Rack, Ruin and Murder Read online

  Trees formed an untidy backdrop to the lodge. They looked like the remnant of native woodland, left to its own devices. Perhaps Bridget didn’t own that scrap of land, or perhaps she did and had let the trees stand, not only to shield the house from the wind, but also to reduce the appearance of it having been left behind when the world moved on. The house itself had a curious Grimm’s fairy-tale look. Its eaves were fringed with carved wooden boards. It had little casement windows and wooden shutters, painted dark green. The path that wound its tortuous way to the front door was paved with mossy stones. The property was surrounded by a dry stone wall.

  Lonely at any time of year and I wouldn’t like to be shut up out here in winter, thought Jess. She frowned. The house did not seem to match the sophisticated woman she’d met. She imagined Bridget Harwell liked company, the bustle of city life, shops and bright lights.

  She entered through the gate and set off towards the front door. It opened as she got to it, before she could knock, and a very young woman faced her. It must be Bridget’s daughter. She was pretty in a wan sort of way. With the exception of her large, pale blue eyes, she resembled her mother, having the same sharpness of feature but without the worldliness. A waterfall of long straight fair hair framed her face and the blue eyes were reddened and dark-circled, as if she’d been crying. She was dressed casually in jeans and sweatshirt emblazoned with a sportswear logo. She held, in her hand, a tumbler of whisky.

  ‘You’ve come to see Uncle Monty,’ she said, ignoring Jess’s proffered ID. ‘I was just going to take him his whisky. Keep Mum talking for five minutes, will you? So that I can smuggle it out to him. He’s in the back garden.’

  ‘Tansy?’ a woman’s voice called.

  Tansy slipped past Jess and disappeared round the corner of the house, carefully shielding the whisky from view.

  A second later, Bridget appeared. Seeing Jess, she heaved a theatrical sigh. ‘It’s you, then. I know you said you’d be coming. You had better come in. I should tell you that my uncle is a bit confused. I think all this has rattled him badly. I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to talk to him today. Must it be now?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jess simply. ‘I understood from your daughter that Mr Bickerstaffe is in the back garden. Perhaps I could just walk round there?

  ‘Was Tansy here? I thought she was on her computer.’ Bridget frowned. ‘This has upset her. She has a vivid imagination. She always liked Balaclava House when I used to take her over there, when she was a little kid. Aunt Penny still lived there then and made a fuss of her.’

  Bridget paused and squinted at Jess. ‘Funny thing, you look a bit like Penny – in photos I’ve seen of her when she was young. I suppose it’s the red hair. Monty was kind to Tansy in the old days, too, letting her rampage around the place. Aunt Penny eventually walked out on him, with every good reason to do so. She should have gone years earlier but she stuck it out like a heroine. Finally even she had had enough. It gave Monty a helluva shock,’ Bridget added with grim satisfaction. ‘He’d never believed she’d do it. After that, he decided to shut us all out. I have tried to maintain contact, over the years. Tansy has, too, but . . .’

  Bridget shrugged in despair and shook her head. ‘Well, go and talk to him if you must. But honestly, we could all of us do without this hassle. None of us can help you. I know you can’t say how long this investigation will last, but at least, perhaps you could tell us – give me some idea – how long Uncle Monty will be involved. He wasn’t there, after all, when the – the dead chap found his way into Balaclava. He doesn’t know who he is – was.’

  ‘He may still be able to tell us something of interest,’ Jess persisted calmly. ‘Often people don’t realise that some small fact may be very important to us. They judge something trivial. We see it as an important link.’

  Bridget folded her arms and studied Jess. The movement brought the large diamond on her ring finger into view, sparkling in the sunshine. ‘This is very inconvenient for me, you know,’ she said with sudden energy. ‘I’ll be putting the house in mothballs at the end of the month when Tansy goes off to university. I’m going over to the States.’

  ‘To live?’ Jess asked, surprised.

  ‘I’m getting married again. I’ll be living in New York.’

  Oh, yes, Monty had said Bridget was remarrying; for the fourth time, if Jess remembered rightly. ‘So Tansy will be left all alone here in the UK, except for Mr Bickerstaffe?’ Jess raised her eyebrows.

