Magpie Murders Page 12

  The new arrival was surprised to find three visitors in the hall and he didn’t try to conceal it. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

  ‘I was about to ask you the same,’ Chubb replied, already bristling. ‘I’m with the police.’

  ‘Oh.’ The man’s face fell. ‘Well, I’m a friend of Frances’s – Lady Pye. I’ve come down from London to look after her – hour of need and all that. The name’s Dartford, Jack Dartford.’ He held a hand out vaguely, then withdrew it. ‘She’s very upset, you know.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ Pünd stepped forward. ‘I would be interested to know how you heard the news, Mr Dartford.’

  ‘About Magnus? She rang me.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘No. Last night. Immediately after she’d called the police. She was actually quite hysterical. I’d have come down straight away but it was a bit late to hit the road and I had meetings this morning so I said I’d arrive around lunchtime, which is what I did. Picked her up at the hospital and brought her here. Her son, Freddy, is with her, by the way. He’d been staying with friends on the south coast.’

  ‘You will forgive me for asking, but I wonder why she selected you out of all of her friends in what you term her hour of need?’

  ‘Well, that’s easy enough to explain, Mr …?’

  ‘Pünd.’

  ‘Pünd? That’s a German name. And you’ve got the accent to go with it. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Mr Pünd is helping us,’ Chubb cut in, shortly.

  ‘Oh – all right. What was the question? Why did she ask me?’ For all his bluster, it was evident that Jack Dartford was casting around for a safe answer. ‘Well, I suppose it was because we’d just had lunch together. I actually went with her to the station and put her on the train back to Bath. I’d have been uppermost in her mind.’

  ‘Lady Pye was with you in London on the day of the murder?’ Pünd asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Dartford half-sighed, as if he had given away more than he had intended. ‘We had a business lunch. I advise her about stocks and shares, investments … that sort of thing.’

  ‘And what did you do after lunch, Mr Dartford?’

  ‘I just told you—’

  ‘You told us that you accompanied Lady Pye to the station. But we know that she came to Bath on a late evening train. She reached the house around half past nine. I take it, therefore, that you spent the afternoon together.’

  ‘Yes. We did.’ Dartford was looking increasingly uncomfortable. ‘We killed a bit of time.’ He thought for a moment. ‘We went to a gallery. The Royal Academy.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Just some paintings. Dreary stuff.’

  ‘Lady Pye has said that she went shopping.’

  ‘We did a bit of shopping too. She didn’t buy anything though … not that I can remember. She wasn’t really in the mood.’

  ‘I have one last question for you, if you will forgive me, Mr Dartford. You say that you are a friend of Lady Pye. Would you have described yourself as a friend of the late Sir Magnus, too?’

  ‘No. Not really. I mean, I knew him of course. I quite liked him. Decent enough sort of chap. But Frances and I used to play tennis together. That’s how we met. So I saw rather more of her than of him. Not that he minded! But he wasn’t particularly sporty. That’s all.’

  ‘Where is Lady Pye?’ Chubb asked.

  ‘She’s in her room, upstairs. She’s in bed.’

  ‘Asleep?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She wasn’t when I looked in a few minutes ago.’

  ‘Then we would like to see her.’

  ‘Now?’ Dartford saw the answer in the detective’s implacable face. ‘All right, I’ll take you up.’

  6

  Frances Pye was lying on her bed, wrapped in a dressing gown and half-submerged in a wave of crumpled sheets. She had been drinking champagne. There was a half-empty glass on the table beside her, along with a bottle, slanting out of an ice bucket. Sedative or celebration? To Fraser’s eye, it could have been either and the look on her face as they came in was just as hard to decipher. She was annoyed to be interrupted but at the same time she had been expecting it. She was reluctant to talk but had already geared herself up to answer the questions that must come her way.

