Murder in the Museum (Fethering Mysteries) Read online

  PRAISE FOR SIMON BRETT

  AND THE FETHERING MYSTERIES

  ‘A new Simon Brett is an event for mystery fans’

  P. D. James

  ‘Murder most enjoyable . . . An author who never takes himself that seriously, and for whom any fictional murder can frequently form part of the entertainment industry’

  Colin Dexter, Oldie

  ‘A crime novel in the traditional style, with delightful little touches of humour and vignettes of a small town and its bitchy inhabitants’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘With a smidge of adultery thrown in, some wise observations about stagnant marriages, disillusioned lovers and the importance of friendship, and, of course, plenty of whiffy red herrings, it all makes for a highly enjoyable read’

  Daily Mail

  ‘This is lovely stuff, as comforting – and as unputdownable – as a Sussex cream tea. More please’

  Brighton Evening Argus

  ‘Crime writing just like in the good old days, and perfect entertainment’

  Guardian

  ‘I stayed up until three in the morning and chewed off two fingernails finishing this delightful, thoroughly English whodunnit’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Simon Brett comes up trumps yet again . . . an excellent thriller but also a well-observed social commentary’

  Irish News

  ‘One of the exceptional detective story writers around’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘[Brett is] highly commended for atmosphere and wit’

  Evening Standard

  ‘Simon Brett writes stunning detective stories . . . I would recommend them to anyone’

  Jilly Cooper

  ‘Simon Brett is a man of many talents . . . totally engrossing and unusually funny’

  London Life Magazine

  ‘For readers who like their crime told elegantly and light-heartedly, with a wit which bubbles throughout plot and narrative . . . pure pleasure from beginning to end’

  Birmingham Post

  ‘One of the wittiest crime writers around’

  Antonia Fraser

  MURDER IN THE MUSEUM

  Simon Brett worked as a producer in radio and television before taking up writing full time. As well as the much-loved Fethering series, the Mrs Pargeter novels and the Charles Paris detective series, he is the author of the radio and television series After Henry, the radio series No Commitments and Smelling of Roses and the bestselling How to Be a Little Sod. His novel A Shock to the System was filmed starring Michael Caine.

  Married with three grown-up children, Simon lives in an Agatha Christie-style village on the South Downs.

  Murder in the Museum is the fourth novel in the Fethering Mysteries series. The ninth, Blood at the Bookies, is available now.

  Also by Simon Brett

  A Shock to the System

  Dead Romantic

  Singled Out

  The Fethering Mysteries

  The Body on the Beach

  Death on the Downs

  The Torso in the Town

  The Hanging in the Hotel

  The Witness at the Wedding

  The Stabbing in the Stables

  Death Under the Dryer

  Blood at the Bookies

  Mrs Pargeter novels

  A Nice Class of Corpse

  Mrs, Presumed Dead

  Mrs Pargeter’s Package

  Mrs Pargeter’s Pound of Flesh

  Mrs Pargeter’s Plot

  Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour

  Charles Paris novels

  Cast, in Order of Disappearance

  So Much Blood

  Star Trap

  An Amateur Corpse

  A Comedian Dies

  The Dead Side of Mike

  Situation Tragedy

  Murder Unprompted

  Murder in the Title

  Not Dead, Only Resting

  Dead Giveaway

  What Bloody Man Is That?

  A Series of Murders

  Corporate Bodies

  A Reconstructed Corpse

  Sicken and So Die

  Dead Room Farce

  Short stories

  A Box of Tricks

  Crime Writers and Other Animals

  First published 2003 by Macmillan

  First published in paperback 2004 by Pan Books

  This edition published 2007 by Pan Books

  This electronic edition published 2009 by Pan Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd

  Pan Macmillan, 4 Crinan Street, London N1 9XW

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-330-46553-3 in Adobe Reader format

  ISBN 978-0-330-46552-6 in Adobe Digital Editions format

  ISBN 978-0-330-46554-0 in Mobipocket format

  Copyright © Simon Brett 2003

  The right of Simon Brett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  To Norman and Hilary

  Chapter One

  Carole Seddon was good at meetings, but only when she was running them. She got restless under the chairmanship of others, particularly those she didn’t think were very impressive chairmen.

