The House At Sea’s End

CHAPTER 13

The sheltered housing looks rather pleasant in the spring sunshine. The grounds are immaculate, the grass cut in neat deckchair stripes, the beds full of daffodils. The buildings too are attractive, low and red brick, doors and windows freshly painted. Not bad, thinks Nelson approvingly, one day he might have to fix his mum up with something like this. Not yet, though. Maureen Nelson goes mad if anyone mentions the words ‘pensioner’ or ‘sheltered’ or, especially, ‘warden’. Besides, when the time comes, Nelson has two older sisters who will manage the whole thing, complaining all the time about the extra work but scorning any offers of help, especially from him. It’s handy being the youngest sometimes.

Now, Nelson presses the bell marked with the dreaded word ‘warden’, but surely even Maureen wouldn’t disapprove of the charming, soft-spoken man (possibly Irish, like Maureen herself) who ushers him through the double doors and into a ground floor flat.

‘Do you live on site?’ asks Nelson.

‘Yes,’ says the warden, whose name is Kevin Fitzherbert.

‘Lots of places, they say “warden” but it’s just a voice on the end of the phone, not someone living downstairs who’ll come and unblock your sink for you.’

‘Is that what you do? Unblock sinks?’

‘That, and find lost glasses, help people up if they take a tumble, change the channel on the TV – there’s hell to pay if they can’t get Countdown – undo jars, post their pools coupons.’

Nelson looks round the room. It is comfortable and extremely neat with a single armchair pushed close to the TV, remote control and folded Radio Times on the arm.

‘Are you married, Mr Fitzherbert?’ he asks, accepting an invitation to sit down.

Kevin Fitzherbert looks slightly discomforted. ‘Divorced. My wife and I… we had our problems… but I’m off the drink now, been off it for five years. I’m in AA. Made a completely new start.’

Not for the first time Nelson wonders at the things people will disclose to the police without being asked. The fact that Kevin Fitzherbert used to have a drink problem might be relevant or it might not. Either way, Nelson stores the information away and smiles non-committally.

‘Tell me about Hugh Anselm,’ he says.

‘Ah…’ Fitzherbert looks genuinely sad now, the Irish lilt well to the fore. ‘That was a tragedy, so it was. A fine gentleman. A true gentle man, if you get my meaning. One of the old school.’

Nelson wonders where else he heard this phrase recently. ‘How did he die?’ he asks.

‘Heart attack,’ says Fitzherbert. ‘He had a heart problem. Angina. It was very serious, the slightest exertion could trigger an episode. He knew he could go any time. I try to call on the older residents once a day, check they’re all right. Most people like a regular time. I used to see Hugh at nine o’clock, he was an early riser. We’d have a cup of tea, have a go at the Telegraph crossword together. He was a whizz at crosswords, Hughie. Anyway, I called on him as usual and there was no answer. I thought it was odd so I used my master key and went in. He was sitting in his stairlift, seatbelt on, stone dead.’

‘Why did he have a stairlift?’ asks Nelson, suddenly thinking. ‘Aren’t these all flats?’

‘No, some are maisonettes. They’re the nicest units really. Hugh had some stairs and climbing made him breathless, so he used the lift.’

‘How long did they think he’d been there?’

‘Almost twenty-four hours the coroner thought. He must have got into the lift just after I’d left him the day before.’

‘The coroner. Did the police investigate? One of my team?’ The incident must have happened when he was on his holiday, thinks Nelson. It still rang a faint bell though.

‘Yes, a nice fellow called Clough. I remember the name because I used to be a big Forest fan.’

Clough! That’s why the story seemed familiar; Nelson must have read it in the weekly report. Although Clough isn’t really to blame – the death appeared to be natural causes and he did write it up – Nelson still feels slightly irritated with his sergeant.

‘Mr Fitzherbert,’ he says, leaning forward, ‘as I said on the phone, I’m interested in anything Hugh Anselm may have told you about the war. Especially his years in the Home Guard.’

‘I know you mentioned it and I’ve been wracking my brains so. But the truth is he never talked about the war. I think he’d been in the RAF but he never spoke about it. He was all for peace, Hugh. Wouldn’t even wear a poppy. Said Remembrance Day should be as much about the German war dead as the British. He said there was no good side and no bad side, only winners and losers. He was a bit of a Leftie really. Used to write all these letters to the papers about Iraq and so on.’

