The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries Page 15

  “Has-beens? Ma, you can’t say that.” Toby was appalled at such ignorance. “Their records are still selling in their hundreds of thousands. If you took the slightest interest in the pop scene, you’d know it.” His generation had grown up with the music of the singing duo.

  His mother snorted and returned to the kitchen.

  “Tell you what, son,” Sam said. “You go to play Maple-church, and I’ll tell you the story on one condition. You find out what really happened. Which of them did it? I’d like to know.”

  “Did what?”

  “Made off with her. Did the husband murder her, or did she run away with Dan? Or did Dan do her in, come to that? And how was it done?”

  “Me find out?” Toby blinked. “Don’t be daft. How can I?”

  “You’ll manage. You can take old Ned with you to bottle for you this time. He was there in ‘67; maybe he can help. All water under the bridge to me. Now, listen to me, omi, and I’ll tell you the story. The husband did it, that’s what the gossip is. Everyone was sure of it, though they couldn’t pin anything on him. Pete Browning was her manager as well as her husband and was greedy and jealous with it. He’d grown accustomed to her money, so he pushed Fay to keep right on singing, and she grew to hate it. There was only one problem for Pete Browning: Fay’s fame went hand in hand with Dan Smith, and Pete was convinced that Fay was in love with him. He wanted her to go solo. She refused, said she’d give up altogether if he forced her, and of course that confirmed his suspicions, especially since Dan had just moved in opposite with his wife.

  “Anyway, Dan Smith never appeared at the fête that day, and there was a terrible row between Fay and the husband. Everyone could hear it. That had me shivering in my shoes, for when Ned and I got down the evening before to test the pitch’s acoustics, I heard Dan and Fay were due to open the festivities, so I planned the whole show round the new puppets, now residing in our loft. Instead, Pete opened the fête, with Fay singing solo. Dan never turned up.”

  “What was she really like, pa?”

  “Lovely, just as lovely as her pictures, all delicate and fair, and gentle, not a bit like you imagine a sixties’ hippy pop star. With her husky voice, well, she was spell-binding. Since I’d played the pitch ever since they lived there, she’d talk to me sometimes. I reckon she was scared of her husband. She wanted to have kids, but Pete wasn’t having any of that. Money, that was all that mattered. I don’t know whether she was in love with Dan or not, but I wouldn’t have blamed her if so, the life she led. He was a handsome devil, with more than a streak of Romany in him. That’s why their signature tune was that pop version of ‘The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies oh’. And since she sang it solo that day, just before she disappeared, some folks think she knew she would shortly be ‘off with her raggle-taggle gypsy’ like the song says. Most think Pete murdered her, though.”

  “She actually disappeared during the fête, didn’t she?”

  “That’s right, omi. The grounds run down to the Thames, and on the far side of the lawns from where I put the booth there is – or was – a boathouse with a longish landing stage running out over the water, and a sort of covered porch and passageway round the building on the far side. Fay and Pete were such having such a humdinger in the boathouse, just before she sang her song, that everyone was listening. It grew very silent because folks had already gathered by the river bank to listen to the formal opening of the fête. Fay’s voice being higher, you could hear every word she was saying. ‘What have you done?’ she kept shouting. I remember that. I was just getting Mr Punch and his chums sorted to be ready for Ned when he began banging the drum after the fête was officially open.

  “Fay and Pete both came out onto the landing stage, as though they’d just remembered what they were supposed to be doing. Pete introduced her – he was black in the face with rage – and it got blacker when she sang ‘Everything but you’ – that’s the song jazzing up Glück’s ‘What is life to me without you’ and then the ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsies’. She didn’t need any accompaniment, not Fay. You could have heard a pin drop. Then Fay went back into the boathouse, while Pete declared the fête open. After that he went in, and a minute later there was a terrible scream that chilled me to the marrow. Inhuman it was. We all, and I mean all, rushed to the boathouse, thinking he was strangling her, but when we got there, we found Pete there alone. ‘She’s gone,’ he blurted out, putting on a good show of amazement. ‘Gone back to the house.’

