Death and the Princess (8 page)

Knightley, it turned out, was a charming little village of about four or five hundred inhabitants: not one of the Shropshire showplaces, not an obvious venue for Housman fanciers bent on tracing the course of the celebrated Lad from plough-shaft to gallows, but still a very pleasant little place indeed. I could see no obvious reason why Bill Tredgold should have found himself here, unless the reason was the hotel itself, where he spent his last night. It doubled as the local pub, called itself The Wrekin, and was a splendid Elizabethan half-timber job with about thirty-odd bedrooms, which no doubt filled up nicely in the summer and in the spring holiday periods. It was not one of those places that aim to provide every mod. con. to go with the frisson of uneven floors
and oak-beamed ceilings. In fact, I doubted whether much modernization had taken place in the last fifty years or so. But it was comfortable and unpretentious, while being just that bit run down as well. Even the foyer, where the hotel reception was, had a nicely lived-in appearance, as if generations of farmers had eased their ample bottoms down into the armchairs.

It was the owner who came when I rang, and I booked in for the night. I liked the look of the man, so I opened in on the subject immediately.

‘I’m afraid you’re not going to like this, but in point of fact, I’m Police. Scotland Yard. It’s that business of William Tredgold again.’

‘Good God, surely we’ve had enough of you here going into that, haven’t we? It’s not good for business, you know.’

‘It might be better for business to have had a murder in the place than to have had a leaky gas-fire,’ I pointed out.

‘Perhaps,’ the owner admitted gloomily. ‘That’s not the sort of publicity we like though, either way. Look, you’d better come through to the office.’

So I went round the desk and settled snugly into the little den behind — more of the threadbare old furniture, and a nice coal fire for both of us to sit around. He introduced himself as Terence Shaply: he was about fifty-five — a capable, intelligent chap, the sort who might have retired here from his own business, enjoying both the occasional bustle and the normal humdrum course of things. I had no doubt the place was well-run, in an unostentatious sort of way.

I said: ‘Look, I have the details of the previous investigations, but it might be helpful if you went over the main points again.’

He sighed. ‘That’s what they all say. Well, here goes. He — or rather they — checked in somewhere around seven o’clock.’

‘Had the room been reserved in advance?’

‘Oh yes, earlier in the day. I took the call myself.’

‘So it definitely wasn’t just a casual visit — they hadn’t just been driving through and decided to stop.’

‘Oh no, we get quite a bit of that sort of custom, but this wasn’t one of that kind. To tell you the truth, they didn’t seem to know each other that well, and I’m afraid I assumed it was a dirty weekend, arranged pretty much on the spur.’

‘You hadn’t had him before, for that reason?’

‘Never seen him in my life, to my knowledge.’

‘Do you — don’t be offended — do you get many people here on dirty weekends? You’re not, so to speak, known for it?’

‘Certainly not! Many more likely places than us for that. If we have dirty weekenders it’s likely to be the quiet here that attracts them. In other words, one or both of them are probably married.’

‘Yes — and that wasn’t the case here.’

‘No, I gather not. Well, he booked in at the desk there, and we swapped a few remarks about the weather. She stood well aside, and didn’t say anything. They went up to their room, weren’t up there long, and then came down and had dinner. That’s when I got the idea they didn’t know each other all that well — ’

‘Why?’

‘Well, the conversation was just that bit forced: lots of jokes and laughing, but some awkward silences too. They played footy under the table, and giggled. You don’t do that if you’ve been going out with each other any length of time.’

‘Indeed not. What did they do next?’

‘They didn’t linger over dinner. They went straight upstairs, and that was the last anyone here saw of them. Alive.’

‘I see. I suppose in the morning one of the maids smelt the gas, did she?’

‘That’s right.’

‘There are two interesting points here, aren’t there? First of all the gas-fire.’

‘Right. We’re still on the sort of gas-fire that was installed twenty or thirty years ago — these were put in before my time, but are still quite serviceable. We’ve had this one inspected, naturally, and the police had a look at it too, and they say there was no fault there, and no reason why the flame should have gone out. Of course, most people would turn it off before they went to sleep.’

