Chapter and Hearse Read online

  ‘You mean you would really like to have it back again?’

  ‘Only if the price was right, naturally.’ He sniffed. ‘It’s not worth anything like what you gave for it, I can tell you.’

  ‘Really?’ she said.

  ‘Not without the view.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right.’

  He waved an arm over the valley. ‘But with it … then, that’s different, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very,’ said Marion Carstairs drily.

  ‘Think about it,’ he said.

  ‘I will,’ she promised.

  ‘Mind you, I won’t pay a lot.’ He twisted his lips. ‘But you’re not going to get too many people willing to take the Toft off your hands now.’

  ‘Not without the view,’ she conceded gravely.

  * * *

  She was highly amused, though, when she described the encounter to her sister. ‘What? No, we didn’t talk money. It’s a bit soon.’

  ‘Soon for what?’ enquired Jean.

  ‘My Christmas trees. I’m waiting for the valuable seasonal trade, remember…’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And for the damage from the fomes to be quite apparent.’

  * * *

  Marion Carstairs was all sympathy the next time she saw Mike Boness. ‘Your poor hedge, Mr Boness. It has got something nasty, hasn’t it? I do hope you weren’t hoping to use it for timber.’

  ‘I’ve got an expert coming to see it,’ he said thickly, ‘and if he tells me that it’s anything you’ve done to it, then I’ll be taking the matter further.’

  ‘Me?’ protested Marion. ‘I haven’t been near your hedge.’

  ‘He’s a proper tree specialist.’

  ‘Just what you need,’ she said.

  ‘He’ll know, and then watch out.’

  ‘If I’ve done anything,’ she corrected him.

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ he said, storming away, red-faced. ‘For my money, you’ll be hearing more about this.’

  * * *

  Marion watched the arboriculturist come and go from behind her bedroom curtain. The one thing she didn’t want at this stage was to be recognized. She was pleased, though, to see the expert look long and hard over the fence into her garden and then go over to peer equally hard at and dig round the remains of a felled birch tree on Mike Boness’s land. That was after he had taken some samples of soil and of a fungus that had made its appearance on some of the leylandii roots. He took a core sample too from the stem of one of the dying leylandii trees.

  * * *

  ‘A textbook examination,’ she reported to her sister, metaphorically rubbing her hands. ‘Any minute now he’ll be telling Boness about the fomes and that the spore could have come from that old birch of his. Birches are very susceptible to fomes too.’

  ‘Like leylandii and Christmas trees,’ observed her sister happily.

  ‘Exactly. Now, I think our time has come … How much did you say you and Paul lost when you sold the house back to Boness, Jean?’

  The sum of money named by Jean Mullen formed the basis of a claim by Marion Carstairs, the retired professor of plant biology at the Toft, against Michael Boness, the owner of the Croft, for damage to a substantial crop of Picea abies – otherwise known as Christmas tree – by a fungus called fomes, caught from his leylandii trees.

  It was successful.

  And without coming to court either.

  A Soldier of the Queen

  Private Saffery was quite surprised at the extent of his own fear. Nothing he had ever experienced in his time in the army so far had been quite as frightening as this. He shivered, clutched his gun even more tightly and nerved himself to a total and unnatural stillness.

  Worst of all was the waiting.

  His ordeal had begun on the Friday morning when the next week’s roster had been pinned up in the barracks which were presently being occupied by the 2nd Battalion of the East Calleshire Regiment.

  ‘Sentry duty?’ said his oppo, Mike Clarkson. ‘Nothing to it, mate. Did my stint last month and not a thing happened.’

  ‘As I remember,’ Saffery remarked sturdily, ‘you didn’t enjoy it and said so quite a lot.’

  ‘No … Well, not at the time, maybe,’ agreed Clarkson. ‘But it was all right afterwards.’

  ‘So’s having a baby, my mother says,’ retorted Saffery.

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ conceded Clarkson, ‘but all I can say, Kev, is that though I admit sentry duty is no picnic at the time, it’s no problem after you’ve done it once. Honest.’

