The Magic Chair Murder Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by Diane Janes

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  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

  Recent Titles by Diane Janes

  Fiction

  THE PULL OF THE MOON

  WHY DON’T YOU COME FOR ME?

  SWIMMING IN THE SHADOWS *

  STICK OR TWIST *

  Non-fiction

  EDWARDIAN MURDER: IGHTHAM & THE MORPETH TRAIN ROBBERY

  POISONOUS LIES: THE CROYDON ARSENIC MYSTERY

  THE CASE OF THE POISONED PARTRIDGE

  DEATH AT WOLF’S NICK

  * available from Severn House

  THE MAGIC CHAIR MURDER

  Diane Janes

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2017 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  This eBook edition first published in 2018 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2018 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  Copyright © 2017 by Diane Janes.

  The right of Diane Janes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8759-7 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-875-0 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-937-4 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  In memory of Ann and Alastair

  ONE

  The car was still blazing by the time Sergeant Graydon arrived. He allowed his bicycle to freewheel the final few yards along the lane, swinging his left leg over the crossbar so that he was standing upright with one foot balanced on the right-hand pedal for the dismount; a rather flashy method of arrival which he had favoured ever since joining the Lancashire Constabulary back in ’twenty-one. He steered the bicycle into the side of the lane, applying his brakes just enough to bring the machine to a halt alongside the young constable awaiting him.

  ‘Now then,’ Graydon said.

  Police Constable Hamilton had only been in the job a matter of months, but he already knew that this gruff introduction was a question, to which a response was required.

  ‘The fire was spotted by Mr Birkett, sir. He’d been to a bit of a do at one of the farms over the top, and was walking back. He reckons he saw the fire start when he was only about five minutes from home. Says he knocked on my door as soon as he got to the village. I logged the time as two twenty-three a.m., so if Mr Birkett is right, then it didn’t catch alight much before a quarter past two. Then I telephoned you, got into my uniform and came straight to the scene, sir.’

  Graydon made a humphing sound. The lad was overeager, the polish not yet knocked off him by a few years of rural beat work.

  ‘I didn’t pass anyone on the road,’ Hamilton went on. ‘There’s no sign of the driver, nor yet another vehicle. It doesn’t look like there’s been an accident, or a collision or some such.’

  Graydon continued to contemplate the vehicle in silence. He had occasionally known motorcars to overturn and catch alight after an accident, but this one looked for all the world as if it had been neatly parked at the side of the lane. Funny place to leave a motorcar, a good mile or more away from the nearest dwelling, just where the lane dipped between high banks before disappearing beneath the stone arch of a railway bridge. A back of beyond kind of a spot, where the initial glow would have been well concealed by the overgrown banking at either side of the road, though not of course from anyone walking the hilltop track. It might have gone unnoticed until morning if that bloke had not been cutting across the hill on his way home from a party.

  ‘So … no sign of the driver, then,’ he said at last.

  As if in response to an instruction, Hamilton leant his bike against the bank and approached the car, raising a hand to shield his face in defiance of the heat.

  ‘Hey,’ Graydon shouted. ‘Back off, you soft bugger. You’re not Douglas Fairbanks.’

  ‘Douglas Fairbanks?’ Hamilton retreated a couple of yards, as instructed.

  ‘Douglas Fairbanks – in His Majesty, the American.’

  ‘Would that be a film, sir?’

  ‘Oh, never mind.’

  ‘Do you reckon it was a fault with the engine? Or something else?’

  ‘Could be something, might be nothing. Get your torch and let’s have a look round. Don’t get too close.’ Hamilton was too young, the older man thought. Too raw and inclined to get overexcited. Most likely it was no more than a fault of some kind in the engine, and the driver gone off in the other direction to find his way home. Motorcars were unreliable buggers and always breaking down. They burned easily, what with wooden floorboards and leather seats and a tank full of petrol, and indeed, as the men approached the flames suddenly leapt higher so that some overhanging branches glowed red for a moment or two, but it was still early in the year and too damp for there to be any real risk of the fire spreading to the surrounding trees and bushes.

  Keeping the blazing car at a discreet distance, the two men checked the ground for anything from a spent match upwards, but they found nothing more remarkable than some of last year’s damp leaves, and after a couple of minutes they returned to stand beside their bicycles. The air was filled with the stink of burning fuel and rubber. Palls of smoke surged upwards, temporarily obscuring the stars. The brightness of the blaze made everything else seem darker and, beyond the burning wreck, the lane ahead appeared to end in a solid wall of black, where the railwa
y bridge cut across it.

