Faithful unto Death Page 9

  “That” was a thatched cottage of such dreamlike perfection that it was almost impossible to believe it was occupied by credit-carded, telly-watching, bar-coded human beings. A gingerbread family might have been more appropriate. Or a painted weather man and his wife, trundling in and out at regular intervals, as immaculately inexpressive as their storybook setting.

  “Who’d want to live in a house with a wig on?” Troy’s remark was laced with baffled resentment. He hated being presented with the spoils of people with immeasurably more money than himself, especially when they chose to chuck it about on such incomprehensible trifles.

  The sergeant was urban spirit incarnate, weaned on exhaust fumes, addicted to multistory car parks and multiplex cinemas carpeted with popcorn, to ziggurating shopping malls studded with zooming glass lifts and throbbing to the beat of hard rock, to space-invaded pubs.

  “Might as well be dead,” he added, never averse to ramming home a point already more than adequately made.

  They were coming into Fawcett Green and Barnaby pointed out that St. Chad’s Lane was the narrow turning on the right. Troy forbore to ask what else could the turning be in a two-street, one-horse dump like this?

  He was delightedly vindicated when, a moment later, the horse itself appeared, sedately clopping along. A small child, wearing a velvet riding hat and jodhpurs, bobbed on the vast leather saddle. Troy, father of one and daily exposed to the world’s wickedness, immediately wondered where its mother was.

  Becoming aware of the car, the little girl skilfully eased her mount on to the grass verge and gestured with calm authority for them to pass. Troy, who would have much preferred flustered anxiety that he could have authoritatively soothed, muttered, “Kids today.”

  “Over there,” the Chief Inspector pointed. “Where the bike is.”

  Perrot’s Honda motorcycle was standing inside the gates of Nightingales, which were wide open. His yellow safety jerkin and white helmet marked POLICE rested on the seat. The constable himself was nowhere to be seen.

  Troy drove in and the two men got out of the car. In spite of the heat, the sergeant then put on his immaculately pressed, silver-grey flecked cotton jacket after giving the collar a quick once over and removing a stray red hair.

  Barnaby rapped sharply on the front door but no one answered. The house had a desolate air as if recently abandoned, though vases and ornaments could still be seen on the windowsills between the glass and half-drawn curtains.

  “Tray posh,” said Sergeant Troy, peering through the glass.

  A narrow shingle path ran down the side of the garage to the rear of the house. Barnaby and Troy crunched along it and entered a somewhat neglected garden. This was encroaching on to the patio, a pleasant if unimaginative arrangement of multicoloured slabs. It held parched begonias in smart Chinese pots, a barbecue, still full of ashes, and a large, blue and white daisy-patterned hammock.

  Barnaby, a gardener to his fingertips, climbed down the steps and stared with irritation. There were some beautiful day lilies surrounded by couch grass, a newly planted but unwatered rhododendron, “George Reynolds” and a sad old hebe which also looked as if it could do with a drink. But there was one patch that caught his eye. Not far away was a small section of ground which looked slightly softer than the rest and had been freshly turned over. Perhaps Hollingsworth had decided to start tidying up but that was as far as he’d got. Given the man’s state of mind as described by Perrot, it seemed unlikely.

  “Sir! Over here!”

  Barnaby heard his sergeant rattle and shake the French windows. Before he could scramble back up, Troy had run over to the barbecue, seized the metal tongs and smashed the glass. He put his hand in and turned the key then broke two more panes to release the bolts. By the time Barnaby reached him the windows stood wide open.

  A man was lying on a brightly patterned rug in front of an empty fireplace. Barnaby crossed quickly over and knelt beside him. Troy stood on the threshold, his fastidious nature affronted by the mixture of stale offensive odours about the place, not least of which came from the pool of urine beneath the recumbent figure. Troy noticed a tumbler lying on its side a short distance from the man’s right hand.

  “Is he a gonner?”

  “Yes. Get hold of the FME, would you?”

  “Righty-oh.” Troy crossed over to a fussy gilt table holding a mock Edwardian telephone.

  “Don’t touch that,” said the Chief Inspector sharply. “Use the car radio. Ask them to send a photographer. And a round-the-clock watch.”

