A Murder to Die For Page 3

  The springs in Gaynor Nithercott’s car seat squeaked and groaned as she sped along a dark tree-lined country lane, her ancient Mini Cooper’s thin wheels unerringly finding every rut and pothole. But she was oblivious to everything except the words issuing from her car’s ancient speaker. The audiobook of Punishment of the Sword was reaching its dramatic conclusion and Millicent Cutter had cornered her Belgian nemesis and occasional lover, Dr Florian Belfrage, among the dangerously grinding machinery of a windmill running at full tilt. While Belfrage flustered and ranted, Miss Cutter explained how she had unravelled his dastardly plot to steal the formula for Professor Hubert Foig’s improved form of gunpowder. When Miss Nithercott’s eyesight had become too poor for extended bouts of reading, she’d taken to audiobooks, and was now so addicted to them that she could recite large sections from memory. She joined in as the narration reached one of her favourite moments; when Belfrage realises that he and Miss Cutter have now become so opposed in their moral standpoints that they can never again be lovers.

  The flames that had for so long warmed Belfrage’s passions flared all at once and then died. His heart was instantly and for ever baked into a hard, unyielding mass; as insensitive as a fist, as impenetrable as iron, it would lie buried deep inside his chest – for ever still, for ever cold, for ever beyond repair. In that instant, he knew that he would never again be able to stoke those fires to life. He would be eternally invulnerable to Eros’s darts.

  A stabbing pain in Miss Nithercott’s chest made her take a sudden deep breath and, for a moment, she wondered if she was suffering an empathetic response to Belfrage’s heartbreak. But, she reassured herself, it was most probably indigestion caused by the jam sandwiches she’d snacked on half an hour ago. She’d eaten them far too quickly and the bread had been very heavy. She fumbled in her handbag for an antacid tablet.

  Mrs Denise Hatman-Temples drove sedately along a road that ran parallel to the canal and wished that driving her little Peugeot didn’t preclude her from shutting her eyes and letting her imagination roam more freely. She was listening to a radio dramatisation of Teeth Set on Edge, the book in which Miss Cutter and Dr Belfrage finally ended the ‘will they/won’t they’ speculation with a spirited lovemaking session atop Scafell Pike. Mrs Hatman-Temples’s mental image of Miss Cutter looked nothing like Helen Greeley’s high-cheekboned and glitzy portrayal for the TV series. It looked rather more like she herself had done in her thirties, a fantasy that was enhanced by Maggie Woodbead – the actress who played Miss Cutter in the BBC radio dramas – having a voice not dissimilar in tone to her own. The fact that the TV series portrayed the characters so very differently from the way they appeared in her mind’s eye was one reason why she tended to stick to audio; as Agnes Crabbe herself had once said, ‘Words have all the best pictures.’

  He looked deeply into my eyes. His own were full of confusion.

  ‘No, it’s you who doesn’t understand, Florian,’ I said. ‘Love has no foundation in logic. It is possible to love someone whose morals are not cut from the same cloth as one’s own. In many ways, it is often the tension of opposition that excites; the fact that it is wrong makes it desirable.’

  He straightened to his full height and, without another word, slowly buttoned his waistcoat and slid his sword stick back into its Malacca sheath. He took a deep breath and a wry smile crept across his full lips.

  ‘So where does that leave matters, dear lady?’ he said, his words forming a milky cloud on the frigid night air. ‘Where does that leave . . . us?’

  An old Mini suddenly came roaring out of the dark and, in the last second before it smashed into the side of her car, Mrs Hatman-Temples caught a glimpse of Miss Gaynor Nithercott slumped sideways in the driver’s seat. The impact flipped the Peugeot on to its side and it tumbled over and over before plunging upside-down into the shallow waters of the canal. The Mini, meanwhile, careened away from the impact and crashed headlong into the substantial trunk of an ancient oak. The noise of the car horn, stuck on a continuous ear-splitting bleat, echoed across the flat landscape, and a mushroom-shaped cloud of radiator vapour rose above the wreckage and was lost among the high-arching branches above.

