by Granger, Ann
‘Right, then.’ Tansy turned back to Carter and Jess. ‘This is the family dirty linen I’m going to flap in front of you now. Everything they got up to.’ She gave a wicked grin. ‘How they would all have hated to know I was telling anyone this and to think I’d be telling the police – they’d all have had fits!
‘It’s hard to know where to begin because it all goes back donkey’s years, to the late nineteen forties, just after the end of World War Two. Edward Bickerstaffe was living at Balaclava House with his wife and their son, Monty – that’s Uncle Monty, who was only a schoolboy then. They sent him away to boarding school so he was only there in the holidays. They didn’t have any other kids and I don’t know the name of Edward’s wife. Funny thing . . .’ Tansy frowned. ‘No one in the family ever uses it when talking of family history. She’s always referred to as “Edward’s wife” or as “Monty’s mother”. The poor wretched woman might never have had a name or any individual existence.
‘Anyhow, as I was saying, they were living at Balaclava, mostly just Edward and Mrs Edward, she-of-no-name, all on their own. A war widow called Elizabeth Henderson lived nearby in a cottage belonging to Sneddon’s Farm. That cottage is just a ruin now but then it was still habitable, if a bit primitive. I suppose it was the cheapest place she could find. She lived there with her young daughter, Penny, and supported the pair of them writing little stories for children’s magazines. There were a lot more mags of that sort around then, I believe. She educated Penny at home herself, no money for school fees. I know all this because Aunt Penny told me about her childhood. She said it had been very happy with a lot of freedom.’
‘Aunt Penny?’ interrupted Jess, surprised. ‘That wouldn’t be—’
‘Yes, it would!’ snapped Tansy. ‘That’s the real irony of the whole thing. Little Penny Henderson and young Monty Bickerstaffe grew up and got married. It was really unfortunate because long before that, Elizabeth and Edward had a fling, well, an affair, I suppose you’d call it, and a pretty hot-blooded one. It must have gone on for quite a long time.’
Tansy paused and grew thoughtful. ‘They were all so bloody hypocritical in those days. They really were. They were dead set on respectability. That didn’t mean they behaved themselves, just that they buried any bad news, any scandal, as they saw it. It turned out later some of Elizabeth’s friends knew about it, but said nothing. If any of the Bickerstaffes got wind of it, they all kept quiet. No one ever spoke of it freely, the most they did was whisper together in corners, but everybody knew. That’s where the hypocrisy lay. They hoped that in time when their generation, the ones who knew, had gone, the whole thing would be written out of history. The younger generation wouldn’t ever have known about it and so couldn’t pass it on.’
Tansy’s gaze, as she spoke, had been fixed on the opposite wall. Now, unexpectedly, she turned her large pale blue eyes directly towards Carter and Jess.
‘I don’t know whether Edward and Elizabeth were in love. Perhaps they were just bored to tears out there in the sticks; Elizabeth in that tiny cottage with a little child for company and Edward rattling around Balaclava with a dull wife whose name no one could remember.’
The frown briefly puckered her brow again. ‘When you think about it, it’s quite possible Edward’s nameless wife knew her husband was fooling around. I’d have realised it, if I’d been her. Not that anyone seems to have cared what she thought about it. They would just have wanted to be sure she’d shut up and not make waves.’
‘Perhaps she had little choice,’ Carter said quietly. ‘It wasn’t easy to get a divorce back then. She could have cited adultery on her husband’s part, but would have had to prove it; and there would have been a lot of unwanted publicity. Edward’s wife would have feared that, as much as the rest of the family. Divorced women, even if they were the injured party, still faced a mountain of criticism. They risked being social outcasts. It took guts to go through divorce.’
Tansy shrugged. ‘Well, whatever the reason, no one spoke about it. It was a big secret, one they all shared in their tight little circle, but still a secret from public knowledge. Of course, the children, Penny and Monty, wouldn’t have known anything. No one would tell a child a thing like that and little kids were innocent back then. They wouldn’t have twigged what was going on. It seems to me, from what my mother’s told me, that no one told children anything on principle. They drummed it into them that their parents represented the ultimate authority and were never to be questioned. Our great-grandparents were a pretty mouldy lot, if you ask me.’