  ‘There are other family members dotted around,’ Bridget said irritably. ‘I’m not abandoning her. She is just coming up to her nineteenth birthday. She’s not a child. If you must know, Max – my fiancé – and I tried to persuade her to go to college in the States. But she wanted to stay here in the UK.’ She shrugged. ‘The problem is more with my uncle than with my daughter. I can’t alter my plans because of him. He can’t stay here in this house alone. He can’t go back to Balaclava. It’s out of the question. He won’t accept it, but he’s got to sell the old museum piece, if he can find a buyer for it, and move into sheltered accommodation. The old boy could live the rest of his days in relative comfort. But you try telling him that!’

  She shrugged. ‘You’ll find him in the far corner of the garden. There’s a seat.’ She walked back indoors and Jess was left to find her own way.

  * * *

  Jess was pleased Bridget hadn’t accompanied her into the garden. She didn’t want Monty annoyed when she, Jess, was trying to start a conversation. She was irritated herself by Bridget’s self-absorption and lack of sympathy for the old man.

  She turned the corner of the house and the afternoon sun struck her face, blinding her for a moment. She put up her hand to shield her eyes.

  There was no sign of Tansy. She must have slipped back into the house through the rear. The garden had been carefully laid out for low maintenance, mainly lawn with a surrounding border of shrubs. In a far corner, there appeared to be a flagged patio and a sort of bower with a seat. A pair of legs stuck out into view past intervening shrubbery. She walked towards it. ‘Monty?’

  Monty was sipping his whisky. He was almost unrecognisably well scrubbed and his hair had been trimmed professionally in a ‘short back and sides’ style. This had spruced him up but had the unintended effect of making him look both older and frailer. His previous well-worn and begrimed appearance had been both a kind of disguise and an armour. Now, stripped of it, it was as if he was sitting inside the wrong skin. When Jess’s shadow fell across him, he sat up with a start and placed a protective hand round the glass.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said with relief. ‘I thought it was Bridget, come to boss me about and stop me enjoying my one consolation in life.’

  ‘Mind if I sit down?’ Jess asked.

  ‘Please yourself,’ said Monty. He shuffled along the painted metal seat and indicated the space created beside him.

  ‘How are you?’ Jess asked, when she’d sat down. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Bloody awful. But not because of that dratted stiff in my house. Look at me!’

  ‘Very smart,’ said Jess, taking note of all the new clothes.

  Monty uttered a ferocious growl. ‘Smart? Why on earth should I want to be smart? I’m not going to a wedding or a funeral. I’m sitting in a garden. It’s not my own, but it is still a garden…’ He paused and surveyed the view. ‘Of sorts,’ he added.

  He sipped his whisky and his manner mellowed. ‘Have you taken him away?’

  ‘The deceased? Yes, he’s gone.’

  ‘So I can go back?’

  ‘Well,’ Jess hesitated. ‘We’re still looking round the grounds. You have a lot of land there and it’s all – um – rather overgrown. Searching through it isn’t easy.’

  Unexpectedly Monty chuckled. ‘Grounds? What do you think you’re going to find there? Of course it’s overgrown. I can’t do any gardening. Know yet who he is?’

  ‘No, not yet. We’ll get there.’

  ‘What did he di
e of?’

  Monty was gazing studiously ahead, avoiding eye contact; but the question had been crisply put. He does want to talk about it, thought Jess with some relief. He doesn’t want to appear curious, but naturally he’s eager to find out all he can.

  ‘I hope we’ll know that soon, too. A post-mortem examination is being carried out.’

  ‘Seems to me it’s going to be a slow business,’ observed Monty. ‘I can’t stay here indefinitely, you know. Bridget’s going to America, getting married.’

  ‘So she has just explained to me.’

  ‘And young whatsit, Tansy, is going off to some university or other. Bridget’s not selling up. She’s keeping on the house for when she and the new man come over to the UK… a little place in the Cotswolds!’ Monty snorted. ‘But it will be all locked up. I suppose Tansy might come down and use it from time to time. But I can’t stay here on my tod. Bridget wouldn’t let me, anyhow, in case I wrecked the place with my dissolute lifestyle!’ He snorted again.

