Murder in the Museum (Fethering Mysteries) (36 page)

‘Why did you shout at her?’

‘Because she kept on at me. She always did keep on at me. Always ordering me around, she was, telling me what to do.’

Jude could have told him he was not the only one to have suffered such treatment, but it wasn’t the moment. ‘What did she keep on at you about?’

‘About the body . . . you know, the one Jonny dug up. She said the press’d found out about it, and I wasn’t to say anything to anyone. How she thought the press was going to get into the nick, I don’t know.’

‘And that was all?’

‘Yes, but the way she went on at me. I . . . It made me think . . . It reminded me of . . .’ His words trickled away in pained recollection.

‘So why did that make you want to escape?’

‘Just to get away from her. The thought that I was kind of locked in the nick, and she could get at me any time she wanted . . . I couldn’t stand it. Anyway, I’d been thinking about going over the wall for some time.’

‘So that you’d be recaptured?’ asked Jude gently. ‘So that you’d end up back in somewhere like here?’

‘Maybe.’ He looked at her defiantly. ‘This is only temporary. They haven’t sorted out yet where I’m spending the rest of my sentence, but it won’t be Lewes.’

‘Still be the same security level, won’t it?’

‘Yeah. Not an open nick. I’ve been recategorized.’ There was almost a level of pride in his voice.

‘Mervyn, if you so hated Sheila Cartwright, why did you go straight to Bracketts, the very place where you were most likely to find her?’

‘I knew she wouldn’t be there that Thursday night. She mentioned something else she was doing. And it was late afternoon when I walked out of Austen, so I knew I had to find somewhere close for that first night.’

‘And you thought of the Priest’s Hole at Bracketts?’

He was genuinely surprised. ‘How do you know that?’

‘We worked it out,’ Jude replied mysteriously. ‘My friend found the secret cell underneath, and saw evidence that you’d been there.’

‘Did she?’ Mervyn Hunter sounded impressed. ‘Yeah, I’d read this book about the place and checked it out one lunchtime when I was working over there. Always useful to know a hiding-place.’

‘Listen, Mervyn, I can understand why you went there on the Thursday night . . . but why did you stay through the Friday?’

‘For one thing, I’d got a mate to organize some grub for me.’

‘Jonny Tyson.’

‘Here, you know bloody everything, don’t you?’

Jude shook her head. ‘Sadly, no. But you were still there in the evening, weren’t you?’

‘Yes. I’d just made this one quick trip out of my hiding-place to get the grub from Jonny. That lunch-time when I knew there wouldn’t be anyone around. Then I lay low till I thought everyone had gone for the day. But when I get out the house, I see there’s bloody cars in the car park, and I look in through the window and there’s a meeting going on in the dining room. Well, no way I was going to risk them hearing me getting back into the Priest’s Hole, so I scarpered.’

‘You went straight away? You left the grounds immediately? You didn’t do anything else?’

‘For Christ’s sake, you’re just like the bloody police!’

‘I’m sorry. But there’s something else that needs explaining. Did you go to the kitchen garden?’

Mervyn Hunter let out a long sigh, and nodded. ‘I knew where there was a spare set of keys in the Admin Office. Easy to break in there, without anyone noticing. That’s how I’d got into the main house. And just when I was leaving, I remembered there was a key to the kitchen garden on the bunch too, and I . . . I wanted to have a look at where the skeleton was found. So I unlocked the gates.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know why. It was . . . something . . . A dead body . . . something about seeing a dead body . . .’

Jude remembered Carole’s description of how he’d reacted when the skull had first been uncovered. ‘But of course there was nothing there,’ she said.

‘No. Don’t know why I thought there would be. I knew there wouldn’t be . . .’ He shook his head, and turned it despairingly against the wall, in exactly the same posture that Jude had first encountered him in the Visiting Hall at Austen.

‘Mervyn . . .’ she said very softly. ‘All of this . . . this fascination with the dead . . . this fear of what you might do to women . . . this . . .
fear of women
. . .’ She had hesitated before she spoke the last three words, but he did not contest her analysis. ‘It all goes back to Lee-Anne Rogers, doesn’t it?’

The silence was so long she began to fear he’d never break it, but finally he spoke. ‘I was very young, young for my age. Immature probably, a bit stupid. I’d never been with a girl, though all my mates – well, people I knew, didn’t have that many close mates – they all talked about it, and everything on television talked about it, and how you had to get your end away and . . . I was in this club, and this girl come on to me very strong, and I’d been drinking – wasn’t used to that either – and . . . Anyway, I thought this was it, I thought I’d hit the jackpot. And then she wants me to go out with her in her car, and I’m still thinking this is good . . . And she stops in this lay-by, and she gets in the back of the car and invites me to join her. She knew what she was doing, been through the routine lots of times before . . . So I get in the back with her and . . .’ The tension within him was now so strong he could hardly get the words out. ‘And she starts telling me what to do . . . Not loving, not caring, just greedy. She starts telling me what to do . . . She starts telling me what to do . . .’

‘Just,’ Jude suggested very gently, ‘like your mother used to tell you what to do?’

