Chapter 7
The Culpeppers' house was an impressive structure. Built in traditional Cotswold stone, its lines and proportions were unequivocally though unobtrusively modern.
The gardens consisted principally of herbaceous borders and lawns running down to an encirclement of trees. Whether the Culpepper estate extended into the woods was not clear. The lawns themselves were beautifully kept. Only one of them, hooped for croquet, showed any signs of wear. Coming up the drive, Pascoe had glimpsed a bent figure in a bright orange coat slowly brushing away the leaves which the autumn wind had laid on one of the side lawns. A fluorescent gardener, he thought, and prepared himself for anything from a parlourmaid to a full-dress butler when he rang the bell. But it had been Culpepper himself, features etched with well-bred solicitude, who opened the door.
Pascoe could see that Ellie disliked him at once.
He recalled his own reaction to Marianne Culpepper and groaned inwardly at the thought of the evening ahead. Not that much social intercourse would be expected of them, surely. Or sexual either, he added to himself as they were shown into separate bedrooms. The bed at Brookside Cottage with its ornamental pillow came into his mind. Half the local police-force would have seen it. It was a good job he hadn't been having a bit on the side with the chief constable's wife.
The frivolity of the thought touched him with guilt. This was the way grief worked. It could only achieve complete victory for a comparatively short time. But it filled the mind with snares of guilt and self-disgust to catch at all thoughts and emotions fighting against it.
Ellie felt the same. She had raised her eyebrows humorously at his as Culpepper opened her bedroom door. But it was a brief flicker of light in dark sky.
The evening's prospects did not improve when Marianne Culpepper returned. Pascoe heard a car arrive as he was unpacking his over-night case and when he left his room a minute later to collect Ellie, he found her standing at the head of the stairs, unashamedly eavesdropping on a conversation below.
Culpepper's neutral tones were audible only as an indecipherable murmur, but his wife's elegantly vowelled voice carried perfectly. Pascoe was reminded of teenage visits to the local repertory theatre (now declined to bingo) where hopeful young actresses projected their lines to the most distant 'gods'.
Even half a conversation was enough to reveal that Marianne Culpepper had no knowledge whatsoever of her husband's invitation to Pascoe and Ellie. They exchanged rueful glances on the landing. Pascoe moved to the nearest door, opened it and slammed it shut. It might have been more politic to retreat for a while, but Pascoe found himself looking forward to putting all that good breeding below to the test.
'Let's go down, shall we?' he said in an exaggeratedly loud voice.
The Culpeppers presented a fairly united front as introductions took place.
'Didn't I see you in the village hall this morning?' asked Marianne of Pascoe. 'I didn't realize then. I thought you were just one of the policemen.'
Oh, I am, I am, thought Pascoe.
'Look,' the woman went on, 'I'm terrible sorry about your friends. I hardly knew them, the Hopkinses I mean, but they seemed very nice people.'
Everyone speaks as if we've lost them both, thought Pascoe. Perhaps we have.
'You'll be tired of expressions of sympathy I know. They become very wearing.' She paused as though communicating with herself only, then continued. 'Which brings me to this evening. You are very welcome indeed to our house, but Hartley and I have got our lines crossed somewhere. I've asked a couple of friends along to dinner and a few more people may drop in for drinks later. Please, it's up to you. If you'd rather duck out, have your meal early, and generally avoid the madding crowd, just say so. Don't be silly about it.'
The crossed lines cut both ways, Pascoe mixed his metaphors. Hartley knew as little of his wife's evening invitations as she did of his. Or did he?
'I think we'd like to join in,' said Ellie, rather to Pascoe's surprise, though it confirmed his own reaction. The reasons must be very different, however. 'If we're not going to be spectres at the feast, that is.'
'Not at all. Good, that's settled. It's just a cold collation on Saturdays, but I'd better go and get things organized before I change.'
She was wearing slacks and a chunky sweater and looked wind-blown, as if she had just returned from some fairly active outdoor activity.
'May I help?' asked Ellie.
'Why not?' she said with a smile. 'How are you at carving? Hartley's a near-vegetarian and doesn't take kindly to sawing up chunks of dead animals.'
'Are you interested in porcelain?' asked Culpepper when the two men were alone.
'I know little about it,' answered Pascoe cautiously. More therapy? he wondered. From Dalziel's burglars to Culpepper's culture. I must appear all things to all men.
'My own knowledge is very limited,’ said Culpepper modestly. 'Come and see my few pieces.'
He rose, led Pascoe across the entrance hall and unlocked a solid-looking oak door. When he opened it, Pascoe was surprised to see a metal grille, rather like the expanding doors used in old-fashioned lifts. Culpepper inserted another key and the grille slid back of its own accord.
Whether the value of the collection justified these elaborate precautions Pascoe could not say. The pieces were magnificently displayed. There were no windows in the room and the walls were broken by a series of different sized niches which held the porcelain. Each niche had its own light, controlled separately so that it was possible to centre the attention completely on each of the pieces in turn. The only free-standing pieces were two large capped urns which occupied plinths in the middle of the room. They were decorated in the Chinese style but Culpepper assured Pascoe that they were late eighteenth-century English imitations.
'Out of place here, really,' he said. 'But they were the first things I ever bought when I discovered I had enough money to start buying.'
'How much is it all worth?' was all Pascoe could find to say.
'Oh, several thousands,' said Culpepper vaguely. 'Much of it is not what the experts might call first-rate. But to me it is irreplaceable and therefore invaluable.'
He led the way out, crashing the grille door locked behind him.
'Valuable or not, I wish more people would take the precautions you do with their property,' said Pascoe, thinking of the ease with which his current burglar had been helping himself to small fortune. This time last night he had been working on the case. It seemed barely credible.
Dinner went quite well. Ellie and Marianne seemed to have taken to each other, though Pascoe would not have seen either as the other's 'type'. The guests, John and Sandra Bell, were a pleasant enough couple in their mid-thirties, he extrovert, outspoken, nearly hearty; she pretty, much quieter but far from subdued. The name touched a chord in Pascoe's mind. But it was only when the conversation, carefully vetted and censored for his and Ellie's benefit, came round to the local water pollution controversy that he recalled noticing Bell's name in the Amenities Committee minutes. He was a staunch down-streamer, and complained bitterly that the village brook was being polluted upstream by careless management of the cesspool drainage which many of the local properties still relied on. Culpepper, eating an egg mayonnaise with green salad, pushed his plate away from him with an expression of distaste.
'John, please,' said Mrs Bell. 'You're making Hartley nauseous and must be boring his visitors stiff.'
'I'm sorry,’ said Bell, grinning at Ellie. 'Forgive me. It's all right for the idle rich on this side of the village. They can be objective. But that stream runs at the bottom of my garden and I've got a young son. He catches enough without getting typhoid. But never fear. I have a plan. The next Amenities Committee meeting may get a surprise.'
He winked conspiratorially as Marianne began clearing away the plates.
The first after-dinner guest arrived as they were drinking their coffee. Marianne let him in. There was a perceptible interval before she returned with Angus Pelman. Pascoe assumed the time was spent in warning the man about the strangers in the house.
Pelman made no attempt to avoid the subject of the killings.
'Any news of Hopkins?' he asked brusquely after being introduced.
'I think not,' intervened Culpepper diplomatically. 'I wonder, Miss Soper, if you would care to see my
