Stately Homicide (32 page)

Francis Coryton looked down at his hands, inert on the bed. They were encased in clear plastic bags containing small quantities of some pink solution, and they seemed, almost, separated creatures: goldfish awaiting transport to the home aquarium.

‘The answer, Inspector, is that I did no such thing. Risk presupposes a conscious selection between choices. I simply didn't stop to think – just as I didn't stop to think what, given its exposure to heat and flame, would be the almost certain consequences of extracting the correspondence from its envelope instead of handing it over unopened to the conservation johnnies at the BM.' Francis Coryton chuckled, a curious rumble of sound from between rubber lips. ‘Just as I didn't stop to think that my unpremeditated action would undoubtedly restore me to the Number One spot in your list of suspects – assuming, that is, that I haven't stayed there all along.'

Jurnet said: ‘I make a point of treating all my suspects the same. No favourites. No top of the pops.'

‘I hardly know whether to be relieved or affronted. On the whole, I think, flattered. Such a macho thing, murder. Nobody before has ever thought me capable of it.'

Jurnet said deprecatingly: ‘Crippen was a mingy little man. You don't have to be anything special to kill someone. All you need's a defective moral sense and an overblown idea of your own importance.'

‘How deflating!' Coryton looked at his hands again. Then: ‘Ever heard of the Judgement of God, Inspector?'

‘The Judgement of –?'

‘Trial by ordeal, if you prefer. In the Middle Ages, when they had someone up on a serious charge, they had two very effective ways of determining the truth, or otherwise, of the accusation. The accused person either was required to pick up a stone lying at the bottom of a cauldron of boiling water, or else was ordered, barehanded, to carry a lump of red-hot metal over a specified distance. The scalded or the burned flesh, as the case might be, was bound up and left for a few days, and then the bandages were taken off and the wounds examined. Though you, as a modern police officer, might not think so, they were reasonable beings, the people who devised such tests. They knew from bitter experience that the Judgement of God, like God himself, could be mystifying and equivocal. So they didn't expect miracles – only that the hands should be well on their way to healing.' Coryton raises his own, bagged, hands and held them out to the detective as if proffering a gift. The pink liquid swirled about his wrists. ‘Come back in a little while, Inspector, and see how mine are getting on. Maybe they'll convince you.'

‘Of your guilt or your innocence?'

‘That will be for you to say.'

It was a very nice funeral, as funerals went; the weather good, and Bullensthorpe churchyard as good a place as any for a kip pending the dawn of the last day. The whole countryside, of high and low degree, seemed to have turned out to wish Percy Toller happy dreams.

Jurnet, arriving late, noted with some surprise that even Miss Appleyard had come along. She sat in a front pew clasping a prayer book bound in ivory. In the row behind, Anna March, making an elaborate pretence of not seeing him, had engaged Mrs Coryton in an intense conversation, to which the curator's wife was responding with her customary good humour, but a little absent-mindedly, fingertips gently touching the area of abraded skin above her left cheekbone. No sign of Danny, who had made Percy's coffin – a farewell gift, if ever there was one.

No Charles Winter either, which was no surprise. According to the detective's information, the potter spent his days hanging about outside the derelict warehouse where Mike Botley had found sanctuary with a squat of like-minded companions.

Jurnet found himself a seat in the side chapel off the chancel, out of sight of the bulk of the congregation, and out of earshot of most of what the officiating cleric had to say in praise of the dear departed. The detective, who thought it unlikely the panegyric included any mention of Percy's career in crime, felt saddened by the omission, for the little man had been a burglar in a million. Angleby CID would not soon see his like again. And where fitter than in church to celebrate his special talents? How did that bit go – about there being more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than for ninety-nine law-abiding citizens? The reverend gentleman, beseeching God's mercy on the soul of Percy Toller, clearly hadn't a clue that even as he pumped out his pious platitudes the trumpets in honour of the dear old ex-villain must be sounding fortissimo on the other side.

