The Nursery Rhyme Murders Read online

  ‘Would you spend even five minutes in a car with the vicar?’ his partner asked reasonably.

  Desmond shuddered. Like his mother, indeed most of Beldon Magna, he found the cleric so mind-numbingly boring that he, along with the majority of the villagers, wished him a well-deserved retirement, preferably soon. Indeed, two years previously when he’d been unwell and a local, retired, priest stood in, attendances had almost doubled for the Sunday services.

  ‘No – nor with Marcia, heaven forbid!’ he agreed honestly. He had never liked his cousin by marriage. She, like her husband, was only too keen to reap the benefits of the wealth and social position the baronetcy had conferred on them on the death of Ian’s father some dozen or so years previously, but there it stopped. They had no interest in the two villages, Beldon Magna and the much smaller hamlet of Bevesham-Juxta-Beldon, beyond treating them as a revenue stream. For Marcia, it was to fund her rapacious buying of the latest designer clothes, lavish foreign holidays and her life with the high society fast set in London; for Ian, it was a source of funding for his numerous, usually ill-fated, business ventures.

  It only exacerbated matters when their few contacts with the villages were done in such a patronising manner that it was clear how much of a favour they thought they were doing everyone to descend and move amongst them. It did not go down well at all with the quiet, but ferociously independent-minded, villagers. His relatives should have remembered, Desmond frequently thought, that despite the village staying loyal to the Royalist cause during the civil war, it was due entirely to their loyalty to the family, not to a king who’s cause most felt misguided at best and not a few felt actually devil-inspired. Indeed, many of the surrounding areas had been strong parliamentary country, with their resulting low tolerance of any form of over-bearing noblesse. What was even odder, to Desmond’s mind, was that neither Ian nor Marcia were from the nouveau riche who supposedly got it wrong when they suddenly came into money. Ian was from a bloodline that ran straight back over six hundred years and Marcia herself came from a long line of country gentry who’d owned their own small estate for two hundred years.

  ‘To be fair Des, it was your dog she tripped over,’ Gwilym murmured.

  Desmond glared, speechless for a moment, a moment, which quickly gave way to an explosion. ‘Considering it was you and my mother who foisted the blasted animal onto me in the first place and considering the ungrateful little sod has now deserted me and gone over to my mother, I think you’ve got a bloody cheek!’ he said hotly. ‘Mind you, what you said was rather funny!’ he said after a moment, and then started to laugh, ‘

  ‘Glad you can laugh about it,’ said Gwilym, suddenly on his guard.

  ‘Oh, I’m not laughing about that. Oh no. It’s the fact that you will be sharing the driving on the day with me! And don’t use the pub as an excuse, you know perfectly well your staff can manage without you for a few hours.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ his partner agreed. ‘But it’ll have to be the morning. We’ve three coach parties booked in in the afternoon.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ agreed Desmond, surprised the other man had so readily acquiesced. But, then again, he knew that there wasn’t a lot he wouldn’t do for the woman he had always regarded as his second mother. She had, in fact, been more of one than his real one, Desmond sometimes thought, whenever he did think about the dyspeptic woman, which he tried not to do very often. He’d been delighted when he heard that she was leaving the village to return to the Welsh valley she originated from and where she now lived alone and in semi-seclusion. He’d often wondered how the hell her sour-faced presence hadn’t bankrupted the pub she and her husband had run for thirty years or more, but run it successfully they had.

  Chapter 9

  ‘I’m sorry to have to drag you into this, Doctor,’ Calderwood said, some ten days after the murder, with genuine regret, as he looked at the exhausted and grief-stricken man sitting opposite him. He’d been told that Alan Rutherford had been a tall, well-set-up man who’s sparkling health belied his being well into his forties. Not any more, though hardly surprising in the circumstances, the DI thought with compassion. Calderwood knew from his conversations both with the GP, and with others, how hard he’d been hit by the death of his father. It was only years of professional training and habit, plus the example the older man himself had set, that had kept him going. Calderwood could see, however, in the stooped shoulders and the pale, lined face, the effort it was costing him just to keep making the effort.

