Death of a Friend (9 page)

The investigation was showing every sign of stalling when Den reported back to the station. DI Smith had drawn one of his elaborate diagrams on the whiteboard, listing names of all the people involved, and a cluster of headings
Mo, Me
and
Op
, with strange jottings beneath them. Den deciphered them with relative ease:
Motive, Means
and
Opportunity
– the basic catechism used in murder investigations, but which barely embraced the whole story. The means with which Charlie had been killed was straightforward, if unusual.
Lrg hrs
was written underneath
Me
. Motives had burgeoned over the day, too.
Aml rghts, Money? Rvnge? Poltcs, Jlsy? Women?
were all scribbled under
Mo. Op
still headed a blank column – which 
Den thought he could now fill all on his own. He stepped forward and uncapped the blue marker pen on the ledge below the board. Carefully, he wrote
Clive Aspen, Quaker Warden.
Stepping back, the incongruity struck him. Violence was anathema to Quakers. But perhaps this had been precisely the kind of attack a Quaker might be able to live with – if he could convince himself that the horse had been the killer. A barely-controlled stallion, given to rearing and kicking out with its forelegs, could be blamed for the incident with the rider virtually exonerated. The idea, perhaps, sown by the manner of Nina Nesbitt’s dying. The only flaw there, thought Den dourly, was the failure to report the incident. Whatever the precise truth of the matter, by not calling for help that horse rider had effectively committed murder. And somehow Den could all too clearly envisage Friend Clive doing exactly that.

He stepped forward again and added
F
rank Gratton
to the
Op
column. Frank, the estranged brother, who had a whole yardful of horses at his disposal, and who had been named by Martha Cattermole as a likely suspect. The obstinate demeanour of the man had piqued Den’s curiosity. And why –
why
– had his virtuous Quaker relatives seen fit to ostracise him so comprehensively?

Having left some notes for DI Smith, and looked in vain for any evidence of progress made by Danny and Phil since he last saw them, Den took a quick solitary tea break in the canteen before returning to his interviews. The drive to and from Chillhampton was becoming familiar already; he was in no doubt that before the case was closed, he’d be thoroughly sick of it. Originally he had hoped to offload some of the Quaker interviews onto Phil, but since the meeting that morning he felt much more inclined to follow everything through himself. He would be a familiar face to the remaining four he’d met and the others who had not attended the meeting would no doubt have heard of him by the time he reached them.

He chose Dorothy Mansfield for his next interview. Her address was simple enough: 1 Hawthorn Way, Chillhampton. The unimaginative and unexciting little development of new homes lay behind the village hall, two hundred yards from the Meeting House and all too easy to locate.

Mrs Mansfield opened the door ten seconds after Den had rung the bell, and greeted him with an encouraging smile. Before embarking on his formal questions, he permitted himself a personal touch. ‘You used to be Mrs Maples,’ he said with a smile. ‘I came to you for piano lessons.’

She laughed. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised,’
she agreed. ‘But I’m definitely not Mrs Maples any more, and I didn’t even bring the piano with me when I moved. You must have been terribly young – I don’t remember you at all.’

‘I was six and it was twenty-one years ago. I didn’t stick it for very long.’

‘Well, come in. This must be my turn to be grilled about Charlie?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ he admitted. ‘There’s still a lot I need to know.’

‘I expect there is,’ she said. Den followed her into the house.

It was very small and betrayed no sign of any Mr Mansfield. The ground floor evidently consisted of nothing more than a long, narrow room, arranged to provide comfortable seating at one end and a dining table at the other, with a small kitchen adjacent to the eating area. Stairs and a narrow hall completed the rectangular layout. It was altogether familiar and curiously depressing in its predictability.

Mrs Mansfield, however, was not predictable at all. ‘Horrible, isn’t it,’ she said cheerfully. ‘There’s almost nothing you can do with a house like this. Not downstairs, anyway. It gets more interesting on the upper floor – but I don’t intend to show you, unless you decide I’m a prime suspect, in which case you’ll want to do a thorough search. You can if you want, of course.’

He forced a cautious laugh, wondering whether he was going to need to ask questions at all, or whether the whole story – if there was a story – would be presented to him rehearsed and unprompted.

