Murder in the Museum (Fethering Mysteries) (9 page)

There was a chaos about Graham Chadleigh-Bewes’ study which might once have been organized, but had long since got completely out of control. He sat on an old wooden swivel chair in a recess backed by small cottage windows, against which that morning the rain rattled relentlessly. In front of him was a structure which logic dictated must be a desk, but the surface was so crowded with papers and the sides so buttressed by books and files that no part of it was visible. All available wall-space was shelved, and books were crammed in double ranks, some hanging precariously off the edges, others stuffed in horizontally over ranks of the unevenly vertical.

Hanging slightly askew from a nail on one shelf end was a small crucifix with an ivory Christ. Atop one of the peaks of the desk’s topography perched an old black telephone with a white dial and nubbly brown fabric-covered wire. There was no sign of fax, photocopier or computer – indeed no technology invented in the last fifty years.

Graham himself, poring importantly over some papers, did not even rise to greet Carole. Having rather grandly given his coffee order to his aunt, he waved his guest to a chair from which she had to remove a pile of flimsy carbon copies. ‘Be careful with that lot,’ he admonished, without looking up. ‘Mustn’t get them out of sequence.’

Sequence? As Carole sat down and looked around the room, she couldn’t see much evidence of sequence anywhere.

After dutifully watching Graham read for a couple of minutes, she decided she’d had enough. He was the one who had summoned her, after all.

‘Could we get on, please?’ she said. ‘I don’t have all day.’

He looked up from his letters with some hurt, as at a philistine interruption of the creative process. His expression was calculated to make her feel like the visitor from Porlock, breaking Coleridge’s flow on
Kubla Khan
, but if he thought it’d have that effect on Carole Seddon, he’d got the wrong woman.

‘I gather you want to give me some kind of briefing, before I speak to Professor Teischbaum.’

‘In a way.’ Reluctantly, he added the letters he was reading to the refuse tip on his desk. ‘I have to say, I’m not in favour of your meeting this frightful Yank, anyway.’

‘I’m not that keen on it myself, but Gina is very insistent that I should. When I agreed to be a Trustee, I took on certain responsibilities, and this is just one of them. If we clam up completely and refuse to let anyone talk to Professor Teischbaum, she’ll just think we’ve got something to hide.’

‘Yes. I suppose I see the logic of that.’ He didn’t sound convinced. He still reckoned, if the Bracketts hierarchy completely ignored his rival biographer, then she’d go away. ‘But I don’t think Gina should be the one to decide who talks to the woman.’

‘Gina is Director of this organization. I would have thought this was exactly the sort of decision that she should make.’

‘Yes, I know she’s
Director
. . .’ He dismissed the title as an irrelevance, ‘but she doesn’t really
know
Bracketts. She hadn’t even read any Esmond before she mugged him up for the job interview. And though she’s absolutely fine as a kind of office manager, she shouldn’t be making decisions about important things like this.’

‘So far as I can gather, her thinking in suggesting that I talk to Professor Teischbaum is that I know relatively little about Bracketts, and therefore won’t be able to give much away.’

Graham Chadleigh-Bewes pulled at his fat lower lip disconsolately. ‘It still should be someone aware of the issues at stake.’

‘You’re not suggesting
you
should talk to the Professor, are you? Rival biographers meeting at dawn? Who’d have the choice of weapons?’

‘No,’ he replied testily. ‘The obvious person to do it is Sheila.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she
knows
Bracketts. She knows everything about the place, everything about Esmond. She would see this woman off with no problem at all.’

‘But, as I understand it, Graham, Sheila no longer has any official role at Bracketts. She certainly isn’t the Director. I gather she isn’t even a Trustee.’

‘Oh, that’s just office politics.’

‘What, do you mean she was voted off by the other Trustees?’

‘No, no, no. She went entirely of her own accord. Sheila had been wanting to reduce her commitment to Bracketts for some time. She’s put so much into the place, she wanted to have a bit of time to herself. Who can blame her?’

‘Nobody.’