  ‘Like having a baby, I suppose,’ said Kevin Saffery, who at the time hadn’t known all that much about either process.

  He did now.

  About the preparations for sentry duty, anyway. And just at this moment Private Kevin Saffery heartily wished it was already afterwards for him too, just like it was for Mike Clarkson.

  Even so, his friend Private Clarkson had been more encouraging than some of his other mates. They seemed inclined to regard a turn of sentry duty in this day and age, let alone in this place, as something of an initiation rite.

  ‘After which I’ll be a real soldier, I suppose,’ Kevin had said bitterly in response to this. He came from an old army family where the expression ‘being a real soldier’ didn’t just mean not crying when you grazed your knee falling off your bike. It meant the same as ‘being blooded’ in other fields – notably the hunting ones – as well as most probably literally becoming ‘bloodied’ into the bargain.

  ‘Well, you’ll be different anyway,’ Clarkson had mumbled inarticulately. ‘And you’ll feel different somehow. Bit difficult to explain…’

  Now, out of the barracks and – except for one other soldier in sight – to all intents and purposes entirely on his own, Kevin Saffery knew what Clarkson had meant. He shivered again. And not from cold.

  ‘Watch out for the kids,’ Clarkson had warned him too. ‘They’re worse than the adults. Much worse.’

  It was something Private Saffery had already heard on all sides and he had said so.

  ‘When I have kids,’ said Private Clarkson feelingly, ‘I shall lock ’em up indoors when they’re not in school. All the time.’

  On the other hand, Private Milligan’s advice had been strictly practical. ‘When you see them getting ready to shoot…’

  ‘Yes?’ he had asked urgently.

  ‘Freeze, man, freeze, or you’ll never hear the end of it.’

  ‘Thanks a lot, mate.’

  For nothing, he nearly added. Not being able to keep absolutely still was the one thing Private Kevin Saffery feared most of all.

  As usual, the Corporal had managed to be his customary nasty little self at the same time as being strictly practical. ‘Your main problem, all of you lot,’ he had said, when addressing the next week’s roster of raw duty men in the barrack room, ‘will be cramp. Simple but painful. And sleeping with corks in your bed like your granny does won’t help.’

  There was a dutiful snigger.

  ‘The ’uman body,’ he went on, ‘wasn’t meant for keeping really still for as long as you’ve got to do it for.’ He sneered. ‘Now, if you was cats it would come easy. But you’re not cats, are you?’ He glared at them. ‘Well, are you cats?’

  ‘No, Corporal,’ they had chorused. Kevin had heard some reservation about this on his left, but fortunately the words ‘It’s that ginger torn from next door’ and a veiled reference to an overseas cathouse had not reached the Corporal. There would have been trouble if they had.

  Big trouble.

  ‘Cats can watch mice for hours without twitching a whisker,’ declared the little corporal, ‘and if I catch any of you shower twitching whiskers while you’re on sentry go you’re on a charge. Understood?’

  ‘Understood,’ they had all echoed dutifully, murder in their hearts. The name of the murder was ‘fragging’ and Private Saffery had learned the word at his grandfather’s knee.

  ‘Saw a bit of it done once,’ the old
man had once told him, still too much of an old soldier and thus too wise to say right out whether or not he’d been the one to do it. ‘On the road to Mersa Matruh.’

  ‘But what is it, Grandad?’ a younger and more innocent Kevin had wanted to know. He’d been of an age then when new words – especially the dubious-sounding ones which his grandfather used – were suddenly interesting. He’d only just been clouted by his mother for saying ‘frigging’ and to a lad of his age the word ‘fragging’ seemed deliciously dangerous-sounding too.

  ‘Dangerous?’ his grandfather had growled. ‘Of course it was dangerous. To both sides, you might say.’

  ‘But what does “fragging” mean, Grandad?’

  Any resemblance of the tableau the two of them made, talking at his grandfather’s gate, to the famous picture of little Peterkin asking old Kaspar about a certain famous victory at Blenheim was purely coincidental.

