Jilly was waiting in the hall, and, though I walked fast, she managed to get to the door ahead of me. Hand on the knob, blocking my way, she whispered insistently, ‘If it hadn’t been Edward it would have been somebody else, you know. Grace was that sort.’
‘But, Jilly, it was Edward,’ I said.
I drove through the rain without thought or direction. Eventually I stopped under some trees and, winding down the window, let the damp air rush against my face. The rain fell from the overhanging branches in uneven salvoes, beating tattoos on the car roof.
A dazed and overladen mind goes its own chaotic way, and the string of revelations, the succession of surprises seemed to have filled all the available space in my brain, I couldn’t begin to make sense of anything. I kept seeing Father and Maggie together over all those years, meeting in secret places, and nine-year-old Edward standing at the barn door, judgemental, unforgiving; I saw Will opening the sluices with destruction in his heart, and Grace shouting at Maggie, with rage in hers; and everything in my understanding of people seemed to have been turned upside down.
Worse still, in all the confusion, I couldn’t escape the suspicion that I was missing the one simple fact which would keep the police off Will’s back; that if only I could find a way through the minutiae cluttering my brain I would be able to home in on the unarguable piece of evidence that would set him free.
I closed my eyes, I let my thoughts drift, I tried to push the contradictions and inconsistencies to one side and concentrate on what seemed clear.
What seemed absolutely clear was that Will’s story was nonsense. Every instinct told me so. Almost nothing rang true. The phone call to Grace—why warn her of what he was about to do?—the opening of the sluices, an act that would harm no one but himself, the sudden change of mind and the decision to reclose the gates. I couldn’t imagine it, I couldn’t see the point of it. Remembering Will’s uncertain delivery, the lack of detail, I could only think he had made the whole thing up.
Except for one thing. The raised voices, the row between Grace and Maggie. It seemed to me that this was the only part of the story that might be true. Unless Edward was lying about following Grace to Reed Cottage—and I knew him well enough to think this unlikely—who else could he have heard?
I wound up the window and started off again, heading, I thought, for Marsh House, only to find myself driving past the road to the quay and turning down Salterns Lane. Maggie was in Norwich, but I would leave an urgent message for her.
The hunched grey outline of Reed Cottage emerged through the steady downpour, its windows dark and secretive under the dripping eaves. I looked twice, I peered hard, but there was no mistake: Maggie’s Citroen was there, parked at the corner of the cottage.
In a surge of anticipation, I began to rehearse my questions; I didn’t stop to think why she hadn’t gone to Norwich.
Pulling up as close as possible to the front porch, lifting my jacket up over my head to make a dash for it, I didn’t glance in the direction of the Citroen again, I didn’t notice the figure in the front seat.
I gave the bell a quick ring and was just reaching for the door handle when it turned, the door opened and Charlie appeared, face pale, hair wet as though he’d just come in from the rain.
‘It’s Granny,’ he panted in a small voice. ‘She needs her pills.’
He had something clutched in his hand but still I didn’t make the connection. ‘Can I help?’
He didn’t say anything, but dived past me and ran towards the Citroen.
At last I saw Maggie through the streaming car window. She was lying in the driver’s seat, head lolling against the rest, mouth slightly open, eyes swivelled towards me.
I reached the door as Charlie pulled it open. ‘What is it?’ I cried. ‘Are you ill?’
She said calmly, ‘Get me inside, Alex.’
Her skin was drained, greyer even than the day, her eyes were half closed with pain or illness. I looked for something to cover her head, but there was nothing, and, drawing her coat lapels more securely around her neck, I hooked her arm over my shoulders and helped her out of the car. She leant heavily on me, Charlie took her other arm, but still she couldn’t walk at any speed and by the time we reached the cottage door her face was running with water, her hair was plastered to her head.
I got her into the dining room, to the nearest chair, and sent Charlie to fetch a towel. She sat with her head resting on the chair back, eyes closed, arms splayed out over the sides.
‘Let me get you to bed,’ I said. ‘And then I’ll call the doctor.’
‘No doctor,’ she gasped. ‘Just my tablets.’
