Chapter 3
Under the watchful eye of the ancestors rendered in oils and affixed to the passage walls, Julia and Jess looked first into a formal sitting room, and then into a more casual room with a television.
But there was no sign of trouble. In fact, there was no sign of anyone, no second scream, no panicked footsteps, and Julia was beginning to wonder whether they’d been mistaken about the noise, and whether it had come from a radio, or a dog, or a person with a stubbed toe, when they reached the third door.
It was ajar, showing a wall of wooden bookshelves framing a large fireplace, an ornate Persian rug and a heavy wooden desk. And a woman. She was bent over, leaning heavily on the arm of the sofa at the far end of the room, looking over the back. Her face was hidden by her long blonde curls.
‘Wake up! Come on!’ she was crying.
‘Are you all right?’ Julia asked, walking towards her.
The woman stood up and looked around. Julia saw that she was young – older than Jess, maybe in her early thirties, she guessed. She was holding a white marble lamp with a pink shade.
‘There’s been an accident. He’s hurt.’ She pointed.
Julia walked forward to look. There on the floor, behind the sofa, lay Colonel Clarence Loxton.
‘Oh my lord,’ gasped Julia.
‘I found him like that,’ said the woman. ‘I think he’s…’
He was flat on his back, arms at his sides, palms up, as if he were sunbathing. Although Julia suspected that he was well beyond warming by any sun. By all appearances, he was stone-cold dead. Julia felt a shiver run through her own body.
‘What’s going on?’ said Biddy from the doorway. ‘What was that scream? Are you all right, Emily?’
Ah, so the young woman was Marigold’s daughter.
Emily shook her head. No, she was not all right.
Biddy saw the colonel. She went pale. ‘What happened? He’s not…’
‘Biddy, phone the emergency services,’ Julia cut in, in an authoritative voice that had the housekeeper reaching into her pocket for her phone.
Julia knelt and leaned forward to feel for a pulse on the colonel’s neck.
She wasn’t hopeful. His eyes were open and glassy, and his recently ruddy face was deathly pale, almost the colour of the luxuriating bear of a moustache.
His skin felt cool. There was no sign of injury.
She wondered if he’d had a heart attack, just weeks after his sister had died of the same thing.
‘I know CPR,’ said Jess, who had finally stepped over the threshold. ‘Remember, Mum, I did that first-aid course when I was in my final year at school.’
‘Oh, darling. I don’t think that will be needed.’ Julia had seen enough dead bodies to know when a person was gone. Colonel Loxton was beyond help.
Julia looked over at Emily, who was still clutching the lamp, her face white and as expressionless as a zombie.
Biddy was shouting into the phone, ‘I need an ambulance, it’s an emergency… Greystone Manor in Berrywick.’
Julia looked at Emily. ‘Emily, can you tell us what happened? How you found him?’
‘I came to talk to my uncle. About when I plan to go back to France. And I found him like… this,’ she said, gesturing towards the body without looking at it.
‘You didn’t touch anything?’
‘No, of course not,’ she said with a shiver. ‘I would never…’
‘And the lamp?’ Julia asked.
Emily looked at it as if noticing it for the first time. ‘It was on the floor next to him. He must have knocked it when he fell, I think. I picked it up. It looked so awkward there, right by his head. Unless… I’ve just had a thought. Do you think he might have been electrocuted?’
Julia was quite taken aback that Emily had so quickly assumed that the colonel had not simply had a heart attack. ‘I really don’t know. The cause of death will have to be determined.’
There was no blood anywhere on the scene, which was a relief. Julia had seen a good few bloodied bodies in her time, and hoped never to see another. A quick, clean heart attack – or even an electrocution – would be better than some of the horrors she’d witnessed.
Then, for the second time that day, the sound of a woman in distress rattled Julia’s nerves. This time, it was a high-pitched shriek. And this time, the shriek was issued from a heavily pregnant woman standing in the doorway.
‘Oh dear,’ said Biddy, under her breath. ‘It’s Beth.’
‘Oh no! Oh dear, Daddy!’ The pregnant woman dropped to her knees next to the body, sobbing. If shock had rendered Emily dazed and mute, it made this woman hysterical.
‘Wake up! Wake up!’ she shouted, shaking the lifeless man. She turned to the others, ‘Why aren’t you doing something? Don’t just stand there!’
