An Air That Kills

by Andrew Taylor

  This evening, both Philip and Charlotte were in a cheerful mood – Philip because he had sold his story about the Victorian murderess and the Templefields bones to one of the nationals, the Daily Express, and Charlotte because she had spent the day rearranging the Harcutts’ lives; Good Works agreed with her.

  ‘I phoned Madge this evening,’ Charlotte announced as she spooned coffee into the jug; she added for Jill’s benefit, ‘She’s the headmistress of the High School. We’ve had a wonderful stroke of luck. Their assistant secretary is leaving at the end of term. She’s going to have a baby.’

  ‘You’re plotting,’ Philip said.

  ‘Well, it would be perfect for Antonia, wouldn’t it? If she got the job, she could live at home and look after her father. I explained the situation to Madge, and between ourselves I think it’s as good as settled. The school has a policy of favouring applications from Old Girls.’

  The telephone started to ring in the hall. Charlotte went to answer it.

  Ash fell from the end of Philip’s cigarette into the soapy water. ‘What did Thornhill want with Harcutt?’

  ‘He didn’t say,’ Jill said.

  ‘I wonder if the police have found out something else, something they needed to check with him. Maybe I should give him a ring tomorrow. Did he say he’d tell the Harcutts about the man you saw?’

  ‘Yes. And he’s going to get the local bobby to keep an eye on the place.’ Jill began to polish a plate. ‘He thought it was probably someone having a look round on the off chance – someone who thought the major was in hospital and who didn’t know Antonia was back.’

  ‘But they’d have seen the lights and our car in the drive.’

  ‘No, the Harcutts live at the back of the house. And he wouldn’t have seen the car because I parked on the green. The drive’s in a terrible state.’

  Charlotte bustled back into the kitchen. ‘It’s for you.’

  Philip turned, reaching for a towel. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘No, for Jill.’ Charlotte’s face was alert with curiosity. ‘Someone called Oliver Yateley. Very charming.’

  Very slowly and very carefully, Jill put down the plate on the table.

  ‘I didn’t know anyone knew you were down here,’ Charlotte said.

  ‘Nor did I,’ Jill replied.

  ‘The name sounds faintly familiar. Perhaps we met him when we were up in London?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Jill went into the hall. The handset was waiting for her, lying like a menacing black slug beside the cradle. This was one eventuality for which she was entirely unprepared. She had thought that she would be safe in Lydmouth.

  She picked up the handset. For a second she listened to the electric near-silence of the open line. Somewhere on the other end of this piece of wire was Oliver, breathing and biding his time. She could break the connection and cast him back to the limbo of memory; but that wouldn’t work because he would telephone again and again until he reached her. Oliver was persistent if nothing else as she knew to her cost.

  ‘Oliver.’

  ‘Jill – thank God. I’ve been phoning everyone I could think of.’

  ‘Where did you get the number?’

  ‘The address book in your desk. Listen, darling, I—’

  ‘You’ve been to my flat?’

  ‘Of course I have. What else could I do?’

  ‘I want to have the keys back. Or do I have to change the locks?’

  There was a silence. She imagined him spending the evening, perhaps several evenings, working doggedly through the address book – ‘Is Jill with you, by any chance? No? So sorry to bother you’ – until at last he reached the Wemyss-Browns near the bottom of the alphabet. It was humiliating to think that his pursuit of her had been so public. She missed something he was saying and had to ask him to repeat it.

  ‘I found the roses in your wastepaper basket.’

  ‘What do you expect? A dozen red roses aren’t going to make me change my mind.’

  ‘Darling, you haven’t been well. I need to see you, to talk to you properly. And what’s this I hear about you resigning? You’re in no state to make decisions at present. What do you think you’re going to live on?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with you, Oliver. Will you just stop pestering me?’

  She put down the phone, closed her eyes and leant against the wall. It’s over, she said to herself, and nothing matters any more. She was dry-eyed, which pleased her; she was too angry to cry.

  She went back to the kitchen. The door was an inch ajar. She could hear Charlotte’s voice inside.