Jurnet joined in a couple of hymns, careful to shut off the sound whenever he came to a ‘Christ' or a ‘Jesus' or a ‘Saviour'; names which, as a Jew in the making, it now embarrassed him to let pass his lips other than as an expletive, which somehow didn't count. A sudden sharp longing for Miriam transfixed him: an odd place to feel randy, and for an odd reason. He fixed his eyes intently on the black marble tablet on the facing wall.

To The Undying Memory Of Laz Appleyard
Appleyard of Hungary
A Hero Of Our Time
1926–1973

It was, on the whole, a jolly get-together. Even Mollie, her plump prettiness sadly diminished, shone with a pride in which there was more rejoicing than grief. Outside in the churchyard, the grass, the trees, the women's summery dresses, made it seem more a village garden fête than a funeral, the flowery box moving slowly on the shoulders of the dark-clad bearers an outsize cake of which you were invited to guess the weight.

Back at ‘Pippins' the ham was as succulent and moist as if the little man himself had cycled into Bersham to get it fresh that morning. Jurnet helped himself to a slice without thinking; found it delicious and himself, to his immense gratification, devoid of guilt feelings. A milestone. To have reached the point where you could sin comfortably in a new religion must be progress.

Miss Appleyard, Jurnet noted, had not stayed to partake of the funeral baked meats, but both the Hungarians were there, a circumstance which embarrassed the detective considerably, since it meant he could not in decency postpone any longer thanking Ferenc Szanto for saving his life.

He waited until the blacksmith had settled his friend into an armchair, the sticks placed carefully to one side, and then joined him at the dining table where, with no genteel holding back, the big man was loading two plates with ham and potato salad.

Before Jurnet had time to speak, the Hungarian put down the two plates and clasped the detective in a hug as painful as it was unexpected.

‘Thank you! Thank you!'

Extricating himself with as little damage to the still unhealed portions of his flesh as he could manage, Jurnet said: ‘I'm the one should be doing the thanking.'

‘The Fire Brigade themselves say, without you, Steve wouldn't have had a chance.'

‘All the same –'

The other raised a large, calloused hand.

‘Not another word!' Eyes twinkling: ‘Kindly note that as a bloody foreigner, unlike you, I do not hang my head with English modesty and murmur “it is nothing”. You are grateful – good! To be in a policeman's good books can never be bad, eh? Who knows when it will come in useful?'

‘You weren't in the Norfolk and Angleby, at least. Glad you got out without too much harm done.'

‘Harm? Me? A smith is a salamander, didn't you know that? Fire has no power against him. Who can smoke an already kippered kipper? But now –' readdressing himself to the food – ‘now is time to eat. Why is it funerals make you always hungry? Is it because they remind us to get on with it while there is still time?'

Jurnet said with calculated cruelty – the debt had been acknowledged, time to get on to the next thing: ‘I don't suppose any of us will have all that much of an appetite when it comes to burying young Jessica.'

At that, the other moved away without a word; set the two plates of food down on a sideboard until he had found a small table to place at the side of Jeno Matyas's chair. Having spread a napkin over his friend's knees, he retrieved one of the plates, set knife and fork upon either side; and only when he had seen the crippled man set to did he return to the detective's side, there to receive the second blow which Jurnet had ready and waiting.

‘I'm sure it's already occurred to you that if you'd only told Steve right at the start about his possible relationship to Jessica, the boy wouldn't be just out of intensive care at the Norfolk and Angleby, and that poor girl could still be alive.'

The Hungarian spoke softly.

‘You do me an injustice, Inspector. I knew nothing.'

‘Oh? Miss Appleyard says, that time I found you messing about with the Appleyard papers, what you were really trying to do was remove any letters you could find relating to the affair with Mrs Chalgrove.'

‘There is nothing Elena does not know. At the Coryton party I saw, for the first time, that here was a man and a woman in love, no longer children playing a game. And I thought – yes, before Mr Shelden was even dead, I thought – I must get hold of the love letters, if there were any, that had passed between Laz and Jessica's mother. Those two must not be hurt. Not because they were brother and sister – of that, I swear, I knew nothing. To me, Mrs Chalgrove was just another of Laz's women that came and went like the leaves on the trees. One less among so many to be written in Mr Shelden's book would, so it seemed to me, make no difference to the biography. But it could make Steve unhappy to know.'

