Stately Homicide Read online

  Jurnet said: ‘Never saw a Miss World yet could hold a candle to Mollie.’

  Percy Toller beamed, his false teeth white and gleaming.

  ‘Wait till I tell her what you said! She’s always had a soft spot for you, Mr Jurnet, you know that. Always says you treated me a bloody sight better ’n I deserved.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ Jurnet accepted the compliment with becoming grace. ‘So, if it isn’t the silver you’re after, what are you doing here at Bullen Hall?’

  ‘Conservation, Mr Jurnet,’ the other returned with dignity. ‘Preserving our national heritage. We got a nice little bungalow in the village, Mollie an’ me, and, I mean, they’re always asking for helpers, so here I am. All the upper crust hereabouts go in for it, and I don’t mind telling you we’ve met a very nice class of people. I’m not boasting, Mr Jurnet, when I say Mollie and me are very well thought of here in Bullensthorpe.’

  ‘So you should be.’

  ‘Winters, when the Hall’s closed to the public, we have lectures to learn about the Bullens and the Appleyards so’s we can answer questions people ask us – and as I’m doing History and English Literature for the Open University, it seemed right up my alley.’

  ‘You’re doing an Open University course! You’re never!’

  ‘In’t it a scream?’ The retired burglar appeared to take no offence at the other’s tone of disbelief. ‘Percy Toller, B.A. – that’ll be the day! But Mollie says she don’t see why not. You know what, Mr Jurnet?’ The little man looked at the detective with eyes trusting as a child’s. ‘A man got a wife what believes in him and gives him a belief in hisself, there’s nothing he bloody can’t do once he puts his mind to it.’

  Reminded with a sudden pang of Miriam, Jurnet elected to change the subject.

  ‘I can’t imagine what put it into your head I look anything like that bloke up there on the wall.’

  ‘Evidence of my own eyes, Mr Jurnet!’ Percy Toller contemplated the portrait of Anne Boleyn’s brother with the air of a connoisseur. ‘It’s the Valentino look,’ he pronounced finally. ‘You both got it. You know, don’t you, Mr Jurnet, that’s what they call you, down at the nick?’

  Jurnet frowned. His dark, Mediterranean looks were a sore trial to him. Bad enough to have your mates call you, even if it was carefully behind your back, after some brilliantined gigolo of the Twenties. But to think that the clients, the villains on the other side of the counter, had cottoned on to it as well!

  ‘How come he’s Bullen and she’s Boleyn?’ he demanded. ‘Didn’t they know how to spell their own names, in those days?’

  ‘Bloody sight more sensible than we are. Spelled a word any way that took their fancy. What’s the difference, long as you could read it?’ The retired burglar studied the portrait further. ‘It’s the nose, Mr Jurnet, and those eyes. Smouldering. Very romantic, if you don’t mind me saying so. Not English.’

  ‘Well, I am –’ pushing away ancestral memories of the medieval Jew who had gone by the name of Jurnet of Angleby1 – ‘and so was he, wasn’t he?’ Jurnet jerked his head at the picture. ‘Queen’s brother. You can’t be more English than that.’

  ‘That’s just where you’re wrong, then!’ Percy Toller smiled with the complacency of superior knowledge. ‘Half the queens of England – intending no disrespect, of course – frogs an’ dagoes, the lot of ’em. Not that this bloke was. English as roast beef, for all his looks. And Anne Boleyn, his sister, the same. She may have looked like bring on the castanets, but she weren’t only English, she was Norfolk, and you can’t say more English ’n that.’

  ‘Fat lot of good it did her.’

  ‘Lost her nob, you mean? I don’t know –’ The little man pondered judiciously: ‘I sometimes think they must have looked at things different in the olden times. I mean, nowadays, every time we step out of doors, who’s to say we won’t be run over by some ruddy juggernaut? Yet it don’t mean we stay in for ever, do it, on the chance it might happen. An’ every time we fly to Benidorm, how are we to know there’s not a bomb in the luggage compartment ready to go off an’ sprinkle us over the Costa Brava like cheese on a plate of spaghetti? It’s been done. But that don’t stop us booking up for next year the minute we take down the mistletoe.

