THROUGH THE GLASS DARKLY - OLD SINS CAST LONG SHADOWS

THROUGH THE GLASS DARKLY - EPISODE THREE

CHAPTER

FOUR

I looked at Lady Mabbott, astonished.

            “I wanted to humiliate him,” she said proudly.  “Like he’d humiliated me.”

            I looked at her with intensity.  “Lady Mabbott, did you kill your husband?”

            Her eyes widened with astonishment.  “What?  No!  How dare you!  I may not have liked the man, but I wouldn’t ever kill him.”

            Realizing what she had just said, Lady Mabbott put her hand to her mouth in embarrassment.

            “I shouldn’t have said that,” she said.

            “What do you mean, you didn’t like him?”

            “Does it matter?  I had nothing to do with his death.”

            “The Suffolk Constabulary will still need to know about your relationship with your husband,” I said.

            “But you’re not Suffolk Constabulary.”

 "No, I'm not, but I'm sure you would rather tell me here in the comfort of your home than tell DCI Shaw in a small, damp interview room down the station."

            She thought about this, but not for very long.

 "All right.  I'm innocent.  I've nothing to fear.  So yes, since you are asking.  I didn't much like my husband.”

            “And why was that?”  I asked.

            “Where do you want me to start?  He was controlling.  He wouldn’t let me be myself.  I mean, look at this house, do you think it is how I’d do it up?  I hate it.”

            I had to concede that some décor was eccentric, to say the least.

            “But Greg said he was the one who earned the money, he was the one who got to spend it.  So, he chose everything about this house.  Can you imagine what that was like for me?  Even putting aside how horrible is taste is, I mean, I am his wife.  And I didn’t even get to choose how the place looked that I had got lived in.  This house was like a mausoleum.  And if you think some décor inside is cold, it has nothing compared to how cold Greg was inside.  He was uncaring.  Since you’re asking.  He just did what he wanted and did not care about anyone else.  And I am sorry you must hear it, but I could cope with him doing his thing or working every hour of the day but despite what I said earlier I couldn’t really cope with the women.  And, when I found out he was chasing my transgender stepsister, I couldn’t believe my luck.  So, I just let him get on with it and when he found out the truth, it nearly destroyed him.  He was one of those men who thought he had to sleep with every woman he met.  And the most insulting thing about it all was that he wouldn’t have s*x with me.”

            I covered my sudden embarrassment by discovering I had a frog in my throat, but I cleared it with a few coughs.

            “There, that’s better,” I said, once I had regathered what I hoped was a degree of gravitas.  “What else can you tell me about your husband?”

            “He was a bully,” Lady Mabbott said, all her anger suddenly spitting out of her.  “But what could I do?  I’d married him, and when I look around myself and see what I have, I realized it was better to grin and bear it.  So, if it is true that my husband was murdered then you’d better start looking at his business associates and political colleagues and start asking them some questions.”

            “Do you think someone from the government could have ordered his death?”

            “Or someone he crossed.  It could’ve been anyone.  But if I were you, I would start working out whose toes he stood on to get where he was in the government.  There are plenty of people in the Houses of Parliament who know someone who is capable of committing murder and making it look like a suicide."

            I got the distinct impression that Lady Mabbott had dropped her guard and was beginning to enjoy sticking the knife into her deceased husband.

            “And what about you?”

            “How do you mean?”

            “Were you involved in your husband’s working life?”

 "No way.  I know which side my bread is buttered.  As I said, it is not been a perfect life with Greg, but I am not short of anything financially if you see what I mean.  And before you ask, I do not have any proof that my husband was involved in any dodgy business deals.  But I was his wife, so I can tell you that whatever he was up to was not all legitimate.  And if he was murdered, the person who has done this to Greg is someone that he has hurt over the years.  It’s obvious.”

 "Okay," I said and realized that Lady Mabbott could be leading me up the garden path.  "Can I ask, do you remember your husband's movements on the day before he died?"

            “I’m not sure I can.”

 "Did he perhaps go out for the day?  Before 10 am, let us say?"

 "You know what, he did.  Yes, I remember now, he left in his car at about nine in the morning and didn't come back until about 11 pm that night."

            “He was gone all day?”

            “That is right, I had been in bed for an hour or so when he got back, and he was blind drunk.  He made such a racket as he got changed.”

            “Do you know where he’d been?”

