by Anne Morice
1
Passing the open nursery door, en route for the apricot box, I spied Serena sitting on the floor beside the white cupboard, surrounded by broken, shabby toys and a pile of dusty old 78 records.
‘Trying to clear out some of the junk,’ she explained. ‘Poor old Nan was such a hoarder and anything that one of the children had been fond of was practically sacred. Some of this stuff must date back to Rupert’s infancy, by the look of it.’
‘Is this really the moment?’
‘No, I suppose not, but it more or less crept up on me. I started to clear out a few things and this is how it ends.’
‘You weren’t looking for her spectacles, by any chance?’
‘Not specially. That’s a mystery, isn’t it?’
‘I hope you won’t mind my making it still more mysterious. I ought to have told you this before, but there hasn’t been much chance and I didn’t want to refer to it in front of Dr Soames, or anyone else for that matter.’
‘Refer to what?’
‘The spectacles. The point is, they were here, in this room, when she died.’
‘Oh, my dearest girl, whatever makes you think so?’
‘I saw them. They were hidden in a fold of the rug which she’d spread round her legs. When I pulled it up the glasses fell on the floor.’
‘But that’s incredible! Are you quite sure you’re not mistaken? Don’t forget that you were terribly confused and distressed at the time.’
‘Was I?’
‘You certainly appeared so, though I don’t suppose you remember much about it now. Merciful, isn’t it, how the memory obliterates these unpleasant experiences?’
‘Yes, isn’t it? Nevertheless, I did see the glasses. I remember bending down to pick them up. They were in my hand.’
‘Where did you put them?’
‘On the table there . . . I think.’
‘There you are, you see!’ she announced triumphantly. ‘You’re not sure, are you?’
‘Not about that bit. At least, I couldn’t swear to it on oath, but I am positive about the rest of it. If you don’t believe me, there’s a very simple solution. Why not ask Mrs Thorne?’
‘I have. That was the first thing I did, naturally.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Exactly what you told us at dinner. That she’d found a pair of spectacles, believed them to be Nannie’s and had taken them up to her; but you hadn’t heard the end of the story.’
‘No? How did it end?’
‘Apparently, they weren’t hers at all, hence all the fuss. Nannie probably saw it as some kind of trick, to tease her, which was why she lost her temper and said such rude things.’
‘Oh yes? And then what?’
‘That was all. Alice was very upset and she ran out of the room.’
‘I mean, what did she do with the spectacles?’
‘Oh yes, well, you see, she realised she’d made a mistake and that they must belong to Pelham or Lindy, so she put them back in the spare room.’
‘She wasn’t carrying them when she came out of the nursery.’
‘I expect they were in her apron pocket. What is this, darling? Some kind of inquisition?’
‘No, it’s just that I’m still a bit puzzled. All these loose ends bother my tidy mind. One pair of spectacles lost, one pair found, but it turns out that they’re not the same pair. Now it seems that the first pair is still lost and so is the second pair.’
‘No, no, dearest, you must try not to make everything so complicated. That’s not the way of it at all. The original pair, as you say, is still lost; those which Alice found must have been left behind by Aunt Louise last time she stayed here. She’s another dotty old lady who’s forever putting things in a safe place and forgetting where she hid them. That brings us back to where we started and there was nothing odd or sinister about Nannie having mislaid her glasses, I can assure you. She was always doing it and, naturally, without them she couldn’t find them. It’s perfectly simple, you see; no problem at all.’
‘Except, at the risk of being a bore, I must repeat that this time she did find them; or someone else found them and returned them to her, and subsequently that person or someone else saw fit to remove them again after she was dead. One either has to accept that, or else that a third pair has entered the script because, whatever you may say, I did see them, right here in this room.’
‘Yes, I expect you did, Tessa, but please don’t worry so much about it. I think you’ve overlooked the most obvious explanation of all and it was silly of me not to think of it before.’