  In olden days, I reckon, the only difference was that instead of lorries and bombs, it was plagues and having your head cut off. What I mean is, there’s always something. I reckon Anne Boleyn, knowing what that bugger Henry the Eighth was like, didn’t have to be told what she could be letting herself in for. And I reckon, give her a second chance, and she’d ’a’ done the same thing all over again. I mean, to be a queen, that’s something, even if you do end up with your head tucked underneath your arm.’

  Jurnet smiled at the little man, so spry in his light blue slacks, white shirt, and nautical blazer with a handkerchief folded carefully into the breast pocket. It was the first time the detective ever remembered enjoying a history lesson. He hoped the Open University appreciated what a treasure it had netted.

  He looked again at the portrait of George Bullen.

  ‘He didn’t do badly out of it, at least, if this place is anything to go by.’

  ‘Executed 17th May, 1536,’ Percy Toller announced with unction. ‘Accused of carrying on carnally with his sister, if you’ll excuse the expression. His own sister – imagine! And her queen of England!’

  ‘Anything in it?’

  ‘Load of codswallop!’ The little man spoke with the certainty of one in the know. ‘Bad enough Henry give ’em both the chop, he didn’t have to go blacking their characters into the bargain!’ Abashed by his own vehemence: ‘Sorry, Mr Jurnet. It’s just that, looking as he does, so much like you, an old friend as you might say, it always churns me up to think of it.’

  ‘Remind me to come to you for a reference next time I need one.’ Jurnet lingered, reluctant to break off human contact and move on from the vast, panelled Library to more rooms, more possessions, more yawns. ‘Bullen Hall been in the family ever since, then?’

  ‘Ever since Queen Elizabeth. Now, there was a woman! Henry grabbed the estate, like he grabbed everything else he could get his paws on, but Lizzy, she had a soft spot for her ma’s family, and she give it back, to a man called Ambrose Appleyard that everyone knew was George Bullen’s son really, and so the queen’s first cousin, even if it was on the wrong side of the blanket. And Appleyards ha’ been at Bullen Hall ever since. Young Istvan Appleyard – Steve, that is, to his pals –’ the ex-burglar’s face became suffused with a snobbery exquisite in its unselfconscious purity – ‘he’s always popping in and out of our place. Says Mollie’s Victoria sponge is the stuff dreams are made of. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene I.’

  ‘You don’t say! Istvan. Funny sort of name.’

  ‘Ah. That’s account of his granny, the countess. Hungarian for Stephen. Good King Wenceslas looked out, on the feast of Istvan. That’s what it ought to be, only it don’t rhyme with “even”. One of the Karhazy family, the old countess,’ the little man went on. ‘Owned half of Hungary, till the Reds took it away. You can read it all in that guidebook you got there.’

  ‘Oh ah. Dull as ditch water. They always are. The people in charge here ought to put you on to writing a fresh one.’

  ‘Funny you should say that.’ Percy Toller’s glow became positively incandescent. ‘Mollie’s always on at me about that very thing. Will she be chuffed to hear I ran into you! Mr Jurnet!’ – the little man repossessed himself of the detective’s hand – ‘How about a bite of tea with us after we shut up shop here? It’d be an honour! We close at six sharp, and it don’t take me ten minutes to bike home. There’s a nice bit of ham – I got it myself in Bersham this morning, to be sure it’s fresh in this heat, so I know there’s plenty for three, an’ Mollie’s always got a cake in the cake tin on the off-chance someone may drop in –’

  ‘Stuff dreams are made of, eh?’ Jurnet had no difficulty in making his voice suitably regretful. Ham and Victoria
sponge with the undemanding Tollers was infinitely to be preferred to the high fibre and high thinking to be expected at the Marches. For a moment he was tempted. Then: ‘Only wish I could say yes. Previous engagement, I’m afraid. Like the Yanks say, can I take a rain check on it?’

  ‘Any time, Mr Jurnet! Pippins, Bullensthorpe. Anyone ’ll direct you.’

  ‘I’ll do that. Meanwhile, give Mollie my love and say how much I look forward to seeing her again soon. I must be getting on,’ Jurnet finished without enthusiasm. ‘I suppose if I keep going I’ll end up in the Appleyard Room eventually?’

  ‘You’ll see a sign at the end of the passage.’ Percy Toller shook his head in wonderment. ‘Fancy you, a police officer of all people, an’ never been there before!’

  ‘There has to be a first time for everything.’