  She was not alone. A teenaged boy, dressed in whites as if for cricket, lounged in a chair, one leg crossed over the other. He was obviously her son. He had the same dark hair, swept back across his forehead, the same haughty eyes. He was eating an apple. Neither mother nor son looked particularly grieved by what had happened. She could have been in bed with a touch of flu. He could have been visiting her.

  ‘Frances …’ Jack Dartford introduced them. ‘This is Detective Inspector Chubb. He’s from the Bath police.’

  ‘We saw each other briefly the night it happened,’ Chubb reminded her. ‘I was there when you were taken off in the ambulance.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ The voice was husky, uninterested.

  ‘And this is Mr Pond.’

  ‘Pünd.’ Pünd nodded his head. ‘I am assisting the police. My assistant, James Fraser.’

  ‘They want to ask you a few questions.’ Dartford was deliberately attempting to insinuate himself into the room. ‘I’ll hang around, if you like.’

  ‘That’s all right, thank you, Mr Dartford.’ Chubb answered the question for her. ‘We’ll call you if we need you.’

  ‘I really don’t think I ought to leave Frances on her own.’

  ‘We won’t keep her very long.’

  ‘It’s all right, Jack.’ Frances Pye settled back onto the pile of cushions that had been heaped up behind her. She turned to the three unwanted visitors. ‘I suppose we ought to get this over with.’

  There was a brief moment of awkwardness as Dartford tried to work out what to do next and even Fraser could see what was going through his mind. He wanted to tell her what he had said about the London visit. He wanted to make sure that her account tallied with his. But there was no way Pünd was going to allow that to happen. Separate the suspects. Set them against each other. That was how he worked.

  Dartford left. Chubb closed the door and Fraser drew up three chairs. There was plenty of furniture in the bedroom, which was large, with tumbling curtains, thick carpets, fitted wardrobes and an antique dressing table whose bowed legs seemed barely up to the weight of all the bottles, boxes, bowls and brushes piled up on the surface. Fraser, who liked to read Charles Dickens, thought at once of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. The whole room was chintzy, slightly Victorian. All that was missing was the cobwebs.

  Pünd sat down. ‘I’m afraid I have to ask you some questions about your husband,’ he began.

  ‘I quite understand. It’s a ghastly business. Who would so such a thing? Please go ahead.’

  ‘You might prefer to ask your son to leave.’

  ‘But I want to stay!’ Freddy protested. There was a certain arrogance in his voice, all the more inappropriate as it hadn’t yet broken. ‘I’ve never met a real detective.’ He stared insolently at Pünd. ‘How come you’ve got a foreign name? Do you work for Scotland Yard?’

  ‘Don’t be rude, Freddy,’ his mother said. ‘You can stay – but only if you don’t interrupt.’ Her eyes flickered over to Pünd. ‘Do begin!’

  Pünd took off his glasses, polished them, put them on again. Fraser guessed that he would be uncomfortable talking in front of the boy. Pünd was never good with children, particularly English ones who had grown up in the belief that he was still the enemy. ‘Very well. May I ask, first, if you were aware of your husband having received any threats in recent weeks?’

  ‘Threats?’

  ‘Had he received any letters or telephone calls that might have suggested his life was in danger?’

  There was a large, white telephone on the bedside table, next to the ice bucke
t. Frances glanced at it before answering. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why would he have?’

  ‘There was, I believe, a property with which he was involved. The new development …’

  ‘Oh! You mean Dingle Dell!’ She muttered the name contemptuously. ‘Well, I don’t know about that. There were bound to be a few raised temperatures in the village. People around here are very narrow-minded and Magnus was expecting a few protests. But death threats? I hardly think so.’

  ‘We found a note on your husband’s desk,’ Chubb cut in. ‘It was unsigned, typewritten and we have every reason to believe that whoever wrote it was very angry indeed.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘The letter made a very specific threat, Lady Pye. There’s also the weapon that we found, the service revolver in his desk.’

  ‘Well, I know nothing about that. The gun was usually in the safe. And Magnus didn’t mention any threatening letter to me.’

