Folly (25 page)

‘Isn't all this for the police?' Doc James said.

‘If they're getting anywhere, they aren't telling us,' Alex said. ‘Where's the harm in trying to put the pieces together? Tony and I have had some pretty pointed questions put to us and meanwhile there's been another death and Reverend Restrick has been spirited away with some sort of horrible injury. Why did he fall down a flight of stairs he's been using for years? Why can't the police move faster? This is a small place. That should make it easier.'

‘Let's not get carried away,' Doc James said. ‘If there was anything we could do to help things along, that would be one thing. But I'm not putting myself in a position to be accused of meddling.'

‘In other words your reputation comes first.' Embarrassed, Alex shook her head. ‘I'm so sorry. That wasn't called for. I understand your reticence.'

Doc James took a thoughtful swallow of Scotch. ‘Some things are best left unsaid if all they'll do is cause pain.'

‘How do you decide what things those are?' Tony asked. ‘Rather than details that could help right a wrong.'

‘Sometimes you have to be patient, son. If it becomes obvious that you ought to speak up for the general good, you do it. Not otherwise.'

Alex took the risk of asking, ‘Did you ever see Edward as a patient?'

‘A few times. Usual childhood ailments.'

‘What about his speech difficulties.'

Doc James snorted. ‘A stutter made worse by his family's ignorance. And there was nothing stupid about the boy although that was the story circulated. I never understood Cornelius's attitude. Sending Edward away seemed cruel.'

‘Dad, do you think Edward was the sort of boy who might grow up and want to be a monk?'

‘How could I possibly know?'

‘You couldn't,' Alex said. ‘You saw the man I found in the woods. Was there anything familiar—'

‘I'd have to be clairvoyant, psychic, whatever, to make a connection there. But they've got to find out who did that. There's someone very sick running around.' The doctor got to his feet and put down his glass. His agitation showed. ‘That poor man couldn't have had a chance. He didn't even put up his hands to try to save himself.'

‘Tony …' Alex turned to him. ‘The story about the coffin.'

Looking as if he expected to be laughed at, Tony began, ‘It's just some twaddle about Edward's hand getting caught when his mother's coffin was closed.'

‘It did.'

They all fell silent. For the first time Alex noticed the slight hissing sound the artificial flames of the electric fire made. Still wearing his Barbour coat, Tony flexed his shoulders.

His father said, ‘Where did that come from? How did you know about it?'

‘Harriet and Mary mentioned it. They said Edward supposedly had his hand in his mother's coffin and they closed it without noticing. Broke his finger and it was never set.'

Doc James turned his face away. ‘It was the only time I heard him speak clearly. He didn't want the finger touched because it was special, he said. It was between him and his mother or some such thing. I told his father that setting it would take more out of the child than it was worth. It would be a bigger job, but bones are broken again to get them properly set all the time. I expected Cornelius Derwinter to fight me about it but he didn't. Edward was a nice boy. Very deep and in a lot of emotional pain.'

‘Do you think that's Edward's body in the morgue?' Tony asked.

‘If it's Edward and he's Leonard's brother, DNA will prove it. That shouldn't be much longer now. They'll have taken a swab from Leonard, you can be sure of that. You may think nothing much is happening but I'd put money on this investigation getting a fair amount of attention from the police. They'll be in a hurry for that DNA. They'll also know if there's an old break to a finger.'

‘Would whatever you don't want to talk about help clear all this up?' Alex said softly. Her eyes felt gritty and she longed to be somewhere completely quiet.

‘No. If that were the case I wouldn't wait. What I do think is that the answers will turn out to be close to home. I only hope there isn't anyone else who could be a threat to the killer. They wouldn't be safe.'

‘Y
ou're going to love the latest,' Bill Lamb said as O'Reilly buckled himself into his partner's car outside the Black Dog.

They pulled away rapidly and set out for the road up the hill and toward the Dimple. This morning the sky was clear enough to outline Tinley Tower on its vantage point in searing blue. ‘The tooth' fitted its pointed, up-thrust, slightly leaning shape well, but O'Reilly wondered just why the earliest villagers had made the folly their settlement's namesake.

