Death in Disguise Read online

  Asked about the death in the Solar she explained that the term was inappropriate. The Master had been magnetically transmuted and was now an ariel tapping into the interplanetary pool; a lord of all the Elohim and a droplet in the great field of cosmic consciousness.

  ‘Be that as it may, Miss Cuttle…’ (Oh, very witty thought Troy.) ‘what I’m trying to get at is who was responsible for sending him there.’

  ‘Oh no, no, no—it wasn’t like that at all.’ She bestowed on him a sweet but slightly patronising smile. Barnaby felt he might be advised any minute not to worry his pretty little head.

  ‘How was it then?’ asked Sergeant Troy.

  ‘Well…’ May settled herself more comfortably, resting her bag like a kangaroo’s pouch in her lap. ‘It all started with my regression.’ She broke off noticing the increased strain on Barnaby’s rugged features. ‘Oh dear…it’s so difficult explaining to outsiders. Suffice it to say that we have all been on this earth many times before and, under the guidance of the Masters, I relive incidents from one or the other of these lives the third Friday of every month except for Feb. when there was a Psychic Self Defence Workshop.

  ‘There is always a great deal of energy humming about at regression times but today was really outstanding. I had an accident, for instance, this afternoon which I see now was not an accident at all but a metaphor. A chunk of iron fell off the roof—’

  ‘Could we stick to this evening, Miss Cuttle?’

  ‘Oh. Very well. Continuation of same, really. A symbolisation of Astarte, goddess of the moon. Then later during the actual regression, nebulae crashing about, stars colliding, darts of silver light showers and showers of golden rain, spinning moons… The passing of an arahat is of gigantic astral significance and cannot be accomplished by mere common or garden dynamism. It is no casual or accidental matter.’

  ‘Certainly not accidental.’

  ‘I see you’re hankering after some sort of human intervention.’

  ‘That’s the line this investigation will be taking—yes.’

  ‘When you came out of this trance or whatever it was you were in,’ said Troy, ‘what exactly did you see?’

  ‘I’ve just explained all that. Moons whizzing—’

  ‘I mean in actual fact.’

  ‘Those are the facts.’

  Barnaby continued, determined to tighten his questions in such a way as to leave no loophole for further astrological whimsy. ‘Now Miss Cuttle—’

  ‘Taster to the General.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘That’s what I was tonight. In Roman Britain.’

  ‘Really?’ Never strong on ancestor-worship, Barnaby pressed on. ‘Could you tell me—or better still show me—where he and the others were sitting before you began.’ He pushed over a pencil and sheet of paper, adding hurriedly as she opened her mouth, ‘White is all there is.’

  May said, ‘Music’s my forte you know. Not art.’

  ‘A rough sketch will do. Use crosses if you wish. But don’t guess. If you’re not sure leave a blank.’

  She drew like a child, concentrating fiercely, her tongue peeping out. Barnaby looked at the results.

  ‘And had these positions changed when you…um…were yourself again?’

  ‘Oh yes. Everyone was crowding round me. Arno was crying—silly man.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’d been poisoned. When I was tasting some mushrooms. They will worry so. He should have known I’d be all right. Once I was bound to a chariot wheel—’

  ‘You say everyone,’ said Troy. ‘Did that include Craigie?’

  ‘No. But I didn’t realise that till Christopher put the lights on.’

  ‘Where is he on this?’ Barnaby took the drawing.

  ‘Nowhere. He stayed with me.’

  ‘You mean it was dark?’ inquired Barnaby.

  ‘Duskish.’

  ‘That’s handy,’ said Troy.

  May frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Who suggested putting them off?’

  ‘No one. It’s always done for meditative practices.’

  ‘So what did you see once they were on again?’

  ‘The Master was standing in front of his chair—’

  ‘Still on the dais?’ Barnaby glanced down at the sketch.

  ‘Yes. Then he just sort of toppled down the steps.’ The voice faltered and her lips trembled with remembrance. ‘His bosom had already received the celestial lance.’

  The chief inspector’s patience was wearing thin. Brutally he picked up the first polythene bag and pushed it across the table. ‘Your lance, Miss Cuttle. Do you recognise it?’

