Death of a Friend (13 page)

Smith looked at Den. ‘Keep coming back to that in your interviews,’ he advised. ‘Somebody somewhere must know the secret.’

‘Right, sir. So I’m doing all the interviews, am I?’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘Well …’

‘Phil’s needed at the computer for a while, before getting back to the local horsy types, and Danny – as you’ve probably forgotten – is due to start a three-day training course in Bristol 
this afternoon. We’re going to have to manage without him for a while.’

Oh well,
thought Den.
It’s my own fault.
I shouldn’t have been so keen.
And armed with the list of Quakers, and his almost-blank notepad, he hurried off for his next interview.

 ‘How’s it going?’ Lilah asked Den that evening.

He shook his head wearily. ‘I’ve been surrounded by Quakers all day. They’re all very nice people, really friendly and open – and I don’t feel as if they’ve got me anywhere at all. I’ve seen Dorothy Mansfield – that was yesterday …’ he began ticking them off on his fingers. ‘And Silas Daggs—’

‘What a wonderful name!’ Lilah exclaimed. ‘I’ve never heard of him before.’

‘He’s not very sociable. Lives with a smelly old corgi and a lot of valuable-looking antiques. He’s Bill and Hannah Gratton’s bachelor cousin, and their grandad left all the family heirlooms to him, for some reason. The others got hardly
anything, as far as I can see. He didn’t approve of Charlie, in a general sort of way. Been a pig farmer for much of his life, but thanks his stars he’s out of it now. Thinks the world has gone to rack and ruin.’

‘Carry on,’ she prompted.

‘Right. Dorothy, Silas, Miriam Snow, Barty White and the two younger ones – Polly Spence and Valerie Taylor. I haven’t seen the last two yet. They weren’t in when I tried.’

‘I have heard of Barty White,’ Lilah nodded. ‘He used to have a big herd of Friesians. Actually, thinking about it, I remember my dad and I went there once to have a look at his set-up. He was milking ten at a time, when we were only doing three. He had an ACR system, which we thought was amazing.’

‘Do I know what ACR stands for?’

‘I can never remember exactly. Something like Automatic Cluster Removal. Basically, the unit comes off when the cow’s finished milking, of its own accord. Saves a lot of time.’ She grinned. ‘We decided not to bother with it. Dad said it was bound to lead to mastitis, you see—’

‘I don’t want to know,’ Den decided. ‘Anyway, Barty told me a bit about his life. He sold nearly all the land three years ago, when he hit sixty, and let his son keep the house. He lives in a bungalow across the road now and dreams of past glories.
He also breeds Jack Russells – for the hunt.’

‘Which can’t have endeared him to Charlie Gratton.’

‘I tried to ask him what the Quakers thought about it. He said it wasn’t their business, that hunting was a time-honoured country practice and that if he didn’t sell dogs to augment his pathetic pension, he’d probably starve. I was fairly well convinced.’

‘So who is Miriam Snow?’

‘She lives in that tiny village west of Chillhampton – bet you’ve never been there. Kilworthy. Wonderful scenery, like going back a thousand years. She cycles through the lanes to Meeting. Doesn’t even have a car. She seemed lonely and a bit helpless. Mrs Mansfield said some quite rude things about her.’

‘So she isn’t one of your suspects?’

Den shook his head. ‘I can’t bring myself to imagine it. I asked her if she rode a horse and she went pale at the very idea. Partly because horses frighten her and partly because Charlie told her it was exploitative, I think.’

‘Or because she felt guilty?’

‘I don’t think so. But you’re right – I should have kept an open mind to the possibility. I’m a hopeless policeman – it’s so difficult to think the worst of people all the time.’

‘You don’t have to do that. Just allow for the
possibility that they’re lying to you. They might be doing it to protect someone else. Or because they’re being threatened. And watch their body language.’

‘Yes, miss,’ he said meekly. ‘I’ll do better next time. Anyway, Miriam Snow was one of Charlie’s most ardent followers – she swallowed all that stuff about slave animals and human beings not having the right to use other species. Except she didn’t seem to have any real grasp of what it meant. She’s got a cat and two budgies and her garden obviously makes full use of a host of pesticides. I saw a box of slug pellets on her windowsill.’

‘Does Barty White ride?’

Den sighed. ‘Unfortunately, he does. Not only that, but he’s got a seventeen-hand stallion in his paddock. Said it belongs to his son and doesn’t often get ridden. But he lends it out from time to time to anyone who fancies a gallop and can handle it. Looked rather a nasty brute to my ignorant eye.’

