Murder Among Us Page 4

  The apparition looked round as if to make sure she had everyone's attention. She raised a banner with an indecipherable legend and set off at a lumbering run towards the crowd and the lawn with its invited guests, heading, so it seemed to Meredith, straight towards her.

  Reactions were initially slow. Only one man from the crowd was racing around the edge, perhaps intending to cut the streaker off. But she was too quick for him and others had not yet organised themselves to intervene. The naked woman was moving deceptively fast and she'd reached the barrier.

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  For a dreadful moment Meredith feared she meant to try and hurdle it. But she just swept it aside and, whooping, raced on, brandishing her flowing banner. She'd reached the edge of the lawn and the gala guests, attracted by the rumpus, had all seen her now. Their faces, frozen and disbelieving, gazed at the sight and their hands remained clasping their drinks half raised to their lips. In the surrounding crowd faces were equally dazed and only one person was pointing and saying something to a companion.

  But the TV crew had spotted the cause of the commotion all right and their reporter, who had been trying to inject some enthusiasm into what he privately considered a dreary society shindig, had the look on his face of a man whose pools coupon had come up.

  Then one of the security guards hired by Schuhmacher to watch over his special guests, his face white with shock, shouted a warning and began to pound heavy-footed towards the demonstrator. Schuhmacher himself was back, his face as red as the guard's was white. Beside Meredith, Alan Markby swore softly and began to run, dragging off his jacket with great presence of mind as he raced forward intent on veiling this unexpected and undesirable display of flesh.

  The streaker avoided them all. She ducked and dived under the guard's outstretched hand, hurled the banner over Schuhmacher's head and raced round the corner of the building. Behind her came the security men, Schuhmacher still entangled in the banner, Markby, Laura and Paul Danby and even Victor Merle. After them came the TV camera crew, all baying like hounds in full cry. Meredith was caught up in the crazy chase, picking up her long skirts clear of the grass and bounding along as if headed for the tape on some far-off school sports day. "This is madness!" she thought, but couldn't stop. Her legs had taken on an impetus of their own and any attempt to stop or even slow down would have caused a disastrous pile-up all around her.

  The crowd of sightseers, who'd never expected a

  show half as good, had entered into the spirit of the thing. They whistled and cheered and roared on the competitors in the impromptu fancy-dress race presented. Several of the younger ones surged through the destroyed barrier and joined the pack.

  The front runners vanished round the side of the building to the back. Meredith, in company with everyone around her, followed them. They were all mingled together now, invited and mere onlookers. Social and technical barriers had broken down. Dinner jackets and long gowns jostled among blue jeans and sweatshirts, diamonds glittered next door to chainstore plastic earrings. Cameras of all kinds from the TV company's to humble snapshot varieties were waved. Expensive hairdos were wrecked. The man from the television was shouting himself hoarse. It was bedlam.

  Their quarry had been cornered at the back of the house. But she still tried to avoid capture. She turned and dived into the entrance to the kitchens but seeing an array of startled cooks in front of her, stopped, pinned against the side wall of the narrow corridor. Her hand groped vaguely at the wall behind her and connected with a door handle. Desperately she tugged at it and miraculously it opened.

  She vanished backwards through it with the suddenness of the demon king in panto. Meredith wouldn't have been surprised to see a puff of smoke. But an empty doorway was explained by the fact that following some instinct, she must have run down steps inside. The pack, in considerable disarray, tried to follow her. They piled up in the cramped vestibule, getting squashed in the narrow doorway, howling contradictory instructions at one another and uttering squawks of pain as elbows encountered ribs.

  The steps down which the streaker had vanished led, Meredith knew from their earlier tour, to the wine cellars. There was no other way in or out and they had the streaker trapped. Meredith didn't really want to go down after her, but caught up in the crowd she found herself

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  pushed through the door and down the stone staircase underground.

  At the bottom the woman stood at bay, panting but triumphant. Her modesty had been restored, more or less, in haphazard fashion. She wore Alan Markby's jacket and round her lower half was swathed a silver lame evening shawl donated by one of the lady celebrities.

