Enter Pale Death Page 10

  Her pre-judgement of the room allocated to her had been equally unjust, she recognised as she settled in. It was spacious enough for a couple and equipped with two single beds. The furnishings and the linen were all of excellent quality and the water came boiling out of the taps in the bathroom next door. She kicked off her laced shoes and removed the heavy spectacles that distorted her vision. Though longing to apply a slather of cold cream to her makeup, she resisted the urge, planning to make a further foray into the lobby when the rush had abated. She hung up the jacket of her heather-mix Hebe suit and, with relief, took out of her brassière the layer of padding that boosted her lissom 34 inches to 44 inches of imposing bosom. She flopped down onto one of the beds, relishing a moment to spend with the book she’d bought half an hour before. She’d been drawn by the title: Midsummer Masquerade. It had seemed appropriate. She’d better read it and find out how this historical novel business was managed. How taxing could it be? Lily was full of confidence. She was able to write and she knew some history after all.

  Lily hadn’t counted on anyone but her Aunt Phyl actually being fascinated sufficiently by this stuff to want to initiate a conversation about it. Her cover story was meant to be plausible if questioned but so dull as to deflect interest in the first place. In extremis, she would have to call on her deafness or authorial modesty to wriggle free.

  She persevered for ten minutes. Ten tedious minutes of soulful sighs and side-slipping glances, fans and hearts a-flutter and—the last straw: “ ’Pon my soul, Mr. Ponsonby” and the book broke its spine on the wall opposite.

  Back to business. Lily went to reception and began to make notes. She’d overheard Fitzwilliam booking a table for four at one o’clock. Lily rang down to the desk and requested a lunch table for herself at 12:30. She would be already in position when his guests arrived and could always linger over coffee if she needed to prolong her surveillance. Joe was going to get his money’s worth. This Fitzwilliam was troubling her boss in a way that was a mystery to her. Not such a mystery to Joe, she had concluded, and wondered what he was deliberately hiding from her.

  NO WONDER AT all that Special Branch had been bored out of their skins keeping a watchful eye on this bird, Lily reckoned. His three guests were respectability itself. A Tory grandee with a finger in every financial pie in Westminster, his glum wife and, last to arrive, to make up the numbers, Lily guessed, a lady who by her looks could be no other than Fitzwilliam’s younger sister. Tall, slender, dark and fashionably though not showily dressed, she moved easily into her place in the group. After a loving exchange of kisses with her brother, she was presented to the other two. “You haven’t met my sister Margaret, who is in her other life Mrs. Hubert Hawkes? She’s so often travelling the world these days I don’t have a chance to see much of her.”

  Lily recognised the name of an English conductor about to perform in the forthcoming Promenade Concerts. Margaret, or Meggie, as her brother called her, proceeded to keep the table entertained with a flow of conversation that skilfully drew out the rather silent wife while flirting innocently with her elderly husband, Lily noticed. A useful sister for a man like Fitzwilliam.

  What was she to make of her target on this showing? Confident, amusing, attentive. She was not close enough to catch much of the conversation but he appeared to be exuding a happiness she had no way of accounting for. His happiness extended to the dull political pair and they appeared flattered and warmed by it. It had, for a brief moment, reached out and touched the dumpy, deaf old lady from the provinces he’d met in the lobby. As she watched, a young waiter allowed a fork to drop to the floor from the plate he was clearing. He stood, astonished to see Fitzwilliam leap to his feet, pick up the offending utensil and replace it on the plate with a wink and a grin. Next he’d be tap-dancing down Piccadilly. A man who was “on something”? He was definitely experiencing euphoria of some sort. In Lily’s experience there could be only one possible cause for such relentless jollity. Could she be right? Lily felt a sudden need for a second opinion.

  Otherwise, so uneventful was the luncheon party that Lily, who’d brought her notebook to the table in a defiantly eccentric gesture, found that between the soup and the dessert she’d sketched out the first chapter of her first anti-historical novel.