  “But she hadn’t. She’d have been seen coming out of the boathouse door. Besides, Pete was a tightwad, and he made sure you couldn’t get into or out of the fête without passing the cashpoints. Even Fay would have had to go through them. No, there was only one place she could have gone, over the side of the far passageway into the river. You couldn’t see far because there was a bend in the river, so folks started spreading out along the bank, and another party went to search the fête grounds. I ran through the trees, followed by all the world and his wife, to see if Fay’s body had been swept round the bend, for there was a fair old current running. Then I saw her lovely hat, all white and flowers on it, bobbing along the river. A few of the better swimmers plunged into the water, but no trace of her was found. When there was no news by evening, Pete called in the police. The river was dredged eventually, but no body turned up. Only that blessed hat again. Months later a body was dredged up, but it was too far gone to identify, and there weren’t no DNA testing in those days. So it was case unproven against Pete.”

  Sam paused, then continued. “Except in Maplechurch. I stopped in for a drink at the pub that evening.”

  “And for the gossip, I bet,” Toby put in.

  “Right, omi. That was flowing even faster than the beer. She would never have killed herself. Most reckoned Pete had strangled her and pushed her over the side into the river. Others reckoned she jumped in herself, and swum off to join Dan. He was never heard of again either. Rumour has it they’re still busking on a Greek island, singing their hearts out for pennies. Fay had left a will, so it turned out, that in the event of her death – which was presumed in due legal course – all her royalties from her music should go to charity. Dan’s went to his wife of course, but Fay wouldn’t want Pete to touch a penny of hers. He could have the house, that was all. Fay was mighty scared of Pete. There was no question of divorce, you see, and she knew he’d come after her if she just ran away.

  “A few of them thought it was Dan murdered her, however, because she was planning to go solo. He knew that would end his career and preferred to end with a bang, not a whimper. Fay was the leader in the partnership, of course. He was a passionate, headstrong chap, and they too had a stormy relationship, if you believed the tabloids of the day.

  “The police questioned Pete endlessly, but in the end there was nothing they could do. There was no body to prove she’d been strangled and if he’d just pushed her into the river in the hope she’d drown, there was no proof of that either.”

  “So he got away scot free?”

  “Oh no, son. Only Mr Punch does that. The whole of Maplechurch had Pete marked down as a murderer, and worse, murderer of both Fay and Dan. Where was Dan, they asked, if Fay alone had been killed? Dan’s wife hadn’t heard a dickey bird from him. He’d just vanished. Pete shut himself up in the house and drank himself to death. The next time I passed that way, five years later, I heard he was dead. Even so I never played the pitch again when the new folk bought the house. It seemed somehow disrespectful to Fay.”

  “What do you think happened, dad?”

  “I’m a swatchel omi, son, a Punch and Judy man, not a blooming Sherlock Holmes.”

  “All right, I’ll take you on. I will be a Sherlock. I could even do a show based round it.” Toby’s eyes gleamed. “Think of the publicity for the show, if I sort out what happened.”

  Sam laughed. “You’ll do, omi, you’ll do. You just come back with the answer. I want to know which of ’em did it.”

  “This where the booth was, Ned?” Ned
was well past seventy now, and ready to throw in his drum and collection hat. He grumbled incessantly, but Toby knew that if his father didn’t bottle for him, he’d never have the heart to find someone else, since he had a shrewd idea that talk of retiring was all for show. He’d die in his bottling boots, would Ned.

  Ned grunted in his usual fashion, and banged down one of the pegs as answer.

  “What do you think happened, Ned?” Toby asked when the booth was up. His first pitch as professor. He’d mastered the swazzle, written his show, and was bursting to get going. At the end of the day he’d have another show to plan: the true story of Fay and Dan. And then he’d be on the map.

  “I don’t think. I bottles.” Ned snorted.

  Shortly the gates would be thrown open, and the crowds would throng the grounds. There was no charge now to attend, for the present owners were a benevolent couple in their sixties. There were other changes too, Toby reflected, from the last time his father played here. There was a double-glazing stand here to start with, and what would old Punch make of a bouncy castle? Still, Punch had survived because he kept up with the times, and Toby uneasily wondered whether in the excitement of taking up his father’s challenge he had given enough thought to that aspect in his first regular show.

  “Point out to me where it happened, Ned, while we can leave the booth.”

  Ned shot him a look but complied. “Not sure as I know.”

