Amendment of Life Read online

  * * *

  Reaching the entrance of the maze at Aumerle Court presented Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby with no problems at all. It was a simple matter of driving out of the market town of Berebury towards Calleford and making their way through the Calleshire countryside to the little village of Staple St James.

  Getting inside the labyrinth itself proved quite a different matter. Blocking the way in with a large green dustbin on wheels was Kenny Prickett. A foot soldier manqué, he was mounting guard against all-comers, holding his broom with the bristles aloft with one hand and looking for all the world like a latterday Britannia complete with trident. His other hand clutched his shovel – in his mind’s eye already an entrenching tool – very much at the ready.

  ‘Miss Daphne sent a message to say I wasn’t to let no one in’, he said firmly, ‘until the police came.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan nodded. ‘Quite right,’ he murmured abstractedly, surveying the vast area of impenetrable yew hedge on either side of the narrow entrance.

  ‘And to listen hard in case Pete called out.’ Kenny Prickett relaxed a little and lowered his broom to a sort of stand-easy position.

  ‘And has he?’ enquired Sloan.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Kenny. ‘Miss Daphne said he would, but not for a bit. Haven’t heard a dicky bird from him yet, but I will. Bound to when he gets to this body that Miss Daphne says is in there.’ Like Milly Smithers, Kenny Prickett had been born in Staple St James and took Daphne Pedlinge’s word for law. ‘Pete’s never liked being in the maze. Not ever.’ He jerked his shoulder upwards in the direction of the house. ‘Miss Daphne said Pete wouldn’t have got to Ariadne yet, let alone any further in.’

  ‘Who’s Ariadne?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby, bringing up the rear and taking out his own notebook at the mention of a name.

  ‘A statue,’ responded Kenny.

  The Constable looked disappointed.

  ‘It’s a lady with a ball of wool, that’s all,’ explained Kenny, parking his broom against the yew hedge.

  ‘How do you mean “all”?’ demanded Crosby, his pen hovering unused above his notebook.

  ‘I mean that’s all she’s got on,’ said Kenny Prickett simply.

  ‘A ball of wool?’ echoed Crosby, disbelievingly.

  ‘Miss Daphne said that Ariadne had something to do with mazes in history,’ explained the man, ‘and the ball of wool was what she gave to her lover to help him get in and out of the maze.’

  ‘Get away,’ said Crosby.

  ‘She did. Tied it to the entrance and told him not to let it go so that he could find his way out again. That’s why she’s in there.’

  ‘Is there a plan of the maze?’ asked Sloan briskly. Tempting as it was to send his Detective Constable into the maze then and there without one, it probably wouldn’t help the investigation in the long run. In the end someone was bound to have to go in and find him again.

  Kenny Prickett scratched his head. ‘They say that Miss Daphne’s got one in her room but no one’s ever seen it. Take all the fun away, wouldn’t it, if everyone had the plan?’

  ‘Very probably,’ said Sloan wryly. He didn’t see any point in solving puzzles purely for pleasure, but then he was a working policeman. He had to solve puzzles anyway – without maps – most of the time; and without any pleasure all of the time.

  ‘I can tell you that Ariadne’s about halfway in,’ volunteered Kenny Prickett. He stood down his shovel, too, propping it up against the yew hedge. ‘There’s a seat by her, and Pete usually stops there, Mondays, for a bit of a breather after he’s done her alcove. Not too long, of course,’ he added, ‘on account of Miss Daphne watching and the Captain waiting.’

  ‘Ah…’ said Detective Inspector Sloan alertly. He spun round on his heel and looked behind him. Soaring upwards was the elegant diapered brickwork of the eastern wall of a fine Elizabethan house. At first-floor level, and overlooking this part of the grounds, was a mullioned window. It was impossible to tell at this distance whether or not anyone was looking out of it.

  ‘It usually takes either of us the best part of an hour to work our way round to Ariadne,’ offered Kenny, ‘give or take a load of extra rubbish to clear up. Broken glass can make you very late.’

  Sloan nodded. He’d never yet met an occupation without hazards. It seemed that broken glass was one that dustmen shared with policemen.

