‘How did she die?’
‘Her throat was cut. She was by the pond. I think she must have gone to meet him.’
His big body sagged. He let himself sink down on a low table like something melting.
‘Why didn’t she come to me?’
The mirror frame he’d carved so carefully was standing on the top of a chest of drawers between us and the light, the beautiful cupped hands in silhouette. I thought of how they’d held the reflection of Carol’s face and the way he’d looked at her. Pride in his own craftsmanship, I’d thought. Now I guessed it had been a lot more than that.
‘You loved her?’
‘Yes.’ It came out as a groan, but he couldn’t stop himself glancing upstairs to where Janie and the baby were. ‘She doesn’t know. We wouldn’t have hurt her, neither of us, not for the world.’
‘And Carol loved you?’
A nod. ‘Yes. I couldn’t believe it. She’d done so much for us, done everything. She was so good to us, so beautiful, I just couldn’t believe it. There was one day – we were working on a piece together and our hands touched and … it wasn’t taking anything from Janie, not anything. It was just different, that’s all.’
‘Upstairs just now, you thought I was going to tell Janie.’
He nodded.
‘I’m not going to. I hope she never knows.’
‘Where did it happen? Where did he kill her?’
‘By the pool at the bottom of the coppice. I think she’d arranged to meet him there in the middle of the night. She took your best knife to protect herself. She picked it up from your bench, the night she came in and took her own money. Did you guess that?’
‘Not till now, no. I can see now. I can see it all now.’
‘I think she needed the money because Fardel was blackmailing her. Why? Had he seen the two of you together?’
‘It was worse than that. It was a lot worse than that.’
Silence. The sweet smell of wood was all round us, from upstairs the sound of the wooden cradle rocking.
‘Will you look after Janie and the baby?’ he said. ‘Somebody’s got to look after them.’
‘But why? You’re not going away, are you? She needn’t know about you and Mrs Venn.’
‘When I’m in prison, I mean.’
‘You won’t go to prison. It’s not a legal offence to love another man’s wife.’
‘I don’t mean that. I mean they’ll say I killed Daisy’
‘No. Carol Venn did. You’ve known that all along, haven’t you?’
‘That Sunday, when she brought Janie back, she told me what had happened. I wanted Fardel to go back where he came from and stop scaring Janie. She wanted Daisy to go back where she came from because of all the trouble she was causing in the family. So she said if he’d come to get Daisy he could take her and go, best thing for everybody all round. The only thing was bringing the two of them together, but Carol had an idea about that.’
She would, of course, Carol the cool solver of everybody’s problems.
‘What was the idea?’
‘She got a message to Daisy at the camp saying her sister was here and wanted to meet her in the wood by the church. She wouldn’t be, of course. Janie didn’t know anything about it. Then she said she’d find out where Fardel was and let him know to be there at the same time so that he could come across Daisy there and take her back. As it turned out, she didn’t have far to look for him because Bestley went and hired him to help take the cabinet up.’
‘She did see him that morning, then?’
‘Of course she did. It went well enough, at first. Daisy came to the coppice and Carol kept her talking, waiting for him. We’d arranged I’d be there watching from behind a tree in case he caused any trouble.’
‘Did you know she’d brought a gun with her?’
‘Never in the world.’
‘So then what happened?’
‘When Fardel arrived, Daisy screamed and tried to get away. Fardel grabbed her and was getting rough with her and Carol tried to stop him. Once she saw how scared Daisy was of him and how she didn’t want to go back with him, she changed her mind. She got the gun out and shouted to him to let Daisy go. I was running out, trying to help her, then the gun went off. Carol was only trying to scare him, but he twisted round and it was Daisy who got shot.’
‘What did you do?’
‘We were scared, all of us. We hoped she was just hurt, but she was dead. It was Fardel’s idea to bury her under a lot of leaves in the old quarry, then when we’d done it, he ran off. We thought … Carol thought when she was missed people would just think she’d wandered off back home.’
Such a small hole in the world Daisy made, no wonder Carol thought it.
‘We went away, but he must have had another thought about it and come back and put Daisy’s body in the cabinet deliberately to scare Mrs Venn, put the blame on her.’
