by Diane Janes
She heard herself saying to Tom, ‘There’s the sinister man. You can’t rule out the sinister man.’ She had not mentioned Stephen-with-a-ph’s visits to Tom or Mo, but this put things in a different light. She picked up the telephone, then hesitated. Perhaps Mo was right and Tom Dod would not want his wife to be forever answering the telephone to her. She would have to leave the news about Stephen Latchford for another time.
SIXTEEN
Feeling like a pioneer for her generation, Fran was among the earliest to arrive at Haverthwaite church hall and she marched in with her head held high. All that fuss over being allowed to put a cross on a piece of paper, when the stupidest of men had been allowed to do it for years! Now that it actually came to it, the whole business was over in a moment and something of an anti-climax. Anyway, it was a step forward – the time might even come when women were shown how to use corkscrews and put up shelves.
A light drizzle had begun to fall as she waited for the bus on the main road, and by the time she had connected with the route to Carlisle they were driving through fog. Shapes loomed at the roadside like lingering primeval spirits from an earlier age. It was an alien landscape alive with suggestion: sighting a troop of ghostly border reivers seemed a possibility, an encounter with a murderous hitchhiker positively likely, but once the bus had topped the watershed and began to descend again, the mist dispersed entirely, giving way to a pale blue sky.
Fran had spent the past couple of days half fearing that Christina Harper might change her mind and withdraw permission to search her sister’s house, so when she got home on Wednesday evening and saw an envelope on the mat, in handwriting that she recognized as Mrs Harper’s, Fran had naturally feared the worst. In fact, the woman had written to ask a favour. Would Fran mind bringing a couple of items back with her – a model of a horse’s head and an antique clock, both of which would be found in the drawing room? Fran sighed with relief while mentally sending up a prayer that the items in question were small enough to be easily transported on a public omnibus.
Gladness was not her predominant emotion, however, now that the mission was almost upon her. It would be very strange, going into a dead person’s house like this. A place, moreover, into which she had never been invited while the owner was alive. She finally alighted from the third bus of the day at half past eleven in the morning and walked briskly down the lane to the cottage, which she easily identified as Mrs Roseby’s, feeling that every eye in the village was probably focused upon her. One pair certainly had been, because Mrs Roseby opened the door before she even had a chance to knock.
‘You’ll be Mrs Black. Mrs Dexter’s sister told me to expect you.’
Fran waited while Mrs Roseby handed over the keys, explaining which one related to the front door, which to the back and so on.
‘With the police, are you?’
‘No. I’m not with the police.’
‘Oh, I thought you must be. The sister gave me to understand that you’d be looking for something.’ Mrs Roseby was evidently burning with curiosity, but when Fran said nothing to enlighten her, she reluctantly relinquished the keys, saying: ‘If you need anything, you just pop across and let me know. I’ll be in all day.’
‘Thank you.’
Fran crossed the lane, conscious of the thin breeze which found its way into a non-existent gap where her skirt met her jumper. Whatever the national papers might say, it was unseasonably cool for the end of May.
Curiosity killed the cat, said a voice in her head.
Rubbish. No one ever got anywhere without curiosity. She hadn’t got up at the crack of dawn only to chicken out at the last minute. She opened one of the front gates and walked up the gravel path which led directly to the front door. A drive led past the side of the building to a half-visible coach house, where Linda had probably garaged her car. Fran noticed that her feet seemed to be making an incredible amount of noise. She wondered if Mrs Roseby was still watching her and whether there was a particular trick to opening the front door – she would feel such a fool if, after all, she couldn’t get in, but the key turned easily in the lock and the front door seemed to swing open of its own volition, without her needing to exert any pressure at all. It came up short against two or three election flyers which were lying on the doormat. Christina Harper had probably arranged for the post to be redirected, but that didn’t prevent the occasional item being hand-delivered. Fran bent to pick them up before quietly closing the front door behind her.
At first sight, the hall looked reassuringly normal, just as it would have done if Linda had still been alive and someone had been admitting Fran as a visitor to the house in the ordinary way, but a closer look revealed the layer of dust which dulled the surface of the hall table, the five-week-old newspaper which lay forgotten on the seat of a mock-Regency chair, the newsprint already fading where the sun had caught it. It was only a few weeks since Linda had left for the last time, but the house already exuded a sense of being long deserted. Linda’s sister evidently saw no benefit in continuing to pay a maid to keep the place up.
Fran stood in the hall, wondering where to begin. When discussing the proposed search with Tom during a telephone call two evenings before, he had suggested that she should look through ‘everything’ on the basis that should his million-to-one theory turn out to be wrong, there might still be some other useful clues. This comprehensive operation had sounded simple enough when discussed on the phone and she had not demurred, as she had with Mo, over poking her nose into someone else’s private life. Now that she was actually standing on the doormat, however, the task seemed altogether more daunting.
‘Oh, come on,’ she said aloud. ‘You’re here now. Might as well go through with it.’ The house swallowed up her words, converting them into an icy silence as surely as if they had never been uttered.
