by Alex Pavesi
Nobody answered.
‘Then we should take it in turns to say where we were at the time of the murder, and whether we noticed anything of interest.’
‘Do you suspect one of us?’ Violet asked nervously. ‘Do you suspect Ben?’
Dorothea approached her. ‘It’s too early to say.’ And she stroked the young woman’s hair. She was now part of the semicircle, leaving the middle of the room empty as if they were sitting around a campfire, about to tell stories. ‘Who wants to go first?’ The question was met with silence. ‘Well, who was the last one to see her alive?’
Lauren turned to face Dorothea. ‘I suppose that would be me, then.’
Every day since her stroke Agnes had woken up to an overwhelming feeling of dizziness and disorientation. She lay very still, fighting the urge to be sick, and imagined that her wooden room was in the prow of a ship or hung from a hot air balloon, swinging from side to side. The light coming through the window was so bright, so smothering, that anything around the edges of the room was apt to blend into the walls, taking shape at the oddest moments.
‘It’s irresponsible to be keeping secrets at this time.’ A face loomed at her out of the wood; Lauren had entered the room without her noticing. ‘If you feel worse, you must tell us.’
Lauren was a blonde, floaty thing, married to her son Matthew; Agnes could see the attraction, but she’d never liked the woman herself.
‘Let’s have a little fresh air, shall we?’ Lauren opened the window and stood looking out at the view. ‘There’s Raymond, sweeping the paths. You don’t know how lucky you are to be free to sit and watch him all morning. A fine figure of a man, all sweat and muscles.’ She turned and winked at her mother-in-law. ‘Don’t tell Matthew I said that, of course.’
Agnes thought her daughter-in-law insufferable but found it was usually best to stay silent until she grew bored of talking.
Lauren was now nibbling on some toast that she’d brought up on a tray. ‘That doctor, too. He’s always up here, isn’t he? The two of you alone together.’ She turned to Agnes with a brief look of disdain. ‘Why aren’t you talking to me?’
Agnes put one hand to her throat and reached out towards the tray with her other. She made the sound of creaking floorboards, as if her lungs were a haunted house.
Lauren looked at the glass of milk at the edge of the tray, and turned back to the old lady. ‘You can get it yourself. Do you think I’m your maid?’
Lauren smiled. For a moment she pictured herself throwing the food out of the window – two pieces of toast like two palm prints in the soil and then the impact of the milk, like a retch into a flower bed – but resisted the impulse. ‘Do try to sort yourself out in time for lunch.’ She stepped towards the door. ‘And don’t forget your sister is coming today.’
There was a creaking and a slamming of wood, then the blonde apparition was gone.
Dorothea bowed her head. ‘The last friendly face she ever saw.’
Lauren nodded. ‘Yes. I left Agnes and came downstairs. Violet was asleep, on the couch, so I had nothing to do and went home. I thought I might do an hour of housework before coming back to join you for lunch. When I returned, she was dead.’
‘Thank you.’ Dorothea squeezed Violet’s hand. ‘Perhaps you could go next, dear.’
Violet shivered. ‘Yes, all right.’ But she could barely speak, suddenly overcome with fear and guilt.
She’d been dreaming about Ben.
How strange to think that two months ago he was just an image from her childhood and now he was in her thoughts all the time. As if her lust for Raymond wasn’t shameful enough.
There were three dreary lounges on the ground floor of The Grange, connected to one another like the chambers of a digestive system. Matthew found Violet asleep on a low couch in the darkest of the three, the blinds drawn down and inaccessible behind an unbroken line of desks and tables.
Matthew approached his niece. He was bored. Pretending concern, he put a hand on her forehead as if checking for a fever. The touch woke her up and she opened her mouth to scream, then saw in the dim light that it was only her uncle and instead the scream became a hot rush of breath, like a stifled sneeze. It was a more appropriate response to his presence.
‘You poor child,’ he said. ‘You must be exhausted.’
