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Authors: Marjorie Eccles

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BOOK: Untimely Graves
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Mayo trawled his memory, but Reuben Bysouth meant nothing significant. He shook his head.
‘On second thoughts, maybe he might’ve been before your time.’
‘You mean he’s one of our customers?’
‘Was. Used to fence anything that wasn’t cemented down, but he’s reckoned to have been going straight now, since he started working with Jared. I’ll believe that when I see it, though Jared’s all right. He’s always been a farmer, and when he bought the neighbouring land and farmhouse off the farmer’s widow and went into pigs, Reuben and his missis went to live with him. Pig farming and Reuben Bysouth! Appropriate, organic or not.’ He grinned and looked at the pipe that had stayed clenched in his fist. Unlit and, Mayo now saw with some disbelief, unfilled.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve given up smoking, George?’
‘Yes. Daphne’s orders.’
There was something to be said for being married to She-who-must-be-obeyed, after all. ‘Well, are you saying this Reuben Bysouth might be our man?’
‘I’m saying he’d be worth watching. He’s a nasty customer, more ways than one. Rough as a bear’s arse. He used to slap his wife around something chronic, but he was never nailed for it. You know how it is with these women, they make a complaint and then withdraw it, go back to the old bugger.’
Mayo could see the clock on the wall behind George’s head. He had a meeting at two. ‘What has Bysouth to do with Cleo?’
‘Nothing, I bloody well hope!’ George said vehemently, ramming the pipe-holding fist on the table. ‘But it’s damn funny … I don’t believe in coincidences.’
‘They happen.’
‘Yes, well, I think it’s not only a coincidence, I think it’s a bloody miracle, this old woman who keeps a gun in her drawers, in a manner of speaking, living next door to Reuben Bysouth.’
‘Come on, spit it out, George. What are you getting at?’
There’d be a perfectly reasonable explanation, he thought when George had finished. Guns and farmhouses, they went together. No respectable farmer would be without a shotgun, as George well knew, and this was a farmer’s widow they were talking about. All the same, if George thought it worth looking into … ‘I’ll give it a spin, send somebody there to poke around,’ he promised.
He should have set the enquiry in motion immediately, it was brought home to him later, but the events that awaited him when he got back to the station drove it temporarily out of his mind.
Sam had worked all day in the back garden, without stopping for lunch. Dorrie had disappeared, probably to work on her own garden.
The most you could say, he thought ruefully, resting from his labours at the end of it, was that the garden looked better, despite the determination with which he’d attacked it. Not good, yet, but better. You could at least see where the borders finished and the paths began.
The light was fading, and he decided to pack it in for the day. He was tired, muscles he hadn’t used for a long time were aching, but he felt physically good and mentally refreshed. While mechanically clearing and cutting down, his mind working on another level, his thoughts had gained some sort of perspective. The rage that had suddenly overcome him yesterday had channelled into a cold determination to act. And his regrets about the letter he had sent to Hannah Wetherby vanished. They had to meet, sooner or later. Better that it was planned, rather than thrust upon them when neither was ready.
So occupied was he with his thoughts that when he looked up from his digging, he’d been astonished to find himself, not surrounded by glacial vistas, where only moss, lichens and algae survive, but in a temperate English garden, with spring around
the corner. And it had lifted his heart. Now, he stood under the bare branches of the apple tree and looked up to where, as a boy, he’d had a favourite, secret reading perch in an angle of the limbs; he was almost tempted to climb it again, as he had once before, no longer a child, just in the impossible hope of getting a glimpse of her, or even seeing as far as the house where she lived. Almost. But no, he could wait. Things had changed since the days when he might have done that, not least himself.
The wind was still around as he cleaned his spade, though not so sneaky, and the soil was drying out at last. There was a damp, loamy smell in the air and, underneath all the debris he’d been clearing, signs that the earth was awakening again. Under a tree, he’d found huge clumps of cyclamen with marbled leaves and tiny, pointed, carmine and white buds nestling in the undisturbed leaf mould. There were late snowdrops there, too, and velvet-petalled polyanthus emerging from their rosettes of crinkled leaves by the path edges. He stacked the tools, sucked the sharp cut on his hand that had begun to ooze blood again and went into the house looking for a fresh Elastoplast and a well-earned beer.
