From Devon With Death

by Stephanie Austin

  ‘I’m not sure. It opened just after I opened Old Nick’s.’ To be honest, I hadn’t been too pleased about it. Old Nick’s had enough competition in Ashburton as it was, with fifteen other antique traders and a scattering of gift shops, and we were already disadvantaged by being stuck up a lonely side street, the aptly named Shadow Lane.

  But the new gallery, Swann’s, was in a different league from Old Nick’s: smart and expensive, concentrating on paintings and sculpture by feted artists, far superior to the odd collection of stuff we try to peddle in Old Nick’s. The owner, Meredith Swann, crafted the original jewellery she sold: original twists of chunky silver, settings for sea glass, quartz and semi-precious stones. The silver swan she wore around her slender neck was an example of her own work. She had come around to see Old Nick’s shortly after she’d opened, ostensibly to introduce herself. But her real motive was soon apparent. She wanted Sophie’s paintings for her gallery. Sophie is really talented, has work on display in shops and galleries all over Devon and I’ve no problem with her spreading her wares, but somehow, Ms Swann’s blatant interest in poaching her works rankled with me. Sophie must have felt awkward about it too, because she turned her down.

  ‘She’s a lovely-looking creature, the owner,’ Chloe went on, finally finding what she was searching for under a bundle of tissues. ‘She reminds me of someone, some actress, I expect.’

  Meredith was certainly glamorous enough to be in films. I envied her straight, conker-brown hair. She had that smooth, glossy look: hair, skin and lips all possessed of the same glowing sheen. It was a healthy radiance that I suspected was born out of iron discipline – a stringent diet and rigorous exercise routine, also resulting in the unhurried feline grace with which she moved. She probably meditated as well.

  Chloe had insisted on going into her gallery for a wander around and I gazed with envy at hand-blown glass in jewelled colours, sophisticated, modern pottery, woven alpaca shawls, original silver jewellery and delicately painted silk scarves. I had to admit Sophie’s exquisitely detailed watercolours would sit well on these walls. For her own sake, I decided, I must talk her into it. Business is business, after all. Meanwhile, Chloe had fallen for a sculpture of an otter, although she had a tough time deciding whether she liked it more than a hare by the same sculptor. The cost of it made my eyes water.

  Just as we were leaving, Verbena Clarke had walked in. Relations between Verbena and me are always strained. She is the only one of my employers to have sacked me. It’s true, she later felt forced to offer me my job back, but by then the damage was done. She had never been pleasant to work for and I cheerfully told her to get stuffed. Standing back to let her through the gallery, the most she could summon in thanks was a stiff nod of acknowledgement. I could feel her glowering at me as Chloe and I passed the window, and I had turned to give her a smile and an annoying little wave.

  Tea and tartes citrons later, we emerged from Taylor’s and headed back towards the car park. I was trying to steer Chloe firmly, to discourage her from more shopping. I wanted to get back to her house and finish her wretched unpacking. But after a few steps, she suddenly grabbed my arm, hissed, ‘Quick! Hide!’ and pulled me through an open door into the grocer’s.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, gaping at her.

  ‘Those two people over there,’ she was trying to peer out of the door without being seen, ‘on the corner, outside the estate agents, do you see them?’

  ‘That couple?’ I could see a man and woman, probably in late middle age, the woman willowy and slightly taller than her male companion.

  ‘They’re looking very smug and pleased with themselves,’ Chloe went on, her plucked brows puckered in a frown. ‘You don’t think they’ve bought a property here, do you? Of all the cheek!’

  She was so indignant I began laughing. ‘Who are they?’

  Chloe didn’t answer, still concentrating furiously on the couple outside. She drew back hastily as they strolled past on the opposite pavement. ‘See where they’re going!’ she commanded imperiously, prodding me between the shoulder blades.

  I looked out in time to see them disappear into the tea room. ‘They’ve gone into Taylor’s,’ I told her.

  ‘Thank goodness, we can escape!’ She hurried off, leaving me to give an apologetic shrug to the girl behind the counter, who was staring, open-mouthed.