  ‘It’s alright, Inspector,’ the doctor, replied with a tired shake of his head. ‘I’d expected this once I heard you wanted access to the medical records. My father didn’t have the neatest hand-writing in the world!’

  Neither do you mate, thought Bulmer feelingly, having seen examples where the son’s writing was, if anything, worse than the father’s had been.

  ‘Do you think his… his death was linked to his professional life? Sorry, it’s a daft question, you can’t tell me, obviously,’ Teddy said, dismissing his own question, as Calderwood hesitated.

  ‘It’s less a case of can’t and more one of don’t know, I’m afraid, but it’s a line we must follow-up, unfortunately,’ the DI responded with a half-smile as yet another box was brought in. What he didn’t add was the growing necessity of the exercise. A huge, and manpower-heavy, drive, had resulted in statements from everyone in the area who knew the old man. All the statements were being reviewed, some for the second time, and a number of those interviewed would be seen again, but initial results were alarmingly negative from the investigation’s point of view. A surprising number of those interviewed had alibis. This, Calderwood knew, was down to the timing of the murder. Seven to eight a.m. was a time where many families and couples were bustling about, within eyesight of each other as the scramble for breakfast, use of the bathroom, lunch-packs, searching for misplaced school books, dentures, spectacles and so on, meant that people were less scattered about than they would be in almost any other part of the day.

  ‘Well, thanks for agreeing to look through them all here, rather than over at the pub,’ Teddy said with genuine appreciation. ‘Quite apart from it making it a hell of a lot easier if – when – I need to translate what Dad said, but… well, you know…’

  Calderwood did know. The issue of patient confidentiality was a big part of the reason he’d agreed to have all the medical files looked at within the practise walls; all forty years plus, by the look of it, he thought wryly. He was very aware that, despite himself having the necessary Court Order to access the records, Teddy, as the GP, could have made getting access very difficult and time-consuming. This was particularly so as the search parameters were so vague and covered all the records of all his current patients. Even those who had an alibi for the hour or so in question would be looked at, so inter-related were many of the village families.

  *

  After several hours, Calderwood was growing increasingly pessimistic as to whether the whole tedious exercise would yield anything, as he listened to a report from the two young, usually keen, detective constables, Bulmer had put onto the thankless task.

  ‘We’ve done about twenty percent, sir,’ the older of the two reported. ‘We started on the earliest ones as you asked – though that only brings us up to the late 1970s,’ she added gloomily.

  Calderwood nodded, smiling in sympathy. He himself had been through such mind-numbing, but essential, work very early in his career, and he hoped fervently that he never had to again.

  ‘And you’ve come up with…?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing at all sir, so far at any rate. We thought we might have, but nothing came of it,’ she continued, shaking her head in remembered frustration.

  ‘Go on,’ said Calderwood, intrigued.

  ‘Well, once we got used to the old Doc’s writing which, though dreadful, was always the same dreadful, if you get my meaning, we saw that some of the entries weren’t difficult to make sense of just because of his crap handwriting. Some
of it was actually in a sort of code.’

  ‘Code?’ echoed Bulmer, looking across the desk in surprise.

  ‘Yes Sir, code. But as I say, it wasn’t as important as we thought, unfortunately. Apparently the old Doc used to enter anything at all personal or embarrassing in a simple code. To add a bit more security, I suppose,’ she added, shrugging her shoulders.

  ‘How do you know that what he’s encoded has nothing to do with our enquiry?’

  ‘Because sir, we asked the present Doctor Rutherford about it and he uses it too. Apparently his father taught it to him years ago, and he, himself still uses it if there’s anything he feels is too sensitive for his receptionist or other staff to be able to see.’

  ‘And nothing has so far cropped up that could be relevant, however far-fetched?’ pushed the DI.

  ‘No Sir, nothing; that’s provided, of course, that the younger Doctor Rutherford was telling us the truth when he de-coded stuff we passed to him,’ she added blandly, neatly forestalling Bulmer raising that very point.

