The Garden Party Read online

  ‘OK . . . carry on,’ Brunnie replied encouragingly.

  ‘The wall is not a tall wall. It’s about six feet high . . . two metres . . . and twenty feet long, and there is a gap in the middle of about ten feet where the coach crashed into it, so I went to work putting the bricks back together and it was when I was doing that that I found the note.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘But I can’t fathom it, neither I can, because you see the wall is Victorian, glazed brick, but the note is on modern writing paper . . . in a plastic bin liner. The note was well in the wall between the two lines of bricks; two vertical lines topped off with heavy coping stones. See, sir, think of a ham sandwich on its side . . . the bread is the two walls . . . the ham is the narrow space between the two walls.’

  ‘The cavity?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Brady nodded. ‘That’s the word; just a very narrow cavity between the two walls; that was where I found the note. So I took the note home. I have a niece and she is wed to a police officer . . . so I phoned Nettie, my niece, her name is Annette but we call her “Nettie”, so we do, and I asked her advice and she asked her husband, and he said to take it to New Scotland Yard.’

  ‘And here you are.’ Brunnie raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Yes, sir, and here I am –’ Brady shrugged his shoulders – ‘and here I am. Don’t know what I have started . . . if anything. But, yes, sir, here I am.’

  Harry Vicary leaned forward with a furrowed brow as he read the photocopy of the note which lay on his desktop. He re-read it and then he focussed his attention upon the handwriting. He noted the large and clumsy, childlike scrawl and he also noted the very evident spelling errors. ‘Semi-literate,’ he commented softly.

  ‘Probably and possibly, sir.’ Brunnie reclined backwards in the chair in front of Vicary’s desk, with arms folded and legs crossed. ‘But only probably and only possibly.’

  ‘Probably? Possibly?’ Vicary looked up at Brunnie with a brief smile. ‘Why do you say that, Frank?’

  ‘Well, sir, it is simply that disguising your handwriting by writing a note with your subordinate hand – pretending to be semi-literate – is another way of throwing the hounds off the scent; another way of hiding your identity. It is not easy for a genuinely semi-literate person to give the impression that they are literate . . . such a person would have to know that they are semi-literate, and would have to check the spelling of each word using a dictionary. That is not easy for a semi-literate and is also very time-consuming.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ Vicary once again looked at the note. ‘I take your point and so we won’t jump to the conclusion that we are dealing with a semi-literate person. “The bodies”, which he has spelled “b-o-d-y-s”, “is here” . . . which I assume means “are here” . . . “one day they will get a right burial” . . . spelling burial as “b-u-r-y-a-l”, by which we can assume the note writer means a proper funeral, do you think?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Brunnie unfolded his arms and clasped his hands together in front of him. ‘That would be my reading of it. The writer is notifying the authorities in some time to come of the location of the possible unlawful burial of two or more bodies in the hope that they’ll get a proper funeral and their souls will be released. Proper burial confirms, I think, that we are talking about human remains; we are not going to dig up a pair of much-loved dogs or cats or a couple of hamsters.’

  Vicary chuckled softly.

  ‘And,’ Brunnie continued, ‘the note seems to have been written by someone with a conscience, and a male of the species because of where it was found.’

  ‘Inside a brick wall you mean?’ Vicary asked.

  ‘Yes, sir, as if placed there by a bricklayer. Women get everywhere these days, even flying fast jets and being in command of battleships, but I have yet to come across a female brickie. It’s hard to see a woman surviving on a building site . . . but working alone and building a brick wall, well . . . it’s feasible,’ Brunnie suggested, ‘it is feasible.’

  ‘Yes . . . just,’ Vicary growled, ‘but I think you are right, we must assume that we are looking for a male . . . and someone with a conscience . . . and . . . and also someone who assumed that he’d be well out of it by the time his note was found, but he left the note in a plastic bin liner . . . which is?’

  ‘With forensics, sir,’ Brunnie replied promptly, ‘along with the original note.’

