Timetable of Death (16 page)

‘But you just told me that it came from Germany. How many people would even know that such a product existed?’

‘Good horticulturalists are observant people,’ said Colbeck. ‘They read articles about developments abroad. Mr Burns is luckier than most in that he’s encouraged to keep abreast of the latest news.’

‘I think you’ve got enough to put him behind bars.’

‘Then you have an inadequate grasp of the law.’

‘I don’t think so. On the evidence we have – including his hatred of Vivian Quayle – a clever barrister could send him off for a rendezvous with the hangman.’

‘I dispute that,’ said Colbeck, firmly, ‘and I speak as a former barrister. When you prosecute an innocent man, it can be embarrassing and not without consequences. To begin with, the police can be sued for wrongful arrest. Before you go to court, you must ensure that you have watertight evidence of guilt.’

‘But you have it, Inspector. Burns is the obvious killer.’

‘The burden of proof still lies with us.’

‘Arrest him now before he makes a run for it.’

‘Where would he go, sir?’ asked Colbeck. ‘Burns has a wife and a child on the way. It’s one of the factors that I deem important. He loves his job. Would he risk losing everything by committing a murder?’

‘Yes,’ asserted Haygarth, ‘if he could get away with it.’

‘Most killers suffer from that delusion.’

The remark produced a long, heavy silence. Haygarth pretended to look for something on his desk then opened
a drawer to continue the search. He slammed it shut in annoyance.

‘There was something I wanted to show you,’ he said, ‘but I can’t find it.’

‘Give it to me another time, sir.’

‘It was the list of the new locomotives being built for the Midland. I thought you might be interested in it.’ He looked up. ‘And you still haven’t visited the Works, have you? Cope is ready to show you round.’

‘Thank you.’

Colbeck knew that he was just trying to change the subject. In an office as tidy as his, Haygarth would know exactly where everything was. He’d instituted the false search because he’d been knocked off balance. Colbeck exploited the weakness.

‘Is it true that you haven’t been to Spondon for decades, sir?’

‘Yes, it is. I told you so.’

‘Then you must have a twin, Mr Haygarth. I have reliable reports that someone looking remarkably like you attended the funeral of Mrs Peet.’ He gave a quizzical smile. ‘Have you any idea who that might have been?’

The situation was intolerable. They both felt that. Lydia Quayle and Beatrice Myler still had their meals together but they were ordeals rather than occasions for pleasure. They were conducted largely in silence and what conversation they did manage was brief and brittle. Blaming herself for what had happened, Lydia kept more and more to her room, the one place in the house where she didn’t feel that she was intruding. Beatrice, too, often sought privacy. Yet even though they were physically apart, they felt each other’s presence keenly. When they did move about the house, it was as if they were walking on eggshells, each afraid that she might accidentally bump into the other. Mutual love and understanding had perished.

Unable to stand it any longer, Lydia came to a decision. When she found her friend in the drawing room, she tried to sound as pleasant as possible.

‘I think that we need some time apart, Beatrice,’ she said.

‘Yes, I’ve been thinking the same thing. Where will you go?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh, I fancy that you do, Lydia.’

‘Truly, I don’t.’

‘You want to go
there
, don’t you?’ said Beatrice, accusation hanging on the air. ‘In spite of everything you promised, you intend to go home.’

‘That’s not the case at all. I simply … don’t want to be in the way.’

Beatrice made no reply. Lowering her eyes, she sat in silence. The tension between them was almost tangible. For several minutes, they wrestled with words that refused to come out of their mouths. It was only when Lydia was about to move off that her friend recovered her voice.

‘How long will you be away?’

‘How long do you
want
me to be away?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘But you’d value a break from me, is that it?’

‘We’d both profit, Lydia.’

It was gone. The ability that each of them had had to read the other’s mind had vanished. They were like strangers, meeting for the first time, unable to get beyond a surface politeness, bereft of any affection. Lydia suddenly noticed what a plain and unbecoming woman she was and, by the same token, Beatrice was struck by the fact that there was so little about her companion to interest her. Neither would believe that they had lived together so agreeably.

‘Are you still reading that book about Venice?’ asked Lydia.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘And you still want to go there again?’

‘I need a holiday.’

‘Would you need one if I wasn’t here?’

Mildly put, the question had explosive power. Beatrice recoiled.

‘I didn’t say that, Lydia.’

‘Would you?’

‘I haven’t thought about it.’

‘I’ll wager that you’ve thought about nothing else.’

‘All right,’ conceded the other, ‘it has crossed my mind.’

‘In other words,’ said Lydia, grasping the nettle and speaking more forcefully, ‘you’d be better off without me.’

‘I might be.’

‘Why can’t you be honest about it?’

‘Why can’t you be honest about your plan to go home?’

‘I don’t
have
a plan.’

