by Diane Janes
He and the woman had it all planned. He had obtained a transfer and they had already arranged to rent a house in Nottingham, where no one knew them and they could live as Mr and Mrs Black, pretending to be a married couple, while she, the real Mrs Black, would be left to face the gossip and the stares afforded to those whose marriages had failed. It was not fair.
Michael had tentatively asked her if she would consider a divorce. Not naming the other woman, of course. His idea had involved the usual sordid put-up job – paying some woman to stay overnight in a hotel with him so that Fran could then sue for adultery. She had refused, of course. Why should she make things that easy for them? And anyway, her mother could never have coped with the scandal of a divorce. A separation could be glossed over to a certain extent, but divorces were public property.
‘Such a disgrace,’ her mother had said. ‘But it’s not my disgrace, Mummy,’ she had protested. Her mother had said nothing in return, and this, she knew, was because privately her mother thought that it was her disgrace. It took two people to fail at marriage. Clearly she had not made a success of it, because if she had, Michael would never have left her. And as well as failing Michael, Fran knew that she had failed her mother too, for with Geoff and Cec both dead, the end of her marriage had stifled the sole possible source of grandchildren.
‘I suppose you will have to come back and live with me,’ her mother had said. But it had not come to that. Her great-aunt Rachel’s legacy had provided her with enough to live on and the means to rent a little cottage not too far away from her old school friend, Mo, but well away from the wagging tongues of her own old neighbours or her mother’s. And though her mother had initially protested that she ought not to live alone, Fran knew that her mother was secretly relieved. ‘No one will know anything about it there,’ she had said. ‘People will think you’re a widow.’
But, of course, she was not a widow and, unlike a widow, she was not free, after a respectable interval, to find another man and marry again. In which case, she asked herself, almost angrily, what was she doing dreaming about Tom Dod? Did she imagine that she was the type of woman who had affairs? Did Tom think she was a widow? She did not know what he thought, because one did not broadcast one’s private situation from the rooftops. She had once indulged in a cosy little fantasy in which Tom had paid court to her, she had divorced Michael and married Tom, but in real life she knew that there was little hope of such an outcome. Even if Tom himself had accepted this state of affairs, his family were unlikely to accept his marrying a woman who was divorced. The whole thing was extremely depressing and, in any case, she reminded herself, there was not the slightest suggestion that he even regarded her as anything more than a casual acquaintance.
She had already begun to regret her election to the society’s executive committee. She knew that she would find Hugh Allonby hard work, to say nothing of his chief acolyte, the tedious Mrs Ingoldsby. Perhaps her glum mood wasn’t just about Tom Dod, she thought, because there was also this strange, unfathomable business about Linda Dexter too.
She was still thinking about it when the motor coach trundled to a halt in the cobbled forecourt of the railway station, and she suddenly remembered that she did have a note of Linda Dexter’s telephone number after all – it was in the back of her pocket diary, where she had jotted it down when Mrs Dexter had first mentioned the possibility of giving a lecture. Glancing at her wristwatch to confirm that she still had time before her train, Fran carried her case across to the public call box, pulled the coppers out from her purse, lifted the handset and asked the operator for the number. After the usual plinks and clicks, the line went silent while the request was relayed from one exchange to the next. While she waited, Fran began to have second thoughts. She did not know what she was going to say when the call was answered. Wouldn’t Linda Dexter think it strange, presumptuous even, of Fran to call? It was not as if they were really friends – only people who knew each other slightly through mutual membership of a club. But when a woman’s voice came on the line at last, it was not Linda Dexter but the original operator, informing her that there was no reply from the number she had requested.
As she replaced the receiver, a knock on the window of the booth startled her into a stifled scream. She turned to find Stephen-with-a-ph-Latchford smiling at her from the other side of the glass. Shaken and astonished, Fran pushed the door open and stared out at him.
‘Problem with your train?’
She supposed that he thought he was being helpful, but it was still hard to keep the annoyance out of her voice. ‘No, everything is fine. I was just making a telephone call.’
‘Right-ho. You know, I was passing the station and I saw the chara and suddenly had a thought – if I took you home by way of the station, we could let your driver know that he wasn’t needed and I could drop you at your door. It’s scarcely out of my way.’ He was filling the space she needed to step into, inadvertently penning her into the phone booth.
‘On the contrary,’ she said, ‘I think that is asking you to go much too far out of your way. Thank you for stopping, but if you’ll excuse me, I really must get across to the other platform for my train.’ She all but pushed past him, forcing him to step backwards in a hurry, so that he almost fell over a couple of wicker hampers which were standing on the platform. It was barely polite, but it was the second time he had frightened the life out of her in the past hour and she was not amused, however generous his intentions. Normally she would be only too glad of a lift, for she liked driving, and of course it was much more direct than taking the omnibus or the train, but something about the way Mr Latchford was pressing her to accept made her all the more determined to refuse.
It was a dispiriting homecoming. The train seemed to trundle at half its normal pace under ever greyer skies and spots of rain began to hit the windshield of the taxi when she was still about a mile from home. By the time Freddie Dyson, the local driver who could easily have doubled as the village idiot, drew up at the cottage gate, rain was beating feverishly against the car, and even in the few seconds that it took her to run up the path and get the front door open, the hair which protruded from under her hat had become a tangle of rats’ tails.