  “OK, OK.” Keep your hair on, a phrase that Troy would never have dared utter, provided the subtext. At the French windows he hesitated. “You don’t think he’s just . . . conked out then—Hollingsworth?”

  “We don’t know yet that it is Hollingsworth. Try and find out what’s happened to Sniffer of the Yard. If he’s good for nothing else, at least he can identify the body, pro tem.”

  When his sergeant had disappeared, Barnaby straightened up and looked about him. He would have recognised the place anywhere, thanks to Constable Perrot’s eye for detail. What a loss to the airport bookstalls that man was. Not necessarily, however, a permanent one. Should he carry on with the staggering lack of acumen and foresight that he had shown so far, a career change might well be in the offing. And sooner rather than later.

  Barnaby worked his way once round the room, keeping as near the edge as possible, protecting the scene as severely as if the man had been found with his head bashed in. Why precisely, he would have been hard put to say. Though this was clearly an unexplained death, there was nothing at this stage to suggest it was suspicious. Perhaps thirty years’ exposure to dirty work had given him a nose for it.

  The Chief Inspector looked into cabinets of china, along shelves of books, at pictures and photographs. He carried his hands loosely at his sides. Years and years ago he would have held them away from his body, maybe be even slightly in the air to remind him not to reach out or handle anything.

  As a young constable he had been seconded to a fire-eating DCI who had simply terrified him. Once, arriving at the scene of a murder and finding the body, a wretched half-naked young woman lying face down in a muddy ditch, Barnaby, unthinking, jumped into it and pulled her dress down. He had received a tongue-lashing that almost brought tears to his eyes. (What do you think she wants? Her arse covered or the shithead who did this put away?) For months afterwards he had been made to keep his hands in his pockets until the first stage of any investigation was completed. Jeeringly called “Tommy Billiards” by the rest of the team, the humiliation paid off, for he never did it again.

  At the front of the house his own bag carrier, having made the necessary calls, was getting out of the car. Aware that the local talent was huffing and puffing down the lane, Troy waited until Perrot was a few yards away then turned and walked briskly off. The constable, scarlet-faced and perspiring heavily, caught up with him on the patio.

  “Um, good morning, Sergeant.”

  “Well, hullo, Polly.”

  Perrot eyed the smashed windows with dismay. “What’s happened?”

  Troy grinned, shrugged, and said, “We thought you’d taken the day off.”

  “Call of nature, Sergeant,” said Perrot.

  In truth, after standing sentry for over two hours and finding himself absolutely ravenous, he had popped up to Ostlers for a double Twix and a cold drink. The chocolate was now melting in his pocket, the aluminium can thrown into some bushes when he spotted the DCI’s car.

  “What’d you think that’s for then?” Troy jerked his head towards the Hollingsworths’ charming little fish pond then said, “You’re in deep do-do, Poll. And not just for leaving this place unguarded.”

  Unsure how to respond but already resigned to the prospect of endless parrot jokes, the policeman remained silent. Troy crossed to the French windows. As his black shadow fell across the creamy carpet, Barnaby looked up.

  “He’s just drifted back, sir.” Standing aside,
Sergeant Troy indicated to Perrot that he should enter the room.

  PC Perrot stepped over the threshold and stopped dead. He stared at the body on the hearth rug. Barnaby watched the colour drain from his face and saw that there was no need to spell out the seriousness of the policeman’s position.

  “Is this the man you know as Alan Hollingsworth, Perrot?”

  The constable moved a few steps to the left and slightly forward so that the dead man’s profile was in his line of vision.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Perrot hadn’t fainted since he was twelve years old. A scorching day very much like this when he had had to have a tetanus jab after scraping his leg on a rusty fence. Standing waiting, dizzy in the heat, afraid of the needle, he had passed out cold. He must not do that now even though he felt a thousand times worse. Not with the sneering sergeant at his back and cold condemnation flowing across the carpet to his face.

  How was he even to handle, let alone survive, this appalling situation? What sort of fool, the foolish Perrot now asked himself, would stand for hours in front of a building simply because his knock had been unanswered? Surely a quick check around the place would be the next step? Then the dead man would have been found. Or, unspeakably harder to bear, a man who might not have been quite dead. A dying man whose life could have been saved.