Charlie produced the bottle of white capsules on his return and I held them up to her. ‘Two.’ She nodded.
Charlie fetched water and steadied the glass while Maggie washed the capsules down. She wanted to rest, but not on her bed, so we helped her through to the sitting room. With one hand propping her elbow, the other gripping her waist, I couldn’t help thinking of other arms that had circled her, had held her body while it was still strong and vital, had clasped it with passion, maybe love. I couldn’t help thinking of Father in this cottage, moving around these rooms, climbing the stairs, lying next to Maggie in the bed in the small white room; in this cottage that he may have paid for, or helped to pay for. I thought, too, of the early years of the affair, when Maggie was still living at Marsh House, when people dropped in all the time and Will was a student with long vacations, and I couldn’t help wondering how the relationship had stayed secret for so long. Had they always met in barns and out-of-the-way places? My father had led such a busy, organized life that it was hard to imagine him ever having the time. Had they simply been immensely careful? Followed some apparently innocent routine?
I helped Maggie out of her coat. She lay down on the sofa and exhaled with a soft shudder. ‘Five minutes, some tea…I will be fine.’ Her eyes fixed on me sternly. ‘No calls, Alex. No doctor. Promise?’
I promised, subject to review.
I left Charlie hovering uncertainly beside her, but as soon as I came back with the tea he moved towards the door. Maggie put out a hand as if to detain him.
‘We’ll go in half an hour,’ she called after him. ‘Half an hour, Charlie!’ Her arm fell, she listened as he banged noisily up the stairs and went into his room. Poor Charlie!’ she breathed. ‘I am no good to him like this. No good.’
‘Is it pain?’ I asked.
She pulled a dismissive face, she wasn’t going to be drawn as easily as that. ‘These doctors, they know nothing.’
Leaving her to rest for a while, I went into the hall and made some calls.
Will’s voice contained a note of reproach. ‘Where are you? I’ve been trying to get you.’
I would have preferred to tell him the truths but I didn’t want Maggie disturbed until I’d had the chance to talk to her. ‘I’m going into Fakenham,’ I said. ‘Stephen Makim has a list of calls Grace made on the mobile.’
‘Mobile?’ He sounded baffled and mildly exasperated. ‘But she didn’t have a mobile.’
I explained about the borrowing of the hand-set, the use of Stephen Makim’s number, how she’d made six or seven calls a day. If Will thought it strange that Grace had kept the mobile such a secret, he didn’t comment on it.
‘When’ll you be back?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got DC Smith in the kitchen, wanting to fix a time for us to go into Norwich.’
‘Say you can’t possibly arrange anything until I get back. And go out for a few hours if you can. I don’t want Ramsey knowing you’re there, thinking he can turn up again.’
‘How long are you going to be?’ He was sounding unsettled.
‘An hour, maybe two.’
‘Then we’ll go into Norwich? I want to get it over and done with, Ali. As soon as possible. I want to get Charlie back to a normal life.’
I realized he had failed to appreciate the danger he was still in, or that I had failed to spell it out to him.
&n
bsp; ‘It might be best to wait until tomorrow.’
‘Why that long?’
‘I just want to check out a few things first.’
‘But what things?’
‘Let’s talk about it when I get back.’
‘You’re sounding worried.’
‘I’m sounding cautious, Will.’
‘Ali, don’t frighten me.’ And he gave a nervous laugh.
Ramsey wouldn’t hear of leaving Will’s interview to the next day. We haggled over a time for that evening. I wanted seven, he pressed for five, I politely stuck to seven. I told him Will was busy on the farm all day and couldn’t possibly get away any earlier.
Ringing off, I tried to work out how much time this left me and, whichever way I calculated it, it wasn’t enough.
I made another cup of tea and took it quietly into the sitting room, but not so quietly that Maggie didn’t hear me and turn her head. The pills appeared to have done their work, the pain had cleared from her face.
‘So, Alex!’ She gave me a sharp appraising look. ‘What happened with the police?’
She still looked so frail that I wondered whether this was the moment to tell her. But she needed to be warned of the dangers ahead, and perhaps I wanted to frighten her a bit so that she would tell me something nearer the truth.
