‘The papers had all been stacked in a tin box which had been taken from its hiding place by the inglenook fireplace. The door to the old bread oven was open when Bill’s body was discovered, and careful examination revealed that at the back of the oven was an ingeniously fabricated hiding place. The stone construction of the oven seemed solid enough, but if pushed in the right places the back pivoted to one side. And beyond it was a cavity containing two more tin boxes. So cleverly concealed was this hiding place that, had old Bill not been actually dealing with his boxes at the time of his death, and had he not left the door of the oven open, it would probably never have been found.
‘One tin box contained jewellery and two watches — a lady’s watch and a man’s pocket watch, a beautiful antique half hunter. The other held a selection of yellowed newspaper cuttings and a scribbled notebook with what could have been computer codes written in it.’
Todd was watching her face.
‘The pocket watch was inscribed, which was helpful,’ the policeman went on. ‘It belonged to the last Lord Lynmouth. He was murdered a couple of years after the war and his watch was taken the night he died. He disturbed burglars at his house on the edge of Exmoor and was strangled. There was a spate of big art thefts at the time — heavy stuff, priceless treasures disappeared that could only have gone to a certain kind of private collector, because goods like that could never go on display, too easily recognised. Quite an operation, it was, and nobody ever did get to the bottom of it.
‘There was always some suspicion that Bill Turpin had been involved, though. Do you remember hearing about the robbery when you were a kid?’
Jennifer half nodded, half shook her head. She did remember something: there had always been gossip about Bill. And she vaguely recalled Marcus telling her in the early days how he had once tried to turn Bill Turpin over and what a waste of time it had been. But Jennifer did not want to interrupt. She waited for Todd to get on with it. She wanted to know everything he could possibly tell her.
Todd didn’t push her. He took a long slow pull of his pint and eventually he continued.
‘The Earl of Lynmouth had a housemaid, who came forward and claimed that she had been hiding in the pantry at the time and had seen the old Earl murdered, and that she recognised the man who did it. She named him as Bill Turpin from Brinton, the village where he lived before the war, but she would never tell the police how she knew him. The police investigated as best they could, and, according to my father, who remembers the talk about the case even though it was before his time, there were those who were quite sure the housemaid was telling the truth. I mean, how could she just conjure up a name like that anyway? But the whole thing was bizarre. Nothing and nobody could persuade her to say any more. Apparently she was tuppence short of a shilling, very much on the slow side. According to Lord Lynmouth’s widow she had a history of fantasising, and there was no real evidence to link Bill to the crime — any more than there was with arms dealing out of Bristol and God knows what else folk said he was involved in in those days.
‘Eventually the whole thing receded into local myth, as these thing do, and was dropped. More or less forgotten about until now. And Bill Turpin may have got away with one hell of a crime — although I doubt you could prove that, even now we’ve found the watch.’
‘And the other watch?’ asked Jennifer, suspecting she knew the answer.
‘A dainty silver thing, inexpensive, tarnished with the years. My guess is that it belonged to Irene Nichols. I shall be showing it to her parents, but I don’t want to give them more misery for nothing, so I’m waiting till forensic have come up with the goods.
‘The cuttings we found included stories on the Lord Lynmouth burglary, several of the other big art robberies of the period, the disappearance of Irene Nichols, and the murder of Marjorie Benson — the girl whose body you found.’
He paused and took another long draught of his pint.
Jennifer felt she was being told too much to grasp in one sitting.
‘So what are you saying, Bill Turpin was a some kind of mass murderer, a serial killer, he strangled the Earl of Lynmouth, and then years later he killed Irene Nichols and Marjorie Benson?’ she asked.
‘I know,’ Todd said. ‘It does sound far fetched.’ But there’s more. The Swiss bank statements indicated a regular annual income and several big one-off payments. Most came around the time of the murder of Lord Lynmouth in 1945 and during the following couple of years, and there was one for £100,000 in 1970 — dated not long after Irene Nichols and Marjorie Benson were killed.’
Jennifer gasped. ‘You don’t think Bill Turpin was a paid hit man for goodness’ sake, do you?’
‘A pretty highly paid one, if he was,’ Todd replied. ‘That or a top-of-the-league burglar, or both. I just don’t know. It’s going to take a bit of sorting, this one...’
‘You’re telling me,’ Jennifer managed to mutter. ‘I don’t know about Lord Lynmouth and his treasures, but who would pay somebody a hundred grand to murder poor little Irene and some barmaid? Anyway, I don’t see that you have anything concrete linking Bill Turpin to the Marjorie Benson murder.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Todd. ‘But we have quite a coincidence, don’t we?’
‘The Durraton Gazette made it sound like more than that, as if you had hard evidence. OK, so he had stashed away cuttings about Marjorie Benson’s murder. You could never have jailed him for that, could you?’
Todd shook his head. ‘Of course not, but I’m sure they fit together somehow. There’s always a pattern. And we haven’t finished yet — the inquiry into the Marjorie Benson murder has been reopened just like the Gazette said.
Two murders in a little place like Pelham Bay within a few days — there’s not been another killing in Pelham since, you know. And nobody ever managed to find out who Marjorie was all those years ago. She remains a mystery. There was nothing at the golf club to give a clue as to her background, we couldn’t find any medical or national insurance records, nothing, and nobody every reported her missing. And we still have no motive for her murder, let alone the murderer.’
He leaned back in his chair, warming to his theme. He had already given a great deal of thought to the Lord Lynmouth connection, and it cleared his mind to explain his thinking to Jennifer.
‘You have to remember that Lord Lynmouth was the richest man in Britain and one of the richest in the world in those days,’ he continued. ‘There has never been private wealth like his in this country since. He died worth eight billion even after half his most valuable treasures were nicked. You can’t imagine it really. I don’t believe his death was a hitman job, I honestly do think he just got in the way of a massive burglary. He had next-to-no security. By modern standards, anyway. He didn’t stand a chance really. And he was up against real pros.
‘That network of fine-art burglaries was mightily organised all right, because even now I don’t think any of the sculptures or paintings taken have ever surfaced. The word in the trade was that there were a small group of manic collectors with money to burn — probably gathered God knows where during the war — who were willing to pay a fortune for old masters and that kind of thing, and then quite content to keep the stuff behind locked doors; the kind of stuff money normally cannot buy because most of it is either in museums and galleries or going to end up in them.
‘Several galleries were done at that time too — and nobody does that kind of thieving unless they have their market worked out. It’s very big business indeed. Lord Lynmouth had a Leonardo de Vinci, you know. Can you imagine what that was worth even then? He’d left it to the National Gallery, but it walked the night he was murdered and has never been seen since.’