Murder in the Afternoon (29 page)

Mr Sykes places great store by pub gossip because it gives him an advantage over me who wouldn’t be able to indulge in the same kind of information gathering.

‘If you must. But be careful. We don’t know how many plain-clothes men might have the same idea.’

He met me halfway.

‘I haven’t forgotten I’m due at the insurance offices at nine o’clock in the morning. Just a couple of pints and an hour’s earwigging, and then I’ll find my way home.’

I scribbled a note for Mary Jane and set it in the middle of the table so that she would spot it as soon as Sergeant Sharp brought her home; if he brought her home.

‘You’d better leave first, Mr Sykes. I shall pay my condolences to the vicar.’

There was a connection between the death of Ethan Armstrong and that of Miss Trimble, and I intended to uncover that link.

A craggy man with a well-fed belly greeted me in a soft cultured voice. I guessed the vicar to be an Oxford man, and remembered his sister saying that he would rather have served God in Brighton than in the wilds of Yorkshire. He gave the impression of a man who had been over-condoled and there was the possibility I would be rebuffed. Perhaps this was not the moment for him to confront the woman who had shared his sister’s last moments.

With my practised skill, I introduced myself with full credentials including my status and profession, Dad’s job and Mother’s title. That did the trick.

Wearily, he picked up a book from the hall table. ‘Come into the study, Mrs Shackleton. So, I have you to thank for finding my sister.’

I said a few appropriate words. He opened the book. ‘Condolences,’ he said, turning it towards me. ‘People have been very good. She didn’t realise how loved she was.’

I glanced at the pages, full of signatures, prayers, and flowery sentiments.

I was meant to take the pen. ‘I’m sorry to say I did not
know Miss Trimble, having only met her that morning. If you’ll give me a moment …’

Even with a moment, I could think of nothing to write.

‘Poor Aurora was in high spirits that day,’ he said glumly. ‘The lord gave her joy in her final days on earth.’

‘Was she joyful for a particular reason?’

He pushed his sermon in progress away. ‘She’d spent a happy week in Clitheroe with our cousin who is married to the verger there. And of course, she loved the church windows, you see, leaded lights, heavenly stained glass.’

‘In Clitheroe?’

‘No. Here. Poor Aurora.’

For a long moment, as I wrote something anodyne in the condolence book, I tried to think of how to phrase the question: is there anyone who would have wanted your sister dead? Instead, I said, ‘You have a lovely church.’ And then I remembered that one of the windows was plain glass. ‘Were you to have a new window?’

‘Yes. That was why she was so happy. Farmer Conroy spoke to my sister about it on Sunday. He would pay for a new one, in memory of his parents and his brother.’

Bob Conroy. So he intended to donate some of the proceeds of his farm sale. He was in the churchyard after I left the vicarage, by his brother’s grave, talking to the dead, distressed. I kept my face as expressionless as a poker player as I wondered had Bob Conroy helped Aurora Trimble into the afterlife so that she could not give evidence against Mary Jane?

Mr Trimble was speaking, asking me a question.

‘Sorry. What did you ask me?’

‘Did Aurora say anything before she died?’

Oh dear. Gerald used to play a game with a doctor friend. One would name a person living or dead. The
other had to quote or invent Famous Last Words. I was tempted to invent something marvellous now. But I had been hopeless at the game.

‘She said only two words, Mr Trimble. “Bitter” was the first.’

‘Bitter, or
bitte
?’

‘Pardon?’

‘She spoke German you know. Just like her to be so polite, even on the point of death.’

‘Why would she speak to me in German?’

‘We had a cousin to stay from Baden-Baden. Perhaps she … No, she would not have mistaken you for our cousin. Did my sister say anything else?’

This was even worse. Now he would think I was deaf, or making it up. ‘She said, “dandy”.’

‘Dandy?’ He shook his head in puzzlement.