  ‘Helping Antonia could be a blessing in disguise. It’ll take Jill’s mind off things.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  With his head down and his hands deep in his pockets, Richard Thornhill walked into the wind. Without making a conscious decision, he headed towards the centre of the town. He drove himself hard, feeling that exhaustion was desirable because it led eventually to oblivion.

  A lorry rolled by and for an instant he thought how easy it would be to step in front of it, like Harcutt’s dog: the driver wouldn’t have a chance of stopping. That would show them all. Bloody women. To make matters worse, he was aware, though for most of the time he managed to suppress the knowledge, that he was making a fool of himself.

  At this hour, the High Street was almost deserted, even on Friday night. The idea of going up to his office slipped into his mind, only to be summarily dismissed. He hadn’t come out on a filthy evening merely to plough through a few more of his predecessor’s files. He deserved to enjoy himself for once, didn’t he? A pint of beer, or perhaps two, was a far better idea.

  The Bull Hotel was the nearest place. But Thornhill walked past it. His heart beating a little faster, he turned into Lyd Street. He walked quickly down the hill, warmed by the exercise and by a sense of guilty excitement. On the way, he passed on the left the dark windows of Masterman’s the jeweller’s.

  At the bottom of the hill, near the river, was the Bathurst Arms. There was no harm in it, for God’s sake, Thornhill told himself angrily as he opened the outer door. Laughter, cigarette smoke and the smell of beer washed over him. He went into the lounge bar.

  The room wasn’t crowded, though there was a decent sprinkling of drinkers. Gloria wasn’t in evidence. He realised from his disappointment how much he had counted on seeing her. The plain young girl, Gloria’s stepdaughter, took his order; there was no sign of recognition on her dull, pinched face. He glanced beyond her, into the public bar, where a noisy game of darts was in progress.

  He paid for his drink and took it to a table near the fire. The beer tasted sour, and it sat heavily on his stomach. He drank quickly, tried to concentrate on the Gazette and told himself that this was the life, that he should do this more often.

  Bravado dictated that he should have at least one more pint. He carried his glass to the bar. A few seconds before he got there, a tall man staggered across the public bar and slammed four glasses, two pints and two shorts, on to the bar top.

  ‘Same again, my love,’ he bellowed to the barmaid.

  While she was serving him, he began to roll a cigarette. Thornhill glanced at him and quickly looked away: it was Charlie Meague, and he was well on the way to becoming as drunk as a lord. The situation was one which made Thornhill automatically wary. Alcohol could remove many inhibitions, including the one about not hitting policemen. He changed his position to get a better view of the public bar: he was curious to see whom Meague was drinking with.

  A small, bearded man was sitting near the window with a book open on the table in front of him. Thornhill’s attention sharpened. He’d seen that man before – coming out of the library on the evening they had found the bones and going into the Bull Hotel. The thin, pasty face stirred other memories. Genghis Carn might be looking for Charlie Meague. If you took the beard away from that face, it would look not unlike the description of Carn in the Police Gazette.

  Meague swore. He was
making heavy weather of rolling his cigarette and had spilled tobacco into a pool of beer on the counter.

  ‘If you’d wiped that up, my girl,’ he complained to the sad barmaid, ‘I could have used that tobacco. It’s a bloody waste. What are you going to do about it?’

  There was a roar from the men around the dartboard. Several people were in the process of leaving the lounge bar. Thornhill heard the clack of high heels in the private corridor behind the bar and he smelled perfume. He looked up eagerly. Gloria came in.

  ‘Charlie,’ she said, ‘haven’t you had enough?’

  ‘No.’ With unexpected speed, Charlie’s hand shot out and seized Gloria’s arm. He lowered his voice until it wasn’t much above a whisper. ‘I haven’t had enough of you, either.’

  ‘Let go of my arm.’

  He obeyed. ‘You should have married me, girl.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. You’re making a fool of yourself. And of me.’