‘Someone has gone to the police with new information,’ I said. ‘Apparently this person was with Grace at Marsh House that last afternoon. Apparently Grace took a call while this person was there, a call informing her that—as she thought—Will was in the process of opening the sluices. Then—’
‘He said this!’ Maggie pulled herself upright, vibrating with indignation. ‘Your brother, he said Will opened the sluices?’
I stared at her. ‘You knew it was Edward—’
‘How could he do such a thing?’ she exploded. ‘How could he tell such terrible lies?’
‘You knew about Edward?’
‘Oh, I knew! I just did not believe he could do such a thing! I did not believe he could tell such lies, Alex! Such lies!’
‘How long have you known?’ I asked, wondering if we were talking about the same thing.
But she was carried away by the force of her own outrage. Shivering with anger, she railed against Edward for some moments before giving in to exhaustion and sinking back against the cushions. Patting the sofa, casting about the room, she hunted fruitlessly for cigarettes.
I urged, ‘Tell me about Grace. Tell me what happened when she came over.’
‘My bag, Alex. My bag.’
I didn’t argue but went out into the rain again and fetched her bag from the Citroen.
When I got back she was a little calmer. Shaking a cigarette from the packet, she echoed one last time, ‘How can he say this, Alex? How?’
‘Maggie, whether it’s true or not, the police have decided to act on it. I have to tell you they’re now treating Grace’s death as murder and…’ There was no easy way to say it. I’m afraid they’re going to arrest Will.’
She paled, she searched my face for confirmation, then she was very still, very contained.
‘Tell me what happened when Grace arrived.’
But she was caught up in her own thoughts again. She started to nod distractedly, and kept nodding for some time. Lighting her cigarette at last, she pulled the smoke deep into her lungs and stared at the window. The rain cast a pall over her face, a deathly whiteness that emphasized the withering of her body. Drawing another long gasp of smoke, she seemed to arrive at a decision.
‘There is no choice, then,’ she announced in a gruff voice. ‘I will tell them.’
‘Tell them what?’
‘The truth.’
As always, the truth sounded a loud note of alarm in my mind. ‘Well, let’s just see what we need to tell them, shall we?’
‘No,’ she declared firmly, ‘they will have everything.’ A tremor passed down her body, as if the enormity of her decision was only now coming home to her.
‘Why don’t we just go through it first?’ I coaxed gently. ‘See what needs to be told.’
‘No.’
‘Maggie, you must trust me on this.’
She spread a hand. ‘But, Alex, you will not like what I say, you will try to stop me.’
‘Absolutely right,’ I agreed emphatically. ‘Because you may not understand all the implications. You may end up saying things that do as much harm as good.’
She gave this a lot of thought. ‘There’s time?’
‘There’s time.’
‘Though I tell you now, Alex’—she raised a warning finger—‘you will not stop me.’
I was distracted by a sound that seemed to come from the other side of the door. I got up and opened it. The little hall was empty. I listened for a moment. Above the steady drone and dribble of the rain I could make out the faint repetitive squawk of Charlie’s computer game upstairs. I peered out of the dining-room window and saw nothing but my car and the Citroen and the rain.
Going back to the sitting room, I waited until Maggie had taken a gulp of tea before prompting, ‘So, what happened, Maggie?’
She turned her gaze to the window again. ‘It was me,’ she announced flatly. ‘It was me who opened the sluices.’
She glanced at me and shrugged. ‘I opened them.’ She paused as if to gauge my reaction before going on in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘I did it so that the Gun Marsh would be no good to Edward Woodford. I did it so that he would get nothing but black fields stinking of salt.’
‘But, Maggie, the marsh hadn’t been sold. It didn’t belong to him.’
The point appeared to catch her off-guard. ‘But I didn’t know this. I thought it was finished, done, sold. I didn’t know this.’
I found this so extraordinary that I had to press her. ‘You thought the sale had gone through?’
‘Will told me so. He said it was all finished.’
Still puzzled, I nodded slowly. ‘And why then, Maggie? Why that afternoon?’
