Blood Ties (18 page)

‘Mr Friedman, Mrs Friedman, please come in, come along through.' He led them into a small living room at the front of the cottage. Lined with bookshelves and crammed with overstuffed furnishings, the room felt claustrophobic and, to Naomi, muffled and deadened. She sat down beside Alec on a two-seater sofa. Behind her neck a faint draft and a definite chill told her they were sitting with their backs to the front window.

‘Good of you to agree to see us,' Alec said.

‘Oh, that's no problem. Edward was a friend and a frequent visitor. A knowledgeable one too.'

‘Something of a scholar, we've been told,' Alec said.

A slight hesitation. ‘Oh, yes, I suppose that's true. He published a short article or so, I believe.'

‘You didn't read any of them?'

‘Not, um, not my area. Eddy was a seventeenth-century man; my interests are mostly medieval.' He laughed, briefly. ‘I'm afraid it takes me all my time to keep up with that.'

‘I suppose it must,' Alec said. To Naomi's ear he sounded puzzled.

‘So you didn't know about the book he was writing?'

‘He was writing a book? Oh, good for Eddy. Oh, but I suppose it's a bit late to say that.'

They fell silent, each with their own thoughts. Naomi, confused now by the different Eddy Thame that Dr Matthews and Adam Hart seemed to have been intimate with.

‘But he brought his finds to show you?' Alec said, evidently feeling he was on firmer ground with this.

‘Well, yes. Anything he thought might be important. Eddy was excellent at recording what he found and he was very good at encouraging others to be as meticulous. Young Kevin, for instance.'

‘In his notes he mentions a seal ring, with a cedar tree. He associates it with the Kirkwood family?'

Matthews laughed fondly. ‘Ah, yes. Eddy's treasure hunt. I'm afraid he became a little obsessed. It's right for the period and could well have belonged to the Kirkwoods. Who knows?'

‘Kevin found coins at the same site,' Alec said.

‘Ah, yes.' Matthews leaned forward. ‘Now, they are interesting. They shed light on just how fanatical and how
convinced
of victory Monmouth's followers were. The notion that you could go ahead and strike commemorative medals under such circumstances, well, that speaks of certainty, unreasoning certainty.'

‘You believe they are genuine.' Naomi was intrigued by the change of tone.

‘Yes. Yes, I do. There's no reason to suppose fakery, and because of that they are intriguing, but in the scheme of things they are a mere footnote. A rather special footnote, but nothing more than that.' He paused, and laughed. ‘It's an amusing and somewhat sobering thing, though, to see medals with the head of King James III and it be the son of Charles II, and not the son of James II, as is usually the case.'

‘I'm not sure I follow,' Alec said.

‘Ah, right. Well James, Duke of Monmouth, was the illegitimate son of Charles II. James II was the brother of Charles and he was the king at the time of the rebellion. He was a Catholic and the general public had become very suspicious of members of the Roman church, but anyway he was generally unpopular. His son, who would have become James III, never actually came to the throne, because only a couple of years after the rebellion, James II was deposed in an almost bloodless coup when we went and asked the Dutch if we could borrow a couple of their spare royals. Hence we ended up with the Protestant William and Mary of Orange.

‘Anyway, the medallions Kevin brought to me were inscribed King James III and the date is 1685. He is also described as being defender of the faith: i.e. the Church of England.'

‘Right.' Alec still sounded doubtful. ‘So you don't think Eddy was on to anything more than that? Just interesting but random finds.'

Matthews' tone changed, almost imperceptibly, but Naomi noticed it and knew Alec did too. He tensed.

‘Look, I can understand the draw of the treasure hunt, but those incidents make the news precisely because they are so unusual. I'm not sure that Eddy believed it; I hope not, but
I
certainly never did. The Kirkwood treasure is a lovely story, but that's all it is.'

There was little more to be said after that and they left a short time later.

‘Well,' Alec said. ‘Lunch, I think. Back to The Lamb. What do you make of Matthews?'

‘I don't know. I'm disposed to dislike him because he put Eddy down, but I'm probably being picky. Kevin seems to rate him and Eddy did too, apparently. Adam Hart is easy to like, which automatically gets my spider sense tingling.'

