An Air That Kills (32 page)

‘She wants a friend to be with her. I'll wait till then.'

‘Do you want me to have a go?'

‘If I'd wanted you to have a go, I'd have asked you.'

‘Just mentioning it, sir. Can't afford to waste time, I thought.'

Thornhill stared at Kirby. ‘At present I'll make the decisions, Sergeant. All right? Come and have a look at this.'

Kirby flushed and reluctantly came into the room, closing the door behind him. His eyes were hot and angry. Thornhill guessed that the younger man was keyed up by the excitement of robbery and sudden death, that he was hungry for drama and that above all he wanted to do something.

Thornhill pointed into the wastepaper basket. ‘What do you think of that?'

‘They're his medals, aren't they?'

‘Seems rather odd to throw them away.'

‘Might have been an accident.' Kirby waved at the poppies on the carpet. ‘Maybe he tripped, or something, and knocked the medals and the poppies off the bureau.'

‘Maybe. It seems odd that the medals should fall so neatly into the wastepaper basket, though. That's the Military Cross, isn't it?'

Kirby nodded, his expression puzzled; he could not see the relevance of Harcutt's achievements. ‘Do you think he turned the gas on – and couldn't manage to light it? Or maybe he was so pissed that he thought he had.'

Thornhill didn't answer. He got up and stretched. He was conscious that he did not want to look unnecessarily at the dead meat in the armchair. But why should a human corpse be more disturbing than a pig hanging in a butcher's shop? How terrible it would be if the fairy tales were true after all – if Harcutt were witnessing the humiliating treatment meted out to him after death. Thornhill moved to the fireplace and stared at the photograph of the little family.

‘Or I suppose there could have been an interruption in the gas supply,' Kirby went on. ‘Nothing to do with him.'

‘I wondered that. The mains inlet is in the scullery.'

Kirby's head jerked up in surprise. ‘Do you mean . . .'

‘At this stage I'm just keeping an eye on all the possibilities.' Thornhill looked down at the poppies and remembered when he'd seen them on the floor here before. They reminded him that he'd never got round to asking Harcutt to explain how he had known that the brooch they found at Templefields was made of silver. It was too late to ask him now. In all probability the major had simply assumed or guessed that it was silver; either that or Jill Francis or Charlotte Wemyss-Brown had mentioned it to him after all.

‘But if someone turned off the gas at the mains,' Kirby said slowly, ‘and turned it on again, knowingly, I mean, that would amount to . . .'

There were footsteps outside. The door opened and Bayswater peered into the room. ‘Ha!' he said. ‘What have you got for me?'

PC Lincoln arrived. ‘I tried to make him wait, sir. He just wouldn't listen.'

‘That's all right, Lincoln.'

Bayswater put down his bag and rubbed his hands together. With his head thrust forward, he moved towards Harcutt's body.

‘And the lady's turned up, too,' Lincoln went on. ‘Miss Francis.'

‘Damn,' Thornhill said, and for an instant he felt dizzy. ‘Before you do anything else, Doctor, I wonder if you'd see Miss Harcutt. I want to know if she's well enough for me to talk to her.'

Bayswater turned and raised his eyebrows. ‘Shock?'

Thornhill shrugged. ‘You tell me. I've arranged for her to have a friend with her. She's just arrived. Kirby, take Dr Bayswater along to the kitchen. I'll deal with Miss Francis.'

He tried to keep his voice cool and succeeded in sounding bored and on the verge of yawning. He ushered the other men out of the room and shut the door behind them. He told Lincoln to stay on guard until Kirby returned.

Jill Francis was waiting at the foot of the stairs. She was wearing a long fur coat and hugging herself to keep the cold away. He had forgotten that she was so attractive – or rather, he'd tried so hard to forget in her absence that he'd almost succeeded. Her pale face with its blue eyes seemed to float in the gloom of the hall. He caught himself wondering what a woman like this could have seen in a great bear of a man like Yateley. It embarrassed him that he had seen her cry and that he knew about her lover and her lost baby. It seemed to him that the knowledge was a form of intimacy acquired in an underhand way. He also felt illogically irritated with her: she couldn't have chosen a worse moment to appear before him – he was in the middle of his first major case in Lydmouth and among colleagues he neither knew nor trusted. He wished she were a hundred miles away.

