THROUGH THE GLASS DARKLY - OLD SINS CAST LONG SHADOWS

THROUGH THE GLASS DARKLY - EPISODE TWO

CHAPTER

THREE

I followed Lady Mabbott upstairs, giving scrutiny to each stair as we climbed and to the walls either side of each stair.  The carpet itself was fairly new, with a thickish pile. The wallpaper looked expensive, and I noticed some spots of red nail varnish on it, quite low down near the skirting board, about halfway up the staircase.  I said nothing as Lady Mabbott led me to the study on the top floor, she opened the door for me, I was greeted by an ornate bookcase, carved by a person with an obvious profound love of literature. The engravings were of leaves, of autumn berries and birds on the wing - so sublime it invited the fingers to take it in just as much as the eyes.  It was full of row after row of neatly lined up books with their spines facing outward, fiction sections arranged in alphabetical order, romance novels, crime novels, science fiction, assorted travel books, biographies, phrasebooks for various languages and large encyclopaedias.

 The room was painted grey, and it had a floor-to-ceiling window, which overlooked the impressive gardens. On the grey desk sat a desktop computer, a notebook lying open, and a stack of puzzle books sat under a turtle-shaped paperweight. In one corner, a water dispenser with no cups and there was a swivel chair behind the desk. Another bookshelf, bursting with books was in a corner, with yet another stack of books under a paperweight that was shaped to look like a tuft of grass. A few pens were lying on the books, but some had fallen onto the top of the bookshelf.   On one of the walls was a large framed print of the periodic table. The periodic table, or the periodic table of elements, is a tabular arrangement of the chemical elements, arranged by atomic number, electron configuration, and recurring chemical properties, whose structure shows periodic trends. The seven rows of the table, called periods, had metals on the left and non-metals on the right. The columns, called groups, had elements with similar chemical behaviours. Six groups had accepted names as well as assigned numbers: for example, group 17 elements were the halogens; and group 18 were the noble gases. Also displayed were four simple rectangular areas or blocks associated with the filling of different atomic orbitals.

 The air in the room smelt stale with a hint, of burnt paraffin.  But ignoring that, to begin with, I walked around the desk and discovered an opened puzzle book on the desk alongside a diary.  I looked up at Lady Mabbott.  She was leaning against the door frame.

            “May I?”  I asked

            “Please, feel free.”

            I slipped on the spare pair of latex gloves that I always carried with me when I was called to consult on a case, and opened the diary flicking slowly through the pages.  The only entries were the dates that Lord Mabbott had told me before he died: “Fourth of March Fifth of April Fourth of June and the Fourth of October.” And beside each date was £50,000.

            I closed the diary and turned my attention to the book of puzzles.  They were all lateral thinking questions.  The opening page explained the concept of lateral thinking: The solving of problems by an indirect and creative approach, typically through viewing the problem in a new and unusual light. 

            I turned the next page:  

A rope breaks. A bell rings. A man dies.

            The answer was at the back of the book.  I flicked to the last page: 

            A blind man enjoys walking near a cliff and uses the sound of a buoy to gauge his distance from the edge. One day, the buoys anchor rope breaks, allowing the buoy to drift away from the shore. When it rings, the man thinks he is further away from the edge than he is, walks over it, and falls to his death.

            I turned to page two:

            A man tries the new cologne his wife gave him for his birthday. He goes out to get some food and is killed.

            I flicked to the end of the book once more:

            The man is a beekeeper, and the bees attack all together because they did not recognize his fragrance.

            I closed the book.  Here was a man obsessed with puzzles, who kept a diary that only had four entries in it, and was pushed out of a window.  That in itself was a big puzzle.

            I walked to the window and looked out.   The garden was covered in a thick blanket of white, decorated like a birthday cake, fountain statues peeked out under their new white caps, footsteps and paw prints criss-crossed each other around the labyrinth of paths. The trees stood starkly like x-rays of their summer selves, only in reverse; black on white. They looked so forlorn in the frigid early evening, with the short winter daylight already fading. The branches hung low with the weight of the snow, reminding me of my mother's arms when she returned from the greengrocers, laden with fruit and vegetables.  It was odd to think that grass was still down there, surviving as good as it could until the spring melt, entombed in the compacted and icy layers lower down. After yesterday's storm, the top layer was perfect powder, our coldest season does not get any better than this.

            I looked down to where he had fallen.  The latest snowfall had filled part of the indentation where he had landed, but I could still make out his shape in the snow.  Why was he killed?

            I started checking out the window frame.  I could see that it was fixed solidly to the stone casement, and the glass was held in place with old putty that had crumpled in places but had clearly not been tampered with in any way.  But I knew the real test would be the latch that kept the window locked shut, and I gently touched it with my fingers.  It did not move.  In fact, I could see that the window’s latch was jammed tightly into the window frame.