‘This at the same time you were planning to make Steve very unhappy indeed by letting him learn all those other home truths about his hero father.'

‘Different altogether!' The Hungarian shook his head energetically. ‘The girl – that was something real, precious. A jewel to be safeguarded. The other, the destruction of a myth.'

Jurnet said slowly: ‘It's a good story, Mr Szanto. It holds together, sounds good.'

‘But you don't believe.' Statement, not question. ‘What did I tell you? What it is to be in a policeman's good books!' Ferenc Szanto burst into gargantuan laughter, and clapped the detective on the shoulder. Jeno Matyas looked up smiling, warmed by his friend's good spirits. The other funeral guests, chomping with dedication, frowned over their loaded plates. There was a time and a place for everything.

Jurnet opened the door to Percy Toller's study to find somebody there before him, sitting at the little desk: a raw-boned young woman with a face of engaging ugliness. At the detective's entrance she looked up smiling, and shut an open desk drawer without embarrassment.

‘Not there,' she announced. ‘Pity. Mrs Toller said she'd have been sure to come upon it, but I couldn't resist taking a look all the same.' Then: ‘I'm Pam Grant, Mr Toller's OU tutor, just in case you thought I was after the family jewels.'

Jurnet grinned, liking what he saw.

‘And I'm Detective-Inspector Ben Jurnet, just in case you were. What
were
you looking for, if I may ask?'

‘Percy's last essay. He was going to bring it to me the night he –' She broke off, and began again after a moment's sombre reflection. ‘Not to me personally, that is. For forwarding to Bletchley, untouched by human hands. Finished essays go to OU headquarters for marking. I don't see them till they come back, and then I can go over them with students.'

‘We reckoned it must have been swept away in the flood waters. Something about the English novel, wasn't it?'

‘That's right. “From
Pamela
to
Sense and Sensibility
– the Emergence of the English Novel, 1740–1810”. Were you a friend of his? Did he let you see it?'

‘Yes to the first question: no to the second. He mentioned what he was doing. Couldn't get over his own surprise it was him actually doing it.'

‘It wasn't a joke, you know,' the young woman insisted earnestly. ‘He was marvellous – a true original, with a wonderfully fresh way of looking at things, but with a quick, analytic brain any academic might have envied. I'm sure I learned a lot more from Mr Toller than he ever learned from me.' Miss Grant got up from the chair and looked round the little room with a smile. ‘Not quite what I expected, I must say. You should have heard him going on about his study – and his books. Gorgeous leather bindings, first editions … he must have got it mixed up in his mind with the Library at Bullen Hall. Ah, well.' Turning back to the detective: ‘Did Mrs Toller tell you she's going to join the Open University herself, in Percy's memory? Isn't that marvellous?'

‘Give her something to take her mind off things, apart from anything else.'

‘Just what I thought. She'll do well, too. When you've had as many students through your hands as I have, you get to know what to expect. Not in Percy's class, of course, but a sticker. Once she's made up her mind to get her degree, she'll soldier on till she gets it, come hell or high water. With Percy, now –' fondly – ‘that was the one question mark. Had he the patience, the concentration, to stay the course? He'd make those great intuitive leaps forward, not always making sure beforehand there was a net to land in –'

Remembering all those high-flying burglaries which had ended with good old Percy not only finding no net to break his fall, but a copper waiting with open arms to catch him, Jurnet concurred gravely: ‘I know exactly what you mean.'

Mollie kissed him when he took his leave, and thanked him for coming.

Jurnet said: ‘That's a grand idea of yours – to do an Open University course yourself.'

‘Cracked, really.' Lips quivering a little: ‘I wouldn't want you to think, Mr Jurnet, even in the bad old days – even times he was inside – I wouldn't rather have been Mrs Percy Toller than the highest lady in the land.'

‘You
were
the highest lady in the land.'

‘You've always been very kind, Mr Jurnet. Percy always said it was almost worth while being a villain to have the honour of making your acquaintance.'