Eat, Drink and Be Buried (20 page)

“Ah, yes, sir—they told me I might find you here. There's an urgent phone call for you.” He handed me a cell phone. “Just leave it in the kitchen when you're finished.”

A pleasant female voice greeted me. It had a vaguely familiar tone to it.

“This is Dr. Wyatt. We haven't exactly met but we have people—friends—in common. Listen, it's very important that we talk at once. I can't explain over the phone but it concerns events at the castle. I live in the village—Stony Stratton. Can you come here right away?”

The last sentence was couched as a question but it had a ring of authority that one might expect from a doctor. Even so, I was hesitant. She picked up on my hesitation. “It really is very urgent.”

“All right. Where are you in the village?”

“Seventeen, Laurel Cottages. Do you know the village at all?”

“A little. I know the High Street and the Post Office.”

“Laurel Cottages is a lane that runs off the High Street just past the Post Office.”

“I'll be there,” I said.

A shuttle bus was about to leave and I boarded, getting almost the last seat.

The shuttle bus stopped in what was called the village square. It was hardly big enough to merit the name, its main feature being the Church of St. Anselm which fronted onto it. It was just a small village church, but it had one unusual feature, one seen in just a few churches throughout England: a clock set into its façade. The time was a quarter to five. As I got off the bus, a blue van went by. It looked like the one I had seen at the castle. It slowed, and as the bus moved away, I saw the van stop on the other side of the High Street. I took a few paces so I could see just where. It was in front of a café-restaurant. The sign said “Roberto's.”

It was flanked by a greengrocer's shop and a butcher's. Busy shoppers were going in and out. Adjoining the greengrocer's, the Ripon Arms was doing a modest trade.

While I was watching, a young man in an apron came out of Roberto's. The rear door of the van swung open from the inside and the young man lifted out a cardboard crate. He took it inside the café and the van drove down the street. I believed that solved one mystery. Now for another.

A phone box was in front of the pub. The Stony Strattonians were a law-abiding bunch—at least, they didn't vandalize their phone boxes. The thin phone book was neither torn nor battered. I opened it. Sure enough, there was a Dr. Evelyn Wyatt, and she did indeed live at Seventeen, Laurel Cottages, in Stony Stratton, Hertfordshire. So my precaution was unnecessary. But I had found myself in trouble before—trouble that could have been avoided if I had taken this same elementary step.

The lane called Laurel Cottages was clearly signposted—an ancient cobbled thoroughfare that might have accommodated horses but certainly not vehicular traffic. To make certain that this prohibition was clear, two heavy wrought-iron posts were set to bar anything other than pedestrians.

The cottages were upmarket versions of what were once called “workingmen's cottages,” and still are in the estate agent business. All have been thoroughly modernized and are now quite expensive. The workingmen of a century ago would be turning over in their graves if they knew what their old homes were bringing.

Gardens in front blazed with flowers. Door knockers, handles, and letterboxes gleamed polished brass, and the mullioned windows were clean and sparkling. Number Seventeen was no exception.

I rang the bell. There was no reply. I tried again, still without reply. I looked up and down the street. No one was in sight. I tried the door and it opened. I stepped inside, feeling a slight shiver of apprehension.

I called out. All was quiet. I went on in, carefully leaving the door wide open.

The front parlor, as it would have been called in its heyday, was tastefully furnished without losing a period atmosphere. I went through into the next room. Books lined the walls, mostly massive medical tomes. Certificates and diplomas were hung behind a handsome carved desk with a green baize inset. File cabinets filled the rest of the space.

I called out again and there was still no answer. I went into the adjacent kitchen—and stopped. A woman was slumped over the table.

Her skin was still warm. I examined her quickly, but no signs of life remained. I leaned over her and inhaled. There was the faintest odor but it was sufficient. It was one I remembered.

In my business, I have to remember tastes and odors the way an insurance man has to remember actuarial tables and a bookmaker has to remember odds. I had only smelled this odor once before, but that had also been from a dead body—the body of Kenny Bryce.

