Murder Among Us (12 page)

"Yes, I am. Unforgettable, fantastic stuff."

"He was a homicidal maniac.''

"Speaking of homicide," he began but she interrupted.

"I know absolutely nothing about that. I suppose you want to talk about Ellen's murder again. I've already told you I know nothing whatsoever about it! I saw Ellen earlier as I'd expected to. She was a committee member and I expected her support. When I demonstrated at the opening of the hotel, it was in the cause of the environment, our history, our heritage! Preserving things, Chief Inspector, not destroying them! And I repeat, I have no regrets!" She tossed her mane of black curls. "I dare say you think I'm a crank. No!"

She held up a beringed hand on the assumption, he felt somewhat premature, that he was going to disagree. "Say so, if that is what you think. However, I am not. I have lived in Bamford all my life. As for other longtime residents, Springwood Hall was a part of my childhood. I know that no family has lived there for years, but it was put to other uses. It was a school for a while, if you remember, and then a holiday centre for the handicapped—only of course it was a little too remote and it didn't have the facilities so they had to give it up. I visited it myself when it was a holiday centre for the disadvantaged and gave some art classes. They were great fun. We held a little exhibition of our creative work afterwards in the church hall and everyone who came along to see it was amazed and impressed.

"I know that the Hall was left without a use over the past few years, but a new use could and should have been found for it. Something which would have left it

accessible to the people of Bamford and the surrounds." She pulled a face. "I don't think many Bamford people will be dining in the new restaurant! It will be an island of wealthy strangers, visitors, birds of passage and worst of all, it will be 'off bounds' to local people!"

Markby wondered if she knew she had found his Achilles' heel. ''That's all very well and I can't argue with your basic principles," he wanted to say, "I agree with you that in a perfect world some use would have been found for the place so that it could serve the community. But the plain fact was no one wanted it. It wasn't suitable, as both the school and the disabled charity had already discovered. And with no one offering to take it on, it was falling down in the meantime and repairs were going to cost a small fortune." But getting into an argument with Hope was not why he had come here so he said none of this aloud.

"Mrs. Bryant was a member of your committee." He dragged the conversation firmly back to police matters. 'Tm trying to find out as much as I can about her. She doesn't seem to have had many friends and so her contacts with your committee become very important."

The word important appealed to Hope. She rustled the tent and gave a sort of satisfied chirrup. One of the three dogs slumbering about the room looked up and yapped. Markby eyed them with some misgiving and surreptitiously picked pekinese hairs from his jacket sleeve.

"She was not," said Hope curtly, "a friendly person. Ellen was really a problem."

"Oh, to the society?"

"No, to herself. One can always tell an unhappy person, Chief Inspector. They spread their misery. They push it on to other people. She was bitter."

"About what?"

"How should I know?" Hope's ample shoulders quivered. "I tried to be friendly, goodness knows I tried. I even asked her if she'd like to join one of my craft classes at the poly. I mean, she was artistic—in a way. A commercial sort of way."

No one had said the word commercial like that, thought Markby, amused, since the word * 'trade" had been unacceptable in a gentleman's drawing room. 4 'And what did Ellen reply?" he asked.

The violet tent heaved. "She was very rude! She said she had no interest in painting daubs and stringing beads! She could be very coarse. I'm not surprised she had no friends!"

"No one in particular in the society?"

"No. Well—" Hope paused. "No. Not really."

He let that go for the time being. "Can you think of any reason why she was killed?"

"Chief Inspector!" Hope leaned forward. "You should not be wondering about why, you should be wondering about where! You should be at that hotel asking questions, not here!"

"In what way could her death be linked directly with the hotel, other than it taking place there on a very public occasion?"

"You really are a very tiresome man. I should have thought it was obvious. She found out something sinister about that place and she was killed to prevent her telling!"

"Found out what?"

"That's your job to establish," said Ms. Mapple, throwing herself back on her divan. "Not mine. Go and talk to Schuhmacher."

"Well, I dare say I shall," Markby said, rising to take his leave. "Oh, in the meantime, if you should think of anything you may have forgotten to mention, you can just pick up the phone and give me a call or leave a message, you know. In the utmost confidence."