‘Coffee?’ she asked him. ‘I’ve got some good stuff. You should taste the disgusting muck Mandy gives us after meeting. It’s a little-known fact about Quakers, that they serve the most unspeakable hot drinks in the civilised world.’

‘Thanks,’ Den accepted, and he followed her through to the little square kitchen.

‘So … Charlie,’ she continued, turning to face him, meeting his eye with a direct gaze that he found disconcerting. An echo from the piano lessons rang in his head.
Denholm Cooper, you’re absolutely hopeless! Why on earth did your mother send you here? You’d be much better off wielding a cricket bat.
He wanted to tell her now that she’d been right, that he had never wanted to play the piano, never for a moment enjoyed the silly little tunes he’d been required to learn. Fortunately for all concerned, his mother had been quickly persuaded to let the whole thing drop after a couple of terms.

Mrs Mansfield’s eyes were a light brown, like a wild animal’s. Her hair was a softly glistening silver, and she had it tied back in a long ponytail. She was narrow across the hips and shoulders,
making her seem taller than she really was, and she was unnervingly schoolmistressy. He supposed she must be in her seventies, although her face had few wrinkles and her hands looked strong and unmarked. He had learnt to add a good ten years to most women’s ages, from the evidence of their appearance. Most of them had been ignoring all the old rules about hair and clothes for a long time now.

‘Yes, Charlie,’ he confirmed. ‘I’m sure you’re aware that he was almost certainly murdered. We can’t be sure of the exact day it happened, but it looks like late Sunday or early Monday.’

‘So I understand. Some time between the death of Nina and her funeral. Two deaths within a few days – it has naturally shaken us all up rather badly. What must it be like for poor Alexis? I keep thinking I should go and see her, but I’m not sure I would be welcome.’

Den tried to visualise the scene and failed. Where strong women gathered together, it was hard to predict what might happen. ‘We’re still trying to understand the precise connection between Charlie and the animal rights protests, and the Quaker Meeting. Would you be able to throw any light on that for me?’

She busied herself with the coffee for a minute and then handed him a mug. ‘You take this and I’ll bring the biscuits,’ she said. ‘Sugar?’ 

‘No thanks.’

She settled herself and Den on two armchairs beneath the front window and took a hearty gulp of the coffee before answering. ‘Charlie was the philosophical ringleader, so to speak. As opposed to Nina Nesbitt, who was the organiser, the pragmatist. Charlie believed in it all quite desperately. I felt sorry for him, to be honest, banging his head on such a solid brick wall. He was never going to get hunting stopped, not to mention virtually all modern farming practices, which is what he wanted. Anything at all that involved what he called “slave animals” was evil in his mind. Quite frankly, I found the whole business rather irritating. Especially when it came to Val and Miriam – and Polly Spence, of course.’

‘They all agreed with him?’

‘Miriam will agree with anybody. The woman’s weak-minded. I don’t mean that unkindly – she can’t help it. We’re all immensely patient with her, I promise you. But she’s a great one for causes and Charlie found her a lot of simple jobs to do. Val’s a political animal. She thinks the future lies with animal rights and she’s furthering her own agenda, or whatever it is they say nowadays. I can just see her as Chair of the District Council in years to come – assuming she learns to be a bit more conciliatory first. At the moment, she’s
intent on alienating some very influential people, which isn’t too sensible.’

Den made rapid notes. ‘And Polly Spence?’

‘Val’s poodle,’ came the prompt reply, followed by a half-serious hand to her mouth, eyes wide with self-reproach. ‘Oh, no, that’s putting it too strongly. Polly has time on her hands and a good heart. She needs a banner to march behind, and Charlie supplied it. I like Polly the best of them all, taken all round. She’s also an artist of sorts, which endears her to me. Not that she’s got much to show for it.’

‘What does she do for a living?’

‘I think she works as a receptionist at the Dartmoor Hotel. But she fancies herself as a potter, and has a stand at craft fairs from time to time. Some of her things are rather interesting.’

Den sat back in the expensive easy chair and assembled his thoughts. Garrulous as the woman was being, he had no sense of getting close to the kernel of truth that would pin down the killer of Charlie Gratton. It all felt like background, an intriguing picture of an interesting collection of people; but nothing about them pointed towards a vicious murder. ‘Charlie,’ he prompted. ‘How did these people feel about Charlie?’

