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

  ‘Ninety-two years and four months. I only hope I’m in my grave long before I get that far. And I didn’t know her all that well, her being all that much older, but it seemed right and proper to go up to her funeral and sort out her bits of things. I took up an empty case just to bring a few bits and pieces back. The matron of the alms-houses made me very welcome, I’ll say that.’

  They sat chatting for a short time and Adrian finally glanced at his watch.

  ‘I must push off,’ he said. ‘Dad wants to run me over to the Works to see a famous old book that’s come in to be mended. But when I’m down for Easter, Nanky, I’ll take you out for a drive. We’ll have lunch somewhere and you can point out all the things that are wrong with the cooking.’

  ‘Cheeky you were as a little boy and cheeky you still are,’ she replied, clearly gratified. ‘But I won’t say I shan’t enjoy an outing with you.’

  ‘Ok. That’s a date then. See you this evening. I’m looking forward to my dinner already, I can tell you.’ He gave her a hug and hurried off to spend an absorbing afternoon at Morley’s Book Restoration with John, considering every feature of the Mandeville’s Decameron.

  In due course all five members of the family sat down to clear soup, duck, strawberries and cream and a special savoury invented by Nanky.

  ‘No better meal than this ever came out of the College kitchen,’ Adrian remarked.

  ‘It’s numbers,’ Nanky commented cryptically. ‘You just can’t do the same. Now, Mrs Reckitt’s here to help, so I don’t want no one else in the kitchen. Coffee’s waiting in the library in the thermos jugs.’

  ‘A bottle of that Cognac I brought back from France last autumn’s waiting too,’ John Morley added.

  In the library a wood fire flickered cheerfully on the hearth. The family party gathered round, well-fed and relaxed.

  ‘Your Easter Monday party’s on as usual, I take it, Mum?’ Richard asked presently.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Rose replied. ‘Dare we hope for two fine Easter Mondays running I wonder? And that reminds me. The two young Crabbes have accepted, and undertaken to bring poor Henrietta Legge. I do hope she won’t lose her nerve at the last minute. It’s high time she started leading a normal social life again.’

  ‘What exactly happened?’ Adrian asked. ‘I was having my year in the States and never caught up properly on it. I met her once or twice and thought her charming, but never really knew her.’

  ‘It’s a complicated story,’ Gail said. ‘She was engaged to Basil Railsdon of Loxford. He was simply rolling in money and the prospective Tory candidate for the Shirborough constituency. On the way back from his adoption meeting he was running late and took a short cut. A little girl fell out of a tree in front of his car and fractured her skull and died at once. He thought he would be blamed and lose his chance of the Shirborough seat, and managed to hide the body. I’m not absolutely clear about the next bit.’

  ‘I am, more or less, I think,’ John Morley took up. ‘At the same time young Jeremy Crabbe whom you know, of course, managed to get a grave opened in Loxford church to disprove that the last Abbess but one of Loxford Abbey had been buried in it. Railsdon hid the body in the empty grave which was left partly open overnight and closed up the next morning. But just when he had apparently got away with it a piece of an earring the child was wearing was discovered embedded in a tyre of Railsdon’s car. I can’t remember the exact details, but Railsdon shot himself just as the police — Scotland Yard — had taken over the case, got the grave open again and the other earring was found on the child’s body.’

  ‘Good God! What a ghastly story,’ Adrian exclaimed. ‘No wonder Henrietta hasn’t felt like going about.’

  ‘There was another tragic love affair earlier on,’ Rose said. ‘I’ve just remembered. She was engaged to someone in one of the Guards regiments, and he was killed in a flying accident. And you know that Railsdon’s daughter married Jeremy Crabbe. They are awfully good to her. They’ve bought a holiday cottage opposite hers and get down as often as they can.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope they can persuade her to come over on Easter Monday,’ Gail commented. ‘Not too obtrusive friendliness would be the best line to take, I should think.’

  There was general concurrence, and the conversation turned to other topics.

  ‘I noticed Russell’s, the estate agent’s, car outside Hob’s Cottage when we went over to MBR this afternoon,’ John Morley remarked presently. ‘They seem to be having trouble in selling the place.’

