‘The police? Your wunnerful Scotland Yard.’
‘It’s not Scotland Yard, Nel, it’s the local force.’
‘The sheriff?’
‘Something like that. And they’re not interested. I’m on my own, Nel.’
A deep breath from him. ‘Now you listen to me, Phillie.’ It was his deep, masterful voice. ‘Never say that to me again. Y’ hear me? Never tell me you’re on your own. Poppa’s here. Lemme get Marietta on it, an’ I’ll be on the first flight outa Kennedy, and be with y’. Get it, cherub? I’m on my way. And y’ listen to me. Right? No tacklin’ any slimy murderers till I’m there, right at y’ shoulder. You readin’ me?’
I sighed. I should have guessed. ‘Loud and clear, Nel,’ I said. ‘And bring a raincoat. Make a note of this. Change at Heathrow and fly to Birmingham International. That’s Birmingham as in Alabama. Get Marietta to tell me when and I’ll pick you up.’
‘I’ll hire an Avis —’
‘And kill yourself? You’re murder in the US. Double murder on the wrong side of the road.’
‘I can —’
‘And Nel…are you listening? Good. Be said — as they say over here — and do what I tell you for once. Okay, partner?’
‘Got it, sweetheart.’
I just managed to slip in the phone number of The Carlton before he hung up.
I could have sat down right there and wept. Just what I didn’t need! They wouldn’t even understand him in England. He’d probably try to smuggle in a pistol!
I laughed at that. They’d hold him for questioning, and they wouldn’t understand his answers.
I put on a pair of slacks and went out to hire a car. With a bit of luck I’d be able to get a cup of tea at Hawthorne Cottage, and a bun. Flung at me, perhaps, if Dennis was there.
4
I arrived at Hawthorne Cottage in a hired Peugeot 205 and a new anorak. The small car had been chosen because its size would amuse Cornel, and be very uncomfortable for him, thus sending him back again as quickly as possible. The anorak was a morale booster, something new, even if it was far from glamorous. But the weather was wet and cold, and most of my stuff was still back in Zurich, so I’d reckoned I would need something.
I should have thought of wellies, too, I decided ruefully. My shoes were half submerged in mud as I stood out in the lane in the fine drizzle. There was nothing on my hair either, but I wasn’t concerned about that. My hair’s a misery, or, as of that moment, a comfort. It resembles a tangle of bright copper wire. No matter what I did to it, that was what it always finished as. Top stylists have wept bitter tears over my hair. I couldn’t do anything about it, except be glad it was copper wire and not steel, or it would’ve rusted.
The lane, which turned from the Penley to Mattock road by the old mill, had seemed to be narrower than I recalled, the trees and hedgerows encroaching closer and the surface fast deteriorating. Theoretically, it serves Corry’s Head farm, but the land was long ago bought up by a neighbouring farmer, and the farmhouse had been left empty and allowed to collapse in its own good time.
Hawthorne Cottage had been a tied cottage, the home of one of the labourers. Somebody had modernized it, but had barely dragged it into the twentieth century. Modernized meant that the thatch had been replaced by pantiles and the doors and windows re-timbered and re-glazed. But nothing could change the way it seemed to cringe as the woodland beyond it gradually crept closer. Now, I recalled bitterly, the nearest trees were tall enough to produce a chimney downdraught when the wind was in the north, a feeble glow in the hearth when it was west or east, and a roar of triumph when it was in the south, sucking away your fuel. Electricity was connected, but no gas. The nearest telephone was half a mile away on the main road, and the water came from a well, which I’d always suspected as being a rat’s graveyard.
Now, with one window glowing dimly in the failing daylight at four o’clock, I couldn’t believe I’d lived there. And for three years! It looked so tiny. So bereft.
I realized that the door was open. A voice called out, ‘Don’t just stand there. Come in if you’re coming.’
So I went in. The warmth hit me as I entered the hall.
‘The wind must be in the south,’ I said, as she took my anorak.
Anna smiled. This was an easy smile, untainted by any strong emotion. ‘You lived here. You’ll know it.’ Then, half turning away, ‘I expected you, some time or other. Come on through.’