  ‘Good. So, the wall . . .’ Vicary brought the conversation back on track. ‘It is described as being of the Victorian era but contains a note written on contemporary notepaper wrapped in a plastic bag. The only conclusion we can draw is that the wall was rebuilt some time in its recent history, in addition to the rebuilding of the present time, and it was rebuilt by someone who knew about what might be two shallow graves or some other form of concealment, and –’ Vicary leaned back in his chair – ‘rebuilt by someone who knew there would be some fallout upon the discovery of said concealment and who wanted to ensure that he was not going to get in the way of said fallout. He knew about the bodies and he knew that his head would be for the chopping block if and when they were discovered, but he also wanted to ensure that they were discovered at some point. A villain with a conscience.’

  ‘Seems so, sir . . . or somebody trying to protect another living person; wanting to ensure that another person is well out of it by the time the remains are found.’

  ‘Yes . . . dare say we’ll find out at some point.’ Vicary held up the photocopy. ‘And the map . . . well, hardly a map . . . simple diagram . . . clear as a bell; two lines which join each other, and close to the join is a cross . . . and from the note there is a line leading to the cross.’ Vicary paused. ‘There is, though, no indication that this map shows a location within the Greater London area.’

  ‘I thought that also, sir.’ Brunnie once again glanced out of the window of Vicary’s office. He saw blue sky and high, wispy white cloud . . . summer over London Town.

  ‘If it isn’t of London, we’ll broadcast it nationwide to all the provincial forces, but for now we’ll assume it shows a location within London.’ Vicary placed the photocopy back on his desktop and re-read the note. ‘There won’t be many Monkhams, quite a few Orchards though . . . whether Avenue, Street, Road, Drive or any other name . . . but there will only be one place where a Monkham something will join an Orchard something.’

  ‘Shall I get on to that, sir?’ Brunnie stood. ‘I just need an A to Z.’

  ‘Yes, please, if you would, if you would.’ Vicary smiled. ‘Who is in the unit right now?’

  ‘Just Tom Ainsclough and Penny Yewdall, sir; they’re both addressing paperwork at the moment, which –’ Brunnie opened his right palm – ‘may well be important . . . if not vital . . . but I don’t doubt for a second that they will mind being torn from it.’

  Vicary grinned. ‘I don’t doubt it either. Ask them to go out to the address in question, will you, and obtain any information they can about the earlier rebuilding of the wall, then pick up a trail if they can, see where it takes them.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  ‘Then open a file, get a case number from the collator and write up what has been reported so far.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Brunnie stood and reached for the handle of the door of Vicary’s office.

  ‘Well, as you see this is the wall –’ the man indicated the wall with his left hand – ‘one wall, brick, boundary definition, for the purpose of. It is at least the wall in its present condition. Most of the middle section, as you see, is in the form of loose bricks on the ground.’ He was a tall man, slender, round-lensed spectacles, T-shirt, trimmed beard, wispy hair, jeans and sports shoes. He had, thought Tom Ainsclough, a warm and a confident manner about him. Ainsclough also noticed clipped vowel sounds in his speaking voice which emerged occasionally within his apparent Received Pronunciation. He might, Ainsclough thought, be a man who could initially be taken for a native of the Home Counties until he felt the need to bathe, whereupon he would announce his inten
tion to take a bath rather than a ‘barthe’. For this man there would be no ‘R’ in bath, or path, or many other words in which the southern English clearly believe there to be one. Neither Yewdall nor Ainsclough were surprised when the man gave his occupation as that of ‘university lecturer’. ‘Lovely glazed brick, as you see . . . gorgeous . . . really gorgeous . . . they could afford such luxury in Victorian times.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ainsclough nodded his agreement and smiled. ‘I too appreciate glazed brick; it glows in the sun on occasions, like Northern Red Brick.’

  ‘Yes, this brick has to be kept clean to do that but Northern Red Brick will glow even if caked with industrial fallout . . . but, yes, glazed brick is quite a luxury and we do appreciate it.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘My wife and I,’ the man explained.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Ainsclough replied with a note of apology in his voice. ‘Sorry, I should have realized.’