‘So where does Jay Taylor come in?’ asked Jess, dragging Tansy back to the story. ‘How do you know so much about it and how do you know it really happened at all, if everyone was so secretive and never spoke of it?’
Tansy tossed her hair. ‘Finding it all out was down to Jay. A generation had passed away. No one knew the truth. Our ancestors had got what they wanted: an event just written out of history. It took Jay and his decision to research his family tree to dig it all up.’
‘Quite an achievement on his part, too,’ Carter remarked.
‘He was very good at research,’ Tansy told them. ‘It was part and parcel of what he had to do to write his books. You know, look up people’s family trees and try and ferret out any scandal, because scandal helps sell those sorts of books. The people in whose name he was ghosting them generally didn’t mind. The idea is to sell books, as many books as possible, and if a connection with a well-known name of any kind turns up so much the better. They don’t worry about skeletons in cupboards, not nearly so much, anyway. It would have to be something really bad to make them want to hide it. A love affair, well, they’d see that as sad and romantic. People don’t try and hide that now, and a good thing, too!’ Tansy opined fiercely.
‘So, Jay?’ prompted Jess.
‘Oh, yes . . . Jay had a quiet period work-wise, a window between jobs. He’d turned in one completed manuscript. Happy celebrity, happy publisher. Another commission was on the cards but only at discussion stage. So he had a bit of time on his hands. He decided to research his own ancestry. He’d been wanting to do it for ages because he only had one living relative he knew of. She’s an oldish woman, retired and unmarried, who lives in Bristol.’
‘Miss Bryant. We’ve spoken to her,’ Jess told Tansy.
Tansy looked startled. ‘How on earth did you get on to her? Jay told me she was a miserable old biddy who’d never liked him; but she was all Jay had or knew about. His mother was dead. He’d no siblings. His father bunked off when he was a baby and no one had heard of him since. He wanted to try and find some other relatives, anyone at all. He thought there must be some. He began by visiting the aunt about a year ago, and quizzing her. She came out with a real bombshell. Jay’s father, Lionel Taylor, had been adopted as a baby. Taylor was the name of the people who had adopted him. Jay said that when the aunt told him about it, she had a really spiteful look on her face. ‘You wanted to know, so now you do!’ she’d said.
‘Well, he was glad she’d told him because otherwise he’d have wasted time researching the Taylor family tree; and they were nothing to do with him, not blood kin, anyway. But he really had something to go for in finding Lionel’s birth mother. He managed to get hold of a copy of his father’s original birth certificate; the one issued when his birth was first registered. Not long after that he was adopted and got a new birth certificate. But on the original one Lionel’s mother’s name was Elizabeth Henderson. She lived at Sneddon Farm Cottage. In the column headed “Father” was only the one word, “unknown”. It was an illegitimate birth. But the informant on the certificate, the person who’d actually gone to the registry and registered the birth was Edward Bickerstaffe of Balaclava House.
‘Jay scented he was on to something, but he needed a lot more to put it all together. He tried tracing Elizabeth Henderson but she was long dead, sadly, and information scarce. So he turned to her war hero husband’s family. It was a shot in the dark, but it turned up trumps
. He actually found a Mrs Edmonton, née Henderson, a much younger cousin of Elizabeth’s husband, and still alive. Jay went to see her. She was really ancient, terribly upper crust and very frosty. He explained who he was and why he was searching for information. Elizabeth Henderson was his grandmother. At first Mrs Edmonton wouldn’t admit a thing; said it was all too long ago and she didn’t remember. Luckily he persevered. Eventually she said she’d no knowledge of Elizabeth having any baby other than Penny, who had unquestionably been legitimate. He wondered if she’d said that just to get rid of him because any scandal would’ve touched all the Hendersons. At any rate, he was afraid he’d reached a dead end. But then, quite unexpectedly, Mrs Edmonton phoned him a few days later. She’d been spending sleepless nights over his visit; and had decided he had a right to know the truth. She invited him back to see her and Jay went like a shot.
