The Ellie Hardwick Mysteries (8 page)

I dialled a number I'd scribbled down in the library on the inside of my wrist.

‘Inspector Jennings?' I said. ‘Sorry to ring you at home. Ellie Hardwick here. You know—we met at the church this morning . . . I'm afraid I have to tell you something you really won't want to hear . . .'

A THREATENED SPECIES

An Ellie Hardwick, Architect, Mystery.

I knew I shouldn't be doing this.

It was against all the firm's safety rules to enter a deserted church, at dusk, alone.

I was due to inspect the place the next day anyway, in the morning sunshine and the comforting presence of Ben Crabtree, the county of Suffolk's best ancient buildings contractor. So why couldn't I wait? Why was I creeping, ankle-deep in rotting wilton, along the aisle, jumping at every owl hoot and mouse rustle, torch in one hand, mobile phone in the other and the firm's hard hat on my head?

I'm a romantic, I suppose, and I love old buildings in all their different moods. I'd come to catch what might well be the grace notes of the splendour of All Souls, adrift in the fields outside the village of Crowden. It would be my five-year survey tomorrow that would sign the death warrant for this once-lovely building. It had been disused for years and the grants of money, never generous enough, had finally run out. The fabric was considered dangerous and it was inevitable that the bulldozers would roll. The only people vocal in its support were the Bat Group.

‘But the pipistrelles!' they shrieked. ‘They're
a
protected species! Their habitat must not be demolished!'

‘I've nothing against bats but I'd like to slap a closing order on their support groups!' I'd said to my boss when he handed me the church file with a warning. ‘The Barmy Bat Army! That chairman of theirs! Lady What's 'Er Name . . .'

‘Frampton,' supplied Charles. ‘Laetitia Frampton.'

‘Yes. Well, the lady gave me a very bad time over Mendlesett Church last year. I don't fancy another encounter just yet.'

‘Oh, I don't know,' said Charles vaguely. ‘I suppose the bats are worth saving. Never seen it myself but they do say the twilight flight of bats out of the church tower is one of the sights of Suffolk. They were still firmly in place when the last quinquennial inspection was done. Byam did it. Now
he
seemed to get on all right with the lovely Laetitia.' Charles rolled his eyes in a meaningful way. ‘They spent quite some time observing the habits of our leather-winged friends in remote church towers all over the county, I seem to remember.'

‘Byam? Byam who? Or should I say who Byam?'

‘Ah . . . He left a couple of years before you arrived. So that'll be five years, give or take . . . Byam Somersham. Damn good architect . . . Good looking chap as well. Women round here seem to go for that dark, romantic look.'
He
grinned, remembering. ‘I never could persuade him to get rid of his piratical earing.' Charles tugged absent-mindedly at his left ear. ‘Can't say the infringement of the House Style put off the lady clients though—there was always a waiting list for Byam. Pity he . . . but . . . Anyway, he left the country soon after this bit of work. Went to Spain . . . or was it Portugal?'

I'd been passing on the main road on the way home from a job in Norfolk and had suddenly caught sight of the tower of All Souls silhouetted against a darkening blood-red sky, streaked with saffron. One of those vivid late-summer sunsets we get just after harvesting. I couldn't resist. ‘I'll just poke my head inside,' I told myself, turning into the driveway to the church. ‘Might be in time to witness the twilight flight of the pipistrelles.' I watched the shadows lengthen under the stand of ancient oaks which gathered protectively, still wearing their dark leaf canopy, around the secluded stones but no bats flew out to greet me.

And here I was, giving in to temptation and enjoying the guilty frisson of going against all common sense and Charles' firm rules. I paused to sit on the back row of pews to say a silent prayer for the building as I always did and then went on down the aisle, sorrowful for the poor condition of the fabric, the boarded-up windows, the cracked masonry, the water stains running down the plastered walls.

