And, as if his daughter’s absence and the kitten’s presence was not enough, Barnaby was now faced with the misery of dieting. Always a big man, he had taken up cooking a couple of years previously, largely in self-defence, for Joyce’s food was so spectacularly bad that friends, invited for dinner, had been known to bring it with them.
He had taken to the art like a duck to orange sauce and had discovered, after years of munching on indescribable indefinables chased by antacid tablets, that he had, by nature, the appetite of a king. It was just his luck that the king in question happened to be Henry the Eighth.
Even a man of six foot three cannot healthily carry sixteen stone and he had been warned, at his last check-up, that a minimum of thirty pounds would have to go. And he was trying. He really was. But it was bloody hard. At the moment he was spinning out a slice of toast, having polished off his boiled egg in two scoops.
Joyce, pressing the plunger in the cafetière, was keeping an eye out for the postman. She was hoping for a card or letter from Poland, where
Much Ado
was running for the next fortnight - hoping, she realised, probably in vain, for Cully was a negligent correspondent to put it mildly. Nicholas was the one most likely to keep in touch.
Joyce couldn’t help worrying about them both however much common sense pointed out that an august body such as the Arts Council would hardly be sending a company of English actors into danger. But the whole of Eastern Europe seemed to her so volatile that today’s safe area could well be tomorrow’s war zone. Threatening words and phrases pattered around Joyce’s mind - ‘unstable government’, ‘fundamentalist guerrillas’, ‘racial riots’, ‘trigger-happy border guards’, ‘roof-top snipers’.
These unhappy reflections were shattered by an enraged yell. She turned to see her husband grasping the kitten by the scruff of its neck and lifting it into the air.
‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ She ran across the room. ‘Give him to me. Right now, Tom!’ Kilmowski was passed over. ‘How could you be so unkind.’
‘It’s just walked through my marmalade.’
‘He doesn’t know.’ Joyce kissed a grey velvet triangular nose. ‘Do you?’ The kitten squinted amberly at her. ‘Poor little scrap.’
She placed Kilmowski gently on the carpet, whereupon he immediately sought the edge of the tablecloth, dug in his claws and started to climb again.
‘Look! Look at that.’
‘Leave him alone. D’you want some fresh coffee?’
‘No thanks.’ Barnaby glanced at the clock. It was nearly nine thirty. ‘Better be off.’ As he was putting on his overcoat the phone rang. ‘Would you take that, love? Say I’m on my way.’
‘Of course it might just be for me.’ Joyce sounded quite huffy. ‘I do have a wide circle of friends, some of whom have been known to ring me up from time to time.’
‘’Course you have.’ Barnaby came back wrapped in heavy black and white herringbone tweed and pulling on his gloves. ‘And of course they do.’ He kissed a coolish cheek. ‘Back around six.’
As he turned to leave Barnaby sourly regarded the kitten, now squatting, with great dignity, in the precise centre of his tray. Kilmowski stared straight through him then, crossing his eyes with effort, gave a squeaky little fart.
It was a foul day. Rain during the night followed by an early morning freeze-up had turned the roads to glass. Barnaby drove his blue Orion with great care, taking twice as long over the journey as was usual. An extremely cautious swing through the police station’s main gates had his rear wheels skittering sideways. A scene-of-crime Sherpa van, on the point of exit, wheeled into nippy avoidance. He eased gently into his reserved space and walked slowly into the building.
A WPC at the desk looked up. ‘Morning, sir. They’ve been trying to get you at home. Something’s come up.’
Barnaby lifted his hand in acknowledgement and made for his office. He was crossing the enclosed walkway that linked the CID block to the station proper when he observed his bag carrier striding smartly towards him. Gavin Troy wore a long, tightly belted black leather coat which flapped and slapped against his boots. A dark cap covered his cropped red hair and he had, in readiness, put on the steel-rimmed glasses he wore when driving. He looked like a storm trooper.
Knowing the pleasure such a comparison would afford, Barnaby immediately put it from his mind. As they drew closer he could see that Troy was scowling with bad temper.
‘Morning, sergeant.’
‘Chief. We’ve got a murder.’ Troy gave a regimental swivel on his heel and fell into step beside the boss. ‘On your desk.’
‘Well, there’s a novelty.’