‘Oh, you were a copper for far too long. Funny though, the thing that really strikes me is that Eddy was careful, tidy, odd in what he told people. No one seems to have the full picture. It's like he fulfilled whatever their expectations were, even with people he is supposed to have liked and been close to.'

‘Don't we all do that to a certain extent? I mean, Sam knows things about me even you don't. Not because I'm hiding anything; just because they're sister things, girl stuff, you know?'

‘Sure, I suppose so. Maybe that's all it is.'

‘But you're not sure that's all it is.'

‘No, I'm not so sure.'

EIGHTEEN

L
unch was an oddly sober affair. Susan was distracted by the mundane weekly task of ordering and resupply for the pub; Kevin, oddly quiet, had taken up residence in Eddy's corner, if not yet in his chair. A few locals drifted in, but they were a largely evening, post-work phenomenon and at lunchtime were thin on the ground. Trade at lunchtime was steady and, Naomi noted, generally older people, Susan having a discount policy twice a week for those of pensionable age.

‘I've got great staff,' Susan said when Naomi tentatively asked if she could make a profit overall. ‘Regular lunch customers who come back week after week, a couple of walking groups who have monthly bookings for thirty or more, and in the summer there are several B&Bs who put custom my way, so we all get by. I'm in this for a steady living for me and my staff, and that means building loyalty, so we do OK.'

She
didn't know Eddy had been writing a book and neither did Kevin.

Post lunch, Alec intended to drive out to Eddy's house, so he sought Susan out in her office in order to borrow her key, leaving Kevin and Naomi ensconced by the fire and examining Eddy's notebooks. Kevin had brought with him a digital recorder so Naomi could listen back later to their discussion. It was a thoughtful move and much appreciated. Alec was now kicking himself for not having thought of it.

‘What do you hope to find at Eddy's place?' Susan asked, handing the key over.

‘I don't know. He talks about some interesting papers that he used for researching his book. I'm probably barking up the wrong tree but . . .' He shrugged. ‘Have you heard anything from the police?'

She shook her head. ‘No, but the solicitor phoned this morning, said he'd been looking over Eddy's estate and there's more to it than just the house.'

‘Oh?'

‘Yeah. We always assumed Eddy had some kind of pension he was living on, but it looks like he had money apart from that, some kind of trust fund that came from his wife. It should have passed directly to Karen when she was twenty-one, but of course she died, so it came back to him.'

‘I see. Do you know how much?'

Susan shook her head again. ‘No, Mr Cole says he's still collating all the details. Apparently Eddy made several investments with the interest and there's stocks and shares and such.'

‘Sounds as though it's a large sum, then.'

‘When I asked if there'd be enough to hire a solicitor to look after Kevin, and he said yes, I thought he meant that we'd settle up after I sold the house or whatever, but it seems like this is what he meant. That there is actual money. I know it sounds silly, but I'm a bit daunted, Alec.'

‘I think that's understandable. It's all happening rather quickly.'

She nodded and turned back to her desk to continue with the day to day concerns of running The Lamb, but Alec was pensive. More mystery, he thought.

Alec drove along the winding road to Eddy's house deep in thought. It had not escaped his attention that all they'd done so far was uncover random facts about Eddy's life; nothing that actually gave them a lead on who had killed him.

More and more, Alec was drawn to the notion that Eddy had quarrelled with a friend and the death had been accidental. Why on earth would anyone want to hurt a man whose main interests in life were events that had happened centuries before?

Susan would have been a possible suspect had she known about the will, but as she'd got a pretty solid alibi and, as even Eddy's solicitor seemed to have been vague about his estate until now, that really didn't seem likely.

‘What about Kevin, then?' Alec spoke his thoughts out loud, trying them on for size. ‘He had opportunity; did he have motive? Did Eddy find something that Kevin wanted? Did they argue about it? Did Eddy fall and Kevin was too scared to call for help?' Alec frowned at the road ahead. ‘I don't see it,' he said. ‘I'm missing something.'

