Murder in the Rough Read online

  “My husband’s a waste contractor,” Fern Margrave told me. She drove the night roads with decision, none of this bumping along with one wheel in the gutter. She scraped the hanging hedges with impunity. Her vintage Bentley could always get a respray. “Don’t laugh, Lovejoy. Where there’s muck, there’s brass, people say.”

  I hadn’t laughed. I knew of Margrave. “Where?”

  “Locally. The old De Haviland place.”

  These ancient manor houses were once the centers of whole estates with thousands of acres. Over centuries they shrank, bits being nibbled off for that hunting lodge or this new housing complex. The final few hundred acres tend to sit in rural bondage, rimmed by motorways or shopping malls. They’re subjects for historical societies. Wildlifers investigate the flora and fauna of the old forests. Bored broadcasters pretend delirium when some rare Fritillaria plant is discovered lurking in the undergrowth. Real estate developers point indignantly to the decaying mansion and lust after the two thousand houses they imagine building there and the profit they’ll rake in.

  “Does he bribe many?” I asked. Developers are known for it.

  She smiled. “Of course!” She shot me a sidelong glance, hard as nails. “How else do you think I could indulge my hobby of antiques?”

  A few minutes later she dropped me off at my cottage, making the usual response: “Dear God! You don’t really live in that hovel?” etc., etc. I watched the motor drive away, a dark blob dragged through the countryside behind its cone of amber light. What had I got myself into?

  I went in and brewed up, cut myself some cheese and a chunk of bread, and thought about Bendix, he of the bowler hat and frayed mustache. One thing you learn to spot in antiques is a setup. Tonight’s coincidence gleamed like a moon in a mine. For Bendix had been the butler at the old De Haviland place before the manor house was closed up. And Fern Margrave’s husband was the real estate man with his eyes on developing the whole estate. And I’d been pressed by Joe Winter, gardener, to bid for some old golfiana junk. His dad was once the De Haviland gardener.

  Now, I know nothing about golf. Who does? And if Bendix had ever played a single round of golf I’m the pope. Bendix’s eyes hadn’t even flickered in her direction, but you can always tell.

  Too many coincidences. Why had she dropped in at the Fox and Stork? And her husband ran a garbage disposal firm whose latest development was on the old De Haviland place. And Bendix was the De Haviland family’s retired butler, who’d not spoken in the Fox and Stork since the Boer War… No, too many coincidences spoil the broth.

  Next dawn I was up at six. I fed the blue tits their sunflower seeds and thumbed a lift into town as the town hall clock struck seven. I waited at the bus station near St. Alfege’s church, and thought of golf and what it meant to antique dealers.

  They say golf is the best game on earth. To me, it’s yawnsville, even more pointless than synchronized swimming. Unbelievably, golf courses are burgeoning everywhere. If some derelict hospital grounds or some school’s playing fields are sold off, sure as eggs some lunatic will spend millions to build a golf course.

  Not only that, golfiana’s a massive field for collectors. (I’m not making the name up.) The most valuable relics are ancient golf balls—featheries the most highly priced. In days before Dr. Paterson of St. Andrews, meaning pre-1845, you boiled feathers (one top hat full of goose down was the correct measure) to a soggy mess, then compressed each dollop. You squashed the blob into a hand-sewn leather sphere, and there was your golf ball. Of course, scoundrels now fake them. But if you find an original antique one, it’ll buy you a house. Then came Dr. P. and his gutta-percha golf balls, made from the inspissated gum of the Isonandra tree—it’s found in Malaysia and thereabouts. One old guttie ball will buy you another house. And if you can find one of those ancient wooden press gad-gets the Victorians used to indent the balls with, you’re talking a round-the-world cruise. Fakes abound, so watch out.