            “It’s like I said.  I never asked, but I guessed he hadn’t been with a woman.  I can normally smell the perfume on his clothes when he's been with a woman."

            “And how was his mood the next morning?”

 "That was the morning he told me about the photographs and the affair."  Lady Mabbott said with sudden enthusiasm. 

            I looked at Lady Mabbott and realized that she was looking far more assured than she had been at the beginning of the interview.  It was as if previously she had been nervous about taking a test, but now she felt as if she had passed it with flying colours.

            “Can I ask you one final question before I go and speak to your daughter?  Do you know the significance of the Fourth of March Fifth of April Fourth of June and the Fourth of October?”

            She thought this for a moment.

            “No, I don’t,” Lady Mabbott said.  “Is there anything significant I should know about them?”

            “I’m not certain,” I said.  “But discovering your husband’s love of puzzles and cryptic clues, I just wondered whether they might have meant something to you.”

            “What were they again?”

            “Fourth of March Fifth of April Fourth of June and the Fourth of October,” I repeated.

            She sat there pondering again for a few moments before answering.  “No, sorry, I wish I could help more, but I’m afraid they don’t mean anything to me.”

            It seemed a fair enough response, so, thanking Lady Mabbott for her time, I went in search of Cleo Mabbott.

            I found her in the kitchen drinking coffee and wearing a white robe.  She was in her early twenties, had long blonde hair that was tied up in a ponytail, and she was looking back at me with doe eyes, as dismayed at the turn of events as everyone else.

            As I approached, I pulled a little notebook and silver retractable pencil from an inside pocket.  I clicked the lead out and said, “Hello.  My name’s John Handful, I am a consulting private detective for the Suffolk Constabulary, and I’m assisting in the investigation that your father was possibly murdered.”

            I sat down on the stool beside her and was at my most gentle and coaxing as I tried to find out more about her.  In truth, I didn’t really have a ‘gentle’ or ‘coaxing’ side – my idea of doing either was to leave slightly longer pauses in between each of my questions – but I found my manner softening anyway as Cleo was so naturally beautiful.  It brought out my paternal side.  Or that is what I told myself.  As she talked, I could notice how sparkling and blue her eyes were; and how her skin was bronzed by a golden tan; and how her blonde hair captured the wintery sunlight, and it radiated it back out in golden strands of light.

            It turned out that Cleo Mabbott was twenty-six years old and had graduated from Cambridge University after completing a degree in economics.  Since then, she had been working and travelling, before her father offered her a part-time job working in, to cover one of the girl’s on maternity leave, and she enjoyed working for him so much that she’d asked if she could stay on.

            Cleo was overjoyed when her father said yes, and it turned out her timing couldn’t have been better.  Lord Mabbott had been looking for help in the office for some time. Cleo wanted to work for him, and it worked it out perfectly for both parties.

            As Cleo told her story, I tried to work out what I found so puzzling about her.  After a while, I realized what it was.  Cleo was clearly still numbed from the shock of her father’s death, but she was also acting as though she was as keen as I was to find the murderer.  Which was interesting, considering she was one of my suspects.

            “Could you tell me where you were when your father died?”

            Cleo blinked back tears as she looked deep into my eyes and said, “I should’ve been at work.”

            “Should have been?”

            Cleo gulped.  “I was here, with my boyfriend.”

            “In this house?”

            “Yes,” she nodded slowly. 

            “In your bedroom?”

            “Yes.”

            Cleo was overwhelmed by her memories and started to weep.

            Foolishly, my heart softened even more.  “Hey.  We don’t have to do this now.  DCI Shaw can take your official statement later.”

            “No,” Cleo said, after a moment.  “You should know what happened.  I owe that to my father.”

 In short order, I got the remaining details.  But nothing stacked up.  I was convinced he was murdered.  But now no one could supply a decent means, motive, or opportunity.  Despite his adulterous behaviour, he was worshipped by his daughter, and his wife knew where ‘her bread was buttered.’

            Lord Mabbott was a strange and complicated man.  A surge of frustration washed over me. Not for the first time, I had a strong feeling that I was missing something about the case.  Something fundamental.  But it was more than that, I realized because I was increasingly of the opinion that there was a shadowy presence on the edges of the case.  Someone I couldn't see, but who was influencing events.

