Written in Blood (11 page)

‘Not much point in trying that,’ said Barnaby. On the top of a cracked flight of steps was a mass of dried leaves and twiggy bits which the wind had piled against the front door. ‘Doesn’t look as if it’s been opened for years.’

As they made their way down the side of the house Troy said, only half joking, ‘Beggars and tradesmen round the back.’

They found a second opening. Poorly made and ill fitting, the door was the type that usually leads simply to an outhouse, but it was the only one visible so Barnaby rapped on it. Quite loudly, but without result.

He waited for a few moments and was about to try again when Troy stayed his hand. A woman, having made her way through a bareish vegetable garden, was crossing the stone courtyard towards them. A large, middle-aged woman in a shapeless, lumpy woollen skirt, a Barbour almost black with age and a waterproof fisherman’s hat. A worn leather pouch hung around her neck, bouncing on the granite shelf of her bosom like a nosebag on a horse. She had a huge face, an expanse of raw red flesh, the features lassoed into a tight, malignant bunch in the centre, dark shaggy eyebrows and a mouth like a gin trap. She was what Troy’s dad would have called ‘as ugly as sin’.

‘I was right about this place,’ Troy mumbled just before she hove into earshot. ‘Here’s Dracula’s mother.’

To the men’s astonishment she walked straight past them as if they were invisible, lifted the wooden latch in the old door and slammed it in their faces. Barnaby was furious. He raised his fist and thundered on the shaky panels. The door was immediately snatched open.

‘How dare you! Can’t you read?’ She pointed a Fair Isled digit at a weathered metal plate: No Hawkers. No Circulars. ‘Go away at once or I shall call the police.’

‘We are the police,’ replied Barnaby and his helpmate smirked invisibly at the sweet neatness of this riposte. Arrogant, fart-faced old biddy.

‘Well, why didn’t you say so?’

‘We were hardly given an opportunity.’ Barnaby reached inside his overcoat and produced his warrant card. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby. Causton CID.’

‘What do you want?’

‘To ask a few questions. I take it you are Miss Lyddiard?’

‘Questions about what?’

‘Could we come inside for a moment?’

She gave an impatient and irritated sigh but stood back, admitting them into what is now called a utility room, though this one had the floor area of a two-bedroomed bungalow. It was full of old furniture, a rubber-rollered mangle, garden tools, jumbled-up sports equipment - croquet mallets, tennis racquets and nets - and bicycles. There was a long workbench covered with dahlia corms, drying bulbs and other gardening paraphernalia.

A family of five could live in this, bridled Sergeant Troy as he made his way silently behind the others though, in truth, he had little concern for either the homeless or the destitute.

At the far end of the room was a second door much more solid and with a wire-mesh glass panel in the top half. Honoria pushed at this and they were in the kitchen. Another vast space - high ceilinged, shabby and extremely cold.

It was not unoccupied. A small, round woman, wearing baggy trousers and several sweaters topped with a cardigan embroidered vividly with butterflies, was making pastry at an ancient deal table. She stopped immediately when they came in, looking embarrassed and a little apprehensive, as if caught out in some foolishness.

Barnaby, uncertain whether this was the sister-in-law, the cook or someone else entirely, waited to be informed, but in vain.

‘We’re investigating a suspicious death.’ He addressed the two of them equally. ‘I’m afraid a near neighbour of yours. Mr Hadleigh.’

He observed their twin expressions of incredulity without surprise and wondered how many more times he would be faced with just such a reaction before the day was out. It was always the same. No one could ever believe that someone they had recently seen alive and apparently well was no more. It was impossible. That sort of thing only happened to strangers. An unknown name in the papers. An alien face on the television screen.

The woman in the cardigan had gone deathly pale. She had a sweet face which seemed made for happiness, not the slack-jawed distress that had now overtaken it.

‘Gerald . . . But we only . . . oh. Ohhh . . .’

‘For heaven’s sake, Amy. Remember who you are.’ Honoria seized her sister-in-law by the arm and bundled her, none too gently, into the nearest chair. ‘There are strangers present.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Amy trembled and looked around with the air of a child seeking comfort. Barnaby suspected she might be in for a long wait. Honoria spoke.

‘There has obviously been some abhorrent mix up,’ she said firmly, putting both of them straight once and for all.

