‘Well?’
‘OK, the sodding costume didn’t need fitting, it’s not too tight, never mind what old Barmpot says!’ She glanced scornfully towards where the released Roger Barmforth, with a young female teacher, was collecting scripts and props. ‘So I rang Mrs Wetherby and she said it would be all right, I needn’t go. She told me she wouldn’t say anything if I didn’t.’
‘So where were you?’
Her eyes strayed to the door and back again. She said hurriedly, ‘If you must know, I was with my boyfriend.’
Jenny would have bet her next month’s wages that it wasn’t Macheath.
She wasn’t a vindictive young woman, but she couldn’t help feeling a malicious pleasure as she rang into the station and relayed the information she’d just obtained before going thankfully off duty. Oh, Scotty, she thought, Mayo’ll have your guts for garters. He’ll have you back on traffic duty before you can say Caramello.
Strangely enough, now that darkness had really come, the cottage looked ordinary, unthreatening, a small chocolate-box affair, not at all inimical. Or perhaps, Abigail thought with a vestigial memory of her earlier apprehensions, that was simply because its owner wasn’t here. She hadn’t answered the door, the cottage was in complete darkness. As they walked round to the back, and Mayo pointed to the hard standing, the concrete slab tucked discreetly out of sight and just large enough for a small car, she saw it was vacant.
A vehicle drew up as they walked round to the front of the cottage again. It proved to be driven by Jared Bysouth, returning to the farm, blocking the lane with his Land Rover. Being a good neighbour once more, nosing around and preventing anyone who’d no business at the cottage from escaping.
‘Oh, it’s you, Inspector,’ he called, leaning out of the window. ‘I wondered what was going on. If you’re looking for Iris, you’re out of luck. She was backing her car out when I passed about half an hour ago.’
He stuck his elbow out of the window, looking ready for a chat, but Abigail said, ‘Thanks, Mr Bysouth, we’ll come back in the morning.’
Deflated, she looked back at the house as she slid back into the driving seat of the car. She had screwed herself up to a pitch of expectancy, and now, prosaically, the interview would have to be put on hold. Finding out whether Iris was a killer or not would simply have to wait until morning.
As they drove back, Mayo sat next to her, picking up messages, one of which was to lighten his days for some time to come, the other to prove crucial to the immediate situation. Acting Sergeant Farrar came though, jubilation triumphing over the crackling static, with news of a patrol car, responding to a 999 over a fight outside the Lion and Lamb which had arisen during a drugs handover. One man had been stabbed and was in a critical condition, several others were in custody and one of them was offering information about the man suspected of shooting and killing Danny Fermanagh in exchange for leniency. ‘We’ve got him, gaffer,’ Farrar exclaimed, forgetting in his excitement to sound like the world-weary, seen-it-all sergeant he aspired to be.
‘Hallelujah!’ said Abigail when she heard the glad tidings, saw Mayo punching the air. And then fell silent and listened, as he did, when Farrar started speaking again.
‘Jenny rang in a report on that interview she did. Want to hear it?’
Sam Leadbetter never knew what sudden urgency drove him to push aside his writing and immediately leg it out for Hannah’s house. He only knew that the need was as imperative as a sneeze, something he couldn’t have stopped and had no control over. And that he had to prevent her: Hannah, at the moment, was dangerous, volatile, and liable to go off at any moment, with who could say what disastrous consequences?
He could have saved himself fifteen minutes if he’d been able to cut across the playing fields and use the gate near the house. But even Sam didn’t entertain the possibility of scaling the school’s chainlink fencing, behind which grew a robust hawthorn hedge – and to drive via the ring road would
add
at least fifteen minutes. No alternative but to walk along Kelsey Road and turn right into Vanson Hill.
The night was soft and springlike after the day’s rain, the sap was rising and even in his hurry he noticed the faint flower scents drifting from the gardens he passed. He had to pause at the hospital gates for an ambulance to turn out and gather speed as it raced urgently down the hill; the hospital itself stood berthed like a great, lighted ship in the lee of the hill, giving out its subliminal message that here the desperate business of life and death went on all the time, separate from the rest of the world, regardless of its material pressures. A sense of nameless panic caused him to lengthen his strides into a jog.
A full moon sailed high, sending a wash of cold light over the garden as he turned into Hannah’s drive, the delicate scent of a single daffodil made nauseous when multiplied into that of a thousand, naturalised as they were under the trees here, increased year by year … a heaviness of lilies, funeral chapels, hints of mortality. As a sitting tenant, it was rumoured that Hannah would now have the legal option to buy at a reasonable price. How would she be able to bring herself to continue living here?
