She raised the brick. ‘You? It was you?’
There was a deep chuckle. ‘Mrs Langstone,’ Joseph Serridge said. ‘I don’t think you’ll be needing that.’
She lowered the brick. For the first time she sensed the nature of the man’s charm, a blind force like magnetism or a seismic tremor. Except it wasn’t really charm but a sort of hypnotic spell, an impression of overwhelming power. For the first time she also understood what had happened to Miss Penhow and Amy Narton.
‘Thank you. I wasn’t quite sure—’
‘What happened?’ Serridge said, his voice hardening. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes.’ Lydia dropped the brick on the pile in the corner. ‘I am now, at any rate.’
‘What’s been going on?’ Serridge advanced into the barn, forcing her to step back. He glanced around quickly. ‘You’re the last person I expected to see.’ He swung round and towered over her. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I came for a walk,’ Lydia said sharply, feeling rattled. ‘I knew the farm my father used to own was over this way, and I thought I’d have a look at it. He told me he sold Morthams Farm to you.’
‘But what are you doing in Rawling? You didn’t come all this way just to look at Morthams.’
‘No, of course not,’ Lydia snapped. ‘I came with Mrs Alforde.’
‘I didn’t realize you knew her.’
‘Colonel Alforde is my godfather,’ Lydia said.
‘The devil he is. Well, I’m damned.’ Serridge began to smile, but then his face changed again. ‘So why is Mrs Alforde here today, and why has she brought you?’
‘Look here, Mr Serridge, I know I’m probably trespassing, and I apologize for that. But I don’t see why you should interrogate me like this. I’m having a day out of London with Mrs Alforde. We’ve just had lunch with the Vicar.’
‘Oh, I see. Narton’s funeral, I suppose. Mrs Narton’s an old servant, isn’t she, and her dad worked on the estate.’
‘And now I’d better be getting back to the Vicarage,’ Lydia said, moving towards the door. ‘Mrs Alforde and Mr Gladwyn will be wondering where I am.’
‘Of course. But somebody shut you in. Who?’
Lydia was outside now. On the ground was a length of iron piping about five feet long.
‘I don’t like people going in here,’ Serridge said. ‘The structure’s unsafe. I’m going to have it pulled down. It’s not used for anything now.’
Lydia pointed at the pipe. ‘Is that what was keeping the door shut?’
He nodded. ‘It had been wedged against it. Used to be the downpipe from the guttering on the corner.’
A long, rounded indentation marked where the pipe had lain, imprinting its outline on the smooth, clay-streaked mud beneath. Lydia noticed a small footprint at one end.
‘You didn’t see anyone?’ Serridge asked. ‘Hear anyone?’
Lydia turned back to him, smudging the footprint with the heel of her own shoe as she did so. ‘No, I had my back to the door. There was an almighty bang. Somebody’s idea of a practical joke, I suppose.’
Serridge scowled, his face a dark red. ‘If I catch whoever did it, they’ll be sorry. I promise you that, Mrs Langstone. Now, do you want to come up to the farm? I’ve got the car up there – I can run you back to the Vicarage.’
‘Thank you, but no. They’ll probably be worrying about me. It won’t take me ten minutes to get back.’
He hesitated, and she thought he would try to persuade her to come to Morthams Farm with him. She didn’t want to go, for reasons she could only half acknowledge.
‘All right. I’ll walk you back to the road.’
Lydia tried to protest that there was no need but he insisted. Serridge made her walk on the tussocky but relatively firm ground beside the hedge while he lumbered through the raw, recently ploughed earth of the field itself. At last they came to the gate. On the other side lay the lane, with the lights of the Vicarage already glimmering a hundred yards away.
Serridge paused, with his hand on the iron latch. ‘You’ll be making plans soon, I reckon.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘About what you do with your life.’
Lydia looked coldly at him and said with all the haughtiness she could muster, ‘I’m afraid Mrs Alforde will be getting worried, Mr Serridge. I wonder if you could open the gate?’
He looked down at her, his forehead corrugated with lines, his heavy brows huddled together. He looked so woebegone that for a second she almost felt sorry for him. Then it struck her that it was almost as if he knew about the divorce, or at least that a longer separation was likely. Had her father told him? But even her father didn’t yet know about her conversations with Mr Shires.
