by Susan Sallis
I hadn’t thought of Daphne. She probably knew all about Maude Smith anyway after Roland’s drunken get-together with his father, and the ensuing correspondence of last summer with Vicky. It struck me suddenly that if Roland had confided in his mother, it was more than likely that a lot of people knew about Maude Smith.
‘That’s a good idea, Daisy. I’ll put it to the committee!’
Rose said, ‘By the way, Mum, Aunt Merry has finished with Gus, hasn’t she? Only I think he’s got a thing about Hermione.’
I laughed, once more astonished by their sheer empathy, kissed them both and tucked them in tighter, making the three-foot bed look like a giant papoose. I wondered whether they would talk about this into the wee small hours, but when I checked on them less than an hour later they were both asleep, arms and hair everywhere.
Meanwhile we finished clearing away supper and went back into the sitting room to ‘make a few decisions’, as Meriel put it. Tom stoked the fire again, Dad fiddled with the tree lights and got them going, Meriel sat on the rug, Gus took the space next to Hermione on the sofa, and Dad, Tom and I eventually collapsed into the remaining chairs. I found myself eyeing Hermione and Gus, and then wondering how on earth I could do such a thing in the middle of this horrible crisis. But, somehow, it helped.
I said, ‘Daisy suggested that Daphne Beard could help out with sleeping arrangements. Shall I telephone her?’
We thought about it. Gus said, ‘This is crazy. What are the police doing?’
Dad said, ‘They’re keeping an eye on her house. And on the shell of our house—’ he glanced at Hermione, who seemed her usual calm and collected self. ‘They think she might go back to look through the rubble. For bodies.’
Gus drew in a breath and said again, ‘This is crazy – just crazy.’
Meriel said, ‘Back home there would probably be an armed posse looking for her. Well, they would have found her by now during the daylight hours. Such a small area—’
Hermione said, ‘They would also probably have shot and killed her, too. She needs treatment. At a hospital. She must be in hell. All that deception and betrayal and death.’
Gus repeated, ‘It’s crazy. Totally crazy. And she’s your mother?’
‘No. Actually she is not. She did not tell me until after my mother was dead. By which time she was almost my mother. I’m proud that Aunt Eva was really my mother but I can’t love her like I loved . . . this other mother.’
Dad said quietly, ‘She wants to kill you, Hermione.’
‘She wants to be rid of me, certainly. It would have been some kind of solution for her if I’d been in that house. But when – if – she discovers that I wasn’t, I am absolutely certain she will feel relief.’ She turned her head to look at Gus. ‘She needs help.’
He said, ‘It’s crazy, honey. She is insane. It’s just not possible—’
Meriel said, ‘It’s the same situation as I was in, don’t forget. Poor old Mum might lose her mind – I think she is slightly senile, actually – but she would never want to kill me.’
Dad shifted in his armchair. ‘She killed her husband, however. She loved him – she was proud of being the wife of a wing commander. But when he found out about Mr Silverman—’
Hermione said, ‘She did not love my father. He had slept with his sister and produced me. She hated him for that.’
She paused. The last piece of the jigsaw fell into place. It made such . . . sense.
Hermione lifted her shoulders slightly, acknowledging our shock. ‘Yes. I am the offspring of incest.’ She smiled, a proper smile. I thought of her childhood and shivered. She went on in her calm, objective way, ‘Then Strassen arrived. Mr Silverman had bought him a bride . . . but he fell for my mother. Eva. My other mother, Maude Smith, was in love with Willi Strassen. She worked for him. She was devastated when he died.’ She looked at Gus again. ‘And we have no proof that she killed my father.’
He was almost pop-eyed by this time. ‘It’s crazy,’ he protested yet again.
Tom said, ‘You’re right, Gus. It is crazy. And we have to think how far that craziness will extend. And that is why we are so anxious for Hermione.’
‘Hermione—’ Gus said, then stopped. I made a vow never to call him in a medical emergency. Then he seemed to get a grasp of the situation. ‘I’ll take her back with me. On Thursday, as arranged. She can have your ticket, Meriel. We’ll stay at the hotel overnight. She’s a sitting duck here. She can’t stay here.’
