Christmas Mourning (The Falconer Files Book 8) Read online

  Alice Diggory lived in one of four new dwellings on the Carsfold Road, just south of the village green, her home bearing the name Hillview. On the same side of the road to her, but slightly to the south was The Nook, inhabited by Cedric Malting, on the other side of the road mirroring these two dwellings were Pastures New, the residence of Robin De’ath, and Michaelmas Cottage, the home of the late Digby Jeffries. The newness of the buildings was the main reason the residents had fled to The Fisherman’s Flies, for there were no open fireplaces or bottled gas cookers to relieve their discomfort in such weather as this.

  ‘Did you notice anything odd in that later part of the evening?’ asked Falconer.

  ‘Nothing other than that silly old man still dressed up in his red suit. In that weather! Why, he could have caught his death of cold! Oh!’ she suddenly fell silent, as she remembered what had actually happened to the man in the red suit. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she apologised. ‘I just wasn’t thinking straight.’

  ‘Don’t apologise, Miss Diggory. It’s quite understandable, in the circumstances. Now, can you tell us anything about Mr Jeffries’ relations with other people in the village? Had he upset anyone? Made anyone angry with him?’

  ‘I should have thought he’d upset just about every resident. Of course, it was all water off a duck’s back to me.’ Here she gave a little simper of superiority, then continued, ‘But he really did upset poor Cedric Malting in particular. There was a little group of five of us. I have only ever worked in education, but the other four had all been in broadcasting – well, except for Cedric.

  ‘But I’m not explaining things very well. Cedric was a playwright, but has never had a play put on by a professional company – only by amateurs. Robin De’ath worked for Channel 6 before he retired. Digby worked for BBC Television and, although Henry Pistorius had also worked for the BBC, it was in radio, not television.

  ‘Digby looked down on us all and rather tried to be cock of the walk. Of course, he pointed out his superior position, but it was Cedric that he upset the most. He’s been trying for years to get one of his plays accepted by anyone; radio, television, professional drama company, it didn’t matter to him. He believed in his work, and was beginning to get a little interest in it.

  ‘That dratted man, though, wouldn’t leave him alone. Always calling him an amateur and a hack who ought to know when to throw in the towel. Well, you can understand how upset Cedric was by all this, but he’d never … Oh! I didn’t mean to imply that Cedric killed him. I’m afraid I’ve let my mouth run away with itself again. Just ignore what I’ve said. I simply wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘Just one more question: did you ever have any uncomfortable feelings about his attitude towards children?’

  This put her back into her previous flustered state, and she finally began to speak, her hands twisting together in her lap with anxiety. ‘I really don’t like to speak ill of the dead,’ she began, conveniently forgetting all the other things she’d said about Jeffries, ‘but I must admit that his behaviour was rather … over-familiar. I don’t know how else to describe it, but I wouldn’t have been happy to have him passing out presents in a school where I worked. There was just something about him that made me uneasy.’

  Now she’d got this out of her system she relaxed again, and even managed a little smile of relief. Falconer dismissed her with a reassuring smile, but had been very interested in all the information she had given him: ever efficient, she was a teacher to the core. Carmichael had been sitting just out of view, and had got everything down in his notebook for later reference, then they’d decide how important what Alice Diggory had just told them was.

  ‘With everyone in such a state, what with the murder and the weather, we might be lucky enough to get a good chorus of ‘Grass thy Neighbour’ in the first round of interviews,’ declared Falconer, feeling pretty pleased with what had been imparted to them so far. When people were out of their comfort zone they said things they would never have considered saying, simply because they were in a state of heightened emotion and anxiety.

  He was just choosing his next victim when they became aware of a woman screaming, and both men shot out of their seats and through the door back into the bar. Paula Covington was standing just inside the door from the stairs, yelling her head off. ‘He’s dead!’ she screamed. ‘The vicar’s dead! Someone’s killed him! Murder! Help!’

  George rushed to her aid, taking her in his arms and holding her to his body to calm her, and Falconer and Carmichael rushed across the distance that separated them from this highly distressed woman as fast as they could, as the babble of voices that had filled the air a few seconds before withered and died as the import of Paula’s announcement sunk in.

