Bricks and Mortality: Campbell & Carter 3 (19 page)

‘The ruins provide no shelter now, Mr Trenton, and I doubt will attract the sort of undesirables you were describing as being there before the fire. I am just on my way to see Muriel Pickering,’ Jess added.

‘There you are, then. Muriel lives alone!’ said Roger triumphantly. ‘That small dog she has won’t protect her. Although Muriel can be quite fierce and would probably see off any intruder. But it’s not right that people shouldn’t feel safe in their homes!’

‘We don’t know Mr Crown’s long-term plans,’ Jess told him. ‘But we are reasonably confident he means to make some decision about the property. It’s been nice to talk to you, Mr Trenton. I must be on my way to Mullions.’

‘Let me know if you need any more help from me,’ Roger told her politely, ignoring the fact that he’d not had anything new to say.

He could be right, even so. Matthew Pietrangelo might just have walked in on a couple of drug addicts off their heads. They might have thought he was an undercover copper. Jess promised that she would get in touch if necessary, and Trenton seemed satisfied.

There was no sign of Muriel at the front of the house, but there was a strange smell filling the air. It suggested bran and seemed to come from the rear of the building. Jess walked down the side of the house and round the corner.

The cockerel and his harem were clustered around the back door. They seemed expectant. At first Jess was alarmed to see, through the kitchen window, what she took to be smoke filling the room, making it impossible to discern anything within. But Hamlet had begun to bark inside, signalling that he’d detected an intruder who had approached the house. The back door flew open and a great cloud of steam billowed out. The smell of bran became overpowering. The chickens fled, squawking, into the undergrowth smothering the back garden, as Hamlet erupted from the house and began a furious war dance around Jess’s feet. An apocalyptic figure emerged in a haze of steam, appearing to brandish a weapon. It turned out to be Muriel, waving a wooden spoon.

‘Don’t mind the dog!’ she yelled by way of greeting and reassurance. ‘Shut up, Hamlet!’

Hamlet stopped darting at Jess’s shins and stood glowering at her, growling softly in his throat.

‘He’s a good watchdog,’ Jess observed.

‘Doesn’t miss a trick!’ said Hamlet’s proud owner. ‘He can suss out friend from foe in a second or two. He’s stopped barking, you see. That means he thinks you’re probably OK. He might just keep a close eye on you, but don’t worry about that. Come in.’

The invitation was hospitable but Jess accepted it with a certain reluctance. The kitchen air was still full of steam. Sinister glooping noises came from a large enamelled tub on the stove and the overpowering smell was frankly awful.

‘Mash for the chickens,’ explained Muriel, prodding at the tub’s contents with the wooden spoon, ‘old fashioned but cheap. I cook up all the peelings and odd leftovers with it. Chickens love it. It’s about ready. I’ll turn off the stove and leave it to cool. We can go into the sitting room. I’ll leave the back door open. It lets in the cold but it lets out the steam. This way.’

Jess was led along a narrow, dingy hallway into the room she’d observed through the front window on her first visit. It was no tidier, although the plates of unfinished food had gone, the scraps no doubt fed into the mash. Books and newspapers still littered every surface. Muriel swept an assortment from a sofa.

‘Sit down and I’ll dig out the elderflower.’

‘Thank you, but actually this is an official call.’ Jess sat cautiously on the sofa. Shiny black strands protruding through holes in the cloth revealed the filling was of horsehair.

‘Don’t say you’re on duty and can’t have a drink,’ said Muriel. ‘Because it’s only elderflower cordial, made by yours truly. It won’t make you tiddly.’

A glass of some slightly muddy liquid was thrust into her hand. Jess thought apprehensively that it might as well be poteen, and she only had Muriel’s word that it wasn’t.

Her hostess plonked herself down on a sagging armchair against the opposite wall. Above her head hung one of the two oils Jess had seen through the window. She could now make out that they were seascapes, showing what looked like fishing smacks on an unquiet ocean. Hamlet had followed them and sat in the doorway, guarding the entrance and exit like Cerberus. Even if he only had one head, there was a distinct suggestion of the Underworld about him. Wisps of mash-scented steam escaping from the kitchen stood in for the smell of sulphur.

‘What do you want, then?’ asked Muriel. ‘Cheers!’ She raised her glass.

‘Oh, er, cheers!’ Jess waved her own glass feebly in reply and wondered if she would be given a chance to tip its contents into a plant pot nearby, the occupant of which had long since expired through lack of water. ‘I’d like to talk about the past, Mrs Pickering.’

