The Morbid Kitchen Read online

  ‘Yes, I would have been sceptical.’ She was now. ‘ You remember it all well.’

  ‘Everyone was questioned, over and over again. Anyone who seemed connected or had even been seen near the school that day. Or any day, it seemed sometimes. All the neighbours, the postman, even he was under suspicion for a bit, I think; the road sweeper, and even a young police cadet because he was seen walking up and down the road. Nothing of course.’

  It was all in the records, Charmian thought, even about the road sweeper, long since dead.

  ‘I thought about it a lot over the years, and I talked about it with Nancy till she died. She never stopped talking about it if she could find a listener.’

  After the school had closed, Nancy Bailey had taken a clerical job in the Castle library. She was well liked and always had friends, but she had probably not enjoyed the humble position. No longer Miss Bailey of the school, just Nancy at the desk in the window.

  ‘She loved the school, she’d made it. It was hers, I understood.’ The touch of sadness again.

  Nancy had her school, Father had his book, what did Emily have?

  Emily looked up at the blank face of the house. Next door a curtain stirred as if someone was standing there, looking at her looking at the house. An epitome of what life would always be for her: she was an object of interest.

  Charmian registered the movement of the curtain for the quick peep at Emily. She ought to move away from Windsor. Go to London. Leave the country. A good lawyer, and she would be a good one, would never be wasted.

  ‘Do you come here often?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you saw the woman looking at me? I thought you might. She’s often there. I suppose she’s lonely. Yes, I have been coming lately. Business not pleasure.’

  ‘A good idea to sell.’

  ‘There’s something I have to explain, perhaps I haven’t given the true picture of how things were. Nancy wouldn’t sell the house. She did try to live in it. The school was ruined, done for, all the pupils melted away, except for one – her parents didn’t seem to mind, but she went, too, in the end, to a school in the country. She’s still in Windsor at the University, Clara Meldrum. I see her around sometimes.’

  So do I, thought Charmian, who, once interested, as she must admit she was, in the long past murder, had been at pains to seek her out. Not to talk to her yet, but to see her. She was at all the concerts. Music mad.

  ‘So your sister did cling on?’

  ‘While Father was still alive. He didn’t want to leave his study, he liked working in it.’

  And the odd murder in the house had not deterred him.

  ‘But something had to be done before Nancy could face it; she had to make the basement room disappear.’ Emily looked down at the basement window. ‘We did it ourselves, Nancy and my father, and I helped. We boarded the doors up, painted it over, then hung pictures on the wall. That’s how it is now. But to sell, we have to undo it. The room has to come back.’ She looked at Charmian. ‘I wanted you to be with me when that happened.’

  There was too much emotion running loose here. Charmian tried to lighten the mood. ‘Do I have to take a hammer to it?’

  Emily looked down the road where a small van was just turning the corner. ‘No, I have a builder coming to do the work. It won’t take him long.’ She nodded at the van. ‘There he is now.’

  Charmian looked; she knew the face. Eddy Bell. ‘I know him, I’ve used him myself. It’s a good firm.’

  ‘An old Windsor firm,’ Emily answered absently. She turned back to the house, walked up the short path and put her key in the door.

  It opened at once, Charmian observed. ‘ That was easy, keys always stick with me.’

  The front door swung open letting a puff of stale air blow over them. Not dirty air, just air that had lost its vitality and turned useless.

  Eddy walked in behind them, a shortish, sturdy figure. Bright, alert eyes. ‘Here I am, ladies, right on time.’

  ‘Five minutes late,’ said Emily, not smiling. ‘Come in. You know what is needed?’

  ‘You said.’ If she wouldn’t talk, then Eddy wouldn’t either. Besides, he had another interest: Charmian. He admired her and did not mind showing it. ‘Nice to see you, ma’am … m’lady, I should say. Not the happiest time for you, I’m admitting. I’ve been working at Mrs Cooper’s, building a lift to the nursery floor … Sad affair but the baby has got a good granny.’

