Wycliffe & The Tangled Web

by W.J. Burley

Genres: Mystery; Cozy Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

A beautiful girl goes missing, and Wycliffe must untangle a mystery to solve a murder . . . A beautiful schoolgirl goes missing from a Cornish village on the day she has told her boyfriend and sister she is pregnant. The possibility that she has been raped or murdered - or both - grows with every passing hour, and Chief Superintendent Wycliffe is brought in on the case. The investigation reveals a complex network of family relationships and rivalries centred on the girl; and then Wycliffe finds a body - but not the one he expects. Have there been two murders? And if so, are they connected? Wycliffe digs deeper, and soon realises that just beneath the normal, day-to-day surface of the community lies a web of hatred and resentment - a web he will have to untangle if he is to find the key to the mystery . . . Why readers love W.J. Burley: 'First-class, old-time, hyper-ingenious whodunit.' Observer 'You can always count on Wycliffe ... he inevitably guarantees a good story, convincing characters and appealing landscape ' Financial Times 'Wycliffe teases out the truth with delicate skill that leaves the reader intrigued and convinced.' Mail on Sunday 'Gripping.' The Times Fans of Ruth Rendell, Val McDermid and Peter Robinson will love W.J. Burley: 1. Wycliffe and the Three-Toed Pussy 2. Wycliffe and How to Kill a Cat 3. Wycliffe and the Guilt Edged Alibi 4. Wycliffe and Death in a Salubrious Place 5. Wycliffe and Death in Stanley Street 6. Wycliffe and the Pea-Green Boat 7. Wycliffe and the School Bullies 8. Wycliffe and the Scapegoat 9. Wycliffe in Paul's Court 10. Wycliffe's Wild Goose Chase 11. Wycliffe and the Beales 12. Wycliffe and the Four Jacks 13. Wycliffe and the Quiet Virgin 14. Wycliffe and the Winsor Blue 15. Wycliffe and the Tangled Web 16. Wycliffe and the Cycle of Death 17. Wycliffe and the Dead Flautist 18. Wycliffe and the Last Rites 19. Wycliffe and the Dunes Mystery 20. Wycliffe and the House of Fear 21. Wycliffe and the Redhead 22. Wycliffe and the Guild of Nine * Each Inspector Wycliffe novel can be read as part of a series or as a standalone*

Release date: December 16, 2010

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 224

Sample

The fair girl looked out of place in a doctor’s waiting-room; she seemed to glow with health.

The old man thought so; he watched her, his chin resting on arthritic hands clasped over the knob of his walking stick. He watched her steadily, through bleached, expressionless eyes, remembering other girls with honey-coloured skin, speckled with golden hairs; girls with swelling breasts and cheeks that were smooth and soft with the bloom of youth; girls who were old now — or dead.

The woman thought so too. Her immense bulk, confined in a flowered frock, spread over one of the cane chairs; her shopping bags took up another. Her fat, ringed fingers clutched a leather handbag to her abdomen, and she watched the girl through little piggy eyes.

The girl herself seemed unaware of them; she sat in a shaft of sunlight from a high window, idly turning the pages of a magazine. Now and then she glanced at her wrist-watch and at the excluding door of the consulting-room.

The old man said: ‘Doctor’s on his holidays.’

The girl said: ‘Yes.’

‘I reckon it takes the locum a bit longer.’

‘Yes.’

‘Likely he’s a bit more conscientious.’ The old man laughed, a senile chuckle.

The woman, feeling that the ice had been broken, said: ‘You’re Rosie Clemo’s girl.’ It sounded like an accusation.

‘Yes.’

‘You buried your granny yesterday.’

‘Yes.’

‘A big funeral. I was there. Lovely lot of flowers too. Sad! ’Course she was coming on. She must’ve bin eighty? Eighty-one?’

‘She was eighty.’

‘A happy release in a way, bedridden like she was. I remember Elinor more’n forty year back, teaching in Sunday school. Your poor mother an’ me was in her class.’

It meant nothing to Hilda. Although she had been born and brought up with it, village gossip bored her; it was a background, like the chattering of a radio when one’s attention is elsewhere. Especially now.

Through the window of the waiting-room she could see the harbour, the light dancing on the water less than a stone’s throw away, yet it was another world, a world from which she was cut off.