  ‘May I ask, Lady Pye …’ Pünd sounded apologetic. ‘What were your movements in London yesterday? I do not wish to intrude,’ he continued, hurriedly, ‘but it is necessary for us to establish the whereabouts of everyone who is involved.’

  ‘Do you think Mummy’s involved?’ Freddy asked, eagerly. ‘Do you think she did it?’

  ‘Freddy, be quiet!’ Frances Pye glanced at her son disdainfully, then turned her eyes back to Pünd. ‘It is an intrusion,’ she said. ‘And I’ve already told the Detective Inspector exactly what I was doing, but if you must know, I had lunch at Carlotta’s with Jack Dartford. It was quite a long lunch. We were talking business. I don’t really understand anything about money and Jack is terribly helpful.’

  ‘What time did you leave London?’

  ‘I was on the seven-forty train.’ She paused, perhaps realising that there was a lengthy interval to be explained. ‘I went shopping after lunch. I didn’t buy anything but I strolled down Bond Street and into Fortnum & Mason.’

  ‘It is quite pleasant to kill time in London,’ Pünd agreed. ‘Did you perhaps look into an art gallery?’

  ‘No. Not this time. There was something on at the Courtauld, I think, but I wasn’t really in the mood.’

  So Dartford had been lying. Even James Fraser picked up on the obvious discrepancy between the two accounts of the afternoon but before either of them could remark upon it, the telephone rang – not in the bedroom but downstairs. Lady Pye glanced briefly at the handset on the table beside her and frowned. ‘Would you go and answer that please, Freddy?’ she asked. ‘Whoever it is, tell than I’m resting and don’t want to be disturbed.’

  ‘What if it’s for Daddy?’

  ‘Just tell them we’re not taking any calls. There’s a good boy.’

  ‘All right.’ Freddy was a little annoyed to be dismissed from the room. He slouched off the chair and out of the door. The three of them listened to the ringing as it echoed up from downstairs. After less than a minute, it stopped.

  ‘The phone’s broken up here,’ Frances Pye explained. ‘This is an old house and there’s always something going wrong. At the moment it’s the phones. Last month it was the electrics. We also have woodwork and dry rot. People may complain about Dingle Dell but at least the new houses will be modern and efficient. You have no idea what it’s like living in an ancient pile.’

  It occurred to Fraser that she had adroitly changed the subject, moving away from what she had – or had not – been doing in London. But Pünd did not seem too concerned. ‘What time did you return to Pye Hall on the night of your husband’s murder?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, let me see. The train would have got in about half past eight. It was very slow. I’d left my car at Bath station and by the time I’d driven over here, it must have been about nine twenty.’ She paused. ‘A car drove out just as I arrived.’

  Chubb nodded. ‘You did mention that to me, Lady Pye. I don’t suppose you managed to see the driver.’

  ‘I may have glimpsed him. I don’t know why I say that. I’m not even certain it was a man. It was a green car. I already told you. It had the letters FP in the registration. I’m afraid I can’t tell you the make.’

  ‘Just the one person in it?’

  ‘Yes. In the driving seat. I saw his shoulders and the back of his head. He was wearing a hat.’

  ‘You saw the car leave,’ Pünd said. ‘How would you say it was being driven?’

  ‘The driver was in a hurry. He skidded as he turned into the main road.’

  ‘He was driving to Bath?’

  ‘No. The other way.’

  ‘You then proceeded to the front door. The lights were on.’

  ‘Yes. I let myself in.’ She shuddered. ‘I saw my husband at once and I called the police.’

  There was a long silence. Lady Pye seemed genuinely exhausted. When Pünd spoke again, his voice was gentle. ‘Do you by any chance know the combination of your husband’s safe?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I do. I keep some of my more expensive jewellery there. It hasn’t been opened, has it?’

  ‘No, not at all, Lady Pye,’ Pünd assured her. ‘Although it is possible that it had been opened some time recently as the picture behind which it was concealed was not quite flush with the wall.’

