The Claresby Collection: Twelve Mysteries (27 page)

“But you don’t know that it was Gordon’s money in the first place, “said Laura sensibly. “He inherited the house from Janice and we don’t know anything about her. She must have been pretty well off to buy The Red House in the first place. Where did her money come from?”

“I guess the house is worth over half a million now – so, yes, she must have had some money; but the picture I have of her shows a barmaid.”

“Perhaps she robbed a bank?” suggested Laura helpfully.

“Maybe she did,” acknowledged Rupert. “I’m going to see the pub where she worked tomorrow. A lot of time has passed, but I might find out something about her there.”

As it turned out, Rupert’s luck was in when he made his way to the Rotherhithe pub pictured in the photograph of Janice. It was a free house which had been in the Bullock family for three generations and still had a fine selection of real ales on tap. The family lived on the premises and there were a couple of rooms available for guests. It was a smart, square fronted brick building, very well maintained and comfortable within. But the first thing that struck Rupert as he entered was that the landlady, who was pulling a pint and chatting to the customer at the bar, bore a striking resemblance to Janice Lacey. Rupert waited his turn before ordering a pint himself and asking if sandwiches were available, it being still before midday.

“Yes, no problem,” smiled the woman, who was a shapely blonde in her late thirties or early forties. “Beef and mustard, ham, cheese?”

“The beef would be nice,” said Rupert with a smile. “By the way, if you have a moment, could you tell me if you recognise the lady in this picture?”

The woman put Rupert’s pint down in front of him and glanced over at the picture,

“Well, it’s this pub, isn’t it?” she said with mild interest. “She looks kind of familiar. When was it taken?”

“I don’t know for sure,” admitted Rupert. “Maybe forty years ago.”

“Oh, my dad would be the one to ask, then. He’s over in the corner keeping an eye on me – aren’t you dad?” She gave a wink in the direction of an elderly man who sat on his own with a half finished pint in front of him. The man glowered back at her. He was a big, bullish man who didn’t do anything to encourage Rupert to come and join him. Rupert, however, smiled and sat on the opposite side of the little round table,

“I’ll sit here and wait for my sandwich,” he said in a friendly way. “Nice pub this.”

“Been in the family three generations,” said the man. “Always managed to keep our independence: that’s why people come here – best beer for miles.”

“This is a nice drop,” agreed Rupert, taking a good swig of his own drink. “I take it that you ran the pub before your daughter?”

“I still do my share,” said the man, “but Trudy and her husband have taken over now. I’m John Bullock and my father, James, was landlord before me.”

“So you’ll probably recognise the lady in this picture?” Rupert passed the photograph across the table. The man only looked at it for a moment, but it was a long enough glance for Rupert to detect signs of recognition in it. No comment was returned, so he prompted, “One of your barmaids, was she?”

“Where did you get this?” was the response.

“It was in a house which I recently inherited – she was one of the previous owners.”

“Dead, is she?”

“As far as I know she died about two decades ago.”

“She’d have only have been in her forties, then – not much older than Trudy here. They look alike.”

“Yes, I thought there was a resemblance,” said Rupert.

“The woman’s my sister: Janice.”

“That would be Janice Bullock?”

“That’s right.”

“And she moved away?” pursued Rupert.

“Disappeared more like. Didn’t know what happened to her. My dad was furious. Don’t know where she would have gone to. She didn’t have any money and left with nothing more than what she stood up in. We tried to find her, but we never heard another word. What did she get up to, then?”

“I don’t know much myself. She came to live in Claresby village, where I live now. She was well liked locally; that’s all I know.”

“Why are you bringing that picture in here then?”

“I was trying to make a connection with a man called Gordon Hodge: he’s the man who left me the house.”

“Never heard of him,” replied John Bullock shortly.

“He was rather a slight man, fair hair, pale face. I think he grew up just around the corner from here. I wondered if you remember him coming into the pub to chat to Janice?”

“A couple of blokes used to hang around after Janice, but she never paid them much attention – my dad wouldn’t have liked it.”