‘Midsomer Worthy. Just the bare details. Apparently the woman who discovered the body, a Mrs Bundy, was so hysterical nobody’s been able to get much sense out of her.’ Troy moved ahead quickly to open the office door. ‘SOCO have just left.’
‘Yes. I barely missed them.’
‘And Doc Bullard’s there.’
‘Already?’
‘He lives in the next village. Charlecote Lucy.’
‘So he does.’ Barnaby sat down behind his desk and picked up the report.
‘Victim’s male,’ said Troy. ‘Found in his bed—’
‘Thank you. I can read.’
Suit yourself. Troy waited, impatient but concealing it, while Barnaby cleared his desk. This involved two memos and several quite lengthy phone calls delegating work in hand.
The chief inspector had not troubled to remove his coat and this, plus the warmth of the building, made him feel quite snug, but once outside the harsh air snatched all the heat from his body. His lungs cringed as the wind whistled down his windpipe and his lips were so dry and cold they stuck together.
Inside the car Troy drew on his black peccary driving gloves (sliced off at the knuckles and buckled at the wrist), turned the heater full on and negotiated his way into Causton High Street. He was an extremely skilled driver but inclined to be overproud of that skill and to perform on occasion in a very flamboyant manner. At work he never took unnecessary risks, but Barnaby sometimes wondered about his sergeant’s off-duty motoring. However at the moment he was easing the car along the A4007 in a manner that was, for him, positively decorous. The bad-tempered scowl, so marked half an hour ago, had died down into mere sullenness.
‘What’s the matter with you this morning?’
‘I’m all right, sir.’
The matter was Troy’s cousin Colin. His mother’s sister’s boy. Colin had been a thorn in Troy’s flesh for years. Sailing through exams that Troy had had to sweat blood even to scrape a pass in. Silver-tongued, sarcastic, Colin was always laughing at things his cousin held most dear. He seemed to regard Troy’s whole lifestyle as some sort of comedic entertainment, referring to the sergeant more than once as a clockwork Rambo. Last night he had turned up at his Aunty Betty’s when Troy was also present and for the same reason - to deliver a birthday gift. Winking at his cousin, Colin had taken off his filthy battered sheepskin jacket to flash the message on his T-shirt: ‘
When The Going Gets Tough The Smart Bugger Off
’. He had just left university and, to Troy’s deep satisfaction, had so far been unable to find a job.
‘They make me laugh,’ said Troy, with bitter lack of humour. Barnaby sensibly received this out-of-the-blue remark in silence.
‘People who don’t reckon the police,’ continued his sergeant, signalling and easing on to a slip road. ‘Catch them being mugged or burgled or losing their bloody car. They start yelling for us then fast enough.’ His grip on the steering wheel tightened till the seams on his gloves looked fit to burst.
Barnaby only half listened. The inclination to tease out the reason for Troy’s present petulance had proved fleeting. It could be anything, for Gavin was a walking mass of insecurities. He also had an overwhelming need to be admired which, given the public’s current perception of the Force, was in no danger at all of being satisfied.
The chief inspector was also distracted by a keen gnawing in his stomach, which seemed similarly proportioned now to the inside of Jonah’s whale - his breakfast slice of toast and solitary boiled egg bounced and fell from wall to hungry wall like a solitary sock in a tumble dryer.
‘Over there, chief.’
Troy was crunching around a village green on a surface newly scattered with rough sand. Barnaby could see a Panda, the SOCO van and George Bullard’s blue Viva parked in the driveway of an attractive double-fronted cottage with prettily fretworked shutters. Troy pulled up a few feet away.
It was very quiet. There was some moody quacking from the ducks slithering about on their frozen pond and a fair amount of bird song, though what the hell they could find to sing about on a day like this Troy could not even begin to comprehend. He took in the immaculate oval of expensive, beautifully maintained houses. In their gardens trees and shrubs glittered with frost in the hard, bright winter light. Only the prominent display of burglar alarms detracted from a Christmas-calendar image of perfection. As they approached Plover’s Rest the footsteps of the two men rang out on the rock-hard road with the clarity of horses’ hooves.
