Sarah Rayne - What Lies Beneath

A bit of frivolity would go down very nicely at the moment. Some of the things he wrote in his Jottings were often quite frivolous, even a bit quirky; the trouble was that people did not always understand that kind of quirkiness, which was why Clem got stupid rejections for his articles, with magazine editors and feature writers politely saying they did not think his work was quite what they wanted at the moment.

He always blew a mental raspberry at the people who sent him these letters, and planned that one day he would assemble his Jottings into a book and everyone would marvel at his powers of observation and acuity of character-drawing. This last phrase pleased him so much he hunted out his spiral notebook to write it down before he forgot it. His father had been a great one for writing your thoughts down; diaries and journals were the very cloth of history, he used to say.

Clem thought that one day his own diaries and essays might receive the acclaim they deserved. They would give future generations an insight into the last half of the twentieth century and the first part of the twenty-first, and researchers would say things like, ‘We’d better consult Poulter on that point.’ Academics would argue the merits of the Poulter Journals against other learned sources.

But in the meantime, and since the library was not very busy this morning, Clem spent a happy half-hour drafting out the menu for his party. There would be eight people – ten if he included Ella and Derek, which he supposed he would do in the end; it was not worth Ella’s ice-queen sulking if he left them out. In any case, he wanted Amy to come, partly because he enjoyed her company, but also because he suspected Amy might be a good lure for Dr Malik. To have Dr Malik as a guest would be a real coup.

Ten people meant extending both leaves of his table and he would have to borrow two chairs from Mrs Williams next door. But ten was a satisfying number and Clem enjoyed cooking. He was just frowning over the advisability of a seafood starter – you could depend on it that someone would claim a shellfish allergy – when Amy scooted across to his partitioned cubbyhole to say there were two policemen asking to see him.

This was faintly alarming, but when Amy brought them in Clem waved them to chairs and asked how he could help.

‘I dare say it’s this wretched business of the – um – body you’ve found, is it?’ Which was a ridiculous thing to say, because what else would it be?

But they took it at face value, and said it was indeed, sir, and very puzzling.

‘And there’s now an added complication,’ said the older of the two men.

They had told Clem their names and ranks when they came in, but he had been in too much of a fluster to take it in properly, other than to register which was the inspector and which the detective sergeant.

‘Complication?’

‘There’s a second set of remains been found,’ said the inspector.

‘What kind of— You mean another body?’ said Clem.

‘I do. This time inside the manor itself.’

‘And,’ said the sergeant, ‘it looks as if it’s from the same era as the first one. Fifty years old, is our guess.’

Clem felt as if he had been punched in the face. He stared at the two men, then realized his mouth was gaping open as if he was the village idiot, and said, with an effort, ‘You mean there’ve been two bodies lying there in Priors Bramley all these years? Two? ’

‘Two,’ affirmed the sergeant, pulling out a notebook.

‘And that being so, Mr Poulter, we’d like to find out a bit more about the history of Priors Bramley,’ said the inspector.

‘History? I’m sorry, I don’t quite see—’

‘I should have said Cadence Manor’s history,’ said the inspector. ‘The family who lived there and so on. Local people who might have been involved with them – helping out on a domestic level at the house, maybe. A bit feudal, I know, but it’s how life was in village communities, even as late as the 1940s and 1950s. Between ourselves, Mr Poulter, we’re having trouble enough identifying one body, never mind two. We’ve scoured the missing persons lists, but they haven’t yielded anything helpful so far. And so, you being the local librarian, we thought you might put us onto some archive stuff.’

‘We’ll be looking at the old newspapers as well, of course,’ put in the sergeant.

‘You’ll find a lot of those here,’ said Clem at once. ‘It’s always been my pride to keep a copy of every issue of the Bramley Advertiser . I like to think of myself as keeper of the area’s history, you know.’

‘Do you indeed, sir? Very admirable. And I hear you’re mounting an exhibition of Old Bramley, so very likely you’ll have unearthed a lot of quite useful stuff already.’

‘Well, yes, I have,’ admitted Clem. ‘At least, Amy – that’s Amy Haywood, who’s helping out – has done.’ He peered over the partition to see where Amy was and waved to her to come over.

Amy, listening to the inspector’s explanation, was horrified to hear another body had turned up. ‘It’s surreal, isn’t it? Like a whodunnit where the author chucks a new corpse in every twenty pages in case the reader’s getting bored,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean that to be disrespectful, but the bodies are from pretty far back, aren’t they?’

‘About fifty years ago, we think, miss. We’re waiting for forensics before we can be sure, though.’

‘Well, I’ve got a ton of boxes that I’m sorting through,’ said Amy. ‘But there’s a million more in the basement.’

‘We’ll take a bit of a look at what’s in the basement, if that’s all right, sir.’

‘Inspector, you can have the run of the entire library, as far as I’m concerned,’ said Clem. ‘If you want to go down there now you can have the keys.’

‘You keep the cellars locked, do you, sir?’

‘Yes, on account of security and fire hazard,’ said Clem, who had been on a Health and Safety course. ‘You never know who might sneak down there during the day when you aren’t looking. There are peculiar people around, Inspector, even in Bramley.’

‘Especially in Bramley, if two murders were committed fifty years ago and nobody knew about them,’ said Amy, as Clem rummaged in his cabinet for the cellar keys.

‘We don’t know that it was murder,’ said the inspector. ‘There could be an innocent explanation.’ He took the keys and nodded his thanks to Clem. ‘The cellar door’s in the hallway, isn’t it? I thought I saw it. There’s no need to come down with us, Mr Poulter. We’ll find our own way. No need to put you to trouble.’

‘It’s no trouble,’ said Clem earnestly.

Amy said, ‘Clem, I think the inspector’s trying to say tactfully that they’d prefer to do their own delving.’

‘Quite right, miss,’ said the inspector. ‘Although if it does turn out to be murder, Mr Poulter’s not likely to be the killer, not with both bodies having died over fifty years ago.’

Clem managed a nervous laugh and said, well goodness, he was hardly likely to have been murdering people when he was only nine.

‘You’d be surprised at the things some children get up to, though,’ said the inspector. ‘None of us will ever forget the Jamie Bulger case. And there have been other cases of child murderers.’

Child murderers. But what they had done that day had not been murder. There was nothing to worry about. Clem watched the two men descend to the cellars, then returned to his cubbyhole and retrieved his plans for Friday evening. He would not dwell on all this police stuff. Instead he would concentrate on his menu and on the games his guests might play.

Veronica generally found games at dinner parties boring.