‘Anybody you had cause to sack recently?’ Jennings persisted. ‘You’re bound to have a disgruntled employee or two in the offing, so to speak?’
‘Bound to,’ Sir Marcus said offhandedly. ‘But I doubt it would run to this, do you?’
Jennings sighed. ‘Perhaps not, sir,’ he agreed, although secretly he wasn’t so sure. Folk did odd things when they got their dander up. ‘What about your domestic staff, sir?’
‘No, no. Been with me years, all of them,’ the millionaire said dismissively. ‘Well, the cook and my butler, certainly. The housemaids seem to come and go… leave all that sort of thing to my wife.’
‘Hmmm. And do you, er…’ Jennings paused, trying to find a tactful way to put the next question. ‘Do you have any idea what our anonymous letter writer means when they urge you to do the right thing?’
Sir Marcus wavered. Again, he thought about the fire. And again he dismissed it. It was so long ago now, and it definitely hadn’t been his fault. ‘Er, no. That’s what’s so frustrating. Why can’t this bloody person just say what they mean in straightforward language? Usually these anonymous letters have no trouble doing that, do they?’
And Jennings was forced to agree that Sir Marcus had a point. Your run-of-the-mill nasty letter usually spelt out, in very colourful language indeed sometimes, exactly what was on the writer’s mind.
‘It’s this blasted threat to Anthony that’s really thrown me,’ Sir Marcus admitted with a heavy sigh. ‘The boy just laughs it off, of course, but I’m not so sure.’ He leaned forward slightly in his chair and fixed the Inspector with a fierce eye. ‘Isn’t it the job of the police to protect citizens when their lives are being threatened?’
And there it was, Jennings thought, biting back a groan. Ever since he’d read the letter, he’d just known this would be coming. And of course there was no getting around it. He’d have to waste a certain number of man hours on it.
‘Yes, sir, of course it is,’ he said soothingly. ‘And you can be assured that, come noon tomorrow, Sergeant O’Grady here will be at your house, and will have your son under observation at all times.’
‘Yes, well… so I should jolly well hope,’ Sir Marcus said, a little more mollified now as he leant back in his chair. ‘I’ve told Anthony I want him in the house, and although he kicked up a bit of a fuss about it, he’s agreed. Mind you, he says he can take care of himself, and I dare say he can, but, well, when you’re dealing with someone a bit cracked, as this blasted idiot obviously is, you never can tell, can you? I dare say Anthony could acquit himself well if it came to a brawl or a bout of fisticuffs,’ his father boasted proudly, ‘but what if the maniac has a knife? Or worse, a gun?’
‘I think that’s highly unlikely, Sir Marcus,’ Jennings reassured him promptly. But secretly, he had to wonder. A lot of men had brought their service revolvers back with them from the war. They weren’t supposed to, of course, but they did. So it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that the letter writer had the wherewithal to follow up on his threat to kill Sir Marcus’s son.
‘That’s as may be. But until we find out who’s been writing these damn letters, how can we be sure?’ Sir Marcus demanded fretfully. ‘It may well turn out to be some demented old woman who gets a kick out of scaring people, or some weedy little clerk in one of my back offices with a Napoleon complex or bearing a grudge of some kind. But then again it might not! Damn it, man, I can’t go around the rest of my life looking over my shoulder!’
‘No, sir, of course you can’t,’ Jennings said, and not without genuine sympathy for his point of view. ‘And we’ll definitely look into it for you. If you could just provide us with a list of anybody you think might, even by the remotest chance, have some sort of grudge against you or your family, sir?’
The businessman nodded glumly and rose ponderously to his feet. ‘Very well, I’ll do that. And you’ll be at the house tomorrow?’ he demanded, drawing out one of his personal visiting cards and placing it on the desk. ‘This is the address.’
‘Yes, sir, my Sergeant and another constable will be there bright and early,’ Jennings promised. ‘I take it your son lives with you?’
‘At the moment. He has a flat in London, of course, but he’s still up with us for Christmas. He likes to attend the Boxing Day hunt,’ the older man said, a fond glint coming to his eye as he talked about his son and heir. ‘So he always stays on for another couple of weeks to enjoy the gallops. Boy always was horse-mad, and rides every day he’s with us.’
