Written in Blood(30)

Oh dear, oh dear, mused Troy. Pardon me while I curtsey. Knowing he was expected to remove it he pushed his cap to the back of his head with his thumb and glanced around with bold derision, taking in cracked gloss paint on walls the colour of dirty custard, free-standing old-fashioned cupboards and a huge Electrolux fridge of the type that was obsolete before Adam went into the cider business. He’d be ashamed to ask Maureen to keep her yoghurts in it. If I couldn’t do better than this, reflected Troy, with a deep inner glow of satisfaction, I’d shoot myself. He tuned back in.

‘. . . and so, I am sure you would wish to help us in any way you can.’ Here Barnaby paused, wondering if, by introducing the word ‘duty’, he had overstretched his luck but it seemed not.

‘Naturally we would wish to do all that we can to bring this miscreant to justice. If justice it can these days be called.’

Barnaby recognised a note of harsh longing and guessed that Honoria was wistfully recalling the days when a villein could be publicly disembowelled for patting his master’s dog. He said, ‘Could you perhaps tell us first who was present at your meeting last night and give us their addresses.’ Troy wrote the details down. ‘And you met, how often?’

‘Once a month.’

‘And did yesterday follow the usual pattern?’

‘No. We had a guest speaker.’ Already she was sounding impatient. ‘What on earth has our meeting to do with someone breaking in and attacking Gerald?’

‘No one broke in, Miss Lyddiard.’ Barnaby saw the release of this information as inevitable given the form his questioning would be compelled to take.

‘You mean’ - Amy was staring in disbelief - ‘Gerald just opened the door and let him in?’

‘Opening the door’ - Honoria separated her words and spoke loudly as if Amy was not only mentally retarded but deaf as well - ‘is not the same as letting someone in. People are always calling round,’ she turned back to Barnaby, ‘delivering rubbishy newspapers, begging for charity or asking for jumble—’

‘At that hour of the night?’ Troy consciously exaggerated his West of Slough twang, whining his vowels and dropping his T’s - emphasising the social divide but on his own terms. He could have saved his breath. Honoria did not even deign to glance in his direction, just stared blankly down her nose, her expression that of someone noticing a fresh and particularly repulsive specimen of doggy doo in the middle of their priceless Aubusson.

‘A guest speaker?’ reminded Barnaby.

‘Grave disappointment. Max Jennings. Some sort of novelist.’

The name sounded vaguely familiar, though Barnaby couldn’t think from where. Certainly it would not be from personal experience, for he never read fiction. Indeed hardly read at all, preferring to paint or cook or garden in his spare time.

‘Consequently,’ concluded Honoria, ‘we finished later than usual. Around ten thirty.’

‘And did you all leave then?’

‘All but Rex St John. And Jennings.’

‘To go straight home?’

‘Of course,’ snapped Honoria, adding, without apparent irony, ‘it was a dark and stormy night.’

‘And you didn’t go out again?’ She stared at him as if he were mad. ‘Or return to Plover’s Rest for any reason?’

Pluvvers is it? noted Troy, who had been rhyming it with Rover’s, as in Return.

‘Certainly not.’

‘And . . .’ Barnaby turned to the younger woman. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t . . .’

‘Mrs Lyddiard - Amy. No. I didn’t go out either.’

‘Did you retire straight away?’ Barnaby asked.

‘Yes,’ replied Honoria. ‘I had a headache. The visitor was allowed to smoke. A disgusting habit. He wouldn’t have done it here.’

‘And you, Mrs Lyddiard?’ Barnaby smiled encouragingly.

‘Not quite straight away. First I made us a drink - cocoa actually—’

‘They don’t want to know every little detail of our domestic life.’

‘I’m sorry, Honoria.’

‘Why don’t you tell them how much sugar you put in? Describe the cups and saucers.’

Amy’s full lower lip started to quiver and Barnaby gave up. There seemed little point, given Honoria’s recent strictures on the spreading of gossip, in persisting. Plenty of other people were yet to be questioned and some, merely by the law of averages, were bound to prove co-operative. And he could always get back to Mrs Lyddiard, preferably when she was alone. But Troy jumped in where his superior had decided not to tread. Touching his tie and ostentatiously displaying nicotined fingertips he said, ‘What sort of man was Mr Hadleigh?’