A Kind of Healthy Grave (Tamara Hoyland Book 4)

by Jessica Mann

  Annie was tempted to leave her client and her well protected treasures undisturbed in their fortress, but within her sophisticated and street-wise exterior lived a woman who helped old people across roads and left her telephone number on the windscreen of any car she had scraped. She felt sorry for this client, so committed to her pitiful, obsessive battle to retain, or regain, a lost status and beauty.

  Annie had – indeed, professionally she had to have – contacts everywhere. In less than an hour she was standing beside a smooth young man from the managing agents of the apartment block as he wielded the set of master keys. As he said, the tenants were not told that the master set of keys existed, though it had been necessary to have them ever since the time someone from Qatar locked himself in with the sacrificial goat and was gored by it.

  The keys opened the street door, which led into a thickly carpeted lobby and thence into a lift lined with mirror glass. On each floor there was one apartment. Their outside doors had no knocker or bell, since all visitors would have rung and been admitted at the street door. Annie hammered her fists against the smooth wood.

  ‘She couldn’t hear that. The doors are hardwood panels sandwiching a steel plate. Keeps the hatchets off.’

  Annie was regretting her enterprise. ‘I must say, I do hope she is out.’

  Tristram turned the Banham key in both locks, and then fitted the Yale to open the door. It led directly into a large white living room.

  Lady Digby’s body lay on the floor near the door. She had vomited copiously and diarrhoea had stained her clothes. Her limbs were contorted. She was obviously dead and the stench was unimaginable.

  Annie Hamilton Routley and Tristram Arkle staggered backwards, retching and gasping. Clutching at each other, they stumbled into the lift, down and out into the clean lobby downstairs where the only smell was of conditioned air and the only thing to see an empire-style chair.

  Tristram had both his hands over his mouth and nose, his eyes squeezed closed. Annie, tears pouring from her eyes, wiped her hands against her jersey, over and over again, although she had not touched anything to make them dirty. After a while, without a word to each other, they went, slowly and carefully like old, infirm people, out into the street to find help from people better able than either of them to cope with appalling reality.

  Later that day, and during the next few days, until fresher news supervened, publicity ensued, enough even for Chantal Digby’s ambition. Better late than never, Annie heard herself saying, and, scandalised by her own words, collapsed again into tears, dripping water that blurred the newsprint where Chantal Digby’s ancient triumphs and failures were rehearsed for readers to whom they seemed as historical as Nell Gwyn’s.

  Annie Hamilton Routley was haunted by squalor. That horrible sight remained in her mind to interpose itself between her concentration and the artificial gloss of her familiar world. When she painted varnish on to her nails, she would see blue-white claws tipped by scarlet paint clutching a shaggy rug. When she performed her own healthy bodily functions she was reminded of the liquefied explosions that had tortured the dead woman. When she brushed mascara on to her eyelashes she saw those staring, open eyes. And the smell remained in her senses, that reek of a thousand lavatories and sickrooms overpowering the Mitsouko in her nostrils. If that was the end of things, how could she carry on?

  Only a month before, if Annie had attended a law court or inquest she would have arrived self-consciously aware of the impression she would make on the onlookers, of her own elegance dazzling the dingy public. In a way, she would have told herself, she brought a little amusement into workaday lives with her glamour, a whiff, she would have said, of another world. Now all her artifice seemed trivial. Annie looked as downcast as anyone else at the Central London Coroners Court, and she gave her evidence with a simplicity that could never have come from the exclamatory Annie Tristram Arkle used to know. He hardly recognised her. Side by side they sat and forced themselves to hear the other witnesses.

  The pathologist said that Chantal Digby’s last meal had been eaten on the evening of Christmas Day. It had consisted of a highly spiced casserole dish of turkey and mushrooms in wine sauce, followed by brandied fruit, cheese and coffee. She had drunk champagne.

