Closed at Dusk (26 page)

Go to bed
. Alec suggested, as she paced about in a state of charged excitement. She took his picture outside and flung it far over the back hedge into the darkness of the impenetrable brambles.

On Friday morning, Jo went up to the house early with the cakes and offered to drive Rob to High Wycombe. Dorothy was not even up and dressed. She talked to Jo out of her bedroom window.

‘You're a treasure,' she said. ‘I won't forget this, Jo.'

No, Dottie, I don't think you will.

Jo went to the bank and drew out all the money from the Josephine Kennedy account that she had obtained by giving her real name of Marigold Renshaw as a reference. Then she went back to Bramble Bank for her bags, and took from the top of the wardrobe her father's old service revolver, the Webley Scott 45 that she had found at the house after her mother died. She put the two bags in the boot of the car and locked it, so that Dorothy could not open it to put Rob's stuff in there.

‘Can I climb through to the front seat now that Granny can't see?' Rob was delighted to be driving with Jo, because she drove faster than his grandmother.

‘No, Rob. It's against the law.'

‘You don't care about that.'

‘I have to.' To be stopped by the police for having a small child in the front seat would be one of those ironically stupid mistakes that foiled the most inspired schemes of people in books.

‘This isn't the road we take to go to Dad's.'

‘We're going a new way. This will be more fun, you'll see.'

Jo was heading west. Short of sleep and light-headed, she imagined Wales, perhaps, or up to Birmingham, and on to Scotland. Could you go to the Isle of Man without a passport? Dorothy had said that Rob was not expected at any particular
time. How long would it be safe to stay on the road in this car? How long before a nation-wide search of hotels and bed-and-breakfasts began? It was one thing to disappear by herself and have her hair bleached out and be Marigold again; quite another to disappear with a child for whom everyone was looking.

Infirm of purpose
! She was fully awake. This morning's sloppy, euphoric idea that she could somehow kidnap Rob and vanish would not stand up against what she knew in her heart was the only possible ending to the saga of her revenge.
Give me the daggers
.

She stopped to buy something to eat and drink, and she and Rob sat with it in the back seat, and she told him a story about a boy and his travels. Stories either put Rob over the top with excitement, or made him sleepy. He leaned against her, his dark tousled hair against her breast.

She propped him against the window and quickly took off the padded bra with its hard twin cones that were the hallmark of Jo's shirts and sweaters, then drew him to her again and put her arms round him and sat for a long time, hidden from the road on the track into a wood, his head against the smaller, softer breast of Marigold.

Do it here? Here? Now? She would lead him deep into the wood and lie him down and put the gun to his head while he was sleeping, then throw it far into the trees and walk back to the car alone.

To what? Her hard and ruthless campaign was against Tessa and her family, not against Rob. Could the real Marigold really snuff out his life and walk away?

No wonder she had never looked realistically beyond the deed when she was brewing her plans. There was no beyond for her, that was the truth of it. If killing Rob was her final revenge on Tessa, then the last act of her life's drama was done, and her own death the final curtain.

She left Rob, and with shaking hands, took from her bag the sleeping pills she had brought in case he was excitable and difficult.

‘Wake up for a minute, Rob.'

‘No.' He pushed her away and snuggled into the corner of the back seat.

‘Here. I've got a pill for you. Mummy says you're to take it like a good boy. Look, there's some Coke left.'

When he was half awake, she fumbled the pill into his mouth and tipped in the remains of the Coca-Cola. He coughed and spluttered, but the pill stayed down. He cried a little when she laid him down on the seat, but was soon asleep again.

Jo drove on slowly, because her mind was a turmoil of thoughts and panicky visions. She saw herself finding a disused garage, driving in, and with the door shut and the engine running, holding Rob down by the exhaust, then lying down herself to breathe in its deadly fumes. They said it paralysed you very quickly, so that even if you tried to move away, you couldn't.

She saw a car crash at a hundred miles an hour, the bodies unrecognizable within the concertina of distorted metal. Trees near the road, telegraph poles, the abutment of a bridge – was this the one? Was this?

