The Package Included Murder (8 page)

The Hon. Con sighed, folded her arms across her chest and closed her eyes. Only four more acts to go. Perhaps, if she put her mind to it, she could snatch a well-earned forty winks or …

‘Scuse me, ducks!'

The Hon. Con opened her eyes to find Jim Lewcock bending over her. His stupidly grinning face shone obscenely in the light coming from the stage. She scowled up at him. ‘ What is it?'

‘Sorry to bother you, love,' – Jim Lewcock's whisper rang through the auditorium and the heads of one or two music lovers began to turn – ‘but I've just got to go and shake hands with the wife's best friend.'

The Hon. Con blinked and reluctandy tucked her feet up so that Jim Lewcock could push past.

Sitting next to the Hon. Con, Miss Jones momentarily abandoned the passionate but unintelligible duet on the stage and turned to watch Jim Lewcock leave the box. She seemed puzzled.

The Hon. Con, eager to occupy her mind with anything other than the glories of nineteenth-century Russian music, gave her a nudge. ‘What's up?'

Miss Jones shook her head. She knew, of course, that it was terribly wrong to talk during artistic performances of any kind but the temptation was too strong to resist. After all, the Hon. Con was always saying that the essence of detection was the spotting of discrepancies – or something like that. ‘ It's Mr Lewcock, dear!' she murmured from behind a white-gloved hand.

‘What about him?'

‘I'd no idea he was married. Had you?'

Actually, in the end, Tashkent didn't prove to be a total disaster – at least, not from the detection point of view. The credit for the way things bucked up in that direction was really due to Miss Jones, but the Hon. Con didn't bother much about that. Gratitude to the doormats of this world (however well beloved) was not one of her strong points.

The Hon. Con had gobbled through her breakfast the following day at her usual indigestion-producing speed and had returned to the bedroom for a touch of the old bicarb. The flight to Bukhara, their next port of call, wasn't until eleven o'clock, a timing which effectively (and certainly deliberately) ruined the whole morning. The Hon. Con waited moodily for the fizzing to stop and stared at the suitcase which, apart from one, were all packed and locked. Miss Jones didn't like to be all at the last minute.

Having taken the bicarb, the Hon. Con had nothing much else to do. She ambled into the bathroom and, watching very carefully where she put her feet, began to clean her teeth. She heard someone come into the bedroom and spat out a mouthful of minty foam.

‘That you, Bones?'

‘Yes, dear.'

The Hon. Con examined her tongue dubiously. Either she was sickening for something or that mirror had got the damp. ‘You've been a long time.'

‘Have I, dear?' Miss Jones came over to the open bathroom door to account for the odd five minutes that she had been out of the Hon. Con's ken. ‘ I was with Oleg.'

‘Oleg?' The Hon. Con sprayed a generous mouthful of water round the bathroom. ‘That rat!'

‘He wanted me to hand the passports out, dear. He said he was very busy this morning and simply couldn't spare the time to …'

‘Passports?' The Hon. Con granted Miss Jones the courtesy of her undivided attention.

It is the custom in the Soviet Union for tourists to surrender their passports when they book into their hotel, rarely getting them back again until just before they leave. The authorities like to give the police as long a time as possible with them.

‘
Passports
!' The Hon. Con came out of the bathroom like a champagne cork out of the bottle. She stretched out a toothpaste besmattered hand. ‘ Gimme!'

Miss Jones had some scruples and demurred.

‘Oh, don't be so blooming pi, Bones!' snapped the Hon. Con, grabbing successfully. ‘Passports are what we call primary sources of evidence.'

Miss Jones blinked. ‘Are they, dear?'

‘Cross my heart!' The Hon. Con shuffled eagerly through the pack. She quickly discarded her own passport and Miss Jones's and sat down on the bed with the one she was really after – Penelope Clough-Cooper's.

Miss Jones hovered unhappily.

‘Jolly nice photograph!' said the Hon. Con, lost in admiration.

‘She's changed her hair style.' Miss Jones sniffed. ‘I wonder why. She looked much better with it long. Made her look younger.'

‘Either way,' said the Hon. Con, ‘she's a dashed pretty girl.'

‘Girl?' Miss Jones got really nasty. ‘ How old is she, by the way?'

‘Eh? Oh,' – the Hon. Con did her arithmetic and frowned – ‘er – well – thirty-one.'