  ‘My…’ She picked up the bag. The stains had already oxidised to a rusty orange. ‘But that’s one of our knives from the kitchen.’ She put it down again. ‘How could…?’ For a long moment she stared at him, her forehead tuckered deep with puzzlement, her eyes bewildered. Then they cleared.

  ‘Of course.’ The cast-iron confidence was back. ‘We are unawakened ones here, Inspector. We strive, we pray, we struggle for perfection, but it is a long and troubling discipleship. None of us, apparently, are ready for the revelation of divine wisdom. Knowing this, the Gods in their ineffable kindness have transmuted their sublimely mysterious weapon of dispatch into a humble household implement. Something all we acolytes can easily assimilate and comprehend. I’ve no doubt at all you’ll find a karmic fingerprint.’

  Troy snorted. Barnaby, feeling perhaps that this analysis lacked a certain rigour, produced his second bag. ‘And is this from the kitchen too?’

  ‘Yes. Janet wears them. She has a mild skin disorder, gradually giving ground to my Mallow and Horehound salve. What are you doing with it?’

  ‘It was found behind one of the curtains in the Solar.’

  ‘How odd. You can’t wash up in there.’

  Given her conviction of a mystical assassin, there seemed little sense in pointing out the evident connection.

  ‘Did you see anyone cross to the window at any time?’ May shook her head. ‘And these regressions—do they usually take such a dramatic form?’

  ‘Varies. I succumbed to the Black Death once and screamed the place down. Next week—a whizzo time with Henry the Eighth. You just can’t tell.’

  Good question, thought Troy. Very shrewd. Because if people knew there might be a possible distraction on the way… He put a question of his own. ‘Was anyone present who was unfamiliar with this routine?’

  ‘Yes indeed. Mr and Mrs Gamelin were strangers to us.’

  (Gamelin, thought Barnaby. That’s who it was.)

  ‘They’d come down for their daughter’s birthday. Poor child.’

  Her accent really stuck in Troy’s craw. Toney. British racing green. Born to order others to jump to it. Or thought they were which came down to the same thing. You could get away with being bonkers if you sounded right. But you couldn’t get away with murder. The chief was asking about the structure of the commune and who would take charge now.

  ‘We’re equal here, Inspector Barnaby, although, as in all groups, I suppose you will find a natural hierarchy.’ Barnaby nodded, thinking how rarely people who used the phrase saw themselves at the bottom of the heap. ‘I have been here longest and I suppose you could call me the bursar. I do all the ordering from the soya beans to Calypso’s hay. And the banking. I’m allowed to sign cheques.’ She went on to list the other members of the organisation, the order of their arrival and length of stay.

  ‘And the boy?’ Barnaby nodded in the direction of the door. The moaning had now quite died away.

  ‘Tim? Oh—he was…found.’ She appeared uneasy. ‘I don’t know the details. Arno would never tell me. He got quite upset when I asked a second time. One day he and the Master simply brought Tim home. How he will bear this…poor boy. The Master was his life, his whole existence. I fear for him, I really do.’ She got up. ‘If that’s all, could I go? I’d like to see—’

  ‘One more question,’ said Barnaby. �
�Has anyone changed their clothes since the regression?’

  After she had replied in the negative and been allowed to go, the three men exchanged bemused glances. Barnaby said, ‘Calypso’s hay?’

  ‘They’ll all be vegetarians, sir,’ said the young constable.

  ‘Get every word of that did you, sunshine?’ said Troy.

  ‘Course not, Sergeant,’ said the PC, going very pink. He had an absurdly fluffy moustache like a strip of duckling feathers. ‘Just the relevant details.’

  ‘They had plenty of time to get together on this before the patrol car turned up, Chief. Maybe this supernatural garbage is going to be the official party line.’

  ‘I doubt it. They can’t all be as batty as that one.’

  There was a knock and the woman with the long grey hair came in, followed by the man with the Hey Viva! moustache. They had taken off their headbands and wore expressions of exalted mourning. Their eyes were sharp and interested. She carried a tray with three cups and he a plate which could easily have fitted on the tray.