  The meal had been served from a couple of silver-foil containers whose wrappings or labels had disappeared and could not be traced, since the bin in the basement of the apartment block, into which rubbish was thrown, was emptied every day by private contractors, who at once disposed of everything at a municipal incinerator; the source of that meal was not traceable, but there were other ready cooked dishes stacked in the freezer ready to be heated in the microwave oven. They had been bought either in a chain store or in one of the numerous delicatessens near Piccadilly.

  The turkey and mushroom casserole had been contaminated with the poisonous fungus Amanita phalloides which looks so dangerously like a wild field-mushroom.

  A person who ate it would soon feel violently nauseated. She would have diarrhoea and vomit violently. She would feel acute stomach pains, become dizzy and choke. These symptoms would be quickly followed by convulsions and probably by blindness. The victim would become either delirious or unconscious. The immediate cause of death was respiratory paralysis.

  Surely, the Coroner asked, anyone suffering even the least of those symptoms would call for help.

  The police inspector who followed the pathologist into the box explained that a combination of circumstances seemed to have prevented the deceased from doing so. The telephone handset, which could be plugged into a large number of sockets in the apartment, had fallen on to the floor of the bedroom under an armchair and been concealed from sight by a pile of clothes. It seemed as though the deceased had quite simply not been able to find it to telephone for help.

  Lady Digby’s body had been found near the front door, on which her fingerprints were marked and smeared as though she had scrabbled against the wood in an attempt to open it. The door was locked by the Banham key from inside, as (according to the cleaner’s and Annie Hamilton Routley’s evidence) had been the dead woman’s custom, and the keys had fallen to the floor behind the small chest near the door on which she had usually put them. It was possible that they had been pushed off when Lady Digby groped around for them. She had reported the loss of her spare set of keys on Christmas Eve.

  And there was no sign that she tried to call from a window?

  The windows of these apartments are not designed to open. The building has a sophisticated air-conditioning system.

  Could nobody else in the building have heard her?

  As usual over weekends and public holidays, the building’s other occupiers were away; Oxfordshire, Gstaad, Meribel, Bermuda and Texas.

  Had Lady Digby received any visitors over the Christmas break?

  There was no evidence showing whether she had or not. The fingerprints in the flat were smudged and many were unidentifiable, but the only recognisable ones belonged to Lady Digby herself and to her cleaner.

  Death by misadventure. What else could they say?

  And the immediate results: Chantal Digby’s name on front pages, once or twice at least, as she had so much wished; the bankruptcy of two small firms of caterers named at the inquest as having supplied food found in Lady Digby’s deep freeze; the unexpected enrichment of a middle-aged orthodontist’s wife in Ohio, who had been named as Chantal’s heir in the latest will that her solicitors, Wootton Hardman, could find, dating from her brief, last marriage to a gynaecologist from Mexico City, the woman’s father; the frustration of any interest aroused by Chantal’s televised promise to reveal her secrets about Rex; and the transformation of a successful publicity person about town into an unemployed depressive. Not long afterwards, Annie Hamilton Routley was born again. On the advice of her psychotherapist, she became a member of Watchwomen.

  Chapter Eight

  Some of the congregation must have been thinking about the words they murmured, embracing in their prayers
the entity that was Carmell, ‘so well served by its son Basil Hutber’. The prayers were led by the Bishop, a newcomer himself and less well able to visualise the component parts of that whole, the people and the place.

