by Morag Joss
Andrew sighed and looked round the Incident Room, its walls covered with sheets of diligent, hopeless mapping, pictures, blackboard lists of names and numbers waiting for mechanistic, dogged checking and rechecking. The chalked Happy Birthday! message to one of the team in one corner of the blackboard was the only confirmation that the crew working here under DS Bridger’s immediate supervision was not utterly demoralised, for the room seemed empty not just of people but of energy and optimism. Miffy’s chances in hell seemed a better bet than Andrew’s hopes of finding a worthwhile lead.
CHAPTER 25
BUNNY KNEW IT was Tuesday. She also knew ‘it’ was Petronella, for she knew no one else who spoke in that tinny tone. Bunny sighed but did not open her eyes. She had been able to see to it that Petronella acquired a decent accent, that being a matter simply of the right choice of school, but she had been unable to amend her daughter’s needling voice, which had made Bunny itch to slap her almost from the minute she could speak. Before that, actually.
‘It’s Petronella,’ went the voice again. ‘Petronella’s here, Mummy, so’s Hugh. You’re in the Sulis, and it’s Tuesday. Mummy, are you awake?’
Bunny sighed again and opened her eyes. ‘Of course I’m awake and I know very well it’s Tuesday. What on earth’s the point of telling me it’s Tuesday?’ The effort of pushing out the words started a fit of coughing. She allowed herself to be raised from her pillow until she was sitting up in bed. She rather guardedly took the cup of tea that Petronella was proffering and found to her private delight that the tremor in her hands had subsided. She drank in steady draughts until the cup was empty.
‘Camomile and parsley,’ she said, decisively.
‘Dr Golightly thought it would help,’ Hugh put in earnestly, from the other side of the bed.
‘Help what?’ Bunny asked. ‘I’m perfectly all right. Except that I’m hungry.’
Petronella and Hugh smiled at each other across the bed. ‘That’s wonderful!’ Petronella said. ‘I’ll go and find someone, shall I, and get something brought up.’ She almost skipped to the door, watched by an unamused Bunny.
‘Can’t see what’s wonderful about it,’ she said crisply to Hugh after the door had closed. ‘Perfectly natural. I haven’t eaten since Sunday, so I’m bound to be hungry.’
Hugh smiled. ‘Poor thing’s relieved, that’s all. You gave us a bit of a fright, you know. You have been rather out of it, shaking and whatnot, sleeping all hours and mumbling. Petronella thought you were er … seeing things. You did seem confused.’
Bunny looked pleased for the first time. ‘My body and mind simply required rest. I keep telling you, the body heals itself when you let it tell you what it needs. And of course I wasn’t confused. I’m not gaga yet. Where’s Warwick?’
‘He’s—well, actually, I was hoping we could clear the air about Warwick. If you’re up to having a little chat about him.’
‘Chat about Warwick? Where is he? Warwick’s my lifeline.’
‘Well, that’s rather it, actually. The thing is, Pet was rather worrying in case you’d got yourself into some commitment or other with the chap and we’re not sure quite how things would lie then, you see. Vis-à-vis us, and the er … you know, your next grandchild. I don’t know if you remember …’
‘Of course I remember. There’s to be another.’ Bunny sighed heavily and shook her head. ‘I was the same. So fertile men just had to look at me. I did get in some scrapes. At least Petronella is married, and one supposes to the father. That’s something.’
Hugh cleared his throat and spoke with his eyes focused somewhere near the top of Bunny’s headboard. ‘You see, as far as things go with Warwick, we did wonder—I mean it’s your decision of course but you haven’t known him long and I’m sure he’s good company and so on, but we wouldn’t want you to be er … well, let down. If supposing, later on, I mean, we don’t really know anything about him, after all.’
Hugh glanced at Bunny, saw her look of amused distrust and knew he was going to have to lay it on the line. ‘I mean look, the new baby’s going to wallop us hard, needless to say. In the old wallet. And we are so grateful for the help you gave for the boys and the decision’s yours, of course. But really, I always feel one should treat them all the same if one possibly can, all fair do’s, so to speak. Pet’s worried sick quite frankly and she feels as I do that after all, family comes first and this one will be the last after all. Frankly, perhaps we should be a little wary of Warwick’s motives, I mean I take it you do see that.’
