The Book of the Dead Read online

  ‘What do you think Charlotte will do if you’re right?’ she asked.

  ‘What would you do?’

  Tess was silent for a moment. ‘First I’d weep. Then I’d wait until they released Jennifer Carrington. I wouldn’t care how many years it was.’

  Maltravers twisted his head round and looked down at her.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then I think I’d kill her.’

  ‘That would be a long time to carry hate.’

  ‘I’d have a lot of hatred to carry.’

  *

  Late that afternoon, Charlotte Quinn stood in the drizzle outside a newsagents in Stricklandgate, reading the Lancashire Evening Post report of Lydden’s court appearance by the light from the shop window. People milled about her, but she was oblivious of their existence. A placard reading ‘Kendal Man on Murder Charge’ stood by the doorway. She felt the numbed unreality that accompanies the experience of seeing something dreadful in a newspaper about someone you know. The Post had pushed the reporting restrictions of the Criminal Justice Act as far as it dared.

  ‘Company director Douglas Keith Lydden, 44, appeared before Kendal magistrates today charged with the murder of Lancaster solicitor Charles Carrington.

  Wearing a blue suit and open-necked shirt, the accused appeared in the dock between two police officers. No plea was entered, but when asked by chairman of the bench, Colonel Brian Harrison, if he had anything to say, Lydden replied in a clear voice: “I did not do it.”

  Lydden, of 27 Ruskin Close, Kendal, who owns an interior design shop in Stricklandgate, was further charged with the theft of ten books and a number of papers from Mr Carrington’ s home at Carwelton Hall, Attwater and with possession of a shotgun without a current firearms certificate.

  An application for bail was refused and the accused was remanded in custody for seven days after Mr Michael Imeson, prosecuting, told the court that police enquiries were continuing. Committal proceedings to the Crown Court are expected to begin next week.

  Mr Carrington, 61, was found dead at his home from gunshot wounds last Thursday. He had been in practice as a solicitor in Lancaster for more than 30 years. His wife Jennifer was questioned by police after his death, but later released.’

  Accompanying the report was a picture of Charles Carrington taken from a larger group photograph at a Lancashire Law Society dinner the previous year. Charlotte Quinn remembered the original, with Charles happily standing next to a smiling Jennifer in the middle of a group in evening dress. Now some sub-editor had brutally cut him out of the picture, separating him from the rest as the dead were removed from the living. As she started to read the report again, as though to convince herself that it was true, a couple walked out of the shop behind her.

  ‘Fancy that nice Mr Lydden being accused of murder!’ the woman said. ‘We bought those curtains from him only a few weeks ago. Let’s go and look at his shop. It’s just down this way.’

  Charlotte Quinn quivered with fury as she watched them stop under the street lamp outside the closed door of Lakeland Interiors, peering through the darkened window. She wanted to run after them and physically shake them, screaming that ‘nice Mr Lydden’ was not fit to clean up vomit and had callously betrayed the man who had saved his business by jumping into bed with his tart of a wife. Let them think about that as they told their friends about who sold them their wretched and probably tasteless curtains. As the couple pointed in fascination at something in the window, glamorising pedestrian lives with someone else’s tragedy, she almost started to go after them.

  ‘Excuse me. Are you all right?’

  Another man had come out of the newsagents and seen her, shuddering with emotion and face twisted with rage. She glared at him then ran back across the road to Quintessence. Her assistant looked up in alarm as she burst in, barging a customer aside as she rushed through and dashed upstairs to her flat. She slammed the door behind her and leaned against it, the newspaper crushed in her hand. She threw it down like something unclean as she clapped her hand to her retching mouth then ran into the bathroom and was sick.

  Pale-faced, she returned to the living-room and poured a drink. As she sat recovering, swarming emotions began to overwhelm her. Not against Duggie Lydden; the courts would deal with him. It was the inescapable image of Jennifer Carrington that tortured her and boiled her anger. The woman who had wormed her way into the affections of a man she had then coldly cheated would now become the owner of Carwelton Hall. Charlotte Quinn’s gnawing resentment began to consume her with unforgiving loathing.