‘Seventeen hands is enormous. Did you ask him where he got it from?’

‘Apparently it was a reject from somewhere, because its temper’s not too good. His son said he would give it a home.’

Lilah looked at him in excitement. ‘But it might be the very one you’re looking for! Has
anyone examined its hooves for bloodstains?’

He nodded. ‘A team went over this afternoon. I called them right away. They didn’t find anything. It’s hopeless, quite honestly, over a week after the event. Just walking about on wet grass for all that time would be enough to clean everything off. It hadn’t been given new shoes, so there’s the very faintest possibility they’ll match against Charlie’s wounds, but I’m not holding my breath. I can’t see Barty doing the deed, and his son was away in London over the crucial period.’ He sighed. ‘I’m not really getting anywhere at all.’

Before Lilah could adequately sympathise, Den’s doorbell rang. ‘Expecting anyone?’ she asked. He shook his head and slowly stood up. ‘I’ll go,’ she offered. But perhaps because they’d been talking about murder, or perhaps because he was a policeman and therefore a natural protector, he went to the door.

His visitor was so out of context that he merely gaped at her for a few seconds. ‘Sorry to intrude,’ she smiled. ‘I’ll go away again if you’re busy. But I gather Lilah’s here and I was hoping for a little chat.’

Lilah appeared behind Den. ‘Martha!’ she yelped. ‘How did you know I was here?’

‘I phoned your ma and she told me. Is this a bad time? Are you in the middle of something?’ 

‘Well—’ Lilah hesitated and looked to Den for a contribution.

‘Of course we’re not,’ he said heartily, suddenly enlivened by the unexpectedness of the visit. ‘It’ll be great to talk to you. You won’t be surprised to know we were discussing Charlie. Come in.’

Martha stepped confidently into the house and began to unwind a scarf. ‘It’s got cold again,’ she said.

They settled her down with a mug of coffee and waited to hear the reason for her visitation. Den forced himself to do some quick thinking. He had a duty to be cautious, even suspicious, with this woman who could herself have murdered Charlie Gratton. She certainly had the opportunity. By paying this call she might even be increasing his suspicions. The obvious conclusion was that she wanted to discover how the inquiry was going and where police attention was most sharply directed. Under the guise of a somewhat moribund friendship with Lilah she might very well be trying to ferret out information that it would be unwise to share.

But at the same time, he was aware of a strong feeling of sympathy for Martha, fortified by knowing that she was – or had once been – Lilah’s friend. He himself had been a pupil at the same school where Martha had taught English to Lilah and befriended her as a sixth former,
but he had left before Martha arrived, and knew her only by reputation. The connection worked both ways, of course. If Martha turned out to have killed Charlie, then Den for one was going to be both amazed and distressed. The mere possibility was supposed to be enough to keep him at a professional distance, and he did his best to maintain it.

Martha began to speak almost immediately. ‘I suppose you know about me and Nina and Alexis all having different fathers.’ She sounded relieved to say it, as if she’d been holding the words in for too long already.

Den and Lilah both nodded with a hint of sheepishness.

‘Okay. So I assume you also know the essential facts: the three daughters of Eliza Cattermole, born within seven years of each other. Nina, then me, then Alexis. We don’t know who any of the fathers were –
are
. It was a village scandal, thirty-five years ago. If you asked, even now, there are plenty of people who’d tell you all about our wicked mother. She was actually a lovely person. She was all give, no take. Our mother was the daughter of gentry. High Copse was the Big House, with a capital B, capital H. The manor house, at one time. It’s been changed a lot, of course—’ She paused, staring vaguely out of the small window onto the street below, apparently
seeing High Copse as it once was, and not a side street in Okehampton.

Martha took a deep breath, and Den understood that she was making an effort to speak steadily. ‘Ma had brothers, too. Uncle Luke and Uncle Paul. They gave her shares in the house. Luke was a somewhat unorthodox civil servant with the Foreign Office and Paul was a psychiatrist, firmly in the R.D. Laing mould. In fact, I think he came to the same conclusions ten years before Laing did. Never occurred to him to write books about it, though.’ She laughed. ‘Is this getting boring? I am getting to the point, honestly. About my mother. She was even more in the middle of things than her brothers. She met W.H. Auden and Stanley Spencer – definitely the bohemian end of the spectrum – and she brought us up at High Copse in as liberal an atmosphere as you can get.’ She stopped abruptly.

‘And she’s dead now?’ asked Den, well aware of the answer already.