The woman wore a dark blue sweater of light wool and a skirt in a tweedy pattern on a slim, trim figure. One arm lay across the table and her head was turned sideways alongside it. I bent down to look at her.

She was good-looking, probably in her late forties. She was familiar—but where? Then I recalled. I had seen her twice before, and both times she had been at Harlington Castle. She was the woman I had seen with Sir Gerald.

I checked for a pulse once more, then hurried to the study. Hadn't I seen a phone on the desk? Yes, there it was. I dialed nine-nine-nine and asked for the police.

A female voice answered on the first ring. I replied to all her crisp questions and was told to wait where I was, the police would be there. I hung up and had not moved when—

The doorbell rang.

A
UNIFORMED POLICE CONSTABLE
stood there.

I knew that the British police were wonderful, but this response must be a hot candidate for the
Guinness Book of Records.

“You reported a disturbance here, sir?”

He was a youngish man, but he had been out of police training for enough years to view me with a careful mix of suspicion and caution.

“May I come in, sir?” He was already coming in before I could answer.

“Of course,” I said. “You surprised me—”

“Yes, sir. Now perhaps you can tell me who you are—”

“No, I meant arriving so quickly. I had only just hung up the phone.”

He looked me over, then his eyes swept through the room.

“We received the call about twenty minutes ago, sir. I was out at the hospital when it came in. I came here as quickly as I could.”

“Not my call,” I said, keeping as calm as I could.

“Ah, you called too, did you, sir?” I didn't like his tone of polite skepticism.

“Yes. You'd better come into the kitchen.”

I led him into the kitchen. I heard him catch his breath as he saw the body. He wasn't that experienced, evidently, but he examined her efficiently.

“The lady's dead, sir,” he said, standing up and not taking his eyes from me.

He took the cell phone from his breast pocket. His report was concise. He answered questions from a superior who was put on the line. He snapped off the phone.

“We'd better go into the other room. I'll have to ask you a few questions before the inspector gets here.”

I knew the technique. Get a suspect or a witness to talk as soon after the event as possible. Compare their answers at that time to their answers to the same questions asked later. Pick on the slightest discrepancies.

The young constable did a competent job. I responded to his question about my presence, and he looked up when I said that I was temporarily at the castle.

“Ah, yes, having some trouble there, aren't they? Well, if you're there, you'll know Inspector Devlin.”

I admitted the acquaintance.

“She'll be here in a few minutes,” he told me. “We're lucky she's so close by.”

I agreed how lucky we were.

The constable went on with his inquiries, digging deeper and deeper. All I learned was that the woman in the study was indeed Dr. Evelyn Wyatt and that this was her cottage. I didn't like some of his innuendoes—he didn't put them that way but that was what they were. Still, I kept my answers tight and simple. It was not that I had anything to hide, but I knew that when the redoubtable Inspector Maureen Devlin arrived, she would be asking me exactly the same questions—along with plenty of new ones.

An hour later, she was still asking. She had arrived after a few minutes, as predicted. Whether or not she would be in charge of this case, she didn't know yet, she said. But as she was in the immediate vicinity, she had been instructed to make a preliminary investigation.

She did it with the same cut-and-thrust style I had already become familiar with. She sounded as if she did not believe a word I said, and she would pound on the same point from different angles, sometimes making a case from one word.

When she had heard my story four times, I felt that she accepted it. Not enough to admit it by any means, but enough to get me off the hook. For the moment anyway.

I became more convinced of this as I gleaned fragments of information from her questions. The local police station had logged my call, but the reason the constable showed up so promptly was that they had received a call twenty minutes earlier. She avoided telling me whether it was a man or a woman, but someone describing him- or herself as “a neighbor” had reported hearing a suspicious noise from Number Seventeen. That was what the young constable had been investigating. It was why he had concluded his business at the hospital and taken twenty minutes to get here, and it was why he was so surprised at finding a dead body.

