No Human Enemy (Suzie Mountford Mysteries) (7 page)

‘Never had cause to visit Newbury,’ the driver said as they turned into a drive on the outskirts of Churchbridge village and glimpsed a magnificent Queen Anne house, large, imposing, complete with outbuildings and stables.

Even the gravel under the tyres was deep, the crunch sounding expensive, while the house was impressive, the frontage thick with Virginia creeper. Look wonderful in the autumn, she thought, her imagination seeing the layers of creeper turning into flaming blood red.

Like a jigsaw puzzle picture or the top of a box of pre-war chocolates: the house itself huge, done in a weathered red brick with east and west wings leading off from the main house and some forty-odd windows visible along the front elevation, a row of dormers sprouting from the roof.

A tail-coated elderly butler opened the door to her – it was that kind of house – and was unimpressed when Suzie showed him her warrant card. He would, he said, see if Mr Lees-Duncan was at home, and left her in the large hall that smelt of money, dog and leather. After a few minutes the butler returned (Suzie thought of him as ‘Old Scrotum, the wrinkled retainer’, one of Tommy’s favourite terms for faithful servants) and showed her into a large and quite lovely drawing room. A bay window looked out onto a striped lawn that had been manicured to within an inch of its life, and a rose garden where a young woman worked, in the uniform of her class, a long wide-skirted dress, floppy hat, gloves and a trug. The furnishings of the room were slightly turn of the century, big and plushy; oil paintings of ancestors and horses hung on the walls, there were flowers in large cut-glass vases, and a big blue and white jug full of gladioli stood in a deep fireplace.

John Lees-Duncan was a tall man oozing charm and dressed in worn tailored tweeds. He was fine-looking, in his sixties, sixty-five-ish she reckoned, his face tanned, fit, and with twinkling, mocking grey eyes.

‘Well?’ he smiled, sticking out a hand. ‘You’re not from the Gloucester constabulary are you? See your warrant card?’ She held up the card, making sure he didn’t reach out for it. ‘You auxiliary?’ he asked, pleasant yet conscious of his own commanding presence. His handshake was dry and firm and Suzie thought how well he’d get on with Tommy.

‘I think, sir, you’d best sit down,’ she said, lowering her voice.

‘Don’t think I’ll have people telling me to sit down in me own house.’ Still pleasant, the smile almost bewitching, but the eyes hard as rock and bleak as a winter sea. ‘Look, whatever you’ve come to say, out with it. Don’t suppose you’ve got all day any more than I have.’

If you’re going to be like that, she thought, then here goes. ‘You are John Lees-Duncan?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Father of Winifred Audrey Lees-Duncan?’

‘Yes,’ count of four, ‘I suppose.’

‘Then I have some unpleasant news for you, sir. Your daughter was killed during a flying bomb attack in London yesterday, sir. I’m very sorry.’ That’s what they always advised you to say. That you were sorry.

For a moment, John Lees-Duncan stood with his mouth open. Then his face crinkled and he began to laugh.

‘Winnie’s dead, is she?’

‘She is, sir. The Convent of St Catherine of Siena received a direct hit.’

‘And she was in this convent, was she?’

‘She was, sir. A novice.’

He lifted a hand, his forefinger pointing out of the window. ‘Then who the hell’s that, out there cutting me roses?’ he asked.

CHAPTER SEVEN

She was tall and slender with short, unassisted, old gold hair in a pageboy bob, no fringe, Winifred Lees-Duncan. Suzie thought Tommy would certainly like her if only for the thighs which moved almost salaciously against the thin material of her long, predominantly blue dress. Maybe he’d like the accent as well. Very county: yah, yah.

‘You’d have adored her,’ she told him on the telephone. ‘Kind of subservient blonde fizzer with, I suspect, a delayed timer and a quick-release mechanism. You’d be over the moon for her. She’s a WAAF Flight Officer, or whatever they call them. You’d be shot down in flames as the Brylcreem boys have it.’

‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘You do talk a lot of twaddle, heart,’ rather liking the idea of her thinking he was no end of a dog with women.

‘She has a pet name as well. Nobody calls her Winifred or Winnie…’

‘I bet they call her Wonky. Wonky Lees-Duncan…’ School thing. Old Wonky Lees-Duncan of the Upper Fourth. Good on the lax field, eh.’

‘As a child she couldn’t say Winnie. She called herself Wiltow – you know kids – in time it became Willow. That’s what everyone calls her – Willow.’

‘As in “a willow grows aslant a brook”?’ Tommy asked.

Suzie tried to think of something cheeky to top the Shakespeare. Perhaps, ‘On a tree by a river a little Tom-Tit sang Willow, tit-willow, tit-willow,’ – Gilbert and Sullivan. Decided against it: Tommy would only get vulgar.

