Won over by his enthusiasm, Josephine said: ‘The Lodge is stunning, but you didn’t have to move out for me. You don’t get much time here, and I could have fallen in with the girls.’
‘You wouldn’t have had any peace, though, and I know you need to work. Anyway, the Lodge is special and I wanted you to have a chance to spend some time there. I don’t mind – I quite fancy a couple of weeks in the big house, seeing how the other half lives.’
‘Playing at Lord of the Manor? I didn’t know you were really in line for it.’
‘Ronnie told you that? Thank God the family had the sense to bow out gracefully. I could never see myself taking this lot on. William’s dedication to it is extraordinary, but I don’t know where he finds the patience. I used to think the challenge of my job was dealing fairly with so many different people and trying to keep the peace in a community, but believe me – a day in Tottenham Court Road has nothing on this place. I wouldn’t last five minutes here before the temptation to bang their heads together got too much for me.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Josephine said, thinking again how at ease Archie looked. ‘You seem quite at home to me.’ She touched his forehead playfully. ‘It’s a long time since that hasn’t been knitted together in a frown. I might have to rethink my prejudice against aristocratic detectives.’
‘I wouldn’t bother. There are more than enough of those already.’ He stood up, and they walked on towards the house. ‘By the way, Bill sends you his regards.’ Archie’s sergeant at the Yard was an avid reader of crime novels in general, and a big fan of Josephine’s books in particular. ‘Between you and me, I think he’s hoping for another appearance in this new one.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she promised, ‘although I can’t say I’m feeling very diligent at the moment, and somewhere as beautiful as this is hardly likely to put me in the mood for murder.’
‘Don’t you believe it.’ He told her briefly about the funeral, Morwenna’s fears, and the tensions at the wake afterwards.
‘What a terrible suspicion for his sister to have to live with,’ Josephine said. ‘I can understand why she’s angry. Do
‘I don’t honestly see how there could be, but there’s no doubt that certain people are closing ranks about something. It’ll be interesting to see if William’s got anything to say about Harry’s death, although obviously I can’t talk about suicide. You know how indiscreet Ronnie and Lettice can be, and Morwenna wouldn’t thank me for spreading that round the estate. It’d be me they’d have to fish out of the lake next.’
They rounded another bend in the drive, and Josephine saw Loe House in its entirety – an embattled seventeenth-century mansion, with two slightly projecting wings and many features which had clearly been added at various points over the two hundred years that followed. She could see why Ronnie had warned her not to expect anything too grand: constructed of a self-effacing pale stone and topped with a grey slate roof, the building seemed to crouch into the parkland and its obvious restorations gave it a rather patched-together appearance; nevertheless, taken with the landscape on either side, there was something quite noble about the house in front of her. A long garden wall stretched out from both wings, topped to the right with a line of dark yew trees and forming a pair of linked enclosures on the left-hand side, one of which was filled with apple trees in blossom so thick that snow seemed to have settled on the leaves. Just past the kitchen garden, where the driveway joined a track leading round the lake to the sea, there were some ramshackle farm buildings and an immaculately kept stable block, built in a U-shape and crowned with a clock turret. It was just after seven, but a couple of men were still working in the yard, taking advantage of the pleasant evening and, as she watched them go leisurely about their tasks, Josephine found it hard to imagine the kind of friction here that Archie had just described. To her, Loe House seemed to be that rare sort of place which encouraged the illusion that certain corners of England might never again be touched by conflict, the sort of place where a personal life undisturbed by politics might still be possible – and for that, she blessed it.
‘It
Josephine nodded, noticing that there were three more cars in the driveway, parked next to Archie’s and the Austin in which Ronnie had collected her from the station. ‘Is anyone else coming for dinner?’ she asked casually, waving to Lettice, who was waiting in the doorway.