‘She confessed that she knew Elizabeth had had another baby when she’d been a war widow for several years. All Elizabeth’s friends, and even her late husband’s family, had conspired to “protect” her and prevent the news getting public. The old lady had been one of those who had known all about it, but had kept quiet. “Not just for her sake,” she said, “but for poor dear Penny’s, too. Her childhood would have been blighted. She’d have lost all her little friends.’ A case of the sins of the fathers, or in this case, of the mothers, you know. Miserable bunch. As if it could have been the child Penny’s fault in any way!
‘Jay’s informant told him she only knew for sure that the father of Elizabeth’s baby had been a married man, a neighbour with whom she’d been conducting a long affair, an “unfortunate entanglement” as she called it. Otherwise, the neighbour was rumoured to be one of the Bickerstaffe biscuit family, but the old lady had no firm knowledge of that. She kept insisting that Elizabeth and her lover would have married, had he been free. “I don’t want you to have the wrong idea about your grandmother,” she told Jay. “She was a thoroughly decent but unlucky young woman. Her husband had been killed and she was all alone and vulnerable. She wasn’t a floozy.”
‘Jay liked that word, “floozy”. He said it made him think of girls wearing black-market nylons, jitterbugging in smoky cellars. He’d quite have liked to have had a grandmother like that; but the old lady was most anxious he didn’t have that impression of Elizabeth. Anyway, whatever the truth, Elizabeth found she was pregnant and couldn’t have been too pleased about it. It must have given Edward a bad moment, too.’
Tansy scowled. ‘It was dealt with very efficiently. She was whisked away to a very private nursing home that specialised in unmarried mothers like her, and gave birth there to a boy. She called him Lionel. The Taylors, who were childless, adopted the baby. The nursing home ran a profitable little sideline as an adoption agency. It was all very informal, as it was back then. He was handed over at only a few weeks old. Elizabeth had already returned home, her reputation intact, and that was that.
‘Jay had smelt a rat when he saw the name of Bickerstaffe on the birth certificate as informant; now he had his suspicions confirmed. Edward had avoided having to own up to being the father, but he’d gone along to register the birth – protecting Elizabeth from some clerk’s disapproval, I suppose – and he must have paid the nursing home fees. Elizabeth was scraping along on a tiny war widow’s pension and what she could earn from her books. She couldn’t have afforded it. But it was neatly managed. Everyone carried on as before, secret well and truly buried! But Jay had successfully dug it up. His father, Lionel, was that baby. Randy old Edward Bickerstaffe was his grandfather.’
From the doorway Morton gave a long low whistle that earned him a glare from Carter.
Quietly but in a voice trembling with remembered rage, Tansy added, ‘I can’t describe Jay’s manner when he told me all this. Every sentence was – flung at me. It was as if he really was lobbing rocks at me. When he finished he looked so – so triumphant! I had no answer to any of it and he knew it.’
‘If all this is true, Tansy,’ the superintendent told her, ‘whatever Jay Taylor’s belief, it would still have to be proved. Until then it’s a conjecture based on circumstantial evidence: rumour, an elderly person’s memory, the name of someone, who might have been acting as no more than a good friend in need, registering a baby’s birth . . . this wouldn’t be enough in law. A DNA test would have settled it; if Monty, say, had agreed to participate. He might have been loath to do so. If it did prove it, it would make Lionel Taylor Monty’s half-brother. Jay would be right.’
Tansy nodded. ‘I think he was right. I sort of feel it in my bones. My mother says the Bickerstaffes were always very cagey about Edward, even though the poor chap died before he was fifty. My grandfather Harry – Monty’s cousin – remembered his Uncle Edward smoking like a chimney; and told us some chest complaint took him off, not surprisingly. Mummy later got the impression from Grandpa that Edward had blotted his copybook somehow, although she’d no idea how or when. Neither of us did until Jay starting digging and presented us with his findings.’
