Fete Fatale by Robert Barnard

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

CHAPTER 9

CASTLE WALLS

I spent the first part of the next day in thought. So did Jasper. He moped. Marcus, he thought, was away, as he occasionally was, to conferences, or on a difficult case at some remote farm. Jasper, I feared, was going to mope still more before the week was out, and, with that blessed shortness of canine memory, he began to forget. I, meanwhile, had not the heart to attempt any of those tactics for cheering him up which I usually employed to keep his mind off Marcus’s absences.

I was thinking. First of all I was wondering whether I dared to pay the first of my mourning calls that day. There were limits to my daring in defiance of Hexton custom—I was a Fabian rather than a revolutionary by temperament. Also, my embarrassed reception of the day before had made me wary. But, more than that, I was uncertain how I was to approach the crux of the matter on these visits. ‘Where were you when my husband was killed?’ spoken above the tinkle of teaspoons on bone china, seemed a preposterous intrusion, and one likely to get me nowhere at all. I could not even explain why I believed that the murderer of Marcus was to be found among the middle-class residents of Hexton whose quarrels he had spent his last days trying to dampen down. Hexton, I had no doubt, had by now fixed on one of the army boys, or perhaps all of them, as culprit. Rumour would swiftly have broadcast their inquisition by the Superintendent, and Hexton would have breathed a relieved (and self-congratulatory) sigh: it was the sort of thing they had more or less expected. ‘I always said that one day . . . ’ they would be saying to one another.

But they were wrong, wilfully wrong. They were setting up a smoke-screen. It was they who had killed Marcus. One of them. The question was: how to manage the discussions that eventually might give me a lead as to which of them it was. I began to think that aggression, blatancy, was my only possible form of approach.

After lunch—I was eating ravenously still—I made a concession to weakness and pain and had a lie-down. As the afternoon wore on, and I still had made no decision and lighted on no definite plan of campaign, it became imperative to take Jasper for his daily walk. Moping or not, he was a dog who kept his mind—and mine—on his few and simple needs. He perked up no end when he heard the jingle of his lead. Impelled by I-knew-not-what, we made once more in the direction of the castle.

As I neared the place where Castle Walk began, and the little cluster of cottages around the entrance to the castle itself, I thought I had an inkling of why I had been drawn in this direction again. Castle Walk was largely shielded from the meadows, and from the lower paths along the river and past the weir, by its height and by the vegetation on its slopes.

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