  ‘Yes,’ Charmian nodded. She had married recently, which was an occasion for more joy than she allowed herself to show, although Eddy seemed to know, but she had lost a loved goddaughter, Kate, who had died in childbirth. The child was in the care of Kate’s mother Anny with visiting rights to the father and also to Charmian, who loved the new baby, but Anny was the determined ruler of the cradle. There was a nanny and an assistant and two nurseries and now a nursery lift. Rich baby.

  ‘Not want for anything that baby,’ was how Eddy put it.

  ‘No.’ Anny’s way of showing love, perhaps her only way. She was an old friend to Charmian, they had been students together and the bond between them was strong. Anny was one of the reasons she had come to work in the south of England, but she could not deny that Anny, always rich, and a brilliant artist, had made a difficult wife and mother. You had to stand away from Anny to live with her, which had been hard for her daughter and husband.

  ‘It’s the best way for the child, the father being in the same trade as you, ma’am.’ Charmian was married to a man with an inherited title, which Eddy knew and wanted to show, but he also enjoyed calling her ma’am because this was what you called the Queen.

  She didn’t answer. Kate had married a clever young detective, George Rewley, always part of Charmian’s team. There were so many thoughts these days that edged back to Kate and her death, and her husband, Inspector Rewley, was one of them. She saw him almost daily and he never mentioned Kate. Everyone has their own ways of mourning, but she feared for the way he had chosen.

  Emily gave her a quick look: she too knew about Kate. DC this up. She turned to Eddy: ‘Are you ready?’

  Eddy bounced forward. ‘Ready, ready. Lead me to it.’

  The hall was dark, curtains were drawn on the window at the back of the hall. Ahead was a wide staircase, leading upwards, and further down the hall a series of shallow steps to the basement.

  Emily took a deep breath, then walked forward. She was pale but determined. This house was going to be sold, the basement room would be opened up, she had to face it.

  After six steps downward, the stairs turned left for the dozen steps to the basement. It was dark down here but Emily pressed a switch and the ceiling light came on to reveal a blank wall which faced Charmian and Eddy as they followed Emily down. She nodded towards the wall. ‘We worked as fast as we could, my father who didn’t want to help, and my sister and me. She did most of it, I just helped her hammer plywood panels into place. Then we slapped on some paint.’

  The white paint had turned a streaky yellow. No undercoat had been used so here and there the wood underneath could be seen. Emily had already taken down the pictures, stacking them on the floor. She nodded at Eddy. ‘ Here you are. Get on with it, please.’ She took a deep breath. ‘It has to be done.’

  ‘Right, right.’ Eddy shouted up the stairs. ‘Come on, Albert, let’s have you down here.’

  The clatter of metal on the stone stairs, together with the scuffle of heavy footsteps, announced the arrival of Albert with spades, buckets and a variety of sharp and probing instruments. Albert was a hefty, broad-shouldered young man with huge red hands; a cheerful smile stayed always on his face, he seemed to have no other expression, as if he knew he was not clever but also knew his own worth: he could do anything with his hands.

  Eddy was serious as he checked over his tools. He selected a large chisel and handed a similar one to Albert in whose large hand it looked tiny. Eddy went up to the wall and patted along it. ‘Coming away already in places. You didn’t do a good job. Just as w
ell, really.’

  Emily did not answer, she was staring ahead without a word.

  ‘Are you going to be all right?’ Charmian moved closer to her. ‘Why don’t you go upstairs? I’ll stay and watch.’

  Eddy was quick. ‘ I don’t need watching, you ought to know that, ma’am.’

  ‘Not criticizing you, Eddy. I’m curious, that’s all. I want to be there.’

  ‘I’m staying,’ said Emily. She moved back to the stairs, climbed one step as if getting out of the water, and stood to watch.

  Charmian took a pace to stand beside her, discreetly studying her face. Too much emotion floating round here. She tried to puncture the bubble. ‘How long did you wait before putting this wall up?’

  ‘As soon as the inquest was over, and the child identified for sure … not that there was any doubt really.’

