Rack, Ruin and Murder Read online

  He sat glumly watching the young woman inspector and listening to the one-sided conversation.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Harwell, it’s a mystery, I agree. But there is, or was, a body on the sofa in your uncle’s living room. We shall be removing it in due course, but he can’t stay here tonight. Yes, he’s in pretty good shape, but a little shocked. No…’ The inspector glanced at Monty and at the empty whisky glass. ‘No, he’s not.’

  ‘Wants to know if I’m drunk, does she?’ growled Monty.

  ‘I see, Mrs Harwell. That sounds an excellent idea. I’ll tell him. Yes, I’ll wait until you get here.’

  ‘What?’ shouted Monty, as the inspector broke the phone connection. ‘What’s all that about good ideas and Bridget coming here?’

  ‘Mrs Harwell has kindly offered to take you home with her and put you up for a bit,’ said Inspector Campbell. ‘She says she’ll be here in twenty minutes or so.’

  ‘Bloody hell! Don’t you think you might have asked me about that? I am not going home with Bridget. You might as well throw me into a prison cell, lock the door and chuck away the key.’ Monty waved his arms in distress and knocked over the empty whisky glass.

  ‘We have no reason to do that, do we?’ she pointed out, at the same time neatly grabbing the glass before it could roll off the table and smash on the floor. ‘Perhaps you’d better stay with Mrs Harwell, if only for tonight. I think you are rather shocked and you can’t stay here. We’ve already agreed that.’

  The kitchen door opened and a stocky, youngish man appeared and caught Campbell’s eye. She excused herself and left the kitchen, the heels of her little pointy-toed black boots tapping briskly on the stone flags like a male flamenco dancer building up to a thunderous zapateado.

  She’d closed the door behind her. He could hear the murmur of their voices but wasn’t interested to know what they were saying. Bridget was coming. He had to go back with her to her place. He’d thought, when he’d realised the fellow on the sofa was dead, that things couldn’t get worse, but they just had.

  Chapter 3

  ‘This is really weird,’ said Sergeant Phil Morton quietly to Jess Campbell. They had retreated to the hall and Monty couldn’t have heard them; but something churchlike about the empty vault of the stairwell encouraged whispers. ‘I’ve had a quick look in our corpse’s jacket pockets, and I can’t find a thing to identify him. No wallet, car keys, driving licence, nothing. There’s only some loose change. I’d say someone’s been ahead of us and removed everything.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Jess. ‘I’ll bet my boots this isn’t a natural death. Why try and hide his identity? I’ll take Mr Bickerstaffe outside. He can wait in a police car until his niece, Mrs Harwell, gets here.’

  ‘There’s no sign of violence on the body,’ said Morton doubtfully. ‘At least, I can’t see any. No sign of a struggle. Mind you, the whole place is such a tip it would be hard to tell if anything was out of place or untidier than usual.’

  ‘So we’ll have to scout round outside and see if we can find any tracks or any signs of activity out there. There may be a puddle of vomit. He’s been sick. He didn’t fly in here like Mary Poppins, Phil! He came here by car, so where is it? He didn’t walk, not in those shoes. Anyway, he’s not a tramp, looking for a handout. He’s a well-dressed, well-nourished male in his early forties at the most, would you agree?’

  Morton nodded. Then he looked at the closed kitchen door with the invisible Monty behind it. ‘The old fellow might have gone through his pockets, looking for cash to buy his whisky.’

  ‘He wouldn’t take car keys or a whole wallet, just the cash. But I don’t think he did take it. I agree with you. Someone intended to delay identification and emptied our dead friend’s pockets. I think it more than possible that person – or persons – brought him here by car and abandoned him.’

  ‘Why here?’ Morton asked promptly. ‘You think whoever it was knew about this house?’ He glanced round him. ‘They chose the right place, didn’t they? It’s already a dump and as cheery as a morgue.’