He pulled into the short drive that led to Eddy's house, switched off the engine and sat, mulling everything over in his mind. What had Eddy really been like? It seemed he had been trying to be all things to all people – at least some of the time. But was Naomi right and Eddy had merely been magnifying that habit everyone had of showing the most acceptable face in any given situation?

He got out of the car, fishing Susan's key from his trouser pocket and then, remembering how cold Eddy's house would be, taking his heavy winter coat off the back seat and shrugging it on. It was unbelievably quiet out here, he thought. Just the sound of the wind and a few extra hardy birds.

Before going inside, Alec wandered round to the back of the house, through a little wooden gate and into the rear garden. He halted in surprise. He knew that rural gardens could be large but he had expected nothing like this. The garden meandered, there was no other word for it. The boundary line on his right was roughly straight, marked out by a hedge of hawthorn and ash and other plants Alec couldn't name. To his left the garden arced around, first to the right then sharply left. It then curved and snaked out into the middle of a neighbouring field before bounding back to join the hedge line. But it was vast. Long and wide, once it left the environs of the cottage and the paved area of old bricks that formed a sort of patio immediately behind.

Alec moved to stand by the back door, just outside the little porch he had noticed when he stood in the kitchen with Susan. A brick path led down to a plashed hedge, its structure clear now the winter had denuded it of leaves. An arch led through to what Alec discovered was an extensive vegetable plot and beyond that a small orchard with perhaps a dozen trees. He wasn't good at estimating acreage, but he reckoned there was a small field's worth of land here and, from the look of the still-stocked vegetable patch, kale and onions and winter cabbage ready to crop and the neat beds up towards the house, it was all well loved.

He could see now the reason for the odd shape. A little stream wound its burbling way down the side of the garden and across the ploughed fields beyond. There was no other boundary here, and quick examination showed that the stream was shallow, easily forded, and the line of a footpath could be discerned a hundred or so yards distant where the road looped to touch the farmland. It would have been a muddy journey from footpath to stream and thence into garden, but it would not have been a difficult one.

He turned to look back at the house. The lean-to porch didn't look sturdy enough for anyone to use that as an access point to the upper floor – and, besides, Kevin and Eddy had sat talking in the kitchen, so they'd have heard anyone climbing it. Conversely, a person coming up the garden path could clearly have seen them both in the kitchen, though with the lights on inside, neither Kevin nor Eddy would have been able to see
them
.

Carefully, Alec walked back up the path, looking for signs that the CSI had been out here and examined the scene. He found none. Evidently their search had been focussed inside the house.

He walked round the other side of the cottage. A rain butt had been set below the downpipe from the roof. He had noted several, set around the cottage. This, like the others, had a wooden lid. All the rain of the past few days had washed it clean and filled the butt to overflowing. Beside the butt, a couple of ageing wine crates had been upended and stacked one on the other. It was a precarious balance, but would have been enough to assist anyone trying to gain the top of the water butt. Alec examined them, saw no sign of shoe prints. He tested them for sturdiness and, with one hand on the downpipe, managed to balance and then step on to the wooden lid of the water butt. Alec looked up. A small window, which he figured must give on to the landing, could just about be reached by someone climbing the downpipe. Plumbing from the bathroom overflow protruded through the wall and Alec reached for it. It broke as he touched it, the pipe coming away clean in his hand. He tucked it into his pocket and looked more closely at the wall. Scuff marks, as though a foot had slipped from the pipe and scraped down the wall, could just be discerned, and he figured that someone lighter and more limber than himself could just about have reached that upper window.

He jumped down from the water butt and took the short length of plastic pipe from his pocket. Of course, he couldn't be certain, but the break looked new and a tiny scrape of mud still clung to what had been the upper side. Feeling in his pocket he found a couple of ziplock bags, thanking his long career which meant he almost always had evidence bags somewhere about his person. The pipe was too big to fit into one and he slid a second over to cover the top, knowing that he was probably wasting his time with this; any forensics would have been compromised by his interference and the fact that he could not establish a proper chain of evidence. Still, it might add to what could be classified as circumstantial; it might pique someone's interest.