It’s a two up and two down cottage, originally with a tiny kitchen tacked on. Graham had built an extension to include a bathroom and to enlarge the kitchen. Formerly, the toilet arrangements had meant washing in the kitchen sink, bathing in a tin tub in front of the fire, and traipsing down the garden to the closet shed, but all this was mercifully before my time. The downstairs room she took me into was the living room. I stood and looked round, making no pretence of a casual survey. It was in admiration. A few pieces of our old furniture were still there, but the whole effect was of brightness and colour. She certainly had a painter’s eye. Somebody, perhaps Anna herself, had chipped away the crumbling plaster, revealing bare stone and the support beams that I hadn’t known were there. It made a finishing touch. The room had a life of its own, and the aged staircase that wound up from the corner now became part of the decor.
‘Like it?’ she asked.
I turned to her. She glowed. Clearly her brother wasn’t around, and away from him she was a different person. I now saw that she was an inch or two taller than me, which made her around five-nine. Her hair was different. She’d let it down, blonde and fine and shimmering as she moved. Laughing, as she was, her face was perfectly framed by the hair, her chin no longer appearing too stubborn. She’d have to watch that fugitive grin; it rippled creases into her face where she wouldn’t welcome them later. But they would be, I reckoned, lines to be proud of — laughter lines.
‘You’ve done wonders with it.’
‘Of course, you were never home enough to do much here,’ she observed, and now there was no criticism in her voice. She was offering me an excuse. ‘And I loved every minute of it.’
‘I’m sure. Is the other room the same?’
The other room had been our junk room, where we’d stored all those things you’re scared to throw away and always wished you had.
‘Oh…’ She waved a hand gracefully. ‘Very different.’
But she didn’t offer to show me.
‘Now,’ she said briskly. ‘Tea. I’ve got Earl Grey and Darjeeling and Assam. Take your pick.’
I laughed. ‘I’m out of touch, living in New York. The strongest.’
‘Assam, then. I’ll be a few minutes. Look around, why don’t you.’
She left me. I was uneasy. She was too confident, too much in control. I looked around, as she’d suggested, moving slowly, admiring her colour scheme. But the painter’s eye was obvious. There’d be nothing violent, to draw attention to itself. Pastel colours prevailed. The clock Graham and I had bought in York, a rather splendid carriage clock made in France, was now on the stone mantel above the huge fireplace. The wrong place for it, I thought. It would dry out. They were still using logs for the fire. It’d been almost impossible to get a coal lorry up the lane — oh for the good old days of the horse and cart! But Graham, strangely, had seemed to enjoy log cutting. It helped, he always said, to keep the woodland at bay.
And on the same old sideboard, heavily carved and black with age, there was a photograph. Of me. Now…that was strange. You’d have thought she’d have had it out of the house in a flash. It wasn’t one I remembered being taken, certainly one I wouldn’t have displayed myself, the light casting shadows beneath my cheekbones, when I’ve always been conscious of their prominence, and at the same time catching copper highlights in that tangle of hair I spoke about. And something sulky about the mouth! But of course, she would have it there to remind him what a good swap he’d made.
‘There’s some buttered scones,’ she said brightly, sweeping in, shutting th
e door behind her with a very fetching swing of a hip. ‘I’m afraid I’m having difficulty shopping. As you’ll guess. No car…at the moment.’
She put down the tray. The tea service was mine. Personally. One I’d chosen and bought. I lowered myself on to the Queen Anne chair that now sported a loose cover in a sandy fawn and bluey mauve pattern.
‘I never thought of that,’ I said. ‘How are you managing?’ At her raised eyebrows, ‘Two sugars, please.’
She poured the tea before she answered. ‘I walk down to the main road and catch a bus to Mattock. Better shops there. But I’ll be all right when I can get another car. Though…’ Her eyes lit up. ‘…I’ll probably be moving from here, anyway.’
‘There’s no need —’
But she wasn’t listening. ‘Somewhere modern and closer to the shops. When it comes through.’
