by Amy Myers
Had Elfie had this core of selfishness too? Apparently not from the descriptions of her, and even in her portrait there seemed a frailty that Elena’s photographs failed to convey. Nor did Elfie get what she most wanted. She must have agonized over her dilemma too, but accepted that she had no choice but to stay with Gavin and Matthew.
‘Elfie was the trapped butterfly,’ Georgia added, gambling on its likely effect. ‘Elena just fluttered on her own merry way.’
Luckily Peter cheered up. ‘That’s very lyrical of you, Georgia.’
‘How does it affect Alwyn Field’s death?’
‘I suppose I feel I should look into it for Elfie’s sake, just as I would have done for Elena,’ Peter ended with a shamefaced glance at her.
‘We should be doing it for Alwyn’s sake, not Elfie’s. But there is nothing in Alwyn’s story to take us forward.’
‘Except Damien Trent.’
Blast Peter, she thought crossly. He would pick on her Achilles heel. ‘He came here to talk to Joe Baker, probably for family reasons.’
‘Point dismissed. If good old Joe were so important to Trent, he would have known before he came that Joe had long departed. There are such things as death certificates, the internet and family research. And at the very least Trent would have known what generation Joe came from and be able to calculate whether he was likely still to be living aged a hundred and five or whatever.’
‘True,’ she admitted reluctantly. ‘And I admit Damien had seen Birdie Field, as well as Joe, which fits in with his interest in Alwyn.’
‘He had, you said, more than a passing interest in Field. He might have been just a fan of his work or of the Fernbourne Five as a whole, but if so why didn’t he spread the word more widely that this was his reason for being here? Who else did he visit apart from Birdie Field?’ The tapping fingers on the arm of his wheelchair began: a sure sign of frustration. ‘We need to know more about Field’s death. I’ll ask Mike if he can put in a request for the inquest report. He won’t begrudge me that.’
Unless it trod on his ground, she thought, as she went inside to pay for their drinks. The sun was still shining but sinking fast, and she and Peter had had the garden to themselves. When she came back, however, she saw that Peter was deep in conversation with an elderly woman who had seated herself at the table. An unusually clad one, Georgia noticed. A pink woolly hat with blue bobbles adorned her white hair, and a bright red jacket with orange trousers and blue blouse completed her outfit. Her face was tanned and wrinkled, but it looked extremely happy. She beamed at Georgia.
‘Alice Laycock, Georgia,’ Peter introduced her. ‘Ted’s wife.’
Georgia’s immediate thought was that this garden couldn’t be attributable to her; it was more likely to be Ted’s precise handiwork. Alice looked a few years older than Ted, and as if she might have taken a step back from the worries of everyday life.
‘Here for supper are you?’ Alice enquired. ‘Doreen turns a good chip, does Doreen.’
‘Doreen’s Bob’s wife,’ Peter explained. Typical, thought Georgia, amused. She’d only been away for a couple of minutes and already he had the family sorted out. On their earlier visit with Mike, there had been too much going on for Peter to indulge in his normal pursuit of making himself completely at home, but he was making up for it now. A shout from the doorway distracted them.
‘Gran, Mum wants you.’
When there was no sign of a response, the young man slouched unwillingly towards them. He was a good-looking lad in his late teens – and Georgia recognized him. Last time she had seen him, he was lurking in a church porch, with his face contorted with jealousy over Emma Baker.
‘Like hell she does,’ volunteered Alice happily. ‘She thinks I annoy the customers. Aren’t annoying you, am I?’
‘By no means,’ Peter assured her – truthfully, Georgia knew. He always related to eccentricity, which he claimed was often the truth uncomfortably presented.
‘Tell your ma I’m busy, Adam. Met him, have you?’ Alice winked at her.
‘No,’ Georgia smiled, as the self-conscious lad was forced to nod to them. ‘But I’ve seen you. You’re a friend of Emma Baker’s, aren’t you?’ He blushed red and mumbled something.
‘Was.’ Alice cheerfully put her foot in it. ‘That Sean’s messing around with her now, ain’t he? Up to his old ways, is he? You’re not snorting again, are you?’