  ‘No matter.’ The householder smiled. ‘But, glazed brick . . . You know I went to an awful school – a terrible place which was new built and was constructed out of soft, unfaced brick – and I was the first pupil to carve his name into the wall, and another lad who was with me at the time did the same. The staff were not best pleased, the Education Department had, we were told, wanted to build the school in glazed brick to prevent pupils carving their names or their initials into it, but were told by the Council that it would be too expensive, so they had then asked to compromise and have the lower six feet of glazed brick, but even that was out of the question, financially speaking. The school lasted for twenty years without such vandalism, “Then one boy had to come here and now the school is ruined.” They couldn’t take action because I wasn’t caught in the act and I was not going to admit to anything. Also, I wasn’t the only boy in the school with the initials C.B. and the other boy wasn’t the only boy with the initials D.H., but they knew I had done it. I was just that sort of boy . . . Fifteen years later I took my wife-to-be to show her my roots and I took her to the school. The initials of other boys had spread out like a virus from where me and D.H. had carved our initials . . . all over the wall and round the corner.’

  ‘You don’t feel guilty about doing that?’ Yewdall commented. She was unimpressed and allowed a note of disapproval to enter her voice.

  ‘Nope.’ The man shook his head. ‘No reason why I should feel guilty, it was just that sort of school; it invited contempt. I mean, we were told that Victorians ventilated coal mines by lighting live fires underground to cause an updraught – apparently methane did not exist then – and that the Romans owed nothing to their weapons. What nonsense. We had a maths teacher who did not know what interpolation meant, and that was in the final year. We had a physics teacher whose idea of teaching was to copy the text book on to the blackboard . . . I mean, word for word, and have us copy it into our exercise books . . . and a religious instruction teacher who was so out of his box that he could be goaded into a very satisfying fist fight . . . and you know, quite frankly, in hindsight, I am surprised it took twenty years before a pupil saw the appeal of all that non-glazed brick, and if they had taken action against me I would have returned under cover of darkness and carved my initials below the headmaster’s study window. As I said, I was just that sort of boy.’

  ‘You seem to have done well despite a poor start.’ Ainsclough cast an envious eye over the man’s house, and having also survived a similar-sounding school he did not share Penny Yewdall’s disapproval of the man’s early teenage actions and attitude.

  ‘Yes, I have degrees from three universities. I feel that what I achieved in life I achieved despite my school, not because of it. I am a school governor and read the Old Testament lesson at our church’s Evensong Service . . . I am part of our neighbourhood watch team . . . so I dare say that I have evolved out of all recognition from the fifteen-year-old boy with a penknife, but I do not regret doing what I did. But the wall: Mr Brady is repairing it . . . doing a good job. He phoned us this morning to let us know that he wouldn’t be attending today; he did not say why and now the police have arrived and have an interest in it. Is it something I should know about?’

  ‘Yes,’ Yewdall replied. ‘I mean, yes, we have an interest in it.’

  ‘Why?’ the man asked.

  ‘We can’t say at the moment, but I can say that it seems unlikely that it is anything that you need worry about, sir.’

  ‘That’s a relief.’ The man breathed deeply. ‘When the police call it can only mean trouble in one form or another.’

  ‘Trouble for somebody,’ Yewdall replied, ‘but not necessarily for the person being called upon, as in this instance. We have reason to believe that the wall was also rebuilt some years ago, but not a long time ago.’

  ‘Yes.’ The man looked inquisitively at Yewdall and then at Ainsclough. He saw two plain-clothes officers in their late twenties. ‘Yes, it was; it was a bigger and a more expensive job than we had anticipated. It was leaning you see . . . about ten degrees out of true.’

  ‘Which is quite a lot,’ Yewdall commented, ‘quite significant.’

  ‘Oh yes, and it was leaning inwards towards our house, not outwards and thus towards the hotel car park. That is inwards from our perspective.’

  ‘Yes . . . yes . . .’ Ainsclough replied, ‘I knew what you meant.’

  ‘It was like that when we moved in and would probably have stayed like that for the next fifty years, but the children had arrived and since it could not have leaned any more without collapsing, there was no decision to take; it had to be demolished and rebuilt.’ The man looked at the pile of bricks. ‘It really was at my wife’s insistence; she had a near death experience when she was about five years old; a brick wall collapsed on top of her and her parents were told that the only reason she survived was because she had a very strong will to live . . . but it haunts her.’

  ‘It would do,’ Yewdall said drily, ‘those sorts of experiences never leave any of us. I have a few such memories – we all have – they come unbidden to mind when you can’t sleep or are triggered by an unexpected sight or sound or turn of phrase.’

  ‘Yes, it is like that, and for my wife it’s a leaning brick wall with children in close proximity, and so she was nothing if not insistent. So down it came.’

  ‘Very understandable,’ Yewdall nodded.