‘I have to stay here. I’m the only one who can talk to Mother.’
Gus said warningly, ‘Hang on. You might be able to talk to her, but will she listen?’
‘Of course. She’s looking for a rescuer – you know that, Gus.’ He tightened his lips and she took it as agreement. ‘I’m the obvious person. She needs my forgiveness and my total understanding.’ She turned her face to Dad. ‘She’d like it to be you, George. But she knows it can’t be. Because of your Flo. I’ve got no one like that. Only her. I have to convince her that I still love her.’
Meriel said, ‘You’re going to let her find you? There won’t be time for chit-chat then, honey. You’ll probably be struck down from behind – isn’t that how they put it?’
‘No. I’ll go to her.’ She looked up, surprised by our protests. ‘I know where she will be. Where he was living most of the time. Strassen. Willi Strassen.’ She rolled the name around her tongue with distaste. It was the nearest I’d known her come to showing dislike. But then she smiled. ‘Thank God my father was my real father. Its dreadful to think I might have been fathered by Willi! Its very lucky he didn’t appear in this country until many years after I was born.’
Gus opened his mouth – probably to mention the craziness again. But then, thankfully, shut it.
Tom sighed. ‘Of course. She will go to the manor, the old internment camp. And you know that area so much better than she does.’
Hermione nodded. ‘Not all the huts have been removed, by any means. We use some of them as wards but there are others, almost derelict. She will be in one of those. They are linked to the tannoy system. I can talk to her from my office.’
‘My God!’ Gus smiled at last. ‘You are brilliant. You are completely brilliant!’
Dad reached across from his chair to mine and took my hand. ‘There’s been so much coming and going. Bogey men – or women – in every turn of the road. Now I think we will be able to sleep.’
I smiled back at him. And Hermione said, ‘George, I’m so sorry, but there won’t be much sleep for any of us tonight. I would like you to come with me, and I suggest we go now.’ She smiled apologetically at me. ‘You do understand, Rachel? Your father knows everything about her. And she knows that. It makes her want to kill him but it also makes him a hated friend.’ She turned to Gus. ‘Perhaps you would drive us there, Gus? As your car is outside and you are such an unbiased observer of all this. But no one else. It will frighten her into doing something out of character. It is important that we know who we are dealing with.’
No one argued. I could see why Hermione was so good at her job. She laid down facts so calmly they became laws.
But in the end they did not use Gus’s car. Someone had knocked out the headlights. Someone had left a hammer in the road as proof of responsibility. Dad recognized the hammer immediately. It came from his old tool shed.
Tom fetched our car and Gus slid behind the wheel of that. And then they were gone. It was ten thirty.
Twenty-two
TOM DID NOT even suggest that we should go to bed. He filled two hot-water bottles and handed one to Meriel, the other to me. It was only then that we realized we were both shivering in spite of the fire. It was so dreadful to think that while we were discussing what we should do – six of us separated from Gus’s hired car by a wall and a boot scraper – Maude Smith had actually been out there with a hammer. Why hadn’t we heard her? Those were not the days of double glazing; why hadn’t we heard Dad’s hammer crashing through the headlights? Meri
el and I clutched our hot-water bottles and crouched by the fire. Tom went upstairs to check on the girls, and then came down and said that probably Dad would spot Mrs Smith in his headlights long before they reached the old manor.
Meriel said, ‘Is that what she wants, d’you think? I mean she is taking such risks, does she want to be caught?’
I was past trying to fathom Mrs Smith’s motives, but Tom said, ‘It could be. Yes, it could be, couldn’t it?’ He crouched between the two of us and put his hands on our shoulders to keep his balance. ‘Strange, this need to hide . . . hide our secrets and then hide ourselves. There must come a point when it seems pointless and we throw it all to the winds.’
Meriel nodded at the glowing caverns of the fire. ‘We had a psychology lecture on that sort of thing. It showed up during the First World War, apparently. The men came back and couldn’t talk about what they had experienced because they couldn’t bear to think about it.’ There was a silence while we all stared into the caverns. Then Meriel added, ‘That could have happened to your dad, Tom. It’s called voluntary amnesia.’