Jennings, not one whit interested, nodded vaguely. ‘I see, sir. Well, leave it with us. Sergeant, show Sir Marcus out.’
Outside, Trudy stepped smartly away from the filing cabinet and nonchalantly moved back towards a free desk.
Sergeant O’Grady shot her a quick look, lips twitching, as he ushered their visitor out.
Once back in with the DI, he sighed in sympathy. ‘It’s a bit of a pig, sir, and no mistake,’ he said flatly. ‘But there’s nothing much we can do for him, of course. Sooner or later our letter-writing friend will just get bored and move on to some other target. And as for the chances of anything funny happening tomorrow bang on noon…’ O’Grady snorted. ‘Well, that’s about on a par with pigs being seen flying over Brize Norton airbase.’
‘No good telling Sir Marcus that, though,’ Jennings said with a brief smile. ‘And I don’t mind telling you, that threat to his son was a bit odd. Naming a specific date and time like that.’
‘Yes,’ O’Grady agreed uncertainly. ‘It’s not the usual run-of-the-mill thing, I’ll grant you.’ And he wondered if his superior had picked up on the slight hesitation when he’d asked Sir Marcus if he had any idea what the letter writer meant by ‘doing the right thing’. Because the Sergeant was sure Sir Marcus had definitely looked a bit shifty-eyed then. And if the millionaire didn’t have a skeleton or two in his cupboard, he’d eat his hat. The rich, in his experience, always had something they’d prefer to keep quiet about.
‘Well, go and hold their hands tomorrow anyway,’ Jennings ordered briskly. ‘And although I agree that the chances of anything coming of it are virtually nil, take a strapping lad with you just in case. Broadstairs, perhaps. He’s handy to have in a scrap.’
‘Sir.’
‘Oh, and Sergeant…’
‘Sir?’
‘When you go tomorrow, take WPC Loveday with you, will you? All week long she’s been giving me long-suffering looks. It’s beginning to get on my nerves. She can help question the housemaids or something. They won’t know anything, naturally, so it won’t matter if she cocks it up.’
O’Grady grinned. ‘Good idea, sir. It’ll be good practice for her too – honing her questioning skills.’
Jennings shrugged indifferently.
But as he closed the door behind him, Mike O’Grady didn’t think it was at all likely that WPC Trudy Loveday would cock anything up. She was a bright enough girl and, being pretty and personable as well, would probably have Sir Marcus’s domestic staff quickly eating out of her hand.
CHAPTER FIVE
The next morning, Mavis McGillicuddy dunked a soldier into her boiled egg and glanced at the kitchen clock. She had an hour yet before she had to get her granddaughter up for school, which was just as well, since, at ten years old, Marie was fast getting to the stage where her endearingly childish eagerness to please was beginning to transform into something more mutinous.
Not that Mavis minded all the ups and downs that came with child rearing, even at her age. Most women in their early sixties might have thought all that was behind them now, but Mavis was very much aware that without her son and his daughter living with her, she’d be just one more lonely widow.
And she’d much rather be rushed off her feet or dealing with a childish tantrum than sitting twiddling her thumbs.
On the wireless the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was saying something dreary, as he always seemed to be doing, and she was half-tempted to get up and fiddle with the dial to see if she could find something more cheerful to listen to. But nowadays the radio stations seemed to play nothing but all this modern music the youngsters were going for. It was all Be-bop-a-lula this, or Poison Ivy that. And it was getting harder and harder for her to find the music she liked – recordings of the Glenn Miller Band, say, or a nice bit of Vera Lynn.
She looked up as the kitchen door opened and her only child swept in. ‘Morning, Mum. Seen my boots anywhere – the ones with the toe-caps? I’m uprooting some old apple trees today, and I don’t want… oh, I see them.’
The sight of her son, Jonathan, always brought a smile to Mavis’s face. At just turned thirty, he was still a handsome lad and looked far younger than his years. He’d inherited his thick, wavy blond hair from her and striking hazel-green eyes from his father. At nearly six feet tall, his work as a landscape gardener kept him fit and lean.