‘Warwick,’ Bunny repeated slowly, ‘is my lifeline.’ She turned flinty eyes to Hugh and said, almost accusingly, ‘You do know he had the most terrible time in the war. Terrible. Your generation doesn’t understand. What is quite wonderful is the way he’s always so cheerful. He can’t do enough for me, you know.’
‘Yes, I’m sure, but I mean has he—have you, er … shown your appreciation, in any material way? Has he suggested any kind of well … permanent arrangement?’
‘Warwick is a gentleman,’ Bunny said. ‘I wonder that you can even ask.’
Just then Petronella returned, followed by Sister Yvonne who in turn was followed by Ivan, bearing a tray.
‘I do any suggesting that is required,’ Bunny went on. ‘And I won’t discuss it any more.’
‘You are honoured, Mrs F. Feeling more yourself? The man himself has brought you some lunch,’ Sister Yvonne said, giving the bedcovers some brisk smoothing down. ‘All specially prepared.’
Ivan carefully placed the tray on the hospital table which swung over the bed. On it were three exquisitely arranged plates: one with a multicoloured salad, one piled with bread, crackers and lentil pâté, the last filled with scented summer fruits. A jug of viscous yellow juice stood next to them.
‘Mango and orange,’ Ivan said, smiling, as he poured some into a glass. ‘Nice to see you better. Enjoy. Wait till you taste those strawberries. I’ll let Warwick know you’re feeling better. He’s been missing you, he says.’
Bunny smiled complacently through a mouthful of bread and pâté. ‘Tell Warwick to visit me this afternoon. I may feel up to some work on his head. And tell him’—she narrowed her eyes in Hugh’s direction—‘that I can’t wait to see him and talk about our plans.’
CHAPTER 26
POOR OLD DAN had asked his dad to take him to Legoland on his birthday but Valerie had put a stop to that, designating the birthday treat to be in her gift.
‘I’m taking them to Legoland on the Saturday. You’re getting him on the actual day. Take them on a picnic or something,’ she had told Andrew on Sunday, arriving back from her Assertiveness Course in a hostile cloud of vindaloo fumes, round about the same time that Sara was flinging a Thai dinner for two across her garden.
‘But he asked me to take him,’ Andrew said. ‘He specially asked me and Sara to take him on Tuesday and it is his birthday, so if that’s what he wants—’
‘Oh, will you shut up about what he wants!’
Valerie’s fuses, always short, were now the length of stubble. ‘What about what I want for once? That’s just the point! You get to do all the nice treats, don’t you, while I get to do every other single bloody thing, every other bloody day of the week. All you do is breeze in and out at weekends with her and over-indulge them. Well, this time I’m doing the treat. It won’t kill you to take them on a simple little picnic, will it? Or doesn’t she do picnics?’
Andrew had opened his mouth to contest the justice of just about everything she had said, and closed it again. He desperately wanted to have the children with him for a night mid-week, but instead had to content himself with putting in short and cheerful visits to them on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Valerie would not allow the children to go to him on school nights on the grounds that it would unsettle them. He saw them every weekend that he was not working and tried to ensure that they did something together, just as he had done with them most weekends before the divorce. It was sometimes no more than a country ram
ble and a funny tea back at his poky flat, but it was true that he now made more effort to think of places to take them and things to do. This was what Valerie described as over-indulging them.
Indeed, there was nothing wrong with a simple picnic. But when Valerie dropped the children off at ten o’clock on Tuesday morning at Medlar Cottage she had not actually told them that they were not, as they were expecting, going to Legoland with Daddy and Sara. That little piece of news had been left for Andrew to impart. ‘Didn’t Mummy say? She’s taking you instead, on Saturday! Today, we’re going for a walk and a picnic!’ Not even the brightest tone of voice could sell a picnic over Legoland or convince Dan that he had not been betrayed by his father.
