The Book of the Dead Read online

  ‘And you’re saying they killed Charles Carrington?’ Lambert’s tone defied him to agree.

  ‘Yes. And they fitted up Lydden as what our American friends call a patsy beforehand. I inadvertently helped strengthen the case against him by seeing the connection between the safe combination and the Sherlock Holmes book.’

  Lambert sank into a chair like a half-set jelly. ‘You’ve got a gift for theories, my friend. Just go over this little lot for me. We’ve got all night if necessary.’

  ‘It won’t take that long,’ Maltravers assured him. ‘It began when Howard met Gillian Carrington in Manchester. Probably he was her supplier. She must have told him about the Conan Doyle books and the safe combination. After she died, Howard decided to get those books.

  ‘I don’t know how long he’d known Jennifer, but he was certainly her boyfriend before she became a secretary at Carrington’s firm. Obviously the first part of their plan was that she should marry him if possible, which turned out to be easier than they expected. She then started the affair with Lydden because he was stupid enough for what they wanted.’

  Lambert sat with the stillness of a soporific gorilla, but needle sharp eyes burned as he listened.

  ‘The murder was very intricate,’ Maltravers went on. ‘Jennifer set off for Manchester all right, but returned shortly afterwards. She may have driven to Forton services on the M6 where Howard could have picked her up and brought her back in his car in case anyone spotted her red Fiesta. He’d spent the first part of the morning in the city buying things at busy shops and using her cash card at the bank to start building up her story that she’d been there all day.

  ‘When Lydden arrived at Carwelton Hall at lunchtime she was there just as he said and they went to bed. That would have given Howard time to go to Lydden’s house—Jennifer obviously lied about losing the key he gave her—and steal his shotgun. At the same time, he could have hidden the Conan Doyle books there.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ Lambert interrupted. ‘How do you know where the police found the books? We haven’t revealed that.’

  ‘Jennifer Carrington told me. When she came to Brook Cottage after you released her, all sorts of things came out, almost certainly aimed at putting her in the clear and making things difficult for Lydden.’

  Lambert grunted, temporarily retreating as Maltravers continued.

  ‘After Lydden left Carwelton Hall, Howard took Jennifer Carrington back to wherever her car was and she really went to Manchester. On her way to Timperley she called at Sherratt & Hughes and bought the book for Charles, using her credit card. She claimed that she went straight there after drawing the money from the bank in the morning, didn’t she? I was in that shop today and it’s so busy that the chances of the staff being able to remember if any one customer called in during the morning or afternoon can’t be very great. It was a risk, but have you been able to confirm exactly what time she was actually there?’

  Maltravers shrugged when Lambert did not reply. ‘Fair enough, it’s not my place to ask you questions. However, Howard waited at Carwelton Hall for Carrington to return and killed him with Lydden’s shotgun. I don’t know exactly where the police found it later, but I’ll bet it was somewhere highly suspicious where he might have hidden it himself. When Jennifer pointed you in Lydden’s direction, he insisted he had met her at Carwelton Hall that lunchtime when she was apparently able to prove she had been in Manchester all day. Do you mind?’

  Lambert’s coconut head wobbled agreement as Maltravers produced his cigarettes; the superintendent declined one, but lit a pipe, the fallout from which manifested a serious breach of smoke pollution regulations.

  ‘Then I came up with the point that Lydden could have guessed the safe combination from reading The Attwater Firewitch.’ Maltravers looked apologetic. ‘I’m afraid that misled you, but it seemed such a good idea at the time. They must have been counting on it as the final piece of evidence against him and it also deflected any suspicion from them. Charles himself told me Jennifer had never read the book and an old friend of hers who allegedly had never been to Carwelton Hall before the dinner party couldn’t have, could he? If I hadn’t worked out the significance of the murderer reading the book, they could have relied on the police realising it themselves eventually or found some other way of drawing it to their attention.’

  Maltravers tapped cigarette ash into a saucer on the table. ‘That’s all I know, but you can find out the rest yourselves. What happened at Carwelton Hall tonight proves I’m right in any event.’