And
then I heard it. A trickle of sound at first, growing louder and more insistent: the chirping, twittering, agitated noise that bats make when they're about to take off. I decided to find out where they were roosting. If I was quick enough, I might actually see them emerge from their holes in the rafters or window dressings. I hurried silently back down the nave to the bell tower. The door was swinging open. Checking the state of the staircase with my torch, I was relieved to see that this bit of the fabric at least had been replaced since the middle ages. It was of stout steel. Not pretty, but a tug and a kick convinced me it was firm. I began to climb. I planned to go as far as the first floor but no further than that. Too risky. Up on the platform, the noise of the bats was louder. Would the light of my torch disturb them? I shone it anyway over the floor. Stout oak floorboards, complete, and no holes down which I might stick a foot. There were hundreds of bats tuning up in the woodwork all around me and, I guessed in the very top floor above my head, thousands more. Not too late, then.

I shone the torch upwards from my feet. No staircase to the top floor. A very old oak ladder reached upwards to the trapdoor giving access to the bell tower. I ran the beam along it to check its condition. There was no chance I would climb that tonight but if it was obviously
rickety
I would ask Ben to bring a ladder with him tomorrow and impress him with my forethought.

Looking up, I became aware of a darker shadow amongst the shadows of the raftered roof. As I watched, it moved gently with a sudden gust of wind through a broken pane.

I leaned against the ladder to steady myself, unable to look away.

Above my head a huge black shape was suspended, life-sized, vampire-like. A stiff cape flapped in another gust. With a mew of fear audible even over the noise of the bats, I held my torch in both hands, lighting up the horror dangling above my head. Life-sized, yes, because this thing had once been human and alive. Legs and feet hung from the cloak, arms reached upwards, truncated, caught under the heavy trap-door. I forced myself to light the face. This was no pallid, bloodstained Dracula mask of horror films but—no less terrifying to me—I saw leathery features which might have lain, undiscovered for millennia, in an Egyptian sarcophagus or been hauled, as brown as the enveloping earth, from the depths of a peat bog.

I gulped and, as people do when frightened out of their wits, I said something very silly, just to hear the human sound of my own voice. ‘Byam Somersham? I see you still have your earring . . . Byam, can this possibly be you?'

At that moment, with a rush and a high-
pitched
whirring, the whole population of bats poured from holes in every part of the tower. They surged into the air, zipping and diving past me and I flapped at them in panic, groping my way back to the head of the stairs. I was grateful to hear the clang of my boots on the steel treads as I scrambled down. I ran out to my Golf and, still shaking, dialled up a number on my mobile phone.

‘Inspector Jennings? I wonder if you remember me? It's Ellie Hardwick here. I'm at All Souls' Church near Crowden and something awful's happened!'

Richard Jennings of the Eastern Counties CID groaned. ‘I'm just going off duty and I don't want to hear this. What
is
it with you and churches? Oh, go on, then . . .'

He listened silently as I burbled on, ending dramatically with, ‘Inspector . . . it's every architect's nightmare—getting themselves caught up in one of those trap doors! In a deserted church . . . no one to hear you scream . . . your phone's in your pocket and you can't get to it . . .' And, with an increasing hysteria I didn't like to hear: ‘And you know no one's going to come near the building for another five years! It's Byam Somersham, isn't it?'

‘Calm down and I'll get straight out to you,' said Jennings. ‘Don't move from your car! Have you got a flask of coffee in there? Good. Keep some for me. Ten minutes.'

Cocooned in the lights of my car with an
up-beat
jazz album playing and the windows fogging over with coffee fumes, I managed to get my teeth to unclench and my hands to stop trembling by the time the police car drew up. The inspector was by himself. He slid into the passenger seat, a large, masculine presence, took my cup from me and drained my coffee. He listened again to my story, nodding quietly.

Finally, ‘I've been on the phone with headquarters on the way here,' he said. ‘Spoke to someone in Missing Persons. It's looking most unlikely that this is your bloke. Somersham was indeed reported to them nearly five years ago. By his wife. But then she had to withdraw the notice because he turned up in Spain.' He paused for a moment, thoughtful. ‘His car was found abandoned at Stansted airport. And he sent her a postcard on her birthday from Barcelona. He's sent one every year since he went off. CID checked. Date stamped in Spain. Certified husband's handwriting. A constable was actually on hand at the letter box to intercept one on delivery. At the lady's request. So that was that. No case. We'll have to look further. Earring, you say? Useful but plenty of fellers have them. I blame Johnny Depp. Floating cloak on the body? Ecclesiastical gear? What's the odds that a trendy vicar's gone missing lately, wearing one of those what do you call-ems?'