It, I thought. It comes through. Oh Lord, she thinks she’s Graham’s beneficiary! I gulped tea. It was too hot. She offered me a scone. I took it, avoiding her eyes.
I wanted to get away from the subject of inheritance. ‘About the car,’ I said, munching. ‘These are good.’
‘I baked them myself. What about the car?’
‘Well, I mean, one car and an isolated place like this. Two of you and only you to drive.’
‘That’s how it was. I didn’t mind. I love driving.’
‘It wasn’t that. What I’m getting at is: how did Graham and the car get to Corry’s Head? He certainly didn’t drive it there.’
‘I suppose not,’ she said negligently. She seemed unaffected. The mention of Graham hadn’t even dented her mood, light and slightly frivolous. More than slightly brittle. I wondered whether she mourned him. There was no sign of it at that time.
‘He couldn’t have driven it,’ I said.
‘Perhaps not.’
‘But you must certainly know,’ I persisted, a little annoyed that she was being so slow, so dim.
‘I don’t know that.’
‘I’ve said this before — if Graham left in that car, you’d either have had to drive him, or somebody else did.’
‘Well, it wasn’t me. And I’d forgotten you’d said it. On purpose. It wasn’t a nice thing to say.’ She looked across at my cup. ‘More tea?’
It’d been a little too strong for me. ‘Thank you, no. But I’ll have another scone.’ I reached over, saying, ‘If you didn’t drive him, you’d surely have seen who did.’
‘No I wouldn’t. I wasn’t here.’
‘Oh.’ That stopped me. ‘Then where were you?’
‘I went to Wolverhampton, to my dad’s. It was his birthday. We had a right old do, I can tell you.’
‘Then you’d have taken the car, and it wouldn’t have been available to Graham.’
‘Oh…why do we have to have all this digging and delving?’ she complained.
Because, I nearly shouted, you won’t try to see what I’m getting at. ‘Did you take the car?’
‘Of course not. It wouldn’t start. I was furious. I mean, it was all planned. So in the end I rushed down the lane and just managed to scramble on to a bus, and caught a local train to Wolverhampton. They thought I’d got lost.’ She took a deep breath. ‘You know what I thought? After, this was. After I got home and he wasn’t here, and the car gone.’
She stopped. I had to do my bit. ‘No. What did you think?’
‘I thought he’d done something to it — you know — jiggered it so it wouldn’t start, and then he could put it right and use it himself.’
‘But he couldn’t drive.’
‘Piff!’ she said. ‘I expect he could. You know Graham. Our Graham. Lazy. Had to be pushed. I bet he could drive, when he wanted to. And that day he must’ve wanted to.’
I nodded. If she had to think that. If she wanted me to think it. ‘He needed it, you mean, in order to drive to Cony’s Head and kill himself?’
‘No, no!’ she burst out.
‘He could’ve killed himself here, if he’d wanted to. In this very room.’
‘You’re not to say that!’
‘Not to say what? That he took his own life? It was the inquest jury who said that, not me.’
‘I don’t… I can’t…’ She fluttered a hand. ‘Why’ve we got to talk about it?’
‘Because he’s our Graham,’ I said, throwing back her own phrase. ‘And neither of us believes he did that. Do we?’
‘Then what do we believe?’ she asked plaintively. It was clearly painful to her to have to use her brain.
‘I don’t know. That he met somebody. Or somebody came here. Walked up from the road and came here and drove him away…to that cliff top. And killed him by driving —’
‘But that’s silly,’ she cried.
‘I suppose it is.’ That Graham had fixed the car so that it would be available for somebody else to come along, and then use it to drive him up to the quarry. That was, indeed, silly. ‘I’m sorry. I was just trying to get a mental picture. So you went to this party thing, and when you got back the car and Graham were both missing?’
‘Yes.’ She nodded, lower lip between her teeth.
‘And they continued to be missing for a week?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you didn’t tell the police?’
‘Oh, I did. Two days after the…party, I went into Penley and told them. They said I’d better just wait. You know — he was just missing. Said a grown man might have a reason he wanted to go missing. But Graham wasn’t like that. You know he wasn’t. You could tell what they thought…another woman.’