  And Lord Beniston fitted firmly into that category. Carole’s years in the Home Office had been, amongst many other things, a consumer guide in the conduct of meetings. While
honing her own style of calm efficiency, she had endured the chairmanship of the overanxious, the under-prepared, the nit-picking, the lethargic and the frankly incompetent. But Lord Beniston brought a new shortcoming to the role – a world-weary patrician arrogance, which suggested that the afternoon’s agenda was a tiresome interruption to his life and that the Trustees of Bracketts were extremely privileged to have him present amongst them. They might represent the Great and the Good of West Sussex, but he represented the Great and the Good on a national scale. Their names might look quite good on a charity’s letterhead, but Lord Beniston was confident that his name looked a lot better (even though the reforms of New Labour no longer allowed him a seat in the House of Lords).

  He was in his sixties, with steel-grey hair whose parallel furrows always looked as if it had just been combed. He had a claret-coloured face, and yellowish teeth which looked permanently clenched, though his manner was too arrogant to be tense. Presumably there were times when he didn’t wear a pin-striped suit and a blue and red regimental tie, but none of the Bracketts Trustees had ever seen him out of that uniform.

  The Bracketts Trust met six times a year, and this was Carole’s second appearance. She had accepted the offer of a Trusteeship with some misgivings, and the first meeting had strengthened these to the extent that now, only halfway through her second, she was already assessing graceful ways of shedding the responsibility she had taken on.

  She didn’t get the feeling she’d be much missed. The offer to join the Bracketts Board had come from the venue’s new Director, Gina Locke, and seemed to have been issued in the mistaken belief that Carole’s background as a civil servant might provide some shortcuts through the tangles of government bureaucracy, and also that she might have wealthy contacts who would prove useful in the eternal business of fund-raising. When, at the first meeting it had become clear that their new recruit was unlikely to fulfil either of these needs, the other Trustees seemed to lose interest in her.

  And Carole Seddon’s own interest in the affairs of Bracketts was finite. The house was a literary shrine, and she couldn’t really claim to be a literary person. Her reasons for accepting the Trusteeship had been a surprise at being asked, a sense of being flattered, and a feeling that she ought to make more of an effort to fill her years of retirement. Well-pensioned, comfortably housed in High Tor, a desirably neat property in the West Sussex seaside village of Fethering, Carole Seddon did have time on her hands. A thin woman in her early fifties, with short grey hair and glasses shielding pale blue eyes, she reckoned her brain was as good as it ever had been, and deserved more exercise than the mental aerobics of the Times crossword. But she wasn’t convinced that listening to the bored pontifications of Lord Beniston was the kind of workout it needed.

  The setting was nice, though, hard to fault that. The Trustees’ Meetings always took place in the panelled dining room of Bracketts, and were held on Thursdays at five, after the house and gardens had ceased to admit visitors. This was the last meeting of the season; at the end of the next week, coinciding with the end of October, the site would be closed to the public until the following Easter.

  Bracketts, set a little outside the Downland village of South Stapley, was one of those houses which had grown organically. The oldest part was Elizabethan, and additions had been made in Georgian and Victorian times.

  Through the diamond-paned leaded windows, Carole Seddon could see over the house’s rolling lawns to the gleam of the fast-flowing River Fether which ran out into the sea some fifteen miles away at Fethering. It was late autumn, when the fragile heat of the day gave way at evening to the cold breath of approaching winter, but perhaps one of the best times of year to appreciate the beauty and seclusion of the estate. Bracketts was an idyllic place to be the home of a writer.

  The writer to whom the shrine was dedicated was Esmond Chadleigh. His father Felix had bought Bracketts during the First World War, getting the property cheap, in a state of considerable dilapidation, and spending a great deal on loving restoration of the house and gardens. When Felix Chadleigh died in 1937, Bracketts was left to his son and, funded by family inheritance and his own writing income, Esmond Chadleigh had lived there in considerable style until his own death in 1967.

  Esmond Chadleigh was one of those Catholic figures, like Chesterton and Belloc, who, in that unreal, unrealistic world of England between the wars, had made his mark in almost every department of the world of letters. Adult novelist, children’s story-teller, light versifier, essayist, critic, it seemed there was no form of writing to which Esmond Chadleigh could not turn his hand. But when the derisory adjective ‘glib’ was about to be applied to him, critics were brought up short by a series of deeply felt poems of suffering, published in 1935 under the title Vases of Dead Flowers. Of these, the most famous, a staple of anthologies, school assemblies, memorial services and Radio Four’s With Great Pleasure selections, was the poem ‘Threnody for the Lost’.

  Written, according to Esmond Chadleigh’s Introduction, nearly twenty years before its first publication, this was a lament for his older brother Graham, who at eighteen had set off for the battlefields of Flanders and never returned, even in a coffin. In the room where the Trustees were meeting was a glass-topped display-case, dedicated to the memory of Graham Chadleigh.

