by Yaba Badoe
Detective Inspector Roberts, the officer in charge of the case, stated categorically to the Gazette that he intended to leave no stone unturned in pursuit of the truth. ‘We owe it to these unnamed, forgotten children to find out where they came from and who they belonged to.’ There was talk of testing the DNA of everyone alive who had lived and worked at Graylings in the past thirty years; and even Mr Furzey, the mildest, gentlest of men, was now a potential suspect. As was Miss Edith.
Apparently she had attended the proceedings. In an interview with Alexander James afterwards, she claimed she knew nothing about the contents of Miss Fielding’s trunk. She could offer no explanation either. Out on the lawn hunting for strawberries, I was inclined to believe her, though Polly was not.
‘If anyone knows something, she does,’ Polly insisted. ‘She lived there for years. She’s got to be hiding something.’
‘Like what?’ Beth and I enjoyed our visits to the Gatehouse and were both averse to thinking ill of Miss Edith. I was even beginning to like her dogs.
‘She knows what happened. I can feel it in my gut.’ Then, taking us through what the police had discovered thus far, Polly said: ‘Let’s start from the beginning. What’ve we got?’
Picking a strawberry from a pile we’d collected, Beth put it in her mouth: ‘We’ve got two mouldering babies in a trunk. They might be related, but the pathologist couldn’t tell.’
I continued: ‘One was stillborn. The other was . . . was . . .’
‘Murdered,’ Polly said emphatically. She fell down on the grass, her hair spilling over daisies. I sat down cross-legged with Beth beside me.
‘The pathologist wasn’t sure about that either,’ I remembered.
Beth agreed. ‘He said it could have been stillborn as well.’
‘So why hide ’em? Someone is guilty as hell.’
‘But who? And how can we find out?’
‘Seems to me we’ve got to stay on the same page as Malone and Leboeuf and keep on with what we’ve been doing,’ Polly said, answering my question. ‘We’ve got to keep on pestering the Bag Lady until she spills the beans.’
‘And how long is that going to take?’
‘All summer,’ Polly replied with a smile. ‘We’re going to visit her every day until she tells us everything.’
It wasn’t the sort of summer I’d envisaged when I received permission from my father to spend the holidays at Graylings. But whichever way I looked at it, getting the truth out of Miss Edith was going to be much more interesting than spending time with Nina in Rome.
On the first day of the holidays the summer seemed to stretch up to the sky like a tall mango tree laden with fruit. I intended to pluck one every day, savour it for a few minutes, suck it slowly dry, till there was nothing left but the stone and strands of orange hair stiffening in the wind.
Downstairs, Mrs Venus’s small sitting-room had recently been painted a soothing yellow, and upstairs the main bathroom had been refurbished, with a shower and Moorish tiles around the new bath and basin. The floor was covered in a brick-red carpet.
To the left of the house, a tennis court was in place, and the gardener, Mr Furzey, was working steadily to fulfil Mrs Venus’s requirements. A herb garden was being planted by the back door and a new herbaceous border created; and on the far east slope of the grounds, over a stretch of land that had been left idle by Miss Fielding, there were plans to create a woodland copse. If Mr Furzey held strong opinions about the changes taking place, or harboured thoughts about the babies in the trunk, he mostly kept them to himself. His conscience was clear; or so Belinda Bradshaw claimed he had said to her cleaner. ‘Just as well,’ Isobel replied serenely to Belinda, who had taken to trailing morsels of gossip to Graylings like a cat does captured mice. ‘I’d hate to let the poor man go.’
Methodical and diligent, Mr Furzey did everything he was asked to on the estate as quickly as he was able. But when Mrs Venus suggested that she hire a young man to help him, he agreed, visibly relieved.
The house and its grounds were in a state of transition, bending to Isobel’s will. On the first day of the holiday, I trotted obediently at her side as she described her plans for restoring the property to its former glory. Polly had refused to come with us, adopting an attitude of lofty disapproval. She didn’t care about the house or the garden; and when Isobel tried to interest her, her eyes turned heavenward. ‘Do what you got to do,’ she drawled. ‘You always do in the end, Isobel.’