  ‘Who on earth are they?’ I asked when I’d got Chloe and all her shopping safely stowed back in the van.

  ‘I met them on a cruise – don’t remember which one – they’re retired actors, perfectly charming couple, of course!’

  ‘Well, if they’re perfectly charming, why do you take such exception to their being here?’

  She began shaking her head distractedly. ‘I suppose it’s my fault.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘That they’re here. You see, they were talking about Devon and how much they would love to move here, and you know when I go away I always take my thingy with me … you know, the thing I keep all my photographs on …’

  ‘Your tablet?’

  ‘That’s it. Well, I was showing them pictures of Ashburton and Dartmoor and telling them how lovely it was … but I didn’t mean them to come here! I mean, when you exchange addresses with people you meet on holiday and tell them to visit you anytime, you don’t actually expect them to turn up. It’s just not done! The most you expect is a Christmas card.’

  ‘Well,’ I ventured when I could stop laughing, ‘perhaps they’re not living here. They may only be visiting.’

  Chloe was shaking her head with conviction. ‘No, they’re here to stay,’ she moaned in the voice of a doomed prophetess, ‘I can feel it in my bones.’

  If Chloe’s bones were reliable, they were the only part of her anatomy that was.

  ‘Did you actually give them your address?’ I asked.

  She blinked uncertainly. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then you haven’t got much to worry about. You’re hardly here, anyway. You’re on the high seas most of the time. Do you remember their names?’

  ‘Oh. Derek? No, that’s not right. Something beginning with a “D” … I don’t remember … Amanda!’ She held up a finger in triumph. ‘I’m sure her name was Amanda.’ She closed her eyes and shuddered. ‘As long as they don’t want to visit me. Visitors are too exhausting.’

  So exhausting was the prospect that on our return to the cottage, she had to lie down.

  I carried on with the task of unpacking. I was determined to get it finished. I didn’t have any more free days to offer her, and wouldn’t see her again until midweek when I was driving her to see her consultant at a private hospital in Torquay.

  When I’d finally hung everything on hangers and got all the suitcases squared away, I popped my head around her living-room door. She was lying on the sofa, watching the shopping channel, her feet up and a glass of sherry at her elbow.

  ‘Do have a little drinkie before you go,’ she said, waving the television remote in the direction of the decanter. ‘Now, you mustn’t let me spend any money,’ she added as I poured. ‘What do you think of that ring with the yellow zircon?’

  ‘Not a lot,’ I said frankly.

  She heaved a sigh. ‘You’re right,’ she added sadly, switching it off.

  ‘You know, when you dragged me into the grocer’s to hide,’ I told her, taking a seat, ‘I thought you’d spotted Jessie Mole.’

  Chloe shuddered. ‘That creature!’

  I grinned. ‘You know her, then?’

  ‘I used to employ her. Years ago, when Howard was still alive, before I took up seafaring.’

  ‘Employ her?’

  ‘She was my cleaning woman. I had to let her go.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She was …’ Chloe hesitated, frowning, trying to find the right word ‘… intrusive. I don’t think she ever stole anything − other than sprays of my perfume − but she used to snoop. She’d disturb things she had no business touching. She’d go throu
gh all my pots and potions. I could always tell because she never screwed the tops back on the bottles properly. She wasn’t very good at covering her tracks. I caught her once reading my mail.’ She took a sip of sherry. ‘You know, for months I wondered why the milkman disregarded all the notes I left for him … I never got what I ordered. So, one morning I got up early to see if I could catch him … I was going to ask him why he kept ignoring my instructions, give him what for … I stationed myself by the window there, where I could see the front step. There was my empty milk bottle with the note rolled up in the neck of it. Then Jessie came walking up the road – she couldn’t see me, I was behind the net curtain − I saw her stop, look about her, take the note from the bottle, read it, then put it in her pocket and walk on.’

  ‘She stole your note for the milkman?’ I laughed. ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘Well, precisely! What sort of person steals notes from milk bottles?’ she demanded. ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘Didn’t you tackle her about it? Ask her what she thought she was doing?’

  ‘No,’ she chuckled, ‘but next day I put out a rather different sort of note. I never saw her again.’