  The clubs are as bad, or as good. Those made in the nineteenth century by some country blacksmith cost a fortune, especially if the shaft is glued intact with old catgut. Socket-jointed clubs came in about 1900, they say. The point is, golf memorabilia are mostly tat, of no interest except for the small incidental fact that they’ll bring in a fortune. If they’re funny shapes—like the toothed raker (seven prongs on an ash, hazel or American hickory shaft)—then you’re into a year’s cruising plus a freehold house. Daft, I call it, but if the world’s crazy for such things who am I? It’s a collector’s world. The last thing I could recall seeing auctioned, golfwise, was a group of three golf balls made by one Coburn Haskell, who in 1900 first thought of making balls with a rubber inner core. Big deal. Or so I thought, until I saw the bidding rise like a lark and almost vanish off the map. I quickly realized that anything vaguely associated with golf is valuable until proved otherwise. Golfing teapots, if you can imagine such things, ashtrays, briar pipes, T-shirts, standishes and hat pins, even ladies’ golfing shoes, go for a mint. Even poor quality golf paintings bring in four years’ worth of income. There’s only one way to prove a collectible’s value, and that’s by selling it so the money’s in your hand.

  By the time the bus came I was almost fainting at the aromas coming from the bus station nosh bar, but I’d only just got the fare. I stayed hungry, and reached the town council’s rubbish tip by nine.

  There stands Marjorie.

  Now, I’m not knocking sports. They’re great. I just think we should stop inventing them. Sport, not religion, is the opiate of the people.

  “See,” I told Marjorie when we’d got talking at the Council Recycling and Waste Disposal Facility, “if we didn’t invent any more sports, we’d not keep losing at the Olympics, right?”

  “What on earth are you on about?”

  Marjorie is a superb example of perfect middle age. She stands all day long beside her grand Alfa Romeo motor—this week it was a bright cerulean blue—and watches people dump rubbish. Occasionally she leaches out a piece of dross, takes it home in her trunk, has it cleaned and sells it to antique dealers. A strange occupation, but if you stick at it as Marjorie does you can make a living. Council workmen help her if some crud proves heavy, but they wouldn’t help the likes of you or me. Marjorie has ample means of persuasion. She knows little about antiques, but acquires a dozen or so worthwhile collectibles every week—sewing machines, old telephones, glassware, pottery, pewter cups, treen (read old wooden implements) and cutlery. I like her.

  “Well,” I said, painstakingly working toward the subject of golf, “look at badminton. Look at lawn tennis, real tennis, soccer, darts, even snooker, for God’s sake. Look at rugby. Polo. Bowls. We only invent them so we can lose. Cricket.” I paused because I’d run out of sports. “Wasn’t baseball in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, pre-USA?”

  “What are you after, Lovejoy?” she demanded shrewdly.

  That’s the trouble with women. I find that they outmaneuver me without my realizing, but I try the same trick, they spot it a mile off. Her steady eyes kept hold of me.

  “Nothing, Marj. Honest!”

  “This hour of the morning?” A cold wind was coming off the estuary, the distant sea glinting cold as a frog. It was her best hour for finding worthwhile pieces of rubbish, she’d told me once, hence my arrival at cockshout.

  “Well, all right.” I tried to look crestfallen. “I’m after some golfiana. Got any?”

  She usually assembles her gunge according to themes: old football boots that she’ll pass off as worn by somebody once famous, or a broken cricket bat she can swear was used by a West Indian player at Lord’s. She sells them to Empsom in Peldon Marsh, who says he’s expert in suchlike gunge.

  “In time for the new golf course?” She smiled. Not quite as dazzling as Mrs. Margrave’s, but getting there.

  “Is there one?” I asked innocently.

  “That’s the gossip.”

  A small estate wagon came bouncing over the ruts of the dump’s lunar landscape. It car
ried a rusting lathe and worn tools.

  “You’ve caught me out, Marjorie,” I said ruefully. “That’s it. I’m trying to acquire some golf sticks.”

  “Clubs. I once found a mashie niblick here, practically mint. And a cleek head, but the shaft had broken.”

  “Honest?” What the hell was she on about?

  “Ferdie restored them to near-mint condition.”

  Ferdie’s a local carpenter who sidelines in revarnishing old furniture and mending sporting trivia. She waved, smiling. The man unloading the estate wagon grinned and laid his dross out in a line for any passing lady to nab and load up into her splendid motor.

  “I found an old, er, 3-iron once,” I said lamely.