Miss Jones, peeping over the Hon. Con's shoulder, was nippier with the numbers. ‘Thirty-two,' she corrected.

‘Same thing!' grunted the Hon. Con crossly and snapped the passport shut. The next one she opened was the Withenshaws'. Very dull. Seems they lived in Bishop's Thorpe and shared their passport with three small kids. The Hon. Con offered up a silent prayer of thanks that she had been spared the young Withenshaws. Desmond Withenshaw had given his profession as artist but, apart from this harmless vanity, there was nothing of interest. The Hon. Con tossed the passport on the bed.

Miss Jones gathered it up anxiously. ‘ People will be wondering where their passports are, dear.'

‘Fiddlesticks!' The Hon. Con's eyes were busy dissecting the Smiths' passport. It was very dull, too. ‘Hm,' she growled as she slung it over to Miss Jones, ‘seems they are married after all. But only just! Looks as though they're on their flipping honeymoon.'

The Hon. Con's curiosity was catching and Miss Jones ventured a peep into the private life of the Smiths on her own account. ‘Isn't it funny how we all seem to come from the same part of the country, dear?'

‘Nothing funny about it at all,' said the Hon. Con who frequently had an answer for everything. ‘Albatross is a pretty third-rate concern, run on a shoe-string. I imagine they tried to keep their costs down by restricting their advertising to one area. After all, it was in our local rag that I spotted their advertisement wasn't it?'

‘Yes, dear,' agreed Miss Jones, remembering and ruing the day. ‘It's just that with it being a Scottish company – Glencoe, you know – I though it would have – well – a sort of international flavour. Oh – er – thank you, dear!' She caught the next passport in mid-air.

‘Roger Frossell!' snorted the Hon. Con in explanation. ‘ Student! Aren't they all? He lives in Mapperly.'

‘That's quite near us, too, isn't it, dear?'

‘Mrs Mary Frossell,' read the Hon. Con. ‘Housewife.' She looked up. ‘Funny there's never any mention of Mr Frossell, isn't it? Suspicious, that.'

They're separated, dear,' said Miss Jones in a discreet whisper. The marriage broke up over ten years ago. He went off with another woman. Isn't it sad?'

The Hon. Con was highly indignant. ‘Who told you that?' she demanded. Damn it all, the way old Bones picked up the tittle-tattle was positively disgusting.

Miss Jones grovelled apologetically. ‘Mrs Frossell told me herself, dear. I had quite a long chat with her one day. In Moscow. We were waiting for our luncheon. You,' she added quickly, ‘were discussing the reform of the laws of rugby football with Mr Beamish, I think.'

The Hon. Con got busy with the passports of the Lewcock brothers. Both documents were, she noted with the shrewdness of your case-hardened detective, brand new. She wasn't surprised that a couple of plebs like the Lewcock brothers should choose the Soviet Union for their first holiday abroad. ‘ What,' she asked, ‘is a lathe operator, exactly?'

‘I'm afraid I don't know, dear. I suppose it's some sort of factory worker.'

The Hon. Con sighed heavily. ‘I'd guessed that much for myself, old girl!'

Miss Jones added the Lewcock passports to her growing pile. ‘Will you be long dear?'

‘Eh?' The Hon. Con was deep in the Beamishes' passport. She chuckled. ‘Well, well! Fancy that!'

‘What is it, dear?'

‘Did you know that Mrs Beamish – the elegant Ella – is eight years older than her husband?'

‘No, I didn't.'

The Hon. Con sniggered maliciously. ‘Can't say I'm surprised. I mean, she's fighting a gallant rear-guard action and all that sort of thing, but the years are beginning to show. Have a guess – how old do you think she is?'

Miss Jones felt herself going pink. She did so hate it when the Hon. Con got catty. It was so out of character. ‘I really don't know, dear,' she said. ‘Middle thirties, perhaps?' She saw the expression on the Hon. Con's face and tried again. ‘Or maybe the late thirties?'

‘Forty-three!' trumpted the Hon. Con, highly delighted at being able to drop this bombshell. She slapped the last passport into Miss Jones's hands. ‘And he's only thirty-five! How's that for cradle-snatching?'

‘Some marriages where the wife is older than the husband can be very happy, dear.'

‘Well,' said the Hon. Con, blowing unpleasantly down her nose, ‘theirs certainly isn't! Anybody can see that with half an eye.' She changed the subject. ‘On your way, Bones!'

