‘Of course it was! What else could it have been?’
‘I’m afraid it looks now as though foul play was involved.’
‘Foul play?’ For a moment he thought she didn’t understand what that meant, but then he saw that she did. She had gone deathly pale.
‘Please sit down, Mrs Aston.’ She sank clumsily into a chair, knocking into a small table and causing the cup and saucer on it to rattle against the coffee pot. ‘I’m sorry, this has been a shock – would you like me to pour you some more coffee?’
She shuddered. ‘No. But you can get me a glass of water.’
He found the kitchen, small and old-fashioned but as spotless as the rest of the house, looked for a glass, and while he left the tap on for the water to run cold, took stock. It was a soulless place, a table covered with oilcloth, in places worn to its backing by much scrubbing, a copper in one corner, a mangle in the other, one single wooden chair painted a dismal green, an ancient stove and an overall smell of carbolic, unpleasantly reminiscent of public conveniences. He remembered what Maisie had said about her cooking. Joe’s aunt, with whom he lodged, wasn’t much of a cook either, and it wasn’t hard to visualize unappealing meals of grey mince, lumpy potatoes and overcooked cabbage.
When he went back into the other room she was sitting down and had composed herself again, looking much as she had when he had first broken the news of her husband’s death – stoical and unyielding, her lips pressed together, as if such a catastrophe was just more of life’s slings and arrows thrown at her which she had no choice but to accept. ‘Should’ve told you to get yourself a cup if you want some coffee,’ she remarked as he handed her the water and sat himself down opposite.
‘That’s all right, Mrs Aston.’
She drank thirstily. ‘What’s all this, then? What’s this foul play you’re on about?’
‘I’m afraid it looks as though your husband was attacked, and died as a result.’
She took another gulp of water. ‘Killed, you mean? What makes you think that, then?’
He explained as gently as he could what they thought might have happened. ‘Had he any enemies that you know of, or friends he might have quarrelled with recently?’
‘He didn’t have any friends,’ she said spitefully.
Joe raised his eyebrows.
‘It’s true. He never went out, never went anywhere – well, hardly, except down to the Rotary Club or the Punch Bowl sometimes, or to see the major.’ The major, thought Joe, making a mental note to pursue this later, as she went on, ‘Anyway, he stayed late at the works most nights.’ Her lips pursed even tighter.
And then came home and ate an unappetizing supper, sat down and maybe read his newspaper – there was not a book in sight – while Lily crocheted yet more cushion covers? What a prospect: domestic boredom personified.
‘But there must have been people he knew. Did he never mention any names … business contacts, some customer from overseas, maybe?’
Her expression didn’t alter but something alerted him. He’d touched a nerve there. He debated whether to press the point, but decided against it at the moment, knowing full well it would only elicit another negative response.
‘It’s like I told that girl,’ she said. ‘He kept his home life and his business separate.’
‘What girl was that?’
‘Her that writes for the Herald.’
Judy Cash again, snooping around. She gave him an itch, that girl, like winter chilblains, and like them, you couldn’t get rid of her. He knew he should ignore her, but she exasperated him; she was capable of doing a lot of damage, insinuating herself to get information, getting under people’s skin. ‘You want to be careful with her. What you say will go straight into the paper.’
‘Oh, I know that, I wasn’t born yesterday,’ Lily replied, scornful of his estimation of her. ‘But she’s promised it won’t, you know. She understands.’
Not understood, but understands, as if they were in the habit of meeting. He didn’t much like that. ‘All the same, if you see her again, watch what you say to her.’
She shrugged and drank some more water, and when she’d put the glass down, Joe said, ‘He had a graze on his temple, your husband. The doctors don’t believe it was recent – or at any rate not received at the time he died. How did he get it, Mrs Aston?’
She blinked rapidly, her work-reddened hands twisting together, then looked down at her feet without saying anything. Her shoes were old and shapeless. Lily Aston was not a woman you took to, but the sight of those shoes, contrasting with a dress much smarter than the one she’d worn when he had seen her previously – a sort of bravado, that seemed to him – somehow filled Joe with pity.
