Faithful unto Death

by Caroline Graham

  Barnaby, unnoticed by either, watched them both. Simone was speaking, pausing to bite her lip and frown, hesitating, speaking again. Her hands fluttered constantly, at her white bruised forehead, over her heart, smoothing her shaggy silver gilt hair. She was wearing a simple cotton dress, pink and white stripes with a sprig of mignonette pinned to the collar. Beneath it the slender outline of her body was tense.

  Troy, his whole attitude one of absorbed tenderness, listened. Every now and again he nodded his head. Occasionally he said something. Barnaby thought he lip-read the words, “I’m so sorry.”

  He stepped sideways to the woman at the table and introduced himself.

  “Oh, I know who you are.” Each word came out well-rounded, hard and individual, like polished pebbles. She had a strong Scottish accent. “It’s taking you long enough to find out who’s responsible for my brother-in-law’s death.”

  “When did you arrive, Mrs. Hollingsworth?”

  “Yesterday. We had a communication from Alan’s solicitor and have a meeting tomorrow morning. We shall be getting straight back then. My husband has to prepare his weekly sermon.” Then, just in case Barnaby had not fully understood the importance of her spouse’s position, “Edward is a minister of the church.”

  Yes, thought the Chief Inspector, glancing at the bloodless profile and sanctimonious curling lower lip. I guessed he might be. “I understand your husband and his brother had been estranged for some years.”

  “Not at all. They may not have communicated all that frequently but there was no estrangement. In fact over the past few months they have spoken on more than one occasion.”

  “But I am right in thinking you didn’t approve of his second marriage?”

  “As we do not acknowledge divorce there can be no such thing as a second marriage.” She picked up her tray and bared her yellow tombstone teeth at him. “Fornicating liaison, I think the Lord would call it.”

  Blimey. Barnaby watched her ramrod back, long and thin and stiff as a poker, marching off to the kitchen. I wouldn’t fancy trying to warm my feet on that on a winter’s night.

  He made his way over to the couple in the corner relishing, even before he reached it, the pleasant change in the scenery.

  “And how are you feeling today, Mrs. Hollingsworth?”

  “Ohh, Inspector.” They were like white doves, those hands. Her prettiness, her loveliness was returning. Cosmetics had been lightly applied but with such art as to appear artless. How long and silky her lashes were.

  “Much better, I can see.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Sergeant, there’s going to be a police presence here until further notice. This needs to be explained to Mrs. Jennings. So if you’d do the honours?”

  “What, now?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  There was no mistaking the emphasis on the second word. Troy reluctantly rose to his feet. He gave Simone a smile, a mixture of comfort and encouragement, and retreated. Unluckily for him, Mrs. Jennings chose that moment to disappear through the French windows into the garden. Still looking anxiously over his shoulder, Troy followed.

  “Avis has been so kind,” explained Simone. “And her husband too.”

  “Even so, I expect you’re looking forward to going home.”

  “Home?”

  “Nightingales.”

  “I’m never going back there.” The palms of her hands pressed violently against her knees. “I hate it!”

  “You remember being unhappy, then?”

  “Yes.” She looked at him uncertainly. “Some things more than others.”

  “I understand. I want to ask you a question, Simone. And,” her eyes had already widened in alarm, “it’s nothing to do with . . . Well, perhaps very indirectly. Please don’t be alarmed.”

  “You must think I’m very foolish.”

  “Not at all.” Barnaby smiled. “Do you recall, just before you . . . went away, leaving a box with some glass jars on your patio for Sarah Lawson to collect?”

  “Jars? What sort of jars?”

  “Apparently they were Kilner jars. For bottling fruit.”

  “I can’t . . . Wait a moment. Yes. They were for the f&e.”

  “That’s right.” He barely stopped himself saying “good girl” for, having produced the right answer, she appeared as delighted as a child.

  “Now, can you tell me where you got them?”

  “Um, let’s mink.” She frowned and sighed and frowned again. “The church jumble. Everyone is always expected to buy at these dos. And then, as nearly everything’s usually pretty horrible, when the next fête or bring and buy comes round, it goes back in. There’s been a dreadful table lamp apparently doing the rounds for years.”

