Ben had prepared a truly superb meal in what to me seemed an impossibly short time. We allowed ourselves just one glass of champagne, because we would both be driving. The stuffed grape leaves were preceded by a fresh fruit salad and followed by a dark, dense, and delicious chocolate torte. And neither of us allowed grim thoughts to intrude.
My mother had told me something about love. She’d said that it was like a river and that sometimes after you have been married for a while it settles into a gentle flow, very pleasant and safe. And lovely in its way. But suddenly, just when it is least expected, the river makes a sharp bend and there is a new sense of wonder, so that the middle becomes the beginning again—only better, because now there is a shared past to buoy the husband and wife up when they go over the rapids.
Chapter 6
After being washed, the windows should be dried with crumbled newspapers. Polish wood floors to a rich gloss by attaching buffing cloths to the feet.
Mrs. Large’s funeral took place on an afternoon turned grey and rainy after a sunny morning. That was spring, I thought. Like a young girl on the brink of womanhood, bursting with smiles one minute and all teary the next.
Ben came with me and it was nice to see that the front pews of St. Anselm’s were full. A good number of Hearthside Guild members had turned out, including all who had been at the fateful coffee morning. Sir Robert and Lady Pomeroy, Brigadier Lester-Smith, Tom Tingle, and Clarice Whitcombe were all seated two rows in front of us. The Miller sisters sat directly in front of them. The one person conspicuous by her absence was Mrs. Malloy.
I had telephoned the London flat as soon as Ben and I returned home that night, but got only George, who explained in an agitated voice that his mother was busy with the baby. So I asked that Mrs. Malloy ring me back. Not having heard from her by the next morning, I tried again. I thought George might have forgotten to relay the message. My cousin Vanessa answered this time and demanded to know, in a voice verging on hysteria, what I could be thinking to call at such an ungodly hour. (It was eleven o’clock.) Didn’t I realize how little sleep new mothers got, lying awake half the night worrying if they would ever get their figures back and whether the baby would ever learn to give itself a bottle? Or maybe—voice spiraling into a yell—I wouldn’t know, never having been a sex symbol and seeming to enjoy the grind of being a mother. By the time Vanessa wound down, I was wrung out, but I still managed to stress that a friend of Mrs. Malloy’s had died and would she please phone me back. Unfortunately, as so often happens, when Mrs. Malloy finally rang I was out—picking up the twins from play school. But Jonas, who begrudgingly took the call (not holding with telephones), reported that he had given her the time and date of the funeral, and she had assured him she’d be there.
So why, I thought, turning my head to peer at the empty pews behind me, hadn’t she come? Was she having such a grand old time in London that she couldn’t tear herself away even for a few hours? Or had Vanessa gone into a major snit? Saying she shouldn’t be expected to look after baby Rose all by herself and that if Mrs. Malloy were any kind of grandmother at all she would know where her duty lay. Very probably. I knew just how ruthless my cousin could be in pursuit of getting her way, but I also knew Mrs. Malloy. Making it hard to picture her lightly setting aside loyalty to an old friend.
The vicar—a visiting one, because our regular was away on holiday—concluded the eulogy, the usual sort of thing when not knowing the deceased from Adam or Eve. He praised Mrs. Large as a good Christian woman and wished her good speed and all the best, rather as if she were toddling off for a fortnight at the seaside. Mrs. Barrow played the final hymn at full gallop; probably, I thought nastily, because she couldn’t wait to rush off and picket to her heart’s content. Her troops hadn’t paraded outside Abigail’s for the past several days. Ben thought they would be back after enjoying a change of scene in front of the Odeon, currently showing Jane Eyre—which Mrs. Barrow staunchly believed should have included a caption warning against the dangers of living in antiquated houses not equipped with smoke detectors.
The coffin was borne from the church, followed at a stately remove by the clergyman and, a few steps behind, by two women whom I concluded to be Mrs. Large’s daughters. They were both six-footers and solidly built. As they drew level with my pew, I heard one complain that the hymns had given her a headache. And the other said she hoped they would not have to stand too long at the grave.