‘You in a coma, Guv?' Lamb asked.

‘I'm bloody tired, if that's what you mean. Sleep and this case don't go together. OK, spill the news. You're dying to.'

One of the good things about Lamb was that nastiness ran right off him. ‘For once we've got a break. It's going to turn out to be a break, or else.'

‘Or else?'

Lamb stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, lighted it and squinted ahead through acrid smoke. ‘Heads will roll,' he intoned, managing not to grin. ‘The obit for the baby came from the announcements in some uppity small-circulation society rag.
Our Kind
, if you can believe that. One of our eager beaver boys went after their circulation list and got no joy. But the sheet of copy paper used for the obituary left on Alex's kitchen table turns out to come from a batch in use by the library system. Apparently a bunch of London libraries – in appropriate areas – carry the magazine, and the Home Counties, of course. No breaks for several hours but then he hit on a branch in Gloucester where a librarian remembered someone asking for an old copy of
Our Kind
in the last few days.'

O'Reilly gave the man his whole attention. ‘Go on.'

‘They've got CCTV. The Gloucester boys are going through the surveillance films and the librarian is helping. She thinks she might remember the man if she saw him.'

‘But—'

‘I know.' Lamb cut him off. ‘We've got to be sure he wanted to look at the same copy with the obit. But the one he wanted was the right one – according to the librarian.'

‘Don't suppose he was a regular, or she got his name?'

‘No, but if he's on film and identifiable, we've got him.' Lamb negotiated the hill with the familiarity of one who had done so a few times before. ‘You heard they put a rush on the DNA?'

‘Yeah, I know. Could get it any time.'

‘So what's the drill for this fishing expedition, Guv,' Lamb said.

They were on their way for an informal interview with Leonard Derwinter.

‘Just that. I can smell a break and if these people aren't in the mix up to their necks, someone wants us to think they are. There's the entrance. Stags on the gateposts, huh? How high would you say those were? Twenty feet?'

‘Conservatively.'

Impressive was an understatement for the Derwinter estate. It had to cover hundreds of acres and the pale honey-colored stone house itself, set a mile or so back from the road, stood in Georgian splendor amid sloping lawns, and pools more properly classified as lakes, where sculptures rose out of the water and stone urns of evergreen vines interrupted low walls at intervals.

O'Reilly had decided to have Lamb drive them there in the new gray Ford Fiesta which made Bill a happy man. The two of them worked well as an interview team and he wasn't in the mood to soft pedal anymore. He could feel facts tightening around them. Too bad he had yet to find some strong connecting pieces between the revelations.

‘Will you look at this lot?' Bill said. ‘Conspicuous consumption, or what?'

‘That about covers it. See the workers' cottages in the distance. Good for a bit of pastoral color. Not close enough to mar the landscape but visible to prove how important it all is.'

‘A lot of it will be farmland, right?' Lamb said. He inclined his head to numerous sheep huddled together around the trunks of great beech trees. ‘Just sheep, you think? Or other livestock?'

‘They're known for their stables and there's bound to be more. You can only see a sampling of what they've got from here, I shouldn't wonder.'

‘This is only a sampling?' Lamb made a disbelieving sound and stopped the Ford at the bottom of the steps to the main doors. ‘I'd like to see what the whole thing looks like then, boss.'

O'Reilly looked at him sideways. He'd never liked the ‘boss' bit. ‘None of this is what it once was,' he said. ‘If it wasn't a working farm they'd probably be holding tours for the public and have a theme park.'

‘A petting zoo,' Lamb said and laughed. ‘Miniature train? An iced lolly and floss stand?'

‘Down to business,' O'Reilly said, but he grinned. ‘I think it'll work best if I'm Mr Sympathy.'

‘Be my guest. Nice Guy was never in my MO.'

O'Reilly glanced thoughtfully at his second in command and partner. Here was one who hadn't had it easy, but under the hard crust everything wasn't completely without a shred of compassion.