‘I'm sorry to drag you out like this,' he said stiffly.

‘It doesn't matter.' She took a step towards him. ‘How's Antonia?'

‘It's been a great shock, naturally. The doctor's with her now. We'd better wait until he's finished. I'll take you in, and if he says it's OK, I'd like to try to ask her a few questions.'

‘Can I ask what's happened? The man on the phone just said her father had died suddenly.'

‘That's true as far as it goes.' Thornhill hesitated. ‘Could I ask you to keep this confidential?'

‘Of course.'

‘He seems to have died in his sleep. But we're not sure what caused it. There may have been a gas leak.'

‘And she found him? Poor kid.'

‘And there's another consideration. There appears to have been a burglary here last night. All in all, it's a very confused situation.'

He ran out of things to say. Jill waited, apparently composed. He felt that she had no right to make him feel like this; it was an imposition. He wondered how on earth she could have wanted to have Yateley's child.

He cleared his throat and said, ‘I hope you hadn't got plans for this morning.'

‘Nothing important. I was going to church with the Wemyss-Browns. Incidentally, Mrs Wemyss-Brown said she would come along after the service. She thought Antonia would be glad of her support.'

Her eyes met Thornhill's. For an instant, there was a shared hint of amusement. The moment was so brief and the hint so hard to pin down that immediately afterwards Thornhill thought he'd imagined the whole thing.

‘She also said that Antonia was welcome to come and stay at Troy House,' Jill went on. ‘She can't stay here, can she?'

‘Probably not. By the way, there was something I wanted to check with you and Mrs Wemyss-Brown. Do you remember when you first came here to see Major Harcutt? On Thursday morning – I turned up while you and Mrs Wemyss-Brown were here.'

Jill looked at him gravely. ‘I remember it very well.'

‘Mrs Wemyss-Brown said she wanted to warn Major Harcutt that I might be coming to see him. I expect she told him that some bones had been found at Templefields. Did either of you happen to mention the other things I showed you?'

‘The bit of newspaper? The brooch?'

‘That's it. Did you?'

‘I don't think so. There really wasn't time. We'd only been there for a couple of minutes before you turned up.'

‘Neither of you told him that the brooch was silver, I suppose?'

‘I told you – I don't think either of us mentioned the brooch at all. You can ask Charlotte, but I'm pretty sure she'll say the same. Why do you want to know?'

‘I'm not sure. Just one of those little details.'

There was another uncomfortable hiatus in the conversation – uncomfortable as far as Thornhill was concerned at least. Jill stared down the hall in the direction of the kitchen.

‘You'll treat Antonia gently, won't you, Inspector?'

‘Of course we shall.' He felt, and sounded, indignant.

‘Sorry,' she said unexpectedly. ‘It's just that she's very vulnerable at the best of times.'

The kitchen door opened and Bayswater came out. As he walked along the hall, he gave Jill a cool, assessing stare and then ignored her.

‘You might as well talk to her,' he said to Thornhill. ‘It might do her good to get it off her chest. I want to have a look at the body now.'

‘I'll arrange for Kirby to stay with you.'

‘Just to make sure I don't tamper with the evidence, eh? Well, I don't care what you do as long as you don't waste my time.'

‘The feeling's mutual,' Thornhill said. ‘So I'll leave you to it.'

Chapter Ten

What do you do with about a hundred and forty pounds of flesh and bone? There wasn't an easy answer.

Charlie sat in his mother's armchair and smoked one of Carn's cigarettes while he thought about the problem. The blood dried on his face. It hurt to smoke because his lips were sore and swollen. The world had contracted to this cold little room he had known all his life. Gradually he stopped shivering. He had never killed someone before, even in the war. It was a strange sensation. He didn't want to think about what made Carn
now
different from Carn
then
.

