Death of a Friend (6 page)

‘We’re not quite sure of the exact day,’ he told Hugh, with a glance at Richmond. ‘Did you like Charlie?’

Richmond stirred at this and pushed forward his hands, clasped together, making a big beefy V with his arms, flat on the table. His knuckles were only an inch away from Den’s left hand. Den glanced at him, but did not withdraw the question.

Hugh nodded, a single duck and lift of his chin. ‘Yeah,’ he breathed. ‘He was cool.’

‘Do you know anyone who didn’t like him?’

The boy considered. ‘The hunting people and the man at the battery farm. I don’t know. Lots of people got annoyed with him, but I don’t think they didn’t
like
him. Same as Mum – she was always fighting with him, but she was his friend, really.’

‘Look,’ Richmond interrupted. ‘I’m not sure we can let you question Hugh like this. He has nothing useful to tell you, and he’ll get upset if you carry on. Can we let him go now?’

Den was on sufficiently shaky ground not to insist. He had hoped for some sort of background information from Hugh, some detail which would bring the picture into focus, but seemed destined for disappointment.
He nodded. ‘Thanks for your help,’ he said.

Hugh slid off his stool and paused. ‘It was a pleasure,’ he said politely. ‘I hope you catch the person who murdered Charlie. So does Clem. Goodbye.’ And he left, closing the door behind him.

‘Nice boy,’ Den said.

Richmond smiled. ‘Say what you like about Nina, she was a good mother in her way. But you have to remember who they are. Breeding shows in people, even now. Take their grandfathers – younger son of a baronet on one side, and the owner of a hefty tract of farmland on the other. Bet Martha never told you that.’

Den shook his head in puzzlement. ‘My information is that Nina’s father is unknown.’

‘Ah, yes. Sorry, I meant the boys’
great
-grandfather
on that side. Eliza’s dad, Nina’s grandad. Owned a fair part of the land you see from our front garden at one time. Sold it, though, when Eliza was a girl. Then she did the same thing, with most of what was left. It was always assumed that it was the lack of a male heir that motivated them, in both cases. If you ask me, Eliza was just desperate for some ready cash.’

‘Did you know her?’ He was sketching a family tree on his notepad.

‘I did indeed,’ Richmond assured him. ‘A legend in her own time. I didn’t stand a chance
with Martha until the old girl was dead. As it was, I had to jump through any number of hoops. If they hadn’t needed someone to sort them out financially and find some way to survive apart from farming, I doubt if I’d ever have been taken on. She wouldn’t change her name to mine and she says she’s never going to give up her job. It doesn’t look as if I’m ever to be blessed with a son and heir, either.’

‘You make it sound like a marriage of convenience.’

‘A convenient marriage, certainly,’ Richmond agreed. ‘But make no mistake, I love that woman. And she loves me. I would die for her, without a moment’s hesitation.’

‘And would you kill for her?’ Den asked, surprising himself.

‘That remains to be seen,’ smiled Richmond with no sign of agitation.

As he drove away down the winding lane from High Copse, Den felt he had been there for days. His head was filled with snatches and snippets of information, very few of which seemed to connect to the murder. The main item of interest so far was the brother Frank and his horse-breeding; that was surely of real relevance. If Phil was available, he assumed the two of them would be despatched to Ashburton later that day to have a word with Mr Frank Grattan. Plus, he supposed, Mr Nev Nesbitt, when he finally showed up. Something felt iffy about that particular individual – not only the arm’s-length marriage to Nina, but the leisurely return home to his bereft sons. Checking passenger lists was 
a job for Jane Nugent, in the scheme of things.

He felt he’d been immersed in an atmosphere like nothing he could recall experiencing before. The ramshackle, unkempt house, containing people who might have come from another age, or another planet. The strangeness of the relationships, Nina with her absent husband; Charlie, apparently close to both Nina and Alexis; Martha’s patient and surprisingly ordinary husband. And the orphan boys with their bizarrely aristocratic bloodlines and their enviable freedom, living lives that Den could not begin to comprehend. Hugh, so obviously mourning for his mother to the exclusion of everything else; his pale little brother moving from one sheltering aunt to another, more ready, perhaps, to accept a substitute for Nina. And both craving the return of Nevil, their father, if Martha could be believed.