  As Meredith arrived, Eric Schuhmacher erupted from the crowd and shook his fist under the miscreant's nose. He was nearly incoherent with rage, his eyes, bloodshot and rolling, protuded from his head and sweat poured from his brow.

  "Bloody stupid woman! You've ruined my entire opening! Ruined! So much work! The preparation, have you any idea? No, no, you are too stupid! All these people! My God, I kill you!" He stretched out his hands as if to grab the dishevelled woman's throat.

  "Steady, Eric!" snapped Markby, putting up an arm to deflect him. "The TV people ..."

  Schuhmacher groaned and turned away clasping his head.

  Meredith, still panting, made an effort to extricate herself from the mob at last. Both embarrassed at having joined in the hunt and oppressed by the squash of bodies in such a small area, she edged her way out of the throng into the further recesses of the cellars.

  They were surprisingly extensive. As she knew from her earlier visit they consisted of a number of parallel galleries linked by rounded stone arches. It was a sort of catacomb, white-washed and with a thick black cable running along the ceiling to link the electric light bulbs which lit the place. The rows of bottle racks filled much of the space but the effect was still eerie and the temperature was several degrees cooler than outside. Cautiously, Meredith found her way into the furthest gallery. Here a worn flight of steps led up to a blank wall: the old entrance connecting the cellars to the kitchens, now

  blocked up. It reinforced the feeling of being trapped, of being bricked up alive.

  Meredith shivered. There was a story by Edgar Allan Poe about a man who lured his enemy into his wine cellar in order to brick him up in it. No, sherry—that was it. She contemplated the rows of wine bottles and wondered vaguely as to their joint worth. She wasn't a wine buff. The man in the story lured his enemy down to try a rare Amontillado. What nonsense. Why, then, did these rows of bottles lying on their sides in then-cradles look so sinister, like so many cannons pointed at her? She sniffed. The air wasn't as fresh as it could be. That might be because of all the people who had traipsed in and out of the cellars today, to say nothing of the arguing mob round the corner in the further aisle. An odd smell, a bit winy, a bit dusty, a bit flowery or fruity. She sniffed the air again. Surprisingly flowery. Not a wine smell at all.

  She turned to go back and her eye caught a glimmer of white at the far end of the gallery where the wine racks finished and there was a gap between them and the wall. Meredith squinted. It was a white glove, lying on the stone-flagged floor. Someone, a guest earlier or perhaps a waiter, had dropped it. She began to walk towards it and then she saw that it wasn't a glove. It was a hand.

  Meredith stopped, feeling suddenly sick. She could have turned and called for help, but a babble of voices indicated everyone was concerned with getting the streaker out of the cellars and fending off the camera crew. She made herself walk forward, one step at a time, one step nearer.

  The hand was turned palm uppermost and now she could see the arm, and the body of the woman curled up in the recess.

  A mixture of thoughts jostled for supremacy in Meredith's head. Her first was that this person hadn't been crouched in the gap earlier when they'd all been shown over the cellars. The second was a fervent wish that this

  same person, whoever it was, was merely drunk or playing
some stupid game rather in the way the streaker had done. Perhaps this was another of someone's nonsensical ideas for disrupting the gala. But behind all these random speculations loomed a greater truth and a more terrifying one.

  Meredith stooped over the huddled form. She could now see it was a woman of perhaps forty, dark hair trimmed into a straight bob. She was—or had been— good-looking with high cheekbones which were faintly Slav. Her lipsticked mouth was slightly open as were her eyes. She looked surprised, as if she'd been stopped in mid-speech. Meredith wondered what she had been saying. She saw that the woman wore a scarlet hand-knitted sweater.

  Protruding from the indentation above her collar bone was the handle of a knife, and a rivulet of blood, unnoticed at first because it was so uncannily alike to the sweater in hue, ran down and soaked the knitted neck of the garment.

  Meredith fought back nausea. She straightened up and looked quickly round her and in doing so, caught a movement on the other side of a free-standing open rack of bottles to her left.