He nodded slowly, then suddenly averted his head, not to let his eyes betray his emotion. ‘I don’t remember exactly what happened next. But I know I killed her. I must have killed her.’

‘Yes.’

There was a long silence, isolated amidst the mutter of other prisoners and visitors.

Then Jude spoke. ‘Not all women are the same, Mervyn. Not all women want to bully you.’

‘No?’ He sounded sceptical.

‘No. The psychiatrists have said it, and I’m saying it too. You are not a danger to all women.’

‘I must be.’

‘No. Look, we’re talking all right, you and me, aren’t we? I don’t feel you’re a danger to me.’

‘No, but we’re not alone. There’s people here.’

‘When you finally are released, Mervyn . . .’ Jude said slowly, ‘I want you come and see me . . . on my own . . .’

‘But I . . . I mean, if you want me to . . .’

‘I don’t want you to do anything. I just want you to come and talk to me.’

‘I wouldn’t trust myself to—’

‘You’re the one who’s afraid of yourself, Mervyn. I’m not afraid of you.’

He let out a short, bitter laugh. ‘Then you bloody should be.’

‘No, Mervyn. I trust you.’

He turned his face to look at her. In his eye there glinted a tear, but also a tiny glimmer of hope.

The story that Laurence Hawker’s researches unearthed was a grim one, and a tribute to the strength of will of one man, Felix Chadleigh. He it was who had masterminded a cover-up of enormous proportions, who had forced the complicity in the subterfuge of one of his closest friends, Lieutenant Hugo Strider, and of his entire family, stretching down for generations beyond his death.

It was the power of Felix Chadleigh’s personality that had turned Belinda Chadleigh into a murderer, and blighted the entire life of his great-grandson, Graham Chadleigh-Bewes.

Graham Chadleigh was at the heart of it, Graham Chadleigh the golden boy, killed, as everyone knew, on 26 October 1917 at Passchendaele within days of arriving on the continent. He was the hero celebrated in ‘Threnody for the Lost’, his brother’s most famous poem.

It was the date of that poem’s publication which got Laurence Hawker thinking.
Vases of Dead Flowers
came out in 1935 and, though the ‘Threnody’ might have been written some time before that, it still seemed an odd time for war poetry.

And it was only a year or so before that Hugo Strider had been writing letters of impassioned guilt to his Catholic confidant, Father Gerard Hidebourne. In one of them he’d referred to a ‘vow he’d made to F’, and in another he wrote:

Do something about what, Laurence Hawker wondered. What could Esmond do? Well, he was a writer. He could write something. If there was some cloud over the memory of his brother, what better way to dissipate it than by writing a celebration with the power of ‘Threnody for the Lost’

But what was the cloud over Graham Chadleigh? Hugo Strider had spoken of his guilt over his ‘involvement’ in the boy’s death. Miss Hidebourne had even hinted the Lieutenant might have been responsible for the death, murdering his junior in the hell of Passchendaele.

But that didn’t fit. Whatever Lieutenant Strider had done, it was something Felix Chadleigh had known about, possibly even forced him into. And what kind of man would offer a home for life to someone he knew to be the murderer of his precious son?

Laurence Hawker then wondered whether the cloud hung over the boy himself, whether Graham Chadleigh had committed murder. The only candidate as victim was Pat Heggarty, the boy who had apparently run away to avoid conscription. If it could be proved that the body unearthed in the Bracketts kitchen garden had belonged to Pat Heggarty . . . But it hadn’t been proved, and the police were, as ever, reticent in spreading the results of their forensic investigations.

Still, Laurence now had a thread to follow, and follow it he did, through the piles of dusty papers (which didn’t do his cough any good at all). And eventually he found what he was looking for.

The first clue appeared in the document that Carole had looked at in the secret cell beneath the Priest’s Hole. It was definitely in Esmond’s handwriting and it began: ‘I’m writing to you at the request of my commanding officer who had a request from Lieutenant Strider for anyone who witnessed what happened to his men . . .’

Laurence knew he’d read those words before, and it didn’t take long to uncover the photocopies which Graham Chadleigh-Bewes had prepared for Professor Marla Teischbaum. There was exactly the same text, though now written in the uneducated hand of a common soldier. J. T. Hodges (Private).

Yet Esmond Chadleigh’s version was full of changes and crossings-out. In fact, his had been written before the soldier’s letter. In other words, he had faked an eye-witness account of his brother’s death.

With this doubt sown in his mind, Laurence Hawker cast a sceptical eye over some of the other documentation of Graham Chadleigh’s time at the Front. And, though some of the accounts from fellow-soldiers had no rough drafts by Esmond, a sufficient number did to cast doubt on his brother’s ever having been at Passchendaele.

Supposing Lieutenant Strider had supported that subterfuge, had lied about the boy’s presence by his side in battle . . . then that surely would have justified his later paroxysms of guilt.

So if Graham Chadleigh wasn’t on the Ypres Salient in October 1917, where was he?

Laurence Hawker found the truth in two devastating documents.

The first was a letter written to Esmond by his mother in 1921. He was then an undergraduate at Oxford and apparently worrying about work pressures.