‘Yes, you do, I can see it in your face. It’s been fomenting in your mind ever since Sergeant Leeming and that woman came here. Their visit changed your attitude towards your family somehow.’

It was true and Lydia was unable to deny it. Her conversation with Madeleine Colbeck had altered her perception of the world she’d left behind in Nottingham. While she didn’t feel a strong urge to return, she did view her family with less bitterness than hitherto. Attuned to her moods, Beatrice had been aware of it at once.

‘They ruined everything,’ she said, abruptly. ‘Until they came here – until that vile man and that interfering woman arrived – we’d always enjoyed peace and contentment, but not any more.’

‘You can’t blame the sergeant and Mrs Colbeck. They’re
trying to solve a murder and must take whatever steps are necessary.’

Beatrice spoke with coldness. ‘That’s the other thing.’

‘What is?’

‘Most people in my position would find it intolerable,’ she said, giving full vent to her anger. ‘When you came to London, you drifted from one hotel to another. I offered you a place of sanctuary and you brought murder into my house. Yes, I know,’ she went on, quelling Lydia’s protest, ‘it wasn’t
your
fault that your father was killed. That’s not the point. The simple fact is that you are inescapably linked to a heinous crime. Some people would find that highly embarrassing in a lodger yet I was ready to accept it and to support you through a difficult period. In the name of friendship, I did everything humanly possible to offer you succour. When I did that, of course, I was unaware that you’d started a correspondence with your brother.’

Full of pain and recrimination, the words poured out of her but Lydia heard only one of them. It was enough to wound her deeply. Beatrice had described her as a ‘lodger’. The older woman had invited her to move in as a dear friend yet Lydia’s status was now that of someone who merely rented a room.

‘I’ll leave immediately,’ said Lydia.

When they met at the hotel, they had a lot of information to exchange. Colbeck told him about the second visit to Melbourne and about his clash with Donald Haygarth. The acting chairman had shrugged off his question about the funeral.

‘He claimed that it did not constitute a proper visit to
Spondon because he was so preoccupied with the service that he saw nothing of the village.’

‘Why was he there in the first place?’ asked Leeming.

‘It turns out that he’s a friend of Mr Peet and went out of courtesy.’

‘Mr Haygarth could have told us that before.’

‘I think that there are lots of things he could have told us, Victor. One by one, I suspect, we’ll go on finding them. But what do you have to report? Did you follow Hockaday to Duffield?’

‘He didn’t go there, Inspector.’

Leeming explained what had happened and how he had met an old man who confided that he was Jed Hockaday’s father. Where the cobbler had gone, he didn’t know because Hockaday had given the sergeant the slip.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Colbeck. ‘He may not even have known that you were following him. You’ve always been adept at shadowing people.’

‘I felt cheated, sir. He shook me off.’

‘Then he’s cleverer than we gave him credit. On the night of the murder, he was in Duffield, as he told us, but he only called on Mr and Mrs Verney at the end of the evening. Where had Hockaday been beforehand?’

‘I’ll tackle him about that.’

‘What else have you discovered, Victor?’

‘Oh, I had a surprise, sir,’ said Leeming. ‘Stanley Quayle came here to see you. He wasn’t very pleased to deal with me instead but we had an interesting talk. That was the surprise. He may have looked down his nose at me but he’s not the ogre you took him for when you first met him.’

After listening to an account of the conversation between
the two men, Colbeck was sorry to have missed Stanley Quayle. Some valuable information had been gleaned and the most telling fact concerned the murder victim’s whereabouts in the hours leading up to his death.

‘His appointments diary was stolen by the killer,’ decided Colbeck, ‘because it would have told us where he would have been.’

‘His elder son didn’t know, sir. His father was always away somewhere on business, he said. Stanley Quayle and his brother were working at one of their pits. They assumed that their father would have been involved with the Midland Railway.’

‘Yet neither Haygarth nor Cope saw him that day.’

‘That’s what they claim.’

‘The appointments diary was probably kept in the office where the self-appointed acting chairman now sits so he could have been in the best position to take possession of it.’

‘The finger points at Haygarth once again.’

‘That doesn’t mean we forget the other suspects,’ warned Colbeck. ‘Did Stanley Quayle admit that his father had particular enemies this time?’

‘Yes,’ said Leeming, ‘but he added no new names to the list and he missed out Superintendent Wigg. When I mentioned him, Mr Quayle had a long think then said that we should keep the superintendent in mind. Talking of which …’

‘Don’t worry, Victor. I sent another report to Superintendent Tallis. He would have got it today, after you’d left London. I gave the impression that I’d made slightly more progress than I actually had while you
were away but it should be enough to pacify him. Our superintendent is like a caged tiger,’ said Colbeck with a nostalgic smile. ‘The only way to stifle his roar is to feed the beast on a regular basis.’