  Lily decided she’d had enough. If this man was hiding himself away, he had a strange way of going about it. Here he was hosting lunch in plain sight of London society, in the company of three unimpeachable people. Lily’s research had revealed he was not even lying about his name. Rowley and Fitzwilliam were his middle names. He had a perfect right to both of them. This was the simple device of a man in the public eye needing to avoid the attentions of a press who combed through guest lists these days and bribed hotel clerks to divulge the names of their famous clients. A single man, he probably had a club close by and chose to entertain mixed couples in the more relaxed atmosphere of a good hotel. Women generally did not appreciate the kind of hospitality on offer in the world of gentlemen’s clubs even in those ones who were prepared to acknowledge the existence of the other sex.

  Joe had sent her on a wild goose chase.

  She left the dining room the moment she’d finished her coffee. On her way out she paused to bother the maître d’hôtel with a fussy old-lady question. Her arthritic left knee had detected a draught at the table she’d just vacated. Could she be certain of a seat somewhere less exposed for dinner on Saturday night? When he politely referred to his plan, she bossily peered over his shoulder and pointed. “There I am!” She’d actually been taking in the information that Fitzwilliam was booked to have dinner discreetly at the far end of the room. “You’ve put me in the same place but there’s a much better one for me right here,” she said, indicating a table that had a strategically better outlook on the pair she needed to watch. “I should like to be there, well away from the door, if it’s no trouble. Oh, and could you possibly set a second place? I’m expecting a friend to join me.”

  The adjustments were duly made and Lily hobbled off to the lift. The Saturday night dinner was the only meal apart from today’s lunch that she’d heard her target making a booking for. She quite expected him to disappear into London for the rest of the time and she would not follow him. It was not in her brief and Joe had told her that his movements about town had been thoroughly vetted by the Branch. She was to stay at her post and report on whomever he met.

  The whole business pivoted on his single guest tomorrow night, Lily reckoned. It could be anyone from a visiting Head of a Nation to a lady on the end of a telephone. In the lift she took out her London diary to check whether there was something she’d missed, some special occasion or event that might have drawn him here on this date.

  Saturday the 24th of June, it said, Midsummer’s Day. New moon. Feast of St. John.

  Academic term’s end. Racing at Ascot.

  Lily’s romantic streak interpreted these dry facts with some licence. It must be the time of year. In the green depths of an English summer—that’s where they were poised. In that moment when young things found themselves set free from constraints of timetable and corset, their limbs and hearts suddenly open to the sun and new experiences. Nowadays, they jumped on a ferry and made off for Paris or Monte Carlo. In earlier times they’d have been gathering boughs in English woods and leaping bonfires to ward off evil spirits. St. John’s Eve was a time of mystery and fraught with delicious danger: witches walked abroad on mischief bent, egged on by sprites and goblins. Shakespeare had staged the battle between the King and the Queen of the Fairies this evening. Beltane, god of the Celts, chose Midsummer as his moment to pay court to the Great Goddess. Gods, humans and supernatural beings, all were possessed by the same joyous urge to celebrate the return of fertility. Even in the city, all unaware of the deeper meaning, school children still danced around maypoles in June, wearing white for Whitsuntide. With a wreath of lilac blossom on her head, Lily had done this herself in happily pagan East London as a child. Her playground games,
some only half understood, had crept into the city from the country and flourished like the yellow St. John’s Wort in the cracks in every causeway-side. Beneath her sophisticated, street-wise exterior, a Celtic undertow ran deep and unquestioned in her blood.

  There was something intoxicating and ancient about the very word “midsummer.” Lily found her mind, so recently alerted to an author’s sensibilities, supplying a following alliterative: “madness” or “mischief” or “malice.” She searched for a word less baleful and found none.

  CHAPTER 9

  Joe couldn’t repress a shout of laughter when Hunnyton drove up to collect him at the Garden House after breakfast on Friday morning. He walked around the dark red open-topped sports tourer expressing his approval of the motorcar and his admiration for the driver. Hunnyton was suitably dressed in waterproof cape, cloth cap with earflaps and tinted driving goggles.