‘Did you have a quarrel?’ he asked more gently.
She looked up at that and gave a short laugh. ‘I suppose that means you think I hit him? Me? Look at me! He weighed thirteen stone!’
‘You don’t look as though you weigh much more than half of that,’ Joe agreed. She also looked tough and wiry, but he forbore to comment on that. ‘Was it an accident, or a fall, then?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘OK, if it wasn’t either, and you didn’t have a fight with him, do you know how he got that graze?’
‘No.’
After a moment or two, Joe said, ‘Mrs Aston, I think maybe you do.’
She went silent, her mouth set in a mulish line. He saw calculation pass over her face as he waited, and then suddenly she said, ‘All right. It was that Rees-Talbot.’
She waved a hand towards a framed sepia photograph over the mantel, a group of half a dozen uniformed officers, obviously taken some time ago, somewhere under a hot sun: a bare landscape with a tin-roofed building to one side, two or three stunted trees and what looked like native kraals in the background. ‘Him on the right,’ she said. ‘That’s Major Rees-Talbot.’ Joe looked and saw a young man with nothing in particular to distinguish him from the others. They were all wearing khaki tunics, slouch hats, riding breeches and boots, holding whips and sporting the same type of luxuriant moustache that had been popular at the turn of the century.
‘Thought highly of the major, Arthur did. He was his batman during the war in South Africa, they went through a lot together, he used to say, and the major helped him out a bit when he started his business here. He was cut up when he died.’
Joe adjusted his perceptions. ‘Then it wasn’t the major he had the fight with?’
‘Of course not, I told you, he’s dead. Months since. It was his son, that Felix.’
The name Rees-Talbot had caused Joe’s ears to prick up. It was a familiar enough one in Folbury, but also the name of the people Maisie worked for. The major, of course, was the late father of Margaret and Felix Rees-Talbot, whom Maisie said Aston had been in the habit of visiting. What else had she said about Aston, apart from the fact that he couldn’t keep his hands to himself? Something about a nasty atmosphere he’d left behind him when he visited Alma House, wasn’t it? ‘What was the fight about?’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. The young fellow came here and Arthur sent me out of the room. They started shouting, and I came back when I heard them begin to scuffle. It was all over by then, but the place was in a right mess, I can tell you. They’d knocked my palm stand over and my aspidistra was on the floor,’ she said indignantly, pointing to a narrow, tapering oak stand, now upright, and on its lace doily a leathery potted plant of no great beauty that looked more than capable of surviving such rough treatment.
‘And your husband?’
‘Oh, him. He was all right, he went to sit in his chair when I came in, and the young chap left. I will say,’ she added grudgingly, ‘he had the grace to apologize and pick my aspidistra up before he went.’
‘Did Mr Aston say what it was all about?’
Lily looked at him. ‘What makes you think he’d tell me?’
There was a small silence. ‘You didn’t get on, then, you and your husband?’
‘I
didn’t say that. Just that he kept himself to himself.’
‘So you wouldn’t know if he had any enemies?’
‘Like that young chap, you mean?’
‘Well, from what you say, their meeting doesn’t seem to have been exactly friendly. Did you happen to overhear anything of what went on?’
She blushed, an ugly dark red that ran in a tide from her chest and throat right up to her hairline. ‘What do you take me for? I don’t listen at doors.’ She stood up and added with a certain dignity, ‘If that’s it, Sergeant, then I have to go out soon.’
‘Another few minutes, please, and then I’ll be off, I promise.’
‘Be as quick as you can then,’ she said sharply. ‘What else is it you want?’
You didn’t have to read between the lines, Joe thought, to see she was an unhappy woman in what had been an unhappy marriage, but the cowed wife Maisie had known wasn’t much in evidence today. She was showing spirit, though anxious to get rid of him. Yet there still remained the somewhat delicate matter of asking permission to go through the dead man’s things, papers and perhaps personal belongings. The papers first.
