The Company She Kept

by Marjorie Eccles

  Hartopp Moor took on a totally different aspect in the daylight. Bare and windswept today, it had its own peculiar beauty, a wild emptiness, with the odd clump of yellow furze and the young heather, not yet in bloom, bending to a scouring wind. A bright sun reflected the occasional black, oily gleam beneath the sedge, indicating peat beneath. Mayo, who had been born within a few miles of the Bronte Parsonage and missed its bracing ambience, wound down his window to let the clean, cold air rush in, while Abigail did her best not to flinch. The cry of a curlew was the only sound. There was an empty, unimpeded view for miles.

  ‘Next left, I think, Abigail.’

  Almost at once the turning materialized, a narrow road which dropped into what might have been a different world, so different was it from the moor they’d been crossing.

  The Morwen valley was pretty, soft and fertile even at this season when the trees and hedgerows were bare, but with the occasional field of winter wheat already showing pale spears, the quickthorn greening over and wild cherry showing pale stars of blossom. Now and again, signs of habitation appeared: a farm or two, a grey church and a cluster of cottages.

  The road meandered unhurriedly through the valley until eventually, three or four miles past the church and the last of the cottages, they came to the place they were looking for. It was situated in a hollow, a decaying tree-girt house built of rosy Elizabethan brick, gabled and timbered, with a sagging roof and tall, twisted chimneys. Smaller than Mayo had expected, though small in this sense was relative: compared with your average three- or four-bedroomed semi it was pretty big, though not by any means a mansion. Surrounded by a high brick wall, only the roofs and upper storeys were clearly visible from the road.

  Abigail cut the engine and went to try the pair of high, rusty, wrought-iron gates which proved, not unexpectedly, to be locked. She looked round and saw that on the other side of the road a grassy knoll rose directly opposite the house. Scaling it nimbly, she made room for Mayo to scramble up beside her. From their new vantage-point they were able to see right over the wall and observe the tranquil scene spread out before them.

  The deserted house looked peaceful and undisturbed, as though it felt it had existed long enough and was now, without regret, slowly crumbling into the earth. Reflected in the still waters of the lake which stretched in front of it, it had stood like this for centuries, a jewel of a house, true to the original conception of its builder. Until some twentieth-century vandal had added the absurd, minaret-like structure which was tacked on to one end – stuccoed, domed and once painted blue and white. This was no doubt Kitty Wilbraham’s doing, the study she had added on to house the gruesome mementoes of her working life. ‘How’s that for an improvement on the scenery?’ Abigail asked, making a face.

  Mayo grunted. He thought it the sort of outrage local planning authorities ought not to allow people to get away with, though more than likely permission hadn’t even been asked, with the relative isolation of the house giving Kitty Wilbraham cause to feel she could cock a snook at authority, that what she did with her own property was nobody else’s business.

  ‘Might be an idea to take a gander round the back,’ he said, curious to know more of this house where Kitty Wilbraham had lived.

  Behind the house rose an extensive belt of woodland, stretching out to the left, while most of the foreground was taken up by the tadpole-shaped lake which appeared to run out at its narrow end towards a boathouse in the distance and thence to join the river, a glimpse of which could just be seen beyond the trees. A wall surrounded the property and like the house it was crumbling and decaying, overgrown with ivy and toadflax and following the road at least as far as the next bend. A speculative look appeared in Mayo’s eye and Abigail had a nasty premonition she was going to be instructed to scale the damn thing.

  ‘Looks as if it’s held up only by hope and the grace of God,’ she offered hopefully.

  Mayo, however, was slithering down the bank and taking his boots from the back of the car. ‘We’ll follow it round. There’ll be some way in at the back or I’m a Chinaman.’

  He set off at a fast pace and now knowing by repute the alacrity with which the gaffer welcomed the chance of a walk, preferably on the rougher mountains of Wales, or the remoter Scottish moors, and the longer the better, plus her own antipathy to walking anywhere but on the paved streets of a town or city, Abigail groaned, tucked her trousers into her boots, then set off at a canter to catch up with Mayo’s long strides.

