Murder in the Museum (Fethering Mysteries) (6 page)

‘Oh, did I meet her?’

‘Him. No.’ Carole would have liked more information about the friend, but Jude had already moved on. ‘We saw Sheila Cartwright then. She was pointed out to us by the guide, almost as if she was one of the remarkable exhibits. Very much Lady of the Manor, I thought.’

‘Well, she’s no longer in charge of the place . . . though you’d never know it from the way she goes on.’ Jude raised interrogative eyebrows, but Carole shook her head. ‘Complex management politics which I’m not going to go into at the moment. I’ll fill you in soon enough.’

‘Then what
are
you going to go into at the moment?’

‘Just the discovery of the skull.’

‘You used the word “skeleton” earlier.’

‘Yes, there were other bones around. Certainly part of a spinal column. Only the top bit had been unearthed, but it was lying as if it was still with the rest of the skeleton.’

There was a silence. Jude prompted, ‘There was something you thought odd, though, wasn’t there?’

‘I told you. There was a hole in the skull.’

‘Yes. Must be murder. Did it look like a bullet-hole?’

‘Jude, I’ve no idea.’

‘Hole made by surgery? Or by an ice-pick, as in the case of Trotsky?’

‘I just don’t know.’ Carole looked thoughtful and took a long sip from her Chardonnay. ‘It wasn’t the skull itself so much . . . it was the people’s reaction to it.’

‘Like . . .?’

‘Well, Sheila Cartwright was desperate that no publicity should leak out about the find.’

‘Fair enough. She didn’t want the status quo at Bracketts disrupted.’

‘Her reaction seemed more than that. She said it was dangerous. She actually used the word “dangerous”.’

Jude shrugged. ‘Just meant that bad publicity could be dangerous”.’

‘Possibly.’ But there was something else nagging at Carole. ‘Then there was this man who broke down in tears.’

‘At the sight of the skull?’

‘That’s right. He said that he couldn’t stand seeing dead bodies, but his reaction was very violent.’

‘Some people are spooked by that kind of stuff. It’s a nasty shock for anyone.’

‘Yes.’ Carole sighed and nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Do you know who this man was?’

‘One of the day-release prisoners from Austen. Do you know Austen, the Open Prison?’

‘I know it,’ replied Jude, with a new seriousness in her manner. ‘Did you get the man’s name?’

‘Sheila Cartwright called him Mervyn. And – this was the strange thing – she implied that this man was used to seeing dead bodies.’

‘Was that explained at all?’

‘No. That’s all I got, before I was summarily whisked off the premises.’

Jude looked thoughtful.

‘Why, do you know an Austen prisoner called Mervyn?’

‘No. I don’t.’ Introspection was swept away with a toss of the blonde hair. ‘Come on, we’re going to have lunch here, aren’t we?’

‘Well, I’ve got a cottage cheese salad in the fridge.’

‘In that case, we are
definitely
going to have lunch here. Cottage cheese is an abomination in the sight of God and Man. Ted!’ Jude called across to the bar, ‘What do you recommend today?’

Instantly ignoring the queues of the thirsty in front of him, the landlord turned to his favoured customers and replied, ‘Well, putting my good self on one side, I don’t think you’d go far wrong with the Fillet of Fresh Cod. Tell you, this morning that fish was still in the sea at Littlehampton, worrying about paying the mortgage on its special piece of seaweed.’

‘Right, I’ll go for it.’ On a nod from Carole, ‘Make that two.’

‘Two Fillet of Fresh Cod it is, ladies.’ Ted Crisp called the order through to some unknown person in the kitchen. Then he turned back to the two women and emerged from behind the bar.

He was wearing shorts. They might once have been blue and didn’t, it has to be said, do a lot for him. His stomach sat on the ledge of their belt like a jelly on a plate.

‘You two been finding any more dead bodies, have you?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Carole replied primly.

‘Oh well, there you go,’ said Ted Crisp, and returned to serve the holiday hordes.

‘So that’s it,’ said Carole flatly. ‘I was present at the unearthing of a skull. Full stop.’

‘In that case, maybe you’d better go through the boring stuff now.’

‘Boring stuff?’

‘ “Complex management politics” was the phrase you used.’

‘Oh. All right.’

And so Carole Seddon outlined to her friend the conflict between the former and current Directors of Bracketts, thinking – wrongly, as it turned out – she’d never hear any more about the skeleton that had been found there.

Jude didn’t have strong feelings about lying, when it was necessary. She felt no guilt for having lied to Carole about not knowing anyone locally called Mervyn. Even given the detail that the Mervyn she knew was currently serving time in HMP Austen.

Nor did she feel any guilt for keeping her own connection with the prison a secret from her neighbour.

Jude’s work at Austen was voluntary and semiofficial. The prison had a very imaginative Education Officer called Sandy Fairbarns, who was always doing her best to extend the definition of the word ‘education’ and to introduce new activities to alleviate the boredom of the prisoners. Since her budget was small and getting smaller, this meant that she was constantly listening out for opportunities, homing in on people who might have a skill they could share, and pursuing them with relentless charm until they agreed to do a session or series of sessions at the jail. She had built up a good relationship with the Governor who, recognizing that the more the prisoners had to do, the less trouble they were likely to cause, encouraged Sandy’s alternative programme.

As a result, Austen Prison became the destination for a disparate group of writers, musicians, artists and local historians. Some found the working conditions impossible; prisoners would wander in and out at will; it was difficult to impose any structure on the sessions. For others the experience was very positive, and they pressed Sandy Fairbarns to organize further courses for them.

The continuity of the programme was always under threat. Only one disciplinary problem was required, one whiff of adverse publicity, and the Governor would put a stop to it. But the Education Officer walked her tightrope with skill, and the project prospered.