  Lambert stood up and asked Maltravers to wait. He returned after about ten minutes.

  ‘According to Mr Howard’s statement, you and Miss Davy went to Carwelton Hall this evening and accused Mrs Carrington of murder without any evidence,’ he said. ‘He was holding you at gunpoint prior to calling the police himself when Mrs Quinn’s arrival caused a disturbance and you overpowered him.’

  ‘Balls.’ Maltravers gestured disparagingly. ‘That’s desperation country. See what Jennifer’s story is, they haven’t had time to collude on this. And ask him about being a civil engineer in Nigeria for the past ten years, which was his story at the dinner party. My statement includes the name and address of a retired headmistress who has a flat in the same house in Manchester as he does and remembers meeting Jennifer Lloyd, as she then was, more than once within the last three years. Let him explain that lot away for starters.’

  ‘You’ve been very busy, Mr Maltravers.’ Lambert’s pit-bottom voice had an accusing edge. ‘Why didn’t you come to the police with all this at once instead of playing at amateur detectives?’

  Maltravers looked regretful. ‘I’ve got no excuses for that. I wanted to prove I was right, but if I’d realised what Mrs Quinn was planning I’d have come to you immediately. Now I’ve had to give a statement as a witness to an assault as well as evidence of a murder. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not just assault,’ Lambert corrected sternly. ‘Mrs Quinn may be charged with attempted murder and you could face charges as well. Withholding information from the police which could be of assistance in a murder enquiry is a very serious offence.’

  Maltravers looked at the impassive, unforgiving face of the law and sighed. ‘Can I ask for my presence at Carwelton Hall tonight to be taken into consideration? If I hadn’t been there, Howard would probably have killed Charlotte Quinn when she attacked Jennifer and then they’d have made a run for it. I may have prevented a second murder.’

  ‘That’s a matter for the Chief Constable,’ Lambert replied stonily and walked out. In his office he read the statements with growing resignation. There was a great deal the police would have to confirm, but Maltravers’s story had a bizarre persuasiveness and the superintendent grudgingly accepted that it could actually be true.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ he groaned as he contemplated the prospect and consequences of being obliged to release Duggie Lydden.

  A pale, moist dawn was forcing reluctant light into the sky by the time Maltravers and Tess left Kendal police station. The air was raw, the town was still and empty with a low mist smothering the River Kent as they drove through the silence across the grey stone bridge on their way back to Brook Cottage. They passed the hospital where Jennifer Carrington had recovered sufficiently for the police to begin questioning her; she was trying to blame Howard for the murder, claiming that he had said he only intended stealing the books. Iron-faced and numbed, Charlotte Quinn was being charged with grievous bodily harm as a holding operation. Lambert said the attempted murder charge could wait.

  *

  ‘Congratulations.’ Malcolm raised his glass as they sat round the fireplace in the lounge of Hodge Hill Hotel near Newby Bridge that evening. Maltravers had taken them all for dinner to the fifteenth-century manor house he regarded as the finest restaurant in Cumbria. ‘But for God’s sake, you could both have ended up dead last night.’

  ‘Don’t remind me,’ Maltravers admitted sourly. ‘I don’t know if Tess will ever forgive me. And if
I hadn’t decided to go off and do my own thing, Charlotte might not have tried to kill Jennifer. Now I could end up helping send her to jail. I can’t forgive myself for that.’

  Lucinda reached across from her chair and squeezed his hand. ‘Crime of passion perhaps? The courts might not be too hard on her. Stop blaming yourself, you weren’t to know.’ He looked far from convinced.

  ‘Lucinda’s right,’ Tess added. ‘We survived and they might have got away with it if you hadn’t worked it all out. I thought you’d gone mad when you started talking about dogs not barking in the night.’

  ‘But that was only the start,’ Maltravers remarked. ‘It was The Attwater Firewitch that helped me to think straight.’

  ‘How?’ Malcolm asked.