  The old, many of them now corralled into a huge home for senior citizens; the young, some at the nursery school Basil himself had opened, others at Mrs Benwood’s flourishing private pre-prep school, whence acceptance by the best preparatory schools was guaranteed; the schoolchildren, at Basil’s own St Uny’s School, at the Girls’ High School, or in the oversized state primary and comprehensive schools; all the citizens in the third, fourth and fifth ages of man – the ever increasing number of those who were out of work; the ever diminishing number of manual labourers; the numerous office workers, fortunate in a town whose only expansion was in administration. There were building society offices, but no building in progress; there was an industrial adviser but not much industry. Would they pray for themselves also, those worthies who came out on winter mornings to such ceremonies? And when they did, would they include in some nebulous image of Carmell the physical fabric? The diminishing number of old buildings, the unloved post-war estates, the memorial to the dead of the First World War, completed only two years before the start of the Second; the hospital, a spreading barracks that had been a poor house, the covered market, the old Town Hall, the new Sports Centre, that expensive white elephant built as a skateboard rink; the little houses whose doors were repainted in colours chosen by the Civic Trust and whose picture represented Carmell in tourist-board brochures, and the new out-of-town shopping centre. All that was Carmell; that and the looming central church.

  Zoe left the service before its end to join the volunteer servers at the tea urns in the Council Chamber, high up above the municipal offices. Fine mist drifted outside the plate glass, obscuring any further view, enclosing Carmell so as to emphasise, in Zoe’s mind, its isolation from any world she knew. She realised that she was not perfectly sure where, geographically, she was, except that she was far from London and to its north.

  Crash barriers had been erected in the square, but in this cruel cold no crowd had assembled behind them to watch or applaud the passing dignitaries.

  Velvet and ermine, maces and wigs, gleaming buttons and chains of office recalled historic achievements. Senior officers from the services based nearby marched as though they were demonstrating the technique to the civilians who walked, self-consciously, out of step. All the leading citizens were there – all whose obituaries would appear without a fee in the Carmell Times and Echo and for whom places were reserved in the nuclear fall-out shelter. The Lord Lieutenant, the High Sheriff, the Chief Constable, councillors and magistrates; representatives of all the political parties, of the voluntary organisations and of the public authorities. Here assembled was, as Rainsford had explained, a microcosm, an example of the basic strength of the country of which his father was part.

  Basil Hutber walked briskly, without embarrassment. Fifty years of public life and of facing an assembled school had taught him a calm public face. Rainsford, behind him, was less at ease. Dame Viola Hutber was self-effacing. This was not her day, but her brother’s.

  Zoe was recognised, but not many people went so far as to say so. She poured tea and watched the strange gathering, making those unconscious observations that would help her to re-create mannerisms she would have forgotten seeing when the dramatic occasion arose.

  There were speeches. The Town Clerk, the Mayor, the Deputy Mayor, and the Chairman of the County Council. He had tight, mauve flesh and chipmunk cheeks. His mouth, in repose lipless and inward folded, opened and closed like the lid of a box.

  ‘The various spheres of Basil Hutber’s achievements . . .’

  Zoe hitched her bottom on the corner of the tea table and nibbled a mince-pie. Most people stood attentively. Rainsford and Gillian Hutber sat in the rear row of chairs on the dais, Rainsford pulling gently at his earlobe, Gillian all polite attention, her ankles crossed and hands clasped. It was a solemn gathering.

  ‘A life well spent. Public housing; road improvements; re-sewering . . .’

  Basil Hutber’s sister, Dame Viola, sat beside him on the platform. She had been welcomed with public unction by all the speakers, who spoke, like polite orientals, of their own unworthy obscurity and her renown, of their good fortune in being with her, and her generosity in coming from London, where she had been spending Christmas, to honour her home town. She looked mild and dignified. From time to time she and her brother exchanged amused glances, full of complicity like children who know something the grown-ups don’t. Gillian had not met Rainsford’s famous aunt during the years of her retirement. It was only after Viola Hutber was revealed as Hilary Vivian and a public figure that she came back to the town she had left before the war, when she joined up. ‘I think she and Rainsford’s mother had a quarrel,’ Gillian had whispered to Zoe. ‘But don’t say anything to Rainsford.’

