The Birthday Present

by Pamela Oldfield

  ‘You owe her nothing, Bernard. She is a close friend who developed a schoolgirl crush on you. That is all. I thought better of her, to tell you the truth. She is obviously trying to make mischief between you and your bride-to-be.’ She held out her hand. ‘I want to see her letter, Bernard. The wedding has to go ahead on Saturday with no loose ends and if necessary I will write to Carlotta myself.’

  ‘I’m not going to show it to you!’

  Alicia rose to her feet. ‘Then I shall go to see her, face to face, in front of her parents and—’

  Bernard also jumped to his feet. ‘No! Don’t you dare do such a thing. If you do I . . . I shall leave this house and never come back!’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s your choice to make. I will not be thwarted, Bernard. I want to see that letter. I need to reassure myself that—’

  ‘It won’t reassure you. Quite the opposite in fact.’

  She gave him a long, hard stare. ‘Go and get the letter.’

  He gave in as she had known he would. Poor Bernard. Not much backbone. His father had seen the weakness in him when he was much younger. As soon as he had left the room she sank back on to the chair and tried to compose herself. Her heart was beating rapidly and she took several deep breaths. Somehow she had to stay strong. Bernard had to marry his fiancée on Saturday and no one must ever know of these last-minute setbacks. The affection in which she had previously held Carlotta had been finally dispelled by her meddling.

  It was anathema to Alicia that a woman should be unable to accept that a man had stopped loving her – or vice versa. Admitting such a failure, if that is what it was, was naturally humiliating but continuing the fight to keep the beloved was even worse, involving such a deep loss of dignity.

  Did her parents know what was happening, she wondered. If so they must be appalled. If not then perhaps she, Alicia, should tell them. If that meant a break with Carlotta’s family then so be it. Bernard’s happiness, his marriage to Letitia and the family prestige came first, she reminded herself. If necessary, friendships would have to be abandoned for the greater good.

  Bernard returned, tossed her the letter and then resumed his study of the lawn. His hands were in his pockets, she noticed with disapproval, and his shoulders sagged. She reached for her spectacles and opened the letter. With a sinking heart she read,

  My darling Bernard, I cannot let another day pass without reaching out to you. You know just how much I love you and I know that you still care for me. Letitia was a mistake but there is still time to put matters right. Tell Letitia the truth. Beg her forgiveness and then, whether or not she gives it, you and I can make plans for our future. We can run away, marry somewhere far away from the families and live happily ever after – as you know we will . . .

  ‘Dear God!’ She glared at her son’s unresponsive back. ‘This is so immature! Lovesick babbling!’

  He said nothing and she read on.

  . . . Come to the barn this evening and I will give you the courage you need to break with Letitia. I can be strong for both of us, my very dearest Bernard. I will be there at nine o’clock. I know you won’t fail me. I know you will not break my heart. Your devoted Carlotta . . .

  In spite of her anger and her previous comment, Alicia was reluctantly forced to admit that the wording of the letter had a genuine ring to it. She must accept that the poor woman loved her son. Poor besotted creature. If only she could accept that Bernard no longer loved her.

  She resisted a dramatic urge to tear the letter into pieces and hurl them into the empty grate. That would incense Bernard. Instead she said, ‘Do you intend to meet her, Bernard?’

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’ He turned wearily. ‘Whatever happens I shall make one of them deeply unhappy.’

  ‘If you abandon Letitia you will make everyone unhappy – including me and your father. To desert her at this late stage would ruin her life . . . and probably yours also. You would be branded an utter cad, Bernard, and Carlotta would be to blame.’

  ‘I know all of that, Mother! he said hoarsely. ‘Do you think this wretched business hasn’t been in my mind for every minute of every hour of every damned day? God!’ He let out a long breath. ‘I sometimes wish I had never met either of them. Maybe I am not cut out for married life. All this emotion . . . I cannot deal with it. Last night I tossed and turned and ended up wishing I could put an end to everything!’

  ‘What does that mean?’ she asked, her voice rising in alarm. ‘Of course you can deal with it. Be a man, Bernard. Stand up for what you want . . . Put an end to everything? I hope you don’t mean . . .’