Before making any request, Joe enquired, ‘By the way, did Mr Aston happen to keep any duplicate keys for the works?’
‘Duplicates? I wouldn’t know. Unless there were some at Henrietta Street. He only had the one set as far as I know.’
‘He let himself into the foundry that morning but we haven’t found any keys.’
She shrugged and said ungraciously, ‘Better have another look, then, hadn’t you? A big bunch like that doesn’t lose itself easy. They were on a ring with his house keys and that.’
‘We’ll do that, of course. Meanwhile, your husband’s private papers … I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask for a look at them.’
‘You could if you had the keys, but you’ll have to find them first, won’t you? It’s locked,’ she said, with a touch of malice, gesturing towards a dark oak roll-top desk with a green opaque-glass nymph displayed on its top.
He gave her a direct look before saying casually, ‘Right, well, never mind that, Mrs Aston, I can force it open. No, no, don’t worry, I’ll be careful not to make too many scratches. Do you have a knife?’
‘Don’t be so hasty,’ she replied like a shot, alarmed for her furniture. ‘There might be a spare key somewhere upstairs.’
There was, of course. After some time she came back with it, sucking a bead of blood from her thumb. ‘Key slipped – I mean the one to the cupboard where this was,’ she said, handing him the very small key to the desk. ‘You’d think it was Winson Green, this house, the way things were kept locked up.’
Arthur Aston was certainly emerging as a careful man, secretive even, but keys kept within locked cupboards? Number seven, Cherry Avenue must indeed have seemed like a prison to Mrs Aston sometimes.
But when he looked, Joe didn’t find anything that warranted such secrecy. Aston had been an orderly man and his desk was very tidy. No personal diary, though. Evidently the appointment book he kept in his office desk had been sufficient for him, along with what appeared to be a scribbled reminder list on the back of a part-used chequebook, items meaningless to anyone else: Rates, 16th June; Harrison, painter, Queen’s Rd; WIM (several times); Car Licence, June 30th; Timber, £5.17.6. The cheque stubs all appeared to be for small payments of household bills. There were no bank statements and no cash in the desk – now he came to think of it, Aston had had very little on him when he was killed, just some loose change in his pocket and a couple of pound notes in his wallet. Careful chap, Aston.
Apart from these mundane papers, there was a file containing deeds for the house and a bank passbook with a tidy though not excessive balance, which would need to be checked more thoroughly. His business statements and a preliminary look through the books in the safe at his office had revealed similarly satisfactory figures. At the back of the file was a marriage certificate dated June 1911 for Arthur Aston, bachelor, and Lily Jane Tucker, spinster. There was no will, nor had there been one among his papers at the office, though it would have been surprising if he’d kept it there.
‘Did your husband keep private documents anywhere else, Mrs Aston? A copy of his will, perhaps?’
‘Will? I don’t know of any will.’ She shrugged, not seeming too concerned at its absence.
So unless Aston had lodged a copy with his bank or his solicitor, it seemed he might have died intestate. It was possible, with all his assets realized and his business wound up, that when Lily Jane Tucker married Arthur Aston, she might not have made such a bad bargain after all.
Nine
In preparation for Easter, tonight’s choir practice was an extra – just the boys, with none of the deeper male voices as a counterpoint to their piercing sweetness.
‘My soul doth magnify the Lord …’
Perhaps because this setting of the Magnificat was as new and unfamiliar to the boys as it was to Margaret, the choirmaster kept making them stop and go back to the beginning, repeating phrases over and over again. Voices echoing in the empty spaces of the church and around the stone pillars, soaring to the vaulting, becoming ragged, dying away. The choirmaster giving them a note. His interjections, his actual words not quite reaching to where Margaret sat …
She had lately found herself coming in here on most choir practice nights, just to listen, much as her father had done. Philip Latham, the young and enthusiastic organist and choirmaster, had been a particular friend of his, their shared love of music, particularly sacred music, having brought them together. She had indeed sometimes been tempted to wonder if her father’s faithful adherence to Holy Trinity had as much to do with that as his commitment to his faith. Heretical thought! But who could ever tell with Osbert?