  Before I left Chloe, we went through my diary, making sure I had all her hospital appointments noted down. She liked to get a full MOT when she came home, to ensure she was fit enough for her next cruise.

  I was later leaving her than I’d hoped. It was gone six, the shop would be shut and Pat would have gone home. I decided I’d pop in anyway, in the faint hope that I might have sold something during the day. There was no sign of Pat, but I discovered she’d left a note for me on the counter. Someone brought in parcel for you. I didn’t catch his name. I’ve put it in your unit.

  The place where I displayed my wares had once been the old storeroom. Here I kept the bric-a-brac and oddments of furniture that made up my stock, and also the vintage clothes I sold on commission for Ricky and Morris. I looked around and found the parcel, wrapped in brown paper, propped up against the wall. It was oblong and flattish and quite heavy. My name was scrawled on it in handwriting I didn’t recognise, and there was no indication where it had come from. I certainly hadn’t ordered anything.

  I wondered, as I tore the paper off, if it might be a birthday present from someone, but my birthday was something I tended to keep quiet about and very few people knew when it was. Inside was a picture in a simple black frame. I found I was looking at the back of it and turned it over to see a print − Ophelia by John Everett Millais. I gazed through grimy glass at the poor drowning mad girl floating downstream amongst the flowers, her eyes open, her hair rippling on the water, the weight of her long, pale dress gradually dragging her down, singing as she died.

  I searched around but there was no explanatory note – nothing.

  I looked at the picture again. I remembered reading how the model, Lizzie Siddal, spent days lying in a bath of cold water while Millais painted her. She caught a terrible cold, apparently. But this time the picture made me think of something else, of a grotesque effigy under the bridge, bobbing obscenely on the surface of the water.

  I phoned Pat when I got home and asked her if she could tell me anything about the man who’d delivered the picture. ‘He didn’t say who it was from?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Sorry. He spoke as if you’d know all about it. And I barely got a look at him. He was wearing one of those baseball caps. I was busy serving a customer at the time and he was in and out in seconds, just dumped the thing on the counter and left.’

  ‘OK. Thanks.’ I put the phone down, still with no idea where the picture had come from or why it had been left for me at the shop. Had it been brought in for me to sell for someone? I didn’t remember making any such arrangement. I’d just hang it on the wall and hope an explanation for its presence would come to light.

  I sat down on the sofa and leafed through the mail I’d picked up from the hall table, which mostly consisted of credit card statements and begging letters from charities. There were three envelopes that obviously contained birthday cards, but I decided I’d be good and wait until the morning to open them. I propped them on the mantelpiece, kicked off my shoes, and was pondering what to have for supper when Bill strolled in from the kitchen and leapt up on my lap. As usual, doors and windows were all shut, and how he’d got in was a mystery.

  ‘Do you know Hamlet?’ I asked him. ‘Ophelia was Hamlet’s girlfriend. She went mad because he was so rotten to her and killed her dad, stabbed him behind the arras. She fell in the river and drowned.’

  Bill was too busy purring and treading up and down on my lap to answer. I lay back and let him tread away. I’d had to learn the speech about Ophelia drowning for my English A-level. I still remembered bits of it.

  ‘There is a willow stands aslant a brook,’ I began, ‘That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream; there with fantastic garlands did she come … Blah-di-blah, lots of stuff about flowers … Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide; and, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up … something, something, something …’ Bill had closed his eye and stopped purring but I could tell he was impressed. ‘But long it could not be,’ I went on, ‘till that her garments, heavy with their drink … pull’d the poor wretch from … something … to muddy death. There!’ I felt triumphant. Well, I’d remembered most of it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I reckon January is a rotten month to get born in. I could hear the rain before I opened my eyes, pattering on the glass of Kate and Adam’s conservatory, if that’s what you can call the structure of rotting wood and cracked glass that is gradually peeling itself away from the back of the building. The roof is just a few feet below my bedroom window and even a light shower makes a hell of a racket. This didn’t sound like a light shower, though; it had a relentless, monotonous rhythm to it as if it had set in for the day.

