Stately Homicide (14 page)

‘That's the kind of remark,' she said at the end of the examination, ‘reminds me you're not only Ben Jurnet, Danny's friend and Tommy's godfather – you're also a bloody policeman.'

‘That's me,' Jurnet agreed. ‘So you'd better answer my question.'

‘A rerun of the good old days in Neasden, is that what you think? Only, this time, with me the one asking to be let up the stairs. And this time, because I'm looking smashing, he's really keen.'

‘Your scenario, not mine.'

‘What happens next? Do I come to my senses, resist his lewd advances, and push him off the roof accidentally while defending my honour? Or do we settle down for a right old screw – after which, my revenge accomplished, I deliberately pitch him into the moat?'

‘In either case,' Jurnet answered, ‘I hope you didn't leave your glass slipper behind.'

‘Not bad!' said the Superintendent.

Keeping a prudent distance from the balustrade, he looked out at the landscape. A warm breeze ruffled the trees. It ran rippling through the barley ripening from gold to bronze. On the lake a solitary swan rocked on its puckered reflection.

‘D'you know,' the Superintendent exclaimed, eyes narrowed, ‘I do believe – yes, over there, Ben, do you see? – You can actually see the sea!'

‘Yes, sir.'

With the sensation of looking through the eyes of a dead man, Jurnet looked as directed, and located the small vee of metallic blue filling in a narrow gap between the hills like an old-fashioned modesty vest. He blinked hard and thankfully lost it; though the knowledge that it was there regardless seemed suddenly to sharpen the air with a tang of salt.

‘Ah, well.' With a small exhalation of breath, not enough to count as a sigh, the Superintendent turned his attention to the foreground view. Upon either side the roof receded round turrets and clustering chimneypots that numbered the rooms beneath. ‘They certainly knew how to live in those days!'

Jurnet scowled and said nothing.

‘Brings out the Bolshie in you, does it?' The Superintendent smiled sunnily, well aware of the true cause of his subordinate's ill humour. ‘Never learn, do you? You're at it again, Ben, however many times I warn you. Getting involved.'

But the detective, his eyes on the stretch of parapet from which several pieces of the coping were missing, was in no mood for the ritual sparring with which the two regularly cemented their bonds of brotherhood and cock-eyed affection.

‘It's the damnedest thing!' he exploded. ‘Here's the one time I actually get to meet a murder victim in person, alive and kicking, and, for all the good it does me, I could just as well have seen him first time on a tray in the morgue. I don't
know
him, and I need to.' Kicking moodily at the marl which covered the roof: ‘Oh, a pretty boy, I saw that. Maybe AC – DC, and maybe not. No fool, though he sometimes made himself out one – in fact, bloody clever, and enough cheek deliberately to risk putting a lot of backs up at Bullen first time he opens his mouth. A first-class writer, so everyone tells me. But what does it all amount to?'

‘I'd say it amounted to something.'

The other shook his head.

‘Not a row of pins. The bloke had just that moment arrived. There wasn't time for anyone to build up a sufficient head of steam. Enough, that is, to kill.'

‘There's that young woman, of course. The mother of the boy.'

‘Yes.' Going a shade too quickly on to the next thing: ‘Unless the target was the office, not the man; and any other curator would have filled the bill equally well.'

‘Only a curator, surely, with plans to write a life of Appleyard of Hungary? No one seems to have attempted the assassination of the retiring incumbent, who appears to have had no such ambitions.' The Superintendent considered the implications of what he had just said. ‘Mr Coryton, now – what, say, if he's been helping himself to a choice objet d'art or two when no one was looking? He wouldn't be too welcoming to a new man, nosing around and checking that all was present and correct. Have you questioned Coryton yet?'

‘Not yet. I'm letting him stew in his own juice for a bit. I've been on to the accountants, though, and the solicitors for the Trust, for a copy of the inventory.'

‘We've been thinking along the same lines,' the Superintendent conceded. ‘Place this size, take you six months to check it – but who's pushing you?' Coming to the point at last, as Jurnet knew he was bound to – it was one of the classic moves of the game they played: ‘You know, don't you, Ben, you're going to need some help.'