  About a hundred yards further along, just after the sharp bend in the road, the wall turned at right angles to the hedgerow, continuing upwards along the edge of a ploughed field. They first had to push through the scrubby hedge of hawthorn, beech and field maple, then walk along the margin of the field whose deeply ridged furrows followed the line of the wall, here in a considerably worse state of repair than along the front, with gaps in it like a boxer’s front teeth. Another fifty yards and the wall petered out altogether and the woodland began, a mixed plantation of coniferous and deciduous trees.

  Leading between the trees was a path running parallel with the house, thick with the mast of beech and oak, springy with pine needles that deadened their footsteps. It was dark beneath the canopy but lit here and there by the brassy, hopeful gleam of aconites alongside the bramble-snagged and obviously little-used path. It wasn’t until the house eventually came into sight, slightly below where they stood, that they paused to take stock. The silence was total, apart from the croo-croo of the wood pigeons and the stirring of the small wind in the bare branches above.

  Then, ripping the silence apart, came the slam of a shotgun. Pellets sang past their ears and bit into the trunk of a spruce, chips of soft bark flew as the sound ricocheted through the clearing. The two detectives covered a lot of space in a very short time and froze, flattening themselves behind tree-trunks. Outraged pigeons clattered up into the trees before the woods settled again into silence.

  ‘What are you doing here? Don’t you know this is private property?’

  A cautious look showed a man standing watching them with a gun to his shoulder, a dark-browed individual with a closed expression and a black labrador at his heels.

  ‘We’re police officers and what the hell d’you think you’re doing with that gun?’ Mayo demanded, emerging from the shelter of his tree.

  ‘Rabbiting. Think yourselves lucky you didn’t get hurt. I didn’t see you there.’

  This was a patent lie. They had been standing in plain view in the middle of the clearing and the gun had without doubt been aimed deliberately. Aimed to miss, maybe, to put the fear of God into them, but aimed, all the same.

  ‘You own this property?’

  ‘I keep an eye on the house here, look after the grounds. I’ve a smallholding over there.’ The man jerked his head backwards.

  ‘In that case you can give us a few minutes of your time.’

  He debated this. Then he gave a brusque nod and said grudgingly that they’d better come over to his cottage, whistled for the dog and began to walk away, leaving them to follow him across the top edge of the ploughed field and into a small cleanly-swept farmyard surrounding a tiny, brick-built cottage with a slate roof. The yard had a tidy air of self-sufficiency, despite a clapped-out old motorbike standing in one corner and a pigsty in the other. As they walked towards the cottage a big shire horse gave a loud whinny and thrust a gentle, inquiring head over the door of a stable nearly the size of the cottage itself.

  ‘No need for that,’ Abigail was told as she tried to knock off the earth clinging to her boots at the doorstep, ‘I’m not houseproud.’ She took them off, all the same, leaving them by the door before following him into a living-room warm from an open fire in the range and redolent with the savoury aroma of a slow-cooking stew in the fireside oven.

  Plainly whitewashed, as neat and clean as the deck of a ship, the interior gave the lie to his remark. It spoke of an owner with few material needs, living alone and content to do so. A sink under the w
indow, a scrubbed pine table in the centre, on it an old portable typewriter, a pile of paper and a ledger or two. Open plank shelves filled to capacity with books, both paperback and hardcover, ran across one wall.

  ‘All right. Maybe you’ll tell me what this is all about? Sit down.’ Apart from a sagging easy chair in front of the range, there were no seats other than two wooden stools which he pulled out from under the table. Visitors were patently not encouraged. He himself ignored the easy chair. With a curt ‘Basket, Nell,’ to the dog, he stood with his back to the fire, facing the room. ‘Well?’

  Abigail availed herself of one of the two stools, but Mayo, not intending to leave the dominant position to the man he was about to question, leaned back against the sink and folded his arms. ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Mayo and this is Sergeant Moon. And your name?’

  ‘You can call me Tommo, everyone does.’

  ‘Your proper name, please.’

  ‘Maryan Thomas, spelt with a “y”. You can see why I prefer Tommo.’

