Chapter Nine
NINE
By the time Alec and his team reached Tunbridge Wells, the day was still hotter, more like August than June.
Colonel Pelham had lived on the north side of the common.
His favourite public house, the Duke of York, was in the Pantiles on the south side, one of the old buildings surrounding the hot springs, a fashionable spa since the seventeenth century.
When they stopped to drop off Tom, he looked at the common, dropping into a valley then rising again, and groaned. “Why can’t these people live closer to their locals?” he demanded.
“It would have made things more difficult for our murderer,” Alec pointed out. “The common’s well wooded, with plenty of lurking places, and roads as well as footpaths cutting across so he could have left a vehicle not too far from his chosen spot.”
“Bloody lucky murderer,” Tom grunted. “If one of ’em had lived in a busy street—”
“He’d have found a way. It seems to me he must have been obsessed with these three, and might well have been studying their habits and movements for some time.”
“That means you think the pub connection’s valid, Chief?” Piper asked eagerly.
“Hold on, Ernie! It’s still only speculation. You’re going too fast. The landlords of both the Cricketers and the Goat and Compasses said no strangers were about on the evenings Devine and Halliday disappeared.”
Mackinnon nodded. “He canna hae been a local resident in both Guildford and Ayot St. Paul.”
“No,” Piper had to agree, somewhat crestfallen. “It must have been the army, then.”
“I’m not ready to give up either possibility,” Alec said firmly. “Let’s hope Tom will find enlightenment at the Duke of York.”
Tom cast another sour look at the common.
“Dunno about enlightenment but you’ll find a pint, Sarge,” Piper consoled him. “It’s ten minutes to closing time.”
“Ten minutes? Ta, laddie. I’m on my way.” Always light on his feet for such a big man, Tom rapidly disappeared into the arcade.
“Happy thought, Ernie,” said Alec. “Let’s go.”
Colonel Pelham had lived in a stuccoed post-war bungalow, painted a bilious shade of mustard yellow with a dreary olive-green front door. The contrast with the typical Kentish red-tile roof was particularly distressing.
The front garden was laid out with military precision.
A rectangular patch of lawn on each side of the brick path had rectangular flowerbeds centred in each lawn, edged with low, rectangular box hedges, as was the path.
The beds were planted with rigid rows of magenta rose-campion and sternly staked red-hot pokers.
The overall effect was sufficiently hideous to draw a “Blimey!” from Piper, who had not seen it the night before.
Alec sent Mackinnon to talk to the neighbours.
The Kent police had done so when Mrs. Pelham first reported her husband missing, but without any great sense of urgency.
After the passage of ten months, the likelihood of any remembering much about the late August evening he’d disappeared was slim.
The possibility couldn’t be ignored, though.
The subsequent enquiries might have fixed some oddment in someone’s memory that they hadn’t bothered to bring up earlier but would recall now that it was a matter of murder.
As Alec and Piper walked up the garden path, their ears were assailed by a well-bred but determined female voice floating out through an open window.
“Everything,” it insisted. “The lawn, the box, the campion—hideous colour!—the lot. I’m putting in a forsythia, and rambler roses, and … What else sprawls all over the place?”
“But madam—”
“What else?”
“Well, buddleia, madam, an’… But they be mortal untidy, madam!”
“Just what I want, a bit of untidiness in my life. Nasturtiums! Trailing geraniums! You can start digging everything up, Johnson, and I’ll get a book to help me decide what to plant.”
“Yes, madam,” came the mournful, resigned voice of—presumably—the gardener.
Alec knocked on the front door.
“Oh good, that must be the painter. I wonder why he’s come to the front door? But never mind, the sooner he gets busy the better. You, too, Johnson. Off you go and get rid of the whole lot.”
“If ’ee sez so, madam.”
“I do.” Mrs. Pelham, a stout woman in her sixties, of commanding aspect, appeared at the window of the room to the right. “Oh, it’s the police. Good afternoon, Mr. Fletcher. You haven’t come to tell me there’s been a mistake and the colonel’s been found alive and well after all, have you?”
“I’m afraid not, Mrs. Pelham.”
“Thank goodness! Come in, come in, do. Now I remember, you said you’d be back today.
I hope you don’t imagine I murdered William, though I can’t say I didn’t sometimes consider it!
” She giggled, a sound so incongruous with her appearance and inappropriate to the occasion that Alec couldn’t think of anything to say.