As she fondly watched him pulling on his work boots, she sipped her tea in contentment. Although life had been hard for Mavis in her early years (and during the war, naturally), she had to admit she’d had some luck in her life, and never ceased to be thankful for it. Outside the window of their modest, tiny, terraced house, the suburb of Cowley was going about its busy business, with the majority of the men in the neighbourhood flocking into the car works. But, thanks to help from Jonathan’s father, Mavis actually owned the little house they lived in, and was the only one in their street not to be renting. She had been able to afford to send Jonathan to the local grammar school, which in turn had led to his being able to do a bit better for himself than his peers, first becoming apprentice to the head gardener at St Edmund Hall, before striking out on his own and setting up his own little business.
Yes, in many ways, Mavis knew, she had been lucky.
‘Marie still in bed?’ her son asked now, pouring out a mug of tea for himself and peering through the window. The last few days had been wet and relatively mild – perfect for grubbing up stubborn tree roots.
‘Yes. She’s not happy to be going back to school after the Christmas holidays, though,’ Mavis said with a smile. ‘So I suspect I’ll have a bit of a job getting her up in time. But don’t you worry about it, son – I’ll not be having any of her tantrums. She’ll soon settle down again.’
Absently, Jonathan walked behind her chair and kissed the top of her head. ‘Thanks for looking after her, Mum. Don’t know what we’d have done without you.’
Jonathan said this often, more out of habit than anything, although he was vaguely aware that what he said was perfectly true.
He’d had to marry young, at just twenty, when the girl he’d been going steady with had fallen pregnant, and in truth, he’d never felt really happy about it – something that had always made him feel guilty. But there was no point in denying he’d felt trapped and a little resentful, and when his daughter had been born seven months later, he’d felt vaguely cheated. He’d expected – and wanted – a boy. Which had only increased his sense of guilt further.
But then, just three years after Marie was born, Jenny had been killed in a train crash, along with four others. She’d been on her way to Banbury to see about a part-time job, in the hopes they’d be able to afford to move out of his mother’s house and find a place of their own.
Obviously, that had never happened. So, at the age of just twenty-four, Jonathan McGillicuddy had become a very eligible young widower with a little girl to look after, and had quickly found that his unexpected freedom wasn’t as wonderful as he might have imagined. He’d missed Jenny terribly. And far from being an unwanted child, his daughter had come to mean the world to him. Luckily, his mum, long since widowed herself, had been more than happy to step into the breach.
Now Marie called her ‘mum’ and seemed to have no memories of Jenny at all.
His mother set about buttering some toast for him and then made sandwiches for his packed lunch. Slightly plump, she still bustled about with energy, but she must, Jonathan mused, be beginning to feel her age a little bit. And once more, he felt a vague sense of guilt wash over him. Was it fair to keep on expecting her to look after his daughter and effectively ‘keep house’ for him? Perhaps it was time he thought about marrying again? But even as he thought it, he shied violently away from the idea.
He’d only had two serious relationships with women in his life, and both had ended in utter disaster. First Jenny and then… But no, he wouldn’t think of her. He couldn’t. It had taken years for the nightmares to stop, and sometimes they plagued him still, wrenching him out of sleep, sweating and shaking, with his heart pounding.
Sometimes, he wondered if he was actually cursed.
His own ‘natural’ father had died before he’d even got the chance to know him. Everyone, it seemed, left him. And what if something happened to his mum? Or to Marie?
He shuddered and, telling himself not to be so maudlin – or stupid – quickly ate his toast and threw on his mackintosh. Everything would be fine. It had been for some time now. He mustn’t think about that other time in his life, when it had seemed he must be going crazy. When the danger had been so sharp and acrid he could almost taste it. No, that part of his life was over, and it was never coming back. It couldn’t. It was all dead and done and finished with.
Once again he absently kissed his mother on top of her head as she sat sipping her tea. ‘Bye, Mum. See you about four,’ he added cheerfully. ‘It’s no use trying to work in a garden after dark.’ That was one of the few advantages of winter for a gardener – a shorter working day.
He was whistling slightly as he stepped out onto the wet path and closed the door behind him. And as he walked to the end of the street and the group of lock-up garages where he kept his old van, full of his gardening tools, he didn’t notice the silent, watchful figure making careful note of his movements.
And it probably wouldn’t have made much difference if he had.
CHAPTER SIX
Trudy felt her jaw fall open as she looked at the house on the outskirts of Hampton Poyle, a pretty little village set deep in farming country. Large, built of Cotswold stone and uncompromisingly square in the Georgian manner, it stood in manicured grounds, looking effortlessly elegant and substantial.