‘Of course not. So eighteen months ago, she resigned as Director – for which, incidentally, she was never paid – and she became a Trustee. Then after six months, she resigned as a Trustee.’

‘Why?’

‘She didn’t want to affect the freedom of the Trustees to take new initiatives. Sheila knew the management of Bracketts had to change. She was the one who suggested advertising for a professional Director, for heaven’s sake. She said she didn’t want to outstay her welcome, like Margaret Thatcher. She wanted to give whoever took over from her a completely free hand and, as for herself, just withdraw gracefully.’

If Sheila Cartwright’s behaviour at the recent Trustees’ Meeting had been an example of her graceful withdrawal, Carole had even more sympathy for the impossible position into which Gina Locke had been placed. The new Director’s power was only theoretical. Every decision she made was going to be scrutinized – and quite possibly countermanded – by her predecessor.

The Board of Trustees, the regulatory body with the mandate to control such behaviour, seemed to be so awed by – or possibly in love with – Sheila Cartwright, that they gave Gina Locke no support at all. And since the discovery of the skeleton in the kitchen garden, no one even attempted to maintain the illusion that Sheila had taken a back seat.

‘Well,’ said Carole firmly. ‘It is going to be me who talks to Professor Teischbaum, so what do you want me to say to her?’

Whether Graham might have argued his point further was impossible to know, because they were interrupted by the arrival of his aunt with the coffee. And not just coffee, either. As well as the silver pot and bone china cups on the tray – with a tray-cloth! – there was an untouched circular sponge cake whose midriff revealed a jam and cream filling. Side-plates and silver cake forks completed the layout.

In the speed with which this apparition distracted Graham Chadleigh-Bewes from their conversation lay the explanation for his spreading girth. His Aunt Belinda not only pampered his ego and kept house for him; she also saw it as her duty to fatten him up. And the gleam in Graham’s eye showed that he loved being fattened up. The arrival of the sponge cake crystallized a vague feeling that Carole had formed about the man – that he was asexual, driven by pique rather than passion, that even his enthusiasm for the works of Esmond Chadleigh was in some way automatic. But there was nothing half-hearted or unspontaneous about his love of food.

Carole refused the offer of a slice. She had only had breakfast a couple of hours before and, anyway, didn’t ever eat between meals. Having resisted the biscuit-nibbling culture of the Civil Service all her working life, she wasn’t going to relax her standards in retirement.

Her host had no such scruples. His ageing face looked ever more babyish as he watched his Aunt Belinda make one incision in the powdered surface of the sponge and remove the knife. Then she went through a little pantomime of moving the knife round the arc to find exactly the size of slice he favoured. An angle of twenty-five degrees was condemned as ‘Too mean’, and her overreaction of moving the knife round to forty-five degrees prompted a squeal of ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Auntie – I’ll explode!’ But the slice he ended up with was still a pretty substantial one.

Carole found the display a little unwholesome, because it was clearly such a well-established routine. The two of them did this every day – possibly at every meal – the elderly woman playing mothering games with the middle-aged man-child. Carole found herself wondering what had happened to Graham’s real mother, and how long Belinda had been looking after her nephew.

As soon as he’d got his slice of cake, Graham Chadleigh-Bewes said, with some brusqueness, ‘Now you must go, Auntie. Carole and I have got important things to discuss.’

The old lady, unoffended, reached for the tray. ‘Shall I take this with me?’

‘No,’ her nephew replied hastily. ‘I . . . or my guest . . . might want some more . . . coffee.’

The coy exchange of looks between them made Carole realize that this was an extension of their game. Aunt Belinda threatened to take Graham’s cake away every morning. Every morning he stopped her – and no doubt later helped himself to a second slice. Carole felt increasingly uncomfortable as, with a little chortle, Belinda Chadleigh left the room.

‘Now where were we?’ asked Graham, as though he were a serious executive in a serious business meeting.

‘We had just agreed,’ replied Carole, removing the possibility of further argument, ‘that since I’m going to see Professor Teischbaum, you were going to give me some stuff for her.’

