Blackground

by Joan Aiken

  “Don’t stay down at the harbour too long,” Pat called after her. “And do watch out for tractors — it’s so foggy you can’t expect them to watch out for you. And if you see Father Athanasios, invite him up for a grog.”

  “All right,” said Shuna. “But the fog’s not so thick now. Patches are quite clear.”

  The telephone rang. Pat picked up the receiver. “Glifonis? Yes, this is Miss Limbourne. No, I don’t have any story for the Wessex Chronicle. No, it was an entirely accidental death. It was thought the lady may have been hunting for fossils — can’t possibly tell you what time of day, no doubt the coroner — shotgun pellets? I’ve no idea what you are talking about. Most improbable . . . you’d have to ask the police that — No; I’m afraid not. No, that is quite out of the question. Ask the police. No, nothing more. Good day.”

  “Blasted newspapers have got on to the Olga story,” she said crossly, a few minutes later, when Elspeth reappeared in the kitchen.

  “It was bound to happen sooner or later.” Elspeth washed earth from her hands, dried them vigorously, and said, “I think I’d better just go up and call on that little Cat. Don’t like to think of her up in that house on her own while he’s wandering about the village in this nasty unpredictable mood. I’ll tell you what he reminds me of — one of those disgusting radioactive mixtures gone critical. So I’ll just pop up and see if she needs anything. Perhaps stay with her for a bit.”

  “Good idea,” Pat agreed. “It seems more than probable that Olga was making mischief between them.”

  “What ever else did Olga do? Besides —” Elspeth twined a ravelled grey muffler round her neck — “Cat, silly girl, is a shocking hypochondriac. Did you know? It’s not good for her to be alone for too long; she suffers from the most far-fetched notions about the state of her health —”

  “And how did you discover that?” But Pat’s tone had a dry respect: she knew her friend’s talent for spotting such foibles.

  “Just put two and two together! Now don’t forget the casserole. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

  But when Elspeth opened the door, they both heard the frantic shrilling of the dog whistle.

  So, of course, the village filled with police again. But Elspeth reached me long before they came, hobbling up through the patchy mist, almost before I had taken breath for my second whistle-blast.

  “What is the matter, my dear? What has happened?”

  “It’s Ty,” I stammered. “My husband. He’s — he’s dead!”

  “Dead? My dear, are you sure? What happened? Was he taken ill? A stroke?”

  “No — no — somebody shot him — there’s a horrible thing sticking out of his back.”

  I had tried — stupidly — to pull it out. That had been my first impulse. But no way would it come. And it wouldn’t have made any difference. Nobody could be deader than Ty was. So then I had knelt by him, gulping and sobbing useless tears of remorse, regret and terror, until, after a while, it came into my head that Society would expect me to do something about the crumpled empty thing that had been menacing, furious, unpredictable Ty only half an hour before.

  Elspeth took one look at me and said, “I’ll make a cup of tea.”

  Which she did with great speed, putting in about two dessertspoonfuls of sugar. It was disgusting, but boiling hot, and it did stop my shivers, thereby giving me a chance to notice a new and terrifying pain which began in the roof of my mouth on the right side and from there forked down into my right arm and my chest . . .

  “Oughtn’t we to call the police?” I asked, my teeth chattering against the rim of the cup.

  “Pat will have done that already. I told her to do so as soon as I heard your whistle.”

  “But how did you know?”

  “He’d been to see us — he was in a very peculiar mood — not rational, I thought — storming on about the Pool family (he’s given them notice, you know, and us too) — and carrying on about poor Lilias Leyburn — it was plain he’d been breathing fire all over the village,” Miss Morgan said placidly, “and I thought he might have driven some poor soul to violence.”

  “But why would someone kill him? In such a queer, awful way?”

  Elspeth had been out to look at Ty’s body, and returned with her lips pursed and brow puckered.

  “Well,” she said, frowning, pouring herself a cup of the tea she had made, “I do have a theory about that; the police will certainly think it’s very far-fetched and that I’m a fanciful, meddlesome old body.” She gave a somewhat eldritch grin.