‘How the other half lives, eh?’ Rodney Broadstairs said from the front passenger seat of the Panda car. Behind the wheel, Sergeant O’Grady smiled grimly.
‘Better watch your Ps and Qs here, sonny,’ he advised him flatly. ‘Right, I dare say the son of the house is out on his bleeding horse, but he’s promised his father he’ll be back by ten. Rod, you stick with him like glue – especially come twelve o’clock. Trudy, I want you to make your way to the kitchen and talk to the staff. Pick up on any gossip you can about the family. We’re not just interested in who wrote the letters – there has to be a reason Sir Marcus and this family were targeted, and we need to find out what that is. Got it?’
‘Yes, Sarge,’ Trudy said happily.
Finally, she was being allowed to get hands-on in a real case!
Jonathan McGillicuddy drove through the large village of Kidlington and parked his van under the bare branches of a large beech tree. The grounds he was currently working in belonged to a Victorian pile overlooking the Oxford canal, but the new owners were currently in Barbados, wintering in their villa there. Having only recently purchased the house, they had left him detailed plans for the changes they wanted made in the large garden, which included grubbing up the old orchard and creating a large pond there instead.
He began unloading the van, carrying a large pickaxe and several different types of saws through an overgrown herb garden towards the rear of the property and then into the orchard at the far perimeter. As he walked, he hummed the latest Ricky Valance song softly under his breath.
Having nobody living up at the house was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, he didn’t have his clients looking over his shoulder every moment of the day to make sure he wasn’t slacking, or to keep changing their minds about what they wanted done. But it also meant he couldn’t just pop in to use their downstairs loo, or scrounge in the kitchen on a cold day for a warming cup of tea or bowl of soup.
He glanced at his watch as he unloaded the last of his gear by the first of several gnarled and mostly disease-ridden apple trees, so old even their topmost branches bent down far enough to almost touch the ground.
It was just gone nine.
The young lad he sometimes hired as casual labour to help him out with the heavy work, Robby Dix, had another job on today, but Jonathan didn’t really mind. He quite liked working alone.
As Jonathan set to work sawing off a tree limb, the figure that had noted his movements back in Cowley moved stealthily around the outskirts of the walled kitchen garden. And from the dark depths of the arched opening in one side of it, carefully peered out into the old orchard.
It was a damp day, the grass was long and wet, and the beginnings of a vague fog were forming. Although the house had neighbours on either side, the gardens were large and empty, and even the street outside was silent. No one was out and about on such a damp and dreary day – not even a dog walker.
Which was a definite bonus.
The figure withdrew and retreated to the even darker shadow cast by an old yew tree, which had been planted in one particularly obscure corner of the grounds. The patient voyeur now had less than three hours to wait. Not that he needed to actually wait until noon. It hardly mattered, after all, did it? He smiled grimly. But if a thing was worth doing, it was worth doing well.
Trudy ate her final morsel of Dundee cake and smiled at the cook. ‘Lovely, Mrs Rogers, but I couldn’t eat another bite.’ She smiled, patting her flat stomach. She’d spent the last two hours, as Sergeant O’Grady had wanted, chatting to the staff and making friends with the housemaids, Milly and Phyllis (‘call me Phil’). Both girls were only a year or so older than her, and far more interested in grilling her about what it was like to be a police officer than in gossiping about the family. Nevertheless, Trudy had persisted, and now thought she probably knew as much about Sir Marcus Deering and how his household was run as the man himself.
She knew, for instance, that Lady Deering had a bit of a gambling habit she was very careful to keep from her husband. She knew that the son, Anthony, was the apple of both his parents’ eyes, and could do no wrong in their opinion; but both Milly and Phil said they had to keep an eye on him, otherwise he’d take advantage, if they let him. A good-looking man, apparently, but he tended to think his wealth and charm entitled him to take liberties.
Trudy had smiled and said she’d found most men to be the same.
This had led on to talk about Sir Marcus himself, who tended to be more pompous than promiscuous. ‘He’s so full of himself sometimes,’ Milly had complained. ‘I reckon it’s because he’s not a proper “Sir” at all. He only got his title for being one of them industrial barons, or whatever. He feels it, see. Not being a proper toff, I mean. It makes him on edge whenever they entertain. Always thinking the proper gentry are looking down on him, when half of them couldn’t care tuppence.’