She had been talking to Tommy on the telephone, a trunk call from Sheffield – murder of Mrs Doris Butler – because when she got back to Upper St Martin’s Lane there was a note:

Sorry, heart, the Sheffield case blew up again and they need the brains there, on the spot, so I’m taking Ron and Laura. It appears that the late Mrs Butler is lamented by three, possibly five, swains. A situation that poses a problem or four. So, you’re in charge of the Convent Mystery, as Fleet Street will undoubtedly call it – male nun who never was, kind of thing. Ring me. Love for ever and a day, Tommy.
Then a little row of Xs indicating kisses: uncharacteristic for Tommy Livermore. Then a PS:
Emma, like the poor, is of course still with me and Sheffield, so important to our war effort as the steel capital of Great Britain, is just as it was – dirty, smoky and dingy from the factory chimneys and the steel works.

*   *   *

So she rang Sheffield nick and was told that Detective Chief Superintendent Livermore was having dinner with Detective Chief Superintendent Berry, Sheffield CID. Emma Penticost was there, though, said the chief was staying at The Royal Victoria, where they’d all stayed at the start of the Doris Butler murder case a few weeks ago. ‘He’s OK, ma’am, and I’ll see that he stays OK,’ she told Suzie who grunted and put down the phone.

She remembered the Blitz humour of that stay at The Royal Victoria – ‘Glad you didn’t try Marples Hotel,’ the porter said. ‘They’ve got no rooms at all.’ Later they found that Marples – in the city centre – had received a direct hit in December 1940, killing over sixty people: Sheffield’s worst air raid incident so far.

She rang The Royal Victoria and left a message asking Tommy to telephone as soon as he got in. She suspected the receptionist she left the message with was the snooty one with the snub nose and superior manner: the one who had been unpleasant and condescending when Suzie and the rest of the Reserve Squad stayed there: the one Tommy seemed to like: all over her with, ‘Oh, Miss Hunter this, and Miss Hunter that.’ Her name was Christine Hunter and Tommy started calling her ‘Our Chrissie’ which hadn’t gone down well with Suzie.

While she waited for Tommy to phone she wandered around the flat, hated being there alone, loathed it ever since the psychotic, murderous Golly Goldfinch had jumped her in the bathroom during that terrible time at the end of 1940. She hated being alone there now, just not used to it: twitchy, moving through the rooms, mind teeming with the horrid memories, touching things to calm her, the locks on the doors, Tommy’s Harris tweed jacket with the big leather buttons – she buried her face in it and inhaled, getting the scent of him, the soap and his tobacco – picked up his ties one by one, old school, police college, a blue with white polka dots, red with the same and a splendid silk creation by Sulka; then the pistol they kept, illegally, in the drawer of the bedside table, checking the mechanism, letting the magazine drop out of the butt, then slamming it home again, making certain there was one up the spout.

In the largest room, at the front, looking over the street, Tommy had hung a painting over the fireplace. He’d brought it up from Kingscote: a copy, Canaletto,
Venice, The Grand Canal,
a big canvas that she’d have sworn was an original, but he’d never have let on, any more than he’d ever call the artist by his proper name. ‘Ah, old Cannelloni,’ he’d say, ‘good enough to eat.’ That was Tommy: sound, tough copper and schoolboy. She smiled, getting his measure again. Getting it at last.

She was in the front room – the drawing room as her mother called it – looking down on Upper St Martin’s Lane, when the telephone rang and she lunged for it, almost tripping over. But it was James asking if she’d do him a favour. ‘Not today, Suze, but sometime next week.’

She told him to hurry up because she was expecting Tommy to ring.

‘Thing is Suze, that Maren. Emily. One that drove me up.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Well done, Jim. Hormones raging, I’ll bet.

‘Well, we’ve got a kind of tentative date. Been talking to her on the blower.’

‘She’s an OR.’ Meaning other rank, meaning officers keep your hands off.

‘Commandos don’t bother about things like that.’ A bit lofty and full of himself. ‘I want you to cover for me if necessary: back me up with the ma if I say I’m in London for a medical appointment or something. Actually I do have to go back to the hospital soon so it might not be needed.’

She told him of course she would back him up, tickled that her little brother was showing interest in young women. In truth she found it amusing: ‘Old Jim,’ she thought. ‘You can’t get into much trouble, seeing as how you’re a cripple.’ Then she asked how their mother was.

‘Picking fruit. Bottling it. Jams and pickles. All that.’

‘Enjoying having you home?’

‘Think I’m a buffer between her and the GM.’ GM for Galloping Major.