‘Good God, no,’ he said, knowing how she felt about parties. ‘William isn’t the type to stand on ceremony – he just has a passion for motor cars. And apart from being proud of Lettice and Ronnie, he’s not particularly interested in theatre, he won’t have read your novels, and he has no appetite whatsoever for the London crime scene. We might even have a nice evening.’
Kestrel Jacks stood under a sycamore tree at the edge of the small clearing, smoking a cigarette and watching as the bird beat out the last minutes of its life in the trap that he had set for it. Jackdaws were less of a threat than magpies or crows, but they were still a menace in the nesting season, hunting eggs in all the likely places, and the more he could wipe out the better. It was his father who had taught him to build this particular ambush – a wire cage with an opening at the top which formed the mouth to a funnel; a pheasant’s egg, placed carefully on the grass below, was enough to seal the fate of any unsuspecting predator: as soon as a bird went down to get the egg, it lost all sense of direction and was powerless to find the narrow end of the cone which was its only hope of escape. Now, Jacks watched his latest victim panic and batter itself against the sides of the cage as it became increasingly disorientated, catching its feathers on the wire and emitting a sharp, almost doglike cry. The kind thing to do would be to wring its neck, but he waited a moment, enjoying the fact that the bird’s characteristic jauntiness had been so easily defeated. As it tired, he opened the door and walked over to where it was flapping pathetically on the floor. He picked it up by one of its wings and it lay still in his hands, seeming to know that he held its life in the balance. In that second, the bird reminded him of his wife and he turned and swung it hard against the fence, putting it out of its misery sooner than he had meant to. Annoyed with himself, he placed a new pheasant egg on the ground and shut the cage door securely behind him.
Jacks walked through the wood with the dead bird in his hand. When he got to the fence, he wound a piece of string around its neck and hung it on the fence next to the others, far enough away from the trap to ensure that the carcasses did not deter other birds from showing the same, fatal greed. As he looked up from his work, he saw Penrose in the distance, walking towards Loe House with a woman he didn’t recognise. He watched as they went inside, and followed their progress from room to room through the open curtains, feeling the anger well up inside him again as he remembered the wake. Why Morwenna let that bastard get so close to her, he couldn’t imagine. When he had seen them alone together earlier, he had wanted to smash his fist into Penrose’s face and beat him to a pulp, just as he had wanted to hurt Harry Pinching all those years ago when Pinching warned him to keep away from his sister. But now, as then, he needed to play a cleverer game. He was accustomed to waiting and watching, protecting what needed protecting and destroying anything that threatened it, and he would have Morwenna, one way or another. Penrose – like that opportunist bird, the jackdaw – should look around carefully before assuming that the prize was his.
There were nine birds on the fence now, he noted with satisfaction. He was good at his job, and people would do well to remember that.
‘Is it me, or is this trout even tastier than usual?’ asked Ronnie with a devilish twinkle in her eye. ‘Must be something we put in the water.’
Lettice’s fork clattered to her plate as she realised what her sister was hinting at. ‘If you must say whatever comes into your head, could you at least do it before it’s too late?’ she asked sharply, looking ruefully at the head and bones which were all that remained of her fish course.
‘Just think what those eyes might have seen,’ Ronnie continued, warming to her theme. ‘We should have let Archie interrogate the poor thing before handing it over to the Snipe.’
More than used to sparring with his cousin, Archie flashed the smile he reserved for her across the table and decided to drop the subject of Harry’s death. His casual efforts to find out if any rumours were circling around the estate had only earned him jibes from Ronnie about bringing the Yard with him in a suitcase, and when Josephine – in an effort to help – had asked William to describe the accident, his uncle’s reply told him nothing new. A straightforward question about suicide would, no doubt, wipe the smirk off Ronnie’s face very quickly and have them speculating for the rest of the night, but he couldn’t betray Morwenna’s confidence like that, so it was best to leave it and try again another time.
Josephine – who was far more interested in the people round the table than she was in the mythical Harry –