  I went back to something she had said. “Lilias Leyburn? You mentioned her name. Who was she?”

  “Oh, my dear. She was a poor girl — very, very brainy, but sadly unstable I fear. She was at Larchmont — that was my little private school, you know, I was headmistress. Academically she did most brilliantly, but we always worried about her.”

  “Did — did —” a sudden piercing memory came into my mind. “Did she go on to Manchester University?”

  “Yes, took a science degree. Pat had known her father, Ostin Leyburn, from way back — met him over some scheme he had for starting a factory at Weymouth — at first he couldn’t get planning permission. — Her mother had died, you see, poor child, when she was quite tiny, and I’m afraid her father didn’t give her so much of his attention as he should have; he was so busy pursuing his career; a very successful man indeed —”

  Was that why the old boy was so nice to me? I wondered. Because he had neglected his own daughter and felt guilty about her? How mixed our motives are. One leg of mutton drives another down. Who said that? (And what a very peculiar expression it is.)

  Elspeth, frowning with disapproval, had swiftly tidied away all the newspaper cuttings, stuffed them back in the envelope and buried it deep in my underwear drawer. “Who sent you these? Olga? I might have known. There’s no need for the police to see them. Olga had been a friend of poor Lilias at one time.”

  “I was going to ask where she came into all this?”

  “Well, I am very much afraid,” said Miss Morgan, wearing a most headmistresslike expression, “that Olga, having found that your husband had been short-listed for the Companions of Whatever-it-was — she told us about that — and being aware of this sadly unhappy connection from his younger days — he had promised to marry the poor girl, I understand, but made not the least effort to keep in touch or look after her. And finally she died in that dreadful way —”

  “Olga had been trying to blackmail him?”

  “Well, yes, I fear so.”

  “What happened to Lilias Leyburn?”

  I had not had time to do more than glance at the clippings before Ty appeared, and had not the least wish to look at them afterwards. I asked the question with an icy chill at the pit of my stomach.

  “She vanished,” Elspeth said slowly. “She had been on drugs at the university, and associated with a very wild set; then she just totally disappeared. It was thought at first that she must have died somewhere unidentified — they were a wealthy set — used to roam about Europe and the near East. She always had plenty of money from her father. But when he died, it was found he had cut her out of his will. Assuming her to be dead, perhaps. The money was left in trust for scientific research and charitable purposes. The trust to be administered by your — by Lord Fortuneswell. Or James Tybold as he was then.”

  “Yes.”

  “But then — after eight years or so — Lilias turned up again. Telling a most piteous and dreadful tale. It seemed that she had married a man — a citizen of some wild little Arab emirate — and he had taken her back to his own country. What she expected, goodness knows — the garden of Eden perhaps —” Miss Morgan paused.

  “Go on,” I said, thinking of Papa and Shangri-la.

  “What she found was a primitive mountain village, absolutely cut off, where for seven years she lived a c
ompletely menial existence — working in the fields, treated as a servant, without any rights, by her husband’s elderly female relatives — of whom there were dozens — unable to leave — physically abused, beaten on her hands till some of her fingers were broken —”

  Irrelevantly — no, relevantly—I remembered the grey velvet hands, with diamond watches on their velvet wrists.

  “And she had worse experiences — still, no sense in going into all that,” Elspeth said quickly. “But then, unbelievably, she escaped. A Swedish scientific film unit came by, the first Europeans she had seen since she arrived, and she managed to hide herself, stowed away in their truck. When they got to Baghdad she told them her story, and the Swedish Red Cross flew her to Stockholm. And from there she got back to England —”

  “What happened then?” My mouth was dry.

  “She was pregnant by the time she got to England.”

  “By — by her husband?”

