False Pride Read online

  ‘I haven’t the slightest.’ Wide eyes, hands that trembled.

  Uh-oh. I think you know all right. There was a flash of knowledge in your eyes just then. Piers may have missed it, but I didn’t. Whatever it is she knows, she’s decided not to say. What on earth is going on here?

  Piers said, ‘The police and the hospital need a member of his family to identify him.’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked around her, without focusing. ‘I see what you mean. Someone ought to go, but … who would be best? When I arrived this morning and found the place empty, I did wonder where he was, but—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bea. ‘Why were you here?’

  ‘What? Oh, I deal with the maintenance on the Rycroft houses in London. I don’t do anything about the country house, of course, but—’

  ‘You don’t cover Lucas’s place, do you?’

  ‘No. He’s so pernickety; if he even sees a maintenance man, he throws a strop. Mrs Tarring got his new housekeeper to look after all that for him. I haven’t been there for ages.’

  The way her eyelids skittered around when she said she hadn’t been to his place for ages makes me think it was a lie. And, she hadn’t needed to say that she hadn’t been there. We hadn’t asked her if she had. Why should she lie?

  Piers said, ‘Look, it’s not up to us to decide, but you really ought to report the break-in here to the police.’

  She made a despairing gesture with her hands. ‘The door was open when I arrived.’

  ‘Which means someone had a key?’

  Shirley produced a hankie and wiped her eyes. ‘If you tell the police, Uncle Rycroft will only say it was boys being boys.’

  Her ‘uncle’ Rycroft would be Lord Rycroft, wouldn’t it? She’s referring to the twins?

  Shirley blew her nose. ‘Uncle Rycroft lets them get away with murder.’

  Interesting choice of words.

  Shirley tottered to her feet.

  Piers put his arm around her, and she subsided gratefully into his care. ‘Piers, isn’t it? Tell me what to do.’

  Bea wasn’t having any of this missishness. ‘You think the twins came here and searched this place? That they could get a key from the office, or borrow your key? Is it right that you have access to keys to all the Rycroft accommodation?’

  ‘Well, yes. In a way. The keys are all kept in a cupboard at the office and the cupboard is kept locked, but I suppose anyone could borrow them, really.’

  ‘You think the twins not only searched this place but also knocked Kent out?’

  ‘Of course.’ She shuddered. ‘They give me the willies, those two. If you don’t mind, I’d better lock up here and get round to the hospital to see Kent. Do you know which hospital?’ She ushered them out of the house and locked the door behind her.

  So Shirley had gone to the house armed with keys to get in? She said she’d found the front door open. Really? Do I believe her?

  Piers said, ‘You’ll find him at Hammersmith Hospital.’

  Shirley nodded, got into an unobtrusive car parked at the kerb and drove off.

  ‘That’s a nice girl,’ said Piers. ‘She has style.’

  ‘You’ve told me often enough that when you draw someone, they reveal their true nature. Would you like to draw Shirley for me?’

  Bea phoned for another taxi. Piers sat on the doorstep and sketched. When he started, he was humming to himself. By the time he finished, he was staring in disbelief at what he’d done. He handed his notebook to Bea.

  First he’d drawn an accurate, even flattering portrait of Shirley. On the next page he’d drawn a caricature of a little monkey, with huge eyes. ‘I really don’t know where that came from.’

  ‘A monkey. Mischievous, but out of her depth in a land where lions and tigers roam.’

  Piers was annoyed. With himself for being taken in by Shirley, or with Bea for pointing out that Shirley was no sweet innocent? ‘Why did you doubt her?’

  ‘She had keys to the flat. She says she found the front door open. I don’t know that I believe her. Why didn’t she shut the door after herself when she got in?’

  ‘She was in shock because she found the place had been ransacked.’

  Bea reflected that men often give women the benefit of the doubt. Her expression must have told him to think again.

  He rubbed his chin. ‘You think she was expecting to meet someone there?’

  ‘Why was she there in the first place? She said it was because she was responsible for the maintenance of the place, but I’m not sure I believe her.’