  ‘What now?’ asked Hamilton.

  ‘You’ve telephoned for the fire brigade, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, sir, but they’ve a good way to come.’

  ‘Right, then. We wait until they get here to damp it down and then we’re away.’

  ‘Suppose there’s something in the boot?’

  ‘What did you have in mind? Posh folks’ picnic hamper? If there is, the sandwiches will be well and truly kippered by now. If there’s anything to see, we’ll find it right enough in the morning. We can’t stand around here all night, waiting for this lot to cool down.’

  TWO

  At the exact same moment as PC Hamilton was preparing to lever open the boot of Linda Dexter’s burnt-out Talbot 105, Hugh Allonby, chairman of the Robert Barnaby Society, was flagging up her absence to a select group of members who were gathered on the terrace of the Furnival Towers Hotel. It was the mid-morning break on the first full day of the society’s annual conference and the terrace was crowded with delegates taking full advantage of the unseasonably warm weather to enjoy their tea and coffee. An onlooker might have wondered what sort of occasion would bring together this disparate mix of people and perhaps been further perplexed by the sprinkling of unusual costumes on show, which suggested that a relatively staid gathering had somehow been infiltrated by a group leftover from a fancy dress ball.

  A man in a Viking helmet, a strangely fashioned canvas jacket and trousers which resembled nothing more than the bottom half of a bear, was conversing in animated fashion with an elderly woman whose greying hair had been coaxed into a pair of unlikely pigtails beneath a milkmaid’s cap, while a few yards away a tweedy academic was sharing his opinions with a woman sporting a coolie hat as wide as a banqueting platter, who was nodding enthusiastically while attempting to balance not only the hat but also three biscuits on the saucer of her coffee cup.

  Chairman Allonby, who was reckoned to be one of the greatest living authorities on the late Robert Barnaby, and already had two books on the subject to his name, was not among those who had dressed as a character from one of Robert Barnaby’s poems. Indeed, had it been within his power to do so, Allonby would have prohibited this frivolity on the grounds that Barnaby’s poetry – though originally written for children – had now attained a status which ought to have ensured that it was approached with an appropriate level of seriousness at all times. He made a point of never speaking to any member clad in a costume, if he could possibly avoid it, a snub which was lost upon most of the perceived offenders, since Allonby generally emphasized his importance in the scheme of things by maintaining a discreet distance between himself and the ordinary rank-and-file members, their mode of dress notwithstanding.

  It therefore attracted no undue attention when Mr Allonby gathered half-a-dozen members of his executive committee on the terrace, lowered his voice to maintain discretion and said, ‘I daresay that some of you must have noticed the absence of Mrs Dexter. Under normal circumstances, of course, I wouldn’t notice one way or the other whether Mrs Dexter was in the hall, but I don’t need to remind you that she has been scheduled – against my better judgement – to give the first presentation this afternoon, so I find it a trifle disquieting that she did not appear at breakfast this morning, or attend the first of the morning lectures. I sincerely hope that she is not going to let us down after such a fuss was made about including her in the programme.’ He punctuated this last statement with a glare in the direction of one of the newest committee members, Frances Black – or Fran – a handsome woman in her late twenties, who was notably younger than most of the others.

  Fran Black reddened slightly but her voice emerged confidently. ‘I’m sure Mrs Dexter will appear. She was really keen to speak.’

  ‘But suppose she doesn’t? What if I’m up there on the platform and I announce her and …’ The voice of Mrs Sarah Ingoldsby was rising to a squeak of indignation.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Ingoldsby. We will have things sorted out long before it comes to that.’ Hugh Allonby patted the woman’s shoulder.

  Sarah Ingoldsby might be an irritating and generally useless fusspot, thought Fran, but the fact that she was employed at the Vester House Museum, which held a large collection of Robert Barnaby’s private papers, to which Hugh Allonby required frequent access, would always guarantee her a place in his inner circle of Barnaby-ites – an elite little clique of members to which Fran neither aspired nor belonged, her recent election to the national committee of the society notwithstanding.

  Allonby turned back to the others and asked, ‘Does anyone have any idea why Mrs Dexter has not appeared? Presumably none of you have seen her this morning?’

  The enquiry met only with a general shaking of heads and murmurs of denial. It seemed that Linda Dexter had not been seen since she left the hotel lounge late the previous evening.

  The sensible voice of Miss Jean Robertson, small, brisk and chairman of the Scottish Chapter of the Barnaby Society, cut across the others. ‘Has it occurred to anyone that she might be unwell?’