Mrs Snegglington, her cat, who had been named for a character in a Robert Barnaby story, did not come to greet her when she let herself in. Sulking, probably, Fran thought, having been left with no one but Ada, the daily maid, to minister to her needs. Ada had not put a match to the fire before she left to catch her afternoon bus back to Ulverston and the place felt chilly, almost damp. Fran had a love-hate relationship with Bee Hive Cottage. When she had first seen it, on a summer afternoon, with shadows dancing on the walls and birdsong pouring in through the open windows, she had thought there could be no better place to be. But it was very different on these darker days, with the stone floor echoing her footsteps as she made another solitary homecoming.
At least the fire was laid. She only had to apply a match and within moments the kindling had caught, the silence dispelled by a series of snaps and hisses as the smaller stuff surrendered to the flames. Good old Ada – she certainly knew how to lay a fire. The logs would catch in no time.
Ada was a bit of a luxury on her relatively small income and something of a sop to her mother, whose ideas of Armageddon included the thought of being without help in the house. Fran knew that she was perfectly capable of managing the little place herself, and what was more, having Ada in to help with the chores just left her with more time on her hands. After Michael left her, she had initially attempted to find some work. She was an able typist and bookkeeper, but with so many people unemployed, firms were able to pick and choose, and most employers flatly refused to take on married women. One hope had been snuffed out when she arrived at the interview to discover that they had mistaken Frances for Francis. Another had told her, in a pseudo kindly voice, that it would be different if she had been a war widow. In what way would it be different? she had wanted to scream. Is a woman any less
in need of supplementing her income just because her husband has fallen victim to a frizzy-haired little tramp with skinny ankles rather than the bloody Hun? She had not screamed, of course. It wasn’t something a well-brought-up young woman did.
After taking off her outdoor things and warming her hands in front of the glowing fire, she went into the kitchen and attempted to make her peace with Mrs Snegglington, who only agreed to thaw at the prospect of some tinned sardines. Fran made a pot of tea and, having set the tray with cup, saucer, milk jug, tea pot and strainer, she carried it into the sitting room and placed it on the small table alongside the armchair closest to the fire, where she sat with her legs curled under her, glancing idly through the minutes of the last meeting of the Barnaby Society executive committee. Homework from Hugh Allonby in preparation for her new role.
Liaison with the Vester House Museum over next year’s proposed exhibition …
Proposal for lapel pins for purchase by members …
Motion to raise subscriptions …
The telephone startled her. She reached across to grab it, almost upsetting her part-drunk cup of tea, which rattled precariously in its saucer.
‘Hello?’
‘Fran, darling, it’s Mo.’
‘Hello, Mo. How are you?’
‘I’m fine. So how about you? How did it go?’ Mo’s voice was full of expectation.
‘How did what go?’
Mo made an impatient noise down the line. ‘Your weekend … with that chap.’
‘What do you mean, with that chap?’
‘You know, this Tom chap. The chap you keep on talking about.’
‘I told you before, there’s absolutely nothing in it. We see each other at Barnaby meetings and that’s it. We’re just friends.’
‘You need to make a move. Get back in the game. It’s the only way you’ll ever get over … Anyway,’ Mo changed the subject abruptly. ‘What’s his other name – this Tom?’
‘It’s Dod,’ she said reluctantly.
‘Dud!’
‘No. Dod.’
‘As in D-O-D-D?’
‘No. As in D-O-D.’
‘Gosh, how unusual. Like Lottie Dod, the tennis player.’
‘Before my time, darling.’
‘But everyone knows about her – first woman to win the Ladies’ Championships three years in a row. I say, do you think Helen Wills will make it three in a row this year? Of course, now that Mademoiselle Lenglen has gone and won it five times in a row, the gloss has rather gone off a mere three victories, don’t you think? Anyway, talking of pairing up for mixed doubles and all that, let’s get back to this Tom character …’
Mo was her oldest friend and Fran loved her dearly, but Mo’s fixation with getting Fran ‘back in the game’, as she put it, had already led to a dull dinner with a bachelor accountant, to say nothing of an excruciating evening with an old letch from Mo’s tennis club, and just now she didn’t feel in the mood to talk about Tom Dod, over whom she was beginning to feel rather a fool, so she changed the subject by telling Mo about the strange disappearance of Linda Dexter instead.
When she had finished, Mo said, ‘She might have been kidnapped. Why, the whole thing sounds straight out of an Agatha Christie. Didn’t anyone think to ring the police?’
‘That’s a bit overdramatic. She’s a grown woman and I’m afraid that the obvious answer is that she just panicked and cleared off.’ Yet even as she said it, Fran could hear that alarm bell of worry clanging faintly in the back of her mind again.
‘Nope.’ There was undisguised mirth in Mo’s voice as she continued, ‘She’s been done away with. Probably about to reveal something terrible in the sainted Robert Barnaby’s past and had to be silenced. This woman disappears into thin air and there’s a chap called Dod at the same conference. I mean, you don’t have to look far for a suspect, do you?’
