Gone Away

by Hazel Holt

  That was not at all what I had in mind. What I wanted was to have a good old poke around on my own.

  ‘Oh, that’s all right. I’m sure I’ll be able to find it perfectly well. If you can let me have the keys I could pop in one day next week. That is,’ I continued archly, ‘if you trust me with them!’

  I looked up at him ingenuously from under my eyelashes. I was glad that Rosemary wasn’t there or I would have giggled and spoiled everything. Anthea and Ronnie, who were never very perceptive, seemed to notice nothing odd in my behaviour.

  ‘Well...’ he said doubtfully.

  ‘I’ll be very careful to lock up properly. I’m fright-fully conscientious, you ask Anthea.’

  His naturally grasping nature finally overcame his caution, and he appeared to decide that a good spring let for the cottage was not to be missed.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a set of keys for the cottage on me. You’d better take them now and let me have them back when you’ve had a look.’

  I burst forth into a flood of gratitude and enthusiasm on the behalf of the mythical bird-watchers.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said confidentially, ‘drop the keys in one evening and we’ll have a drink on it!’

  I shuddered inwardly at the thought of a drink à deux with Philip Bradford, but I smiled happily at him and said that it would be lovely and that I would look forward to it immensely.

  ‘I’ll just give you my address.’ he said, ‘and the name and address of the woman in the village who looks after the cottage ... There you are.’ He scribbled on the back of a business card and handed it to me. I saw that he owned a firm of builders’ merchants and thought how handy that would be for any development scheme.

  ‘Thank you so much.’ I said, putting it away in my handbag. ‘I’ll be in touch in the next few days.’

  As soon as I decently could, I made my fare-wells, pleading the need to give Tris a run before his bedtime.

  ‘Oh, you and your animals!’ Anthea said. ‘You let them rule your life!’

  No animal had ever been allowed into her immaculate home, and whenever she came to see me she always brushed (real or imaginary) animal hairs from the cushions and stared disapprovingly at the threads drawn from my furniture by sharp Siamese claws.

  ‘Thank you for a super evening, Anthea, Ronnie. Delicious food, such a treat. Goodbye Philip – so lovely to have met you at last...’

  Anthea and Ronnie embraced me, and I firmly held out my hand to Bradford who had shown an inclination to do the same.

  I got into my car and heaved a great sigh of relief at being on my own again. Anthea and Ronnie were old friends but a little of them went a long way. As for Bradford ... I wriggled my shoulders inside my coat as if I could shake off the slimy feeling I still had from contact with him. Had he really been Lee’s lover? How could she!

  But that was a naive way of looking at things. I knew now that for Lee sex was just one more way of getting what she wanted in life and, I suppose, it had got her quite a way. I felt revolted and saddened and, perhaps thanks to the gin and Ronnie’s good burgundy, rather confused.

  ‘But right is right and wrong is wrong.’ I said aloud as I turned into my drive. It might well be that Lee’s false values had finally been what had caused her death. Like Rosemary, I wouldn’t be at all sorry if Philip Bradford turned out to be the murderer.

  Tris had heard the car and was barking excitedly as I let myself into the house, and then there was a thump followed by a wail, which indicated that Foss had just jumped down from the top of my wardrobe and was ready for supper. In spite of all the food and drink, what I wanted most of all was a nice cup of cocoa. I let Tris out into the garden to bark at the hedgehogs and put the milk on. I felt rather pleased with myself. On Monday – no, bother, not Monday because I had a committee meeting – on Tuesday I would go and see Bradford’s cottage. I got out Peter’s Ordnance Survey map of the area and found where I thought it must be. There was a track marked, round the wood, that brought one out at the back of Plover’s Barrow. He could easily have got there on foot – or perhaps he went with Lee in the car, killed her and walked back to the cottage and picked up his own car there. I couldn’t think it all out logically, not times and distances and everything, but it seemed a possibility at any rate. And if I could have a good look round the cottage, who knew what I might find?