It was still drizzling when Ben and I fell in line behind Brigadier Lester-Smith. He was wearing a bottle-green raincoat, which reminded me that I still had to return the one Ben had taken home by mistake. We made our way along the moss-grown path to the graveside to huddle with the other mourners under a gnarled old tree that looked as though it had been ordered to stand there indefinitely as penance for a lifetime of sin. While the vicar fumbled in his vestment pockets for his prayer book and produced everything but (including a couple of dog biscuits, a set of keys, and a black sock), I looked around for the Miller sisters.
They stood only a few feet to my left, sandwiched in between Tom Tingle and the brigadier. Vienna looked composed and tweedy in an old-fashioned suit and a felt hat with a wisp of feather tucked in the side. It could have been there by design or the result of a molting pigeon flying overhead. Madrid wore one of her trailing Flower Child outfits, but I couldn’t see her face. Her head was bowed, her long hair falling forward, so she looked rather like a weeping willow, shivering a little in the wind. I had thought about the Millers a good deal, wondering how they were doing. Would it have been easier for them had it turned out that Mrs. Large had succumbed to some dire ailment? Rather than dying as a result of the fall—as had proven the case? Did Vienna and Madrid lie awake at night questioning whether the stepladder had been sufficiently sturdy, or the floor uneven?
The vicar had now found his little book and was rustling through its pages for the appropriate passage while the little black marker ribbon flapped in the breeze. My thoughts returned to Mrs. Malloy. How could she have failed to attend? Surely her fellow members of the C.F.C.W.A. would feel she had let them and the organization down.
My gaze shifted to where Mrs. Smalley stood, looking more than ever like a workhouse waif in a black coat that was clearly borrowed, being three or four sizes too big for her. Her nose was reddened either from crying or the cold. Alongside her stood a stringy woman with heavy eyebrows, a beaky nose, and dark hair liberally streaked with grey, bound around her head in a double row of tightly woven plaits. Mrs. Nettle, I wondered? She certainly looked prickly enough to fit the name. Standing just behind her was a curly-haired youngish woman, arm in arm with a man of similar age in a black leather jacket. From the scowl on his face and the restless shifting of his feet, I suspected he thought only dead people should go to funerals. Trina McKinnley, I presumed? I drew back so she wouldn’t catch me staring.
Ben squeezed my hand. I shifted closer within the circle of his arm as the vicar recited the burial prayers in a voice almost as brisk as the wind. His cassock flapped against his legs and his hair fell forward in a monk’s fringe. Mrs. Large’s daughters stepped forward to toss handfuls of earth onto the coffin and others straggled forward to do likewise. I tried to read the faces as they went by. Brigadier Lester-Smith leaped forward, at the risk of getting mud on his shoes, to offer a steadying hand when Clarice Whitcombe moved within a few feet of the grave’s edge. The man in the black leather jacket wore the pained expression of someone having several body parts pierced at once. Mrs. Smalley was sobbing hard and being lectured on being dignified by the woman I took to be Mrs. Nettle. Lady Pomeroy looked truly grief-stricken as she bent to lay a small posy of flowers on the sod-strewn grass. But mostly people looked more moved by the cold and damp than anything else.
It was time to go. And as we wended our way between the tombstones, many of them dating back to the seventeenth century, I caught the eye of one of Mrs. Large’s daughters and stopped to introduce myself and Ben before offering our condolences.
“Haskell!” She chewed on the name with a good-sized set of dentures, while looking more at Ben than at me. “Oh, I get it! You’re one of the ladies that found Mum. Must have been a nasty shock. Life pulls some funny tricks, don’t it! But it’s good she went quick. She wouldn’t have wanted to linger and be a burden to me and Roberta.” She jerked a gigantic thumb in her sister’s direction. “And I doubt Mum would have been an easy patient, tending as she did to look on the dark side at the best of times. Not what you could call a cheerful Charlie, if you get me.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ll miss her” was all I could think to say, and Ben added a few words about it always being hard to lose a parent.
“I guess it’ll take some getting used to,” the woman agreed without much conviction, “not hearing Mum’s voice on the phone every few months or bumping into her in the high street of a now and then. But as they say”—looking around and beckoning to her sister—”life goes on, and right now me and Rob need to be getting down to see Mr. Wiseman, the solicitor, about the will. Doesn’t do to be late for that sort of appointment, does it?"