  Somewhere in the middle distance, sirens wailed. Shunter found himself wondering whether they belonged to a police vehicle or an ambulance. Police sirens were very rare in this sleepy corner of rural South Herewardshire but ambulances weren’t uncommon; no surprise really given the average age of the population. He twirled the corner of his moustache, a habit he often indulged in while thinking. Heavier rain had replaced the light drizzle and he didn’t have an umbrella, but he was a patient man and he’d decided that it was worth waiting a few minutes to see if it eased off before walking home. Besides, Mrs Shunter was in a foul mood, which was what had driven him to the pub in the first place. Her unlikeable and flighty younger sister had just returned from a two-week holiday in Las Vegas at some temporary boyfriend’s expense and had been boasting ever since about what a wonderful time she’d had. To rub salt into the wound, she’d also won over ten thousand pounds purely on games of chance. Mrs Shunter was, understandably, fuming at the injustice of it all.

  Shunter had never been ambitious. While friends, colleagues and family had chased promotions, salary increases and bonuses, he’d been content to plod along in public service, happy with his policeman’s lot. All he’d ever wanted to do was catch the bad guys and he had steadfastly rejected the idea of a higher pay grade as it would have meant less hands-on thief-taking and a lot more desk-bound admin. It had also meant living a respectable, if modest, life, but one that he’d found satisfying. However, while Mrs Shunter rarely complained, he knew that she secretly envied her sister’s glamorous lifestyle and that visiting their friends’ ever more extravagant houses made her feel too embarrassed to consider inviting anyone back to her humble suburban semi in west London. Shunter hated the obsessive and greedy keeping-up-with-the-Joneses nature of it all and had little time for people who considered wealth to be life’s primary goal. But he also felt guilty about not having given Mrs Shunter a better life. She deserved better and, not for the first time, he wondered why she’d stayed with him for nearly thirty years.

  It was why he had suggested that they move to the country upon his retirement where they could start afresh, away from the corrosive one-upmanship of London. It had meant using all of their savings but they’d been very lucky to find a pretty little cottage in picturesque and much-sought-after Nasely. And, for a while, things in the Shunter household had improved immensely. Mrs Shunter had become embroiled in a handful of local societies and they’d made some lovely new friends. But then her sister and her latest boyfriend – a Premiership footballer – had visited and remarked that the cottage reminded them of a ‘pokey little holiday gîte in Clohars-Fouesnant’ they had once stayed in and old wounds had been reopened. All of which meant that, rather than enjoying his retirement, Shunter now spent much of it looking for a lucrative second career so that he could afford to have the cottage upgraded to a standard that Mrs Shunter would be proud to show off. It had also led to him skulking in the pub and drinking far more beer than he had ever done before.

  To lift his mood, he peered out from the pub doorway and up and down the High Street. It was looking very good, he thought, authentically vintage. No one could say that the people of Nasely didn’t put the effort in. This was his first Agnes Crabbe Murder-Mystery Festival, having only moved to the village ten months previously, and it had been interesting to watch its transformation this past week. The shop-window displays were now delightfully retro with the chemist’s boasting adverts for Goddard’s White Horse Oils and something called Cavanaugh’s Wonder Remedy, and the newsagent’s full of antique posters for Will’s Gold Flake and Titbits magazine. A billboard outside the Masonic Hall advertised the Agnes Crabbe play Evil Company Corrupts, which was due to be performed on Sunday evening as a finale to the festival, and, diagonally opposite the pub, the Empire Hotel displayed a banner that
read ‘Welcome Millies!’ Shunter frowned at the hotel, a 1960s Bauhaus, quite out of keeping with the rest of the village, and wondered how the place had ever got planning permission. Backhanders presumably. The current owners had tried to soften its stark outlines by adding rooftop crenellations, balconied windows and a portico over the front doors but the pretence at grand Victorian splendour hadn’t worked at all. When the facade was up-lit at night it had the same effect as a person holding a torch under their chin; it highlighted the true horror of trying to merge two entirely uncomplementary architectural styles. And to make matters even worse, the hotel’s white stuccoed walls had faded to a sickly yellowish colour that gave the building a distinctly jaundiced look. The wet pavement reflected the yellow light from the floodlit hotel and also from the fluted and filigreed cast-iron lampposts, expensively installed along the High Street in an effort to enhance the charm of the village.

