Murder in the Museum (Fethering Mysteries) (25 page)

The confusion in his face gradually melted into one of his huge smiles. ‘Mervyn’ll be pleased,’ he announced.

‘Mervyn Hunter?’

‘Yes. My
friend
. Mervyn doesn’t like Sheila Cartwright.’

‘Ah.’ The opportunity was too good to miss. ‘I did actually want to talk to you about Mervyn Hunter, Jonny.’

‘That’s all right. He’s my friend. And he lives at Austen Prison.’ These facts were produced like rich gifts.

‘But he isn’t at Austen Prison now.’

‘Isn’t he? Have they let him go home early?’

‘No, they haven’t, Jonny. He ran away from the prison.’

‘Did he?’

‘Yes. Last week.’ Jude looked into the slightly watery blue eyes. ‘When did you last see Mervyn, Jonny?’

‘At Bracketts. At work. Last week.’

‘Do you know which day?’

Jonny Tyson shook his head dubiously, jutting out his lower lip. ‘I’m not sure.’ But then he remembered. ‘Oh yes, it was Thursday. Late Thursday . . . because my friend Mervyn was doing
a special project
.’ He brought his voice down to a childlike conspiratorial level for the words.

‘What kind of “special project”?’

‘It was something Sheila Cartwright had asked him to do. That’s why he couldn’t be seen by the other Volunteers. Only me. I was the only one he trusted,’ said Jonny Tyson, once again as proud as Punch.

‘Did he give you any more details about it?’

‘No, he said it was secret. And if something’s secret, that means you can’t tell people about it.’ He looked at Jude reprovingly. ‘Which means I can’t tell you about it.’

‘But do you actually know about it? Did Mervyn tell you?’

Jonny looked a little discomfited. ‘No, he didn’t tell me. But if he had told me, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you about it. Because it was a secret.’

Jude didn’t want to bully him, so she shifted the angle of her questioning. ‘But it was definitely Thursday you saw him?’

‘Thursday.’ He nodded emphatically. ‘And Friday.’

‘Oh?’ The young man could not begin to know the impact of his words. ‘Mervyn Hunter was at Bracketts on Friday?’

‘Mm. Because I gave him something on Friday.’

‘What did you give him, Jonny?’

‘They don’t do nice food at Austen Prison. My friend Mervyn used to have the same packed lunch every day he came to Bracketts. Not very nice. Not like the packed lunches Mummy does for me on my working days.’ The pleasure in his voice once again demonstrated the close relationship between Jonny Tyson and his food. ‘And I always said to my friend Mervyn, “Why don’t you have some of my lunch? Or, even better, why don’t I get Mummy to do a nice packed lunch for you too?” But my friend Mervyn always said no. Until last Thursday.’

‘He did ask you to bring him a packed lunch?’

‘Yes. On Thursday. He said the “special project” he was on meant it was difficult to get his packed lunch from Austen Prison. So I asked Mummy, and she did two packed lunches for me on Friday.’ Awestruck by his own cunning, he went on, ‘I didn’t tell her who it was for. Because my friend Mervyn had said it was a “special project”, you see. And that meant it was a secret. And I had to meet him somewhere secret at Bracketts to give him his packed lunch.’

‘Do you know,’ asked Jude softly, ‘whether his “special project” meant Mervyn couldn’t go back to Austen Prison on Thursday night?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘That could explain why he wasn’t able to get his food from the prison, couldn’t it?’

Jonny looked confused. Clearly the idea had never entered his head. All he could produce was another ‘I don’t know.’

She smiled her most reassuring smile. ‘Don’t worry about that. Mervyn didn’t ever talk about the idea of staying at Bracketts, did he . . .? Of having a secret place there that he could stay in if he wanted to . . .?’

‘Yes, he did,’ said Jonny in innocent surprise. ‘How did you know that?’

‘I just wondered.’

‘You’re very clever, Jude.’ He looked at her with increased respect. ‘Yes, my friend Mervyn did say there was always somewhere he could hide at Bracketts.’ A belated caution came into his wide blue eyes. ‘But he said it was a secret. And you can’t tell people about secrets, can you?’