At the gate a constable was telling a small gathering of people, who were staring at the house in a hopeful and fascinated way, that there was nothing to see and would they please move along. Stretching his arms wide he moved towards them and, broom-like, swept them away a few feet. He had done this more than once and more than once they had drifted back. Soon the barriers would go up and the containment problem would be solved. There was something officially dissuasive about the holey orange plastic. Once it was pegged in, observers, no matter how half-hearted their previous willingness to toe an invisible line, rarely pushed or climbed beyond it.
A policeman at the cottage door which was standing open, said, ‘Upstairs on the left, sir.’
Unnecessary information. Barnaby could smell the carnage even in the hall. As he climbed the stairs the scent became stronger and his stomach, already so cruelly maltreated, revolted further in anticipation.
The small bedroom was full of people. Scenes-of-crime; three men and one woman, their hands and feet encased in polythene. A stills photographer. And the body of a man clad in a towelling robe lying between the bed and the wardrobe. His feet were towards the door, his head, what there was left of it, closer to the overhanging duvet.
‘Have we got what did it?’ Barnaby stood on the threshold, neither touching the door nor stepping inside. A heavy candlestick smeared with blood and hair and already bagged and ticketed was held up. ‘Where’s the doc?’
‘In the kitchen, chief inspector,’ said the photographer - a young man with curly hair and a bright smile that his calling seemed to have done nothing to diminish. ‘Nice to see the sun for a change.’
Barnaby no sooner showed his face than George Bullard, sitting with a woman at the table, got up swiftly. He eased Barnaby and Troy back into the hall.
‘Can’t talk in there. She’s in a terrible state.’ They stood bunched into an awkward knot in the narrow passage, the knob of the downstairs cloakroom digging into Troy’s back. ‘Before you ask, between eleven last night and one this morning. Might be a bit later, but that’s as close as I can make it right now. Whoever did it was in a hell of a temper. There’s a huge blow in the centre of the forehead which may well have finished him but they just went on bashing—’
‘Yes, George, I saw. Face to face then?’
‘Absolutely. Nothing sneaky about this one.’ He was carrying a mug which he now drained and handed to Sergeant Troy. Then he picked up his coat, which was draped over the banisters. ‘No fighting either’s my guess.’
The tiny hall became even more jammed as the technical services video team arrived and George Bullard tried to squeeze out. Barnaby and Troy backed into the kitchen, where the unfortunate discoverer of the body was being comforted by a policewoman. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and Troy’s nostrils twitched in appreciation.
On first hearing the name Bundy, Barnaby’s imagination had lazily conjured up a middle-aged dumpling of a woman. A Happy Families playing card. Starched apron, up to her stout dimpled elbows in flour. Voluble, a bit of a busybody but warm-hearted withal. The sort who would ‘do anything’ for you.
The person facing him was thin, barely thirty and wore a shiny nylon overall - three-quarters-length, in pink and white check, with tails like a man’s shirt - plus leggings and a black polo-necked jumper. Her hands gripped the upper parts of her arms, which were tightly folded against her flattish chest, and her fingernails, quite long, dug fiercely into the flesh. Barnaby suspected that, once released, her whole body would start to vibrate. Her face was in constant motion, eyes blinking, lips twitching, and her head shook rapidly from side to side as if to remove some terrible imprint from her mind. Barnaby sat down at the table. Troy withdrew, leaning his rough notebook on a worktop near the sink and uncapping his Biro.
‘Mrs Bundy . . . ?’ She stared down into her cup, at the congealing puddle of melting sugar. ‘This must have been a terrible shock for you.’
After a very long pause her carefully painted lips formed the soundless word, ‘yes’. She coughed, repeated the affirmative then said, in a thready whisper, ‘I’ve never seen a dead person before.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Barnaby. He gave it five and then a bit longer. ‘Do you feel up to helping me by answering one or two questions?’
‘I don’t know.’ She released her arms and reached with a trembling hand for a gold packet of Benson’s Super Kings lying next to a half-full ashtray. She lit up, producing a gas lighter from her pocket, and drew deep, exhaling with her eyes closed. ‘I’m not going back upstairs.’ Released, her voice ran shrilly up the scale. ‘Not in that room.’
Behind her back Troy rolled his eyeballs, mocking such dramatic overkill. He caught the attention of the policewoman and gave a complicitous wink. She stared coldly back.