The Glade Manor Murder (Pollard & Toye Investigations Book 17) Read online

  ‘All laid on,’ Gail said, getting to her feet. ‘Lamb chops and gooseberry pie. The last of last year’s.’

  ‘Lead me to it,’ Richard replied, following her to the door round which Gyp was peering anxiously.

  Morley’s Book Restoration occupied a converted warehouse up a side turning off the main street of Buckford. Gail arrived in her Metro on the following afternoon and walked into a small active world of intermittent varied noises and a familiar composite smell of paper and allied substances, leather, solvents and glue. She was a familiar figure at MBR, as the works were habitually known, and stopped for a few words with some of the employees who were old friends. Going on to the upper floor she arrived at John and Richard Morley’s working quarters and the firm’s offices.

  John Morley looked up and smiled as she came in. War service in North Africa and the loss of his first wife had left their mark on him, but in build, features and colouring there was a strong resemblance between Richard and himself, and also to several of the portraits of earlier generations of Morleys that hung on the walls of Glade Manor.

  ‘Come along in, my dear,’ he said. ‘Good of you to give Rose back-up in Nanky’s absence. You’re going to enjoy lending a hand over this job we’ve just landed. We’ve spent the morning prospecting and are discussing the dismembering of the Corpse.’

  Gail sat down beside Richard on the chair he had pulled out for her and contemplated the book lying on the table. It was smaller and bulkier than she had expected, with an outer cover of badly stained and grubby parchment of some sort.

  ‘Impossible to tell at this stage if we can restore anything of the original cover,’ John said. ‘Some sort of red leather from the look of it.’

  ‘Fortunately the spine’s in fairly good condition,’ Richard commented, picking up the book and handing it to Gail, who examined it with interest. ‘We’ll have to take the whole thing to pieces, section by section.’

  She opened it and exclaimed with surprise at the Papal imprimatur.

  ‘This isn’t the original edition. Not surprisingly emendato as a result of the Council of Trent,’ John explained. ‘It’s amusing that one or two of the little drawings which embellish the opening capital letters of the chapters seem to have been given a miss. See here.’

  They all laughed. Gail asked if many pages were missing and learnt that it was impossible to know definitely until the sections had been separated and checked.

  ‘Job for you if any are,’ Richard said. ‘I can see you scouring the copies at the BM and Bodley and similar establishments for us.’

  ‘Fun,’ she replied. ‘The sort of job I like. I only hope there are a few gaps.’

  The conversation moved on to chemical analysis of the many stains on the Decameron’s pages and the most suitable methods of repairing tears in the rather thick paper.

  ‘I must go,’ Gail said at last. ‘I really must check over the searches I’ve undertaken to put in hand for earnest American members of the Historical Society. I want to deal with them at St Catherine’s House tomorrow. By the way, Richard, we’re having supper at the Manor tonight. Rose insists, and her Mrs Cluett’s putting in an extra evening.’

  It proved to be a particularly enjoyable evening, made all the more so by a telephone call from Adrian at Oxford where he held a Readership in Classical Archaeology at Athanasius College. Rose had written to bring him up to date on family news. His questions about the Mandeville commission landed by MBR and Nanky’s temporary absence were interspersed with light-hearted banter with Richard and Gail. Later, as she walked home with her husband under a frosty sky brilliant with stars she felt an upsurge of affection for the Morley family. It was abruptly replaced by a hope which as yet she had hardly dared to admit to herself. Before their marriage she and Richard had agreed to allow themselves a couple of years to settle down and concentrate on MBR and her own writing before starting a family. It was three years ago now that they had decided to embark on their first child. In due course hope had given place to anxiety. The family doctor had referred them to a specialist. No medical explanation had been found for Gail’s failure to conceive a child. They were assured that it was early days ... counselled to persevere...

  Now, for the first time she was experiencing a sense of hope. Too faint to be confided to Richard as yet...

  On the following morning she went up to London on an early train, as planned. Settling herself comfortably in the corner of a first-class compartment she opened her briefcase and extracted her notes for a final run-through.

