Stately Homicide (33 page)

‘Did he say that? Best compliment anyone ever paid me.'

‘Don't think he didn't mean it. What he said was, that you were a very parfit gentil knight – like in Chaucer, the Canterbury Tales. Did he ever tell you how I got him on to learning bits out of the Dictionary of Quotations, one every day? I've decided to carry on with that, too, myself. It helps to make Percy seem – not quite so far away. You just open the book anywhere, and sometimes it's a whole poem, sometimes just a snippet, doesn't even seem to make sense.' Like a child asking to be asked: ‘Would you like to hear what I learnt for today?'

‘Tell me.'

‘John Donne,' Mollie Toller began. ‘1571 to 1631.' Then:

‘”Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.”'

Jurnet said: ‘I like it.'

Seasons, thought Jurnet, were different in town from what they were in the country. Out there at Bullensthorpe, autumn was coming in like a carnival: flames flaring along the stubbles, the ploughed fields shameless in their naked promise. As the detective drove into the forecourt of his block of flats, the melancholy of summer's end seeped out of the cracked concrete to envelop him. It settled dankly on the car, the rubbish bags awaiting collection, the thin black cat watching him from the shadows.

He still did not know who had killed Chad Shelden.

He climbed the stairs heavily, feeling that he ought to know; feeling that someone, somewhere, had told him all that needed telling, if only he had had the mother wit to take note of it. It was simply not possible for a halfway intelligent person to know people as he had come to know that lot out at Bullen Hall, and overlook that one little foible – that one of them was a murderer.

A supper of baked beans put him into a better frame of mind: willing to admit that, whatever the season, Angleby, for him, would always hold delights denied to those condemned to live out in the sticks. Perhaps that was the thing about cities. They had no seasons, like love.

‘Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.'

He spoke the words aloud, pleased to have them come pat. Good on you, John Donne, whoever you were, whenever you were.

In an inexplicable burst of optimism he spent the evening cleaning the flat, not even depressed that, at the end of his labours, it did not look noticeably different from when he had begun. He went to bed and, drowsily, between waking and sleeping, made up his mind to get a Dictionary of Quotations himself, and follow the Tollers' example. A quotation a day keeps the doctor away. Who knows? – he might even join the Open University. You too can learn to write essays with titles like ‘From
Pamela
to
Sense and Sensibility:
the Emergence of the English Novel, 1740–1810'. It'd be worth it if only to see the Superintendent's face the day he signed his name with B.A. after it.

Poor old Percy! All that work down the drain. Gone to the bottom of the river. The submergence of the English novel.

Suddenly Jurnet was sitting up in bed, wide awake. The square of window in the opposite wall was still filled in with that dingy dark which, in the city, passes for night. Yet light had dawned, nevertheless, and for a blissful moment the detective allowed himself to bathe in its refulgence. In that lovely illumination, no shadows, everything became clear. Doubts fell away, the pieces fell into place: the puzzle complete.

For a moment, head against the pillows, Jurnet contemplated this happy state of affairs. Then he leaned over and switched on the bedside lamp, discovering to his surprise, since he had no recollection of having slept, that it was nearly two o'clock.

Which, still, was as nothing to his astonishment that he now had two murders on his hands.

Without sounding peevish or even put out, the Superintendent had observed: ‘I still can't see why it can't wait until morning.'

Smoothing away the condensation on the windscreen with the flat of his hand, Jurnet wished – as he had wished then, in the Hospital call box, waking up his superior officer in the middle of the night – that he could have thought of an explanation convincing enough to satisfy the possessor of that voice tinged with ironic amusement.

At the Hospital, at least, it hadn't gone too badly; the security man turning out to be an ex-PC of the old school who had known the Inspector when he was still wet behind the ears, and the senior administrator an insomniac who had sounded positively grateful to be presented with a task to occupy the dragging hours. Even the night sister, adamant that nothing, nobody, was to disturb her sleeping patient, had softened under the influence of that dark, Mediterranean charm which the detective – an observing inner self the while twisting a wry lip at the bugger's taking ways – knew how to turn on when the situation called for it.

