Timetable of Death Page 15

  He continued to berate the coachman. Everyone within earshot felt sorry for Cleary but the man himself withstood the onslaught with relative equanimity. The fact that the coachman remained so calm under fire only enraged Stanley Quayle even more and he threatened to dismiss the man.

  ‘I was employed by your father, sir,’ Cleary reminded him. ‘Now that he’s no longer here to give orders, I’m answerable to Mrs Quayle instead.’

  ‘Damn your insolence!’

  After ridding himself of another torrent of bile, Quayle turned away and stormed back into the house. Roused by the first confrontation that evening, he was pulsing with fury as he went off to the second one. When he found his brother in the drawing room, he went straight on the attack.

  ‘Why, in God’s name, did you let it happen?’

  Lucas Quayle shrugged. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Mother is dying in front of us and you let her go gallivanting around the countryside in the landau.’

  ‘She said that she needed fresh air, Stanley. That seemed to me a very reasonable proposition.’

  ‘It will have taxed her already waning health.’

  ‘Only the doctor can decide that,’ said his brother. ‘But I’m told that she looked well enough when she came back. Even Agnes admitted that and she did everything to prevent Mother going out in the first place.’

  ‘Well, it won’t happen again. I’ve just given Cleary orders to that effect.’

  ‘You can’t stop Mother going out, Stanley.’

  ‘It’s in her best interests.’

  ‘She loves the countryside around here.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Lucas, she’s in mourning!’

  ‘So are you, for that matter,’ responded his brother, tartly, ‘yet it didn’t stop you traipsing off to one of our coal mines.’

  ‘Someone had to make the funeral arrangements.’

  ‘I agree, but you didn’t have to go on to Ilkeston afterwards.’

  ‘I had things to check up on,’ said the other, angrily, ‘so I won’t be called to account by you. I’m in charge now and that means I make all the decisions. In fact, that’s what I really want to talk about. I had a legitimate reason to go out, Lucas. You didn’t. Agnes tells me that you went to Derby to see Inspector Colbeck.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the other, defiantly. ‘I wanted information.’

  ‘I gave the inspector all the information he required.’

  ‘That’s nonsense, Stanley. You told him almost nothing and had him out of the house in a matter of minutes. It was absurd. Don’t you want to catch the man who killed our father?’

  ‘Of course, I do.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you offer proper assistance to Inspector Colbeck?’

  ‘I had too many other things to do.’

  ‘The investigation takes precedence over all of them.’

  ‘Nothing that’s happened within these four walls has any bearing on the case. That’s why I was not prepared to waste time talking to the police. Above all else,’ he said, sternly, ‘I’m not having our dirty linen washed in public.’

  ‘Inspector Colbeck is very discreet.’

  ‘But you aren’t, Lucas. You blurt things out before you realise what you’re doing. You had no cause to leave this house.’

  ‘I wanted to know what was going on, Stanley. That’s what normal people do. If a loved one is murdered, they want every scrap of information they can get about the police investigation. It’s only natural.’

  ‘I don’t want strangers prying into things that don’t concern them.’

  ‘The police need our help,’ Lucas emphasised.

  ‘Keep away from them.’

  ‘The inspector said how useful I’d been.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have been allowed within a mile of him.’

  ‘Stop giving me orders, Stanley. I’m old enough to make up my own mind about things. Power goes to your head sometimes. It was the same when we played cricket. I told the inspector about it.’

  His brother was puce with indignation. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your insistence on being in control,’ said Lucas. ‘You had to captain the team even though people like Burns, Cleary and me were much better players. You went round bawling commands at us as if you really knew what you were doing.’

  ‘I did know, Lucas. That’s why we always won the matches.’

  ‘Gerard Burns was the real match-winner not Stanley Quayle.’

  ‘Captaincy was the deciding factor. I set the field and I chose the bowlers.’

  ‘You also selected yourself as our opening batsman even though you hardly ever got into double figures. That was appalling captaincy.’

