by Jessica Mann
Chapter Fourteen
Dame Viola Hutber’s American tour had been widely reported and a barrage of photographers and reporters greeted her on her return to Manchester International Airport. She dealt neatly with questions and compliments, and followed her two companions through the crowd to the hired car.
Dame Viola stood to one side, gesturing the girls to get in before her. ‘You are coming home with me, aren’t you, girls?’ she said, but both of them wanted to catch a train to London. ‘My dears, please! Annie, won’t you at least keep me company? You have been such a support. Or you, Noelle? It’s been an exhausting trip, you could do with recuperating in the country. No? Oh dear, what a disappointment. I was counting on having you with me.’
Neither girl would have a long break, for a punishing programme of meetings and rallies was planned for the next few weeks; Watchwomen’s political spies expected a general election within a few months and Dame Viola was anxious to consolidate their influence.
A policeman slammed the car door and waved the driver on. He had been interested in this first sight of the President of Watchwomen. He got the impression that she took her role as a public figure seriously, accepting and considering her audience and waving with royal graciousness. Policemen may not admit to their politics, but the young man’s wife was an active Conservative and he took home to her the warning to take what Viola Hutber said seriously.
*
Taxi drivers tend to speak either too much or not at all. Dame Viola found herself with one of the former variety.
‘You’re the one that goes on about morals aren’t you? Seen you on the box. Something in what you say, but a nice lady like you, you don’t know half of it. Now take me, sitting in the cab all day, I see all sorts. The other week I had that women that thinks teenagers ought to . . .’ He chattered on, his opinions punctuated by Dame Viola’s sympathetic murmurs. ‘What I say is,’ he said, and ‘The way I see it.’
After a weary journey Dame Viola had to interrupt an account of the driver’s experiences on holiday in Morocco (‘Keep their women under wraps there, I can tell you’) with directions. Her cottage had once been a gamekeeper’s, surrounded by woods and wastes over which poachers and preservers fought their surreptitious wars. The wood was sold during the First World War for mine props. The land was later sold during the agricultural depression to an investor who reaped the profit in the next war. Now most of the fields had disappeared under a spread of ‘starter homes’. Sometimes a starting housewife would clean the cottage but it was an unreliable source of domestic help and mostly Dame Viola preferred to be her own housekeeper.
A belt of trees survived around the cottage itself. The long dead gamekeeper would recognise little else. The place had been thatched, its windows leaded, its stones whitewashed. Roses and wistaria clothed the walls, and the sheds that had once housed dogs and ferrets had been replaced by a wrought iron conservatory. Dame Viola was famous for her roses, and the house had often been described in picture magazines. The long drive was not as well maintained.
‘Doesn’t do my suspension any good,’ the driver complained.
‘It’s the frost. It breaks up the surface.’
‘Now when I was in Spain last year, the roads there, they are something else. Take it from me.’
‘There it is.’ Dame Viola leant forward for the first sight of her home.
The car drew up in front of the jasmine shrouded porch.
‘I wonder whether I might ask you to be very kind. The luggage isn’t heavy, it’s just that – at my age . . .’
‘Can’t rightly help you. I’m not allowed to lift things, it’s the arthritis. The specialist said the joints were degenerate, know what I mean?’
‘I am so sorry. That’s a horrid thing to have wrong with you. Perhaps in that case you’d just hold the door open for me? I’m sure I shall manage.’ With gallant unconcern Dame Viola dragged her cases from the car.
‘Tell you what, I daresay I could—’
‘No no, don’t think of it. I should hate to make your condition more painful. Might you be able to pick up those letters for me?’ The mat inside the front door was piled high with mail, which, groaning, the driver bent to put on the small table.
‘Nice little place you’ve got here.’
‘Do come in and have a look. I’m very proud of it. Look, this is my sitting room.’
‘Did I see it in a colour supp.?’