It was time for lunch. He would stop at the village shop in Chillhampton and get himself a pork pie. Then he had to go and talk to the Grattans, who lived at the northern end of the village. From them he hoped to draw forth a more complete picture of Charlie. Why, for example, was a man of thirty-three still living with the people who’d reared him, and why did he not have a proper job? And what, if anything, did being a Quaker really mean in this day and age?

The interview was painful. Hannah Grattan gave unadorned facts in a soft, patient voice which betrayed none of her feelings. Charlie’s mother, Bill’s wife, had died when the boy was two years old. Hannah had come back from working in Nigeria, in the aftermath of the Biafran War, and had devoted the rest of her life to caring for the two men. Yes, there was another Grattan son, Frank, who had been seventeen when his mother had died. He had left home a week after Hannah arrived, and she had seen very little of him since.

Den asked to be shown Charlie’s bedroom and Hannah led him up the twisting cottage stairway and onto a landing. Four doors opened from it and she indicated the first one. ‘In there,’ she said. ‘We haven’t touched anything.’

The room was square, with a low ceiling, the view over open fields. A single bed with a wooden slatted headboard was covered with a handmade patchwork quilt. A large desk was covered with magazines, including
Horse and Hound, The Friend, The Vegan
and
Resurgence
, as well as a chaotic litter of papers. A computer sat in one corner, with an expensive-looking laser printer on a second table alongside. Clothes were obviously kept to a minimum, in a neat three-drawered chest under the window. The wall above the desk was covered with newspaper
articles, hand-written addresses, phone numbers, reminders, all attached with Blu-tack.

The impression was in complete harmony with Alexis’s assessment of Charlie: a man with a one-track mind, a total obsession with animal rights. Den picked up a copy of
The Friend
, realising it to be the weekly magazine for Quakers, and found a red felt-tipped slash in the margin against a letter from someone insisting that Quakers had a moral duty to defend all creatures from exploitation. On the front cover of one of the copies of
Resurgence
, the words
NATURE
,
SCIENCE
and
SOCIETY
shouted at him.

Beside the bed was another small table holding an alarm clock and a framed photograph. It showed a woman in her mid-thirties with a young child in her arms and a teenage boy at her side. The boy had a large head with shaggy dark hair and a long chin. Den could see a clear likeness to Bill Grattan, the wrecked man downstairs. The child was under a year old, sitting on his mother’s arm, looking straight at the camera, his face serious. Pale, with colourless hair, he resembled his mother in the round face and small mouth. Den assumed Charlie kept this picture as a memorial of the dead mother he surely couldn’t remember – and perhaps of Frank, the estranged older brother. If Hannah’s story was true, Charlie had lost two of his closest
relatives when he was only two years old.

Something about the room took Den back to his own boyhood. Despite the magazines and adult clothes, Charlie seemed to have lived more like a teenager than a man in his thirties. There was a certain purposefulness, an absence of the mess and self-indulgence of a single man which was intriguing. Den recalled his own piles of comics and schoolbooks, the forgotten coffee mugs and mismatched socks which had typified his room when he was sixteen. Charlie’s room was tidier than Den’s had been, but in some ways it was almost the same.

It was mid-afternoon when he made his report on progress so far. The Inspector had an air of urgency, muttering about the first forty-eight hours being the most crucial, insisting that every detail, every impression, be noted. ‘We don’t know these people,’ he reminded Den. ‘Our job is to get under their skin, understand how they operate. Write it all down, Cooper. That pad’s nowhere near as full as it ought to be.’

Hastily Den opened his notepad and added
Hannah Grattan – Charlie’s aunt, not mother
to the few lines of notes he’d made so far. He was longing to make a joke about ‘Charlie’s aunt’ but could see the Inspector was not in the mood. For good measure, he also wrote,
Bedroom very
boyish, CG somehow not fully grown up. Hints from AC suggest the same sort of thing or cd be plain Quaker lifestyle?