  ‘Possibly someone should check her room,’ suggested John James. As the new membership secretary, he had also taken on the task of liaising with the hotel over the room allocations and, as he spoke, he extracted a folded delegate list from his jacket pocket and began to consult it.

  Somewhat to everyone’s surprise, Allonby himself, though normally a delegator par excellence, immediately announced that he would go in search of the missing speaker’s room. Jean Robertson demurred that perhaps it would be better if someone else (meaning a female) went, but Hugh Allonby was already heading purposefully back into the building.

  As he left them, Fran Black glanced around the terrace, still vainly hoping to see Linda Dexter somewhere among the groups of people, standing chatting in the glow of spring sunshine. There was the inevitable group of blue stockings, loudly attempting academic one-upmanship in that tiresome way of university women fixated on English literature; the fancy-dress brigade, of course, overgrown children every one, and a couple of gatherings made up of ex-servicemen, easily marked by their vaguely military bearing, as if the years in khaki hung invisibly upon them still – one or two of them, of course, more obviously marked by the war: an eyepatch here, a walking stick there. Strange how they tended to gravitate towards one another in any gathering, she thought. Like belonging to a secret society. If her own brothers had survived they would have belonged too. The words of Brooke’s poem came to her unbidden, and she had to turn away and swallow hard.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ It was the kindly voice of Tom Dod (with one ‘d’, as he invariably had to specify). Like herself, he was a few years younger than the rest, another newcomer to the committee, and had presumably mistaken the source of her emotion. ‘I’m sure Mrs Dexter will turn up.’

  Meanwhile, Hugh Allonby was locating the room which had been reserved for Linda Dexter: a room inconveniently situated at the furthest end of a ground-floor corridor, next to some recently installed fire doors. When he reached it, he found the door to the room wide open and the sound of a woman humming was issuing from within. Advancing to the threshold, he realized at once that the sounds were emanating from a hotel chambermaid who was in the act of remaking the bed. He attracted her attention by briskly rapping his knuckles on the door.

  The humming ceased abruptly. ‘You want come in?’ The girl was a foreigner. ‘You want I go? Come back later?’

  ‘No – no,’ Hugh said impatiently. ‘I’m looking for Mrs Dexter.’

  The girl looked at him blankly. ‘You want more towel?’

  ‘No.’ His voice began to betray his notoriously short fuse. ‘I am looking for Mrs Linda Dexter – the woman who is staying in this room. Is she here?’ He took a step into the room, enough to confirm that there were no occupants other than himself and the foreign girl, who was watching him nervously, poised with a half-plumped pillow in her hand. As he stood looking around, several things struck him, the first of which was that it
was a noticeably larger room than the one which had been allocated to him – he would have to have a word in someone’s ear about that – but there was something else too. Hugh Allonby was not an especially tidy man. His own bedroom had been left in a state of minor disarray: a couple of ties draped over the back of a chair, yesterday’s newspaper tossed on top of the dressing table, among his brushes and a bottle of hair oil, his suitcase left half unpacked and open on its stand. This room was pristine. Once the maid had finished making the bed, there would be nothing to indicate that it was being occupied by a guest at all.

  ‘Open the wardrobe,’ he instructed. The girl stared at him. He couldn’t decide if she had understood him or not.

  ‘I should call manager,’ she said. It was not exactly a question or a statement.

  ‘Never mind, I’ll do it myself.’ Why on earth they had to employ a foreign girl, with half the country out of work, he couldn’t imagine.

  She backed away, still clutching the pillow as he advanced into the room and threw open the wardrobe doors. There was nothing inside except vacant coat hangers and a spare blanket neatly folded on the top shelf. From where he stood he could now see that the dressing table was completely devoid of brushes, cosmetics and the like. He turned on his heel and marched back towards Reception, his first instinct being that James had given him the wrong room number. Time was running out. The morning coffee break was almost over. It would not do for the chairman of the Robert Barnaby Society to hold up proceedings. He liked to time his entrance at the point when the lecture theatre was almost full, making a steady progress up the central aisle, pausing to acknowledge a favoured few members who were already in their seats, and being noticed by the newer members, who sometimes recognized him and nudged their companions, whispering, ‘It’s Hugh Allonby,’ while he modestly pretended not to have heard.

  Back in Reception, the desk was unattended, so he had to ping the brass bell. When the pimply youth who generally presided over the desk arrived, it took him an age to check the big ledger on the desk and confirm that the room number Mr James had given him was the correct one and that no, Mrs Dexter had not checked out.