  ‘You think she left the door ajar so that someone could get in after her? Someone who hadn’t a key but was going to help her search the place. What for?’

  ‘The jewels.’

  ‘Nah. I expect the door sticks and she didn’t close it firmly enough. Then it edged itself open again.’ The taxi arrived. ‘Where to now?’

  ‘Your place. Give them the address.’

  ‘Oh, good. I can grab a few essentials. And then what do you propose to do with me?’

  She had been wondering whether or not she’d dump him in the mews cottage. That would be the appropriate thing to do. But, for some reason – perhaps because he’d championed Shirley, which wasn’t a good reason, was it? – she’d decided against doing so. She said, ‘I don’t know. Have you a friend who’ll give you a bed tonight?’

  He gave her a Look. He turned his head away from her and said nothing. She smiled to herself. If he wanted to sulk, so be it.

  NINE

  Saturday late afternoon

  There was no sign of the police outside Piers’s house.

  Piers’s key let them into the hall. Doors had been left open on the ground floor. A suggestive bloodstain had spread itself across the floor of the hall but the cast-iron cockerel which had been used as a blunt instrument was nowhere to be seen.

  What a pity. I liked that cockerel.

  She said, ‘Kent – or whoever it was – must still be alive, or the police would have taped this off as a crime scene and we wouldn’t have been allowed in.’

  Bea looked into the living room, which stretched from front to back of the house. As Piers had said, the place had been torn apart. Roughly. Not only had drawers been pulled out but the contents had been dumped and stirred around, possibly with a foot. The television had been levered off the wall and lay on its face on the carpet. An old-fashioned Bakelite telephone lay on the floor, its wiring torn from the socket on the skirting board.

  The twins had been thorough, hadn’t they!

  Piers picked up the pieces of his laptop, which looked as if it had been stamped on. ‘You carry on from day to day minding your own business and then this happens. I’m not staying here. I don’t care where I go but I’m not staying here.’ He hesitated. ‘Bea, I hate to beg, but … look, can I leave my easel and canvases with you? I can go to a hotel or something, I’ll only need a suitcase or two, but I’ll need a Man with a Van for the big stuff, and I haven’t got a working phone yet. Can you use your mobile to magic me up some transport? And as to where I should go …?’

  She softened towards him. ‘All right. You can have the mews cottage at the end of my road. I keep my car down below but there’s a separate entrance to the flat above. Bedsitting room, k and b. The bedsitting room is not really big enough for you to use as a studio, but you can always rent somewhere else for work, can’t you?’ She got out her phone. ‘Do you use any transport firm in particular?’

  ‘Any one will do. Bless you. I’ll stack everything that can be saved in the hall. No, perhaps not in the hall. In the living room. It shouldn’t take me long to pack.’

  She located a removal van company prepared to work at a weekend, and paid for it with her credit card. They were charging double time for a Saturday afternoon, needless to say. After that, she explored the rest of the house. In the kitchen everything had been swept off the surfaces and dumped on the floor. Cupboard doors had been wrenched open. One had even been torn off its hinges.

&nbs
p; Piers didn’t do much cooking, did he? There was a packet of cereal, a hand of bananas, some ready meals. There was some frozen food in the freezer and some milk and bread in the fridge. Bea found a cool bag, turned off the fridge and freezer and rescued their contents.

  In the living room she picked up the broken laptop and all the paperwork that had been strewn around and dumped it beside the bag.

  The garden? Bea didn’t think he’d ever been out there. What had once been a lawn was now a sea, knee-high, of unkempt grass. A lounger at the far end was almost completely submerged.

  Piers bumped and banged around on the top floor. His idea of packing was probably to swathe the tools of his trade in bubble wrap and thrust a few clothes into any old supermarket bag.

  She took the stairs to the bedroom floor. More chaos here. She’d guessed correctly; he hadn’t even started to pick up his clothes. Not that he had many. What he did possess had been torn out of the built-in wardrobe and left in a pile on the floor. The mattress had been stood on end beside the bed. The bedhead had been broken off from the base. The bed linen was strewn on the floor.