  She remained in the flat until her assistant came up and said she had closed for the night. Dismissing questions about what was the matter, Charlotte sent the girl home then went down into the shop. On one shelf was a collection of hunting knives. It was a line she had not wanted to stock, but there had been repeated requests from tourists and at least she had bought the best. The one she selected was Swiss, its end fashioned like the curve of a quarter moon to a needle-sharp point. She stared for a long time at the six inches of tempered steel, shining slightly with a smear of oil, scraping her thumb against the honed fineness of the blade’s edge. The feeling that had been born when she saw Charles’s body was now fully formed and possessed her. She thrust the knife back into its stitched leather sheath and took it upstairs.

  10

  Telephone wedged between chin and shoulder, Maltravers scribbled swift notes as he listened to Bradshaw on Tuesday morning.

  ‘Geoffrey Martin Howard, aged thirty-five, address 307b Palatine Road, Didsbury, Manchester,’ he said. ‘Lived there for the past six years, immediate previous address his parents’ home in Stockport, Cheshire. Civil engineering student at the University of Manchester, Institute of Science and Technology but dropped out half-way through the course. Went to Africa for a year—there’s a smell of smuggling about that period—then came back. A couple of part-time jobs as a petrol station attendant and barman, but registered unemployed since 1983.’

  ‘Unemployed?’ Maltravers queried. ‘He looked affluent enough when I met him.’

  ‘He would,’ Bradshaw said caustically. ‘Naughty boy, your Mr Howard, with a nice little earner. He doesn’t need his dole money.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Drug pushing. But my mate in Criminal Records says he’s too clever to be caught. He doesn’t deal with the street junkies any more—too fly for that. He supplies the respectable middle classes who think it’s all frightfully daring and a bit of fun. Stupid buggers.’

  ‘So he’s got the sort of customers who can look after him if necessary,’ Maltravers remarked.

  ‘You’ve got it,’ said Bradshaw. ‘They almost had him once but some high-powered city councillor—who’s also a JP incidentally—put a stop to it with a few words in the right ears. Howard’s been keeping him and his wife high for years. Anyway, that’s the guts of it. I didn’t bother with medical records or anything like that, but if you want…’

  ‘No,’ Maltravers interrupted. ‘You’ve given me more than enough already. Send your bill to me in London. Thanks a lot.’

  He gave Bradshaw his home address then rang off and stood by the phone looking back through his notes. Tess tried to read them over his shoulder but his shorthand frustrated her.

  ‘Well?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s a clever liar. He used things that he’s actually done to provide a cover story. And Bradshaw’s just told me something else I didn’t expect, which…’ Maltravers idly corrected an outline, then turned to Lucinda. ‘When did Charles’s daughter die?’

  ‘Gillian? Five or six years ago.’

  ‘That’s too vague. I need the year and the month and the date as well if possible. Who’d know?’

  Lucinda looked unsure. ‘People who’d been friends of Charles’s longer than us, but I don’t know many of them. Except Charlotte of course. She’d certainly remember.’

  ‘I’d rather not ask her. What about Alan Morris, your vicar? He’d known Charles for ye
ars hadn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, and…’ Lucinda stopped and gave a gesture of realisation. ‘You don’t need to ask anybody. You can read it for yourself on the gravestone. Gillian’s buried in Attwater churchyard.’

  ‘Buried? I thought all old village churchyards were full these days.’

  ‘There’s a Carrington family plot going back to who knows when,’ Lucinda explained. ‘There’s room for at least two more bodies in it.’

  ‘Whereabouts in the churchyard is it?’ Maltravers asked.

  ‘By the wall on the north side,’ Lucinda told him. ‘Right next to a monstrosity with weeping angels. You can’t miss it. But how is it going to help you?’