  “No. She had had two children, in the village, but had to leave them behind when she ran away. No, by one of the Swedish scientists; with whom she had spent a night.” Miss Morgan’s tone withheld judgment on this. “She borrowed a car and went down to Knoyle, looking for her father — but he was dead by then. When she learned about the money she went into premature labour and was taken off to Ludwell hospital, where she had a baby which had to be reared in an incubator — and then, somehow, she escaped from the hospital —”

  “Escaped?”

  “The place was scandalously understaffed. But then,” sighed Miss Morgan, “what hospital isn’t?”

  “What did she do?”

  “Found a doctor’s car with the keys in, drove herself back to Knoyle. There’s a workshop, it seems, among the outbuildings, with power saws and so forth — Lilias had used it when she was younger, had been fond of joinery as a child — she cut off both her hands with the circular saw, and bled to death. One of the maintenance men came to see why the lights were on, and found her.”

  “Oh, my god.”

  I sat thinking about Lilias Leyburn. I wondered what she had looked like. What she had believed in. What she had thought, when she painfully made her way back to her childhood home, only to find that her father had died. Had she been angry with him for dying? We expect people we love to stay alive and look after us. And Ty — who had promised her father to look after her and see she came to no harm — how must he have felt about it? I wondered if he had become acquainted with Leyburn in the first place through knowing his daughter . . . He must have thought her long dead when she vanished. And then, to have her reappear, only to kill herself in that dreadful way — what a shock for him.

  “Why didn’t I hear about her death? It must have been in the papers?”

  “It was hushed up very much — except in the local press — naturally the hospital authorities were extremely keen to keep it out of the national news — it reflected great discredit on them —”

  “And so it would on Ty.” Discredit is putting it mildly, I thought. But no doubt by that time Ty had influence, and friends with influence; they had been able to reduce the story to a sad unfortunate affair of a poor unbalanced girl who had come to grief.

  Miss Morgan looked out of the window. “Ah, here come the police.”

  During the two hours that followed I was heartily glad of Miss Morgan’s presence. Up to the moment of their arrival it had not occurred to me that I would be their natural first suspect. I had forgotten that in murder cases the spouse is always the likeliest killer. But this was soon borne in upon me by the tone in which they questioned me, the way they looked at me, the remarkably thorough way in which they went over the house, although I told them that Ty had never even set foot in it.

  “You say he knocked on the kitchen door?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you let him in?”

  “I had no time to. I was sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter — before I could move he took the key from his pocket he was just going to open the door — when he fell forward and I saw this thing sticking out from his back.”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “I can help you there,” Miss Morgan put in.

  The detective inspector — Mattingley, his name was — gave her an annoyed look.

  “Just a minute — Miss — er, if you please. I’d rather you didn’t —”

  “No, but I can help you,” she went on with calm authority, ignoring his protest. “It’s a crossbow quarrel. And the reason why I can tell you that is because it is almost certainly one of mine.”

  “One of yours, Miss — ?” Now he looked even more annoyed.

  “Morgan,” she returned placidly. “I live just next door down the hill, at Number 2.”

  “And you have a crossbow?”

  “Yes; I used to shoot for Hampshire, you see; I haven’t been involved in county archery for some years, of course, but I still keep a couple of bows.”

  “Where?” he snapped.

  “Down there in my garden shed.”

  “Is it locked?”

  “Good heavens, no. The door doesn’t even have a lock. All the people around here are so honest!”

  “Who knew that the bow was in the shed?”

  “Everybody in the village, I should imagine,” said Miss Morgan.

  “Did you?” The inspector turned back to me.

  “Well, no, I didn’t, as a matter of fact. But I’ve only been here a few days,” I said apologetically.

  “Did you know Miss Olga Laszlo?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long had you known her?”

  “Ten years perhaps — I don’t remember exactly.”

  “Where were you at the time her body was found?”

  “Taking a walk with my husband on the cliffs.”

  “And last night?”

  “Here, in this house.”

  “With your husband?”

  “No, alone.”

  “Why was that? Where was he?”

  “At the Close Hotel in Dorchester. So far as I know.”

  “Why? Why wasn’t he here?”