  She laughed. “You haven’t a clue, have you? They’re old names for golf clubs. The mashie niblick’s the modern 7-iron. The cleek’s another. They changed to numbers about the 1930s. It’s worth keeping a lookout.” She drew her fur coat tighter round her against the wind. “An old persimmon-headed wooden club would buy you a freehold five-bedroom house on Margrave’s new estate—when he gets round to building it.” She grew reflective. “I’ve been wondering whether to transfer to his landfill, now it’s got going.”

  I looked over the derelict landscape. “You’d leave here?”

  “Margrave’s new rubbish tip will be massive. Imagine the finds!”

  “I heard Margrave was begging the local council for a single acre for a landfill.” I was still questing.

  She shook her head at my ignorance.

  “He’s been allowed to dump twenty thousand metric tons of uncontaminated rubble there, Lovejoy. That means he’ll bribe the council’s inspectors to stay away—while he dumps ten times that much. And uncontaminated’s a laugh.” Not laughing now, though. “Lorries go where he tells them, anywhere over the twenty-three hectares he’s got his eye on. Asbestos, oil drums, toxic waste. He gets a backhander from every unauthorized wagon. He’s already made a million from it.” Her expression became pure scorn. I felt withered by her look. “The trucks dump a thousand loads a week. It’s ever since the landfill tax came in—32,000 unauthorized sites in this creaking old kingdom, Lovejoy.” She saw my look of disbelief. “You can’t teach me anything about rubbish. I had you once, remember?”

  I swallowed the insult. “You telling me the truth, Marj?”

  “Don’t call me Marj. I pay the men to rescue the good bits and clean them up so they’re safe to handle. Never heard of Brisket Wood in Hertfordshire? Margrave did it there too. Now it’s a wonderful golf course, splendid clubhouse and all, built on contaminated illegal garbage.”

  “Why doesn’t somebody report him?”

  “They did. He got fined a few pence.” She glared at me. “You know why? The council can’t afford to excavate the rubbish dump once the land’s filled. It’s cheaper to let the dangerous contaminants lie covered by a golf course that pays revenue and employs people.”

  “Who’s the golf king hereabouts?”

  “Player, memorabilia collector, clubhouse owner, what?”

  “Any of the above.”

  “You want Wymond, the Norwich judge. He was in town yesterday, buying old golf stuff. He employs three collectors hunting for his golf museum.”

  “Where is it?”

  “He’s going halves, him and Margrave, when there’s enough infilled De Haviland land.”

  For a moment or two I thought hard. I’m pretty slow.

  “Ta, Marjorie. I’ll help you lift your garbage.”

  She laughed outright. “You’re so gullible, Lovejoy! Since when did a woman ever lack help to lift anything?”

  True, true. I said so long and trudged toward the road.

  Bendix lived in a cottage down the River Deben estuary. There, folk frolic in yachts. The pubs are always full of talk about force nine gales and compass bearings, all very nautical. I got a lift from the vicar’s wife. I said I was visiting an old friend’s grave. She offered to help me find it. I told her no, ta, I’d manage.

  “I do understand. Spiritual solace.” She went all misty. “How sweet.”

  Which left me within a hundred yards of Bendix’s place. I found him sitting on his veranda watching the water. Punts glided by. It was sickeningly serene.

  “Wotcher, Benny.” I plonked myself down. He didn’t even turn his head. “Tranquillity like this gives countryside a bad name.”

  He turned to inspect me. “Countryside’s the land’s breath, Lovejoy. Vandals throttle it.”

  “Never seen you without your bowler,” I said, surprised by his thin wispy hair, gray-white. “What was that crack about golf?”

  “It’s on the parlor wall, son. Bring it.”

  Apart from a broken mirror there was only a small watercolor painting. I lifted it down and took it to him.

  “I knew you’d come, Lovejoy. Recognize it?” As I tilted it for more light he cautioned, “Shade it from sun,” as if we were in torrid desert heat.

  “I know, I know,” I said, narked, examining the painting.

  Somebody had done it in the style of Victorian watercolorists, highlighting with pastels. The artist must have admired the Rowbothams, a family of old artists. Do the painting, then pick out the areas you need to show more brilliantly. Purists see this technique as cheating, but even great artists used the trick. It showed a landscape, a manor house in the distance, nearby a clump of trees and a small mound. So?