The kitchen appeared to be sinking under the weight of cooking utensils and ingredients which covered every spattered surface, but the air was filled with a savoury aroma that took him straight back to his childhood. ‘Mmm. Smells good.’
Dorrie lifted her flushed face and smiled. ‘I thought I’d give you something you liked, seeing you didn’t have any lunch.’
‘I prefer to work up an appetite for my evening meal. I’ll do justice to that.’
‘You always did.’ She was cooking minced lamb and onion for a shepherd’s pie, and he sniffed in anticipation. By no means haute cuisine, but one of the simple pleasures of life.
‘What have you done to your finger?’ she asked, adding grated carrot and herbs to the mince as he ran the cold tap over his hand.
‘That damned pampas grass. It has leaves like razors.’
‘You haven’t been trying to cut a thing that size down! It’s been there a thousand years. You should burn it off.’
‘Sounds a bit drastic – what if it’s killed in the process?’ She sniffed. ‘No great loss if it is. It never flowers until November and then the winds blow the plumes straight down.
My father would never get rid of it, though. You go and douse it in petrol and throw a match on it, that’s what the old gardeners used to do. Stand clear when you’ve lit it, that’s all.’ She sprinkled a mixture of brown breadcrumbs and grated cheese in generous measure on top of the mashed potatoes and mince and popped the dish in the oven of the old black Rayburn. ‘Dinner in about half an hour?’
‘Fine.’ Sam washed his hands, dabbed the cut with disinfectant and stuck on a plaster from a squashed box he found amongst the debris of the oddments drawer.
Dorrie said, ‘I came out with a mug of tea at lunchtime, thought you might be persuaded to have a sandwich, but I couldn’t see you anywhere.’
Carefully, he sorted out the remaining plasters in the box, one by one in order of size. ‘I was probably out in the lane – there’s been a lot of activity up at the school and I went to find out what was going on, but I couldn’t see anything.’ He closed the plaster box and put it back in the drawer. ‘Someone’s been dumping rubbish in the ditch again and choked it, so I cleaned it out while I was there. Took over an hour,’ he added.
An unmade-up and little-used lane ran along the backs of the houses on Kelsey Road, offering access to the back gardens. Between that and the school playing fields ran a drainage ditch which was often blocked with garden rubbish, a constant source of friction between the residents.
‘It’s too handy, that lane,’ Dorrie said, tutting. ‘Too much trouble for some people to compost their rubbish, or even put it in a bag for the council to take away. What sort of activity?’
‘Police sirens, maybe an ambulance. I couldn’t see anything. It’s as well I went out, though I wouldn’t have noticed the ditch, otherwise,’ Sam replied as he opened the fridge and found a can of beer. ‘Do you want one of these?’
‘I think I’d rather have my usual sherry. No, don’t bother, I’ll pour it.’ She took a pewter beer tankard and a small glass from a cupboard and he remembered that for all her slapdash ways she didn’t like him drinking from the can. There was a bottle of sweet sherry on the counter top, thick and brown as cough mixture, and she filled her glass to the brim. ‘Cheers. It’ll be the ambulances over at the hospital you heard. The sound carries so from over the back.’
She stood sipping her sherry, looking out over the rear garden. ‘You’ve done wonders today, Sam. I’m sorry I’ve let things get to this stage. I don’t think I realised just how overgrown it’d all become. The trouble is, it sort of creeps up on you – but don’t spend too much time on it. You have your own work to think of.’
She spoke absently, as if the state of the back garden really didn’t matter, having turned now to gaze out over the little wild garden which could be seen through the side window in the kitchen. She was looking at the shallow, rocky bank above the pool, where primroses had seeded and cushioned themselves between the mosses, a tender, loving expression on her face.
He wasn’t sure whether she even heard him when he replied, ‘Don’t worry about that. I thought I’d give a week or two to the garden, but then I’ll have to start writing up my notes.’ He’d anticipated a leisurely spring and summer, getting acclimatised to being back in Britain, working on his scientific researches, preparing them for publication. He wanted that out of the way before he started his new lectureship, and his publishers were expecting the manuscript for the book they’d commissioned by the end of September, a collection of papers and monographs he’d written and which had been previously printed and well received by the journals of various learned societies. In discussions with his editor, especially after they’d seen the photographs he’d taken, they’d become enthusiastic about doing something in lighter vein as well, something they could offer to a more general readership. More than a coffee table book, less indigestible to non-scientists than his other important, serious and scholarly academic work.