  He recrossed the room and threw himself into the armchair. ‘No, Mother. I don’t mean that.’ He frowned. ‘I mean disappear to the ends of the earth where nobody knows me and nobody even wants to know me – let alone marry me!’ He looked at her, frowning thoughtfully. ‘Kill myself? At least I have never thought of taking that way out before today, Mother. I daresay I’m too much of a coward to put an end to my life.’

  ‘You’re not a coward, Bernard, and I can prove it to you. Write to Carlotta ending it, give the letter to me and I will meet her at nine o’clock. Where is this barn?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, Mother, I’ll go. I have to do it myself.’ He sighed heavily and muttered something under his breath which Alicia pretended not to hear. ‘I’ll go and write it now, and then, by the time I wake up tomorrow, it will all be settled.’ Fuelled by a growing bitterness, he added, ‘I hope that will finally satisfy you!’

  He was unprepared for the resounding slap she gave him which stung his left cheek long after she had swept out of the room.

  Next morning as soon as breakfast was over, Marcus and Rose retired to the study. Marcus handed her a sheet of his paper and a pencil and she was quickly ensconced at a table by the window, composing a letter to her father in Pentonville Prison. Marcus, meanwhile, pressed ahead with his latest stage-set designs.

  No longer a sketch, he had fleshed out the scene with washes of colour, trying to add something original. The shrubs were now a pale green, the tree trunks in the background a soft brown-grey, the sky a yellow streaked with red. He wanted the water in the foreground to make something of an impact because the swans would appear to dance upon it so the water was almost Prussian blue to contrast with the lighter colours and add depth.

  ‘And, hopefully, distance,’ he said aloud.

  Rose glanced up. ‘How do you spell your stepfather’s surname?’

  ‘F, e, i, g, a, n, t. Gerard Feigant.’ He said, ‘What do you think of this? Come and look.’

  Flattered to be asked for her opinion on such an important issue, Rose hurried to stand beside him. To her surprise he draped what she assumed to be a casual arm around her waist while she pored over the design. ‘I like it,’ she told him, not quite sure whether she meant the design or his friendly gesture. A little flustered, she said quickly, ‘Shall I read you my letter to Pa?’

  He nodded and she fetched it from the table.

  . . . Dear Pa, I have been to France and back to stay with Gerard and Clarice Feigant on their farm. Mrs Clarice Feigant is Marcus’s mother and we were taking Marie to stay with them. It was very exiting. Now we are looking forward to Letitia’s wedding on Saterday. This is just to warn you that Mr Markam has murderd Connie and if they catch him he might be sent to Pentonville. If you meet him dont say you know me. So for now I am staying with Marcus’s family and I have to find another job. I hope you do not find prison too awful. Keep your spirits up. Your loving dorter, Rosie. Pee Ess They might hang him instead . . .’

  ‘A very nice letter, Rose.’

  ‘Oh! D’you think so?’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘I wonder where he’s gone?’

  ‘As far away as possible, I should think. South America or Timbuctoo! Poor Connie will have to be identified. I wonder who will do that?’

  ‘Maybe Mr Coates or Mrs Jupp. They’ve known her a long time.’

  ‘We said you would give
them a statement about your whereabouts and they will ask you about her relationship with Markham. You’d better think it over before we reach the police station . . . and they might ask you to identify her. You did share her flat. They can’t make you but . . .’ He shrugged.

  Rose frowned. ‘I think I could do it. What I mean is, she won’t look very different, will she? Not weird or frightening. A bit quiet, probably, and pale.’

  ‘Very quiet, I would imagine.’

  She looked at him suspiciously but Marcus kept a straight face.

  ‘People in their coffins usually look very nice, don’t they?’ she persisted hopefully. ‘They wear long white nightgowns and with their hands crossed over on their chest. I wouldn’t mind that.’

  ‘She might not be in a coffin yet, Rose. She won’t be at the undertakers. She will be at the mortuary on a sort of trolley, covered with a white sheet.’