  The row escalated at once and the brothers stood toe to toe, exchanging insults. Though they talked about cricket, they were really arguing about the lifelong tension and inequality between them. Stanley Quayle became more and more like his father, cold, authoritative and uncompromising, while his brother regressed into the rebel he’d been in his younger days. All of the old dissension between them came to the surface. They were still trading accusations when their sister came into the room.

  ‘Whatever’s going on?’ she asked in alarm. ‘I could hear you upstairs.’

  Sobered by her intervention, Lucas apologised to her but Stanley Quayle was determined to shift any blame from himself. He claimed that his brother had let the whole family down by talking to Colbeck. At a time as fraught as the present one, the one thing they had to guard was their privacy. It was deplorable, he said, that the police were allowed to peer into their lives and learn about their past upheavals. Agnes agreed that it had been a mistake for her younger brother to go to Derby but he defended himself vigorously.

  ‘I learnt things of importance to us,’ he asserted.

  ‘You should have stayed here to mourn Father,’ said Agnes.

  ‘I prefer to help in the search for his killer.’

  ‘What could you say that would have been of any help?’

  ‘I talked about Lydia, for a start.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ railed his brother. ‘There was absolutely no need to open that Pandora’s box. It should have been left firmly closed.’

  ‘The inspector already knew the truth. He’d spoken to Burns.’

  ‘Don’t mention that hateful name again!’

  ‘We have to face facts, Stanley. He may be involved here. Burns would have more reason than anybody to want Father killed. He has to be a suspect.’

  ‘He wouldn’t dare,’ snapped the other. ‘We scared him away.’

  ‘You never understood what happened between him and Lydia, did you?’

  ‘I understood enough to know that it was a grotesque misalliance.’

  ‘That was what I felt as well,’ said Agnes. ‘Lydia was so reckless.’

  ‘Did you really want your sister married to a gardener?’ asked Stanley, curling his lip. ‘That cunning wretch led her astray, Lucas. I daren’t think what he did to Lydia. It’s too unsettling. Burns should have been horsewhipped.’

  ‘The inspector told me something that I didn’t know,’ said Lucas.

  ‘We don’t want to hear it.’

  ‘That’s your trouble, Stanley. You never want to learn the truth. You just close your ears and block everything out. How can you make a fair judgement on anything until you’re aware of all the facts?’

  ‘The main fact was all I needed to know – Burns tried to seduce our sister.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think it went that far,’ protested Agnes.

  ‘That’s all he was after.’

  ‘You’re quite wrong about him,’ said Lucas, ‘and so was I. The inspector told me something that’s made me revise my opinion of Burns and showed me just how much he meant to Lydia.’ He paused for a few moments. ‘It was no passing fancy. They were planning to elope and get married.’

  Lydia knew that her friend was deeply upset. The moment that the visitors had left, Beatrice reti
red to her room and stayed there for well over an hour. Nonetheless, Lydia felt that she’d been right to speak to Madeleine Colbeck. It was foolish to pretend that she had no interest in the murder inquiry. Part of her wanted to know what had happened and when the person responsible would be caught. Madeleine had probed gently away without causing the slightest offence or discomfort. When she was leaving with the sergeant, Madeleine had given her an address where she could be reached in case she thought of anything that might be useful to the inquiry. Lydia had felt soothed. In the wake of Beatrice’s departure upstairs, the sensation quickly evaporated. There would be repercussions and Lydia was not looking forward to them.

  Beatrice finally emerged from her room and came downstairs but she made no immediate contact with Lydia. Instead, she wandered about the house from room to room as if deliberately avoiding her. It was left to Lydia to make the first move. She intercepted Beatrice outside the kitchen.

  ‘We must talk,’ she said.

  Beatrice feigned indifference. ‘Must we?’

  ‘To begin with, I owe you an apology. When all is said and done, this is still your house. I had no right to invite someone in when you clearly objected to them.’

  ‘That’s certainly true.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, Beatrice.’