  Piers hadn’t used the back bedroom, but had dumped some empty boxes and an overnight bag or two there. Bea supposed they were the ones he kept for his not infrequent flits from one place to another. Good, the boxes and the bag would come in useful.

  The bathroom was spartan but adequate. The bathroom cabinet had been opened and some over-the-counter remedies had been tossed into the basin. Someone had used the toilet and forgotten to get rid of the evidence. The bathroom stank. Bea left it as it was. If Kent died, the bathroom might provide evidence for the prosecution.

  Piers came stumbling down the stairs with a portfolio under one arm and some canvases under the other. As Bea had foreseen, his first concern had been for his paintings. He wasn’t bothered about his clothes or his shaving kit, was he? ‘Did you manage to get a removal van? When will they be here?’

  ‘Give or take, an hour.’

  He nodded and went past her down the stairs while she went on up to the studio. To what had been his studio. He didn’t really care much where he lived, did he?

  The mess in the studio was even worse than downstairs. The destruction was thorough. Bea visualized the twins, wreaking havoc. Stamp, stamp! Tear down! Frustration! Anger out of control!

  Searching the place was one thing, but pulling the blinds down off the window, and overturning the table where Piers kept his paints and brushes was mindless destruction. Did the twins really think they were above the law? They had been protected by their uncle Rycroft from the results of minor transgressions for ages. Perhaps they felt that as their search for the jewels was a family matter, they would still be protected? Or perhaps they were notching up another gear from bluster to bludgeoning?

  Piers dragged a couple of empty boxes up the stairs and proceeded to rescue what he could of his paints and brushes.

  Bea went back down to the bedroom, took a travel bag from the spare room and began to pack up his clothes. And then his bed linen.

  Piers paused in the doorway as he toted down an unruly armful of canvases long enough to say, ‘You shouldn’t have to pack for me.’

  ‘The sooner we’re out of here, the sooner I’ll be pleased. I don’t fancy coming up against the twins again and they haven’t found what they’ve been searching for yet, have they?’

  He shuddered. ‘I’ve been wondering how many times I’ve hired a removal van to take me from one rented place to another. I usually dump anything which I can’t get into the van. It’s not much to show for a life, is it?’

  ‘Except,’ said Bea, ‘your paintings hang in museums and galleries all round the world. You have painted a generation of worthwhile people.’

  ‘And some thieves and scoundrels along the way as well. I’ll paint those twins one day.’

  One of the canvases under his arm slipped to the floor. He abandoned the rest to pick it up and show it to her. ‘Look!’ Someone had put a boot through this canvas. ‘This is a portrait of a man who has done a lot of good in his life. Why would they want to destroy it?’

  Bea shrugged. ‘Evil can’t stand the sight of excellence?’

  He passed his hand over the ruined surface, mourning.

  Bea’s phone rang. She abandoned her packing to answer it as Piers went on down the stairs.

  It was a man’s voice on the phone. ‘Mrs Abbot, that you there?’ A deep man’s voice. One she couldn’t place at first. Then she could. ‘This is Ellis’s friend, from the flat. You rang me this morning, asking for details of his death. It was almost precisely three months ago. The sixth, to be exact. He was unconscious when they found him and he died on his way to hospital. He had a key with a tag on it, so the police knew where he lived. It fell to me to phone his father and break the news. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I liked Ellis. He was all right. You don’t expect friends of your own age to die, do you?’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘There was an autopsy, but it was clear he’d been run over by a car that hadn’t stopped. They never found the car, unfortunately. The cremation was a fortnight later. We, his flatmates, were not invited. The family said they wanted to grieve in private. We sent a cheque to the Salvation Army. Ellis thought they were wonderful. We took his clothes there and a member of the family came and collected everything else. We’d have attended a memorial service but there wasn’t one, so we had a bit of a wake here ourselves.’

  Bea felt like sitting down. The mattress had gone, but she perched on the side of the bed frame. ‘Do you know who came from the family to take his stuff?’

  ‘No. I was out. Someone who had a key.’