‘But he read the Telegraph?’

‘Ah, that was just for the crossword. He took the Guardian too and the New Statesman. History magazines as well. He was a fine, well-educated man.’

‘Mr Fitzherbert, I know it sounds odd but did Hugh Anselm ever mention… Lucifer?’

‘Lucifer? Dear God, no.’ In an instinctive gesture, Fitzherbert’s hand hovers over his forehead. A Catholic then.

There’s nothing else here, thinks Nelson. Hugh was a fine, well-educated man who died, aged eighty-six, of a heart attack. No close family, Nelson has already asked. His wife died eight years ago. No children. Nobody to mourn him except Kevin Fitzherbert, who missed his company over the crossword.

But, at the door, Nelson has a Columboesque last thought.

‘The stairlift. Was it up or down?’

Fitzherbert’s brow creases. ‘That’s the funny thing. It was halfway up.’

‘Halfway up? Had it broken?’

‘Must have done, but it’s an odd thing. They’re serviced regularly, and when I saw Hugh sitting there I pressed the button. It was an instinctive thing really. And the lift moved instantly.’

‘So why would it stop halfway up?’

‘Something must have interfered with the current. Or Hugh pressed the button by accident.’

‘Or someone could have stopped it,’ says Nelson.

Nelson drives back to the station, thinking hard. On the face of it, the deaths of the two old men could be from natural causes. But there are enough questions now to add up to a suspicion. How did the stairlift stop in mid air? What did Archie mean by the word ‘Lucifer’ and what was the blood oath sworn by the two men when they were still teenagers? There’s something else too that’s nagging at him. Something to do with an armchair, a Radio Times and Ruth Galloway. He frowns, taking the corner by the Campbell’s Soup factory on two wheels.

When he gets in, he asks Leah for black coffee and fills in a form requesting an autopsy on Archie Whitcliffe. His boss will see it, no question, but it makes sense to get the wheels in motion. ‘Just following procedure,’ he’d say, when challenged. Whitcliffe is a great one for procedure.

As he is laboriously filling in the boxes, Clough appears in the doorway.

‘You wanted me, boss?’ Nelson had sent him a text.

‘Yes, sit down a minute.’

Clough sits down, his jaws still working on some item of food lodged in his back teeth.

‘It’s about Hugh Anselm.’

Clough looks blank.

‘The old man found dead in the stairlift.’

‘Oh, yes. It was while you were on holiday. Poor old bloke got in his stairlift, had a heart attack, found the next morning. I filed a report.’ Slightly defensively.

‘The stairlift stopped halfway up. You didn’t think that was odd?’

‘The warden thought it must have malfunctioned. Or the old boy pressed the wrong button by mistake. There were no suspicious circumstances.’ Definitely defensive.

‘What happened to Hugh Anselm’s stuff? His belongings?’

‘I don’t know. I presumed next-of-kin took them.’ Clough looks curious now. ‘What’s this all about, boss?’

‘Probably nothing.’

‘Is there a link to old man Whitcliffe?’

That’s the trouble with Clough. He’s not as thick as he looks.

‘Possibly. They were both in the Home Guard, and before he died Hugh Anselm wrote a letter to a German military historian. He said something had happened in 1940 that had haunted him all his life. A “great wrong” he called it.’

‘Do you think it was the murder of our six chums?’ The team now know that the dead men were almost certainly German. Nelson has heard Clough calling them ‘the Nazi boy band’.

‘I don’t know and now there’s no-one left to ask.’

‘Suspicious,’ says Clough happily.

‘Yes.’

Clough is on his way out when Nelson calls him back. ‘Cloughie, what do you know about Countdown?’

‘Countdown, boss? It’s a quiz programme. Teatime TV. For the oldies. It’s a word game. Dictionary corner and all that.’

‘The sort of thing someone who liked crosswords would enjoy?’

‘I suppose so.’

Because Nelson had identified the thought that was nagging at him. Archie’s newspaper, folded back at his day’s viewing. Countdown, Coronation Street, Panorama, an afternoon film matinee of Went the Day Well?

When Clough has gone, he googles Went the Day Well?

‘Chilling classic,’ he reads, ‘imagining the brutal Nazi invasion of a sleepy English village.’