She cautiously pulled open the drawer in the hall table, as if she expected something to jump out at her, and sifted through the contents, taking elaborate care not to disarrange anything before remembering that this was not a furtive search where everything must be left exactly in place to avoid the homeowner ever suspecting that it had occurred. The homeowner was never coming back. She could afford a little rearrangement. The drawer contained various odds and ends, including a card advertising a plumbing service, an unused notepad, some loose paperclips and a couple of old receipts. Nothing of significance at all.
To the right of the hall was the drawing room, and to the left a door led into a formal dining room. Fran entered the drawing room hesitantly, still half expecting to be ejected as a trespasser. The room was expensively furnished with modern sofas and ornaments. Large cabinets housed a collection of china figurines, which Fran instinctively knew to be good quality. A gramophone stood on a specially designed cabinet, which included a cupboard for housing the records. It was a collection which ranged from Swan Lake to Lilac Time, and included some dance music too. There was no sign of anything which might house personal notebooks. Fran tried to stop herself from speculating on which had been Linda’s favourite spot. Were those cushions somewhat higgledy-piggledy because the police had searched behind them, or because that was where Linda had last sat to listen to the gramophone the day before she died?
There was a curious kind of anonymity to the room, she thought. In many ways it reminded her of a large furniture showroom which she and Michael had once visited in order to choose their dining suite. It had occupied the entire upper floor of a big store in Manchester, and had been arranged to display the firm’s goods in a series of rooms, which were necessarily somewhat anonymous, devoid of the usual framed family photographs, the sepia brides and grooms, little girls with their hands folded in their laps, their brothers standing at their shoulders, wearing sailor suits and serious expressions, the inevitable beloved son or nephew in uniform, not destined to grow old as we grow old. Just as there had been nothing of that in the showroom, so it was here, in Linda’s drawing room. The only exception was a lone framed photograph standing on a
side table. It was a picture of a large house: a view from the garden, taken on a sunny day and, on closer examination, the place struck Fran as being oddly familiar. She decided that she must have seen it somewhere before, perhaps in a book or a magazine.
Casting around the room again, she easily identified the clock and the ornamental horse’s head which Christina Harper had asked her to bring back. Though they were not particularly large, the items were awkwardly shaped and quite heavy. She lifted them both on to the little table, next to the picture of the house which had caught her eye a moment before. As she examined the picture more closely, it occurred to her that perhaps it could be somewhere which was connected with Robert Barnaby. It was the sort of house in the country to which the author had often found himself invited, particularly as his books began to gain him attention. On a whim, she decided to help herself to the photograph. After all, Mrs Harper had made it clear that she was welcome to take anything connected to Linda’s research, and the picture would fetch nothing at auction. She would have to find some newspaper to wrap the things in, she decided, so that they didn’t scratch one another as they travelled home together in her wicker shopping basket.
A second door led out of the drawing room directly into a small sitting room, where there was a wireless on the table and a sewing basket beside one of the armchairs. Behind the sitting room lay the large kitchen. Here, too, no expense had been spared. Oak cupboards opened to reveal all the latest kitchen gadgetry and two services, both courtesy of Royal Doulton. There was no paperwork save for a drawer full of handwritten recipes.
From the kitchen, it was possible to re-enter the hall or continue directly into the dining room. Fran went back into the hall and looked doubtfully at the stairs. She swallowed hard and began to ascend slowly, twice pausing to glance over her shoulder as the light played tricks at the periphery of her vision. There were half-a-dozen doors leading off the landing, and the first one she chose was a bathroom. The room next door had obviously been Linda’s bedroom. A part-used jar of Pond’s Cold Cream and an almost empty bottle of Chanel No.5 still stood on the dressing table, and there were more cosmetic preparations of various kinds visible in a partly open drawer. With fingers which trembled, Fran systematically opened one drawer after another, reluctantly probing to check that there was nothing concealed among the dead woman’s sweaters and underwear, all the time resisting the impulse to look over her shoulder, ignoring that ever-present sense of being observed.
You shouldn’t be doing this, she said to herself. These are Linda’s personal things.
And yet, Christina Harper had given her permission. It came to her that she would never have agreed to a virtual stranger rooting through Geoffrey or Cec’s belongings. Nor employed some anonymous company to dispose of them. The woman’s actions demonstrated an unusual level of detachment bordering on cold-hearted.
After Linda’s bedroom, she tackled the other upstairs rooms. The first two were spare bedrooms – double rooms furnished as if for guests, although there was little sign that they were ever used. All the furnishings were in showroom condition, the drawers and wardrobes either empty or else repositories for pristine towels and bed linen. Fran was reminded again of that large store which she and Michael had visited so many years before. Everything here seemed to have been chosen for looking at rather than living with. Nothing about any of these rooms gave much of a clue to the person who had furnished them.