Sara happened to like picnics rather more than Andrew did, so it was she who had organised the food with what she privately thought was heroic selflessness and good humour. She had also picked up the broken china and glass from her garden, scrubbed the path clean of its food slick and hosed disgusting yellow spatterings off the surrounding shrubs. And she had not only not told Andrew of her encounter on the towpath, she had decided not to mention Sunday at all. So she was not altogether delighted when Andrew suggested the towpath for the picnic.
‘Oh, why there? It’s rather boring, isn’t it? Why don’t we take them up to Browns Folly?’
‘Natalie hates climbing hills. The towpath’s flat.’
‘Well, what about going off to Bowood? There’s an adventure playground.’
‘Too far. Benji might be car sick.’
‘But he could get car sick going to Legoland.’
‘He’s welcome to be sick in Valerie’s car,’ Andrew said, and sighed. ‘All right, there’s no point hiding it from you. I wouldn’t mind just having another look at the Golightly place. Don’t know why but it still bugs me. Why she should have been staying there, of all places. There’s something we’re not getting. I just want to take a look.’
Sara understood, not quite what the Golightly place might have to do with any of it, but how it was that part of Andrew’s mind could not leave go, why he felt the need to pace the towpath again, thinking, wondering, looking, in the hope that he might finally see something. Although, she reassured herself sternly, it had been no such compulsion that had brought her there on Sunday night, for she was not involving herself in the case, difficult as it was to curb her natural nosiness. To do so only annoyed Andrew and diverted her attention from her work. Yet, had that not been part of it? That, even as she had felt herself lost in an irrational rage against Valerie, she had nevertheless brought herself, of all places, almost to the very spot that preoccupied her lover? And all she had found was a shivering vagrant. She really ought to leave the detective work to Andrew.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘The towpath will be fine. They’ll like the locks and barges, won’t they? Better than boring old countryside.’
She did not add that she was still curious about the shabby man and was hoping to see him again. And when she did she would nonchalantly point him out, and only then might she relate the story of Sunday night’s little adventure. Andrew might, if she could pull his attention away from the Takahashi murder for a minute, be interested.
They had started at Bathampton Lock under a subdued sky which affected everyone’s mood. Kicking along and saying little, every few yards stepping over the long fishing rods of the silent anglers who slumped at the canal side next to their horrifying tins of maggots, they had ended up, round about lunchtime and just as it looked as if it might rain, at the far side of the viaduct on the edge of Limpley Stoke. The anglers were now all behind them. Presumably the fish did not bite this close to the landing stages near the viaduct, where the traffic of tourist barges coming and going from their moorings kept the water churning in a dirty brown swirl. They were alone on the path, most other strollers and cyclists, Sara supposed, having taken themselves off to do something sensible such as have lunch in pub gardens.
Sara and Natalie stopped and turned to wait for the others to catch up. Andrew was still a long way down the path with Benji, and Dan, who seemed rather withdrawn for a birthday boy, trailed farther behind still. Sara put down the basket she was carrying and Natalie, freeing her hand from Sara’s, danced off to the hedge to find unripe blackberries. She didn’t much like blackberries, ripe or not, but she had to pick as many as possible in order to stop her brothers from getting them. Sara breathed in the sour green smell of crushed nettles and gazed past Natalie. Just on the far side of the hedge that Natalie was trying to reach, tramping down all the long grass in her path, and across a stretch of bramble scrub, lay the railway line. Down a steep slope on the far side of the tracks and across another narrow stretch of scrub was the start of the Golightlys’ land. A sprinkler waved slowly, raining softly over some bright green plants, possibly lettuces. Compost heaps, polytunnels and various sheds were set at points among the rows of vegetables and brown bare squares, which stretched up to the back garden of the modern, rather ugly brick house. Another identical house stood some hundred yards off down a lane that connected the houses on the far side. A whirligig for drying clothes sprouted from the grass of the perfunctory back garden which sat between the house and the vegetables, where washing of nondescript colours lifted listlessly in the slight wind. The place was deserted.
‘Don’t bother ’cos I’ve picked all the best ones!’ Natalie crowed in a sing-song, as the others reached them. ‘There’s only little ones left now!’
‘Aw that’s not fair,’ Benji whined. ‘Da-ad, that’s not fair.’
‘They’re not ripe anyway, so they probably wouldn’t taste very nice,’ Sara said, as if that were the point.