‘It’s very flattering, people are so kind and seem to think it’s worth writing about. Do let me show you my pride and joy, here we are, it’s the kitchen. I converted it from a dreadful little scullery.’ She opened the door into a pale pink and apple green room full of rustic looking fitments. ‘Goodness, what a funny smell,’ she said.
‘It does pong a bit. Left something in the cupboard to go off?’
‘No, I’m sure I was careful to empty everything out.’ She opened the refrigerator, which contained only an unstarted bottle of long-life milk. The driver sniffed his way around the room.
‘You’ve probably got a dead rat under the floorboards.’
‘Not rats!’
The man had gone through to the scullery. ‘Hey!’
‘Oh, what is it?’
‘Someone’s broken in. You’ve been burgled,’ the driver said. A pane of glass beside the door handle had been broken. Splinters of glass lay on the mat. Dame Viola hurried towards her sitting room.
‘Oh, they’ve gone! My candelabra, and my mother’s work box. And the silver trophy from the Lovers of Literature. And my little picture—’ She scuttled round the room wringing her hands.
‘At least they didn’t make a mess. Some of these young boys . . .’
‘I must ring the police.’ But the telephone wire had been wrenched from its socket.
‘I’ll get in the cab and fetch them.’
‘Oh no, please don’t leave me here alone, not till we’re sure it’s all right. There’s that smell . . .’ The odour was spreading from the kitchen, hanging in the chilly air like a poisonous miasma. Dame Viola pressed her handkerchief over her mouth and nose, and went up the stairs. There she found that her silver hairbrushes had disappeared. ‘I suppose it’s lucky that I’ve never had much jewellery,’ she said, opening the dressing-table drawer to reveal a muddle of pots and tubes. The driver, who had followed her up, could be heard opening other doors, before going down again, following his nose. He called:
‘This is where the pong’s coming from, through this trap door. What’s underneath?’
‘Only the cellar. But that’s quite empty.’
Ignoring his arthritis, the driver turned the iron handle that was set into the heavy door and pulled upwards. A putrid odour came out in a thick, horrible puff of air. Dame Viola staggered backwards. The man let the trap fall back into its recess with a loud bang. He dashed for the sink, into which he was copiously sick. Well trained, he ran water to clear up. Then he followed Dame Viola out on to the gravel drive in front of the house.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ she gasped. ‘I suppose so. It was just that smell. What can it have been? It was like nothing on earth.’
The man said, ‘There’s a body down there.’
‘A body?’
‘A stiff. A corpse.’
‘What, in my house?’
‘Must have been there for some time. How long have you been away?’
‘Nearly three weeks.’
‘There you are then. I should have known, I was right through the war. Should have recognised the smell. Must have been the villain that broke in, poor bastard. Went down to look for more loot and got trapped. Serve him right, in a way.’
The explanation seemed plausible, and Dame Viola suggested it to the police who were very solicitous of their illustrious complainant. She seemed, as they told each other later, like just any other dear old lady, garrulous and agitated. She chattered and speculated. She was brave and stoical about her lost possessions. ‘It’s that poor
man I feel so dreadful about,’ she said.
The press seized on the story, speculating that a gang of thieves had left one of their number behind when they escaped with the stolen goods, for none of them had been found with the decomposing body.
But the identification of the dead man made that explanation seem unlikely. He had all the usual paper paraphernalia of modern life in his wallet. He was a London based businessman in his fifties: Allan Cory, son of a Wesleyan minister, from Maxton in Derbyshire, a public-school boy, the father-in-law of Zoe Meredith of Stacey’s Sleuths.
At the inquest the reason for Allan Cory’s visit to Viola Hutber’s cottage became clear from a letter that had been in the pile awaiting her return. It was from her brother, the headmaster of St Uny’s School, Carmell. ‘Just to tell you that my former pupil Allan Cory may be calling on you to ask for your recollections of this place before the war. He is doing some research about the school – he’s one of our most devoted old boys as you may know. Anyway, I’ve told him that you may remember more than I do and I think he’s planning to come and seen you soon.’