As I followed her to the garden, Isobel told me that when the balustrade and steps linking the two lawns were mended, a pergola would be built across the bottom lawn; and coming out from the back of the house, a brick terrace with steps in three places. She told me many things: things I didn’t fully comprehend but listened to, conscious that no one within the family seemed to listen to the mistress of the manor.
Yet for all her talk of things – how they would change, how they would look, the colours of the plants that would clamber the pergola, the way they would blend with the terrace and its steps, merging landscape and house into one – there was one thing I knew with certainty: Isobel was depressed. She was gaunt, and her inability to sit still, to take stock of what was happening, was because she was frightened. She was tumbling into an abyss, but she wasn’t ready to acknowledge it yet. She couldn’t smell the odour of fear exuding from her own pores, the stench of crushed violets on her skin.
I sensed it as acutely as I’d perceived my mother’s distress. Recognising it for what it was, I tried to comfort Isobel. Even though I couldn’t fathom the implications of the angry assertions she made repeatedly, I did my best to listen. She said that I should never trust a cheating man; and under no circumstances was I to listen to his confession, for his guilt would consume me and in the end, taking me for granted, he’d up and leave. I expressed wonder at everything she said. I used every expression available to me, every expletive I knew in a bid to make Isobel feel better.
And while I listened, walking the garden beside her, I tried to imagine what everything would look like in the end. Not in the house and garden especially, but with the Venuses. My one wish was that Isobel would be happy again, that Peter would come down from London instead of staying away all the time. And if he couldn’t come back straight away, I wanted Theo to come home quickly. Theo would make his mother better.
I scarcely slept that first night. I stayed awake listening to the house talking to me. I heard Isobel getting up, the bath water running. I heard her weeping and then the tap turned on again, loudly. While Polly slept, I prayed to God to make Isobel better.
Theo’s arrival at the end of the week was not the success I had hoped it would be. He was full of himself and his exams. Unlike Polly, he was affectionate to his mother, though he too refused to participate in her plans for the house. Creating the perfect home didn’t appeal to his minimalist taste.
‘You’re too Home and Garden,’ he said to Isobel. ‘You’ve too much clutter about the place. If I were you I’d throw most of it out and start all over again.’
‘And end up looking like Conran?’
‘You know what I mean, Ma. I’m not into this.’ Theo looked around him as if he were a vegetarian standing in the middle of an abattoir, though in fact he was in Isobel’s new sitting-room.
‘Maybe it’s all right for someone of your generation,’ he conceded, ‘but I prefer something simpler. Don’t you, Polly?’
Of course, Polly agreed.
‘I like it,’ I said.
Polly made a slurping noise. ‘Ajuba, you always like what Isobel likes.’
‘I’m not sucking up,’ I protested.
‘You are too!’
‘Well, at least somebody likes what I’m doing.’ Pushing Theo out of the room, Isobel escorted him on a tour of her renovations.
I couldn’t understand why, when I woke the next morning, a nervous tremor passed through me, coiling in my abdomen. As the day wore on, the coil tightened until, in the middle of the afternoon, I
plucked up the courage to ask Theo a question I had wanted to ask for some time. Where was Peter? And when was he coming home again?
Theo explained that his father was in Paris covering a G7 meeting, and he would be back in London within the week. Theo was going to join him on his houseboat, before going to the Dordogne to spend the summer with Sylvie and her family. I noticed that when Theo mentioned Peter’s name, Isobel turned away.
If they were aware of their mother’s unhappiness, Polly and Theo made no concessions to it whatsoever. Incapable of adopting their detachment, I followed my instincts; I felt like a seal-cub searching for its mother, swimming blindly towards an expanse of stormy sea.
One afternoon, when I’d observed that Isobel was no longer eating proper food, grazing instead on sunflower and pumpkin seeds, cashews and walnuts, thin, cool slices of melon, she reciprocated my concern for her with an ashen smile. Her eyes were dark moons in her face, her collar bones protruded, and the mood of the house, brewing with desolation, propelled Polly and me outside. If I’m honest, I was as relieved as Polly was to leave Isobel for the Gatehouse.