  "Who's there?" she called sharply. "Come out!"

  As the words left her mouth she realised that the invitation was both stupid and dangerous. It could well be the killer who lurked there. But it was too late to run. She steeled herself.

  Her words were answered with a gasp, the scrape of a foot on the brick floor, and a figure emerged unwillingly to stand before her.

  It was a young woman, in her early twenties. She wore jeans and trainers and her hair had been chopped off in a ragged urchin cut so uneven she must surely have attempted her own hair-dressing. She was weather-tanned, like a much more elderly person, but nonetheless pretty, although her face was now distorted into a picture of terror, the mouth working but no sound coming out,

  her rounded pale blue eyes starting from their sockets.

  Meredith, recognising incipient hysteria, said quickly, ''It's all right, don't panic!"

  The words were nonsensical, but did the trick. The other looked up at her and whispered. "She—she is dead, isn't she?"

  "Yes. I think so. We mustn't touch her." Meredith hesitated. The girl hardly looked like a murderer but was certainly an important witness. The choice was between sending her off to find help and risking her disappearing—or leaving her here while Meredith fetched help, and risking her tampering with the evidence in some way. If they went together, it might be difficult in the crowd to attract Markby and keep an eye on the girl. And someone had to stop anyone else wandering into this bay and raising a further hullaballoo. She made her decision.

  "I'll go and ask Chief Inspector Markby to come. He's only just over by the entrance. You must stay here—"

  "Oh no, I can't!" The voice emerged in a strangled cry.

  "It will only be for a few minutes. He's in the first bay with the crowd. What's your name?"

  "Zoe—Zoe Foster." The girl blinked. "That— that's ..." Her eyes rolled whitely towards the body.

  "Yes? Do you know her?" Meredith frowned.

  "Y-yes. It's Ellen ... Ellen Bryant. She's—she's a member of our society."

  "Society?" For a moment Meredith didn't make the connection.

  "For the Preservation of Historic Bamford. She—I— all of us, we came here to protest. The—the streaking was Hope's idea. Ellen didn't want to be there... she went away. We only came to protest..."

  The girl's voice died and she gulped, turning her face away from the dead woman.

  Meredith hoped the girl wasn't going to be sick. As much to distract her as in the hope of securing infor-

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  mation, she asked quickly, "And, er, Ellen, she didn't want to join the protest?"

  "No—because of her shop, the bad publicity. I was only worried about Hope. I wanted to s-stop her." The speaker rubbed her hand over her mouth. Hand and voice were shaking. "I followed the crowd down here, but when I saw Hope with all those people around her, I was so ashamed—embarrassed—I don't know! I wanted to get away and I couldn't get back up the stairs so I came through here and—and I found—"

  She raised a trembling hand and indicated the collapsed form. "And then I heard someone coming. It was you, but I didn't know that. I hid quickly, over there. I was frightened."

  "Yes, of course you were." Meredith eyed her thoughtfully. "But you don't need to be afraid now. The—your friend, can't hurt you. I must go and fetch the chief inspector and you must stay here and stop anyone else coming into this bay. Be brave, just for a few minutes more."

  The girl nodded and made a visible effort to pull herself together.

  Meredith gave her a reassuring smile and hurried past the ranked muzzles of the wine bottles to find Markby.

  Four

  The change which came over the scene at Springwood Hall once the gala occasion became a police investigation seemed even to extend to the weather. The late afternoon sun disappeared. Everything was now suffused by the mournful tone of the cool, dull grey light which replaced it. The bright colours seeped out of the flowers, making them look tired, and out of the women's high-fashion gowns which now just seemed garish. The green lawns took on an olive tinge. The faces of the prestige guests looked all at once older and unglamorous. The local people who had come to be entertained now looked frightened and awkward, huddling in whispering groups. The identity of the murder victim was not yet generally known but it was enough that "they" had found "a dead body."

