The Killings at Badger's Drift (20 page)

And there might be children. Somewhere deep under the cosy coat a knife turned. She would be useful then. Poor old Aunty Phyllis. Funny Aunty Phyllis. A tear plopped into her empty glass. God, she could do with another drink. She became vaguely aware that Henry was saying something.

‘. . . and we’re both very worried about you.’

‘. . .’Bout what, Henry?’

‘Haven’t you been listening?’ She stared at him with intense drunken concentration. ‘About you, of course.’

‘Nothing matter with me.’

He put down his glass and propelled himself over to where she stood. ‘Look - you don’t have to go to the cottage, you know, Phyllis. It was you who suggested it. Kate and I would be happy for you to stay here.’ She made a peculiar sound which could have been a sob or a laugh. ‘In any case we both hope you’ll still spend a lot of time with us. Katherine isn’t used to running a big house, you know. She’ll be grateful for all the help you can give her. As I have always been.’

‘Is that what I’m reduced to then? An unpaid domestic?’

‘Of course not. I simply—’

‘Is that the price I have to pay for my tied cottage? Scrubbing floors.’

‘Now you’re being ridiculous.’ She watched his face crease into irritation. Henry hated rows. Bella had always been wonderful at defusing them before they really got a hold. She would have stopped right now. ‘You don’t know what it’s like. What I’ve had to put up with since she came. All the sneering remarks, the little humiliations. She never does it when you’re around.’

‘You’re imagining things—’

‘Am I? Oh, she’s clever. You were blind but I saw what she was up to. Bella was hardly in her grave before she was up here . . . helping with this . . . helping with that . . . simpering shyly . . . pushing in where she wasn’t wanted.’ Oh stop, Phyllis, stop! You’ll make him hate you. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it was going on while Bella was still alive.’

‘That’s enough. You know that isn’t true. I won’t have you speaking of Katherine in that way.’

‘She’s only marrying you for your money. Do you think she’d look twice at you if you were paralysed and poor?’ She drove on and on. Henry Trace watched her, more amazed and distressed than angry. So much venom. He almost expected to see bile, black and thick as treacle, bubbling between her lips. When she had finished he said quietly, ‘I’d no idea you felt like this. I thought you would be pleased at my happiness. I thought you were fond of me.’

‘
Fond
. . .’ She cried out then, hard ugly sounds. Her cheeks remained dry and red with anger. When Katherine appeared in the doorway Phyllis Cadell ran from the room, pushing the girl’s slim figure aside, unable to look at her face, which she was sure would be filled with sly laughter - or worse, with pity.

 

‘Oh Pookie.’ Barbara Lessiter curled her tongue into her husband’s ear like a pliant little snail. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been so . . .’ She took a deep breath, putting an impossible strain on the thin lace and crêpe-de-chine nightdress. Her headache was better at last.

‘There, there. You mustn’t worry,’ replied Pookie, romping happily between satin sheets. Like a very hungry man after a vast banquet he felt that what he had just received (twice) would last him forever. Which was fortunate because, as things turned out, it was going to have to from that particular source at any rate. ‘Change of life, I expect.’

At this reference to her age he felt Barbara withdraw slightly. Well, a little dig from time to time wouldn’t come amiss. Keep her on her toes. Show her she wasn’t dealing with the lovesick swain of five years ago. He’d be damned if he was going to be grateful for something that was his by rights. If her headache had gone on much longer it could have featured in the
Guinness Book of Records
. His hand moved again.

‘Darling . . . Pooks?’

‘Mm?’ Ah, there was nothing like silk and lace. Unless it was warm bare flesh.

‘Don’t, sweetheart . . . listen to Barbie . . .’

Growl, growl. And a pretend doggy panting.

‘It’s just that . . . I’ve been so terribly worried . . . I know I’ve got to confess . . . but I don’t know how to tell you . . .’

Apprehension sluiced the passion from his loins, leaving him cold as ice. He seized her arms, glaring at her in the light from the ivory figurine. How could he not have guessed the reason for her neglect and distant behaviour? ‘You’ve been with someone else!’

‘Oh Pookums!’ she cried, and covered her face with her hands. ‘How could you even think such a thing of your poor Barbie?’