Tom nodded. ‘Imagine the opposite. Hermione derided every day for being . . . illegal?’ He stood up, and Meriel and I shuffled to the sofa and flopped on to it.
She said, ‘It’s amazing that she got away from her foster mother, trained, has such a good reputation already. In fact Maude Smith’s constant insults were counter-productive, weren’t they? Hermione is thankful and proud of being Eva Schmidt’s daughter.’
‘As well as the daughter of Eva’s brother,’ I said in a low voice.
Tom caught my eye; we exchanged looks. He said, ‘Yes.’
Meriel took a deep breath. ‘She’s a doctor. She understands all the . . . genetic things. Implications. She still loved him, and is proud to be his daughter as well as Eva’s.’
We were all silent for some time. The fire fell in again and Tom said, ‘Yours is the best way, Merry. Protest as loudly as possible about all injustices. Tear up the dress made by the mother you didn’t want. Tell the world that you had Vicky so that you could shake the dust of all of it off your tiny feet!’
We all laughed. She shook her fist at Tom. That interval of terrible grief for Hermione was somehow absorbed. And then the door bell rang.
I leapt up, finger on lips, and whipped out of the sitting room and up the stairs, along the landing and into our dark bedroom. The curtains were still tied back, and I peered down into the street. Mr Dawson was standing there. He was an elderly man who lived on the other side of the road and had built a life around his ancient cat. I ran to the top of the stairs and nodded at Tom who was on the alert in the hall. He opened the door.
Mr Dawson said, ‘There must’ve been an accident, Mr Fairbrother. The front of this car is badly damaged.’
‘Yes. We do know, Mr Dawson. We have no idea how it happened. We heard nothing.’
‘Reported it to the police, have you?’
Tom looked back at me. We hadn’t. ‘I was just about to do so,’ he said.
‘Only there’s a bit of woolly stuff under the bumper there. Could be an important clue.’ Mr Dawson was speaking over his shoulder while he clambered down the kerb as if it was Everest, and gathered up the ‘woolly stuff’ and came back with it. I had seen Maude Smith in that cardigan. And it solved another little mystery. We had not heard her smashing the headlights because she had wrapped her cardigan around each one while she carefully knocked it out. It had not been an act of pure rage; it had been carefully thought out and executed. We did not ring the police about the car because no sooner had Mr Dawson disappeared over the road than the telephone rang and it was Dad.
‘We’re in Hermione’s office and she has just put out her first message on the tannoy.’ He spoke so quietly I could barely hear him and he seemed to realize that and gave a small laugh. ‘Sorry, love—’ his voice came over clearly and amazingly normally. ‘The temptation to whisper is ridiculous. We found we were doing it in the car! We came across country fairly slowly – this damned mist all the time – and went down Tewkesbury Road, parked in the courtyard. Dashed over to the two occupied wards, alerted the staff there, searched, locked them. Came back here, looked in the three consulting rooms, big sitting room, dining room . . . everywhere. No sign of her. We reckoned it would take her at least an hour to cycle from town, so Hermione is just putting out the first message. Can you hear?’
He must have held the receiver in her general direction. I heard her voice, a kind of double echo, gentle and calm inside the office, nasal as it bounced back against the windows.
‘Mother. It’s Hermione. Your little Hermione. I know you want to see me and tell me how you feel about Dad and Aunt Eva and George Throstle and everyone who has hurt you . . . betrayed you. You want to tell me so that I will know the truth. And because, in a way, when all those people betrayed you, they betrayed me, too.’ There was a long pause while she waited for her words to stop echoing outside and penetrate Maude Smith’s illogical mind. If indeed Maude Smith was within hearing distance.
Then that strange double-edged voice filtered into my ear again.
‘We were there, mostly just the two of us, alone in that house day after day while everyone else went on living. When you met Willi at Eva’s house, that was when you took hold of our lives, Mother. Tried to change things. You got that name for him from the records office, d’you remember? And then – best of all – got those drawings from George Throstle. Everything would have been all right if Willi hadn’t died, wouldn’t it? You even got rid of that old fool Silverman for him. Nobody had anything on him. You had taken it all on yourself. And he would have realized that. He would have left Eva for you. After the war we could have gone to Germany. Together. Could we still do that, Mother? Let’s talk about that. Just come over to the front door and ring the bell. I’ll make some tea, shall I?’
