Stately Homicide (37 page)

‘Exactly as the Inspector planned it, of course!' The Superintendent was not yet ready to abandon his ill humour. ‘Getting Miss Appleyard to telephone the other Hungarian with some nonsense about intruders in the Library, and then making sure he got a sight of those fudged books –'

‘It worked, sir, didn't it?' the little Welshman persisted. ‘Ben knew if anyone could flush Matyas out, get him walking, it would be his pal Szanto –'

‘Hold on!' Jurnet nevertheless smiled gratefully at his mate. ‘Don't have me knowing all the answers. First go off, I thought the two of 'em were in it together. It certainly wasn't any part of my plan to have Szanto take along his horsewhip to make sure Matyas got on to his own two feet and no two ways about it.'

The Superintendent remarked sourly: ‘It's no offence I know of to pretend you can't walk when you're perfectly able to. So far as I'm aware, Matyas was neither soliciting alms, claiming disability allowance, nor making bogus demands upon the National Health Service.'

‘He is now,' Jurnet pointed out sombrely. ‘Not bogus. The latest is that one leg may have to come off.'

‘My heart bleeds,' said the Superintendent. He came back to his desk and picked up the copy of Jeno Matyas's confession, turning the pages to the closing sentences, about the little girls and their dolls' prams, which he read, slowly and with a close attention, as if reading them for the first time. Then he raised his head from the typescript and said in a quiet voice that conveyed more than invective: ‘These people who talk about nations, the fate of nations, all mankind – they're the really depraved ones. There is no
all
mankind or anything else – only one and one and one, and one, and so on, ad infinitum.' He looked directly at Jurnet, and said, with a simplicity the detective longed to believe in: ‘Well done, Ben!'

Jurnet offered, with a certain diffidence: ‘There was one other small pointer, once its significance dawned on me. I'm still not sure Percy wasn't trying to pass me a message in code – telling me something without actually shopping a fellow-villain in so many words. His quotation for the day, that last time I saw him at the Hall, was just one line: “Rob me, but bind me not, and let me go.” Bind me not,' Jurnet repeated, then, pronouncing the surname and the Christian name of the poet so that they rhymed: ‘It's by a geezer named John Donne.'

The Superintendent corrected him kindly: ‘You mean John Donne'– pronouncing it Dunn, the bastard.

But then, thought Jurnet, he would, wouldn't he, bless his heart.

If asked, Jurnet would have been hard put to it to produce a convincing reason for driving back yet again to Bullen Hall. Surely he had seen enough of the place to last a lifetime!

With the passing of summer's heat, the great lawn in front of the house was greener than ever. The world had rolled round a little since that broiling day when the detective had heard the peacock scream. Now the sun, so mellow on the old brick, gilding afresh the little pennons atop the turrets, packed beneath its benign exterior a spiteful undercurrent of chill. The trees had a slatternly look, the rookeries exposed by the thinning leaves.

Nothing stayed the same, Jurnet reflected, accepted: things changed even as you looked at them. All the same, he felt a need to fix the place in his memory, set it in jelly like one of Rosie Ellers' celebrated moulds in aspic, every slice of cucumber in its appointed place.

The Coachyard was moderately crowded. Considering the time of year, the shops were doing good business. Anna March, in the middle of selling a pair of earrings to a hard-faced woman in her sixties, suddenly looked up, saw the detective watching her, and turned back to her customer. Her expression, which signalled the end of the relationship – the relationship with Danny, that is – upset Jurnet less than the sight of the merchandise she was flogging. Did the woman have to sell that raddled old bag earrings which were the exact replicas of the ones she had made for Miriam?

A brisk young woman had taken over Mike Botley's basket business. The shutters were fastened over the bookbinder's place, but a few doors away a new shop had opened, an art gallery, full of Broadland landscapes. Outside the shop, a couple in their mid-forties were supervising the efforts of a young man – their son, Jurnet guessed – to attach a red-and-white striped awning to some hooks high up on the fascia. The father held the ladder firm, his wife smiled upward, a little anxious whenever the ladder teetered on the cobbles. The three formed a pleasant, self-contained unit among the moving throng, at ease in each other's company.

