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

by Clare Curzon

  ‘I hardly think she’ll find that a compliment,’ Kate couldn’t help saying, then wondered if that had been Marion Paige’s intention.

  With the removal of the tea things the atmosphere eased a little and they were able to move about, trickling through to the terrace and fanning across the lawn. Kate found herself again in the company of Robert’s intended. ‘Have you picked on a date for the wedding?’ she asked.

  The woman gave a lean grin and Kate decided she might actually be quite fun. ‘His divorce isn’t absolute yet. When it is – ’ and she darted Kate a sideways look – ‘I think we may just go off and do the fait accompli thing.’

  ‘Cheat us of another family gathering?’ Kate suggested, almost innocently.

  Marion chuckled. ‘Could you bear that?’

  ‘Just about.’ They turned at the end of the shrubbery and started walking back towards the house. Robert was talking to Claudia in the doorway of the room they’d just left and waving his arms extravagantly. Dr Marion Paige regarded them both, head tilted. ‘He’s not too bad an old stick really,’ she said dispassionately.

  Kate was impressed. The newcomer had acuity and humour, a rare coupling. On the spur of the moment she dared ask, ‘What have you got against my daughter?’

  ‘Ah, that,’ Marion said sombrely, not denying what Kate had intuitively picked up. ‘That is another story entirely.’

  3

  Marion never answered Kate’s question but turned to smile at Robert as he advanced on them alone. ‘That woman!’ he complained. ‘Boadicea had nothing on her.’

  ‘A little opposition can be good for one occasionally,’ his fiancée murmured mischievously. In Robert’s case Kate doubted it. His face was turkey-red and he seethed with indignation.

  ‘What has Claudia done now?’ she inquired. ‘Had swords fixed to the wheel-hubs of their ancient Daimler?’

  ‘She’s only sold off most of Grandfather’s library.’

  ‘I’m sure she was well advised on its value first,’ she suggested.

  ‘That isn’t the point. There were books there which he’d always meant me to have.’

  Marion faced him with her lopsided smile. It entirely changed the severe expression of her straight, leathery face. ‘You can still get them, if you discover which dealers they went to.’

  That, of course, would mean reaching into his pocket, and Kate was quite certain that Dr Marion Paige was by now as aware as she that this action was painful to her intended. Kate doubted that their coming marriage would prove entirely comfortable. But certainly interesting. As Marion had herself said, a little opposition can be good for one occasionally.

  ‘What are you grinning at, Kate?’ he demanded, scowling.

  ‘I’ve been enjoying your fiancée’s company,’ she said, ‘and finding we’ve a lot in common. Contemporaries and all that, you know.’

  ‘Yes.’ He considered that a moment. ‘Silly, isn’t it,’ he told Marion. ‘Kate’s husband was born so much later than Carlton and my father that here she is, my aunt, and I’m actually her senior by six years.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Marion lied. ‘Now come and show me round the garden. It must be simply vast.’

  ‘A wilderness.’ Robert went off still complaining. ‘If they were short of cash why didn’t they get rid of a few acres, instead of the books?’

  Kate left them to explore together and turned back towards the terrace where Jessica was standing alone by a clematis pillar. It was time, perhaps, to bury the hatchet.

  Warily Jess watched her mother approach. When she was close she darted her a cool glance from under the fringe of flat curls. On near sight they reminded Kate of those little gilt coins Mediterranean girls sew on to their veils: intended, perhaps, to allure. She wondered who among this family party her daughter intended to work on. She hoped it wasn’t Old Carlton, with venal motivation?

  Had she hopes of a major mention in his will? However much she dazzled him with her vibrant youth and beauty, she’d hardly succeed there, with Claudia standing dragon-guard all the time. Jess would get as short shrift as her cousin Robert had over the books he’d coveted. Kate was realist enough to accept, and forgive, that the young couldn’ t avoid an occasional view of the elderly as eventual treasure-troves.

  ‘Is Eddie coming?’ Jess brusquely demanded, breaking into her mother’s thoughts.

  ‘I understood so.’

  ‘Good. I need to see him.’