Relief repaired some of the sexual damage. Down in the forest something stirred. ‘Well . . . what can it be, then? Can’t be too dwedful. Whisper it in Pookie’s ear.’

The lace expanded again in heartfelt preparation. ‘Well . . . when I got my mink coat out of store for the Traces’ wedding the other day I left it on the back seat of the car . . . just while I went shopping and . . . Oh sweetheart . . . someone stole it . . .’ She burst into a flood of tears, then, as he did not speak, peeped coyly out between her fingers. This action, which he had once thought charming, now struck him as suitable only for a child of three. A nauseatingly winsome child at that.

‘What the hell do you want to wear a mink coat for in July?’

‘I wanted you to be proud of me.’

‘Have you been to the police?’

‘No . . . I was in such a state . . . I just drove around worrying . . . and then I came home.’

‘You must do that tomorrow. Give them all the details. Fortunately it’s insured.’

‘Yes, darling . . . I don’t suppose?’ - a serpentine arm twisted over his shoulder and around his neck - ‘Pookie will ever buy his naughty Barbie anovver one?’

Pookie’s stare gave nothing away. He was trying to recall Krystal’s remark; little Krystal who was always so pleased to see him; whose welcome was never anything but warm and friendly. What was it she had said? ‘I’d have to do it five hundred times to get a coat like that.’ He smiled calmly, almost forgivingly, at his wife and patted her smooth brown shoulder.

‘We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?’

Barnaby sat in the incident room. He was in his shirt sleeves before an open window. The soft thud of tennis balls and an occasional reproachful cry floated in from the nearby recreation ground. He twirled his rotating cards for the hundredth time and called for some coffee.

‘And not in that mug with the blasted frog squatting in it.’

‘Oh. I thought he was rather sweet,’ said Policewoman Brierley, her lips twitching.

‘Well I didn’t.’

‘No, sir.’

Barnaby spun one more time, realizing that he knew all the information by heart, hoping that a fresh reading might show a piece of the puzzle in a different light, juxtapose seemingly disparate facts, reveal with a whisk of the conjuror’s cloth something which had hitherto been darkly concealed. At least with poor old Loveless/Lovejoy/Lessiter accounted for all afternoon there was one suspect fewer.

Barnaby toyed with the idea that the murderer might be fancy free, killing to protect the reputation of his or her partner. It sounded a bit far fetched but if the partner’s legal spouse held the purse strings it might be a possibility. Money had been behind many a killing. Money and sex. Interlocked. An eternal ampersand. And a motive for murder since murder began.

Two days had passed since the funeral and Barnaby had spent one of them discussing the death of Mrs Trace with all the members of the shooting party with the exception of the farm boy and neighbouring landowners whom he had left to Troy. The only new bit of information to arise from this was that, at the time of the shooting, Phyllis Cadell was on her way back to Tye House, having got bored by the whole proceedings. Henry had expressed surprise that she had decided to accompany them in the first place. Phyllis in her turn had assured Barnaby that Bella had been urging her for some time to come out with them. Phyllis had done a certain amount of shooting when she was younger and knew how to handle a gun but had simply lost the taste for it. ‘I regretted joining them almost as soon as things really got going. I stayed for a bit then decided to give up. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself so I just slipped back to the house.’

Another example of unusual behaviour. Barnaby’s mind turned back to his cards and Miss Simpson. On the day of her death she too had behaved ‘out of character’. Were the two deaths connected? There was no sensible logical reason for believing this. Yet he still couldn’t leave the idea alone. Barnaby read the photostat of the inquest report again although by now he knew it backwards. He remembered his first quick conviction that there was something odd, some fact buried in there that didn’t make sense, but by now the whole piece was so stale he wondered where that original impulse had sprung from. Certainly repeated readings had done nothing to support or elucidate this instinctive belief.

On the morning of the second day he had interviewed Norah Whiteley in the tactfully vacated office of the headmaster at the school where she worked. She was a thin woman with a bitter mouth, mistakenly wearing very youthful clothes. What she had to tell him was disturbing.