The young man, who was scarcely more than a boy, was amazingly handsome – golden tan, a cap of shining chestnut hair, a neat body that moved with little of the unsureness of youth. In this day and age, Jurnet was quite certain, it was inconceivable that a boy could reach that boy's age and be unaware of his natural advantages, and of the power they gave him. So that the detective was not all that surprised to see Charles Winter, still wearing his grubby yellow sweater, leaning over the stable door of his workshop, watching the boy: nor to read, in the way the boy tilted his head and moved his shoulders, that he was well aware of the other's scrutiny, and of all that it implied.

A voice said: ‘Alan and Mary Loring.' The detective turned to find Mrs Coryton at his side, bright-eyed and indomitable in a tweed suit subtly tailored to combine high fashion with just a soupçon of dowdiness. Her face was completely healed. ‘Their son's called Christopher. They ought to do well. They've got some very nice stuff.'

‘Windmills and yachts,' Jurnet commented disparagingly. ‘You'd think that was all Norfolk was made of.'

‘Oh come! Even you wouldn't want sugar beet or a natural gas terminal on your living room wall!' Changing tone as she observed the detective's gaze unshiftingly intent on the silent communication between Charles Winter and the boy on the ladder: ‘I'd hoped I'd convinced you that all forms of love are equally precious.'

‘Oh ah.' Then: ‘Last week we had a bloke up in court for having sex with a five-year-old kid.'

‘You know what I mean! So long as it does no hurt.'

Jurnet said: ‘All love hurts.'

Again the woman insisted: ‘You know what I mean! Really! You're like Procrustes with his bed – you construct a model of the world the way you'd like it to be, and then snip off all the bits that don't fit.' Demonstrating that she, too, could be cruel, she ended: ‘Is your girl back from Greece yet?'

‘Not yet.'

‘She will, soon. The season's over. The weather over there will be breaking up any day now.'

‘Very flattering.'

Not one to sustain spite, Mrs Coryton said with a sad smile: ‘Haven't you learnt yet, Inspector, to be thankful for what you can get?'

‘Not yet,' Jurnet said again; and, because his nature was less forgiving than hers, added: ‘I saw Mr Coryton in the Norfolk and Angleby. I thought he was looking very chipper.'

‘Yes,' she agreed bleakly. ‘Very.'

At the forge, the jeep was gone, the fire was out. Jurnet was not sorry to find Ferenc Szanto away from home. What was he expected to say to the blacksmith? Apologise for having suspected him wrongly? The bugger was lucky not to find himself on a charge of attempted murder himself.

He came out of the yard, crossed the rutted track which led to the back entrance, and entered the belt of trees on the further side. Beyond lay the field that, as on that first day at Bullen, divided him from the river. It was still full of sheep, their young fleeces grown a little shop-soiled. A few of them stared at him in a mindless manner as he followed the chain-link fence to the gate beside the hedgerow oak where Jessica Chalgrove had hanged herself.

The gate was padlocked and he climbed it doggedly, concentrating on keeping his jacket and slacks clear of the new strand of barbed wire along the top. Safely over, he did not look back; crossed the field with an uncaring directness that scattered the baaing ninnies to left and right: climbed a second gate, and dropped down to a strip of grass patterned with yellowing leaves that had fallen from the willows along the river bank.

The little stream, replenished after the summer drought, slid down its invisible gradient with the calm deliberation common to all Norfolk rivers. Were it not for some leaves travelling unhurriedly with the current, it would not have been immediately obvious which way lay the sea.

The detective turned upstream. Past the willows, the grass gave way to rushes and cabbage thistles, the withered umbels of hemlock and wild angelica. Burrs and feathered seeds attached themselves to Jurnet's clothes: morsels of stalk found their way into his shoes. Intent upon every step, it came as a surprise, when at last he raised his head, to discover that he had rounded a bend of the river. The mill loomed ahead of him.

It came as even more of a surprise to find Elena Appleyard sitting on a fallen tree trunk, looking out at the river.