‘Perhaps they did,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they did. Now the other thing is the wine, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. I must say I find that odd. There were glasses, you see, two glasses. And they certainly weren’t the hotel’s glasses. Of course they could have brought them with them, but they had very little luggage, and it seems an odd thing to pack. Most people who bring a bottle of anything to drink in their rooms use the bathroom glasses. And then, you see, it was white wine — so if they brought it with them they must have drunk it unchilled. Perfectly possible, but most people would have brought red.’

‘Had they drunk wine at dinner?’

‘Yes. A bottle of white — a Jugoslav Riesling.’

‘Did they have a corkscrew with them?’

‘No, they didn’t. Apparently they’d brought glasses, but not a corkscrew. That was one of the things that worried the police here, right from the beginning. On the other hand, you can get your bottle opened for you in the shop where you buy it.’

‘Certainly. There’s an awful lot of
slightly
odd things that
could
be explained. If they
had
ordered wine up to their room, who would have taken it up to them?’

‘Anyone might. Whoever happened to be free in the dining-room or the bar. Or it might be myself or my wife. This isn’t the sort of place where you have uniformed maids or wine-waiters.’

‘Could I see the hotel register for that day?’

‘Surely. Just that day? Several of the guests that night would have been here some days already.’

‘I’m assuming that the person I’m interested in would have decided to come here only when Tredgold and his girl came. But you’re quite right, it could conceivably be more in the nature of an accidental meeting here. In fact, I’d like a list of everyone in the hotel that night, if you can rustle one up.’

The register showed five married couples to have booked in on the same day as Tredgold, and also three men and two women in singles. I noted them all down, and their place of origin, mentally registering more interest in the people in single rooms: murderers rarely hunt in pairs. When Terence Shaply had rustled up the complete guest list we went back into the foyer. He said: ‘Like to have the room they had?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and he gave me the key to Room 39.

The Wrekin ran true to form for its kind: corridors that rose and fell like the North Sea, odd side passages leading to laundry cupboards, steps with no rational excuse for being there. No. 39 was near the end of a passage, and I have to admit that when I opened the door I got the silliest eerie feeling. I tried to suppress this access of schoolgirlishness: after all, probably every room in the house had had someone die in it at one time or another. Still, this was so recent, and so subtly nasty. But when I got in and looked around, the feeling left me: this was just another hotel room — more irregular than some, but not as large as you sometimes get in these old places. The window had a wonderful view out on to the Shropshire hills. I put my bag on the bed and sat down on a rather insubstantial upright chair. As far as the room itself was concerned, there was nothing now to be done that hadn’t already been done. I had no fatuous idea of finding a vital scrap of material which had caught on a nail, or
suchlike detective-story clues. With current standards of service in hotels any such clue could have been left by any guest over the past two or three years. On the other hand, this did seem to be the ideal place to think the thing through — if, indeed,
thing
there was.

Ignoring for the moment the possibility of accident, how could the murder have been done? They had drunk white wine at dinner — and could have been seen to do so by any other guest, or of course by the hotel staff. They then came up to this room, with obvious intentions. Assuming this murder wasn’t well premeditated (and in detail it could not be, granted that Tredgold had only booked into the hotel that evening), the murderer then had to make his plans. First he had to get hold of a bottle of white wine. Where from? If he was a guest he could order it from room service, but surely that was too risky. From a pub, then, or from Shrewsbury, which was only twelve miles away. Both options involved a car, but I imagined most — perhaps all — the night’s guests at the hotel came by car.

So he picked up the wine, and presumably the glasses, at a late-night wine merchant’s or from a pub (a Shrewsbury pub would be safest, and least likely to remember a customer who bought a bottle of wine, and conceivably pinched a couple of their glasses). But what then? How to get them to accept and drink it?

