I took the back stairs to the study but I was only halfway down when I heard the jingle of jazz on the gramophone and the thud of footsteps tapping out a tune on the drawing room carpet. In a matter of minutes Aunt Audrey had forgotten about the newspapers’ destruction of her brother-in-law and the ruin of the family, and perfecting dance steps to Duke Ellington had become more important.
I suddenly felt weary. Aunt Audrey might not have been a Bewsey but I was and, while I knew that she would soon move on to some other crisis such as Jemima spilling milk on her cherished settee or a new rabbit hole in the lawn, I would always be stuck with my name, this house and all that came with it.
I bypassed the study and continued on down to the basement, past the old servants’ rooms, which Dad and I now called home, and into the kitchen.
Dad sat in the old armchair, his feet up on the kitchen table that was littered with rusty engine parts. Bits of oiled metal were spread out on crumpled sheets of newspaper, but he held the front page up to his face.
‘Is that the Herald?’ I asked.
He looked up and nodded.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I suppose you’ve already heard that Audrey has seen the story?’
‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘it’s only three lines, it’s hardly a story, is it?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I suppose it isn’t really a story any more, not for most people.’
He folded the paper and I saw a ripple of tears across his eyes and he took off his spectacles and rubbed them. ‘I must have been reading for too long,’ he said. Then he stood up shakily. ‘I suppose I had better…’ but then his words trailed off and I fancied that he did not want to stay and draw me into his sadness but knew that, with Audrey upstairs, he had nowhere else to go.
‘Oh come here.’ I put my arms around him, but he felt so frail that I dared not squeeze too hard lest he shatter in my hands. Nine years had changed him and I realised that the shoulders I had once thought broad were now small and hunched, his braces slack over the hollow in his chest.
He stepped back and wiped his eyes again and I realised that his thick spectacles had been hiding yellow tinges around his pupils. He caught my eye and then looked away quickly as if he knew what I was thinking.
‘Is that a fresh pot?’ I said, pointing to the teapot on the draining board.
‘It is, actually.’
He returned to the armchair and I poured two cups of strong tea and pulled a chair up next to him.
‘It’s funny,’ I said. ‘I was at the station earlier today. I had to meet Aunt Audrey from the train. In fact I was on the platform when the ten thirty arrived.’
He sat up quickly and leant forward as if I was about to tell him something important – the one piece of information that he had always hoped for, the one that would change everything – and I realised, too late, that my attempt to show him that he was not alone in his suffering had only brought back memories.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said quickly. ‘Really, I have no more than that to tell you. In fact, I don’t know why I am saying this. I suppose I just felt like telling someone.’
‘It’s all right,’ he said, sinking back into the chair.
‘I just remembered that we said that we would always tell each other everything,’ I said. ‘We’ve only got each other, remember, that is the only way we can get through this.’
He sighed. ‘Audrey was insensitive to put you in that situation.’
‘She didn’t know,’ I said. ‘Well, it wouldn’t have occurred to her anyway.’
‘I suppose not,’ he said wearily.
‘It’s funny, though,’ I said after a while. ‘There was a man at the station who looked like he might be a tramp. He was standing on the opposite platform, and he had a bouquet of flowers. They were quite scarlet, and some of the petals fell and, for a moment, I thought that they looked like blood. It wasn’t until then that it all started to come back to me.’
He opened his mouth but the words seemed to catch in his throat.
‘What?’ I said gently. ‘What is it?’
‘A tramp?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A man in an old red army jacket and cap, holding some—’
‘But, Kate!’ He jumped to his feet. ‘This might be something after all. Don’t you remember the witness statements?’
‘No, I don’t remember,’ I said, annoyed at myself for exciting him. ‘It all happened so long ago, why would I remember every little detail?’
‘Well, a couple of the witnesses mentioned seeing a tramp at the station, an old soldier carrying flowers, red ones. Just like the tramp you saw today, he too was stood on the opposite platform. The man could have been another witness but he never came forward.’ The eyes that had appeared dull and yellowed just a few moments before were now alert and so large that they seemed to fill the thick lenses of his spectacles. It was a look that I had seen in him before, but not for many years and I blamed myself for the return of his madness.
‘No Dad,’ I said sternly. ‘Don’t get excited. I was at the station that day nine years ago too and I don’t remember seeing a tramp.’
‘But—’
‘Tramps are ten a penny and they are mostly old soldiers; this means nothing!’
‘But if this was the same man, it might mean that he saw something. He would be the only witness that was stood on the opposite platform. He might have seen things from a different angle.’ He waved an excited finger in the air. ‘He would have seen that the woman fell and was not pushed.’
‘I don’t think that’s likely—’ I began.
‘But you yourself were not sure at the time, Kate!’ he protested.
I felt my face warm a little. The truth was that I had seen something happen and I had seen the woman falling on to the track, but whatever I had witnessed on that day had been echoed in the cries of the waiting passengers and in the renditions I overheard on the platform as the constable wrote hastily in his pocketbook. It was those voices that had stayed with me and somehow those voices had become my own. In the years that had passed I had become unsure of my memories, yet to admit any doubt would have seemed foolish.