‘What on earth are you talking about now?’
‘Didn’t you know that dod means death in some of the Scandinavian languages?’
‘Of course I didn’t. Only someone like you, whose husband is permanently globe-trotting, would know a thing like that.’
‘Heavens, it’s just as well the two of you don’t appear to be getting together. I mean, imagine if the names were hyphenated … black-death …’
‘Oh, yes, very droll,’ said Fran sarcastically.
‘Anyway, if nothing’s come of the Tom thing …’
‘There is no Tom thing.’
‘Then there’s another really nice unattached chap, just joined the tennis club …’
‘Please, Mo. No more chaps from the tennis club.’
A call from Mo normally cheered her up, but when their conversation was over and Fran recalled her friend’s question about ‘the Tom thing’, it depressed her. She hadn’t realized that she had gone on about him to Mo. It made her feel immature and desperate. It wasn’t as if she even knew anything about Tom Dod, except that he shared her interest in Robert Barnaby and made her laugh. Was she really so desperate that any man who made the slightest friendly overture became some sort of target? Of course not. She had not gone on about him. It was just Mo’s interpretation of things.
It seemed particularly quiet in the cottage after the constant background chatter of the conference. She could have put on the wireless, but it smacked too much of an admission that she didn’t like the silence of the place at night. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come and live here. Pig-headedness winning out over common sense. Sometimes the cottage felt very empty with just her and the cat. She had begun to drink too many pink gins to see her through the evenings, and caught herself talking a little too frequently to Mrs Snegglington. That’s how I’ll end up, she thought. A batty old woman who lives on her own, with a regiment of cats. I’ll drink too much and go senile, thinking I’m a child again, with my pets named after characters in bloody Robert Barnaby books … and Mo will still be ringing up to tell me about a really nice chap who’s just joined her Retired Gentlefolk’s Dining Club. She grinned in spite of herself. Pull yourself together. You’re only twenty-eight. That’s a year younger than that dull little woman was when she snared Michael. Winifred – the wouldn’t-say-boo-to-a-goose scorer at the cricket club. Well, she’d scored with Michael all right. She actually called herself Winny, which rhymed very nicely with ninny. It made the whole thing sound rather ridiculous. My husband’s run off with Winny the Ninny.
SIX
The branch line between Clitheroe and Shieldsby had been constructed solely for the purpose of carrying aggregate from Shieldsby Quarry. In its heyday, the line had sometimes seen the passage of several trains per day, but for many years now the number of train movements had been reduced to fewer than a dozen each week. From Monday to Friday, one heavily laden beast would carry away a full load of crushed stone in the hour before midnight, and from Monday to Friday another sturdy workhorse would come steaming in the opposite direction a few hours later, its trucks clattering and empty in readiness to stand in the sidings and be loaded afresh. These were slow-moving trains, which were only allowed to join the main line in the wee small hours of the morning when the more glamorous expresses were scarcer and the solid bulk of goods traffic held sway. The routine varied at the weekends, for the quarrymen had a half day on Saturdays and did not work at all on Sundays, so once the sound of the fully laden wagons had faded into the distance on Friday nights, the line fell silent until around six on Monday mornings, when the rails rang again to the rattle of the empty wagons.
Throughout the winter months, Driver Tyler made the inward run to Shieldsby Quarry under cover of darkness, but as April advanced towards May, he completed the last few miles of his journey in the grey half-light which precedes dawn, the visibility increasing week by week as the hour of sunrise crept inexorably forward. He knew the line intimately and was immediately alert to any changes, so although the brief glimpse of something on the track just after Bridge 485 did not look like anything in particular – just a bag of rubbish
or some discarded clothes – Driver Tyler knew at once that it had not been there before the weekend. They were past the place before he even had time to point the object out to his fireman and it was neither practical nor possible to stop the train. He sensed rather than felt the impact as the wheels brushed whatever it was contemptuously aside. He knew instinctively that there was something not right about the bundle on the line. Someone would have to be told about it.
Fran’s telephone rang at just after half past six that evening. Although he had never called her before, she immediately recognized Tom Dod’s voice on the line.
‘Fran.’ He always called her Fran these days, never Mrs Black. It had come about at a society meeting a couple of months ago, when he had said, ‘I say, do call me Tom,’ and she had naturally reciprocated by inviting him to call her Fran. It was part of his air of easy informality which she found so attractive. There was nothing stuffy about Tom Dod. ‘Have you heard the news?’ he asked.
‘What news?’
‘I think you had better prepare yourself for a shock. I believe they’ve found Linda Dexter’s body on a railway line.’
For a moment, she was too stunned to say anything. ‘You’re joking! No, obviously you’re not joking. No one would joke about a thing like that.’
‘It was in the evening paper. Of course, it doesn’t actually say that it’s Linda Dexter, but apparently the police found a burnt-out motor car in the early hours of Saturday morning, standing in a lane not far from the spot where the body was. It’s a Talbot 105.’
‘But they haven’t said that it’s her? Are you sure, Tom? What makes you think it’s her?’