Closed at Dusk

by Monica Dickens

  ‘How can we be sure there ever was a nightingale?’ Chris asked William. ‘He conveniently didn’t tell you until they’d migrated.’

  ‘But why would he lie?’ William liked Frank, because he was fulsome about The Sanctuary.

  ‘He admitted to me some time ago that he was a birdwatcher,’ Jo said from the stove.

  ‘You hear confessions in the tea-room?’ Tessa said gloomily, hands round her drink on the table, not looking up.

  ‘He told me a lot of stuff about ducks and thrushes and why pheasants are saved from extinction by being shot.’ Jo turned round for her effect. ‘But he never said a word about nightingales.’

  ‘Let it drop,’ Dorothy said. ‘Scapegoating won’t bring Tessa’s dog back. Anyway, suppose he did do it, for some bizarre reason, why would he fish her up two months later and bring her here?’

  ‘A bluff?’ Jo suggested. ‘To make you say just what you’ve said.’

  ‘There’s no evidence against the man,’ Dorothy said. ‘There were hundreds of people there that night. Anyone could have done it.’

  ‘But why?’ Tessa went back and back to that. ‘It’s sick.’

  ‘Want me to stop letting people come to The Sanctuary?’ Her father stroked her hair, and she leaned against his shoulder.

  ‘I don’t know, Daddy. All I know is, someone’s got a grudge against us, and that’s horrible. Oh, hell. Everything is going wrong.’

  Jo’s cue to say brightly, as if she had not heard, ‘It’s just about ready, Tessa. Shall I go and call Rob?’

  Rob was in the sitting-room watching something unsuitable on television.

  ‘Better turn that off’ – Jo did so – ‘or Chris will be angry with you again.’ She had not heard Chris scolding Rob, but he might have, since Rob had been acting up today. She might as well drop in a tickler.

  The next day, coming from the downstairs cloakroom, Rob met Chris going there.

  ‘Do up your zip,’ Chris said.

  ‘Always telling me!’

  ‘Did you wash your hands?’

  ‘Yes.’ Chris was always going to nag, so Rob was always going to lie. Rob’s mother was never angry with him. Why was Chris angry, like Jo said?

  ‘Come here a sec, old man,’ Chris said. ‘I’ll do up your shoelaces before you fall over them.’

  ‘Not there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re standing by the dumb waiter and that’s a bad place.’

  ‘All right.’ Chris moved to him. While he was on one knee tying the laces, Rob stuck out his lip and said to the top of his head, which was brown and soft like a dog, ‘I miss Charlotte.’

  ‘Of course you do. And I’m sure she misses you, wherever she is.’ At least he didn’t say ‘in heaven’ like some grown-ups.

  ‘She isn’t in the ground, you know. She got out. She’s inside the dumb waiter.’

  ‘Oh, stuff.’ Chris sat back on his heels. ‘You don’t expect me to believe that?’

  ‘She is!’ Rob stamped both feet, one, two, like coming to attention at Cub marching. ‘You know what?’

  ‘What?’ Chris smiled up at him, small teeth white through the beard, very doggy.

  ‘Jo put her in there.’

  ‘Come on, Rob.’ Chris got up. ‘Go and get the new spanner Wum gave you. We’re going now.’

  ‘She did, she did!’ Whether Jo had done that before or after Charlotte drowned made no difference. Nobody believed Rob.

  While they had been talking about Frank Pargeter, Jo had one of her genius ideas. Since he was under some family suspicion about the dog, and since this would be the last day he would come here until next spring, Jo made a detour through the gathering darkness on the way to her car, and, humming lightly, pushed the graceful statue of the proud cat-goddess Bastet off its pedestal in the temple. Let them suspect him of that too.

  At Bramble Bank, Jo poured herself a large whisky. She never accepted anything except wine or sherry at The Sanctuary. With the second whisky, she sat down before Alec’s picture.