Georgia hastily intervened, seeing Adam’s embarrassment. ‘She’ll see sense,’ she said with more assurance than she felt. She had been referring to Emma, but to her dismay she realized she had been ambiguous.
‘No I damn well won’t,’ Alice said gleefully. ‘Bang, bang, bang.’ She brought her fist down on the table. ‘He’ll get himself rough music, he will. You mark my words.’
Adam’s embarrassment turned to gentleness rather than annoyance. ‘Come on, Gran. Mum’s got your supper ready.’
If she were Emma, Georgia thought, she knew which swain she would pick. But then would she have made the same choice at seventeen or eighteen? And what was this about drugs? It tied in with what Mike had been saying about the area behind the church being used for dealing. Was that Sean’s ‘old ways’?
‘What do you mean about rough music?’ Georgia asked, intending to lead on to the drugs, but Alice was off on her own track.
‘Did Sean have anything to do with that killing, young man?’ she asked.
‘Dunno, Gran,’ was Adam’s stonewall reply.
‘He’s in trouble, ain’t he?’
Adam glanced at Peter and Georgia. ‘Yeah. Sort of.’
‘Village business, that is. We could’ve coped till that daft Trent man came here. Strangers are always trouble. Comes of sticking your noses in where they’re not wanted.’ She grinned at Peter, but there was no warmth in the smile now.
By the time Georgia reached Medlars, it was past eight o’clock and she was in a mood to expect problems. Peter had already snapped her head off for insisting on checking that his carer Margaret had left supper ready for him. He was not a child, he yelled at her, thereby making her feel like one.
Luke was nowhere to be seen, and Georgia prepared their own evening meal, still fuming without any outlet. Finally at gone eight o’clock she was forced to go across to the oast house where he had his office. It was only a stone’s throw from their front door but sacrosanct land so far as unnecessary intrusion was concerned. The staff had long since gone home, but Luke was poring over a set of proofs in the office, and hardly looked up as she came in.
‘Is anything wrong?’ she asked fatuously, trying to sound calm and sympathetic.
‘Only the usual.’
‘Which is?’
‘We’re in overdraft again.’
‘The company or us?’ This was unexpected and definitely deflating. Nothing like a dose of depression to dampen irritation.
‘They’re beginning to be suspiciously similar,’ he grunted. ‘The company for the moment, but that will have a knock-on effect. No salary for me, and no royalties for you in October unless we buck our ideas up.’
‘I’d love to buck, but how?’ This was looking like really bad news.
Normally Luke would have laughed, but not today. That was hardly surprising, considering he still had a mortgage on Medlars, and the higher interest rates weren’t helping.
‘Is there a magic bullet?’ she asked.
‘A bestseller or two would help.’
So now was not the time even to discuss another Marsh & Daughter case, she realized, otherwise the dreaded word ‘contract’ would emerge at some point, only to be refused. ‘How bad is it?’ she asked.
‘The bank has given me an overdraft for three months – at a price. Everything rests on autumn sales and prompt payments.’ He grimaced. ‘Not the rose garden I promised you, is it?’
‘There’s one way out of course, to tide us over.’ The words were out of her mouth before she had thought them through. Now all she could do was wait for the fall-out.
Inevitably, Luke realized immediately what this way out was. ‘That’s entirely your decision, but it shouldn’t be made only because we need the money.’
Oh, hell, she’d walked into the quagmire head-on. The ball was back in her court: should she sell her house in Haden Shaw? Cutting her lifeboat adrift would inevitably bring up the question of marriage again. And that decision was even harder to make.
He obviously read her expression correctly for he continued wryly. ‘Let me help, my love. Think of capital gains. Would it be sensible to sell it? House prices have gone up a lot since you bought it.’
‘It would help us out of our present hole.’
Luke agreed. ‘Especially if we married.’
‘Either way,’ she said too quickly, appalled that marriage was back on the agenda so quickly.
He sighed. ‘Keep the house.’ He didn’t add ‘as an escape route’ but it was implicit.
‘I could rent it.’ It was a good straw to clutch.
‘Compromise has never suited you, Georgia. Or me,’ he added.
Stalemate.
