The Ellie Hardwick Mysteries (10 page)

‘I
walked. I work in the village.'

Catherine performed the introductions. ‘My neighbour, Tony Scott.'

He stood glaring at me, willing me to leave. He was too large for the room, he'd left muddy prints on the shining floor, he smelled of diesel and he frightened me.

‘Pleased to have met you Mr. Scott,' I lied with a sweet smile, ‘but I must dash. Oh! Before I go! Nearly forgot, Catherine! The name of that new hairdresser . . . I like to support local initiatives, don't you?' I confided as I scribbled. ‘Ask for Ricardo at Hairtique,' and added the inspector's mobile number.

Catherine smiled and nodded. ‘Quite right, Ellie. Thank you for coming. I'll take your advice,' she said.

* * *

‘It's so obvious why she's been deceiving people like that,' I said to Richard over a pint in the Angel that night. ‘That Scott won't take no for an answer. She's been doing a Penelope.'

‘A what?'

‘Odysseus' wife! Repelling suitors by insisting her old man's still alive. Just taking an awfully long time to get back from the Trojan War. Penelope promised to marry one of the brigands who were after her fortune as soon as she'd finished a bit of weaving she
was
doing. But at night she used to creep down and unpick what she'd done in the day time. Delaying tactics! Spun it out for years! Catherine's house must be worth a bob or two and now you tell me she's due to get a large sum from the insurance company. Tony's well known to be a bit short of cash . . . well—there you are. He's been putting pressure on her. Won't take no for an answer. You know the type. He worried me, Richard. He's a ball of pent-up violence. You're not to go near him.' I stopped abruptly and bit my lip.

‘I'll be sure to keep my styling scissors ready in my back pocket,' he grinned.

‘You'll just have to forgive her. All she's done is waste police time, isn't it?'

‘I'll forgive your new friend if you'll do something for me,' he said mysteriously. ‘Would you mind presenting yourself back at the scene tomorrow morning? Something I want to check on.'

* * *

‘Never had the Law at my feet before.' I almost giggled with nerves at the sight of Richard's body, face down, on the dusty floor of the tower.

‘Get on with it, Ellie,' he grumbled. ‘My helmet's conveniently over there in the corner, you've coshed me on the head with one of those planks that litter the floor. I'm dead.
Now
pull me towards the trapdoor.'

‘Ankles or knees, Richard?'

‘Take your pick.'

I tugged him by the ankles and to my surprise his body moved easily with the grain of the boards to the hatch. Gingerly I climbed half way down the ladder and pulled him after me. When I'd got him balanced with the weight of his upper body still bearing on the lip of the hole, steadying him firmly against the oak structure, I reached up and grasped the handle on the flap of the trapdoor which I'd propped open with a piece of planking on either side.

‘I could do it Richard!' I gasped. ‘If I push out one of the props and then the other, tugging you as it gives way, you're a dead man! Would be if you weren't already!'

He surged back to life and carefully moved the door out of reach.

‘It could be done!' he said with satisfaction. ‘And if
you
can do it, a 5' 4" female, anyone can. Let's get out of here, shall we?'

We went out into the sunshine and I flapped a hand at his jacket front, covered in dust and worse. He looked at it with interest.

‘Probably splinters of oak floor boarding in there as well,' he said. ‘Just like the ones we found down the front of Byam's cloak. We know he'd arranged a meeting here with someone. Had he lured some female up here with romantic intent? “Come up and
experience
the twilight flight with me?”' he purred. He studied his jacket. ‘Nice roll in the pigeon droppings? Amatory activity witnessed by a million swooping bats? Not the place
I'd
choose for an assignation.'

‘Wouldn't work for me either,' I agreed. ‘Have you thought, Richard, someone could have lured
Byam
here? He (could be she) sets up a meeting, gets someone to drop him off here, climbs the tower and kills him, leaves him dangling. He takes the keys from Byam's pocket—or perhaps they'd just been left in the car—and drives it away to the airport. Plenty of public transport back from there to anywhere in the county. With everyone's eyes on Spain, no one's going to look in a deserted church lost among the cornfields. He'd finished the job anyway and, according to his schedule, was supposed to be going on holiday.'

