The Judgement of Strangers

by Taylor, Andrew

  She was standing just outside the bus shelter haranguing the people inside – three hairy youths in T-shirts and jeans, and a fat girl with dyed blonde hair and a short pink dress.

  ‘Parasites,’ she was saying. ‘You ruin the village for everyone. If I had my way, I’d bring back the birch. And which of you did those horrible things to my cat?’

  ‘Audrey,’ I said, laying a hand on her shoulder, ‘let’s go back to the cottage.’

  She whirled round. Her cheeks wobbled – by now she was gobbling like a turkey, making half-articulate sounds. Her breath smelt of sweet sherry. I took her arm, but she tore it away from me. She swung back to the young people in the bus shelter. Before I could stop her, she darted towards the tallest of the youths, a strapping boy with several days’ growth of beard on his face.

  ‘You’re scum,’ she shrieked. And she spat in his face.

  I seized Audrey’s arm again and tried to drag her away. Simultaneously the girl in the pink dress slapped Audrey’s face. Audrey screamed, a high animal sound.

  ‘Shut up, you dried-up old bitch,’ the girl yelled, bringing her face very close to Audrey’s. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, swanning around pretending to be Lady Muck? Don’t you know everyone laughs at you?’

  There were running footsteps behind me. Charlene appeared beside me in the doorway.

  ‘You can shut that big mouth of yours, Judy.’ Charlene took Audrey’s other arm and pulled her gently outside. ‘Come along, Miss Oliphant.’

  Judy, the girl in pink, took a step after Audrey but stopped when Charlene glared at her.

  ‘Kevin,’ Charlene said to one of the other boys. ‘Aren’t you meant to be at work?’

  He stared at his shuffling feet and said he was just going.

  Charlene and I helped Audrey across the road and into Tudor Cottage. Fortunately there were no customers in the tea room. We took Audrey upstairs and into the sitting room, where she sank into the armchair by the window. She was still trembling, but less violently than before and her face was pale where it had previously been red. I glanced out of the window. The bus shelter appeared to be empty.

  ‘I’m going to fetch her a cup of tea,’ Charlene told me. ‘And one of those pills Dr Vintner left. Can you stay with her? I won’t be long.’

  Charlene left us alone.

  ‘Do sit down,’ Audrey said faintly. ‘I always think that chair needs a man. There’s a clean ashtray over there …’

  The effort to act normally seemed to exhaust her still more. For a moment she said nothing. I noticed on the little table beside her chair an empty glass and a red exercise book, probably the one I had seen in her office the other day.

  Audrey peered out of the window, down at the empty bus shelter. ‘I was sitting here after lunch, writing my journal, when I saw them,’ she said quietly, looking not at me but the bus shelter. ‘I knew they were up to no good. They had been in the pub. The three of them with that dreadful girl. No better than she should be … And they were laughing and giggling, and I knew they were laughing at me and Lord Peter. I had to say something. No one else will. It’s not right that evil should go unpunished.’ She stared at me. ‘And if no one else will punish evil, then we must do it ourselves. You do agree with me, David, don’t you? David?’

  On Friday evening, after Evensong, Doris Potter was waiting for me on the bench by the south porch.

  ‘Can you spare a moment, Vicar?’

  I went and sat beside her on the bench. I had noticed her in church but thought nothing of it. I said Evensong on Tuesdays and Fridays, and she usually tried to come to at least one of them. I was in no particular hurry to get home. I knew we were having a cold supper. Besides, since our conversation on Wednesday evening, Vanessa and I had not had a great deal to say to each other.

  ‘I saw that solicitor the other day,’ Doris said.

  ‘Mr Deakin?’

  She nodded. ‘He’s asked me to stay on at the house for a while – try and clean it up a bit.’ She stared down at her rough, red hands. ‘He says the old lady left me something in her will.’

  ‘I’m not surprised – after all you did for her.’

  She shrugged impatiently. ‘There’s a bit of money which will come in handy, I don’t mind admitting. There’s something else too. She added it to her will a few months before she died. A – a – what’s it called?’

  ‘A codicil?’