  “Come on, Ned,” Toby said patiently. “You were there.”

  Grumbling under his breath, and playing up his stiff leg as he hobbled along, Ned took him over to the far side of the lawns.

  The boathouse looked derelict, and was roped off, whether to avoid accidents with rotting boards or to prevent morbid curiosity from fans of Fay Darling. Toby looked at the landing stage from where his father had seen it, according to Ned, and then walked past the front of the boathouse to peer at the passageway from which it was presumed Fay had disappeared. His father had been right. If Fay had come through the front entrance to the boathouse, she’d have been seen by at least some of the crowd, and so she must have gone over the side, of her own volition or not. Had she planned her disappearance? The story had all the hallmarks. No identifiable body, singing those particular songs, Dan’s disappearance. Fay had had good reason to vanish. She’d probably swum round the bend past the boundary to the gardens, climbed ashore and met her Dan. Romantic, really.

  “What was Dan’s wife like?” he asked Ned.

  Ned shrugged. “Never met her, did I?”

  Toby sighed. “I thought Dad said you were to give me all the help I needed. You’re sure you were here that day?”

  Ned looked pained. “Certainly I was, omi. Bottling, weren’t I? And now I’m a-helping. Just you follow me. This is the way everyone ran, led by your dad.” Making great play of his hobbling, he led the way over the hillock of land around which the river curved. “The ‘at your dad saw were over there.” He pointed to the middle of the river.

  Toby looked at the rows of grand houses opposite, and the reed-fringed edges of the river, trying to imagine the scene thirty-odd years ago. Then he turned his attention to the wooded valley garden bordering the river with its stream trickling down to join it. “I think she just landed there, met Dan and left. No one would have seen her if she kept away from the lawns.”

  Ned sighed. “Good job you’re a Punch professor, not the real kind. You ain’t got the brains you was born with, young Toby. They’d still have to get out of the grounds. There was a blooming fifteen-foot fence to keep her little ladyship in when her hubby got mad. And the grounds were searched thoroughly, believe me.”

  “Then suppose she swam as far as the next property?”

  “That’s what some said.” Ned seemed pleased. “To meet her lover,” he added with relish. “Funny thing is that with all the publicity in the papers, no one claimed to have seen them leave the village. You’d have thought someone might have noticed. What’s more, their cars were still here, and no one came forward to say they’d given a lift to two familiar-looking hitchhikers in disguise. How’d they do it?”

  “She swam across the river to Dan’s house?”

  “Listen, omi, if I’d been Fay and there was a wife like Dan’s ready to stick a knife in my gullet, I’d have opted for Pete to strangle me and have done with it.”

  This was getting him nowhere, and the show was about to start. Toby was getting frustrated.

  “Who could be here today who would have been present in sixty-seven – at the house, I mean? Not the villagers. They’re no more use than—” Toby stopped himself in time from saying “you”.

  Ned looked pleased. “Now you’re talking. There’s a gardener I ran into. He was only a lad then, he’s head gardener – you can have a talk to him after the show. I’ll mind the booth.”

  The show! Toby had almost forgotten his debut was only minutes away.

  “Oh, it was him what did it.” Adam Dale took off his sunhat, wiped his brow and sat down in his potting shed. Here, he said mysteriously, they could talk away from the crowds. Talk he could, Toby thought to himself. If Prince Charles was right and growing things responded to being spoken to, Manor Court must have the biggest vegetables and flowers in the country.

  “Oh yes,” he continued, “that gypsy. Underhand, mean-looking Dan Smith was. The master had a temper, but he loved Mrs Fay. He wouldn’t have hurt a hair on her head.”

  “What about blacking her eyes?” Toby began to recall the footage he’d seen of Fay Darling in huge dark sunglasses on a winter’s day.

  Adam hardly paused. “They had their differences, but murder – no – not even a crime passion fruit or whatever they call it. Mrs Fay – everyone loved her and so did the master. Broke his heart when she disappeared.”

  “She left her royalties to charity, not him,” Toby pointed out. “Doesn’t sound like a happy marriage.”

  “Master told me afterwards that was his idea. He’d plenty to live on, and it would all go in tax anyway. No, it was that Dan was the joker in the pack, believe me.”