  The only other occupant of the compartment was a middle-aged man in the corner opposite to her own. He studied her with interest from behind his copy of The Times. Not a conventional good-looker, he thought, but a face quite easy on the eye ... good brow ... firm, but not aggressive chin ... good hairdresser and country clothes of a decidedly pricey brand ... wedding ring ... combining matrimony with some rather high-level career from the look of it.

  Suddenly conscious of his scrutiny Gail glanced up and he was abruptly absorbed in his newspaper, but not before registering a pair of fine hazel eyes under well-shaped eyebrows. Accustomed to appraising scrutiny from rather older men she reverted to her notes, disinclined to spend an enjoyable railway journey in conversation with a type almost certainly on a different wavelength from her own. Finally she returned her notes to her briefcase and extracted the Guardian. After a time her attention wandered to the landscape flowing past the window. It had a curious rotating appearance, she thought, dark hedges swinging past in rapid succession like the radii of rotating circles, the lightly frosted fields between them forming segments. At irregular intervals a huddle of buildings broke the sequence with a brief shattering roar. Her thoughts reverted to the hope which was beginning to form a constantly recurring background to her mind.

  Presently she glanced at her watch. They were making good time. As the encroachment of suburbia became more and more apparent an inevitable conversation about the reliability of the train service and the probable taxi situation at the terminus was launched from the opposite corner. It was a relief to learn that her travelling companion was making for the City, and the risk of laboured conversation in the taxi queue evaporated. After the exchange of a few conventional remarks as the train slowed down he proffered her formal assistance in descending to the platform at Waterloo, politely raised his hat and was engulfed in the stream of arrivals making for the barrier. Gail’s spirits rose as she joined it. They were in on time. With any luck she would get through her programme at St Catherine’s House without any holdups and catch a reasonably early train back to Brading. Back to Richard and the warm family circle while still secretly nursing her hopes. Back to the enjoyable work ahead on the Decameron now being dismantled at MBR.

  In a surprisingly short time she reached the head of the taxi queue and a few seconds later was en route for St Catherine’s House. On her arrival there she found a surprising number of people having their enquiries dealt with. As an established genealogist, however, she was quickly recognised and in a short time was discussing the searches that she wanted made with a senior official. On hearing that she had only come up for the day he promised to get at least some of the information for her by the afternoon. She then went on to look up a number of references in connection with her own work, and went out for a belated lunch. On returning in the early afternoon she found a larger collection of potential researchers demanding attention than ever, and was obliged to join the tail of the queue for the member of staff who had helped her earlier in the day. It moved forward slowly. She had reached the second place when she was abruptly startled into attention by the official dealing with the man at the head of the neighbouring queue.

  ‘Mr Stephen Ash, isn’t it? Here’s the copy of the marriage certificate you applied for from the Registrar General. Mr Stephen Ash to Miss Fenella Plume, on 14 July 1944. Right? Good. The fee’s five pounds.’

  Gail froze into immobility. The man addressed as Stephen Ash was of medium heig
ht, sun-tanned, and in late middle age. He was wearing a substantial tweed overcoat. She watched him accept the certificate and hand over a five pound note with a few comments in a slightly nasal accent. At this point her own queue moved and she found herself at its head. Controlling herself with all her will power as the man pushed past her on his way out, she conversed with the helpful official, paid for the certificates that had been completed for her, and managed to extricate herself.

  She turned thankfully away and made for a vacant chair, realising that she was — probably absurdly — quite shaken. She made a business of stowing away the certificates in her briefcase as thoughts raced through her mind. Fenella was not all that uncommon a Christian name for a girl, but she had never come across ‘Plume’ as a surname before meeting the Morleys and getting to know Richard and the family. The London telephone directory would show if there were a reasonable number of examples. Glancing at her watch she saw that it was just on half-past three, a perfectly reasonable hour to pack it in and make for home. Seclusion in a taxi suddenly appeared intensely desirable. Hurrying downstairs and out on to the pavement she managed to flag one down in under a minute.