One of the boats was in, moored against the fish quay — Peter Scoble. He’d been out wreck-netting and she wondered vaguely why he was back so early. He must be running a trip in the afternoon. These thoughts, like the snippets she read in her magazine, drifted on the surface of her mind while underneath there was a great hollowness of apprehension. On the other side of that door, on a slip of paper . . .

The consulting-room door opened and a scrawny little man in a fisherman’s jersey came out, clutching a prescription form. He greeted the others briefly and went out.

A pause that seemed unending, then: ‘Miss Hilda Clemo, please!’ The doctor, a young man with blond curly hair, and wearing a white coat, stood in the doorway.

The girl followed him into his consulting-room and the door closed behind her.

The woman said: ‘Snotty little piece, she is!’

The old man said: ‘A good-looker though. I dunno where she got it from. Not from the Clemos, that’s for sure. And the Rules is no oil paintings.’

The woman followed her own line. ‘I know we shouldn’ speak ill of the dead but ’er mother was the same, thought she was a cut above the rest of us — an’ all they Rules for that matter. I mind when their father kept a shop in Church Street; you’d think ’e done you a favour just by taking your money.’

The old man said: ‘I thought Jimmy Clemo would’ve married again when ’is wife died. I mean, ’e was still a young man an’ that girl was no more’n four or five year old.’ He started to cough, then pulled out a grubby handkerchief and spat into it. ‘Funny! I always thought they Clemos was a warm lot by nature like.’

The woman was deflected. ‘There’s Esther.’

‘Esther!’ Surprise set the old man coughing again. ‘You don’t think . . . God! I’d sooner go to bed with a bag of ol’ bones. Anyways she’s gone for religion — Catholic, too.’ He chuckled. ‘Sensible, I s’pose, looking the way she do.’

For a while silence closed in. The old man stared out of the window with unfocused eyes, and the woman stared at the wall with its notices about smoking, about AIDS, and about inoculations against influenza.

The woman said: ‘Jimmy Clemo is making a fortune out o’ that caravan site. A gold mine, they say.’

‘More in it than farming, that’s for sure.’

The woman looked at the closed door. ‘E’s taking ’is time with ’er.’

‘Examining ’er, I dare say. I wouldn’ mind being that young doctor!’

‘You’re a dirty ol’ man, Willie Prowse!’

At last the door of the consulting-room opened again. Hilda Clemo came through and, without a look, marched through the room and out by the door to the street.

The white-coated young doctor said: ‘Mr Prowse, please!’

The quay loungers were parked in a row on one of the seats; tourists and trippers milled aimlessly about, eating ice-creams and wondering what to do with the day. She spotted Ralph Martin farther along the quay, hesitated, decided not to see him, and turned off into one of the alleys before she reached him.

Her slimness made her look taller than she was, and her suntan appeared deeper because of her straw-coloured hair. She wore jeans and a navy-blue, sleeveless, cotton top, moulded to her body; a white logo on the front carried the words: M.V. Sea Spray. She walked with the easy, unhurried stride of a young animal in perfect health.

Expectant mother . . . prenatal . . . midwife . . . labour . . . delivery . . . breast feeding . . . Or, abortion. She had brooded on those words and they had disgusted her. The very thought . . .

She turned inland from the harbour, through the square where most of the shops were, and along a narrow street where cottages opened directly on the road. Strangers turned to look at her, women with a certain envy, men with lust. Locals greeted her, but she did not acknowledge them.

She was remembering her sister’s pregnancy and the birth of her nephew: Alice’s morning sickness and indigestion; her barrel-like figure and unrelieved peevishness. Though in less than six months from the birth, Alice had gone back to leading the life she had led before, with Esther taking charge of the baby . . . A mother by proxy. But what did Alice’s life amount to anyway? I’d rather die than end up like Alice!

‘Hi!’

A boy she went to school with, studying the same subjects. In less than a year they should be sitting A–levels together. The boy wanted to stop for a gossip but she brushed him off. To be able to think ahead again to A–levels, without the shadow . . .

Almost from the start she had been sure, and in a curious way she had come to terms with it. She had planned exactly what she would do; how she would first break the news to Alice: ‘I’m pregnant.’ Alice would tell Esther, Esther would have the job of breaking it to her father. She, herself, would tell Ralph Martin; there would be a session with her brother-in-law, Bertie; another with . . .

