Caroline Graham - Death in Disguise

No one in the village of Compton Dando was surprised to hear of the murder up at the Manor House. They were a funny lot up there. A most peculiar lot. Weird.

Mr and Mrs Bulstrode were almost the only locals to have a thread of contact with the spiritual community (so called) in the big house. She pushed the parish magazine determinedly through the letter box once a month. He delivered a single daily pint of milk. The tenuousness of this connection in no way undermined the couple’s standing as a source of much juicily informative gossip. Now, of course, they were in even more demand and Mrs Bulstrode found herself facing a full house every time she put foot to pavement outside her front door.

Demurring at first: ‘I know no more than I did yesterday Mrs Oxtoby ...’, the temptation to embroider and expand proved irresistible. And by the evening of the third day if the inhabitants of ‘The Lodge of the Golden Windhorse’ had come sailing over their crinkle-crankle wall on broom-sticks, the village would have been unastonished if not exactly sanguine.

In the butcher’s, buying her lamb’s liver and a bone for Ponting, Mrs Bulstrode shook her head in reluctant and judicious revelation. She had seen it coming she told Major Palfrey (two kidneys and a packet of dripping) in a voice that carried. The goings-on at that place you would simply not believe. The queue, more than willing to take up the challenge, followed her to the Post Office.

There Miss Tombs, cushiony cheeks practically taking an impression from the wire grill, passed over Mrs Bulstrode’s stamps with a stage whisper: ‘You won’t be getting over this in a hurry, dear. Your Derek finding a body. Not something you come across every day of the week.’

‘Ohhh ...’ Overcome, Mrs Bulstrode (whose husband had not even seen the body), clutched at the counter’s edge. ‘It’s all rushing back, Myrtle-’

‘Devil take my tongue!’ called Miss Tombs and watched her customers disappear, clustering like nebulae around their guiding star.

In Bob’s Emporium Mrs Bulstrode said that just the way they dressed was enough. Her audience seemed to think this a mite parsimonious. They hung on for a sec then started to drift towards pyramids of Happy Shopper cat food and bags of carrots.

‘Can’t tell if they’re male or female half the time.’ Then, gussying things up a bit, ‘What my Derek’s seen through the windows some mornings ... Well - I wouldn’t divulge in mixed company.’

‘You mean ...’ A woman in a headscarf with a snout like a porbeagle breathed heavily ‘... sacrifices ?’

‘Let’s just say “ceremonies” shall we, Miss Oughtred? Best leave it there.’

Ceremonies! People regathered, quick and solemn. Their minds swarmed with melodramatic images, horrific and banal. Graves yawned, allowing the undead easy access to careless passers-by. Horned Lucifer, yellow-eyed and sulphurous, clattered his hooves at the pentagon’s rim. Burning sand and a girl, once beautiful as a Mameluke, staked-out to be eaten alive by marching ants. (Major Palfrey had served with the Desert Rats.)

Next stop was the Crinoline Tea Rooms for half a dozen homemade Viennese fingers. While the assistant silver tong’d these into a bag, Mrs Bulstrode looked around in the hope of further increasing her audience ratings.

But she was out of luck. Only two people were present tucking into coffee and cakes. Ann Cosins and her friend from Causton, Mrs Barnaby. There was no point at all in trying to talk to them. Ann had a most dry and unimpressed way with her - almost as if she were laughing up her sleeve - that made her quite unpopular. Also she had let the whole village down on one occasion by actually going to the Manor House on a course. The two of them had been seen walking up the drive bold as brass one Friday afternoon, not emerging till the Sunday. To add insult to injury, Ann had then refused to be drawn as to what the place and people were really like.

So Mrs Bulstrode contented herself with a cool inclination of the head and a sniff of acknowledgement, grandly ignoring the gurgling snorts upon which she closed the door. Finally, on the way home, she paused to exchange a few words with the vicar who was leaning over the gate of ‘Benisons’ smoking his pipe. He greeted her with a look of deep satisfaction, for The Lodge had long been a thorn in the ecclesiastical side. Uncertainty as to its precise ethos had proved no hindrance when it came to firing off a series of mildly hysterical salvos at the letters page of the Causton Echo - warning readers against the new idolatrous theology now nestling in the wholesome English countryside, like a maggot in the heart of a rose.

Any religion (wrote the vicar) invented by man as opposed to that plainly emanating directly from the Almighty could surely come to no good end. And so it had proved to be. God, after all, was seen to be not mocked and the Reverend Phipps plus his minuscule congregation had gathered to celebrate the fact with a renewed sense of righteousness and not a little surprise. Now he raised a greying compassionate brow and asked if there were any fresh developments.

Mrs Bulstrode, flattered at the implication that Derek and the CID were as two peas in the same pod, could not bring herself to tell even the whitest of lies to a man of the cloth. She had to admit there were none, adding: ‘But the inquest’s Tuesday, Vicar. Eleven o’clock.’

He knew that of course. Everyone knew and they were all going, some even taking time off work to do so. Hopes were high that the hearing might last all day and every table in Causton’s Soft Shoe Café had long since been booked for lunch. Compton Dando had not seen such excitement since three boys from the Council Estate burned down the bus shelter and it was confidently supposed that the incendiary quotient in this later drama would be immeasurably higher.

The scene of these dramatic goings-on was a modestly beautiful example of early Elizabethan architecture. Two storeys high, it was built of grey stone horizontally banded with flint and smooth pebbles and was charmingly unsymmetrical. There were Ionic columns at the slightly off-centre doorway, a little porch and forty-six light mullioned windows. The chimneys were huddled together in three separate clumps, some twisted like barley sugar, others appliquéd with vine leaves and convolvulus. Many had star-shaped openings emitting, during the cold winter months, star-shaped puffs of smoke. A huge lump of metal thought to be a meteorite or, less romantically, part of a cannon ball lay near the edge of the roof which had rose-red, moss-encrusted tiles.

The building was the gift of Elizabeth the First to an exiled favourite, Gervaise Huyton-Corbett. The queen and her entourage were frequent visitors during the first five years of his occupancy and this crippling honour brought him, and several near neighbours obliged to absorb the overspill, near to bankruptcy. The descendants of Sir Gervaise (as he was graciously dubbed once brought to his knees by penury) had lived at Compton Manor for the next four centuries but the family coffers never really recovered. Each year the house cost far more to maintain than it had originally cost to build but, so great was their love of the place, the Huyton-Corbetts struggled on - borrowing beyond their means and unable to bear the thought of parting with the family home. Then, in 1939, Ashley joined the Fleet Air Arm. The scion of the house, he was killed at the Battle of the River Plate. In old age and having no immediate heir, his father sold the property and the village suffered the first of what was to be a long line of cultural shocks and setbacks.