  ‘What I’m sorry about is that you made me look foolish and deceitful. If you heard them mention your name, you must also have heard me telling them that they’d made a mistake in coming here. Then out you pop and contradict me.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that at all.’

  ‘They knew I’d been lying. I felt betrayed.’

  ‘Why didn’t you simply tell them that I live here?’

  ‘I didn’t want them interfering,’ said Beatrice, petulantly. ‘I didn’t want strangers to walk in off the street and … take you away.’

  ‘They made no suggestion about taking me anywhere.’

  ‘I’m talking about your mind, Lydia. They filled it with all the things that you ran away from. When they did that, they took you away from me.’

  Lydia touched her arm. ‘But I’m still here, Beatrice.’

  ‘Only in body – your mind is back in the Midlands.’

  ‘I can’t just ignore what happened to my father.’

  ‘You’ve managed to do that very effectively, so far. After a month of living here, you stopped mentioning his name. It was as if he didn’t exist.’

  ‘In that sense, he still doesn’t.’

  ‘Then why did you spend such a long time talking about him?’

  ‘I was answering questions about the family.’

  ‘You were being drawn back into a past you swore to escape. And while you were doing that,’ said Beatrice, unhappily, ‘I was trapped in the other room with that ugly detective. He frightened me, Lydia.’

  ‘Then that’s something else I have to apologise for,’ said the other, ‘but he did the right thing in leaving me alone with Mrs Colbeck. I could talk to her in a way that would have been impossible with a man.’

  ‘What did you say to her?’

  Lydia chose her words with care. Though she’d taken her friend into her confidence about the reasons for coming to London, she had spared Beatrice the more disturbing details. She had said nothing about the threat made to her about Gerard Burns by her father or about the violence she’d suffered. When she’d dared to defend her actions, Vivian Quayle had lost his temper and struck her across the face. He’d then grabbed her by the shoulders and shaken her before hurling her to the floor. On the following day, when he’d calmed down, he’d mumbled an apology but the damage was irreparable by then. All that Lydia could think about from that point onwards was her eventual escape. When the break came, she’d resolved never to see her father again and she’d kept her vow.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault that they came here,’ she pointed out. ‘It was yours.’

  Beatrice tensed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re the one who belongs to the Lending Library. How clever of them to find this address by asking about readers with a passion for Italy! I’d never have thought of doing that.’

  ‘There are other ways to discover where you are, Lydia.’

  ‘Nobody else has any reason to find me.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  Lydia felt as if she’d just walked into something very solid and she was dazed for a moment. Beatrice’s revelation was stunning. Evidently, she knew. Lydia had concealed from her the fact that her younger brother had learnt her address by employing a private detective and had then written to her. The only way that her friend could possibly know about the correspondence was by going into Lydia’s room and finding the letter in the bedside drawer. There was profound awkwardness on both sides. Lydia was shocked that her privacy had been violated and Beatrice was horrified that her friend had kept something so important from her. The taut silence lasted for minutes.

  ‘I should have been told, Lydia,’ said the older woman at length.

  ‘It would have been hurtful to you.’

  ‘It was far more hurtful to learn that you hid the truth from me.’

  ‘You had no call to search my bedroom.’

  ‘I had to find out the truth.’

  ‘How did you even know that I’d received a letter? You were out at the time.’

  ‘Dora told me.’

  ‘Then why not ask me directly?’

  Beatrice’s tone sharpened. ‘Why not save me the trouble of asking?’

  The awkwardness between them suddenly intensified and the whole balance of their relationship seemed to shift. Beatrice knew that her friend had not been entirely honest with her and, by the same token, Lydia knew that the older woman had gone behind her back to search for something. Neither of them knew what to say. Beatrice felt both let down and guilty while Lydia was at once hurt and chastened. She wanted to tell Beatrice that she had replied to her brother and told him not to contact her again but the words simply would not come. For her part, Beatrice had an urge to enfold her in a tearful embrace yet she was quite unable to move.