  “Now who’s doing a Mister Toad?” Joe challenged. “Look at you! I’m afraid if I climb aboard you’ll drive me back a couple of decades. We’ll be bursting into the Edwardian age before you can say ‘H. G. Wells’!”

  Hunnyton shook his head. “Who needs a time machine? Besides—Edwardian? Pouf!—that’s just yesterday. No, we’re going back a few centuries. Disappearing down a tunnel of green gloom into an age where they still speak the language of Chaucer and think this young Shakespeare feller is a bit avant-garde with his expression.”

  “I shall be glad to have an interpreter aboard then. What is this vehicle?”

  “It’s a Lagonda M45. The poor man’s Bentley, they call them. Very popular with undergraduates seeking to impress. I thought we’d have something with a collapsible hood so we can enjoy the views and the fresh air. It’s a bit wide for the country lanes but it’s got tough wheels and tyres and we won’t have to blush for it when we park it on the forecourt of the Hall. If it were a horse, I’d say it was a well-shod, long-legged hunter with a deep chest, suitable mount for a gentleman.”

  He turned off the ignition and made to climb out.

  “No, no! Stay where you are,” Joe hurried to shout. “You look perfect at the wheel. It would take me at least ten miles to get the hang of it. And I did note the streams rushing down open gutters on both sides of Trumpington Street on the way here. They’d caught a Ford, two bikes and an old lady on a tricycle before breakfast, I noticed. Damn dangerous bit of plumbing! Can’t think why you allow that in a civilised city. The Romans would never have sanctioned it.” Chattering on, he threw his bags into the back and, hearing not even a token objection, settled into the passenger seat.

  Hunnyton looked sideways at Joe as they moved out into the almost empty King’s Parade, heading for the river crossing. He took in Joe’s lightweight Burbury trench coat worn with an officer’s swagger open over a summer tweed suit; he eyed his pale grey soft hat and his black shoes from Lobbs. “I think they’ll work out which one of us is from the Yard,” he commented.

  “I never see any point in disguising what I am when I’m working,” Joe said. “Some have even found it reassuring. If it scares the villains—good.”

  ALL ATTEMPTS AT conversation were abandoned as they zipped along the main road east leading to Newmarket and on to the North Sea coast. Joe noticed that, as with most good horsemen, Hunnyton also seemed to have a sure touch with a motorcar, and he wondered with envy why the skills had not been meted out to him in equal measure. Joe had been born on a Scottish Borders farm, and had grown up riding everything from pony to plough horse, but he was the first to admit that he was never in harmony with a car. His lack of enthusiasm to take the wheel seemed to have further confirmed Hunnyton’s picture of him as a high-ranking officer who expected to be driven everywhere, a Man of the Metropolis. He had no doubt that the superintendent was looking forward to watching him submerge his shining Oxfords in something unspeakable at the first opportunity.

  After a few miles of dodging dangerously around lorries and swaying haywains, they turned off the noisy road, taking an offshoot to the left. Hunnyton slowed down in response to the narrowed road and trundled along at twenty miles an hour. Perversely, now that conversation was possible, neither man chose to speak. Both were hushed by the silence of the thick green canopy of oak and beech enclosing the road over their heads, hypnotised by the rhythmic swish of the tree trunks as they passed through. It had the same effect on their senses as the architecture of a lofty cathedral, arousing a quiet awe.

  Hunnyton broke the silence. “It’ll be like this for miles now. We should get where we’re going before the horse-drawn hay-carts start clogging up the roads. They’ll be taking a third cut this year—it’s been a good one so far.”

  “What’s that scent? Like incense …” Joe answered his own question. “Of course—honeysuckle!”

  “S’right. Ten minutes of this’ll unclog your city nose.”

  “Coked up as it is with soot and fog and the spewed-out contents of the Lots’ Road power station—my next door neighbour in Chelsea. Ears, too. Birds! I can hear real birds! We only get pigeons and raucous seagulls in London.” Joe was perfectly content to exploit the image of city slicker he’d detected in Hunnyton’s evaluation of him.

