Murder in Abbot's Folly (3 page)

She took the bull by the horns. ‘Is this about Luckhurst or Elena?'

Another pause, longer this time. ‘Let's find out what she's up to, daughter mine. Meanwhile, let's assume it's about Robert Luckhurst.'

The subject of Elena was clearly closed, and on the whole, Georgia reflected, remembering Luke's advice to keep it cool, that was a good thing. Was Peter seriously considering taking on this case, though? So far, probably not. Marsh & Daughter had their own ‘rules' for choosing new cases, and this one did not qualify. She suspected that Peter was merely using it as a distraction from Elena, and if so, there was no reason she couldn't do the same.

‘You said there were a couple of loose ends over the Tanner conviction,' she prompted him.

‘Yes. For instance, why should he choose to take his revenge for a lost licence twelve months after losing it?'

‘There was another reason for the murder,' Georgia reminded him, ‘if it's true that he and Amelia Luckhurst were an item.'

‘Worth bearing in mind. Luckhurst seems to have been a funny sort of chap,' Peter reflected.

‘Don't tell me he was the Stourdens Jane Austen fan?'

‘An understatement. I rang Dora and badgered her into telling me more. He seems to be of the obsessive collector genus.'

‘Expensive hobby when Jane Austen is the subject.'

‘Not if you're handed down the goods by your father,' Peter said. ‘But the Luckhursts owned Stourdens from the middle of the nineteenth century, so it seems odd that we are only hearing about this collection now. A question mark, don't you think?'

‘It's possible. Lots of old mansions still have unexplored attics full of goodies. It just needs an enthusiast to inherit – and Robert Luckhurst seems to have been just the chap. Any idea what the collection consists of?'

‘None, so we're left with the Clackington Claptrappers' heavy hints. Anyway, it's hardly relevant to the Luckhurst murder because theft wasn't the motive for it. Not a mention of theft in the trial reports or from what Dora could tell me. Jane Austen's archive was in the Folly when Luckhurst was killed, but it wasn't touched. So we have to look elsewhere for a motive, if we exclude the ones we know about. And there seems no reason to do that at present. Tanner seems either to have planned his crime very oddly or to have been seriously unlucky in having so many potential witnesses turn up.'

‘Explain please.' She knew he liked nothing better than explaining. Anything to stop thinking of tomorrow and meeting Elena again. Georgia was painfully aware that her reluctance to think about her mother might be linked to emotions whose origins were too deeply buried to want to unearth, as well as those springing from more obvious causes.

Peter obliged. ‘It was Saturday sixteenth June. Tanner and Luckhurst were mates of a sort, because they belonged to the same classic car club, which met every month at the Edgar Arms and had a summer annual beano at Stourdens. Apart from that one day, Luckhurst was severely reclusive, being paranoid about having his precious Austen collection pinched. Which, as I told you, it wasn't.

‘What happened was this,' he continued. ‘Just as the classic car owners were getting into their serious technical jargon stride, their numbers were swelled by a protest group of twenty or thirty Dunham residents complaining about the closure of a footpath across Stourdens' land. It had apparently been used by farmers for time out of mind, and a diversion had been agreed through the woods. That wasn't much help to the farmers, though, as only the path that led through Stourdens was wide enough to take farm machinery and animals – which it had duly done for ages past, with no objection being raised by the Luckhursts. Robert Luckhurst was a councillor, however, and had taken it into his head to decide that the footpath in question was a threat to his precious collection. Unfortunately, the protest group was not a peaceful reasonable deputation, as it was led by a determined hothead, one Tom Miller. He soon winkled out that Luckhurst had fled from the classic car line-up to take refuge in his beloved Abbot's Folly.'

‘Just what
is
that? Gerald just said it was a monstrosity.'

‘Patience. I gathered from Mike Gilroy that—'

‘I knew it!' Georgia said resignedly. ‘You just had to get on the phone to him, didn't you?' Chief Superintendent Mike Gilroy had been Peter's sergeant in his police career days, and to Peter he still was. Mike was extraordinarily patient, but Georgia had no intention of letting Peter take too much advantage of this.