I waited, to hear what other languages she may have spoken, to other cousins, in which the word “dandy” meant thank you and goodbye.

When I drove back to the cottage, a light shone in the window. Mary Jane was home. I tapped on the door, which was locked.

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s me.’

She unlocked the door and opened it, waiting for me to step inside. She looked wrung out and exhausted.

‘I wanted to make sure you’re all right. Was it terrible?’

‘Yes.’ She returned to her chair by the fire and stared into the flames. ‘So final. It’s not him any more, Kate. Ethan’s gone. People say oh he’s just a shell. I never knew what that meant. I wish I hadn’t seen him like that.’

‘Have you eaten?’

‘I’m not hungry. And look at that lot.’ She waved her arm at the table. There was a pot of stew, a cake, a pie. ‘People left stuff on the doorstep. For the kids probably. They don’t like me.’

‘That can’t be true. There’ll be a lot of sympathy for you in the village.’

Reluctantly, I confided my visit to the Ledgers and the colonel’s telephone call to his solicitor. ‘Now is there anything I can do?’

There was not.

I ignored the rebuff and picked up the bed warmer from the hearth. It was a silver shoe, waiting to be filled with boiling water. I took it to the table, lifted the kettle and began to pour. ‘I’ll put this in your bed. You look done in.’

She made no objection. While upstairs, I checked under the mattress for the disappeared bank book. Not there.

We sat on either side of the fire. She gazed at the flames. ‘What did you say to the children?’

‘I told them as simply as I could. Austin, well, he didn’t understand.’

‘No. I don’t suppose he would. You probably think I’m a coward not wanting to tell them myself.’

‘Of course not.’

She poked the fire, stirring up the flames. ‘Only when our dad died, Mam told us all straight away, all the details. He was brought home into that downstairs room and we all had to sit there, him lying on a board on the table. We all had to kiss him. It was horrible. Then go to the funeral, and I was too little, and my legs ached but no one noticed. I just had to try and keep up. I always said that if ever my children … I wanted to protect them. And
you can’t. I see that now. There’s no way to do it. Mam did what she thought best.’

‘Do you want me to stay with you?’

‘No. The inspector, chief inspector, whatever he is, said nothing will happen now until after the post mortem and after more information has been gathered, whatever he means by that. I’ll just have to get through. I’ll be best on my own. Mrs Conroy will take care of the kids. I want a little time to be here, just a bit longer. Ethan loved this place, and I couldn’t wait to be out. Well, sometimes I couldn’t wait to be out and other times … I loved it too, at first. People will be calling on me tomorrow. I’ll have to put up with it. I’ll be best on my own.’

‘All right. You know where I am if you need me. Ask Sergeant Sharp to telephone me.’

She nodded.

There was a knock on the door.

‘I can’t bear it, Kate. Say I’ve gone to bed. Say you’re just leaving. Anything.’

She let her shawl drop to the floor as she hurried to the bottom of the stairs.

‘Hello again.’ It was Bob Conroy.

‘Mary Jane’s gone to …’

But she was there beside me, running to him, saying, ‘Bob, oh Bob.’ He stepped inside and took her in his arms.

I left.

By the tram stop on the main road, I stopped and picked up Sykes.

‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’

The one person who had claimed to see Mary Jane in the vicinity of the quarry at a crucial time was Miss
Trimble. Miss Trimble was dead. The person who hovered near the vicarage at her time of death was Bob Conroy. But the doctor had certified death from heart failure. And doctors are never wrong. I should put thoughts of poison out of my mind.

Sage snail, within thine own self curl’d,
Instruct me softly to make haste,
Whilst these my feet go slowly fast.

Richard Lovelace

Thursday was my favourite day as a child. It was the day the grocery box came from Lipton’s store, with a bar of Fry’s Five Boys chocolate. Thursday was the day when I came home from school with nothing to do, no ballet class (Monday and Wednesday); no visit from my home tutor (Tuesday) who smoked a pipe, wore a smelly tweed jacket, picked his nose and did all the sums himself as I pretended to follow while watching the dry skin fall from his chin onto the page as he rubbed bogeymen into his beard.

