Last to Leave: A Superintendent Mike Yeadings Mystery (Superintendent Mike Yeadings Mysteries)

by Clare Curzon

She offered her arm and between them the two women raised Carlton to his feet and got him moving in the right direction. As they passed round to the front of the house the full heat struck at them again. Three fire appliances were present and a battery of hoses was being directed on the house, already reduced to a glowing shell. It seemed impossible that such devastation could have happened in so short a while. Piles of smouldering debris lay where thrown from windows in a panicky attempt to save what seemed precious. They had to pick their way through it all to where the family had been herded together, a phalanx of stunned strangers in oddly assembled garb.

  An ambulance was pulling away, circling what had been a reasonably tidy stretch of lawn before so much trampling, and just then the promised minibus, bright yellow, appeared at the far end of the drive.

  They were dragooned into a semblance of order, oldies first, and, busy with getting Carlton’s stiff old legs to cope with the high steps, Kate hadn’t time to look around for the twins, assuming they’d be equally occupied with organizing their elders and board last.

  A trio of firemen clumped across to the bus. One wearing a soot-smeared white helmet put his head through the bus doorway. He had a list on his clipboard. ‘Mrs Kate Dellar?’ he accused her, as though she might have denied it. ‘Could I have a word, please?’ So she climbed down.

  Then, as the others were driven off, he told her: Eddie had been injured. He was on his way to High Wycombe Casualty Unit. And, after a recount of survivors, one was missing: her daughter Jessica.

  Eddie? Jess? Both her children? ‘But they said everyone was safe!’ she shouted at him.

  A policewoman, fair hair straggling from an untidy bun under her crushed uniform hat, took her arm. Kate shook her hand off. Then the full horror exploded on her. She stared back at the collapsed frontage of the still glowing ruin. Jess – somewhere inside that inferno? No, no! Impossible.

  ‘We’ll drive you to the hospital,’ the policewoman offered.

  But how could she leave? There might, by some miracle, be just a chance that … But then Eddie – badly hurt? She was torn apart.

  In a daze she let herself be manoeuvred into the rear of the police car. The girl climbed into the driving seat. Kate was aware of the dark outline of a man beside her. He turned briefly to look at her as the siren crudely broke out after the doors slammed. He had a round, expressionless, puppet face with a sharp nose.

  ‘Cut that row,’ he ordered the girl, and leaned across to silence the siren and switch on the windscreen wipers. Twin jets of soapy water spurted up to dislodge the film of black detritus that had settled. The flip and slick of the blades on glass were the only sounds now above the low hum of the engine.

  The car swung out of the driveway and into leafy Windmill Lane, headlights stabbing the dark through a tunnel of golden trees. Nothing was real. Kate felt her heart beating up in her throat. She closed her eyes, hugged her chest tight, desperately hunting for the words of some prayer.

  There had been no point in their rushing. Eddie was no longer in the Casualty department.

  ‘Gone to theatre,’ a doctor explained. Kate had a ludicrous vision of a floodlit Edwardian proscenium, all gilt plaster and cherubs. The ruby velvet curtains were closed, like a crematorium chapel’s after last viewing of the coffin. She found herself retching. A nurse brought her a chair. They were handling her like a Friday night drunk.

  In the surgical ward Eddie wasn’t expected back for at least an hour, and even then not awake enough to talk. Come back tomorrow, she was told: not too early.

  She wanted to insist she’d just wait there, not be in their way, simply hold his hand when he returned; but it was fear of her son’s embarrassment that held her back. Over-imaginative and by nature protective, she’d always forced herself not to fuss, never let the twins feel she smothered them. Even more so since losing Michael.

  She hadn’t known that one day she’d need them there so badly for herself.

  ‘I have to go back to the fire,’ she said after they insisted that Eddie, with his injured head and chest, was in the safest hands possible. She believed they’d do their best, but had a fatalistic premonition. Distraught, and so recently widowed, she saw her little family being picked off, one by one.

  She was barely aware of being helped into a taxi. When it stopped she found she’d been delivered to the Greythorpe Hotel. She stood outside shivering on that early May morning as dawn slowly broke, and knew she couldn’t yet face the others.

