David Webb 8 - Symbols at Your Door Read online

  David Webb 8 - Symbols at Your Door

  Anthea Fraser

  Endeavour Press (2007)

  * * *

  Rating: ★★★★☆

  Tags: Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, Mystery, Police Procedurals, Thrillers & Suspense, Crime, Murder, Crime Fiction

  Mystery; Thriller & Suspensettt Mysteryttt Police Proceduralsttt Thrillers & Suspensettt Crimettt Murderttt Crime Fictionttt

  In the English village of Beckworth, the local residents live in fear.

  Five houses have been defaced with the same graffiti.

  A grotesquely leering gargoyle’s head on the the front door.

  The vandalism is blamed on the ‘Bedworth Bruisers’, a gang of local youths who notoriously terrorise newcomers to the village.

  As the marked houses becomes targets for break-ins and theft, Detective Chief Inspector Webb steps in.

  When the body of Carol Dexter, who has just moved from London, is found floating in a pond, Webb can’t help but note that her door was also marked by this strange symbol.

  It seems to act as a warning...or as a target...

  With three more houses marked, DCI Webb must consider whether murder is the meaning behind the symbols on the doors.

  Or is it something even stranger...

  'Symbols At Your Door' is a compelling crime thriller that will keep readers gripped from the first page to the last.

  Praise for Anthea Fraser:

  “A superbly crafted, riveting, page-turner of a read" - Booklist

  “Ms Fraser is her dependable elegant, guileful self withholding the killer's identity till a dying fall" - Sunday Times

  'A well-mannered, well-plotted and well-told story' - Birmingham Post

  'Sympathetic, well-executed book, in which full attention is paid to human feelings and failings' - Yorkshire Post

  ANTHEA FRASER has written all her life but did not begin to take it seriously until after marriage, when she found herself at home with two small daughters and embarked on a correspondence course with the London School of Journalism. She wrote short stories before turning to novels of the supernatural, and then to crime. Her other books include ‘Pretty Maids all in a Row’, ‘Eleven Who Went Up to Heaven’, The Ten Commandments’, ‘The Seven Stars’ and ‘One is One and All Alone’.

  Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent publisher of digital books.

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  Symbols at Your Door

  Anthea Fraser

  Copyright © Anthea Fraser 1990

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

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2000 by Collins Crime Club.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Some of the Residents of Beckworth

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  Extract from The Ten Commandments by Anthea Fraser

  GREEN GROW THE RUSHES-O

  I’ll sing you one-O!

  (Chorus) Green grow the rushes-O!

  What is your one-O?

  One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so.

  I’ll sing you two-O!

  (Chorus) Green grow the rushes-O!

  What are your two-O?

  Two, two, the lily-white Boys, clothed all in green-O,

  (Chorus) One is one and all alone and evermore shall

  be so.

  I’ll sing you three-O!

  (Chorus) Green grow the rushes-O!

  What are your three-O?

  Three, three the Rivals,

  (Chorus) Two, two, the lily-white Boys, clothed all in

  green-O,

  One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so.

  Four for the Gospel-makers.

  Five for the Symbols at your door.

  Six for the six proud Walkers.

  Seven for the seven Stars in the sky.

  Eight for the April Rainers.

  Nine for the nine bright Shiners.

  Ten for the ten Commandments.

  Eleven for the Eleven that went up to heaven.

  Twelve for the twelve Apostles.

  Some of the Residents of Beckworth

  At Beckworth House: the Duke and Duchess of Hampshire At the Lodge: Neil and Alison Carey and daughter Philippa

  At Coppins Farmhouse: Stewart and Carol Dexter and children Jenny and James

  At Mews Grange: Bob and Gina Cummings, her mother Edith Irving, and sons Andrew and Duncan

  At No. 1 Old Schoolhouse: Leslie and Joyce Scott At No. 2 Old Schoolhouse: Giles and Lalage Parrish At the Green Man: Stan and Doris Haydock

  At No. 17 Tinker’s Lane: Joe and Hazel Barlow, Joe’s father Bert, daughter Mavis and son-in-law Lenny Hobbs

  CHAPTER 1

  Stewart Dexter put his head round the kitchen door, his face tight with anger. “Which of you two has been scribbling on the front door?” he demanded furiously. The children seated at the breakfast bar looked up at him blankly.

  “Come on, I intend to find out, and until the culprit owns up there’s no pocket-money for either of you. Or were you both in on it?”

  Carol, glancing at the children’s bewildered faces, said quietly, “Just a minute, Stewart. What exactly are you talking about?”

  “A bloody great scrawl in green felt-tip, that’s what I’m talking about. What the hell got into you?” He glared at his son and daughter, whose uncertainty had given way to indignation.

  “It wasn’t me!” declared nine-year-old Jenny, adding virtuously, “I don’t go scribbling on doors!”

  “Nor do I!” James said hastily.

  “I suppose it was the fairies?”

  “Look, Stewart, if the children say they didn’t do it, then they didn’t. Let’s go and see what all the fuss is about.”