  ‘No offence meant,’ the little man responded quickly, ‘and none taken, I should hope. It’s only – I mean, a man like that, one of our great English heroes, like Nelson and Lawrence of Arabia, and him local, too –’

  ‘I’m not much of a one for heroes,’ Jurnet said, not for the first time that day.

  ‘But he was a wonderful man! A modern Scarlet Pimpernel.’

  ‘Give me Leslie Howard any day of the week.’

  ‘Now I know you’re joking! Just you wait till you see all the things they got there about him.’

  ‘Drowned, wasn’t he? I seem to remember something –’

  ‘Ah, that was a tragedy, all right. Down by the old mill. You can actually see it from the Appleyard Room – well, not this time of year, but in the winter when the leaves are down. Falling to pieces even then, so they say. Bit of the old grid, or whatever it is they call it, regulates the flow of water, suddenly dropped and caught him square on the back of the neck, just as he come swimming by. Nearly took his head off, by all accounts – just like George Bullen, his ancestor.’ The little man looked suitably portentous. ‘History repeating itself, as you might say.’

  ‘Not quite in the same class as going to the block for incest.’

  ‘Beheaded, I mean. Not a common way to die nowadays, not in a civilised country. Funny thing, too – he was exactly the same age as Lord Nelson when he got killed at Trafalgar, and Lawrence of Arabia when he come off that motorbike of his. Forty-seven, all three of ’em. Makes you think, don’t it?’

  ‘If you mean, to think twice before you join the Navy or ride high-powered machines you don’t know how to control, and to keep away from rotting mill sluices when taking a dip, I couldn’t agree more.’

  ‘Dying like that, Mr Jurnet!’ the other persisted. ‘After all the terrible dangers he’d been through without a hair of his head harmed, to go in what you might call a purely domestic way –’

  ‘Best thing that could have happened, probably. After hitting the high spots everything that came after had to be downhill all the way. Whom the gods love die young, that’s what they say, isn’t it? Not that forty-seven is as young as all that.’

  ‘Menander, Ancient Greek poet, 324–292 B.C.’ Responding with due modesty to the other’s admiring astonishment: ‘Mollie give me a Dictionary of Quotations for my birthday. Learn a new one every day, she says, and I should get by all right. She reckons if you’re a bugger with a lot of culture to catch up on, like I am, that’s as good a way as any to go about it.’

  ‘Did you say Percy Toller, B.A.? Percy Toller, Ph. D., more like it!’

  ‘Mr Jurnet! Just wait till I tell Mollie what you said!’

  See Death and the Pregnant Virgin

  Back to Text

  Chapter Three

  The Appleyard Room had once been a ballroom or a conservatory, or possibly a combination of the two. Tagged on to the north side of Bullen Hall, it was mercifully invisible from the front of the house, whose lovely line betrayed no hint of the absurd glass bustle disfiguring the rear. Within, it looked like a cross between Liverpool Street Station, the Paris Opera, and Harrod’s Food Hall, and, as such, may well have embodied all those elements which the Hungarian countess, whose money had paid for its building, had considered desirable in the way of architecture.

  In such surroundings it was asking a lot to expect anyone to take even a hero seriously, and Jurnet did not even try, mindlessly following the prescribed route past cases filled with bric-à-brac and faded photographs to which he accorded only the most perfunctory glance. Even had he been a one for heroes, the detective felt pretty sure that the secret of what made them tick was not to be discovered in these reverently salvaged bits and bobs.

  Out of the lot only two photographs stayed with him: one of a tow-headed toddler with a black-haired girl-child a couple of years older, who held the younger one’s hand tightly, and regarded him with great dark eyes full of an anxious love: ‘Lazlo, aged three, with Elena, his sister.’ The second showed the same children older, on the verge of adolescence, the fair and the dark, mounted on their ponies. They were dressed alike, in gentrified versions of the loose blouses, baggy trousers, leather aprons and broad-brimmed hats of the horsemen of the Hungarian puszta: and this time, instead of one who watched and one who stood unheeding, the two had turned to each other faces full of a gleeful complicity.

  Two immense blow-ups – one of a turreted country house against a background of wooded mountains, the second of a Russian tank mowing down a crowd of students in a Budapest street – next commanded Jurnet’s reluctant attention. Bludgeoned by their very size, he felt compelled to read the captions beneath.