They climbed out of the car and started up the steps, steps brushed clear of snow and coated with grit. Before they arrived at the top, one of the double doors opened and the sexy Heather Derwinter emerged to greet them. O'Reilly had never seen her without a tight high-necked jumper – this one white – and skin-tight jodhpurs. He was grateful there was no sun or the sheen on her boots might blind him. She no longer wore a sling, but held her left arm protectively against her ribs.

‘Welcome,' she said, smiling and showing off beautiful teeth. ‘We're expecting you.'

O'Reilly and Lamb automatically flipped out their warrant cards and introduced themselves, although they'd both met Heather Derwinter following her encounter with the dart in her horse's rump. She still had healing scratches on her face. They entered the house and O'Reilly nodded to a servant, a man in a dark suit, who hovered nearby.

The portraits that lined dark green silk-covered walls were of horses rather than ancestors, although the most prominent painting, large enough for small details to be more or less discernable at the top of a first flight of marble stairs, had to be of Heather Derwinter mounted on a handsome gray. Derwinter House was in the background, and the richness of rolling land.

‘I didn't want Leonard to put it there,' she said, and O'Reilly realized she knew what he was looking at. ‘He wouldn't listen.
Men
. Really.' She giggled and he didn't think she made that particular sound often. The message he got was to treat her gently, as Leonard's charming but uninvolved pet.

She led the way beneath lofty ceilings and through towering gilded doors into some sort of receiving room. The place was huge, furnished with elegant-looking antiques, although O'Reilly was no expert on that subject, and smelled heavily of the large floral arrangements on tables, desks and mantel.

Leonard rose from a straight-backed chair in an alcove where he had been reading – or holding a book open – and showed none of his wife's cheery countenance. ‘Detectives,' he said, shaking hands with each of them. ‘You must have news for me. I admit I've been edgy – more than edgy, waiting to find out what you know.'

‘I'll ring for coffee,' Heather said. ‘Elliot's nose is out of joint because I took over his duties at the door. Serving coffee will mend his ego.'

Mrs Derwinter had definite ideas about what assuaged the egos of the served and those who served, O'Reilly noted. ‘We just had coffee,' he said, avoiding catching Lamb's eye. Bill would drink coffee whenever he could get it, which was most of the time. O'Reilly didn't want the interference of niceties.

Leonard didn't sit. He remembered the book he held and tossed it on a sofa with spindly legs that reflected in polished wood floors. ‘So?' His raised eyebrows underscored the question.

‘We'd like to talk more, Mr Derwinter,' O'Reilly said as if he didn't know the man was asking for DNA results. ‘There have been some developments. Informal would be acceptable to us but you might prefer to have your solicitor. If that's—'

‘Hell, no,' Leonard shot back. ‘You're not accusing me of anything. Why would I need my solicitor? What did the test show?'

‘Anxious about that, aren't you?' Lamb said, producing a notebook. ‘What difference will it make one way or the other? The man's dead.'

Leonard stared, swallowed hard enough to make his throat jerk, and a flush spread over his olive skin.

‘That's really not very nice, Detective,' Heather said behind them. ‘Wouldn't you like to know if a man who was found dead was your brother or not?'

‘Given that Mr Derwinter supposedly thought his brother had been dead for years he must be used to the idea.'

Time for the sympathy
. ‘Those results aren't back yet,' O'Reilly said pleasantly. ‘Could we sit down and go over a few things?'

Leonard closed his eyes for an instant and let his hands fall to his sides. ‘Of course.' He waved them to a pair of red velvet chairs and sat at one end of a facing loveseat.

This was just one of half-a-dozen potential conversation groupings in the room, which seemed like a lot of redundancy to O'Reilly.

Heather joined her husband on the couch and the girlish ingénue had left. The woman glared steadily at Lamb, who could always find a smile in such moments.

‘Your brother, Edward, was older than you,' O'Reilly began. ‘That would have made him your father's heir.'

‘Correct.'

‘Hypothetically, why would your father invent the death of a son?'

‘He didn't,' Heather said reflexively. ‘That couldn't have been Edward's body.'