Serridge unhooked the gate and pulled it open, standing aside to allow her through. ‘I’ll say good afternoon, Mrs Langstone.’ He touched the brim of his hat with a forefinger. ‘Mind how you go.’
Rory was still a little drunk by the time he returned to Bleeding Heart Square. He wasn’t so far gone that he was incapacitated, either mentally or physically, but he was saturated with the fuzzy self-confidence that whisky brings, and as yet had little trace of the hangover that might follow. It wasn’t just the whisky that was affecting him. It was also the possibility of work, real work. A connection with a magazine like Berkeley’s could make all the difference. It might even be possible, using that as a springboard, eventually to make a living as a freelance, which was his real ambition. At this moment even Julian Dawlish seemed not such a bad fellow. After all, the chap could hardly be blamed for falling in love with Fenella, if that was in fact what had happened. They had arranged to meet on Friday evening to confirm the details for Saturday.
At the corner, Rory paused. There were people drinking in the Crozier. He heard a loud yapping at knee level and looked down. Nipper had been attached to the old pump with a piece of string. Howlett was visible through the window of the lounge bar, and his top hat was resting on the window ledge.
Rory bent down and scratched Nipper behind the ears, which seemed to please him. He rubbed the dog’s neck, pushing his fingers under the collar. It was rather a handsome collar, or at least it had been, with a tarnished brass buckle and little brass stars set into the strap. There were footsteps behind him. He gave the dog a last pat and straightened up. Mrs Renton, laden with a shopping basket, was coming up the alley from Charleston Street.
‘Good afternoon,’ Rory said, cheerfully. ‘Let me carry that.’
‘Thank you.’ She held out the basket and he took it from her.
Nipper strained towards her, his tail wagging and his yapping intensifying.
‘Oh stop it, do,’ Mrs Renton said and backed away from him. She made a semicircular detour around the pump, keeping her distance. ‘Nasty thing.’
‘He’s all right,’ Rory said. ‘I think he’s pretty harmless, really.’
Mrs Renton shook her head. ‘I can’t abide dogs. You can’t trust them, not really. They’ll go with anyone who feeds them.’
She set off towards the house. Nipper backed away, squatted and scratched vigorously behind his left ear with a hind leg. Fleas, probably, Rory thought. Behind him there was the ring of a bicycle bell and one of the mechanics at the workshop at the end of the square cycled past. It was the conjunction of those two factors, the bicycle and the dog scratching its ear, that collided with a third item that was lying like an unexploded bomb in his memory.
Mrs Renton was unlocking the door of the house. ‘Are you coming, Mr Wentwood?’ she called. ‘I haven’t got all day, you know.’
‘Oh dear. Oh dear me. A fall? How very unfortunate.’
Lydia stripped off her ruined gloves. ‘No bones broken. It was all my fault. Luckily Mr Serridge came to my rescue.’
Cheerfulness broke like sunshine across Mr Gladwyn’s round, red face. ‘Serridge – yes. One of nature’s gentlemen. Rebecca, take Mrs Langstone upstairs and see what you can do to help.’
Lydia held up her ar
ms as Rebecca helped her out of her coat. ‘Is Mrs Alforde back?’
‘No – she’s still at Mrs Narton’s, I presume.’ Mr Gladwyn gnawed his lower lip. ‘She wouldn’t want us to wait for her, I’m sure, especially in the circumstances. You’ll need something to sustain you, Mrs Langstone. As soon as you are ready, we shall have tea.’ He glided into his study to wait for it.
‘This way, madam.’ Rebecca led Lydia towards the stairs. ‘I’ll see what I can do with the coat while you’re having your tea.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But I’m not sure there’s much we can do with the gloves,’ Rebecca said as they climbed the stairs.
‘Throw them away.’ Lydia wondered how long she would have to work at Shires and Trimble to earn enough for another pair of gloves like that.
Rebecca showed her into a guest bedroom with its own washbasin. Lydia removed her hat and stared at her pale face in the mirror above the taps. How on earth had that smear of mud arrived on her nose? Rebecca brought towels and a flannel. She murmured that the WC and bathroom were next door.