            What was more, I could see that the metal lever that allowed the window to open and close had an old butterfly screw on it that was tightly screwed down as well.  Giving the butterfly screw a hard twist to the left, I unscrewed it enough that I could finally open the window.  I leaned outside and felt the chilly air blowing into my face. 

            I closed the window, reset the catch in the window frame and re-locked the butterfly screw on the lever.

            “Is there a problem?”  Lady Mabbott asked.

            “This window can only be locked from the inside?”

            “Yes”

            I crossed to the centre of the room and looked up at the ceiling high above us.

            “And there’s no way in or out of this room through the roof.”

            “No,” Lady Mabbott shook her head.

            I walked over to the door sniffing the air, trying to determine the source of the smell.

            Taking a closer look, I found some minuscule remnants of some burnt twine wrapped around the brass handle, which showed signs of intense heat around the lock on the inside of the door.

            “This door is ancient isn’t it?”  I asked.

            Lady Mabbott nodded.

            “I couldn’t even begin to tamper with the hinges or get around it or under it in any way.”

            “No, that would be impossible,” Lady Mabbott said.

            I inspected the thick iron bolt that ran across the back of the door.  It was about three feet long and was fixed very firmly inside a solid housing made of iron.  And it was obvious that neither the bolt nor housing had been tampered with any more than the hinges of the door had been.

            So, I turned my attention to the door frame.  It was just as solid as the door, and the lock worked by sliding the iron bolt across, so it slotted into a deep hole that had been drilled directly into the door frame.  I could see that the iron bolt had ripped through the wooden door when the police smashed the door open with a sledgehammer.

            “As for the iron bolt,” I said, “it was obviously slid across when the police made their forced entry.  You can see where the bolt has torn through the wood of the door frame.  And that is why we have got a problem, isn’t it?”

            “I don’t understand,” Lady Mabbott admitted.

            “This room is entirely made of stone, and there are only three ways a human could have got out of it after the murder – those being, through the window on the far side, out through the roof, or through this door.  The ceiling is impossible, and both the door and window were locked from the inside.

            “Oh, I see,” Lady Mabbott said, understanding finally dawning on her.

 "Because seeing as the police found no-one else in here when we broke in, just how did our killer commit murder and then escape from a locked room?”

            “Then he did commit suicide?”

            I shook my head.  “Suicides, don’t leap.”

            “Pardon?”

            “Jump suicides tend to drop from whatever height they’d chosen to commit suicide from.  They don’t leap out to their death.”

             There was an awkward silence between us while I returned to the centre of the room when I noticed a collection of photos of Lady Mabbott and a man I presumed must be her husband, on a shelf.  The photos were taken at parties, and Lord and Lady Mabbott were laughing or dancing in all of them.  They looked a handsome couple, I thought to myself, and I realized I had trouble matching the vivacious young woman in the photos with the older version I’d just met.  But then, I had to remind myself, Lady Mabbott had only recently lost her husband.

            As for the photos of Lord Mabbott, he looked as though he was always having an enjoyable time.  He was laughing in every photo, or smoking a cigar, or raising a toast with his bottle of beer.

            I turned away from the photographs and focused my attention on the laptop. It looked like a slice of technology from some far-flung extra-terrestrial world meeting the hand-hewn woodwork of the late nineteenth century. Like opposite worlds colliding. Sleek and shiny, it held the knowledge of an entire world, at the click of a mouse and the touch of a button.

 The keyboard was entirely flat, it was more like typing on a table than the machines of old. They always had some give to the keys like you were pressing a button. It let you know you had made contact, now it was just the feeling of something solid and cold under the fingertip.

            “Is this password protected?”

            Lady Mabbott nodded.

            “Do you know it?”

            She shook her head.

            “The police will probably want to take it away,” I explained.  “Is there anything discriminating on it?”

            She laughed nervously.  “What are you trying to say?”

            “Your husband has been murdered,” I said.  “People aren’t usually murdered for no reason.  He was being blackmailed as well and paid out a total of two hundred thousand pounds.  Now, do you know if there is anything on here that will discriminate him?”

            Lady Mabbott gave a deep sigh full of emotion.

“It started on the day he had spoken to the Prime Minister,” she said.  “It was only a matter of time before he was moved upwards in the next reshuffle.  He was a high-flyer who had risen from Secretary to the Treasury to Secretary of Defence in little more than eighteen months.”  She paused.  “He was still smiling to himself when I brought in the post that arrived that morning.”