  Chapter Thirteen

  Tuesday was a lovely day with a bright blue sky, and in the car out of the wind there was real warmth in the sun. There were quite a few early lambs in the fields and I felt that the year was on the turn at last. Since it was such a nice day I didn’t take the coast road but drove over the hill and across the moor. There was still a little snow on the higher ground but the road was clear and dry. I saw very little traffic and it didn’t seem to be a hunting day. As always when I was up on the moor, my spirits rose and I even sang a little – an indulgence of which I am rather ashamed and would never admit to.

  After a while I stopped and looked at the map and tried to get my bearings. More by luck than judgement I found the cottage quite easily. It lay back from the road a bit, but there was a farm gate with the name painted on it: ‘Barleymead’. I stopped and opened the gate and drove up to the front door. It was a well-kept, smooth-surfaced drive – I suppose Bradford had it done at cost, like the decorations to the cottage, which was immaculate. It had a tiled roof, not thatch, but in every other respect was exactly what a summer visitor would expect a country cottage to be – white walls, and a heavy, dark, wood front door with a lot of genuine wrought-iron hinges and latches. There was even an evergreen honeysuckle climbing round the porch. I took a bet with myself that there would be an old bread oven. There was plenty of room to park at the front so I left the car there and let myself into the cottage.

  The inside was even more perfect. There were heavy oak beams and an enormous old open fire-place (with a bread oven), and the staircase went straight up through a door in the sitting room. There were two rooms downstairs as well as a beautiful modern kitchen, and to my surprise the whole thing was furnished with some very nice pieces. Either Mrs Bradford had very good taste (but then how could she have married Philip Bradford?) or else he had had it all done by a firm of interior decorators. Certainly he would be able to charge a very high rent for it. It must be a nice little investment.

  I don’t know what I expected to find. Something that would prove that Lee had been there on the day before she died – a hairpin, perhaps, or one of those clues that featured in the more old-fashioned detective stories. But no one used hairpins now, and certainly Lee didn’t; her hair was short and naturally curly. Still, inspired by that thought, I opened the door in the sitting room and went up the narrow stairs.

  There were three bedrooms (one of them minute, for a child, I supposed) and a very luxurious bath-room (palest blue and white and I coveted it greatly). The bedrooms were very Laura Ashley, with pretty, spriggy printed curtains and covers. I went into the larger bedroom, which was the one with the double bed, and looked about me. Everything was neat and apparently untouched. I had hardly expected to find a rumpled, unmade bed, it is true, but I must admit that I felt slightly let down and disappointed. I opened the door of the wardrobe, but apart from a collection of wooden hangers it was empty. So were all the drawers of a rather nice mahogany bow-fronted chest and those of the old-fashioned dressing table. I sat down on the dressing-table stool and stared at my reflection in the mirror. I looked rather dishevelled and windblown and my lipstick had got eaten off as usual. I got out my lipstick and put some more on and then laid it down on the dressing table to fish in my bag for a comb. The old uneven floor had made the surface of the dressing table slope, and my lipstick rolled off and on to the carpet. I exclaimed in annoyance and bent down to look for it. At first I couldn’t see it anywhere, and then, when I had got down on my knees and looked more closely, I saw that it had rolled over and come to rest against the skirting. As I went to pick it up, I s
aw that something else had rolled down the same sloping bit of floor. Hidden between the skirting and the leg of the dressing table was an eye-liner.

  I picked it up and took it over to the window to look at it properly in the light. It was an expensive one, an Elizabeth Arden, and instead of the usual black or brown, it was navy. I was immediately convinced that it belonged to Lee. She used Elizabeth Arden cosmetics, I was sure, because I remembered recognising the smell of Blue Grass when we were in the close confines of the car together. It is a perfume that has upsetting memories for me, so I always notice it. And her eyes were so very blue that she would be sure to use a navy liner to emphasise them – I remembered all those beauty hints in Vogue. The fact that it was an eye-liner suggested that she had stayed the night. Lee looked to me like the sort of woman who put her make-up on very carefully in the morning and then didn’t touch it all day except to renew her lipstick. Perhaps she’d been in a hurry that morning and hadn’t noticed that the liner had rolled off the dressing table. And then I thought, my excitement mounting, if it if was the morning she had been killed, she would have been dead before she realised that it was missing, so she wouldn’t have mentioned the loss to Bradford (I was sure they were very careful to leave no traces here) or come back to look for it herself.