  ‘It wants quite a bit spending on it,’ Richard said. ‘The roof’s in a poorish way to start with. What sort of a neighbour do we want? Companionable, or a competent gardener who’d put in a bit of time for both of us?’

  ‘It depends on the degree of companionability, if there is such a word,’ Gail suggested. ‘Anyway, it would be nice to have the place occupied again. There’s always something a bit spooky about an uninhabited house.’

  Chapter 3

  Both at Glade Manor and the Dower House Sunday morning breakfast was an individual affair. Thanks to electric hot plates, bacon and eggs were available as required. When on duty as church-warden at Buckford parish church John Morley attended the mid-morning service, usually accompanied by Rose. Nanky cooked a robust Sunday lunch and was then off duty for the rest of the day, a friend from a nearby farm giving her a lift to Evensong. The church attendance of Richard and Gail was somewhat spasmodic.

  On this particular Sunday Adrian woke early. As a drizzling rain was falling he abandoned the idea of the walk he had intended, rolled over and went to sleep again. He surfaced at 11, got up, and went to drop in on Richard and Gail before the Manor lunch. Finally he departed for Oxford in the afternoon.

  After he had gone John Morley, who had numerous useful contacts in the world of valuable books, settled down to a round of telephoning. The final outcome of this exceeded his most optimistic expectations. By midevening he had established contact with the owner of another copy of the 1576 edition of the Decameron.

  ‘Ours is in quite fair shape,’ an elderly and decidedly uppercrust voice with a trace of Scots informed him, speaking from a stately home in the Border country. ‘Of course, we should be delighted for you or anyone from your well-known firm to come up and have a look at it... Put you up with pleasure. We’re a bit off the map here and enjoy having visitors from the outer world… Your daughter-in-law? Spendid! Next Thursday would be perfectly all right by us... All the better if the job takes several days!’

  John finally put down the receiver, picking it up again after a couple of seconds and dialling the Dower House.

  ‘I’m in touch with one Sir Ian Carstairs-Drummond,’ he announced triumphantly. ‘Believe it or not, he’s got a copy of the Decameron of the same edition as Mandeville’s. He lives in a remote part of the Borders, and will be delighted to welcome you on Thursday, Gail.’

  ‘Here!’ Richard interposed. ‘Sending my wife off into the unknown like this. Who put you on to him?’

  ‘Henley,’ John Morley replied referring to the head librarian of a distinguished Cambridge college. ‘There’s a Lady Carstairs-Drummond, I gathered, eminent in the Girl Guide world. Gail simply must be the one to go. You and I hardly know a word of Italian.’

  ‘Calm your fears, darling,’ Gail adjured her husband. ‘I foresee a severely academic and probably austere atmosphere with an emphasis on good works. Dare one hope for central heating, I wonder?’

  On the following morning intensive work on Lord Mandeville’s Decameron began at Morley’s Book Restoration, involving some experienced members of the permanent staff as well as John, Richard and Gail. After the cautious removal of the case cover the threads of each section of the book were cut with extreme care and each page examined in detail. By Wednesday Gail had made full notes of every passage illegible as a result of stains and tearing, all of which she hoped to copy from the Carstairs-Drummond book, together with the missing half-page.

  ‘Fortunate,’ she remarked,
‘that Italian was one of my A-level subjects. I expect some of Boccaccio’s sixteenth-century phraseology will floor me, but Adrian ought to be able to rustle up somebody at Oxford who can help.’

  It was decided that she should spend Wednesday night in London in order to catch an early train to Scotland the next morning. John Morley drove her into Brading in mid-afternoon. On his way home he slowed down as one of the vans of Frewley, a Brading builder, began to emerge from the gate of Hob’s Cottage. The two vehicles drew up alongside.

  ‘Afternoon, sir,’ the driver said, whom John knew through contacts over building work on the Glade property. ‘I expect you’ve met your new neighbour already. He’s bought Hob’s Cottage and we’ve been discussing jobs that want doing. Mr Stephen Ash, sir. Mr Morley of Glade Manor up there in the trees, Mr Ash.’

  ‘No, we haven’t met up to now,’ John replied, ‘although I’ve noticed some comings and goings over here. Good afternoon, Mr Ash. Hope you’ll like it down here.’