  Two close friends had just reached an impasse, unable to decide if they’d somehow been drawn closer by their respective mistakes or if their relationship had been shattered beyond recall.

  Since he knew the train that Leeming would catch in London that morning, Colbeck walked to Derby station to meet it. When an earlier train steamed in, one of the passengers who alighted was Elijah Wigg, adjusting his hat and jacket. He was obviously so proud of his uniform that Colbeck wondered if the man could ever be persuaded to take it off. Wigg strode across to him.

  ‘Where are you going, Inspector?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m waiting for someone to arrive, actually.’

  ‘My day clearly starts much earlier than yours. I was in Spondon at eight o’clock to see what, if anything, the local constables had managed to discover. I’m known for my sudden inspections. It keeps men on their toes.’

  ‘Has any new evidence come to light?’

  ‘If it has, they didn’t get a sniff of it. I told them where and how to look.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Colbeck, ‘I’m glad that you mentioned the Spondon constables. One of them accosted Sergeant Leeming. He’s a local cobbler by the name of Jed Hockaday.’

  ‘Yes, he’s very committed and you can’t say that of all of them. Hockaday’s a man of low intelligence but I like that in a policeman. It’s more important to have someone who obeys orders at once than someone who thinks too much.’

  ‘Then we must agree to differ, Superintendent,’ said Colbeck. ‘Given the choice, I prefer a thinking policeman every time. He usually knows that discretion is the better part of valour and never rushes in regardless.’

  ‘I can’t see you rushing in anywhere,’ joked Wigg. ‘It might crease that impeccable attire of yours.’

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised how often I’ve had torn garments and scuffed shoes. During a case I handled in Kent,’ recalled Colbeck, ‘my frock coat acquired a nasty tear
when someone shot at me. As a thinking policeman, I had the presence of mind to fall to the ground and feign injury.’

  ‘Hockaday would never dream of doing that.’

  ‘How long has he been a constable?’

  ‘He volunteered when Enoch Stone was killed.’

  ‘According to that reporter, Philip Conway, the fellow is still carrying out a one-man investigation into the murder.’

  ‘It’s not confined to one man,’ corrected Wigg. ‘That case remains open.’ He stroked a whisker and grinned. ‘I see that the love affair with Mr Haygarth is over.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what you mean.’

  ‘When he sent for you, he told me that you were the cleverest detective in England. His enthusiasm has waned a bit since then. After I left you at the Royal last night, I bumped into him outside the Midland headquarters. Haygarth was less than complimentary about you.’

  ‘He’s entitled to his opinion,’ said Colbeck, easily. ‘I daresay that even you have your detractors, Superintendent, impossible as it may seem.’

  Wigg leant in close. ‘Haygarth is not your detractor,’ he said, quietly. ‘His fear is that you’ll do your job too well and discover that he’s implicated in this murder somehow. I told you that he had to be a suspect. His change of attitude to you is clear proof of it.’ He tugged his jacket into shape. ‘And where Haygarth goes, that slimy creature of his called Maurice Cope goes as well. Watch your back, Inspector. They’re dangerous men.’

  Of all the members of the family, Agnes Quayle had been the one most unnerved by the news of the murder. Her life might be dull and repetitious but at least, she had always consoled herself, it was both comfortable and supremely safe. Those guarantees had suddenly disappeared. She was profoundly discomfited and no longer felt safe at the house. If her father could be killed in mysterious circumstances, then the rest of the family might also be in jeopardy. The thought made her afraid to leave the house alone for her daily walk. Her main concern, however, was for her mother. In defying her children and going for a drive in the landau the previous day, Harriet Quayle had been taking an unnecessary risk, yet she’d returned with a touch of colour in her cheeks. Even so, Agnes agreed with her elder brother’s argument that their mother should be kept inside the house and more or less confined to her room. While Stanley and Lucas would pop their heads in to exchange a few words with her, the burden of looking after the old woman would fall as usual on Agnes. It was a burden that was feeling increasingly heavy.