Ceremonies of Innocence

by Annie Bullen

  Tim Tyson was thick-skinned in the manner that policemen develop, and also practised at soothing the agitated.

  ‘She probably has nothing at all to do with this, Mrs Augier. Except that a young lady of that description was sitting in the car which was driven away from here, er, hastily, by Fergus Slack.’

  ‘Fergus! In my Traveller?’

  ‘Yes. That’s the car. Midway through the concert. He left in rather a hurry, taking this young lady, who we must assume is your daughter – Dorelia, did you say? – with him.’

  ‘Dorelia! With FERGUS?’ Kattie was aghast. ‘But she left me a note saying she was going to London for a couple of days. She often stays with friends there. She planned to take the Mini, but she wouldn’t go anywhere with Fergus!’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Tim Tyson knew precisely the extent of the unattractiveness of Fergus’ habits, still, you could never be certain when it came to young girls. But Kattie was positive on that account.

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ she said firmly, and for a moment all the women were united, nodding their conviction that if Dorelia had gone with Fergus it was against her will. Then the awful thought came, as it had to, to Kattie.

  ‘Oh my God. You don’t mean that they, that he, in my old car … they killed Billy?’ They all turned to stare down the darkened driveway towards the gates where the body, covered in a tartan rug, still lay. Angela shuddered and Anna, crooning gently, put an arm around her shoulder.

  ‘I am afraid that is very possible,’ said Tim gently. ‘What we must do now is to talk to young Fergus and your daughter. I take it he was making for Meadow Farm?’

  Hugh’s hour of triumph had been overshadowed and soured. The concert, it is true, had been over and applauded before anyone in the gathering became aware that there was not only the body of a one-legged man outside the gateway, but also a spectacular new attraction in the shape of a beautiful and vociferous woman who had arrived to claim a baby from the composer. But before notes could be compared properly, or information swapped, reinforcements arrived from the local police (and a devil of a job they had covering up poor old Billy in rather a small tartan rug, on account of the hollow leg which had been squashed flat by the passage of the car and refused to bend the proper way for the concealing process) to usher the audience firmly past the body.

  Hugh, wishing more than anything to escape the attentions of Anna (he could still feel a tender spot on his head resulting from the last encounter), attached himself helplessly to Marjorie Pelham who, splendid in crisis, carried him off to her comfortable little cottage.

  The Puttnam household, its spirit still embodied in Kattie’s generous nature, was split into areas of concern. Obviously the main worry, for her parents at any rate, was for the welfare of Dorelia. But Angela’s acknowledged loss must be seen as the darkest area, while the unspoken loss to Kattie of the baby came a close third. Strangely, it was Anna who made things bearable for the household that night. Her strong instinct of the right way to deal with the important matters of birth and death proved invaluable. Still clutching the baby Juanita, who gazed with milky indifference on this barely remembered face, Anna bore down on Angela and took her gently to her room, where she piled duvets and blankets on the floor and made soothing brews of herb tea (did she really forage for those in the garden in the middle of the night? thought Angela sleepily in the morning) before settling the newly widowed woman to dream-filled sleep.

  In the kitchen Kattie and Clem were quarrelling. They had been bickering for an hour or so, something that happened so rarely that each was taking time to develop a technique, exploring the new form of communication. Meanwhile the squabbling, built on the inexplicable disappearance of Dorelia and exacerbated, on Kattie’s part, by the inauspicious ending of her special evening, was settling down to weary and mechanical repetition.

  The setting was verging on the squalid. The caterers, cooking generously (and expensively) for the hundred or so guests, had been contracted to clear away completely afterwards. But it seemed best to send them away until the following day when things might be resolved. Everything had been piled hastily in the kitchen. Bowls half filled with blackening salad tipped at angles between piles of plates, too hastily stacked, so that here and there a knife or fork or screwed up napkin stuck out. Each stack had its own dribble – squashed-out mayonnaise, soft cheese, melting butter which dripped down the plates and onto the tables and cupboard tops. Kattie noticed heaps of bread dumped, still in wicker baskets, on the hot covers of the Aga. They were hardening in the heat, but in her misery she had neither the energy nor the inclination to do anything about it.