Or his way of claiming his twenty pounds. Goods returned, payment expected.
‘Did you know he was blackmailing her?’
‘No. I wish she’d come to me. But by then I was so worried about Janie going I suppose she didn’t like to. I knew the sort of man he was, you see. I really thought he’d killed Janie.’
Footsteps and voices sounded from outside: the craftsman and apprentices on their way back in.
‘What shall I do?’ he said. ‘Shall I go to the police and tell them?’
‘Not yet.’ Not ever, if I can help it. ‘For now, go to Janie and the baby.’ I watched him going back up the stairs as the men came in.
‘All right now, then?’ a craftsman asked me cheerfully.
I don’t know what I answered, if anything, because I’d turned again to look at the love gift of clasped hands. There was a little corner of paper sticking out from under the base and I pulled at it, thinking: She’s left him a letter. If so, I’d have to find a time to let him know when Janie wasn’t there. It was an envelope, with neat italic handwriting that might well be Carol’s and a name, only the name wasn’t Walter Sutton’s, it was her husband’s.
* * *
Beside the road up to the Venns’ house a farmer had already started ploughing, two great horses, one grey and one bay, drawing a gleaming line through silver-yellow stubble, a few seagulls following as if they expected herring to leap out of the furrow. The windows of the house were blank and dark, the sun not on them.
Rounding the curve in the drive I found three vehicles parked outside the front door, two gigs and the police motor car. The door was ajar. I knocked, got no answer and walked in. Part of my mind that still hadn’t caught up with things still expected to hear Carol’s steps on the stairs and see her looking over the banister at me. No sign or sound of anybody. I walked slowly towards the studio, pushed open the door. Adam was sitting on the sofa, staring at the woman in the tapestry.
‘She left you a note,’ I said.
I gave it to him and watched while he read. He blinked, put it in his pocket.
‘Where was it?’
‘In the workshop. I think if things had gone differently she’d have gone back and taken it.’
‘So you were right, then,’ he said, not looking at me. ‘He was out there all the time. He killed Carol.’
‘Yes. But not Daisy.’
‘They’ll hang him in any case when they find him, so does it matter?’
‘Did you know she was going out last night to try to buy him off?’
‘No, I’d have stopped her.’
‘She had to steal her own money back from the workshop because Fardel was blackmailing her for anything he could get. She took the knife from there too. Up to the end, she might have been wondering whether to use it on herself or Fardel. Don’t you think so?’
‘She wouldn’t have killed herself. She promised me she wouldn’t kill herself.’
‘Did you know he was blackmailing her?’
He shook his head.
‘But the rest…?’
‘Yes … after
wards. On the Tuesday morning after…’
‘After we found Daisy’s body in the cabinet. No wonder she broke down. So she confessed to you that she killed Daisy?’
‘She didn’t mean to. She was trying to protect Daisy.’
Which fitted with Walter’s story, but I didn’t tell him so.
‘Poor Daisy,’ I said. ‘We thought she was too timid to go anywhere on her own. But can you imagine how pleased she must have felt when Carol went to her and said her half-sister was in the village and wanted to meet her. So she left the other girls and went to the coppice and instead of her sister there was the man she never wanted to see again.’
The cruelty of it still amazed me.
‘She was trying to do her best for all of us,’ Adam said.
‘So she brought the gun back and hid it in the summer-house. Did Felicia really just find that as she said?’
‘Yes.’
And I was the one who jumped to the wrong conclusions, making both Daniel and Felicia suspects. I wasn’t pleased with myself and I couldn’t be angry with Adam any more. He’d had to sit there and see both his brother and his mistress coming close to a murder charge, facing an intolerable choice.
‘Felicia thought you’d killed Daisy,’ I told him.
‘I know.’
‘And you said nothing when the police arrested Daniel?’
‘It’s the hardest decision anybody could have to make. I wouldn’t have let him go to trial. Neither of us would. We just hoped … I suppose hoped something would happen.’
‘That I’d find Fardel? Pin the whole blame on him?’
‘The blame should be on him. He’s a monster.’
I said nothing, noting that he hadn’t mentioned that Sutton was there when Daisy was killed. Carol hadn’t told him. Sutton was the person she’d been trying to protect all along. It was as if even after her death she’d passed that responsibility on to me – still posthumously arranging things.
