by Nicola Upson
The cottage was surrounded by an orchard and large gardens, which – according to Curtis – Maria had loved and tended. Feeling a little like one of the crowds who had flocked there after her body was discovered, hoping for a glimpse of her family or leaving money for her orphaned son, Josephine turned away and left the house to its past. She had been out longer than she had intended, and when she reached the brow of the hill and looked down on Red Barn Cottage it was bathed in evening sunlight. The scene reminded her that the murder site had got its name from a trick of the Suffolk light, a strange red glow that often fell on the barn at sunset. Needless to say, on that night in 1827 the effect was said to have been particularly intense, as if the violence inside the barn had stained the very fabric of the landscape; cloud and a light drizzle would hardly have done justice to the folklore. All the same, as Josephine looked in awe at the scorching sun, setting the fields on fire with a blaze of colour, she could easily believe that Nature had seen to the destruction of the Red Barn herself.
She walked on, absorbed in the beauty of the evening, and only when she was within a few yards of the cottage did she notice a familiar figure leaning nonchalantly against the gate, smoking a cigarette. ‘You chose the right day to come back, Miss Tey. Lovely, isn’t it?’
‘Bert,’ Josephine said, hoping for a tone that was neither too welcoming nor too hostile. ‘How did you know I was here?’
‘Your chimney. Elsie saw the smoke and happened to mention it.’ She looked up at the undeniable signs of life from the range and realised that she might as well buy a flagpole and raise the standard as soon as she arrived. ‘I’ve brought you these,’ he explained, holding out a set of keys. ‘There wasn’t room in the garage, so I’ve tucked her just behind for now.’
Josephine opened the gate and walked over to her gift. It was an old Austin Chummy – open-topped, bright turquoise and very much a ‘ladies’ car’, as Bert had said. Her heart sank. She would be conspicuous enough in any vehicle – at most, there could only be three or four cars in the village – but no one would miss her in this. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she murmured truthfully. ‘It’s really too kind of you.’
‘I’m glad you’re pleased. I wouldn’t try getting back to Scotland in her, but she’ll run you about all right down here.’ He grinned. ‘Most of the time, anyway.’
Josephine was touched by the genuine pleasure on his face at being able to give her something precious of Hester’s. She looked again at the highly polished car, which had obviously received hours of attention, and entertained the thought that the problem lay with her. If she were honest, much of her antipathy towards Bert stemmed from that uncomfortable exchange with his wife, and he wasn’t the only one who came and went as he pleased; it seemed to be the country way, and she shouldn’t blame other people for her own cynicism, or expect them to behave differently because of it. ‘Thank you,’ she said, more sincerely this time. ‘I appreciate it. The window, too. It’s good of you to take the trouble.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that. It only took me five minutes and it was the least I could do. Jenny told me she gave you a bit of grief over it.’
‘Something like that, yes.’
‘She didn’t mean anything by it. She’s just a bit overprotective about me and the kids.’
Josephine couldn’t quite see why she posed such a threat to the Willis family, but she let it drop in favour of what she really wanted to know. ‘Your wife seemed very resentful of Hester and the things you did for her.’
‘She thought Miss Larkspur took it for granted.’
‘And did she?’ Thinking about what Hilary had said, Josephine would not have been surprised to hear that Hester had made the most of Bert’s loyalty, or that she had relished the ability to create a spark of jealousy in another woman, even in her later years.
‘It never seemed like that. I only ever did what I was happy to do.’
He spoke defensively, as if wary of reliving an old argument with a new adversary. Josephine hesitated before pushing him, but in the end her curiosity got the better of her. ‘What did you and Hester fall out about, Bert?’
‘Jenny told you that?’ Josephine nodded. ‘It was something and nothing, really – the sort of thing you look back on later and wonder why you let it happen. Miss Larkspur accused Lizzie and Vicky of stealing something from the cottage. She said she heard them downstairs in the house one morning, and later that day she discovered that an ornament was missing.’
‘And they denied taking it?’
‘Of course they did. They don’t lie.’ Josephine’s face must have expressed a doubt in the absolute honesty of children, because he added: ‘I know they were telling the truth.’
‘What was it?’
‘One of those pottery figures of William and Maria. Miss Larkspur loved all that stuff. She collected anything to do with the Red Barn. Beats me why people will pay a fortune to remember a murder. I could think of much better things to spend that sort of money on if I had it.’
Josephine was inclined to agree with him. ‘I suppose it’s a piece of history,’ she said unconvincingly. ‘And it meant a lot to Hester personally. She’d devoted so much of her life to the story.’
‘I suppose so.’
His resentment of the item that had caused so much trouble was only natural, Josephine thought; such an accusation would have hurt more than his pride. ‘I don’t understand why Hester would say something like that, though.’
Bert shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t know. She wasn’t herself those last few months. Everything had got on top of her. The business with her eyes came from nowhere, and she wasn’t coping with it as well as she thought she could.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She made me promise not to tell anyone, but I don’t suppose it matters now.’ Bert took a handkerchief from his pocket and busied himself with a mark on the car’s paintwork that was invisible to Josephine. ‘Miss Larkspur was losing her sight.’