  Mayo frowned. He had come across the name, as a man’s name, before, though he couldn’t immediately remember where. ‘How long have you lived here, Mr Thomas?’ He was damned if he was going to use the nickname, which he found ridiculous, besides being unwilling to introduce any sort of familiarity into the interview.

  ‘Seventeen years.’

  ‘And before that?’

  The stillness before he answered was scarcely the space between one tick of the clock and the next, but this was clearly a question that wasn’t welcome. At last he replied that he’d been teaching at an agricultural college in the north of England but had given it up in order to farm.

  ‘Do you own this place?’

  ‘I do now. It was a hovel and I lived in it rent-free when I first came here, in return for the work I put in on the house and garden.’ An obvious pride lifted the heaviness of his features, and made him more loquacious. ‘They call it organic farming now but for me I’d no choice if I wanted to survive. I couldn’t afford fancy gadgets and expensive chemicals. I built up my smallholding, bit by bit, and in the end I was able to buy it from Kitty – from Mrs Wilbraham, the owner. She wasn’t demanding in what she asked, it didn’t break me,’ he added ironically.

  He was a taut, compactly-built individual, sturdy but with no spare fat, nothing at all extraneous about him, in fact. His answers were punctuated by considered silences. He was the sort who’d keep secrets just for the hell of it – and would be a reluctant, even downright hostile, witness. There could be violence just beneath the surface.

  ‘Do you know a woman called Angie Robinson?’

  He thought, and said eventually, ‘I did.’

  ‘What do you mean, did?’ Mayo asked. ‘How d’you know she was dead?’

  That called for another pause. ‘I didn’t, and I hardly knew her, but I’m sorry to hear it.’

  ‘How did you come to know her?’

  ‘Oh, she visited the big house a few times, years ago, with Madeleine Freeman, Mrs Wilbraham’s doctor. Why? Was there something suspicious about her death?’

  ‘What makes you ask that?’

  Thomas shrugged. ‘Busy police ... I hardly think you’d be here talking to me if it wasn’t something like that.’

  ‘She was murdered,’ Mayo said.

  Thomas received the news with another of his unreadable silences before eventually saying, ‘Well, she was all sorts of a fool, Angie, but she didn’t deserve that. And you’re on the wrong tack if you think I’d anything to do with it.’

  ‘Don’t put words into my mouth, Mr Thomas. When was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘Good God, you expect me to remember that? At least twelve or thirteen years ago, I’d say, maybe more. Before Kitty went away at any rate.’ But something different had entered into his tone, something guarded.

  Abigail said, ‘If you knew Angie Robinson, I assume you had social connections with Mrs Wilbraham, as well as working for her?’

  Thomas looked at her, took in the coppery hair, the slim, neat figure and long legs, her feet curled around the bottom rail of the stool. He smiled. He had very white, even teeth. His face was very brown and weatherbeaten.

  ‘Practically every day. Occasionally, I was even invited to dine. I do know which knife and fork to use, you know.’ Abigail flushed slightly and a dangerous spark of green lit her hazel eyes. Mayo thought: If that was bait it wasn’t worth rising to. There was nothing uncouth about Thomas or his surroundings, nothing uneducated about his speech. He had no doubt the man’s beginnings had been very different from the way he lived now, and if necessary these would be gone into, but, for the present, if he chose to live in circumstances likely to be regarded as primitive by the rest of society, that was his business.

  ‘Then you’d know most of Mrs Wilbraham’s friends,’ Abigail said crisply, ‘at any rate, those who might have known Angie Robinson. Sophie Lawrence, for instance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You still keep in contact?’

  ‘Occasionally.’

  ‘You met on Thursday in Oundle’s Bookshop, in fact?’

  ‘We did?’

  ‘Come on, Mr Thomas, I saw you there.’

  He shrugged. ‘Then there’s no point in denying it.’

  ‘And you still say you hadn’t heard of Angie Robinson’s death until now?’

  ‘When Sophie and I meet,’ he said, ‘we have other things to discuss.’

