by Nicola Upson
‘She was in her nightclothes, yes.’
‘Mm. No one quite knows why it happens. The cause of death is usually hypothermia, but we can’t tell if the cold affects their mind and causes confusion, or if senility leads them to behave in that way and they die from the cold because of it. Presumably the doctor was called in?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what does the death certificate say?’
‘I don’t know, but the thing is – Bert moved her body.’
‘He did what?’ Archie frowned at her in disbelief. ‘Why on earth would he do that?’
‘For her dignity, he said. He told me she would never have wanted anyone to see her like that.’
‘Very convenient. He could tell you anything with an excuse like that – or not tell you something you should know. Do you trust this Bert?’
‘I don’t know. He seems genuine, and I believe he really cared for Hester. And he didn’t have to tell me anything, did he? How would I have found out? He’s the only person who knows what happened.’ She thought for a moment, trying to decide how she really felt about Bert. ‘He fell out with Hester towards the end of her life; she said his kids had stolen something from the cottage – but she was behaving strangely by then, so who knows what really happened?’
‘I had no idea it was Hester’s death you were so worried about. Your note mentioned stolen goods, but are you saying that someone killed her?’
‘Yes, I suppose I am – but I’ve got absolutely no evidence for that, and it’s all tied up with stolen goods. Let me tell you about the diary.’ She did so, conscious of how good it felt to talk to someone whom she could trust with anything, someone who wasn’t connected in any way to Hester or to the village.
‘And Hester was going to publish it?’ Archie asked, when she had finished her account of the bookseller in Leather Lane. ‘It would be the most authentic account, I suppose – there’d be a lot of interest in it.’
‘Not only that. It was written by a friend of Maria’s and it treats her as a real person – not a victim, and not a whore. None of the other accounts tell it from Maria’s perspective, not even Curtis. History is always more interested in the murderer.’
‘That’s true.’ He nodded, and she could tell that her enthusiasm was infectious. ‘It sounds unique.’
‘It is. I’ve brought you a sample to look at.’ She took the bundle of pages out of her bag and watched as he examined it, as fascinated by the diary as she was.
‘Where did Hester get it?’
‘Rose said she found it in the cottage when she moved in.’
‘You should have brought a cast list. Who’s Rose?’
Josephine smiled, and offered him another sandwich. ‘Rose Boreham. She’s the girl who charred for Hester. She lives in the next village – her parents run a pub there. I went to see her yesterday.’
‘If she charred for Hester, she’d know about everything in the cottage. Was she interested in the Red Barn murder?’
‘Yes, but I trust her, Archie.’
He gave her a look, but said nothing. ‘So there’s no actual proof of ownership of the diary, other than Hester’s transcript and this girl’s word?’
Josephine was deflated. ‘Isn’t that enough? John Moore readily admits he bought it from someone, and it certainly wasn’t Hester.’
‘He won’t tell you who, of course.’
‘No. That’s where I thought you might be able to help me.’ She reached for a cream horn and spoke nonchalantly. ‘I know how heavy you can be – I’ve seen you strong-arm for royalty.’
‘I’m never going to live that down, am I? But of course I can do that. I’ll have a word back at the office and see if John Moore is known to us as someone who buys stolen relics. A lot of that goes on, and I’m ashamed to say that it’s often our lot who encourage it. Sometimes things go missing from the archives, and you find out that a constable nearing retirement has decided to make things a bit more comfortable in his final years. If Moore has got a record already, that would make it much easier to put some pressure on him to reveal his sources.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I meant what I said about ownership, though. To prove it was stolen, you have to prove it was rightfully Hester’s.’ She was about to argue through a mouthful of pastry, but he pre-empted her. ‘Assuming that can be done, though, who are the candidates for the middleman? Bert and his family, Rose Boreham – who else knew what was in that cottage?’
‘Well, there’s the mysterious woman from London,’ Josephine said, warming to her theme; if the village spinster cap fitted, she might as well wear it. ‘Two people have mentioned her. Rose said she came to call on Hester unexpectedly . . .’
‘She tells a good story, our Rose.’
‘. . . and my solicitor’s secretary met her at Hester’s funeral. At least, I assume it was the same person. How many shadowy, dark-haired women can there be?’
‘What does your solicitor say about all this, by the way?’
‘I haven’t had a chance to talk to him properly yet.’ Absorbed in her conversation with Rose, she had forgotten to telephone as planned from Stoke, but it could wait until next week now, when she would be able to speak to John MacDonald in person – and ask him about Dilys Nichols. ‘But everything’s in order with her estate as far as he’s concerned.’
‘All right. So – the woman from London.’ He listened, increasingly concerned as Josephine described Rose’s traumatic last meeting with Hester, and the elderly woman’s sudden, unexplained decline. ‘Listen, Josephine – are you sure you should be getting involved in all this? If someone gets wind of the fact that you’re asking questions, you could be making yourself very vulnerable. I hate the thought of you stuck out in the middle of nowhere, all on your own. Can’t Marta come and stay while this is going on?’