Martha nodded. ‘She died five years ago, at the age of seventy-six. She came to motherhood quite late, you see. Very late, by the standards of the time. She was forty-six when she had Alexis. Uncle Luke’s in a nursing home in Kent and Uncle Paul went a bit strange. The last we heard he was in New Zealand, building himself an ocean-going boat. He’d be nearly eighty now.’

‘And you really don’t know who your fathers were? Not any of them?’

Martha shook her head. ‘We never really asked. She convinced us that it didn’t matter. They weren’t chosen with any real care, as I understand it. These days, they’d have been anonymous sperm donors from a private agency. They weren’t local. She always insisted on that. It was about the only thing she ever told us. It isn’t so very unusual, you know. I could show you five or six women with children by three different men. Three seems to be the favourite number. Maybe there’s an evolutionary significance to it. Her only deviation was in not marrying any of them.’

‘The
point
, Martha,’ Lilah prompted.

Martha said nothing for an uncomfortably long time. ‘I could give a variety of answers to that. First of all, I’d like to set the record straight, so you don’t rush off looking for Nina’s outraged father seeking vengeance on Charlie for her death. Nina’s father almost certainly doesn’t know she ever existed.’

Den considered his next words carefully, swallowing back those which first came to mind.
We never seriously thought of looking for Nina’s father.
In the complex game that every murder inquiry turned into, sooner or later, he wondered just what part it was that Martha was trying to play.

‘What else?’ he asked.

She smiled. ‘I want to make sure you know exactly how peculiar we are. And how, by associating with us, Charlie also became peculiar. A lot of locals resent us.’

‘I’m not really sure—’ Den began.

‘Neither am I,’ Lilah chipped in. ‘You’re obviously trying to tell us something, but I’ve no idea what it is.’

Martha flushed, her clear skin deepening into a shade resembling a recent tan. Den felt the same warmth in his own cheeks, watching her. She certainly rewarded close observation. Initially striking because of her hair and height, it took time to realise just how lovely she was. The clear gaze and confident tilt of her head gave the impression of dignity and authority. Den hoped again that the outcome of his inquiry was not going to bring any further grief onto Martha’s shoulders.

‘I’ve been thinking about something one of the other teachers said to me at school today. Term finishes this week and we’ve been having parents’ evenings. I overheard one chap saying he wondered what the parents would think about meeting me.
After all, there’s probably a murderer in the family
– that was what he said. It never really occurred to me until then that people were thinking that. The papers have concentrated on us, because Charlie was found on our land –
and because of Nina, I suppose. But they seem to be assuming that one of us actually killed him. So I wanted to make sure that you don’t think that. Because it would be an awful waste of your time if you did. It would distract you from finding the real killer.’ She met Den’s eyes, unblinking, for the last part of her speech. ‘Did you go to see Frank?’ she asked after a brief pause.

He nodded but offered no further information. Martha leant forward urgently. ‘It must have been someone good with horses, and someone with a precise knowledge of where they could find Charlie. You might think that rules Frank out, but I know he would have been able to find Charlie if he wanted to.’

‘How would he?’ Den asked, before he could stop himself. He hadn’t wanted to get drawn into this conversation.

She leant back again and folded her arms. ‘He … knows people locally.’

‘But who? How do you know? Does he know you and Alexis?’

‘No,’ she said with resignation. ‘I’ve hardly ever met him. I think Nina ran into him once or twice. But he does know Nev. You see, Frank Gratton is Nevil Nesbitt’s godfather.’

‘I think I’ll go back to High Copse,’ Den told Phil, after lunch on Tuesday. ‘I had a rather
unexpected visit from Martha Cattermole last night and it’s had the opposite effect from what she intended.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Phil said inattentively.

‘She seemed to be trying to divert us away from her family onto Charlie’s brother Frank. So I’m wondering what it is we’ve missed up there.’

Phil fingered his narrow chin for a moment, obviously thinking hard. Den had no illusions that the thoughts he was focused on concerned him or anything he had said.

‘Any inspiration?’ he asked hopefully.

‘Hang on a minute.’ Phil put up one finger. ‘Right. Got it. Sorry. You’re talking about the Gratton thing, right?’

‘What else would I be talking about?’

Phil rubbed his chin again more vigorously. ‘Plenty,’ he grinned. ‘But it’s good to see you concentrating on the job in hand. So you’re going back to the big house. Who’s going to be there? The sisters both work, and the kids’ll be at school, won’t they? That just leaves the chap who runs the feedstuffs business.’