She stared at him resentfully.

The rain had stopped when he left Hope's flat to drive to Springwood Hall. The countryside looked freshly washed and green. It had been a pleasant summer and it was hard to think that in only a few weeks' time the

leaves would change colour and flutter from the trees in showers of red and gold.

The harvest was in, fields shaved to ground level and here and there black patches marked where a few farmers still burned stubble, something they wouldn't be allowed to do much longer. Markby was pleased about the recent ban, only too aware that the drifting smoke from burning fields had been known to cause traffic accidents or to flare up into conflagrations requiring the fire brigade. Moreover he had walked over fields scorched by the flame and mourned the charred bodies of fieldmice. Dotted about the field he passed at the moment pheasants roamed, both handsome and incongruous in their bronze, purple and sea-green plumage. They had left the cover of nearby woods perhaps knowing by some instinct that the open season for them was still some weeks away.

Eric greeted him with a kind of gloomy enthusiasm. "You have made no progress. I see it in your face. But you've come to tell me so in person and I appreciate that. Make yourself comfortable. I will open up a bottle of good wine—or perhaps you would prefer a beer?"

*'Sadly I'm driving myself so I'll have to refuse both. But a cup of coffee would be much appreciated."

"Of course." Schuhmacher reached for the phone and spoke on some internal link to the kitchens. Then he put down the receiver and sat back in the comfortable leather-covered armchair in his private sitting room. "Well, then? She remains a mystery, this lady in my wine cellars?"

"Afraid so. Very much a lady of secrets. I've— I've just been to see Miss Mapple of the historical society—"

Eric's face had changed, working alarmingly. "That woman! She should be in an asylum! Locked away! Locked away for everone's sake!"

"I'd rather not become personally involved in that argument, Eric. The puzzle for me is this. Ellen Bryant was killed here. Therefore her killer was also here. But

Ellen came here to demonstrate or lend her support to Miss Mapple's demonstration. So why did her killer come here? Only following Ellen? Did he or she know about the planned disruption of the opening? Or was the killer here already in some other capacity?"

"I hope you do not accuse my staff. That would be nonsense. He or she probably came for the same reason as the Mapple woman and belongs to the same crazy society! They would stop at nothing, that bunch of lunatics!"

The door opened and coffee was brought in by a young man in waiter's black trousers, shirtsleeves and waistcoat, with a bow tie. When he had left them and Eric had poured coffee for them both, Markby said in reasonable tones, *'However strongly the society felt about your use of the Hall, I don't think they would go so far as literally to sacrifice one of their members to disrupt the opening."

'They would do anything!" said Schuhmacher ominously.

"Come off it, Eric, not murder."

"As it happens, I have made inquiries of my own. I am told that the dead woman and Miss Mapple were not friends. They had some quarrel. If you wish to know who told me, it was one of the chambermaids here, a local girl. She worked for a week or two as a cleaner for Miss Mapple but gave it up because, it seems, the woman Mapple's flat is infested with dogs and the furniture covered in hair."

That was true enough. "What is this chambermaid's name?"

"Ah—Pollock, I think. Denise, I believe she is called, or Deirdre. I am not sure which. You wish to see her?"

"Not right now but I'll send my sergeant over to have a word with her, if that's all right." Markby sipped his coffee. "This is excellent coffee."

"Of course," said Schuhmacher testily. "Everything here is of the best. And to what purpose? To get lurid

stories in the tabloid press! Do you know I am also now a persecutor of aged horses?"

"I do assume you haven't been accused of serving up horsemeat steaks."

4 'If that is a joke, it is a very bad one!" said Eric fiercely. "No! Of course not! I mean, because I don't want smelly animals under the noses of my guests, I am some kind of monster!"

"Ah, the Horse and Donkey Rest Home."

"The girl who runs it, her name is Foster, she is also a member of the Society for the Preservation of Historic Bamford! Historic, pah! We have historic towns in Switzerland. They have beautiful, interesting buildings. They are surrounded by stupendous scenery! Bamford—some of it is old, I suppose—but it is very modest. It has few interesting buildings except for its church and its market cross. Its old houses have not been respected. They have modern aluminium frame windows put in them and do I hear the society for preserving the place protest about that? As for the countryside here, it is very pleasant, but its hills are not the Alps."