This Thursday I lay in bed, my first long lie in since returning from London last Sunday. Mrs Sugden fussed over me and brought up breakfast. ‘Stop where you are, Mrs Shackleton, you look done in.’

I felt done in, but from the frustration of making no progress, and the growing certainty that the investigation into Ethan Armstrong’s death was slipping from my grasp.

When I am stuck, it can help to tell myself the story of what has happened so far, which I did, hoping then to project into where I should look next. A powerful image held me back. Each time I ran through the story, the
embrace between Mary Jane and Bob Conroy brought me to a halt.

Conroy had concluded his deal with Ledger. It would be simply a matter of time, selling up of farm stock and equipment, and then Conroy would move on. But where would he go, and with whom – his own wife, or Mary Jane, her children, and her bank book?

Unable to go forward, I went back, to the vicarage drawing room and Miss Trimble’s last words. Bitter. Well yes, a bitter pill to be dying. Dandy. A person? During my brief time in Great Applewick, I saw not a single person who could be accused of snappy dressing.

Mrs Sugden came into the bedroom to pick up my breakfast tray. ‘Do you want anything else?’

‘Yes but I’ll get it.’

‘You rest. Everyone who carries a lot of cares in their head should have one day a month in their nightdress.’

‘In that case, I’ll have the dictionary please. Miss Trimble’s last word was dandy, and I can’t imagine what she meant to say.’

‘Then don’t,’ Mrs Sugden said. ‘She was probably rambling. Rest your brain or you’ll be rambling yourself.’

I glanced at the clock. Nine-thirty. I would lie till ten-thirty, with my eyes shut, and see whether any amazing insights occurred.

Mrs Sugden returned, dictionary in hand. She stood by the trug of kittens and read, ‘Dandy. Noun. A fop; coxcomb; something very neat and trim; a subsidiary attachment to a machine; a chamber in a pudding furnace; a Ganges boatman; a cloth hammock slung on a bamboo staff used in India like a palanquin; a sloop-rigged vessel with a jigger mast; a small sail carried at the stern of a small boat; a jigger: Dandy, adjective, pertaining to or
characteristic of a dandy or fop. Dandy-brush, a whalebone brush; Dandy-note, a Custom’s permit for the removal of goods from a bonded warehouse.’ She shut the book. ‘Now are you any wiser, Mrs Shackleton?’

‘No.’ I wasn’t going to ask her to read the definition of palanquin.

She sighed. ‘It’s unlikely, but if she felt herself to be ailing …’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, there’s
dandy fever
isn’t there?’

‘You’re right. But is she likely to have caught
dandy fever
in Great Applewick, or during her visit to Clitheroe, and self-diagnosed her condition as she lay dying? I don’t think so.’

The puzzle remained. I decided against staying in bed any longer. After my bath, I walked about the wood, hoping for inspiration. I was still there, admiring bluebells, when Marcus called my name.

He strode towards me, arms open, ‘My wood nymph! Now I see you in your own habitat.’

‘Welcome to Batswing Wood.’

‘It’s lovely here.’

We perched on the log that forms a bench. He looked around. ‘You even have a natural stage.’

‘Yes. The local children put on their plays here. All a little precocious, lots of academic and medical parents come to dote in the summer before they flee on their long holidays.’ He had not come to discuss the merits of Batswing Wood and my learned neighbours. ‘Will you have lunch, Marcus? I’m sure it’ll stretch.’

‘Perhaps a quick bite.’ He made a playful dart for my ear.

‘You have a driver with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ask him in. Mrs Sugden will look after him.’ I reached for his hand. ‘Let’s go inside.’

He pulled me back. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be joking about. I’m putting off what I have to tell you.’

‘Go on.’