There was something putrid about his touch after her sultry dreams of Ben. She looked shamefully into the darkest corner of the room. ‘Uncle Matthew, forgive me. I woke up early to prepare for lunch, but I got so little sleep last night. I just planned to sit down for a moment.’
‘There’s nothing to forgive, Violet. Your efforts in this house are heroic. Only sixteen, and effectively the head of the household.’ Seventeen, but she didn’t correct him. ‘Lauren has taken Mummy’s breakfast up. We thought it best not to wake you.’
Violet got up and walked through to the kitchen. Matthew followed her, still talking. ‘In some ways it will be a blessing for all of us when this is over. Then we can make sure you’re taken care of.’
Violet smiled weakly. She felt a pang of sadness about her grandmother’s failing health. ‘Not too soon, let’s hope.’
‘Dot will be arriving in an hour. I thought I might go to the station to meet her.’
Violet frowned, facing away from him. Her grand-aunt’s visit meant more work for her. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That would be nice of you.’
‘I think I might set off soon, then.’
Violet looked out of the window. ‘Here,’ she said, as he went to the door. ‘The children are playing by the pond. Take them an apple each, will you?’
He nodded and she handed him two apples from the bowl that were as large and bright as tennis balls.
Violet looked at each face in turn.
‘After that I went back to sleep, until I heard my sister scream about an hour later.’
‘Thank you,’ said Dorothea. She looked sympathetically at Lily, who was standing half hidden behind Matthew. ‘Then the children found the body. That would perhaps be a logical point for you to take over the narrative, Raymond?’
He seemed surprised to have been mentioned at all. He stood up straight, proud to play his part. ‘That’s right. I heard the scream. I was outside in the garden, picking up leaves.’
Agnes had been unbearable lately. Confined to her room, with only a view of the garden for entertainment, she had taken to watching and commenting on everything Raymond did. He had spent some of his time, over the last few days, repairing a boat he’d found in the garage; yesterday he’d made the mistake of starting work on it – turning it upside down on the driveway so he could paint it – directly under her window. He’d made it through most of the day, but in the late afternoon he heard her calling weakly to him. It hurt her to shout, so instead she opened her window and rattled her stick against the top and bottom of the frame.
He looked up at the window: an eyeball with a needle stuck in it. She’s unhinged, he thought.
‘I don’t pay you to play with that wooden toy,’ she said to him, after he’d walked up the three flights of stairs to her room. She only spoke to him, or about him, in terms of money.
Instead she’d asked him to pick up all the fallen leaves in the garden, to tidy it for her sister’s visit. ‘Of course, ma’am.’ Then he’d walked back down the three sets of stairs, picturing her broken body bouncing down each step and landing with a broken neck at the bottom.
He was up early on the day Agnes died, hoping to finish the boat. But tiredness had proved too much for him and he’d kicked the wood in frustration, leaving a footprint in the fresh white paint. Then he’d dragged it over to the pond and dropped it in. He wanted to check it would float. The white paint swirled into the water.
He took a shovel and wheelbarrow and began collecting leaves. He was stooped down at the side of a hedgerow when Lauren and Matthew arrived, neither of them noticing him. And the barrow was almost full by the time he spotted Ben standing one field over, hiding behind a tre
e and holding his binoculars up to his eyes. When it wouldn’t take any more without spilling, he pushed the wheelbarrow over to a compost heap at the corner of two fences and tilted it forward, then stood back to admire the amount he’d gathered. Some had started to turn brown but most were a poisonous green and the heap looked like a plate of vegetables. Then he noticed an indentation at the side; a small hole where something heavy had been thrown at it.
He put his hand in and pulled out a dead squirrel. Its body lay heavily across his gloved hand, rigid except where the head hung down from the edge of his palm, as if it were dangling from a string. He felt around the neck with his thumb. There was nothing there, just soft skin like worn fabric with some wiry tendons inside. The creature had been strangled, to begin with, then all the bones in its neck had been snapped.