The front of the house was in darkness. He didn’t bother to
ring the bell but tried the side door, tutted at finding it unlocked, but then, seeing a wedge of light driven out into the darkness from the conservatory, he moved quietly round towards the back.
Fifteen minutes earlier, Hannah had been sitting in Charles’s study, from which led the conservatory extension. Drawers were open, piles of papers were stacked on the desk in front of her, but she felt incapable of doing anything except stare in front of her. There wasn’t much she needed to do in actual fact; he had typically left his affairs, as was to be expected, in perfect order.
She sat facing the conservatory, where the expensively installed uplighting and downlighting mutated the spiky leaves of palms and other nameless plants into rapiers against the glass, and limned the twelve foot high cheese plant she hated, throwing demon shadows of its monstrous holed leaves on to the walls. That, at least, was weeping for him, dripping sticky honeydew from the points of its leaves on to the floor and on to a small polished table beneath it, something it had never done before. She hadn’t either moved the table or wiped away the secretion.
She’d had the lighting, the whole extension in fact, copied from an illustrated feature in one of the magazines devoted to showing the interiors of other people’s homes, but now she hated it. There was garden lighting, too, but rather than enhance the features there, the coloured lights had the effect of making the waving branches of the trees seem menacing and grotesque. Charles, who rarely commented on her choice of furnishings or decor, had, strangely enough, liked it.
What had it felt like to be Charles, sitting here, night after night, his Wagner CDs going at full volume, looking out across the conservatory? Had he, too, been trying to push back the jungle that was just outside? Had he had any intimations of his own death? Her Catholicism had always induced a certain fatalism in her, she had believed you died when your destiny was fulfilled, but now her beliefs were being strangely tested.
Why did he have to die? Why did he have to be what he was? They could have had such a wonderful life together. Instead, for
years she had been like a rabbit transfixed in the headlights of a car, held in thrall. Until she had, suddenly, found herself able to move again, felt life coursing through her veins. Alive. Vibrant. Active and powerful. But it had all drained away, leaving her empty again.
The house was so quiet you could have heard a fly crawling on the ceiling.
Then she saw, or imagined she saw, some movement in the shadows of the garden. She squeezed her eyes shut, like a child who thinks if she can’t see the menace in front of her, it won’t be there, as she’d done every time Charles lifted his hand to her. Put her hands over her ears to shut out words that wounded like arrows. But now, her eyes flew open, fancying she heard the faint creak of the conservatory door handle. Heart jumping, she remembered it wasn’t locked. She hadn’t yet become accustomed to going round the house and locking up, every evening before supper, as he had always done. Meticulous in that, as in everything else. After that first leap, her heart settled into a slow, hard, painful thumping, and she strained her ears for the next, slightest sound, sitting as if turned to marble.
A clock chimed. Unnaturally loud sounds penetrated the silent house. The traffic, whooshing by on Tilbourne Road. A wailing ambulance siren, a sound so common in this house that she normally never noticed it. Charles’s long-case clock sounding a measured tock, tock. The house was very empty.
Gradually, she heard it, no imagination this time, a halting footfall exploring the dark, finding it hard to discover the step up from the conservatory into the study. Still she sat motionless as the door opened and the air from outside lifted the fronds of a huge fern, making it shiver like a live thing, and the figure moved slowly forwards, out of the shadows.
A small figure with white hair.
She was wearing grey, unlike the sweet-pea colours she and the Queen Mother normally favoured, an old-fashioned suit with a Gor-ray skirt she must have had hidden in her wardrobe for years. Indeed as she came nearer, a faint, sickeningly sweet smell of orris, patchouli, strawberry, of Body Shop clothes-protector sachets, came with her.
Hannah felt a shiver of something almost akin to anticipation. Keep her talking, wasn’t that what they always said you must do
in these sort of situations? Calmly, as though you felt no astonishment at this invasion of privacy from someone you hardly knew.
‘Goodness, you gave me a fright!’ Leaning back, fanning herself exaggeratedly, she let her other hand trail over the chair arm. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Well, I’m beginning to think it’s about time we got our act together, as my grandchildren say. I’ve been visited by the police, Hannah, and I’ve no intention of taking the blame for something that was no fault of mine.’
She was mad, barking mad, but Hannah had suspected this from the beginning. Mad, or dangerous. Had been certain of it ever since she had received that parcel she’d had to pretend was a new pair of scales.
