Murder in the Museum

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Jude was thoughtful as she left Miss Hidebourne’s flat and stood waiting for her taxi. The old lady had, reasonably enough, not allowed her to take any of the letters with her, but given permission for further research visits if required. If he was fit enough, Jude wanted to get Laurence to come and look through the material. Though the image of him dripping his cigarette ash over the neat surfaces of Miss Hidebourne’s flat was incongruous, his instinct for research would quickly lead him to what was important.

Jude had found some useful detail in the letters, and pieced together a kind of chronology for Lieutenant Strider’s life in 1917. Writing to Gerard Hide-bourne, he had told how he’d used his influence from out in Flanders to get a commission in his own regiment for the eighteen-year-old Graham Chadleigh. There were a few mentions of the young man’s officer training, details passed on in letters Strider had received from Felix Chadleigh, and the Lieutenant’s clear view that such minimal preparation was inadequate for someone about to face the horrors of the Ypres Salient.

Then, at the beginning of October 1917, Strider wrote to his friend from Bracketts. He’d been given two weeks’ home leave and, since he had no close living relatives, the natural course was to spend that time with his old friend Felix Chadleigh and his family.

Jude recalled how the letter had captured the atmosphere of suppressed tension in the house.

After that letter, there had been a long gap in the correspondence between Lieutenant Strider and Gerard Hidebourne. It was not resumed until March 1920, by which time the doctors had done all they could for the crippled man and he was staying as a permanent invalid at Bracketts.

From the moment this new stream of letters started, the guilt was in them. Jude had read a few more, but they hadn’t added a lot to the first one Miss Hidebourne had shown her. Hugo Strider was deeply troubled by something dreadful he had done, something so dreadful he could not tell his closest friend, so dreadful he could not even breathe the secret in the anonymity of the confessional. And the crime was in some way related to the death of Graham Chadleigh.

‘You’re not meant to be down there,’ said the owner of the torch. ‘Nobody’s meant to go down there.’

‘But I’m a Trustee,’ protested Carole. In the circumstances her assertion sounded rather feeble.

‘I’m coming down,’ said Graham Chadleigh-Bewes. And, with considerable puffing and wheezing, he lowered himself down the rungs into the cell below.

His wide torch-beam sought out the opened boxes around Carole. ‘You shouldn’t be looking in those.’

All Carole could think of was to repeat the fact that she was a Trustee, but there didn’t seem much point.

‘This material’s all secret. It’s been down here since Esmond died. No one’s allowed to look at it.’ He sounded as if he was repeating a formula learnt by rote, a pupil in detention reciting the school rules.

‘Do you mean even you haven’t looked at it, Graham?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s forbidden.’

‘Is this the first time you’ve been down here?’

‘Yes. I heard rumours of the existence of a second Priest’s Hole, but I’ve never been here.’

‘Well, as Esmond’s biographer, I think you should have been.’ Carole gestured towards the boxes. ‘I’ve only glanced through it, but the little I’ve seen suggests that a revisionist view of Esmond Chadleigh is at least a possibility.’

‘Esmond was a good man. He did his best, according to his lights . . . according to the values with which he was brought up. He never harmed anyone.’

‘He may not have harmed anyone, but he was certainly involved in covering something up.’

‘What do you mean?’

Carole held out the letter from Felix Chadleigh to his son. Graham Chadleigh-Bewes’s fat face showed the struggle between two conflicting intentions. Then he made his decision. ‘I recognize the letter,’ he said.

Suddenly he snatched it from her, together with some of the other papers she had been looking at, and stuffed them into his pocket.

‘You mean you have been down here?’ asked Carole. ‘You have seen all this stuff?’

Caught out in his earlier lie, he nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘But you’re still not planning to include it in your biography?’

‘Some skeletons are best left undisturbed.’

‘Some of them refuse to stay undisturbed, Graham. That one in the kitchen garden that Jonny Tyson uncovered, that refused to be undisturbed, didn’t it?’

‘Yes. But nobody seems to know who it belonged to. It was nothing to do with the Chadleigh family.’

‘No? That’s certainly what you wanted people to think. You wanted people to think the body was buried before the Chadleighs moved here. Which is why you falsified the documents you gave to Professor Teischbaum, to try to put her off the scent.’

‘Maybe,’ he said sourly.

‘I think you were overreacting, Graham. Forensic science isn’t accurate enough to say exactly whether a body was buried in 1916 or 1917, so what you did was only going to cause a temporary confusion. The truth would have come out pretty quickly. All you achieved by your crude tampering with the documents was to reveal that you knew something about the body in the kitchen garden. And that you knew the body did have something to do with the Chadleigh family.’

‘Well, if it did, it was most likely the housekeeper’s son. Pat Heggarty. He went missing around that time.’

‘So how did Pat Heggarty come to have a bullet-hole in his head? Did one of the Chadleighs shoot him?’

‘No, of course not!’ Graham sounded flustered and confused.

‘All right. Let’s put that on one side for the moment. What about the other skeleton that refuses to stay undisturbed? Sheila Cartwright?’

He shook visibly at the mention of her name.

‘What about her? Who killed her, Graham?’

‘The police have arrested this convict, haven’t they?’

‘They’ve recaptured him. They’re holding him in Lewes Prison. But, so far as we know, that’s just because he escaped. They haven’t charged him with murder.’

‘Only a matter of time.’

‘Do you think so? Did you know, incidentally, that the convict, Mervyn Hunter, actually hid down here after he escaped?’

‘Really?’

Carole indicated the rug and candles. ‘He left those.’

‘Good God. How did he know the place existed?’

‘From some book he read in the library here, I think. But presumably you know the contents of the Bracketts library inside out . . .?’

‘Well . . .’ he prevaricated, ‘I can’t claim to have read everything.’

‘Tell me, Graham,’ said Carole, suddenly direct, ‘what did you do immediately after storming out of that Emergency Trustees’ Meeting on Friday?’

‘What the hell do you mean?’ He was full of a weak man’s ineffectual bluster. ‘Are you accusing me of murdering Sheila?’

‘I’m asking you what you did straight after the Emergency Trustees’ Meeting? If you have nothing to hide, I see no reason why you shouldn’t tell me.’

‘Because it’s none of your business!’

‘I may be being nosy, Graham, but I’m not accusing you of anything. If on the other hand, you don’t answer . . . well, that would make me suspicious.’

There was a silence, then he put his hand against the suspended floorboards in the middle of the cell, and mumbled truculently, ‘I went back to the cottage and straight to bed. I was very upset. Anyone’d be upset if they’d just had their life’s work rejected.’

‘Yes, of course. Are you sure you went straight up to bed? You didn’t go into any of the other rooms in the house?’

‘No . . .’

Carole pounced on the slight hesitation in his voice. ‘Did you go into the study, Graham?’

‘Why should I have done?’

‘That’s where you had Graham Chadleigh’s service revolver.’

‘No, I didn’t go in there,’ he snapped.

‘So you went straight upstairs to bed?’

He wilted under the ferocity of her gaze. ‘Well, no . . .’

‘Where did you go, Graham?’

‘Only into the kitchen. I got a tin of biscuits. I get very hungry when I’m upset.’

Looking at the girth of the pathetic child-man in front of her, Carole Seddon could well believe that.

‘But tell me, when did you . . .?’

Her words trickled away. A new panic fluttered her heart.

There was a sound of footsteps on the floor above them. And of voices.