            And this person was the real killer.  And they were manipulating me.  Manipulating us all.  That is why Cleo guiltily admitted that she was having s*x with her boyfriend when her father died; why Lady Mabbott admitted that she didn’t love her husband but would put up with his philandering ways for the sake of a comfortable lifestyle.  And then there was the brother Adam, who tried but couldn’t bully his way into the investigation.  What was he hiding?  And what about this transgender relation, who had caused so many problems when Lord Mabbott had fallen in love with her?  Once again, I found myself thinking back to those four dates.  What was the significance of them?  They were so random, but they had to mean something.  But what?  And then there were the closed windows.  Why would the killer go to all the effort of making Lord Mabbott’s death look like a suicide and then make the fundamental mistake of shutting and locking the window he had fallen out of?

 It was as if the killer was throwing down a challenge to me.  To see if I was clever enough to work it out.

            The kitchen door swung open and Adam Mabbott barrelled into the room, full of bonhomie.

            “God, that policeman friend of yours is a bit of a miserable so-and-so, isn’t he?”

            “DCI Shaw is a more than capable policeman.”

            Adam laughed as I watched him go over to a metal bowl that held a pile of fresh fruit.  He plucked himself up a crisp green apple.

            “Doesn’t look like the pair of you are getting very far with this case, does it now?” he said, taking a bite out of the apple.  “In fact, I would say, that neither of you knows your arse from your elbow."

            I decided that enough was enough.

            “Tell me, Mr Mabbott,” I said, entirely politely.  “Where were you when your brother died?”

            “What do you mean?”  He asked as he finished his mouthful.

            “It’s a simple enough question, sir.”

            Adam seemed to think for a moment, but I thought I saw the tiniest flicker of indecision.

            “What does it matter?  Greg committed suicide.”

            “No, he didn’t sir.  I can categorically confirm that he was in fact murdered.”

            I couldn’t, but Adam Mabbott didn’t need to know that.  I watched him carefully.  He was thinking once again, and I decided that unless I was very much mistaken, Adam Mabbott was hiding something.   

“I was otherwise engaged,” he said finally.

“Doing what?”

“That’s none of your business,” he said, still chewing on his mouthful of apple.

As I held his gaze, there was the briefest flicker of fear in his eyes.  He looked away, embarrassed, and wandered out trying to look nonchalant, but I knew the truth now.

He wasn’t an innocent.  He was connected to his brother’s murder somehow.

I just had to work out how.

CHAPTER

FIVE

            We both reverently removed our shoes before entering the room, and while I searched through the tidy rack of clothes inside the wardrobe, I found myself musing that there really was nothing finer in life than that feeling of wiggling your toes into the plush pile of a deep expensive carpet.  As for the rows of smart, expensive clothes and shoes I found neatly lined up inside the wardrobe, my thoughts returned to the women who owned them.

            Once I had finished looking through the wardrobe, I turned to DCI Shaw.  “Found anything?”

            “Not a thing.”

             I went into the ensuite bathroom.  There was a brand-new walk-in shower, and the mirror sparkled above the white porcelain sink.  I opened a medicine cabinet and saw only neat piles of vitamins. 

            I returned to the bedroom where something, I hadn’t noticed before, caught my eye. I dropped to my knees and pulled up a corner of the cream carpet.

            “What are you doing?”  Shaw demanded.

            “Following a lead,” I said, showing a thin electric cable that was running under the carpet.  “What I mean,” I then said, knowing that I hadn’t been entirely clear, “is that I’m following a lead figuratively and literally.”

            “I understood what you meant the first time,” Shaw said, joining me on the carpet. 

            I showed him the thin white electric cable.

            “You see, when I looked behind the chest of drawers, I saw a plug in a socket, with the cable running down to the carpet.”

            “So why are you pulling up the carpet?” he asked impatiently.

            “Of course.  The only electrical device in the whole room is the lamp on the bedside table, and, as I’m sure you’ve already noticed, it’s plugged in by the wall just underneath it.”

            Shaw looked over my shoulder and saw what I said was true.  There was only one electrical device in the room – which was clearly plugged in – so what was the cable under the carpet powering.

            With a loud rip, I pulled up another half foot of carpet up in between the wall and the bed and saw that the little electric cable was still heading towards the bed.  However, it was now near enough that I could pull on the cable alone, and it ripped up through the gap between the carpet and the wall.

 The cable went up to the back leg of the bed and seemed to go into the underside of the bed frame.

            “Hold on, I’ll get this,” I said.