‘You hate us all, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You blame us all.’
‘Is that the point now? The question is, what we’re going to do. When the police catch Fardel, it will all come out anyway.’
‘They won’t believe anything he says.’
‘So he’ll be charged with two murders when he only committed one?’
A constable put his head round the door. Inspector Bull would be grateful for another word with Mr Venn. Also, the inspector had noticed me coming up the drive and would I please see him before I left. While I was waiting on my own I heard the sound of wheels on gravel, then Daniel’s and Galway’s voices in the hall sounding subdued, asking Annie where Adam was. Probably Galway had managed to arrange bail on compassionate grounds, but the charge against Daniel would soon be dropped in any case. He’d have to know why, but this time I wouldn’t be the one who had to break the news. Every time I looked up, the woman who was so much like Carol was staring at me from the tapestry. It was almost a relief when the constable came back to say Inspector Bull was ready for me.
* * *
Our last meeting took place in the same upstairs room as the first one, with a different constable. It took a long time to get my statement down, from Fardel coming out of the carrier’s cart to finding Carol’s body. At the end of it he looked at me.
‘Well, what are you hiding this time?’
‘She killed Daisy. She didn’t mean to and I didn’t know until this morning.’
It had been another decision. If they never caught Fardel, if Adam had decided to say nothing about the note, nobody need ever know. Daisy would be tidied out of all our lives. It was only after I’d made the decision and spoken that I noticed the corner of Carol’s envelope sticking out from under the inspector’s papers. Perhaps he’d meant me to see it. He was nodding.
‘Did Mr Adam Venn tell you that?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just now.’
Not a lie, as it happened, and it meant I could leave out Sutton. I asked him if they were still looking for Luke Fardel.
‘Oh, didn’t I tell you? He was arrested on the road to Moreton-in-Marsh a couple of hours ago. Apparently he had a collision with a young lady on a horse.’
‘Bobbie Fieldfare.’ I was certain of it. ‘Was she hurt?’
‘I don’t know the young lady’s name, but there were no reports of any injuries. Not to her at any rate.’
It was the best news I’d had in weeks. I signed the statement and went downstairs and out. As I walked down the drive I saw two people in the garden. Daniel and Felicia walking slowly, heads down, a little distance between them. I guessed she was telling him about Adam and hoped for both their sakes that Carol had been right about her walking out of earthquakes.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I FOUND BOBBIE SITTING ON MRS Penny’s doorstep in her brown check riding habit, with Mrs Penny peering round the curtains from inside as if under siege from some exotic and alarming animal.
‘Don’t you ever do what you’re told?’ I said.
‘But I did. You told me to look out for him. I’d have had him yesterday only he got away with the hook, when I tried to reel him in.’
‘I said you were on no account to try and do anything, just let me know if you found him.’
‘I did try, but you weren’t there. So I rode back and found him where I’d left him, asleep under a tree. He jumped up and tried to run away, so I reached out and got my riding crop hooked over his collar, only he twisted and got away, crop and all.’
‘I found that crop.’
‘Oh good. Can you let me have it back? It belongs to the friend I’m staying with.’
‘I found it in the wagon where he was living. I thought he’d killed you. I nearly went mad worrying about you.’
‘Anyway, I wasn’t going to give up. I borrowed my friend’s horse again and came across him in broad daylight, running along a road. He looked pretty well done in. He tried to dive into a ditch when he saw me but we went after him and skittled him over and then these two policemen came along in a dogcart and said they were looking for him. They spooked the mare and she bolted, but she’s probably home by now, so that’s all right.’
‘Nothing’s all right, nothing at all.’
She gave me a critical glance. ‘You do look a bit tucked up. What’s wrong? Is it true he’s killed another woman?’
‘Yes. Only he didn’t kill the first one.’
‘Did you know her?’
‘Yes.’
There were things I didn’t intend to explain to anybody, least of all Bobbie. Luckily, her butterfly mind didn’t stay with any subject long enough to be curious. If her riding crop had held in Fardel’s collar she might have been dead by now, or Carol Venn might have been alive and facing a murder charge on his evidence. Bobbie Fieldfare as an agent of the fates. I nudged her aside to make room on the step and sat down beside her, legs weak and shaky. Perhaps – against all previous evidence – she was thinking, because she went quiet for a while. Then:
‘There are police all over the place, aren’t there?’