That Elena Appleyard, rather than the guardian dragon Maudie, had answered the phone at Bullen Hall, was better luck than he had had any right to hope for. Turning the car into the empty driveway, Jurnet saw the light on in the east wing, a small hole in the night. He brought the car to a halt: opened the door to find Elena Appleyard waiting for him.

She held no torch, seemed to know her way in the dark, like a cat. When the detective took out his own torch and shone it in her face, she barely flinched. With her hair spread out on her shoulders, the soft, flowing lines of her white silk dressing gown and filmy shawl, she could have been a fairy tale princess who had slipped out of the castle to an assignation with her prince. Blink and look again, and you saw a goddess old as creation, and as knowing.

She said, without introduction: ‘I've done everything you asked. I've turned off the alarms and I've unlocked the door into the Appleyard Room. Here are the keys you wanted. Is that the lot?'

Taking the keys she held out to him: ‘Thanks very much. Again, I'm sorry about waking you up.'

‘As I've already had occasion to tell you, I'm a poor sleeper.'

She half-turned away, as if she had better things to do with the rest of the night. ‘Do you need me any further?'

‘My colleagues will be along presently. You'll need to turn the alarms back on after us.'

‘I shan't bother.' She frowned briefly. ‘Have you spoken to Steve?' Jurnet nodded. ‘Then you'll know it really doesn't matter any longer what happens to Bullen Hall.'

‘That's for you to say.'

‘I do say. Goodnight, Inspector.'

‘Just a minute.' Jurnet put out a hand to detain her. The slender arm beneath the billowing silk felt strong and unyielding. ‘Don't you think, maybe, you ought to come along? I don't want to be held responsible if something goes missing.'

‘That,' she said evenly, ‘is a chance you'll have to take.'

Miss Appleyard had left a single light on in the Appleyard Room. It was enough for Jurnet. More than. With compressed lips he hurried on to the Library where George Bullen, sardonic over the mantelpiece, had this much, at least, to be said for him: that he had been dead four hundred years and more. Whatever he and that hot-pants sister of his had or had not got up to, it wasn't a matter for Angleby CID.

Jurnet's business at Bullen took him less time than he had expected, even though, after the initial exultation at finding what he had been looking for, he had proceeded – he who was normally so quick in his ways – with an odd deliberation, laying out the evidence on a table close to the window, and bringing a table lamp from its accustomed alcove to illuminate it. There had been a moment when the detective had stiffened, fancying he heard a step outside, the snap of a breaking twig: only to resume his work with a slight nod of satisfaction, or understanding.

Well before the Superintendent and Sergeant Ellers were due he was back at the car, eyes straining into the night, which was blacker than ever, the sky blanketed with cloud. Miss Appleyard had switched off her light and the darkness was complete. For all his excitement, a familiar melancholy depressed the detective's spirits. Death was a lonely thing, only life lonelier. Why did he always, on the trail of a killer and closing the distance between them minute by minute, feel himself the hunted rather than the hunter?

The beam of headlights swinging round in a wide arc from the road was immensely cheering. In another moment, Jack Ellers, in the driving seat, braked to a halt alongside, and informed Jurnet through the window: ‘Jeep turned left into the road just as we were passing the Bullensthorpe turn-off. That OK?'

‘What I was hoping for. Saves us the trouble of lighting the fuse.'

From within the car, the Superintendent, informal in an anorak of couture scruffiness, leaned across to say: ‘You lead on, Ben. We'll follow. Everything's laid on, just as you ordered, even unto the wellies.'

‘The wellies? I never –' Jurnet stopped short, rendered speechless by admiration and loathing in equal measure.

‘Logistics,' the Superintendent proclaimed, settling himself comfortably in his seat. ‘That's the name of the game. No detail too large, none too small. That's what I like to see.' He inclined his head towards his subordinate in benign approval. ‘On the wet side, marshes!'