            I gained access to the underside of the bed by lying down on the carpet.  The clearance was only a foot or so, but it was just about enough for me to slip underneath.

            Once my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I followed the cable’s trail and saw that it went into a grey plastic box no bigger than a pack of cards that had been gaffer-taped to the underside of the bed.  But the grey box had a pattern of what looked like dozens of air holes on its underside and a tiny green LED light on its side.

            “Can you see what it is yet?” Shaw asked.

            “Yep,” I said.  “It’s a surveillance bug.”

            “Jesus Christ, really?”

            “Afraid so,” I confirmed.  “Someone has been listening in to everything that has been going on in Cleo’s bedroom.”

            “Bloody hell.”

            “Have you got a knife?”

            “Yes,” Shaw said.  “Hang on a minute.”

            The DCI handed me a pearl-handled pocketknife, and it made light work of cutting the surveillance bug from its cable.  However, getting my body back out from under the bed proved more of a challenge, but once I was finally standing up, I handed Shaw the surveillance bug to put in an evidence bag.

            “You probably want to dust this for fingerprints,” I said.

            “I think we might be able to do better than that,” Shaw, said pulling a large Swiss Army Knife out of his other jacket pocket.  As he flicked past the array of tools – the magnifying glass, the saw, and the hook for carrying parcels of newspapers – I could not help but make comparisons.

            “I didn’t know you had such a big penknife,” I said, holding up the other tiny pocketknife he had loaned me earlier.

            DCI Shaw looked at me and laughed.

            “You know the old joke, Handful.  It’s not the size but what you do with it that matters.”

            I laughed along with him as he flicked out a screwdriver and started on the tiny screws on the surveillance bug.  After a short while, he popped the back off the device to reveal its electronic innards.  “What I want to know is, how does the bug broadcast its recordings?”

            Using the tip of the screwdriver, he reached into the tiny machine and flicked out the little SIM card that was inside.

            “Now that’s interesting," I said, with excitement.  “If there is a SIM card then that means someone phones in to get the recordings – or the device phones out – but, either way, this SIM card will be registered to someone’s credit card.  If I get onto the phone company, they should be able to tell us who owns this.”

            “You can do that, can you?”

            “Yes,” I said.  But what I did not tell him was how I would obtain that information. Grahame Moore was an old friend and an expert hacker, and I used him often.  He had been an incredible source of information where he could get beyond any security system without leaving a trace, bagging names, numbers, and email addresses, even credit histories and contracts while he was there.  He ran this cash-only information service from an unknown address in Oxmarket, and I wasn’t under any illusions about the nature of his work – or the legality of me asking. 

“I’m impressed.”

I went outside into the cold and walked down the side of the house, so that I could get a decent signal and scrolled through the numbers on my phone until I found the one, I wanted.

I hit ‘Call.’

            “Citizens Advice Bureau.”

            I smiled.  “Oh, come on.”

            “Who’s that?”

            “Citizens Advice?”

            “John?”

            “Yeah.  How are you doing, Grahame?”

            “It’s been ages, treacle.”

 We chatted for a while, catching up.

“What can I do for you, son?”

            He had a slight Suffolk accent and always called me either ‘son’ or ‘treacle,’ whenever I phoned him.  They were terms of endearment from a man who didn’t often express his feelings.

            “I need you to fire up the supercomputer."

            “Course I can.  What have you got?”

I gave him the details of the SIM card.

“Okay, no problem.  You’ll have to give me a couple of hours, though.”

 “Sure.”

 I gave him all the details I had.

 “Oh, and my fee’s gone up a bit,” he said.

  “Whatever it takes, Grahame.”

 I hung up and looked across the darkening horizon.  The wind whispered as the snow fell like confetti on my head. I gazed at the untouched snow in front of me. The shrubs and trees were stained with white. The ground was as smooth as a cake and the snow fell like icing powder, perfecting it to its finest point.

A vast blanket of white hung heavy over the grounds of Mabbott Manor. It suffocated every tree at their base, swallowing every distant object and vanishing around every corner. It crept around the small derelict family chapel, its silent footsteps tiptoeing around each gravestone in the family crypt.