Sam was rather excited at the prospect of this himself. He’d often been told that he had a clear and easy style, and he rather liked the idea of his work reaching a wider audience, of being able to write about the awe-inspiring, unimaginable and sometimes terrifying beauties of Antarctica, as well as the scientific facts. But the prospect of going away and leaving Dorrie here on her own, in this house she allegedly hated, was one that made him distinctly uneasy.
‘Dorrie?’
She still didn’t answer. She was away again, where he couldn’t
reach her. Since Mrs Totty had made him aware of how much his aunt disliked the house, he’d kept his eyes and ears open and thought it might well be true. But he was still reluctant to concede that it was nothing more than a garden that was holding her here.
It was high profile, the case that had come in that afternoon, as any crime happening at Lavenstock College, much less a murder, was bound to be. Demanding top-brass attention, since anybody who was anybody in Lavenstock had links with the school one way or another, be it as school governors or merely parents of day boys. Which was why Mayo had had to inform his officers that he’d been requested – he used the word advisedly – by the ACC, to take charge personally of the enquiries. None of them believed him reluctant to do this, and they’d have been damn right, he thought. It was a decision he’d have made himself, anyway. It never needed much to get him out of the office, no way could you get the feel of a case stuck behind a desk.
And this was another murder, another shooting, making three in as many months. One shooting was rare enough in Lavenstock, even if by accident or suicide. Two was an exception, three unheard of. But the first, at least, the Danny Fermanagh killing – which every downbeat instinct he possessed told him was likely to remain unsolved – had been a matter of expediency, a gangland, drug-related knocking-off. Far removed from the murder of a public school administrator.
‘Sit down, Daphne,’ he said when it came time to interview her, after the body had been taken away. ‘Drink your tea.’ He pushed a cup of the universal panacea further towards the Bursar’s secretary: though as far as panaceas went, it didn’t look very promising, he had to admit. Positively unappealing, in fact. It had been made by the tear-stained, draggle-tailed girl who worked the telephone in the outer office and he suspected its origins. Some flowery, herbal substance, no doubt. But it was hot, and sipping it would help Daphne to relax. She didn’t appear unduly shocked, but they were often the worst, after the reaction set in. ‘This has been upsetting for you – I’m sorry you had to be the one to find Mr Wetherby,’ he said. Though upsetting was an ineffectual word that surely couldn’t even begin to describe what the poor woman must have felt.
She’d come back to the office after lunch, unsuspectingly taken some papers in to the Bursar, Charles Wetherby, and found him sprawled over his desk, shot in the back of the head.
But since Daphne Atkins
had
unfortunately found the man in those appalling circumstances, Mayo found himself thanking heaven for a sane and sensible witness. He liked what he knew of her, he believed she’d give him the facts without fear or favour. For years, down at the station, old George had had to put up with a lot of good-natured ragging about his Daph – the Dragon, and of whom he pretended to go in fear and trembling, and perhaps did, a little. There was no doubt she was a formidable lady, and their enduring marriage amazed all but those who knew them well. On the face of it, they seemed incredibly ill matched: slobby old George, everlastingly wreathed in vile tobacco smoke, so immersed in his job he was hardly ever at home, pecking away in the office at the old typewriter from which he refused to be parted, beavering away at his cases, ready at the drop of a hat with information regarding anything that had ever happened in his home town within living memory – and sometimes beyond. And Daphne … generally reckoned to have been a saint to put up with old George – but what about George? Perfectionists are bloody hard to live up to as well, Mayo reflected wryly, having mixed feelings of exasperation and tenderness for the same faults in his own partner. Only bearable for any length of time if there’s real love to offset their often impossible demands.
Blonde, neat, precise; that was Daphne. Nothing ever seemed to faze her. The perfect wife and mother, the perfect secretary. There were two red spots on her smooth cheeks now, as she sat very upright on her chair, sipping the horrible-looking tea without obvious revulsion, but otherwise giving no sign of how much the shock of finding the body had affected her.