  ‘We thought you might appreciate some refreshment—’

  ‘A cup of Acorna—’

  ‘A really excellent coffee substitute—’

  ‘And some cake.’

  Barnaby, taking a cup, asked their names. Then he said, ‘Well perhaps as you’re here you wouldn’t mind answering some questions regarding Mr Craigie’s murder.’ He named the deed deliberately just so everyone knew where they stood.

  Plainly this was the whole point of the exercise and they were both sitting down in a flash. Ken opened by saying, ‘You can’t call it murder.’ Adding kindly, ‘Not as a layman would understand the term.’

  ‘There’s only one way to understand the term, Mr Beavers. The wanton destruction of human life. You can trick it out in whatever airy-fairy jargon you choose. Murder’s what it is.’ He responded to a brace of pitying headshakes by pushing over the paper and pencils and explaining about the sketch. He added, ‘No conferring,’ and watched them start to draw.

  Their diagrams, like their clothes and hairstyles, were almost identical. He could just see them in the winter in matching sweaters and matching bobble hats on their matching pointy heads. Troy was struggling with his refreshment, which as a piece of cake would have made a great foundation stone.

  Ken returned the paper saying, ‘Perhaps I could metacomment on your last verbalisation.’

  ‘By all means. But speak plain if you would. I haven’t got all night,’ replied Barnaby, fearing very much that he had.

  ‘The knife was inserted by a mortal hand.’ Very grudging. ‘But that hand was divinely guided. To tell the truth both of us were more than a little upset at not being chosen—’

  ‘We would have been honoured—’

  ‘No followers could have been more devoted.’

  ‘However,’ Ken sighed sniffily, ‘it was not to be.’

  ‘You should be grateful it was not to be, Mr Beavers. Unless you fancy spending the next ten years in a prison cell.’

  ‘Where are you coming from on this?’ cried Heather, tossing her head back and revealing briefly an embryonic suggestion of what might have been, in the fullness of time, given intensive exercise and a great deal of hugely expensive plastic surgery, the whimsical beginnings of a chin.

  Ken said, ‘There is no such thing as a cell in the life of the spirit.’

  This was when Barnaby passed over the two bags. The one with the knife was handled with intense reverence by Ken, murmuring, ‘Vibrations still present…subtle but potentwise… wow…’

  ‘He can be of real assistance, Inspector,’ said Heather. ‘Try and think of him as your cosmic tuning-fork.’

  What a pair of piss-artists, thought Troy. Right off the wall. He asked what form this assistance might take.

  ‘My husband is a sensitive.’

  ‘A sensitive what?’

  ‘It is a term used to denote a soul in tune not only with the fathomless depths of their own being but with all the vibrant currents of the hidden universe.’

  ‘That a fact?’

  ‘A side effect of this,’ said Ken with a grave and modest lifting of the shoulders, ‘is that I was chosen to be a channel for Hilarion. One of the greatest minds the world has ever known. Transmuted many times, you might know him better as Samuel the Prophet of the Lord. Or Merlin. Better still as Francis Bacon, Son of Elizabeth the First and Robert Dudley—’

  ‘What I’d really like…’ Barnaby determinedly tried to stem the wave of role-playing.

  ‘—the true author of the so-called Shakespearean plays—’

  ‘What I’d really like…’ He could glare to great effect when the occasion demanded and did so now. They sat up smartly. ‘Is to ask if either of you have any idea why this murder was committed.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘Assuming,’ Troy leaned over speaking loudly into their faces, ‘it was like that.’

  ‘Impossible. Everyone loved him.’

  ‘At least one person obviously didn’t, Mrs Beavers,’ said Barnaby. ‘Now, I know there wasn’t much light but did either of you notice any sudden movement during the regression?’ He glanced down at the drawings. ‘Anyone sitting on the steps for instance?’

  ‘Well of course we all got up because of May. And rushed down to her.’

  ‘Simultaneously?’

  ‘Pretty much wouldn’t you say, Heth?’

  Heather nodded. Barnaby suspected this might be the first of many similar opinions. A darkened room. People concentrating on the horizontal figure. Everyone looks one way, the sleight of hand takes place in quite another. A common conjuring ploy. Even so it was a daring thrust. So why choose such a dangerous time? At this stage the question was plainly unanswerable so he changed course, attempting to fill in more of the background.