  ‘What is it, Paula, love? Are you sure ’e wasn’t just asleep?’ asked her husband quietly. Every ear in the pub was pricked with interest.

  ‘He was dead, George! He’d slid to the floor from his chair, and he wasn’t breathing! Dead! Dead! And who did it? That’s what I want to know.’

  Chapter Eight

  Christmas Day – later that afternoon

  Falconer and Carmichael left the now-sobbing woman in her husband’s arms and headed off up the staircase in search of Rev. Searle’s room, leaving a room full of stunned people who were only now recovering their voices and beginning to communicate again, but in whispers.

  Presuming correctly that it was the room with the door left wide open that they sought, the two policemen headed straight for it. Inside the room they found that Rev. Searle was, indeed, dead, and had slipped down from the old-fashioned armchair in which he had been sitting and now lay slumped on the floor.

  Falconer approached the old man’s body, taking care where he put his feet in case he disturbed something that would be useful as evidence, and bent down, putting his face as close to the victim’s as he could. ‘Bitter almonds!’ he declared. ‘The old man’s been poisoned, if I’m not mistaken. Come over here – very carefully, Carmichael – and see if you agree with me.’

  Carmichael did, and was the first to notice a hip flask that lay beside the chair. Neither of them went anywhere when working without a pair of latex gloves, and Carmichael slipped his on now and retrieved the discarded flask. ‘This is where it came from,’ he told Falconer. I can smell it in the flask, and there’s a little cardboard label attached to the neck. Let me see … Amaretto di Saronno! That’s that Italian liqueur, isn’t it?’

  ‘Dead on, Carmichael, and what an ingenious way to disguise the taste of the poison,’ exclaimed Falconer, reluctantly admiring the cunning of whoever had given the old man the flask. ‘Have you got any bags on you?’

  ‘Of course I have, sir. Never go anywhere without them,’ replied Carmichael, slipping an evidence bag from one of his many pockets and sliding the flask into it. ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘I think the only sensible thing to do is to go downstairs and get on with the interviews. This chap isn’t going anywhere, and we can easily get the key and lock the door so that no one can attempt to enter and disturb the crime scene. We’ll get back to this later.’

  This taken care of and the keys – both the guest’s and the pass key – were in Falconer’s pocket when they settled, once again, in the downstairs sitting room and asked for Mr Robin De’ath to be shown in to them. Falconer asked the new interviewee to take a seat as soon as he entered the room, and enquired about the correct pronunciation of his surname. No one likes to have their name mispronounced.

  ‘Deeth,’ replied the rather superior man that Robin De’ath turned out to be. He was probably in his late sixties, and obviously dyed his hair black. A supercilious smile twitched at the sides of his mouth.

  ‘Can you tell me if you noticed anything odd during the Crib Service and Midnight Mass yesterday? Anything at all, no matter how insignificant it appeared to you, that concerned Mr Jeffries?’ asked the inspector.

  ‘Apart from the disgraceful behaviour of old Digby, nothing whatsoever, Inspector,’ replied De’ath
with a superior look. ‘He was never the most sensitive of men.’

  ‘Do you know of anyone who has recently fallen out with Mr Jeffries?’ asked Falconer, watching the man’s face very carefully then, as he went to voice his denial, added, ‘with the exception, of course, of yourself, sir, whom we already know about.’

  De’ath looked stunned. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mr De’ath. He was always having a go at you, wasn’t he? Trumping your work at Channel 6 with his own BBC work. He really got to you, didn’t he? He made you feel like you were always the best man and never the groom. If you could get him out of the picture you’d be top dog in your little gang.

  ‘After all, Mr Pistorius only worked in radio, Mr Malting was, as he would no doubt express it, an “undiscovered” playwright, and Miss Diggory had only been a teacher. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. He had you all over a barrel, didn’t he: top dog, and no way out of it, unless something was done about him.’