  It wasn’t just the weather. Christmas might seem like a distant memory, but it’s not really, not in financial terms. I don’t mean to sound mercenary, but generally January is not a time when people splash out on birthday presents. And you can’t go anywhere interesting either because all the attractions have closed for the winter and restaurant owners have grabbed the opportunity to go away on holiday.

  Bill had brought me a present: half a vole lying on my duvet cover. I struggled out of bed, picked the poor thing up by the tail and flushed it down the loo. Just as I was washing my hands I heard a buzzing noise from the laptop. I groaned, shrugging on my dressing gown. It was still ridiculously early, the light outside just a dull greyness struggling through the curtains. But Seoul is seven hours ahead of us and in South Korea my one remaining relative, Brian, was up and eager to wish me a happy birthday. I sat down at the screen, hit the button, and he appeared. His Skype face was slightly distorted, his amiable features swollen. I suppose mine looked the same. I pushed my hair back from my face so he could see me.

  ‘Hello, Juno! Happy birthday!’

  I winced. He was altogether too loud for this hour of the morning but obviously felt he had to yell as South Korea is a long way off.

  ‘Thanks, Brian.’ I couldn’t stop a cavernous yawn.

  ‘Been out celebrating?’ he asked.

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Good for you!’ Brian is a diplomat but today he obviously had his listening skills switched off.

  ‘How’s things?’ he demanded cheerily. ‘How’s it going in the shop?’

  ‘OK, I suppose.’

  ‘And all your dogs and grannies, you’re still walking them?’

  ‘Well, I don’t walk the grannies, but yes, I still have all my clients.’

  ‘I seem to remember your cousin Cordelia telling me once that your lot are supposed to be ambitious, you know, hard-headed business types—’

  By your lot he meant people born under the sign of Capricorn. ‘They are, yes.’

  ‘—not that I believe any of that clap-trap, of course,’ he added hastily. ‘But what’s gone wrong in your cas
e?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I lied. I did know. Cordelia was an astrologer by profession, and she explained it all to me. My moon and Venus in Pisces, that’s what had gone wrong, giving me too much empathy and unbalancing my supposed hard-head pragmatism altogether. Not that I believed it, either.

  ‘Well, as long as you’re happy. Listen, sweetie. I haven’t sent you a present but I’ve transferred some money into your account.’

  ‘Oh, Brian, you shouldn’t! I owe you so much already.’

  ‘You don’t owe me anything,’ he responded firmly. ‘We’ve been through all this before. If your grandfather hadn’t been such a stubborn old fool, he’d have left everything to you instead of tying it up and making it damn difficult for me to give you what’s rightfully yours. But don’t worry, I’ll be over next year, and we’ll get a few things sorted out.’

  ‘It would be lovely to see you.’ I was genuinely fond of Brian and I only saw him once every two years when he came back to England on leave. I thought I’d better enquire after his hag-wife. ‘How’s Marcia?’

  ‘Oh, fairly perky, you know.’

  The idea of a botox-stiffened mantis like Marcia being even slightly perky was impossible to imagine. ‘Give her my love,’ I said dutifully.

  ‘You doing something nice on your birthday?’ he asked.

  I sighed. ‘No, just working.’

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘I’m spending the day with Ricky and Morris,’ I explained.

  ‘Oh, that pair! Well, don’t let them lead you astray.’

  ‘Too late.’

  He laughed heartily. ‘Well, you take care. And let me know if you need any more funds. Promise me, now.’

  ‘I will,’ I lied, crossed fingers hidden in my lap.

  He promised to Skype again in a month or two and we said our goodbyes. I stared at a blank screen and experienced a rare moment of loneliness. My mother had died when I was too young to remember her, from a drugs overdose. My grandfather had disowned her, and me, and if it hadn’t been for Brian I’d have been brought up in social care. He’d seen to my education and arranged for Cordelia to look after me in the holidays. But she had gone too, years ago. Talk of her always made me sad: Cordelia, my good witch mother. I felt suddenly bereft. Just birthday blues, I suppose. I reminded myself that self-pity is unbecoming, got up, put the kettle on and fetched my three cards from the mantelpiece.