Barnaby could imagine her on the seashore forbidding the waves their approach. Or standing in the eye of a storm sending the wind about its business.

‘I’m afraid not, Miss Lyddiard. Mr Hadleigh was killed late yesterday.’

‘Killed. Are you saying—’

‘Murdered. Yes, I’m afraid so.’

Amy burst into a storm of frightened tears. Honoria sat down and became very still. Her face had a stripped quality as if she had suddenly forgotten everything that she had ever known. Eventually she said, ‘I see.’

‘I understand that there was a meeting at his house last night and that you were both present.’

‘How perfectly frightful.’

‘Indeed.’

‘And in Midsomer Worthy. I warned people again and again, but no one would listen.’ Her grey eyes stared directly at him and Barnaby was frigorified. He had never seen such coldness. ‘The barbarians are at the gates.’

‘I’m sure you would wish to help—’

‘What has this dreadful business to do with us? I am a Lyddiard, as is my brother’s wife. Our name is woven into the very warp and woof of England and above reproach.’

Oh dear, oh dear, mused Troy. Pardon me while I curtsey. Knowing he was expected to remove it he pushed his cap to the back of his head with his thumb and glanced around with bold derision, taking in cracked gloss paint on walls the colour of dirty custard, free-standing old-fashioned cupboards and a huge Electrolux fridge of the type that was obsolete before Adam went into the cider business. He’d be ashamed to ask Maureen to keep her yoghurts in it. If I couldn’t do better than this, reflected Troy, with a deep inner glow of satisfaction, I’d shoot myself. He tuned back in.

‘. . . and so, I am sure you would wish to help us in any way you can.’ Here Barnaby paused, wondering if, by introducing the word ‘duty’, he had overstretched his luck but it seemed not.

‘Naturally we would wish to do all that we can to bring this miscreant to justice. If justice it can these days be called.’

Barnaby recognised a note of harsh longing and guessed that Honoria was wistfully recalling the days when a villein could be publicly disembowelled for patting his master’s dog. He said, ‘Could you perhaps tell us first who was present at your meeting last night and give us their addresses.’ Troy wrote the details down. ‘And you met, how often?’

‘Once a month.’

‘And did yesterday follow the usual pattern?’

‘No. We had a guest speaker.’ Already she was sounding impatient. ‘What on earth has our meeting to do with someone breaking in and attacking Gerald?’

‘No one broke in, Miss Lyddiard.’ Barnaby saw the release of this information as inevitable given the form his questioning would be compelled to take.

‘You mean’ - Amy was staring in disbelief - ‘Gerald just opened the door and let him in?’

‘Opening the door’ - Honoria separated her words and spoke loudly as if Amy was not only mentally retarded but deaf as well - ‘is not the same as letting someone in. People are always calling round,’ she turned back to Barnaby, ‘delivering rubbishy newspapers, begging for charity or asking for jumble—’

‘At that hour of the night?’ Troy consciously exaggerated his West of Slough twang, whining his vowels and dropping his T’s - emphasising the social divide but on his own terms. He could have saved his breath. Honoria did not even deign to glance in his direction, just stared blankly down her nose, her expression that of someone noticing a fresh and particularly repulsive specimen of doggy doo in the middle of their priceless Aubusson.

‘A guest speaker?’ reminded Barnaby.

‘Grave disappointment. Max Jennings. Some sort of novelist.’

The name sounded vaguely familiar, though Barnaby couldn’t think from where. Certainly it would not be from personal experience, for he never read fiction. Indeed hardly read at all, preferring to paint or cook or garden in his spare time.

‘Consequently,’ concluded Honoria, ‘we finished later than usual. Around ten thirty.’

‘And did you all leave then?’

‘All but Rex St John. And Jennings.’

‘To go straight home?’

‘Of course,’ snapped Honoria, adding, without apparent irony, ‘it was a dark and stormy night.’

‘And you didn’t go out again?’ She stared at him as if he were mad. ‘Or return to Plover’s Rest for any reason?’

Pluvvers is it? noted Troy, who had been rhyming it with Rover’s, as in Return.

‘Certainly not.’

‘And . . .’ Barnaby turned to the younger woman. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t . . .’

‘Mrs Lyddiard - Amy. No. I didn’t go out either.’

‘Did you retire straight away?’ Barnaby asked.