Perhaps one should not make too much of that. Britain has become so dizzyingly alcoholic in the last couple of decades that few people will look a gift bottle in the neck. Posing as one of the hotel servants (no need to dress up for that, because as the owner had implied it wasn’t that kind of hotel), the murderer could knock on the door, pretend that the hotel was celebrating something (the owner’s silver wedding, or the building’s four hundredth anniversary, perhaps) and explain that all the guests were getting drinks on the house in celebration, ‘And as you
had been drinking white wine at dinner, the owner thought . . .’ Thin, but probably adequate. With one proviso: for this work, the murderer could not conceivably be known to Bill Tredgold.

And the wine, of course, was drugged. The drug could very easily have been brought with the murderer, in case of opportunity. And when they fell asleep, tired but happy, the murderer could sneak in, in the middle of the night, and turn on the gas-fire. The bedroom door was a rickety Yale lock, presenting no problem to anyone with a bank card. Very neat, very simple, and after this time all but impossible to prove. There was no reason why the murderer should have left any trace of himself behind him, and in the morning he could be up early and away before the deaths were even discovered. If murder there had been, it looked like a hopeless case, from the police point of view.

Nevertheless, some lines of future enquiry did suggest themselves. I took out my notebooks, which so far were practically virgin as far as useful leads on the case were concerned, and after some thought, wrote:

‘Why here?’

Why come away for a weekend with your bird, when you’ve got a perfectly good flat of your own to go to? One answer to that would be that Bill or his girl just felt like a weekend away. Still, there could be other answers. Journalists are very good at mixing business and pleasure (frequently to the detriment of the former), and choosing this place, which apparently neither of them had been to before, did suggest that the excursion had more than one end in view. This put me on to another line of thought. I wrote again: ‘What about his luggage?’ and ‘Reporter’s notebook.’

One thing was certain: he would not have travelled, even on a purely pleasure trip, without a notebook of some kind. Reporters never did. Who had it now? His parents?

All this was vague, but to me necessary, because various new lines of enquiry were opening up, as far as I could see. Hitherto we had seen the most likely explanation for Tredgold’s death as being that it was an attempt on the life of the Princess. On the other hand, if the murderer, coming in with the wine, had seen the girl (if, in other words, she did not conceal herself under the bedclothes with shame, which was hardly likely in this day and age), then he would certainly have known she was not the Princess. But the murder could still have succeeded rather than failed: the intended victim could have been Bill Tredgold or Carol Crossley, his bird. And if it was Bill, there was no reason totally to rule out the possibility that the Princess was still involved. He had recently been sleeping with her, and his reporter’s instinct (a nice way of saying his nose for dirt) could have smelt something fishy going on around her. In which case, it was a fair bet that the details would be in his notebook.

The rest of the day was spent pleasantly, but not very productively. I questioned the staff and the owner’s wife about the procedures when wine was ordered to a room, trying to discover whether any of the other guests had ordered wine that day, but I was not surprised when I drew a blank. I phoned the Shrewsbury police, with whom my coming had been cleared in advance, and had them start an enquiry for anyone who had bought a bottle of white wine in a public house, and perhaps in some way got hold of glasses at the same time. I told them also to check the wine dealers, but asking about people who had bought a bottle of wine there three months before really did seem to be wasting the Salop police’s time most unconscionably. Then I went and sat with the locals in the public bar, drawing, once again, very much a blank. Not, of course, that they were not interested in the matter: the death of these two — ‘not wed, they weren’t, an’ too much on their minds to worry about a little bit of
gas,’ etc., etc. — would in any case have been the local event of the year. If it were to turn out to be murder, it would be the event of the century. Whisper had already got around about this possibility, but it didn’t prevent the locals finding the whole thing rib-nudgingly funny. On the whole their explanations tended towards the comic-supernatural.

‘Reckon if you ’n’ I, Jim ’ed gone upstairs that night, we’d ’a found a phantom waitress, all rustlin’ skirts, carryin’ a tray wi’ wine an’ wine glasses, a-goin’ to do ’em in for havin’ a bit o’ what you fancy.’

They had a good chortle over that one. All their remarks were of that sort. They reminded me of bit parts in a particularly tedious comedy by Goldsmith or somebody. I could have sat with them all night, if I’d got that much time to waste. As it was, I turned in early.