Closed at Dusk (25 page)

She picked up her glasses. ‘I thought everyone knew.'

‘I've been so out of life, I guess its finer points have passed me by.'

‘“Time gone by”,' Lee quoted, with a smile. ‘We'll still sing our songs though, huh?'

‘Don't patronize me. The song ends,' he reminded her bitterly, ‘“Life? It's hollow.”'

He was devastated. After she left the room, he fell into a leather chair with high sides. He thought he might be ill again. What would happen to him now?'

He stayed there until he was freezing cold. Then he went out by the door at the end of the room. Between the double doors, the secret panel had been torn open. It hung on one wrenched hinge, the wood splintered. Still shivering, Keith went to fetch his Uncle William.

*

It was not only the little cupboard. Looking round the library, William found between the sofa and the window a scattering of smashed china, recognizable as some of the pieces Jo had repaired and put on an alcove shelf.

‘Call the police,' Harriet ordered.

‘Nothing's stolen. No one's broken in.'

‘Grill the children then.' Harriet was ready to do it herself. ‘Who's been playing tricks?'

‘A poltergeist,' Keith said glumly. The shock of the discovery had steadied him somewhat, and drained away feeling. With passion knocked out of him, he felt light-headed, as if he had taken pain-killers. ‘Ask Nina.'

‘Don't start on her.' Lee always defended Nina, although she was difficult, given to aggressive sulks, and often rude to her.

‘What do you mean, a poltergeist?' Nina faced Keith angrily.

‘It's the age, ducky. It happens to young girls. Things break. Pictures fly off walls. Watches stop.' He looked at his, and raised his eyebrows.

‘I'll kill you!' Nina shouted.

Lee said, ‘Lay off her, Keith,' and everybody was against him. But what did they want? Would they rather think that one of this stupid family had made this stupid mess deliberately?

When they had all gone, Jo could congratulate herself that she had indeed spoiled Christmas for them, although in a much less spectacular fashion than she had planned. The denouement could wait. There was time. Now that she knew she was capable of it, she could wait for exactly the right moment, and the delay had given her the chance to complete the little drama she had initiated when she put the torn scrap of Jock's
nose-rag into what she had thus designated Sylvia's secret hiding place.

When she came back to The Sanctuary in the small hours after Christmas, she had left the car on the farm track off the road, walked up the drive carrying a rug, and climbed over the roof of the tea-room toilets, just as thrustful Jock used to do, and entered the library through the window she had unlatched before she went home earlier. Sounds of tearing wood and breaking china were muffled by the rug. The dogs were all at the other end of the house in various bedrooms. William's young outside labrador was in with his mother Corrie, because of a cut paw. Thus even dogs conspire to accommodate you if your heart is pure.

Next morning, although it was a holiday, Jo was in the kitchen in an apron quite early, having slipped into the library to fasten the window latch.

‘Thanks for Christmas.' William said that to Dottie every year.

‘Not one of our best. Who could possibly have done such a senseless thing? I can't believe any of the children … Nina is a bit upset about her father and Lee, but – oh, I don't want to think about it any more. Keith and that silly poltergeist stuff. I didn't like the look of him this morning.'

‘Lucky it didn't occur to him,' William said heavily, ‘that it might be my mother wreaking vengeance because I took her keepsake out of its hiding place.'

‘Sylvia walks again?' Dottie thought he was joking, then realized. ‘Oh no, for God's sake, Will, is that what you think?'

‘Well, if Geraldine could come back … It was you smelled the lilies, Dottie, not me.'

‘I don't believe it.'

‘Nor do I, but what else would we prefer to believe?'

*

Two weeks in Italy settled them down, although they drove through storms and lashing rain, and did not find anything stylish enough to replace Bastet. They were both glad to get back to work, both hopeful that The Sanctuary and their life in it would recover the balance it had before things started to slip oddly sideways.

The house smelled warm and clean. Jo had brought flowering plants in from the greenhouse, and a little cushion of riotous pink Alpine splendour was on William's desk. His secretary had lined up letters and bills and magazines in neat, digestible piles on the dining-room table. Ruth had got in plenty of food.