A deposition of evidence from Basil Hutber was to the same effect.
Allan Cory had starved to death. He had been imprisoned in the cellar under Viola Hutber’s kitchen by the closing of a trap door that could be opened only from above. He had tried to escape. There were the marks of scraping on the stone walls, of chipping at the mortar. Fragments of cloth and hair adhered to the underside of the trap, showing how he had tried to force it open. Fragments of the wooden door were traced on his head and shoulders and underneath his broken fingernails. The only weapons or tools he had found in that lonely darkness were his own bunch of keys and a couple of empty wine bottles, waiting for the next year’s refill. Even James Bond or Dick Barton might have met his end in such a prison. Allan Cory had no skills to fit him for it.
Hungry and alone in the pitchy cold. It was a gruesome picture, and the pathologist estimated that the man had survived for nearly a week, before hunger or thirst or the cold, or simply despair, had killed him.
The verdict could only be derived from inference. By some ghastly coincidence Allan Cory must have called to see Dame Viola Hutber soon after she had left for her American tour, and just at the time when one or more housebreakers were inside. They had left him in the cellar while they escaped with the silver candelabra, the Victorian epergne, the presentation silver trophy, the few semi-precious jewels.
Manslaughter by person or persons unknown: nobody expected to trace them. Dame Viola Hutber told reporters that she felt very much to blame. ‘I should never have installed a trap door that wouldn’t open from below. If only the poor man had been able to escape.’
Annie Hamilton Routley, in attendance, said quickly, ‘Of course there was no way that Dame Viola could have guessed it would be dangerous.’
‘If only I had got someone to go in while I was away.’ Dame Viola had no caretaker who might have noticed the broken pane of glass. She had drained the water tanks and left the gas turned off. She had locked all the doors and windows, but now said remorsefully that she had not been sufficiently conscious of security. ‘I should have thought.’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘You won’t find me disclaiming responsibility. Not for that or for anything else. We all need more sense of personal responsibility in our lives, more taking thought for the morrow. But that day the trouble was that I was so eager to be on time. I worry foolishly about catching planes and trains, I know. I was out there waiting when Annie and Noelle arrived to take me to the airport, and I must have neglected to double lock the back door.’
‘A determined thief will break in through any locks,’ Noelle Stephenson told the reporters, and Annie said, ‘None of this could conceivably be blamed on Dame Viola.’
‘All the same,’ their leader said, her voice quivering, ‘I can’t help feeling dreadful, that poor man . . .’ The tears on her cheeks did her nothing but good with the viewing public, to whom they seemed wholly appropriate in every way.
Chapter Fifteen
The penalty clause in Zoe’s contract prevented her from going to England with Lawrence for his father’s funeral, which was to be, in accordance with the provisions of his will, at St Uny’s Abbey.
Lawrence’s memories of school seemed all to be of midwinter or midsummer, of long days punctuated by the evocative sound of bat on ball, the umpire’s call, the cooing of pigeons in their regular rhythm; of the smells of mown grass and boys who have sweated in the sun. Or it was winter, always marked by thick snow, white in his memory, not dirty or slushy, but malleable, crisp, a promise of pleasure. He remembered happiness or misery, love or hatred, but had forgotten the tepid hours of boredom and indifference. All the same, these vivid, edited memories had not made him nostalgic, for, unlike his father, Lawrence was not among those numerous, pitiable Englishmen who believe their schooldays the happiest of their lives.
Allan Cory’s school had represented comfort and security and something to live up to, for his foster parents had been austere and, out of kindness, severe, taking seriously such scriptural advice as that he who loves his son chastens him. Herbert and Gwen Cory chastened Allan as, incidentally, did the environment they inhabited, for Herbert moved every three years from one bleak manse to another, never giving the child time to become an accepted part of the community, never having time to consider life’s graces. The Corys were always called to what they described as challenging posts, which meant among poor, ill educated and irreligious people. Allan was to say that boarding school had been a revelation. An anonymous benefactor had paid his fees and the boy fell in love with the place, the headmaster, indeed with the whole set-up. When his own son Lawrence was small he held out the prospect of going there like a lollipop. Lawrence’s younger stepbrothers were sent to Rugby, but Allan Cory insisted on St Uny’s for Lawrence and the boy enjoyed it, even if he never knew the same emotion about the place that Allan did. Returning there now, only weeks after his New Year visit, he felt that mixture of emotions, fear, nervousness, eagerness, that he remembered from the beginning of term.