  There was too much grief. Not only her own. Carlton had lost the home where he’d been born and lived in for most of his eighty years. If the reality of it hadn’t yet reached the old man, Claudia, totally aware, would be indomitably in command of both herself and him. Kate did not trust herself to be with them for now.

  She told the driver to take her to the Monkey Puzzle. From the pub she’d ring the family and explain she needed to be on her own at present.

  Which was far from the truth. But who was there now to be with?

  The Monkey Puzzle was named after the monstrous tree in its forecourt, which lodged the dust and traffic pollution of almost a century. Desiccated and hang-dog, it was shamed by the sprucely painted version of its kind on the inn’s swinging sign.

  The pub boasted a second tree at the rear, where it dropped confetti-like blossom on the little square of lawn referred to as the Beer Garden. A cherry tree, it had gone wildly leggy, the productive part of it isolated aloft like a ship’s crow’s-nest. Lower, it could have had nets thrown over in the fruiting season, but skied up there on its pine-straight trunk it was only a drop-in for scavenging blackbirds and pigeons. Whenever she thought of the pub, even before the casky beeriness of its smell and the dim, smoky interior swam into her mind, she remembered those two overgrown trees.

  For all its unpretentiousness, or perhaps because of it, she was fond of the place. This was where she’d stayed weekends in her late teens when Michael, very much the youngest of the three Dellar brothers, used to steal away from the manor house to meet her. She was supposedly in college and, skint as students always are, they could afford no plushier venue for their secret meetings.

  The then landlord had long departed, replaced by a disabled ex-midshipman from the Royal Navy, whose name remained over the door while the main work fell to Duncan and Lily Crick, his brawny son and motherly young daughter. For two decades now Kate and Michael had established the habit of dropping in, once she’d become an almost-accepted member of the Dellars’ extended family.

  The Cricks made her warmly welcome. They had woken to see the fire reflected in the sky. It was only half a mile from Larchmoor Place if you went straight through the woods, although three miles round by road. Duncan had rung the house, found the line down and then contacted the local police for information.

  With surprising tact they refrained from questions. Lily showed Kate to a comfortable room under the eaves, bringing up a tray of cold cuts and salad with a half bottle of good Merlot. She declined the food, poured a glass of wine, showered to get the stench of smoke off her body and hair, then climbed into bed wearing a kindly-lent outsize nightdress.

  Determined to sleep, she found it impossible. Against her will, incidents of the past day ran through her mind time and again, as if in a loop of film. She was forced to re-live all that had happened since her taxi drew into sight of the house – her husband’s home until the day they’d eloped together.

  She’d come a long way since then and considered herself a pragmatist. She knew that in his family’s eyes she remained little more than an outsider, valued only for having provided a brace of junior Dellars. But, released from close socializing since being widowed, she felt that she could withstand any disdain the family chose to display towards her. Or had done, until this moment.

  Loyalty to Michael’s ghost had made her accept old Carlton’s eightieth birthday invitation, although she hadn’t looked forward with any pleasure to the family gathering. She knew Eddie had felt much the same. About Jess �
� always the rebel – she wasn’t sure, and she’d been uneasy on seeing her daughter across the drawing-room, partly because of the circumstances of their last meeting.

  That had been when the girl told her she intended living openly with Charles Stone. Kate knew him only by reputation, a wealthy married man who had made a name in the City. Despite her determined policy of non-interference, she’d had to speak out against him.

  ‘It’s what we both want,’ had been Jessica’s excuse.

  ‘That isn’t reason enough, Jess. Marriage means something. He has a duty to his wife. Have you thought what you’d be doing to her? And the monster you’d be making of him? How could you ever trust him yourself, if he could walk out on the woman he’d solemnly promised to love and protect for life?’

  ‘Mother, you should just hear yourself!’ she jeered. ‘I wish, I really, really wish I’d a tape recorder for this moment. You sound like something out of the ark.’

  ‘Because I’m looking straight at what you’re thinking of doing? Be honest, Jess. Admit you’re valuing sexual attraction above loyalty. It’s downright shoddy.’