  ‘That is not so. That is totally incorrect!’ Robin De’ath’s careful Received Pronunciation had slipped, and he made his denial in what was presumably his native Welsh accent. Falconer had rattled him. He knew by the glitter in the man’s eyes and the fine dew of sweat that had broken out on his forehead. He was definitely on the run.

  ‘I have never been so insulted in all my life. And let me tell you, bach, his top dog status was about to crumble. George Covington let it slip last night – accidentally-on-purpose, of course – that Digby had only ever been a floor manager. I, at least, was a producer.

  ‘That nugget of information broke up our cosy little group like a bomb going off, and Digby scuttled off, saying he’d left his glasses in the church. He was unsettled and no mistake.’

  ‘When was this?’ asked Falconer, his ears pricked up. Even Carmichael’s head had shot up from his notebook, and he now sat like a pointer dog that has spotted its prey.

  ‘After Midnight Mass. George was feeling so convivial that he opened the pub for an hour or so: just so that people could have a bit of an internal warmer before they went home.’

  ‘Nobody’s mentioned this,’ said Falconer, thoroughly thrown by this information. This shone a whole new light on things.

  ‘Well, you ask George. Most of the others in the bar were here. Ask them. Given the circumstances, they probably won’t volunteer the information. As I have done,’ he added, now becoming more sure of his position, and losing the lilt of the Valleys.

  ‘I most certainly will ask Mr Covington. Will you leave us now, and I’ll send my sergeant to fetch the next person for interview.’ Falconer was flabbergasted. How come nobody had said a word about this extra opening session? And then he answered his own question: because George didn’t have permission to open after Midnight Mass, and was keeping it quiet in case he got in trouble with the licensing authorities. And, of course, not knowing about it himself, he had not known to ask Alice Diggory or Warren Stupple if they had attended this very late carousal session.

  As Robin De’ath closed the door behind him, Carmichael gave a low whistle. ‘We’re doing well today, sir,’ he commented. ‘Another murder victim and a pub opening without permission. George still hasn’t signed up for the all-day opening, so he’s supposed to stick to regular hours. No wonder he hasn’t said a dicky bird.

  ‘That puts a whole new light on things. Not only do we have to find out who else was out and about at such an ungodly hour, but anyone could have slipped out, if George was having a bit of a ‘do’ in the pub. I think we’ll have to carry on with these initial interviews, and have a bit of a brainstorming session when we get back to your place. We’ll follow up on the other things we’ve just learnt tomorrow, when we’ve had time to reflect on things.

  ‘And I don’t know who to have in next. I’m spoilt for choice. Shall we try Cedric Malting, Castle Farthing’s own budding Shakespeare?’

  ‘I’ll fetch him, sir,’ offered Carmichael, and went in search of their next victim.

  Cedric Malting entered the room with a sort of sliding sideways movement, as if he were having trouble choosing between fight or flight, and flight was definitely fighting the hardest for supremacy.

  ‘Do sit down, Mr Malting. We’d just like to ask you a few questions about whether you noticed anything out of kilter in the church yesterday, and how you got on with Digby Jeffries.’

  Although Cedric knew why he had been summoned, his face still drained of colour. He was usually a mild man, and the only thing that had really made him angry since he had moved into his new house was the cruel teasing of his neighbour about his playwriting. How was he going to explain how he felt without positively incriminating himself?

  ‘I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary in the church, apart from that disgraceful falling out over who was to play Father Christmas, and I didn’t exactly see that, as it happened in the vestry,’ he offered, hoping that they wouldn’t delve too deeply about the run-ins he’d had with Digby. But his hope was to die immediately.

  ‘We’ve heard that Mr Jeffries used to tease you about your writing. Would you like to tell us a bit about that, Mr Malting?’

  And he felt the old fury rise in him, as he remembered some of the things that the man lately in the red suit had said to him. There was no way he could quell his ire, and the words burst from his mouth like machine gun fire.

  ‘He used to ridicule my efforts. He said I was living in Cloud Cuckoo Land if I thought any of my puerile scribblings would ever attract a professional company. He said I’d be spending my time better if I took up something more appropriate to my intellect, like basket-weaving. He used to lord it over us all, putting us down and playing the part of our superior, and then we find out last night that he was only a floor manager.