Returning to the house, I found DCI Shaw gathered in the library going over their statements.  On entering the room, I could see that it was identical shape and size to the sitting room, with the same floor-to-ceiling windows and curtains overlooking the grounds and the North Sea beyond.  And with a similar chandelier in the centre of the ceiling.  In fact, the only architectural difference between the two rooms as far as I could tell was the fact that one wall of this room had a floor-to-ceiling bookcase running down its side that was stuffed with old books, junk, and mementoes in any order.

It was as I idly looked up at the chandelier in the ceiling that I realized what had been unsettling me about the room.

The chandelier wasn’t precisely in the centre of the ceiling as it was in the sitting room.

I frowned.

It wasn’t right.  This room was identical in shape to the sitting room, so I wondered why the chandelier wasn’t in the same spot in the middle of the ceiling.

Ignoring everyone else entirely, I slowly turned on the spot.  Yes, the room was the same – apart from the floor-to-ceiling bookcase that ran along the side wall.  And once again, I realized my instinct was making me look at the bookcase.

“John?”  Shaw asked, puzzled.

“One moment,” I said.

I went over to the bookcase and pulled down a few books.  Immediately, Shaw rushed over to see what I was doing.

“John?” he whispered through gritted teeth.  “Have you gone mad?”

“How deep do you think this bookcase is?”

I reached into the shelf and could see that it was about a foot deep.  As I would expect with any bookcase.

“Can you clear the way?”

I turned so my back was to the bookcase and started to put one foot in front of the other, so I could measure the width of the room in my size eleven feet.

“You see,” I said as though I was making perfect sense.  “I’ve not been able to settle in this room.  And I think it’s because it’s not the same size as the sitting room next door.”

“It isn’t?”  Lady Mabbott asked, confused by my behaviour.

“Even though everything else about this room is identical.  Look at the chandelier in the ceiling.  It’s in the centre of the room lengthwise – measured from the door to the bay windows – but it’s not central if measured widthways.”

Lady Mabbott and Shaw could see that I was telling the truth.  The chandelier was much nearer the wall with the bookcase on it than it was to the opposite wall.

"So, everyone remembers, thirty-eight feet," I finally proclaimed as I finished traversing the width of the room. 

And with that, I left the room.

Lady Mabbott and Shaw followed me into the sitting room, and they joined me, I held up my finger for silence while repeating my experiment of measuring the width of the room in my footsteps.

“Forty-three feet!”  I called out as I hit the further wall.  “This room is five feet wider than the other room!”

“But that’s not surprising,” Lady Mabbott said, still baffled.  “This room doesn’t have the bookcase along the side wall.”

“I know, but I just measured the bookcase, didn’t I?  And it was only about a foot deep.  So, that still leaves something like four feet of width in that room unaccounted for.”

As I said this, I suddenly froze.

            By the expression on the face of the Detective Chief Inspector, he realized that I was having one of my ‘eureka’ moments.

            “Good grief!  You know what is behind these walls?”  I said, before striding out of the room again.

            Behind me, I heard Shaw tell Lady Mabbott, “I’m so sorry.  He does this.”

            Lady Mabbott and Shaw followed me back into the library where I had already started to yank books from the bookshelf.

            “John...?”   Shaw asked me as politely as he could.

            “Not now, Joe!”  I called back as I pulled another handful of books from the shelf and dumped them on to a nearby armchair. 

            I could tell that Shaw was doubly puzzled when he realized that it wasn’t the books that I was interested in, it was the shelves I was revealing behind them.

            It was on the third stack along that I finally stopped.

            “Got you!”

            “Got what, John?”

            “Don’t any of you know anything about priest holds in these old houses,” I said impatiently.  “My God, Henry VIII had the entire Catholic population of this country on the run.  And if I’m not mistaken the original part of this house was built in Tudor times.”

            Lady Mabbott nodded.  “He’s right.”

            I pointed at the inside of the shelf I had just cleared.  Shaw came over and saw where I was pointing, there was a small lever that had previously been hidden by the books that were lined up by it.

            “And that is the reason why this room isn’t quite as wide as its twin room next door.”

            I pulled the lever carefully and the lock mechanism inside the shelf clicked.  It was clearly oiled from regular use.

            I looked at Joe Shaw.

            “Shall we?”  I asked.

            Together we grabbed the empty shelf and pulled.

            The whole book stack swung smoothly open on its hinges just like the secret floor-to-ceiling door it was.

            And beyond the section of the bookcase, they had just swung open, we saw ancient wooden steps leading down into a subterranean passageway of some sort.

            We’d uncovered a secret tunnel.