  ‘You’d be surprised what people leave in there,’ Kenny sniffed. ‘And you never know what some people’ll get up to Sunday afternoons when they haven’t got anything better to do.’

  ‘We do know,’ interposed Detective Constable Crosby feelingly. ‘A day with the family brings out the worst in some.’

  ‘Are you going to go in, then?’ asked Kenny directly.

  ‘Would we be able to find the statue in there if we did?’ countered Crosby.

  ‘Doubt it,’ said Kenny laconically. He pulled his dustcart away from the entrance to the maze and waved a hand. ‘Be my guest. Mind you, Ariadne’s up one of the blind alleys so you might get there by accident. A lot of people do.’

  ‘Couldn’t you just take us straight there?’ suggested Crosby, staring beyond the little ticket booth just inside the entrance. The path ahead gave way to a narrow walkway between two high hedges, which was singularly without signposts of any sort.

  ‘Not me,’ said Kenny. ‘Besides, Miss Daphne said I wasn’t to go in.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Sloan. The man was clearly good military material in the matter of always obeying the last order.

  ‘Told me to send you straight up to the house when you arrived, she did. Said it was a waste of time for you to go inside the maze on your own and she should know … Hello,’ he jerked his head back, ‘here comes trouble.’

  Sloan followed the direction of his gaze as another figure appeared on the scene. He was dressed in a lightly checked soft shirt, regimental tie and a tweed hacking jacket.

  ‘Captain Jeremy Prosser,’ the man said, advancing on them in highly polished brogues, a clipboard tucked under one arm. ‘I’m the steward here.’

  ‘Police,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, without explanation. The newcomer might just as well have been in uniform. Sloan wasn’t.

  ‘I’ve just heard there’s a problem with the maze,’ said Jeremy Prosser.

  ‘In the maze,’ Kenny Prickett corrected him swiftly. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the maze, Captain.’

  ‘Pete Carter should be in there now, clearing up,’ Prosser said to the two policemen, ignoring this. ‘If he’s up to schedule, that is.’

  ‘Pete is in there,’ said Kenny briefly.

  ‘Unless he came out before we got here,’ contributed Detective Constable Crosby helpfully.

  ‘Miss Daphne says he’s in the maze,’ said Kenny, as one citing the laws of the Medes and the Persians.

  ‘And she should know,’ put in Jeremy Prosser smoothly. ‘She has the best view of us all.’

  ‘No one,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan baldly, ‘is going in or out of there until I say so.’

  The effect of this grand pronouncement was undermined almost immediately as a great shout reached them from inside the maze.

  ‘See? I told you that Pete was still in there, didn’t I?’ remarked Kenny with satisfaction. He threw his head back and hollered, ‘Where are you, mate?’

  ‘Here,’ came a muffled voice from somewhere within. ‘Can you come and get me, Kenny? There’s something here that shouldn’t be.’

  ‘Whereabouts exactly?’ called out Jeremy Prosser.

  ‘In the middle,’ came the voice, a certain truculence creeping into its tone in response to the steward. ‘By the bull. The one they call the Minotaur.’

  ‘Police here,’ said Sloan crisply. ‘What exactly have you found?’

  ‘A woman,’ came the distant reply. ‘She’s dead…’ The rest of the sentence was lost as a cock blackbird, alarmed by something, fluttered upwards, squawking.

 
; ‘Come again?’ shouted Kenny to Pete.

  ‘Dead,’ came the voice through the yew. ‘Really dead.’

  Chapter Four

  David Collins pushed open the double doors to the children’s ward at the Berebury and District General Hospital with just the right amount of pressure. He’d been through them so many times now that he could gauge exactly how much shove with a straight arm they took to shift.

  ‘Ah, Mr Collins, there you are.’ The Ward Sister greeted him as he stepped on to the ward. All the nurses knew him by name now, he’d visited his son so often. ‘We wondered when you’d be along. James has had a good night and he’s all ready to see Mr Beaumont when he does his ward round.’

  ‘Good,’ said David Collins.

  ‘After that’, she smiled, taking in with a swift professional glance his tired face and the controlled anxiety she saw in so many of the parents of her patients, ‘I’m sure you’re going to be able to take him home with you today.’

  ‘Until next time,’ he said soberly.

