Best British Crime 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  “I’ll give you a glimpse inside,” Shelagh said, and she swung the door open. We were immediately enveloped in a surge of heat which might have sprung from an equatorial jungle. Through the cloud we could see the back of a tall, perspiring man wearing nothing but a towel round his waist.

  “Mr Airlie!” Shelagh called into the jungle. “This is Mr and Mrs Rumpole. They’ll be beginning their treatments tomorrow.”

  “Mr Rumpole. Hi!” The man turned and lifted a hand. “Join me in here tomorrow. You’ll find it’s heaven. Absolute heaven! Shut the door, Shelagh, it’s getting draughty.”

  Shelagh shut the door on the equatorial rain forest and returned us to a grey Norfolk afternoon. I went back to my room and read Wordsworth before dinner. There may have been a lot wrong with the English countryside he loved so much - there was no wireless, no telephone, no central heating and no reliable bus service. But at least at that time they had managed to live without health farms.

  Before dinner all the guests were asked to assemble in the Great Hall for Oriana to give us a greeting. If I had met myself at Minchingham Hall I also met the other visitors. The majority of them were middle aged and spreading, as middle aged people do, but there were also some younger, more beautiful women who seemed particularly excited by the strange environment and a few younger men.

  Oriana stood, looking, I thought, even more beautiful than ever as she addressed us. “Welcome to you all on this Eve of Christmas and welcome especially to our new friends. When you leave you are going, I hope, to be more healthy than when you arrived. But there is something even more important than physical health. There is the purification of our selves so that we can look inward and find peace and tranquility. Here at Minchingham we call that ‘bliss’. Let us now enjoy a short period of meditation and then hug our neighbours.”

  I meditated for what seemed an eternity on the strange surroundings, the state of my bank balance and whether there was a chance of a decent criminal defence brief in the New Year. My reverie was broken by Oriana’s command to hug. The middle aged, fairly thin, balding man next to me took me in his arms.

  “Welcome to Minchingham, Rumpole. Graham Banks. You may remember I instructed you long ago in a dangerous driving case.”

  It was the first time in my life that I’d been hugged by a solicitor. As it was happening, Oriana started to hum and the whole company joined in, making a noise like a swarm of bees. There may have been some sort of signal, but I didn’t see it, and we processed as one in what I hoped was the direction of the dining room. I was relieved to find that I was right. Perhaps things were looking up.

  The dining room at Minchingham Hall was nowhere near the size of the Great Hall but it was still imposing. There was a minstrels’ gallery where portraits hung of male and female members of the Minchingham family, who had inhabited the Hall, it seemed, for generations before the place had been given over to the treatment industry.

  Before the meal I was introduced to the present Lord Minchingham, a tall, softly spoken man in a tweed suit who might have been in his late fifties. His long nose, heavy eyelids and cynical expression were echoed in the portraits on the walls.

  “All my ancestors - the past inhabitants of Minchingham Hall,” he explained and seemed to be dismissing them with a wave of his hand. Then he pointed to a bronze angel with its wings spread over a map of the world as it was known in the seventeenth century. “This is a small item that might amuse you, Mr Rumpole. You see, my ancestors were great travellers and they used this to plan in which direction they would take their next journey,” and he showed me how the angel could be swivelled round over the map. “At the moment I’ve got her pointing upwards as they may well be in heaven. At least some of them.”

  When we sat down to dinner Hilda and I found ourselves at a table with Graham Banks (the solicitor who had taken me in his arms earlier) and his wife. Banks told us that he was Oriana’s solicitor and he was at pains to let me know that he now had little to do with the criminal law.

  “Don’t you find it very sordid, Rumpole?” he asked me.

  “As sordid and sometimes as surprising as life itself,” I told him, but he didn’t seem impressed.

  Lord Minchingham also came to sit at our table, together with the corpulent man I had last seen sweating in the steam room, who gave us his name as Fred Airlie.

  Dinner was hardly a gastronomic treat. The aperitif consisted of a strange, pale yellowish drink, known as “yak’s milk”. We were told it is very popular with the mountain tribes of Tibet. It may have tasted fine there, but it didn’t, as they say of some of the finest wines, travel well. In fact it tasted so horrible that as I drank it I closed my eyes and dreamt of Pommeroy’s Very Ordinary.

  The main course, indeed the only course, was a small portion of steamed spinach and a little diced carrot, enough, perhaps, to satisfy a small rodent but quite inadequate for a human.

  It was while I was trying to turn this dish, in my imagination, into a decent helping of steak and kidney pie with all the trimmings that I was hailed by a hearty voice from across the table.

  “How are you getting on, Rumpole? Your first time here I take it?” Fred Airlie asked me.

  I wanted to say “the first and I hope the last” but I restrained myself. “I’m not quite sure I need treatments,” was what I said.

  “The treatments are what we all come here for,” Airlie boomed at me. “As I always say to Oriana, your treatments are our treats!”