They came to the coast from among the bracken-choked hills that tumbled down to the wetland, giving the coast road a wide berth and creeping into the car park of Hoope bird sanctuary with lights out and only the voice of a PC alongside murmuring which way to go. The night was as black as ever, but no longer impenetrable. Sound and smell had taken over from sight.

From below rose the unique tang of the marsh, brackish and ancient, yet full of an astringent freshness to cleanse the lungs and send the blood coursing through the veins with renewed vigour. In a small wind which seemed to be blowing simultaneously from all directions, the reed panicles whispered ceaselessly against a clatter of elderly leaves. Somewhere close at hand, water gurgled on and on, as if making a small joke go a long way; whilst in the distance, sounding now near, now far, the sea broke on a shingly shore and retreated, hissing, for another try.

Using his torch circumspectly, Jurnet counted ten men in all awaiting instructions, seven of them in uniform, the other three in well-worn levis and anoraks; all of them local lads with wind-chapped faces, and voices that curved up and over towards the end of every sentence like the combers homing to the beach. They listened to Journet's briefing respectfully, and melted away into the darkness almost before he had finished speaking.

The three from Angleby followed; at first gingerly, distrustful of a world as it might have been at the beginning of Creation – land, sky and water not yet quite separated; then with increasing confidence, filled with a sense of the airy spaces that surrounded them: an enlargement of consciousness which did not save the Superintendent from walking into a dyke from which he emerged wet to the thighs, but with spirits unquenched.

Not much longer now.

Jurnet, head down, intent on the narrow path between the reeds, suddenly became aware – of what, he could not say, except that there was something. How, back in the Coachyard, had the bookbinder described that mysterious prefiguring of dawn?
Something left over from an earlier stage of man's development – perhaps even earlier than that. An apprehension of life beginning.

And ending.

Behind him, the Superintendent took hold of Jurnet's shoulders, twisted them gently, so that he was forced to raise his eyes from their preoccupation with where he put his feet. At first, nothing seemed changed, except that the wind had strengthened and now blew unremittingly from the sea. Then the detective realised that the darkness, without dissipating itself in any discernible way, had split in two laterally; the lower part dense and anchored, as against the continued nothingness above.

Out of this nothingness, someone, something, essayed a tentative ‘
coo-ee
!' which, even whilst the three, startled, peered upward in the attempt to discover its source, dissolved itself into a bubbling trill which lost itself in the reeds' rustling.

‘Curlew,' the Superintendent pronounced, with that calm assumption of knowledge which always made Jurnet want to poke him one in the kisser. ‘Unless it was a whimbrel' – an admission of possible error which should have put all to rights, except what the hell was a whimbrel, anyway, when it was at home?

Sergeant Ellers, in a voice whose tone encapsulated what the little Welshman thought of marshes in general and Hoope in particular, demanded: ‘What's that big lump sticking up?'

‘That must be the barrow,' replied Jurnet, who, in the hours of waiting, had had time to study a map.

‘Don't talk daft! Over there!'

‘Not a
wheel
barrow,' the Superintendent put in.
There he was, sod him, at it again!
‘A long barrow. A grave. Some Bronze Age chieftain, I suppose, who wanted to be buried on the cliff, in sight of the sea.'

‘Ruddy cemetery,' snorted the Welshman, not sounding at all surprised.

However the phrase went, Jurnet thought, turning away from the chubby, aggrieved face, and happy in the realisation that he could actually see it, dawn did not break. It crept up on you insidiously, before you had a chance to say no. Here I am, another day, and sucks to you.

Day seeped over the marsh and revealed, beyond the reeds and the shallow pools that reflected the sky, a high pebble ridge between cliffs which shut out the sea. Not much of a barrier, it seemed to Jurnet, against the breakers banging away on the further side. That old chap in the barrow, or the followers who had borne him to his last resting-place, must have known the way the tides went, to keep him stowed high and dry and out of harm's way, how many hundreds of years was it? Couldn't hardly have been expected to take into account that one day some nosy parkers, in the name of archaeology or whatever, would be along to cart the old bones to a glass case in Angleby Museum, far from the sight of the sea and the sound of the curlews calling, to say nothing of the whimbrels.