Peter had the grace to blush. ‘One more call wouldn't upset him, and the records must have been easy to access. I was working there at the time, for heaven's sake. Anyway, since you ask,' he continued firmly, ‘this mock folly was a—'

‘Isn't that a contradiction in terms? All follies are mock.'

‘Wrong. Follies were beginning to parody themselves towards the end of the eighteenth century, and this one is apparently hardly a ruin. It's a gothic horror, and Robert used it as a study. On the day he died, the protesting horde swept through the grounds to it and found Tanner there talking to Luckhurst on a mission of his own. For whatever reason, in due course the protest group retreated, but Robert was found shot an hour later. He'd been dead at least half an hour. Tanner had witnesses who swore he returned to the main house with the protest group, but then went straight back to the pub. According to him, the real villain had been the village toughie, Tom Miller.'

‘What good would killing Luckhurst do for their cause?' Georgia objected.

‘I presume that Amelia might have been seen as the softer touch in the footpath battle. It never came to be an issue, however, because it was revealed that Tanner's chief witness was an outsider who had done more time than Big Ben.' A pause, then Peter added, ‘I wonder if Amelia Luckhurst is going to be at the Gala?'

‘She can have my ticket,' Georgia muttered.

‘Not keen, eh?'

‘No, for obvious reasons.' She didn't have to spell them out. ‘Plus the fact that I have to conjure up a Jane Austen outfit not only for myself but for Luke too. How are you going to cope? Can I help?'

‘No need. I rang Kate.'

‘Who's she?'

‘Costume Kate, Ltd. She hires them out.'

TWO

G
eorgia forced herself to rise early on the Saturday morning. It was either that or diving under the bedclothes and claiming a sudden dose of flu. She was not, but not, looking forward to this Gala. Even Peter was more interested than she was in seeing the folly where Robert Luckhurst had died, but she still saw it only as a distraction from Elena's presence.

‘At least it's not raining,' Luke observed, regarding his image gloomily in the mirror. He had an uncommon knack of echoing her own reservations, Georgia thought. At the moment these were concentrated on her costume. The sheer stupidity of donning Regency dress on a Saturday morning in the twenty-first century was taking its toll. Dora had eventually conceded that Regency, for Gala purposes, could be taken in its broader sense of beginning from about 1800 rather than from 1811 when the future George IV formally became Regent during the mental instability of his father. After all, Georgia had pointed out (having done some hasty research), Jane Austen was visiting Kent well before 1800.

She had therefore opted for the earlier fashion of a high-waisted open-fronted dress over a silk underskirt, rather than the later straight clinging classical-style dresses of muslin or lawn for which her figure was hardly a bonus, being tall but not sylphlike. Besides, she had been too mutinous to follow Peter's example and hire a costume, and an ancient long silk nightdress seemed to serve the purpose well, with the help of some speedy work on an out-of-date red evening dress. Nevertheless, she had eyed the result with some dissatisfaction the previous evening, until Luke solved the problem by fishing out a rather dashing scarf, which he deftly turned into a pseudo cap with a sprig of grapes attached.

‘High fashion then,' he informed her. ‘Looked it up in a book.'

With the long gloves apparently so essential, the outfit looked passable, although showers were forecast.

‘I'm sure umbrellas were invented by then,' she said, fixing on the cap and grapes and adding an artistic ribbon she had tracked down in her meagre haberdashery supplies. ‘At least for women. Not sure about men. Anyway, we can pop one in the boot.'

‘I think Sheridan had something to do with popularizing umbrellas for men, but I doubt that ran to fold-up National Trust brollies,' Luke observed. ‘They were probably so huge that they required a servant to run alongside carrying it aloft. Just at the moment I'm out of servants.' He gave another disparaging look at the Luke Frost Famous Publisher image of pantaloons hastily improvised from grey trousers tucked into long grey socks fished out of their walking gear drawer, a flashy waistcoat and an outgrown tailcoat from his past, plus – a great find this – an ancient opera hat.

‘I do not feel an up to the knocker Regency gent,' he announced nevertheless. Being Luke, he had consulted a book on Regency jargon in case it came in useful at the Gala.