The admission came as a surprise to Josephine. ‘She told you that?’
‘Only because she had to. There were a few signs early on, I suppose – she’d put salt in my tea instead of sugar, and one day she insisted I stop and have a bit of dinner with her and there was a bar of soap in the bottom of the soup bowl.’ He smiled, and Josephine was struck by the warmth that seemed to have existed between the two of them; never in a million years would she have imagined a friendship between an actress and a garage mechanic, but that probably just showed how little she knew about either. ‘They were easy mistakes to make and I didn’t think anything of it,’ Bert continued. ‘Then last Christmas I took her a photograph of Lizzie in her school nativity. She was thrilled to have it, but she kept talking about the wrong girl, pretending she could see the picture when she obviously couldn’t. It’s not as though Lizzie was hard to spot – she was the Virgin bloody Mary.’
Josephine smiled. ‘That is about as big as roles come.’
‘Anyway, I challenged her about it and she admitted that she’d been having trouble with her eyes, but she swore me to secrecy. She’d been to a doctor in London, apparently, and there was nothing they could do.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘That’s what she said.’
‘So that’s why she gave you the car.’
‘Yes. She knew she wouldn’t be able to drive it any more.’ He patted the bonnet affectionately. ‘They made quite a pair, those two.’
‘I can imagine.’ Things made more sense to Josephine now: Hester’s withdrawal from the film, the piles of unopened post, the chaos of the scullery, and the clock with no glass, time gauged by touch rather than by sight. ‘That’s why she was thinking of leaving,’ she said, more to herself than to Bert. ‘She knew she wouldn’t be able to cope.’
‘Leaving the cottage? I didn’t know that.’
It surprised Josephine that Hilary had known this and Bert had not. ‘It makes sense, surely?’
‘It seemed to me that she clung to it more
than ever. She always told me that when she and Walter first moved here, they vowed they’d be carried out and I don’t think that changed. She was obsessed by the place, and the more frail she became, the more she wanted what she knew.’ That made sense, too; certainly, a great deal of Hester’s will had been about the cottage, and that did not smack of someone who was ready to leave it. Perhaps Hilary had been mistaken, or had automatically assigned to Hester the intentions that she herself thought sensible. ‘It might have been better if she had left,’ Bert said quietly.
‘Why?’
‘It didn’t do her any good being here on her own, while everything she loved faded. She couldn’t read or write any more, and the beauty of the countryside – well, it was a memory to her by the end, not a reality, and memories fade, too, don’t they? Whenever I came to visit her, she’d ask me to tell her what I could see, how the year was changing. You wouldn’t think you could find two people more different, would you?’ he asked, taking the words out of Josephine’s mouth. ‘But we shared that, at least – every inch of this place was precious. It was the cruellest thing that could have happened to her, losing her sight. I think she could have coped with anything else.’ He looked directly at Josephine for the first time and she was moved by his sadness. ‘In the end, she lost the will to live. I’ve said that so many times over the years, but I didn’t really know what it meant until I saw it in Miss Larkspur. She stopped eating properly or taking any care in how she looked. She let the house go, and herself along with it. All the joy had gone out of life.’ It was what Josephine had sensed the first time she had walked into the cottage, and she knew exactly what he meant. ‘It’s enough to drive anyone out of their mind.’
‘Is that what you think happened?’
‘I don’t know what happened, Miss Tey. All I know is that she changed. She never needed much company – just the house and her memories. She lived in the past, and those of us who were still living and breathing never seemed quite as real to her somehow. But it was different towards the end. She stopped seeing anyone, even the few friends she did have, and she got rid of the girl who used to help her out round the house.’
‘What girl?’
‘Someone came in from Stoke to do a couple of mornings a week for her.’
‘I don’t suppose she was called Lucy?’
He shrugged. ‘I can’t remember what her name was. But Miss Larkspur didn’t trust anyone by then, not even me. There were times when she wouldn’t let me in. I’d hear her talking to herself, but she wouldn’t come to the door. And the ornament was the last straw. After that, I stopped trying to help. I wish I hadn’t, but I did. Jenny and I had made light of the row over the pottery with the girls, told them that Miss Larkspur had made a mistake, and I went round to the cottage to set her straight. That was the last time I saw her.’
Josephine remembered what Hilary had said about things disappearing from the front room; only Bert was here to testify to his own honesty and an elderly woman in Hester’s position would have been very easy to exploit – but somehow she believed him. ‘The last time you saw her alive, you mean.’ He looked at her in surprise. ‘You found her body, Bert. You never said.’
‘It’s not something I like to think about.’
There seemed more to his reluctance than a simple sorrow at Hester’s death, or even guilt at having withdrawn his support when she needed help more than ever. Josephine stared at him, a man of an age to have fought, old enough certainly to have known grief in his own family, and wondered what was too painful to think about in the death of an elderly woman who had, by his own admission, found life too wretched to cope with. ‘My solicitor told me she died in her bed. He implied it was peaceful. Is there something I don’t know?’