  Proud of me, aren’t you, the way I pull things off? I have liquidated, so far, one useless old woman, a mute budgerigar and a spoiled lap dog. I’ve got everybody rattled, even old Dottie, who thought she was too rational and analytical to believe in the supernatural. A lot of them think that – you lot up there must laugh, those of you who are putting in the odd insubstantial appearance down here – until you actually confront them with a ghost.

  But it’s not enough. It’s never enough. Vengeance is the gluttonous god. What next, Alec? Exterminate the furry lover? Still not enough. Tarty Miss Tessa would soon find another man. No. For our pièce de résistance, ladies and gentlemen …

  Oh no, Josephine, you can’t kill her. I must. You’re going too far. Not far enough. Jo moved Alec’s picture back and forth to indicate conversation. You don’t think I can do it? How? Alec was always so literal. Wait and see. There’s time.

  Jo got up and stretched like a cat. ‘I am the goddess Bastet, the all-powerful. I have plenty of time.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Frank and Faye were both at home when William Taylor came to their house.

  He sat on the edge of the chair by the electric fire and would not accept tea or coffee or anything to drink. Frank and Faye sat on the sofa and looked at him expectantly. Faye had on last winter’s slippers, but she wasn’t the kind of woman to mind that.

  ‘Nice of you to let me come,’ Mr Taylor said affably, but not at ease. ‘I just wondered – well, I suppose you couldn’t give us any clues about anyone at the Festival who might have drowned my daughter’s dog? Did you see anything at all? It could have been done when the floodlights were turned out and everyone was watching the fireworks.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Frank said, ‘I really am, Mr Taylor. I can’t help you.’

  ‘There’s another mystery too.’ William Taylor frowned and looked at his hands, folding and rubbing them. ‘The – er, the statue of the cat in the little white temple. It was broken, probably some time on Sunday. I wondered if you happened to see anyone in there?’

  Frank shook his head. ‘I showed my friend the temple, but only from a distance, because it was late.’

  ‘I see.’ William cleared his throat. ‘Well …’ He stood up. ‘I don’t want to keep you if you’re busy. I just thought …’

  Embarrassed, he got himself out of the door and drove away.

  ‘Faye.’ Frank shut the front door and stood with his back against it. ‘They think I did it. The dog, and now the cat statue. My God, they think it was me. Me who loves that place, who kept their nightingales safe, found their dog …’

  ‘Ungrateful buggers.’ Faye snapped her fingers in front of Frank’s eyes, because he was staring into space. ‘Don’t look so shattered, Frank. Be angry. “Let the anger out,” they’re always telling old Mr Cassidy, and he comes scuttling down the hall like a crab and bangs his stick on my desk. I move my chair back. “Go it!” I say.’

  ‘I can’t.’ Frank shook his head and went through to sit in the chair where William Taylor had sat. ‘I’m just badly hurt, that’s all.’

  ‘Don’t do them that favour,’ Faye said. ‘Don’t let them hurt you. I know their sort.’

  ‘No – no, you don’t. They’re good people. They love animals and flowers and all living things. That’s what hurts. I like them.’

  ‘Not now, you don’t.’ Faye folded her arms and looked down at him from her height.

  ‘Yes, now. You think I’m daft – well, that’s not news. Faye, I sort of – I love that family.’

  ‘I know you do.’ She smiled broadly, and he saw all the folds of her chins from below. ‘I do think you’re daft, but I understand.’

  ‘No one else would.’

  ‘Who cares? It’s you and me, Frank. We know each other. We let each other be.’

  When William went into the library to see how Jo was getting on with the books, he found her with a syringe, injecting wallpaper glue under a leather corne
r. Her glossy black hair swung forward into two crescents that nearly met across her face as she bent over the books.

  ‘You are clever.’ He watched her put a square of paper and cardboard over the corner and clamp it with a big clip.

  ‘I found a book with drawings of the manor farm as it used to look before your ancestor rebuilt it into this noble pile.’

  ‘There are stacks of papers put away somewhere,’ William said, ‘and the architect’s drawings for the rebuilding. I always thought I might do something with them, if I ever retire. There’s no proper history of this place, and there should be.’

