Bricks and Mortality: Campbell & Carter 3 (34 page)

‘Roger Trenton?’ Carter and Jess spoke together.

‘That’s the one. Fate has a way of having the last word. Sebastian had finally got up enough courage to reappear at the golf club. Roger Trenton, Dr Layton and Sebastian Crown were playing a threesome together. They’d finished and walked back to the clubhouse, and went to the bar. There, without any warning, Sebastian fell forward into his gin and tonic and that was that. Layton, who was his doctor, was right there on hand but couldn’t help.’ Muriel paused. ‘That’s pretty well how Poppy told me about it. You can check with her. Does it matter? He died.

‘Gervase came out of jail early because his father had died. Compassionate grounds, they call it. He didn’t get any sympathy around here and soon found he wasn’t welcome back in the area. It couldn’t have surprised him. The sight of young Petra in a wheelchair must have been uncomfortable for him, too. So he went travelling again. He’d done a bit of that when he was younger, before he started driving fast cars. This time he ended up in Portugal where, we heard, he’d bought a home and settled. Key House was emptied out and we all expected it to be sold. But it wasn’t. It stayed there, an attraction for every ne’er-do-well in the area.’ Muriel’s expression sharpened. ‘Roger Trenton would have you believe he kept an eye on Key House. How could he? He can’t even see it from where he lives. But I could. If anyone kept an eye on Key House, it was me!’

‘How did you do that? Your house, Mullions, is in Long Lane,’ Jess pointed out. ‘Mullions isn’t visible from Key House. I couldn’t see it when I was there. I was surprised to come on Mullions when I turned into Long Lane. So, like Roger, you couldn’t see Key House from your home either. Do you mean you checked out Key House when you walked your dog?’

‘Jumping the gun again!’ Muriel told her. ‘No, you couldn’t see Mullions from ground level at Key House. I can’t see Key House from my front gate or garden. But I haven’t been keeping an eye on it from
ground level
. You remember that Mullions has a pigeon loft up on the roof? It looks like a tower.’

‘Yes, I do,’ Jess admitted.

‘Well, then, that’s my observation post. I’ve been climbing up there pretty well every day, partly to see how the roof is holding up because it’s going to need some more repairs soon, but also to take a look round the countryside. I’ve got a good view of Key House from up there.’ Muriel gave her a triumphant smile, sat back and folded her arms. ‘So I watched out for activity at Key House. I saw ’em come and go, drug users, hippies, odds and sods of all kinds. It was in my interest to know who was sleeping there or using the place. I had to be on my guard. I’m on my own at Mullions. I was afraid some of them might wander up Long Lane and see Mullions and try and break in. They might think it empty, just like Key House.’

Carter was growing restless. ‘Why did you set fire to Key House?’

‘You’re as bad as she is,’ Muriel told him. ‘I haven’t got that far, nor have I admitted to setting fire to the place.’

‘Did you?’ prompted Jess.

‘Later, I did. Hang on a bit. I’ll have to explain how it came about. If I’d just wanted to set fire to it, I could have done it any time. Perhaps I should have done.’ Muriel frowned. ‘That would have taken care of it. I wish I had thought of burning it down. But I didn’t do anything. I thought that eventually it would be sold, although as it began to deteriorate it was a problem as to who would want to take it on! Trenton kept writing to the council, a waste of time. I just watched the house crumble. But I kept up my observation because from time to time all kinds of undesirables continued to turn up there, drinking and doing drugs too, as I told you. I kept waiting for the “for sale” notice to go up, and it never did. Then, one day not all that long ago, I met Poppy and she told me something really strange. She said she thought she’d seen Gervase Crown at the house. She wasn’t sure because the light hadn’t been good and she hadn’t seen Gervase for a long time. But she was eighty per cent sure.

‘I went back to Mullions and camped out in the pigeon loft. Sure enough, a couple of days later, I saw him with my own eyes, or I thought it was Gervase. I saw him again a few days after that. I said to myself, the blighter is looking the place over with a view to moving back in again! He’s keeping a low profile because he knows he’s not Mr Popular. But he’s coming back. I was so angry. After all the trouble he’d caused, to even think of returning to live among us!’

