Cursed Inheritance (19 page)

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sent a tooth from the first skeleton off for analysis? Well the results came back today. They use this amazing technique: they direct a high intensity laser beam at a powdered sample of the tooth which vaporises and releases atoms which can identify the geology of the place where the tooth’s owner was raised. Our first corpse was defmitely brought up in the south-west of England and that makes it pretty certain that he was one of the first settlers who sailed from Tradmouth on the Nicholas. Fantastic what you can tell from just one tooth.

‘You remember my grandmother asked me to find soneone for her? It was a man from Annetown who she met during the war when he was stationed over in Somerset - wartime romance, I suppose. His name’s Max Selbiwood and as Selbiwood’ s not a common name it was quite easy. He says he wants to visit England and see my gran but I haven’t told him how ill she is. Maybe I should. I’d hate him to have a wasted journey at his age.

‘Max turns out to be a direct’ descendant of one of the first settlers, an Edmund Selbiwood who’s named on the passenger list of the Nicholas. He was the younger son of the family who lived at Potwoolstan Hall, not far from Neston. (Isn’t that the place where all those people were murdered years ago?) Max has some old family letters and documents and he’s going to let me see them.

‘Must go now. Got to be at the dig. We’re still excavating the palisades of the original fort. Have a nice day, as they say in these parts. Neil.’

Wesley stared at the sheet of paper. Somehow he never associated Neil with touching reunions between old wartime sweethearts, Neil eing the most unsentimental creature he knew. Perhaps it was something in the Virginia air.

It was strange that Selbiwood h~d a family connection with Potwoolstan Hall but then coincidences happen from time to time. Wesley wondered whether it was significant in any way. But how could it be? Selbiwood’s connection went back centuries, a lot further back than the massacre. He was aware that he was thinking like a policeman. And

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he told himself to stop. He was off duty.

Pam came into the room and flopped down on the sofa. ‘You’ve read it then? What do you think?’

‘All this long-lost wartime sweetheart stuff seems a bit out of character. ‘

‘He’s always been close to his grandmother and she is very ill. Cancer, he said. Apparently she asked him to contact this man for her while he was over there.’

Wesley looked at his wife and wondered how much Neil had confided in her about his plans. And how it was that she seemed to know far more about Neil’s life than he did.

Gerry Heffernan had no reason to go home. Now both his children were away at university he lived alone, answerable to nobody. But he hated the emptiness of his cottage on Baynard’s Quay every time he let himself in at night. That was why he had bought himself a takeaway that evening after most of his team had returned to the bosom of their families, and went back to the office to go over the case.

It was eight 0’ clock and he could hear the sweet sound of the church bells wafting over the river. Practice night. As he was in the choir at St Margaret’s he knew most of the bellringers: perhaps he would join them in the Star for a pint when they’d finished. The companionship of acquaintances in a smoky, crowded pub was better than being alone.

As he read the files he wished Wesley was there. We.sley had an irritating habit of pointing out the loopholes in his most prized theories but in spite of that, Heffernan valued his analytical mind.

He’d noticed that Wesley always made lists. Perhaps it was time he followed his inspector’s example and became more organised. He spread a sheet of paper out in front of him and began to write: Massacre: where are people who featured in the original investigation?

Arbel Harford - Daughter of Edward and Mary

Harford, aged eighteen. Just left boarding school.

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Staying with friend in London at time of shootings. Travelled down to Devon next day for her mother’s birthday celebrations and discovered bodies. Now married to Anthony Jameston MP, junior minister in the Home Office (he’s just turned up at the Hall. Why?)

Victor Bleasdale - head gardener. Left for new job in Yorkshire the morning before shootings. Interviewed by North Yorkshire police and eliminated from enquiries. Current whereabouts unknown.

Richard Gibbons - undergardener at Potwoolstan Hall now living in Tradmouth (conviction for shoplifting). Interviewed and eliminated. Address on the Tradmouth Council Estate.