‘They worshipped him,’ came the ready response. ‘That’s not a very Quakerly way of putting it, I suppose. They took their lead
from him, they believed in him. He was very charismatic, you know.’

Den sucked the end of his pencil and looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Charismatic,’ he repeated, remembering that Alexis had said the same thing. But he also remembered the protester he’d seen on the day Nina died. Thin, with pale skin and gingery colouring, something very earnest in his demeanour; Den had gained an impression of a young man with a mission, a persona probably adopted as an unconscious strategy to mask an immaturity or lack of confidence that went very deep.
Charismatic
didn’t ring true, somehow.

But Dorothy stuck to her point. ‘Definitely,’ she insisted.

Den let it go and moved on. ‘So you wouldn’t say that any of the Quakers disliked him?’

‘That’s not what I said,’ she rebuked him. ‘You only asked me about Miriam, Val and Polly. There’s a lot more to the Meeting than those three.’

‘Of course.’ He shook his head, impatient with himself. ‘I was forgetting Bartholomew White.’

‘You were forgetting the Aspens,’ she said severely. ‘And that’s something you must not do.’

‘Ah!’ Den emitted a short syllable of surprise. ‘But I’ve already interviewed them.’

‘And you think they were both as fond of Charlie as everyone else, do you? You must be
a very poor judge of character if that’s the case.’

Den lifted his chin, hanging on to his dignity as best he could. The careful words came slowly. ‘I merely meant that I have no need to ask
you
about them, because I’ve seen for myself. But if you think there’s anything I should know, I’d appreciate hearing it.’

‘Clive loathed Charlie,’ she said simply. ‘He made no secret of it, either. He thought Charlie was giving Quakerism a bad name. And he didn’t – doesn’t – like Alexis very much, either.’

‘How well does he know her?’

‘Enough to disapprove of her. I haven’t quite worked out what he has against her. It might be straightforward jealousy.’

He cocked his head to one side invitingly. ‘Jealousy?’

‘Of her easy life. There’s a blitheness about the Cattermoles that annoys Clive. He has known hard times. He thinks that’s done his soul good, taught him that life is meant to be a struggle. When he sees people who are congenitally happy, with money and health and lots of friends, he gets very agitated. He can’t work it out, and looks for something below the surface – evidence that all happiness has been bought at a price.’

‘You make him sound almost … well,
disturbed.
’

‘He didn’t tell you about his breakdown, then?’ 

Den reluctantly shook his head. ‘I don’t suppose he thought it was relevant.’

‘It probably isn’t,’ she agreed. ‘But it’s left him with an exaggerated respect for the psychiatric profession. Therapists, counsellors, shrinks – he believes they can do no wrong. And he fancies himself as an amateur practitioner. He reads a lot of books on the subject. Research papers.’

‘What is it they say about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing?’ Den said thoughtfully.

‘Exactly.’ She sat back in her chair and smiled. ‘I must say I never thought you’d come to anything. You were a truly terrible piano pupil, you know.’

‘I thought you couldn’t remember me.’

‘Well now I do. Little Denholm Cooper. Your legs were unnaturally long, even then. I don’t think there’s anything more I can tell you now. I’m not sure I’ve been of much help.’

‘Did
you
like Charlie, Mrs Mansfield?’

The hesitation spoke volumes. ‘I found him very
entertaining
,’ she said at last. ‘And probably quite a useful irritant to the more pompous of our citizens. But I suppose I have to be honest. No, I didn’t really like him. There was something volatile about him, something unsettling. I could never really believe he had the same blood as Hannah and Bill. But he had a rocky childhood, what with his mother dying and his brother
running off. I did my best to give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s the Quaker way, you know.’

‘Yes, I know. You always look for the best in people. Clive told me.’

‘And if anyone knows the finer points of Quaker faith and practice, it’s definitely Clive,’ she said, with a wry sigh.

Den spent Friday evening in his flat only a couple of streets away from the police station, curled up on his comfortable settee with Lilah. She had delegated the afternoon milking to her brother Roddy, who was at sixth form college, and tended to regard farmwork as beneath his dignity. The compromise Lilah had reached with him was that he would take over for two or three afternoons a month, ‘just to keep his hand in’. He had a friend, Jeremy, who was romantic about farming and very much enjoyed taking part once in a while, as well.