He opened the door, which was not locked, and stepped into a narrow hall. A man in gardener’s clothes was tramping away towards the back of the house, muttering, “Mortal maggotty she be!”
As Piper was closing the front door behind him, Mrs. Pelham came to the sitting-room door. “Leave it open, young man,” she commanded. “The colonel insisted on having it closed, even in the hottest weather, but at last I’m free of his tyranny. Leave it open, wide open!”
They followed her into the sitting room where Alec, last night, had posed delicate questions about her husband’s toes.
It was all dark wood, leather upholstery, and crimson curtains, in accordance, he assumed, with Colonel Pelham’s taste.
He wondered what she’d replace it with. She didn’t seem the sort of woman who’d cover everything in chintz, but the girlish giggle proved her unpredictable.
For all he knew, she’d always longed for a room decked in multiple shades of pink frills.
“Sit down,” she commanded, and, as a maid came in, added, “will you take tea or coffee? Or—no—lemonade! William didn’t care for lemonade. Have we any lemons, Bella? He didn’t approve of calling servants by their given names, either.”
“I’ll ask Cook, ma’am,” said Bella, and departed.
Mrs. Pelham turned to the men with an expectant air. Alec introduced Piper, who took out his notebook and one of his ever-ready well-sharpened pencils.
“All I want at present,” said Alec, “is an idea of Colonel Pelham’s character and as many names as you can come up with of his relatives, friends, and other people he associated with.”
“Anyone he could buttonhole. He was a monumental bore, telling the same army stories over and over again. Very few of them were even remotely interesting the first time. He did have one friend of sorts, a junior officer who had served under him, a captain he was. Now what was his name?”
Alec could see that Piper was all agog, the name “Devine” hovering on his lips. He shook his head slightly at the eager young man. He didn’t want his witness prompted.
“Beresford,” said Mrs. Pelham, and Piper’s shoulders sagged in disappointment.
“Bernard Beresford, that’s it. His family’s local.
We only came here after the War, you know.
I’m not saying Captain Beresford would have chosen to be William’s closest friend, but he was the sort who can’t say boo to a goose, and my husband, as you may have gathered, was a tyrant and a bully. ”
Obviously Beresford could have held a grudge against the colonel for having been forced into intimacy with him.
Could the constant repetition of pointless stories, like a variation on the Chinese water torture, have driven him in the end to murder?
Was it possible he had also known Halliday and Devine in the army and found in their behaviour towards him a cause for bitter resentment?
Devine hadn’t sounded like someone who would take advantage of another’s meekness.
“How on earth did Beresford rise to the rank of captain if he was so timid?” Alec asked.
“Sheer longevity! He was shoved into the army by his family—one of those ridiculous traditions. William said it was bad for morale to have a lieutenant in his late forties, so he was promoted, but there was simply no justification for making him a major.”
“Where did they serve together?”
“In the Buffs, the East Kent Regiment. They were always dashing off to Africa to fight one war or another. They both retired before the Great War, of course, and Captain Beresford—who preferred, incidentally, to be addressed as plain Mister—Where was I? Oh, yes, he was too old for the Territorials, a dozen years older than William. He died just two years ago at nearly eighty. He joined the Local Defence Volunteers, though what use he’d have been boggles the imagination. But there, luckily we weren’t invaded.”
Alec and Piper had lost interest in Beresford as soon as they heard he’d been dead for two years.
“Which branch of the Territorial Army was your husband in, Mrs. Pelham?”
“One of the TA battalions of the Buffs, in the Home Counties Division. Once they started taking volunteers in the regular army, they let him go in spite of his age. They needed experienced officers, of course, even if they were mess-room bores. But I don’t suppose they had much of a mess-room for him to bore people in, most of the time. ”
“You don’t happen to know which battalion he ended up in?”
“Why on earth…? Well, never mind, yes, as it happens, I do. If something’s repeated often enough, it sinks in even if you’re not listening.
He was in the Eighth Battalion. They went all over the place, Ypres, Loos, the Somme, and who knows where else.
Wherever there were trenches. William didn’t approve of trenches.
He said the Buffs had fought without in Napoleon’s war and the Boer War and they ought to be out attacking, not cowering in holes in the ground.
I must say, it seems to me that if someone is shooting at you, a hole in the ground is quite a sensible place to be. ”