‘How do I rate as your bit of muslin?' she retorted.

Luke laughed. ‘Bang up. Ah well, let's get it over with. At least we're allowed to take a car. I thought we might have to hire horses.'

‘We could walk,' Georgia threatened him. ‘The Regency folk were great walkers.'

‘We'll take the car and tell them it's a landau.'

Dunham itself consisted of little more than a pub and a few cottages on the Canterbury to Ashford road with farms and farmland stretching into the hinterland. Just past them Georgia spotted the lane that led only to Stourdens, and she began to feel more optimistic. The late June sun was shining, albeit weakly, the trees and meadows were flaunting their summer green glory, and rural calm seemed to prevail. From what Dora had told them, she reasoned that there would be enough diversions at this Gala not to become too heavily embroiled in emotional discussions with Elena. They might even escape the Clackingtons, once Peter had satisfied his interest in the Luckhurst murder.

Beyond them the ground rose gently to hill and woodland. The lane crossed the railway line and led on to the end of the tarmacked roadway and the beginning of Stourdens' drive. Georgia's optimism began to fade as they drove along it. The gravel needed weeding, and rhododendrons and undergrowth on both sides of the path blotted out what sun there was, which made the path in front of them look forbidding. As Luke turned into the field signposted for car parking the day ahead once more felt to Georgia like a very bad idea indeed.

The house looked less dilapidated than when she had last seen it, but that was perhaps because the sun had emerged once again, at least temporarily. Closer inspection revealed that the Georgian portico was roped off to prevent the unwary from walking under it, the roof was concave in places, and there were cracks in some of the stonework. Georgia decided that as a mere outsider she rather liked the air of decayed grandeur.

Arrows pointed Gala guests through a side gate to the rear lawns and on to an extended terrace, which gave Georgia a wide view of the gathering beneath. The landscaped gardens that she remembered were covered with marquees and stalls, peopled with a mob of visitors who from here looked to be clad in some approximation of Regency dress. Georgia was impressed. The TV and film productions of Jane Austen novels must have done a good job of raising awareness of costume; bonnets were bobbing, skirts were swishing, and men uncomfortably clad in boots (or Wellingtons, which would only just have squeezed into the time period) strolled up and down in a semblance of elegance. A grey-haired thin man in rather superior boots but a peasant costume glanced up at the new arrivals, swept off his low-brimmed hat and afforded them a deep bow, which she graciously acknowledged with a curtsy. Perhaps today would not be as bad as she had feared.

It was still only 11.30, thirty minutes after the Gala had opened, and yet it looked to be in full swing. Georgia had seen Peter's car in the car park, but so far no sign of anyone they knew. Two ladies sitting at a table at the foot of the steps down to the lawns eyed her meaningfully, flourishing what looked like raffle tickets in their hands. Were raffles invented by the 1790s? Could be, because gambling and lotteries were all the fashion then. In fact what these ladies were offering proved to be programmes in the form of a fan, with a map of the grounds and attractions. Georgia gratefully dropped a contribution into the box at the ladies' side for donations in aid of local charities.

She studied the map but could see no sign of the folly Dora had mentioned, only of something named Abbot's Retreat, which she assumed must be near to it. Both Retreat and Folly would probably have been part of the Humphrey Repton design for the gardens, to form points of interest to the overall effect of ‘wild untrammelled nature' so popular in the eighteenth century when Stourdens was built. She remembered seeing an attractive small garden when she last came here and wondered whether this was Abbot's Retreat. If so, she would pay a return visit today.

‘Georgia!'

Peter, looking rather grand in his hired costume of breeches, frilly shirt, waistcoat and topper, was wheeling himself rapidly towards her, with a somewhat frenetic look. Perhaps this was because Elena, in a pale blue low-cut silk number (which had no business to suit her years but somehow did) was doing her best to steer him – something Georgia knew he hated. Dora and Gerald were behind them, both trying to keep up with an increasingly faster wheelchair; coupled with their Regency costumes this gave the effect of a Caucus race out of
Alice in Wonderland
. Peter needed rescuing
now
.