Lesley Cookman - Murder to Music

‘Yes. Shall we eat there, too? And we’ll bring Sophie shall we?’

‘Ad will be working at the caff, but he can join us afterwards. I think they need to know all about it, too.’

Libby tried to spend Saturday as normally as possible. Ben didn’t go to work, but did go up to the Manor briefly to explain why he’d taken the Land Rover the previous night. Libby pottered down to the eight-til-late and the butcher and popped in to see Flo and Lenny in Maltby Close, and Peter to say sorry for disturbing his meeting with Ben.

‘If you’re about tonight, I don’t suppose Ian will mind if you sit in on the revelations,’ she said. ‘You’ve been there every time before!’

‘He does like his little Poirot gather-them-in-the-library moments, doesn’t he?’ said Peter.

‘Except it’s only explanation not accusation,’ said Libby.

‘Your time might come,’ said Peter, pointing a long finger. ‘Give me a call when it’s appropriate.’

It was almost eight o’clock before Ian made his entrance into the snug, where his audience was assembled.

‘Yes, please,’ he said to the chorused offer of drinks. ‘Peter has kindly offered me the spare bedroom, so I can.’

‘I sent him a text,’ said Peter. ‘I’ve still got his private number from last winter.’

‘Well, tell us,’ said Libby, when Ian had been provided with a pint of bitter and a whisky chaser. ‘We’ve all been on tenterhooks. What’s Rosie guilty of?’

Ian smiled round at his listeners. ‘If I’m going to tell this, it will have to be in my time and my words. It’s difficult enough to understand forwards, impossible if you take it out of sequence.’

Baffled, Libby shook her head. ‘So were none of our conclusions right?’

‘I said, Libby, let me tell it.’

Libby subsided under a chorus of ‘Shhh!’

‘We have to start with the Princess Beatrice sanatorium. Willoughby Weston, Master of Foxhounds, Justice of the Peace and general VIP, was on the governing body. Despite the NHS, fairly new in those days, people paid to go there. But the incidence of TB was lessening, and antibiotics were proving effective. In the fifties the NHS began sending patients there, but that meant less money. Weston was approached, as far as we can make out, by a drug company who had a new drug they wished to try out. Weston agreed, and they paid him. However, the drugs, which our forensic anthropologists have managed to isolate, proved fatal to the patients.’

‘See, I said so!’ said Libby and received another round of ‘Shhh!’

‘Yes, Libby, you were right.’ Ian gave her a grin. ‘So they buried these poor unfortunates in their back garden and used old gravestones from the graveyard of the chapel that belonged to the estate, I suppose to deflect attention.

‘Then the sanatorium closed and Paul Findon, who’d been doing his bit as a former patient by raising funds performing charity concerts, bought it and returned it to a private dwelling.’

‘What about the barn?’ asked Fran. ‘Sorry to interrupt.’

‘As far as we can tell, the barn was used for isolation purposes, and Paul Findon, if he knew about it, did nothing with it at all,’ said Ian. ‘It was at this time that Findon’s sister Sheila and he began to see each other again and she used to bring young Rosie with her. As we gathered, he introduced her to music, Debussy in particular.

‘And then, one day, Weston came to pay a visit with his son, Hugh.’

There was a subdued rustle from the audience.

‘At the time, Paul was in his little music room, the cellar, with Rosie. She stayed there while he went up to talk to Weston. She heard them arguing. Then she saw her uncle toppling down the stairs. He caught the edge of the door, which slammed shut, locking her inside.’

There was a collective indrawn breath.

‘We gathered that yesterday,’ said Libby, and shuddered. ‘Just thinking about being shut up down there gives me the horrors. So she remembered at last?’

‘She remembered. Things were beginning to come back, you realised that. It was her screaming that finally alerted her mother, who had been away overnight and came back to find her daughter, as she thought, missing. Rosie, as you can imagine, was thoroughly traumatised and was even in hospital for a time. She had completely expunged the whole thing from her memory, though, except for a terror of cellars. Sheila wanted nothing to do with the house, and left it to a local agent, Riley and Naughton, to rent out.’

‘And Weston was a partner?’ said Fran.

‘A director. He put money in at around the same time. Also around the same time, young Hugh was sent off to school.’

‘He would have seen what happened!’ said Ben.

‘He did.’ Ian nodded. ‘As far as we can work out, talking to Hugh and from other sources, killing was a necessary part of living. Willoughby was a military man, had seen active war service and Hugh went straight into the school army corps and from there straight into the army. But one thing apparently stayed with Hugh. Paul Findon had taught him to play the piano.’ Ian shook his head. ‘I don’t know what part that played in his extraordinary psyche, but it affected him.’ He looked up at Fran. ‘He actually used to go there – to White Lodge – in the middle of the night and play the piano. No wonder the rumour spread that it was haunted.

‘But back to the house. The people who rented it turned it into a hotel – not a very grand one, I think, and they wanted to put an extension on the back. It was during excavations for the foundations of this that the body of the poor TB victim was unearthed.’

‘Hang on a minute,’ said Libby. ‘You said Uncle Paul fell down the cellar steps, so presumably Willoughby pushed him. But why?’

‘We can only assume that it was something to do with the deaths from the poisonous medications. Perhaps there were records left somewhere. The police saw the other gravestones hidden in the undergrowth and assumed they were all victims of workhouse and sanatorium, reburied the little body -’

‘Was it -? interrupted Libby.

‘No. They buried the body in a new grave, not the one you saw when you first went there.’

Libby subsided.

‘Then there were reports of a ghost being seen either inside or outside the house. No one quite seems to know where these came from, but we think Willoughby Weston must have paid a maid at the hotel to say she’d seen something, or sent anonymous tip-offs to the media. Anyway, the story spread, the hotel people gave up and left and that was that. Willoughby made sure that the details of the property never made it into the current files of the agency.

‘When he died, his whole estate went to his son, including his interest, now a controlling one, in what had now become just Riley’s. Weston won’t say how much he knew of his father’s misdeeds, but he’s hardly as pure as the driven snow himself.

‘A year or so ago, a new manager came to Riley’s. Being a good, decent, hard-working sort, he went through the files and came across what he saw as a very decent property, updated the details and put it on the website and in the local paper.

‘Weston saw this and, thinking quickly, because he had been in comms -’

‘What?’ said Fran.

‘Communications,’ said Peter, ‘which means he was probably a bit of an electronics whizz.’

‘Quite,’ said Ian. ‘He went and rigged up his Debussy – he knew all about Findon, you see – and then set about bricking up the cellar, where the equipment was.’

‘Why didn’t he just make sure the house details went back into the vaults or wherever they were?’ asked Guy.

‘He did, but they’d been out there already and somebody might have seen them and asked to view. Which in fact they did. Rosie wasn’t the first.’