  Her husband stood aside for her, his anger still simmering, and the children slipped off their stools and followed them outside.

  “Good heavens!” Carol exclaimed. The graffito was a large, crudely drawn face with its tongue sticking out, and unaccountably she shivered. Basic as the drawing was, emanating from the screwed-up eyes, the protruding tongue and spiralling curls was a definite sense of malevolence.

  “Well?” Stewart demanded.

  “We didn’t do it, Daddy,” Jenny said, sounding suddenly subdued. Perhaps the malice had touched her, too.

  “It might have been the ‘Beckworth Bruisers’,” Carol hazarded, using the name Stewart had coined for the village youths. She’d seen a group of them last night, watching her and whispering together as she walked back from the pillar-box.

  “Let me catch them at it, that’s all.” He looked at his watch. “I must go, or I’ll miss the train. See you this evening.” Kissing her hastily, he got into the car and drove out of the gateway.

  Carol said, “Hurry and finish your breakfast while I wash this off. We must leave for school in ten minutes.”

  But though she was able to remove most of the scrawl, a faint outline remained and the shine had been lifted off the polish. Until the door was retouched, the shadow of the face would be discernible, and she was surprised how much this discomfited her.

  ***

  It had been an unusually quiet month at Carrington Street Police Station,
and DCI Webb, looking out of his window at the cloudless blue sky, promised himself a painting trip during the coming weekend. Easter was early this year, and the unseasonally mild weather a bonus not to be wasted. All that was on the books was a spate of burglaries in the affluent outskirts of north Shillingham, and Crombie was handling that. They’d probably call in the Regional Crime Squad, anyway, since suspicion was growing that a motor-way gang was to blame; Shillingham lay within fifteen minutes’ drive of the M4, and the thieves could count on being thirty miles away before the break-ins were discovered.

  He glanced across at the inspector, bent over his files. “Any joy, Alan?”

  “Not so far; in fact there’s another in today. Same MO but in Beckworth, would you believe. Seems a remote little place, yet it’s roughly the same distance north of the motorway as we are south.”

  “Won’t please His Grace!” Webb said with a grin. The village of Beckworth, cradled in the Chantock Hills which bisected the county from north-west to south-east, owed its fame and its very existence to Beckworth House, the ancestral seat of the Dukes of Hampshire.

  Oddly enough, Beckworth House had come up in conversation only yesterday, when Hannah’d told him Mark Templeton’s wedding reception was to be held there. This weekend, at that.

  Webb thought back five months to his own meeting with Templeton and his bride. As usual, he reflected wryly, it was murder that had occasioned it. Well, they were a nice enough young couple, and since they’d withstood the pressures that beset them at the outset of their relationship, they would probably survive. He wished them well.

  He glanced at the clock on the wall and pushed back his chair. “Coming to the Brown Bear for a bite to eat?”

  Alan Crombie took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “Yes, I could do with a break. Your shout, is it?” he added slyly.

  Webb grinned. “I’ll toss you for it,” he said.

  ***

  Alison Carey stood at the window of her office gazing up the long, winding drive that led to the House. It was an idyllic outlook in the spring sunshine: primroses in the grass, a thrush diligently digging for worms—a scene as representative of the English countryside as any she could imagine. She hadn’t realized, until the argument with Neil over breakfast, how much she’d come to love this place in the last three years. The sudden possibility of leaving it was a lead weight in her stomach.

  It had hit her the harder since she’d woken that morning with a feeling of anticipation. Easter was only days away, and after Saturday’s big wedding reception the House would begin its summer season, opening to the public on bank holidays, Wednesdays and weekends. Nor were the other days necessarily free; private parties were increasingly catered for, principally the growing number of tours whose members enjoyed dining with the High and Mighty—lunch at one Stately Home, tea at another, dinner at a third.

  For along with other owners of historic houses, the Hampshires could no longer manage on takings from the dwindling number who paid their £2.50s to trail meekly down the drugget alongside the roped walkways. They had had to diversify, opening their doors in the winter months to art exhibitions, concerts and conferences, and sponsoring courses in country crafts such as lace-making and dried-flower arrangement.

  But to Alison, the advent of the public queuing for tours of the house was one of the first signs of summer, and as such she welcomed it. It had been a shock, this morning, to hear Neil’s very different views. Probably, she thought now, it was a throwback to his general resentment at his redundancy. But why should it surface now, when he was satisfactorily employed again? Whatever the reason, the argument had erupted without warning.

  They’d been breakfasting in the tiny, sun-filled dining-room, and she’d made some laughing comment about breathing in as she squeezed past his chair. To her astonishment, he took her up on it. “You’re right: we’ve no reason to stay in this doll’s house, now I’ve a decent job again.”

  She’d stopped, coffee-pot in hand, and stared at him. “Neil, that was a joke! I love it here!”

  “Oh come on, Alison; it’s always been a tight squeeze. When we moved here we’d no option but to lump it. That doesn’t apply anymore.”

  He was serious, she thought, dismayed. “But Neil, it’s home! And with Jonathan away, there’s room enough for the three of us.”