He threw the body back into the compost and muttered under his breath: ‘Why do you do it, William?’
An hour later the job was finished and he was putting the shovel back in the shed, when he heard a scream come from the house and saw Violet run out of the front door followed by the two children.
He was with her in a matter of seconds. ‘Violet.’ He gripped her wrists tenderly. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Agnes, she’s been hurt.’
Raymond tried to push past her, into the house, but she halted him with a warm palm on his chest. ‘No, go for Dr Lamb.’ He didn’t hesitate, he just turned and ran.
The doctor’s house was over a mile away, at the other end of the village, and although Raymond was in a rush he was already pacing himself so he could run the whole way there. So when he emerged from the lane that connected The Grange to the main road and found Dr Lamb sitting on the low wall that surrounded the war memorial, smoking a pipe, he thought at first that he must be dreaming.
‘Thank you, Raymond,’ said Dorothea. ‘That is most intriguing. Perhaps, Dr Lamb, you could take your turn next? What were you doing at the time Agnes was killed?’
Dr Lamb looked confused. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘What were you doing at the time she died, please?’
The doctor was astonished; the rest of them stared at him blankly. ‘I thought I was here as a witness, not a suspect. Why on earth would you think it matters what I was doing?’
‘Perhaps it doesn’t, but you were in the vicinity of the house at the time it happened. And that fact is currently unexplained.’
‘What I did with my day is none of your business. Talking to you about it could violate the confidentiality of my patients.’ No one seemed impressed by this line of argument and they continued to look at him expectantly. ‘If you must know what brought me to the war memorial, it’s simply that I was taking a walk around the village. It’s a habit of mine, late in the morning. I only stopped there for a minute to sit and light my pipe. Raymond found me there, I sent him on to the police and made my way down the lane. Of course, by that time she was already dead. Thirty minutes dead, by the look of her.’
‘Well then,’ said Dorothea, slightly intimidated by his raised voice. ‘Thank you for clarifying.’
Lily was listening to that same voice, six years later. ‘She didn’t dare accuse me again after that, not to my face.’
‘And did you really think it so unreasonable that she considered you a suspect, or were you just being petty?’
Dr Lamb laughed at this unabridged insult. ‘I’m not sure I remember. I really was just taking a walk, though. The whole thing was quite ridiculous.’
‘I suppose it was.’
‘But let me continue. This is the part you’ll be most interested in.’
The doctor paced around the centre of the semicircle. ‘Your line of thinking, Dorothea, is flawed. Anyone could sneak up on this house from any angle. The garden is a mess of hedges and trees and the house itself is more doors than walls. If you want to know who did this, you’d be better off looking for a motive.’
‘And nobody here has a motive,’ said Matthew. ‘Then it must have been an outsider?’
‘Exactly,’ said Dr Lamb.
‘The motive was money.’ Dorothea spoke quietly, but everybody stopped to listen to her.
‘Money?’ said Matthew. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Agnes wrote to me a little over a week ago. She thought that somebody was trying to poison her. She’d woken up one morning last week feeling close to death, convinced that something had been put in her drink.’
This was different from her usual dizziness. It felt as if there was something feathery living inside her; a restless swan crouching in her guts, with its neck extending up through her throat. She gritted her teeth in agony, and drew the obvious conclusion: someone had tried to poison her but had underestimated the dosage required. Any one of them could have done it; the jug of water was left by her bed throughout the day, and who knows where it had been before that?
The doctor sounded outraged. ‘Did you mention this to the police?’
‘I had hoped that wouldn’t be necessary.’ Dorothea stared at him calmly. ‘She also had the impression that her room had been searched. A few little things were out of place.’
‘But,’ said Matthew, ‘Mummy had nothing to steal.’
‘That’s not entirely true,’ said Dorothea. ‘Your father, when he was alive, when the fields were overflowing, used to buy her jewellery. A piece every year, for their anniversary.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard the story,’ said Matthew. ‘But she sold them all. When times became hard.’