"I like Bamford myself!" Markby heard himself say more sharply than he had intended. "And my family has long associations with the surrounding country area."

Eric's face showed consternation followed by contrition. "Forgive me. I must have sounded both arrogant and discourteous. That was not my intention. What I meant to say was that I have not destroyed any of the amenities on offer in the area by renovating the Hall and putting it to a new use. I believe I have added to them. I have saved the Hall, for a start. Without me, this grand old house—" Schuhmacher indicated the building in which they sat—"it would have tumbled down. Who today can afford to live privately in such a place? To be a lord of the manor, as you say. No, no, it must be found a commercial use if it is to be saved."

"Had you ever met either Ellen Bryant or any member of the society before the Saturday of the opening?"

"Yes, I had met one of the men, a fellow called

Grimsby. He came to see me in London. I was polite. He was not. We had nothing to say to one another. That is the only one of them I met face to face and it was obvious that there was little purpose in my seeing any of the others. We corresponded—or my lawyers did with them."

"You haven't spoken personally to Miss Foster about the horses' home?"

"No—I have seen her from a distance. I drove to a place near the stables where I could observe through binoculars. I saw clearly that reports I had received were not exaggerated. It is an eyesore. Moreover, the wind blew from it to me and smelled very bad of manure. Also there was a noise. Some days you can hear it even here at the hotel. Like something being slaughtered or a cry of the damned. It is caused by a donkey, I understand. Are my guests to suffer that?"

He leaned forward, his square capable hands gripping the arms of his chair. He looked large, solid and dangerous, far more the ice-hockey player than the hotelier. * 'This place, Alan, it is the summit of my career. Everything I have dreamed of, worked for, planned—for years! And is it all to be ruined because a woman I have never met is murdered in my cellar by some lunatic for a reason which has nothing to do with me? It is intolerable! You must find this criminal quickly!"

4 'We are going as fast as we can but it's a curious case. I suppose you aren't doing the kind of business you anticipated with this hanging over you and the press reports."

"What do you imagine? Even worse, the prurient come here, the voyeurs, those who get a kick from being on the scene of a murder! They ask, can you imagine it, to be shown the cellars! We have learned to spot them, these psychos, and refuse them. Is my hotel to be a waxworks' museum, a chamber of horrors? I will not," Schuhmacher's huge fist balled and struck the arm of his chair, "I will not have my entire life's work and financial investment together with the careers of my staff

brought to nothing because of this! I will not allow it!" "It'll prove a nine-day wonder, these things do,"

Markby soothed him without great success. "And then

you'll be able to get on with the business without either

us or the press bothering you." Schuhmacher growled.

Markby glanced at his watch as he left the hotel. He ought to finish his round of visits with another talk to Zoe Foster. The Alice Batt Rest Home was only a few minutes away, as Eric had forcefully pointed out. What was more, should Markby's niece, Emma, be helping out there this afternoon, she'd be thinking about setting off for home about now and he could take her back to Bam-ford by car.

There was a temptation when one had no children oneself to develop strong ideas about how other people should bring up theirs. Markby was well aware of this trap and tried to avoid expressing anything like criticism or helpful advice either to his sister or to her husband. The warning about the prowler in the district had been different. That had been his duty as a police officer.

Generally the problem didn't arise, although he did feel they nagged at Matthew too much about his school-work and that they could, surely, have taught Vicky not to break everything she touched. Vicky in a greenhouse was a gardener's nightmare. But he was fond of the kids. He was Emma's godfather as well as her uncle and he sometimes felt Paul and Laura should keep a better eye on her. Emma spent every Saturday and all her free hol-idaytime at the horses' home, fine. But the lane leading down to it was lonely and even to get that far Emma had to travel alone by country bus to descend at a remote wayside bus-stop surrounded by fields. He had mentioned this to Paul before. Paul had replied, rather tersely, that if it was raining he drove over and fetched his daughter home. "What's she supposed to do if it's not raining?" Markby had been tempted to retort. But knowing the answer would have been on the lines of