‘She’s been for a few days but I don’t need a minder, Archie.’ He looked doubtful, and she tried to reassure him. ‘Anyway, I’m off back to Scotland tomorrow and I don’t know when I’ll have time to come back. I’ve been neglecting things at home, and this bloody biography won’t write itself, no matter how long I leave it on its own in peace and quiet.’
Archie smiled, but he wasn’t convinced. ‘Will you at least promise not to do anything else until I’ve had a chance to ask around for you? I’ll get Bill to pay John Moore a visit straight away – it’s the sort of job he loves, especially if he knows he’s doing it for you. And I’ll make subtle enquiries into a death certificate.’
She laughed. ‘Is there a subtle way of making enquiries into a death certificate?’
‘No, I suppose not. But please, Josephine – be careful whom you trust. Don’t invite anyone into your home, not even this girl Rose. I know you like her, but you know absolutely nothing about her or anyone else in that village. Any one of them could be spinning you lies.’
Rose was hardly another Kate Webster, Josephine thought, picturing the infamous waxwork in her mind, but Archie meant well and she knew he was right. ‘All right, I promise to be careful and I appreciate the help. Thank you.’
She could see him turning the information she had given him over in his mind, and knew he would continue to think about it long after she had gone. ‘You were telling me who else might have been aware of Hester’s collection,’ he reminded her.
‘Well, anyone from the village could have been inside the cottage at one time or another,’ she admitted unhelpfully. ‘They seem to come and go as they please. The vicar and his wife knew Hester quite well.’
‘And are they interested in the murder? Or particularly hard-up, of course.’
‘Definitely not hard-up,’ she said, remembering how well the rectory had been furnished, and already familiar with Hilary’s penchant for haute couture. She hesitated, thinking about the collection of books on Stephen’s shelves and the parish registers that he had been consulting at home. ‘They’re interested in the case, I suppose, but only in the same way that I am. Oh, and there’s the curator
of the local museum. Hester charmed him over sherry one day, and made him salivate into his glass for what she’d collected.’ She told him about the visit she and Marta had made to Moyse’s Hall.
‘So presumably he’d be very keen to have the things there?’
‘Yes, but not at any cost. Apart from the fact that he seemed trustworthy, he’d give himself away the minute he put them on show.’
‘He could say Hester gave them to him.’
‘He could, yes, but he didn’t. He made no secret of how valuable they’d be to him – he was all but panting for the chest that isn’t the chest – but he also told me how valuable they could be to me, and cautioned me against letting them go easily. Of course, neither of us knew for sure then that I hadn’t got them in the first place.’
‘Yes, I see – but that is a problem, you know: anyone could say that Hester had given them the things, particularly if she wasn’t quite herself, and there’s no proof to the contrary. Is there no mention at all of them in the will?’
‘Not individually, no. It was a blanket description of everything.’
‘That’s a shame – we could have argued they were legally yours if so. As things stand, even if I find out who sold the diary to John Moore, that’s no proof of theft, and even further away from any bearing on Hester’s death.’ He saw her disappointment. ‘I’m sorry not to be more positive.’
‘No, you’re right. I know it’s a wild goose chase, but I just feel I need to do something – to know in my own mind what happened.’ He seemed to understand, as she had known he would. ‘And the nicest thing of all is to know I’m not on my own with it any more. Thank you.’
‘It must have tainted the cottage for you,’ he said, accepting more tea. ‘Will you keep it?’
‘If I can get to the bottom of all this, then yes. I don’t know how much time I can realistically spend there when it’s so far away, but in a funny sort of way the distance is also what it has in its favour. It would be nice to have a change of scene when I need it, a different life. Peace and quiet, time to think.’
Archie nodded, pleased for her. ‘Of course, if you go ahead and publish this diary, that’ll be an end to the peace and quiet. Red Barn Cottage will be a magnet for tourists – they’ll be traipsing across that field again, just like the old days. I can’t imagine that the village will thank you for raking it all up again, just when they thought they’d got the lid on it.’
Josephine hadn’t considered that. ‘I feel I owe it to Lucy, though. That might be the thing which brings her peace.’
‘Is she restless now, then?’ he asked, intrigued by her partiality. She looked at him guardedly, but he didn’t seem to be mocking her. ‘Seriously, Josephine – is the cottage haunted by more than Hester’s death?’
So she told him everything – the way the room had affected her and the pain she sensed there, the unexplained noises and the words scratched into the window seat, the figure in the garden and the face at the window. ‘Of course, I’d been up all night reading the diary, so I was exhausted. And to be honest, going back to my mother’s early life has really got to me,’ she admitted. ‘It’s as though I’ve had to come to terms with losing her all over again. It’s made me oversensitive, I suppose – not really myself.’
‘You don’t have to make excuses to me.’
‘Don’t I?’
