Chapter 42
Gerry rubbed his hands together with glee when he heard the news, and insisted on going up to the kennels on Dartmoor himself, leaving Rachel disappointed. Wesley knew she’d been looking forward to the outing.
Wesley drove as usual and Gerry gazed out of the car window, enjoying the view.
The journey took them through Neston and out to the edge of the moor, past small villages and farms to a more sparsely populated landscape.
A roughly painted sign beside a pair of ramshackle gateposts told them they’d reached their destination.
The rusty gate was firmly shut and padlocked, but when they left the car, they could hear dogs barking in the distance, though there was no other sign of life.
‘Sounds like the famous whisht hounds of Dartmoor, said Gerry, half joking.
The gate being locked, Wesley was forced to climb over, but Gerry hesitated.
‘Can’t you open it, Wes?’
Wesley looked at the padlock, new and shiny in contrast to the gate itself, and shook his head.
Gerry produced the skeleton keys he always carried with him, a gift, he claimed, from a grateful burglar many years ago.
He got to work, and when the lock snapped open, he pushed the gate open with a loud creak.
‘You could have done that earlier, saved me the climb,’ said Wesley.
‘Thought the exercise would do you good.’
Wesley shook his head, a smile playing on his lips. ‘I’m not the one who needs exercise, Gerry. Have you made that appointment with the physio my sister recommended?’
‘Haven’t had time, as you well know,’ said Gerry as he began to walk up the rough track. ‘Two deaths. Three if you count the man in the wall. We need to catch whoever’s doing this.’
‘Dale Gadson wanted to tell us something and Jim Baker is the obvious connection, but he’s denying everything. Let’s see what Betsy and Barnaby have to tell us about their time at St Julian’s.’
The sound of barking grew louder as they neared a low stone building, half hidden behind a copse of trees.
When it came into view, Wesley recognised it as a classic Devon longhouse, probably very ancient, designed to accommodate livestock at one end and humans at the other.
It was surrounded by more recent outhouses, but all the buildings had a neglected look.
The two detectives marched up to the front door and Gerry raised the heavy iron knocker, letting it fall three times.
Inside the house it must have sounded like a portent of doom.
When there was no reply, they walked round to the back of the house.
There they saw enclosures full of dogs. They had beds and toys, and the large spaces looked as though they had been kept clean.
Betsy and Barnaby Chalmers hadn’t been lying when they’d said they looked after the animals well.
When the dogs saw the newcomers, the barking grew excited, and the couple appeared at the door of a ramshackle outhouse each carrying a spade, as though they were preparing to defend their charges from attack.
When they saw who’d come calling, they put the spades to one side.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ Barnaby said warily. He didn’t seem pleased to see them, which was hardly surprising.
Betsy stood beside him looking as though she was poised for a swift getaway.
‘We’ve made our confession. We’ve told you everything.
All we want now is to be left alone until our court case comes up. ’
Betsy nodded in agreement. ‘That’s right. We’ve said we’re sorry. We’ve offered to give the money back. What more can we do?’
‘We’re not here about that,’ said Gerry. ‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’ The dogs were barking loudly now and it was getting difficult to hear over the noise.
Without another word, the couple led the way into the house.
The dusty room they ended up in contained furniture that looked as though it had been salvaged from a skip.
Wesley and Pam weren’t exactly obsessively house-proud, but this place made their house look like something out of Homes and Gardens.
A trio of large German shepherd dogs and an elderly Border collie were settled on the pair of sofas, and they looked up as the newcomers entered.
Betsy shooed one of them off so the policemen could sit down.
The dog obeyed, resigned to the disturbance, and made itself comfortable on a spare armchair.
Betsy must have seen Wesley watching the animals, because she explained that of the four, two had health problems and two had been found homes and were getting used to a domestic setting.
When she talked about the dogs, her expression softened.
It was clear she loved them. The hairy kidnap victims had never been in any danger, but that would probably make no difference to how the court viewed the offence when their case came to trial.
Once the detectives were seated, resigned to getting dog hair all over their clothing, Wesley came to the reason for their visit.
‘You lived in the house bought by Timothy Fontescue-Burns and renamed Casa Mirabilis. This was when you called yourselves Aphrodite and Apollo.’ He tilted his head to one side politely and awaited the answer.
The pair looked at each other. ‘What about it?’
‘You heard about the body found in the wall?’
They exchanged another look, then nodded in unison, reminding Wesley of a pair of nodding dogs he’d once seen in a souvenir shop. ‘It was on the radio.’