‘Well, sometimes you can. If someone’s going to be hurt by something being kept secret, then telling the secret might be a good thing . . . because it would be stopping that person from getting hurt.’

This ethical argument seemed too difficult for Jonny Tyson to understand. Anyway, as he explained, he didn’t need to understand it. ‘My friend Mervyn didn’t tell me where his hiding place was, so I haven’t got the secret, so I can’t tell anyone.’

He looked troubled at the end of this, so Jude soothed, ‘It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.’

‘No.’ He was silent for a moment, organizing his thoughts. ‘Sheila Cartwright’s dead . . .?’

‘Yes.’

‘So she won’t come back . . .?’

‘No.’

‘Mummy says nobody comes back when they’re dead.’

‘That’s true.’

‘She says when Daddy dies, he won’t come back.’ He seemed to be testing the ideas against some abstract standard in his mind. ‘Mummy says when she dies, she won’t come back.’ The anxiety in his voice resolved itself into confidence, and his huge smile returned. ‘I’ll look after Mummy. I won’t let her die.’

‘Listen, Jonny, it’s not as simple—’

But that was as far as she was allowed to get with her explanation. Brenda Tyson came hurrying over the brow of the garden towards them. And the expression on her face suggested she was announcing something more weighty than the readiness of Sunday lunch.

‘Jonny, you are popular today. Some other people have arrived who want to talk you.’

For the first time Jude saw petulance in his face as he said, ‘I don’t want to talk to anyone else. I want to have my lunch.’

Though pained by the situation, this time his mother could not let him have his own way. ‘You’ll have to talk to them, Jonny. The people who’ve arrived are from the police.’

Jude’s first thought was that she’d got there only just in time.

Her second was more compassionate. She prayed Jonny Tyson’s next interviewers would be as gentle with him as she had been.

Carole Seddon was so absorbed in the papers on her sitting room table that she didn’t hear the cab driving up to Woodside Cottage. The first she was aware of Laurence Hawker’s return was when the bell rang and there he was standing on her own doorstep.

He looked thinner and more haggard than ever. As ever, a lighted cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth, defying the attempts of his coughing to dislodge it. He was dressed in his usual black with the leather jacket – what Carole regarded as the complete poseur’s kit.

‘Ah. Good afternoon. Is Jude not there to let you in? I do have a key, so, if you like—’

‘No. She gave me a key.’ He smiled the boyish smile which rarely failed to thaw the most frosty of women. It had no effect on Carole.

‘What I actually wondered was whether you’ve got any whisky . . .?’

‘Whisky?’ she echoed.

‘Yes. I drank the last of Jude’s Friday night. I meant to pick some up at an off licence over the weekend, but, what with one thing and another . . .’ He shrugged helplessly.

Carole was torn. Her first instinct was to deny his impertinent request and close the door in his face. But the atavistic middle-class tradition of good manners told her that one should be polite to friends of one’s friends, even if one didn’t particularly care for them.

Breeding won. ‘I believe I may have some left over from Christmas,’ she said primly.

‘If I’m not depriving you of supplies . . .’

She knew how prissy she sounded when she said, ‘I’m not a habitual whisky drinker. It’s in the cupboard in the sitting room,’ she went on, and was then faced by another social dilemma. She wanted just to get the bottle, hand it over and close the door on him. But the entrenched middle-class rules about how one treated guests were too strong. She stood back from the doorway. ‘Won’t you come in?’

He lounged after her into the sitting room, coughing again.

‘So how was your weekend?’ asked Carole, punctiliously polite as she opened the drinks cabinet.

‘Not so dusty,’ he drawled. Which seemed a strangely archaic reply. And, given the fact that he’d spent the night with a woman other than Jude, an inadequate one.

The bottle was nearly half-full. Carole had bought it three Christmases before. She very rarely drank spirits, just the occasional glass of white wine (though, since she’d met Jude, the occasions had got closer together). She held the whisky bottle out towards Laurence Hawker.