  ‘So I negotiated with the hotelier, he’s not a bad sort, and I negotiated access to six foot of his land for six weeks because the builders needed access to both sides of the wall in order to take it down and rebuild it. They reckoned the job would take three weeks but I negotiated for six weeks’ access. I was just being cautious, you understand.’

  ‘Sensible.’ Ainsclough glanced at the hotel car park and the hotel itself which was clearly once a very large family home. Its white paint was at that moment gleaming in the sun.

  ‘So we hired a builder. We hired the one who gave the lowest quote and he came and he started work. He was very thorough, painstakingly removing each brick and then chipping away all the old Victorian mortar. These houses were built in the 1890s . . . so very late Victorian . . . and the wall is contemporary with the house; it is mentioned in the deeds. So, once they had all the bricks in a neat pile, they rebuilt it again. This was five years ago.’

  ‘That is one of the questions we were going to ask.’ Yewdall interrupted the householder. ‘You are sure it was five years ago?’

  ‘Yes.’ The householder smiled. ‘Because if you would care to follow me . . .’ He turned and led the officers to the far end of the wall near the back of the house where he pointed out the year carved into a wider than usual area in the cement between two bricks. ‘Dare say old habits die hard.’ He grinned sheepishly. ‘But there is the date when the cement was still wet. Five years ago this summer.’

  ‘Good enough,’ Ainsclough murmured.

  ‘Very good enough,’ Yewdall also murmured in reply. Then turning to the householder asked, ‘Who were the builders?’

  ‘Oh, they
were an outfit called Seven Kings Construction.’

  ‘Quite local in that case?’ Yewdall commented

  ‘Not far at all,’ the householder agreed, ‘this being Barking, where we are all mad.’

  Ainsclough gave a gentle, diplomatic smile at the householder’s joke.

  ‘Just two geezers in the main,’ the householder continued, ‘with the occasional extra man. They seemed to have a pool of bricklayers to call on. Once the rebuilding commenced there was just one bloke set to the task, sometimes two, but mainly the one fella. It seemed that the labour was required during the controlled demolition and the chipping away of the old cement. Once that was done and dusted the rebuilding was just a one or two man job.’

  ‘I see,’ Ainsclough replied. ‘Do you have their phone number?’

  ‘I did,’ the householder said flatly. ‘I phoned them up again when that drunken halfwit of a coach driver insisted on driving his vehicle into my wall at fifty miles an hour, but they are no longer trading. Fortunately for me the carpenter who is putting up shelves in my study was able to recommend Mr Brady. He’s a good man, a good, steady worker. I don’t mind that he has taken a day off; he’ll get paid when the job’s done but as I say, he’s a good, methodical worker. I can tell you that the business premises of the Seven Kings Construction Company have been taken over by an outfit of glaziers . . . same overall line of work, I dare say.’

  ‘Glaziers?’ Ainsclough repeated.

  ‘Yes, Montgomery Glazing.’

  ‘Montgomery Glazing,’ Ainsclough scribbled the name into his notebook.

  ‘Yes. I remember the name; it’s my sister’s married name. So I dare say if anyone can help you trace the builders of the wall of five years ago it will be the people at Montgomery Glazing. It was they who told me that Seven Kings had ceased trading, suggesting they know at least a little of what happened to the proprietors.’

  ‘Retired.’ Alexander Montgomery of Montgomery Glazing Co. smiled in what both Yewdall and Ainsclough thought to be a knowing and a supercilious manner. It was, they thought, the sort of smile that is often displayed by criminals when they say, ‘You’ll need more than that if you’re going to make this one stick, governor.’ Alexander Montgomery was a large man, overweight, as well as being big boned rather than muscular, with thick black hair and a round, reddish face. He was dressed in a brown workman’s smock over denim jeans, and wore industrial footwear, which both officers felt must make his feet uncomfortably hot in the present very warm weather. Montgomery received the officers in the small wooden hut which stood on what they both thought to be a large area of land for the premises of what evidently was a small business. It seemed that the premises of Montgomery Glazing were stuck in the corner of a large, uncultivated field. Further off, a second wooden hut, which appeared to be unused, stood in the centre of an adjacent smaller area of land which was also uncultivated; the two plots of land being separated only by an ageing wicker fence, with a gate set in it.