  Jess thrust her hands into her jacket pockets and hunched her shoulders. Phil was right. It was like a mausoleum: chilly, dank, dusty and musty-smelling. It must be Victorian. The flight of stairs to the upper floor was wide enough to allow for the passage of crinoline skirts. Above, the gloom of the landing was unexpectedly broken by light from a stained-glass window. Patches of red and yellow fell incongruously across the carved wood and blackened oil paintings. It added to the atmosphere; she felt she was in a memorial chapel. She missed only the smell of stale flower water and smouldering candles.

  She gave herself a shake and said briskly, ‘I’ll take Monty outside. Then you and I had better take a look up there…’ She pointed to the landing. ‘To make sure there are no more dead bodies lying around.’

  When she got back to the kitchen, Jess found Monty apparently sunk in depression. It was difficult to know what to do with him. He clearly didn’t want to go and stay with Bridget Harwell although the woman had sounded very sensible over the phone. But he couldn’t stay in the house until they were sure it wasn’t a crime scene and he needed company. Whether he realised it himself or not, he was deeply shocked.

  ‘Come along, then sir,’ she said to him in as encouraging a manner as she could. He rose obediently and followed her outside.

  Jess gratefully took a deep breath of fresh air. Monty shoved his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders, sulking. Outside the main gates one of the constables who’d first arrived on the scene was standing by his car, talking to a newcomer, a young man in jeans and a scuffed leather jacket.

  ‘Hello, Monty!’ the unknown hailed Bickerstaffe. ‘What’s going on in your place? This copper won’t tell me!’

  Monty opened his mouth to reply but Jess forestalled him. ‘I’ll answer any questions, Mr Bickerstaffe. You say nothing, all right!’ She bundled him into the rear seat of the police car and shut the door firmly on him. Inside, Monty sank back into the seat and folded his arms like a truculent toddler.

  She turned to the officer and the young newcomer. Jess looked him over carefully and judged him to be about twenty. His sunburned complexion indicated he spent most of his time outdoors. His hair was long, curling over the greasy collar of the leather jacket. Hair and jacket needed a wash. In a way he was quite good-looking, but the looks would soon coarsen. He met her gaze boldly. A real Jack-the-lad, she thought.

  ‘You are?’ she asked briskly.

  ‘Gary Colley.’ Despite the gleam in his dark eyes, there was caution in his voice and in his manner.

  ‘This gentleman,’ said the officer with some irony, nodding at Gary, ‘lives a couple of hundred metres or so further down this lane. There’s a sort of smallholding, apparently, belonging to his father. He lives there, with his family.’

  Gary scowled at him but addressed himself to Jess. ‘He won’t tell me what’s going on.’ He took a hand from his jacket pocket and pointed at the officer.

  ‘No, and neither shall I,’ said Jess. ‘You’ll have to wait to find out. But I would like to ask you a couple of questions.’

  Gary hadn’t finished asking his own. ‘You’ve not gone and arrested poor old Monty, have you?’

  ‘No. Now then, were you here earlier today?’

  ‘No,’ said Gary promptly.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Home, looking after the stock and doing odd jobs around the place. We farm a bit, like this copper said. Pigs, mostly.’ He hid a grin.

  He was the sort who normally referred to the police as ‘pigs’ and in his own mind he was being witty. Jess wondered if he had a police record.

  ‘What brought you out here now?’

  ‘On my way into town, thought I’d get in an early pint or two.’

  Jess glanced at her wristwatch. ‘Very early, it’s only ten to five.’

  ‘It’ll take me half an hour to get there,’ Gary said simply. He stared at her. His face wasn’t laughing but his dark e
yes were.

  ‘Who lives at your farm besides you and your father?’ she asked.

  ‘Me mum,’ he told her. ‘My sister, her kid, and me grandma.’

  Four generations of Colleys under one roof. Jess knew the set-up: a local family of the sort that was probably known to everyone, and mistrusted by most. They themselves would know everyone and everything that went on hereabouts. Not crooks, but not entirely honest. Poachers, probably, involved with illegal dogfights perhaps, that sort of thing. They might even store stolen goods at their remote smallholding, supplementing their income by obliging bigger more professional crooks than themselves. It might be worth taking a look if they could think of an excuse for a search warrant.

  ‘How old is your sister’s child?’ Suspicion of child neglect might be a way to investigate the Colleys.