  ‘Why don’t you get someone to start doing some of the research?’ Jo put the glued book aside and examined the covers of another, fingering it lightly and with care.

  ‘You want the job?’ William liked to tease her about always volunteering for extra work.

  ‘If you think I could do it.’

  ‘I mean, I’d pay you, of course.’

  ‘That isn’t why I offered.’

  ‘Don’t get defensive.’ William was not sure of Jo’s financial situation. She owned her cottage, and her husband must have left her some money, or she would have found a full-time job, better paid than the tea-room. ‘We could work something out.’

  ‘I’d like that. Perhaps before you start looking out the papers, you could tell me some of the things you know about The Sanctuary’s history, when you’ve got time.’

  ‘Good idea. This room, for instance.’ He looked at his watch, and sat down on the arm of one of the dark red leather chairs. ‘When Desmond Cobb rebuilt the Elizabethan house in the eighteenth century, he had this room extended over some of the outbuildings, where the tea-room is now.’

  ‘Was it always a library?’

  ‘More or less. It was a billiard room too, before the last war, but when the Air Force was billeted here, they wrecked the table. It’s had its ups and downs.’

  ‘Your mother died in here, didn’t she?’ Jo looked up at him from under the symmetrically shaped brows and thick dark lashes.

  ‘Yes, she did, actually.’

  Troutie had telephoned him at the Bath office. ‘On the lib’ry floor, Billie. She’d pulled down a whole lot of those boxes and piles of papers, as if she’d been trying to get up. Oh, I hate to tell you.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Doctor Higgs and I got her on her bed. Bit of a job because Miss Sylvia was stiff, see, from laying there dead so long.’

  ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can. Who’s with her?’

  ‘Me, of course. And my Ruth’s here.’

  They were drinking soup out of cracked mugs in the cluttered clearing that was William’s mother’s living space at the kitchen end of the library, and beginning to shift the nearer outcrops of furniture and old newspapers and clothes and empty tin cans and dirty dog and cat dishes and rolled-up rugs which had accumulated round Sylvia all through the house as she moved from room to room in these last years.

  They had laid her on the deplorable mattress which she had brought down here from the servants’ corridor. Her thin face was contorted and bruised, as if she had fought her way out of life into death, her stiff grey hair sticking out on the hard yellowed pillow.

  William had sunk down on the floor in a storm of weeping that took him completely by surprise.

  His sister Harriet came with Matthew and they stayed in a hotel because there was no habitable bedroom in the house. ‘No one ever quite gets over losing their mother, because they never get used to being nobody’s child any more,’ Harriet had said. ‘It will be easier for us, though, since she was never really a proper mother.’

  That makes it worse!’ William had cried, as loud as he could cry in the lounge of the Wheatsheaf, with three people watching television in the corner.

  ‘How?’

  He could not explain the black void – had never been able to describe to anyone, even Dottie, the vain relentless search for what you can never find.

  Jo’s November project was to get closer to William, and thus soften him up for the maximum pain.

  Tessa’s death was not worked out in detail. Jo was not yet ready to replace the luxury of bizarre, blood-curdling fantasies with a workmanlike plan. There were many tempting possibilities, easier to come by than your run-of-the-mill whodunnit murder, because Marigold, having achieved her ultimate revenge, would not really care whether she was caught or not. But however it was brought about, the mortification of having been conned into a trusting friendship with a black-haired woman with frosted streaks who did not exist would sharpen the agony of William’s loss to the last excruciating edge.

  The history of The Sanctuary was a lovely ploy. William loved to talk about this place. He told Jo things he remembered from his childhood, and things his grandparents and Mary Trout had told him from the past. Not things his mother had told him. They did not seem to have been close, and from what Jo had picked up in her magpie fashion, she had been a strange, solitary woman.

  ‘She had a very hard life,’ William told Jo, as they went through the churchyard gate to look at gravestones and memorial tablets. ‘Her mother, Geraldine, was a strong-minded woman who always got her own way. She married Walter and Beatrice’s eldest son, and they carried on the work of making a haven for animals and birds. Their only son was killed on the Somme.’