  “Excellent,” said the Chief Inspector. “That’s tidied up, then.”

  “Is that all?”

  “At the moment.”

  She relaxed; lifted her hands from her knees. But so fierce had been the pressure that their imprint remained in the fabric of her dress. “What did you mean when you said to Gavin there’d be a police presence here?”

  “It’s for your own protection, Mrs. Hollingsworth.” Gavin, is it? We’ll see about that.

  “But isn’t it all over?” Under the cosmetics her face paled. “I mean—”

  “Passed the message on, sir.” Sergeant Troy was once more urgently present. Standing four square on the carpet and daring anyone to shift him.

  “Right.” Barnaby got up. “Let’s away.”

  When they reached the car, which they had left parked outside Bay Tree Cottage, Gray Patterson was leaning up against the bonnet. He moved towards them anxiously.

  “I recognised the Rover, Inspector,” he said. “Didn’t like to intrude at the Jennings’ or come to the church. Especially with Alan’s brother there. I thought it might look rather two-faced.”

  “I’ve no doubt it would,” replied Barnaby. “Given your past history.”

  “I’m trying to find out what’s going on regarding Sarah. I heard she’d been arrested so I went down to the station. But they wouldn’t let me see her.”

  “I shouldn’t fret about it, Mr. Patterson.”

  “But she’ll need me. To help get this stupid mistake sorted out.”

  “There’s no mistake, I’m afraid.” Barnaby repeated the information he had so recently given to Cubby and Mrs. Molfrey and with much the same result. Patterson was absolutely devastated.

  “That can’t be right. Sarah?”

  “Working with her lover,” said Sergeant Troy. Still peeved at seeing Simone bullied yet again, he was determined to take it out on someone. “I expect that’s why she suddenly got all chummy with you. To deflect attention, like.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “Not caught up with him yet, but we will.” Smiling, Troy delivered the coup de grâce. “A very passionate affair, by all accounts.”

  Patterson turned from them then. Turned away and walked straight into the road, which was fortunately empty. After this, stumbling and wavering, he wandered off along the grass verges in the direction of his home.

  We are all in the lap of the gods. When Barnaby listened to criminals whining during interrogations or later from the dock that they had never had any luck, he was not overly sympathetic.

  Though he himself had had the luck—affectionate parents, a stable and happy marriage, an intelligent and healthy child—he was not a man to pour libations or even offer up a grateful prayer. Like most people in such a fortunate position, he took it all for granted.

  But now, entering the final stage in what was to be called, in the first of many books dealing with the subject, Twist and Counter Twist: The Mysterious Lives of Alan and Simone Hollingsworth, the Chief Inspector became keenly aware of the part that the Fates had played in his investigation.

  They always did, of course. And you soon knew if they were for you or against you. For instance if someone—and Barnaby didn’t believe for a minute that that someone was Sergeant Troy—had n
ot had the idea of questioning the college accommodation bureau, the chances were the flat at Flavell Street would never have been discovered.

  And if Eden Lo had been looking elsewhere during the few seconds that it took Alan Hollingsworth to put down his coffee cup and walk away, the Heathrow connection might never have been made.

  And now the most vital link of all was winging its way along the ether. At first, it looked like nothing much. Just another sighting, in fact. A woman on the blower, a genuine Bow Bells Cockney, rang in the morning after the funeral. Barnaby picked up the extension and listened in.

  At the time he could not have said why it was this call out of all others that spoke to his condition. It was only a couple of hours later, on the spot as it were, that he recognised the connection.

  Her name was Queenie Lambert and she lived on the Isle of Dogs. The woman sketched in her copy of the Sun had been staying in a flat across the walkway. Although she hadn’t been out and about as such, Mrs. Lambert had glimpsed her a couple of times, once opening the door to the postman and later watering the window boxes on the balcony.