  Mayo raised a figurative eyebrow at this information, which Abigail had had no opportunity of passing on since recognizing Thomas when he had first appeared in the clearing. If correct, it reinforced the impression he was getting – that the group surrounding the late Mrs Wilbraham had been a tightly integrated one, and that they were now closing ranks. Moreover, it was a group growing in number: Sophie Lawrence, Madeleine Freeman, Angie Robinson, the boy, Felix – and now this man, whom both women had omitted to say they knew, for whatever reason, or to mention as part of the Flowerdew scene. Another man who, he thought, might fit the bill, the ‘he’ in Angie Robinson’s letter.

  Abigail was pressing on and Thomas admitted he had been in Lavenstock on Thursday, but only to order farm supplies, pick up some necessary shopping and slip into Oundle’s to meet Sophie. ‘Any reason why I shouldn’t? We meet quite often, Sophie and I, when she’s in England.’

  ‘No reason at all, Mr Thomas,’ Abigail replied, and went on immediately to ask about his movements on the Tuesday night. He admitted to having no alibi, had been working outside all day and got soaked to the skin so, with the light giving out early, he’d come indoors and had a hot bath.

  ‘Which is no easy undertaking in a place like this!’ The sudden, white-toothed smile crossed his face as he indicated a wooden working surface with a curtain slung underneath, behind which presumably lurked some sort of bathing arrangements. ‘Even though the range gives me plenty of hot water.’ After he’d bathed and had his supper, he’d gone early to bed, like the farmer he was. He denied knowing anything at all about Bulstrode Street – and unless he had borrowed or hired a Jaguar it was unlikely he’d been the man who had apparently visited Sophie Lawrence. He didn’t possess a car at all. He used his motorcycle when it was in a good mood, otherwise the thrice-weekly country bus.

  ‘All right,’ Mayo said, ‘I’m sure we shall be able to check whatever’s necessary. Let’s get on to something else. Do you remember a young man, name of Darbell, Felix Darbell?’

  ‘Of course. He was a student who hung around here one summer, used to give me a hand with the garden. Good worker. Why do you want to know? He wasn’t particularly friendly with Angie.’

  ‘Do you know where Mr Darbell is now?’

  ‘Good Lord, no! Why should I?’

  Again Mayo felt a pricking in his thumbs. ‘It was an odd set-up here, wasn’t it, an old woman like Mrs Wilbraham, and all those young people?’

  ‘I don’t see anything peculiar about that – she was always one to have young folks around her
.’

  ‘Well, maybe she felt like that, but what about the rest of you? Didn’t you ever get bored? It’s very quiet out here – nothing much to do of an evening – very tempting to try and liven things up with, say, a bit of fortune-telling, table-tapping or whatever – join in those séances, did you?’

  ‘Séances? Me?’ Thomas laughed shortly. He looked at Mayo with patent scorn. ‘Do I strike you as the sort to go in for that sort of rubbish?’

  No, thought Mayo, sensing the hostility building up once more, but he did strike him as being nifty enough to sidestep the truth when it suited him. Nevertheless, the time had come to call a halt. He knew when he’d got as much as he was likely to get from a witness for the time being. He remarked, on the point of leaving, not really expecting to gain anything fresh from the answer, ‘Presumably you’re paid for looking after the house and grounds, Mr Thomas? Through Mrs Wilbraham’s lawyer?’

  ‘Through her lawyer? Well, I don’t see what damn business it is of yours, but no, Kitty pays me herself. She’s not ga-ga yet.’

  With a feeling that something solid had given way beneath him – bloody hell! – Mayo stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned further back against the sink. ‘What do you mean by that? She sends you the money?’

  ‘Sends it? Why the devil should she? No, I go and touch my forelock and she gives me a cheque.’

  Abigail said carefully, ‘We were told she’d gone to live in Tunisia.’

  ‘So she did.’ Mayo was aware of Thomas’s cool, amused appraisal of the young woman. ‘And came back about three months ago.’

  ‘Where is she living?’

  ‘At Flowerdew. Where else?’

  ‘In that case,’ Mayo said, ‘we’d better get ourselves over there and start asking her some questions.’