  She sighed. ‘Well, when you have finished working we can go to the police station. I think I’d like to get it over and done with.’ She took another look at his design. ‘A few flowers would brighten it up. Hollyhocks, maybe. I love hollyhocks.’

  ‘I don’t think they grow around lakes.’

  ‘That’s a shame, then.’ Remembering she still needed to address the envelope she returned to the table in the window.

  Grudgingly considering her suggestion, Marcus added a few water lilies to the lake with surprisingly good results.

  An hour later, Rose sat at a table in a small cramped room in the local police station while Marcus waited outside, patiently pacing to and fro while considering his brother’s future. As the older brother, Marcus felt vaguely responsible for Steven who, hot-headed and irresponsible, had no father to guide him.

  While the constable made notes in preparation for the statement he would put together for her to sign, Rose screwed up her face in an effort to remember anything she could about the relationship between Connie and Andrew Markham. She wanted the latter caught and punished and desperately hoped that her information would be of use to the police.

  She said, ‘She used to be fond of him . . . I mean, she liked him a lot but maybe he didn’t like her . . . but she thought he did. It must have been a long time ago. I suppose you could say they were romantically linked.’

  ‘Romantically linked?’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Blimey! This is a statement, not The Ladies Journal!’ He wrote and then reread it as ‘She was his fancy piece!’

  Rose glared at him. ‘I didn’t say that! She wasn’t. She was a dancer. She was pretty.’ She snatched the paper on which he was writing the statement and began to read it. ‘You’re supposed to be writing what I say – not what you think I should have said!’

  He shrugged. ‘Please yourself. I’ll say . . . tart . . . or woman. How’s that?’ He snatched it back. ‘Anyway, she’s not pretty now!’ He scrutinized a list. ‘You’re down to identify her. Done it yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘You’ll see for yourself then.’

  She disliked his attitude and wondered whether she was entitled to give up on the statement or whether that would count against her. They might say she’d been wasting police time or refusing to cooperate.

  He tapped the pencil on the table, searching for further questions. ‘So how was she when you left on this convenient trip to France? Did she say they had quarrelled? Did you think she was afraid of him? Can you think of any reason for him to kill her?’

  ‘No. He did have a temper – everyone says so – but she believed that she could always sweet-talk him because of what they had meant to each other. He let her stay in that flat rent-free.’

  He rolled his eyes and added a few words to the statement. ‘I’ll rewrite this in ink,’ he told her, ‘and then you have to read it and sign it if it’s correct. Now . . . do you have any tickets to prove you and Mr Bennley really were in France? You could have gone to Brighton for a few days for all we know.’

  Alarmed, she was silent. He seemed to be enjoying the notion that she might have killed Connie. Did his question mean she was a suspect? ‘I think the crew of the boat would remember us,’ she said at last, ‘because we had an invalid with us who had to be carried on and off.’

  He whistled tunelessly as he wrote down her words, then scratched his head with the blunt end of the pencil. ‘So you can’t think why he might have killed her? She didn’t owe rent or anything?’

  ‘I told you – he let her have the flat rent-free and I gave Connie some money, just to help her, and she cooked a meal in the evening.’

  Recalling the dreadful bacon and onion roll, Rose’s eyes filled with tears. ‘She didn’t deserve to die.’

  He regarded her impassively. ‘Tears don’t wash with me,’ he told her, as he stood up. ‘I’ve seen too many in my time. We’ll get you down to the morgue; then when the identification’s over you come back here and sign the statement.’ He rang a small hand bell and Rose stumbled to her feet as a young man in a large green apron arrived moments later, and she followed him down a corridor, down some steps and along to a door which stood ajar. He kicked it open with a practised blow and Rose found herself in a grim room surrounded by trolleys bearing covered bodies. At the far end of the room a man was wielding a knife which he applied to the inert figure on his slab. Rose shut her eyes, sickened by the smell of cold blood and some kind of disinfectant.

  ‘Over here, Miss Paton.’

  Shaking inwardly, Rose walked across the room as indicated. The assistant whipped back the white sheet to reveal a pale shadow of the woman Rose remembered. Gone were the careful curls – the result of all those overnight curling rags – and in their place she saw dank and lustreless hair.