  ‘George Covington told us after Midnight Mass. I saw red and don’t know how I stayed in my seat, I was so furious. All that superiority, you’d have thought he was something really high up, and it turns out he was just a floor manager!’ Cedric almost spat the last two words. ‘Well, if he’d lived, he’d have had the rough side of not just my tongue, but of all the others he has treated as inferiors since he came here.’

  ‘What did Mr Jeffries do when Mr Covington let out his little secret?’ asked Falconer, wondering how the great pretender had coped with this unmasking.

  ‘He suddenly remembered he’d left his glasses in the church you know, his real ones, not those fake things he wore with his red suit – and he mumbled a bit in embarrassment, then said he was off to the church, as he knew it wasn’t locked, and he needed his glasses for the Christmas telly.’

  ‘And how did you feel when he left?’ Falconer wasn’t letting this fish off the hook so lightly.

  Cedric sat for a moment or two in silence, deciding what to disclose, then said, ‘I was just relieved that he could never look down on us again: that he wasn’t something high-powered at all – just a floor manager with delusions of grandeur. Oh, he handled it quite well, in retrospect, even stopping at the bar to have a drink with someone else, but he made sure that Paula served him, and not George. There’s going to be trouble there, I thought at the time.’

  Neat! thought Falconer, deflecting suspicion away from himself, and trying to incriminate someone else. Maybe the man did have some talent, spinning fiction.

  ‘Would you be so kind as to send in,’ Falconer consulted his list, ‘Mr Henry Pistorius, please. And thank you for your time, Mr Malting.’ Might as well keep it civilised.

  Henry Pistorius entered the room promptly, a gale of a man who radiated energy, wished them a booming ‘Merry Christmas’, and subsided into a chair like the aftermath of a storm. He was almost, but not quite, as tall as Carmichael, of a large loose build, his hair thin on top, and with what seemed the energy of a much younger man.

  ‘I know what you want to know about,’ he said in his deep resonant voice. ‘You want me to tell you about anything I noticed in the church, and how I got on with that o
ld devil Jeffries, don’t you?’

  ‘And a Merry Christmas to you too, Mr Pistorius,’ replied Falconer politely. ‘And, yes, you’re quite right about the enquiries we have for you. Would you care to tell us?’

  ‘Couldn’t be more happy to. Apart from the obvious, it’s come to my notice that there was something not quite kosher – if you know what I mean – about Jeffries’ attitude to and behaviour around children. It’s a thought that’s been slowly gelling in my mind for some time, but he always made me feel uncomfortable, even about the way he spoke about them.

  ‘Yesterday, I was particularly on watch, for I would hate to be wrong about something like that and, in my opinion, I considered that Jeffries was rather too tactile with the kiddies he gave presents to, and it just confirmed what I’d already noticed – that he couldn’t seem to keep his hands off very young ’uns skin.

  ‘Oh, I’ve never known him do anything really out of order, but he did have this habit of stroking their arms and legs, which I found over-familiar. I doubt whether the man went any further than that. I never spoke to him about it: it would have been too distasteful, especially if I’d proved to be wrong.

  ‘As for how we got on, well now, that man was a real tease. He used to rib me mercilessly about only having been involved in radio broadcasting, but I didn’t let him get to me. He obviously suffered from some kind of inferiority complex, the way he treated everyone, he wasn’t a happy man, and I felt sorry for him in a way. His ascendancy over us four – that’s Miss Diggory, Mr Malting, Mr De’ath, and myself – was one of the ways he coped with feeling inferior, and if he had a thing about kiddies, that must have made him very uneasy, possibly making him feel guilty a lot of the time.

  ‘He wasn’t the nicest of men, and he upset a lot of people, but nobody deserves to die like he did. That was blasphemous and sacrilegious, and whoever did it had a lot of hatred in their heart: that, or they were out of their mind. Jeffries may have needed to be taken down a peg or two, but not to die like that. Nobody deserves to have that happen to them.’