  ‘Waterloo, please,’ she said rather breathlessly as the driver leant over to open the door for her. She thankfully sank back on to the seat and closed her eyes. The preliminary stages of the rush hour were already under way. The alternating spurts of speed and jolts of abrupt braking seemed to shake her back into normality. Arriving at Waterloo she paid off her driver with a generous tip and hurried into the vast echoing vault of the station, heading for a row of telephone kiosks. Maddeningly they were all occupied, but within seconds a man erupted from one of them, leaving the door to swing to behind him. She hurried inside, shutting it behind her and seizing the L-R volume of the London directory. Her hands were a little unsteady but with some fumbling she found the Ps and eventually what she sought. Over 40 Plumes were listed. Really, she thought releasing a long breath, shutting the tattered volume and putting it back on the top of the pile, I don’t think I’ve ever been such a panicky fool before. She felt a sudden urge for the sovereign remedy for stress, a good hot cup of tea.

  In the Brading train Gail deliberately applied the full force of her very considerable intelligence and innate honesty to the possibility, infinitesimal though it was, of the Fenella Plume of the marriage certificate being John Morley’s first wife and Richard’s mother. She could have been a war widow, party to an impulsive immature marriage. If so, why was it never mentioned? She might not have wanted it known, and John Morley would undoubtedly have respected her wishes.

  Gail shut her eyes and nerved herself to face a final catastrophic possibility. Suppose Fenella and Stephen Ash had married, discovered an absolutely impossible degree of incompatibility, and decided to part company for good without the formality of a divorce? In honesty one had to accept that this was a possibility.

  She was aware of a sudden tenseness. Then suddenly the list of Plumes in the London telephone directory asserted itself. This damned masochism’s got to stop, she told herself. Logically it was just possible that there had been no divorce, if that Fenella Plume had in fact been known later as Fenella Morley. But from the point of view of probability and horse sense it simply isn’t on. All the same, I’ll give a hostage to fortune by not saying a word about this afternoon at St Catherine’s House to a living soul.

  She relaxed. The train flashed through a station. To her surprise she realised that she was due at Brading in a quarter of an hour.

  Richard was on the platform to meet her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said in answer to his enquiry, ‘a good day. Everything I went up for is in the bag. How about the Decameron?’

  ‘Pop and I have put in a whale of a day. I’ve come here straight from MBR. Quite a lot of torn and loose pages but only half a one actually missing. We’d planned to start on getting off the parchment and what’s left of the original cover tomorrow, but Adrian rang at lunchtime to say he’s coming down tomorrow for the night to celebrate the end of term, and of course he’ll want to see the book as a whole.’

  ‘Super about Adrian. He’ll be home for Easter as well, won’t he?’

  ‘Sure. Wednesday to Tuesday, so he’ll be here to help carry the can at Mum’s party on Easter Monday. Back to Oxford on the Tuesday to pick up his traps and then off to Ephesus.’

  ‘Being a successful don’s a good life, isn’t it?’

  ‘Damn good. I know I haven’t Adrian’s grey matter. I’ve got a wife though.’

  ‘Honour’s easy: I’ve got a husband. I suppose you haven’t managed to get home all day? Poor old Gyp must have had a poorish time.’

  ‘Rose promised to collect him when she took Tim for his walk, so he won’t have done too badly, and I’m quite sure he’ll have wheedled an extra meal out of Mrs Polts,’ Richard said, referring to their daily help.

  An exuberant welcome greeted them at the Dower House, and the estimable Mrs Polts had left a hot two-course meal in the slow oven. As they finished it Richard contemplated his wife.

  ‘You look just about all in. Let’s bung all these things into the dishwasher and go up early. I could do with a good night’s sleep myself.’

  Gail agreed, conscious for a fleeting moment of her earlier tension.