‘I left David because I was afraid. I could just about cope with his women. At least that meant he left me alone. But he was very violent. You never knew what would start him off. The dinner wasn’t right, the car wouldn’t start. I could put up with it for myself but when he started on Jamie . . . I told him to go and when he wouldn’t I packed all his stuff, put it outside and had the locks changed. But even then I had to get a court order to stop him molesting us.’

‘Does he have access to the boy?’

‘No.’ There was a hard, unhappy, yet satisfied set to her lips. ‘He applied but I blocked it. I fought. I wouldn’t trust him to keep his fists to himself.’

‘And do you know if he has a . . . liaison with someone at the moment?’

‘Bound to. David’s never without a woman for long. He’s sex mad.’

As she said this Barnaby had a vivid recollection of his first sight of the man sitting close to Katherine Lacey in the kitchen of Tye House. He had mistrusted his own quick assumption at that time. Shades of D.H. Lawrence. And those wonderful torrid grainy films of his childhood:
Double Indemnity. The Postman always Rings Twice
. It was all there: the beautiful bride, the inadequate husband, the lusty stud. So obvious, such a cliché. And yet, and yet . . . How often the obvious turned out to be the truth.

But Barnaby saw no point in pretending that he had recognized any signs of guilt as the couple had become aware of his presence and broken apart. Whiteley had looked depressed and irritable, Katherine merely interested and concerned. And there was something so cool about the girl: an almost asexual purity in her beauty. He could imagine her body being offered up to its legal possessor when all the knots were properly tied, not without love necessarily, but perhaps with a moderate degree of fond attachment. It was harder to imagine her being swept away by a passion so strong it was worth risking a gilded future for.

David Whiteley was something else: amoral, self-interested and now known to be violent. Barnaby did not find it too difficult to visualize him in the role of murderer. But the death of Miss Simpson had been curiously nonviolent, almost subtle. Barnaby could not see the farm manager annotating
Julius Caesar
and he could never, with those brawny arms and legs, have climbed through the larder window. Nor could Barnaby see him committing murder to save any neck but his own.

Mechanically he gave the wheel another spin. He could not escape the comparison with Russian roulette. Five spins got you nowhere. The sixth could blow your mind. He drained the coffee, pleased to see nothing nearer to animate life in the bottom of the mug than a sweet dark primeval sludge. And then the phone rang.

Policewoman Brierley said, ‘I’ve got a Mrs Sweeney on the line, sir. She asked to speak to whoever was in charge of the inquiry about Miss Simpson.’

‘Put her on.’

‘It’s Mrs Sweeney here of the Black Boy. To whom am I speaking?’

‘Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby.’

‘Are you the gentleman what came in for a half and a ploughman’s the other day?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well I think you ought to come over. There’s something funny happening at the Rainbirds’.’

‘What sort of thing?’ The voice, which he recalled as flatly lugubrious, now positively rippled with excitement.

‘I don’t rightly know . . . it’s almost like someone singing only it’s not like any singing I ever heard . . . more like wailing, really. It’s been going on for ages.’

Afterwards Barnaby remembered that moment very clearly. As he replaced the receiver he had the strongest sense that the machinery of the case, which had seemingly ground almost to a halt with alibis, unproven and unprovable statements and, on the part of at least two people, the deliberate wish to deceive, was now moving again. Although he could not know with what speed the machinery would gather force or that a hand, as yet unknown to him, would hurl a spanner into the works with such terrible repercussions.

 

There must have been fifty people standing at the gate of Tranquillada. As soon as Troy cut the engine he and Barnaby could hear the sounds. A terrible keening. Mrs Sweeney left the gathering and hurried to meet them.

‘Since I talked to you I rung the bell but nobody came. I felt I had to do something.’

The two men walked up the path. No one attempted to follow. That in itself underlined the feeling of dread that permeated the hot still air. Normally, reflected Barnaby, you had to hold them back. He and Troy stood on the step. The threnody continued. Barnaby wondered how anything so apparently emotionless could produce such an effect on the heart of the listener. It stopped and started with inhuman regularity, like a needle stuck on a record. After using the knocker with no result Barnaby crouched down and shouted through the letter box: ‘Mr Rainbird . . . open this door.’