  ‘Theoretically,’ said old grandfather Saffery, a faraway look in his rheumy eyes, ‘fragging is when you kill the man who leads you into danger in war.’

  ‘Yes, but what is it really?’ The word ‘theoretically’ was one that a young Kevin already knew and did not like. ‘Can’t you give me a frinstance, Grandad? Please…’

  The old man had gone on staring into the distance. ‘It’s when you take the opportunity to shoot some bastard of a Corporal in the back of his head on the only occasion when you’ve got half a chance of doing it without being caught in the act – which is when you’re going into action behind him. Now, be off with you, boy, before it happens to you.’

  Kevin had got halfway down the path before he heard his grandfather shout after him. He turned back. ‘What is it, Grandad?’

  ‘I said that corporals are dangerous and don’t you ever forget it.’

  ‘No, Grandad. I won’t.’

  ‘Especially little ones…’

  The person who looked most dangerous of all while the Corporal was going through his spiel was Private ‘Edge’ Bates. Edge wasn’t his real name. Private Bates was called this because of the time he spent sharpening his bayonet. No one, declared Edge Bates with monotonous frequency, was going to creep up behind him on a dark night without feeling the specially sharpened blade.

  The Sergeant had been as full of dire warnings as the Corporal in what passed as his pep talk. ‘And remember, all of you, that should you happen to fall while you’re on sentry go –’ here he glared at them all in such a way as to make it quite clear that if they did fall to the ground it would be considered to be their own fault – ‘we shan’t come and get you.’ The Sergeant’s eye travelled balefully up and down the serried ranks of men. ‘That clearly understood?’

  Kevin’s great-grandfather had been a stretcher bearer in France in 1915 at the bloody cock-up called Loos. He’d – if family legend was to be believed – always got his wounded man whatever the danger. It seemed a bit hard that, if Kevin was to fall at his post, he’d just be left there until the guard was changed.

  Kevin didn’t remember the stretcher bearer in the family himself because, although he’d survived the Battle of Loos, a German shell had had his name on it at the mudbath that became the bloodbath of Passchendaele.

  Private Saffery’s hands were already clammy now where he clutched his rifle. He concentrated on thinking about his name – their name. Saffery, his father said, came from the Arabic for sword – at least the first part, ‘saifer’, did. That meant ‘sword of’ and ‘rey’ was Spanish for ‘king’.

  ‘So Saffery means “sword of the king”,’ explained his father, whose own army service had been in the dull and disappointing years of peace. ‘Only in our case, we have queens.’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  Saffery père had served his time in the army uneventfully and then taken a pub in the country. He was still a disappointed man, having learned to his cost that Mine Host cannot afford to voice opinions of his own, still less express them with real feeling – not and keep the inn’s customers, anyway. He could – and would – though, presently tell all and sundry about his son’s sentry duty.

  And be proud of it.

  The accent had been on pride too, when their officer had addressed them that morning, but Kevin, who had been up since before dawn ready for a full inspection and had not in any case slept well, scarcely listened to him. The officer had been talking about the Battle of Talavera, in which the alertness and devotion to duty of a sentry had apparently saved the East Calleshire Regiment from either the enemy or the wrath of the Duke of Wellington – Kevin wasn’t sure which – and in any case thought those geese whose alarm call had saved Rome would probably have done the job just as well at the time.

  And, whatever the officer had in his mind, talk of a soldier’s duty conjured up only one picture in Kevin’s mind. It was of an ancient painting, a copy of which had hung in the miserable church hall where he’d been sent to Sunday School as a child. The picture had been of a dismayed Roman soldier at Pompeii, watching the remorseless advance of burning lava from Mount Vesuvius heading in his direction. The caption had stayed with Kevin longer than any text or regulation. He could see it now: ‘Faithful unto death’.