Muriel paused but this time they didn’t make the mistake of trying to hurry her. ‘After that, I didn’t see him for a week or two. I thought, good: he’s gone back to Portugal. Then we had some rain, quite heavy. I was worried about the roof. I took to going up to the attics and the pigeon loft at all hours to check for leaks if it was raining again, middle of the night sometimes. One evening I saw a light flickering in Key House. Usually, that’s meant another bunch of dropouts, often Alfie Darrow and his pals, has taken over for a few hours to have one of their parties. I’d had enough. I went down to the shed and got the priest. It was the best thing I could think of for a weapon. I wasn’t going to attack anyone!’ Muriel glared at them. ‘I took it for self-defence. If they were doing drugs, or drunk, or both, they could turn very nasty. But I was going to tell them to clear out, even so, or I’d phone the police.’

‘Perhaps,’ Carter couldn’t resist telling her, ‘you should have phoned the police straight away and not gone yourself.’

‘And how long would it have taken your lot to come out?’ enquired Muriel sarcastically. ‘Key House is private property and trespass isn’t something you coppers worry about. You probably wouldn’t have turned up before the morning, if you’d turned up at all!’

There was, regrettably, an element of truth in that. If more serious incidents had been reported that night, a breakin to a vacant and unfurnished house would have been given low priority.

‘So I went,’ said Muriel. ‘If I’d seen Alfie, I’d have faced him. He knows me. Even with his mates to back him up, he’d have been careful of me. If I hadn’t been able to see Alfie, I would probably have just turned tail and gone back home again. I wouldn’t have faced complete strangers. But, when I got down there to the house, I saw a car parked up under the hedge, a Clio. I crept up to the house and peeped in through a window. Whoever it was, it was just one person. He was walking around from room to room, flashing a torch about. When he turned, the beam fell across his face and I saw him. I thought it was Gervase, back again, just as Poppy had told me she thought he was. I decided to give him a piece of my mind. I knew how to get in. There’s a window catch broken at the rear of the building. I believe Roger Trenton reported it to Reggie Foscott and he sent someone over to board the window up. But the boards were pulled out again, probably by Alfie and his crew. So I clambered through there and went to look for Gervase.’

Muriel paused. ‘I still only meant to tell him to clear off, tell him he wasn’t wanted and ask why the hell he didn’t put the house up for sale. He was in the kitchen. He seemed to be taking a lot of interest in the fitted cabinets in there. Going to have a new kitchen put in, are you? I thought – and I just saw red. All of it, Warwick’s death, Petra being left in a wheelchair, the way he’d left the house empty to be used by any old miscreant. Even the things that had happened before that … Sebastian’s appalling treatment of Amanda. That was not Gervase’s fault, but the Bible says the sins of the fathers are visited on the children. All in all, I thought to myself, you are bad news, Gervase Crown, and if you come back here, there will be more mischief, more sorrow, more lives ruined. You are not going to live here again! I’ll stop you. I marched up behind him and hit him with the priest and down he went. I hit him again for good measure. He lay still.’

Muriel frowned. ‘I sobered up a bit after that. I don’t mean I was drunk. I’d only had a couple of glasses of elderflower that evening. I meant, my head cleared and I realised what I’d done. I’d killed him.’

‘What made you think you’d killed him?’ asked Carter.

‘I shone the torch on him. He was absolutely still, eyes shut, mouth open a bit. I hoped he was only unconscious, so I put my face close to his but I couldn’t feel any breath. I shook him and slapped his face to bring him round, but his head fell back like a rag doll’s. I even had a go at the kiss of life!’ Muriel leaned forward to make sure they got the point of how much she’d tried. Then she sat back and heaved a sigh. ‘I’d never tried it before and only read about it, and might have seen pictures on First Aid posters. I’d never seen a demonstration or had a go, even on a dummy, and these things aren’t as easy as they try to tell you. So next I tried finding his pulse and couldn’t. He looked and appeared in every way as dead as a doornail to me. I thought, he’s a goner, so now what, Muriel? I decided that as I’d got rid of Gervase – I still believed it was Gervase – I’d finish the job and get rid of the house as well. I went back out through the window at the rear and I saw the car parked there again. The keys were in it. I drove it back to Long Lane, past Mullions and parked it in the coppice further down the lane. Nobody goes down there so I thought it wouldn’t be seen and I’d have time to get rid of it somewhere later. Then I went to my garage, put some petrol in a plastic bottle and took it back to Key House with me. I sprinkled it all round the kitchen and put a match to it – and that was that.’

