Murder in the Museum (Fethering Mysteries) (37 page)

So, thought Laurence Hawker,
that
was it. Someone should have realized, from the fact that Graham Chadleigh’s service revolver stayed at Bracketts. If he had been so thoroughly blown up at Passchendaele that no trace of his body was found, then what were the chances of his gun turning up?

Everything else fitted, though. There was no place for cowards in any household run by Felix Chadleigh. No son of his could be known to have ducked out of his duty to King and Country in such a shabby way.

There was the religious dimension too. For a Catholic, suicide is the ultimate sin. The boy’s body must have been secretly buried, without benefit of any funeral rite, in the kitchen garden, there to stay for more than eighty years, until accidentally uncovered by the spade of Jonny Tyson.

For his father, the reality of what Graham Chadleigh had done was too appalling ever to be made public. An alternative, more pleasing, truth would have to be invented.

So Felix Chadleigh had invented it. And by God only knew what amount of bullying and persuasion, he had forced his family and friend to endorse that new truth.

There was one document Laurence Hawker found more chilling than all the others. It was written in 1919 to his wife by Felix Chadleigh, when he was away from Bracketts shooting in Scotland. The part that shocked Laurence read as follows:

Sheila Cartwright’s funeral duly took place, and was duly attended by all the Great and the Good of West Sussex. Lord Beniston recycled the bland appreciation that he had wheeled out for many similar occasions. Sheila’s close friend, the Chief Constable, also spoke. Tributes were paid to her enormous energy and achievements.

And Gina Locke was introduced to some very useful potential sponsors.

An overlooked figure, Sheila’s husband, was, needless to say, present at the ceremony and the reception that followed. He was so ineffectual a figure, however, that the other guests kept forgetting he was there.

But the one or two who did look at him by mistake, noticed on his face an expression that looked not unlike relief.

Laurence Hawker delivered his report well in time for the next meeting of the Bracketts Trustees. In the interim Gina Locke had organized replacements to fill the missing seats on the Board. (Josie Freeman had also tendered her resignation. This had nothing to do with recent events at Bracketts; it had been motivated solely by her masterplan for the social advancement of her husband. She had been offered a position on the Board of the Royal Opera House, where her presence would be much more valuable to his profile. A few more moves of that kind, continuing carefully targeted – and carefully leaked – philanthropy to the right charities, donations to the right political party, and Josie Freeman felt quietly confident of upgrading her husband’s OBE to a knighthood within a couple of years. The only other important thing she had to do was somehow stop him talking about car-parts all the time.)

Of course Gina Locke could not appoint new Trustees herself. But she could suggest suitable names to Lord Beniston, and he could invite them to join the Board. With little knowledge of anyone in West Sussex outside his own circle, and always liking to have his work done for him, the noble Lord had accepted all of Gina’s suggestions without argument. As a result the new Board had a much lower average age than its predecessor, and contained more members who saw the leisure industry exactly the same way as Gina Locke saw it. None of her apprenticeship under Sheila Cartwright had been wasted.

(In fact, approving the new Trustees was Lord Beni-ston’s last action for Bracketts. Confident that he had done his bit during the two years of his involvement, he resigned, quickly to join the board of another, rather more prestigious, heritage property. For him the change had three advantages: first, the patron of the new organization was a minor member of the Royal Family, so he was mixing with his own sort of people; second, it had been agreed that, so long as his name appeared on the letterhead, he wouldn’t have to attend any meetings; and third, he got free membership of the adjacent golf club.)

The reconstituted Board approved Laurence Hawker’s report and accepted Gina’s proposal that the research material should all be handed over to Professor Marla Teischbaum, who was to be given all cooperation in future with her biography of Esmond Chadleigh. (There was only one dissenting voice; unsurprisingly, it belonged to George Ferris.) The hope was that the book would be ready for publication to coincide with the centenary of Esmond’s birth in 2004.

As it turned out, that objective was achieved. The book made a great stir when it came out, was serialized in a Sunday newspaper, and sold in large quantities. Professor Marla Teischbaum became a media celebrity and on her frequent visits to England dished up her vigorous opinions on every available arts programme and chat-show.

And the evidence of his complicity in a major deception revived interest in Esmond Chadleigh.

Gina Locke’s pet project, the Bracketts Museum, funded by one exclusive donor, was also completed in time for the centenary. Though at first just a shrine to Esmond Chadleigh, within two years it had been made over and reopened. In homage to the writer’s new notoriety, it was then called ‘The Bracketts Museum of Fakes and Fraudsters’, and contained the largest collection of confidence tricks and scams this side of the Atlantic. (Graham Chadleigh-Bewes might have been obscurely gratified, had he known that there was a whole display devoted to ‘The Tichborne Claimant’.)

In its new incarnation the Museum did much better than it ever had before. At the beginning of the twenty-first century deviousness and cynicism were much more marketable commodities than faith and honesty.

Having turned around the fortunes of Bracketts, Gina Locke was headhunted for a senior job at the Arts Council, and settled down to a career of dispensing public money to the wrong causes.

Almost all of Esmond Chadleigh’s books went out of print. One exception was
Vases of Dead Flowers
. ‘Threnody for the Lost’ remained one of the nation’s favourite poems, though the notes that accompanied it in anthologies changed considerably.