‘I’ve got tons,’ Natalie said, defiantly.
‘So? We’ll get our own. They’re not all yours you know. There’s loads further up. C’mon, Benji.’
Dan pushed roughly past Andrew and trotted further on up the path, looking intently up and down the hedge for more blackberry bushes. Benji, thrilled to be summoned by his brother, followed. After a few moments, there was a happy shout and wave from Dan and a squeal from Benji, and then they almost disappeared into the hedge, delving for berries.
Andrew, just as Sara had done, had stopped and was now staring past the top of the hedge down to the smallholding on the other side of the railway.
‘It’s a big place, isn’t it? They must grow lots more than they need at the Sulis,’ she murmured.
‘Hmm? Oh, yes. Yes, I think they said they’re part of an organic box scheme. And I think they used to supply a couple of restaurants but the deliveries took so long they gave that up.’ He carried on staring. As Sara watched him, a loose memory of something from Sunday night was beginning to flap in her mind, something in the shabby man’s frightened voice as he had spoken blindly into the dark came back to her.
‘Didn’t you tell me the night after Mrs Takahashi was killed that the Golightly man was called Ivan? Ivan Golightly?’
‘Ivan and Hilary Golightly. That’s right. Why?’
‘And your other suspects—yes, I know you say the husband did it, but you checked out other people who’d had a connection with her, didn’t you? Like the Golightlys?’
Andrew hesitated and spoke slowly. ‘Yes, of course. There’s Ivan Golightly.’ He began to count them off on his fingers. ‘Ivan Golightly was working here all Saturday morning. He was seen by the woman who lives in the other house over there, Mrs Heffer.’
Sara gazed at the two houses. ‘It’s a long way. And there’s so much growing in between. Was she telling the truth?’
‘You have such a suspicious mind. She’s a damn good witness actually. She said the Golightlys are quiet neighbours, they mind their own business. She saw Ivan that Saturday and she even told us the almost exact time because she saw him coming down from the embankment just after the 9.23 went past. He waved.’
‘She’s on her own, is she?’
Andrew nodded. ‘Widow, works in Waitrose. One son. She was in her own garden on the Friday afternoon a
nd met Mrs Takahashi. They talked over the fence about cats. Mrs Heffer’s son works for Dyson doing service calls, he stays with his mother quite often but he lives in Chippenham, and yes, we checked him out too. He was working.’
‘What about the others?’
‘Hilary Golightly? She gave Mrs Takahashi a lift into town on the Saturday morning, dropped her at a quarter to nine at the Abbey, nipped in to Abbey News for a paper. Then she drove on to the Sulis, where she arrived less than ten minutes later. All stories checked out and corroborated.’
‘But there’s another man. What was he doing? What about the shabby man, the man with the beard who hangs out round here? He’s often round here. I’ve spoken to him. He mentioned Ivan.’
‘ You spoke to him? Why? Sara, what have you been up to? If I find you’ve been meddling in police business, I’ll—’
‘Yes? You’ll what?’
Andrew grabbed her suddenly and kissed her. In a silly voice he said, with his arms locked round her neck, ‘I’ll have you deported. To an uninhabited island.’
‘If it’s tropical and you’re there,’ she said back, ‘I’ll go quietly. And as long as it hasn’t got a concert hall. No, but listen,’ she pulled herself away, ‘listen, the shabby man. I met him when I was out running, er … last week some time, I think it was. He said something about staying with Ivan. I spoke to him and I think he was saying he stayed over there somewhere, with Ivan. Who is he? I bet Bridger doesn’t even know he exists. I bet he hasn’t checked him out. Have you checked him out?’
In a voice that Sara recognised as one he used for the benefit of people not very clever, Andrew said, ‘Police officers, Sara, are not entirely stupid. Even Bridger has his moments. Of course we’ve interviewed all the regulars along here. I am quite sure, if I go and check, that your shabby man’s among them. And none of the barge-owners, anglers, dog-walkers or cyclists remember seeing anything that either corroborates or disproves what we think happened to Mrs Takahashi. Oh, and by the way, your shabby man has been known to us and to Julian House for years.’