‘But mother confessed to pushing her,’ I said firmly.
‘You must remember that a tramp accosted you and your mother just a fortnight before the incident at the station’ he said. ‘Don’t forget that he was trespassing on the estate grounds when he came across you both in the walled garden. In fact he stole your mother’s jade necklace, tore it from her throat!’
‘He tried,’ I said, ‘but I still have it!’ I pointed to the cluster of green stones on my chest. ‘He was just a drunkard looking for a few pennies, nothing was lost. Remember that I saw the intruder in the garden, he was a huge man with a madness about him. I did not see the face of the man on the platform today, but he seemed nothing like the man who attacked mother in the garden.’
But I could not calm him. ‘I’ve often thought that the tramp who attacked your mother and the one that the witnesses saw at the station could be the same man,’ he continued excitedly, ‘and if not, we could at least try to prove that seeing a tramp at the station unsettled your mother. If we could get this man to say that he was at the station nine years ago, then we could claim that your mother had not been in her right mind. I’ve often thought—’
‘Dad!’ I snapped. ‘This is the problem – you have thought about this too often. You are barely making sense.’
‘But if she was in terror of the man who attacked her in the walled garden, then thought that she saw him again, the terror may have returned. Who knows what was going through her mind on that day. Remember, she had incarcerated you in the house since the attack!’
I held up my hands to try and stop him, but the words were coming so quickly that there was barely a breath between them.
‘There might just be a link,’ he continued. ‘Something that the police and Mr Crozier didn’t follow up at the time and…’ But at last he stopped and I saw the heave of his ribs un
der the thin cotton of his shirt and I realised that his body had been unable to keep up with the frantic paths that his mind was taking.
‘All right,’ I said, desperately thinking of a way that I could lead him out of this maze. ‘It’s been two hours since I was at the station, how would we ever find this tramp again?’
‘Well the stationmaster might remember him.’
‘I don’t think—’
‘The flowers!’ he said triumphantly. ‘Maybe he was heading for the war memorial, it might be an anniversary of a battle, we might find out a regiment.’
He bent down to me and took both my hands in his and I felt a tremble in his fingertips. His eyes, magnified by his spectacles, were huge and bright and there was a slight curl to his lip as he struggled to contain his excitement.
‘This is folly,’ I said. ‘As it always is with you, Dad. This is how you made yourself so sick before.’
But he did not hear me. ‘Kate, remember, you said it yourself; we only have each other. This time it will lead to something—’
‘Stop it!’ I screamed, jumping from the chair. ‘Stop it now!’ I ran from the kitchen and slammed the door behind me.
Chapter 3
May 1931
We did not see the man until he was close by. The first thing I remember is a shadow on the wall by the vines, the echo of footsteps, and my mother’s hand tightening round mine.
It was 1931 and I was fifteen years old. I was my mother’s only child, and born late in her life, something which made her protective and sentimental. She had kept every one of my childhood toys and my old nursery remained decorated with mobiles and characters from nursery rhymes. She had even kept the thin blanket that had swaddled me in as a newborn, despite the fact that the colour was quite faded and it was stained with patches of blood from my birth. I was allowed outside the Grange only to attend church or Sunday school and my mother had taught me everything I knew from books and newspapers.
I would often feel trapped inside the walls of the big house, especially on the days that I found myself alone in the study as my mother recited verbs and times tables to me. It was only when the winter clouds parted and the sunshine returned that things were different. I loved the warmer months because on the hottest days my mother’s lessons would stop, leaving me free to spend my time outside, within the walls of the Grange.
In those days, my mother liked to walk in the walled garden. She always said that she liked to get away from the house, so far away that she could not hear the servants’ bells and the squabbling of the cook and the scullery maid. Often I would stand at the drawing room window and watch her as she walked across the Long Lawn and through the brick archway that led to the walled garden. Then, with one final glance back to the house, she would close the door behind her. And sometimes, if I was lucky, she would take me with her.
May had been a month of sunshine and warmth and that Sunday was no different and my mother felt that it was not a day for lessons. I was due to make a start on a new Latin text, but my mother had chosen Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to take into the garden with us that day.
Inside the walled garden, the sprawling vines provided some shade from the sun which baked the Long Lawn and we sat on my old swaddling blanket under the pear tree, the shadows cast by the fluttering leaves dappling the pages of the book.
The garden had been built by my parents to supply fruit and vegetables during the winters of the Great War. There were neat rectangular vegetable beds divided by a lattice of brick pathways, an old lean-to glasshouse set against the back wall, and the single pear tree under which we sat – the only thing that my mother had managed to save from the original garden. But by 1931, the war had long been over and, with just one family to feed and no need for the income from the produce, my mother had filled the vegetable beds with flowers to be cut for the house, and tendrils had started to escape from the cracked panes of the glasshouse.