  ‘You’ve read it. Remember when Holmes is misled by what he thinks is a code and dashes off on a wild goose chase to Kirkby Lonsdale? After he realises his mistake, he says something to Watson about ignoring a simple truth because you’ve come up with some ingenious deduction which is so brilliant that you’re dazzled by it.

  ‘I did exactly the same thing. I was so self-satisfied about working out the numbers Carrington used for the safe and stitching up Lydden with it, that I didn’t think it through. If he’d really stolen the books, he would have closed the safe behind him and nobody would have known about the theft until it was opened again. By then it would have been impossible to say when they had been taken and Lydden would not have been an automatic suspect. And he certainly wouldn’t have waited for Charles to return home and shot him. What would have been the point?’

  ‘When you put it like that, it’s obvious,’ said Malcolm.

  ‘As obvious as the fact that those numbers on the paper in The Attwater Firewitch were dates,’ Maltravers agreed. ‘But just like Holmes, I was looking in the wrong haystack.’

  ‘One thing I don’t understand is why Howard was there for dinner that night,’ Tess remarked. ‘Surely Charles might have remembered him from Gillian’s inquest.’

  ‘He didn’t attend Gillian’s inquest.’ Maltravers stretched forward to replace his dry sherry on the low table in front of them. ‘Malcolm and Lucinda told me that the night I arrived here. As far as Charles was concerned, he ceased to have a daughter from the moment he saw her dead. There was no risk of Howard being recognised, and I think he must have worked out that he had to go to Carwelton Hall and be seen there. He must have known that after the murder, police forensic experts would be digging up the drains in the library and those guys can tell your life story from the mud on your shoes. They’d have almost certainly found indications of the presence of everyone at that dinner party. If they’d come up with something specifically tied to Howard, it could have been explained by his having been among the guests.

  ‘On top of that, there must be evidence all over the house of Howard being there from his previous visits to see Jennifer. Remember he was the one who asked Charles if he would show him round, which would have covered that as well.’

  ‘But if the police had got on to Howard, they’d have found everything we discovered,’ Tess objected.

  ‘Of course they would, but with the case building up against Lydden they had little reason to suspect anyone else,’ Maltravers replied. ‘They haven’t shown any interest in any of the rest of us who were there that night as far as I know.’

  ‘I haven’t even been asked to give a statement,’ Malcolm put in.

  ‘Precisely,’ Maltravers said. ‘On the other hand, if the police had chanced to find something which pointed to a man who should never have been at Carwelton Hall in the first place, they’d have become very suspicious. The chances weren’t great, but they existed and Howard was intelligent enough to realise it. Crazy like a fox.’

  A waitress arrived to say their table was ready and they went through to the low, dark-panelled dining-room with its ancient black beams, oil-paintings and fire crackling in the immense open grate.

  ‘What will happen to those books now?’ Malcolm wondered as they began their meal.

  ‘Well Jennifer certainly won’t get her hands on them,’ Maltravers replied. ‘You can’t benefit under your husband’s will if you’ve been involved in killing him. Did Charles have any other family?’

  ‘Not that we know of.’ Malcolm glanced at Lucinda for confirmation. ‘He had an older brother, but he was killed in the Normandy landings and wasn’t married.’

  ‘Lot of deaths in that family,’ Maltravers observed, dipping his fork into his seafood cocktail. ‘Then he may have left everything to Jennifer, but she can’t have it. Perhaps The Attwater Firewitch will finally be published. That would be an ironic sort of happy ending.’

  *

  The ending if any sequence of life involving love and death can be said to have such a thing—evolved over the next few weeks. Geoffrey Howard and Jennifer Carrington were jailed and, greatly to Maltravers’s relief, Charlotte Quinn received a suspended prison sentence after her defence counsel made an impassioned plea to an understanding judge. For his part, Maltravers received a slap-on-the-wrist note from the Deputy Chief Constable of Cumbria, advising him that the police had decided not to take proceedings against him for failing to tell them what he had discovered immediately, but warning him that such actions constituted a very serious offence and any repetition of such behaviour would et cetera. The framed letter had joined his collection of bad reviews and rejection slips on the lavatory wall. Then Malcolm Stapleton wrote to him.