Edward Tallis returned to his office after a testing interview with the commissioner. While he exercised power over his officers, he was answerable to Sir Richard Mayne, the man who’d run the Metropolitan Police Force since the death of the other joint founding commissioner four years earlier. Though Tallis and Mayne had a mutual respect for each other, the meeting that day had been highly uncomfortable for the superintendent. He was roundly criticised for his lack of success in the fight against crime. It was only when he reached the safety of his office, and was smoking a consolatory cigar, that he realised why the commissioner had been in such a bad mood. The satirical magazine,
Punch
, had somehow got hold of Mayne’s standing orders to uniformed policemen and made much of the fact that the commissioner had decreed that, however inclement the weather, his men were not to carry umbrellas. Mayne was lampooned mercilessly. Having himself been ridiculed in cartoons, Tallis had some sympathy for the commissioner but it didn’t lessen the sting of the barbs directed at him. The superintendent wanted to pass on the pain.

As he looked at the pile of documents on his desk, he saw that the latest letter from Colbeck was at the very top. Tallis read through it again. It was a model of how a report should be delivered. Written in a neat hand, it was literate, well organised and informative. No other detective at Scotland Yard could have sent such a crisp yet apparently
comprehensive account of an investigation. At a first reading, it had been very satisfying. But the superintendent knew Robert Colbeck of old. The inspector could use words to beguile and distract. When he looked at the report again, Tallis read between the lines before slapping it down on the desk and drawing on his cigar. After he’d exhaled a veritable cloud of smoke, he spoke aloud.

‘What are you up to this time, Colbeck?’

Much as he liked to see his daughter, Caleb Andrews rationed his visits carefully, mindful of the fact that Madeleine needed time to work on her paintings. For the most part, therefore, he called on her by prior arrangement so as not to interrupt her time at the easel. When he came to the house that day, he knew that she’d finished her daily stint and would give him a welcome. Over a cup of tea, he told her about the visits he’d made to other retired railwaymen and how they’d all agreed that the standard of driving a locomotive had fallen since they’d ceased to occupy a footplate. Madeleine listened to it all with an amused tolerance.

‘Is there any word from Robert?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I had a letter from him yesterday.’

‘What’s the latest news about the case?’

‘He said very little about that,’ replied Madeleine, trying to guide him off the subject. ‘He’s still collecting evidence.’

‘Did you pass on my offer of help, Maddy?’

‘Robert knows that you’re always standing by.’

‘Why hasn’t he sent more details? I need something to work on.’

‘Let him do his job, Father,’ she advised.

In fact, the letter she’d received from Colbeck that
morning had been full of details about the case but Madeleine didn’t wish to divulge any of it to her father. She would certainly never admit that Victor Leeming had recruited her help and that she’d been directly involved in the inquiry. Powered by envy, her father would pester her for every morsel of information. Instead, therefore, she talked about the locomotive that she was currently putting onto canvas. Since it belonged to his beloved LNWR, he waxed lyrical about its features and asked to see it. Madeleine told him to wait, preferring to show him a finished painting.

‘Why do you never put
me
on the footplate?’ he asked, tetchily.

‘I never put any figures in my paintings.’

‘Are you ashamed of your old father?’

‘No,’ she replied, squeezing his arm, ‘I’m proud of what you did as an engine driver. But when you’re an artist, you have to do what you do best and keep away from things you’re not good at. I’m not a figurative artist.’

‘You’re the best artist I’ve ever seen, Maddy.’

‘You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen some of the figures I’ve tried to paint. I’m much safer with locomotives and rolling stock. Somehow I just can’t make people look
real
on canvas.’

‘You could make me look real.’

‘I’ve tried to put you in a painting many times, Father, but it never works.’

‘Is that my fault or yours?’

‘It’s mine,’ she confessed. ‘That’s why I stick to what I
can
do.’

‘But you can do anything if you really try,’ he argued. ‘You’re like me, Maddy. I worked on the railway but I also
found that I had a gift for solving crimes so I developed that gift.’

Madeleine had to suppress a smile. She heard the doorbell ring and, since she was not expecting a visitor, wondered whom it could be. Moments later, a servant came into the room to say that a lady had asked to see her but would not give her name. Madeleine excused herself and went into the hall. When she saw who her visitor was, she was grateful that her name had not been divulged in her father’s hearing.

Lydia Quayle was standing there.

Victor Leeming was delighted to see him again. Apart from the landlord at the Malt Shovel, the reporter was the only person he’d befriended in Spondon. The vicar had been helpful to him but it was Philip Conway with whom the sergeant had formed any sort of bond. Since he was staying at the hotel at the Midland Railway’s expense, Leeming had no compunction about putting the cost of two more drinks on the bill. He and Conway found seats in the lounge. After giving the sergeant an attenuated account of his day, the reporter told him about the friction he’d experienced with Jed Hockaday.