She went on about cooking a late supper but Dad was back on the line again saying, ‘She is going to repeat that sort of thing until midnight when, if Maude intended to come here, she will have heard it. Then we are going to eat something and she will start again.’
‘Can’t be too good for the other patients,’ was all I could say.
‘They had already been sedated for the night when we arrived. And remember, they are used to Hermione’s voice.’ A pause, then he said quietly, ‘She’s pretty marvellous, isn’t she?’
I was choked. Not only because Hermione really was marvellous, but because I had not been able to see any of this from Maude’s point of view. Hermione had opened a door for me.
He did not wait for a reply. ‘By the way, Rache, unless you’ve already done so, don’t bother to report the car thing to the police. We did it when we got here and told them what we were doing. Gilbert must have convinced them that she started the fire, anyway. They will be here as soon as we need them.’
I cleared my throat and said, ‘We’ve been talking about it. We think she wants to be caught.’
‘Yes, Hermione thinks that, too. I am still worried that she might want to take . . . others . . . with her. Just in case we are completely off-track, my love, keep an eye on the twins, OK?’
I felt sick but said, ‘OK.’ Then I put down the phone and took the stairs two at a time. Needless to say, both girls were still fast asleep. I went to the window and lifted a corner of the curtain. The garden was in complete blackness, a slight movement from next door’s silver birch proving that there was still a breeze. I stood there for some time, then turned with a gasp as Tom crept in.
‘Why have you been up here for so long?’ he whispered.
‘Dad said something . . . I wondered whether we were on the wrong track and she had stayed around here. She could shelter in one of the garages.’
‘What would be the point, love?’
‘How could she hurt us most – all of us?’ I turned my head and stared at the bed.
He shuddered, but murmured calmly, ‘The gate to the ash lane is bolted. She might climb over it, but the
n the kitchen door is also bolted top and bottom.’
‘I’ve managed to get in when I’ve forgotten my key.’
‘How?’
‘The dining-room window. Slipped the old gardening knife up between the top and bottom, pushed the fastener to one side, and lifted the sash.’
I heard him swallow but his voice was still calm when he replied. ‘You are agile, Rache. Come on, can you see Mrs Smith climbing through the bottom sash of our dining-room window?’
Of course I couldn’t, but Mrs Smith had done some other things I couldn’t imagine. Anyway, we went downstairs – Meriel was waiting in the hall, completely on edge at our sudden disappearance, and we stood around the fire again while I told them what was happening out at the manor and how marvellous Hermione was. Then Tom went into the dining room to try to secure the window, and Meriel and I made cocoa and put some food on a tray, and we gathered in the sitting room again. It was going to be a long night. Tom had screwed down the window, and in any case we were still certain that Hermione was right and Mrs Smith would make for the manor; but we were frightened on so many levels that there was no hope of us relaxing in the chairs. Meriel said it was like the war again, and in many ways it was, but then the enemy had been unknown, impersonal. Now the enemy was a woman we all knew and had simply thought was a shrewish, curmudgeonly snob.
Yes. It was going to be a long night.
Dad phoned at four thirty and told us it was all over. I had picked up the receiver and the other two crowded into the hall watching my every reaction. I just nodded reassurance at them. I could tell Dad was at the end of his tether; I started to ask a question and he seemed not to hear me. He spoke slowly as if reciting a script. He said, ‘Maude Smith is dead, Rache. Hermione tried to stop her and was injured. Gus dealt with it, and she is all right, but not fit to be moved. They’ve got everything here, no need to move her. Gus is glued to her side. The police are dealing with Maude’s body.’
I must have made a sound that got through to him because he paused, and then added quickly, ‘She stopped being mad, Rache. Just for a moment she saw the whole thing properly. It sort of . . . made sense. At last.’ He paused again, and then said, ‘There’s stuff to do here, Rache. With the police and everything. But I will be with you as soon as I can. It’s all right. I promise.’