  ‘He’s going to need monitoring for quite a while yet,’ the Sister said seriously. ‘It wouldn’t be right for us not to continue with our usual follow-up.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said wearily. ‘But we – my wife and I – get the feeling that we’ll never be finished with hospitals.’ He opened his hands in a gesture of despair. ‘I’m sorry, but you know how it is.’

  ‘We understand all that,’ she said, still serious. ‘And we all know how trying your wife finds it. It’s never easy, living with a child with this sort of condition.’

  ‘Did Margaret get any sleep at all last night?’ he asked. ‘She said she’d try to as soon as James dropped off.’

  ‘Last night?’ echoed the Sister. ‘I don’t know whether she did last night – she wasn’t here. At least,’ she frowned, ‘I don’t think she was. I wasn’t on duty myself but there was nothing in the morning report about her being here overnight.’

  ‘She was,’ he said, unruffled. ‘I brought her in quite early in the afternoon and she was going to stay on here with James. Poor little chap doesn’t like hospitals, and anyway Mr Beaumont wanted to see us both together this morning. As I was going to work late yesterday evening it seemed the simplest thing to do.’

  ‘I certainly haven’t seen her around today myself.’ The Ward Sister looked across the ward. ‘Dr Chomel over there may know because she was on duty yesterday as well as this morning.’

  David Collins looked puzzled. ‘I was expecting my wife to be here to see Mr Beaumont with me as we arranged—’

  ‘You ask Dr Chomel,’ advised the Sister, ‘and I’ll be with you as soon as Mr Beaumont arrives.’

  Dr Dilys Chomel was leaning over James Collins’s hospital cot making a paper airplane for him. ‘Now, you throw it, James … no, aim for me. That’s a clever boy.’ She straightened up as David approached. ‘Now, James, look who’s come to see you.’

  ‘Daddy,’ said James, only looking up cursorily from his paper toy before throwing it at Dr Chomel again.

  ‘Isn’t it nice to see him?’ said the young doctor, neatly fielding the paper dart and explaining that she was using it to test James’s co-ordination and aim now that he only had one eye.

  ‘Mummy,’ said the little boy. ‘I want my mummy.’

  ‘I expect she’s come too,’ said Dr Chomel brightly, looking round.

  ‘She hasn’t,’ said David Collins. ‘Actually, I thought she’d been here overnight with James. That’s what we had arranged. She’s stayed in your parents’ room often enough before now.’

  ‘I want my mummy,’ said James again.

  ‘No.’ Dr Chomel shook her head and moved out of earshot of the child. ‘Mrs Collins was here in the afternoon because I saw her and we talked about James and how soon he could have his artificial eye fitted—’

  ‘I know she’s been worrying a lot about that,’ David Collins volunteered.

  ‘She was a bit upset about it, naturally, but I hope I was able to reassure her,’ said the House Surgeon, beginning to sound quite anxious herself. ‘Children of this age take something like artifical eyes on board so much more easily than grown-ups do.’ She forbore to explain that in the African country from which she came the loss of an eye was common and that it was the artificial replacement that was the rarity.

  ‘That’s what everyone’s always telling us, but it wasn’t that.’ David Collins grimaced. ‘It was the thought of having to see the empty socket that really got to Margaret.’

  ‘I don’t think Mr Beaumont will want James’s bandages left off just yet,’ the doctor murmured obliquely.

  ‘But it’s going to happen one day,’ he said, ‘and Margaret just doesn’t want to be around when it does. She keeps on saying so.’

  ‘I want my mummy,’ declared James Collins even more insistently.

  ‘All right, James,’ said Dr Chomel, going back over to him. ‘Daddy and I’ll go and find Mummy for you now. You look after your airplane until I get back.’

  Her manner changed as soon as she was alone with David Collins. ‘Mr Collins, are you telling me that your wife didn’t come home last night?’

  ‘I am,’ he said flatly. ‘That’s what’s worrying me. You know how much this terrible illness of James’s has upset her – both of us, actually.’ He frowned. ‘I don’t think she would have gone over to her mother’s without saying. But I suppose she just might have done.’