  Scourging deeper, Perrot recalled the report that he had not marked urgent or put directly on some senior officer’s desk. Would doing so have made a difference? Immediately Perrot convinced himself that it would. After all, hadn’t the CID heavy mob come over to Fawcett Green almost straightaway?

  His offence was indeed monstrous. Perrot tried to stiffen his face muscles lest they should quiver and hung his head. His ears hummed. The foetid air was rank with accusation.

  Just as he felt he would not be able to remain upright another minute, the Chief Inspector said, “Outside, you. The less trampling about the better.”

  “Sir.”

  A car drew up at the main gates. Two doors slammed, two sets of footsteps crossed the gravel. Someone rapped the front door and Sergeant Troy shouted, “Round this way!”

  Police Surgeon for years, now mysteriously restyled Force Medical Examiner, Dr. George Bullard, had noted wryly when so informed that, though the designation might change, the raw material showed a tendency to remain as unprepossessing as ever. He was accompanied by a young man in a Stone Roses T-shirt, jeans and filthy sneakers with a camera round his neck, one under his arm, assorted lenses and a light meter.

  As the photographer worked taking shots from all angles, balancing on his toes at one point on the very edge of the fireplace, Perrot, as instructed, retreated to the patio and further persecution. Barnaby and George, old friends as well as old colleagues, stood to one side passing on the latest station gossip, putting the world to rights, talking about their families. Doc Bullard had just had his first grandchild. Barnaby and his wife longed to be in the same position but did not hold out much hope. Recently their daughter Cully had pointed out that Juliet Stevenson, an actor she greatly admired, had just had her first baby at thirty-eight. A mere thirteen years to go, her parents noted sadly when Cully and Nicholas, her husband, had left. We’ll be too old to pick it up, Joyce said. And she was only half joking.

  “Just the stiffy, is it?” asked the photographer, indicating that he was through.

  “For now,” said the Chief Inspector.

  If he sounded confident, that was because he was confident. Perhaps because Nightingales already appeared to be at the centre of a mystery, Barnaby felt certain that Alan Hollingsworth had not succumbed to a stroke or heart attack. Or alcohol poisoning even though, according to Perrot, he’d been lowering gallons of the stuff for days.

  Even so, Barnaby felt it would be prudent to wait until the postmortem before getting Scenes of Crime out. Cuts and more cuts were the order of the day and even a straight-forward investigation with a modest team cost money. Though a mere droplet in the ocean which formed the Thames Valley budget, he would nevertheless be, quite rightly, reprimanded should it be spent unnecessarily.

  On the other hand if murder was eventually proven and evidence had been lost or damaged under the day-to-day business of cleaning and tidying up the house and Hollingsworth’s effects and sorting out his affairs then he would be in much deeper trouble. The worst, in fact, for such an error could well result in a killer getting clean away.

  The Chief Inspector suddenly became aware he was being spoken to.

  “Sorry, George.”

  Dr. Bullard was kneeling on the hearth rug, having unpacked his bag, spread out the tools of his trade and pulled on thin latex gloves. Obligingly he repeated himself.

  “I’d say, from the look of the pupils, he took a whacking great overdose.” He loosened the waistband and undid the flies of the dead man’s trousers. When he picked up the rectal thermometer Barnaby, out of respect, turned away.

  He caught sight of his sergeant, swinging in the daisy hammock, smoking, his face turned to the sun. He knew that Troy would be bewildered by this attitude. Respect for the dead had always struck the sergeant as pointless. Barnaby wondered if this was a generation thing or a question of individual temperament and decided probably the latter.

  He pondered on the division between people with imagination, those able to put themselves in another’s place, and people without. This had always struck him as perhaps the most unbridgeable gap of all. All other differences, given willing hearts and minds, could be reconciled. But how to bestow a gift that nature had unkindly (or, some might argue, kindly) withheld?

  “I’d say he’s been dead a couple of days. Perhaps a bit less.”

  The doctor was unfastening the dead man’s shirt. Suddenly bored with the dismal ritual, the Chief Inspector went outside. It occurred to him to pass this consoling piece of information on to PC Perrot but the man had, once again, disappeared. Sergeant Troy stopped swinging and attempted to look more alert while still plainly relishing the sunshine.