We claimed we were interrogating Miss Edith. But interrogation is perhaps too grand a word for our visits with Beth, which we combined with sustained stalking of the old woman, tracking her commando style as she exercised the dogs and went shopping. Our excuse was that we were trying to get a sense of the ‘big picture’, as Malone and Leboeuf called it. We believed that if we developed a clear idea of life at Graylings in the olden days, if we could imagine what it had looked like with its furnishings, appreciating the geography of where Miss Edith and Miss Fielding slept, then we would begin to know its inhabitants and the people who worked for them: Mr Furzey included.
Observation, Malone and Leboeuf explained in True Murder, only begins to make sense when it is written down. A true detective spends much of her time writing, recording all the evidence she’s uncovered and scenes she’s witnessed, in order to fully appreciate them. ‘Writing is the key to analysing a case and solving it.’ And so it was that under instructions from Polly, Beth borrowed her mother’s Polaroid camera to photograph the old woman and the Gatehouse as documentary evidence for our scrapbook, while in the evening I noted everything down.
That afternoon, following at a safe distance, we tailed Miss Edith to the Co-op at the end of the road. She had the dogs with her. They kept looking back at us and barking as she brought them to heel. Beth took a photograph of Miss Edith entering the shop, then waited outside for a snapshot of her leaving. After a suitable interval, Polly and I shadowed the old woman inside.
She usually bought her provisions on Mondays and Thursdays, surviving on a meagre diet of Quaker porridge oats, milk, bananas, peanut butter, bread and varieties of cake. But that Thursday she bought nothing but a large bottle of Tio Pepe sherry. I was noting down the drink and the brand name as Polly read the label out loud, when, doubling back on her tracks, Miss Edith accosted us.
‘What the hell are you children doing following me around everywhere?’ she yelled. ‘What the blazes have I ever done to you?’
Polly, who had obviously thought of such an eventuality, simulated embarrassment before saying ruefully: ‘I’m sorry. I guess we should have asked your permission, but we’ve been visiting you for research, Miss Edith. You see, we’re studying you for a history project at school.’
‘Yes, history,’ I concurred, surprised by the old woman’s language. I had never heard her curse before. She was angry, and anxious to placate her, I added: ‘You see other people in Seniors are talking to their grandmothers.’
‘And we don’t have grandmothers,’ Polly lamented. ‘And poor old Beth’s grandmother is six feet under as well.’
‘So we’ve chosen you.’
She didn’t believe us. Hugging the bottle of Tio Pepe like a talisman to her shrivelled chest, she shook her head violently: ‘You’re talking nonsense both of you. And you know it. Anyway, what makes you think I’d allow you to use me? I don’t want you following me around any longer. Do you hear me?’
Polly glanced at me in a way that implied that perhaps I might be able to change Miss Edith’s mind. After all, I was able to make the Derbys and the other teachers at school think kindly of me, while they bristled at what they took to be Polly’s impertinence. So, allowing my face to crumple, I rearranged my features to elicit maximum sympathy. My eyes melting, my mouth trembling, I murmured: ‘Please, Miss Edith, we don’t have any grannies of our own to talk to, and we desperately need you for history coursework. Mr Derby says we’ve got to find out what it was like living here in the Olden Days. Please help us.’
I must have seemed on the verge of tears. A pair of leather-clad teenagers stocking up on cider stopped what they were doing. A middle-aged man buying bottles of gin looked over; and Miss Edith, appearing distracted, began mumbling incoherently. She looked up and down the aisle, tugging at the sleeve of her dung-coloured cardigan. I suspect she was acutely sensitive to the rumours circulating about her and the impression she was giving, because she seemed to relent. At any rate, she didn’t want to make a scene. And she certainly didn’t want witnesses to me bursting into tears in front of her. Thrusting the bottle of sherry at Polly, she said gruffly: ‘Well, if you’re going to pester me, you might as well make yourselves useful. Hurry along now.’