  ‘Of course,’ said the doctor, ‘but even so—’

  ‘And she’s not been sleeping either what with all the anxiety of the operation and knowing James had to have his eye out.’ He clenched his fists tightly. ‘It’s not fair on a child,’ he said in anguished tones. ‘He’s scarcely more than a baby.’

  ‘It’s very hard on everybody,’ said the doctor earnestly. ‘I was as reassuring with her as I could be yesterday – I do hope, though, that I didn’t upset her too much, talking about the new eye.’

  David Collins essayed a small smile. ‘I am personally quite sure, Doctor, that in no time at all James will be charging his little mates at school for taking it out and letting them look at it. But you’ll understand that Margaret can’t quite see it like that just yet.’

  ‘It’s early days,’ she said, looking at him with concern. ‘James really is doing well, you know.’

  ‘Well?’ he echoed, putting his hand to his head.

  ‘Really well,’ she insisted.

  ‘As well as can be expected,’ he said ironically. ‘That’s what they all say here, isn’t it? Always.’

  ‘You and your wife must believe me. Please find her and tell her that.’

  ‘But’, he opened his hands in a frantic gesture ‘where is she?’

  The House Surgeon didn’t answer him. She had turned her head in response to a sudden stirring of activity at the ward doors. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Collins. I must go now. Mr Beaumont has arrived to do his ward round.’

  * * *

  Deplorable old dressing gown or not, Bertram Wallingford stood on the threshold for a long moment and then slowly advanced towards the dead rabbit.

  ‘Mind where you tread, Bertie,’ adjured his wife anxiously. ‘I’m sure those chalk lines mean something.’

  ‘They’re a pentagram,’ said the Bishop, stepping carefully round the rabbit laid out on the doorstep to take a better look at the lines of black chalk round the bones, which had been set in a rough circle.

  ‘But what does it all mean?’ asked Mary.

  ‘The pentagram’s a magic symbol—’

  ‘Black magic?’

  The Bishop stood back. ‘Magic which supposedly invokes the power of the devil to perform evil.’

  ‘In the Minster Close at Calleford?’ she protested. ‘Surely not here of all places?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anywhere off-limits to the devil,’ said the Bishop quite seriously, ‘any more than there is to Christ. It wouldn’t be logical.’ He peered down at the dead rabbit. ‘You’re quite right, my dear.
We can’t blame Monsieur Reynard for this.’

  ‘No,’ said Mary Wallingford tightly.

  ‘Nor a cunning little vixen,’ he murmured. ‘At least, I don’t think so,’ he added, half under his breath. In the nature of things, there were some women in every congregation of whom all clerics had to be wary.

  ‘Foxes can’t tie wire round the necks of rabbits,’ said his wife.

  ‘And they can’t draw diagrams either, can they?’ said her husband, staring at the chalked lines.

  Margaret Wallingford’s head came up suddenly. ‘What was that?’

  ‘What was what?’

  ‘That sound.’

  ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘I could have sworn I heard that noise again.’

  ‘What sort of noise?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know – an animal noise. I’m pretty sure it’s coming from the West Canonry.’

  ‘The Shorthouses’ dogs are in kennels while they’re away, so it can’t be them,’ said Bertram Wallingford.

  ‘Not a bark,’ she said. ‘More of a bleat.’

  He lifted his head and began to say that he couldn’t hear anything when the great bell of the Minster began to sound the hour and nobody in the Close could hear anything else at all until it had done.

  ‘Bertie,’ Mary Wallingford said shakily, ‘does this mean that someone wishes you harm?’

  ‘It might.’ He paused and thought for a moment before he said, ‘And perhaps not only me.’

  Mary Wallingford shivered. ‘Me, too, you mean? But why?’ She stopped, remembering something. ‘So this is what has been worrying Malby—’

  ‘The same thing happened to Canon Willoughby the other day,’ admitted Bertie.

  ‘I see.’ She gave a mirthless little laugh. ‘Isn’t it awful how it takes your own troubles to bring home somebody else’s?’

  ‘It is, my dear.’ He tapped their doorstep with his foot. ‘Which, when you come to think about it, is yet another case of sermons in stones.’

  ‘Bertie, I’d have gone round and seen him if I’d heard about what had been left outside the Canonry,’ she said, stricken with remorse. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’