Too late, she had gone past, too slowly. On a straight road she speeded up and watched each car that came towards her. It would be so simple to turn the wheel and swerve across the road into a head-on collision. Why didn't she do it?

Because this wasn't it. In a crackling explosion of light, like fireworks over the lake, she understood. The door into the mausoleum was open. With her own mischievous words in the churchyard, she had set the stage for the ultimate assault: her final inspired legacy to all the Taylors.

‘Love is Eternal' Beatrice had declared in stone. For ever
and ever, eternally, William and Dorothy and their descendants would see the mausoleum from the windows of the house, and they would never forget.

Jo turned the car and drove back fast towards The Sanctuary.

At this time of year, the Sanctuary gardens were closed at twilight, the bell in the tall cypress ringing a little later each day as the evenings lightened.

Avoiding the village, Jo drove by a back road to the side of the estate near the church. Would there be a service on Good Friday evening? The church was dark, the small car park empty. She drove down the narrow lane to where gardeners and grave-diggers left their trucks, and stopped her car out of sight behind a hedge.

With the loaded gun in the pocket of her jacket, she carried Rob into the churchyard. He did not weigh much, poor skinny baby, although he was heavily asleep. She laid him down behind the wall and waited with him until the visitors would have left the gardens.

She wanted dusk, and dreaded it. Give me a little more time. Don't let it be dusk! But although she stretched her eyes to prolong the day, inexorably the light faded, and in the distance, she heard the tolling of the Closing Bell.

Up in the copse, sitting on a dead tree with his feet on a crumbling mat of dry bracken, Frank heard the bell and abandoned his fruitless watch. After this weekend, he would use his old route over the broken wall, but at Easter, and especially on Good Friday, it had not seemed right to cheat.

He extricated himself from the undergrowth and tangled grass, and dropped easily down the slope in his heavy boots. Looking all about him in the gathering twilight, to enjoy the leafing out of the tall trees and the blossom and the patches of
bright colour still holding the light, Frank saw a figure move out from the shadows of the laurels that lined the pathway to the church. The figure was carrying something quite large and moving with a sideways gait along the upper bank of the lake. As he got nearer he saw that it was a woman, carrying a child.

Someone hurt? Frank hurried down to see if he could help.

Rob's sleeping body grew heavier and heavier. To get under the double rope barrier, Jo had to put him down, crawl through and pull him after her.

He woke, without opening his eyes, on the marble step of the tomb, and wailed, feebly.

‘It's all right, darling. Jo's here. Come on.' Her arms were too tired to pick him up again, so she half carried him, dragging his feet, through the smashed door.

Inside the tomb Jo could dimly see that the stone slabs had been replaced on the vaults. She lifted Rob and laid him gently down on one of them. She would put the gun to his head, then lie down on the other side at once, a triumphant Juliet, and shoot herself.

Asleep again, the child lay quite peacefully on his side on the cold stone. After she had brought out the gun, Jo laid it down and took off her jacket. She bundled it up and put it carefully under Rob's head.

A shout. A scrabble and thudding of feet down from the top of the mound. Jo picked up the gun and held it behind her back as a man with a torch pushed through the gap between the doors.

‘What's wrong?' His breath was quick and harsh. ‘What are you doing?'

‘Get out!'

‘No, the child shouldn't be in there. Get his death of cold. Here – wake up, Rob!' he said loudly.

He pulled the limp boy outside. Jo followed and he turned back, holding Rob, his torch full on her face.

What he saw there made him grab at her. She raised the gun and shot wildly at Rob, then turned the gun against herself.

Up at the house, they were lighting a fire and drawing curtains. Dorothy was clearing away the tea things. Tessa, who had come with Chris, was thinking that she would soon ring Rex's house to say goodnight to Rob.

They all heard a double shot

By the lake they found Jo dead, her shattered head hanging half into the water. Frank was dead, or dying. Rob was on the overgrown steps above the mausoleum, moaning feebly, his arms flung out over the stone mastiff that crouched there: ‘Faithful unto Death.'