‘And he wasn’t like that?’
‘No. No, he wasn’t.’ But there was something desperate in her voice. Then she whispered, ‘But I got to thinking it just might be.’
Then suddenly it was all there, all the worry and concern until his body was found, then the distraught disbelief when the truth became indisputable. And perhaps, to turn the knife in the wound, the suspicion that he’d killed himself over another woman. It was all there in her swimming eyes and the abruptly haunted mask that’d been a lovely face a moment before.
‘Oh…you poor dear.’
And that did it, the final and delayed collapse, and I had to move quickly to get round to her. Her shoulders were shaking as I slid beside her on the sofa, one hand flapping in protest and apology, one hand over her eyes, and that appalling weeping keening sound that drove right into a pressure point in my brain, until it was all I could do not to join her. She wept loudly and convulsively, while I wept silently, inside. We wept for the same man. It was a special, precious relationship.
Then, when it was over, when the paper handkerchiefs had been unearthed and demolished into sodden piles on the carpet, she could smile wearily at me, and I could smile back, and I had to pray I didn’t look as dreadful as she did.
‘The bathroom’s through there,’ she said, as though I was a stranger.
‘No. You first. I’ll have that second cup of tea.’
‘It’ll be cold.’
‘No matter.’
While I was waiting for her to return — the tea was terrible — I realized that she’d at least covered a couple of points: how Inspector Oliver Simpson had known Graham had gone missing for a week. She’d told them herself. And how it could have been possible for Graham, plus the car, to have got to Corry’s Head. He’d had a visitor. He’d been ‘missing’ a week, probably with that visitor. Possibly. But it explained what had been inexplicable.
It began to sound depressingly like another woman, and Anna was refusing to accept it.
She came back, almost as good as new. I went through to the bathroom and its mirror. Not too bad. Eyes a bit puffy, and too much colour on those damned prominent cheekbones. But not too bad, considering.
When I returned, she had clearly decided on a complete change of subject. I went along with her on it.
‘You must see the studio,’ she said brightly. ‘The back room.’
We crossed the hall and into what had been the junk r
oom in my time. But it had been transformed.
As an art studio, I’d heard, it should have faced north. It did that, but the trees were just outside there, shading the room. So they had blinds and a lot of that strip lighting, in that special ‘daylight’ white. It was close enough, I expect. There was a bench all along one side, with lengths of strip wood moulding and several large pieces of equipment, sheets of glass, a block of sheets of thick cardboard on one end.
‘He did his own framing,’ she said, with a kind of smug pride.
There were certainly a number of masked and framed watercolours standing around, and one, with a cloth thrown over it, on an easel. I had to tell myself to take it slowly, calmly. Suddenly there’d been a quickening of my heartbeat. This was Graham’s work, his personality, his very being. I felt I was in his presence, that his vivid self was standing before me. This — these were his creation.
‘The flower ones are mine,’ she said modestly. ‘About all I can do, really.’
The flower studies were smaller than Graham’s landscapes, hers about ten inches by six, his twenty by twelve or so. But I didn’t need that distinction. His had a spontaneity that hers lacked. He flowed on the colour with confidence; she achieved her effects by minute and painstaking attention to detail. She signed with modest initials, whereas Graham’s had his full signature in the corners.
‘But…they’re marvellous!’ I said. ‘All of them.’ So that she wouldn’t have to feel left out. ‘I never even guessed he could do this.’
‘Nor did he till I showed him. Then it all seemed to come naturally. It was as though he had a kind of photographic memory. He’d sit with a sheet of 300 pound Bockingford in front of him, and just paint. And it’d turn out to be something we’d seen that day, out in the car.’
‘You driving?’
‘Why do you keep —?’
‘Sorry. I meant, with you driving he could keep his eyes on other things around him.’
‘Well yes. Yes, I see now.’
About twenty were on show, but not hung. Mounted, framed, ready…for what?
Hung in the Balance (Simpson & Lowe Detective series Book 1) Page 5