Rack, Ruin and Murder Read online

  Penny, whose mother was more experimental in culinary matters than his, had brought banana and jam sandwiches cut into triangles with crusts trimmed off, and wrapped in greaseproof paper. Bananas were still a novelty in the shops after the war years and Penny’s sandwiches were something special. Mrs Henderson was clever at creating little treats for the children. It would never have occurred to Monty’s mother to take the trouble. Penny also had two sausage rolls and a bottle of dandelion and burdock.

  They reached the summit and flopped down with relief after spreading out the threadbare green plaid travelling rug that Monty had also been obliged to carry uphill, rolled up over his shoulder. His shirt, where it had rested, was soaked in sweat and its rough woollen texture had rubbed an angry red mark on his neck. He hadn’t wanted to bring it but Penny had insisted. Sneddon’s sheep grazed up here from time to time and left their calling cards on the short dry grass. Penny, like all women, was fussy about that sort of thing despite being only ten years old.

  In silence they proceeded to lay out their joint stock of provisions on the rug. This was the usual drill. It was followed by a ceremonial exchange of items. Monty swapped his boiled egg for one of her sausage rolls and they agreed to share the broken biscuits and dandelion and burdock. Monty had started out with a bottle of weak orange squash but had drunk it on the way up. Secretly, he would have liked one of Penny’s jam and banana triangles, but he hesitated to offer one of his fishpaste monstrosities in exchange; so in the end he didn’t.

  This whole area of high land was known as Shooter’s Hill. From up here you had a spectacular view, miles and miles of undulating countryside, patched with fields, divided by the meandering river and roads, dotted with cottages. It meant Monty could see his whole world, laid out at his feet like a tapestry carpet. Balaclava House looked like a toy building. Further along lay the Colleys’ untidy yard and their ramshackle cottage, even tinier.

  Way over there, behind the woods, lay Sneddon’s Farm and the doll’s house of a cottage where Penny and her widowed mother lived. Mrs Henderson eked out a precarious existence for herself and her daughter by writing children’s stories. Their home was a former farm worker’s hovel, no longer required. Mr Sneddon let Mrs Henderson have it for a peppercorn rent because it had an outside privy, and also because he felt sorry for her, being a war widow. You couldn’t see cottage or farmhouse but you could see Mr Sneddon’s sheep two fields away, mere white dots.

  Beyond the farm was the quarry. You couldn’t see that, either, but occasionally you’d hear a muffled roar. Down below to the right lay the dark stain that was Shooter’s Wood. Sometimes there was shooting down there and you did hear gunshots exploding into the quiet air. Generally it was Jed Colley after pigeons. But not today. Today the woods lay dark, mysterious and silent. Now the only sound was the distant twittering song of a skylark high above. Not so long ago he’d have heard the drone of aircraft. But it had been a peacetime sky for over a year now. Monty fell flat on his back and squinted up into the bright light. He could just make out the fluttering black dot.

  ‘If you look straight into the sun like that,’ said Penny, ‘you’ll go blind.’

  ‘I’ve got my eyes shut,’ countered Monty, closing them to prove it.

  ‘You didn’t just now. You had them open and you were pulling a horrible face.’ She paused. ‘My grandma says, if the wind changes while you’re pulling a face, you’ll stay like it.’

  ‘That’s childish tripe!’ said Monty indignantly. ‘It’s what they tell little kids like you…’ (He was only twelve years old himself, but he knew that would annoy her.) ‘You don’t believe that now, do you? You must be potty.’

  ‘Of course I don’t!’ Her face turned red with fury and it clashed with her carroty hair. To let him know how much he’d offended her, she didn’t speak again.

  He was glad of her silence because it meant he could just lie there, feeling the warm sun on his face, smelling the grass and earth, hearing the buzz of nearby bees on the clover and letting his thoughts drift along any route they chose to take. He was dimly aware that the pattern was already set for the adult relationship that still lay some years ahead of them. Penny would still be telling him what to do, when they were grown up, and generally she’d be right. He would find ways not to take her advice, or appear not to. Penny would be chattering and he longing for silence. She would ever be the practical one and he the dreamer.