  ‘Because once I’ve got that date, Tess and I are going to Manchester to look something up,’ he replied. ‘I can’t be sure it’s going to work, but it’s worth a try.’

  ‘You’re still not going to tell the police?’ Lucinda asked.

  He shook his head. ‘Not yet. Lydden’s been charged, which must mean the police are fairly certain of their ground and a new theory from me, which is not absolutely complete, is hardly likely to fill them with joy. They’ll have to investigate, but official procedures could take time. By this afternoon I could have tied up the loose ends and can hand the whole thing over to them.’

  ‘But aren’t you withholding evidence or something?’ Lucinda argued.

  ‘If I am, it’s still shaky evidence,’ he replied. ‘By the end of the day, it could be definite. A few enquiries in Manchester will sort it out and nothing’s lost in the meantime. Nobody’s going to run away while the police still have those books.’

  *

  In his office at Kendal police station, Lambert looked discontented as his slouched figure overflowed the sides of his chair.

  ‘I know Lydden’s type,’ he told Moore. ‘Guilty as Old Harry, but screams his innocence in the hope that some sharp defence counsel will get him off on a technicality.’

  ‘His lawyer keeps protesting it’s circumstantial, sir.’

  Lambert grunted. ‘They only had circumstantial evidence that Nixon knew about Watergate. Anyway, we’ve got at least to give the impression that we think it still could be someone else, though God knows who it could be. How’s it going?’

  ‘The lads are checking on the names and addresses of all Charles Carrington’s known friends and associates which we drew up from his private address book, his secretary and his wife. They’ve been told to pay particular attention to anyone who says they’ve read this Sherlock Holmes book. I can’t see anything else we can do.’

  ‘Bloody waste of time. The sooner we can drop this and get more men on that rape enquiry in Penrith the better.’

  Detective Constable Ian Drover was one of six officers assigned to further enquiries among Charles Carrington’s friends. As he drove to the first address, his mind constantly returned to his interview with the Reverend Morris. That morning he had almost asked Moore if he could speak to him and explain that…Drover shook his head in rejection. It was unthinkable. Among his earliest childhood memories was having tea at the vicarage and when his mother had been ill, Mr Morris had called in almost every day. It didn’t matter that…Drover reached his destination and pushed his worries to the back of his mind, but they haunted him throughout the rest of the day.

  *

  Eternally piled in strata of coffins, six generations of Carringtons lay in the double plot beneath a wind-blasted blackthorn tree against the granite wall of the little Attwater churchyard. Somewhere at the bottom was Emily Faith, who died in childbirth the year of the Great Exhibition; near the top lay Gillian Zoe, dead from another agony more than a century later. The column of corpses was a mute record of social change, the very names changing with the lifestyles. Immediately above Gillian’s name was that of her brother David which followed their mother. The grave was well tended, and Maltravers felt that Carrington had almost certainly paid some villager to keep it in order. It would have been an agony for him to have come to the spot which contained the bodies of so many he had loved, memories of vibrant lives shared made intolerable by carved records of tragic deaths.

  ‘Gillian died on her birthday,’ he commented as he and Tess looked at the gravestone. ‘She would have been twenty-four—which means she was actually older than Jennifer.’

  ‘And presumably Charles will be buried here as well.’ Tess shivered. ‘God this is depressing. Let’s get away from here.’

  As they walked back to where Maltravers had parked in the lane, Alan Morris watched them from the front room of the vicarage. He recognised Maltravers, but Tess was a stranger and he wondered why they had been taking an interest in that particular grave.

  ‘Where first?’ Tess asked as Maltravers drove down the slip road on to the southbound carriageway of the M6.

  ‘Deansgate,’ he replied. ‘The Evening News offices to see what we can find there, then Sherratt & Hughes.’

  It took less than an hour and a half to reach the city centre and Maltravers parked in the multi-storey near the Crown Court building. They walked past the old northern offices of the Daily Mail, now closed since the computer age and the accountants had moved all production to London, and into the Manchester Evening News where Maltravers asked to see Peter Harris, a colleague from his own earliest reporting days, now the paper’s Medical Correspondent. Having a contact short-circuited the system and they were taken straight to the editorial library where an assistant loaded the viewer for them with the microfilms for July and August 1984.