  Mrs. Lambert sounded elderly and Barnaby imagined her life to be somewhat constrained. She probably spent much of it taking keen note of what the neighbours were up to. Probably regarded as a nosy nuisance around the buildings, such people could be an absolute godsend to the police.

  Although, like everyone else, both detectives were aware that massive development had been taking place around the quays and docks of Canary Wharf, the scale and magnificence of the enterprise was pretty breathtaking. Great towers of glass and steel surrounded by piles of rubble glittered in the sunlight. Diggers roared and trundled about, raising huge clouds of dust. New apartments, soon to be sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds, rose up just a few yards from old thirties-style low-rise council estates, broken down and boarded up poverty fisted by brazen, upmarket cash.

  Driving out of the Blackwall Tunnel, Troy gave an impressed whistle of appreciation and even Barnaby was much taken by the hugely confident operatic splendour that lay spread out before them.

  As it was nearly twelve thirty they stopped at the George, Westferry Road, for a pint of Webster’s Yorkshire bitter and some excellent sandwiches. Sergeant Troy threw a few darts. Barnaby sat quietly thinking. The atmosphere between them seethed and simmered. Troy was still angry that his passionate concern for Simone’s wellbeing had been crudely interpreted as creating an opportunity to get his leg over. He was also smarting over a follow-up lecture against the advisability of getting involved, on any level, with someone so severely entangled in a case that was presently under investigation.

  He knew what that meant, all right. It meant the chief did not trust him to keep his mouth shut. Thought that he, Troy, was so careless and dim that any bit of fluff could wind him round their little finger, ask any questions they fancied and get the right answers. Talk about a fucking insult.

  “You fit then, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir.” Troy hit a bull’s eye, drained his glass and put his black leather jacket back on.

  Mrs. Lambert’s flat was on a small development of Peabody buildings, just behind Thermopylae Gardens, two storeys high with balconies running all round, some strung across with washing. Most of the windows on the ground floor were either barred or covered with wrought-iron grilles. One or two people had bought their homes and personalised them by painting the bricks blue and orange or replacing the original doors and windows. But mostly they remained uniformly drab, grubby looking and in need of repair.

  “Don’t drive right in.” Barnaby recalled an occasion when his car had been parked outside a tower block for barely ten minutes while he had struggled to arrest someone on the eighth floor. When he came out every removable part of the vehicle had vanished, including the seats. “Over there’ll do.”

  Troy parked neatly facing a little row of single-fronted shops and climbed out. The Chief Inspector picked up his mobile phone and followed. They walked across the open well of the courtyard and past smelly communal rubbish bins that were taller than they were. As they climbed the metal staircase, Barnaby wondered again at the strange compulsion that had brought him way out of his own manor to investigate something a local man could have checked out in no time.

  He could see Mrs. Lambert agitating her curtain, watching them approach. The old lady snatched open her door before Troy could even ring the bell. Showed into a sparklingly clean sitting room so overstuffed with furniture they practically had to walk sideways, and having declined the offer of a cup of tea, Barnaby asked where Mrs. Lambert had seen the woman in dark glasses.

  “I’ll show you.” She hobbled painfully towards the window. “Directly over the way, see? Where them boxes wiv the red geraniums are.”

  “And could you tell me—I’m sorry,” the Chief Inspector interrupted himself, “perhaps you’d like to sit down.”

  “I’m better upright, if it’s all the same to you.” She wore large men’s checked slippers bulging round the toes. “Uvverwise the blood rushes to me bunions.”

  “When did you last see this woman?”

  “Oohh, must be four or five days now.”

  “Could you possibly be more precise, Mrs. Lambert?” Barnaby’s heart plummeted in his breast. Five days ago Simone Hollingsworth was lying in Hillingdon Hospital.

  “Well, let’s see. It was the day before our Elaine came round to take me to the chiropodists. They won’t send transport if you can dig up somebody wiv a car. Mean buggers.”

  “And that was?”

  “Well, it’s Thursday afternoon, Health Centre, so it would have been the day before I spotted her.”

  “Wednesday?” Eight days ago. Barnaby held his breath.

  “That’s right.”

  “And can you remember when you saw her first?”

