Written in Blood (10 page)

‘Don’t see anything strange about stealing clothes in weather like this. A dosser’d be glad of the extra warmth.’

‘Maybe the drawers didn’t contain clothes. And I’m not sure this crime’s opportunistic. There’s a Rolex Oyster in the bathroom.’ Troy whistled. ‘No petty thief leaves a watch behind, whether he knows its real value or not.’

‘True, true,’ said the sergeant. ‘Pity the back door was unlocked. Means we don’t know if the murderer’s someone who’d normally have had to break in.’

‘Well, whoever it was must have moved very quietly, otherwise Hadleigh would have heard them and come downstairs.’

‘Perhaps he was planning to. Picked up a sound when he was half undressed, put the robe on to investigate but they got up here first. Would explain why he wasn’t wearing pyjamas.’

Barnaby wandered out on to the landing and into the second bedroom. It was even smaller than the first and used for storage. It held stacked cans of paint, rollers and a ladder. Plus a vacuum cleaner resting against an ironing board. There were also two well-worn brown-leather matching cases. One only slightly larger than a briefcase, the other medium sized. Barnaby made a mental note to check with Mrs Bundy if there had been a third.

He pulled aside the fawn velvet curtain and looked down at the Green. The portable pod had arrived and was setting up near the duck pond. It was a long, pale prefabricated building dropped quite literally (and hydraulically) off the back of a lorry. The locals were already departing from the front of the house in droves. Calling out, ‘Downstairs,’ he moved off.

Troy, trying on the Rolex, turning his wrist this way and that in front of the bathroom mirror, removed it in a hurry and smeared his crisp shirt cuff with grey powder. He cursed silently, knowing it would irritate him for the rest of the day. He wondered how odd it would look if he pushed the cuff out of sight up his coat sleeve. Of course then he’d have to do the same with the other. Snorting with annoyance he joined his boss.

The house was still full of people. More detectives were working in the kitchen and the second door, leading to the garage, now stood open. Barnaby spotted the flat, reptilian head of Inspector Meredith, his
bête noire
, peering into a segmented wooden box of cutlery. Scenes-of-crime were all over the garden. At the front of the adjoining wood were more spectators. One man had a little boy perched on his shoulders and was pointing something out to him.

Barnaby entered a large room to the right of the front door where, he presumed, the Writers Circle had met. Like the bedroom it was curiously characterless. It contained a long sofa and one much smaller, plus three capacious armchairs. All the furniture had loose chintz covers in wishy-washy pastel shades or insipid flower prints. The curtains were beige velvet and floor length, the walls a dreary cream. More boring pictures, this time in rather ornate frames: pyramids of fruit in pewter dishes flanked by dead game birds, hunting scenes, a print of Salisbury cathedral. There was something somnolent and torpid about the place. It had the air of a gentleman’s club, or an elderly solicitor’s waiting room.

The chief inspector recalled Mrs Bundy’s remarks about Mr Hadleigh giving nothing away. This room certainly supported such a notion. But could Hadleigh, could anyone, be as blandly dull and predictable as these trappings and the clothes upstairs implied? The answer to that was obviously yes but Barnaby was hopeful that subsequent investigations would prove otherwise.

In the far corner a light-oak bureau with a drop-leaf front was being systematically worked over by Detective Sergeant Ian Carpenter, who looked up as Barnaby walked over.

‘Good morning, sir.’

‘Found anything interesting?’

‘Not really. Insurance - car and house. Bank statements. The usual bills - water, phone, electricity. All paid.’

‘No letters?’

‘Nothing personal at all. Except this.’ He picked up a framed photograph which had been lying face down inside the bureau and passed it across. Barnaby took it over to the window.

The happy couple were standing in the doorway of what appeared to be a very old church. She wore a cream dress and a little pill-box hat embroidered with gold thread and tiny pearls. Attached to this was a fluttery shoulder-length veil which she was holding away from her face with a gloved hand that also clutched a nosegay of carnations and mignonette.

