverbial limpet. Miss Clough-Cooper's feelings on the matter were naturally not canvassed and the fact that she would probably have preferred being murdered to having the Hon. Con tied round her neck for twenty-four hours a day did not emerge.

The Albatrossers duly had their lunch and then found themselves at something of a loose end. The weather was still far too inclement for sun-bathing and nobody fancied trailing back down to the town again. The Smiths went back to bed and everybody else lounged around and wondered if you could die of boredom. Things brightened up a trifle in the evening, though the three-hour performance of national songs and dances was just about as much as most of them could stomach. As Mrs Frossell shyly commented, really when you'd seen one folk dance, you'd seen them all.

It was only right at bed-time that anybody could be really be said to have enjoyed themselves. That was when the most almighty row broke out between the Hon. Con and Penny Clough-Cooper as to where the latter was to spend the night. Miss Clough-Cooper was quite adamant that she wasn't going to share a bedroom with anybody, but she soon found that public opinion was against her. The Albatrossers, never a particularly long suffering lot, had had enough. With their return to normal life now only a matter of hours away, the last thing they wanted was any more excitement from Penny Clough-Cooper. Tony Lewcock spoke for all of them when he commented in an aside that the Hon. Con didn't quite catch, ‘Well, what does it matter if old Con does turn out to be the bloody murderer? It'll clear the rest of us from suspicion, won't it?'

Penny Clough-Cooper didn't give in without a struggle, though there's not much you can do when you're out-voted eleven to one with Miss Jones bravely abstaining. Eventually, and with a very bad grace, Miss Clough-Cooper bowed to the inevitable and was carried off in triumph by the Hon. Con. Miss Jones's face was, as they say, a picture.

It was still a picture when, just on half past seven the following morning, she came tapping on the Hon. Con's door. It was the Albatrossers' last morning in the Soviet Union and Miss Jones, for one, was not sorry.

The Hon. Con opened the door. She was fully dressed and looking down in the mouth. If the night, as Miss Jones suspected, had been passed in unbridled revelry, the Hon. Con for one had not enjoyed it. ‘Oh, it's you, Bones.'

Miss Jones was in no mood to make concessions but even she had to suppress a stab of sympathy. ‘Did everything go off all right, dear?'

‘Fine,' said the Hon. Con, slouching back to sit on the end of her bed.

‘I've just popped in to finish off your packing and to give Miss Clough-Cooper this head scarf. I found it under a chair in her bedroom. She must have dropped it last night when she was clearing her things out to make way for me. Er – where is she, by the way, dear?'

‘In the bathroom,' grunted the Hon. Con. ‘ She seems to spend most of her time in there. She's getting dressed.' The Hon. Con sighed. ‘She went to a day school, you see,' she added, as though that explained everything.

Miss Jones looked round. ‘Well, I'll just leave the scarf on this chair, dear, if you'll …'

The Hon. Con stretched out her hand. It was, Miss Jones noted rather sadly, a little grubby. Really, if you didn't stand over Constance twenty-four hours a day … ‘I'll give it to her,' said the Hon. Con.

Miss Jones dropped the head scarf into the Hon. Con's hand. It was an action that spoke louder than words but the Hon. Con was too preoccupied with unfolding the somewhat drab coloured, paisley silk square.

‘Pretty!' said the Hon. Con admiringly.

Miss Jones decided to stuff the Hon. Con's packing. ‘ We have to leave for the airport in three-quarters of an hour,' she said indifferently. ‘And you haven't had your breakfast yet.'

‘Be there in a jiffy,' muttered the Hon. Con, staring as though mesmerised at Penny Clough-Cooper's scarf. Amongst the usual plethora of designs and patterns, one motif seemed suddenly to stand and shout. It was roughly circular in shape, maybe an inch and a half in diameter. In the centre was a red figure ‘I' with, superimposed, a crossed golf club and a pole bearing a small, triangular flag. Beneath was a white golf ball.

Even the Hon. Con at her most dim-witted could work this out.

A thought struck her – maybe the scarf was borrowed. But, no! A cash's name tape sewn neatly in one corner proclaimed that it was, in very truth, the property of P. Clough-Cooper.

There was a rattle from the other side of the bathroom door as the bolt was shot back. The Hon. Con jumped guiltily and then, with a warning scowl at the bewildered Miss Jones, hurriedly folded the scarf up again and placed it on the dressing-table.

Not many people, even amongst the sophisticated travelling public, will have heard of Bleastead Moor Airport, and fewer will have been unlucky enough to have endured its facilities. They should count their blessings.

In 1945, after having been a totally undistinguished and highly uncomfortable bomber station during the war, Bleastead Moor sank back happily into the state of rural slumdom for which nature had always intended it. Cows grazed on the air field and a neighbouring farmer fattened his pigs in the Control Tower. Then some idiot with more money than sense got the bright idea of challenging Heathrow, Stanstead and Gatwick on their own ground. The challenge had been accepted and the gauntlet was slapped resoundingly across Bleastead Moor's blighted acres. One could have selected a more inconvenient site for a new international air port, but it would have been hard. No reputable airline would touch the place with a barge-pole and it survived, a financial miracle, on the patronage of firms like the Albatross (Glencoe) Travel Agency, who had presumably been seduced by the extravagant claims of its advertising and its near-criminal extended credit.

Albatross, in turn, made a virtue of necessity. ‘Why slog all the way to London?' it asked. ‘ Fly cheaply, safely and conveniently from Bleastead Moor – Britain's
newest
airport and your own special magic carpet launching pad!' Nor did the lavishness stop there. Nothing was too good for Albatross customers. ‘Avail yourself of our
exclusive
‘pick-you-up-put-you-down' service! We collect you
from your own home
at the start of your wonder-holiday, and return you there at the end! FREE!! Ride in our
luxury
mini-buses, driven by our own, hand-picked, glad-to-serve-you chauffeurs! Ask yourself –
WHO ELSE OFFERS YOU AS MUCH
??'

Many an Albatrossers recalled these glowing promises and burning phrases as he wandered despairingly round Bleastead Moor's echoing Nissen huts. It was four o'clock in the morning and our travellers were tired, bad tempered and stupid after their flight from Moscow. Inevitably, it had been one of those days and nobody was really surprised that there was no sign of their luxury mini-bus or of their hand-picked, glad-to-serve-you chauffeur. There was no sign either of their Albatross courier (‘we call them your smiling holiday friends') who was
guaranteed
to meet every package tour ‘to welcome you home, receive your appreciation and hear your complaints (if any)'. This probably saved a lynching, of course, but it was still very frustrating.

‘They're crooks!' howled Jim Lewcock, in a right paddy because the Customs had not only found but confiscated his packet of dirty postcards. When he thought of all the trouble he'd gone to to get them, he could have spat! You don't find pornography growing on trees in the Soviet Union, you know. ‘Bloody crooks!'