  ‘And how do you know if he is, Cerian?’ queried Calderwood giving her an appreciative glance. She’d been on his team for over a year; a pencil-slim, petite girl with short spiky hair the colour of which varied; today it was blonde. She wouldn’t have even been in the police force had the qualifying height for female officers of 5’4” still been in operation, being more than two or three inches shorter. With her small frame she looked deceptively frail and vulnerable. In her late twenties, she was a late entrant to the police via a career first working in the pub trade, then the late night club trade and, later still, in the sex industry, “on the administration side only”, she’d explained firmly to the stunned recruitment officer.

  ‘John here, sir,’ she replied, nodding at her co-worker, a younger, round-faced, tousled haired figure with an earnest expression. He was another DC, who until now had seemed content to let her do all the talking. This was nothing unusual, his superiors knew. Both Calderwood and Bulmer had wondered at his reticence when he’d first joined their team some three months previously. Both were concerned that it hid either insecurity or an inability to actually add anything to either the conversation or the wider investigation itself. Those concerns had quickly been put to rest at the first team meeting he’d attended. When asked a question he immediately sprang into life and gave a cogent breakdown of what he’d been doing and made some shrewd points arising from it. His colleagues had quickly got used to looking beyond his mild, round face, with its rather bland features under a mop of hair, which, due to his habit, when concentrating, of running his hands through it, permanently looked like an exploded haystack.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said responding to Calderwood’s enquiring look. ‘It was simple really, the old doc used a fairly basic code: each letter of the alphabet was allocated a number, A was 1, B, 2, and so on.’

  ‘Very easy to break,’ remarked Bulmer as the young DC paused for a moment as he looked for an example.

  ‘Yes, sir, but he then added the month the patient was born so, for example, this record is for someone born in March, the third month of the year, A became 1 + 3 i.e. 4 ,so the A became not 1 but 4, B not 2 but 5 and so on,’ he stopped, having said all he needed to.

  ‘He’d worked it out before we asked Dr Rutherford,’ Cerian explained, proudly, ‘but we didn’t say that he had, so we knew we weren’t getting a load of cra… anything inaccurate,’ she amended hastily. She was still, despite both four years in the police force and her own lapses, not entirely at ease with the expletive-loaded conversations that swirled around her.

  ‘Well done, John,’ murmured Calderwood with genuine appreciation. ‘So when Dr Rutherford explained the code, you already knew it and could check that he was being accurate?’

  ‘Yes, sir, though it’s not done us much good so far,’ he replied, as gloomy as Cerian at the thought of the remaining two thirds still left for them to do.

  The two older police officers smiled in silent sympathy as they left them to get on with their thankless task.

  Chapter 10

  It was after lunch the week following the accident, that Desmond took over from Gwilym and drove his mother to the first of the ten remaining houses on her list. The first call was to an exquisite garden tucked behind one of the Tudor cottages at the edge of the common. Every border was ablaze with the most colourful flowers that Desmond had ever seen.

  Joe and Dotty Smith were the keenest of keen gardeners. They were a perfect pair for it. Joe was ultra-conservative and saw nothing wrong with the basic traditional flowers and shrubs, but loved his garden and spent many hours in it. Dotty, before she’d fallen for the handsome young village lad, some thirty years previously, had been a promising artist. She still painted and did stage design commissions, but she’d quickly started to put her artistic flair into the garden as well. This was much to the vocal outrage of her husband, which continued unabated some thirty years later. Each year, whilst keeping the basic layout of their garden unchanged, they developed a different theme.

  Eleanor was impressed when she walked in through the rose-covered gateway and saw that this year they’d created a kaleidoscope of colour swirling in great banks of flowers in a series of large herbaceous borders. The effect was electrifying. Even Desmond, to whom gardens held little appeal, found his interest caught. His own eye for design, so important in his theatrical work, immediately, however, recognised the strength and artistry behind the swirls and loops of glorious colour. Hollyhocks, dahlias, foxgloves, gladioli, geraniums, poppies, delphiniums and many, many others he couldn’t even begin to name, had been planted in joyous beds of differing colours and heights, all inter-linked to create a sort of Catherine wheel of colour. The varying shades of their foliage both divided and added to the rich vigour of the display.