  He registered a man of roughly his own age with an outdoor look and shrewd grey eyes.

  ‘Thanks. This,’ Stephen Ash gestured in the direction of Hob’s Cottage, ‘is just about what I’ve been looking around for.’

  John Morley asked if he knew the neighbourhood, and the other laughed.

  ‘I’ve been off the map so long that all the UK feels like foreign parts. I emigrated to Australia when I came out of the army and I’ve been there ever since. Things don’t seem too rosy over here from all accounts, but I began to feel I’d like to end up in the Old Country come hell or high water.’

  ‘Well, I hope we’ll see something of you when you move in. I expect a fair amount wants doing at Hob’s. You’ve picked the right building firm, though.’

  ‘Reckon I have. I’m hoping to muscle in a bit myself, though. I was in the construction line down under. I...’

  A hoot from an approaching car broke up the conversation and Frewley’s car drove off in the direction of Buckford.

  Back at Glade Manor John Morley reported the encounter to his wife.

  ‘Quite a decent chap, I thought,’ he said. ‘Not on our wave-length but reasonably presentable for an occasional drinks party.’

  ‘We might ask him to the Easter Monday do,’ Rose suggested.

  ‘That’s a thought. He’d pass in a crowd all right.’

  When encountered in Buckford a few days later Stephen Ash seemed genuinely pleased at the invitation but regretted that although he hardly knew a soul in the UK, he had got a date for Easter Monday.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ John said. ‘The race meeting over at Westingham.’

  ‘You’ve got me in one, Mr Morley. After all my years down under I just can’t keep away from the gees, and fixed up to go with a bloke I met in a pub while I was house-hunting.’

  ‘It’s a good meeting. Hope you enjoy it and back some winners. Plenty of time to come along up to us!’

  When John Morley reported that Stephen Ash had declined the invitation as he already had a date for Easter Monday, Rose remarked that it was probably a good thing.

  ‘A bit daunting for him to be plunged into a house full of total strangers who all know themselves well and are old friends of ours. And Ash doesn’t seem to be going down all that well locally. Not with the local people and such anyway.’

  ‘Which of them?’ her husband asked.

  ‘Well, I was in Little’s yesterday and he seems to have had a breeze with them over some paint he’d ordered. Bob Little ended by telling him that he could take his custom somewhere else. And apparently when our Maggie Head took the trouble to get off her bike the other day to shut the Hob’s Cottage gate which was swinging in the wind he burst out and told her to mind her own bloody business.’

  ‘Bit of luck that it’s the Westingham races, then. We’ll ask him up alone sometime and rope in Richard and Gail.’

  The days following Gail’s departure for Scotland were busy but uneventful. At Morley’s Book Restoration work on the Decameron went on steadily: the cautious cleaning of stains, the repairing of torn pages and the dicey problem of restoring the mutilated cover. At Glade Manor, Rose and Nanky discussed the menu for the Easter Monday informal lunch, and extra stores were ordered. From time to time there were signs of activity at Hob’s Cottage — Stephen Ash’s Fiesta, Frewley’s vans and a delivery van from a Brading furniture store. Telephone calls from Gail announced highly enjoyable surroundings and warm hospitality on the part of her elderly host and hostess. She reported good progress in the collecting of missing data needed to fill the gaps in the Mandeville copy of the Decameron. She would be back on the Thursday evening before Easter.

  Adrian heralded the Easter reunion at Glade by arriving on the previous evening. The next day he fulfilled his promise to Nanky by taking her out to lunch at a not too overpowering hotel at Craythorne Bay, 12 miles from Buckford. It was a highly successful outing. Reminiscence played a large part in the conversation, Adrian marvelling at Nanky’s recollection of incidents in his childhood and adolescence which he himself had forgotten. The hotel lunch in general met with her approval, apart from the consistency of the Yorkshire pudding served with the roast beef.

  ‘Properly leathery,’ she commented. ‘Not beaten up proper.’

  On the way home they touched on Fenella Morley’s death and the comfort that Rose had brought into John Morley’s shattered life.

  ‘And if you’d told me I could ever work with a new mistress in Glade Manor I’d never’ve believed you,’ Nanky avowed. After a silence she turned and looked intently at Adrian. ‘’Tis time you found yourself a wife,’ she said.