Two constables visible from where we were sitting, standing outside the Crown looking thirsty. Half the police in the county must have been drafted in to look for Fardel, when it was too late.
‘Yes, a lot of police.’
‘So I suppose that means we can’t do it today. I’ll go back to my friend’s and meet you here tomorrow when it’s getting dark and—’
‘What are you talking about?’
She looked at me, wide-eyed. ‘Bessie Broadbeam. I know we had some bad luck last time but…’
In terms that even Bobbie could understand I told her what I thought of her, of myself, of pictures and the love of money.
‘But if it’s for the cause…’
‘The cause doesn’t need her. We’re better off without her. I hope I never set eyes on her again.’
Pure, simple causes were what I longed for, nothing to do with love or money or all the mixed motives in between. You never get them, of c
ourse.
‘It does seem a pity,’ Bobbie said. Then, after another silence, ‘I’m pretty sure I broke his collarbone, but if they’re going to hang him anyway, I don’t suppose it matters.’
* * *
Luke Fardel was hanged at Oxford several months later for the murder of Carol Venn. He still had Sutton’s knife in his pocket when the constables dragged him out of the ditch where Bobbie had toppled him, blood all over him, down to his underclothes. At the trial Fardel claimed that Mrs Venn had lured him to the pool and tried to attack him. The sheer unlikelihood of that made the jurors grin and murmur, particularly since the judge cut short various other mutterings from the dock against the late Mrs Venn. He said Fardel was doing himself no good by trying to blacken a lady’s reputation. I think it was in his mind that the prisoner was claiming some unlikely romantic liaison with Mrs Venn. I didn’t attend the trial but when I heard about that my conscience pricked me into going to Oxford and speaking to Fardel’s barrister. Without telling him the whole story I said that there could even be some truth in what his client had claimed and it might be worth speaking to Mrs Venn’s husband. The barrister was elderly and cynical from a career of representing hopeless cases.
‘Just suppose we were to take this seriously enough to subpoena the grieving widower for the defence and suggest that a frail and artistic young woman for some reason chose to make an assignation with a man like Fardel and attack him. Can you imagine the effect that would have on the jury? I appreciate your concern, Miss Bray, but I really think that would be all we needed to make quite certain of the black cap.’
So that was that. Even if I’d wanted to do more – and he had killed her, after all – nobody signed clemency petitions for the likes of Luke Fardel. The murder of Daisy Smith remains on police files officially unsolved. Inspector Bull knows, but perhaps there was pressure from higher up to have him moved on to other things back at Oxford headquarters. Harry Hawthorne wrote another trenchant paragraph about it in the Wrecker, then, like the rest of the world, moved on to other things.
* * *
As for our Odalisque, I had to see her again whether I wanted to or not. The lawyers went to work on the tangles of the Venn estate and Philomena’s various trusts. Adam Venn somehow avoided prosecution and bankruptcy, the house was sold and, on a grey January day, the genuine version of the picture came up for auction at Christie’s at last. As far as Emmeline was concerned, she was still my responsibility and I had to be there. It may have been in her mind that Oliver Venn would even at this point manage some last-minute substitution, though he was comfortably tucked up by then as a permanent resident in a private hotel in Torquay. There was drizzle in the air, the umbrella stands at Christie’s were crammed with damp black umbrellas, the hush of the crowded auction room disturbed by sniffs and muffled coughs. And yet, when the two white-gloved porters carried her in and settled her lovingly on the easel, it was like the sun coming out. The coughs stopped and a little sigh of pleasure fluttered round the room. She sprawled on her cushions, pink and peachy, and the lazy mocking look in her eyes, challenging anybody to put a price on her, did half the auctioneer’s work for him. I can’t pretend I followed the bidding because after a little hanging back it went so fast, but I did catch the resentful whisper of ‘Americans’ from a man behind me and the stir of excitement in the room. She was knocked down in the end for a very satisfactory sum of guineas.
Blood on the Wood Page 28