‘Well, now that you have, do put me out of suspense.’
‘The fact is that we’ve both been so upset by the inquest that neither of us is thinking straight. You’ll kick yourself for not seeing this before, but what must have happened is that the lost pair had been tucked away in the rug all the time. It was the last place that anyone would have thought of looking in and at this time of year she wouldn’t have needed to use it very often, so there they stayed until the night she died. Doesn’t that solve the mystery?’
‘Up to a point. I’m not kicking myself so it hurts.’
‘Now, why’s that?’
‘Well, where are they now?’
‘Yes, I know, that is rather peculiar, isn’t it?’ Serena answered smoothly. ‘But I daresay we shouldn’t have given it a moment’s thought in normal circumstances. Perhaps the undertakers put them inside the coffin. If not, I’m sure I’ll find them sooner or later, among all this rubbish.’
It was like trying to lift up a marble with a pair of chopsticks. Each time I raised it up it slid out again, and the longer it stayed aloft the louder the crash as it fell back on the plate.
‘Yes,’ I sighed, ‘if you try hard enough, I feel sure you will. To change to a more fruitful subject, has Pelham spoken to you yet?’
‘Not since I last saw you. Why?’
‘In that case, he must still be with Lindy and the doctor.’
‘No, he’s not. Richard left a few minutes before you came upstairs. I saw him from the window. Pelham was out there too, seeing him off. Very civil he was being. The police have gone too.’
‘Ah! Well, that probably accounts for Pelham’s good humour. He’s chivvied the doctor into certifying that Lindy is too ill to be interviewed, no doubt. I’m afraid we haven’t seen the last of them, though.’
Serena sighed: ‘How tiresome and ridiculous it all is; but I suppose I could have foreseen that Nannie would go on making a nuisance of herself long after she was dead.’
‘Well, cheer up, because good news is on the way.’
‘I could certainly do with some. What is it?’
‘I’d better leave that pleasure to Pelham, but I think you’ll be pleased and I’m sure Primrose will.’
‘That’s the best news of all,’ Serena said, her expression lightening for the first time for days. It was a sight I was later to recall with some remorse.
2
Retreating from the nursery, I saw Lindy on the staircase. I think she had been on her way down, but she swivelled round to make it look as though she were coming up.
‘Hi, Tessa!’
‘Hi, Lindy! Feeling better?’
‘Oh, loads. I’m fine now, thank you.’
‘That’s good. You gave us all a nasty scare.’
‘I did? Why? I just felt a little off colour, that was all. Everything’s okay now.’
‘The trouble is that the current circumstances are not propitious for being off colour in.’
‘Oh, I see what you mean. But it wasn’t at all that kind of thing. It was just . . . well, it was just nothing, really.’
‘Glad to hear it. Were you looking for Serena? She’s in there.’
‘No. Tell you the truth, I was on my way up to ask if you felt like a walk this fine afternoon? I’m feeling kind of cooped up, being in my room all day.’
It was a reasonable claim and yet, in some indefinable way, her manner did not quite
bear it out. Her face, it is true, was rather drawn, making her eyes appear larger than ever, but there was a flush in her cheeks and a hint of bottled up excitement in her voice. Exhilarated, rather than cooped up was how I would have described her.
‘Anywhere in particular?’ I asked, suspecting that the walk might be the excuse for a private discussion, rather than an end in itself.
It was not so, however, for she climbed a few more stairs, clasped the newel post with her tiny, chicken bone fingers and said in her most babyfied voice:
‘You won’t laugh at me?’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
‘Or tell on me?’
‘Not if you say so,’ I replied, fighting a losing battle with boredom and impatience.
‘I wanted to see if we could find where that boy was tied up. You know, the one Serena was telling us about. She said it wasn’t too far from the lake and I thought, if we were together, you knowing the place so well, we might have a chance of locating it.’
‘That sounds rather a morbid objective for an afternoon stroll.’