Determinedly, she pushed domestic matters to the back of her mind, telling herself correctly, if unconvincingly, that injection of capital wasn’t the basic answer to their problems.
On her next visit three days later her former house felt reproachful at her treachery. It was waiting for her like a pair of well-worn slippers, and she lingered over her mail – increasingly little – before she went next door to the Marsh & Daughter office. Of course, she thought, as Peter now slept on the ground floor there was a spare room upstairs. Two in fact. She could use one of those …
She dragged her mind back to the Fernbourne Five, wondering if they worried about mortgages too. That was the trouble with the past: what survived were the memorable highlights. Even diaries recorded only clues to someone’s everyday living problems, but how did one know they were true and not loaded in one direction or another? She thought back to her childhood, and her memory persistently threw up happy days of family picnics. Were they the rosy glow created by present longing or had they really existed? The latter surely, but then what had happened to the unhappy niggles and problems that must have occurred?
‘Ah, there you are, Georgia.’ Peter greeted her arrival in the office, and then promptly demanded to know her progress.
‘Not much further forward,’ she confessed. ‘The local papers report the death on the lines of “man found dead by hanging” or “suspected suicide of local poet”, but there were no interviews with Hunt or Elfie as there would be nowadays.’
‘I did better,’ Peter said smugly. ‘No Times obituary, which is unusual, and no word from Mike yet on the inquest report, but the press reports are most interesting. It wasn’t a verdict of suicide, with or without the balance of the mind being disturbed. It was an open verdict, which means there must have been some kind of police investigation. And that isn’t mentioned in Matthew Hunt’s book.’
Georgia was annoyed with herself for missing this. ‘Mike will be delighted to hear that. Do we infer that it might have been murder disguised as suicide?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘Wouldn’t more than one person have to have been involved if it were murder? It would be too difficult to manage it otherwise, even if he were strangled before being suspended.’ Plain words, but to Georgia they immediately brought back a sickening image of that peaceful stream and tree. The thought of what might have happened there one summer’s day long ago became frighteningly real, and merged with Damien’s death in her mind.
He regarded her wryly. ‘Do you envisage the rest of the Five murdering Alwyn for letting the side down over the plagiarism?’
‘Four,’ she amended. ‘Roy was long dead by then.’ She had found out further details after speaking to Damien. ‘He had died in the Café de Paris during an air raid on Saturday, the eighth of March 1941. And it’s not such a crazy idea. It would explain the lack of mention in The Freedom Seekers.’
‘You don’t think Birdie would have noticed all this activity at her home? Anything about her in the local reports, by the way?’
‘Yes. Alwyn died on the twenty-first of May 1949. It was a Saturday. Birdie was away for the weekend visiting their parents, and came back to find the body; he’d been dead over twenty-four hours by then.’
Peter reached for The Freedom Seekers. ‘Matthew might be short on detail about the inquest, but I seem to remember he waxed lyrical over the suicide notes. Yes – here we are. There were two, one for Elfie and one for Birdie, and both consisting only of short extracts from his verse. Elfie’s read:
“Only you
Will mourn my passing soul,
Only you,
Have loved the whole of me.”
‘And this was Birdie’s,’ he added.
“I cannot limp beyond the mountain
Into paradise.
The door was closed when up I came.
The music melted.”’
Peter pondered. ‘Does this get us any further?’
‘It might do. Birdie’s was from the same poem as on Alwyn’s tombstone,’ Georgia said. ‘I looked it up. It was from a poem called “The Piper”.’
‘Perhaps after Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”? It fits. Only in Browning’s poem, it’s physical limping, as the last of the village children fails to reach the mountain before the door closes on the Piper and all his friends. In Alwyn’s case the limping is emotional.’ Peter paused. ‘In view of this open verdict, I take it we’re limping onwards in this case?’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. There seemed no choice, even though Peter now seemed to have reservations too. If Damien Trent had been following this track, they had a duty to Mike to pursue it, as well as assuaging her nagging sense of responsibility. Irrational perhaps, but it was still there.
‘Matthew first? No, bad plan. In his book he states flatly that Alwyn killed himself. He’s hardly likely to contradict that at this stage. Clemence is the better bet. How about a woman-to-woman talk?’