She paused. ‘I didn’t think the whole place would go up quite so quickly, but it did – whoosh! I must say that, at the time, it was very satisfying. Later on, I found out I killed the wrong fellow. It wasn’t Gervase in the house that night; it was some other man. Poppy had been wrong about seeing him as she told me,’ finished Muriel resentfully. ‘She got me all worked up about Gervase returning, and he hadn’t!’

‘Nor had you killed the intruder at Key House with the priest,’ Carter told her. ‘He wasn’t dead, Muriel, even though you thought so. In the circumstances, in the dark, and lacking first-aid skills, it’s hardly surprising you didn’t find a pulse. But if you’d called an ambulance, they’d have taken care of him. However, you left him there and the fire killed him.’

‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Muriel. ‘I really am. I did my best at the time. It’s like I was telling you. When things start going wrong, they carry on going wrong, just piling up, one on top of another. But they begin long before they appear to happen. You say I left that man to die in the house. But I was there in the house – and he, the Italian, was there in the house that night – because Gervase Crown had left the house empty for so long, giving us all such worry. So why don’t you blame
him
?’

She leaned forward suddenly and declared, ‘Not even my plan for getting rid of the Clio went right, you know? I meant to drive it out into the countryside somewhere the next day and abandon it, perhaps set fire to that, too. But the fire crews arrived very quickly and they stayed for nearly the whole of the day immediately following. The police turned up too because the body hadn’t burned away to nothing, as I hoped it might. So I couldn’t move the Clio.’ She gazed sorrowfully at Jess. ‘I did hope the fire would have burned the body completely, you know. It was so fierce! They cremate dead bodies and it all goes away, or nearly all of it except for a few bits of bone. They put those through a crusher because there’s nothing more they can do with them. I thought that’s what would happen with any fragments left at the house. When I walked down there with Hamlet, and saw you and that idiot Trenton, I learned that the body was more or less intact! Badly charred but still a proper body. That was a nasty shock.

‘The next morning, after that, the fire crew came back and damped down, so I still had to wait. It wasn’t until they’d finally left, around lunchtime, that I walked along the lane to the coppice where I’d left the Clio and, would you believe it? Someone had pinched it! Who on earth would have found it there? I couldn’t believe my eyes. I saw some tyre marks. There were two lots. One lot had been caused when I drove it in there to hide it, and the other lot must have been when it was driven out again. The countryside used to be such a peaceful spot and now you can’t even park a car for forty-eight hours in a lonely patch of woodland, but someone comes along and steals it.’ Muriel glowered at them.

‘We have recovered the car,’ Carter said.

Muriel’s mouth dropped open. ‘That was good going. Where was it?’

‘Just outside Cheltenham.’

‘How did it get there?’ She looked amazed.

‘We’re working on that,’ Carter said evasively.

‘So, Muriel,’ Jess pointed out, ‘your actions resulted in Gervase Crown returning from Portugal to see what was left of his house.’

Distracted from her surprise over the car, Muriel turned back to Jess. ‘Yes, Gervase turned up and he started wandering around the house. I found him there with that poor young woman, the girlfriend of the fellow who died. They were both inside the burnt-out shell. I warned her about him.’

‘How about the anonymous letter?’ Jess asked. ‘Did you write or make up that?’

‘Yes, I tried to frighten him off back to Portugal,’ said Muriel simply. ‘I made up a letter and then I thought, just a minute, the police will trace this because of fingerprints and DNA and all the rest of it. You read about it in the newspapers. Then I remembered that in the library at Weston St Ambrose they’ve got a copier machine. The library is only open two days a week now and mostly it’s run by volunteers. It gets pretty crowded on the two days it is open, so I wasn’t afraid anyone would take any notice of what I was doing. I went down there, as it was a day it was working, and sure enough, there were plenty of people there chattering and looking at the books. Miranda Layton was there but she’s not a chatty woman. She had her nose in a book. No one took any notice of me at the copier and it did it very quickly. I pressed a button and out came a copy. I picked it up wearing my winter gloves. No fingerprints, see?’ Muriel nodded at them, pleased with her cleverness. ‘I stuck the original in my pocket and when I got back home later, I burned it. The other one, the copy, I’d folded up very nicely, gone along to The Royal Oak and slid it under Gervase’s door. I knew it was his room, because I saw him come out of it.’