  “He prefers more comfortable surroundings. Preferred.”

  The inspector gave me a sharp look and said, “I understand that you and your husband had separated. Is that so?”

  “We hadn’t — decided —” I was beginning, but Miss Morgan again interposed.

  “I don’t think Lady Fortuneswell should answer any more questions except in the presence of her lawyer. Don’t you agree, my dear?” turning to me.

  “Yes,” I said in relief, wondering whom to summon. It didn’t seem a case for Ponsonby.

  “Oh, very well,” said Mattingley crossly, but then pounced on her. “Didn’t this house almost burn down a few nights ago?”

  “Now what nonsense have you picked up?” She smiled at him as if at an impertinent fourth-former. “There was a little smoke from a smouldering sofa cushion caused by faulty wiring. Mr Laurence Noble was easily able to put it out.”

  “I’d like to telephone my lawyer,” I said getting up. “May I do that from your house, Miss Morgan?”

  “Of course, my dear. I’ll come with you.”

  “I will too,” said Mattingley.

  I wished again, on the way down, that my crutches were not in the back of Ty’s car. But I still had Zoë’s stick, and Miss Morgan helped me. Mattingley walked alongside, like a sheepdog — he had rather the look of a collie, sharp long nose, narrow eyes, with black hair slicked back. On the way we passed Odd Tom, pattering upwards, who gave me a wide-eyed anxious glance but went on his way, minding his own business.

  The village, dusk now falling, was again overrun by police; Mattingley had left several at my house, taking it apart, no doubt, piece by piece; while others had been
sent to reinterrogate the neighbours. Glifonis was in a state of siege.

  I rang up Roger Blagdon, a friend of Joel’s, who had steered me through the niceties of the Pyramid contract and, by good chance, caught him at home, about to go out to the theatre.

  “Good grief, Cat,” he said when he heard my tale. “Of course. I’ll come. Tonight?”

  “No, no, Roger, dear, tomorrow will be time enough. Go to your play.”

  “Are you sure? It’s only Ibsen. Little Eyolf.”

  “Go and see it. I’ll be fine till tomorrow.”

  “Don’t answer a single question till I get there,” he said.

  So the police took me into custody and I spent a night in a cell. I have passed many more uncomfortable ones in provincial hotels.

  XIII

  IN THE NIGHT I woke from a frantic dream of Ty’s hands murderously tight round my neck, and was hugely relieved to find myself in comfortable police premises.

  I had let out some kind of desperate yell, and a head came poking round my door to ask what was going on.

  “Nothing. I just had a bad dream. Sorry to have disturbed you.”

  “That’s all right,” said the head amiably, and was withdrawing again, when I asked, “By the way, on what grounds am I here? I’ve not been charged with anything, have I?”

  “You are here for your own protection,” stated the head. “Inspector Mattingley thought it best. Too many funny goings-on in that place, Caundle Quay.”

  Well, that was all right by me. I rolled up again snugly in my warm police blankets, with a wonderful carefree feeling of being in official hands. It seemed highly ironic to be suspected of Ty’s murder when, without a shadow of doubt, he had had a number of calculated tries at polishing me off.

  All in all, I thought sadly, it seemed fated that I should live and Ty should not, so I might as well absolve myself from blame in the matter of his death; somebody else felt for him a lethal ill-will and had loosed the deadly dart. Well: supposing I was tried and convicted of the crime. I thought light-heartedly, it would be up to HM Prisons to nurse me through my various terminal illnesses; I could just relax and let them get on with it. While the individual who really killed Ty — with ample justification, doubtless — could just make the best of the situation; I bore them no grudge. Perhaps it was the unhappy Pool boy; I did hope very much that it was not Odd Tom. Old Elspeth had said — hadn’t she?—something about a far-fetched theory; I wondered what it was and how Inspector Mattingley would receive it. Not favourably, I’d guess, judging from his general demeanour to the Ladies. Plainly he had them down in his book as meddlesome spinsters of the worst breed.