She moved towards me and sat down in the swivel chair as if her knees had given way.  Spinning it around to face me.  She raised her eyes suddenly and gave me the same sort of inspection as if she had never seen me before:  and I guessed that for her, it was a much more radical reassessment.  I was no longer the man who had arrived at her front door going with DCI Shaw but a man she had come to wonder whether she could trust.

“He opened the envelope in front of me and three freshly printed photographs spilt out on to the desk," she went on.  "You could smell the fresh developer on them."

            As she said this, she burst into tears.  I watched as she pulled a hankie from the sleeve of her jumper and tried to wipe the tears from her face.

            “My husband was a good person,” she said in between her sniffs.  “You have to believe me.  He was kind to me, and a loving father to our daughter.  He meant well in so many ways, and he became a politician because he wanted to make changes.  But he also made many mistakes with women.  He had affairs.  They never came to anything and I admit I ignored a lot of it because he was always very discreet.  But on this last occasion, he stained his reputation so badly it wasn't possible to wipe away.  And it was all because the woman in the photographs turned his head.”

            “Who was she?”

            “Wendy Clark.  My sister.”

            “Oh.”  Was all I could say.

“I married Greg twenty-five years ago. I was flattered by his attention, and I just ignored my parents who said Greg was no good.  I was full of myself.  Feeling all grown up at nineteen years old.  Having a boyfriend with a Harley-Davidson.  If I could reach back in time, I’d slap myself in the face and tell myself to walk away.”

            “You now feel your parents were right?”

            “They were right.  But they were also wrong.  Greg was a good man.  Like I said.  He just loved being with women.  And politics.  He loved politics.  He had so much potential, and he was on the way until Wendy got her claws into him.”

            “How did that happen?”

            “Wendy is my step-sister and had lived in Australia for almost thirty years and had never met Greg.”  She said.  “Then, last year, she turned up and everything changed.”

            “Why did she suddenly turn up out of the blue?”

            “Our father had died, so she spent most of her time here.  That was the worst time because I knew how predatory she could be.  She had these dead eyes, you know.  And I could tell that when she was looking at men, she was just trying to work out how much use you were to her. I did not let her stay in the house, I farmed her out to the old Gamekeeper’s farmhouse in the grounds, but that still didn’t stop her. Greg and I argued a lot about her.  And my husband became secretive.  Cleo had just graduated from Cambridge University, so things were becoming quite a handful.  I was so worried.  I didn’t know what to do and then one day, completely unexpectedly, Wendy said she was going back to Australia, and she left the next day.”

            “When was this?”

            “About six weeks ago.”

            “And how did your husband take that?”

            “Not very well.  He just shut down and when I confronted Greg about them having an affair and that was the only time he physically hurt me.  He grabbed me so tight I had bruises on my arms for days.  It was like he was trying to crush me, but Greg just said, if I didn’t want him to leave, I had to never mention Wendy’s name again.  I didn’t know what to think.  What had happened?”

            “Have you spoken to your step-sister?”

            “I’ve tried to contact her; I even got the police in Melbourne to try and trace her, but it’s been all to no avail.”  She answered.  “It was such a shame.  Greg had lost his self-confidence and his swagger, and he became distant from us.”

            “Including your daughter?”

            Lady Mabbott looked around the room, with deep sadness.

            “Cleo worshipped her father.  She even worked for him.  Replaced some young girl, who left to start a family.  She was his little princess.  He would never do anything to harm her.”

            “Does she live here?”

            “Yes.”

            “I’d like to talk to her later.”

 "Of course.  But then in the last few months, Greg had become very withdrawn.  And then when the photographs came, he just told me everything, how my suspicions had been correct.  That he'd fancied her and had started to fall in love but ended as soon as he found out Wendy’s secret.”

            “And would you like to share that secret with me?”

            She looked at me with trepidation.  “When he came to me, I felt so sorry for him.  I felt that I somehow had let him down.  That what he was now suffering was my fault. He told me about how he had felt about Wendy and then from utter shame and embarrassment, he just went to his study and poured himself a glass of rum and sat in silence.  And when he had poured his glass, his hand was shaking. I felt so sorry for him and all I wanted to do was to put my arms around him and hold him tight.”

 I wasn't sure I agreed with Lady Mabbott's assessment.  Lord Mabbott was a serial adulterer, and that was that.  And if he had felt guilty after the fact, then that did not make what he had done any better.  If anything, it worsened it because it suggested that there was a moral compass somewhere inside Lord Mabbott that he had chosen to ignore every time he decided to commit adultery.

            “What had Lord Mabbott discovered about your step-sister who was so bad?”  I pressed impatiently.

            “That, when my step-sister went to Australia thirty years ago, she left this country as my step-brother.