‘Yes,’ replied Honoria. ‘I had a headache. The visitor was allowed to smoke. A disgusting habit. He wouldn’t have done it here.’

‘And you, Mrs Lyddiard?’ Barnaby smiled encouragingly.

‘Not quite straight away. First I made us a drink - cocoa actually—’

‘They don’t want to know every little detail of our domestic life.’

‘I’m sorry, Honoria.’

‘Why don’t you tell them how much sugar you put in? Describe the cups and saucers.’

Amy’s full lower lip started to quiver and Barnaby gave up. There seemed little point, given Honoria’s recent strictures on the spreading of gossip, in persisting. Plenty of other people were yet to be questioned and some, merely by the law of averages, were bound to prove co-operative. And he could always get back to Mrs Lyddiard, preferably when she was alone. But Troy jumped in where his superior had decided not to tread. Touching his tie and ostentatiously displaying nicotined fingertips he said, ‘What sort of man was Mr Hadleigh?’

‘He was a gentleman.’

And that put paid to that. End of conversation, end of audience. Barnaby explained that their fingerprints would be needed. Honoria retaliated with great vigour. Such a degrading procedure was quite out of the question. As Amy was showing them out she could be heard declaiming loudly, ‘Jumped up clowns!’

A gentleman
. Troy kicked savagely at the gravel as they made their way back to the rusty gate. Of course we all know what that means. The upper crust on life’s farm-house. He lit a cigarette. A member of the club. Right tie. Right accent. Right attitude. Right sort of money. Right wing. (Troy himself was extremely right wing, but from quite a different jumping-off point, and for quite different reasons.) And, of course, blue balls.

‘You can’t believe folk like that, can you?’ He opened the gate and stood aside to let Barnaby pass through. ‘In this D and A. I bet she’s never done a stroke of work in her life. Bloody parasite.’

‘Now look.’ Barnaby, his voice sharp and irritable, stopped in mid-stride. His back ached from standing and he liked being patronised no more than the next man. ‘Your prejudices are your own affair, Gavin, unless they interfere with your work, in which case they also become mine. Our job is to extract information and to persuade people to reveal themselves. Anything that hinders this procedure is a time-wasting bloody nuisance. And I don’t expect to find it coming from my own side of the fence.’

‘Sir.’

‘Have you got that?’

‘Yeah. Got that.’ The sergeant chewed furiously on his high tar. ‘It’s just they get up my fucking nose.’

‘No one’s asking you to pretend liking or respect. In any case either attitude would be as inappropriate as the one you’re currently wallowing in. Your own feelings are immaterial. Or should be. Self-absorption is fatal in our job. We should be looking out, not in.’

‘Yeah,’ said Troy again. ‘Sorry, chief.’

Trouble was, he knew Barnaby was right. And on the whole he did look out for he loved his work and wanted to do it well. Troy took great pride even in his most modest achievements - of which, it had to be said, there were many. He decided to make a real effort. Politeness to a fault would be the order of the day. After all, civility cost nothing. But there’d be no green-welly licking. Green-welly licking was right out.

By this time they were halfway across the green. Kitty Fosse, a dark, attractive girl, a reporter on the
Causton Echo
, came running to meet them.

‘Hi, chief inspector. What’s the story?’

‘Hullo, Kitty.’ He walked on. The reporter, hurrying to keep up, stumbled over a tussock of grass and Troy leapt forward to assist.

‘Someone in the crowd said a body had been taken out,’ she said, while attempting to retrieve her arm.

‘That’s the case, yes.’

‘And is it the man who lived there? (Thank you, sergeant, I can manage.) A certain,’ she checked her spiral notebook, ‘Gerald Hadleigh?’

‘Mr Hadleigh was found dead early today in suspicious circumstances.’

‘Who by? (I said I could manage!)’ She wrenched her arm away. ‘How was he killed?’

‘You know the form, Kitty. There’ll be a proper statement later from communications.’

As the chief strode away Troy turned to the girl. ‘Why don’t we meet up later for a drink? Might have a leak for you by then.’

‘You’re not catching me on that one twice.’ Kitty gave him a look of deep disgust.

‘Sorry?’

‘Eighteen months ago. The Jolly Cavalier?’ She had naively gone along hoping for some sort of scoop, but had received instead several propositions, none of which was fit for a girl to blow her nose on.