Remembering what it had actually contained, again she felt that shiver of excitement, a remembered thrill of fear, almost sexual. Her trailing hand sought for her handbag, on the floor next to her chair, while she spoke: words, something, nothing, anything, it didn’t matter. The soft leather bag had a magnetic catch, and opened easily. She pulled the flap open and her hand curled around cold metal. Pulling it gently out, she felt its solid weight in her palm. She raised her arm, her finger on the trigger, and brought her other hand up to it. She squeezed, once.
This is a nightmare; the day Angela died, all over again.
The unexpected pull that had made her stagger, the bang that had made her ears ring and ring, the smell of cordite, Angela, toppling forward, like one of those target dolls at a fair …
And now … the same thing, happening again. Iris Osborne this time, with blood blossoming from her chest.
The conservatory door was still open and Sam came charging through. He stopped at the sight of the gun in her hand.
‘Oh, Sam! Oh, my God, Sam! She would have killed me if I hadn’t got the gun from her – just like she killed Angela, and Charles.’
‘Let me have the gun, Hannah.’ His voice was stony.
She looked at her hand, holding the weapon. It was quite steady, when it should have been shaking. For a moment, she hesitated. It would be so easy. Then she allowed her hand to tremble as she passed the gun over to Sam. Let herself cry, big tears spilling from huge, frightened brown eyes as she raised her
head to him. In the circle of lamplight, with the old woman’s body on the floor six feet away, she stood waiting for his arms to encircle her.
Instead, he walked away from her, towards the telephone. ‘What are you doing, Sam?’
‘I’m ringing the police, what do you think?’
The tape recorder in Iris Osborne’s hand was slippery with sweat. Hospitals were always overheated. She felt under the pillow for one of her lace-edged, freesia-scented hankies and wiped it fastidiously. Normally cool and calculating, she was unused to nerves, and the fact that she was shaking disorientated her. But she had to get this recording right, listen to it over and over again before committing herself to making that statement the police needed. She would think it over, carefully, do it in her own time, in her own way. They weren’t pressing her too much, yet. She was off the danger list but far from well. The bullet that madwoman had fired at her had missed any vital organs – the shock had done far more harm.
She must do this before Eleanor came and began fussing and lecturing her again on how foolish she’d been. Then she could concentrate on getting well and being allowed to go back to her own home and her own affairs.
She pressed a calming hand to the bosom of her fluffy turquoise bedjacket, drew a deep breath and took her mind back to the day when she’d first met Angela Hunnicliffe, through one of Iris’s own advertisements. That was where it had all begun, when Angela had rung and asked whether she was interested in buying a piece of Clarice Cliff pottery.
Iris herself didn’t admire Art Deco in any shape or form, but she had customers who did. Clarice Cliff was avidly collected and fetched phenomenal prices. She couldn’t afford
not
to be interested. She’d said she would very much like to see it and arranged for Angela to bring it to Wych Cottage.
‘Where did you come across this?’ she asked interestedly, when she’d examined the candlestick and calculated what she could get for it.
‘Oh, a car boot sale,’ Angela answered evasively, with the irritating giggle Iris was to become familiar with. She was a rather colourless blonde, and her little girl ways sat oddly with her height. Iris didn’t believe her. Maybe she had picked up a
similar candlestick, but not this one. She knew Angela was lying for some reason, and trying to cover up rather clumsily – people at car boot sales in the past had let fortunes slip through their fingers for fifty pence, but not nowadays. The lie made her wary. Anyone capable of lying about one thing could lie about others. But a simple thing like a lie never worried Iris too much and, thinking of the profit she was going to make, she didn’t press the matter.
As they chatted over the tea and biscuits Iris always provided for her clients as part of the general softening-up process before the hard bargaining started, Iris learned that Angela had come over here from America with her husband and while he’d been very much taken up with his job, she’d been left with nothing to occupy her empty days. As a way of overcoming her boredom, she’d started going to auction rooms, markets and antique fairs to pass the time, and discovered an interest in porcelain and pottery. As her collection, and her knowledge, grew, she gradually become more discriminating, and dissatisfied with her earlier, naïve, ‘finds’. She had begun a little modest trading to offload some of them. And that was how it had come about that she had telephoned in response to an advert of Iris’s in the back of one of the glossy magazines devoted to antiques.
Iris found to her surprise that Angela could drive as hard a bargain as she could herself. This was something she understood, and she looked at the young woman with more respect than she had at first. Their meeting started an association that was to their mutual benefit. Angela looked out for anything Iris might be interested in buying from her, and Iris did likewise for her. She was quite sorry that Angela would be returning to the States within the year, when Brad Hunnicliffe’s exchange here ended, they’d become quite good friends.