Julia couldn’t help thinking that she was almost like a character in a play, or perhaps an opera, so dramatic was her reaction. But if Julia knew one thing, it was that shock affected different people in different ways.
Emily put her hand gently on the woman’s shoulder. ‘Beth, please, come and sit down. The ambulance is on its way. You shouldn’t overexcite yourself, not with the baby on the way.’
Mention of the baby calmed Beth. She nodded and allowed herself to be led to a wing-back chair next to the fireplace, where she sat down heavily with a sigh.
Jess went over to her. Julia heard her offering to fetch a glass of water.
The woman’s sobs grew quieter, slowly fading into gulps and sniffs.
‘The colonel’s daughter?’ Julia asked Biddy, quietly.
‘The colonel’s daughter-in-law. His daughter, Clara, lives in Oxford.
She trained as a nurse but she works for some health organisation and travels a lot, all over, all sorts of places.
She’s in Africa at the moment, I think. This is Beth, who is married to the colonel’s son, Gregory.
They live here at the manor, and as you see, they are expecting.
It’s their first child, and the colonel’s first grandchild,’ said Biddy, under her breath.
‘Beth was very attentive to the colonel, made a great fuss of him.’
Now that the colonel’s body was clear of shocked relatives, Julia squatted down to have another proper look at it.
There was no obvious sign of injury, no blood.
It seemed as if he had had a quick, efficient death.
A massive heart attack, or perhaps a fatal stroke.
The only thing out of place, aside from the lamp, was one shiny brown leather loafer that had come off his foot, presumably when he fell, and was lying on its side a little way from the body.
She knew better than to disturb the corpse, but she leaned in close to examine his face.
The moustache drew her eye, as luxurious as ever, as if untouched by the death of its owner.
It stood proud of the colourless lips, which were slightly parted to reveal a glimpse of teeth.
She put her hands on her thighs to help hoist herself to standing, and as she prepared to do so, something caught her eye. Under the colonel’s sparse grey hair, just behind his left temple, there bloomed a pale mauve bruise.
Julia Bird sighed and straightened up, feeling the stiffness in her creaky knees.
She didn’t mention the bruise to anyone, but reached into her jacket pocket for her phone and scrolled through her contacts to find the name Hayley Gibson.
It seemed that this was a job for the detective inspector of Berrywick police.
Julia spoke quietly into the phone, telling Hayley about the scene she had come across, and the bruise on the man’s temple.
As they spoke, she heard the sounds of Hayley leaving the office. The roll of her chair wheels on the floor, the slam of a drawer, the clinking of keys and finally, the opening of the car door – and the slam as it closed.
‘There in six minutes,’ said the detective, her voice coming through the car’s sound system.
The room fell awkwardly silent. No one knew quite what to do while they waited for the ambulance and the police.
Julia’s tummy rumbled, and she realised how hungry she was.
She thought longingly of Biddy’s delicious sandwiches languishing on the wooden board in the kitchen.
The thought made her mouth water and her tummy rumble even more loudly, and that made her feel guilty.
What sort of person hankered after a sandwich while in the actual presence of a dead man?
She tried to distract herself from her hunger by surveying the scene. What would Hayley make of it? she wondered. She tried to analyse it as a detective might. What was strange, or out of place?
The shoe. The brown leather loafer. She moved closer to it and stared hard, but nothing revealed itself.
It must have slipped off when he collapsed.
She looked at the foot it had come off, and noticed that it looked not quite right.
The middle toe was sticking up higher than the others.
She wondered if the colonel had previously injured it somehow, and slipped his shoe off to relieve the pressure.
Or if he had somehow lost the shoe and injured the foot at the same time, perhaps by tripping, or banging it against something.
Could he have hurt his toe and bashed his head in a very unfortunate fall?
She took a few steps towards Biddy Glenn and said quietly, ‘I’m wondering about the shoe, and why it’s off. Did the colonel have anything wrong with his foot? Do you know if he’d hurt it somehow? Or if he was troubled by gout or arthritis or anything?’
‘No,’ said Biddy. ‘Not that I know of. His foot seemed fine this morning. I would have noticed if he was hurt.’
Julia had had the same thought – she had seen him herself that morning, and she was sure she would have noticed if he’d been limping. The two women stared at the body, each deep in their own thoughts.
The sound of tyres on gravel nudged them back into the present.