  She hadn’t seen Thornhill; she and Charlie were concentrating too hard on each other. Though their voices were quiet, their faces were intent and angry. The two of them might have been alone. The barmaid had turned away and was refilling the smaller glasses with whisky; the tips of her ears were red. Gloria was wearing a pink dress that outlined her waist and hips and made her look like a tart. Thornhill no longer wanted to see her, let alone talk to her.

  Thornhill put his glass on the counter – gently to avoid disturbing the two people and whatever form of intimacy held them together. He grabbed his coat and hat and joined the tail end of the group leaving the bar.

  Outside, the wind came roaring up the river and blew the hat off his head. Someone laughed. He bent down, picked it up and crammed it on his head. He felt foolish, unsatisfied and sad: he disgusted himself. Why did desire have to make a mockery of love? He walked slowly up the hill. It was time to go home. There was nowhere else to go.

  Part Four

  Saturday

  Chapter One

  The following morning, Charlotte drove Jill to Chandos Lodge. She pulled up beside the green, opposite the Harcutts’ gates, leaving the engine running and the wipers squeaking to and fro.

  ‘Sure you can get back all right?’ she asked as Jill was opening the door.

  Jill nodded at the bus stop. ‘I just wait there till a bus comes.’

  ‘I feel terribly guilty about this. But they do like St John’s to look its best on Remembrance Sunday, and that means they need all the able bodies they can find. It’s like a three-line whip in parliament.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll manage.’

  ‘You won’t forget to mention the job, will you? The sooner Antonia applies for it the better.’

  Jill said she wouldn’t forget and closed the door. Charlotte gave her a regal wave and the Rover pulled away. Jill put up her umbrella and walked up the drive of Chandos Lodge. The front door opened before she got there.

  ‘I saw you coming from my window,’ Antonia said, her sallow skin flushing unbecomingly. ‘Shall we go out straightaway?’

  ‘Whenever you like.’

  ‘I’ll just get my coat.’ She drew back to let Jill into the hall. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her mouth half-open; she looked like a tired rabbit. ‘Horrible weather. Makes me think of funerals, for some reason.’

  ‘They say November used to be called the month of the dead.’ Jill glimpsed a flood of morbid and unanswerable questions welling up in her own mind. How, for example, do you grieve for the nameless, for the unknown soldiers, for people who never had a name in the first place, who were hardly even people? She forced herself to concentrate on the present, not the past, and on the living rather than the dead. ‘How’s your father today?’

  ‘Physically he’s much better, but morale’s a bit low.’

  ‘Has he seen yesterday’s Gazette? There’s an article about the bones at Templefields. I brought him a copy.’

  For an instant, Antonia’s lips twisted as though she had detected an unpleasant taste in her mouth. But she nodded briskly. ‘Thanks, he’ll like that.’

  ‘He’s mentioned as an expert on Victorian Lydmouth.’

  There was a cough from the stairs, the sort designed to draw attention. A small woman wearing a pinafore was standing on the half-landing, her head alertly cocked in an attitude suggesting that she had been monitoring their conversation; she was carrying a dustpan and brush and her hair was swathed in a turban. Here, Jill thought, was the cleaner Charlotte had referred to as Mrs Thing: she did not usually come in at weekends, but Charlotte had arranged for her to do an extra three hours this morning.

  ‘Do you want me to do the kitchen now’ – there was a barely perceptible pause to mark the absence of the ‘Miss’ which might have been tacked on to the question before the war – ‘Antonia?’

  ‘Yes, please, Mrs Forbes. We’ll go out with the poppies in a moment.’

  ‘Bit late, isn’t it? Everyone I know’s got theirs by now.’

  ‘Yes, but it’ll stop my father worrying about it. Could you keep an ear open for him while I’m out?’

  Mrs Forbes pursed her thin lips. ‘I’ll have to go at twelve, come what may. Got to cook our Terry’s dinner.’

  ‘Well, not to worry if we’re not back. I expect he’d be able to cope.’

  Mrs Forbes stood there, waiting, imperceptibly menacing and saying nothing; and in her silence she conveyed a question or perhaps a demand.