  Clem had foraged in the larder and found a bottle of cheap grape brandy which Kattie used for cooking, sloshing the spirit generously into cakes and puddings. Now they were drinking reheated coffee made palatable by dollops of brandy. Every now and then Kattie pushed impatiently at a heap of crumpled blue paper napkins which had been dumped on the large table. Each time she did this a trickle of crumbs, cigarette ash and the sickly remains of a strawberry shortcake dropped out. She sighed and listened to Clem:

  ‘Why on earth did you let her go tonight? Surely she should have been here, helping you?’ Clem was trying to choke down a sick anger at the thought of his beautiful thin white daughter and Fergus being connected in any sort of way. ‘If you hadn’t asked him here in the first place …’ he had said once, and seeing the hurt in Kattie’s round eyes had backed away from the area of her lame ducks. But again Kattie felt the unfairness of his accusation. Although she recognized the anxiety which prompted it, she could not, because of her own fears, let it pass.

  ‘Clem, I’ve told you, I didn’t know she was planning to go. Until I found her note, and by then it was too late. I don’t think I could have stopped her anyway. She’s been behaving strangely ever since she came home. Quite happy mooning around doing nothing at all.’

  ‘But she’s always like that. You’ve never given her any proper direction!’

  ‘Why me? You sent her away to that school. All right, I know we both thought it was for the best, but it did her no good at all. She was my daughter when she left and a stranger three years later.’

  ‘That’s right. She was YOUR daughter, like the whole bloody world turns up on YOUR doorstep to hear YOUR darling little organ.’ Kattie gasped with pain and burst into tears. Clem was appalled.

  ‘I’m sorry darling. Kattie, I’m sorry! I’m just as much to blame. Settling Dorelia down to anything seems like cutting down flowers. It’s hard to be cross with her. But when she comes back home we’ll all have a long talk. Just the three of us. Perhaps go away together. Yes?’

  ‘Yes. And I’ll stop having ducks. Well – Fergus blast him has gone, and I rather think Hugh wants to foster himself on that strange cancer woman. Oh, but Angela. Clem, we can’t ditch Angela!’

  ‘No. Of course not. But I can’t help feeling that Angela might perhaps sort herself out. She’s not a proper lame duck anyway. Far too much talent.’ Clem did not tell Kattie that he had an appointment in the morning to see a dealer who had expressed an interest in Angela’s work. Just another complication at the moment. ‘Don’t forget she has no – ah – encumbrances any more,’ he added delicately.

  There was a tap on the kitchen door and Tim Tyson, wearing an Arran sweater over his suit trousers, looked round. He had been at the police station organizing the constables who were to visit Fergus.

  ‘May I come in? Thank you.’ He accepted a mug of coffee from Kattie and did not argue as she poured a generous slug of brandy into it.

  ‘More complications I’m afraid.’

  ‘I don’t possibly see,’ said Clem, tired rather than pompous, ‘how anything else could go wrong. There’s nothing left!’

  ‘I’m afraid there is.’ Tim, on duty now but becoming tired, spoke more sharply than he intended. ‘I’ve just been back to the station and they tell me that a constable was going to come out to see you in the morning.’ He held out a hand to quell Katt
ie’s interruption. She could think only of Dorelia. ‘We have just received a message from the French police. Your Mrs Cruickshank, the lady who lost her husband last night – well, I’m afraid that she has also lost her home. It has apparently burnt down. Been gutted for a couple of days from what we could make out.’ He sat down wearily at the deal table, pushing the crumby napkins out of the way, looking from Kattie to Clem.

  Kattie was still wearing the expensive but rather extraordinary trousered outfit that she had bought especially for this evening. In this light, her face grey with tiredness, old powder and worry, its mustard yellow and emerald green silk folds did nothing for her. The harem-style trousers laid unkind emphasis on her plump curves as she sagged in her chair with the horror of it all. She merely raised her eyebrows and looked at Clem.