Beth took a photograph of us leaving the Co-op, then bounded ahead with the dogs, while Polly and I walked either side of Miss Edith. She moved slowly, stepping cautiously and deliberately, so it was quite arduous maintaining her pace. It takes great patience to survive being ancient, I realised. As we escorted her home, Polly grumbling at the aggravation of doing coursework in the holidays when no one took a blind bit of notice of history anyway, at least not on Planet Earth, what struck me most about Miss Edith was how changeable her moods were. Having expressed irritation at us in the shop, she grunted at Polly’s remarks, occasionally smiling. And when we returned to the Gatehouse, instead of sending us away as I’d anticipated, she invited us in.
Beth fed the dogs, then, settling us in the salon and pushing open the french windows to let in some fresh air, Miss Edith announced: ‘Fire away, girls. What is it you want to know?’
To our surprise it turned out that Miss Edith’s old room at Graylings was now Polly’s. ‘Far out!’ Polly shrieked, as Miss Edith talked of the rose room, its view of the garden, its gentle embrace of the cedar and the setting sun.
‘Did you have horses?’ Beth asked. For half an hour, Miss Edith narrated tales of Miss Fielding’s love of animals: the horses and the dogs she had kept; how heartbroken Olivia had been when the old mare, Medea, had died.
‘Poor Olivia,’ Miss Edith sighed. ‘She couldn’t afford to replace her. We cut back on the heating and everything. No more port after dinner. No more pheasant or Turkish delight. We even had to let the Bramleys go and instead of investing in central heating, we were reduced to using the old ceramic hot-water bottles in our beds. ‘If you’re cold,’ Olivia would say, ‘you should put an extra eiderdown on the bed.’ I froze, my dears, I simply froze in that house. So buying another mare was out of the question. We had to face facts.’
‘Did you hunt?’
‘I didn’t hunt, but Miss Fielding did. Do you hunt?’
‘Not yet,’ Beth replied. ‘My sister Dinah does, and soon I’m going to as well.’
Miss Edith shuddered.
‘Don’t you like hunting?’ I asked.
She refused to respond, turning her head away: the first inkling I had that Miss Edith was not wholly supportive of Miss Fielding’s hobbies.
‘What was Miss Fielding like?’ Polly asked in her most beguiling voice.
‘I don’t think I can answer that question.’
‘Why not?’
Miss Edith hesitated. She started to say something and stopped, a nerve at the side of her mouth contracting. She lifted up a glass of lemonade, taking a sip. The glass in her hand shook. I know, because I was sitting beside her. I stared
at her, absorbing her anxiety like a piece of blotting paper sucking up ink.
Now it was my turn: ‘Did Miss Fielding like children?’
‘She adored them. She simply adored them.’
She had responded too quickly, her bottom lip twitching. It was then, I believe, that our investigation turned a corner, in the words of Malone and Leboeuf, and we realised that behind Miss Edith’s eccentric facade was a woman with a wealth of secrets to tell. And there was something else, something I spent the next eight years trying to understand. In Miss Edith’s wary hazel eyes, I saw a flash of fear. Not to the same extent as Isobel, perhaps, but by linking the two women in my conscious mind, I began to wonder if our probing about the house – with questions ranging from the geography to the relationships of the people within it – hadn’t aroused it, quickening it with our breath. I didn’t know if such a thing was possible, so I wondered out loud:
‘Is there something wrong with the house, Miss Edith? Doesn’t it like us? Is it making Isobel ill?’
‘Fiddlesticks!’ Miss Edith laughed. ‘Olivia adored children. Every year, we used to throw a party for the village. A summer party with cakes and trifle. You’d have enjoyed yourself, Ajuba.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘As sure as I am of anything, my dear. You’d have loved it. That house and its grounds have had more children running through it than you can begin to imagine.’
According to Malone and Leboeuf, ‘An aspiring detective should never leave a stone unturned. The good detective,’ they wrote in their column, ‘always checks and double-checks every aspect of a suspect’s story.’
Consequently, as soon we left the Gatehouse that afternoon, we tracked down Mr Furzey in the garden. Polly said, and I agreed with her, that we had to verify Miss Edith’s account of the good old days: when pheasant and Turkish Delight were consumed for dinner, and a couple called the Bramleys cooked for Miss Fielding and drove her and Miss Edith around. We had decided, between us, that Mr Furzey was our best source of secondary information; another route to establishing the truth.