The herd had changed considerably in the year since Lilah had taken over. Smaller in size, it concentrated on the speciality market for 
creamy Jersey milk. While the nation’s dairy farms seemed obsessed with the high-
quantity-low
-fat Friesian stuff, the Beardons stuck with the old-fashioned bad-for-your-heart product. ‘The tide will turn again, you see,’ Lilah insisted. ‘I haven’t noticed the rate of heart attacks coming down since people changed to milk without any cream on it.’

But twice-daily milking was a straitjacket from which there was no escape. It was Lilah’s first thought when she woke up, and the first consideration when she tried to arrange any sort of social life. Even though she had Amos and Roddy as back-up, the real onus of responsibility fell squarely onto her shoulders.

‘How well do you know the Cattermoles, really?’ Den had just asked her. She was considering her reply.

‘Not terribly well now,’ she concluded. ‘Martha was a brilliant teacher, and she and I would meet after school sometimes to talk about books. When I was doing A-level, she gave me a bit of extra tuition at her house, in return for babysitting the boys now and then. But that was ages ago, and I’ve only seen her three or four times a year since then.’

‘They’re not
her
boys,’ Den objected, needing to keep the convoluted facts of the High Copse family straight in his mind. He pulled her head
onto his shoulder, and wrapped a long arm round her. The ruby ring on her left hand gleamed at him.

‘No,’ Lilah agreed. ‘But Nina used to go off and leave them. Alexis wasn’t there very much in those days – she was doing some sort of public relations course in Liverpool, I think, which lasted a couple of years. It was just after the old mother died. Martha wasn’t married then, and she was off courting with Richmond. It’s a fabulous house. I loved going there.’ She twisted her face to look at him, and grinned. ‘It was always an adventure.’

‘I only saw the kitchen and that hideous new shed. What’s so great about it?’

‘There’s a secret passage, for one thing. It goes from Martha’s room up to the attic, up a tiny little staircase with a hidden door. I think it’s Elizabethan. The boys are lucky to have such a place to live. They’ve had a much freer life than most kids get these days.’ They both fell silent for a moment, thinking about country children and their relative freedom. Their favourite topic of conversation in recent weeks had been where they would live when they married, and how many children they’d have.

‘They don’t seem to take much care of it,’ Den commented lazily. ‘It was full of cobwebs and dust.’ 

‘It always was like that, although they used to have a cleaning woman. Remember Hetty Taplow, from our village?’

Den wrinkled his brow, but could not honestly say he did. Lilah carried on. ‘She works in the pub. Has done for years. She also used to do a bit of housework at High Copse. I don’t think she does any more.’

‘Evidently not, I’d say.’

‘Funny she wasn’t at Nina’s funeral, come to think of it. Hetty always loves a funeral. Perhaps she didn’t approve of the way they were doing it.’

Den had little interest in Hetty; it was the Cattermoles who intrigued him. ‘Did you know Nina?’ he asked.

‘Not really. To be honest I was a bit in awe of her. Very forceful. I sometimes suspected that Alexis didn’t really like her, even though they were always joking around when they were together. People keep saying now how close those two were – but it never felt like that to me.’

‘Did you know,’ he began hesitantly, unwilling to gossip, ‘that Nina, Martha and Alexis have three different fathers?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said readily. ‘Everybody knows that. Thanks to Hetty, probably. My mum was very impressed. Well, you know what she’s like. She always wanted to be friends with the old woman – Eliza Cattermole – but she never got
the chance. You don’t think
that’s
got anything to do with what happened to Charlie, do you? It couldn’t possibly have.’

He shook his head slowly. ‘Hard to imagine how it could,’ he agreed. ‘Unless one of the fathers turned up and took a dislike to Charlie. Say it was Alexis’s father. Conservative with a capital
C
. When he realised she was having it off with a Quaker animal rights activist, he saw red and ran him down with his horse.’

‘No,’ Lilah judged. ‘I don’t see it, somehow. Implausible, Constable.’ She adopted the tight-lipped wooden look that Den often used when imitating his Inspector.

‘You’re right,’ he admitted, and shifted slightly, so as to reach her mouth for a long kiss.