  ‘Well, darling, you were quite right.’ She turned to Tim. ‘My husband was just saying that Angela, Mrs Cruickshank, now has no encumbrances. It seems he was exactly right. How on earth did the French police track her down?’

  ‘She had written a postcard to her old cleaning lady, who took it to the police. They managed to read the postmark and contacted us.’

  ‘Well, there is no point in waking her now, that’s if she has managed to sleep at all with Anna and the baby looking after her and – oh God! I can’t stop worrying about Dorelia!’ She turned away and covered her eyes with her hands.

  ‘Worrying is not going to help you, Mrs Augier. Anyway, I know Fergus Slack of old. He’s got a long record for drug offences but there’s nothing against him for anything to do with violence or, if you’ll pardon me, for sexual offences. And again, if you’ll pardon me, we don’t know yet if she went willingly or not.’

  The hard edge in Clem’s voice was unmistakable.

  ‘I can assure you, Inspector, that if Dorelia has not returned by now she is being held against her will. There was absolutely nothing between her and this young man. Good God, he’s a repulsive human being. All right, I’m sorry darling, I know you saw beyond that.’ He put his hand over Kattie’s. ‘But there could not possibly be any attraction for a girl like Dorelia in a … a … pillock … like that to make her go willingly. My guess is that Dorelia was getting ready for her journey when he commandeered the car and her with it.’

  Tim nodded wearily.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, sir, but we’ve got to look at all the possibilities. You’ve got to understand.’ He held up his hand for silence as Clem, his face mottling with anger, started to speak. ‘We are taking action, believe me. There are officers at the farmhouse now. For a start we want to have a word with our friend Fergus about the death of poor Mr Cruickshank. May I ask what he was doing wandering in the road like that? The foreign lady said something about a taxi.’ He had been unable to get a proper answer about Billy’s movements earlier in all the confusion.

  ‘Coming to visit his wife,’ said Kattie.

  ‘No idea. I thought he was in France,’ said Clem. They spoke simultaneously. Tim, resting his hands squarely on the table, looked from one to the other.

  ‘There seems to be a small failure in communication,’ he said. ‘I’ll call again as soon as I’ve got something positive to report. We have tried telephoning the farm, but they’ve been cut off. Bill not paid I expect.’ As he left the room, Kattie looked guiltily at Clem.

  ‘I’m sorry. I should have told you that Billy might be turning up. I really did not know about Anna though.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Clem. ‘Let’s try to sleep for a couple of hours.’

  Angela fell almost immediately into a deep sleep. She was put tenderly to bed by Anna, who helped her off with her clothes and lifted a voluminous white embroidered cotton nightdress, smelling of lavender, over her head. Angela, to whom this type of physical intimacy would normally have been utterly unthinkable, was so tired and bemused that she submitted, allowing her limbs to be arranged this way and that. She sipped a sweet hot herb-based liquid which Anna had somehow brewed and, half listening to the younger woman who muttered breathily as she settled herself and her baby for the night into a nest of bedclothes on the floor, she drifted away.

  She could hear shouting, laughing and a thin thread of sound which she identified as music. The stubborn little tune returned again and again, filling her head. She tried to spit it out, but could not. The music wrapped her about, became a dark dust that prevented her from seeing. She had become nothing more than a dark head, full of music, and she could not bear it. But, as she struggled to find her limbs to be free, she saw, a great distance away, points of bright light, moving steadily towards her. Her struggles ceased and she waited. Slowly, slowly they moved towards her, brightening as they drew near to where she was imprisoned. As the lights glided ever nearer she saw that they were the deck and cabin lights of a vast vessel, an ocean-going liner carrying its own rich world of light and music and laughter. As the immense vessel bore down on her she struggled once more to be free so that she could pull an arm out of the water to flag it down. A figure, large out of all proportion even with the enormous ship, stood on the prow.

  She knew that figure. She had thought she had known that figure. Once she had known him, but now the details of his face, his posture, his accustomed gestures had been lost, forgotten as time and France and nights spent beside Billy had sanded away the sharpness that she thought her memory held. Now she saw him clearly again.