  Penny already said, ‘When we are married…’ and she was almost certainly right about that, too. Monty knew he was temperamentally lazy and accepted it would be easier to marry Penny, one day, than go out and find someone else. At least he knew Penny’s faults and that was preferable, he reckoned, to marrying another girl and finding out she had a score of unexpected failings.

  He pushed himself up on his elbows and peered at the back of her head through narrowed eyelids. The sun sprinkled her hair with gold dust. He liked her hair. The sun made her freckles darker but he didn’t mind those. He quite liked the blue-check cotton dress she wore. He wondered how many years of relative freedom he’d got before Penny carried out her resolve to marry him. He was twelve now and he ought to be able to put it off for another twelve at least, surely? That was a lifetime. If he obliged his parents in their wish to send him to university, he wouldn’t be able to marry Penny for ages. What a relief!

  ‘What are you grinning at?’ asked Penny suspiciously, turning round and speaking at last, if only to accuse him. She must have eyes in the back of her head.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Monty promptly.

  ‘It has to be something. Is a beetle crawling up my back?’ Alarmed, she began to reach behind her and make awkward brushing gestures.

  ‘No, honestly, Penny, I wasn’t thinking of anything special.’ To distract her, he added, ‘Let’s go down to Shooter’s Wood.’

  ‘No,’ said Penny, grumpy now because she still didn’t know why he’d been grinning and suspected a private joke at her expense. ‘My mother doesn’t allow me into Shooter’s Wood.’

  ‘That’s only because she’s afraid Jed Colley will blast you with his shotgun. He’s not firing down there today. We’d have heard him.’

  ‘I’m not going!’ snapped Penny.

  ‘Then I’ll go on my own!’ Irritated, he jumped to his feet.

  He scrambled and slithered down the hill. Once he thought he heard her call after him. He half hoped she would follow, once she realised he really would leave her sitting there. But he couldn’t hear her puffing behind him and male pride would not allow him to look back. He knew, of course, that he would be in trouble with both their mothers if they learned he’d left Penny all alone on the hillside. But Penny wasn’t a sneak.

  At the wood’s edge he did stop and look back up the hill, shielding his eyes against the sunshine. Penny was still sitting where he’d left her, a lonely figure in blue with a red topknot. He waved to her. She didn’t wave back. She, too, had her pride.

  Monty turned back to the first line of trees and the mass of bramble bushes that fringed the track. He hunted around to see if he could find one of Jed Colley’s expelled shotgun cartridges. He was rewarded with just one and put it in his pocket to take back to Penny as a peace offering. Then he plunged into the trees and felt the shock of the change in temperature. After the heat of the hillside, he shivered in the cool air. It was creepy in here. He wouldn’t stay long; just long enough to show Penny she couldn’t be boss all the time. He followed a narrow track probably made by deer. The wood closed around him shutting out all but its own noises: the rustles and fluttering in the branches above; the sudden crack of a twig as something living moved unseen by him. A dip in the track, filled with rain a week ago, had still not drained and he skirted the smelly green sludge. He picked up a nice undamaged magpie’s feather and added it to the collection he was making to take back to Penny.

  It was then, as he was thinking he could now return without loss of face, that he heard the other voices. At first he feared it might be
Jed Colley who, though an amiable fellow, was likely to fire off his shotgun at pretty well any sound. He opened his mouth to call out and let Jed know he was there. But before he could, he realised that one of the voices was female. Jed would never take a woman along with him shooting. The Colley women all busied themselves around their smallholding and rarely went anywhere. They were always pegging out washing or scrubbing pots or feeding chickens.

  A man’s voice joined in the conversation. Curiosity led Monty to make his way quietly towards it. He made a game of it, imagining he was a hunter tracking a prey. The conversational sounds changed and it was as if no humans made them, as if there really was some animal ahead of him. The invisible pair were making strange, disturbing noises, the like of which he’d never heard before. Someone was grunting and panting. He heard the woman give an excited little cry and then there was silence.