The last time Angela had knocked on the door of Wych Cottage she had been sheltering from the pelting rain under an umbrella, having paddled through the widening mud-scree the ceaseless downpours of the last week or two had made of the lane. ‘My, you’re going to be under water if this deluge doesn’t stop soon!’ she announced, prophetically had she but known it, as Iris ushered her in.
‘Pray that it
does
stop, then.’ Iris was beginning to be very
worried indeed at the amount of water that was sweeping down the lane to the dip where Wych Cottage stood.
‘This weather is something I shall
not
miss when I’ve gone,’ said Angela, taking off her rubber boots and leaving them and her umbrella in the porch.
‘Gone?’
Angela then told Iris that she was in fact returning to America the next day. Her husband had unexpectedly been called back to the States – had already left, in fact, to spend a couple of weeks with his ailing father before taking up his new position in San Francisco. Angela had arranged to stay behind for that period, in order to attend a country house sale she didn’t want to miss, where there might be bargains to be had, and also to arrange for her china collection to be shipped over to America. ‘My suitcases are packed, all I have to do is leave the keys with our landlord. But I can’t say I’m sorry to be going.’
‘No doubt you’ll be glad to get home, quite apart from leaving all this rain behind.’
But Angela said not really, in fact she’d rather begun to enjoy being over here, now that she’d found – now that she’d found such an absorbing interest. She’d flushed a little and Iris thought, shrewdly, she hadn’t been going to say that, there’s a man. She’d suspected before now that Angela, if not her husband, Brad, was finding their marriage a strain. But lately, Angela went on, she hadn’t been so comfortable around Lavenstock. She’d hesitated, as though not expecting to be believed, and then rushed on … We-ell, it sounded paranoic, but she’d had the definite feeling lately that someone had been following her, and not just once or twice, but several times. ‘It’s weird!’ Her hands twisted nervously and she shivered, but then she shrugged it off with a forced laugh and unpacked the latest piece of china she’d acquired for Iris.
They’d struck an amicable bargain, and Angela had been ready to leave, standing in her stockinged feet waiting for Iris to fetch her mac, when the knock came at the door. A strange woman stood there, dripping, rain streaming from her unprotected hair and from the light, showerproof jacket she wore, useless in such a deluge, her eyes wild.
‘You have Angela Hunnicliffe in there!’ she announced, accusingly, and before Iris could stop her, had forced her way in.
Iris, protesting, hurried after her into the sitting-room where Angela and the woman Iris later learnt was Hannah Wetherby faced each other like a pair of tigresses. Iris was outraged, being forced to endure this vulgar cat-fight, here in her own pretty sitting-room, but could do nothing to prevent it: Angela, pale as death, and Hannah, hair plastered to her head, her inadequate shoes squelching mud all over Iris’s precious Persian rugs with every movement she made. Spitting out, in a low, furious voice, that she knew all about her husband and Angela Hunnicliffe, and that it was something she would not tolerate any longer. This was obviously the person who had been following Angela – she hadn’t imagined it, then.
If Angela had simply said, in answer to the accusation, that she was going away the following day, maybe the other woman would have calmed down. But Angela didn’t. She retorted that if Hannah hadn’t been such a frigid bitch in the first place maybe Charles Wetherby wouldn’t have had to look elsewhere.
Hannah could barely contain herself. She hissed furiously, ‘And maybe if he’d treated you like he’s treated me, you’d be frigid towards him, too!’
Angela didn’t draw away as Iris would have done, but took a step nearer. ‘You’re hysterical,’ she said coldly, and slapped Hannah’s face.
However Iris searched her memory, she could not be quite certain of how it had appeared to her then – whether Hannah deliberately shot Angela, had meant to do so all along (though if not, why had she come equipped with a gun?) or whether it was, as she said afterwards, an uncontrollable impulse that came over her, that she’d only meant to threaten Angela. Iris, in view of what had happened to
her
, now believed it was certainly the latter. But whatever the truth was, she had pulled a pistol from her bag and in a moment it was all over. Angela was dead.
Iris couldn’t believe it. Ten minutes ago, in this lamplit room with the dark weather comfortably on the other side of the windows, she’d been sitting in front of a roaring fire, having a cosy chat and a cup of tea, eating shortbreads. And now, here she was, with an armed madwoman in front of her and the dead body of her friend at her feet. Her heart was pounding ominously. She shook with fear and reminded herself she was no longer a young woman. And then she looked at the intruder and
saw she was also trembling, even more uncontrollably, staring at Angela’s body with horror and with the gun dangerously hanging from her fingers.