‘What next then?’ the DI pursued. ‘List the priorities for me.’

‘The brother, sir. Frank Grattan. Breeds horses, lives near Ashburton. Several years older than Charlie – some trouble in the family. Martha Cattermole told me about him. Seems to think he should be questioned.’

Smith nodded. ‘Fair enough,’ he agreed. ‘Get hold of Phil and the two of you can get over there soon as you like. Got the address, have you?’

‘Not yet, sir. Give me a couple of minutes.’ Den reached for a telephone directory from a high shelf level with his head and opened it at very nearly the right page.
F
. Grattan was conveniently listed, with enough of an address to make finding the stables an easy matter. ‘Got it, sir,’ he said.

‘What else?’ Smith pursued. ‘There should be a pageful of names by now.’

Den took a deep breath. ‘I’ve spoken to … seven people this morning,’ he said calmly, having done a hasty mental count. ‘If you count the younger boy, Clem. As soon as the boys’ father gets home, I think I should have a word with him. Plus the people who go to the Quaker meeting.’ 

‘Ah, yes!’ The DI seized on this. ‘When do they meet, do you know?’

‘They’re having a special meeting tomorrow morning, sir, in memory of Charlie. Eleven o’clock, I think. Miss Grattan mentioned it.’

‘Be there,’ instructed Smith.

Den gulped. ‘Right, sir.’

Detective Constable Phil Bennett turned up from a series of visits to local equestrian establishments smelling slightly of manure and shaking his head glumly. ‘Too many of the bloody things,’ he said. ‘They’re taking over the world. It’s a needle in a haystack job if ever there was one.’

Den explained with some diffidence that Phil had yet another similar call to make that day. ‘But this one’s much more promising,’ he said encouragingly. ‘And it’ll be a nice drive.’

‘All in a day’s work,’ said Phil, with unnerving good cheer. ‘And you might be right. I shouldn’t wonder if Brother Frank’s got plenty to tell us.’

There were certainly horses in plenty in the fields to either side of Frank Gratton’s entrance drive. The low-lying land, poorly maintained and apparently boggy in places, conveyed a depressing atmosphere. The horses, however, looked bursting with health. Two mares had young foals alongside them, and leggy colts nudged and shouldered each other in a group
close to the drive. ‘Everyone’s gone horse mad, seems like,’ said Den. ‘Useless creatures, Lilah calls them.’

‘Little girls love ’em, though. My Sophie’s as bad as any,’ Phil admitted. ‘She can’t wait for Saturday when she goes for her lessons. Not that I get involved with it. But even I can see that these’d be way out of her class. These beauties are strictly for the grown-ups, if I’m any judge.’

Den assessed the depths of his own ignorance concerning horses, and deemed them profound. He had never once been on the back of one, never attended a race meeting, never thought to distinguish between hacks and hunters, Arabs and Shetlands. He had a vague idea, gleaned from the film
Gandhi
, that a horse wouldn’t willingly trample on a human being. On the other hand, there sometimes wasn’t much option available to the creature. If you got yourself under the hoofs of a large galloping horse, you couldn’t blame it if your head got broken.

Frank Gratton himself was standing in the muddy yard, halfway between the modest bungalow and extensive stables, watching their arrival with only the vaguest hint of concern. He looked at least fifty, with narrow shoulders, a sparse scattering of long grey hair and ruddy cheeks. Den could see a likeness to Bill now only in the deepset eyes. He narrowed these eyes until
they almost disappeared, waiting for the police detectives to leave their vehicle.

‘Good afternoon, sir,’ said Phil easily. ‘Mr Gratton?’

‘Come about our Charlie, I reckon,’ he replied bleakly. ‘Wondered if you’d be bothered to come and see me. Wasn’t sure you’d even be told I existed.’ He ducked his head, so they couldn’t see his face. Then he braced himself, hefting two buckets by his sides. ‘Just let me take these …’ he nodded at the buckets and then at the stables. The message was clear and the visitors were left in the yard.

