Magpie Murders (11 page)

‘Oh. She’s all right. She’s up in London … shopping.’

There was another awkward pause. ‘Can I get you something to drink?’ Clarissa asked. Perhaps this was a social visit. She couldn’t think of any other reason for her brother to be here.

‘That would be nice. Yes. What have you got?’

‘I have some sherry.’

‘Thank you.’

Magnus sat down. Clarissa went over to the corner cupboard and took out a bottle. It had been there since Christmas. Did sherry go off? She poured two glasses, sniffed them, then carried them over. ‘I was sorry to hear about the burglary,’ she said.

Magnus shrugged. ‘Yes. It wasn’t a nice thing to come home to.’

‘When did you get back from France?’

‘Saturday evening. We walked in and found the whole place ransacked. It was that damn fool Brent, not fixing up the back door. I’m glad I’ve got rid of him. He’d been getting on my nerves for a while now. Not a bad gardener but I never did like his attitude.’

‘Have you fired him?’

‘I think it’s time he moved on.’

Clarissa sipped her sherry. It clung to her lip as if reluctant to enter her mouth. ‘I heard you lost some of the silver.’

‘Most of it, actually. To tell you the truth, it’s been a bit of a trying time – what with everything else.’

‘You mean, Mary Blakiston.’

‘Yes.’

‘I was sorry not to see you at the funeral.’

‘I know. It’s a shame. I didn’t know …’

‘I thought the vicar wrote to you.’

‘He did – but I didn’t get his note until it was too late. Bloody French post office. Actually, that was what I wanted to talk to you about.’ He hadn’t touched his sherry. He looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Do you like it here?’

The question took her by surprise. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, and then more determinedly, ‘Actually, I’m very happy here.’

‘Are you?’ He made it sound as if he didn’t believe her.

‘Well, yes.’

‘Because, the thing is, you see, the Lodge House is empty now …’

‘You mean the Lodge House at Pye Hall?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you want me to move in?’

‘I was thinking about it on the plane home. It’s a damn shame about Mary Blakiston. I was very fond of her, you know. She was a good cook, a good housekeeper but above all she was discreet. When I heard about this bloody accident, I knew she was going to be very hard to replace. And then I thought about you …’

Clarissa felt a cold shudder run the length of her body. ‘Magnus, are you offering me her job?’

‘Why not? You’ve hardly worked since you got back from America. I’m sure the school doesn’t pay you very much and you could probably use the cash. If you moved into the Lodge House, you could sell this place and you might enjoy being back in the hall. You remember, you and me chasing around the lake? Croquet on the lawn! Of course, I’d have to talk about it with Frances. I haven’t mentioned it to her yet. I thought I’d sound you out first. What do you say?’

‘Can I think about it?’

‘Absolutely. It was just a thought but it might actually work out very well.’ He lifted his glass, had second thoughts and put it down again. ‘Always good to see you, Clara. It would be marvellous if you moved back in.’

Somehow she managed to show him to the door and stood there watching as he climbed into his Jaguar and drove away. Clarissa’s breath was not coming easily. Even speaking to him had taken a gigantic effort. She felt wave after wave of nausea spreading through her. There was no feeling in her hands. She had heard the expression ‘numb with anger’ but she had never realised it could be a reality.

He had offered her a job, working as his skivvy. Mopping floors and doing the washing up – dear God! She was his sister. She had been born in that house. She had lived there until she was in her twenties, eating the same food as him. She had only moved out after the death of their parents and Magnus’s wedding, the two events following, shamefully fast, one upon the other. Ever since that day, she had been nothing to him. And now this!

There was a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s
The Virgin of the Rocks
in the hallway. The Virgin Mary might have turned her head from John the Baptist and looked in alarm as Clarissa Pye stomped up to the first floor with vengeance in her eyes.

Certainly, she wasn’t going there to pray.

9

By half past eight, darkness had fallen on Saxby-on-Avon.

Brent had decided to work late. Quite apart from the lawns and all the weeding, there were fifty varieties of rose to be deadheaded and the yew trees to be trimmed. When he had docked the wheelbarrow and his various tools in the stable, he walked round the lake and out through Dingle Dell, following a path that would take him close to the vicarage and on to the Ferryman, the village’s second pub, which stood at the lower crossroads.