  ‘Toby!’ she tried to call out, but the soft dust of the music filled her mouth and throat and the word would not come out, although it nearly burst in her head, chasing the little tune round and round.

  ‘Toby, I’m here,’ she tried again. But because she could not make the right sounds, he, giant of the dark seas, did not turn his head.

  Now something freed her. She could move her arms and legs and she was swimming across the calm deep water. The giant ship bore down on her, all sounds extinguished now but for the persistent tune and her silent scream which, released from her head, boomed back at her across the waves. The giant figurehead, unblinking, unmoving, hands set like stone into the rail that bounded the black boat, gazed unseeing across the eternal ocean. Helpless, she panicked as she knew that the liner, a world apart with its light and music, was going to sail right through her. She made one last, gigantic, lung-burning effort.

  ‘Save me, oh save me!’ she screamed. At long last her lungs worked, and the sound broke through as the great ship passed noiselessly on, leaving her to fight through layers of consciousness back through the clinging seaweed of the bedclothes to a dark awakening in her incense-scented bedroom.

  Dorelia too was lying in the darkness. She was sucking her thumb and humming to herself the little tune which had so entranced Hugh and Fergus in another time.

  She lay in the darkness because she wished it so. The room had only one light, a bright unshaded overhead bulb which brought into sharp focus every unsavoury detail of its spotted and stained grey carpet, stringy curtains and filthy woodwork. In one corner of the room was a bale of mildewed musty hay whose damp decaying smell filled her throat and made her want to choke. She had switched the light off rather than see her surroundings, and now she shivered on the bare damp mattress and pulled her sweater tightly around her. She hummed to herself and sucked her thumb, and remembered that long, cold and lonely climb up the steps of the dark tower, long ago when she was a child.

  She wondered how long she had been lying on this stained and smelly mattress. She was too frightened to be hungry but she wanted desperately to go to the lavatory.

  The door to the room was not locked – there was no key – but that ghastly Tommy-with-the-knife was patrolling up and down. The window was screwed shut. She had made a feeble attempt at prising it open after the bald-headed minder had pushed her roughly in the room, but the effort tired her and, dispirited, she had given up. She must have a pee. Still unwilling to look again on the full horror of the room (although the mildew smell was a constant reminder), she lifted her legs from the bed and stood up. She felt h
er way to where she thought the door was, running her hands along the wall. The door handle, a metal press-down lever with squeaky springs, was stiff. Rusty probably. But she pushed hard, cautiously pressing down until she felt it yield. Bit by bit she opened the door, trying to make out shapes in the grey of the passageway. A yellow square of light was the only colour. That must be the sitting room where Fergus was probably still prone on his rug. She thought longingly of Fergus, now a friend in her darkness. Although he was her captor, the cause of her present misery, he was also her only hope. After all, she knew him. He had not offered her gratuitous harm; he was a person with whom she had shared the same house, eaten at the same table and observed the same daily ritual. Whatever he had done to upset the police he could not, surely, drag her into it. Once he had slept off the dope or whatever it was, he would let her go. She moved cautiously forward.

  ‘And where do we think we’re going?’

  Grinning Tommy was standing squarely in front of her, outlined in the yellow light, stroking his face with the flat of the knife blade.

  ‘Going somewhere?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, to the bathroom.’ Dorelia hoped that her voice was not wobbling too much.

  ‘Oh yeah. In there. Don’t lock the door – and no funny business!’

  Dorelia made for the door he had indicated with a flick of his knife, went in and defiantly turned the key in the lock. Immediately a heavy thud shook the door, and another and another. Each was punctuated by a string of threats so that a sort of rhythm was established.

  ‘Come on out of there’ thud ‘you little cow’ thud ‘or I’ll slit your’ thud ‘fucking’ thud ‘throat.’ Reasoning that she had burnt her boats, Dorelia quickly used the lavatory and, wincing at each blow on the door, made a quick survey of the window, but the only pane which opened was far too small for her to escape through. She felt the rise of panic within her as the clamour carried on outside.