  ‘She died on the twenty-second of July and the inquest should have been during the next few weeks,’ Maltravers said as he wound the handle and the pages flickered across the screen. ‘Keep your eyes peeled.’

  He only had to check through one edition to work out the editorial pattern, skipping past the national and foreign news, sport and feature pages and concentrating on the northern news sections. The first reference was a single paragraph stating that an inquest on Gillian Carrington had been opened and adjourned, then they found the full report three weeks later. Maltravers instinctively glanced at the final sentence; verdicts invariably appeared at the end.

  ‘Death by misadventure,’ he said, then went back to the beginning as Tess reached forward and pointed half-way down the column.

  ‘There he is.’ For a few moments they read in silence.

  ‘Same address Bradshaw gave me,’ Maltravers commented. ‘Described himself as an unemployed barman and last saw Gillian two weeks before they found her body. He knew she’d been an addict for some years.’

  ‘That’s it then,’ Tess said.

  ‘Just about,’ Maltravers agreed. ‘Let’s check Sherratt & Hughes.’

  The shop was crowded when they walked in and Maltravers watched the transactions at the cash desk as they both idly flicked through books they took from the shelves. He selected the new Mary Wesley and went to pay for it with his credit card.

  ‘What do you think?’ Tess asked as they left.

  ‘It’s only negative proof, of course,’ he replied. ‘But that’s all I expected. If we can confirm the link, that’s it.’

  ‘Which means my little starring role,’ said Tess. ‘Let’s have lunch somewhere first.’

  They drove out of the city centre to a restaurant in Didsbury which Maltravers remembered from his time in Manchester. After they had eaten, Tess went to the ladies room and Maltravers smiled appreciatively as she reappeared. She had wound her hair up in a bun style she never wore and her features had been flattened by skilfully applied make-up. She spoke to the waiter as she crossed the room and her natural London voice had totally changed, not to obvious broad northern but to the accent of the Cheshire county set, vowels subtly widened, the ‘G’ at the end of the present participles faintly audible.

  ‘The rehearsal went well,’ Maltravers remarked, nodding at the waiter as she sat down again. ‘He’s trying to work out why I’m having lunch with two different women.’

  ‘So you don’t think any
body will recognise me?’ Tess asked.

  ‘Darling, I don’t recognise you,’ he replied. ‘Come on, let’s get to Palatine Road.’

  As Maltravers had expected from the address, the detached house in the suburbs was a typical home of an Industrial Revolution businessman, originally big enough to accommodate an entire Victorian family and servants, now converted, like its neighbours, into flats. The garden at the front had been concreted over to provide car-parking, but the rest of the property was well preserved with new maroon paint on the woodwork and the front door’s flower pattern of leaded stained-glass intact.

  ‘Upmarket flats,’ he commented as they looked at the house from the opposite side of the road. ‘Too many of these places haven’t been looked after properly. All right, know your lines?’

  ‘Naturally,’ Tess replied. ‘I’m looking up an old friend called Jennifer Davenport and this is the last address I’ve got for her. When he says he’s never heard of her, I ask if he knows of anyone called Jennifer who’s lived here because she might have got married and have a different surname. After that, I hope for the best.’

  ‘Not a plan with any guarantee of success, but he might let something slip out and it’s worth trying as long as we’re here,’ said Maltravers. ‘I’ll wait round the corner past those traffic lights. I don’t want to risk him seeing me. Good luck.’

  Tess got out and heard Maltravers drive away as she crossed the road and walked up to the house. There were five bells set in a two-way intercom next to the front door and she pressed the one with Howard’s name beside it on a strip of card. There was no reply. She tried twice more without success then examined the rest of the names. One of the cards looked much older than the rest and when she pressed the button a voice echoed out of the loudspeaker.