Her son had got a caretaker's job and had moved out with his girl-friend and the baby. Ruth was regularly at the house, Jo was there less, and the two of them were spring-cleaning the tea-room in what seemed to be their old matey style.

The mild winter was anticipating spring with carpets of yellow aconite stars and dense drifts of snowdrops, the famous tall Sanctuary green-tips that Beatrice and Walter had first planted, brilliant white with clusters of green-edged petals within.

William spent contented hours with the new head gardener, familiarizing him with the gardens and planning the spring and summer campaign. He still spent time with Jo, to add to her notes for the history of The Sanctuary. She carried round a thick looseleaf binder, but was not ready to let him look at it yet.

She wanted to know more about the mausoleum, so William got the key to open the heavy doors, and took her inside. It was a dank and wretched place, a small cave inside the outer mound. On either side were thick stone tombs with slab lids, big enough to enclose coffins.

‘What's in there?' Jo whispered, glancing back to the open
door to reassure herself that light and water and greenery were still outside.

‘Nothing.' William slapped the vault where the Reverend Hardcastle had once rested. ‘I told you. After Beatrice died, the bodies of her husband and her lover went with her to the churchyard.'

Jo read the carving over the door: ‘“Love is Eternal”… It's thrilling,' she shivered. ‘But I think I've had enough.'

It was Dottie's turn to put spring flowers into the church for Sunday service. That weekend, she and William were in London, so Jo had offered to arrange primroses and daffodils.

Coming out of the church as it was getting dark, on her way to return the keys to the vicarage, Jo saw two large young men with flat heads trying to prise an old headstone out of the ground with a crowbar.

‘What are you doing?' she enquired mildly.

They stood their ground. One of them menaced her with the crowbar. ‘Piss off,' he said.

‘All right I just wondered if you needed any help.'

‘Piss off.'

She walked down the path, wanting to run, and gave them an inane grin as she passed, for self-protection. They had smashed the lock on the gate too. Before she reached it, she saw a chance to use this mindless force against the enemy. She turned. ‘I just thought.' They were watching her. ‘You fellows like old gravestones?'

‘Yer.'

‘Why?'

‘Sell 'em.'

‘Do you know about the tomb, over there at the big house, the one they call The Sanctuary?'

‘What tomb?' one of them asked suspiciously.

‘It's by the lake. There's some good old stone there, I heard, in a vault above ground.'

‘So what?'

‘So nothing.' She was still a chirpy, harmless lady, a bit barmy. ‘I found it interesting, and I thought you might too.'

‘Heard the latest, Faye?'

Frank came home from the shops and found his wife in from her afternoon's digging in the cold lumpy soil, lying on the floor because of her back.

‘You're the one who gets out to hear all the news,' she said in the gruff, blunt voice that meant she was in a good mood.

‘Those poor Taylors. They've had enough this year, I should have thought. Now it's the mausoleum.'

‘Someone buried alive?'

‘Somebody broke in there last night when they were away. Smashed in those thick doors with an iron bar or something, and prised the lids off the tombs.'

‘Body snatchers,' Faye said sagely, on her back, chin tucked in, big breasts flopped out sideways.

‘No bodies in there, so the vandals left a few messages in spray paint.'

‘And I suppose the Taylors will think you did that too,' Faye said throatily, because her bronchial tubes were at the wrong angle.

‘I thought I'd slip up there next week when the gardens open and let you know how much damage has been done.'

‘Not to mention having a look to see what the birds and waterfowl are up to.'

‘Does that annoy you?'

‘I'm glad you have a hobby. Keeps you off the street.'

‘You're good to me.' He smiled down at her.

‘It's because I'm on my back. You're easier to take from this angle.'

As it was opening day, Frank paid to go in to The Sanctuary. He crossed the marsh boardwalk and went straight through the copse and over to the other side of the hill. Most of the trees and bushes were bare, but the undergrowth where the birds had nested was still an impenetrable tangle. He would have to wait until there was a chance of seeing one of them in flight before he would know whether they had come back again this year. In a month, three weeks perhaps, in this early spring … soon, soon he would know.