  I tried to be practical. If it did belong to Lee then it would have her fingerprints on it so I mustn’t handle it too much. There was a box of fancy tissues on the dressing table and I took a handful and wrapped the liner loosely in them, taking care not to smudge any prints that might be there. Then I put it in an empty plastic bag I found in my handbag. Peter used to groan at the immense amount of junk I carried around in my bag, but, I thought triumphantly, it does come in useful sometime!

  I put my lipstick away and combed my hair, smiling at myself in the mirror. Then I went down-stairs. If they had been here, there might just be traces in the kitchen. It was unlikely that they would risk being seen eating out together, and even if they had, then I was pretty sure, from what I knew of both of them, they would have had a drink. No doubt Bradford would have tidied up to leave no trace, but, in my experience, most men never really leave a kitchen looking quite impeccable.

  I looked around and was gratified to see that there was a trace of spillage in the smaller oven of the elegant electric stove. It was still quite soft and hadn’t been burnt on, so it wasn’t a relic of previous visitors. And it was obvious enough for a housewifely eye to spot it, so it must have been done since Mrs Ellis – the woman in the village – had last come in to clean the cottage. I imagined that they had brought some sort of made-up dish in a foil container and heated it up. I found myself wondering what it had been.

  Inspired by this discovery, I looked in the pedal bin, but that was empty and lined with a clean plastic dustbin bag. This evidence of Mrs Ellis’s zeal reinforced my belief that she would certainly have cleaned the oven properly. I poked around the kitchen a bit more, opening cupboards, and admiring the high standard of equipment. I even found myself regretting that Freda Benson wasn’t coming at Easter, since I would have had no hesitation in recommending the cottage. The refrigerator was switched off, but when I opened the small freezing compartment there was still water in the ice-cube tray. Mrs Ellis, I told myself, would have made sure it was empty before she defrosted the fridge, so Bradford had probably switched it on to make ice for their drinks.

  I was really very pleased with myself as I let myself out of the cottage, carefully double-locking the door behind me. I sat in the car and took stock of what I had found out. Lee had certainly spent at least one night there, though there was no way I could prove that it was the night before she was killed. Still, I felt I had established a personal connection between her and Bradford. Whether that gave him a reason for killing her I didn’t know, but it was a start. Anyway, since I had a perfect excuse, it would do no harm to have a word with Mrs Ellis. I drove on into the village and found her bungalow in the main street. It was, as I would have expected, immaculately kept, with a blue front door and a plethora of net curtains. I rang the bell, and a young woman came to the door with a small girl clinging to her hand. I was surprised, since I had imagined somehow that Mrs Ellis would be an elderly ‘treasure’.

  I explained who I was and that Mr Bradford had said that she looked after the cottage, and would she mind turning on the electric heaters and getting in milk and bread for my friends if they decided to come at Easter.

  ‘Come in, won’t you?’ she said, and I followed her into a small sitting room, brightly papered and crammed with innumerable small objects. A little boy of about two was playing with bricks on the floor, and I marvelled that all the bric-à-brac was intact, remembering Michael’s destructive tendencies at that age. However, it seemed that Mrs Ellis’s children were as impeccable as her house, and the boy went on playing peacefully and the little girl, who was a few years older, sat quietly on the sofa watching the television which was showing an episode of an Australian soap opera.

  ‘Half a mo,’ Mrs Ellis said, ‘I’ll just turn this thing down.’

  She turned the sound down, but the child still sat regarding the now silent screen with its bright images of sun-drenched beaches and patios.

  ‘That’s better, now we can hear ourselves think!’

  I repeated my request on behalf of my friends.

  ‘Oh yes, just let me know when they’ll be coming. I’ll have given the place a good going over, of course, but I can see to the bread and milk and anything else they want. Barry might have some early lettuce by then and I could make them an apple tart...’