He shook his head. ‘Not at all. I don’t think you’d have to justify yourself to anyone who’s been in the trenches. Sassoon wrote about an army of ghosts. He meant it metaphorically, but I saw the real thing. Most of us did. None of the more elaborate visions for me, I’m afraid – no squadrons of silent cavalry or figures in white tending the wounded, but I saw people I’d lost.’ It wasn’t a confession or even an admission, just a simple statement; Josephine thought about all the people who had talked with similar matter-of-factness about the dead – Rose, Hilary, Hester, even Bert – but she had not expected it from someone who spent most of his life in a rational world where everything had to be proved, and she realised now that she had underestimated Archie. ‘One day, when things were particularly bad, I poured my heart out to a chap from the same regiment,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know him very well, so he seemed a safe pair of ears, more anonymous somehow. I only found out later that it couldn’t possibly have been him. He was somewhere else completely, and he died that morning, round about the time I was talking to him.’ There was a similar legend about Claverhouse, Josephine remembered: he had appeared to a friend at precisely the moment of his death on the battlefield. ‘Like you, I was under stress and I suppose my senses were heightened – and I felt a strong connection with people I’d lost, but I’ve never been able to explain it away. I’ve never wanted to. We all need something to believe in, and it was never going to be God for me after that. You don’t doubt what you saw, do you?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Neither do I. And it’s more surprising, surely, if people don’t leave traces behind. Why would that sort of pain go away? Or joy, of course – I believe that hangs around, too. And whether ghosts really exist, or whether we carry them with us – does that actually matter? All it’s really saying is that the past is important.’
Josephine nodded, thinking about what he had said. ‘They’re real all right. I’ve got a photograph of Lucy Kyte.’
She told him what Rose had said about the picture on Hester’s desk, and he threw back his head and laughed. ‘Now that I do draw the line at. Dead people don’t pose for the camera.’
‘She’s not posing,’ Josephine said defensively, feeling gullible now for believing everything she was told about Lucy. ‘She’s just in the background. And her dress looks old-fashioned.’
‘How much has a servant’s uniform changed in two hundred years, especially in a country village? I think Hester was having a laugh with your Rose.’
Josephine smiled, embarrassed. ‘Yes, you’re probably right. Or Rose was having a laugh with me.’ It was getting late and, in spite of all their bravado, she did not want to arrive back at the cottage in darkness. ‘I’d better go,’ she said, ‘and I’ve kept you long enough. But thank you, Archie. You have no idea how much I appreciate it.’
‘You’re welcome.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’ll give Bill a call from the hotel now, and see what he can find out. You said you were going back to Scotland?’
‘That’s right. Tomorrow.’
‘Then I’ll telephone you there as soon as I have some news for you.’
‘How’s Bridget?’ she asked, as he walked her back to the car. ‘Have you seen much of her lately?’ By chance, Archie had bumped into someone from his past during a holiday at Portmeirion that summer, an artist called Bridget Foley with whom he had had an affair during the war.
‘Not really. She’s been busy getting ready for an exhibition, and then all this kicked off, so we haven’t had a chance. But we’ll see each other when I’m back in London, I hope.’
‘How much longer are you here for?’
‘Just a few days, then I have an appointment in Ipswich and it’s back home.’ He paused, obviously feeling awkward about something. ‘You won’t say anything about what happened earlier, will you?’
She laughed. ‘Of course I won’t.’
‘Sorry, but I had to ask.’
‘There is one condition, though. When it’s all out in the open, I get to tell Ronnie and Lettice.’ Archie’s cousins, Ronnie and Lettice Motley, were stage and costume designers and two of Josephine’s closest friends. Lettice, in particular, was renowned for keeping her ear so close to the ground that she risked damaging her jewellery, and Josephine relished the chance of trumping whatever gossip they had to offer when the time came.
‘All right, it’s a deal.’
Chummy was waiting patiently outside the restaurant, and Archie showed considerable restraint in resisting another comment. ‘I nearly forgot – I’ve got you a present,’ Josephine said. She reached behind the passenger seat and handed him a book wrapped
in brown paper.
‘Don’t tell me – it’s an early copy of Claverhouse.’
She raised her eyes to the heavens. ‘If only.’
He unwrapped the parcel and smiled when he saw the jacket. ‘Mrs Dalloway – how lovely. Thank you, Josephine.’
‘I know you’ve got it already, but you won’t have brought it with you and I thought a vicarious walk around Westminster while you’re here might do you good.’
He smiled. ‘Only you would have thought of that. It’s ridiculous, I suppose, but I do miss London.’
‘It’s not ridiculous at all – especially when there’s someone there you want to see.’
She saw him flush a little, and hoped that Bridget understood how much he was beginning to care about her. ‘Well, we both know how that feels,’ he admitted. ‘So you can borrow this when I’ve finished with it.’
‘I’m far too busy to read, Archie. You keep it.’
He laughed, and was about to extol the novel’s virtues when they were both distracted by a small group of people coming out of a driveway nearby. One of them was the woman whom Josephine had seen earlier with the King. She stopped when she saw Archie, and put a hand on his arm. ‘Thank you for coming to our rescue earlier, Chief Inspector,’ she said, in a soft American accent. Josephine tried to remain nonchalant as she looked at her, and was struck by her pale, smooth skin and wide mouth – an intelligent face rather than a beautiful one. ‘We appreciate it.’
The woman rejoined her friends and Josephine watched them go, amazed that someone whose name would surely be on everyone’s lips before long could pass unnoticed in the street; whoever this woman was, she had turned the head that mattered; for now, though, she might as well have been invisible.