She wore a dress of fine grey woollen, long-sleeved and effacing, and she sat so still and quiet that, for a moment, until she turned her head, and her body with it, and regarded him, neither welcoming nor forbidding, Jurnet thought he must be imagining her. Easy to accept ghosts in that setting: – the mill on the opposite bank, a shell of black brick, pierced with door-and window-holes out of which poked bushes and saplings and clumps of rosebay willowherb; the partly collapsed sluice gate, a length of metal tubing that had once done service as handrail for the catwalk along its top, trailing rustily in the water. Where the river, its path still narrowed by the obstruction, pushed through the dam opening with uncharacteristic noise, the jagged remains of a centre board hung crazily above the water.

Appleyard of Hungary's guillotine.

Elena Appleyard said: ‘Surely not still looking for clues, Inspector?'

Feeling unaccountably embarrassed by the encounter, Jurnet replied: ‘Just that I never had a chance to come down here to the mill before.' As the woman made no comment, he floundered on: ‘From the look of it, it won't be here much longer.'

‘Do you think so?' she said then. ‘It looked exactly the same when Laz and I were children. Those stone steps – do you see them? We used to climb all the way up to the top floor. The stairs inside are still there, just as they used to be; and still quite safe, so long as you know where to put your feet.'

Jurnet stared.

‘You don't mean to say you still go inside there?'

‘Frequently.' She smiled for the first time. ‘Everyone needs some private place, don't you think? The mill is mine. Though how much longer –.' Miss Appleyard turned her face away from a contemplation of the mill towards the detective. ‘You've visited Steve in hospital. Did he tell you what he intends to do once he's well again? He says he's going to Australia, he and Ferenc. He says he's never coming back to Bullen, not even to say goodbye.'

Jurnet began awkwardly: ‘He did say something –. About going to a place that has no history –'

‘Can you understand it?'

‘Frankly, yes: given what's happened –'

‘But an Appleyard!'

Her calm assumption that Appleyards were not as other mortals made Jurnet bite his lips to suppress a grin. But then, how right she was.

Aloud, he said: ‘I'm sure you understand that Bullen Hall could hold memories Steve can't bear to –'

Elena Appleyard cut him short.

‘Memories! Don't you suppose that I too have memories, Inspector, when I come here, to the mill?'

‘You're made of sterner stuff than he is.'

She considered this for a moment, head a little to one side. Then agreed: ‘Yes, that's true.' She stood up, a little stiffly, as always, raised an arm with a lovely grace, and pointed. ‘Do you see that window on the second floor? There, to the left of the grating?' And when she was satisfied that the detective had pinpointed the spot: ‘That's the one room which still has a proper floor. They used to store the sacks of grain there, so I suppose it had to be specially strong.' She looked at Jurnet brightly. ‘That's where Laz used to take Carla Chalgrove.'

Jurnet, not knowing the right response to this piece of information, mumbled something unintelligible.

‘Do you know?' – with a trill of amusement – ‘she said it was too uncomfortable, making love on the bare boards. She made poor old Laz bring a mattress down from the house. How ineffably bourgeois, don't you think? That's how I first found out what was going on. And that –' Miss Appleyard continued, in a tone which, for her, was almost chatty – ‘is how I came to kill him.'

Her words took Jurnet's breath away, as no doubt she had intended they should. Before he had time to regain it she went on, as if in answer to a question he had put to her: ‘Oh – because he loved her. I can't think why. She was no different from all those other brainless women he went to bed with. But Laz thought she was. And I couldn't have that.'

Jurnet said, tense and still unwilling to believe: ‘But I understood she died when Jessica was born. By the time your brother met with his accident, she'd been dead for years.'

‘His accident! How charmingly circumspect you policemen are! While she lived, I never realised the true nature of their relationship. And when I did –! Laz died the day he told me that what he had felt for Carla he had never felt for any other woman. Including me.'

‘You were brother and sister!'

Elena Appleyard looked at the detective with something like disappointment.

‘And I'd fancied you were a man to understand something at least of the nature of love!' Her voice, for the first time in their acquaintance, became dark and intense. ‘How can you hope to discover the boundaries of love except by going beyond the boundaries?'

‘I suppose I'm a bit of a bourgeois myself.' Jurnet pulled his thoughts together. ‘Do you want to tell me what happened?'