“Like what?” I asked.
Like demolish any landmarks, said the Thames Valley Police.
“Good one,” said I.
They said they weren’t joking, but I’m almost a hundred percent certain they were.
So, off to not-actually-very-historic Amersham we went. There is a medieval core that dates back to the tenth century but the railway station and the modern town sit on a plateau between two rivers—the Misbourne and the Chess. A quick follow-up call to Nightingale established that neither were known to possess genius loci.
“Although you should remember, Peter,” he said, “that not every entity associated with the natural world is as garrulous as Mother Thames’s daughters. My mother once told me that the stream at the bottom of our garden had its own fairy guardian and even though I went as far as to construct a hide I never caught so much as a glimpse.”
I wondered if there had really been a fairy guardian or whether his mum had been looking for a way of getting the youngest child of six out from under her feet.
“Incidentally, why on earth are you visiting Amersham?” he asked.
“There’s this house,” I said. “Used to sit all alone on a hill…”
Back in 1929 a pair of likely lads made the first of many attempts to drag the English out of their cosy brick hobbit holes and ascend into the future borne aloft on gleaming cubes of white rendered concrete. Thus was High and Over House brought into being upon a hill overlooking the small but rapidly growing town of Amersham. The locals hated it—but I’ve got to say, if you have to build a monstrous flat-roofed modernist pile, then it might as well have decent proportions.
Me and Jaget proceeded out of the train station down through the late Victorian and Edwardian shopping parades and terraces and then left up the hill through lines of faux Edwardian semi-detached houses until he practically stumbled on the entrance. The modernist splendour of High and Over now being largely hidden behind an enormous hedge and old-growth trees.
The woman who answered the door gave a familiar little start when she saw us and hesitated before saying—“Ah. Yes.”
We know that reaction well—it is the cry of the guilty middle-class homeowner.
This sort of thing always create a dilemma since the scale of guilt you’re dealing with ranges from using a hosepipe during a ban to having just finished cementing your abusive husband into the patio.
The trick to ascertaining whether it’s time to rush in or back away slowly is to say as little as possible while looming and adopting a friendly grin that edges into the menacing. Asking ambiguous but leading questions can also help.
“Good afternoon,” said Jaget. “Is this your house?”
The women was white, late forties, brown hair cut in a bob, blue eyes, straight nose, pointed chin, narrow mouth, no dimples—it pays to remember these details in case you have to construct an e-fit later. She was wearing prefaded designer jeans and a white blouse with ruffles at the collar and wrists. No obvious dirt stains on her knees or blood stains on the blouse, so if there was a dead husband it had happened long enough ago for her to clean up.
“This house?” asked the woman.
“Yes ma’am,” I said. “This house.”
She looked over her shoulder as if seeing the interior for the first time.
“Yes, I suppose so,” she said. “And my husband of course, we own it, yes.”
I know it sounds cruel, but nothing gladdens the heart of the police quite like the sight of a potential customer so off balance that one good nudge will get you a result.
Jaget judged the pause perfectly, giving the woman enough time to almost relax before asking—“Is there something wrong?”
“I just found them, okay?” she said. “I buried them because I didn’t know what else to do. But it wasn’t me who poisoned them.”
“Poisoned who?” asked Jaget.
She told us, and as she did I realised I’d been played good and proper.
“You’d better show us, ma’am,” I said.
The charnel pit was round the back, down a flight of white garden steps, to a sloping lawn and beyond the round swimming pool where the garden proper merged into the woods. I could see where the turfs had been cut and re-laid. The owner provided me with a shovel and I carefully stripped off the turf and the first ten centimetres of soil.
“Damn,” said Jaget. “It’s a fox apocalypse.”
I counted six just on the top layer—I don’t know enough about foxes to be sure, but there were at least two smaller specimens that may have been adolescents. None of them seemed large enough to be one of Abigail’s talking variety but, like I said, what do I know?
The woman found the first victim floating in her swimming pool a fortnight earlier. She assumed that it had fallen in and drowned.
“So I wrapped it a Waitrose bag,” she said. “One of those big ones with the handles that you’re supposed to buy because it’s greener.” She considered whether she could just pop it in amongst the rest of rubbish for collection, but thought she’d read somewhere that that it might damage the council’s incinerator. So she decided to pick out a pleasant spot in the woods to bury it.
“The woods were planted by the original owner,” said the current owner. “Bernard Ashmole, he was curator of the British Museum.”
“The foxes?” asked Jaget.
“I found the next two while I was carrying the first to its grave,” she said. “Ironically.”
Then another three along a line from the bottom of the garden to the pool.
“As if they were trying to reach the water,” she said. “Perhaps whatever killed them made them thirsty or, I don’t know, hot, feverish?”
I asked her if she had any ideas about who might be responsible.
“Oh, one of those lot.” She waved her hand airily at the ranks of dull-looking mid-sixties semis that rolled down the hill towards the old town. “They move out of the city but they want everything to be as nice and tidy and as convenient as living in London.”
Jaget coughed and banged his chest theatrically.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s all the clean air.”
I asked the woman if she had a tarpaulin or plastic sheeting and, while Jaget helped her fetch it, I called Thames Valley Police. They were happy to know that High and Over House, a Grade II* listed building I might add, was still standing and that the problem was something that the local CID could handle.
While we waited for the local Morse impersonators to turn up, the homeowner served us a rather nice tea on the lawn.
“I’m not in trouble am I?” she asked.
“Nah,” I said. “But whoever was poisoning those foxes should seriously consider moving abroad.”
We managed to get back to London before the rush hour started and I spent the last part of the afternoon compiling my notes for one of the demonstration investigations I’d have to present to my invigilator as part of the detective’s exam.