Lawrence hired a car at Newcastle and drove along the line of the Roman road, the casket containing his father’s ashes in a box at his side.
Snow lay on the hills, not the white fluff of Lawrence’s selective memory, but a brindled patching of the slopes that left dun coloured stretches in between and dark rectangles of conifer plantations. To the north ran the line of Hadrian’s Wall. One summer Lawrence had walked its length with Allan. They had carried rucksacks and slept at deplorable pubs. During clear moments they gazed at the miles of empty Britain once scanned by imperial sentries. Lawrence had wished his thoughts were more constructive. He was sure that his current heroes (Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh) would have found the landscape evocative of some cynical wit. It rained and on the third day Allan Cory twisted his ankle, but it had been a good week all the same. Out there in the lonely hills the silence between father and son felt harmonious and very different from the question and answer sessions they endured on the obligatory weekend visits specified by the divorce court. Allan, so blatantly devoted to Lawrence, seldom seemed to know what to say to him. Perhaps he would have got on more easily with a grandchild.
St Uny’s school, once St Uny’s Abbey, was approached across inhospitable countryside. It was on the shore of a lake that used to be crossed by horse drawn travellers on a ferry, but the motor road ran around it, to Carmell. The town was not readily accessible even now. Before the Reformation the place was isolated indeed, and thereby protected from interference both spiritual and material. The Abbey was a centre of licence, rather than spirituality, when Henry VIII gave it to a local family that assumed its name.
During the ensuing centuries the secular settlement around the Abbey precincts grew into the town of Carmell, which spread out along the lake shore, separated from the Great House by a park and a high stone wall.
A traveller approaching by roa
d first saw the great tower looming ahead of him. As he drew closer, the tower became hidden by a belt of trees and then behind the wall that circled the estate. The road ran along between the wall and the shore, into the town which, once a fief of the St Uny family, was now a cluster of democratic freeholds. It had been protected from the worst excesses of modern development less by the good sense of the owners and the planners than by the lack of industry. It was not a prosperous place, though the tourist trade was increasing, but for some years the school had been a major employer.
The school had been founded by the last male descendant of the St Uny family, a distant cousin who had inherited the property after all the more direct heirs had died during the First World War: two killed in action, one during the Zeppelin raid on Scarborough, one in a boating accident on the lake; their father was suspected of having committed suicide, but the merciful verdict was accidental death by drowning, and his body was interred in the Abbey’s consecrated ground along with his ancestors’.
Donald St Uny, who had been brought up in Oxford (son of the classics tutor of Balliol), had no means to support a great house and no notion of how to manage a great estate. The only way to keep the place, at a time when opening to the public was not recognised as a money spinner, seemed to be to start a school. There was no difficulty in finding staff and little in attracting pupils. Basil Hutber started work there in 1930 and eight years later married Nell St Uny, eventually succeeding his father-in-law as headmaster. By the time that Lawrence started there the school was popularly known as ‘Hutber’s’. Basil Hutber’s personality seemed chiefly responsible for keeping the place attractive to parents and their sons.
Even then Basil Hutber had seemed old, though still in his early sixties. He had settled into the ‘grand old man’ role, and was so much an institution that nobody seemed to notice his departures from the headmasterly norm; for instance, that he never wore an academic gown, and never taught an academic subject; nor did any letters appear after his name on the prospectus. Had he been to a university? What was his own subject? Had he ever taught elsewhere? Nobody ever asked or told.