Gerald Hadleigh, dark-suited, an apricot rose in his buttonhole, gripped her other hand tightly. She was much shorter than him and had tilted her head back to quite a sharp degree so that she could look into his eyes. She was laughing happily but the groom’s profile was serious and intent and the set of his mouth suggested that the prize he was holding on to so firmly would not easily be surrendered.

Barnaby regretted that Hadleigh was not facing the camera. He would have liked to look directly at the man, try to guess his thoughts and imagine his emotions. Hadleigh was certainly attractive. Reconstructed, the battered head proved to be both large and shapely, with a straight nose and strong, square jaw. He could have been a soldier. An explorer, perhaps. Or an extremely determined man of the cloth.

What was really interesting about the picture, of course, was why it was not in its place on the sideboard beside the vase of scented viburnum but hidden away in a bureau. Barnaby looked forward to finding the answer to this. He was, in fact, looking forward generally.

There was something about the very beginning of a case, when no medical or forensic evidence to speak of was available, that exhilarated him. Marooned in a vast landscape of unknown limits with barely a visual aid in sight, Barnaby remained quite unfazed.

But it had not always been so, which was why he understood, and sympathised with, his sergeant’s very different reaction. Troy suffered greatly from what Barnaby always thought of as the ‘treading-water syndrome’. Panic at being out of one’s depth. Fear that, if a case did not quickly yield up its secrets, it would remain forever impenetrable. Troy craved for something to hang on to, and quickly. A fact, an artefact, a list, a bag, a lighter, a wallet. Anything as long as it was solidly present and clearly visible. Right now he was picking up and sniffing the remains of a cigar. But Barnaby had seen too many wrong conclusions drawn from apparently incorruptible certainties to take easy comfort from their presence.

‘This,’ said Troy now, rolling the elegant, slim, gold-banded cylinder between his fingers, ‘is what I call a stogy. Beautiful.’

‘Must be one of the guests,’ said Barnaby crossing to an alcove filled with books. ‘He’s no smoker. You can always smell it.’

The chief inspector bent his head sideways, twisting round to read the titles. All non-fiction. Architecture, travel, food and wine. Several on the craft of writing. The arrangement of the books was in sharp contrast to those in his own household, where volumes would be jumbled up any old how with titles every which way. There was always at least one stack of books on the floor, a pile of new paperbacks by Joyce’s chair and at least a couple on her bedside table. Here the spines were aligned like high-kicking chorus girls, tallest at each end, smallest in the middle. Most wore shiny, fresh-looking dust jackets now dulled by SOCO’s ministrations. Barnaby reached out and, with a satisfaction which he knew to be pathetically childish even as he indulged it, poked one of the books completely out of line, muttering ‘Anal retentive.’

‘Was he?’ said Troy, abandoning his contemplation of rosy apples and lifeless grouse. ‘The dirty devil.’

Barnaby went outside, only to be once more accosted by Aubrey Marine, this time divested of his polythene carapace and carrying a sealed metal container.

‘The Celica’s missing, Tom.’

‘Oh? Garage doors forced?’

‘Nope. All nicely locked up. Of course our man could simply have used Hadleigh’s keys and replaced them. Or the car could be off somewhere having its MOT. Just another little wrinkle.’ He beamed and set off down the path.

The two policemen followed, the cold air smacking them hard in the face. Barnaby shivered and told himself this was due to a grievous lack of solid pabulum. He looked at his watch, convinced he had missed lunch by half a century, but it was barely twelve.

‘We’ll have time to call next door. What did she say their names were, Mrs Bundy? Crampton?’

‘Clapton, chief.’

‘What would I do without your memory, sergeant?’ It was true. His own got worse every day. ‘Maybe she’ll come up with a cup of tea.’

‘You never know. We could strike lucky.’

‘And a biscuit.’

Outside the cottage the crowd, now untidily straggling behind a barrier, had increased. Young mothers with toddlers in pushchairs, three children of school age. Old men in flat caps and mufflers which crossed their chests to be tied up behind like soldiers’ bandoleers. They were blowing on their mittens, flinging their arms backwards and forwards, trying to keep warm. Catching their deaths. Some middle-aged women, hair rollers like pink foam sausages poking from woollen head scarves, were sharing a Thermos. One was bringing a new arrival up to date.