‘Oh, sure, but then I am morbid,’ she answered cheerfully. ‘I have this very, very morbid streak in me.’
‘You wouldn’t prefer me to try and talk you out of it?’
‘Why no, Tessa, that’s good of you, but it wouldn’t be any use. Lots of people have tried. I even tried it on myself, but it hasn’t got me anywhere. I keep thinking about that poor kid all alone out there and what really scares me is that it could get all twisted up inside me, so it would come out some day in a different form and I’d do something awful that I didn’t even know I had it in me to do.’
‘And we don’t want that,’ I said. ‘We have enough trouble with the people who do know what it’s in them to do.’
‘So you will come with me?’ she begged. ‘I have this crazy, neurotic urge to find the place and see it with my own eyes and Dr Soames says I have to face up to my problems, instead of trying to pretend they aren’t there. So I want to try and get it out of my system, but all the same I’d be scared to go on my own.’
All this claptrap was thrown out quite matter-of-factly, but with a deadly seriousness that more than half convinced me that she was in earnest. At the same time, there was also the slender chance that, either on her own initiative, or acting on Pelham’s instructions, she had some quite different motive for wishing to inspect the scene of this ancient crime. If so, it could only be to my advantage to find out what it was and I said:
‘Okay, I’ll just get a jacket from my room and I’ll be with you.’
‘Thanks, Tessa, you’re a real sport! See you downstairs.’
‘In two minutes,’ I agreed.
It was to be hoped that she wasn’t counting them because the two minutes stretched to seven or eight before I rejoined her. The reason for this was the rather odd one that as soon as I walked into my bedroom I saw that the centre drawer of the apricot flounced dressing table was tightly closed. Some people of my acquaintance would have been more disturbed by finding it in some other position, so I must now confess to an idiotic but deep rooted superstition.
At the age of about eighteen I happened to be doing some practice make-up one afternoon when the telephone rang, and the ensuing conversation had led to my very first engagement in the theatre, which happened to be A.S.M. and understudy in a pre-London try-out which never got further south than Macclesfield. Some minutes after replacing the receiver I had drifted gracefully down from the clouds and had noticed that my dressing table drawer, for reasons now forgotten, was wide open. I was about to close it with a joyous slam when it flashed into my mind that this was the good luck position for it to be in and, so far as humanly possible, I have never completely shut one from that day to this.
Naturally, I soon discovered the impracticability of going through life leaving a trail of wide open drawers in my wake, so over the years I have developed a technique whereby the principle is upheld, without incurring the slur of eccentricity, and nowadays the drawer is always left open a token two inches.
Normally, this is scarcely noticeable by me or anyone else, but in Serena’s apricot box it had been sufficient to cause a distinct bulge in the muslin flouncing and this bulge had now disappeared.
I had left nothing of interest or value inside the drawer, so paused only to pull it out by the regulation distance before casting an appraising eye round the rest of the room and the first thing the eye lighted on was my bag, which was on top of the chest of drawers. A quick examination of the contents, followed by a more thorough and pessimistic one, which involved tipping them all out on to the bed, revealed that the only thing to have been removed was the sheet of writing paper to which I had so laboriously committed Nannie’s dying words.
Several emotions competed for supremacy, among them anger and outrage, shot through by the first little thread of fear, but there was no time to indulge them and as soon as the initial shock had faded I forced myself to concentrate on practicalities, leading almost immediately to a quick sprint to the writing desk. The pad and envelopes were inside the blotter, just as I had last seen them and I spared a moment to pass a quick vote of thanks to the inventor of the ball-point pen. The impression of my writing on the top page was clear as a bell and there were fainter traces on the second and third as well, so for good measure I tore off the first half dozen sheets and folded them into an envelope which I stuffed inside my bag.