Down by the lake the mausoleum was roped off, with a warning notice. One of the doors had been forced open outwards. It hung crookedly, the metal smashed and buckled, as if by an angry giant. The violence of the damage was a brutal, incongruous scar on the peace and beauty of the gardens.

The Taylors' grandson was running about with a chubby friend, scrapping and tumbling each other, rolling in combat down the sloping lawn.

‘Steady on,' Frank said as he passed near them to take a closer look at the mausoleum.

The fatter boy stared. The boy called Rob scrambled up and said bossily, ‘If you go near the mouse-o-leum, they'll get you.'

‘Who will?'

‘The dead people. The skeleton of Hardcastle. He broke down the door and came bursting out. I knew he would.'

‘I'm not afraid.' Frank liked this funny little boy who flung himself so eagerly into fear or excitement.

Rob screamed and ran off shouting, the slower boy tagging along behind.

Coming from the cypress walk after exchanging spring greetings
with Mr Archer in the ticket hut, Jo saw Rob talking to the birdwatcher.

When he screamed and plunged away, she wanted to run after him, chase him through the shrubbery, and finish him off like a hare.

The fat boy panted up to her. ‘Which way did he go?'

‘That way.' Jo pointed in the wrong direction, but Rob pranced out of the bushes and yelled, ‘Silly bugger – wait till I get you!'

Yes, Rob, wait. My poor little Rob. Soon now. Soon.

It was to be sooner than she thought.

In the village where Jo lived she had been pleasant to everybody, so as not to arouse comment, but she had not made friends, beyond knowing a few people to speak to in the shop.

When she went in for bread, Priscilla Smythe was there, with a round-shouldered man in a hat like a tweed basin whose back was turned.

‘
Hul
-lo, Jo.' Priscilla was always gracious to second-class citizens like widows. ‘Larry, this is Jo Kennedy who lives in one of those enchanting little cottages by the stream.'

Larry turned round from the shelves with a mean moon face, and Jo wanted to run. Those rolled disgruntled lips, the little seeking eyes. It was Lawrence Pratt, who used to come to the pink house in Holland Park, before he tried to make trouble for Rex over a dodgy project, and was jettisoned.

‘Morning.' Lawrence nodded without interest, then his eyes sharpened and he frowned under the silly hat. ‘I know you, don't I?'

‘I don't think so.' Jo stretched her smile to be even more Jo and less Marigold, and kept her voice high and theatrical. ‘Excuse me, I've got to run.'

Damn Lawrence. Jo walked away fast, without her bread.
Could he really suspect dim, colourless Marigold behind the make-up and the flashy manner and the black hair with the dramatic frosted streaks? Oh, God – to have everything blown apart now by a cunning fool like Lawrence Pratt!

Out of sight of the shop, she began to run. She scurried across her bridge and through the cottage door like a field animal, then sat down with her coat on to slow her agitated heart and get her breath.

Steady, Josephine
. Alec called her that when he was taking charge.

I'm afraid.

Don't panic
. Alec never panicked or wavered.
Lawrence couldn't have recognized you in that moment. He's not psychic
.

But Lawrence Pratt came with his stooped walk along the lane past Bramble Bank, and stopped to look quite intrusively over the bridge and the gate, straight at the downstairs window where Jo stood back out of sight, and wished him dead.

Rob was to go to his father at Easter. His grandmother would drive him to High Wycombe on Good Friday.

Dorothy was tired. Patients, meetings, reports to write, and hours of free clinic time for the agency in London had been building up to an uncharacteristic tension and weariness.

‘Let me do this … let me do that for you,' Jo would urge.

‘Don't indulge me. I'll fall apart.'

The tea-room was to open at the weekend, with Ruth's hot-cross buns and Jo's simnel cake. Although she was still agitated and full of an indecisive fear that was more Marigold than Jo, she stayed up late on Thursday to bake the simnel cakes. Jo was like that, even in a crisis. Thoughtful for the pleasure of others.

As a reward, the inspiration came to her, in a flash of pure clear light as she was washing cake tins at the sink. Doubt fled. Anxiety was gone. This was it, then.