‘For he that is mighty hath magnified me …’
Margaret vaguely wondered who the composer was. Her father could have told her. She closed her eyes but that only brought the questions back. For the last few hours, they’d tumbled about in her mind – the doubts, everything that had gone wrong since Osbert’s death, the shock at the manner of it …
Strangely, tonight she felt closer to him than at any time since his death, as if this new worry that had arisen today had set up some communion with him. But that didn’t mean he could tell her what to do now … what to do about things being stirred up again, what to do when she tried to face her fears as she knew she should and her own brisk common sense deserted her.
‘… and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.’
Finally, the choirmaster, having let them sing the canticle right through without any interruptions, was winding up the practice, his voice raised enough now for her to distinguish his words. ‘All right, that’s it for tonight. But I shall expect a better performance on Sunday. Off you go – quietly!’ he shouted above the ensuing din that immediately broke out as the choir dispersed. Like choirboys everywhere, they looked and sounded angelic, singing like angels and incapable of mischief or naughtiness when dressed in their dark blue robes and short white surplices, but now they were just ordinary, mortal boys in their rough jerseys and shorts, socks at half-mast as they jostled each other rowdily past her down the aisle and shot out of the door like greyhounds released from a trap.
An uncanny silence was left behind until presently the organ began again – toccata and fugue, eclipsing the gentler notes of the Magnificat, rolling and thunderous, the sort of music that always filled Margaret with melancholy foreboding. An agitation gripped her; she could no longer sit still.
She hurried, almost ran out of the church into a green and gold spring evening, into the tranquil churchyard that was no longer used as a burial ground, shaded by lime trees, bisected by flagged paths where the grass between the old graves was now allowed to grow and become studded with wild flowers. This was not a place that gave off melancholy, nor indeed indulged it; the dead here had slept peacefully for centuries, the inscriptions on their ancient headstones indecipherable now, worn by the
passage of time. A fragrance hung around the lych gate from wallflowers which had seeded themselves into the cracks of the old churchyard wall, some already in bloom.
Her footsteps gradually slowed; she felt a hand on her shoulder and spun round. ‘I saw you in church, my love. I hoped I might catch you.’
‘Symon! I didn’t see you,’ she said, still agitated.
‘I only popped out from the vestry for a minute. You seemed very … absorbed. What’s wrong?’ In fact he had watched her from the vestry doorway for longer than that and thought, though he could not be sure from that distance, that she might have been weeping.
‘I am so pleased to see you, Symon!’
‘Now that’s good. My future wife is pleased to see me!’
‘Of course I am.’ His teasing irony had missed its mark. ‘I need to talk to you,’ she said rapidly. ‘Something’s happened, but … oh, I don’t know how to begin!’
He waited, his hand still on her arm.
‘There’s – there’s been an accident at one of the factories in Arms Green.’
‘Arthur Aston, I know.’
‘You know? News travels fast.’
‘I went to pay a pastoral call on his wife yesterday. Though they were not church attenders.’ He added, with slightly heightened colour, ‘She refused to speak to me.’
In fact Lily Aston had taken one look at his dog collar and demanded rudely what business it was of his when he had mentioned the purpose of his visit, and then virtually shut the door in his face.
‘I suppose it must be a difficult time for her,’ Margaret said.
‘Do you know her?’
‘I’ve never met her but Maisie used to work for the Astons. And – I did know her husband, slightly. He was my father’s batman in South Africa and used to come and see him occasionally …’ Now that Symon was here, she began to feel less agitated and made an effort to get her thoughts in better order, rolling a small pebble on the path with the pointed toe of her smart kid shoe.
‘Margaret?’ She went on pushing the pebble about. ‘You’re upset because of Aston’s death?’ he prompted.
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