She was sometimes troubled by the fact that however desperately she wanted to avoid some threatening prospect, a small voice inside her would whisper: ‘But if, in spite of everything, it happens . . .’ And the voice seemed to suggest something more than resignation.

In those restless nights she had decided that she could predict their reactions, almost the very words they would use.

Beyond the cottages there were larger houses with gardens; then as the ground began to rise, these gave way to fields on one side, and on the other to a screen of trees. She had left the village behind.

Suddenly she realized that she was smiling.

A break in the trees, and she came to a tall, arched entrance with a suspended sign: ‘Tregwythen Leisure and Tourist Park. Camping, Caravanning, Golf, Tennis, and Swimming’. From the entrance, a metalled road curved away between grassy slopes, terraced to accommodate the caravans. The vans were well spaced, with trees and shrubs to mitigate their brash intrusion. On one side of the entrance, reached by a short drive, there was a large, stone-built house with a hipped roof and overhanging eaves; the house where she had been born and where she had lived her life so far. On the other side a building in the style of a Swiss chalet carried a sign: ‘Reception, Shop and Café. All enquiries.’ Beyond the building there were tables for people who preferred to eat out of doors.

Hilda pushed open a door labelled ‘Reception’.

Mid-morning is usually a quiet time in any tourist park and her sister, Alice, was making up accounts. Alice’s assistant, a lanky girl of Hilda’s age, was entering new arrivals from registration slips.

Alice looked up from her ledger. ‘Hullo, kid — bored? Never mind, another fortnight and you’ll be back at school.’

‘Very funny!’

The two sisters were much alike in features and colouring but, at twenty-eight, Alice was already slipping into matronly slackness, beginning to lose her figure and her looks.

Hilda glanced at the girl. ‘Can we . . .?’

Alice said: ‘Sharon, be a dear and see if you can find that husband of mine; he should be somewhere on the top site. Ask him what happened to the docket for diesel he had delivered on the twelfth.’

The girl took herself off and Alice said: ‘That’ll keep her out of the way for a bit; Bertie’s cutting the grass behind the toilets. Now, kid, what’s your problem?’

‘I’ve just come from the doctor.’

‘The doctor? You’re not ill?’

‘No, pregnant.’

She had said it. The words were out.

‘Pregnant! Christ!’ It took Alice a while to absorb the news. ‘Is it definite?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long?’

‘Eight weeks.’

‘You must have been pretty sure you’d put your foot in it.’

‘I was.’

‘Who is it? Ralph?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure! What do you think I am?’

Alice brushed her indignation aside. ‘All right, we won’t go into that, but don’t come the innocent with me, kid! How long has Ralph Martin . . .?’

‘It was the first time.’

‘You weren’t on the pill?’

‘No.’

‘And he — ’

‘We didn’t intend to go that far.’

‘Famous last words.’

‘There’s no need to be like that.’

‘Perhaps not, but I hope you realize Father will go through the roof. What do you want to do?’

‘I told the doctor — the locum — that I wanted an abortion but he was difficult.’

‘That can be got over. You’ll see Hosking when he comes back from holiday.’

It was all going more smoothly than she had foreseen in her night-time imaginings. Alice was matter-of-fact, prosaic even; so much so that Hilda felt almost cheated.

She was looking out of the window, her back to the office. Across the roadway a young woman sat on the steps of her caravan while her baby, wearing only a nappy, crawled about on the grass. The mother watched with a Mona Lisa smile. Was it conceivable that any woman would actually want to give herself to that?

All the same, she turned back into the room, already growing into the role she had chosen. ‘I suppose I could go through with it.’ Moving out a pawn.

‘And marry Ralph?’

‘Yes.’

‘The simplest way out — is that it?’ Alice was taking her seriously.

‘I suppose it could be.’

Alice drew a deep breath. ‘Apart from anything else, what would you live on?’

‘Ralph is working with his father on the boats.’

‘Yes, but Ralph has two brothers, still at school. Charlie Martin manages to make a living for himself and his family but I’d be very surprised if there was enough in it to take on you and the baby. Ralph may want to, and Charlie might agree, but it would mean a thin time all round. For anything more than subsistence you’d be dependent on Father.’

‘I’m dependent on him now for everything.’

Alice gave a short laugh. ‘You think Father would let you marry Ralph and everything would go on much as it did before?’

‘I don’t see why not.’