  “But fortunately I’m not ill.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Well, I mean it’s bad enough being treated when you’re ill. But to be treated when you’re not ill . . .”

  “It’s fun, Rumpole. This place’ll give you the greatest time in the world. Anyway, you look as though you could lose half a stone. I’ve lost almost that much.”

  “Ah! Is that so?” I tried to feign interest.

  “You’ve come at a fortuitous moment,” Airlie said. “Oriana is going to give us a special Christmas dinner.”

  “You mean turkey?”

  “Turkey meat is quite low in calories,” Airlie assured me.

  “And bread sauce? Sprouts? Roast potatoes?”

  “I think she’d allow a sprout. So cheer up, Rumpole.”

  “And Christmas pud?”

  “She’s found a special low calorie one. She’s very pleased about that.”

  “Wine?” I sipped my glass of water hopefully.

  “Of course not. You can’t get low calorie wine.”

  “So the traditional Christmas cheer is ‘Bah Humbug’.”

  “Excuse me?” Airlie looked puzzled.

  “A touch of the Scrooge about the health farm manageress, is there?” It was no doubt rude of me to say it, and I wouldn’t, probably, have uttered such a sacrilegious thought in those sanctified precincts if Oriana had been near.

  For a moment or two Airlie sat back in his chair, regarding me with something like horror, but another voice came to my support.

  “Looking round at my ancestors on these walls,” Lord Minchingham murmured, as though he was talking to himself, “it occurs to me that they won several wars, indulged in complicated love affairs and ruled distant territories without ever counting the calories they consumed.”

  “But that was long ago,” Airlie protested.

  “It was indeed. Very, very long ago.”

  “You can’t say Oriana lacks the Christmas spirit. She’s decorated the dining room.”

  There were indeed, both in the dining room and the Great Hall, odd streamers placed here and there and some sprigs of holly under some of the pictures. These signs had given me some hopes for a Christmas dinner, hopes that had been somewhat dashed by my talk with Airlie.

  “In my great-grandfather’s day,” Minchingham’s voice was quiet but persistent, “a whole ox was roasted on a spit in the Great Hall. The whole village was invited.”

  “I think we’ve rather grown out of the spit-roasting peri
od, haven’t we?” Airlie was smiling tolerantly. “And we take a more enlightened view of what we put in our mouths. Whatever you say about it, I think Oriana’s done a wonderful job here. Quite honestly, I look on this place as my home. I haven’t had much of a family life, not since I parted company with the third Mrs Airlie. This has become my home and Oriana and all her helpers are my family. So, Mr Rumpole, you’re welcome to join us.” Airlie raised his glass and took a swig of yak’s milk, which seemed to give him the same good cheer and feeling of being at one with the world as I got from a bottle of Chateau Thames Embankment.

  “And let me tell you this.” He leant forward and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “When I go all I’ve got will go to Oriana, so she can build the Remedial Wing she’s so keen on. I’ve told her that.”

  “That’s very good of you.” Minchingham seemed genuinely impressed. “My old father was very impressed with Oriana when he did the deal with her. But he wasn’t as generous as you.”

  “I’m not generous at all. It’s just a fair reward for all the good this place has done me.”

  He sat back with an extremely satisfied smile. I’ve always found people who talk about their wills in public deeply embarrassing, as though they were admitting to inappropriate love affairs or strange sexual behaviour. And then I thought of his lost half stone and decided it must have had enormous value to bring such a rich reward to the health farm.

  Thomas Minchingham left us early. When he had gone, Airlie told us, “Tom Minchingham rates Oriana as highly as we all do. And, as he told us, his father did before him.”

  Whether it was hunger or being in a strange and, to me, curiously alien environment, I felt tired and went to bed early. My wife Hilda opted for a discussion in the Great Hall on the “art of repose”, led by two young men who had become Buddhist monks. I had fallen asleep some hours before she got back and, as a consequence, I woke up early.

  I lay awake for a while as a dim morning light seeped through the curtains. My need for food became imperative and I thought I might venture downstairs to see if breakfast was still a custom at Minchingham Hall.

  When I turned on the lights the dining room had been cleared and was empty. I thought I could hear sounds from the kitchen but I was stopped by a single cry, a cry of panic or a call for help. I couldn’t tell which. I only knew that it was coming from the Great Hall.

  When I got there, I saw the nurse Shelagh, already dressed, standing by the door to the steam room. The door was open and hot steam was billowing around. Looking into the room I saw Fred Airlie lying face down; a pool of blood had formed under his forehead.

  Shelagh came towards me out of the mist. “Is he hurt badly?” I asked her.

  “Is he hurt?” she repeated. “I’m afraid he’s dead. He couldn’t get out, you see.”

  “Why couldn’t he? The door opens . . .”

  Shelagh bent down and picked up a piece of wood, about a foot long; it could have been part of a sawn-off chair leg. As she held it out to me she said, “Someone jammed the door handle with this on the outside. That’s how I found it when I came down.”