‘Yes.' Miss Jones emerged reluctantly from a rather delightful reverie in which … ‘I'd better distribute these passports, I suppose.' She got as far as the door before – oh, so casually – she asked her innocent little question. She could have looked for herself, of course, but when one has been strictly brought up … ‘Er– did you say that the two Lewcock gentlemen were both unmarried, dear?'

‘I didn't,' said the Hon. Con, giving Miss Jones a sharp glance, ‘but, since you mention it, they are.'

‘Oh,' said Miss Jones.

‘One's forty-nine,' said the Hon. Con, rubbing it in, ‘and the other's fifty. They're not exactly chickens.'

‘They look,' ventured Miss Jones, ‘younger.'

The Hon. Con curled an aristocratic lip. ‘ Doubt if working in a blooming factory takes much out of you,' she sneered. ‘They're always on strike.'

Miss Jones returned to the harsh realities of the world as it really is. She opened the bedroom door. ‘I won't be more than a couple of minutes, dear.'

It may have been Miss Jones's unsavoury interest in the Lewcock brothers that inspired the Hon. Con to interrogate them in depth on the flight from Tashkent to Bukhara. The brothers, sporting the little embroidered Uzbek skull caps which they had bought as souvenirs in Tashkent and a mite the worse for Armenian brandy, were surprised and a little alarmed to find the Hon. Con inserting her ample behind in the seat which they had carefully left vacant between them. They realised that the sobering sleep to which they had been looking forward was now out of the question.

Whatever the advertisements say, you can't really hold an intimate conversation in an aeroplane, especially not in the type of plane used on internal flights in the Soviet Union. Luckily the Hon. Con possessed a fog-siren voice and a pair of leather lungs.

‘Tell me all about yourselves!' she bellowed, accompanying her invitation with a leer that would have unnerved a man-eating crocodile.

The Lewcock brothers, unable to communicate with or even see each other, suddenly felt naked and alone.

Jim Lewcock, being the elder, took the initiative and tried to stall for time. What did Miss Morrison-Burke mean, exactly. He and his kid brother were just a couple of ordinary blokes about whom there was really nothing much of interest to be said.

‘Got something to hide, have you?' asked the Hon. Con in a would-be jokey voice. She licked the writing end of her pencil as though to ensure that anything taken down was going to be of the blackest.

Jim Lewcock couldn't wait to reassure the Hon. Con on this point. Neither he nor his brother knew a thing about these strange attacks on poor Miss Clough-Cooper. They had absolutely nothing to hide, never had had in the past and never would have in the future. See this wet, see this dry …

‘Methinks,' said the Hon. Con who was never at a loss for an apt misquotation, ‘methinks the fellow, doth protest too much!'

Jim Lewcock wiped the sweat off the palm of his hands. ‘Where would you like us to begin, miss?'

The Hon. Con was never at a loss for a cliché, either. ‘Begin at the beginning,' she instructed grandly, ‘and go on until you come to the end!'

Hesitantly at first and then with growing confidence, the Lewcock brothers compiled.

Dad, it appeared, had been a cowman and Mum – a horny-handed, golden-hearted old trooper – had done a bit of charring when she could get the work. There were eight Lewcock children altogether (not counting the one who died) – six girls and two boys. They'd all done quite well at school but there was, of course, no question of going on to the grammar for the likes of them. The girls had taken up a variety of jobs. Lucy …

‘Skip the girls!' The Hon. Con let a huge yawn split her face. ‘In fact,' – she blinked furiously in an effort to keep herself awake – ‘you can skip all this rubbish about your early life and hard times. We've all had to rough it, you know, and you're not the only ones who've pulled themselves up by their boot-laces. Maybe if I ask you a few questions it'll speed things up.'

‘I think that would help,' agreed Jim Lewcock humbly. He and his brother had had some rather unkind things to say about the Hon. Con in the privacy of their bedroom but now, face to face with the daunting reality, they were very subdued.

‘All right,' grunted the Hon. Con. She donned her thinking cap. ‘Did either of you know Miss Clough-Cooper before you came on this trip?'

‘No.'

The Hon. Con didn't let a flat denial like that put her off. ‘You sure?'

‘Of course we're sure!'

‘But you live in Pear's Hill. That's only a couple of miles from Wattington.'