  “Only worth maybe a week’s wages, Benny.”

  “Any good?”

  “No. Want to sell? I’ll talk Shipshape into flogging it at some auction, if you like. Get you enough for a holiday weekend.” I smiled at the thought. “Be waited on, instead of serving others, you being a butler and all.”

  He didn’t speak. Squinting, I guessed, “The old De Haviland place at Horkesley?”

  He nodded, watching a rowing boat slide through the reeds. Two ducks flew up angrily. The young couple saw Bendix’s cottage, us both on his veranda, and decided to find somewhere else to snog. I waved sympathetically. They ignored us. The ducks settled down, miffed.

  “When I worked there,” Benny ruminated, “we had eighteen gardeners, thirteen full-time resident household servants, grooms.”

  Funny what a word does. You can’t say the word “servant” now without getting neck prickles, because it proves you’re fascist or something. The word’s only legitimate use is in historical novels, “Ho there, Milady” and all that. But these old servants (sorry) don’t have any such compunction. On the wall near London’s Kings Cross Station is a small plaque recording the lifetime slog of an old Victorian geezer, nominating him as A Trusty Servant of the Company. He was Lord Somebody, no less. See? Prickles and all, I cleared my throat.

  “Quite a crowd, Benny.”

  “Three months short of fifty years I served the family, from being fourteen. Apart from national service in the Malayan war.” He almost smiled. “You have to say Ma-lay-si-an now.”

  “Right, Benny. Ta for the, er, visit.” I rose and propped the framed painting against the wall, face inward. “See you Friday, eh?”

  “That painting’s of her grave, you see. He never saw me watching him bury her, after she was murdered.” I sat down again. We watched two punts on the river, one energetically poled by a young laughing bloke, a seated girl squealing, while two oldsters in the other punt frowned at such levity. “Youngsters nowadays just don’t think. They disturb the waterbirds. One moorhen had a broken wing last week. I got the bird people out to help it, all the way from Fingringhoe.”

  My feet were suddenly unwilling. What had he said? I picked up the picture and looked again.

  “The river used to be much wider,” Benny was rabbiting on in his dry voice. “Until the earthquake. Was it in 1883? It struck Colchester as well. I forget important dates.”

  There was a small mound depicted in burnt umber on yellow ocher, the tired watercolorist’s trick to get shaded ground. It stood close to the viewer, so your eye tended to pass over it and look inst
ead at the manor house, the drive, a coach drawing up to the broad steps by the ornamental balustrade. Was that just a clever deception or a beginner’s fluke? It seemed to be shadowed by a grove of trees—larch, were they? I’m hopeless with Mother Nature.

  “Broad-leaved limes.” He answered my unspoken question, adding proudly, “One was planted by the lord lieutenant of the county.” He looked at me with rheumy eyes. “It was an honor. We servants were allowed to watch the planting ceremony.”

  “How, er, kind.”

  Grave, though? I peered. The mansion was shown about a mile off. Undulating fields, a cow or two, fencing of thin wire done with pencil, a wash of cerulean blue but no expensive French ultramarine, directly from the paint box. The old adage is that true artists mix their own, never using what the colorman sells. The earth was painstakingly shown as disturbed—browns, umber, ocher, sienna, used, rubbed out, used again. Too meticulous, done by a rank amateur.

  “Was this your first drawing, Benny?”

  He nodded. “And last. You know, son, I’m glad they stopped motorboats using this stretch. Engines and vandals go together.”

  “Why didn’t you report them—it—to the police, Benny?”

  “One doesn’t betray. Things were so different then. And what would have happened to the bab if I had?”

  His obliquity was narking me. I pointed at features in his watercolor, trying to remember bits from the local newspapers. “Isn’t there going to be a new putting green at this end of the estate? A furlong from the lane?”

  “Yes. Developers want it. People will play there of a Sunday. I’m told putting is very popular with children.” He paused while a punt went by. “I’m the last of the old servants who know. Teddy Winter, the gardener, was my friend. He died a fortnight ago.”

  “Teddy Winter? His son’s Joe, the gardener at Gramphorn’s Garden Centre?”