We sat with our backs to the sun and took it in turns to read chapters from the book, our voices accompanied by the chatter of the sparrows that flitted through the vines. My mother did not correct me when I mispronounced a word nor scold me when I licked my finger to turn the page and I fancied that she was neither listening to the story, nor even the sentences within it and, on that lazy day, the sound of my voice had been all that she desired.
Then a shadow, a footstep, the squeeze of my mother’s trembling hand and I looked up from the page.
He could not have been more than five feet away from us, for he stood at the edge of the blanket. He was a large man, dressed in an old work coat and cap. His face was a raw pink, the skin creased and puckered, his nose ended abruptly in a narrow point and his upper lip was raised and twisted. His head was turned towards my mother, but I could only guess at whether he saw me at all because one eye was shrunken, the pupil glazed white.
At that moment I could sense nothing else; the mottled light faded to shadow and the chattering sparrows were silenced. There was something about the man, the way he stood so close, the lack of words or greeting, and the way he stared at my mother without lowering his gaze or doffing his cap, that made me fearful.
Then the book fell silently from my mother’s lap and she moved, slowly and deliberately, until she was standing upright with her head raised. She looked at the man and addressed him in a way that the upper classes did in those days, as if his huge size and sneering face were no threat to the natural order of the world.
‘This is a private garden,’ she said. ‘What is your business here?’
The man muttered something and I remember thinking that he must be either a madman or drunk but, at that age, I had little experience of either and could not tell.
I don’t know if my mother understood him, it did not seem to matter either way, but she continued slowly and clearly, as if addressing a petulant child. ‘I don’t care how unfortunate you are, I have no money about me and I shall not give money to anyone who enters my property uninvited.’
But he did not seem to hear her for now his face had turned to me, his good eye staring right at me and, in that moment, I felt the stab of an icicle deep within, spreading a slow freeze through my veins, and I feared that maybe it was not money that he wanted.
‘You’re a beauty,’ he whispered, ‘and I shall have you.’
‘You shall not,’ my mother said, her voice starting to fail her. ‘You will leave now.’
The man stepped forward and raised a hand to my mother’s neck, his fingers gripping at her throat. I could see myself jumping up, grabbing at him, breaking his hold and tearing his arms away from her, but the real me did not do that, for I was frozen with fear and I could only watch as his fingers tightened around her neck. I could not even scream, because when I tried, I heard only the hiss of air in my throat.
Then he pulled his hand away, down and hard, and the necklace that my mother had been wearing lay in the dust.
My mother stumbled backwards, clutching at her neckline, then she looked about her desperately, but the walls of the garden were high and we could not be seen from the house. Then she crouched to the ground and took up a spade which lay on the soil. She stood up slowly, the spade across her chest, the blade angled towards the man.
She had a look about her I had not seen before, chin jutting and her eyes wild, her limbs tense and quivering. Then her whole being seemed to change – the soft, gentle body that was so familiar appeared to twist and harden, as if she was possessed by someone that I did not know, someone hard and cruel.
The man took a step back but I saw now that he was unsteady on his feet and I did not know whether this was due to drunkenness or frailty.
‘Mercy!’ he said quietly.
My mother raised the spade, the blade now level with his face.
Then the man seemed to falter, as if his confidence had suddenly left him and he had woken to the reality of standing in a stranger’s garden with the blade of a spade jutting towards him. He said nothing more, just turned and
left us.
We watched him leave through the brick archway, my mother’s eyes tracking him like a predatory animal. Then the wild stranger that had possessed her for just those few minutes, seemed to leave her body and she sank to her knees still clutching the spade.
On the ground by my mother’s skirts, her jade necklace lay in the dust.
Chapter 4
May 1940
I did not see Dad again until the following morning. I had become so angry after our row about the tramp that I had made a point of not returning to our rooms until I was absolutely sure that he had retired for the evening. The old armchair in the kitchen was unusually empty when I rose at dawn and I was quite happy to make a start on the porridge and get Jemima dressed without Dad’s interference. When his post arrived, I pushed it gently under his door, trying not to wake him.
It was not until I had begun the dusting in the drawing room that I heard the thud of the water pipes that meant he had woken. I was actually relieved when Aunt Audrey appeared with a letter addressed to the Missensham Herald, accompanied by a reinvigorated rant about irresponsible reporting. I was to take her letter to the postbox immediately, she said.
I did not argue and ran for my hat and coat.
I had nearly made it to the front door when Dad stopped me in the hallway. I thought a night’s sleep would have been enough to calm him, but the nervous energy I had seen the previous day was still running through him and his eyes were rimmed with red.
He waved a typed letter in front of me. ‘I knew as soon as you mentioned the flowers,’ he stammered. ‘I had a feeling that something was about to happen.’
‘No, Dad.’ I headed to the door and wrestled with the key in the lock.
‘Wait.’ He thrust the envelope at me. ‘It’s about your mother. You must read it.’
‘No,’ I said firmly. ’You know full well that I want nothing to do with her.’
But he ignored me. ‘Your mother’s case will be reviewed as part of a parole hearing,’ he said excitedly.
The Murderess Page 2