  Jess’s face flamed. For a moment she looked almost ugly. ‘You’re a Dodo!’ she’d screamed. ‘We love each other and that’s what we mean to do. What we’re doing already. I should have known better than to mention it to you at all! You go on and on about how you loved Pa, but I was there, remember? It wasn’t some great heroic passion that changed the world. You only think that now because you’ve lost him. If he was alive today, who knows …’

  And then Kate had slapped her. A stinging blow across her cheek. She left her standing there, head bowed, hands hiding her eyes and her chestnut hair tumbling about her shoulders.

  Ashamed because she had never before raised a hand to either of her children, Kate stumbled out of the narrowboat. She almost ran, with the wind in her face, along the canal towpath until weariness took over and she found herself at unfamiliar lock gates. A man leaning over his elbows on the bar advised her to go a quarter mile back and cross by the bridge, where a short walk would bring her to a railway station with a taxi rank.

  She had arrived home exhausted, fell into bed in broad daylight and slept for ten hours. They had never quarrelled like that before. There had never been cause to. Other dramas had been cautiously steered clear of crisis. Not this time. It seemed – if not the end of the world – a point passed to which they could never return: something both needed, now irrevocably lost.

  Jess didn’t ring to apologize. Nor did she. Neither of them had been in touch since.

  When Kate arrived at Larchmoor Place they were all assembled indoors for afternoon tea, except Eddie who couldn’t just slope away from work after Friday lunch. She had taken a week’s leave from the library, unsure how long she was meant, or was meaning, to stay. Whatever free time was left over would be profitably spent getting her little garden in order.

  If Carlton or Claudia had changed since she’d last seen them it was only to have become even more what they were before: he a frail guru figure and she utterly daunting. Thin and erect, she had beautiful bones under the tightly stretched parchment skin. Her dark eyes in hollowed sockets were matched by the sepulchral tones of a contralto voice which could imbue the most banal of remarks with momentous significance. Besides her early legal career she had been an amateur singer of some note, but now for several years had restricted herself to public recitations of her husband’s verses. She was, Kate knew, fifteen years younger than Carlton and would have carried her years well if she hadn’t always dressed in cobwebby draperies of black or grey. Eddie, as a little boy, had called her the Spider Lady.

  Carlton’s surviving brother, Matthew, had been born after a gap of six years, and Kate’s dear Michael much later, the only son of their father’s second wife, Lorna. Had he lived he would have been almost fifty. She was four years his junior. The twins had been twenty two this St. Valentine’s Day.

  If you counted Matthew’s step-grandson, the assembled family covered three generations. Matthew was a widower, Joanne having died of typhoid fever on her return from a dig in Egypt when Robert was seven and Madeleine only five. Now fifty, Madeleine was married to Gus, with a stepson Jake who had arrived that day with due biker panache on a Kawasaki and flaunting the company’s matching leathers. He’d dared to park his mount opposite the house’s double front doors. Jake was three or four years older than Kate’s two, but there was little come and go between the younger folk.

  A family member easily overlooked was the late-produced daughter born, to general amazement, some thirty-odd years ago to Carlton and Claudia. Daringly christened Miranda, she’d failed to live up to her name, once she’d miraculously survived. She had almost made the Guinness Book of Records for low birth weight, had three times stopped breathing and three times been resuscitated in hospital before eventually being brought home, puny and ailing, in the care of a nursemaid who’d been kept on as nanny until the child was eight. She’d been a solitary little girl, almost autistic, dumpy and without charm; an enigma to most of the family, not least to her parents.

  The last member of the party, an outsider who had yet to become acclimatized to the impact of a full Dellar assembly, was Dr Marion Paige. An unknown factor as yet, she was engaged to marry Robert as soon as his divorce was made absolute.

  As Kate slid in, the murmur of greetings only momentarily broke the conversation. Robert, robust ego that he was, had been centre-stage.

  ‘That book you left lying around …’ said Claudia accusingly.

  ‘Oh, did you see it?’ Impervious to any attempt to deflate him, Robert preened himself. ‘An advance copy. It comes out next month. Rather a good cover this time, I thought.’

  Nobody rushed to assure him he was right, but then none of the family shared his enthusiasm for science fiction. They doubted, in fact, whether Robert could be much of an author. If pressed into reading the things as they came out year after year they might have felt obliged to give an opinion on his efforts.