‘No,’ said Dorothea. ‘She lied to you. She sold everything else, but she couldn’t bear to part with her diamonds.’
‘How ghastly,’ said Lauren, quite excited. ‘And have they been stolen?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Dorothea. ‘I don’t know where she kept them. They were hidden somewhere, at first because she felt ashamed that she’d lied about them. Then later for their safety.’
‘Did anybody else know about this?’ Matthew looked around the room.
‘I knew she’d kept a few small pieces,’ said Violet. ‘But not the diamonds. I’ve cleaned that room, every inch of it. There’s nowhere they could be.’
The last of the day drained from the sky and there she still was: Agnes, sitting by the open window in a room now dark, listening for footsteps on the stairs.
She leaned forward and pulled an old, cracked slat of wood from the frame, where the window would sit against it when closed. Behind that was a thin slit, extending into the wall itself, a hiding place chiselled into the bricks. Out of it she pulled a tatty cloth pouch and then she carefully poured its contents onto the table beside her chair. A stream of jewels tapped onto a silver tray. Rubies, emeralds and diamonds, all half black in the moonlight. It wasn’t safe to look at them during the daytime, only when the creaking staircase that led to her room had held its breath for the night. There were thirty of them, forming a shallow pile; it looked like a treasure trove from a children’s adventure book.
This is what they were all after, this shallow, heavy fortune.
Dr Lamb poured them both another drink. ‘You can’t still be cold?’
Lily ran her hands along her arms. ‘I think it’s the topic of conversation that is chilling my blood.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We can stop.’
‘No, no. I’m fine, really.’
‘I think we’ve reached the end, anyway. I left your aunt Dorothea to her childish games.’
‘My grand-aunt, Dr Lamb. It’s important to get the details right.’
‘Very well, I left your grand-aunt to her speculation and walked out, so that’s where my story must end. She persisted in playing detective for a few more weeks, even questioning the rest of the village. Of course, that only convinced them we were all suspects. And that’s when I started thinking about moving. I understand she died a number of years ago?’
‘That’s right, a year after Agnes. Entirely natural causes, in her case.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘She never q
uestioned me, of course.’
‘I did notice that omission. Do you remember anything of that day, apart from finding the body?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Lily. ‘I remember it all quite clearly.’
After Dorothea’s gathering dissolved, William and Lily found themselves in one of the cramped storage spaces on the second floor. It was a rare treat for them to be up so late. They should have been sent to bed, but everyone was distracted and nobody wanted to acknowledge the end of such a momentous day. Now the two of them were alone together.
Lily was picking at a loose strip of wallpaper. ‘Dottie’s playing detectives. Do you think she’ll solve the crime?’
William didn’t respond. He was standing by a forgotten windowsill, lined with Christmas cards from several years ago, and watching the indistinct movements outside. She approached behind him.
‘William, when we went to look at her body, you already knew she would be there.’
He shook his head. ‘I didn’t.’
‘You said you wanted to show me something.’
‘I didn’t know it would be like that.’ The boy was sobbing.
She crept up to him slowly, then put a comforting, probing hand on his shoulder. He turned around. He was crying openly now, with tears dripping from his chin. She looked at him. He held out a chubby closed fist. It hung in the air like a moon. With her other hand she touched it and it opened; she looked down into the cupped flesh, red with indentations. Centred in his palm was a glistening diamond ring.
‘And that was that,’ said the older Lily. ‘I’d solved the crime. My young cousin William had murdered her. To my eleven-year-old mind, I was the greatest detective in Europe.’
‘Well,’ said Dr Lamb. ‘You certainly kept that to yourself.’
‘Of course. I was appalled by the crime, but I still wanted to keep him out of trouble. I would always have taken his side. And I thought for a long time that he really had killed her. He’d shown me proof, after all.’