  Gary thought about that and then offered, ‘About four?’

  ‘And his – or her – father?’

  He grinned. ‘You a detective?’

  ‘Yes,’ she told him.

  ‘Well, you might be able to find out who Katie’s dad is. None of us know.’

  Jess drew a deep breath. ‘Have you seen any strange vehicles travelling along this road today?’

  ‘Not much comes down this way,’ said Gary. ‘If it does, it’s mostly coming from, or making for, Sneddon’s Farm. That’s about half a mile further on.’ He pointed down the lane. ‘I haven’t seen any cars I didn’t recognise. If we ever get a stranger it’s probably someone lost.’

  ‘Sure about that?’

  He nodded confidently. ‘I’d have noticed. Usually they stop and ask the way. I send them back to the main road. You can get across country this way but it’s all lanes and bits of tracks going down to the woods. There aren’t any signposts and the surfaces are all full of potholes. You can’t pass another vehicle, neither. One of you has to back up and find the entry to a gate to pull off the road and there’s not many of them. So a strange driver, he’s pretty noticeable.’

  ‘How about walkers?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. We don’t get walkers as a rule, not on this road.’ Gary turned and pointed with raised arm past the house and towards the rise of the land behind. ‘There’s a right of way across Shooter’s Hill. We see a lot of walkers up there in good weather. But I can’t say I noticed anyone up there today and I know I didn’t see anyone down here.’

  Gary squinted at her and tempered his statement with, ‘But then, I wasn’t out front of the place all day. Pigs are mostly in the field at the back. They’re destructive blighters. They broke down the fence and got into Pete Sneddon’s field alongside ours. He’d have kicked up a fuss, Pete, if he’d seen them; so my dad and I, we rounded them up. Then I had to mend the fence.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Jess said. ‘Someone will come to your home and talk to your whole family. Try and remember if you saw anything unusual or anyone you didn’t know around here today, either on the road or off it.’

  Gary looked over her shoulder towards the house behind her. ‘You lot staying around here for much longer, are you?’

  ‘Off you go!’ growled the constable.

  Gary shrugged and walked off jauntily towards the distant sprawl of the town. Jess wasn’t fooled. Gary was smart enough not to turn back to his home immediately, but she doubted he was making his way into town and the pubs, as he’d said was his intention. He would take himself out of their sight and then double back over the fields, carrying a warning to his clan. Any search warrant they obtained would be useless. If there were dodgy merchandise at the farm, it would be cleared out pronto.

  ‘When Mrs Harwell gets here, let me know,’ Jess told the constable. ‘Keep her out here.’

  * * *

  Jess turned back to the house and saw Morton standing by the front door and talking to the constable. Both were peering at the ground. As she approached them, it struck her that there was a pungent animal smell in the air, something she’d not noticed before. She remarked on it, adding that it must be the nearby pig farm.

  ‘They’re clean animals, on the whole, pigs,’ said the constable. ‘But if you get a lot of them together…’

  ‘OK, Farmer Giles,’ said Morton to him.

  ‘Carry on looking around,’ Jess told the constable. ‘Time for you and me to take that look at the upstairs rooms, Phil. Let’s hope there are no more unpleasant surprises up there!’

  They returned to the house and paused briefly in the cavernous entrance hall. Morton’s habitual expression of gloom turned to one of wonder as he gazed upward.

  ‘To think,’ he said, ‘that the old chap lives here alone. Wouldn’t you think it would give him nightmares?’

  ‘He’s always lived here,’ Jess replied. ‘He doesn’t notice the state of it, probably.’

  ‘I reckon the family must have had money at some time,’ Morton went on as they cautiously ascended the staircase in single file, keeping to one side. ‘I wonder what happened to it. Hey, do you think the old boy is an eccentric millionaire? What are we going to find up here? Mouldering banknotes stashed under the floorboards?’

  They had reached the landing and the stained-glass window loomed over them. It appeared to show a biblical subject with robed figures. Jess and Morton stood side by side and studied it. It was an action-packed scene. A crowd milled angrily outside a building, looking up at it. Above their heads, vengeful faces grimaced from a window aperture as a female form, with long yellow hair, plummeted earthward. Her braceleted arms were flung out in a mix of entreaty, despair and a doomed effort to save herself. At the very bottom of the window, a pair of hounds looked up expectantly.

