Written in Blood(27)

Barnaby regretted that Hadleigh was not facing the camera. He would have liked to look directly at the man, try to guess his thoughts and imagine his emotions. Hadleigh was certainly attractive. Reconstructed, the battered head proved to be both large and shapely, with a straight nose and strong, square jaw. He could have been a soldier. An explorer, perhaps. Or an extremely determined man of the cloth.

What was really interesting about the picture, of course, was why it was not in its place on the sideboard beside the vase of scented viburnum but hidden away in a bureau. Barnaby looked forward to finding the answer to this. He was, in fact, looking forward generally.

There was something about the very beginning of a case, when no medical or forensic evidence to speak of was available, that exhilarated him. Marooned in a vast landscape of unknown limits with barely a visual aid in sight, Barnaby remained quite unfazed.

But it had not always been so, which was why he understood, and sympathised with, his sergeant’s very different reaction. Troy suffered greatly from what Barnaby always thought of as the ‘treading-water syndrome’. Panic at being out of one’s depth. Fear that, if a case did not quickly yield up its secrets, it would remain forever impenetrable. Troy craved for something to hang on to, and quickly. A fact, an artefact, a list, a bag, a lighter, a wallet. Anything as long as it was solidly present and clearly visible. Right now he was picking up and sniffing the remains of a cigar. But Barnaby had seen too many wrong conclusions drawn from apparently incorruptible certainties to take easy comfort from their presence.

‘This,’ said Troy now, rolling the elegant, slim, gold-banded cylinder between his fingers, ‘is what I call a stogy. Beautiful.’

‘Must be one of the guests,’ said Barnaby crossing to an alcove filled with books. ‘He’s no smoker. You can always smell it.’

The chief inspector bent his head sideways, twisting round to read the titles. All non-fiction. Architecture, travel, food and wine. Several on the craft of writing. The arrangement of the books was in sharp contrast to those in his own household, where volumes would be jumbled up any old how with titles every which way. There was always at least one stack of books on the floor, a pile of new paperbacks by Joyce’s chair and at least a couple on her bedside table. Here the spines were aligned like high-kicking chorus girls, tallest at each end, smallest in the middle. Most wore shiny, fresh-looking dust jackets now dulled by SOCO’s ministrations. Barnaby reached out and, with a satisfaction which he knew to be pathetically childish even as he indulged it, poked one of the books completely out of line, muttering ‘Anal retentive.’

‘Was he?’ said Troy, abandoning his contemplation of rosy apples and lifeless grouse. ‘The dirty devil.’

Barnaby went outside, only to be once more accosted by Aubrey Marine, this time divested of his polythene carapace and carrying a sealed metal container.

‘The Celica’s missing, Tom.’

‘Oh? Garage doors forced?’

‘Nope. All nicely locked up. Of course our man could simply have used Hadleigh’s keys and replaced them. Or the car could be off somewhere having its MOT. Just another little wrinkle.’ He beamed and set off down the path.

The two policemen followed, the cold air smacking them hard in the face. Barnaby shivered and told himself this was due to a grievous lack of solid pabulum. He looked at his watch, convinced he had missed lunch by half a century, but it was barely twelve.

‘We’ll have time to call next door. What did she say their names were, Mrs Bundy? Crampton?’

‘Clapton, chief.’

‘What would I do without your memory, sergeant?’ It was true. His own got worse every day. ‘Maybe she’ll come up with a cup of tea.’

‘You never know. We could strike lucky.’

‘And a biscuit.’




Outside the cottage the crowd, now untidily straggling behind a barrier, had increased. Young mothers with toddlers in pushchairs, three children of school age. Old men in flat caps and mufflers which crossed their chests to be tied up behind like soldiers’ bandoleers. They were blowing on their mittens, flinging their arms backwards and forwards, trying to keep warm. Catching their deaths. Some middle-aged women, hair rollers like pink foam sausages poking from woollen head scarves, were sharing a Thermos. One was bringing a new arrival up to date.

‘Basically they have brought him out but he was in this zip-up. You couldn’t see a thing.’ The tone of her voice was deeply resentful, as if a ticket for a show had been bought and the curtain had failed to rise.

‘Our Don hangs his suit up in one of them,’ said her companion. ‘They’re dead useful.’