THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END

have a go at the
Telegraph
crossword together. He was a whizz at crosswords, Hughie. Anyway, I called on him as usual and there was no answer. I thought it was odd so I used my master key and went in. He was sitting in his stairlift, seatbelt on, stone dead.’
    ‘Why did he have a stairlift?’ asks Nelson, suddenly thinking. ‘Aren’t these all flats?’
    ‘No, some are maisonettes. They’re the nicest units really. Hugh had some stairs and climbing made him breathless, so he used the lift.’
    ‘How long did they think he’d been there?’
    ‘Almost twenty-four hours the coroner thought. He must have got into the lift just after I’d left him the day before.’
    ‘The coroner. Did the police investigate? One of my team?’ The incident must have happened when he was on his holiday, thinks Nelson. It still rang a faint bell though.
    ‘Yes, a nice fellow called Clough. I remember the name because I used to be a big Forest fan.’
    Clough! That’s why the story seemed familiar; Nelson must have read it in the weekly report. Although Clough isn’t really to blame – the death appeared to be natural causes and he did write it up – Nelson still feels slightly irritated with his sergeant.
    ‘Mr Fitzherbert,’ he says, leaning forward, ‘as I said on the phone, I’m interested in anything Hugh Anselm mayhave told you about the war. Especially his years in the Home Guard.’
    ‘I know you mentioned it and I’ve been wracking my brains so. But the truth is he never talked about the war. I think he’d been in the RAF but he never spoke about it. He was all for peace, Hugh. Wouldn’t even wear a poppy. Said Remembrance Day should be as much about the German war dead as the British. He said there was no good side and no bad side, only winners and losers. He was a bit of a Leftie really. Used to write all these letters to the papers about Iraq and so on.’
    ‘But he read the
Telegraph
?’
    ‘Ah, that was just for the crossword. He took the
Guardian
too and the
New Statesman
. History magazines as well. He was a fine, well-educated man.’
    ‘Mr Fitzherbert, I know it sounds odd but did Hugh Anselm ever mention … Lucifer?’
    ‘Lucifer? Dear God, no.’ In an instinctive gesture, Fitzherbert’s hand hovers over his forehead. A Catholic then.
    There’s nothing else here, thinks Nelson. Hugh was a fine, well-educated man who died, aged eighty-six, of a heart attack. No close family, Nelson has already asked. His wife died eight years ago. No children. Nobody to mourn him except Kevin Fitzherbert, who missed his company over the crossword.
    But, at the door, Nelson has a Columboesque last thought.
    ‘The stairlift. Was it up or down?’
    Fitzherbert’s brow creases. ‘That’s the funny thing. It was halfway up.’
    ‘Halfway up? Had it broken?’
    ‘Must have done, but it’s an odd thing. They’re serviced regularly, and when I saw Hugh sitting there I pressed the button. It was an instinctive thing really. And the lift moved instantly.’
    ‘So why would it stop halfway up?’
    ‘Something must have interfered with the current. Or Hugh pressed the button by accident.’
    ‘Or someone could have stopped it,’ says Nelson.
    Nelson drives back to the station, thinking hard. On the face of it, the deaths of the two old men could be from natural causes. But there are enough questions now to add up to a suspicion. How did the stairlift stop in mid air? What did Archie mean by the word ‘Lucifer’ and what was the blood oath sworn by the two men when they were still teenagers? There’s something else too that’s nagging at him. Something to do with an armchair, a
Radio Times
and Ruth Galloway. He frowns, taking the corner by the Campbell’s Soup factory on two wheels.
    When he gets in, he asks Leah for black coffee and fills in a form requesting an autopsy on Archie Whitcliffe. His boss will see it, no question, but it makes sense to get the wheels in motion. ‘Just following procedure,’ he’d say, when challenged. Whitcliffe is a great one for procedure.
    As he is laboriously filling in the boxes, Clough appears in the doorway.
    ‘You wanted me, boss?’ Nelson had sent him a text.
    ‘Yes, sit down a minute.’
    Clough sits down, his jaws still working on some item of food lodged in his back teeth.
    ‘It’s about Hugh Anselm.’
    Clough looks blank.
    ‘The old man found dead in the stairlift.’
    ‘Oh, yes. It was while you were on holiday. Poor old bloke got in his stairlift,