Jude had met Sandy at a Mind, Body and Spirit Fair in Brighton, and Sandy had immediately responded to Jude’s aura of equanimity. Within minutes she had suggested involving her new acquaintance in the Austen courses and over a drink that evening, Jude had agreed to do an exploratory session on ‘New Approaches’.

The vagueness of the subject had suited her well, and she’d launched into the first visit to Austen with an open mind, prepared to go where the participants led her. Seven prisoners had been there at the beginning of the session, three left during it, and two more wandered in. Sandy said that was par for the course, and pressed Jude to do another session a few weeks later. The sequence had now continued, more or less on a monthly basis, for nearly nine months.

Though there were one or two faces that recurred, Jude got used to being confronted on each occasion by a roomful of strangers. The shifting nature of the prison population made her realize how acute was the problem of continuity in Sandy Fairbarns’ job. Individuals might be encouraged and nurtured towards individual goals – exams and qualifications – but a lot of the educational effort was regarded by the prisoners as an optional entertainment, to be assessed against the rival attractions of the television, the gym or a kickaround with a football.

The subject-matter of Jude’s sessions usually started with her talking about some alternative therapy – be it yoga or acupuncture – but very soon the conversation moved away from the medical to the more general. There was usually resistance to be overcome. Jude was an attractive woman, so she had to survive an initial onslaught of sexist banter from men starved of female company. There was a lot of swearing, and frequently aggression between the prisoners, reviving old quarrels.

But each time her good sense, good humour and serenity would gradually allow discussion to flow. Amongst the shifting group of multi-ethnic, multi-faith prisoners, discussion quickly homed in on human psychology and belief systems. Because Austen was an open prison, there were a good few highly educated prisoners – mostly solicitors, as it happened – who were skilled in reasoned argument, but Jude was usually more impressed by the articulacy of the less privileged. Many of them, unused to discussion of abstract concepts, quickly caught on to the idea, and more than held their own with the more highly trained debaters.

Each session creaked for the first twenty minutes, then gained fluency. There was a lot of laughter, too, and the arrival of the warder to announce the two hours were up always came as a surprise. ‘New Approaches’ frequently ended up as philosophy, and always as a form of therapy.

And each time Jude was escorted by Sandy back across the compound to the Austen main gate, where she would hand in her visitor badge, Jude felt a sadness. She was going back out into the real world. The men whose ideas had flowed, whose identities had been so alive for the previous two hours, were going back to the stultifying, imagination-cramping repetitions of prison routine.

The reason Jude kept her activities at Austen secret was not the false modesty of philanthropy. It was the respect that she had for what Sandy Fairbarns was trying to achieve, and an unwillingness for knowledge of it to get to the wrong people. She could imagine the mileage in newsprint that a hang-’em-and-flog-’em right-wing politician could get out of the news that prisoners were being given instruction in healing and alternative therapies.

She also felt that talking about her work would be a betrayal of the confidences which some of the prisoners had shared with her. They had their integrity, and she had hers.

It was serendipity that Jude’s next visit to Austen was scheduled for the Monday after she had had lunch with Carole at the Crown and Anchor. As she got off the train from Fethering, she made a private prayer to one of her gods that Mervyn Hunter would once again be part of her group.

The walk from the station to the prison was pleasant in the autumn sunshine. HMP Austen was set on the flat coastal plain only about a mile from the sea. Behind her Jude could see the blue-grey humps of the Downs, receding ever paler into the distance. The town of Fedborough nestled in the crevice where their undulations began. If you had to be in prison, there were worse venues.

And yet Austen was still bleak. The path she trod, past the redbrick houses of prison officers, made Jude think of the other people she had seen walking along the same route on other afternoons. Harassed wives, snapping at trailing, whining children, going to snatch an hour’s visit to their errant husbands.

She remembered some words of Sandy’s. ‘You see them coming in, wiped out, totally exhausted, worried about money, worried about how the kids are behaving, forced into single parenthood. Then you see the men – a lot of them down here have been putting in time in the gym, and they’re brown from all that working outside, positively glowing with health. And you ask yourself: Who’s actually being punished here?’

And yet Austen Prison was a place of punishment. Undeniably so. Though the dark redbrick entrance Jude approached could have belonged to a College of Further Education, the fact remained that there were walls all around the compound and the blocks in which the men slept were locked at night.

Compared to other prisons, of course, the security at Austen was light. Anyone sufficiently determined to get out wouldn’t need to form an escape committee. It would be easy enough to hop over the wall, or become detached from an outside working party and slip away. Indeed round Christmas that did happen as home-loving prisoners decided they needed a few hours with their families. But such events were rare during the rest of the year. Most of the prisoners with experience of Category B and C prisons knew just how easy they had it in Austen. They knew how many fewer locked doors there were between them and the outside world. They knew how much more time they were allowed to spend outside their cells. It wasn’t the perimeter walls that kept the men inside Austen Prison; it was the knowledge that if they escaped and were – as they almost inevitably would be – recaught, their next sojourn would be back in a Cat B or C nick. And that would not be funny.

Apart from the white-collar criminals – the aforementioned solicitors, bent financiers and careless accountants – most of the Austen population were young men banged up for minor offences that didn’t involve violence. There were also quite a few lifers, serving out their last few years of punishment in an environment which had a little more in common with the world outside than the grim compounds where they had spent the bulk of their sentences.

Sandy Fairbarns was in the entrance hall to greet her, and vouch for the incomer. Jude was issued with her pass by a cheery prison officer who recognized her from a previous visit. They went through into the prison grounds and walked across towards the Education block.