  The space was divided down the middle. On one side there were photographs of him as a boy in a house before Bracketts, with his younger brother beside him; both carried tennis rackets. Then Graham appeared in a cricket team in a gravely posed school photograph, dated 1915. Besides this was the faded tasselled cap of his cricket colours. There was a letter he had written from school to his parents, politely requesting them to send him more tuck.

  On the other side of the division was the pitifully small collection of memorabilia from Graham Chadleigh’s wartime life. There was a letter written to him in the trenches by his father. There was a cap-badge and a service revolver. That was all that had been recovered.

  It was the totality of his absence that could still shock visitors to Bracketts at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Like many others in the muddy holocaust of Passchendaele, Graham Chadleigh had just vanished off the face of the earth, literally blown to smithereens. That was why his brother’s famous poem carried such emotional impact. ‘Threnody for the Lost’ was a powerful evocation of bereavement, particularly the pain of the mourner left with nothing tangible to mourn.

  No grave, no lichened tombstone, graven plaque,

  No yew-treed cross beneath its cloak of moss,

  No sense but absence, unforgiving dark,

  The stretching void that is eternal loss.

  No one of Carole Seddon’s generation could have got through school without having learned those lines, and the revival of interest in the Great War towards the end of the twentieth century had ensured that the name of Esmond Chadleigh was not forgotten.

  But, as was being made clear at the Board of Trustees meeting that autumn afternoon, though his name was familiar, it was not familiar enough. The teetering finances of Bracketts required the profile of Esmond Chadleigh to be a lot higher than it currently was. Without a substantial injection of cash, closure of the estate as a heritage site was a very real possibility.

  Gina Locke spelled out the reality in typically uncompromising style. ‘Unless something happens, Bracketts might be closing at the end of October for the last time.’

  Gina was mid- to late thirties, slight and dark, but with undeniable charisma. Carole had met her at a dinner party in the nearby town of Fedborough, and been immediately taken by the enthusiasm with which she talked about her new job as Director of Bracketts. It was that enthusiasm which had carried Carole into her current position as a Trustee, and which made her feel guilty for her recent thoughts of escaping the role. (But then a suspicion that was hardening into a reality made her feel less guilty. She was increasingly certain that she’d been taken on board – and indeed on to the Board at Bracketts – to provide more support
for Gina Locke’s personal agenda. If the Director thought she was going to get subservience from Carole Seddon, she couldn’t have been more wrong.)

  ‘Aren’t you being a little bit alarmist there?’ The languid voice that challenged Gina Locke’s pessimism belonged to Graham Chadleigh-Bewes, one of the two Trustees who were blood relatives of Esmond Chadleigh. He was the great man’s grandson. Chubby, in his fifties, with a round body which threatened to spill out of the chair in which it sat, Graham Chadleigh-Bewes had one of those faces whose babyishness is only accentuated by the advance of wrinkles and the retreat of hair. His permanent expression was one of mild pique, as though someone else had just appropriated a treat he had been promising himself. Apparently he had had some minor literary career of his own, but most of his energies were now focused on perpetuating the image of his grandfather.

  The other Trustee from the Chadleigh family was Graham’s Aunt Belinda, the younger of Esmond’s daughters. (Her sister Sonia, Graham’s mother, had died of a brain tumour in 1976.) Though not yet seventy, Belinda Chadleigh behaved as though she were a lot older. She never failed to attend the Trustees’ Meetings, but always failed to make much impression once she was there. She was a few lines behind the general discussion and on the rare occasions she spoke it was usually to clarify something she had misunderstood. Once she had had the point spelled out to her, the unchanging vagueness in her bleached blue eyes suggested that the explanation had left her none the wiser.

  ‘I don’t think I’m being alarmist,’ Gina Locke replied coolly to Graham Chadleigh-Bewes’ interruption. ‘I think I’m being realistic.’

  Lord Beniston cleared his throat testily, unwilling to have even that amount of conversation not conducted through the chair. ‘It would be useful, Gina, if you could give the Trustees a quick overview of the current state of Bracketts’ finances.’

  ‘Exactly what I was about to do.’

  This reply, though not overtly rude, still didn’t contain the amount of deference Lord Beniston would have liked. He harrumphed again and said, ‘Let’s hear the worst then.’

  ‘Right.’ Gina Locke picked up a sheaf of papers in front of her. ‘You’ve all been circulated copies of the last six months’ accounts, which I think are self-explanatory. If there are any details you’d like to pick up on, I’m more than happy to give you fuller information.’ She allowed a short pause, but no one filled it with any enquiry. ‘Basically, as you’ll see, there is a worrying shortfall between income and expenditure.’