‘She wasn’t in her bed. I put her there, but it’s not where I found her.’
For a moment, Josephine was too surprised to speak. ‘Why on earth did you move her?’ she asked, trying to keep any note of judgement out of her voice.
‘No woman would have wanted to be seen like that, especially not Miss Larkspur.’
‘Like what?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
Whenever anyone said that to her, it was Josephine’s instinct to disagree. In this case, she thought more carefully, knowing that – once she had pursued it – she would have to live in the cottage with whatever she discovered. On the other hand, she also knew that her imagination would readily supply anything she chose not to hear, and that seemed the greater evil. ‘Please tell me, Bert. How did Hester die?’
He leaned against the car and looked back at the cottage, reliving the day in his mind. ‘She was upstairs, in that tiny room at the end of the house, burrowed under a pile of old clothes.’ Josephine closed her eyes and fought back a wave of nausea when she remembered her only visit to that room – the touch of those clothes against her skin, the heavy, cloying smell of them in the darkness. ‘God knows how long she’d been there – a few days, I’d say. She was right in the corner of the mattress, curled up. It looked as if she’d pulled a load of stuff on top of her – clothes, newspapers, anything she could find.’
‘To keep warm?’
‘More like she was hiding from something. As if she’d crawled away to die, like an animal rather than a human being. I wouldn’t have known she was there if it hadn’t been for the . . . well, you know.’
He tailed off to spare her feelings, but his meaning was obvious; Josephine did not have to guess at how a body that had lain in a cottage for days in early summer might reveal itself. ‘Why were you there?’
In her shock, it was the only thing she could think of to ask, and it sounded more accusatory than she had intended. Bert didn’t answer straight away, and she wondered if she had offended him. ‘The kids fetched me,’ he said at last, his voice unnaturally even.
‘Good God, please don’t tell me they found her first?’
‘No, not exactly. They just knew something was wrong when they went to the cottage. It was the anniversary of the murder, you see – the eighteenth of May.’ Josephine didn’t see at all, and Bert had to explain. ‘Every year, the girls would go to the church with Miss Larkspur and put some roses from her garden on Maria Marten’s grave. There’s no stone there now – the last of it was chipped away in the 1890s, but Miss Larkspur remembered where it was from when she first came to the village. It put everyone’s back up, seeing those flowers there every May as a reminder of what had happened, but Miss Larkspur didn’t give a damn about that and there was no harm in it. Lizzie and Vicky couldn’t get enough of the story the way she told it, and there’s nothing wrong with learning a bit of respect as a kid, is there?’ Josephine shook her head. ‘So they went round like they’d normally do, not knowing things had changed. It wasn’t their fault. Jenny and I had made light of the business with the pottery because we didn’t want to upset them, and we hadn’t really explained why they didn’t see Miss Larkspur any more. We should have been more honest with them, but it was hard to know what to say. They knocked on the door and let themselves in like they always used to, but there was no one downstairs so they went up to the bedrooms.’
‘But they didn’t look round?’
‘No, thank God. They swore to me that they’d only gone to the top of the stairs. But like I say, they knew something was wrong. There were flies everywhere, and places have an atmosphere when something like that happens – kids pick up on it as much as any of us. That was enough to stop them going any further. They ran straight home. They were both in tears when they got to me.’
‘So you went to see what had happened?’
He nodded. ‘It didn’t take me long to find her. I knew I couldn’t leave her there like that for anyone else to see. She never had any time for the local doctor and word soon would have got round. She’d have hated being humiliated like that with everyone talking about her, saying she’d gone soft in the head. No, I couldn’t just leave her.’ His voice was firm and definite, suggesting that he was still tryin
g to convince himself that he had done the right thing; when he continued, Josephine noticed that he spoke matter-of-factly about what he had done, almost as if he were giving a statement, and never once hinted at his own feelings. She didn’t blame him: the emotional impact of the experience was hard to imagine, and not something to be discussed with a stranger. ‘There was nothing of her,’ he said. ‘She’d lost so much weight – I hadn’t realised. I got her out as gently as I could and put her in her bed. She was in her night things anyway, so it looked right enough. Then I tidied up a bit and went for the doctor.’ Josephine wondered why he hadn’t done that straight away. It must have been obvious from what his children said that Hester had died, and it would have been more natural to fetch some proper help – or perhaps that was simply her own cowardice talking. Privately, she could not decide if what Bert had done had been an act of extraordinary humanity or something rather less heroic. He was still talking, but she had been too wrapped up in her own thoughts to listen. ‘I was just saying that I’d never have forgiven myself if the kids had seen everything,’ he repeated. ‘That’s why Jenny’s so angry. She’s cross with herself, really, for allowing them to go there at all. We both are.’
‘Does she know how you found Hester?’ Josephine asked. The more Bert had talked, the more relieved he had seemed, and she sensed that this was a burden he had carried alone.
‘No, not exactly.’ He looked uncomfortable at having shared something with Josephine that had been withheld from his wife. ‘I shouldn’t have said as much to you, either. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise. I asked you to tell me.’