The Hangman's Row Enquiry (12 page)

He took out a small box, opened it and extracted an exquisite sapphire and diamond ring. It was like a small regal crown, released into the light, sparkling as if it was brand-new. He smiled, muttered that the sapphire would match her eyes, and slipped it into his pyjama jacket pocket. Then he shut the safe door, straightened the portrait, and silently retraced his steps to his bedroom.

When Beattie knocked at his door before bringing in his early morning tea, he was able to give a convincing performance of a man waking up for the first time, yawning and rubbing his eyes.

“Market day, Mr. Theo,” she said. “Up we get as soon as we’ve finished our tea. I need to get breakfast out of the way, then a basketful of ironing, quick lunch and then off on the bus. Anything you particularly fancy from the market? They had some lovely ripe peaches last week.”

Then why didn’t you buy them last week, Theo said to himself, but he answered that peaches would be just the thing. Perhaps she could look for strawberries, too, and then he could have a fruity pudding tonight.

The morning went as always for Theo. He enjoyed his breakfast of bacon and fresh mushrooms gathered by Rose’s husband David, then settled in his study with the
Times
crossword. Bouyed up by the thought of Rose coming after lunch, he hummed to himself as he consulted a pile of dictionaries and
Roget’s Thesaurus
at his elbow. He prided himself on being able to complete the crossword before dinner, and as Rose was unfortunately no help at all with the clues, he would have only this morning and an hour or so after tea to finish it today.

 

GUS WALKED BRISKLY along the terrace and stopped at the Budd’s house. He had tried to find Rose several times yesterday, but there had been no one at home. It would be bad luck if they had gone away on holiday! But no, someone was coming to the door. It was David Budd, and he smiled in a friendly way at Gus.

“Mr. Halfhide? Rose told me you’d met. Is there anything we can help you with? Come on in. We’re in our usual squalid muddle, but that’s children for you. Rose!” he shouted. “Here’s Mr. Halfhide!”

David was a good-looking thirty-year-old, his face tanned by an outdoor life, and with not an ounce of spare flesh on him. He had done well at school and set out to be an architect. But the years of study needed to qualify were too daunting for him, and in any case, he had always wanted to be a farmer like his maternal grandfather. Agricultural college had proved ideal, and he had enjoyed his time there. In fact, it was there he met Rose. It had been love at first sight for both of them, and in due course they were married.

There was no money for David to buy a farm, and so he had ended up in Barrington, working on the Roussel estate. It suited him well, apart from having to deal with Miss Beatty. But he kept well away from her, and apart from paying lip service to some of her more bizarre instructions, like keeping a piglet in an old rabbit hutch in the empty stable, he had the management of the land more or less to himself.

Even the piglet project was dropped when, as David had tried to warn her, the piglet grew too big for the hutch.

“What can we do for you, Mr. Halfhide?” Rose said, clattering down the stairs in lilac-coloured plastic clogs.

“Please, do call me Gus.”

“Okay—and I’m Rose and he’s David. And little snot-nose there is Simon.”

“I won’t take up much of your time,” promised Gus, as they insisted they should all sit down and have a coffee.

David nodded. “I do have to get going very soon,” he said. “Otherwise old gimlet-eyes at the Hall will be giving me a lecture on punctuality.”

“It’s about Miss Beatty that I’ve come,” Gus explained. “Beattie and Theo, that is. My good friend Deirdre Bloxham is an old flame of Theo, and would very much like to chat about old times with him. Try to bring a bit of outside interest into his life, she says. She arranged to call on him, but Miss Beatty made several excuses and Deirdre had to go away without seeing him. Since then, she has been unable to get through to the Hall. The phone rings, but as soon as someone answers it their end, it goes dead.”

“We could certainly get the telephone engineer to look at it,” David said sympathetically. He felt permanently sorry for his boss, though privately thought the man was not that old, and should stand up to the Beattie woman.

Gus shook his head. “Nothing wrong with the phone, I’m sure of that,” he said. “It’s being monitored by Beattie Beatty. You can hear her breathing.”

“So how can we help?” Rose said, lifting Simon onto her lap and feeding him with a soggy biscuit dipped into her coffee.

Gus explained the plan. Deirdre would arrive at the Hall immediately after Beattie had been seen by Ivy boarding the bus to town. Rose would admit Deirdre directly to the drawing room where Theo would be sitting waiting for his first game of Scrabble.

Then Rose would make herself scarce, leaving the two old friends alone together.

Rose went very pink and clapped her hands like a little girl. “What a lovely surprise!” she said. “He’ll be so excited to see her. They’ll have a good two hours. I can keep an eye out for other visitors, or raise the drawbridge if, heaven forefend, Miss Beatty returns on the early bus. Which, to my knowledge, she never has.”

Gus was alarmed. “I didn’t know there was an earlier bus,” he said.

“Just runs in the summer,” said David. “It comes back an hour after they’ve got there, so there’s hardly anybody on it.”

They talked a bit more about how they could make the arrangements foolproof, and then Gus got up to go. “It is so kind of you both,” he said.

“Theo’s a sweetie,” Rose said. “We’d do anything to brighten his life. I’m always hoping that one day he’ll get so angry with Miss Beatty that he’ll send her packing and live a more normal life. There’s nothing wrong with him, you know. Fit as a fiddle, and all his marbles in place.”

“I hear he was quite a ladies’ man in his youth?” Gus said, as he stepped outside into the sunshine.

“Still is!” said David. “Rose has to keep him at bay sometimes, don’t you, duckie?”

Rose didn’t answer, but laughed so much that Simon bounced off her lap and began to yell. She followed the men into the garden, and assured Gus that all would go smoothly. “If it works,” she said, “we can make it a regular assignation. One in the eye for old Beattie. I reckon she has hopes of a Roussel ring on her finger one of these days.”