  ‘Identification did have its difficulties,’ said Charmian, who had read the report and knew the state of the child.

  Emily looked pale, but she carried on: ‘And a verdict of murder was brought in and Margaret named. Then we did it. It seemed the moment.’

  ‘Whose idea was it?’

  Emily looked back to that day in the past. ‘It just seemed to happen,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we all thought of it at once. And when you consider, it wasn’t such a bad idea.’

  ‘Is it ever a good idea to hide things away?’

  ‘Oh yes. Sometimes you have to. We all do.’

  ‘But when things come out? And they so often do. Like this room … Here it is again. You put it to sleep for ten years but now you have had to wake it up.’

  ‘We thought we’d come back to live one day, Nancy and I, when we talked over how we felt about things. And the aunt in Australia said she was going to leave us her share. Then it would have been ours and ours alone. Nance made a will leaving me her share and I did the same for her.’

  ‘But your aunt didn’t do as she said she would?’

  ‘No, people often don’t when money and property is concerned. That’s something I’ve learnt.’

  As they talked, Eddy and Albert had been removing the panels, one by one. Eddy turned to Emily. ‘Came away easy enough. They’d have fallen down of themselves if left much longer.’

  ‘We didn’t mean them to stay up for ever.’

  Revealed was a pair of handsome, heavy oak doors, a little dusty and unpolished after their imprisonment. Eddy tried the handle, but the door did not open.

  Emily moved forward. ‘It’s locked; I know where the key is. We left it inside.’ Emily ran her hand along the ledge above the doors. She withdrew her hand. ‘Here it is.’ She put the key in the lock and turned it. ‘We oiled the lock before we shut it all in.’

  What a scene it must have been, Charmian thought, a mixture of coolness and panic. Which of the actors provided which emotion?

  Eddy tried to go in but Emily pulled him back. ‘No, this is for me.’

  She threw open the doors, then pressed the switch on the wall so that the centre light came on. ‘Still works, I wondered if it would.’ A breath of stale, dead air, faintly scented with something or other, so that Charmian sniffed, rose up towards them.

  They crowded round the door. The room was empty except for a line of small chairs by the boarded up window. A row of tall cupboards ran along one wall. An old-fashioned cooker with an open grate beside it, rusty now but once blackened and shiny. A thin layer of dust lay over everything, but it was undisturbed. No rodent feet marks or droppings disturbed it.

  ‘The old stove was left,’ said Emily. ‘In the winter it was so cosy.’

  As they looked, one of the doors, disturbed perhaps by the banging, swung open a little way. Something moved behind. A foot-shaped object appeared. Charmian went over and dragged the cupboard door wide apart. A figure was sitting there, legs apart and extended. From between her legs, something round and with hair, rolled towards them.

  Charmian turned towards Emily. ‘I don’t think Margaret left you after all.’

  Chapter Two

  ‘So what happened?’ asked Dolly Barstow. ‘ What did Em do?’ Dolly had a remote friendship with Emily, the two met occasionally at the pool where Dolly swam. She couldn’t count herself as a close friend, but she was prepared to be a supporter. And a close observer. She was very interested.

  She was talking to Charmian in the latter’s office in one of the older buildings in the town and in which Charmian had created, on purpose, a scholarly book-lined air. It was a sign that she meant to be taken seriously.

  It was over an uneasy, troubled week later. Charmian had come to her office from the house in Maid of Honour Row where she and Humphrey still lived while they debated which of the four houses they owned between them they would live in. Humphrey had a handsome town house in Windsor as well as a family home in Berkshire; Charmian had a qualified right to a small village house as well as the house in Maid of Honour Row. It was proving difficult to decide. Meanwhile Muff the cat and Benjy the dog had voted with their feet to stay where they were. The dog was attached to Charmian’s neighbours, Birdie Peacock and her friend Winifred Eagle, two charming white witches who kept a benevolent eye on Charmian.

  Charmian considered. ‘Emily went very white, but didn’t faint. It was big Albert that went down.’