The last of the upstairs rooms was completely different. Instead of a bed there was a small, comfortable sofa positioned under the window to afford anyone who sat in it the best possible light for reading. Wall-to-ceiling shelves had been built around the other three sides of the room and these were filled to overflowing with books. Robert Barnaby had pride of place but they were all here: Kipling, Stevenson, Alcott, Lucy Maude Montgomery, the early Angela Brazils. It was a shrine to children’s literature. For the first time since she had entered the house, Fran felt halfway towards being comfortable. The temptation to browse the nearest volumes was strong. She reached up to remove an illustrated copy of The Wind in the Willows from the top shelf, but her sleeve must have caught something because a small pile of books cascaded on to the floor, sending an explosion of noise through the silent house.
‘A noise fit to wake the dead,’ said a voice in her head before she could stop it. She set about restoring the books to their former positions, pausing every so often to convince herself that the only movements she could hear were her own. The book room felt increasingly like a safe haven from the otherwise hostile house. Here you could shut the door on life in general and immerse yourself in a world where worries dissolved as the pages turned and no bogeyman could come and get you.
She had assumed that the only room left to check downstairs was the dining room but, as soon as she entered it, she realized that there was a door leading into another room beyond it – at last, the room which Linda had used as a study, complete with a shelf of neatly labelled box files and carefully stacked notebooks, with covers got up in a design which imitated marble. The hands of the large wall clock had stopped at twenty-three minutes past two, but its presence provided a reminder that she had to consider the infrequency of the bus service. She did not have an infinite amount of time. Bother, bother – if only she had poked her head into the dining room first.
She scanned the neatly printed labels which had been affixed to both the files and the spines of the notebooks. Immediately after Household Accounts came a box labelled RB. Robert Barnaby – it had to be. She eased the large rectangular box file down from its place and put it on the desk, dropping into the big leather chair where Linda herself must have sat hundreds of times, and pressed the little release button which allowed the top cover of the box file to be opened.
The trio of bangs on the window made her jump right out of the seat. Mrs Roseby was standing outside, gesturing with her hand and nodding down at a tray which she was balancing on the outside windowsill with her spare hand. Taking in the small teapot and accompanying paraphernalia, Fran had little alternative but to backtrack through the dining room and open the front door.
‘Sorry if I startled you. I came to the window because I thought you might not come if I used the knocker, seeing as you’re not expecting anyone. I’ve brought you some tea. Thought you might be glad of it. There’s nothing left over here to make yourself a drink, is there? I think that sister’s even taken the tea caddy.’
Since Mrs Roseby made no move to actually hand over the tray, Fran made room for her to step inside, which she did, immediately heading straight down the hall to the kitchen. She seemed to know her way around, Fran thought, and the remark about the missing tea caddy suggested that perhaps the police search had not been the only scrutiny to which the premises had already been subjected.
‘I thought we might as well use Mrs Dexter’s china, to save me carrying anything else over.’
Fran noted the ‘we’. Oh, well, perhaps the interlude could be put to some use: and anyway, although she was dying to get back to Linda’s study, she genuinely welcomed the tea.
They took their cups and saucers across to the kitchen table, sitting in the pair of hard wooden chairs which had presumably been used by the now-departed staff. Mrs Roseby needed no encouragement to talk. ‘To think when I saw Mrs Dexter putting that case into her motorcar, that would be the last time I’d ever set eyes on her. You just can’t credit it, can you?’
‘You must have been very upset when you heard the news,’ Fran prompted.
‘Well, yes and no, dear. When you reach my age, you get to more funerals than weddings, if you see what I mean. And it wasn’t as if we were really friendly. Oh, she was a pleasant enough lady but she kept herself to herself. In fact, some folk thought she was a bit standoffish. She didn’t mix or get involved much in the life of the village.’
‘Had she lived in the village for long?’
‘Ooh, yes, let’s see … A good nine or ten years, I’d say. But she didn’t join in wi
th anything much. Wasn’t a churchgoer. She didn’t neighbour. In fact, apart from Mrs Griggs, who used to come in to do the heavy work, I doubt if anyone in the village has ever set foot in this house since she bought it, other than me.’
‘Did she have any other help in the house?’ asked Fran.
‘Oh, bless you, yes. She might not have been one of the county set but she was a lady right enough. There was Mrs Parsons, the cook, who came originally from Penrith, and a house parlour maid called Ethel. They’ve both been let go, of course, but they got new positions pretty easily, I believe. Well, there’s such a shortage of good help these days, isn’t there, with so many girls going off to get work in the towns.’ Mrs Roseby paused to sip her tea before continuing. ‘I don’t know that those young women will find such an easy life at another post, mind you. There was never any entertaining and Mrs Dexter was away a lot, of course; always off on trips and holidays, she was. It’s all right for some, isn’t it?’
‘Has she always lived here on her own?’
‘Always, just Mrs Dexter and whatever staff she had. Ethel and the cook lived in, and at one time I seem to remember there used to be a scullery maid too, though maybe she went home at nights. And I will say this for her,’ Mrs Roseby lowered her voice, as if she was afraid that there might be eavesdroppers lurking in the larder, ‘there was never any carrying-on. Not like some I could mention. Strange cars parked outside overnight and men going off the next morning. No, Mrs Dexter wasn’t that type of woman. In fact, she had no visitors at all to speak of.’