  Shortly before midday on the following morning Adrian Morley drove through Buckford, having covered the distance from Oxford in record time. As he passed he glanced up at Morley’s Book Restoration enveloped in weekend calm, and keenly anticipated inspecting the Mandeville Decameron. He returned the waves of several passers-by and pressed on to Glade Manor, which still represented home to him.

  John and Fenella Morley had decided to let him grow up aware of his adoption from infancy. The fact that they had ‘chosen’ him had been subtly emphasised from the first, and made understandable to him by learning that both his natural parents had been killed in a car disaster when he was a few months old. There had been occasional difficult psychological stages but his growing-up had been greatly helped by his much above-average intellectual ability. From the entrance to his preparatory school a succession of scholarships and academic successes had led to the Readership in Classical Archaeology which he now held at Athanasius College, Oxford.

  John and Rose Morley were immensely proud of Adrian’s achievements but disappointed by his apparent lack of interest in women.

  ‘It’s not as though he isn’t run after,’ John grumbled as they waited for his arrival. ‘He’s personable all right. He’s got a future and is pulling down a tidy income already with his job and books and whatever. And you know what he’s down for in my will if a bloody Labour government hasn’t snitched the lot by then. And look at Richard and Gail,’ he went on with rising indignation. ‘It’s their fifth wedding anniversary in the autumn and not a hint of a baby. Seems to me the Morleys are on the way out.’

  Rose attempted reasoned consolation. ‘Young people seem to want a bit of freedom before they finally commit themselves to the tie of a family these days. At least the saner ones do. Isn’t that Adrian’s car coming up the drive?’

  A couple of short blasts on a horn confirmed the fact and they hurried to the front door.

  Adrian was half a head shorter and more lightly built than John and Richard, and in contrast to their fairness had dark eyes and hair.

  ‘Terrific to be back,’ he said, kissing Rose and being slapped on the back by John. ‘Are the others coming to lunch?’

  He learnt that Richard and Gail were having a morning’s golf but a family supper was being organised by Nanky.

  ‘I’ll just dash up to my room and dump my bag,’ he said, ‘and I’ll be with you. Has Nanky got over her sister’s death and the funeral and everything?’

  He stopped to fondle Tim, an elderly retriever, a cherished family pet of long standing.

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ Rose replied. ‘It was a merciful release, as they say. The poor old thing was over 90 and only Nanky’s half-sister anyway. Nanky said
she felt she ought to go up to the funeral out of respect, but I honestly don’t think there was any grief involved.’

  ‘I’ll drop in on her this afternoon and have a few words,’ Adrian said as he ran up the stairs. ‘You can bring me up to date on the Mandeville Decameron over lunch, Dad. I simply can’t wait to see it.’

  As a result of the absolute insistence of John and Rose, Nanky’s activities in the house had been cut down when she reached pensionable age. Unless there were guests lunch was a simple meal cooked by one of a rota of daily women from the village. After gilding the lily as far as the housework was concerned Nanky retired to her flatlet until it was time to start preparations for dinner, the main meal of the day.

  After lunch and further chat over coffee in the library Adrian went up to call on her. In token of being off duty she had discarded her white overall and was relaxing over the Daily Mirror in a comfortable chair by an electric fire. As he came in she looked up at him, her pleasure disguised by a look of critical appraisal.

  She simply doesn’t change a bit, Adrian thought. Still the same round apple-cheeked face and those sharp blue eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles. Hair just a shade whiter, perhaps...

  ‘So here you are,’ she said. ‘That end-of-term look about you I know well enough by now. Chasing all the way down here just for 24 hours. Pull up that chair.’

  Adrian stooped to plant a smacking kiss on her barely wrinkled forehead and complied.

  ‘Only a flying visit, it’s true,’ he said, ‘but it just peps me up for the end-of-term jobs I’ve got to do before I come down for Easter.’

  ‘Then you’ll be off again for foreign parts I hear tell.’

  ‘Yes. Ten days in Ephesus where exciting things are being dug up... Nanky, I won’t say that I was sorry to hear about your half-sister. She’d had a good long innings, hadn’t she?’