‘Then it’s time you did. Haven’t you noticed how Father looks at you? You’re the only one of us who matters: I’m the great disappointment of his life to date; Esther is part of the furniture. As for Bertie . . .’

Alice took a cigarette from a packet on her desk and lit it. ‘So it’s over to you, kid. As Father sees it, you’re going to do brilliantly in your A–levels, then you’ll be God’s gift to Oxford. A First is a foregone conclusion; then some wonderful job. After that — one day, an acceptable Prince Charming may come along. Of course, for preference, he’ll be defective in a vital part of his anatomy.’

Alice exhaled smoke slowly and watched it spiral. ‘Do you think he’s going to sit back while you put Ralph Martin in place of all that?’

The idea that her father might find her sexually attractive had never occurred to Hilda. It was a new thought, and an intriguing one. For a moment or two it took possession of her mind.

Alice misunderstood her silence. ‘Don’t worry, kid. It’s all in his mind. Men have their fantasies. You happen to be Father’s.’

Hilda flicked idly through a little bundle of registration blanks. ‘What would you do?’

‘About being pregnant? I’d have an abortion. Apart from anything else, seventeen is too young to hand yourself over to a man. You need to learn the not-so-gentle art of self-defence — and I’m not talking about being knocked about physically.’

‘Is that what you did before you married Bertie?’ She couldn’t resist it.

Alice flushed. ‘We’re not talking about me.’

‘Here’s Father.’

James Clemo came into the office, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his hands smeared with grease.

‘That husband of yours is bloody useless, Alice! The funeral yesterday, half this morning wasted with old Penrose about Granny’s will, then I come back here and it’s “I can’t get the mower to start, Jim!” A ten-year-old boy would be more bloody use! Sometimes I think it’s deliberate.’

Alice said: ‘Tell him, not me.’

Clemo was stocky, like all the Clemo males before him; his thinning fair hair had a reddish tinge, now tending to grey; his features inclined to fleshiness, and he had a high colour. He went into the toilet cubicle and emerged some minutes later, drying his hands on a paper towel.

He noticed Hilda for the first time. ‘Hullo, kid! What are you doing here?’

He looked his younger daughter up and down. ‘I don’t like you wearing that top thing. It’s not . . . not suitable.’

Hilda said nothing.

‘I suppose you’re going out with the Spray again this afternoon?’ His manner was hostile, almost threatening.

‘Yes.’

Clemo rolled up the paper towel, shied it irritably in the direction of a wastepaper basket, and missed. He turned again to Hilda, obviously about to say something more, but changed his mind. He looked at his wrist-watch.

‘Twelve o’clock; the bloody morning gone! See you at lunch, and get that thing off, Hilda; I shall be glad when you’re back at school.’

Alice watched him go, then she said: ‘See what I mean?’

Hilda told herself: It’s like the opening scene of a play.

Hilda walked up the drive to the house and around to the back. Esther was in the kitchen preparing lunch and Alice’s little boy, Peter, was building his bricks on the window seat. He looked round as Hilda came in, his solemn blue eyes met hers, but he returned at once to his building.

‘Anything I can do?’

‘You can lay the table.’

Esther was thirty-six but she looked older; her hair was scraped back into a ragged pony-tail, her thin features were ill-assembled, her pinched little nose was red at the tip and her forehead shone. There were unanswered questions about Esther; she had been adopted as a girl of sixteen by Hilda’s grandparents and, from then on, treated as one of the family. Why, no one seemed to know.

Gradually, as she grew into womanhood, Esther had taken over the running of the house and, when Hilda’s mother died, it was she who had assumed responsibility for the child’s upbringing.

Hilda spread a cloth over the pitch-pine table which occupied the middle of the barn-like kitchen. The Clemos had their meals in the kitchen unless there were guests. Though much of their land was rented off, they followed the traditions of their farming ancestry; their house had the appearance of a farmhouse and their ways were the ways of a prosperous farming family.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Esther spoke over her shoulder. She was straining boiled potatoes at the sink.

‘Me? Nothing.’

Esther tipped the potatoes into a dish and slid the dish into the grill compartment to keep warm. ‘There’s something, my girl, and you might as well tell me first as last.’

It was true that, through the years, Hilda had confided more in Esther than in anyone else, but the idea that she was incapable of keeping a secret from her was one of Esther’s illusions.

Six places: knives, fork. . .