Brenda Varney - cleaner. Probably stole jewellery from the Harfords. Disappeared a couple of weeks before the killings and couldn’t be traced at the time. Current whereabouts unknown.

Pauline Black - daughter of Harford employee killed in industrial accident. Dispute with Jack Harford. Alibi for time of killings. Current whereabouts unknown.

Gwen Madeley - childhood friend of Arhel Harford. Interviewed in case she’d witnessed anything unusual (she hadn’t). Arbel stayed with her after the murders. Art therapist working at Potwoolstan Hall.

Dylan Madeley - Gwen Madeley’s elder brother. Interviewed but never serious suspect. Numerous convictions for drugs and petty crime. He’d left home a few weeks before the murders. and was living in Morbay at the time. Current whereabouts unknown.

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Heffernan frowned. Dylan Madeley had a record. That’s why his name rang a bell. But he’d been in Morbay at the time of the murders and he had never been considered as a serious suspect.

Heffernan flicked through the files, concentrating on the people they hadn’t encountered yet. Brenda Varney had disappeared, whereabouts unknown and no alibi for the time of the shootings. Head gardener Victor Bleasdale had left Potwoolstan Hall to take up a new job in North Yorkshire the morning before the murders and had been interviewed by the police up north and eliminated from enquires. Richard Gibbons, likewise, had been interviewed and eliminated. But now he wanted to talk to them both.

It had been assumed at the time that Martha Wallace was gUilty - an open and shut case - so nobody had bothered digging too deeply into alternative possibilities.

He closed his eyes and saw the blood-soaked scene that had confronted him at the Hall all those years ago. Why the dead crows? Was it to muddy the waters? Or did it hold some significance?

Then there was Martha Wallace’s seven-year-old daughter. According to the files she had been taken in by relatives, far too traumatised to give any sort of statement. Heffernan found himself wondering what exactly she had witnessed. And whether those memories had ever resurfaced. Surely Patrick Evans would have tried to find her. And he wondered if he should do likewise.

But tomorrow they would pay Gwen Madeley a call. It was about time they had a clearer picture of what they were dealing with.

Gwen Madeley slumped down behind the front door of her cottage, her back braced against the wood. She had thought it was reporters at first, wanting to ask her about Patrick Evans. And about her connection with Arbel.

But now she knew who had been knocking and rattling at her windows. She had never been able to cope with

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Dylan when he got himself into this state. And if she didn’t do something about it, she knew he’d be back. He always came back.

Gwen thought about ringing Anthony Jameston. But then she hardly knew him. She had only met him once before briefly when she had called at the London house to see Arbel. When she had met him at the Hall the other day, she had found him attractive. But Jameston hadn’t responded to her signals. Perhaps she had been too subtle. Perhaps that was her trouble. There had been so many times when Gwen had yearned to have someone to confide in; someone to take care of her and help her to deal with Dylan, to get him off drugs and back on his feet. A man to protect her. Even if he was Arbel’s man.

Anthony had told her that Arbel was planning to come down to Devon again. It was difficult to tell what Anthony and Arbel’s exact relationship was, but she did know that they inhabited a different world from the one she moved in. Theirs was the big, rich world of the wealthy and powerful and she was a small-time, small-town artist struggling to get a man in her bed and make ends meet.

But there was a bond between her and Arbel. A link that could never be broken. And Patrick Evans had wanted to dig up the past again.

Evans had asked question after question. Pushing and pushing as though he knew he was on the brink of discovering the truth. ‘

Now Patrick Evans was dead. Perhaps he had asked one question too many.

The kitchen at Potwoolstan Hall had changed out of all recognition. It was now a therapy room, plain and white. The pantry where Emma Oldchester had hidden a few yards from her mother’s dead body had been opened up and made into an alcove. At half past ten, when the occupants of the Hall had retired for the night, Emma crept downstairs and crouched there in the dark, on the exact spot, trying to remember.