  ‘It’s a good news week on the Chronicle,’ he read. ‘Alan Morris—you remember our local vicar?—has been sent down for twelve months for ripping off the funds of several church charities. Apparently he’d been gambling on the horses for years and was up to his ears in debt to half the bookies in the north of England. Is nothing sacred? Several ladies of the parish are inconsolable.

  ‘The other big story is Charles Carrington’s will. He left everything to Jennifer, apart from some paintings for his old school and an edition of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer which goes to Attwater church. The personal beneficiaries include Charlotte Quinn, who gets all the jewellery that belonged to his first wife. As we know, Jennifer can’t inherit, but that should be covered by a standard clause under which everything was to be sold and the proceeds donated to a charity for drug addicts if she did not survive him by twenty-eight days.

  ‘But the tragedy is The Attwater Firewitch. Charles left specific instructions that all ten volumes and the relevant letters were to be destroyed on his death (I quote from the will), “to ensure that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s wishes that the book should not be published will never be betrayed”. I’ve checked with Campbell, who was his executor, and he says it’s been done; rather appropriately he burned them. At least we read it.’

  Maltravers smiled reflectively as he passed the letter across the breakfast table to Tess.

  ‘Charles told me he’d made “certain arrangements” about it,’ he said as she finished and looked at him sympathetically. ‘He didn’t trust Jennifer. Anyway, there was an appalling mistake in it.’

  ‘Mistake? What?’

  ‘For all practical purposes, eagles have no sense of smell. It would have been impossible to train one to hunt the way it happens in the book. But Conan Doyle moved Watson’s wound from his arm to his leg—or perhaps it was the other way round, I can’t exactly remember—in different stories and that didn’t seem to matter either.’

  ‘And what about the photocopy?’ Tess asked mildly. ‘Nobody knows you put it back in your pocket that night, do they? Apart from me.’

  Maltravers raised a surprised eyebrow. ‘You watch me too closely, madam. I didn’t think anybody noticed.’

  ‘I had a feeling you weren’t going to let it go. Your promise was that you would return it to Charles Carrington, not Jennifer.’

  ‘Exactly. I wanted to…I’m not sure. Not just to have it, although that’s part of it of course, but to remind myself of a man who couldn’t be bought. I don’t meet many of them.’
/>   ‘What are you going to do with it?’

  ‘Charles lent it to me because he trusted me. I’d certainly never try to publish it and the proof that it’s the genuine article has been destroyed anyway.’ Maltravers shrugged. ‘It’s just a literary curiosity now…perhaps I’ll leave it to the grandchildren.’

  ‘Grandchildren?’ Tess echoed innocently. ‘Don’t children come first? And doesn’t marriage…?’

  Abruptly aware of the implications of his remark, Maltravers imitated generations of (usually mendacious) newspaper reporters offered sexual favours while working on a vice ring exposé; he made an excuse and left. Tess’s laughter followed him out of the room.

  If you enjoyed The Book of the Dead then you might be interested in An Act of Evil by Robert Richardson, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from An Act of Evil by Robert Richardson

  Chapter One

  “REBECCA, MY DEAR,” said Augustus Maltravers, “you are a child to make one contemplate the possible attractions of celibacy.”

  This reasonably well turned aphorism, which he had spent some minutes mentally constructing, was totally ignored by his three-year-old niece who contentedly continued to dismantle his retractable ball-point pen which had proved a greater attraction than a scattered and rejected collection of ingenious toys marrying education with entertainment. There was a slight twang as the spring jumped out, much to her delight, and, quite inexplicably, a further streak of ink appeared on her hand; the exit of the spring appeared to trigger a total self-destruct mechanism and the entire pen collapsed into its component parts. Her mother, Melissa, came back into the kitchen, instantly comprehended the scene and took appropriate action. In a single maternal movement she scooped Rebecca up with one arm, planted her in the middle of a previously demolished yellow plastic construction and stepped expertly through the various pieces of debris to the sink.

  “Don’t give her things like pens, Augustus,” she said. “At this age everything ends up in the mouth.”