After that I left the room, only to recapture another memory which sent me hurtling inside again. Since it is bad luck to re-enter a room for this purpose without sitting down on the nearest chair and keeping the feet raised off the ground while counting to eleven, I had to spend another few seconds over this ritual before collecting my jacket from the wardrobe. I then left the room again and descended at a leisurely pace to the hall, where Lindy was waiting for me.
‘You won’t need that, will you?’ she asked, eyeing the bag which was now slung over my left shoulder.
‘You never know,’ I replied. ‘All sorts of emergencies could arise.’
‘What kind of emergencies?’ she asked, looking faintly apprehensive.
‘Well, for instance, this may turn out to be quite a stiff ordeal for one of your nervous temperament. You might fall down and bruise yourself, or foam at the mouth. It is as well to be prepared for everything and I always carry a load of first aid equipment in this bag.’
If she were the culprit, it was scarcely to be hoped that she would fall for such a crude trick as that, and I was not specially cast down when she burst into trills of laughter and affectionately linked her arm in my unencumbered one.
‘Oh, Tessa, I really do love you! You know why?’
‘Not the foggiest.’
‘Because you’re so different from anyone I ever met before. So mundane, I guess you could call it. And I never know whether to take you seriously, or whether you’re just kidding.’
I considered that the same could be said of her, but the heavy bag bumping against my ribs was a constant reminder that someone in the vicinity was up to some pretty sharp tricks and I thought it wiser to stay mundane and appear to take all her remarks at face value.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1
The clump of sycamores known as High Copse was situated on rising ground about half a mile to the east of the main drive, almost in a straight line from West Lodge. To reach it we had first to cross the drive and then to climb the long steep bank on the far side, which eventually brought us out on to open grassland, on a level with the big house and overlooking the lake. Duck-pond would have been a more accurate description of this, but in typically grandiose Chargrove fashion it was always known as the lake. We could see the copse from this point, but the only approach to it was by circling the lake and then climbing up another slope on the far side, all of it in open country.
There were two black cars parked near the stable block and I grabbed Lindy’s hand and dragged her, squealing and protesting, back behind a high screen o
f rhododendrons.
‘What’s the matter?’ she squeaked in great alarm. ‘Where are you going, Tessa? Let go of me, will you?’
‘It’s all right now,’ I said, releasing her hand and dropping down on the grass.
‘I don’t understand,’ she complained, still in a high-pitched, tremulous voice. ‘What got into you, Tessa?’
‘I was trying to save you some embarrassment. Those were police cars down there.’
‘So what? They wouldn’t have opened fire on us, would they?’
‘Probably not. I daresay they weren’t even looking in this direction, but if they had caught sight of us it could have been awkward.’
‘Why? They couldn’t have guessed where we were making for and anyway it’s no crime, is it?’
‘No, but it occurred to me that if you’re too ill to give them a statement about your movements on Saturday night, then strictly speaking you ought to be too ill to go prancing around the countryside.’
‘Gosh yes, you’re right, I guess,’ she admitted, relaxing sufficiently to sit down and select a nice fat stem of grass to chew on.
An odd thing about Lindy was that she invariably had something in her mouth. She was forever biting her thumb knuckle, chewing up blades of grass or, as a last resort, nibbling the ends of her own hair. Perhaps she had cultivated the habit, as visual proof of her immaturity.
‘Only thing is, Tessa, I’m not sick in that way. Dr Soames said it would be okay to get up and lead a normal life, only I shouldn’t be pressurised in any way, on account of . . .’
‘Your psychotic neuroses and tendency to mental instability?’ I suggested.
‘Right!’ she agreed proudly, evidently assured that this time I was not kidding.
‘Try telling that to Superintendent Hobley-Johnson.’
‘Yeah, see what you mean. I guess your police aren’t that wonderful. Well, thanks anyway, Tessa.’
‘Don’t bother. The evasive action wasn’t solely for your sake.’
‘No? Whose then?’
‘Serena’s mainly. She’s got enough worries without the police turning all suspicious and fidgety.’