‘I do wish,’ Muriel burst out with a return to her habitual irritability, ‘that you and that sergeant of yours would stop calling me
Mrs
Pickering! I’m
Miss
Pickering. I know it’s the fashion for women nowadays, married or not, to style themselves
mizz
, but I’m
Miss
. I never married and I’m not ashamed of it.’

‘I’m not married, either,’ said Jess.

‘Shacked up with someone?’

‘No.’

‘Sensible girl. I never married because Father wouldn’t have it. My mother died when I was fifteen and after that, it was just Father and me here. He was a semi-invalid. I dare say he could have done more for himself, or to help me, if he’d had a mind to, but he didn’t. “Semi-invalid” meant he could do the things he wanted to, like fishing. He was a keen fisherman. But he couldn’t chop up wood or push a vacuum cleaner round. So I had to look after him, the house, garden, chickens … we even had a couple of goats back then and a donkey some gypsies left behind. So I never had time to get married. Not that Father would have allowed it.’

‘He couldn’t have stopped you,’ Jess pointed out. ‘Not once you were of age.’

‘That just shows how much
you
know,’ retorted Muriel. ‘He told me if I didn’t take care of him, he wouldn’t leave me Mullions in his will. He’d leave it to some charity or other. Not that he was a charitable man, far from it, but he was a spiteful one. He meant it. My family has lived here for a hundred and fifty years and I wasn’t going to be done out of my inheritance, or what was left of it.’ She waved a hand in a circular motion indicating everything about them. ‘We used to own all you can see out there. Bit by bit all sold to prop up our finances. The last lot of farmland was sold off in 1967. The Pearson family bought it and they’re still there.’

‘So you’ll have lived here all your life,’ Jess seized the opportunity to redirect the conversation to the subject that had brought her.

Muriel gave an unexpected laugh that sounded like an unoiled hinge creaking open. ‘I bet you think I’m as old as the hills, eh? Well, I’m not. I just look it. I’m fifty-nine.’ Observing Jess’s face, she gave a satisfied nod. ‘That shook you, eh? It’s OK, I don’t mind you sitting there with your mouth open.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jess apologised, flushing.

‘What for? You’re not responsible. I ain’t a beauty, never was. I started going grey when I was still in my thirties. Marriage was never on the cards for me. I never knew how to chatter away about pop music or films, or dance or flirt, or anything like that, never learned. So I dare say no one would have wanted me, anyway. I’m fit, mind you, and had plenty of time to learn other practical things. I have to do everything round here. Notice the gate as you came in?’

Jess recalled the chicken wire spread over a rough wooden frame. ‘Yes.’

‘I made that,’ Muriel told her proudly. ‘I’ve been up on the roof and replaced a couple of tiles several times. You name it, I can probably do it. You haven’t drunk your cordial.’

‘I’m savouring it,’ said Jess firmly.

‘Savour away. Let me know if you’d like a top-up.’ Muriel topped up her own emptied glass.

‘Miss Pickering!’

If she didn’t insist now on asking Muriel the questions she’d come here to put, it was beginning to look as though Jess wouldn’t get a chance. Muriel was showing distinct signs of settling in with the elderflower cordial. Jess suspected the contents had been pepped up with something stronger, like gin. She resolved to find a moment to tip hers into the plant pot, whatever else. Muriel’s normally spiky attitude had mellowed and she’d relaxed in her chair beneath the storm-tossed fishing ketches. Even Hamlet had settled down in the doorway with his nose on his paws and his eyes shut. From time to time faint rumbling noises came from his direction. Muriel’s eyelids were also drooping.

‘Miss Pickering!’ Jess repeated more loudly.

Muriel’s eyes flickered open. ‘What?’ she asked, her hand groping for the bottle. ‘Top-up now?’

‘No, thank you very much. I came to ask you about Key House.’

‘What about it?’ enquired Muriel. ‘It burned down and was empty for years before that, so what’s to ask?’

‘I’m interested in before that, when it was still lived in, years ago. Sebastian Crown, his wife and his child … do you remember those days?’

‘Of course I do!’ replied Muriel with a touch of her customary truculence. ‘My brain’s all right. I don’t forget things. I have always …’ She tipped up the bottle and peered at it critically. ‘I have always had an excellent memory. This one’s empty. I’ll get us another.’

She began to struggle out of the chair.