‘I don’t see her as a womanly chat sort of person. But I’ll have a go.’
‘Janie is at the hairdresser’s,’ Clemence announced, straight-faced – which was clearly why she had suggested Monday afternoon rather than the weekend to Georgia. ‘How about a nice nip of whisky in the garden?’
‘Perhaps a nip of tea instead, in the interests of driving home, and a rain-check on the whisky,’ Georgia amended.
‘Done.’
Georgia carried the tray down to a small walled garden in the manor grounds. It was a pleasant spot, reminiscent of Sissinghurst Castle gardens, and she thought the great gardener Victoria Sackville West would have approved of it, especially in this September sunshine. There was a vine loaded with ripening grapes running riot over the arbour that sheltered the bench to which Clemence had led her; pears ripened against the warm red brick of the wall, and the garden itself was still full of colour. Various statues peered out of the greenery at points along the paths. At right angles to the bench a life-sized warm stone sculpture of a man on a seat regarded them, a folded newspaper on his knee.
‘That’s Gavin,’ Clemence said matter-of-factly. ‘I do, or rather did, some sculpture work and it’s a friendly face to have around me here. It was his house after all, and in a way it still is since Matthew inherits after my death.’
‘Not the trust?’
‘That didn’t exist when Gavin died. It was very much the family thing with him. Janie was otherwise provided for, and Matthew got the house. He’ll lease it to the trust on a peppercorn rent. His house in the village goes to his wife and children, of course. There are two sons, and three grandchildren. The oldest, Sean, is nineteen now.’
‘Sean?’ Georgia exclaimed. ‘Would he be a friend of Emma Baker?’
‘Ah. You are getting to know our village. Yes, she’s his latest conquest – unless it’s the other way around. She’s a heartbreaker, that one. Rather a problem is our Sean. A rebel, but he
’ll grow out of it. At present he fancies himself as the boss amongst the village youth. He dropped out of university and now he’s supposed to be doing an IT course to work in his father’s firm. He seems to have a lot of time on his hands unfortunately, and he’s not the only one. Even a rebel can’t rouse saints. Still, I shouldn’t be bothering you with this blot on our picturesque village. Cheers.’
Clemence, thought Georgia, probably did or said nothing without a reason and so what lay behind this? She was not going to get sidetracked, however. ‘I have a difficult question for you.’
‘I’m used to those.’ Clemence’s eyes flickered. ‘About the Fernbourne Five, of course. What is it?’
‘Alwyn Field. Is there any chance that he could have been murdered? The inquest recorded an open verdict.’
She had obviously taken Clemence by surprise, as though this were a completely new idea, but she recovered quickly. ‘In theory it could equally well have been an accident. After all, some people got their sexual thrills in the same variety of ways as today,’ she said briskly. ‘However, I don’t see Alwyn risking his life like that, and as for murder, well, there was no doubt about its being suicide amongst us. For good reason. Alwyn was in deep depression having realized that Elfie could never be his. Tragic doomed love affairs are splendid for Pre-Raphaelite art, but not quite so much fun in real life. And then,’ she continued, ‘there was the plagiarism charge, which was somewhat more complicated than Matthew told you. Alwyn played a much more positive role than Matthew implied. Matthew wasn’t there, of course, but I was. After Roy died, I believe Alwyn deliberately decided to claim ownership of all the poems, not just the couple he had already published. I had felt a little sorry for him because before the war his own work had languished beside Roy’s. His detective novel had a phase of popularity after the war, as did his new collection, A Mourning in Spring. Unfortunately they have both sunk without trace since then.
‘After the war, when Alwyn suggested a reprint of The Flight of the Soul, it all came to light,’ Clemence continued. ‘Gavin had always been surprised by the strength of the poems in that collection, compared with Alwyn’s former style. Then he found the originals in Roy’s handwriting when some of his papers left behind at Shaw Cottage were taken up to the manor. Alwyn had no answer to that; he was unable to produce any handwritten originals of his own, only the typewritten copies. He blustered for a while, refusing to admit what he’d done, but the evidence was all too clear.’