‘Basically they have brought him out but he was in this zip-up. You couldn’t see a thing.’ The tone of her voice was deeply resentful, as if a ticket for a show had been bought and the curtain had failed to rise.

‘Our Don hangs his suit up in one of them,’ said her companion. ‘They’re dead useful.’

‘Mister, mister.’ Two boys, around eight or nine, ran up to Barnaby.

‘What do you want?’ Troy grimaced fiercely at them and his fingers twitched.

‘I want a burger, onions and chips,’ said the larger of the lads, jerking his head in the direction of the portable pod, ‘and he wants a hot dog.’

‘Very funny. Why aren’t you at school?’

‘I got a bone in me leg,’ replied the village wit.

‘Well, if you don’t want a pain in the arse to go with it you’d better clear off.’

At least a dozen cars had drawn up on the far side of the Green. Every gaze was fixed on to the cottage as if the occupants’ heads had been locked into position. Troy stared coolly across at them all and he made his leather coat crack fiercely round his boots as he strode along, basking the while in his authoritative role at the very heart of the drama.

‘I say!’ Barnaby, his hand on the gate of Trevelyan Villas, was stopped by a girl holding a runny-nosed blue-cheeked baby swaddled in a puce and ultramarine shell suit. ‘There’s nobody in. He teaches at Causton Comprehensive and Sue’s at the local play group.’

‘Do you have any idea when Mrs Clapton will be back?’

‘Around one usually.’

‘Thank you.’

‘What do you want to see them for?’ asked a tall, thin man wearing a sweater with a snowman on it. He had a dewdrop at the end of his nose.

Ignoring him, the policemen turned their backs and Barnaby set off along the sparkling cold pavement. Troy hurried to keep up.

‘You going to try the Lyddiards, chief?’

‘Might as well.’

Gresham House’s pineapples were in poor condition. One had lost its leaves, the other was crumbling from the base up. The sandstone pillars they surmounted were also in poor shape and the iron gates, some fifteen feet tall and ornately curlicued, were rusty.

The house was a monstrous pile of heavily pitted grey stone, three storeys high with a small, round tower fatly bulging from one corner of the top storey like a warty carbuncle and from which icicles depended like daggers. The door and window frames, once white, were now a dirty grey and flaking fast. Perhaps in the spring and summer, softened by climbers in bloom or pots of bright geraniums on the steps, it might, just, have seemed attractive. But at the moment (thought Sergeant Troy) it looked about as jolly as Castle Dracula.

Barnaby, on the contrary, saw much to admire. His gardener’s soul was cheered by the many trees and the shrub borders on each side of the drive. Variegated hollies festooned with damp cobwebs, a shiny sealing-wax-red dogwood. Two flowering wintersweets, the ground beneath them thick with aconites and
Iris stylosa
. Mahonias, their droopy yellow racemes smelling richly of honey, and also several hebes. He recognised the tough and charming ‘Mrs Winder’, her narrow elliptical leaves gleaming purple in the grey winter light. And . . . could that
Cotoneaster
be? . . . surely not? . . .

‘Good grief. It’s a Rothschildianus.’

‘Is that right?’ Troy stared at some creamy yellow balls roughly the size of sheep droppings.

‘What a jewel. I’ve got the Exvuriensis. Nice of course. But not the same.’

‘No, well. It wouldn’t be.’ Troy racked his brains for some intelligent rejoinder, for he hated to be found wanting. Faintly, memory chimed. ‘Aren’t they rich, chief? The Rothschilds? Millionaries or something?’

‘They have this wonderful garden in Hampshire. Exbury. You can buy plants there.’

Troy nodded vaguely and his interest in the creamy balls, never overwhelming, expired, for there was not a spot of horticultural blood in his veins. Almost the first thing he had done after moving into his small 1970s terraced house was see off the front garden and replace it with a tarmacadam parking space.