  Without warning, he came upon them. They were in a small clearing and he almost walked right into them. He drew back in the nick of time; although they were not paying attention to anything but each other. As he and Penny had done, they’d put down something on the ground to lie on. It looked like an old raincoat. What shocked Monty most deeply at first was their nakedness. They’d taken off all their clothes and lay on the flattened raincoat still entwined in each other’s arms. It was like coming upon Adam and Eve, as illustrated in the stained-glass window of their local church.

  Then realisation struck him. This, then, was the sexual act! He was both appalled and thrilled. His heart thumped and he broke into a sweat. This was it: the subject of the whispered conjectures and imaginative boasts made among the boys at school. For accounts of this they avidly devoured the occasional ‘dirty book’; smuggled in (or purloined from an older boy at great risk) to be passed around the dorm. Before him now wasn’t myth or invention, this was the real thing and he, Monty, had seen it. What a tale he’d have to tell next term! How his stock would rise among his contemporaries. Excitement gripped him and made his head spin. It found its way down into his shorts in a way both disturbing and pleasurable. He could hardly breathe.

  Then they sat up and he saw their faces. This was not Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This wasn’t a badly printed Continental magazine or postcard. This was Shooter’s Wood and the couple consisted of his own father and Penny’s mother.

  It was as if a cold shower had drenched him. It was all he could do not to cry out. He pressed his hand over his mouth to stop the sound. He wanted to run away, crashing through the undergrowth, but he had to be silent; they must not know he was there. They must never know he’d seen them. No one must ever know of it. He crept back the way he’d come, hardly daring to breathe, avoiding the smallest twig lest it snap and betray him. Then he ran, far enough away at last, bursting out of the trees into the bright sunshine as if he’d been pursued by a band of cannibals.

  Penny was still up there, waiting for his return. He climbed laboriously up the steep slope towards her and she watched him draw nearer, stony-faced and silent.

  He threw himself down on the rug and put the shotgun cartridge and magpie’s feather down on the rug between them.

  She glanced down at his peace offering disdainfully. There was the dried track of a tear on her cheek.

  ‘I’ve drunk the last of the fizz,’ she said. ‘So if you’re thirsty, too bad. Serves you right!’

  He didn’t say anything because she was correct again. He ought to have stayed here with her and then he wouldn’t have seen what he had seen. He wouldn’t have to carry this awful secret inside his head; carry it for ever.

  * * *

  ‘Uncle Monty?’

  Monty opened his eyes with a start. Someone was standing in front of him. The sun dazzled him and at first he couldn’t make out who it was. His mind was confused, too, still half back there in Shooter’s Wood.

  Seeing his bewildered expression, she said: ‘It’s Tansy.’

  ‘Oh, Tansy, my dear,’ said Monty. ‘So it is. I was having a little nap.’

  ‘I’m sorry to wake you up.’ She sat down on the garden seat beside him.

  Monty thought the kid looked wretched. She had always been slim but now looked skinny, all bones and angles. Her face was drained of colour except for the dark blue patches under her eyes.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

  ‘That police inspector woman has just rung up. She wants to come out here and speak to you again. Or else, she says, you can go in and speak to her at the police station or headquarters or whatever it is. She wants to come today. Mum’s annoyed.’

  ‘What’s new?’ muttered Monty.

  ‘Mum says, they’re harassing you. She wants to have a solicitor here when the inspector comes. She suggests Mike Heston.’

  ‘Lawyers?’ said Monty fiercely. ‘Bloodsuckers!’

  ‘Or, Mum says, we can ask Dr Simmons to write a letter saying you are suffering from shock and can’t answer questions. Mum thinks that would be a good idea for you to have a little time to recover and consider what you are going to say.’

  ‘What on earth have I to consider? Tell your mama,’ said Monty loftily, ‘that I am certainly capable of talking to Inspector Campbell and I don’t need a solicitor there. Let the woman come. I’ll see her here. I don’t want to get back into that midget’s car and be driven miles to see her.’