A few moments after she strode away, I heard a mocking voice say, “She’s in for a surprise, her and that oaf of a sister. Gertrude won’t have left them a tea towel apiece. Selfish, rotten cows!”
The speaker was the curly-haired woman. I saw Mrs. Smalley give her arm a squeeze before guiding her towards us, while the man in the black leather jacket slouched along behind.
“Trina, love,” said the elderly waif, “I want you to meet Mrs. Haskell, that I was talking to you about, and this must be her hubby.” She peeked at Ben. “Glad to meet you, sir, I’m sure. Ever such nice things I’ve heard about you from Roxie Malloy. Can’t think why she hasn’t turned up, it’s not like her one bit.”
Standing within the shadow of a very large monument to the deceased members of the Pomeroy family, Ben murmured polite somethings to Mrs. Smalley while Trina said she understood I needed someone to come in and clean.
“I realize, Mrs. Haskell, that Roxie gave you a full day once a week, but I can’t manage but four hours of a morning every other week, and it’ll have to be a Monday.” She had snapping black eyes and a determined chin, along with a crisp way of talking that had me feeling beholden before I had agreed to anything. “You see, Tuesdays I go to Tall Chimneys. Perhaps you know Gertrude was only filling in for me because I was on my holidays, and . . .” She rattled off the names of other people she worked for, including all of Mrs. Large’s former clients, whom she was taking on.
“You couldn’t possibly give me a full day on alternate Mondays?” I asked hesitantly, aware that I was being scrutinized from head to toe without winning much favor by the man in the black leather jacket.
“Can’t do.” Trina shook her curly head. “Monday afternoon’s kept for Joe here”—tossing him a glance— “and we don’t get near enough time together as it is.”
“You know how life goes on.” He gave me a man-to-woman wink. “Got a wife at home that keeps me on a short lead.”
“Pesky of her,” I said.
“So you going to take these Monday mornings?” He reached into the pockets of his tight jeans and pulled out a flattened packet of cigarettes. “You won’t find no one better than Trina. A real hard worker and very particular. She’s got one of them—what do you call it? Photogenic memories.”
“People like to have their little knickknacks and such put back just like they had them arranged. I can clear everything off for dusting, and when I’m done you wouldn’t know nothing was ever moved.” Trina was too self-assured to preen. “It helps that I know a lot about china and glass and stuff from being brought up by my granny that was housekeeper to an earl.”
“Could you start this coming Monday?” I hoped I didn’t sound too deferential.
“Don’t see why not. Will nine o’clock suit?”
I said that would be perfect.
It was no longer raining, but the wind was picking up by the minute. Leather Jack or Joe stuck a cigarette in his mouth, flicked a match, and cupped his hand around the flame. He eyed Trina through a smoke ring produced, I was sure, to impress the knickers off any woman watching. “Don’t you think that you need to talk to Mrs. Haskell about how you charge more than the others? Well, stands to reason, doesn’t it?” He fielded me a thin smile. “You’ll get twice the work out of someone Trina’s age in half an hour than you’ll see out of one of the old bats in a day.”
I was spared from replying because Sir Robert Pomeroy, who had moved up to talk to Ben, now turned to include me in the conversation. Trina said we could discuss wages when she came on Monday and off she went with Joe, leaving me glad to see the back of him, hoisting up his jacket collar and stubbing out his cigarette on a gravestone.
“I didn’t like the look of that chap,” Ben observed as we drove home. I agreed, without elaborating. I was thinking about Mrs. Malloy and feeling very cross with her for not showing up at the funeral. If she had been taken ill, surely she would have had George or Vanessa telephone with the news. We all have a selfish streak, I decided, and remembered Mrs. Malloy once telling me that she wasn’t keen on funerals. In fact she wasn’t sure that she’d bother turning up for her own. Even so, I thought as I followed Ben into the house, we all need to make sacrifices now and then for the sake of our loved ones.
“Back already?” Freddy stuck his head around the drawing-room door and favored us with a woeful smile. “I haven’t finished teaching the children their psalm for the day.”