‘Great.’ He looked at it wryly. ‘Keep me going for a couple of hours. Jude can get some more when she comes back.’

He didn’t say that walking any distance was becoming increasingly difficult, so that the stroll down to Allinstore, the supermarket in the High Street, would have been beyond him. For Carole, the impression of his cavalier male chauvinism was reinforced.

With no attempt at concealment of his interest, Laurence Hawker was looking at the photocopies spread over the table. By Carole’s middle-class standards, such behaviour came under the definition of ‘nosy’.

‘Esmond Chadleigh memorabilia,’ he observed, compounding his offence, revealing that he had actually read someone else’s papers.

‘Yes.’ Carole’s curt monosyllable was meant to precede her suggestion that, now he’d got his whisky, perhaps he’d like to return to Woodside Cottage and consume it. But another thought came into her mind. Her own perusal of the documents had revealed nothing; she didn’t have the background knowledge of Esmond Chadleigh and his world to make them meaningful. But she did actually have in her sitting room an academic, who – although she had considerable reservations about him as a person – would know a lot more. She remembered the details he’d filled in for them on the Bracketts Guided Tour.

The reservations were put on hold. ‘Would you like to have a look at the material, Laurence?’

He agreed with relish, drew up a chair to the table and, without asking permission, lit up another cigarette.

‘I think I’ve got an ashtray somewhere,’ said Carole tautly.

But Laurence Hawker was uninterested in such domestic details. ‘If you happened to have a glass too and could pour some of the whisky into it, that would help enormously.’

Biting her lip – if Jude wanted to be treated like a doormat by this man that was up to her – Carole did as he suggested. She put a full glass and the bottle to his left, and an ashtray to his right. Taking alternate sips and puffs, except for the regular coughing, Laurence Hawker was silent while he read through the documentation. Carole Seddon quietly drew a chair up to the table, feeling like a visitor in her own sitting room.

After about twenty minutes, he sat back, and let out a cough even louder than the previous ones. When he’d recovered his breath, he said, ‘Interesting. Where did you get this stuff from?’

‘Graham Chadleigh-Bewes. I was to deliver it to Professor Marla Teischbaum.’

Laurence let out an ironical laugh. ‘That makes sense.’

‘You know her?’

‘By reputation. In the academic world you hear about what most people in the same field are up to. I know Marla Teischbaum’s working on a biography of Esmond Chadleigh. And I think hers will have rather more intellectual rigour than the one written by Graham Chadleigh-Bewes –’ He tapped the photocopies on the table ‘– in spite of his delaying tactics.’

‘What do you mean?’ Carole remembered the word Marla Teischbaum had used on the telephone. ‘Are you saying that this stuff has been
doctored
?’

‘Yes. Not very subtly either.’

‘When she last rang me, Marla Teischbaum accused Graham of doing it.’

‘I should think she’s right. You said he issued the material, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. What kind of “doctoring” has been done, Laurence?’ The longer he was there, the easier she was finding it to use his name. She still disliked and disapproved of him, but she couldn’t fault his intellect.

‘There’s been a bit of fiddling with the dates. Don’t know why.’ Instinctively, and without asking, Laurence Hawker topped up his empty whisky glass. ‘I suppose he just hoped Professor Teischbaum would publish the misinformation in her book, and then be discredited for getting her facts wrong. But she’d be too canny to fall for that. I’m not even an expert on Esmond Chadleigh, and yet I saw instantly what had been done. No, I’m afraid all this stuff does is to show up the sad incompetence of Graham Chadleigh-Bewes. Incompetence as a forger, certainly – and probably incompetence as a biographer too.’

Carole moved closer to the table. ‘Can you show me exactly what you’re talking about?’

Proximity strengthened the smells of cigarette smoke and whisky, but she was starting to find them less offensive as her interest in the documents mounted.

‘Well, take a look at this.’ He picked up the photocopy of the letter from ‘Pickles’ to ‘Chadders’. ‘Perfectly ordinary schoolboy letter, thanking his friend for letting him stay at Christmas. Dated “29 December 1917”. And yet there are a whole lot of references in it that make that date sound wrong.’