Lydia turned on the hot tap and picked up the flannel. ‘Rebecca?’
‘Yes, madam?’
‘I went to the little barn.’ She watched the maid’s face in the mirror. ‘The one you can see from the lane. Where Amy Narton died.’
Rebecca’s face remained blank and faintly disapproving, the face of a well-trained servant.
‘I didn’t fall over,’ Lydia went on, turning off the tap. ‘Someone shut me in. They wedged the door closed with a bit of piping. That’s how I ruined the gloves, by picking up a brick and hammering on the door.’
‘Oh, madam,’ Rebecca said. ‘Shall I ask Mr Gladwyn to call the police?’
‘That depends. I think I know who did it, you see.’ Lydia rubbed at a smear of mud that had unaccountably appeared on her cheek. ‘There was a fresh footprint in the mud underneath where the piping was lying. Someone with small feet. A child, probably.’ She rinsed the flannel and wrung it out. ‘So that means it was almost certainly Robbie.’
The colour slipped away from Rebecca’s face. But most of all Lydia noticed her eyes, the way they moved to and fro, looking for something that couldn’t be found. It was a miserable business, bullying someone, which was what this came down to.
‘What – what do you know about Robbie, madam? You do mean my nephew?’
‘Yes. I know that you’re fond of him. And I know that the barn is a special place because no one else normally goes there, even Mr Serridge. Perhaps especially Mr Serridge.’
‘Did Mrs Alforde tell you, madam?’
‘Not about Robbie. Mr Wentwood did. As it happens, he’s a friend of mine.’
Rebecca let out her breath but said nothing.
Lydia picked up the towel and turned to face her. ‘It’s all right. I don’t want to make life difficult for Robbie. Or for you. But I thought you should know what happened. And there’s something else: Mr Serridge said the barn was dangerous. He’s going to have it pulled down.’
‘I’m so sorry, madam. I just don’t know what to say. If Mr Gladwyn hears that—’
‘There’s no reason why he should,’ Lydia interrupted.
‘You see, he’s so funny about that barn and the skulls. Robbie, I mean. They’re … they’re special.’
‘His private Golgotha?’
For the first time Rebecca smiled, as one woman to another. ‘Yes. Mr Wentwood told you about that.’
Lydia turned back to the basin and buried her face in the flannel again. Afterwards she said, ‘You’d better warn Robbie. He’ll want to move his skulls.’
‘There’s no harm in them,’ Rebecca said, as though Lydia had said something quite different. ‘It’s just that they’re like toys to him. Or even friends. He was that upset when one of them went. I don’t know what he’d do if they all did.’
‘When he lost the goat’s skull?’
The maid nodded. ‘He thinks it was old Narton.’
‘Hold on.’ Lydia dried her face again and sat down at the dressing table. ‘Sergeant Narton? When?’
‘I’m not sure. Robbie’s not very good with time. Must have been only a few days before he died.’
‘Are you sure he meant Narton?’
‘Yes. He saw him coming out early one morning. He didn’t dare go up to him. Narton hit him once.’
Lydia picked up the hairbrush. ‘Robbie told you all this?’
The maid hovered at Lydia’s shoulder. ‘He can speak more than you’d think, madam. It’s just that he doesn’t like doing it with strangers and it takes a bit of practice to understand what he’s saying.’ She bent closer. ‘Are you really not going to do anything?’
‘About Robbie this afternoon? Of course not.’ For a moment she thought the maid was about to burst into tears. ‘It didn’t matter.’
‘Thank you. He was a bit funny today, you know, a bit overwrought. That must have been why he shut you in. He probably thought you were after the other skulls.’
It occurred to Lydia that at no point had Rebecca questioned Lydia’s accusation: she had assumed that it was perfectly likely, even probable, that Robbie had shut her in the barn.
‘I’ll take the coat down to the kitchen, shall I, and dry it by the fire. That mud will soon brush off.’
‘Thank you. Tell me, what was she like? Miss Penhow, I mean.’
‘I called her Mrs Serridge, of course. She was all right, quite a nice little thing. I was only with her for a week or two, but we got on fine. She gave herself airs sometimes but there was no harm in it. And you couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. She was so unhappy.’