  Troy took no part in this. He told himself there was no point. That it was a complete waste of time. But in truth a nervous apprehension, the like of which he had never known, was gradually seeping into his bones.

  “I can’t, in all honesty,” replied Queenie Lambert. “But I do know it was after June the twelfth because that’s when I come back from me holiday in Cromer.”

  “Thank you,” said Barnaby feeling the phrase would prove to be shamefully inadequate but not knowing quite what to put in its place.

  He and Troy had to go down to the courtyard again to get to the other side. Halfway across they passed some little girls skipping. One of them wore a T-shirt that caught the Chief Inspector’s eye. The bold letters read: Cuba Street Carnival.

  He stopped walking then and stood, stock still, engrossed in thought. Troy carried on for a few steps, realised he was alone and also came to a halt. Deciding he had deliberately been made to look foolish, the sergeant refused to backtrack. Instead he wandered over to the little girls, smiled and said, “Hullo.”

  They all ran away.

  “Gavin?”

  “Sir.”

  “You got the London A to Z?”

  “In my pocket.”

  “Look up Cuba Street, would you?” As he waited, Barnaby couldn’t help wondering what he was waiting for, why the word Cuba rang in his ear like a cracked bell, and what earthly connection this seedy environment could prove to have with the beautifully maintained hamlet of Fawcett Green. Yet the longer he stood there, the surer he became that he was in the right place at the right time. And for the right reasons.

  “There you go.” Coolly Troy handed over the book, open at page eighty. “Cuba Street. Square two C.”

  Barnaby stared at the page. The River Thames, like a great white snake, twined through it, cutting off the Isle of Dogs from Rotherhithe and Deptford and Greenwich. He located Cuba Street at the West Indian Dock Pier. It meant nothing at all.

  Sergeant Troy noted this and not without a certain amount of satisfaction. He hadn’t a clue as to what the chief was after but recognised a letdown when he saw it.

  Barnaby continued studying the map. And then he di
d find something. Troy knew this because an expression of recognition followed quickly by one of astonishment possessed Barnaby’s solid features. Troy thought the boss looked like that daft bird in a story he sometimes read to his daughter. Left the safety of the farmyard to go walkabout and the sky fell on it. Say what you like about chickens, they may be stupid but they know where the action is.

  “It’s not Cuba, Sergeant. It’s Cubitt.”

  “Right, guv.”

  “Cubitt Town.”

  “Got that.”

  “Mean anything?”

  “Not offhand.” Here we go.

  “Think about it.”

  Yeah, think about it, Gavin. Give your mind a hernia, why don’t you?

  They negotiated the second staircase and walked along the balcony. The flat with the window boxes was the last in the row. As they approached, Barnaby’s footsteps slowed. He was conscious of feeling extremely nauseous and slightly dazed. There was a lump the size of a ping pong ball stuck in his throat and his whole body felt as heavy as lead. Now, so close, his previous certainty wavered. Wasn’t it rather foolish to build up such hopes merely on a single geographical coincidence?

  Then he noticed, stretched along the balcony wall, yawning and sunning itself, a beautifully marked tabby cat. He bent down, stretched out his hand and called, “Nelson?”

  The cat jumped down and came straight to him.

  “Nelson?” Sergeant Troy stared at the animal now weaving itself around and about Barnaby’s trouser legs and purring. “You mean that’s . . . ?”

  “Simone’s cat, yes.” Barnaby rapped hard on the door.

  “What the hell is it doing out here?”

  “I suppose they’ve been looking after it for her.”

  “But how did it . . . I mean, who’s they?”

  Someone was moving inside. They could see through the small frosted panes of glass a dark formless shape approaching. A mortise was unlocked, a key turned, a chain rattled then fell, clattering against the frame. Slowly the door opened.

  A middle-aged woman stood there. Thin, consumptive looking, heavily made-up. Sucking in smoke through a slim cigarette. Frizzy henna’d hair. She smelt of vinegar and chips and wore a denim mini skirt and a semi-transparent nylon blouse with rhinestone buttons.