After a long time, life at The Sanctuary settled down and grew peaceful again. The gardens were closed for a year, and when they reopened the following spring the mausoleum had been torn down and the mound flattened and grassed over, so that there was nothing to be peered at by ghoulish sightseers.

There was a noticeable increase in visitors, and occasionally still another journalist. No questions were answered by the gardeners, or Ruth in the tea-room. They had learned to say, ‘I didn't work here last year.'

‘I wish that were true, Will,' Ruth said, more than once. ‘I torture myself thinking there must have been some way I could have known.'

Papers at Bramble Bank had told them who Jo was. Publicity had brought an aunt and cousin, a few friends, a man who had been staying with Priscilla Smythe. Most of the mysteries had been gradually cleared up, except for the great central mystery of how they could all have been so totally deceived by Marigold's performance as Jo.

‘We wanted to be, I suppose,' Ruth said. ‘She was so blooming useful. Right from the beginning, when she turned up to help me in the tea-room, she seemed like just what we needed.'

‘And there
are
women like that. Over-made-up and theatrical, cheerful, pushy. I rather liked her,' Tessa said sadly.

‘I liked her very much.' William thought about the strange
scene in the underground kitchen, where Jo, as he realized now, was being Marigold, and giving him her real self.

They had all liked her. Jill did say, ‘I always found her a bit over-powering,' but it was only Harriet who boasted, ‘I knew all along there was something bogus about her,' and nobody believed that.

One evening in June, William and Frank Pargeter's friend Roger, who had looked for the nightingales last year in vain, made a twilight pilgrimage to the thicket at the top of the hill. There was some general bird movement and warbler song, and what seemed like nesting activity. They waited quietly. Roger never said much anyway.

After a while, they heard it, over-riding the other birds. The loud clear, clicking call, and then the bubbling trill.

The nightingales had come back again.

Roger muttered, looking at William with his crooked smile, ‘Frank's epitaph. He saved the birds.'

‘He also saved my grandson.'

Frank had lived for two days after the operation on the stomach wound. Whispering, his wife interpreting, he had managed to tell them what had happened at the tomb.

Now the family did not talk about that any more, nor about the things that had happened while Jo was at The Sanctuary. After Frank died, clutching Faye's hand, they had talked and talked endlessly, reasoning, remembering, until everything had been explained.

Troutie's death. Poor Charlotte. Perhaps the hare in the hidden garden. Probably Bastet. The keepsake of Sylvia's lover and the destruction in the library.

When the rooms where John and Polly Dix had once lived were being looked at for conversion into a separate flat, they remembered that there was a crawl space under the central roof to the attics of the other turret wing. On the floor, where a
trapdoor had been cut in the boards, Dorothy found transparent, long-dead lily petals and a few curled dry leaves.

The shock of discovering that Jo was responsible for psychic phenomena had been quickly overtaken by relief that they had not been genuine mysteries.

‘And perhaps I never did smell those lilies in the first place,' Dorothy said.

‘You did. And my mother did shout up the stairs.'

‘She could have imagined that Geraldine had come back to haunt her. Anyway, nothing like that can ever happen again. I remember telling Ralph Stern two years ago, “No supernatural phenomena here,” rather pompously, but he was so full of himself. The Sanctuary is safe, Will.'

‘All's well.'

The nightmare was over. The house was theirs again. The garden entranced itself in luminous bloom and beauty, and shed its untroubled peace once more on the gentle visitors who came to wander and enjoy.

They held the Festival of the Lake again, because life goes on, and tradition heals its own wounds. Tessa and Rob and Chris did not come, but when the summer was almost over, they had a last family weekend, before the children went back to school.

In the kitchen before dinner, Jill and Tessa were feeding children and cooking, and William was making drinks in the butler's pantry.

He put a glass on the table for Dottie, who was playing cards with Rob and Annabel.

‘What's the matter, Wum?' Rob's eyes followed William's towards the door of the back pantry where cakes were prepared for the tea-room. The door had been closed. It was opening very slowly. Then it stopped, not far enough to see into the pantry. They would normally have looked away and started to
talk again, because not all the doors shut properly or hung level in this old house.