‘And the children?’ Her sister’s kids, Charlotte’s children, Lucy and Ben. Ben, who could not speak and could not hear, locked into his own world, in his head.

‘They’re great. Ben can do a lot of signing now. Seems to know who I am.’

As they said goodbye, Suzie told him, ‘Watch your back, Jim.’ One of Tommy’s favourite warnings.

‘Not my back I’m worried about. Not with Maren Emily Styles,’ Jim closed the connection, Suzie put down the receiver and the phone rang immediately, Tommy breathing in her ear. ‘Who you been talking to, heart?’ Smile in his voice.

‘My brother. Getting the hots for that Maren who drove him over on Sunday.’ She started to tell him about the goings on at Churchbridge, Winifred Lees-Duncan not being the body.

‘You’re absolutely certain, heart?’

‘That Winnie Lees-Duncan’s alive? One hundred and fifty per cent. Absolutely pukka gen. There’s no doubt.’

‘Then who’s the nun, heart?’

‘Someone who knows the Lees-Duncan family that’s for sure, though I don’t trust the father: John Lees-Duncan, gentleman farmer.’

‘OK. Sum him up, heart.’

‘Cold, uncompromising, arrogant. You’re made for one another.’

‘Well, tough ’cos I ain’t coming back.’

‘Tommy,’ just this side of pleading.

‘No can do, heart. They need me here, we’re up to five runners now and I fancy myself as an interrogator. You can do the job. I mean you’re so good with nuns. Know ’em like the back of your whatsit. Brought up with ’em and all that. Sat at their feet, what?’ Tommy the bluff, pleasant cove who got on with everybody.

‘How’s Chrissie?’ Suzie asked.

‘Chrissie?’ Tommy pondered, as though trying to match the name with a face.

‘Yes, Tom. Chrissie Hunter, receptionist, long legs, snub nose, “Coming, Mr Livermore.”’ Doing a passable imitation of Jack Benny’s rasp-voiced retainer, Rochester: now a favourite of the Jack Benny radio show, a hit on the BBC since the US troops had arrived in the UK. Rochester’s favourite cry was, ‘Comin’, Mr Benny.’

‘Oh, yes. Chrissie,’ kind of savouring the name. ‘Yes, I remember. I think she’s left here. Haven’t seen her, heart. Now, the nuns…’

‘Tell me what to do, Tom.’

‘See the nuns, that Mother Rachel’s a good un. See her and make sure they’ve got a pretty picture of La Winnie in the flesh as it were. Then go back to the gallant John Lees-Duncan and give him a look-see. Find out if he recognises her. Show it around a bit.’

‘You ring him first, Tommy? Please. I need him brought down a peg or three before I see him again. Lean on him and tell him he’s got to cooperate.’

‘I’ll get the Assistant Deputy Commissioner to do it…’

‘Super.’ And perhaps, she asked, he could get someone in Gloucester to mark Lees-Duncan’s card as well.

‘If he’s so unpleasant…’

‘It’s probably me.’

‘Check him out with CRO, and ask the Branch just to be on the safe side. Talk to Woolly.’ Woolly was Woolly Bear, Superintendent Basil Bear, the 2i/c of Special Branch, an old chum of Tommy’s. (‘School together, heart. Used to share a study back in the dark ages.’)

‘And don’t forget you’ve got to see the parson, whatname, Harding, father of Joan, Novice Bridget, isn’t it? Mother Rachel’s done the dirty work – broken the news – but we’ll have to follow up.’

‘OK. But what if they haven’t got a photo of Winnie, or the one purporting to be Winnie?’

‘Nip down the mortuary and take a photo. Nothing difficult about that. We do it all the time. Open the corpse’s eyes and put a lot of shine on the face to light the eyes, give them some life. Does the trick. Get it nice and grainy. Nobody’ll know the difference.’

‘I can’t do all this by myself, Tommy. I need some help.’

‘Stop whining, woman. Take Dennis, he’s free.’ He chortled at his watery joke. Dennis Free was free. ‘Just do it, old heart. You’re always grumbling about not being trusted with a case of your own. Well, now you’ve got a case of your own. Go to. Take Dennis and Shirley and do it. Dennis knows how to take pretty pics: he’ll do it.’ Pause, count of three. ‘And while he’s at it he can take a picture of the other corpse, the bloke. Give them a flash of that an’ all.’

Silence for a moment, then – ‘Second thoughts, heart, have your pal Magnus get his tame photographer to do it. Owes you a favour, eh?’

‘Piece of cake,’ she said, up to her knees in the irony, and hung up on him wondering if he was making a fuss of Christine Hunter and fuming at the idea of Magnus being an old pal.