  She showed me how the wood had been jammed into the oval circle of the door handle. Fred Airlie had been effectively locked into a steam filled tomb and left there to die.

  “I think you’d better call someone, don’t you?” I asked Shelagh. She agreed and went at once to the small closet that held the telephone. I waited for her to come back and, once she arrived, told her that I was going to my room and would make myself available if needed.

  It was Christmas morning. The bells of the village church rang out the usual peals of celebration. The sun rose cheerfully, flecking the empty branches of the trees with an unusually golden light. In our bedroom Hilda and I exchanged presents. I received my tie and socks with appropriate gasps of surprise and delight and she greeted her lavender water in the same way. It was difficult to remember that, in the apparently peaceful health farm, a man had been done horribly to death while we were asleep.

  “I don’t know what it is about you, Rumpole,” She Who Must Be Obeyed told me, “but you do seem to attract crime wherever you go. You often say you’re waiting for some good murder case to come along.”

  “Do I say that?” I felt ashamed.

  “Very often.”

  “I suppose that’s different,” I tried to excuse myself. “I get my work long after the event. Served up cold in a brief. There are names, photographs of people you’ve never met. It’s all laid out for a legal argument. But we had dinner with Fred Airlie. He seemed so happy,” I remembered.

  “Full of himself.” He had clearly failed to charm She Who Must Be Obeyed. “When you go downstairs, Rumpole, just you try to keep out of it. We’re on holiday, remember, and it’s got absolutely nothing to do with you.”

  When I got downstairs again there was a strange and unusual quietness about the Great Hall and the dining room. The steam room door was closed and there was a note pinned to it that said it was out of order. A doctor had been sent for and had gone away after pronouncing Airlie dead. An ambulance had called and removed the body.

  Oriana was going round her patients and visitors, doing her best to spread calm. As I sat down to breakfast (fruit, which I ate, and special low calorie muesli, which I avoided) Graham Banks, the solicitor, came and sat down beside me. He seemed, I thought, curiously enlivened by the night’s events. However he began by accusing me of a personal interest.

  “I suppose this is just up your street, isn’t it, Rumpole?”

  “Not really. I wouldn’t want that to happen to anyone.” I told him.

  Banks thought this over and poured himself a cup of herbal tea (the only beverage on offer). “You know that they’re saying someone jammed the door so Airlie couldn’t escape?”

  “Shelagh told me that.”

  “They must have done it after midnight when everyone else was asleep.”

  “I imagine so.”

  “Airlie often couldn’t sleep so he took a late night steam bath. He told me that, so he must have told someone else. Who, I wonder?”

  “Yes. I wonder too.”

  “So someone must have been about, very early in the morning.’’

  “That would seem to follow.”

  There was a pause then, whilst Banks seemed to think all this over. Then he said, “Rumpole, if they find anyone they think is to blame for this ...”

  “By ‘they’ you mean the police?”

  “They’ll have to be informed, won’t they?” Banks seemed to be filled with gloom at the prospect.

  “Certainly they will. And as the company’s solicitor, I think you’re the man to do it,” I told him.

  “If they suspect someone, will you defend them, whoever it is?”

  “If I’m asked to, yes.”

  “Even if they’re guilty?”

  “They won’t be guilty until twelve honest citizens come back from the jury room and pronounce them so. In this country we’re still hanging on to the presumption of innocence, if only by the skin of our teeth.”

  There was a silence for a while as Banks got on with his breakfast. Then he asked me, “Will I have to tell them what Airlie said about leaving his money to Oriana?”

  “If you think it might be relevant.”

  The solicitor thought this over quietly whilst he chewed his spoonful of low calorie cereal. Then he said, “The truth of the matter is that Minchingham Hall’s been going through a bit of a bad patch. We’ve spent out on a lot of new equipment and the amount of business has been, well, all I can say is disappointing. We’re not really full up this Christmas. Of course, Oriana’s a wonderful leader, but not enough people seem to really care about their health.”

  “You mean they cling to their old habits, like indulging in turkey with bread sauce and a few glasses of wine?” I couldn’t resist the jab.

  He ignored me. “The fact is, this organization is in desperate need of money.”

  I let this information
hang in the air and we sat in silence for a minute or two, until Graham Banks said, “I was hungry during the night.”

  “I know exactly what you mean.” I began to feel a certain sympathy for the solicitor.

  “My wife was fast asleep so I thought I’d go down to the kitchen and see if they’d left anything out. A slice of cheese or something. What are you smiling at?”

  “Nothing much. It’s just so strange that well-off citizens like you will pay good money to be reduced to the hardships of the poor.”

  “I don’t know about that. I only know I fancied a decent slice of cheese. I found some in the kitchen, and a bit of cake.”

  “Did you really? Does that mean that the kitchen staff are allowed to become obese?”