‘Surplice? No, it's much shorter than that. Like . . . an old-fashioned policeman's
cape
. . .'

‘Eh? Good Lord!' said Jennings.

* * *

The inspector's torch was more powerful than mine but I stayed as close to him as I could without inviting comment.

‘You don't have to do this, you know,' he said when we reached the ladder. ‘Leave it to me.'

‘I'm coming with you,' I said and began to climb after him. ‘Don't worry. I won't touch anything I haven't already touched.'

We stood together gazing in silence at the corpse. The brighter light of the police torch revealed further horrors. Now I saw that the dead face was even more appalling than I'd guessed from my first startled look. It didn't have the dreamy, at-rest quality of a bog-burial or a Pharaoh: the eyes had been picked out long ago by the carrion crows that haunted the fields around and accusing black holes were trained down on us; the shoulders were stained with trailing white patches of pigeon droppings. It had the macabre force of a medieval execution, the look of a pirate's body left to rot away on the Thames Embankment.

And that was odd, I thought.

And not the only odd detail. ‘Look at his shoes,' I whispered. ‘Under all that dust those are smart shoes, practically unworn. He didn't
walk
three miles in those. He drove here. So, if this is Byam, who took his car to the airport and why didn't they come forward when he disappeared?' I shuddered at the implication.

Jennings put an arm protectively around my shoulders and I didn't shrug it away. I'd noticed that, in spite of its strength, the arm was quivering. I think he was glad of my company.

Half an hour later several urgent phone calls had produced a squad of professionals and I had lost the inspector to the well-oiled police machine as it took over, reducing the gothic horror of the setting to an arc-lamp-illuminated, plastic-taped, sanitised crime scene.

He paused by my car to say, ‘You can go home now, Ellie, and I'll take your statement in the morning. Probably no more than a grisly accident we think but I'll call by your office at—say—nine? You'll have to put off your survey for a while, of course. Oh, your first guess was right, by the way. His hard hat's abandoned in the upper tower . . . wallet in his pocket had his driving licence and cards in it . . . It
was
Byam Somersham.'

* * *

By the time Ben Crabtree arrived to pick me up at the office I'd spent an hour studying
the
Crowden file. Richard Jennings had given me his automatic ‘just leave it to the experts' speech but I was hardly listening. And in this field I counted myself an expert anyway. Ben hurried in, stunned and excited in equal measures by the brief outline I'd given him on the phone. After a few minutes of, ‘Corst, blast! Who'd ever a thought it? So the old devil got his comeuppance! That trap's lined with ten pound lead, did you know that, Ellie? Accident waiting to happen! Poor old sod, though . . . awful way to go . . .' we settled down, file open on the desk between us, coffee mugs at elbow, to a gossipy discussion of the dead architect and his work. Strangely, Ben had most to say about the man himself.

His broad, honest Suffolk face clouded and he looked at me shiftily. ‘Don't want to speak ill of the dead but . . . he were a right lot of no good, yon chap, Ellie. Fair architect—no denying
that
—but no good to the firm or any firm for that matter. We all said it when he went off—“Good riddance!” '

‘That's a bit harsh, Ben? Why do you say that? Oh, come on, you can't leave it there!'

‘Not to be trusted with the . . . er . . . female clients, shall I say?' he finally confided.

‘Really! Attractive man was he?'

‘Oh, yers, I'll say. Even
I
could see it!'

This was quite an admission from the aggressively masculine Ben. And as far as he was prepared to go. Suffolk people are nothing
if
not discreet and unjudgmental and I was going to hear no more gossip from Ben.

Not so with Charles though. Hurrying through the office at that moment, he hesitated, picking up his bag. ‘Attractive, you say? Byam? Yes, but it was his manner more than anything. He'd look at a woman—very long eyelashes he had, I remember—as if she was the only woman in the world and, do you know, at that moment he very likely thought so . . . And he could make 'em laugh. He'd have made
you
laugh, Ellie. You'd be surprised how many female clients suddenly decided to splash out on an extension so long as
he
was the architect in charge! I must say—he certainly brought the work in!'