  Dame Viola did not look quarrelsome now. Her soft, white hair waved out under a velvet beret, her hands were placid in their kid gloves, her neat ankles together. She looked much more like a granny than a rabble-rouser. Zoe tried to imagine her face when it had been young, before the colour was bleached from skin and hair, before the clear lines blurred beneath spreading skin. It was an impossible imaginary jump; as impossible as foretelling the adult a baby will be, although one could always see the baby in its grown-up features. No doubt familiarity made a difference. Zoe had heard some people here today say to Dame Viola that she hadn’t changed a bit, but it was only in the eye of the beholder that anyone remained unchanged. Objectively, every particle of the human fabric was replaced and renewed.

  As Stacey Stewart, Zoe had once acted a part in which she magically aged, returning years older from outer space to an earth that had passed only one calendar year.

  Make-up artists had prophetic skills. With pads and pegs, with wax and colours and crayons, Zoe had been shown a foresight of herself when old. But no clever visagiste would have invented the mantle of smooth, expansive skin that had obscured Viola Hutber’s bones. The young woman could not have guessed; the old woman showed nothing of her youth.

  And the men in this full room; had they ever been young and ardent?

  On Christmas Day, Zoe had leafed through back numbers of colour supplements at her mother-in-law’s house. In one she had found the assertion that surveys showed that ninety per cent of men thought about sex for ninety per cent of the time. On the most cynical view of such surveys’ veracity, divide by half: forty-five per cent of men.

  These men? At this time? It was hard even for Zoe Meredith, once a toy and tease of men, to credit.

  This must be a typical gathering that could be repeated in formally furnished rooms all over the Western world, of self-confident, self-assertive men, and some, but fewer, women. About three-quarters of the men present wore spectacles, about a tenth hearing aids. Zoe could see three walking sticks and one walking frame, one toupee (wiry, greasy, perched like a beret on its wearer’s head) and many false teeth. Everyone was solemn and attentive, on their dignity.

  Hypocrites then, if their minds were really on sex?

  No; shift the kaleidoscope to show good men, devoted to their wives, homes and pets, concerned about their children, altruistic towards their fellow men. They would spend long hours in this room, performing unselfish service.

  The truth, as usual, would be somewhere in between. Zoe suppressed a yawn behind her clenched cheek muscles. Where else to look? The Council Chamber itself: a raw oblong of brick and wood, its only decorative touch a photograph of a young Queen shaking hands with a past mayor. There was a faint smell of wood preservative and raw cement.

  It was the turn of the retired Town Clerk to speak. Air-raid shelters. Allotments. Red Cross parcels. He remembered Basil Hutber’s hard work during the war, and his own. ‘Years of hardship and labour, but we all pulled together.’ The Dunkirk spirit. The will to win.

  Rainsford Hutber shif
ted himself sideways. His legs were too long for his plastic chair. He listened expressionless to the eulogies of his father.

  ‘Where Basil Hutber saw work to do he set to and did it. An example to us all.’

  Zoe and Lawrence had discussed the proposal Basil had made in their bedroom, in whispers. ‘I suppose you’d be too bored,’ Lawrence said.

  ‘I think new vistas of boredom would open up before us both,’ Zoe said and, remembering her words, looked now to see whether Lawrence already realised their truth. He looked fascinated. Did he pine to move to Carmell? Did he see in today’s events a promise to himself, envisage his own name carved in slate and on brass, inscribed on parchment, his own face sculpted in bronze, his praises voiced at such a ceremony?

  ‘Forgive me if I quote from the contemporary record,’ the speaker commanded. He began to read aloud from press chronicles of Basil Hutber’s career, from the welcome accorded him and his sister when they returned to their family home in 1930 as the last representatives of a local name well known through years of public involvement and service. He heaped some more praise on the heroine of Duaman in passing.

  These were the new vistas of boredom Zoe had guessed at. She began to do invisible yoga exercises, breathing deeply, and tensing her muscles.

  The Mayor: scarlet cloak edged with ermine, three-cornered hat, the image slightly marred by horn-rimmed spectacles.