It was just as he reached the edge of the wood that something made him turn back. He had heard something. He quickly ran his eyes over the house itself, squinting through the darkness. There were a couple of lights burning on the ground floor but no sign of any movement. As far as he knew, Sir Magnus Pye was in alone. He’d driven back from the village an hour ago but his wife was away for the day, in London. Her car was still out of the garage.

He saw a figure, walking up the pathway from the main gate. It was a man, on his own. Brent had good eyesight and the moon was out but he couldn’t be sure if it was anyone from the village. It was hard to tell as the visitor was wearing a hat that concealed most of his face. There was something about the way he was walking that was a little odd. He was half-stooping, keeping to the shadows, almost as if he didn’t want to be seen. It was a late hour to be visiting Sir Magnus. Brent considered turning back. There’d been that burglary, the same day as the funeral, and everyone was on the alert. It wouldn’t take him a minute to go back across the lawn and check that everything was all right.

He decided against it. After all, it wasn’t any business of his who visited Pye Hall and following the discussion he’d had with Sir Magnus that same afternoon, after what Sir Magnus had said to him, he certainly felt no loyalty towards his employer, or his wife. It wasn’t as if they’d ever looked after him. They’d taken him for granted. Brent had been working from eight in the morning until the middle of the night for years now with never a word of thanks and at a salary that was frankly laughable. He wouldn’t normally go drinking in the middle of the week but as it happened, he had ten bob in his pocket which he was going to spend on fish and chips and a couple of pints. The Ferryman stood at the bottom end of the village. It was a shabby, ramshackle place, much less genteel than the Queen’s Arms. They knew him there. He always sat at the same seat near the window. Over the next couple of hours he might exchange half a dozen words with the barman but for Brent that amounted to a conversation. He put the visitor out of his mind and continued on his way.

He had another strange encounter before he reached the pub twenty-five minutes later. As he emerged from the woods, he came upon a single, slightly dishevelled woman walking towards him and recognised Henrietta Osborne, the vicar’s wife. She must have come from her house, which was just up the road, and she had left in a hurry. She had thrown on a pale blue parka, a man’s, presumably her husband’s. Her hair was untidy. She looked distracted.

She saw him. ‘Oh, good evening, Brent,’ she said. ‘You’re out late.’

‘I’m going to the pub.’

‘Are you? I was just wondering … I was looking for the vicar. I don’t suppose you’ve seen him?’

‘No.’ Brent shook his head, wondering why the vicar would be out at this time of the night. Had the two of them had a row? Then he remembered. ‘There was someone up at Pye Hall, Mrs Osborne. I suppose it might have been him.’

‘Pye Hall?’

‘They were just going in.’

‘I can’t imagine why he’d want to go up there.’ She sounded nervous.

‘I don’t know who it was.’ Brent shrugged.

‘Well, good night.’ Henrietta turned and went back the way she had come, heading towards her home.

An hour later, Brent was sitting with his fish and chips, sipping his second pint. The room was thick with cigarette smoke. Music had been playing loudly on the jukebox but there was a pause between discs and he heard the bicycle as it went past, heading up towards the crossroads. He glanced out and saw it as it went past. The sound it made was unmistakeable. So he had been right. The vicar had been down at Pye Hall and now he was on his way home. He had been there for quite a while. Brent thought briefly about his meeting with Henrietta Osborne. She’d been worried about something. What was going on? Well, it was nothing to do with him. He turned away and put it all out of his head.

But he would be reminded of it soon enough.

10

Atticus Pünd read the story in
The
Times
the following morning.

BARONET MURDERED

Police were called to the Wiltshire village of Saxby-on-Avon following the death of Sir Magnus Pye, a wealthy local landowner. Detective Inspector Raymond Chubb, speaking on behalf of the Bath constabulary, confirmed that the death is being treated as murder. Sir Magnus is survived by his wife, Frances, Lady Pye, and his son, Frederick.

He was in the sitting room at Tanner Court, smoking a cigarette. James Fraser had brought him the newspaper and a cup of tea. Now he returned, carrying an ashtray.