‘I've got Sergeant Ellers, sir.' The classic response.

‘Ha ha.
And
Sergeant Bowles, so I hear, to man your incident room. Makes the best cup of tea in the Force. You must ask me over some time.' The Superintendent regarded Jurnet with a mixture of exasperation, fondness and conspiratorial glee. ‘Know what, Ben? I get run over by a bus and you'll be out on your ear before you know what hit you. I hope and trust that every night, before you get into bed, you go down on your knees and thank that Jewish God of yours you've got me for a boss instead of a lot of others I could name.'

‘Not on my knees, sir!' Jurnet's heart lifted at the oblique intimation that he was to be left to go his own way, even though he had as yet only the haziest notion where it might lead.

‘Just the same, we have to go through the motions. Shelden came from Hampstead – so I'm sending Dave Batterby up to town, to investigate the London angle, if any.' The Superintendent's eyes twinkled as he pronounced the name of the most ambitious officer on the Angleby strength. ‘If he does nothing more than stand on the pavement outside the Yard, surveying the scene of his future triumphs, at least I'll be able to go to the Chief with my hand on my heart and set his mind at rest that, for once, Detective-Inspector Jurnet is not being left to his own devices.'

Immaculate in his light grey summer suit, the Superintendent made his way briskly across the roof, making for the narrow door which led down to the minstrels' gallery. Jurnet, following more slowly, paused by the air bed where Chad Shelden had intended to sleep under the stars. The bed, covered with a black groundsheet save for a corner which disclosed a triangle of orange canvas, had a bump in the middle which the detective diagnosed as the foot-pump dumped there by the scene-of-crime team which had swarmed over the place like worker ants, penetrating every nook and cranny, examining every stair and skylight with the dedication of astronomers seeking a new star.

Jurnet nudged the exposed part of the bed with the toe of his shoe. It was still reasonably pneumatic, still harbouring air pumped in by one who, in his present situation, could have done with a bit of it himself.

He found the Superintendent looking over the wooden rail of the gallery, down at the room below. After the radiant outdoors the Long Chamber looked dim, slatternly with crumpled paper napkins and dishes that had once held ice cream. It was only too evident that Mrs Barwell had preferred not to return to her duties.

The Superintendent leaned over the rail and observed with a romantic lilt to his voice: ‘So this was where they danced to the sound of the lute –'

Jurnet countered tartly: ‘Funny how an offence suddenly becomes OK so long as it was committed hundreds of years ago, preferably by royals –'

‘What a puritan you are, Ben! Can you honestly say –' the Superintendent demanded – ‘that the story doesn't touch you? Two doomed young people snatching a fugitive happiness before time runs out?'

‘Case turned up on our patch,' the other maintained stubbornly, ‘I doubt you'd be going on about fugitive happiness and all that.'

‘Right as usual!' the Superintendent capitulated gracefully. ‘Well – since it's a bit late to bring the Boleyns to book, let's see who we can put the finger on instead, shall we? Is the chance to edit some sizzling letters of a long-dead queen sufficient motive for murder? Though, if Coryton did do it, I don't suppose it'd be the first time a man killed for the sake of that black-haired witch. Did you know, Ben, that she had a rudimentary sixth finger on one hand with which, so her enemies asserted, she gave suck to the devil?'

The Superintendent descended the stair and began to walk slowly along the length of the room, keeping to the same board, like a child trying not to step on a line. ‘Where exactly have you pitched your tent?'

‘We've taken over the dining room, sir. I'd have preferred the study, only it's chockful with Laz Appleyard's papers. On the other hand –' demurely – ‘the dining room's next to the kitchen. Very handy for Sergeant Bowles.'

Sergeant Bowles, a large, comfortable man not far from his pension, and a widower who often had to be reminded to go home at the end of a duty, had already turned the dining room of the curator's flat into a home from home. The table, thoughtfully covered with a length of green baize, was set out with paper and pens, clipboard and paper fasteners. An earthenware jug full of marigolds stood on top of a grey painted filing cabinet; an electric typewriter rested on a thick pad. The geraniums on the wide, white-painted window sill looked newly refreshed. Through the open window came the croo-crooing of woodpigeons and the muted scream of a passing jet, a white trail feathering slowly across the high blue sky.