‘The body belonged to a man called Aleric Donnal. He was an academic with an interest in medieval history. Did he ever come to the house?’
Again in unison, they shook their heads. ‘Not while we were there.’
‘You don’t recognise the name?’
‘No.’
‘You lived there before Tim Fontescue-Burns bought the premises; when the house was known as St Julian’s and was owned by a bookseller called Ethelred Bingley. Mr Bingley’s daughter had your name – Aphrodite – on the list of tenants. But you were there too, weren’t you, Mr Chalmers?’
Betsy smiled. ‘Apollo’s name wasn’t actually on the rent book Mr Bingley insisted on giving us, but he lived there with me and we stayed on after Tim bought the house.
He changed the name from St Julian’s to Casa Mirabilis.
’ A faraway look appeared in her eyes, as though she was recalling her lost youth.
‘We were young and idealistic and we thought we could change the world. And Tim was charismatic. We’d have followed him to the ends of the earth. ’
‘So he was your commune leader?’
‘We called it a community of souls. Tim was a very spiritual man and Casa Mirabilis was on a ley line. He said there was an ancient sacred well in the grounds, probably pre-Christian.’
‘I know,’ said Wesley. ‘I’ve seen it.’
Barnaby looked surprised. ‘It was just an overgrown pile of stones when we lived there, but the ground around was waterlogged so you could tell there was a spring. Tim was planning to restore it, but he died before he had a chance.’
‘There was a chapel in the gardens. Ruined.’
Betsy nodded. ‘We saw some stones that looked as though they belonged to some kind of building. Tim said it was an ancient chapel; a sacred place on a ley line.’
‘Was any building work done while you were living in the house?’
‘A toilet was fitted under the stairs,’ said Betsy. ‘That was Tim’s idea, because there was only one for the whole house before that and there were five of us. Tim said five was a perfect number.’
‘Were you aware of any other building work being carried out before Tim moved in – when the house was owned by Mr Bingley? I’m thinking about the small dining room next to the kitchen.’
Betsy shook her head. ‘Nothing like that. And we never went in that room. It was just used for storage.’
‘Who else was living there at that time?’
The couple had a brief hushed conversation before Betsy answered the question. ‘We had a whole wing to ourselves, so we hardly saw them.’
‘Who are you talking about?’
‘Carlo. He was a student. He wanted to be a writer.’
‘Carlo what?’ Gerry was beginning to sound impatient.
‘It was something Italian, but I don’t think he was Italian. Maybe his parents were.’
‘Was his surname Lanzani?’
Her eyes lit up with recognition. ‘Yes, that was it.’
‘What can you tell us about him?’
The pair exchanged another look. ‘He only lived there for a few months, before the place was sold to Tim at the end of May. He came and went. We didn’t have much to do with him.’
‘Is there anything else you can tell us about him?’
Barnaby raised a hand. ‘He once told me Carlo Lanzani wasn’t actually his name. But before you ask, I don’t know what his real name was. He said it was boringly English – he even had a bit of a local accent – so I thought he must have chosen a more exotic name to make himself more interesting.’
‘You never told me that.’ Betsy sounded a little hurt.
Barnaby shrugged. ‘Didn’t I? Must have forgotten. Giving ourselves exotic names was the sort of thing a lot of us did in those days.’
‘Hence Aphrodite and Apollo?’
This caused a rueful smile. ‘We wanted to be different. Rebellious. We thought calling ourselves after a couple of Greek gods made us more . . . romantic. It was your idea, wasn’t it, Betsy?’
She nodded. ‘Silly when you look back. And life gets in the way of that sort of thing eventually.’
‘You say Carlo was a student.’ Wesley leaned forward. ‘What was he studying? And where?’
‘He was vague about it, but I think he was studying at Morbay.’
‘Subject?’ Gerry sounded impatient.
‘History, I think,’ said Betsy. ‘He was interested in the ruined chapel in the grounds. Used to spend a lot of time there. Meditating, he said.’
‘A man called Jim Baker lived at the house too, I believe.’
‘He only stayed a short while. He was into drugs, heavy stuff: acid and mushrooms. Eventually he went off to live with some girlfriend.’
‘When was this?’
‘It must have been around the time Tim took over. Tim was very choosy about who lived at Casa Mirabilis, and he said Carlo and Jim didn’t fit in with his ethos.’ She glanced at her partner. ‘But we did.’