‘Have you seen the front page?’ Pünd asked.

‘Absolutely! It’s terrible. Poor Lady Mountbatten …’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Her car was stolen! And in the middle of Hyde Park!’

Pünd smiled, a little sadly. ‘That was not the story to which I referred.’ He turned it round to show to his assistant.

Fraser read the paragraphs. ‘Pye!’ he exclaimed. ‘Wasn’t that—’

‘It was indeed. Yes. He was the employer of Mary Blakiston. His name was mentioned in this room just a few days ago.’

‘Quite a coincidence!’

‘It is possible, yes. Coincidences do occur. But in this instance, I am not so sure. We are talking here of death, of two unexpected deaths in the same house. Do you not find that intriguing?’

‘You’re not going to go down, are you?’

Atticus Pünd considered.

It had certainly not been in his mind to take on any more work. The time remaining to him simply would not allow it. According to Dr Benson, he had at best three months of reasonable health, which might not even be enough to catch a killer. Anyway, he had already made certain decisions. He intended to use that time to put his affairs in order. There was the question of his will, the disbursement of his home and property. He had left Germany with almost nothing of his own but there was the collection of eighteenth-century Meissen figurines which had belonged to his father and which had, miraculously, survived the war. He would like to see them in a museum and had already written to the Victoria and Albert in Kensington. It would comfort him to know that the musician, the preacher, the soldier, the seamstress and all the other members of his little family would still be together after he had gone. They were, after all, the only family that he had.

He would make a bequest for James Fraser who had been with him during his last five cases and whose loyalty and good humour had never failed him, even if he had never helped very much when it came to the investigation of crime. There were various charities that he wished to benefit, in particular the Metropolitan and City Police Orphans Fund. Above all, there were the papers relating to his masterwork,
The Landscape of Criminal Investigation
. It would have taken him another year to finish it. There was no possibility of presenting it to a publisher in its present state. But he had thought that he might be able to collate all his notes, along with the newspaper clippings, letters and police reports, so that some student of criminology might be able to assemble the whole thing at a future date. It would be sad to have done so much work for nothing.

These had been his plans. But if there was one thing that life had taught him, it was the futility of making plans. Life had its own agenda.

Now he turned to Fraser. ‘I told Miss Sanderling that I was unable to help her because I had no official reason to present myself at Pye Hall,’ he said. ‘But now a reason has presented itself and I see that our old friend Detective Inspector Chubb is involved.’ Pünd smiled. The old light had come into his eyes. ‘Pack the bags, James, and bring round the car. We are leaving at once.’

THREE

A Girl

1

Atticus Pünd had never learned to drive. He was not wilfully old-fashioned. He kept himself informed of all the latest scientific developments and would not hesitate to use them – in the treatment of his illness, for example. But there was something about the pace of change that concerned him, the sudden onrush of machines in every shape and size. As televisions, typewriters, fridges and washing machines became more ubiquitous, as even the fields became crowded with electric pylons, he sometimes wondered if there might not be hidden costs for a humanity that had already been sorely tested in his lifetime. Nazism, after all, had been a machine in itself. He was in no rush to join the new technological age.

And so, when he had bowed to the inevitable and agreed that he needed a private car, he had left the whole business to James Fraser who had gone out and returned with a Vauxhall Velox four-door saloon, a good choice Pünd had to admit; sturdy and reliable with plenty of space. Fraser of course was boyishly excited. It had a six-cylinder engine. It would go from zero to sixty in just twenty-two seconds. The heater could be set to de-ice the windscreen in the winter. Pünd was just happy that it would get him where he wanted to go and – a sober, unremarkable grey – it would not scream out that he had arrived.

The Vauxhall, with James Fraser at the wheel, pulled in outside Pye Hall after the three-hour drive from London, which they had taken without stopping. There were two police cars parked on the gravel. Pünd got out and stretched his legs, grateful to be released from the confined space. His eyes travelled across the front of the building, taking in its grandeur, its elegance, its very Englishness. He could tell at once that it had belonged to the same family for many generations. It had an unchanging quality, a sense of permanence.