There was also a girl.

Jessica Chalgrove put down her cup and saucer and got up from her chair blushing prettily.

‘I do hope it's all right –'

‘Please!' The Superintendent held up a hand, smiling. ‘We interrupted you. Miss Chalgrove, isn't it? I'm glad to see Sergeant Bowles has been looking after you.'

Sergeant Bowles said: ‘Young lady's come to work on those papers next door, if you and Mr Jurnet have no objection, sir.'

The Superintendent exclaimed: ‘Don't tell me
you're
going to write the life of Appleyard of Hungary!'

‘Goodness, no!' The girl blushed even more deeply. ‘Elena – Miss Appleyard – has given me a job. I told her I was looking for one. Mucking out horses or something, was what I thought, actually: but she said she'd been meaning for ages to get somebody in to make an index of the Appleyard papers, and she didn't see why I shouldn't be able to do it as well as anybody. She explained exactly how you went about it, and it didn't sound all that difficult – at least, I hope it won't be, but Elena's so clever she makes everything sound easy. Anyway, she rang up Herrold's in Angleby there and then, and ordered a lot of cards and some little metal boxes to keep them in. But the thing is –' she ended, suddenly nervous, and tucking the bottom of her T-shirt into her jeans – ‘it all depends, really, on whether you'll let me stay.'

Jurnet said: ‘I understood from Miss Appleyard she wanted to get the papers returned to her part of the house at the earliest possible moment.'

‘She told me about that. But then she said, since they were over here already, in a good place for working in, it might be better if I went through them here first, box by box, and every time I finished one, I could take it over to her flat, and she'd know that was one done, anyway.' With a touching lack of self-importance: ‘I rather think, once she thought about it, she decided it'd be better not to have me under her feet all the time, bothering her with silly questions.' An endearing anxiety surfacing: ‘I only hope she didn't invent that bit about wanting an index simply because I'd told her I needed a job.'

The Superintendent declared nobly: ‘Any archive requires to be indexed before it can be of use. Otherwise, it's simply a hodge-podge of miscellaneous information nobody can make head or tail of. Make a good job of it, young lady, and the new biographer, whoever he may be, will call down blessings on your head. You'll have cut his labours by half, and I only hope he has the decency to make you a handsome acknowledgment in his preface.'

‘That would be marvellous!' The girl glowed. Addressing herself to the Superintendent as to the obvious fount of power: ‘Does that mean it's OK for me to stay?'

‘That's a matter for Detective-Inspector Jurnet,' the Superintendent returned with a familiar touch of mischief.

‘With respect, sir,' Jurnet demurred, ‘the fact that Miss Appleyard's given us the use of this one room doesn't entitle us to make conditions as to what she does with the rest of the space.'

Jessica Chalgrove cried: ‘That means it's all right, then? Oh, goody!' as the detective nodded smilingly. ‘Ferenc promised to pick up the cards this afternoon, so I'll be able to start tomorrow first thing. And you needn't worry, Mr Jurnet. I'll be so quiet, you won't know I'm here.' The girl's delight was charming to see. ‘The most you'll hear is a faint moan whenever I make a particularly awful bish of something, which I reckon will be once every five minutes, roughly. After the first hour or two, you shouldn't even notice it. And now,' she finished, making another attempt as she spoke to tuck in the T-shirt, which had come out of the waistband once again, revealing a circlet of tanned young flesh, ‘I mustn't interrupt your work any longer, or you'll never catch your murderer.' The light faded, the girl's eyes darkened with memory. ‘Who could possibly hate anybody enough to kill him?'

‘You've got it wrong, my dear.' The Superintendent's voice was gentle. ‘Wars are about hate. Murders are about love.'

‘Oh, no!'

‘Oh, yes!' the other insisted. ‘If you were a cynic you might even say they are the purest expression of it. Love – for a man or a woman, for money, revenge, religion, or even for love of oneself. One way or another, all murders are crimes of passion.'

‘But that's horrible!'

‘What else would you expect murder to be? Which is why what we have to do – haven't we, Inspector Jurnet? – is figure out what on earth it was that made Mr Chad Shelden so lovable.'