The Greenstone Grail (30 page)

Later that afternoon, Inspector Pobjoy dropped in. Seeing him, Annie remembered the journalist from the
Indy
who had made a joke about village murders solved by old ladies. Only in this case, it was the old lady who was dead.

‘How are your investigations progressing?’ she asked politely.

The inspector was leafing through a book. In itself, this was not unusual; after all, it was a bookshop. But Annie was increasingly conscious that many of her customers had only a superficial interest in buying books.

In so far as he allowed himself normal expressions, Pobjoy looked startled at being questioned so directly. ‘There is … progress,’ he said cagily. ‘Have you heard anything that might have a bearing on the case?’

‘No,’ Annie said baldly, throwing in a smile for good measure. She had had two or three glasses of wine with lunch and was feeling slightly light-headed. ‘I heard you released Dave Bagot. I must say, I don’t think pushing his grandmother-in-law into the river is quite his style.’

‘The evidence is inconclusive.’

‘D’you really believe it was murder?’ Annie persisted. ‘Is there any conclusive evidence for that?’

‘Let’s say – there are a few pointers,’ he amended. And, on an impulse: ‘We received an anonymous letter stating very specifically that Mrs Carlow’s death wasn’t natural. Have you any idea who might have sent it?’

‘An anonymous letter … good God, no.’ Annie was
genuinely taken aback. Whatever she had been expecting, it wasn’t that. ‘Don’t you think it could have been just someone out to make trouble?’

‘It’s always a possibility. After all, there has been trouble … for Dave Bagot, to start with.’ He was feeling his way, but her reaction wasn’t what he’d anticipated.

‘You mean, I hit him over the head with a saucepan.’ She grinned mischievously. ‘I daresay that counts as trouble.’

‘I didn’t know that.’ His face lightened with the beginnings of a smile. ‘I heard there was a scene and you were involved, but not … um … the details. Good for you. Of course, we don’t like to encourage the public to resort to violence, but …’

‘Of course.’ For a moment, there was a spark of camaraderie between them. I really mustn’t drink at lunchtime, Annie thought.

She went on: ‘Incidentally, there’s a friend of mine who thinks he may have known one of your relatives. Bartlemy Goodman. He lives out at Thornyhill, in the woods. I don’t suppose you’ve been to see him.’

‘Which of my relatives did he meet?’ His manner was cooling down again.

‘Well,’ Annie said, pulling herself together, ‘it wasn’t Bartlemy, of course, he’s not old enough. It would have been – his father, and your grandfather, I think he said. In the war. It could be coincidence – but Pobjoy isn’t a common name, is it?’

He gave a noncommittal grunt.

‘Did you hate it when you were a boy?’ Annie asked gently.

He shrugged. ‘What’s in a name? And – for the record – I ask the questions.’

This time, he left without buying a book.

The inspector interviewed Hazel in the presence of her mother, as required by law, with Sergeant Hale in the background for good measure. Hazel, almost completely hidden behind the tangle of her hair, was at her quietest. She felt both overawed by the presence of the police and resentful of that awe, nagged by guilt about her father (which she also resented), and frightened about the authorship of the letter. But writing a letter wasn’t a crime (was it?), and anyhow, they had no way of finding out it was her.

Pobjoy placed the letter on the table in front of her. ‘Did you write this?’

Lily Bagot stared at it in bewilderment. ‘Of course she didn’t. She would never do such a thing. I can’t think why you’re making this fuss over Great-grandma’s death – it was just an accident.’

‘I thought she was your
grandmother
?’ The inspector seized on the discrepancy immediately.

‘Yes. Sorry. My grandmother, Hazel’s great-grandmother …’ Lily pressed a hand to her forehead in an effort to sort out the muddle of her thoughts. ‘I’m getting mixed up. Anyway, whoever wrote that letter, it wasn’t Hazel. And it’s a lie.’

‘Please let your daughter answer for herself.’

Hazel sat with her lips clamped together, lest a stray word escape and incriminate her. She wished there was a tree at hand for her to climb.

