“Right, Perrot. You can go.”
“Sir.”
Somehow Perrot’s feet covered the carpet as far as the door. The knob slipped in his sweaty fingers as he tried to turn it. The tighter he gripped it the more it slipped. He used his handkerchief. A hundred years passed before he found himself once more outside in the corridor. He stood for a moment braced to hear derisive chuckles from the room he had just left but there was only silence.
Troy was still enjoyably reflecting on Perrot’s interview as he drove Barnaby’s Rover Four Hundred swiftly along the A4020 towards Chalfont St. Peter, the windows wide open against the warm, pressing air. Nothing entertained him more than another’s discomfiture. It had been good, the chief’s crack about writing a novel. Troy only thought of smart remarks and snappy put-downs hours, sometimes days, after their natural insertion point into the dialogue had passed.
“He’s a throwback, if you like,” he said. “I bet that bloke on telly years ago was like Perrot. Apparently he’d pat the villains on the head, give them a stern talking to and a lollipop to make it better. My nan’s for ever on about it.”
“Dixon of Dock Green.”
“That’s him. A right anachronism.”
Every now and again Troy, who was always coming across words he didn’t understand, took the trouble to look them up in his daughter’s dictionary. Once aware of the meaning, he would flaunt them till he got bored or until the next enigma turned up. Last month it had been cognisance. Before that, pachyderm.
Barnaby rolled an ice-cold can of Orange Fanta, snatched from the Automat just before leaving, against his cheeks, hoping to cool them down.
“I trust you know where you’re going.”
“Roughly. It’s not far from Compton Dando.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Course you have,” said Sergeant Troy. “That manor house full of New Age weirdoes. Where the old geezer in the long nightie got stabbed.”
“Oh. Yes.”
“I’d go mad living out here.” Troy looked out of the open window and down his nose. It was a pale, narrow nose. Jutting out only slightly, it descended in an elegant straight line, like the nosepiece on a Roman helmet. “I mean, look at that.”
“That” was a thatched cottage of such dreamlike perfection that it was almost impossible to believe it was occupied by credit-carded, telly-watching, bar-coded human beings. A gingerbread family might have been more appropriate. Or a painted weather man and his wife, trundling in and out at regular intervals, as immaculately inexpressive as their storybook setting.
“Who’d want to live in a house with a wig on?” Troy’s remark was laced with baffled resentment. He hated being presented with the spoils of people with immeasurably more money than himself, especially when they chose to chuck it about on such incomprehensible trifles.
The sergeant was urban spirit incarnate, weaned on exhaust fumes, addicted to multistory car parks and multiplex cinemas carpeted with popcorn, to ziggurating shopping malls studded with zooming glass lifts and throbbing to the beat of hard rock, to space-invaded pubs.
“Might as well be dead,” he added, never averse to ramming home a point already more than adequately made.
They were coming into Fawcett Green and Barnaby pointed out that St. Chad’s Lane was the narrow turning on the right. Troy forbore to ask what else could the turning be in a two-street, one-horse dump like this?
He was delightedly vindicated when, a moment later, the horse itself appeared, sedately clopping along. A small child, wearing a velvet riding hat and jodhpurs, bobbed on the vast leather saddle. Troy, father of one and daily exposed to the world’s wickedness, immediately wondered where its mother was.
Becoming aware of the car, the little girl skilfully eased her mount on to the grass verge and gestured with calm authority for them to pass. Troy, who would have much preferred flustered anxiety that he could have authoritatively soothed, muttered, “Kids today.”
“Over there,” the Chief Inspector pointed. “Where the bike is.”
Perrot’s Honda motorcycle was standing inside the gates of Nightingales, which were wide open. His yellow safety jerkin and white helmet marked POLICE rested on the seat. The constable himself was nowhere to be seen.
Troy drove in and the two men got out of the car. In spite of the heat, the sergeant then put on his immaculately pressed, silver-grey flecked cotton jacket after giving the collar a quick once over and removing a stray red hair.
Barnaby rapped sharply on the front door but no one answered. The house had a desolate air as if recently abandoned, though vases and ornaments could still be seen on the windowsills between the glass and half-drawn curtains.
“Tray posh,” said Sergeant Troy, peering through the glass.
A narrow shingle path ran down the side of the garage to the rear of the house. Barnaby and Troy crunched along it and entered a somewhat neglected garden. This was encroaching on to the patio, a pleasant if unimaginative arrangement of multicoloured slabs. It held parched begonias in smart Chinese pots, a barbecue, still full of ashes, and a large, blue and white daisy-patterned hammock.
Barnaby, a gardener to his fingertips, climbed down the steps and stared with irritation. There were some beautiful day lilies surrounded by couch grass, a newly planted but unwatered rhododendron, “George Reynolds” and a sad old hebe which also looked as if it could do with a drink. But there was one patch that caught his eye. Not far away was a small section of ground which looked slightly softer than the rest and had been freshly turned over. Perhaps Hollingsworth had decided to start tidying up but that was as far as he’d got. Given the man’s state of mind as described by Perrot, it seemed unlikely.
“Sir! Over here!”
Barnaby heard his sergeant rattle and shake the French windows. Before he could scramble back up, Troy had run over to the barbecue, seized the metal tongs and smashed the glass. He put his hand in and turned the key then broke two more panes to release the bolts. By the time Barnaby reached him the windows stood wide open.
A man was lying on a brightly patterned rug in front of an empty fireplace. Barnaby crossed quickly over and knelt beside him. Troy stood on the threshold, his fastidious nature affronted by the mixture of stale offensive odours about the place, not least of which came from the pool of urine beneath the recumbent figure. Troy noticed a tumbler lying on its side a short distance from the man’s right hand.
“Is he a gonner?”
“Yes. Get hold of the FME, would you?”
“Righty-oh.” Troy crossed over to a fussy gilt table holding a mock Edwardian telephone.
“Don’t touch that,” said the Chief Inspector sharply. “Use the car radio. Ask them to send a photographer. And a round-the-clock watch.”
“OK, OK.” Keep your hair on, a phrase that Troy would never have dared utter, provided the subtext. At the French windows he hesitated. “You don’t think he’s just ... conked out then—Hollingsworth?”
“We don’t know yet that it is Hollingsworth. Try and find out what’s happened to Sniffer of the Yard. If he’s good for nothing else, at least he can identify the body, pro tem.”
When his sergeant had disappeared, Barnaby straightened up and looked about him. He would have recognised the place anywhere, thanks to Constable Perrot’s eye for detail. What a loss to the airport bookstalls that man was. Not necessarily, however, a permanent one. Should he carry on with the staggering lack of acumen and foresight that he had shown so far, a career change might well be in the offing. And sooner rather than later.
Barnaby worked his way once round the room, keeping as near the edge as possible, protecting the scene as severely as if the man had been found with his head bashed in. Why precisely, he would have been hard put to say. Though this was clearly an unexplained death, there was nothing at this stage to suggest it was suspicious. Perhaps thirty years’ exposure to dirty work had given him a nose for it.