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The tension in her head, born of her frustration, had developed into a constant nagging headache. She had tried so hard to make Elsham understand why she had come. That she was there to lay the ghosts that haunted her and to clear her mother’s name. But he had merely smiled: that irritating, patronising upward curve of the lips. She’d felt like punching him.

Hiding there in the pantry all those years ago, she had heard the killer switch off the radio that had masked the sound of the shots in the main house before arranging her mother’s body carefully, almost lovingly. Then he had wiped the gun and placed it in her hand. It had had to look like suicide. It had needed to be right. Sometimes the killer’s face swam into blurred focus for a split second, only to retreat again into the darkness. It was no good .. She returned to her room on tiptoe, unsure what to do next.

The fact that there was no lock on the door of her room made her uncomfortable but there was nothing she could do about it. Unable to settle, she opened the door again and stepped out on to the landing. It was almost midnight and all the Beings were tucked up for the night but a light was still visible underneath the door of Jeremy Elsham’s office. He was working late.

As she stood looking over the oak banisters she spotted someone moving across the hall towards the front door and froze. There was something furtive, yet also something familiar about the way the man moved and she watched as he opened the heavy oak door, just a cautious crack at first, then much wider to admit a woman who clutched the front of her jacket defensively as if she was nervous and afraid.

Emma’s hands went up to her mouth and she took a step back. Even though she hadn’t set eyes on the woman in the hall for almost twenty years, Emma recognised her at once. Arbel Harford had been beautiful then. And the years had been kind to her.

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Today I walked with Penelope near to the place where

the Nicholas is moored. The captain is to set sail for

England soon and I was sorely tempted to sail with

him. I think often of my home at Potwoolstan Hall and

of my brother yet I know that I cannot return. I must

make the best of my new life in this good and fertile

land of Virginia and I pray the Lord that I will have

strength to endure any trials and hardships that lie

ahead in the winter season.

I think not only of the trials of the body but also

those of the soul. Penelope did tell me that her

husband used her ill last night, taking her against her

will and beating her most grievously. She showed me

her wounds and I longed to kiss the bruised flesh, to

kiss away her pain. I fear where the madness of my

desire for her might lead me.

Set down by Master Edmund Selbiwood, Gentleman,

on the twenty-fifth ˇday of August 1605 at Annetown,

Virginia.

Wesley felt a tingle of excitement as he approached Gwen Madeley’s cottage. He was about to come face to face with someone directly concerned with the massacre. And anybody with a connection with the massacre had a connection with Patrick Evans.

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He was gradually forming a mental picture of what had happened at Potwoolstan Hall all those years ago. Martha Wallace had shot the elder daughter’s fiance, Nigel Armley, first with a shotgun. The noise had brought the two Harford children, Jack and Catriona, to the door of the drawing room where they had been shot with a rifle. Then the housekeeper, distraught at false allegations against her, had climbed the stairs to the main bedroom at the back of the house where she surprised Edward and Mary Harford, who were on the landing, preparing to investigate the noise, and killed them before going down to the kitchen and committing suicide. This version of events meant that Martha must have taken the trouble to steal the key to the gun cupboard from Edward Harford’s desk. Then she must have taken the two firearms, realised that one wouldn’t be enough to carry out the job, located the ammunition and loaded them, even though there was never any suggestion that she was experienced in handling firearms. In the circumstances, would she really have been so calm and calculating?

The more Wesley thought about the Harford case, the more he was convinced that the police had gone for the easy solution; the one the real killer, whoever that was, had wanted them to swallow.

And now the dead case had been resurrected by Patrick Evans’s murder. Which meant he must have been close to the truth. Whatever that was.

‘Bit quiet round here,’ Heffeman observed cheerfully as they pulled up outside Gwen Madeley’s cottage. ‘You wouldn’t think a woman on her own would want to live so far from civilisation, would you?’

Wesley didn’t answer. He switched off the engine and climbed out of the car. Heffeman was right. The cottage was isolated, set back on a narrow lane surrounded by ploughed fields that would soon be full of growing crops. There were no other houses in sight. But then some people liked solitude.