‘Did you write this letter?’

She allowed herself a quick shake of the head. ‘Tell him no,’ Lily prompted, but Hazel still didn’t speak.

‘Our experts say this is the handwriting of a child.’

There was an appreciable pause. ‘I’m not a child,’ Hazel said.

‘No crime has been committed as yet,’ the inspector pursued.
‘But the letter-writer could be found guilty of wasting police time, if she has some information about Mrs Carlow’s death which she is deliberately withholding.’

‘I told you, my daughter didn’t write –’

‘Please, Mrs Bagot. Hazel,
do
you know something?’

‘Not really.’ How could she tell him what she knew? He’d laugh in her face, which would be worse than threats. ‘I know it wasn’t an accident, that’s all. She went to the attic and locked herself in and never came out. I’d have heard her: my room’s underneath. I always heard her before.’

‘So you wrote the letter?’

‘Mm.’ It was almost an admission.

‘But she must have come out of the attic,’ Pobjoy said carefully, ‘in order to get to the river.’

Hazel relapsed into silence.

‘Would you like something to drink?’

‘Bacardi and coke.’ She had never had one, but it sounded like a good idea.

‘Just coke,’ said Pobjoy, nodding at Sergeant Hale. There was coke in the kitchen. The sergeant brought it to her, poured it into a glass.

‘She must have left the attic,’ the inspector reiterated, ‘to get into the river.’

Hazel mumbled something, into the coke.

‘What?’

‘The basin was broken.’

‘Yes,’ said Pobjoy. ‘There was a broken basin in the attic. Are you saying – she might have been drowned in the basin, not the river?’

Hazel gave a half-nod. It’s true, she thought. A bit of the truth. The basin, and the river. He would never manage the whole truth.

Lily, like the inspector, was following the clue in a different
direction. ‘That’s nonsense. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. You’re bullying her …’

‘We can check the broken shards for fingerprints,’ Pobjoy was saying. Instinct told him they were onto something, though he wasn’t sure what. As the girl had said, her room was underneath the attic. She must have overheard an argument – a struggle – not knowing what it meant, not till it was too late, afraid to accuse someone close to her. ‘Who else had a key to the attic?’

‘Nobody,’ Lily said. ‘My grandmother took the only key.’

‘There may have been a copy you didn’t know about – in your husband’s possession, for instance.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Lily persisted. ‘Gran came to stay here when – when my husband moved out. She took the key then. It was unplanned. Dave couldn’t have known she would do that – he had no idea he might need a copy made. If – if he had meant to hurt her, which he didn’t.’

‘They didn’t get along, did they?’ said Pobjoy. Her argument had been garbled, but he took the point. Every time he thought a clue was leading him somewhere, the trail petered out. Beneath his surface inscrutability, he was annoyed.

‘Gran didn’t get along with most people,’ Lily said. ‘She was – she could be a difficult person.’

‘
Why
did she take the attic key?’ Pobjoy demanded. ‘What did she want to do there?’

Lily merely looked baffled, but he saw the sudden tension in Hazel’s expression, behind the disorder of her hair.

‘She liked her privacy,’ Lily said, though she didn’t look convinced about it. ‘She wanted a place to be … alone.’

‘What do you think?’ he asked Hazel.

Hazel achieved a gesture between a twitch and a shrug which got the interrogation exactly nowhere.

‘I know you’re keeping something from me,’ Pobjoy said
in what was, for him, a gentle manner. ‘Why did you write the letter? Did you want justice for your great-grandmother? Or revenge on her killer?’

Hazel was looking down at her hands. This time, she didn’t even manage a gesture.

‘Who are you protecting?’

He didn’t expect an answer, but he got one, in the suddenly-deep voice that she used when she was nervous or upset. ‘Nobody.’

‘Then why won’t you tell me what you know?’

She lifted her head, pushing her hair aside, and for the first time she met his eyes. ‘You wouldn’t believe me,’ she said.