  Already, he learned, long before the rising of 1956, the tow-headed toddler, grown to manhood, had made a secret journey to Kasnovar – the great estate which the countess had brought into the Appleyard family – to rescue some cousins who had survived the war only to fall foul of the new Stalinist régime. When, for a brief seven days, it looked as if Hungary had succeeded in throwing off the Soviet yoke, he was back there again – whether to celebrate the liberation of a country he loved as his own, or to investigate the possibility of salvaging some of the sequestrated family assets, was not made clear. Whichever it was, he was there in Budapest when the Russian tanks treacherously re-entered the city; when the Avo, the hated Secret Police, re-emerged from under their stones, and the price had to be paid in blood for the impertinence of preferring freedom to slavery.

  A hundred and seventeen people, Jurnet read – intellectuals, workers, army officers who had thrown in their lot with the insurgents – owed their lives to Laz Appleyard; one of them Mara Forro, the daughter of Prime Minister Nagy’s right-hand man, and the woman who eventually became his wife. Overtopping his actual achievements was a magnificent failure – his attempted rescue of Imre Nagy and his companions, kidnapped in a Budapest street by the Soviet MVD and carried off to imprisonment in the turreted country house, the former royal summer palace in Sinaia, Romania.

  Perversely refusing to go along with the Appleyard scenario, the Prime Minister had, in the event, rejected the chance of escape; but Pal Maleter, the military leader of the rising, and Janos Farro, the father of Mara, had got away, though only to be surprised and retaken within the week, sheltering in a so-called ‘safe’ house near the Yugoslav border. Their deaths had followed within days. Nothing but the chance that Laz Appleyard had been away from the house at the time, reconnoitring the last few kilometres to sanctuary, had saved him from suffering a similar fate.

  Better for him if he had, Jurnet decided. Nelson knew what he was about, putting on the flashy coat that made him such an easy mark at the Battle of Trafalgar. Heroes would never come back, if they knew what was good for them.

  The last photograph in the display showed Laz Appleyard with a laughing youngster, tow-headed as himself, perched on his shoulders; and, at his side, a pale, exquisite young woman who did not look happy.

  ‘It is – Inspector Jurnet, is it not?’

  ‘It is,’ Jurnet confirmed, wondering, who now? Someone who, despite the bumbling affability, the baggy flannels and the old safari shirt bulging with felt tip pens, must
be more than met the eye. The man had come into the Appleyard Room by the door marked WAY OUT, and, in Jurnet’s experience, only members of the criminal classes and those in positions of authority possessed the nonchalance to enter through doors marked, as this one must surely be on the outside, NO ENTRY.

  ‘You won’t remember me, of course,’ the other said comfortably, beaming through his thick-lensed glasses, as if to be utterly unmemorable were matter for self-congratulation. ‘Francis Coryton. It must be three years at least. I came into Angleby to find out whether we ought or ought not to install burglar alarms here at Bullen.’

  ‘In that case, it couldn’t have been me, sir. You’d have seen our crime prevention officer.’

  ‘Indeed I did! But only after your much appreciated intervention. For some reason I had a little difficulty in making clear to the young sergeant at the desk whom I wished to see and for what purpose. You happened to be standing close by and you were most kind. When I got home I particularly remember telling Jane, my wife, how very kind you’d been.’

  Jurnet, who had no recollection of having rendered any such service, murmured: ‘Happy to have been of assistance.’

  ‘Most kind!’ the other repeated. ‘In fact, I was saying to Jane only a few days ago that I mustn’t forget to let Mr Shelden know that Inspector Jurnet’s the one to ask for at Angleby should the need ever arise.’

  ‘Mr Shelden?’

  ‘Our new curator. This is my last day in that august office. I assumed you’d seen it in the Argus. It was all over the front page – not my going, of course, but Mr Shelden’s coming. It’s a tremendous coup for the Trust to have obtained a man of his calibre. You know, of course, he got the D’Arblay prize for his biography of Rommel?’ Without waiting for an answer – which, Jurnet thought, was just as well – the man continued: ‘Look here – if you aren’t doing anything this evening why not come along to our little party and meet him in the flesh? Any time from 8.30 on. He’s a delightful chap, he is, really, and it can only be to your mutual advantage to know each other at the outset, just in case anything ever comes up. Do come! Just a drink and a nibble before I bow out gracefully.’