  His fingers were too slippery now to work properly should they need to, but that worry was succeeded by an even greater horror – he wanted to cough. A tickle somewhere at the back of his throat became a real threat to his stillness. He clamped his jaws shut and soon felt his eyes begin to bulge like a frog’s. He would choke to death if he didn’t open his mouth and cough soon …

  It was then that he heard a whisper from the sentry on his right. Strictly forbidden, of course. The man would have been put on a charge if anyone had heard his warning.

  ‘Watch it. Here they come…’

  And Private Kevin Saffery of the 2nd Battalion, the East Calleshire Regiment, froze as still as Niobe herself as the day’s first coachload of foreign tourists spilled out into Whitehall, directly in front of the entrance to Horseguards’ Parade, cameras at the ready.

  Touch Not the Cat

  They said, of course, that she should have had a dog. Not a great big dog that she couldn’t handle at her time of life, nor one which needed long walks night and morning whatever the weather, which she obviously couldn’t have managed, and certainly not the size of dog that ate a lot, things being what they were.

  Or, at least, as they thought things were.

  No, what the old lady could have done with, they said – afterwards, of course – was a small dog that barked. A barking dog, they thought, would have protected her in a way that a cat never could. They said – afterwards, of course – that having a dog might have saved her.

  Well, someone modified this, at the very least it might have raised the alarm. That would have been something. Somebody, they said, might just have heard a dog barking in her cottage and gone to see what the trouble was. A small dog like a chihuahua, say, or a little terrier. Everyone else’s small dogs always seemed to be barking when anyone came to the door. Why hadn’t she had one too, just to be on the safe side? After all, Almstone was a pretty remote little village and there weren’t all that many people about there after dark these days.

  They all knew the answer to why she hadn’t had a dog, of course. Mrs Doughty had a cat.

  But a dog would have helped.

  And Mr Mackenzie next door, although both very deaf and very Scottish, might have heard a dog barking. In the event – the sad event – it had been Mr Mackenzie who had found her afterwards. On account of the milk bottles not having been taken in, that was, and very upset about it, he had been.

  Old Mrs Doughty hadn’t had a dog not only because she had a cat but also because she had always insisted that her cat would take care of her.

  ‘Pusskins will look after me,’ the old lady had said time and again, stroking the rather bad-tempered black and white moggie. ‘Won’t you, my lovely?’

  Pusskins, who never miaowed except at mealtimes, would arch his back and allow her to rub behind his good ear. (T
he other had come to grief in a memorable encounter with a ginger tom in the alley on the other side of the cottage.)

  It was a great-nephew, full of undesirable book learning, who had first said that Pusskins was the old lady’s familiar. He’d always thought of his great-aunt as a witch anyway, probably because she didn’t wash overmuch.

  His mother, who hadn’t quite understood his meaning, told him not to be so forward. At the time she had had high hopes of a bracket clock that had stood on the cottage mantelpiece (without going) for as long as she could remember. As she was to tell the other relations again and again, the clock had been promised …

  Familiar or not, Pusskins was therefore eyed warily while Mrs Doughty’s relations consoled themselves in the way that relations will – afterwards, of course – with saying things to each other such as, ‘You didn’t get to her age and go on living alone without having a mind of your own,’ and, ‘If she didn’t want a dog on account of having that mangy old cat, then that was that, wasn’t it?’

  That had certainly been that in the old lady’s cottage when the burglar had come and gone. That is, the police were fairly sure that he had come only as a burglar. What was unfortunately undeniable was that, though he might have come only as burglar, he had indubitably left as a murderer as well.

  What was equally obvious was that the cat had not been able to protect his mistress after all. The police as well as the relations knew Pusskins had done his best, of course, because not only was there the old lady’s blood everywhere in the little cottage but, most interestingly, the police said, there was also blood – human blood, that wasn’t hers – on Pusskins’s claws as well.

  It was a young detective constable from Berebury called Crosby, who manifestly hadn’t enjoyed the sight of an elderly bludgeoned head, who had first turned his wayward attention to the cat and noticed some blood there. He had even managed to get a sample of it before Pusskins – a preternaturally clean member of his species, in spite of his battered appearance – could lick it off his paws.

  Which the cat had promptly tried to do.