‘But if they are miffed or like to look down on him, it’s only because they’re jealous he’s got pots more money than they have,’ Phil had agreed, displaying surprising insight into how the minds of the upper classes truly worked.
All of which had proved very interesting, of course, Trudy acknowledged as she checked through her notes, but she couldn’t imagine what use all of this would be to the Sergeant.
Still, that wasn’t for a humble WPC to say.
‘That’s the precious son and heir coming now,’ Phyllis said, turning to crane her neck to peer out of the kitchen window, and earning a dark look from the much more circumspect Mrs Rogers. ‘Well, I can hear his horse,’ Phyllis insisted with a giggle.
Trudy, not wanting to miss the chance of being allowed to assess Sir Marcus’s son with her own eyes, got quickly to her feet. ‘Well, I think that’ll be all for now,’ she added politely. ‘Thank you for your time.’
‘I do hope you find that nasty poison pen soon,’ the cook said anxiously.
Although the servants had already suspected that something was upsetting their employer – they’d all noticed he’d been particularly edgy of late – all of them had seemed genuinely shocked by the news that he’d been receiving death threats, directed at his son. Unfortunately, none of them had any idea of who could be behind it all. Likewise, they’d all professed ignorance about any possible dark misdeeds in Sir Marcus’s past that might account for someone wanting revenge now.
It had all been rather discouraging, but Trudy’s pace quickened with excitement as she stepped out of the kitchen and made her way outside.
It was half past eleven and, in the stable block situated at the back of the house, she watched as Rodney Broadstairs approached the young man dismounting from a lovely black hunter.
Trudy, a city girl through and through, knew nothing about horseflesh, but she instinctively recognised quality when she saw it. And it occurred to her, as Anthony Deering swept off his riding helmet and handed the reins to the stable girl who had stepped up to take them, that it wasn’t only the horseflesh on display that was worth looking at.
As she got nearer, she saw that the son of the house was about the same height as she was, with thick brown hair and large, hazel-green eyes. Dressed in jodhpurs and a dark-green hacking jacket, he looked the epitome of an upper-class gent at play.
His eyes swept over her warmly, reminding her of Phyllis’s warning. ‘Let him near your bottom, and he’d as likely as not try to pinch it.’
Trudy smiled now as she contemplated how nice it would be to arrest this handsome young toff for assaulting a police officer if he was ever rash enough to try and pinch her derrière!
‘Well, things are looking up, I must say,’ Anthony Deering said, smiling into her eyes. ‘And are you going to protect me from Dad’s nasty letter writer too?’
‘No, sir.’ It was Rodney who spoke up first, his eyes shooting daggers at Trudy. ‘WPC Loveday is just about to go inside and talk to your mother, sir.’
Trudy, taking the hint, nodded briskly and continued round to the back of the house, where she knew Sergeant O’Grady was with the Deerings in the large sunroom.
It was ten minutes before noon.
The sunroom was accessed by a pair of French doors with an aspect on the south-facing side of the house, and as she tapped on a glass pane and was bid to enter, she couldn’t help but wonder what Anthony Deering must be thinking now.
And again, she glanced at her watch.
Just eight minutes to go.
Even though the young man’s swagger and joking manner had suggested he really didn’t take the threat seriously – as, indeed, most of them didn’t – he must still, nevertheless, feel just a little trepidation, surely? Knowing that someone, somewhere, had vowed to kill you when the hands of the clock both stood straight up would be enough to make anyone feel a cold chill up their spine.
In some respects, the situation reminded her a little bit of the film High Noon. With herself, the Sergeant and Rodney keeping an anxious eye on the clock while waiting for something explosive to happen. Except that Anthony Deering was no Gary Cooper! And he certainly wasn’t expected to face any gunmen alone.
Even so, she still maintained he wouldn’t have been human if he didn’t feel a little bit scared. And she knew for a fact that his parents definitely had the wind up for, inside the sunroom, Lady Deering, a tall, sparse woman with a rather long face, paced restlessly up and down, while her husband pretended to read the newspaper. Sergeant O’Grady glanced at her as she came in, smiled briefly, and continued to survey the expanse of fields outside the house.