  Shunter had recently discovered that there were CCTV cameras hidden inside two of the lampposts; as faithfully antique as Nasely might try to appear to be, evidence of the Modern Age was there to see if you scratched the surface. And was there anything that said twenty-first century more than public surveillance? Shunter wondered whether the cameras were ever misused by the staff that monitored them. After all, there was almost no crime in the village but there were plenty of pretty teenage girls around, thanks to the nearby boarding school at Harpax Grange. Big Brother may not be watching, but some pimply youth employed by the village council probably was. Were they watching him now, he wondered? Was the video definition of sufficient quality to identify him from this distance? He was suddenly very aware of his every move. How often had he adjusted his crotch or scratched his backside while forgetful of the cameras? He knew for sure that, during the winter, he’d fallen flat on his face after glissading on ice outside the library. Had he given the lads in the control room a good laugh?

  A sudden noise drew his attention to a coach idling slowly up through the High Street towards him. He looked at his watch and saw that it was 10.30 p.m. Coaches and minibuses had been arriving all day, dropping off the faithful in time for the start of festivities in the morning. This one – a special service run by a local company that picked up from Bowcester railway station and from the surrounding villages of Spradbarrow, Tingwell, Panswick and Sherrinford – was probably the last of them, he mused. The vehicle pulled up in front of the village hall and, with a loud hiss, hunkered down on to its suspension like a camel kneeling. The passengers, all middle-aged ladies dressed in an assortment of drab colours, began reaching bags down from overhead racks and pulling on coats and jackets. The door opened and they disembarked noisily while glancing at pieces of paper and pointing in different directions. Sensing that beating a hasty retreat would spare him a good thirty minutes of questions regarding the whereabouts of their various accommodations, Shunter slid quietly back inside the pub.

  ‘I thought you’d gone home,’ said Vic. ‘I was just closing up.’

  ‘I would if I were you. Another coachload of Millies has just turned up,’ said Shunter. ‘And if they’re anything like the bunch I met on the way here, they’ll keep us pinned to the wall with questions for the next half hour. Can I hide in here for a few minutes?’

  ‘Another one for the road then? On the house?’ said Vic as he bolted the pub doors shut.

  ‘Cheers, Vic. Maybe just a half.’

  ‘They look so innocent, don’t they?’ said Vic, looking out of the window. ‘But I’ll tell you this, for a bunch of librarians, primary school teachers and Women’s Institute types, they can’t half put it away.’

  ‘Really? They look more like the occasional glass of dry sherry with the vicar types.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. I reckon this is their once-a-year chance to let their hair down. You’ll see what I mean once they’re all in costume tomorrow. It’s like they dress up as someone else and it gives them permission to . . . Oh hang on . . . something’s kicking off.’

  As Vic had been talking he’d become aware of raised voices outside getting louder and angrier as the passengers gathered around the coach’s luggage compartment. Two women were now facing off against each other and a crowd had formed around them.

  ‘There are two Millies out there and—’

  ‘I’m retired,’ said Shunter, opening his book.

  *

  While the driver had been handing out the suitcases, the rusting catches on Mrs Handibode’s ancient leather case had sprung open, spilling the contents on to the wet road. That it had happened at the feet of Miss Brenda Tradescant of the Millicent Cutter Appreciation Society was pure bad luck.

  ‘What have we here then?’ said Miss Tradescant, picking up a paperback and pointing at its lurid cover illustration. ‘Love’s Moist Promise, Esme? And by someone called Simone Bedhead I see. There’s a name that reeks of fine literature.’

  ‘It’s for research,’ said Mrs Handibode, struggling to refill her case and desperately hoping that none of her other books had been spotted lurking among the neatly folded clothes. It was bad enough that the ghastly woman had seen just one of them.