  ‘How many people live here?’

  ‘There are ten of us in permanent residence but of course we can accommodate many more. Sometimes at retreats or workshops there can be forty…fifty people.’

  ‘Can’t be easy,’ said Troy, ‘living that close. Must be arguments and upsets.’ Two cloying smiles and headshakes. ‘A clash of personalities? Rows about money?’

  ‘Materialism is not our bag.’

  ‘What is money but the concretisation of etheric force?’

  There was a bit more of this, then Barnaby let them go. He and Troy were being discussed adversely before the door had even closed.

  ‘Those guys…from another planet…you know?’

  ‘Not listening at all. Just hearing the words.’

  ‘I must remember to tell Maureen that next time she tries to up the housekeeping,’ said Troy. ‘How’d it go—money’s the concrete what…? And speaking of concrete—have you tried this cake?’

  ‘I’ve taken enough risks for one night,’ said Barnaby. ‘I drank the drink.’

  ‘Not what you’d call leaping ahead are we, Chief?’ Troy perched on the table, fielding Barnaby’s sour glance with a winning smile. ‘What about the conspiracy theory? The old dingbat deliberately lays on the drama to draw attention from the dais…they all rush down thus allowing the other half of the combo—’

  ‘Exactly. They all rushed down.’

  ‘Yeh…well…look…’ Troy turned May’s sketch round. ‘There’s what…nine of them? It’s dark…ish. Nine people do not move as one. Obviously somebody lags behind, does old Obi Half a One Kenobi, then brings up the rear. How long would it take? A second? Two? And with her yelling and carrying on, no one’d hear even if he did cry out.’

  ‘Mm. It’s a sensible theory.’ Troy smirked with pleasure. ‘Not sure I buy the conspiracy bit, though. Well—let’s talk to—’ he turned the sketch back, ‘Christopher Wainwright. He stayed with the Cuttle woman throughout the regression so, like her, had a head-on view. He may have seen—’ A brief tap and the thirtysomething policewoman put her head round. ‘What is it?’

  ‘There’s a Miss McEndrick outside, sir. She says she has
some urgent information about the incident upstairs.’

  The officer had hardly finished speaking before Janet pushed her way into the room. She stood screwing up her eyes with nervousness and blinking, bony shoulders hunched before bursting into a flurry of speech. The words tripped each other up, fell over themselves.

  ‘I’m sorry—I couldn’t wait till you sent for me—sorry—it’s just that I saw something—I’m sure it’s important—that you’d want to know before wasting your time on other people—sorry…’

  Everything about her was remorseful. She seemed to be asking forgiveness for her height, her unappealing clothes, her angle-poised body, her very existence. Yet she had forced her way in. Imposed herself upon a stranger in a position of authority. That must have taken some doing.

  Barnaby asked her to sit down. She did so saying, ‘I know who did it. He wore a glove didn’t he? A washing-up glove?’

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘Behind the curtain, wasn’t it?’ She paused and Barnaby said, ‘Go on…’ noting the lack of grief in the intelligent, wide-apart eyes and the jumping-jack nerve in her cheek.

  ‘He pulled it out of his pocket. I was watching. He’d been glancing round the room as if waiting till he was unobserved, so I looked the other way—pretending to be talking to someone—but I caught him!’

  ‘Caught who, Miss McEndrick?’

  ‘Why—Guy Gamelin, of course.’ She was struggling to speak evenly but there was a current of triumph in her voice that could not be disguised.

  Of course? This is personal thought Barnaby and wondered why. Perhaps, like his sergeant, she was simply one of those people consumed by envy in the presence of the very rich. Somehow the chief inspector didn’t think so. He asked what her opinion was of Mr Gamelin.

  ‘Me?’ She flushed an ugly crimson. ‘I have no opinion. I only met him today.’

  ‘You had dinner together.’

  ‘Hardly together. There were nine of us.’

  Barnaby nodded, looking expectant and encouraging. The silence lengthened but the expression of concerned interest upon his features did not change. One would have to be a churl not to respond.