  ‘That’s it. She got me to ring Mr Deakin and he came to the house a couple of times. I knew it was about her will, but she didn’t tell me what it was. But Mr Deakin did. She’s gone and left me some land. Carter’s Meadow. You know – that bit of land in Roth Park – between the garden and the housing estate near the reservoir.’ She glanced at me, her grey eyes calm and serious. ‘Where you and Rosemary found the blood and Lord Peter’s fur.’

  ‘But doesn’t that belong to the Cliffords?’

  Doris shook her head. ‘It wasn’t sold with the rest of the land. The Bramleys didn’t own it. And it’s not Youlgreave land either, not family – it doesn’t go with the Old Manor House. It was Lady Youlgreave’s.’

  From what Doris told me, Carter’s Meadow was an anomaly. According to Lady Youlgreave, it had once belonged to a large farm in the northern part of the parish, the part which was now underwater. For many years it had been leased to the Youlgreaves, but the owner had refused to sell it to them outright and had even tried to break the lease.

  ‘There was bad blood between him and the family,’ Doris said, watching me carefully. ‘Something to do with Francis, she thought.’

  Because Francis killed a cat in Carter’s Meadow?

  In the nineteen-thirties, Doris went on, when they built the Jubilee Reservoir, Carter’s Meadow had at last come on the open market and Lady Youlgreave had bought it, intending to give it to her husband as a present. But the sale of Roth Park and then the war and her husband’s death prevented this; because the land belonged directly to Lady Youlgreave, it had not been sold with the rest of the estate.

  ‘I think she’d forgotten all about it until that man came to call,’ Doris said. ‘He wanted to buy it, you see, but she took against him.’

  ‘Which man?’

  ‘Toby Clifford. He tried to push her into selling it, but she wouldn’t budge. You know what she was like – she could be so obstinate. Then he tried to get me to do his dirty work for him.’ Doris frowned. ‘Bare-faced cheek. We were in the hall and I was showing him out, and he pulled out a wallet. Said maybe we could come to an arrangement.’ She snorted. ‘I told him he and his money weren’t wanted.’

  ‘Why did he want the land?’

  ‘Something to do with his plans for Roth Park. He thinks big, that one. Eyes bigger than his stomach.’ Her face creased into a smile full of mischief. ‘The only reason she took against him was because he looked like a girl with all that hair. The thing is, now she’s gone and left me that land. The Clifford boy’s still interested in buying it – Mr Deakin told me. But I don’t know what to do for the best. She wouldn’t have liked me to sell Carter’s Meadow to him.’

  ‘I don’t think you should worry about that,’ I said. ‘You can do whatever you like with the land, unless Lady Youlgreave laid down any conditions in the will.’

  ‘So do you think I should let him have it? If he offers a fair price, that is.’

  I thought of Toby and Joanna, camping like a pair of waifs in that tumbledown house. And I thought of the hints I’d heard about Toby. I thought of the things that Toby had told me about Joanna, and Joanna had told me about Toby.

  Toby was a determined young man, and if Carter’s Meadow was essential for his plans for Roth Park, then the timing of Lady Youlgreave’s death must have been convenient for him. I glimpsed melodramatic possibilities: a visit to a vulnerable old woman when the house was empty; another refusal countered by a quick push; a disguised voice on the telephone; knocking over the medicine in the bedroom to suggest a reason why Lady Youlgreave might have tripped on
the hearthrug. I shook my head, trying to clear it of these fancies. But a residue of doubt remained.

  ‘If I were you,’ I said to Doris, ‘I’d hang on to the land for a while. Wait and see.’

  28

  At lunchtime on Sunday, Rosemary said that she could not possibly spare the time to come to Roth Park: she had to work. We did not press her. Michael wanted to go because of the swimming pool. Vanessa wanted to go in order to see Francis Youlgreave’s room. Even though her access to the family papers was now in doubt, and some of the papers had been destroyed, she was still determined to write the biography – far more so than she had been when Lady Youlgreave was alive. It was as if the Youlgreaves had infected her with a bacillus, and the disease would have to run its course.

  ‘There must be other materials,’ she said over lunch. ‘Just because nobody’s found them yet, it doesn’t mean they’re not around if one only looks in the right place. Perhaps I should go to Rosington.’