  Facing it, across the landing, was another window. It had probably been a companion piece with another Bible story depicted, but it had apparently suffered some accident and was partly boarded up in a rough job using sections of plank. Only a few pieces of coloured glass at the top remained visible.

  ‘What do you reckon’s going on here?’ asked Morton, gazing up at the undamaged window.

  ‘The death of Jezebel,’ said Jess promptly. ‘I’ve seen pictures of it before and when I was at school, our RI teacher was very keen on the story. Jezebel was the queen of King Ahab and under her bad influence he committed all kinds of crimes. He was killed in battle by a stray arrow.’

  ‘Like that chap, King Harold, at the Battle of Hastings,’ said Morton, not to be outdone in general knowledge.

  ‘Right. When people got news of his death, they took their revenge on wicked Jezebel and threw her from a palace window, as you can see there.’ She pointed up. ‘And the stray dogs ate her body. You can see a couple of dogs at the bottom there.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Morton, ‘just the sort of thing to have in your home. Now, who in his right mind would want to get up every morning and walk past that on his way down to breakfast?’

  ‘The Victorians liked stories with a strong moral,’ Jess offered. ‘It encouraged people to do the right thing. They saw it as uplifting.’

  Morton wasn’t accepting that argument. ‘It’s about violent murder and there’s nothing very uplifting about that, just the usual blood and guts. If that blonde female is anything to go by, a good dollop of sex as well. People have always liked that kind of story; but not because it makes them feel better. Because it gives them a kick.’

  The upstairs landing formed the short crossbar of a letter H. On either side corridors ran towards the back of the house and also towards the front.

  ‘I’ll take this side, you take that,’ Jess suggested.

  Morton, with another mistrustful glance up at Jezebel’s death plunge, set off along the corridor leading towards the front of the house on the left-hand side. Jess took a parallel route on the right. Doors opened on to a depressing line of abandoned bedrooms with dust sheets thrown over the beds and some pieces of furniture also shrouded. Unshrouded pieces had their own powdery veil of dust. The damp had got in everywhere. Once-fine curtains hung in mouldering shreds. The remains of jackdaw nests litter
ed the fireplaces. In a bathroom taps had rusted; and a huge Victorian iron bath on claw feet held part of the ceiling above it that had fallen down.

  She turned back and began to make her way down the corridor to the rear. She had only opened the first door, discovering a large linen cupboard with yellowed sheets still stacked inside, when she heard Morton call.

  He, too, had begun to investigate the rear corridor on his side. He was standing in an open doorway at the very end of the corridor, waiting. Jess joined him.

  ‘What do you think of this?’ Morton asked her. He gestured into the room.

  Jess drew in a sharp breath of surprise. Then she stepped forward into the room and stood, looking around her.

  In startling contrast to the rest of the house, this room showed signs of having been cleaned recently. There was not a speck of dust anywhere. All the wood surfaces gleamed. The bed had no dust sheet on it but the mattress was covered with a blanket of synthetic material, garish pink in colour. Its newness shrieked and its presence in this room with its antiquated fittings jarred as a false note.

  There was something else, too, not something visible but she felt it powerfully. It was human presence. She sniffed. The air was fresher than elsewhere on the upper floor.

  Slowly Jess said. ‘Someone has been using this room. It’s been aired out. That blanket was never put there by any Bickerstaffe. In any case, Monty says he never comes up here. So who’s been in here, what for and when?’

  ‘And does old Bickerstaffe know?’ Morton added. He was prowling about the room, peering into corners.

  ‘I’d guess he doesn’t. We’ll have to be careful how we ask him. Think about it, Phil. Here’s a huge, empty rambling house with an owner who never comes upstairs and habitually leaves it unlocked. Local druggies, tramps, schoolkids, travellers, anyone familiar with the area might know about it. It might provide the ideal hideaway for someone. Monty would never find out. It’s making more and more sense that someone left the body in this house. We need a fingerprint team up here.’