Death and the Chaste Apprentice by Robert Barnard

Author:Robert Barnard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Chapter 11

The Manager’s Flat

THE RESIDENTIAL QUARTERS of the manager of the Saracen’s Head consisted of four rooms immediately above the entrance foyer and reception desk. They could be reached by a small staircase from the manager’s office behind Reception or by a door from the maze of corridors and open areas on the first floor—a door that led directly into the sitting room. Des’s murderer could have gained or been given access to the flat from either of these.

Superintendent Dundy had sent Nettles off to talk to the kitchen and the cleaning staff. Nettles was an excellent chap, but he did tend to chat, to comment, to make his presence felt. Dundy liked to sniff out a place in silence—walk around, get the feel, sense a personality. Then he would look around and think of what was missing, what was out of place. So he said to Charlie, down in Reception: “Let’s go up and quietly get the lie of the land, shall we?” Charlie nodded, and together they ascended the stairs and went to work.

The manager’s living quarters—or dying quarters, as they had so soon become for Des Capper—had been inhabited for twenty years by “dear old Arthur,” as Gillian Soames and others always called him, and his impress was still on them. His had been the choice of furniture, his the choice of the pictures on the walls. It was mainly in the extras and inessentials that Des and Win had made their tenure felt. Or that Des had made his tenure felt.

The photo of the hotel in Dubbo, squarely in the center of the sideboard, had Des standing by the wrought-iron pillar of a wonderful nineteenth-century structure, looking loathsomely proprietorial. Win was not to be seen. Perhaps she was behind the camera, but as it seemed a highly professional photograph—you could feel the flies, smell the sheep-dip—this was unlikely. Probably she had been behind the bar as usual. The books all seemed to be Des’s, too: The Homemaker’s Medical Enquire Within, The Secrets of the Tarot, Desmond Morris, Reader’s Digest evaporated books, L. Ron Hubbard, and Arthur Hailey. Even the Jane Fonda Exercise Book belonged, Dundy guessed, more to Des than to Win. There were newish paperbacks of several biographies of the Mountbattens, presumably purchased to give corroborative detail to Des’s recent incautious claims, which Dundy had heard about from Frank. There was also Heat and Dust and a popular book on Indian religions.

Des’s research for the festival took in heavier tomes. From the Ketterick Public Library he had borrowed a thick book on Donizetti by William Ashbrook and a volume on Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy. The latter had been much renewed, with dates handwritten in. The former was a new borrowing, with a return date ten days hence. They both sat on a small table by the biggest armchair. Charlie took them up and skimmed through the sections on Adelaide and The Chaste Apprentice.

Iain Dundy was over by the sideboard, getting whiffs of Des’s personality. There

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