Cutting the aforementioned meat could be a problem, too, which accounted for the frequency on the menu of Irish stew. When other cuts of meat did happen to be served, the helper on duty – usually the one whom Miss Pevensey most disliked – would, unbidden and unannounced, come up behind her and cut it up for her. This was before she could protest that meat tasted better if you had cut it up yourself. Not that there would have been any use in explaining this in atavistic, developmental terms to this particular woman.
The name which Miss Pevensey had privately bestowed on this least-liked member of staff was ‘Magpie’, although it was neither her nickname nor her official title. The latter was probably ‘Carer’ but this Miss Pevensey could never bring herself to call her because the woman patently didn’t care. Magpies were, to say the least, unattractive birds, given to preying on the nests of smaller, defenceless members of the avian species and this was how Miss Pevensey had come to think of her.
‘We’ll have to wear a bib, won’t we,’ the Magpie had said the last time Miss Pevensey had unwittingly splashed gravy down her blouse. ‘All those stains on your front …’
‘Gravy stains are the medals of the kitchen,’ Miss Pevensey had rejoined, but the woman had not understood.
‘I’ll get you one with a little drip tray at the bottom,’ said the Magpie. ‘That’ll catch anything you let fall.’
And before Miss Pevensey could utter a protest a plastic breastplate with a little trough at the bottom had been hung round her neck.
She had conveyed her indignation, though, to her next visitor. ‘I call it my albatross,’ she said, adding wryly, ‘and try to think of myself now as the Ancient Mariner.’
‘Rotten,’ agreed Meg Ponsonby, her one-time deputy at Ornum College at the University of Calleshire. ‘Haven’t they got any respect?’
‘Not for what one once was, I’m afraid,’ sighed Millicent Pevensey, sometime principal of that college. ‘Of course, rationally it’s not relevant. What one once was, I mean. We’re all just the old, the blind and the infirm here. One’s past doesn’t matter in these places.’
‘Well, then, it jolly well ought to be relevant,’ said Meg stoutly. ‘By the way, have you heard the latest about the vice chancellor?’
Millicent leant forward eagerly, Meg, dear Meg, being her only link with what she still thought of as the real world. ‘No, I haven’t. Do tell me …’
When Millicent Pevensey had first entered the Berebury Home for the Blind she had resolved to apply all the logic that had been so much part of her working life to her present situation and treat her time there as a new and different stage in her life. Unfortunately it hadn’t proved easy to adapt to it and this was largely due to the effect on her of the carer whom she had dubbed the Magpie. Once the woman had found out that Millicent Pevensey had been connected with the world of education, she had been treated by the Magpie with a great deal less than respect.
It soon transpired that the Magpie had disliked school and everything to do with it. Not only that but that she hadn’t done very well there either. Some primary-school teacher had once a long time ago failed this particular pupil – that much was evident – and Millicent Pevensey was paying the price now.
Defenceless as she now was she bore the petty slights the Magpie inflicted on her as best she could. But however patient and tolerant Millicent Pevensey was, the Magpie seemed to search out ways in which she could work out her latent dislike of teachers on the hapless resident. At least Millicent Pevensey hoped that this was the reason for her behaviour, the sinister Nurse Ratched in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest coming into her mind from time to time.
Whilst it had been agreed at the home that the blind woman should be addressed as Miss Pevensey, when no one else was in earshot – and only then – the Magpie always called her Millie. Miss Pevensey hadn’t realised she could still feel such insensate anger. She hadn’t been so cross since her young brother had broken her favourite doll and that had been very many years ago.
The Magpie’s behaviour was not the only cross Miss Pevensey had to bear. There was old Angela Pullen. Angela Pullen was not only old but what was kindly called absent-minded. Miss Pevensey, who had to sit next to her at mealtimes, thought this was a serious understatement. The woman’s mind was not so much absent as entirely missing. The last occasion on which she had asked Angela – who still had some little sight – what the time was she had been answered by a high cackle and the words ‘Two freckles past a hare, eastern elbow time’.