  I regretted more than ever that this pearl among holiday cottages would not be occupied by Freda and her friends.

  ‘That would be absolutely marvellous. I’ll let you know the dates as soon as I hear from them.’

  ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’

  I realised that Mrs Ellis was probably lonely, as young housewives with small children so often are, and would welcome a chat.

  ‘That is kind, I’d love one.’

  She went out of the room and I asked the little girl what her name was.

  ‘I’m Debbie, and he’ – she indicated her brother – ‘is Craig. But he’s not two yet.’

  I trotted out the second classic gambit. ‘And do you go to school?’

  ‘Yes, but I broke my leg falling off my new bike. They put it in plaster, but now they took it off and I mustn’t run about, just sit quiet.’

  Her eyes returned to the television screen where the soap opera had been replaced by the vaguely familiar face of a politician in relentless close-up. Mrs Ellis came back with two mugs of coffee and a plate of custard cream biscuits. I took the coffee gratefully but declined the biscuits. She gave each child a biscuit, which they ate silently and neatly. I began to have considerable respect for Mrs Ellis.

  ‘Debbie tells me she broke her leg.’ I said.

  ‘Yes. It was that new bike she had for her birth-day. I said it was too big for her but Barry would have it that she’d grow into it. Men!’

  I smiled sympathetically. ‘It seems to have mended quite well.’

  ‘They say it has at the hospital. But it means she’s off school for all this time...’

  ‘Are there many children in the village?’

  ‘No. We’re the only family now with young children. Mostly old people, retired and such-like, and holiday homes, people only here at weekends. Hardly seems worth the school bus coming all this way just for one. It’ll be better when Craig starts.’

  ‘I suppose there’s no way you can get him to a playgroup or anything.’

  ‘No – there’s nothing like that nearer than Taviscombe. Seems a shame somehow. I’d like to move, but Barry’s lived here all his life, works on the farm just down from the village. He’s a cowman. He won’t move. Still, I made him get a mortgage so’s we could buy this place. I wasn’t going to live in a tied cottage like his Mum and Dad...’

  ‘You’re not from round here, then?’r />
  ‘No, from Taviscombe. My Dad’s a milkman. Shapwick, his name is, Fred Shapwick.’

  ‘No!’ I exclaimed. ‘He used to be my milkman. Right up until last year when his round was changed! You must be Maureen.’

  ‘Mrs Malory! I thought the name was familiar when you said it ... Dad often talked about you and your husband. He gave Dad some very good advice once when he got into trouble over some HP.’

  We smiled at each other in genuine pleasure, as one does when life presents one with these neat coincidences.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘isn’t it a small world!’

  In recognition of this truth, she passed me the plate of biscuits again and this time I took one.

  ‘It’s a good-sized bungalow,’ I said, ‘and you’ve got it looking so nice. But then, when I think how beautifully you’ve kept Mr Bradford’s cottage, I’m not surprised.’

  ‘To tell you the truth, I’m glad of something to do. You can get round this place in a couple of hours and when Debbie’s at school there’s only Craig to see to. And I like looking after nice things.’

  ‘Yes, the cottage is very nicely furnished, isn’t it.’

  ‘He had it all done, by some firm. He doesn’t know anything about antiques and things and I’ve never seen his wife. She doesn’t have anything to do with the letting.’

  I had the feeling that she didn’t like Philip Brad-ford, despised him, even. Probably he had tried to patronise her, and that would have been a mistake.

  ‘I don’t expect he has any trouble in letting it. It really is a lovely spot and the cottage looks most comfortable.’

  ‘Charges the earth for it. But then, people like that from London, they’ll pay anything for somewhere in the country. Me, I’d rather go where there’s a bit of sun!’

  ‘Was it booked up all last year?’

  ‘Oh yes, every week practically. Except when he used it himself.’

  ‘He stays there himself?’

  ‘Yes, sometimes.’ She hesitated, but the urge to impart a little gossip was irresistible. ‘A love nest, you might say.’