Joe pocketed the plan and looked Hunnyton in the eye. Time for a bit of aggression, he calculated. “So far, so good. It’s all working out for you, isn’t it, Superintendent? You’ve got your man on the inside for a couple of days potentially, by personal invitation of the dowager, welcomed within the drawbridge by various members of the family for reasons that wouldn’t bear close inspection. I’d guess you don’t intend me to leave unless I’m dragging some fiend behind me in handcuffs.”
Hunnyton grinned broadly. “Not too fussed about the cuffs, sir. I just want you to ferret out the truth. I want you to know the truth. Nothing wrong with that, is there?”
There wasn’t. Joe sensed that he and Hunnyton shared the same instinct for ferreting and could well understand why the man wanted to get to the bottom of his Phoebe’s death. A mate of Joe’s had taken a bullet in a fleshy part of his body in the war. It healed over and for years he was able to ignore the metal he was carrying around with him. But one day it seemed to have decided of its own accord to burrow its way painfully to the surface again. Surgery was required. Impossible to cut into one’s own flesh. You call in a steady hand to perform the extraction for you. He laid this out for Hunnyton, who nodded his understanding.
“But Cecily Truelove?” Joe questioned. “She seems to think she also has booked an operating slot with the same surgeon at the same time. I’m sure she has no concern for little Phoebe Pilgrim—if she even remembers her. No, Cecily would appear to be calling for an invasive procedure to be carried out dangerously close to her family’s heart. Why would she do that?”
“It can only be that she knows Lavinia’s death was managed and she thinks she knows who’s responsible. She must have every confidence that the prime suspect—who, in anyone’s book, must be her own son, James, the victim’s husband—is in the clear. Otherwise she wouldn’t countenance your presence within fifty miles. The guilty party must be someone she regards as untouchable by her—someone with influence—or even perhaps very close to her. She wants the guilty party removed by an impartial police officer with sufficient authority to effect that removal.”
“This gathering she’s organising …” Joe said, casting a fly on the water. “She’s re-creating the April house-party, isn’t she? She’s re-enacting the whole show for my benefit. It’s a trap for some poor bugger. Thanks to her careful arrangements, the murderer will be tethered here at Melsett for the next few days, drawbridge up, ready for the strong hand of the Law to feel his collar. He’ll not have dared to turn down the invitation for fear of arousing suspicion. He’ll be giving me a rictus grin over his sherry glass and nervously muttering, ‘So, they tell me you’re a policeman …’ ” He looked searchingly at Hunnyton. “I do wonder why she couldn’t just have had recourse to the Cambridge detective division. To you, Superintendent.”
“Thought you’d get there if I waited long enough. I could go on about prophets in their own country having no respect. Home-grown boy, regrettably intertwined with the family and all that. But the real reason—I’ll say it now I know you’ve worked it out—is that you’re looking at the murderer.” He cast a swift glance at Joe, looking for something in his reaction and fiddled with his pipe in the annoying way pipe smokers have, using the time for thought or emphasis or just to annoy. “In her eyes, I’m the bloke who killed Lavinia, and she’s going to do her level best to prove that. It’s a risk for me but it’s one I’m prepared to take to get you in there. This boil needs lancing.” He waved a nonchalant hand around the room. “If you have to run for shelter from the outfall, remember the door’s never locked. Consider this your retreat—your bunker if you like. You may like to know I keep a pair of guns loaded and ready up there in my bedroom. Purdeys.”
“Purdeys, eh?” Joe waggled his eyebrows.
“His own guns. Made to measure. He had long arms like me. They were the old man’s gift when he died.”
A valuable legacy but could it ever have been appreciated by the man’s oldest-born son, who had to stand by and watch the estate moving over to his younger, legitimate brother? Hunnyton showed no sign of teeth-gnashing resentment.
“Well, thank you for the offer!” Joe grinned. “Sharing a redoubt with killers—it’s what I’m used to. I know how to watch my back as well as my front.”
Fair warning, he thought.
CHAPTER 12
The Lagonda stopped at the bottom of the lime avenue at the point where some ancient landscape artist had calculated the visitor was best placed to be impressed by what, as Hunnyton had hinted, was one of the loveliest houses in England. Or anywhere.
The eye was led by the geometry of the row of sentinel trees straight over an expanse of deer-cropped grass, rising upwards to the bridge over a hidden moat and beyond, the grand façade. Hunnyton turned off the engine and they looked in silence.
“Towers and battlements it sees
Bosomed high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some beauty lies,
The cynosure of neighbouring eyes.”
Hunnyton’s voice was quiet, as though speaking to himself.
“Milton had something entirely more medieval in mind, I think,” Joe said. “It’s bosomed high all right, and those tufted trees framing it look very like thousand-year-old oaks to me, but the house itself isn’t very battlemented. No towers or crenellations … no martial intent whatsoever, I’d say. Jacobean? You’d expect it. No one feared being attacked by the neighbours any longer by that time. The Count of the Saxon Shore had long ago sheathed his sword or beaten it into a ploughshare. The nearest you get to martial is those pinnacles either side of the gatehouse, and they remind me very strongly of the ones we passed this morning on King’s College Chapel.”
Hunnyton nodded in agreement. “It gets even more collegiate inside. It’s built in a square shape with an interior quadrangle complete with storey-high oriel window leading to the great hall.”
“A house for a scholar rather than a soldier, would you say?”
“It’s had its share of both,” murmured Hunnyton. “But the shape lends itself to comfortable living. There’s a very generous kitchen block to the northeast of the hall so the food doesn’t take forever to reach the table. There are company rooms on three sides on the ground floor, with different aspects. On the east there’s what they call a ‘summer parlour’ and on the sunnier south side another one called the ‘winter parlour.’ Oh, by the way, Sandilands, they don’t have anything so common as a ‘breakfast room.’ When you come yumming down for your devilled kidneys in the morning, you’ll find they’re being served in the east-facing summer parlour …”
“Don’t worry,” Joe interrupted. “I’ll just do what I usually do and follow my nose.”
Joe wondered again what thoughts were going on behind those deceptive eyes. Here was the firstborn (according to his own evidence) of the old lord’s sons. Disqualified from ever taking possession of the pile before him by the lowliness of his mother’s birth. Yet, by his situation, tied to the place. A tie at first of necessity but now of love, Joe judged from a fleeting expression on the man’s face. An emotion which was quickly corrected by the irony in his speech. Joe, a second son, although from much more modest circumstances, could begin to understand the envy, the anger, that the younger in line could feel. His own chagrin at the inevitable loss of his family home had been tempered by his complete lack of interest in farming and his older brother’s instinctive ability for it. But what if it had been the other way around?