  It’s not for me to mention sheltered accommodation, thought Jess. I’d like to be a fly on the wall when Bridget does suggest it to him. But the sad fact is, she’s right. He can’t go back to Balaclava. He’s getting older, less steady on his feet, less able to take care of his day-to-day needs. Then there’s all the drink he puts away. It has to have affected his health. His liver must keep going on borrowed time. Monty himself is on borrowed time. The thought made her very sad.

  ‘Mr Bickerstaffe,’ she said. ‘You told me that the dead man looked, to you, as if he might be a racing man. “The sort of fellow who hangs around racecourses”, you said.’

  ‘Did I?’ Monty frowned. ‘I suppose I must have done, if you say so. Yes, he did look that sort. Well, more or less. I didn’t spend that much time looking at the fellow, not after I realised he’d snuffed it.’

  ‘There was nothing else about him that put that idea in your head?’

  ‘No,’ said Monty. ‘Didn’t he have a driving licence or something on him?’

  ‘He had nothing on him at all to identify him. No keys, house or car, no credit cards, nothing at all.’

  Monty twisted slowly on the seat so that now he faced her. ‘Rum, that, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very rum. We think someone, whoever brought him to your house and left him there, cleaned out his pockets.’

  ‘Ah…’ said Monty, watching her face closely.

  Now that she had his full attention, Jess tackled the awkward subject of the bedroom that had been in some sort of use.

  ‘Monty, we think that you may have had a visitor you were unaware of, apart from the dead man, I mean. We looked round upstairs. We checked all the bedrooms. One of them showed signs of a recent presence. It was tidied and dusted. The air was fresher, as if a window had been opened in there. You say you never went upstairs?’

  ‘Not for years,’ Monty said slowly. ‘Well, I’ll be jiggered. Who would want to use a room in Balaclava?’

  ‘We don’t know. Nor do we know if it’s connected with the dead man. But someone has been spending some time up there and, we think, on a fairly regular basis. A tramp or a druggie would have left rubbish, used needles, beer cans, some kind of debris. This person came and went, not making any mess. Also, before we – Sergeant Morton and I – entered, surfaces appeared to have been carefully wiped of fingerprints. Someone went to great lengths to hide his tracks. That leads us to suspect whoever it was could – just possibly – be the same person who brought the dead man to Balaclava.’

  Monty shook his head. ‘Don’t make sense, m’dear. If my unknown visitor didn’t want you, or me, to know he’d been using one of the rooms upstairs, why dump a dead man downstairs for me to find? The police were bound to come. They would search round, as you did. No, no, you’re on the wrong track, I’m sure of it. But good luck, anyway,’ Monty concluded.

  ‘Thank you, Monty,’ Jess said with a wry grin. The point he’d made was a valid one. The drink hadn’t addled his brain. His next question proved it.

  He turned his head to look closely at her again. ‘Think it’s a murder, then, do you?’

  ‘Yes, Monty, since you ask me. We don’t know yet how he died, of course, so it’s not yet official. It’s still an unexplained death. But it’s shaping up that way.’

  ‘That’ll rattle Bridget’s cage,’ said Monty with satisfaction.

  It wouldn’t suit Jess if Monty upset Mrs Harwell so much that she refused to continue to have him under her roof, and turned him out before the investigation was concluded.

  ‘I understand that family members don’t always get along,’ Jess began tactfully, ‘but don’t you think you’re being a little hard on Mrs Harwell? She has made you comfortable here—’

  ‘Comfortable!’ squawked Monty, tugging at the sleeve of his new pullover. ‘You call this comfortable?’

  ‘She has obviously tried,’ persevered Jess desperately.

  ‘She’s been trying… I grant you that,’ was the reply, ‘but that’s not the same thing!’ He chuckled at his own joke.

  ‘It’s a difficult situation for everyone,’ Jess reminded him. ‘I met Tansy earlier.’