  ‘I doubt if you’ll find much there.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’m sure there’s some public record of him,’ I said carefully, aware that Rosemary and Michael were listening to us. ‘The dates of his appointments, where he lived and so on.’

  ‘Yes – but did people talk about him when you lived in Rosington?’

  ‘Occasionally. Gossip, mainly. But that’s not really what you want, is it?’

  ‘It all helps.’ She looked at me across the table, and I had the feeling that she saw me properly for the first time since our conversation on Wednesday evening. ‘I’m going to write this book, David, I really am.’

  We finished the meal in silence. I wanted to go to Roth Park because I would see Joanna. I didn’t want to go for the same reason. Every night since Wednesday I’d dreamed about her. Try as I might to forget her, the image of her lingered in my waking hours as well.

  At half past three, Vanessa, Michael and I walked slowly up the drive of Roth Park. Michael had his bathing costume and a towel, Vanessa carried a notebook and I had a bunch of roses from the Vicarage garden. Vanessa had insisted that we take the roses.

  It was a warm afternoon, still sultry, but sunnier than it had been in the past few days. The house came into view. The E-type Jaguar was parked beside the empty fountain. I felt uneasy, as if some primitive part of me sensed that we were being watched, as if we might be walking into an ambush. I glanced up at the tower at the far end of the house. My eyes found the windows belonging to Joanna’s room, the one under Francis Youlgreave’s.

  Vanessa said, ‘It’s quite a drop, isn’t it? I wonder if he was killed instantly. I must try the local papers. They must have something in their back files about it.’

  ‘I imagine the Youlgreaves tried to hush it up.’

  ‘Yes, but there’ll be something. But of course the big question is what is – or was – in the journals. There may have been a suicide note or something.’ She hugged her notebook. ‘It’s so frustrating.’

  Michael watched us as we talked, his eyes flicking from one to the other. He spent most of that summer watching us.

  ‘Hello.’ Toby was standing in the path through the shrubbery at the corner of the house. ‘Come through this way. I’ve got chairs down by the pool.’

  He was wearing a pair of shorts – cut-off jeans – and nothing else. Even his feet were bare. His hair flowed on either side of his central parting, twin waterfalls of ginger curls. The bones of the shoulders and the ribcage stood out clearly. His body was slighter than I had expected and almost hairless. I remembered then what he usually made it so easy to forget: how young he was.

  ‘Rosemary not with you?’

  ‘She felt she had to work,’ Vanessa replied. ‘She’s got a holiday reading list as long as my arm.’

  ‘Shame.’ Toby led us into the shrubbery. ‘Joanna sends her apologies, by the way. She’s lying down. She woke up with a foul headache, and it’s been growing steadily worse.’

  Lying down in the room below Francis Youlgreave’s. I was both frustrated and relieved. Thank God she’s not here. Yet while I thought this, my nails were digging into the palms of my hands because I had wanted to see her so badly.

  We reached the path beside the terrace. Someone had cut back the grass to an uneven stubble. To our left, the east facade of the house reared up to the sky. We picked our way across the ragged lawn.

  ‘I’m beginning to think we’re making a difference here at last,’ Toby said. ‘I hope we’ll be playing croquet by this time next year.’

  I doubted it. Among the stubble were molehills and stumps of thistles. Brambles had colonized the former flowerbed beneath the terrace and in places were spreading into the lawn. It struck me then with renewed force what an insanely difficult job Toby had taken on. Surely he was too intelligent not to realize that Roth Park needed an ocean of money poured over it? Or was his belief in his own powers so strong that he had drifted into fantasy? Or was it simply that age had not yet blunted his ambitions, that the never-ending compromises that come with maturity had not yet hit him?

  ‘Gosh,’ Michael said, and whistled.

  He was a few paces ahead of us and had seen the swimming pool first. Freshly painted, it glowed in its stone-lined hollow. It seemed much larger than it had in its derelict state. The water was clear and blue. The flagstones around the pool had been weeded and swept. The little changing hut with the verandah, where Rosemary and I had sheltered on the afternoon of the storm, gleamed a fresh, clean white in the sunshine. The springboard had either been replaced or re-covered.

  ‘Not bad, eh?’ Toby said. ‘Take care of the luxuries and the essentials will take care of themselves.’