The other surprising survivor of the Chadleigh
oeuvre
was
The Demesnes of Eregonne
. The book had become a minor cult in California amongst the members of an even more minor cult, who tried to live their lives according to its rather flaky principles. They self-published an edition of two hundred.

Jonny Tyson continued to work at Bracketts, and to keep the Weldisham garden just as his father had always kept it. His father died, but Jonny felt sure the same thing would never happen to his mother.

Mervyn Hunter continued his sentence in a secure prison. Jude continued to visit him and tried to give him confidence, tried to tell him he was no danger to anyone, and sometimes, briefly, Mervyn believed her. When he was released, he hoped to find work as a gardener. But he was also tempted to reoffend. He still felt safer in prison.

And Jude continued her intermittent sessions at Austen Prison. She continued to work harmoniously with Sandy Fairbarns, and neither of them ever knew anything about each other’s private life. Which suited both very well.

George Ferris started work on a new book. Its working title was:
What The County Records Office Can Do For You
.

And, of course, Laurence Hawker died. Working on the Bracketts report had only given him a brief remission from the inevitable. He lived less than three weeks after completing it.

Carole was shocked. Only very near the end had she realized how ill he was; and with that knowledge came the realization that Jude must have been aware of his condition for a much longer time. Carole was confused between sympathy for Jude and resentment of her neighbour’s secretiveness. She didn’t like the feeling that she had been the victim of a conspiracy of silence, a subject of clandestine discussion at Woodside Cottage.

Though inwardly anguished, the reaction to Laurence’s death that Jude presented to the world was one of serenity. Which confused Carole even more. They had been lovers, hadn’t they? Yet Jude didn’t behave as if she’d just lost the love of her life. Jude was very odd about relationships; and a lot of other things, come to that; around Jude nothing was ever cut and dried.

Secretly, Carole felt relieved that Laurence was no longer a fixture in Woodside Cottage. And guilty for feeling relieved.

To everyone’s surprise, Laurence Hawker turned out to have made elaborate plans for his own memorial service, which was to be a very traditional, religious one. Jude organized the event, in the London church he had specified, and there was rather an impressive turnout. Amongst a lot of spiky, combative-looking academics was a large number of women, many with beautiful Slavic cheekbones. Carole thought this was odd, but Jude didn’t mind at all.

And as a final irony, a typical post-modernist joke, Laurence Hawker included in the order of service a reading of Esmond Chadleigh’s ‘Threnody for the Lost’.

And almost everyone in the congregation mouthed the words and, yet to know any better, thought of the poet’s elder brother Graham, so tragically lost at Passchendaele.

The Hopwicke Country House Hotel is to host an event for the all-male society, the Pillars of Sussex, and Jude has been recruited to help look after the rowdy guests. But the next morning one young solicitor is absent from breakfast.

When Jude heads for Nigel Ackford’s room, presuming he is feeling the effects of the night before, she is horrified to find him hanging from the beams of his four-poster bed . . .

Was it suicide? The police are convinced it was, but Jude has her doubts. Enlisting the support of her neighbour, Carole, she makes some tentative enquiries. It soon transpires that the Pillars of Sussex are involved in a conspiracy of misinformation.

As the taxi entered the gates, Jude looked up at Hopwicke Country House Hotel, a monument to nostalgic pampering. The mansion had been built in the early eighteenth century by George Hopwicke, a young baronet who had increased his considerable inheritance by ‘the successes of his plantations in the West Indies’, or, in other words, by his profits from the slave trade. The main building was a perfectly proportioned cube, the ideal echoed in so many late twentieth-century developments of ‘exclusive Georgian town-houses’. The elegantly tall windows on the three floors at the front of the house looked down from the fringes of the South Downs, across the bungalow- and greenhouse-littered plain around Worthing, to the gunmetal glimmer of the English Channel.

Stabling and utility buildings were behind the house, neatly shielded by tall hedges. The hundreds of acres in which George Hopwicke had built this testament to his taste and opulence had been sold off piecemeal for development over the centuries, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century only a four-acre buffer protected the upper-class elegance of the hotel from the encroachments of the ever-expanding English middle classes, and from the encroachments of the present. Even the brochure said, ‘Leave the twenty-first century behind when you step through our elegant portals.’

It’s remarkable, Jude thought as the taxi nosed up the drive, how much nostalgia there is in England for things that never existed. To escape the present, the English like nothing better than to immerse themselves in an idealized past. She felt sure the people of other nations – or other nations whose peoples could afford the luxury of self-examination – also venerated the past, but not in the same way. Only in England would the rosy tints of retrospection be seen through the lens of social class.

The taxi crunched to a halt at the furthest point of the gravel arc, which went on round to rejoin the road at a second set of tall metal gates. The semi-circle of grass the drive framed was laid out as a croquet lawn.

Jude paid off the driver, without calculating how large a chunk the fare would take out of her evening’s earnings, and hurried through the classical portico into the hotel.

New visitors were intended to notice the artfully artless displays of impedimenta that tidily littered the hallway, but Jude had seen them all before, so she didn’t pause to take in the coffin-like croquet box with the mallets spilling out, the randomly propped-up fishing rods, the brown-gutted tennis racquets in wooden presses, the splitting cricket bats and the crumpled leather riding boots. Nor did she linger to scan the walls for their hunting prints, mounted antlers, stuffed trout or ancient photographs of dead-looking tweedy men surveying carpets of dead birds.