‘What time was it when you took the papers in to him?’
‘Half-past one, as soon as I got back from lunch. They were all ready – I’d prepared them this morning, and he needed to go through them before the meeting of the Safety Committee later this afternoon – which of course the Headmaster has cancelled now.’
Mayo had already spoken to the Headmaster, Jeremy Easterbrook. He was a man slightly under medium height, fiftyish, and
going grey in an appropriately distinguished-looking manner, whose practised smile and warm, professional handshake didn’t hide a shrewd glance and an authoritative manner. Wearing an expensively tailored dark grey pinstriped suit, a pale grey shirt, sober tie patterned discreetly in blue and silver, an immaculate haircut, he was the perfect model for the chief executive of a successful company, or a hospital administrator. Which was probably what he was, Mayo thought, an excellent administrator. You didn’t have to be a doctor to run a hospital, or a teacher to run a school. Timpson-Ludgate, the pathologist, however, who had a son in the Upper School, had not been slow to inform him that Jeremy Easterbrook
was
regarded as a brilliant teacher, in the old-fashioned way. ‘Teaches sixth-form history, and keeps ‘em at it. Nothing like it, a bit of discipline. More of it and you and I would be out of a job, though, ha-ha?’
Mayo smiled dutifully. He was all for discipline, to a point. But not if it meant noses to grindstones, for its own sake.
Nothing like this had ever before happened in the school’s 140-year history, Easterbrook had made clear right at the beginning of their conversation, as if it were somehow reprehensible of Wetherby to have broken with such a tradition. He didn’t add that the school had not been thrown into a panic by the terrible happening, nor did he need to. It was very obvious that the teaching routine, at least, was going on as usual, for which Mayo was duly grateful. Since many of the Lower School form-room windows overlooked the quadrangle and the Bursar’s office in the corner, he doubted whether much of what was being taught that afternoon would be absorbed, but it had kept a couple of hundred bright, inquisitive-minded boys out of the hair of the police doctor, the pathologist, the white-overalled technicians, photographers and his own officers while they did their work. The boys would have to be told about the murder sooner or later, and were doubtless agog at all the activity. But for the moment they would have to restrain the curiosity aroused by the arrival of police cars, the sealing off of the Bursar’s office and so on.
Before taking his leave of Easterbrook, Mayo said, ‘I’d better have some idea what Mr Wetherby’s duties as Bursar were.’ He had already been given the details of how long he had worked at the school, his age, that he was married with a grown-up son, and had lived with his wife in a house owned by the school a
couple of miles away, just off Tilbourne Road, adjacent to the hospital.
‘He reported to the school Secretary, who is Head of Administration, but he was in charge of the financial arrangements of the school as well as overseeing its general domestic management, and for communication and public relations, that sort of thing. Make no mistake about it,’ added the Headmaster smoothly, steepling his well-manicured hands, ‘he was an excellent administrator — I can think of no one more fitted for the post of Bursar. The loss to the school will be indescribable.’
He hadn’t liked the man. The cool, scrupulously fair, utterly impersonal appraisal didn’t disguise that, nor hide the fact that the Head seemed slightly more affronted by Wetherby being killed on school premises than by his having lost his life.
‘He seems to have had a wide remit.’
‘Maybe so, but he had a staff of people working under him who took over various responsibilities, and we also have an Assistant Bursar.’
‘Who I assume will be taking over Mr Wetherby’s duties?’
‘For the moment,’ said Easterbrook, after a pause. ‘His name’s Riach, John Riach, he’ll give you all the help you need. Meanwhile –’ he rose from behind his desk to indicate the interview was at an end – ‘I have a sixth-form seminar due in a few moments. If I can be of further use, don’t hesitate to ask.’
In one way it was awkward that he knew Daphne, Mayo thought, albeit not very well, having met her only through the few police social events George had been persuaded to attend, along with his wife. But she was, after all, married to a policeman, and knew the necessity for questioning. Which was why Mayo felt able to say, without dissembling, even though he knew that it wasn’t exactly going to help her banish the ghastly memory of the moment, ‘I’d like you to try and tell me, if you will, exactly what you saw when you went in.’