Tansy leaned forward earnestly. ‘But Uncle Monty never knew anything about Elizabeth’s baby, or the affair or any of it. He was only a schoolboy himself at the time. I told you, it was all hushhush and “we don’t speak of it”. So when poor Uncle Monty found a dead man on his sofa and told you, the police, he didn’t have a clue who he was, he was telling you the truth. He didn’t know and he still doesn’t.’
Tansy stared at them disconsolately. ‘I suppose the poor old chap will have to be told now. He’ll have to be told everything. About Mum and me feeding Jay that—’
The solicitor coughed loudly and leaned towards her. ‘The prosecution will have to establish that. I advise you not to say anything about it now.’
‘Yes,’ Carter said to Tansy. ‘He will have to be told everything, I’m afraid.’
‘It will be such an awful shock for him. And it’s all Jay’s fault!’ Tansy burst out furiously.
‘Miss Peterson—’ began the solicitor again.
‘Oh, shut up!’ snapped Tansy, rounding on him.
The unfortunate young man subsided into a depressed huddle, still clutching his briefcase to him, and probably contemplating the premature end of a promising career.
She turned back to Jess and Carter. ‘Jay traced all the surviving Bickerstaffes and collateral descendants. That was easy enough because the Bickerstaffe family were once well known in the biscuit world. There are all sorts of references to us. You can even still find the odd packet of biscuits with the name on it. The family don’t own the firm any longer, of course. They sold that ages ago. But you can trace the Bickerstaffes, every last remote branch of the tree, with no problem. Jay even found me. He also went off to see if Sneddon Farm Cottage, where his grandmother had lived, and Balaclava House, where his grandfather hung out, were still there. The cottage had fallen down and had obviously always been a dump. But Balaclava was a different matter. It was also pretty much a ruin, but it sat on a big piece of land. It belonged to Monty Bickerstaffe, who was childless and old. It was then Jay got his crazy idea that he was morally entitled to inherit Balaclava. Of course, his father had been born illegitimate, and no Bickerstaffe had ever recognised him, but Jay still thought Balaclava should be his; and he meant to get his grubby paws on it somehow or other. So, you see, it was all his fault.
‘He started plotting and planning and snooping round in the way he did so well, and decided to use me. He’d seek me out and chat me up. That would be easy for him to do. He was good at interviewing people and getting the “real” story from them. That was the journalist’s training he’d had. I was stupid enough to be flattered he liked me, as I thought. I believed for a while that he loved me. I was even ready to marry him at that point, although I dare say I only really wanted to spite my mother. She was so dead against him from the start. I should have been sharper, too. I’m not normally that thick when judging men.
‘Well, he got from me that I was Uncle Monty’s heir in his wil
l. Jay thought he’d hit the jackpot. He’d marry me. This was when I was still obviously dewy-eyed over him! I’d inherit the house and he’d persuade me to pull it down. When I told him I’d found out what he was up to, and he could forget any idea of marrying me, he said he’d press his own claim to Balaclava. He said he was a closer blood relative than I was to Uncle Monty. We all call Monty “Uncle”, but he was my grandfather’s cousin. So, I’m a cousin’s granddaughter, that’s my relationship to Monty. But Jay was his nephew, his nephew! I wasn’t sure Jay couldn’t persuade Monty to alter his will. Jay could be very persuasive and who knew? Monty might be tickled pink to find out he had a nephew. So I talked it over with Mum and we decided that we had to kill him—’
‘Miss Peterson!’ pleaded her distraught solicitor.
‘I wasn’t going to let him think he could use me and get away with it – and I wasn’t going to let him get his hands on Balaclava, pull it down, and cover the whole place with horrid little starter homes, so there.’
Tansy turned her attention to Jess. ‘I told you once I’d never had an aim, any goal in life. That wasn’t quite true. I’ve always had a secret dream, since I was a kid. It was to make Balaclava beautiful again. I wasn’t going to let Jay kill that dream, although I suppose now he pretty well has. That’s my real punishment, you know. I don’t care about being sent to gaol. I thought if I killed him, my dream would live on. Now it’s gone. I’ve got nothing left – and that includes nothing more to say,’ Tansy finished.