Meg Ponsonby had frowned when told about this response, patently searching her memory. ‘I think,’ she said doubtfully, ‘that one of the folklorists at the college might have noted that expression.’
‘I would be very surprised if they had,’ said Millicent Pevensey with spirit. ‘The woman’s lost her marbles.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ frowned Meg Ponsonby. ‘In my experience you can never tell with folklorists.’
Then there had been the matter of Millicent Ponsonby’s breviary. ‘My little book. The one I keep by my bed,’ she said to the Magpie one day. ‘I can’t put my hand on it.’ This had been literally what she had wanted to do. Running her fingers over the little leather-bound volume as she went to sleep always brought the rubric back to her mind and soothed her.
‘I put it on top of the wardrobe,’ said the Magpie, ‘seeing as you can’t read it any more.’
The last straw – the one that led Millicent Pevensey to an entirely new course of action – had happened one morning when the Magpie had been called away in the act of helping her to dress.
‘It was quite insupportable,’ said Millicent, later that day to her friend, Meg. She was still palpably distressed. ‘She left me standing there in my shift, saying she wouldn’t be gone a minute. She’d been late coming in the first place – it was halfway through the morning – and when she came back – that is,’ she corrected herself, ‘when I thought it was she coming back it wasn’t her at all.’
‘Oh, dear,’ said Meg Ponsonby, never slow on the uptake. ‘And who was it then?’
‘Arthur Maple.’
‘Oh, dear,’ said Meg again. ‘I don’t suppose our revered Professor of Moral Law at the University has ever seen a woman in a shift before, bachelor that he is. Didn’t he knock?’
‘Oh, yes, but the Magpie is supposed to knock, too. The worst of it was that he behaved as if everything was normal.’
‘Good for him,’ murmured Meg under her breath.
‘As if,’ went on Millicent Pevensey, unappeased, ‘I always received visitors in a state of undress. I don’t know if that was worse than if he’d run away like a frightened rabbit.’ She trembled with anger at the memory. ‘Quite insupportable.’
The words stayed with the blind woman. And so did the thought. Life really was beginning to be quite insupportable. And, now she came to think of it, there was no real reason why she should put up with life. She put her mind to what action to take as she walked round the indoor exercise room at the home – somewhere she always thought of as like a manège for schooling horses. There was a circular fence there with a rail at hand height for the blind to hold on to as they walked round and round.
She started on her plan the next time Meg came to call. ‘Do you think you could you buy me some more paracetamol, please? I’ve run out.’
It worked once. When she asked Meg the same thing on her next visit she got a gentle ‘No, Millie, I think not. You’ve got earth’s work to do first.’
So she waited until she had a letter delivered to her room and then asked the Magpie if she could borrow a knife from the kitchen to slit it open.
‘Not allowed,’ said the Magpie at once. ‘I’ll open it for you and read it out if you like.’
‘No, thank you,’ said Millicent Pevensey firmly. ‘My friend will do that for me.’
Clasping a glass of water while she swallowed her tablets one night put another thought into Millicent Pevensey’s still-agile mind. Blind she might be but she kne
w exactly where her wrists were – all she needed was some broken glass. This proved less easy than she had thought. Not only did the tumbler not break when cast with all her vigour to the floor but it rolled away and – without sight – she could not locate it.
Next she tried sending the Magpie away while she was having a bath but the Magpie would not be diverted. ‘It’s as much as my job’s worth to leave anyone alone in the bath here,’ the carer had declared. ‘You might drown and I’d get the sack.’
‘True,’ agreed Millicent meekly. ‘And that would never do,’ she added in case the thought of suicide had crossed the Magpie’s mind, too.
She tried to remember Dorothy Parker’s litany of the ways in which one might kill oneself – razors that pained you, acids that stained you, guns that weren’t lawful – none of which were accessible in the Berebury Home for the Blind. And now even North Sea gas didn’t kill any more.