  Monty’s merriment died away. He nodded. ‘Yes, it’s got to her. Well, death, the first time you meet it, does come as a shock. When you’re her age you think you’re going to live for ever. She’s a nice kid. I hope she has a happy life. I wish I could do something for her, but I was never any good at making money. I haven’t a bean to leave her. It’s too late for me to have regrets now. Doesn’t mean I don’t have any, though.’

  On that cryptic note, Monty sighed and gave a little nod of dismissal. The conversation was over.

  Jess left him on the garden seat, his hands folded over his new pullover, staring meditatively into space. He didn’t appear to be studying the garden. She wondered what he did see. Increasingly, the impression she was getting of Monty was that he had ceased to find the present relevant and spent much of his time in the past. Perhaps that was why the whole business of the discovery of the dead man in his own drawing room appeared to have made so little impact on him. It was as if he’d brushed it off. It didn’t matter to him because other things, in his memory, mattered much more.

  She rounded the corner of the house, her footsteps silent on the grass, and was startled to hear the sound of voices raised in anger. The window was open; in the room beyond Bridget and her daughter were in full flow of a mother-and-daughter spat. Jess’s natural instinct was to move out of earshot. But that impulse only lasted a moment and then her detective instincts kicked in and she stayed to listen.

  ‘I really don’t know why you’re so set against going to college in the States. Max and I would be delighted…’

  ‘Nice of you to say so,’ snapped Tansy. ‘Max doesn’t want me hanging round.’

  ‘Rubbish. I realise you don’t like Max, for some unaccountable reason!’ was Bridget’s brittle response.

  ‘Whether I like him or not is neither here nor there. He won’t be around long enough for it to make any difference, will he?’

  ‘And just what does that mean, young lady?’ Bridget’s repressed anger burst through her controlled façade.

  ‘You know damn well!’

  ‘Don’t swear at me! I’m your mother!’

  ‘Well, Mother, none of your previous marriages have lasted long, have they?’ Tansy, too, had been repressing her feelings. A fountain of bitterness welled up with the accusation.

  ‘Things don’t always work out in life, Tansy.’ For the first time, Bridget was defensive.

  ‘Don’t I know it!’ yelled Tansy.

  There was the sound of a door slamming.

  Jess hurried away before she was caught eavesdropping. She reached the front gate just in time. The front door opened and Tansy erupted from the house, pulling on a long knitted jacket of vaguely Andean pattern and jangling car keys.

  ‘Hallo, haven’t you gone yet?’ she asked when she saw Jess.

  Jess indicated the car keys.
‘If you’re getting behind the wheel, Tansy, I suggest you calm down first.’

  ‘Certainly, Officer!’ said Tansy sarcastically. She pushed the car keys into her pocket and came up to Jess. ‘It’s good you’re still here. I want to talk to you.’

  ‘OK, we can walk a little way down the lane, if you want.’

  They set off together, Tansy with her hands thrust into the pockets of the knitted garment and striding out, jaw set.

  ‘You must think we’re a bloody weird family!’

  ‘I don’t know a lot about your family…’ began Jess.

  ‘You’ve seen enough. We are a weird family. Are your parents alive? Are they still married?’

  ‘Yes, to both those questions,’ Jess told her.

  Tansy stopped abruptly and turned to face her. ‘How do you find someone who wants to spend a whole lifetime with you, just because he loves you? Someone who isn’t just passing through, like this guy my mother’s set on marrying at the moment, or doesn’t turn out to be a total deadbeat like the last one she was hitched to?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jess confessed. ‘I’m not into giving advice about love, life, the universe and all that. I haven’t taken the plunge myself yet. I’m a police officer. It’s surprising how many police officers marry another officer. You have to marry the job, you see. It’s very difficult.’

  ‘You wouldn’t perhaps find a different job, if you got married?’ Tansy was watching her face carefully.

  ‘No, of course not, it’s my career.’

  ‘My mother seems to think I ought to have “met somebody” by now.’ Tansy’s voice was unexpectedly sad. ‘You know, somebody wealthy and the right sort. That’s more important to her than a career. I don’t know what she’d do if I said I was going to join the police. She’d have hysterics, probably. No offence. My mother lives in a very narrow world.’