  ‘I’ll tell Mum, but she won’t be happy.’

  Tansy didn’t look very happy, either. She brushed back a strand of long, fair hair. ‘This is a rotten business, Uncle Monty.’

  ‘Unexpected, certainly,’ said Monty, ‘and inconvenient. Oh, I am grateful to your mother for bringing me here, and so on. She means well. But I want to go home.’

  ‘When you can do that will depend on the police, won’t it?’ The strand of hair fell forward again and she began to twist it round her forefinger. ‘When I said rotten business, I meant it was horrible for you to find that – to find it – and in your house.’

  ‘Fortunately I had that mobile phone you made me buy. Anyway, it’s not the first horrible thing I’ve ever found,’ said Monty.

  ‘Not – not someone else dead, surely?’ She gazed at him with appalled blue eyes.

  ‘There are other horrors,’ said Monty. ‘Death isn’t the worst of them.’

  ‘I’ve never had anything to do with death before,’ said Tansy almost inaudibly.

  Monty glanced at her and then patted her arm. ‘Cheer up, young lady. You can go back and tell Bridget what I told you to tell her. Don’t worry about me. I’m tough. But there is one thing…’

  ‘Yes?’ Tansy looked up quickly with the finger still entwined in her hair.

  ‘Be a little love and smuggle me a glass of whisky out here?’ Monty gave her a pathetic look. ‘Please?’

  A smile broke the strained expression on her face. ‘OK, Uncle Monty.’

  He watched her hurry back to the house. Poor kid, only a child, really. She couldn’t be more than eighteen or nineteen and that, to Monty, seemed unbelievably young. She was coming to the end of what she and her mother called ‘a gap year’ before going to university somewhere to study some subject he’d never heard of. He couldn’t say Tansy had had an uneventful life, not with Bridget’s habit of serial marriages. But Tansy had been packed off to some girls’ boarding school for most of the time. The job of those establishments, as far as Monty could make out, was to shelter the young ladies from bad influences, unsuitable friends and the wicked ways of the world. All the things, in fact, that made existence interesting. Now, for the first time in her young life, real unpleasantness and the outside world with all its grubby nastiness had burst in.

  Perhaps it wouldn’t do her any harm. She’d have to face it sooner or later. She’d get over it, lucky if life threw no worse at her. She’d make a career eventually, or meet a nice young man or… just do whatever young people did nowadays. Blowed if he knew anything about it.

  He couldn’t worry about Tansy. The police inspector, Jessica Campbell, was coming to see him
here. The idea made him uneasy, though not because he had any hidden information. He’d told her all he could about the dead man. He wished he could tell her something else, something useful. Then the whole business could be sorted out and settled and he wouldn’t be troubled by it any more. Until then, he’d be getting continual visits from Inspector Campbell. As a person, he’d nothing against her at all. But she did bear a remarkable resemblance to dear old Penny. No wonder he’d dreamed about his childhood and Penny sitting up there on the hillside alone, brave, angry, determined and terrified.

  ‘Sorry, Pen,’ he whispered now. ‘Sorry for all the times I let you down. You’re always lurking at the back of my mind, you know. That’s why I got such a helluva shock when the police female walked in.’

  And later on this afternoon she was going to walk in again. ‘Damn, damn, damn…’ muttered Monty. ‘Are you having a laugh at my expense, Penny, wherever you are?’

  Chapter 7

  Jess climbed out of her car before the Harwell home and stood for a moment assessing the scene before setting off towards the front gate. The house, she’d been warned by its owner, was located ‘rather in the middle of nowhere’ and it did stand alone on a country road. It was called, so the wooden engraved sign on the gate told visitors, The Old Lodge. From the look of the place it might once have been exactly that, a gatekeeper’s lodge standing at the entrance to a substantial estate. Both the drive and the gates it had guarded were long gone. Any great mansion to which they had led had also been pulled down or lay out of sight sinking into ruin. But, if the land beyond had been sold off, it remained as yet undeveloped.