‘The killer knew that the body would be found sooner or later but you could reasonably expect a body exposed like that to be judged a nasty accident as—for the moment—it
is
,' said Richard. ‘And to show your faith in his survival and your innocence, you keep up the payments on his insurance policy and by waiting patiently—you know he'll be discovered in five years at the outside—you come into a tidy sum of money—and five years' rebate probably. They're in it together! Catherine and Scott.'

‘Hold on! I'm not so sure,' I objected. I was
remembering
the way Catherine had held her husband's photograph. Protectively. Lovingly. ‘We're missing something here. Take me back to the office will you, Richard? There may be something in Byam's work records that throws up some information. Let's find out what else our local Don Giovanni was busy with.'

Charles was out on a job when we got back and we settled down with the dusty ledger from five years earlier which recorded the hours spent by each architect on each of his jobs. I pointed out Byam's record. It seemed he had quite a full programme. Ongoing repairs at five churches besides the quinquennial on All Souls. He had, typically, spent half a day at each, usually mornings. His afternoons had been spent on domestic projects: he'd been working on extensions to two private houses. In the record, one was named as ‘Moat Farm Extns.' the other ‘The Limes Extns.' Both were common names hereabouts.

‘Out of county contractors, I see, on both jobs so no use asking Ben for his insights,' said Richard.

I remembered the cutting comment Charles had made about the ladies who ordered extensions and I wondered. I shared my suspicions with Richard.

‘Names,' he said. ‘How do we correlate these jobs with names of clients?'

‘We look in the back. That's where Liz wrote down the accounts and payments before
it
all went on computer.'

We tracked down the two extension jobs and looked at the names of the clients.

‘But isn't this . . .?' Richard started to say, recognising one of them. ‘Oh, Good Lord! You don't imagine . . .? Surely not . . .?'

I stared at the page for a moment, taking in the meaning of the scene we had uncovered and, in an unthinking gesture of appalled rejection, I slammed the ledger shut.

‘We can't leave it there,' said Richard. ‘However much you might want to. But at the moment, all we've got is the suspicion of a scenario that could possibly have led to murder. It's not much. How can we find out more without committing ourselves?'

‘I think I know how. Look at the dates. The work was started a year before Byam died. This lady was spinning it out? “While you're here, Byam, you might as well look at . . . ” We get a lot of that. Can you imagine? It would have been under way by Christmas six years ago. I'll get the album.'

Every year Charles threw a party in mid-December for staff and clients and anyone who'd been involved with the firm in the past year. He enjoyed going around photographing the junketing and faithfully stuck his shots in an album. It was well-thumbed. I leafed back to the Christmas in question. Byam's last. Faces, familiar and unfamiliar, smiled happily or drunkenly at the camera.

‘Look
at this one, Ellie,' Richard murmured. ‘Says it all really, don't you think?'

Byam was standing with his arm around a dark and flamboyantly good-looking woman. He was grinning at the photographer and waving a glass around. The woman was paying no attention to the man behind the camera; she only had eyes for Byam. I was a stranger to both of them but the relationship was clear. It seemed to be clear also to the man standing to the right of the pair, some feet away. He was not smiling. Head lowered, he was showing all the aggression and pent-up anger of a tormented bull. An anger directed straight at the unconcerned Byam.

Richard put a hand down the centre of the photograph, covering up the partying crowd in the background and concealing all but the three main players. The effect was astonishing. Revealed was a crime about to happen. ‘Murderer, victim and motive, would you say? I think Byam extended himself a little too far on this occasion,' said Richard. ‘Husband sees his wife the victim of a serial cuckolder . . . perhaps she's threatened to leave him and go off with the glamorous architect . . . so what does he do? Makes an appointment with the scallywag in a remote place and engineers his disappearance.'

‘It didn't work, you know,' I added slowly. ‘All in vain. The lady left her husband anyway, shortly after. He lives by himself.'