  Antonia’s shoulders twitched. ‘Oh, sorry. I almost forgot. I’d better give you your money before we go.’

  Mrs Forbes advanced down the stairs like a victorious army. ‘I usually have a cup of tea and a fag about now. All right?’

  Antonia took a step backwards. ‘Oh, yes, of course.’

  Mrs Forbes walked, head back, splay-footed, the mistress of all she surveyed, down the hall, past the door of the major’s room and into the kitchen. Antonia said she would fetch her coat, but first she took Jill to see her father.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she whispered.

  The room was tidier than Jill had seen it. The major was sitting at his bureau, apparently examining a row of medals which he thrust into a drawer as they entered.

  ‘Jolly good of you to help with the poppies,’ he said. ‘Hell of a responsibility for one person, you know.’

  Jill gave him the Gazette folded open at the Templefields article. ‘Charlotte thought you might like that.’

  He held out a trembling hand for the newspaper and glanced at the first paragraph of the article. ‘Something for the files, eh? Very decent of you to think of me. Mark you, I’m beginning to think I’ll never get that book finished. Sometimes I wonder if it’s all worth it.’

  ‘I’ll just get my hat and coat,’ Antonia said, declining to try to boost her father’s morale – perhaps, Jill thought, because she had tried and failed too often before.

  After the door had closed behind her, Harcutt leant forward. ‘Good of you and Charlotte to take my girl under your wing. Needs taking out of herself, you know.’

  Jill smiled and wondered how to change the subject.

  ‘Shy, you see. Of course, if she came back home, she’d soon fit in again. This is where she belongs, eh? There are school friends and so forth. People like Charlotte and yourself.’

  ‘But I wasn’t at school with her,’ Jill pointed out. ‘I’m just visiting Lydmouth.’

  ‘No – well, that’s as maybe. Still, you see my point?’

  The door opened and there was Antonia on the threshold, saving Jill from having to answer him. The only point she could see was that he hoped his daughter would come home for good because he was desperate for company.

  Antonia picked up the tray of poppies, Jill took the collecting tin and the two women left the house. It was still raining, though not so heavily. Edge Hill, Antonia explained as they trudged down the drive, consisted of the houses near and around the green, together with a new council estate behind the church. She spoke haltingly as though her attention were elsewhere. />
  ‘Are you all right?’ Jill asked. ‘Do you feel up to this?’

  ‘I’m fine. It’s just that I didn’t sleep very well. Strange bed, I suppose.’ Antonia frowned. ‘Everything seems strange.’

  ‘Perhaps you should take something to help you sleep. Ask Dr Bayswater for some tablets.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Since it was Saturday morning, and raining, they found many people at home; but, as Mrs Forbes had foretold, most of them already had poppies. One or two of them recognised Antonia but far fewer than Jill had expected.

  ‘They all know my father,’ Antonia said. ‘But I haven’t lived here since 1939.’ After a pause, she added, ‘And of course I was very different then.’

  As they worked their way round the village, the two women carried on a conversation which ebbed and flowed between the houses they called at. They spent five minutes telling each other how awful the weather was.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Antonia said, ‘I think I’d like to go back to Africa. All that sun and blue skies.’

  ‘When were you out there?’

  ‘During the war, and just afterwards. My aunt used to live in South Africa, and I stayed with her.’

  ‘Did your father send you away because of the war?’

  ‘Partly, I suppose.’ Antonia glanced at Jill with murky brown eyes, opaque and mysterious. ‘He was in the army, of course. But in fact I think he was glad of the excuse. After my mother died, he must have found it rather hard to cope with me.’

  ‘Where did you live?’

  ‘Johannesburg. Aunt Maud was a nurse at a hospital there. But then she died, and I had to come back to England.’

  They were working their way along a row of cottages facing north across the green. Antonia opened the gate of the last cottage, the one nearest the church. Immediately a small white dog scampered down the side of the house, barking furiously.

  Antonia retreated, putting the gate between herself and the dog. The front door opened and a tiny woman wearing a white apron appeared on the step. She screamed at the dog, which retreated in its turn.