  The assistant said defensively, ‘We had to wash her all over. It’s the rules.’

  Gone was the exaggerated rouge on her cheeks and carelessly applied lip colour. The often clown-like results of Connie’s everyday make-up had been removed and were now replaced by dull yellowing skin and pallid lips. There was a stitch in the upper lip and a bruise had started to form. Rose looked at her with growing dismay. Poor Connie would hate to be seen like this, she thought, even in death.

  She whispered, ‘I’m so sorry, Connie. This shouldn’t have happened but the police are looking for him.’

  There were dark marks around the scraggy neck. The assistant pointed. ‘You can see the thumb marks . . . those bruises, there. He strangled her but he must have hit her first.’

  Rose nodded wordlessly. She was aware of a deep sadness settling into her heart. This was something she could not undo. ‘If only I had been there with you, Connie,’ she said softly. ‘But at least you are at peace.’ Leaning nervously over the body, she lifted one of Connie’s thin, claw-like hands and pressed it to her cheek by way of goodbye. She was ashamed that she felt unable to kiss the ravaged face and felt the tears returning.

  ‘That’s enough now, miss.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Is it, or is it not, the body of Miss Constance Wainwright?’

  ‘Yes. That’s Connie.’ What’s left of her, Rose thought with sudden bitterness. ‘I hope they find him and string him up!’

  He shrugged. ‘Most crimes like this go unsolved. They reckon this one’s long gone. Mexico or somewhere like that!’

  Replacing the sheet with a quick movement, he nodded towards the door and Rose thanked him and made her way slowly back to the front desk.

  ‘Ah, Miss Paton!’

  She nodded and the constable pushed her statement across the counter for her to read. She read it slowly, weighing every word. It seemed the last thing she could do for poor Connie. Satisfied to see that he had finally called Connie ‘a woman friend of the suspect’, she took the proffered pen, signed her name at the bottom, then hurried outside to rejoin Marcus.

  ‘How did it go?’ he asked.

  ‘Horrible . . . terrible . . . all of it!’

  Her voice shook and she began to cry and he put his arms around her and held her close until she recovered.

  Saturday
5th July dawned bright and sunny which was considered by everyone to be a good omen. In Longley Manor, home of Bernard’s wealthy uncle, preparations started as soon as it was light. Caterers had been booked for the lavish luncheon and money was considered no object as the whole event was the uncle’s wedding present to the bride and groom.

  It seemed as though an army of servants had moved in. In the ballroom, where the luncheon would be served, men were to be found on ladders set against the walls, as they hung gold ribbons and trails of green ivy at suitable intervals. Above them down the centre of the room, three elaborate chandeliers had been taken down and washed in vinegar and water and these now sparkled in the sunlight. Two women were busy arranging flowers in sparkling crystal bowls; pink, white and dark red was the chosen colour scheme interspersed with sprays of gold-painted leaves.

  A trolley was pushed into the room bearing china and cutlery, to be set out when the polished table had been covered with the white, gold-edged tablecloth. Dozens of glasses waited on the top of the sideboard, alongside piles of dark red serviettes and a bowl of place names waiting to be set out.

  At seven fifty-four, Henry da Silva entered the ballroom and patrolled the room with a critical frown on his face but he was quickly hustled away by his wife.

  ‘Do please go, Henry! You make people nervous. They all know what they’re doing.’

  ‘I’m just looking, dear,’ he murmured as she steered him firmly towards the door.

  ‘That’s what I mean! Now leave this side of things to the professionals and to me. Go and see how Bernard is faring. He might appreciate a wise word or two on the joys and woes of marriage from his favourite uncle.’

  ‘Bernard? Is he here? Should he be here?’

  ‘Bernard. Your nephew, remember!’ Her tone was exasperated. ‘He slept here overnight.’

  ‘Oh Lord! So he did. I’d quite forgotten.’

  ‘Alicia couldn’t stand any more of his dithering. She was worried about him. Thought he was feeling a mite desperate. She asked if he could come over here. Thought it might buck him up.’