  “You call this room enough? If I push my chair back, I scrape the wall. But the point, surely, is that you don’t have to work now. Added to which, it’s inconvenient my being so far from the office. I can’t entertain clients at this distance, and even if I could, there’s no way I’d bring anyone to this pokey little place.”

  “You were glad enough of it before,” she’d retorted. “It was our salvation, a job for me with a house thrown in. You called it a gift from the gods.”

  “Yes, I was grateful, if you want to rake that up again. You kept us going and saw Philippa through college, while I sat around on my backside.”

  “You know I didn’t mean that,” she said quietly, her spurt of temper gone.

  “But to put it bluntly, this is a tied cottage and I was never one for forelock-tugging and having to be grateful for the odd pheasant or hare passed our way. ‘Yes, Your Grace, no, Your Grace, three bags full, Your Grace!’ It sticks in my craw. And any minute now, the great yobbo invasion will start again and they’ll all troop past our door and peer in our windows as if their miserable £2.50 entitled them to every last ounce of our privacy.”

  She’d gazed at him, appalled. This was the first time he’d voiced any misgivings, but the acrid fluency with which they’d been delivered seemed to indicate he’d been brooding over them for some time.

  “But I love it here,” she repeated. “Not only the house, but the job. It’s challenging and full of interest, and I’m good at it. And it’s not only me,” she continued, placatingly now. “Pippa’s settled in her new job and Jonathan’s near enough to pop over whenever he feels like it. If we moved, we wouldn’t see so much of him.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Alison!” Neil had exclaimed irritably. “Philippa’s job’s nothing special, she can always get another; and we certainly can’t rule our lives to suit Jonathan. Once he’s through college he’ll be off, without a backward glance.”

  “Which leaves us,” she said, still holding the coffee-pot.

  “Yes.” He met her eyes. “I know you’ve enjoyed it here, and I accept that we couldn’t have managed without it, but it’s time to move on. In the end, it comes down to whose job is more important, yours or mine.”

  “That’s not fair,” she said. Emotional blackmail was what she meant.

  He pushed back his chair, bumped against the wall, and swore. Alison had the unworthy impression he’d done it on purpose. “Anyway, we’ve not time to discuss it now; if I don’t make a move I’ll hit the traffic build-up. What bliss it would be, not having an hour and a half’s driving each end of the day.”

  Which was how it had been left, hanging like a cloud over her. Because despite the fact that Neil had been out of work most of the time they’d been here, she’d been happier in this tiny house than she had for years. Was it because she’d felt he needed her, even depended on her while he searched for work? Or because she had such satisfaction in her own job? Or—her muscles tensed—was it really because out here he was unlikely to meet anyone he might be attracted to? And might that—boredom with herself—be the real reason he wanted to move?

  Pushing away the familiar pain, she turned resolutely to her desk. But it was no good. The spring sunshine beckoned, and she needed to shake off her depression. Abandoning the paperwork, she decided instead to look in at the greenhouses and discuss the wedding flowers with Hazel. Professional arrangers would be coming on Good Friday, bringing the more exotic blooms with them, but the specially requested spring flowers had been grown on the estate.

  Pulling the front door shut behind her, she set off up the drive between the tall cedars, their branches smudged with the soft blue-grey of new g
rowth. Paths led off at intervals to left and right marked “To the statuary” or “The maze” or “The folly”. Then, round a final bend, the House itself came into view, and she paused as she always did to gaze at its magnificent proportions, its graceful windows and glowing stone. Must she really give up all this?

  “The Duke of Hampshire in Broadshire?” Neil had said, when she’d first told him she’d been offered the post of booking manager at Beckworth House. “A bit off-course, isn’t he?”

  She’d shrugged. “Dukes don’t live in their title counties, do they? Norfolk in Sussex, Devonshire in Derbyshire. It’s par for the course.” At that stage the job had seemed a lifeline, a necessity to keep them going while Neil endlessly applied for positions. She hadn’t expected it to become so important to her that the thought of leaving was a physical pain.

  With a sigh she turned away, cutting diagonally across the broad gravel sweep in the direction of the greenhouses. She could see Hazel through the glass as she approached, bent over some plants. And there, she chided herself, was someone with more serious problems than she had; a son who’d been in trouble with the law and a tiny house, already overcrowded, which would soon be called on to accommodate an expected grandchild.

  Shrugging aside her own worries, she smiled brightly and pushed open the greenhouse door.

  ***

  When they’d first come to Beckworth, Carol had been horrified to learn that the nearest private school was ten miles away. Even the village one had closed, and a bus took the local children to and from Lethbridge each day. However, attempts to include Jenny and James in their number had fallen on stony ground. “The service is only for state schools,” she was told uncompromisingly.

  Still, now that the weather’d improved, she’d been enjoying the forty-minute round trip, and as Stewart somewhat tactlessly pointed out, she hadn’t much else to do. In the six months they’d lived here, she hadn’t met anyone she could remotely consider a friend.