Rowena had employed Eric to do a few odd jobs for her in the shop in Chizzledown that week. He had never seen a screwdriver and thought a hammer was an antiquated religious symbol, but, as always, he learnt fast, and his strength matched his size, making him invaluable when it came to heavy lifting. Two young men arriving with a vanload of furniture Rowena had bought at auction found themselves effortlessly upstaged by a giant of a man who looked like a cross between a gipsy and a tramp, spoke bad English, and had to be at least twice their age (the actual arithmetic they would have found rather hard to take). But somehow, Rowena noticed, Eric always seemed to win friends. After much moving of furniture, coffee and sandwiches the youths evidently decided in favour of Eric’s eccentricities. With Rowena, he spent his spare time scanning old books or poring over pictures of the cup. ‘Of course you cannot date,’ he explained. ‘
Sangreal
from my world. Time in my world different from yours. Stone different, too.’

He’s a little barmy, Rowena thought. But it’s an explanation – of sorts. She knew nothing of particle physics but
everyone was aware that alternative universes were supposed to be a scientific fact. And there was his evident belief in magic as if it were a natural form of energy, like radiation or kinetics. All nonsense, of course: she knew it was nonsense, her father and grandfather would have known it was nonsense. But then, her father and grandfather would have thought the mobile phone and the microchip nonsense, and she herself had always dismissed the legends surrounding the cup of the Thorns – until lately.

‘We need to arrange for you to see the Grail,’ she told Eric, remembering Annie’s reaction to the cup – or at least, what she assumed was a reaction to the cup. If he saw it, if he touched it, there might be a sign. She would
know
.

She called Julian Epstein, but the looming court case had made Sotheby’s wary and unwilling to cut her any more slack.

On the Friday, Dieter Von Humboldt came into the shop again.

‘Have some tea,’ said Rowena, allowing a trace of brisk friendliness to colour her approach. ‘Been hoping for a chance to talk to you.’

‘So you have been thinking about my proposition?’

‘Ran into that chap Birnbaum the other day. Seems determined to get his pound of flesh – or pound of something, anyway. Says he wants justice, not money. Think it was justice.’ She led him into the back room and offered him a chair.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you want the cup, I want money, he wants justice. It will be interesting trying to work out a three-way split.’

‘That emotional stuff about the death of his family will go down well with the court,’ Rowena said, watching Von Humboldt narrowly. ‘I’m just the relic of an old family – outmoded class system and all that – you’re the grandson of
a Nazi. Sorry to be blunt, but there it is. He’ll get the sympathy vote.’

‘I felt your rush into legal action was – a little hasty.’ She could sense he was pleased at what he thought of as her weakening, but he held back, waiting for her to put her cards on the table. Like all frank, matter-of-fact people who rarely choose to be devious, Rowena was very good at it when she did. She had no intention of showing her hand. Let him guess – and guess wrong.

‘I was thinking of a meeting,’ she said. ‘Informal. Couple of witnesses but no lawyers. Got to have the right location. Birnbaum’s impressed by the history of the cup, so let’s use it. Family home’s been sold years ago, but I know the chap who owns it. He’d let us meet there. Make Birnbaum feel he’s trying to destroy a tradition. He won’t want that. He’s the romantic type.’

‘That would benefit you,’ Von Humboldt pointed out, ‘but not me.’

‘We’d have to deal on the side. He won’t give an inch to you; he might to me.’

‘You are unscrupulous,’ the Austrian said. He sounded slightly shocked.

‘The cup belongs to my family. I want something out of this.’

‘Something … I see. Yet you said all you wanted was the cup itself.’ Von Humboldt accepted a mug of tea, but didn’t drink.

‘As things stand, not much chance of that. Could have fought you in the courts, harder with Birnbaum. For him, we need to deal out of court.’

‘And with Birnbaum out of the way, you will return to legal means to fight me?’

She permitted herself a quick, tight grin. ‘Nice one. No: if
we make a bargain, that’s it. Not suggesting anything in a hurry, though. Just a meeting to start the ball rolling. Doesn’t commit anyone to anything, does it? Wasn’t that what you wanted?’