  ‘Did you ever meet his father?’

  ‘No, everything was done through the Rycroft office.’

  She tried to make sense of this development. ‘Ellis’s car? Did he have one?’

  ‘Yes. He parked it in a dedicated space at the back here. It’s gone. I suppose the man from the office took it when he collected Ellis’s bits and pieces. If that’s all …’

  ‘Thank you. You’ve been most helpful.’

  He switched off. And so did she.

  She said, ‘The heir and two spares.’

  ‘What?’ Piers was climbing the stairs again. She followed him up to the studio. He’d put a second ruined portrait back on his easel, and was teasing at the surface with a palette knife.

  She said, ‘Kent was the heir to Lord Rycroft. He’s been attacked and left for dead. He may be dead by now, for all I know. Then the interloper who’d been brought up in Australia has been killed and left in Magda’s bed. According to the law, he had to be treated as the old lord’s heir, whether or not Lord Rycroft actually sired him. Now I hear that Ellis, who was Kent’s son, died last year, too. It’s an unlucky family.’

  ‘How come?’ He wasn’t really paying attention.

  Bea tried to make him understand. ‘Look, the heir and two spares to the throne have all three been attacked and two of them are dead. Don’t tell me that’s a coincidence.’

  ‘Mm? I wonder if I … no, mending the canvas won’t work. It would always show.’

  Bea persevered. ‘So who gains from killing off the heir and the two spares?’

  He woke up to that. ‘You think the twins did this so that they can inherit when the old man dies?’

  Bea rubbed her forehead. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think that’s right. All I know is that I’m way out of my depth and I need to get back to the safety of my own home as soon as possible, but I don’t want to leave you here by yourself with the twins still hanging around, looking for the family jewels. You have ten minutes before the removal men arrive. How quickly can you dismantle that monster of an easel and get it down the stairs?’

  Her phone rang again. ‘Yes?’ Through her teeth.

  ‘Oh, Bea, I’m so worried!’ It was Bernice’s mother, in hysterical mood. ‘My darling daughter hasn’t rung us! We’ve kept off the phone so that she could get t
hrough, but she hasn’t rung, and then I thought I could ring her mobile and I rang her number and it’s switched off! How could she switch it off when she knows how anxious I must be to—’

  ‘She’s off sailing,’ said Bea. ‘Of course she’s got her mobile switched off.’

  ‘Yes, but you said she was going to ring us and—’

  ‘I’ll wring her neck when she gets back!’ said Bea. ‘She has no right to upset you like this.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think … I wouldn’t want you to punish her for—’

  ‘She has to understand that promises are of importance.’

  ‘Oh yes. I know that. And she is, I know, she can be very wayward, but we do understand, obviously, that it’s not very interesting for her to have to spend time with us at home, as compared to going sailing.’

  Bea almost snarled. ‘It’s called “SBO”, which means, “Subject to a better offer”. Which is totally antisocial and self-centred and won’t win her any prizes in the popularity stakes. So yes, somehow or other, this is a lesson she has to learn.’

  Silence. Piers was grinning. But at least he had started to dismantle his easel.

  Bea stalked off down the stairs, trying to reassure Bernice’s mother, who turned into a fluttery butterfly when under pressure. ‘Look,’ Bea said, ‘I’m out of the house at the moment but going back in a few minutes. I’ll try ringing Bernice’s hostess. I’ll leave a message for her to remind young Bernice of her manners, and I’ll ring you back as soon as I hear from her. All right?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble. It’s just that … are you still coming over for tea yourself? Only we usually eat a little early and—’

  ‘No, that’s very kind of you,’ said Bea, hearing the front doorbell ring, and continuing down to the ground floor. Was it the twins? If it was, she was not opening the front door. ‘I’m running late, I’m afraid. Speak to you later.’

  There were two men silhouetted against the light in the window at the top of the door. Two thin men. Tall. Not the twins. Phew!

  Bea opened the door to the removal men, and talked them through what needed to be done. Piers appeared with sections of the easel over his shoulder, and he took over the loading of his stuff.