  ‘Research, eh?’ said Miss Tradescant, reading the back-cover blurb with a derisory snort. ‘“Orphaned and alone, Chastity Fox uses her ample charms to travel halfway across eighteenth-century England in a quest to discover the truth about the death of her brother. But after an unplanned night of searing naked passion with a mysterious stranger known only as Captain Standish, Chastity races out of his bed and his life when she discovers a dark secret hidden inside a—”’

  ‘If you don’t mind!’ snapped Mrs Handibode, snatching the book from her rival’s hand.

  ‘Esme, Esme, Esme,’ tutted Miss Tradescant. ‘I expected better of you.’

  ‘It’s not what you think.’

  ‘Oh really?’ said Miss Tradescant.

  ‘Really. I am making a study with a view to writing an academic paper.’

  ‘On what?’ goaded Miss Tradescant. ‘Terrible romance novels?’

  ‘In a way, yes. Agnes Crabbe incorporated romantic fiction into her murder mysteries in a way that no other golden age crime-fiction writer ever did. In order to assess how successful she was, one must compare and contrast. I am therefore studying the entire canon of romantic fiction from the sublime to—’

  ‘There’s no shame in admitting that you enjoy a dirty book, Esme,’ said Miss Tradescant with a smile.

  A ripple of nervous laughter ran through the assembled Crabbe fans. Watching two well-known aficionados squaring up to each other was a delicious and unexpected pre-festival treat. If it came to a fight, the two women were fairly equally matched. Both were tall, broad-shouldered and ferociously bosomed. They were dressed similarly in pastel cardigans and pleated skirts. The only obvious difference was that Miss Tradescant wore her grey-blonde hair up in a bun while Mrs Handibode’s had apparently been cropped while she was wearing a crash helmet.

  ‘As I said, it’s for research. Nothing more,’ said Mrs Handibode, firmly.

  ‘Pull the other one! This is pure smut. Even the author’s name is sleazy. Simone Bedhead, for goodness’ sake!’

  Mrs Handibode closed her suitcase and glared at Miss Tradescant. ‘Well, you’d know all about sleaze with those revolting sex stories you write, wouldn’t you? Slash fiction – isn’t that what they call it? Such a vulgar term.’

  There was a sharp intake of breath among the assembled fans.

  ‘I prefer the term erotica,’ growled Miss Tradescant. ‘And I’m adding to the Miss Cutter canon with—’

  ‘With poorly written filth? I don’t think so,’ snapped Mrs Handibode. ‘I have dedicated fifteen years of my life to the study of Agnes Crabbe, the writer. To the quality of her writing, to her character development and plot devices. All you’ve done is sully her memory with your smutty stories.’

  ‘At least I’m making my readers happy,’ said Miss Tradescant indignantly. ‘Can you say the same, Esme? Do you ever make anyone happy? I
s Mr Handibode happy?’

  Another audible mass inhalation from the audience.

  ‘That was a cheap shot, Brenda, even for you,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘And no, I’m not trying to make people happy. I’m trying to educate people. Any true Agnes Crabbe scholar would say that they are doing the same. Meanwhile, all you do is inflict cheap tawdry pornography upon us all. You’ve reduced Miss Cutter to nothing more than a promiscuous slattern.’

  ‘She was promiscuous.’

  ‘Not to the degree to which you paint her in your nasty little stories.’

  ‘Which you have presumably read if you feel qualified enough to criticise me,’ said Miss Tradescant, smiling venomously.

  ‘As I said, I’m researching the history and breadth of romantic fiction from the sublime to the ridiculous. The very ridiculous in your case and—’

  ‘Ladies, ladies. It’s late and I have to get back to the depot some time tonight,’ the coach driver wearily interrupted. ‘So if you could all just make your way to your hotels and guest houses, please?’

  ‘Come, Molly,’ said Mrs Handibode. She threw her chin high, unfurled a large black umbrella and walked off through the drizzle towards the Empire Hotel with Miss Wilderspin trotting at her heels like a terrier.

  ‘One of these days, someone’s going to push you off your high horse, Esme Handibode!’ shouted Miss Tradescant. ‘And I, for one, want to be there to watch you fall!’

  *

  ‘Looks like the coast is clear now,’ said Vic. ‘Rain’s easing off a bit too.’