  ‘It’s glorious!’ he said genuinely impressed as he greeted the middle-aged couple.

  Joe merely grunted ‘aye it’s not too bad this year’. Dotty, on the other hand, threw her arms round Desmond, who was a long-time friend from when they’d first worked together some fifteen years previously. ‘Lovely to see you darling! I didn’t know you were into gardens!’

  ‘I’m not,’ he said shortly, ‘though this is well worth seeing!’ he added, hurriedly gesturing around him, conscious of sounding a little churlish.

  ‘Desmond is being terribly kind and driving me,’ Eleanor explained, with an amused glance at her son.

  ‘Oh yes, I heard! You tripped over Desmond’s puppy didn’t you?’ sympathised Dotty, greatly adding to Desmond’s sense of grievance, and his mother’s amusement.

  ‘And he’s going to video each garden, as we did last year,’ Eleanor added. ‘We found it so helpful in the final judging. And this year, he’s promised to get it all properly edited for us, so we can sell DVDs at the Combined Charities Coffee Morning to raise extra money!’ she added, smiling, as Marcia and the Vicar, walked through the gate.

  Desmond was very much looking forward to the next few minutes as the other two judges arrived for the first of the afternoon visits. He was delighted to see that his cousin by marriage was looking murderous. With her having spent the entire morning with the vicar, he wasn’t surprised. Serves her right, he thought, Ian appointed the man. Beldon Magna was one of the comparatively few parishes where the local landowner still had significant rights over who was appointed to the benefice and Ian, puffed up with seigneurial pride, would listen to no one, hence the current colourless incumbent.

  ‘I’ll leave you to your judging while I have a word with Dotty,’ Desmond said, feeling in a much better mood after seeing how pissed off Marcia was. He wasn’t surprised. Even without the vicar, he knew she loathed this sort of thing, and had only done it to spite Eleanor as she thought she was taking her seat on the panel. It didn’t work, for the simple reason that the “elders” behind selecting the judges simply retired one of the two remaining judges and re-appointed Eleanor.

  An idea had been slowly developing in Desmond’s
mind for a show. He’d held back on taking things further because he couldn’t yet “see” it with his inner eye. Having seen the garden, though, he now could. It wouldn’t be a West End show, not yet at any rate and probably not at all. He’d put it on in smaller provincial venues initially to iron out any problems, and see how it went. The show Tessa was lobbying on was based on song, this one would be based on colour and movement, perhaps through dance and music through the ages, while telling the story of two, perhaps, three famous painters. Now, having seen what Dotty had done with the garden, his mind was racing with ideas as he took her to one side to discuss it. He’d always been fond of the diminutive artist and, along with all their friends, he and Gwilym had been overjoyed for the couple, when after years of childlessness, Dotty had conceived and they’d had, wonders of all wonders, twins. There’d followed three incandescently happy years during which both parents had wondered how they could be so happy, so utterly and completely fulfilled.

  Their wonder, along with most of their joy, disappeared with savage suddenness, one summer’s morning when the twins somehow opened the gate to the garden of the house they were then living in, stepped into the quiet lane and were killed by one of the only two vehicles to pass by that day.

  Dotty was an astute woman who, despite being a promising artist, had been unproven as a set designer and she was fully aware that he’d given her the work to help her get some sort of life back. He’d gone further and insisted also on Joe being in the team and between them the two had fought back to, if not happiness, at least acceptance and a degree of contentment.

  ‘How long does it take to re-design the whole thing each year?’ he asked as, their conversation over to their mutual satisfaction, they were sauntering back to where the judges, under the watchful eye of her husband, were having a quiet discussion. Belatedly remembering his duties, he hurriedly started using the camera as they talked.