He briefly considered the possibility of going to the police. He imagined himself walking into the police station in the High Street. ‘I've just killed Genghis Carn. What are you going to do about it?' Everything would be sorted out for him, and there would be no more decisions.

The idea revolted him. They wouldn't believe him when he told them what Carn had threatened to do. If they didn't hang him for killing Carn, they would put him inside for most of his life. If the police got him, Charlie thought, he was finished; he might just as well have killed himself. So in that case, he had absolutely nothing to lose by trying to escape. Maybe he could go abroad. Maybe he could slip into another identity.

Charlie got up and knelt beside Carn's body. The little man was still lying on his back with his head on the hearthstone and his beard pointing towards the ceiling. From the front he looked undamaged – indeed, he might have been asleep. Charlie, obeying a reflex he had not known he possessed, had closed the dead man's eyes to stop them looking at him.

He went through Carn's pockets, beginning with those in the jacket and the raincoat. He emptied them methodically and put what he found on the seat of his mother's chair. The trouser pockets were more difficult. Charlie nerved himself to push his hands into the pockets at the side. He felt the hard thigh beneath the layers of clothing. The pockets were still warm with the heat of the living man.

Carn had been carrying a bunch of keys, a wallet, a letter from a woman named Sylvia, a grubby white handkerchief, a handful of small change, a box of matches, two penknives and a cut-throat razor. The wallet contained a driving licence, three stamps and a ten-shilling note. There was also the gold cigarette case which Carn had dropped on the floor.

Charlie sat back on his heels and absentmindedly took another of the dead man's cigarettes. So where was Carn's money? He had bought a round in the Bathurst Arms the previous evening, and he'd peeled off a fiver from a wad of notes. He couldn't have spent it between now and then. Nor was it likely that he'd left his cash with his luggage which was presumably still at the hotel; Carn was not a man to be parted from his money. Then Charlie remembered there was one pocket he had not examined.

He put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and returned to his knees. It was a nasty job, but it had to be done. Squinting through the smoke, Charlie hooked his hands under Carn and gingerly rolled the body on to its front.

The money was in the back pocket of the trousers. Charlie stood up and counted it: there was nearly a hundred and fifty pounds in one-pound and five-pound notes. Charlie glanced involuntarily at his unwitting benefactor. From this angle, he could see the back of Carn's head. Apart from the blood, there was no obvious damage. Carn might just be unconscious. Charlie stretched out his hand and gingerly touched the back of the skull. To his horror, it gave at the slightest pressure; it felt like broken eggs in a sock. His stomach lurched and he hurriedly stood up. Carn was dead. There were no second chances.

Charlie tried to think out the implications of the situation as Carn would have done. The police were expecting Carn to leave Lydmouth this morning, so they might not be completely surprised if he simply disappeared. On the other hand, they knew of his connection with Charlie, and someone might have seen him in Minching Lane. So the coppers might come visiting just on the off-chance.

The first thing to do was to put the body where it wouldn't be too obvious. There was a disused well in the yard. That would be ideal.

Charlie went through the scullery and opened the back door. The well wasn't overlooked by the windows of other houses – it was in the angle between the scullery and the outside privy. The opening had been capped with a stone when the water main reached Templefields and the old iron pump had gone for scrap. The flagstone had not been cemented in. It did not look unusual because the yard was paved with a jumble of cobbles and flagstones. There was nothing to suggest it might cover a well.

He fetched the spade from the privy and used it to lever the stone away from the top of the well. It was clear from the amount of dried dirt that had accumulated between this stone and its neighbours that no one had moved it for years. He peered into the opening, down into the darkness at the bottom. The shaft was narrow, and it seemed to grow narrower as it got deeper; its walls were made of rough stone. He knew that the water was about fifteen feet down. When he was a boy, he and a friend had thrown a cat down there. The cat had howled as it fell, and they had listened to it thrashing about in the water.

There was a strong possibility that Carn might get jammed halfway down. Still, at least the body would be out of the way. Out of sight, out of mind. In Templefields the rats were everywhere. Maybe the rats would get Carn as they had the baby, and what the rats left uneaten would eventually be swallowed by water.