Her eyes hardened. ‘Why? I tell you why. Because I understand many things that evening.’ She made a cone of one hand, pressing the thumb and fingertips together, and circled it towards me to emphasize the bitterness of her words. ‘Many, many things.’
‘Tell me. Everything.’ I added, thinking of a possible witness statement to come: ‘From the beginning.’
‘The beginning?’ She was breathing unevenly, and when she drew on her cigarette the smoke caught in her lungs, she coughed suddenly and violently, and went on coughing for some time. ‘There is too much for a beginning! Where is the beginning?’ She threw this remark disdainfully to the world at large.
‘The events of that afternoon, then.’
‘The events…’ she echoed seriously, as if to impose some sort of order on herself. Stubbing out her cigarette, she coughed again with the deep rasp of the habitual smoker. ‘Yes! Grace dropped Charlie off. She did not stay long, she never stayed long. A minute, no more.’ She was speaking at a gallop, as if to get through distasteful memories in the shortest possible time. ‘Charlie had his tea. I asked him about homework. He had forgotten it, left it at home. He wanted not to do it, of course. But no, I said he must do it. Charlie, he said he would go and get it, but it was a dark day, I wanted a walk, I did not want him to go. So I left him watching TV, I went to Marsh House along the path.’
She reached for another cigarette but, still coughing now and then, thought better of it and settled for turning the packet over and over in her long fingers. ‘I come to the house, I see the red car, Edward’s car. I think: Ah, the festival! Well, that is what I try to tell myself.’ She rolled her eyes sardonically. ‘I go in by the kitchen, I hear voices in another room somewhere. I leave them to talk. I look for Charlie’s homework. Nowhere. There is nothing I can do—I must go into the hall, I must look in the other rooms. I realize the voices are upstairs. I go up. Yes, yes,’ she argued wearily, as though I had challenged her. ‘I know this is putting my nose in what is not my business! B
eing like a fish-wife! Yes, yes, I know this! But you see, Alex, half of me already knew what I would see. In my heart, I knew. It was just who, you understand. I had never been sure of who,’ She made a wide gesture, as if to paint in the rest of the story. ‘So! I saw them! I knew, then! I knew who it was!’
Finally she succumbed to the lure of another cigarette. Between the mechanics of lighting up, the reaching for the lighter and firing it, she kept raising a hand as if to stay a barrage of comment. ‘Let me tell you about Grace! Let me tell you! Grace, she thought only of one person in all her life—and this was Grace. She had no problem with this idea, no problem at all. The centre of the world, it was Grace. Everyone else—they were there for her. You understand? For her. And one day—three years ago, four maybe—she looks around and she decides that her life is not good enough for her. She decides she deserves more money, more beautiful things, more expensive things. She decides she would like a house where she can have the lords and important people to dinner and pretend to be a grand lady. And what she wants she always gets—you understand this, Alex? Grace has to have what she wants. Always. So she begins to buy things, to make Marsh House into this palazzo. Marsh House! It is never designed to be a palazzo! It is a farmhouse. It does not want silk walls and’—her hand windmilled, the cigarette with it—‘furniture that is too big, and paintings of ugly people sitting on horses. Ah, but she has fixed her mind on this. She begins to spend money like there is no tomorrow. How she spends money! Every time Will tells her to stop, she says it is her money. Hers. Never! I tell you, Alex, it is never her money. She says she will pay it back, but never once does she pay it back. Well, maybe once at the beginning. Just once. But after that, nothing. Never again. No, because by this time she has other plans.’ She gave a throaty scoff of contempt. ‘She has better ideas!’
She pressed her fingers into the hollow of her temple as if to stem an incipient headache before reaching for her cup, which she held absent-mindedly, without drinking. ‘No, she decides it is not enough to have a house like this, she must have a better house, a proper country house, a grand house.’ Making a contemptuous gesture, she almost spilled her tea. ‘And a new husband to go with it, a husband who is not a farmer getting up to feed the cattle in the morning, not someone who rents his land. No, she wants someone who owns the land, someone who can give her this beautiful life that she wants, with the house, the money, the people at dinner…’
A Dark Devotion Page 35