She toyed instead with the idea of electrocution as she plodded round the exercise room the next morning. ‘It’s like being in a prison yard except that we can’t do it in pairs and talk,’ she complained to Meg on her next visit. ‘Bearing in mind,’ she added pertinently, ‘that prisoners can at least look forward to the end of their sentence.’
‘Life must have a reason,’ insisted Meg Ponsonby, an authority on Comparative Religions. ‘Nothing makes sense if it doesn’t.’
Millicent Pevensey, though, was undeterred in her search to end it. Electrocution had seemed simple enough at first thought – presumably one only had to take out an electric light bulb and stick one’s fingers in the socket instead. The only snag was that there was no reading lamp beside her bed.
‘No need, is there?’ the Magpie had said when asked about this. ‘Besides, there’s a perfectly good light in the ceiling for those of us that have to work in the room.’
Millicent sighed when she reported this remark to Meg. ‘That’s all that one has become reduced to nowadays – work for someone else.’
‘Cheer up,’ said Meg briskly. ‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison. And, anyway, the economists like people having work to do. Other people, that is.’
Millicent had managed a smile at this but had nevertheless gone on thinking. There was, she knew, a way of death popular in Balkan countries that could leave the general public unsure whether the victim – like Amy Robsart – had fallen or been pushed. Defenestration was the name of the game. That would be perfect. The only snag was that the Berebury Home for the Blind was only one storey high.
Salvation, when it came, was unexpected.
There was to be an outing for the residents from the home to the seaside near Kinnisport. Above the town was a beauty spot on the cliffs looking over the Cunliffe Gap with the added attraction of a broad walk and tea shop, to say nothing of the even greater attraction of a free public car park.
‘Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive, Millicent?’ asked Angela Pullen as they tumbled out of their minibus into a pleasant breeze.
‘I wouldn’t go as far as that, Angela,’ said Millicent dryly.
‘I can feel the sun.’
‘I can hear the sea,’ said Millicent purposefully walking towards the sound. The grass was rough but springy as she strode over it, her white stick a great help on the turf.
‘Millie, come back,’ shouted the Magpie, spotting her and thus diverted from her task of helping the other inmates out of the home’s minibus.
‘The sea, the sea,’ chanted Millicent Pevensey to herself, increasing her speed.
‘Millie, you mustn’t go any further,’ the Magpie shouted after. ‘Stop or you’ll go over the cliff. Just stand still.’
Millicent stepped up her pace even more as she heard feet pounding after her.
‘Don’t move,’ shouted the Magpie.
Millicent heard the woman panting behind her now and walked even more quickly over the grass in the direction of the sound of the sea, quite invigorated. She must be near the edge now. The sound of the sea was getting louder and louder. All she had to do was keep on walking as quickly as she could and keep ahead of the Magpie.
What was undeniable was that the Magpie had youth – and sight – on her side. She reached Millicent’s side just as the blind woman sensed the upward rush of air denoting the very edge of the cliff. The Magpie grabbed at Millicent’s arm but was caught off-balance by the white stick and it was she – not Miss Millicent Pevensey – who tumbled over the cliff edge.
The coroner was very kind when he heard that Miss Pevensey had really just been enjoying a stroll in the fresh air and had had no idea she had been so near the cliff’s edge. He dismissed everything Angela Pullen said as unreliable but placed on record the devotion shown by the carer, which was to be highly commended.
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About the Author
CATHERINE AIRD is the author of more than twenty crime novels and story collections, most of which feature Detective Inspector Sloan. She holds an honorary MA from the University of Kent and was made an MBE. Apart from writing the successful Chronicles of Calleshire, she has also written and edited a series of village histories. She lives in Kent.
By Catherine Aird
Hole in One
Losing Ground
Past Tense
Dead Heading
Last Writes
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
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First published in 2014.
This ebook edition first published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2014.
Copyright © 2014 by CATHERINE AIRD
The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1622–7
Last Writes Page 20