  It was Kate’s turn to be spiky. ‘He’s been perfectly visible for the past few weeks. You could have looked at him then.’

  ‘I know,’ she admitted, suddenly almost humble.

  Kate was reminded of that later, because the first thing her son asked when he finally arrived, somewhat in a lather after the first gong for dinner had sounded, was almost the same question.

  ‘Is Jess here?’ he asked, having dutifully kissed her.

  ‘Very much so,’ she said dryly. ‘I suppose you suddenly need to see her?’

  ‘Something like that,’ he replied; and although it came out lightly, his eyes were deadly serious.

  She hadn’t stayed long in her daughter’s company that afternoon because Jake, divested of his biker gear, had come out in T-shirt and daringly brief Robinson Crusoe denim shorts with frayed edges, to monopolize the girl.

  Expensive Wild West-type fringed leather Kate always found amusingly elegant, but ragged grunge had raised her ire ever since Jess’s teenage flares threatened her clean carpets with their sweepings from the street. ‘I won’t have dog crap in with the rest of my washing,’ she’d warned her.

  Jess hadn’t spoken to her for four hours after that, profoundly wounded. Then she’d hand-laundered the offending jeans and thereafter wore them rolled ostentatiously high whenever in the house.

  Smiling at the recollection, Kate passed on from the young couple to Carlton, alone for once and stretched out on a rattan lounger, exposing scraggy bare arms to the welcome sunshine.

  ‘How are you, Carlton?’ she asked her elderly brother-in-law.

  His washed-out blue eyes almost twinkled. ‘Do you really require an answer?’

  ‘Yes: I don’t waste words. Not many, anyhow.’

  ‘M’m.’ He considered how to reply. ‘It’s a strange thing, this relationship with one’s body – like having an old acquaintance yoked on. From habit and with any luck, most of the time you don’t notice it’s there, then gradually things start to happen to it: small accidents, deficiencies. You begin to feel it’s letting you down, being disloyal.’

  He waved a hand airily. ‘Not that you’ve ever done much for it yourself. Often the opposite; taken chances and dragged it along. Then, irritably, you have to realize it’s fallible. You start to feel some pity for it, a little guilt. Eventually, I suppose, you’re relieved to be rid of the damned thing.’

  His piping voice, high for a man’s, ceased and he smiled dreamily into the distance. ‘Though I don’t particularly care to have mine done with yet.’

  He had almost implied he believed in a separate soul, or at least a personality independent of its physical shell. An avowed agnostic, maybe towards the end he was at least considering an alternative. Teasingly she put the possibility to him.

  ‘The individual’s essence? Ah, solve that little puzzle if you will.’ He was in a whimsical mood now, pleased with himself and the opportunity to tease back. ‘I’m delighted to have stimulated your curiosity about me.’

  His puckishness didn’t deceive her. She’d read his most recent book of verse, The Century’s Done, published for the millennium. Had read it, actually, more than once. He’d used the same coy style he affected now, but in fact he was a seeker after truth. What had the twentieth century – his lifetime – been about? Scientific discoveries; extension of earth’s physical boundaries; labour – and time-saving devices; but to what end? Perhaps – after the nineteenth’s advocacy of Duty and Acquisition, had come the Pursuit of Sensation. Wisely, he’d not settled for summing it up in a single phr
ase. But the book had left her thinking. ‘Solve that little puzzle,’ indeed.

  ‘They should have made you Poet Laureate,’ she said, and meant it.

  ‘Wrong brand of politics,’ he disallowed. ‘I don’t speak the language of New Labour. They consider me outdated, like landed gentry. But it’s interesting, you know, how fast these socialists become what they deride. Remember Wilson, Bevan, Healey, the Old Guard, how, once in power, they couldn’t wait to become gentleman farmers. So, deliberately ignorant of the countryside, where will this new lot finally go with their self-congratulatory life peerages?’

  His voice was growing slower. Kate touched the fine skin on the back of his hand, smiled and wandered off, leaving the sunshine to claim him. Next time she looked across he was asleep, chin on chest, his wild, white beard shivering with each expelled breath. He tired easily, after rare moments of sweetness and wit.

