Written in Blood(28)

‘Mister, mister.’ Two boys, around eight or nine, ran up to Barnaby.

‘What do you want?’ Troy grimaced fiercely at them and his fingers twitched.

‘I want a burger, onions and chips,’ said the larger of the lads, jerking his head in the direction of the portable pod, ‘and he wants a hot dog.’

‘Very funny. Why aren’t you at school?’

‘I got a bone in me leg,’ replied the village wit.

‘Well, if you don’t want a pain in the arse to go with it you’d better clear off.’

At least a dozen cars had drawn up on the far side of the Green. Every gaze was fixed on to the cottage as if the occupants’ heads had been locked into position. Troy stared coolly across at them all and he made his leather coat crack fiercely round his boots as he strode along, basking the while in his authoritative role at the very heart of the drama.

‘I say!’ Barnaby, his hand on the gate of Trevelyan Villas, was stopped by a girl holding a runny-nosed blue-cheeked baby swaddled in a puce and ultramarine shell suit. ‘There’s nobody in. He teaches at Causton Comprehensive and Sue’s at the local play group.’

‘Do you have any idea when Mrs Clapton will be back?’

‘Around one usually.’

‘Thank you.’

‘What do you want to see them for?’ asked a tall, thin man wearing a sweater with a snowman on it. He had a dewdrop at the end of his nose.

Ignoring him, the policemen turned their backs and Barnaby set off along the sparkling cold pavement. Troy hurried to keep up.

‘You going to try the Lyddiards, chief?’

‘Might as well.’

Gresham House’s pineapples were in poor condition. One had lost its leaves, the other was crumbling from the base up. The sandstone pillars they surmounted were also in poor shape and the iron gates, some fifteen feet tall and ornately curlicued, were rusty.

The house was a monstrous pile of heavily pitted grey stone, three storeys high with a small, round tower fatly bulging from one corner of the top storey like a warty carbuncle and from which icicles depended like daggers. The door and window frames, once white, were now a dirty grey and flaking fast. Perhaps in the spring and summer, softened by climbers in bloom or pots of bright geraniums on the steps, it might, just, have seemed attractive. But at the moment (thought Sergeant Troy) it looked about as jolly as Castle Dracula.

Barnaby, on the contrary, saw much to admire. His gardener’s soul was cheered by the many trees and the shrub borders on each side of the drive. Variegated hollies festooned with damp cobwebs, a shiny sealing-wax-red dogwood. Two flowering wintersweets, the ground beneath them thick with aconites and Iris stylosa. Mahonias, their droopy yellow racemes smelling richly of honey, and also several hebes. He recognised the tough and charming ‘Mrs Winder’, her narrow elliptical leaves gleaming purple in the grey winter light. And . . . could that Cotoneaster be? . . . surely not? . . .

‘Good grief. It’s a Rothschildianus.’

‘Is that right?’ Troy stared at some creamy yellow balls roughly the size of sheep droppings.

‘What a jewel. I’ve got the Exvuriensis. Nice of course. But not the same.’

‘No, well. It wouldn’t be.’ Troy racked his brains for some intelligent rejoinder, for he hated to be found wanting. Faintly, memory chimed. ‘Aren’t they rich, chief? The Rothschilds? Millionaries or something?’

‘They have this wonderful garden in Hampshire. Exbury. You can buy plants there.’

Troy nodded vaguely and his interest in the creamy balls, never overwhelming, expired, for there was not a spot of horticultural blood in his veins. Almost the first thing he had done after moving into his small 1970s terraced house was see off the front garden and replace it with a tarmacadam parking space.

‘Not much point in trying that,’ said Barnaby. On the top of a cracked flight of steps was a mass of dried leaves and twiggy bits which the wind had piled against the front door. ‘Doesn’t look as if it’s been opened for years.’

As they made their way down the side of the house Troy said, only half joking, ‘Beggars and tradesmen round the back.’

They found a second opening. Poorly made and ill fitting, the door was the type that usually leads simply to an outhouse, but it was the only one visible so Barnaby rapped on it. Quite loudly, but without result.

He waited for a few moments and was about to try again when Troy stayed his hand. A woman, having made her way through a bareish vegetable garden, was crossing the stone courtyard towards them. A large, middle-aged woman in a shapeless, lumpy woollen skirt, a Barbour almost black with age and a waterproof fisherman’s hat. A worn leather pouch hung around her neck, bouncing on the granite shelf of her bosom like a nosebag on a horse. She had a huge face, an expanse of raw red flesh, the features lassoed into a tight, malignant bunch in the centre, dark shaggy eyebrows and a mouth like a gin trap. She was what Troy’s dad would have called ‘as ugly as sin’.