  ‘Must have made a racket.’

  ‘Like a building coming down.’

  Albert had lain prone on the floor like a great oak tree or whole church tower collapsed, but none of those remaining upright had moved to help him, all three had their eyes on the scene before them. The crouching, bent dusty figure with the head, small and childish, on the floor between its knees, like an anatomical drawing, a sketch by a wandering artist of the ruins of medieval Rome, with art and history all combined.

  ‘It was a shock.’

  ‘I bet. But she’s tough, Em, I’ve always thought so.’

  ‘I didn’t feel too good myself,’ Charmian admitted. ‘ I’ve got soft since the old days. I don’t often see an unburied corpse at SRADIC.’

  ‘We’ve buried a few.’ As Sergeant Dolly Barstow she had taken study leave to add to her academic qualifications (a course which made Charmian, who long since left academia behind, slightly uneasy. Who was treading on whose footsteps? But she admired, liked and trusted Dolly, while feeling the force of her ambitions). Dolly had now returned to work with Charmian in SRADIC at the rank of Inspector. ‘So what happened now you had turned up the body of the long lost?’ She paused and added softly, because it really was a sickening thought, ‘Together with the missing head.’

  Charmian took a sip of her office coffee, which was good, being made on her own machine with her special mocha blend; she had got fussier about what she drank, the older she got. In her green days she had happily swallowed mugs of lukewarm, standard issue powdered coffee. No longer, it was another sign from her that you took her seriously, or else.

  ‘We couldn’t take it for granted that we had the body of Margaret Drue and the head of Alana Heston, although it certainly seemed likely.’ Charmian shrugged. ‘You know how it goes. I made a few telephone calls and the usual chorus arrived.’

  In dribs and drabs.

  A patrol car first, with two uniformed officers, one a woman, eyes filled with interest at what had turned up on a dull day, but being carefully polite to Charmian. They all knew her, even when she did not know them.

  Then a detective sergeant with a woman detective, and soon after this two scene of the crime officers appeared. Then the police surgeon.

  The photographers arrived next, two of them, plus the usual equipment.

  The machine was rolling, and downstairs in the basement it was beginning to get crowded. Charmian found that she knew many of the faces and most of the names.

  ‘What happened to big Albert?’ He had once repaired her roof, badly as it turned out and it still leaked, but Dolly remembered him.

  ‘He was revived by Eddy, or revived himself, I wasn’t noticing. He’s still breathing, so don’t
worry. I think they went to sit in their van to await being questioned. Emily and I sat on the stairs to the basement to watch.’

  The police team would have preferred it if Charmian had left but were not in a position to pull rank.

  ‘Some more coffee? They wanted me out,’ Charmian confessed honestly, ‘for which I don’t blame them, but they couldn’t see their way to it … I had been there when the body and head appeared. Like magic it was, in a terrible kind of way, and I was a witness.’

  She sat back in her chair, remembering the scene. The police surgeon had not occupied himself long, before standing up. ‘ Well, she’s dead all right. You don’t really need me to tell you that. And has been, poor lady, for some years. Yes, a female, and underneath the clothes she is more or less a mummy. I can’t say how she was killed but it looks as if she was strangled. The postmortem and the pathologist will give you all that.’

  Dr Fullyer, yes that was his name, picked up his bag; his job was done, he had declared the corpse dead.

  ‘About the head, well, nothing much to say there, just a skull,’ he frowned, ‘although to be fair, there is more flesh and skin than one might expect. Judging by the bones, a child and by the hair, a girl. But that’s guessing.’

  Dolly sipped her coffee. She appreciated good stuff. ‘Who was there?’

  Charmian ticked them off on her fingers. ‘Jimmy Towers.’ An inspector now, these last two years, a decent if not clever fellow, and said to be bookish by his mates, whatever that meant. He had some special interest, what was it now? ‘His sergeant with him, I know his face, I think he’s called Flail.’

  ‘Will Flail, I know him. He’s clever enough but a bit of a bully if you let him.’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t.’