He hadn’t underestimated her. She said steadily, ‘I saw he was dead, straight away. No one could still have been alive with his face shot away like that.’
‘You were able to see his face, then?’
Even then she didn’t flinch, though she hesitated fractionally.
‘Yes. He’d slumped forward over the desk and his head had fallen sideways. And then I saw there was something stuffed into his mouth. It appeared to be paper of some sort. It – that was somehow more horrible than – all the rest of it.’
He could almost feel her ordering herself to breathe deeply, not to think of the carnage that had confronted her, which must be there, imprinted on her retina, even if she closed her eyes. ‘Yes, it was,’ he agreed, reflecting on the sort of person who could shoot someone in cold blood and then, while the blood was doubtless still pouring from what was left of his mouth, stuff a crumpled ball of paper into it.
Daphne had tapped on the door and waited, and when Wetherby didn’t bark out his usual ‘Come!’ she’d gone in, thinking the office would be empty, and stepped straight on to the set of a horror film.
At first, she’d thought that he was, unthinkably for Wetherby, asleep, but the notion was almost immediately dispelled by the metallic smell of blood which hit the back of her throat, making her gag, at the same time as she saw the blood seeping all over the desk …
‘For obvious reasons, we haven’t been able to read what was on the paper yet, it’s gone down to the lab to be treated for prints and so on, but it appears to have been torn from several stapled-together sheets which he seems to have been reading at the time.’ Mayo showed Daphne the sheaf of papers, now encased in transparent plastic, from which the top sheet was missing.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, after a quick glance. ‘That’s a report he’d written. It was something else which was on the agenda for this afternoon. There were negotiations pending for the purchase of a house in Kelsey Road. The school’s already bought three along there, and they want that one as well. It’s unfortunate that the owner’s not for selling. We recently wrote to her again, making her a better offer, but we had a reply only this morning from her nephew, writing on her behalf, that there was no possibility of her agreeing. The house belongs to Dorrie Lockett.’
He knew Dorrie, if only by sight and reputation. Everyone in Lavenstock knew Dorrie – but he hadn’t heard of the proposed purchase of her house.
He saw Daphne was hesitating. ‘I suppose I’d better tell you. Someone else will, if I don’t. She came here about midday,
demanding to see the Bursar, waving his last letter. I don’t think she could have known that her nephew had already written. Mr Wetherby saw her in his office. I don’t know what passed between them, though I can make a guess. There were raised voices, and eventually she stormed out.’
She looked almost sorry she’d spoken. ‘Of course, it was nothing. She’s a dear, really, and
I’d
be furious if someone tried to turf me out of my house. It’s a maddening situation for the school, of course.’
There was always one, it seemed, in such circumstances: someone who sat there, refusing to move, chained themselves to a tree, barricaded themselves indoors and had to be forcibly evicted: he had, on occasions, been a reluctant part of the removal process himself. But he was, with certain exceptions, nearly always on the side of the protestors. The suffering of the few for the convenience of the many had never been his philosophy.
‘Why does the school want these houses?’
He listened with quiet attention while Daphne explained the situation to him: at present, the one and only entrance to the school was on Tilbourne Road, which had been all right when the school was built, but with the amount of traffic now passing along there, was highly inconvenient for all concerned, especially when anyone wanted to make a right turn into the gates. He nodded, knowing this to his cost, having been held up along that road more times than he could count, for that very reason. He could well appreciate the necessity for another entrance. The school grounds, however, said Daphne, formed a rough triangle, its three sides being the traffic-laden Tilbourne Road; Vanson Hill, the road on which the hospital was situated; and on the third side Kelsey Road, where it was hoped to build the proposed new entrance.
‘And what about the present one?’
‘Oh, that’ll come down, along with all the buildings on this side, to make space for the new science block.’
From where he sat, Mayo could see out through the window and across the quadrangle. A carefully tended lawn, smooth as green velvet, with brick paths intersecting it, a small lily-pond in the centre, and venerable-looking buildings all round. A testament to Victorian durability, the buildings looked gracious and
solid, set to last another century and a half, at least. He was taken aback at the idea of knocking any of them down, despite knowing that computers and laboratory equipment were more important for contemporary studies at the beginning of this new millennium than a few out-of-date buildings, however agedistinguished and hallowed by precedent.
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