  “You think Fay loved him?”

  “Why else would she run off with him?”

  “There was no proof she did.”

  “They both disappear at the same time, to different places? Not on your nelly.”

  “Would you tell me what you remember, Mr Dale?”

  Adam was only too willing, but it matched his dad’s account almost exactly. “What you so interested for?” he asked curiously. “Writing a book, are you? We get ‘em here quite often. I talk to everyone.” Toby could well believe it.

  “I want to do a new show with the Darling Dan puppets,” he explained. “I need a new angle. An ending. Now everyone is dead—”

  “She ain’t,” Adam interrupted.

  “Fay? You know that for sure?” Toby stuttered.

  “Not Mrs Fay. Dan’s missis. Madam bloody Serena Smith. You’ll find her out there somewhere hobnobbing with the gentry. Ned’ll point her out.”

  “Ned?”

  “She was here that day. Didn’t he tell you? I’d have my money on her. Not the late master.”

  “Ned!” Toby roared, as he rushed back to the booth which Ned was minding till the next show. “Why didn’t you tell me Dan’s wife was here that day?”

  Ned paused to disentangle the crocodile’s strings. “Didn’t think of it, Toby. Anyway, she didn’t have anything to do with it. Too busy drinking at the bar. Couldn’t be two places at once.”

  “But she might have seen something. At least it suggests she was expecting to see Dan.”

  Ned shrugged, and returned his concentration to the crocodile.

  It was evening before Toby could talk to Serena Smith. It took some time to track her down, and when he did discover her, at the bar, she refused to speak to him, eyeing him up and down and suggesting he came to the house later.

  She couldn’t have been more than in her mid-fifties but her face, coarsened with drink, looked much older. As the drink h
ad obviously flowed, so had her figure, though not unattractively so. She probably had Romany blood in her, as Dan had, Toby thought, as the rounded curves bulged in the chair she had dropped into with a heavy sigh. He was a little nervous, knowing what some women could be like, alone in the house with a man, but she didn’t appear to have sex on her mind. Or, if she did, it wasn’t with him, he realised with relief. He could see she wasn’t a woman to be crossed, though.

  “’Course it was him did it,” she snorted. “That Pete Browning. I’d put my money on his doing in both of them, my Dan too.”

  “You don’t believe the gossip that Dan is still alive, then?”

  “Look, Dan was a rover. Of course he was. He’d Romany blood in him. But they always come back sooner or later. Thirty years is too late. Besides, he was mad about me, not her. He loved me. No, he’s dead, and Pete Browning did it. That’s what the row was about. I could hear her yelling from the bar. ‘What have you done?’ I didn’t realize what she meant then.”

  “Did you know Fay Darling well?” Toby asked cautiously.

  “Of course I knew her well,” she mimicked. “I wasn’t taken in by that fragile appearance, either. Tough as nails was that lady. She ruled the roost in the Darling Dan duo. Sure they were a success, but Dan loved me, not her. Miss Fay liked all the attention on her and she went on getting it, even after her death. Her own husband wasn’t enough for our little angel. She got what was coming to her, in my humble opinion, when Pete strangled her.”

  “Where was Dan that day, then, if you were at the fête and he was missing?”

  “He’d done it before, I wasn’t too worried. Another tiff with Madam Nose in the Air, I thought. He’d been away for a few days – he did that when he could, to get away from it all. I never knew where he was going, but I always knew he’d be back sometime. I expected him to turn up for the fête though, since he and Fay were opening it. I wasn’t too surprised when he didn’t, though, for he could be an awkward cuss at times. I asked Pete where he was, but he said he’d no idea. With your missus in the hay, I reckon, I told him. That was before the fête opened, and I was already half-seas over with booze. He might as well know the truth, I reckoned. He went bananas. ‘I haven’t seen him,’ he shouted. ‘That clear? And I don’t want to.’ I suppose,” Serena added, as though thinking of it for the first time, “I might have put the idea in his mind to bump them off. First Dan, then her.” Then she cheered up. “No, I couldn’t have done. Dan was already missing, but I’m still sure Pete did for them both.” She looked at her empty glass. “When you ain’t got love, money’s the next best thing, and I’ve plenty of that. One of these journalists, are you? How much are you paying me?”