Rupert’s plate of sandwiches arrived in the hands of Janice’s niece.

“Here – that’s your Aunty Janice!” said the thickset old man, suddenly seeming to take an interest.

“Looks like me, doesn’t she?” said Janice. “Except that I lighten my hair. It was a bit of a family mystery, where she got to, wasn’t it, dad?”

“This man says she died years ago.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Trudy, automatically clearing away her father’s now empty glass. “Where did she get to?”

“She lived in Claresby village until her death,” repeated Rupert.

“Don’t think I’ve heard of that place,” said Trudy. “I hope she was happy. What my dad isn’t saying was that my granddad could be a bit of a bully.”

“Thought he owned my sister,” admitted John Bullock. “I didn’t always get on with him myself; but he was a good landlord.”

“And you don’t have any pictures of her or any idea if she had any gentleman friend?”

“My dad threw all her stuff out after six months,” said John. “That was it, really. We never much spoke about her again, although I did think about her quite a bit. She was younger than me and I suppose I felt I should have done more to look after her. Still, that’s water under the bridge. What about another pint for your dad?” he asked Trudy.

After that Rupert made small talk about football to his reluctant companion until he had finished eating his sandwiches. Then, thanking both father and daughter, he left the pub and made his way around the corner to where the terraced house he thought to have been Gordon’s home was. There was really nothing much to be gleaned from looking at it. Two neighbours chatting in the street were young and unlikely to know anything about the inhabitants of forty or fifty years before. He decided that he had achieved as much as he could and set off home again, still having failed to unravel the story which Gordon had wanted him to make public.

Rupert had left the central heating on a low setting at The Red House and returned there more than once to browse the items in the rooms and to make more careful searches in drawers and even between the pages of the few romantic novels which must have belonged to Janice; but without uncovering anything that explain the relationship between Gordon and Janice or where the money in the attic had come from. The only piece of information which moved him on in his quest was that imparted by the Land Registry entry for the house. It told him that it was Gordon, not Janice, who was named as the owner on the records. He was also now aware that Janice had changed her name from Bullock to Lacey – probably to stop her father from tracing her. For some reason, Rupert always felt uncomfortable in the house as if a hostile not a friendly spirit inhabited it. Therefore he was pleased when Laura accompanied him there one day for her first visit, having dropped Florence off to play with a friend.

“I can see why you don’t love the house,” said Laura after taking a tour of the rooms. “There is something empty and unsatisfactory about the place, despite the pretty furnishings. It’s almost as if nobody ever lived here – although we know first Janice, then Gordon did. And you say it was Gordon’s house all along?”

“Oh, yes. He must have bought if for her and everyone just assumed that it was hers because she moved in and he remained living in his own little cottage until she died.”

“But why not live with her? Do we assume that she was his mistress?”

“Probably. I imagine that Gordon saw her at his local pub – the sort of beauty he never really stood a chance with. But she was trapped and unhappy and he had the money to offer her an escape. He bought the house and maintained her in reasonable style here until her untimely death.”

“Yes, but how? You gained the impression he came from a very modest background and he was not successful in his career – certainly not successful enough to buy and run a place like this as well as having his own home.”

“Well, that’s the mystery, isn’t it? I suppose we can assume that he created the impression that the place was hers in case anyone inquired how he came by the money. No one knew anything about her, so they just accepted her as another independent lady come to live in Claresby.”

“But if he bought the property, someone must have known: the estate agent, the solicitor? And his name was on the deeds clear as day.”

“True, but nobody cared and nobody looked, it was all just taken at face value, right up to the point where everyone thought she had bequeathed him the place, although there was probably no will at all as everything she had was his anyway.”

“So the only remaining question is how, in 1979 when the house was bought by Gordon, did he have the eighty or ninety thousand pounds it would have cost him then?”

“Exactly. And why did he want me to use my “investigatory skills” to find the truth, after he had so successfully covered it up?”

“Well, I’ll take a look about the place, but I don’t know what I’m looking for,” said Laura, pushing her long auburn hair behind her ears as if to prepare herself for the search.