“Mummy! Daddy!” Tam came bounding out into the hall as if he hadn’t seen either of his parents since birth.
“Did you have fun at the fun’ral?”
“We missed you,” Abbey leaped from the sofa onto a chair and began jumping up and down, the skirt of her pink-and-white-check frock swirling with every bounce.
I stood unbuttoning my coat. “Get down from there. That chair isn’t a trampoline.” I thought back to the days when we first came to live at Merlin’s Court. We’d had a marvelous time redecorating the old house. The drawing room had been the most fun of all. I had been lucky to find swatches of fabric and slips of wallpaper in the attic, along with discarded pieces of furniture and a wonderful Persian rug, all dating from the time when Abigail Grantham lived here. Her portrait, handsomely framed, now hung above the fireplace, and I liked to think she smiled because she was pleased to see the room looking much the way she had known it. But when picking out the ivory damask for the sofas and the Queen Anne chairs, I hadn’t foreseen children. And even if I had, it would have been through rose-colored glasses. Other people’s offspring might jump, pounce, and spill things. Not mine.
Now looking down at the turquoise-and-rose carpet, I noticed several spots that had steadfastly refused to respond to the no-fail stain remover I had bought at a shop specializing in products guaranteed to put the merriment back in housework. Maybe I would have more luck using one of the formulas from Abigail’s book of handy household hints. But not this minute. I settled on one of the ivory damask chairs, with Abbey and Tam on my lap.
My son burrowed his face into my neck. It was a sticky face because, as Freddy languidly confessed from the sofa, he had fed the twins chocolate and bananas for lunch. As for Abbey’s hands, they would have stuck like Velcro to anything she touched. But all I could think at that moment was how much more beautiful the room was with children in it. Looking up at Abigail’s portrait, I thought of the one at Tall Chimneys, of little dog Jessica in her lilac bows. I was, I decided, a very lucky woman.
“So,” Freddy said, drumming his fingers on his raised knees, fingers which looked every bit as sticky as my son’s, “how did old Roxie hold up at the funeral?”
“She wasn’t there.” Seeing that Abbey had fallen instantly asleep with that wonderful knack possessed by only the very young and the very old, I relinquished her to Ben, who whispered that he would take her up to the nursery.
“That’s rum!” Freddy observed. “I thought Roxie an
d Mrs. Large were great mates. I trust the deceased’s family at least showed up?”
“Her two daughters were there.” I resettled Tam on my lap and watched his silky dark lashes flicker before his lids drifted shut.
“Did they both take after Mum?” Freddy batted at a yawn with the palm of his hand. “I mean, could you see them living in the giant’s castle at the top of the beanstalk and saying ‘Fe fie fo fum’ every time they stubbed a toe?”
“I can imagine them saying a lot worse than that,” I conceded, “if they didn’t hear what they hoped to hear at the solicitor’s office. They were off to see Lionel Wiseman, my friend Bunty’s ex-husband, to talk to him about Mrs. Large’s will.”
Freddy sat up and scratched at his beard. “I wouldn’t have thought that a woman in Mrs. Large’s position would have a lot to leave.”
“You can never tell about that sort of thing.” I stroked Tam’s hair. “She might have won the pools or inherited money from a nice old uncle for all we know. But Trina McKinnley thinks her daughters are in for a nasty surprise.”
“Interesting!” Freddy was rapidly perking up. “Especially if one of them snuck into the study at Tall Chimneys and pushed dear old mum off that ladder in hope of getting hold of the loot sooner rather than later. And there I was”—shaking his head—”thinking the evil deed was most likely done by one of the Miller sisters, because it happened at their house. What had me stumped was the motive, but that’s water under the bridge now the ugly daughters have entered the picture.”
“I don’t know where you come up with these crazy ideas.” I didn’t even try to keep the exasperation out of my voice. “Accidents happen; people fall off stepladders all the time. Mrs. Large was unlucky, she hit her head too hard, and she died. It was tragic, but if the medical examiner didn’t find anything to puzzle his little grey cells, Freddy, I don’t know why you should.”
The Spring Cleaning Murders Page 9