  “This is the life, eh, guv?”

  Barnaby marvelled at such detachment. Shortly after discovering a human being who would never again see the sunrise this was, apparently, the life. Very occasionally and for barely a heartbeat the Chief Inspector would envy his sergeant. This was not one of those occasions.

  After ten minutes or so, George Bullard joined them. Although he did not actually say this is the life, there was tremendous relish in his inhalation and exhalation of the fragrant summer air. Barnaby began to feel rather out of things.

  “The van should be along any minute, Tom.”

  “Any chance of a PM fairly soon?”

  “Every chance. I’m clear, actually, for the rest of the day.”

  “That’s what we like to hear.” The Chief Inspector looked around. “Where’s our plod, Gavin?”

  “I put him out front to move people along. Last time I checked he was admiring some little kid’s drawing.”

  Barnaby gave a groaning laugh.

  The doctor said, “He’s all right, Colin Perrot. I used to live on his patch. He always had time for you.”

  “I’m sure he’s a warm and richly lovable human being,” said Barnaby. “But I’m starting to think he’s a bloody useless copper.”

  The investigation into Alan Hollingsworth’s death being necessarily delayed until the PM report, it was Simone’s disappearance that now absorbed Barnaby’s attention.

  Half an hour had passed since the mortuary van departed. A uniformed police presence was now stationed at the front and rear of the house.

  The time was one thirty. What better place, suggested Barnaby, both to eat and glean information than the village pub? Walking there, they were overtaken by Constable Perrot. He halted briefly near the crossroad and was seen to reach into the hedge and pick up an aluminium can.

  “Little Miss Tidy,” said Sergeant Troy.

  The Goat and Whistle, awaiting its hundred and fiftieth birthday, had recently been transformed by the brewers. Its
ceiling, kippered by years of tobacco fumes to a rich yellowy brown, had been stripped and repainted with dark, yellowy brown varnish. Its scarred counters, well-worn quarry-tiled floor and old fire grate had been ripped out and replaced by artificially distressed counters, creatively cracked stone flags scattered with fake sawdust and a chipboard Elizabethan ingle-nook. The ancient dartboard disappeared and an Astaroth v. the Dark Hellhounds of Erewhon space invader arrived.

  This imaginative transformation, unasked for and unwanted by both mine host and his customers, had cost thirty thousand pounds. The landlord was assured that, once the word of such startling refurbishments got about, his takings would be going through the roof. So far there was no sign of this. He had replaced the dartboard out of his own pocket.

  Half a dozen heads turned as Barnaby and Troy came in and conversation ceased. The Chief Inspector ordered a ham salad and some Guinness, Troy a corned beef and Branston pickle baguette and a half of bitter. He took them to a table near the space machine and started to play.

  Waiting for his meal, Barnaby was soon engaged in conversation, the landlord, Daniel Carter, opening.

  “Yours, is it? That Rover down the lane?”

  Barnaby admitted that it was.

  “Everything all right?” The question was put by an elderly woman who had come up to the counter for a refill of her gin and peppermint. Although no one else moved, Barnaby was aware of a general gathering of attention keenly focused on his reply.

  “Actually we’re looking into the disappearance of Mrs. Simone Hollingsworth.”

  “What did I tell you, Elsie?” said the gin and pep over her shoulder.

  “Thanks, Bet. I’ll have a drain of White Satin.”

  “Deaf as a beadle,” said Bet, swivelling back. “You’ve taken long enough about it.”

  “Did you know the couple?” asked Barnaby. Addressing the old lady, he also glanced around the room. The floodgates opened.

  By the time he had finished his tired undressed salad and near transparent shavings of ham he had discovered that Mr. H worked all the hours God made, Mrs. H was always done up like a dog’s dinner. He never mixed, she mixed but got bored with you after five minutes. They’d give at the door but not what you’d expect, taking the property into account. The last anyone had seen of poor Simone was on the Causton bus. And, rounded off Elsie, don’t tell me anyone leaves their old man with no more than a handbag and a thin jacket. Specially when he’s loaded.