‘A
tragedy for all of them then. Makes you want to just slam the trapdoor back and cover the whole thing over,' said Richard surprisingly.

We sat together in silence, each assessing the evidence, hunting for a flaw, neither of us ready to take the next step. ‘Oh, who's this?' said Richard, annoyed. ‘Someone's just drawn up in a van. You've got a visitor.'

‘It's Ben. You met him yesterday morning. I'm sure he can shed some light on this,' I said. ‘Want me to leave?'

‘You just stay put!'

Ben came striding in with his usual sunny confidence and stopped as he took in the books and the album open in front of us. Richard rose to his feet.

‘Ah! The Christmas party book,' Ben said and he sat down in Richard's vacated chair to look at the photographs. ‘You'll have figured it out then?' he added prosaically. His calloused forefinger gently traced the face of the dark-haired girl. ‘You never met her, Ellie. Rachel. She was always too good for me. I knew that.' He swallowed and growled, ‘She deserved better, but not him. No, never
him
! I couldn't stand by and watch her break her heart over that no-good poser. If he'd loved her back I don't think I'd have bothered.'

Richard stood uncertainly by. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something.

‘You rang and arranged to meet him at
the
tower, Ben? Mentioning some problem with the bats?' I suggested. ‘The contractor,' I explained for Richard's benefit. ‘Just about the only person in the world the architect would have agreed to see at that late hour at the end of a job. You got one of your blokes to drop you off and after you'd . . . afterwards . . . you drove off in Byam's car.'

‘Story came out that he'd gone off to Spain. Broke my Rachel's heart. She didn't blame me. Why would she?—I never let on. But she pined for him. Never laughed again. Not like that.' He looked again with pain at the photograph. ‘Nothing I could do. Seemed I'd killed her as well, in a way. She packed her bags and went off.'

Seeing Richard's shoulders tense he added wryly, ‘Oh, nothing sinister! You'll find her at her mother's in Stowmarket. Well, shall we go, then? I always expected it would come out. But I reckoned I had five years. Five years to try to get her back. No chance now.'

He turned to me, tears glazing his eyes. ‘Wouldn't be sorry to hear that damned church had been demolished. Was looking forward to swinging a half-ton ball at it myself! Let me know, Ellie, would you, when you've done the deed?'

A BLACK TIE AFFAIR

An Ellie Hardwick, Architect, story.

‘Go on! You're 'aving a larf, Ellie! Evening suit? Me? Sorry, love. Look—if you wouldn't mind making that smart-casual, there's a bash on in town we could . . .'

I grunted with irritation and hung up as soon as I politely could. I crossed Jon Sanderson off my list. And his was the last name. My boss looked up from the elevation he was sketching and grinned at me across the office.

‘Bad luck Ellie! What's the matter with the young men of the East of England? You can't tempt a single one of them to escort you to the social gathering of the season? They must be nuts!'

‘Not a man under forty owns a black tie and dinner jacket any more. That's the matter. They've all given them away to Oxfam.' I waved an embossed invitation card at him and read:

Lord and Lady Redmayne request the

pleasure of the company of

Eleanor Hardwick

to celebrate with them their first year in

residence at Hallowes Hall.

‘
So far so good, but then it says along the
bottom:
Dinner and dancing. Black tie. And I'm obviously not expected to turn up alone because there's a note from Alicia, paper-clipped to the card:

‘Dear Ellie, Do so hope you can come and please bring the gentleman of your choice
.'

‘Well, that's not necessarily the same as a choice gentleman,' Charles quibbled. ‘You'll have to spread your net wider and not be so fussy,' he added. ‘And think of the firm. You did a splendid job on that old ruin of a house. The kitchen you designed is the most glamorous in Suffolk and there'll be hundreds of envious women there asking how it was done. Alicia's showing off the house but she's also showing off her architect. Go! And take some of our business cards with you. Leave them discreetly about the place. Like, on the kitchen table.'

I shuddered.

‘That's an order not a suggestion. Only sorry I can't manage it myself. Now who can we think of? What about old Hamish Peabody—he can still cut a rug and his last procedure was a roaring success, they say.'