  Near the changing hut was a row of four deckchairs. Beside one of them was the radio, a heavy cut-glass ashtray and a paperback novel.

  Vanessa and I made appropriate noises of admiration. Toby smiled and stretched his arms above his head, reminding me suddenly and incongruously of Lord Peter when he was well fed and pleased with life.

  ‘How would you like to do this?’ Toby asked Vanessa. ‘Would you like to see the room first or have a swim? Or you might like a cup of tea?’

  ‘I’d like to see the room, please.’

  Toby smiled at her. ‘I’m afraid there’s not much to see. Not unless you’re psychic and can decode the vibrations, or whatever psychics do.’ He turned to Michael and me. ‘Would you like to come?’

  I didn’t want to see the room again. I did not want to remember my last visit. Besides, if I went up to Francis’s room, there was a very real risk that I would bump into Joanna. I could not say that I had seen the room before, because Toby did not know of that visit to Roth Park and my conversation with Joanna. Nor for that matter did Vanessa. I glanced at Michael: he was staring wistfully at the water and that gave me my cue.

  ‘I’ll stay here with Michael,’ I said. ‘Watch him swim.’

  Vanessa looked sharply at me.

  ‘It’s up to you,’ Toby said. ‘There’re towels in the hut. Are you sure you’ll be all right?’

  Toby seemed excited, in a hurry to be gone. I even wondered if for some reason he wanted to be alone with Vanessa; but that was ridiculous. The two of them walked towards the house. Michael went into the hut to get changed. I moved one of the deckchairs, the one nearest the pool, into a patch of shade. There was a wet footprint on the slab that had been under the deckchair: a small, bare foot – too small for Toby’s so it was almost certainly Joanna’s. Presumably she had been out here until a few moments ago. Had she suddenly felt unable to cope with us? Or unable to cope with me?

  Michael came out of the hut, suddenly shy in a pair of black swimming trunks. I smiled at him and he darted towards the water. There was a great splash. His head appeared, the hair plastered against his skull.

  ‘What’s it like?’ I shouted.

  ‘Freezing. It’s wonderful.’

  He looked younger in the water, less guarded, less self-conscious. He turned away from me and began t
o swim towards the shallow end of the pool, using a primitive crawl that made a lot of noise for very little return. Watching Michael, I stepped forward to the side of the pool. I heard a noise behind me, half concealed by the splashing. I turned.

  Joanna was sitting in the deckchair I had moved from the edge of the pool.

  For a second I could not speak. I knew I must look a fool, standing there open-mouthed. Joanna wore a white wrap that came down to her ankles. It was made of fine cotton, or perhaps silk, and there were long splits in the material from the armpits down to the thighs. Underneath the wrap was a green bikini, still damp to judge by the marks on the wrap. She smiled up at me. It was the sort of smile that hints at shared secrets.

  ‘Toby said you were lying down. Is your headache better?’

  ‘I haven’t got a headache.’ She spread her arms wide, a gesture which made the wrap fall open, revealing the bikini, revealing the high, firm breasts. ‘He thought I wasn’t in a fit state to receive visitors.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you’re not ill.’

  ‘Come and sit down.’

  I glanced back at the pool. Michael had reached the far end and was swimming back to us. Joanna waved to him. There could be no harm in talking to Joanna, I told myself. Michael was our chaperone. Not that we would need one, of course. I sat down beside Joanna and tried not to stare at her. Her voice was slightly slurred and the whites of her eyes were bloodshot. I wondered if she might be on drugs. That might explain why Toby did not want her to meet us.

  Her eyes slid towards me and away. ‘So Rosemary didn’t come?’

  ‘She had to work, I’m afraid. Oxbridge entrance coming up, and she’s very tense about that.’

  ‘I think she didn’t want to see Toby.’

  I didn’t say anything. In a sense, I did not want to hear any more.

  ‘I think they had a quarrel,’ Joanna went on. ‘They were both up here, in the house.’

  There was a silence. Then I moistened my lips and said, ‘When?’

  ‘On Wednesday. He drove her up to London the day before. But on Wednesday they came here.’ The green eyes slid towards me again and this time they did not slide away.