He looked puzzled. His recollection had not got their conversation to quite the same point. But Carole didn’t give him time to respond – and his mouth was too full of sponge cake to make a very effective remonstrance, anyway.

‘That’s what you mentioned on the phone, Graham. That’s why I’m here. You said you wanted to give me some papers for Professor Teischbaum.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘In fact, to use your precise words, you said you wanted to “fob her off with some unimportant stuff”.’

Graham Chadleigh-Bewes chuckled at his own cunning. ‘Exactly. I’ve got it all ready here.’ Clearly he’d given up on Plan A, persuading Carole to cede her meeting with Marla Teischbaum to Sheila Cartwright, and he was moving on to Plan B.

Given the chaos on his desk, it was surprising how quickly he found the documents he was looking for. And how neatly they were ordered in a cardboard file.

He flicked through the contents. Carole could see holograph and typewritten letters. ‘These are only copies,’ he said. ‘Obviously we wouldn’t let her have the originals. Original Esmond Chadleigh material is like gold-dust. My mother and Aunt Belinda wouldn’t let a single scrap of paper be destroyed when he died.’

‘Not even stuff that wasn’t to his credit?’

Graham Chadleigh-Bewes looked at her sharply, piqued like the baby whose rattle has been taken away. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. There were no secrets in Esmond Chadleigh’s life.’

Oh no, thought Carole. Then that makes him unique in the history of the human race. But she didn’t pursue the point. ‘So all this material I’m passing on to Professor Teischbaum is completely useless, is it?’

‘By no means. And they’re documents I know she won’t have seen, because they’re from our archive here at Bracketts.’

‘Very generous of you all of a sudden,’ she observed.

Once again he glowed at his own cleverness. ‘Oh yes,’ he agreed, ‘very generous.’ He tapped the file. ‘Useful stuff. No biographer could write anything about Esmond without access to this.’

‘But equally, I assume, all pretty uncontroversial.’

‘Hm?’

‘Material that reinforces the accepted image of Esmond Chadleigh, just a further illustration of information that could be obtained from other sources.’

Graham nodded complacently. ‘That is exactly right. Sheila and I worked out a strategy on this, you see. If we give the Teischbaum woman – I might almost call her “The Teischbaum Claimant” . . .’ He chuckled at his own verbal dexterity. The play on words about a famous Victorian fraudster, ‘the Tichborne Claimant’, was exactly the sort of joke to tickle Graham Chadleigh-Bewes’ fancy – obscure, academic, and completely pointless.

‘If we give her this lot, there’s no way she can accuse the Esmond Chadleigh estate of being uncooperative. And when we refuse to give her anything else, we won’t appear to be unreasonable.’

Carole took the file. ‘From the way she sounded on the phone, I don’t think she’ll be satisfied with this.’

‘That is her problem, not ours. That is all the documentation that will be granted to . . . The Teischbaum Claimant.’ He was rather pleased with the nickname that he had coined, and would undoubtedly be using it on many other occasions.

‘And what about the family?’ asked Carole.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I would think it quite likely that Professor Teischbaum would ask to talk to you . . . to your Aunt Belinda, I imagine . . . and I don’t know whether there are other living descendants of Esmond Chadleigh . . .’

‘There are a few, yes.’

‘Well, what will you say when the request comes in?’

‘I’ll tell the bloody woman to get lost and . . .’ But his instinctive anger dried up. A little smile irradiated his baby features. ‘No, maybe there too I’ll follow Sheila’s route of conciliation.’

‘So fobbing Marla Teischbaum off with the stuff in this file was Sheila’s idea, was it?’

‘Oh yes.’ Graham spoke as if the question had not been worth asking. He was more excited by the new thought Carole had planted in his mind, and he spoke slowly as he worked it out. ‘Yes . . . I will agree to meet The Teischbaum Claimant . . . and I will be terribly nice to her . . . and I will endeavour to answer all of her questions . . . in my inimitably helpful and charming manner . . .’ He grinned with childish glee. ‘And I will tell her absolutely nothing at all.’