‘If we could talk about Sebastian Crown first,’ Jess insisted.

‘Oh, he’s been dead years,’ said Muriel, sinking back into the depths of the chair. ‘I couldn’t stand the fellow. They’re a bad lot, the Crown men, in the blood – rotters. Like father, like son, as they say. I saw young Gervase yesterday. He was mooching round the house, visiting the scene of the crime.’ Muriel added with a sinister curl of the lip. ‘Hah!’

‘In what way was Sebastian Crown a rotter?’ Jess was not diverted as she sensed Muriel had intended.

‘He’s gone now,’ Muriel told her with deep satisfaction, ‘and I can say what I like about him. I can speak the truth. He was a millionaire, you know, and people are very careful what they say about you if you’re rich, especially if you’re a bully like Sebastian. All that money, all gone to that son of his,’ she shook her head in sorrow. ‘No fairness in life, is there? Sebastian wasn’t nice, oh, no. Successful? Yes. Kept in with the right people? Yes. Decent man? Decidedly not. I liked his wife,’ Muriel finished unexpectedly.

‘No one talks about his wife,’ Jess prompted.

‘That’s because she finally plucked up the courage to leave him. It was the big talking point and scandal hereabouts. Mind you, people talked about it behind closed doors because of Sebastian, who went about looking like Henry the Eighth on a bad day. I was sorry for Amanda,’ Muriel continued. ‘She was very lonely, poor girl. She used to walk along the lanes around here on her own. “Getting my exercise”, she used to call it. Getting out of the house and out of
his
way, more like it. I’ve always had a dog and walked it every day. You might say it got me out of Mullions and out from under Father’s eye. He was always wanting something done, cup of tea, fetch something from upstairs, look for some book he reckoned he’d mislaid and probably never had in the first place! So Amanda and I had something in common if for different reasons.

‘I used to bump into her somewhere along the way and, after a while, we got chatting and then we began walking together. We’d arrange a time and a spot to meet. Occasionally she’d go up to London for two or three days, shopping, or going to the theatre. She’d tell me what she’d seen, describe it all. I liked to listen to her. She asked me a couple of times to go with her, but Father would have decided to have one of his “turns” at the very mention, so I told her it wasn’t possible. She was always happier when she’d been away from Key House for a day or two. Now, some people …’ Muriel wagged a forefinger at Jess. ‘Naming no names, you know. Some people might have thought she had a boyfriend in London. But I don’t believe she did.’

Muriel jerked forward and hissed with such vehemence it made Jess jump, and Hamlet raise his head and give a little yelp. ‘I don’t suppose for a minute that she had a fancy man, because she was too damn scared of Sebastian!’

‘Why was she afraid of him? You said he was a bully, I know.’ The old scandals were coming out of the woodwork. It was what Jess had hoped.

‘He was violent,’ Muriel told her abruptly.

‘She told you this?’

‘No, I saw the bruises with my own eyes. She always wore long sleeves, even in warm weather, and silk scarves round her neck. But she’d reach up to push back a spray of leaves drooping across the path from the hedgerow and the sleeve would ride up. She nearly always had bruises on her arms, like this …’ Muriel gripped one forearm with the fingers of her other hand. ‘Little round black bruises made by the pressure of his fingers. Or the scarf might slip. Once, when it did, I saw bruises round her neck. Ruddy maniac had tried to strangle her!’

There was a silence. Muriel stared past Jess, out of the window and back down the years. ‘Every time she went up to London, I’d wonder if she’d come back. One day she didn’t.’

‘What about the child?’

‘Oh, he was away at boarding school most of the time. They packed him off when he wasn’t much more than a tot. My own theory about that was that both parents wanted him out of the way – but for different reasons. Amanda wanted to keep him away from his father. Sebastian, well, perhaps he just didn’t like children or had no time for them. He couldn’t be bothered or was too busy to spend time with his son.’

Jess asked quietly, ‘Did you ever see bruises on the child, when he was home in the school holidays, for example?’

‘No!’ Muriel shook her head and spoke firmly. ‘No. If he’d started to do that, I really believe Amanda wouldn’t have stood for it. Maternal instinct, if you like. She wouldn’t have allowed him to touch the child. But, you see …’

Muriel gave a strange, mirthless smile and, for the first time in their conversation, held Jess’s gaze directly. ‘She knew Sebastian wasn’t interested in hitting the child, only in hitting
her
. Make what you like of that. I’m saying no more.’