  Once started, conversation began to flow easily along the lanes, punctuated by village and hamlet and the occasional grand house set in its own parkland, each accorded its commentary by Hunnyton.

  “I notice that the grandeur of the houses increases the further we go into the dark interior. Have I got that wrong?” Joe remarked.

  “Oh, where they’ve survived at all—and many have not—they go on getting ever more splendid right through up into Norfolk. Until you stumble on the real stunners like Felbrigg and Oxburgh and Blickling. Melsett, the house we’re heading for, is not as grand as any of those, but it’s the one out of all of them any man with an ounce of sense would choose to live in. Smart enough to invite royalty to stay, old enough to fascinate, well staffed and equipped. Guests never get to see the electricity generator or the refrigerators and cleaning machines it powers, though they appreciate the lamps they can turn on at the flick of a switch, the impeccable laundry and the ice cream desserts. There’s abundant produce from the farm and garden. Where are we?… June … Strawberries, gooseberries, peas, beans, possibly a pineapple or two from the glasshouse … and the choicest lamb. Cook’s favourite time of year.”

  “Shame we’re not invited,” Joe said.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll eat well enough. We’re having supper at my cottage. Yes, the old home. I bought it from the guv’nor when my parents died. My sister Annie lives in the village still—she’s married to the local grocer—and she’s coming in to dust about and leave a dish of something in the oven for us.”

  “That’s very kind of her. But—supper, Hunnyton? I don’t much fancy travelling down these roads in the dark and I have to be back in London tomorrow. Family event in Surrey going on this coming weekend.”

  “Entirely up to you, how much time you want to spend over here. I’ve just taken precautions. If we do get benighted you can bunk up in my spare room. And you can count on there being a good breakfast. Home-cured bacon and Newmarket sausages. Eggs snatched straight from under the hen …”

  Joe stirred uneasily. “Sounds wonderful but—look—is there a telephone I can use out here? I shall need to contact my sister again. If Lydia’s still speaking to me after my early morning call from the Garden House.” He put on a crisp, cross voice: “ ‘You’re where? Well, you shouldn’t be! Why aren’t you coming down the drive?’ ”

  “Fouling up her plans are you?”

  “I’m afraid so. She’s used to it. But this is to be rather a special time. Much planning has gone into it. I can’t disappoint.”

  “The phone lines have staggered out this far,” Hunnyton said drily. “You can use the one at the Hall. The butler’s an old mate of mine. He won’t mind. Mr. Styles is someone you ought to talk to if you want to get a clearer idea of what was going on that night in April. He doesn’t miss much and h
e was presiding over the dinner party when the row broke out between the ladies.”

  “Anyone else in the household I should put at the top of my list?”

  “Grace Aldred. Her ladyship’s maid.”

  “She hasn’t moved on, then?”

  “No. Her family are local folk. She could have got a job in London but she preferred to stay on here, though she had to take a lowering of position to do that. Gracie’s a laundry maid these days. She gets on well with the housekeeper, Mrs. Bolton, and I’d say she could train on to replace her when Mrs. Bolton retires. I’ve asked the staff to stand by to be interviewed after twelve o’clock. We’ll be finished with the vet by then and you can take as long as you want up at the house.” He looked at his wristwatch. “We’ve made good time. Nearly there. This is all Truelove’s land hereabouts. We could take a break and offer ourselves a little distraction, I think. Your first taste of Suffolk.”

  He parked the car by the roadside, choosing a space under a broad oak to ward off the increasing heat of the sun and pointed across the way to a broad stretch of meadowland dotted with stately chestnut trees. “They should be still out there waiting for someone to come and round them up for the afternoon’s hay carting.” He glanced up at the branches of the tree, assessing the wind direction. “Come on. Get out and come and prepare to meet the best horses in the east of England.”

  Warily, but making no protest, Joe took off his trench coat, fanned his face with his hat and took a handkerchief from his pocket. He wiped the sweat from his face and neck and followed Hunnyton to the fence. He jumped over it and walked two paces behind his guide into the field.