  That evening they toasted his eightieth anniversary at dinner. ‘In advance,’ he overrode them rather pettishly. ‘I didn’t make my entrance until almost midnight: not that I’ve since embraced nocturnal activities.’

  Nevertheless he accepted their gift-wrapped offerings at coffee time, and had them set out on a table in the drawing-room. ‘If you’ll permit me I’ll leave opening them until tomorrow morning, when I’ll be fresher,’ he said. ‘It has been a long and exciting day. I thank you all for making the effort to come.’ After which he withdrew and Claudia guided him to bed.

  Kate had vaguer memories of the evening after that. There was music because Matthew had prevailed on Robert to bring along his CD player and a variety of disks. When Claudia had returned they joined her for Bridge with Madeleine as fourth. The rest helped themselves to drinks, wandered in and out of the open french windows, smoked on the terrace or strolled in the garden until the last of the light went. Twos and threes formed, re-formed and broke up again. Conversation was desultory and lethargic. Even Marion Paige was trying to hide yawns behind one thin, brown hand.

  Kate wondered where she had achieved such a rich tan so early in the season, then decided she had a touch of foreign blood, perhaps Mediterranean. She had seen features like hers when on holiday in Turkey and Greece.

  She left her in Eddie’s company, discussing some recent show at the Tate Modern. As she said goodnight she could hear Jess laughing with Jake and his father somewhere out in the dark garden. Suddenly missing Michael so badly just then, she knew she wasn’t good company, and so withdrew.

  Although there were single rooms available, previously servants’ quarters on the top floor, Claudia had put her in what had been Michael’s big bedroom overlooking the neglected rose garden. It was airy and old-fashioned. On her marriage, twenty-four years earlier, a double bed had been installed and the furniture was still the same as when, on visits, they used to hug and whisper there under the covers, fearful of the ancient springs broadcasting their love-making.

  Carlton and Claudia now occupied the suite across the landing, which had then been Michael’s father’s. Matthew, already widowed, shared a home near Ascot with his horse-loving daughter and journalist son. They had seldom visited and never before stayed overnight.

  Kate thought about her twins, aged twenty-two and the youngest Dellars, accorded single rooms up under the eaves; and she fervently hoped Jess wouldn’t be entertaining Jake there overnight. As Gus’s son by his first marriage, Jake wasn’t a blood relative, but he struck her as too willingly sucked into the Dellar family culture.

  Not that Charles Stone would be anyway preferable as her daughter’s partner. At least Jake was of the same generation as Jess and single. So, reflecting gloomily, she slid into sleep, hugging the feather pillow where once Michael’s head had lain beside hers.

  It was shouting that woke Kate, then a thunderous knocking on her door which instantly burst open. Gus hoarsely cried, ‘For God’s sake wake up and get out, Kate. The bloody house is on fire!’

  She didn’t doubt him. Already smoke was billowing into the room. She threw on her travel coat and shoes and grabbed her leather grip; looked wildly round for whatever she could snatch and stuff in. She reached the door, then ‘Handbag!’ she told herself.

  It was somewhere on the floor by the bed but had overturned and spilled out her reading spectacles. She’d be helpless without them. She scrabbled under the rumpled covers, found the specs case, then a couple of loose credit cards. That was all she had time for.

  Leaving, she shut the room’s door firmly behind her. Contain the fire; cut off oxygen. She knew that from library fire drills. Where were the twins? She ran to the servants’ staircase. ‘Top floor’s cleared,’ someone sang out. At the far end of the passage Robert was standing with a hand on the banister rail, waiting to help her down the main stairs. It seemed she’d been the last to wake.

  Smoke was rolling up at them through the square stairwell, and as she hesitated it was shot through with flame. ‘For God’s sake, woman, move!’

  But it was too late. They were cut off. ‘The kitchen roof,’ she shouted. ‘We can get through a back window …’

  ‘Kitchen’s gone,’ he yelled back.

  ‘The front porch then.’ She started running in that direction. The smoke was less dense there and it might offer a way down.