‘Was that obvious?’
Rebecca nodded. ‘She wanted to follow him around like a spaniel but he wasn’t having any of it. She spent a lot of time crying. Or sulking, or trying to coax him round. She thought – she thought she was, well, attractive to him. That she could win him round that way. But then she found she couldn’t.’
‘Was she pretty?’
Rebecca shrugged. ‘She could make herself look well enough. She needed an hour in the morning to get ready. I used to help her sometimes, and she was so fussy. But she dressed quite well, I’ll say that for her. And she wasn’t bad-looking, either, not when she had her teeth in and she’d had her hair tinted. She was a lady who needed her rouge and powder. Even so, you could see just by looking at them together that he was a good ten or fifteen years younger. And then if you saw her when she wasn’t ready for company, you saw how old she really was. I dare say she felt younger than she was.’
‘We all feel that.’
‘Anyone with half an eye could see it was pointless.’
‘What do you mean?’
Rebecca drew herself up and stood primly, her hands clasped together in front of her. ‘He likes the younger ones, madam. Girls.’
Lydia stood up, leaving the towel draped on the end of the bed and the flannel on the edge of the basin. Rebecca folded the coat neatly over her arm and opened the door. It was odd, Lydia thought, and rather unsettling, how quickly one became used to servants again. Or rather to not noticing all the little things they did for you.
‘Rebecca? I found something else in the barn.’
The maid stopped, her hand on the door handle and her face anxious.
‘Nothing to worry about. Something on the ledge with the skulls, right at the end in the corner. An old cigar box. Do you know anything about it?’
‘It was Mrs Serridge’s – Miss Penhow’s, I mean. I remember Robbie showing it to me.’
Lydia blinked. ‘She smoked cigars?’
Rebecca’s face creased into a grin. ‘Oh no, madam. It must have been Mr Serridge’s once, I suppose. She used it for her diary. She was always writing in it.’
‘Why on earth did she keep it there?’
‘Maybe so it wasn’t obvious if Mr Serridge went looking for it. I caught him looking through her writing desk once when she was having a bath.’
‘It can’t
have been very big.’
‘It wasn’t. Just a little green book with hard covers.’
That explained the pencil. Lydia said, ‘Do you know what happened to it?’
‘Not seen hide nor hair of it since I left the farm. He’ll have got his hands on it after she went, if she didn’t take it with her.’
Lydia nodded to Rebecca to open the door. As they crossed the landing and went downstairs, normality re-asserted itself, and the maid, one step behind Lydia, kept her head modestly lowered and her hands clasped round the coat. The distance between them seemed ridiculous, given the nature of the conversation they had just had in the bedroom.
In the hall, Lydia turned to Rebecca and said in a low voice, partly because things had changed between them and partly because she wanted to show that she had no desire for them to return to their old formal footing, ‘You’ll have to find another Golgotha, I suppose.’
Rebecca looked at her and opened her mouth as if about to speak. Then her face changed as if a cloth had been wiped over it.
‘Ah,’ Mr Gladwyn said, emerging from the drawing room. ‘There you are, Mrs Langstone. Fully restored, I hope?’
Lydia turned to him and smiled. ‘Yes, thank you. Rebecca’s been looking after me very well.’
‘Good, good. Now come and get warm, and Rebecca will bring us our tea.’ He stood aside to allow her to enter the room. ‘What was that about Golgotha?’
‘No – taffeta,’ Lydia said swiftly as she passed him in the doorway. ‘I was asking her advice about how to clean a dress.’
Mrs Alforde was sitting smoking by the fire. She said hello but hardly looked at Lydia. She looked tired and also older, as though she had lived too much time too quickly since lunch.
‘Sorry I’ve kept you both waiting,’ Lydia said.
‘Not at all,’ Mr Gladwyn said earnestly. ‘Tea won’t be a jiffy now, I’m sure.’
‘You’ve been in the wars, I gather,’ Mrs Alforde said, tapping ash into the fire.
‘No lasting damage except to my gloves. How was Mrs Narton?’
Mrs Alforde looked away. ‘As well as could be expected.’
‘I shall tell Cook to send her some soup,’ Mr Gladwyn announced. ‘Ah, here is tea.’
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