Gina thought this was an excellent idea and, with the new confidence she now brought to her role as Director, announced that the decision to commission the report should not be referred to the Trustees; she would make it herself. (It may have been a harsh experience in many ways, but she’d learnt a trick or two from working in close proximity to Sheila Cartwright.) Besides, as she pointed out, the Bracketts Board of Trustees was somewhat diminished. Sheila, who acted like a Trustee though she wasn’t one, was dead. So was Graham Chadleigh-Bewes. And Belinda Chadleigh was under arrest, being investigated for the murder of at least one of them. There was nothing to be gained from consulting such a depleted body.
So Laurence Hawker was given the job of checking through Esmond Chadleigh’s hidden archive and, where appropriate, Miss Hidebourne’s collection of Lieutenant Strider’s letters to his brother. The assignment gave him a reason to live for a little longer.
Jude would always have happy memories of the weeks during which he prepared his report. She nursed him unobtrusively, loved him, cuddled him, and watched with pleasure as his mind engaged with its final challenge. At first he would have letters and files and boxes scattered all over her sitting room table, while he sat with his laptop, keying in the relevant data. Later he would operate from her bed, propped up on a mountain of pillows, frequently working through the night, snatching his odd minutes of sleep amidst the chaos of research.
The security at Lewes Prison made clear to Jude why there were so few escapees from Austen. She almost lost count of the number of doors that were opened and locked behind her on the way to the Visiting Room. The Prison Officers also seemed more brusque and watchful; there was no comfort in this regime. The customary prison smells of sweat and disinfectant were more concentrated in the enclosed space.
Jude had felt oppressed before she even entered the place. Lewes always had that effect on her. There was something gloomy and introverted about the town, a feeling of hidden evil that had lasted through many centuries. Jude never arrived in Lewes without a psychic shudder.
The atmosphere of the Visiting Room was also in stark contrast to that of Austen. She didn’t know whether children were forbidden, but there were certainly none in evidence that afternoon. And the process of checking Visiting Orders was stringent and unsmiling, compared to the laid-back attitude she’d encountered on her last visit to Mervyn Hunter.
He looked paler, but sat with the same defensive body language. The tables were all boxed-in rectangles, so that no drugs could be passed beneath them. The Prison Officers who sat behind the visitors did not relax their vigilance.
‘How’re you doing?’ asked Jude.
Mervyn shrugged. ‘OK. I’m more used to this kind of nick than I was to Austen.’
‘Yes. You heard they found who murdered Sheila Cartwright?’
He nodded. ‘You get the news in here. Radio. Television news, too, except most of the time people want to watch something else.’
‘Sandy Fairbarns sends her best wishes.’ He didn’t seem that interested. ‘Mervyn, I’ve come to see you because I want to ask about your escape.’
‘Why?’
It wasn’t a question for which she’d prepared an answer, so, characteristically, she told the truth. ‘A friend and I got interested in Sheila’s murder. There are a few details we wanted to fill in, and we thought you might know.’
‘I didn’t have anything to do with it.’
‘I know that, Mervyn. I never thought you did.’
‘The police did. You’ve got one conviction, that’s it – obviously you’ve committed every other crime they haven’t stitched someone else for.’ He sounded almost too weary for bitterness. ‘Which doesn’t offer me much hope for when I’m back out in what they laughingly call “the real world”. Better off in here.’
Jude disagreed, but didn’t pursue it. ‘Sheila Cartwright visited you the day you escaped, didn’t she?’
‘Yes. That was another reason the police thought I’d topped her. I ended up shouting at her during the visit.’
‘Why did you shout at her?’
‘Because she kept on at me. She always did keep on at me. Always ordering me around, she was, telling me what to do.’
Jude could have told him he was not the only one to have suffered such treatment, but it wasn’t the moment. ‘What did she keep on at you about?’
‘About the body . . . you know, the one Jonny dug up. She said the press’d found out about it, and I wasn’t to say anything to anyone. How she thought the press was going to get into the nick, I don’t know.’
‘And that was all?’
‘Yes, but the way she went on at me. I . . . It made me think . . . It reminded me of . . .’ His words trickled away in pained recollection.
‘So why did that make you want to escape?’
‘Just to get away from her. The thought that I was kind of locked in the nick, and she could get at me any time she wanted . . . I couldn’t stand it. Anyway, I’d been thinking about going over the wall for some time.’
‘So that you’d be recaptured?’ asked Jude gently. ‘So that you’d end up back in somewhere like here?’
‘Maybe.’ He looked at her defiantly. ‘This is only temporary. They haven’t sorted out yet where I’m spending the rest of my sentence, but it won’t be Lewes.’
‘Still be the same security level, won’t it?’
‘Yeah. Not an open nick. I’ve been recategorized.’ There was almost a level of pride in his voice.
‘Mervyn, if you so hated Sheila Cartwright, why did you go straight to Bracketts, the very place where you were most likely to find her?’
‘I knew she wouldn’t be there that Thursday night. She mentioned something else she was doing. And it was late afternoon when I walked out of Austen, so I knew I had to find somewhere close for that first night.’
‘And you thought of the Priest’s Hole at Bracketts?’
He was genuinely surprised. ‘How do you know that?’
‘We worked it out,’ Jude replied mysteriously. ‘My friend found the secret cell underneath, and saw evidence that you’d been there.’
‘Did she?’ Mervyn Hunter sounded impressed. ‘Yeah, I’d read this book about the place and checked it out one lunchtime when I was working over there. Always useful to know a hiding-place.’
‘Listen, Mervyn, I can understand why you went there on the Thursday night . . . but why did you stay through the Friday?’
‘For one thing, I’d got a mate to organize some grub for me.’
‘Jonny Tyson.’
‘Here, you know bloody everything, don’t you?’
Jude shook her head. ‘Sadly, no. But you were still there in the evening, weren’t you?’
‘Yes. I’d just made this one quick trip out of my hiding-place to get the grub from Jonny. That lunch-time when I knew there wouldn’t be anyone around. Then I lay low till I thought everyone had gone for the day. But when I get out the house, I see there’s bloody cars in the car park, and I look in through the window and there’s a meeting going on in the dining room. Well, no way I was going to risk them hearing me getting back into the Priest’s Hole, so I scarpered.’
‘You went straight away? You left the grounds immediately? You didn’t do anything else?’
‘For Christ’s sake, you’re just like the bloody police!’
‘I’m sorry. But there’s something else that needs explaining. Did you go to the kitchen garden?’
Mervyn Hunter let out a long sigh, and nodded. ‘I knew where there was a spare set of keys in the Admin Office. Easy to break in there, without anyone noticing. That’s how I’d got into the main house. And just when I was leaving, I remembered there was a key to the kitchen garden on the bunch too, and I . . . I wanted to have a look at where the skeleton was found. So I unlocked the gates.’