  As they threw themselves through the doorway of the upstairs library, she heard flames roaring behind them, leaping up to where Robert had stood waiting. One of the library’s two high windows already gaped open. As they fled past the other she noticed bare shelves on two sides of the room. Claudia must have sold Carlton’s books by the yard rather than the title.

  Robert was leaning out over the pediment to the front porch. ‘It’s about a fourteen foot drop to the flat bit once you’re over the sill. Then hang on till someone brings a ladder. You first, Kate.’

  Looking down scared her, but fire was the immediate hazard. She dragged on the heavy brocade curtain beside her and the old fabric tore, coming away in her hands. She threw a great bundle of it out, then got her legs over the sill and jumped after it. The fall still jolted her and she rolled, barely able to grab at the edge. On the terrace below people were milling about in panic. Then Robert called down and someone waved back. ‘Stay there! I’ll get help.’

  In the distance Kate heard the hooh-hah of a fire tender. Then Robert crash-landed somewhere behind and fell against her shoulder, nearly sending her off the edge. He was swearing between gritted teeth. ‘I think I’ve broken my fucking ankle.’

  She managed to climb down a ladder brought from the garage, buttoning her coat and wishing she’d gone to bed in her knickers. Robert was less lucky and could not manage the ladder with his ankle, having to stay crouched up there, with the flames breaking through behind, until a hydraulic platform arrived with a fireman to cart him off like a sack of potatoes.

  She abandoned him to Madeleine who was sure he’d only a sprain, and set off through the melee to look for Carlton. He’d seemed so frail last night and she feared what the shoc kmight do to him. Not one for nocturnal activities, he’d said.

  It was then she came on him guarded by Claudia behind a rhododendron hedge, gazing up and burbling about the sky.

  Recall of what happened beyond that point would have been to re-live sheer nightmare. Mercifully Kate was asleep before reaching it.

  At the Monkey Puzzle she slept until almost noon when Lily looked in to say a policeman was below, wanting to speak with her.

  ‘It’s a Detective-Sergeant Beaumont. He said he met you last night.’

  ‘Did he?’ It must be the one alongside the WPC who drove her to the hospital. Hospital! The nausea suddenly returned. ‘Is there any news? Of Jess and Eddie?’

  Lily couldn’t say. She helped Kate find a few clothes to put on. It was DS Beaumont who told her that Eddie had been awake and was removed from Intensive Care to a side ward. There was nothing new on her daughter.

  Kate had guessed right about the policeman. He was the wooden, puppet-faced one who hadn’t spoken except to
order the siren silenced. He wasn’t all that conversational now, uncomfortable about distressing her with questions. She explained she’d gone up quite early, leaving the others downstairs. She’d assumed her children had been given single rooms under the eaves, while she’d been on the floor below.

  But could any of the young people have shared rooms? he wanted to know.

  ‘Why ask me?’ she retorted, hearing – and shamed by – the barb in her own voice. ‘As their mother I’d be the last one they’d have discussed it with.’ And no, she’d not glimpsed them later in a corridor. She really wanted to help but he must question someone else.

  ‘When I retired there were several of the family still downstairs: our hostess; my brother-in-law Sir Matthew; my nephew and niece, Robert and Madeleine; Dr Marion Paige; Maddie’s husband Gus and his son Jake, as well as my two. You need to ask who saw them after the fire alarm was given.’

  Then DS Beaumont explained how Gus had tried to stop Eddie entering the kitchen, but he’d broken free and rushed in, saying something about the cellar. Almost immediately an explosion had blown Gus off his feet. He’d feared Eddie was killed, but by some miracle he’d reached the cellar and escaped by the old coal chute, despite his injuries. But nobody had seen Jess since all the young people went up to bed at about midnight. Her brother and Jake Railton had left her at her door.

  ‘Was her bed slept in?’

  ‘Young Railton flung on some clothes and looked in on your daughter. She’d already left. Her bedclothes were rumpled and her wardrobe door left open.’

  ‘So there’s no reason why she shouldn’t have gone outside to where the others were assembling?’

  He waited for her to take it all in and go one further. ‘Jess – my daughter – can be very impulsive, sergeant. Unpredictable. It’s not beyond belief that she simply walked out on the situation. I mean, just got in her car and drove off.’