“No!” said Gus. “That must be prevented at all costs.”

“And she’s not the only one,” said David, grinning. “Somone approaching down the lane has had similar ideas.”

Gus turned his head. It was Miriam Blake, still in her shop overalls and smiling broadly at the sight of her new neighbour. The three stood in the Budds’ garden and said hello as she passed.

“She’s a new woman,” whispered Rose, and David nodded. “Must’ve found the nest egg,” he said.

“Sshh!” Rose waved a hand to Gus and disappeared into the house, and David said he was going Gus’s way and would accompany him the few yards to his end of the terrace to save him from marauding spinsters who were more than likely lying in wait for him.

IVY WALKED STEADILY along the street from Springfields down to the shop, where she purchased a packet of Polo mints and said she was quite puffed out, and would sit for a while on the Hon. John Roussel memorial seat outside.

After about ten minutes, she was delighted to see a familiar figure approaching briskly from Hangman’s Row into the High Street, and then along to the bus stop outside the shop.

Beattie Beatty recognised Ivy, and managed a gruff “Good morning,” then turned and looked along the street in the direction of the oncoming bus. She was cutting it a bit fine, thought Ivy, as the bus stopped and Beattie climbed aboard. Thank goodness she made it, else all our plans . . .

At this point, to her horror, Miss Beatty reappeared at the bus door and came rapidly down the steps into the street! She rushed across the pavement, into the shop, and disappeared. Ivy thought fast. Should she phone Gus straightaway? She prayed to God that she had mastered the mobile phone in her handbag.

But no, after only a few seconds, Beattie rushed out of the shop and clambered clumsily back into the bus, to be greeted by cheers from the passengers already seated. As Ivy stared, she saw Beattie find a seat next to the window and, scarlet-faced, mop her brow with a tissue wrestled from a new packet.

So, she forgot to put a hankie in her pocket, Ivy guessed as the bus moved away. Just like her to keep everybody waiting. Now, her next job was to ring Gus and give him the all clear. She took the frighteningly small mobile phone from her bag, and switched it on. So far so good! She had memorised his number and carefully pressed the buttons. With each button, the thing beeped at her. She supposed that was to tell her she’d pressed it hard enough. What next? She put it to her ear, but there was no ringing tone. She stared at it again.

“You have to press the green telephone, Miss Beasley,” a girl’s voice said. Ivy looked up in surprise and saw Katya beaming at her.

“Good heavens, girl!” Ivy said. “Just in time to rescue me!” She pressed, and listened again. Now it was ringing, and then Gus’s familiar tones. “All clear,” she said, as arranged. Nothing more. He said nothing in reply, and then there was the dialling tone. “Oh my,” she said, breathing fast and patting her chest to quieten her thudding heart, “I feel just like Mata Hari.”

“Are you all right?” Katya said, looking worried. “Can I get you glass of water?”

“No, no. I’m fine, my dear,” Ivy said, and indeed, she was beginning to feel quite chirpy at the idea of having completed this part in the plot successfully. She stood up, and Katya said she would come back to Springfields with her. It was her afternoon off, but she had nothing planned.

“Well, in that case,” said Ivy, “we don’t want to go back to the tender loving care of Miss Pinkney, do we? I shall take you for a walk, not too far, and show you something really interesting and historic. Come along now.” She refused to hold Katya’s arm, and they set off in the opposite direction from Springfields, past the school and on towards the church.

 

GUS IMMEDIATELY DIALLED Deirdre, and with a loud whoop of delight she said she would set off at once. He replaced the phone and went to the window, where he intended to keep vigil for the next two hours. After no more than five minutes, he saw Deirdre’s swish car go by, and saw her gaily waving as she passed his house. He hoped she would be discreet. In his long experience of working undercover, he knew they must be alert to the unexpected. If it
could
happen, then it very likely
would
happen. Maybe not this time, but if they repeated the exercise, it would be important not to get careless.

Deirdre thought how lovely the Hall looked, as she drove up to the grand front and then round to the stable yard at the back. Gus had thought it a good idea not to park so obviously outside the front door, but Deirdre had argued that if there was a risk of Beattie returning early she could make a quicker getaway from the front. Gus had insisted, and so she agreed.

As she turned off the engine and began to open the door, she stopped. She was doing nothing wrong! All this skulduggery was quite ridiculous. There was absolutely no reason why she should not visit her old friend. If Miss Beatty had gone to market, so what? Either she would be admitted by Theo, or by Rose Budd in the house with him as usual. It was a perfectly normal course of events.

No it wasn’t. Her commonsense reasserted itself. There was a primary reason for her visiting Theo. It was to find out as much as she could from him about the Blakes, and Miriam in particular. A reunion with an old lover was a bonus. It would be important, she knew Gus and Ivy would both argue this, to make it possible to visit Theo more than once, and if the old dragon so much as suspected, let alone found Deirdre ensconced with Theo, Beattie would find a way of putting a final stop to it.

Why did she shiver at this thought? Deirdre shook herself and made for the kitchen door, which was now standing open with a smiling Rose welcoming her in.

 

KATYA WALKED BESIDE Ivy, feeling somehow relaxed for the first time since she had been working at Springfields. She was not unhappy there, and was well aware how lucky she had been to find work so soon after arriving in England. Her parents back in Poland were pleased and proud, and she received a stream of letters and cards from her large family back home. But still she had not relaxed. She could not understand much of what was said to her, and she still found her English classes hard going.

But now, strolling along with this funny, sharp old woman, she began to look about her, see how lovely the trees and flowers were, breathe in the air which, compared to the industrial town she had come from, was like champagne. At least, she supposed it was. She had never drunk champagne, though that nice Mr. Halfhide had promised her a glass very soon.