With a small sigh, he tried to relinquish his duties as a criminal investigator. They were definitely at odds with his desire to spend a lazy, sensual evening with his beloved. He half-wished he hadn’t broached the subject of the Cattermoles in the first place. He half-wished he was in some other line of work entirely. When pursuing a murder inquiry, you had to notice every detail. You had to try and make connections and understand what motivated people. You had to be suspicious and persistent and rude and intrusive. But he had first come together with Lilah during the investigation into her father’s
murder, and the habit of discussing a case with her had been formed from the start. Ten minutes later, his questions resumed.

‘What about Charlie Gratton, then? Had you ever come across him?’

‘Hardly at all,’ she responded willingly. ‘Too far away. Us varming volk don’t get out much, remember. High Copse is the furthest afield I ventured for a long time. The Grattons are another three or four miles from there. I knew they were Quakers, and that Charlie was anti-hunt – and that’s only because I’d seen him in the paper. My dad would have said Charlie was fouling his own nest, making such a commotion so close to home. I’d think he must have made quite a lot of enemies.’

‘Which is where I come in. Trying to identify these enemies isn’t going to be easy.’ He sighed, and added, ‘Nasty way to die. You should have seen the look on his face, what was visible of it. Terrified.’

‘Poor chap. Someone definitely rode a horse over him, then?’

‘It still isn’t certain how deliberate it was. Forensics are arguing over it. But even if it wasn’t premeditated murder, we’ve got someone failing to report a fatal accident, which is serious enough to warrant a few days of our time. We’re hoping they’ll have settled the main facts by tomorrow, anyway.’

‘So we won’t think about it any more now. Okay?’ She glanced out of the window. ‘Looks like rain again.’

‘Course it does. It’s Easter next weekend. It always rains at Easter – especially Good Friday. It’s getting in some practice.’

‘Maybe we should emigrate? That would settle the argument about where we’re going to live, once and for all. We could run an ostrich farm in Swaziland.’

‘I think I’d rather teach wind surfing in Barbados. Once I’ve learnt how to do it myself, of course.’

‘No, no. There have to be some animals involved. I know – we’ll breed llamas in Peru.’

‘Scuba diving off Casablanca.’

She won the fight by tickling him in the one place that always got results.

In their modest cottage at the very end of the village street, Hannah and Bill Gratton were struggling to maintain a semblance of normality. Bill sat where he always sat, in a big old high-backed chair beside the fireplace. He had a table close by, on which were assembled three or four books, a plastic bottle of pills, a fifty-year-old Parker fountain pen and a notepad. He had suffered a slight stroke the previous year, affecting the right side of his body, and was determined to relearn
the copperplate script for which he had always been well known.

Hannah was polishing the dining table with beeswax, having already vacuumed and dusted the room thoroughly. Three cards of condolence stood on the mantelpiece, delivered by hand at the first news of Charlie’s death. Bill glanced at them repeatedly. He had not wanted his sister to display them, but she had insisted, saying that the people who sent them would look for them when they came to visit – which they inevitably would through the coming days.

They would have spoken very little to each other, even without Bill’s stroke. After living together for most of their lives, there didn’t seem to be much to say, even in the face of such a calamity.
Or perhaps
, thought Hannah,
we just haven’t the courage to say what we’re thinking.

She was battling hard to repress the growing feeling of resentment against Bill and his son. It wasn’t fair of her – nobody could blame Bill for Charlie’s death. But the fact remained that, along with Charlie, very nearly everything that Hannah lived for had disappeared. It was difficult not to take it as a personal affront – a deliberate snatching away of the ground beneath her feet. She knew, of course, what people thought of her. They believed that she had clung to her nephew tighter than many a mother would have done.
Still living there in his thirties, with no proper job and everything done for him – many people made no effort to conceal their disapproval. ‘That lad should have left home years ago,’ they muttered. ‘Tied to Hannah’s apron strings, even if she isn’t his real mother.’ Only Hannah and Bill knew that it wasn’t like that at all. Only they understood that they had no choice but to keep him with them as they did. Hannah and Bill had known that it would not be a good thing for Charlie to move in with Alexis and form a permanent relationship with her.
At least
, their eyes had said, as they’d looked at each other that evening when the girl from the police had brought the news –
a
t least now we don’t have to worry about that.