  Shivering in the fresh breeze and with the addition to their company of the members of the Society for the Preservation of Historic Bamford, those invited to the gala were disentangled from the hoi polloi and herded into the restaurant to await police attentions.

  "Sheep from the goats!" said Meredith to Laura. Of the two groups theirs, she had a nasty feeling, was to be sacrificed. The common bond of party-goers was broken. Murder had come among them and with it distrust, suspicion and fear.

  The restaurant, its tablecloths so crisply white, its glassware shining and cutlery gleaming, now looked less set out for a festive gathering than for a funeral wake. The profusion of fresh flowers Eric had ordered arranged all round the room only enhanced this impression. An

  air of sadness had entered it and Meredith felt a pang of pity for Schuhmacher who with his staff had worked so hard for this occasion. She wondered what the scene in the kitchens was like, where Ulli Richter now presided over a wonderful meal spoiling as it waited indefinitely with the strong possibility it would never be served. She doubted anyone here felt like eating.

  They were standing in subdued groups, nervously avoiding one another's eye, few people attempting conversation. Paul Danby, to his wife's obvious annoyance, was lost in frowning study of a menu card. Markby was appearing and disappearing again with disconcerting suddenness, having taken charge of the emergency on an ad hoc basis. Victor Merle stood alone before an oil painting inspecting it closely, back to the rest of them. His disapproval at the turn of events was registered in every line of his body. He had simply opted out of the gathering, present in body but not in spirit.

  Meredith still felt cold, probably, she realised, as a result of shock. She made her way to the exit into the main hall with the intention of going upstairs and collecting her coat, only to find her way barred by Sergeant Pearce who had arrived with the first siren-sounding posse of police vehicles.

  "Good evening, Miss Mitchell!" he greeted her amiably. "Nice to see you again. Pity about all this."

  "Yes," said Meredith glumly, hugging her bare arms. "Can I go and get my coat?"

  "Everyone's supposed to stay down here where we can see 'em until we've got statements," he pointed out, more in sorrow than reproach. "I'll have to get his nibs'—sorry, I mean the chief inspector's say-so." Pearce looked across the room. "He's pretty tied up just at the minute and I'm supposed to keep my eye on this door until he's sorted out what he wants everyone to do. If you could hang on for a bit, one of the constables will come over here to stand guard and I'll be free to collect statements. I'll ask the chief inspector about y
ou going upstairs."

  "I don't like to bother him." Meredith sighed. "I could try mind over matter! Tell myself the place is like a hothouse."

  Pearce grined sympathetically and then, without warning, acquired a conspiratorial manner. ' 'Just between the two of us, Miss Mitchell..." He looked furtively across the room. "He's not said anything to you about leaving us?"

  "Chief Inspector Markby?" Meredith stared at him. "How do you mean, leaving?"

  "I mean, getting promotion and shoved upstairs, you know."

  "No, not a word!" Meredith tried to digest the idea. "Is this certain?"

  "I don't know for sure, none of us does! He hasn't said a word to anyone. Don't tell him I was asking, will you? It's just that a rumour's been going round. I mean, we all think he's earned his promotion, but we'll all be sorry to see him go from Bamford."

  "Go from Bamford?" This was so incredible a notion that even Meredith's fertile imagination had difficulty absorbing it. "Alan—not in Bamford?"

  "People move about," said Pearce argumentatively. "I would have thought you'd know that, in your line of work."

  "Well, yes, I certainly do. But he hasn't said anything of the sort to me and in any case—" She paused. "Maybe it's only a rumour."

  "Perhaps." Pearce eyed her doubtfully. "I thought he would have told you, you being friendly with him, as it were. I didn't mean to put my foot in it!" he added with a wry grimace.

  "No, of course not."

  The brief discussion was over but it left Meredith thinking furiously and feeling a niggle of annoyance. Perhaps it wasn't true, only a rumour. On the other hand, there was no smoke without fire according to the old saying. In any large organisation word of change, promotions and the like, tended to precede official an-

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  nouncement. If it were true, Alan might have mentioned it. They were close enough, surely?