The distinct impression emerged that Inspector Devlin knew a lot about Dr. Wyatt. When I told the inspector of seeing the doctor twice at Harlington Castle, there were no queries concerning my knowledge as to why she might be there. I felt sure that the wily inspector knew. She wasn't out of questions, though.

“So you have never talked to Dr. Wyatt?”

I had told her that three times but I kept a tight rein on a sarcastic answer.

“That's right. I have never talked to her in the flesh.”

“And when she phoned you today to ask you to come here, you weren't surprised to get such a call?”

“I had no reason to connect the woman who called me with the woman I had seen at the castle.”

“Nevertheless, you weren't surprised?”

“Let's say I was puzzled but not dumbfounded. I came right away because I was curious.”

“What did you expect to learn by coming here?”

“I had no idea. She told me she was a doctor but nothing else. I had no idea what to expect,” I added to make the point clear.

She continued her patient and irritatingly repetitive interrogation. Finally, she came to the one query I had been waiting for. She didn't do so directly. She nodded as if satisfied and started to sit back with a body language that said she was finished. Then she rapped: “What connection is there between the doctor's death and the events at the castle?”

“I can't think of one,” I said.

“Try. Try hard.”

I paused for a few seconds so that she could see I was thinking. I had been turning over that very point in my mind ever since I had received the phone call, so it was no problem for me to say, “Absolutely none, Inspector. I can't think what connection there could be.”

She studied me and her rawboned face hardened, if that were possible.

“If there is,” she said, and her voice grew raspier, “I'm going to find it. So you'd better be telling me the truth.”

I contented myself with the least of nods.

“We find you in a room with a dead body. You say you came in response to a phone call. You say you found the doctor dead when you got here. Someone else, a neighbor, had already called us to report a suspicious noise.”

“Anonymous?” I asked.

She ignored that. I took it to be a yes. “We could take you into custody,” she said, though I could detect no emotion in the statement, “but I'm going to let you return to Harrington Castle. You are still doing that medieval food business there, aren't you?”

Under other circumstances I would have hotly debated that description. I just said yes.

She stood. “You can go. I'll talk to you at the castle tomorrow.”

I went. Quickly.

The dining room had the pleasure of my patronage that evening. Finding the dead body of Dr. Evelyn Wyatt had taken the edge off my appetite to say the least, but I had to eat. I wanted a meal beyond the limits of the cafeteria but decided against a repeat visit to the banquet room. The dining room filled the gap neatly.

A smoked eggplant salad provided a good start to the meal. For the main course, I chose the roast quail, stuffed with spinach and served on a bed of roasted leeks with wild rice and orzo pilaf. A guest nearby at the table had peppered lamb chops. They were accompanied by Idaho potatoes, braised in lemon-flavored chicken stock, then baked and lightly fried. Another had a walnut-crusted salmon fillet. With it came a sauce of garlic and cucumber whisked into yogurt.

It was very satisfying meal, even though I could not concentrate on it as it deserved. I am skeptical of coincidences so I found it hard to accept that the doctor's death did not fit somehow into the bizarre events at the castle. I had seen her here twice. Each time, she had been with Sir Gerald.

The fact that Sir Gerald's wife was in a nursing home and incurably insane was impossible to ignore. He was still an active and good-looking man, despite his years. Could there be a liaison between the doctor and Sir Gerald? But what might that have to do with the doctor's death?

I recalled Francis Somerville, Knight Pursuivant at the London Heralds' Society, who had told me that Sir Gerald had only months to live. Might that not make him all the more determined to enjoy the remainder of his life? Could the attractive doctor have been the way to do that?

A number of other lines of inquiry began to pop into my mind. How to get answers to them? Sergeant Winnie Fletcher was the one to provide those, and I also needed to talk to her about her investigations to see if anything new had come up on the poisoning of the visitors to the castle.