  ‘It’s very large,’ Madeleine ventured, to fill the gap. Its size alone had been too much for her.

  ‘For the American readership,’ Robert claimed. ‘They demand a big book.’

  ‘I remember – ’ fluted old Carlton, his nose lifting like a police dog on a waft of cannabis – ‘I remember when editors edited. They discussed the content, advised one what to cut.

  ‘Nowadays,’ he complained reedily, ‘it’s like putting money in a chocolate machine. Typescript in, hardcover out. No discussion, no editorial foreplay, no delightful West End lunching. All haste to get a profit. Automatic as phoning the quack for a repeat prescription.’

  ‘Mine’s not like that,’ Madeleine sighed. ‘Doctor, I mean. I have to wheedle and cajole like some courtesan in a cinquecento Italian intrigue before I’m allowed the weeniest amount of pain relief.’

  ‘Then he’s the rare, old-fashioned sort. Nowadays, once you hit fifty they’ve decided what to put you on, key it into the sacred computer and it’s set that way for the rest of your natural – or thereby ruined – life. More of the chocolate-machine reaction,’ said Matthew, backing up his elder brother whatever the cost to his embarrassed daughter.

  At the mention of age, scoring its menopausal bullseye, Madeleine had jumped up, scarlet-faced, and started fussily rearranging Claudia’s white lilac in a vase on the grand piano.

  ‘Oh, do mind the drips!’ Miranda burst out; then, covered in confusion, put both hands over her mouth.

  Everyone stared pityingly at Maddie’s back except Robert, stung by his sister’s disparaging attitude to his book. ‘Oh hard luck, Sis. Dad forgot you’d just hit the sensitive half-century.’

  ‘You’re looking well, Kate.’ Gus Railton moved across with a freshly poured cup of Earl Grey tea. She thanked him, conscious of all eyes swinging to read something into his effort to turn attention off his embarrassed wife. Poor Gus had a reputation for half-hearted womanizing. He had the unfortunate good looks of a melodrama vil
lain: lean, smooth cheeks with high colour under the eyes, which were of a piercing blue. Elsewhere his porcelain complexion contrasted with the sleeked-back gloss of jet-black hair. He even had the fine, smiley moustache of a thirties Hollywood star. Possibly there’s a Sir Jasper gene, Kate had thought, which also includes a weakness for gambling. In an old Western, Gus would’ve been the one with the figured silk waistcoat.

  ‘I’ve been gardening,’ she said to explain her slight suntan. ‘It provides a welcome break from working indoors all the time.’ She looked around and saw that apparently the ball was still in her court. She had to slam it back to keep the game going.

  ‘Actually I’ve seen a copy of your new book, Robert,’ she told him. ‘It’s on our order for June.’

  ‘At the library, yes.’ He eyed her shrewdly. Like the others he considered her occupation a pathetic effort, but never failed to call on its uses. ‘Did you happen to see how many copies the county’s taking this time?’

  ‘Er, no,’ she lied. It was only eight. Last year they’d gone for twelve, but all departments were economizing at the moment. The cut could have been simply for that reason.

  ‘Won’t you introduce us, Bobbo?’ asked the thin woman in lime green who’d been on the outer edge of the standing group.

  ‘A million pardons. Forgive my crude manners,’ Robert babbled, putting an arm about his fiancée’s waist. ‘Darling, this is Kate, my late Uncle Michael’s er, wife.’ He had shied off from using the word widow. Kate supposed none of them was accustomed to it yet, but his hesitation had made it sound as though her legitimacy were in doubt. She found herself smiling ironically as she took Marion Paige’s hand.

  ‘I should have known who you were,’ Marion said. ‘You’re so like your lovely daughter. Same eyes; same sweet smile.’

  Kate dared then to look straight across at Jess. Gone was her erstwhile mouse-nest neglect. Instead, the long, chestnut hair was twisted high into the glossy coiffure of a Roman matron. Under it a row of little circular curls appeared stuck flat across her brow. Her hair and skin shone. She looked wonderful. From student grunge to Caesar’s wife in one leap.