“We’ll know when we find it, I guess,” replied Rupert.

Again the search only went to prove the paucity of evidence available. Other than the handful of popular novels, it seemed that the only other form of entertainment available would have been provided by the television. There was also a box, rather like a toolbox, full of painting articles which backed up Annie Hart’s reference to Gordon having been fond of art. Rupert looked through the collection for a second time. There were a number of sable brushes suitable for watercolour, a little case containing half pans of watercolours and a few tubes in addition. There were also some tubes of acrylic paints and some bristle brushes and an artist’s knife and another tool for scratching out details. Then there were some bottles of ink and a collection of pens with fine nibs such as Gordon might have used to draw the little cameo which Rupert had seen at Annie’s house. There were a couple of cameos of similar design which appeared to depict Janice displayed on the wall above a bookshelf, although most of the pictures in the house seemed to be shop-bought prints rather than originals. Rupert had also come across a couple of sketch books containing meticulous drawings of commonplace objects carefully initialled by Gordon and one book of watercolour sketches.

Laura returned from her own tour of the house as Rupert packed the art materials back into their box.

“I’ve discovered where Janice’s interest lay, anyway,” she said. “She obviously loved shoes and clothes and has some quite lovely things. Lots of makeup still in the dressing-table too – it’s a wonder Gordon kept all that stuff. What did you find?”

“Nothing: just looked through Gordon’s paint box again.”

“There were a couple of lovely engravings in the bedroom,” said Laura. “Nudes; very elegantly done.”

“Show me!” demanded Rupert, suddenly interested. He followed Laura upstairs and into the main bedroom. The largest pictures in the room were matching prints of pink floral displays. To one side of the bed, however, were two beautiful black and white engravings which Rupert had previously overlooked. Examination proved Laura to be correct: they were exquisite pieces of work.

“Do you think Gordon did those?” asked Laura. “They are lovely – modelled by Janice, perhaps?”

“They have his initials on them so, yes, Gordon’s work. And haven’t I just been an idiot and missed the obvious!” exclaimed Rupert

“What’s obvious?” asked Laura.

“Gordon’s talent for meticulous detail and painstaking work. These are engravings – you do know how they are made, don’t you?”

“Of course. The engraver uses a sharp tool to work into a copper plate and then that is used to print the picture – at least, that’s how I’ve seen it done.”

“And that’s not so dissimilar to how banknotes are made. Which reminds me...” Rupert galloped down the stairs, ungainly limbs flailing in all directions. Laura, following at a more moderate pace, caught up with him as he tipped the contents of the art box unceremoniously on the floor and started to scrabble though the resulting heap. “Look!” he exclaimed triumphantly.

Laura looked. He was holding a sharp tool with a wooden knob for a handle.

“This is a burin or a graver – a tool for engraving. Of course he must have had more, but he obviously disposed of them along with his finished plates. He must have been extraordinarily good, because no one ever spotted his forgeries. And he must have been putting something like fifty pounds worth a day into the system over a ten year period to buy the house for Janice.”

“He was a cashier – so you think he was switching the notes with genuine ones?”

“Maybe, but he didn’t really need to. He could simply have had an account with another bank which didn’t know him and deposited the money on a weekly basis.”

“Wouldn’t they have thought it odd that all the notes were obviously crisp and new?”

“Perhaps. You may be right; he’d switch a few at his own branch to get a variety of ages and serial numbers.”

“He was still taking quite a chance. Suppose someone had spotted that they were forgeries or seen him making the swap?”

“Some men like the thrill of a risk. Presumably he got a kick out of the fact that quiet, dull, overlooked Gordon was getting one up over all of them!”

“Is that why you think he did it? Or did he just want a way to provide a love nest for the girl of his dreams?”

“We’ll never know,” admitted Rupert. “He certainly doesn’t seem to have wanted the money for himself, because he left a heap of it unspent. He also lived quite modestly, even after he moved here. And then there is the fact that he wanted me to find out what he had been doing and tell the world.”