‘D’you want to come in the house?’ Grattan asked, on his reappearance. Without waiting for a reply, he led the way to a plain green-painted door, which scraped on stone flags as he pushed it open. Two thin black cats came rushing to greet him and he shoved them away with his boot. A breath of cold air hit the two policemen as they stepped cautiously inside. On a mild April day, it was noticeably warmer outside than in.

The trio moved into a dark, untidy room with a huge table pushed under the window at one end and a sofa covered in newspapers at the other. When Gratton hesitated, Den and Phil sat down firmly on upright chairs at the table. ‘We’re sorry about what happened to your brother,’ Phil said, without embellishment.

Gratton nodded. ‘Sounds like someone did it
on purpose,’ he said with a frown. ‘Must have had too much of his animal rights antics.’ His accent was intriguing, Den noted: educated middle-class overlaid with a deliberate uncouthness, as if he possessed no respect for his origins. Everything about him suggested a purposeful movement down the social scale, away from wherever he’d started.

‘When did you last see him?’ Phil proceeded, producing a notepad and ballpoint.

‘Weeks ago,’ came the ready response. ‘Months, even. We had little to do with each other.’

‘Could you be more precise?’

‘Let’s see.’ With exaggerated care, Gratton scanned his memory. ‘It was in that cold spell. Early February, must have been. First week of the month, near enough.’

‘And you were on good terms with him, were you?’

‘Not so sure about that. Every time he saw me he’d get on to the subject of the horses, how I was condemning them to a life of misery, with a stream of novices trying to ride them and no chance for them to be their real selves. Sheer bloody nonsense, every word of it. I’ll never understand where he got it all from.’

‘How did you react to that sort of thing?’ Phil asked. 

Gratton shrugged. ‘With a laugh, usually. It made no odds to me, when it came down to it. My horses are the best you can get. I told him he should be glad of people like me. Without us, horses would probably go extinct. They’d suffer, at any rate. They’re nothing more than a hobby for idle rich people these days, I know that. But they pay well and the beasts are well looked after. It was the stupidity of it I couldn’t get used to. Some causes you can see the point of, but not this one. Nobody but our Charlie could have made a campaign for the liberation of gee-gees.’ He laughed sourly, but Den noticed that the frown had returned to his face and a twist of pain lurked around his nose and mouth.

‘Are you familiar with the Cattermole family and the farm where your brother was found?’

Again a shrug, half-suppressed. ‘In a way,’ he answered. ‘Been there once or twice. I knew Charlie was seeing one of the sisters. Heard about the woman being killed in the hunt protest.’

Den gave him a close look and said, ‘You mean Nina. You paid her a visit not long ago, I understand.’

Frank rubbed a grimy hand down one cheek; stubble made a rasping noise against the rough skin. ‘That’s true,’ he said.

‘For what purpose?’

Frank was silent for a long minute. ‘I was passing and called in on the off-chance of a cup of tea.’

Den gave him a sceptical look before asking, ‘So what was your reaction to her death? Especially as it was inflicted by a horse. It must have struck you—’

‘It struck me as damned carelessness,’ Frank said heavily. ‘A senseless waste of a life. It also struck me …’ he turned his head away, but darted brief glances at Den as he spoke, ‘that people would probably think Charlie was to blame.’

‘And you?’ Phil interrupted eagerly. ‘Did
you
think that?’

Frank’s head sank further into his shoulders, like a turtle withdrawing from the world. ‘It crossed my mind,’ he said.

Den couldn’t stop himself. ‘Nina’s death was an accident,’ he said. ‘I saw it happen myself, and—’

‘Okay, Den,’ said Phil repressively, reminding his younger colleague that personal observations were inappropriate. ‘Now Mr Gratton, can I ask you whether you know of anyone who might have wanted your brother dead? Anyone who had a grudge against him?’