Iris breathed deeply and took two courageous steps forward. ‘I think you’d better give me that,’ she said, and took the gun from Hannah Wetherby’s thankfully unresisting grasp. She pressed the safety catch, as her husband had always taught her to do with firearms, and then, not knowing what to do with the weapon, she pushed it into the nearest drawer, which happened to be the top one of the walnut bow-front chest which the Bysouths had later carried upstairs for her. And with so many other things to worry about, her brain had promptly blanked out the memory of ever having seen it; she’d totally forgotten it until her mind and body acted almost in unison to prevent that girl from the contract cleaners seeing what was in the opened drawer.
She had eventually, not knowing what to do with it, simply wrapped the gun in layers of cotton wool and bubble-wrap, put it in a shoe-box and posted it back to Hannah. Let her find the means of disposing of it!
Hannah was standing as if rooted to the spot. ‘Oh God,’ she whispered, almost soundlessly. ‘Oh God, what have I done? I
never
lose my temper.’
‘Come away,’ Iris said, averting her eyes from the body, putting off the decision she knew would have to be made, later, when they were both calmer. Taking refuge in practicalities because the woman frightened her to death. She could go off at any moment like a time bomb. ‘You need to dry off.’
Hannah allowed herself to be led into the kitchen, where Iris found some cooking brandy and poured generous measures into two glasses. ‘Drink this,’ she ordered, sliding one across to Hannah, before reaching for a couple of dry towels from the tumble-dryer. Hannah stood like a doll while Iris helped her off with her jacket and pushed it into the dryer. Her sweater, underneath, was damp and her skirt was sopping, too. ‘Dry your hair while I fetch you a bathrobe, and we’ll put everything else in the machine,’ Iris commanded. She wanted this woman out of her house, as soon as possible, but there were things to be decided and she wouldn’t be any help while her teeth were chattering and she was in that near catatonic state. Iris’s feet, as she went
upstairs, felt leaden; she had to pause for breath on the landing, and wait for her heart to resume its normal pace. She was very much aware that she was too old for all this.
Hot, sweet tea might have been a wiser recommendation for shock than spirits, but after the first sip or two of the brandy, Iris began to feel better; Hannah downed hers as if it were lemonade and the return of some colour into her cheeks showed it had done her no harm, either.
While her visitor was stripping off her skirt and sweater, Iris couldn’t help noticing how underweight she was; neither did the long thin cicatrix of a healed scar right down her upper arm escape her notice. There were also the faint yellow marks of a fading bruise on her neck. Iris looked at her huge dark eyes and facial bones, and the hair that, now it was nearly dry, gave hints that it might be thick and glossy, and thought this woman might once have been very beautiful, but that it had been some time since.
‘Well, don’t you think you owe me some sort of explanation?’ she demanded at last. ‘Your name, for a start?’
‘Yes,’ Hannah said, an unnatural calm descending on her, and began to speak. When she’d finished, Iris said, ‘If he’s treated you like that, why do you want him back? Why didn’t you just leave him?’
‘You don’t understand. If I left him now, I should have nothing. After all, I’ve put up with him for all these years, provided a front for him, pretended to be a model wife for a model husband – why should I have to leave everything, be reduced to skimping and saving, having nothing? He owes me for that. I’ve had a life of sorts. Now I can have a better one …’
Could she possibly have
forgotten
the corpse lying bleeding into the hearthrug in the other room?
Iris had asked herself a dozen times since why she hadn’t called the police, then and there. But she knew the answer, really. The police were the last people she wanted around, poking their noses where they weren’t wanted. In the event, it was Reuben Bysouth she rang, not sure how far she could trust him, but knowing no one else to turn to, after she and Hannah Wetherby had dragged Angela to the cold-room door and tipped her down
those wicked stairs to get her out of the way until they could think of what to do with the body.
‘I’d like you to get rid of that car in the lane for me, Reuben,’ she said when he’d sloshed down the lane in the Land Rover and come in, shaking off water like a dog. ‘Anywhere, anyhow, as long as it can’t be traced. You can have what you can get for it.’
Angela’s car. His bribe for listening, without comment, to her carefully edited account of what had happened; for his complicity in what would later have to be done. Unshockable, he understood perfectly well, without her saying so, why she hadn’t contacted the police. He did ask her who the woman was who’d done the shooting, but when she refused to give either her name or the dead woman’s, he didn’t press her. What he didn’t know, he couldn’t be forced to tell. No one understood the need for keeping schtum at times better than Reuben Bysouth.