  William showed Jo the ornate memorial plaque in the church:

  LIONEL WALTER COBB. 1895–1916.

  O youths to come shall drink air warm and bright,

  Shall hear the bird cry in the sunny wood,

  All my Young England fell today in fight:

  That bird, that wood, was ransomed by our blood!

  ‘Sylvia was all they had left. It wasn’t enough. She was about fourteen, shy, not pretty, bullied by her mother, who discouraged affection between her and her father. Troutie told me. She was sixteen then, a servant girl in her first job. Sit down a minute, and I’ll tell you what else Troutie told me.’

  They moved a couple of embroidered kneelers and sat in a front pew of the chilly little church.

  ‘When Sylvia was about nineteen she fell passionately in love with a man called Jock, who was only alive because he’d been in railways during the war, instead of the Army. That made him “unsuitable”, you see: the railways, and being alive. My mother couldn’t marry him. He couldn’t even come to the house – though he did secretly. He used to sneak in by the library window, over the roof of the harness room.’

  William sat loosely on the narrow pew, hands between knees, looking rather wistfully at the bare altar and the small gilt eagle on the lectern. Jo watched his profile, listening with the right expression, if he should turn to her.

  ‘Sylvia wasn’t capable of defying her parents, but gradually, with the encouragement of Troutie, who was married herself by now, she began to plan how she would go off with Jock. But while she was still getting up her nerve to tell him, Jock got sick of being ostracized, and disappeared.’

  ‘Oh, – poor Sylvia!’ Jo cried, she hoped not too theatrically. ‘What a tragedy.’

  ‘It scarred her.’ William closed his lips and thought for a moment. Then he turned to Jo with a brighter face. ‘Ten years later, she married Eric Taylor, my father: older, unexciting, a solicitor for the land agents which later grew into my firm, Taylor and Birch.’

  They went outside and he showed her his mother’s grave: ‘Wife of Eric and mother of William, Matthew and Harriet.’ Nearby were Beatrice Cobb and Walter, removed from his first resting place in the mausoleum opposite Beatrice’s bedroom window; the Reverend Hardcastle had been placed at a discreet distance.

  ‘Are you going to put your mother’s story into the history of The Sanctuary?’ Jo asked.

  ‘Not like that.’ William laughed. His face was smiling and boyish again, after being serious in church. ‘It’s so sad, and for my mother’s sake, it shouldn’t be forgotten. So I told it to you because you’re a good friend to this family, and you’re interested.
’

  ‘I am all of that.’ Jo bent to pull a thistle growing roughly above the navel of poor frustrated Sylvia, who seemed to have been one of the dimmer wits of this dynasty.

  William went back to the garden, Jo to the village shop to get cough syrup and aspirin for Dorothy, who had gone off to work late with a sore throat, and might not get to the chemist. She was not quite so on top of things these days: less crisply efficient, occasionally forgetful.

  The criminal who finally confesses to the cunningly sympathetic police-woman does himself a favour, as well as the police. He may regret the confession in the light of future events, but the unburdening itself felt good. Marigold was gaining from William’s family stories, but he also liked telling them to understanding, concerned Jo.

  Marigold had now been dear invaluable Jo, ‘good friend to this family,’ for almost six months, and occasionally, when Jo was most pleased with herself, Marigold butted in with irritated revulsion. Stop being this sickening, Jo! At first she had been able to snap out of it in an instant, and laugh at her performance and applaud it. Now she could not always do that. She would come home to Bramble Bank and not be able to stop being Jo, busy bee to the Taylors, by appointment. Ringing the house to remind Dorothy about Folly’s steroid pill, sending a birthday card to Rob, dipping into the thick pile of papers and letters to make a show of extracting a few notes for William’s history.

  Remember me? Marigold could not always get back in. There had been times when she had decided: That’s it. I can’t stand this woman Jo any longer. I’ve got to abandon this charade and go away. But step by step, Jo led Marigold towards her goal: Flusher, Troutie, Geraldine’s lilies, Charlotte, the statue of Bastet. It couldn’t stop, until the end.