  ‘Well, Nanky,’ he replied, ‘you’re not much of a one to preach about holy matrimony, are you?’

  ‘Reckon I found a ready-made family,’ she said. ‘You’re past 30, Adrian. Time you gave your mind to it. There’s more to life than books and digging up things hundreds of years old in foreign parts.’

  Adrian laughed. ‘Well, you old matchmaker,’ he said, ‘if ever I get round to popping the question you shall be the first to hear about it.’

  Late that evening Gail returned, full of praise for the kindness of the Carstairs-Drummonds, and of satisfaction at the gaps in the text of the Mandeville Decameron that she was now able to fill. John Morley was particularly delighted by the colour photographs of the cover which she had taken.

  ‘Red, right enough,’ he exclaimed. ‘This is more than I dared hope for.’

  Breakfast on the following morning at the Dower House was later and more leisurely than usual. As Gail listened to Richard’s catalogue of items of local news she suddenly decided that she could no longer keep to herself the news that had by now become a reasonable certainty.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ Richard said before she could speak, ‘a chap’s bought Hob’s Cottage. Ash, he’s called. Stephen Ash.’

  She could feel her surroundings blacking out as she slipped from her chair to the floor.

  The darkness swirled and finally cleared to reveal Richard’s horror-struck face as he bent over her. His arms were round her, raising her from the kitchen floor.

  ‘I’m perfectly all right, darling,’ she heard a travesty of her own voice saying. As she spoke life resolved itself into a gigantic question mark. Was she to tell him what she had heard in St Catherine’s House, or not...? Now...?

  In the event Richard supplied the answer.

  ‘Gail — darling — is it? Can it possibly be...?’

  She looked up into his eyes, and replied with perfect, if partial truth.

  ‘I really think so, dearest. Two consecutive blanks.’

  ‘We’ll get Greaves. Now — right away. He might be out on his rounds — anyway, they can track him down. Lie still.’

  Gail listened to Richard’s running footsteps on the stairs. Lying on her bed she had the sensation of being in a curious double-layered dream. Uppermost was the almost unbelievable possibility of the pregnancy so long hoped for. But below this was the sinister arrival on the
Morley doorstep, so to speak, of the man who had obviously come to use the knowledge he possessed to shatter the happiness of the people who meant most to her in the world. What, if anything, ought she to do?

  She pressed the palms of her hands to her temples in the effort to think clearly. Nothing, she felt, was likely to happen over Easter. Stephen Ash had plenty of time at his disposal. He would get himself established at Hob’s Cottage before embarking on his programme of — almost certainly — blackmail. On Easter Monday there was Rose’s annual alfresco lunch party, and on the following day Rose and John, together with Richard and herself, were driving down to that wedding in Cornwall, and not returning until the Thursday. That gave one time to think.

  The sound of a car drawing up at the front door could mean Dr Greaves. Gail braced herself to appear normal and sensible. A few minutes later Richard brought him into the room, gave her the V-sign and withdrew. Dr Greaves, who had succeeded his father in the practice and was an old friend of the Morleys, greeted her cheerfully as the door closed.

  ‘Now, my dear, what’s all this in aid of, I wonder?’ he asked, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

  Gail began to talk, calmly and sensibly ... there was plenty of relevant matter unconnected with Stephen Ash, she told herself. Dr Greaves listened attentively, and asked her a number of questions.

  Later, as he finished his examination, he began to whistle a tune softly. Gail’s heart gave a sudden leap as she looked up at him.

  ‘I see you are Gilbert & Sullivan addict like me,’ he said. ‘No possible doubt whatever.’ He went to the door and called Richard. ‘Keep her in bed for the rest of the day and she’ll be as right as rain, if you don’t let her work too hard at William the Conqueror’s diary or whatever it is you’re all so hooked on at the Works.’

  After he had gone the rest of the day seemed to Gail to have a dreamlike quality. While aware that the week or so ahead was only a brief respite from the Stephen Ash threat she seemed able to relax. After Dr Greaves had gone there was an unforgettable half-hour with Richard. There followed at intervals John Morley, triumphant, and Rose, her delight just tinctured with anxiety about Gail’s welfare.