  ‘That might have been Magnus. He kept money in there. And private papers.’

  ‘And the combination?’ Chubb asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Left to seventeen, right to nine, left to fifty-seven, then turn the dial twice.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Pünd smiled sympathetically. ‘I am sure you are tired, Lady Pye, and we will not keep you much longer. There are just two more questions I wish to ask you. The first concerns a note which we also found on your husband’s desk and which seems to have been written in his hand.’

  Chubb had brought the notepad, now encased in a plastic evidence bag. He passed it to Lady Pye who quickly scanned the three lines written in pencil:

  ASHTON H

  Mw

  A GIRL

  ‘This is Magnus’s handwriting,’ she said. ‘And there’s nothing very mysterious about it. He had a habit of making notes when he took a telephone call. He was always forgetting things. I don’t know who or what Ashton H is. MW? I suppose that could be somebody’s initials.’

  ‘The M is large but the w is small,’ Pünd pointed out.

  ‘Then it might be a word. He did that too. If you asked him to buy the newspaper when he went out, he’d jot down Np.’

  ‘Could it be that this Mw angered him in some way? He takes no further notes but there are several lines. You can see that he has almost torn the sheet of paper with the pencil.’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘And what about this girl?’ Chubb cut in. ‘Who might that be?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that either. Obviously, we needed a new housekeeper. I suppose someone could have recommended a girl.’

  ‘Your former housekeeper, Mary Blakiston—’ Pünd began.

  ‘Yes. It has been a horrible time – just horrible. We were away when it happened, in the south of France. Mary had been with us for ever. Magnus was very close to her. She worshipped him! From the moment she moved into the Lodge, she was beholden to him, as if he were some sort of monarch and she’d been asked to join the royal guard. Personally, I found her rather tiresome although I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. What else do you want to know?’

  ‘I noticed that there is a painting missing from the wall in the great hall where your husband was discovered. It hung next to the door.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Every detail is of interest to me, Lady Pye.’

  ‘It was a portrait of me.’ Frances Pye seemed reluctant to answer. ‘Magnus didn’t like it so he threw it out.’

  ‘Recently?’

  ‘Yes. It can’t have been more than a week ago, actual
ly. I don’t remember exactly when.’ Frances Pye sank back into her pillows, signalling that she had spoken enough. Pünd nodded and, following his cue, Fraser and Chubb stood up and the three of them left.

  ‘What did you make of that?’ Chubb asked as they left the room.

  ‘She was definitely lying about London,’ Fraser said. ‘If you ask me, she and that Dartford chap spent the afternoon together – and they certainly weren’t shopping!’

  ‘It is evident that Lady Pye and her husband no longer shared a bed,’ Pünd agreed.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It was obvious from the décor of the bedroom, the embroidered pillows. It was a room without any trace of a man.’

  ‘So there are two people with a good reason to kill him,’ Chubb muttered. ‘The oldest motive in the book. Kill the husband and run off together with the loot.’

  ‘You may be right, Detective Inspector. Perhaps we will find a copy of Sir Magnus Pye’s will in his safe. But his family has been in this house for many years and it is likely, I would think, that it will pass directly to his only son and heir.’

  ‘And a nasty piece of work he was too,’ Chubb remarked.

  The safe in fact contained little of interest. There were several pieces of jewellery, about five hundred pounds in different currencies and various documents: some recent, some dating back as much as twenty years. Chubb took them with him.

  He and Pünd parted company at the door, Chubb returning to his home in Hamswell where his wife, Harriet, would be waiting for him. He would know her mood instantly. As he had once confided in Pünd, she communicated it by the speed of her knitting needles.

  Pünd and Fraser shook hands with him, then returned to the questionable comforts of the Queen’s Arms.

  7

  More people had gathered around the bus shelter on the far side of the village square, clearly exercised by something they had seen. Fraser had noticed a crowd of them that morning when they checked into the pub and clearly they had spread the word. Something had happened. The entire village needed to know.