‘So not all that carnal, then?’
‘It would seem not. So then we come to her death. She was living at Cumnor Place, which didn’t belong to the Dudleys but was being rented for her by Dudley’s friend, Anthony Forster, who’s a suspect in the case. There’s stuff about him in the church at Cumnor, apparently. I should tell you, by the way, that Cumnor Place, where she died, no longer exists, so we can’t view the crime scene. Anyway, I’m sure you know about the circumstances of her death. It was a September Sunday and Amy Dudley gave all her household the day off to go to Abingdon fair. She wasn’t alone, though. There were three ladies staying in the house – Forster’s wife and a couple of others – who stayed behind. Their story was that she was sitting with them after dinner when she suddenly got up and left the room. She didn’t return and they didn’t go looking for her. When the servants got back from the fair, they found her lying at the foot of the stairs with a broken neck.’
‘And the women weren’t suspected?’ he asked.
‘No. Her husband was suspected, of course, but it’s much more likely that Cecil – Lord Burghley – had her killed. He was desperate to halt Dudley’s progress – he was a threat to his own influence with the queen – and he’d been spreading rumours for months about Dudley’s plans to poison his wife so he could marry the queen. Obviously, if she then died, Dudley would be suspected and a marriage with the queen would be impossible. As it was, when Amy died Dudley ordered a thorough coroner’s inquest and a verdict of “mischance” was recorded. Dudley didn’t get to marry the queen, but he survived politically and became a Privy Councillor et cetera.’
‘So, it’s thought Cecil had her killed? Who by?’
‘Possibly Anthony Forster. But there is also the possibility of suicide. She must have heard those rumours about his plans to marry the queen, and have known that her husband didn’t want her – and she may have had breast cancer. There are several references to her having “a malady of the breast”. Suicide makes sense of her sending everyone to the fair, obviously. Or it could actually have been an accident. Falls down stairs don’t often kill people, apparently, unless they hit their heads on something hard. But breast cancer often spreads to the bones, so she may have had porous bones, and so the fall killed her.’
‘Poor woman.’ He considered Gina’s account and then he said, ‘If we think Marina’s killer was really out to kill Glenys and was following the Amy Dudley story in some way, then he didn’t do very well, did he? Because if her killer was Cecil, he set Dudley up as the prime suspect, whereas what we lack is a prime suspect in our case.’
She didn’t answer, so he turned to look at her and found that she was looking back at him, very bright-eyed, her lips clamped firmly together. ‘Is this a trap?’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘If I answer, will you put me out on the road, here in the wilds of Berkshire, and leave me to hitch home? I mean, it’s not fair if you can talk about it and I can’t.’
He glanced at her again. ‘You didn’t really think we were going to spend the day together and not talk about it. You didn’t think that for a moment, did you?’
‘No,’ she said, and she was laughing at him, ‘but I knew I wouldn’t be the first to crack.’
‘So?’
‘So?’
‘What do you think? Why hasn’t anyone been set up as a suspect?’
‘Hold on, not so fast. You have to absolve me from my promise first.’
‘Fine.’
‘No, that’s not good enough. You have to say, “I absolve you from your promise not to talk about the Marina Carson case and I promise not to put you out on the road and leave you to hitch home.” Go on.’
‘Oh for heaven’s sake.’
‘You have to say it!’ She was happy now, back in charge, laughing at him.
‘OK. I absolve you from your promise not to talk about the Marina Carson case and I promise not to put you out on the road and leave you to hitch home.’
She gave a sigh of satisfaction. ‘Good. Well, I’m not sure I have an answer to your question, but it seems to me that you – the police, I mean – were expected to notice the Amy Dudley connection, so maybe it’s a red herring somehow.’
‘In that case, this is a wild goose chase, isn’t it?’
‘A wild herring chase.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what Annie used to call it, “a wild herring chase.” I think –’ her voice sounded slightly odd but she cleared her throat and went on, ‘– I think there is a connection but it’s being used to distract us – you, I mean. Sorry! I was thinking if Cecil directed all the suspicion onto Dudley, her husband, your killer is directing suspicion the other way – out of the circle of friends and family. The link with the show is designed to suggest an outsider, a crazed fan, so maybe you should be looking nearer to home. And there are two very unpleasant characters who run the Aphra Behn Theatre and seem to have open access to Charter Hall. Neil Cunningham and Alex Driver. They knew all about Amy because they worked on the original production. They were also lurking about near Charter Hall when I went there last weekend. And they’d have been able to find an actress to make the phone call for them. If you’re looking for prime suspects, they’d be my first choice.’
‘Not a bad answer, DC Gray.’
‘Oh DS, please. Surely I’m worth DS?’
‘Too insubordinate, I’m afraid. But tell me, what about motive?’
‘I haven’t worked one out. Perhaps they were blackmailing her and she was going to blow the gaff. Or she was blackmailing them. They strike me as people who would have murky secrets.’
‘How do you know them?’
‘I hired some costumes from them this week and they were extraordinarily rude.’
‘Fancy dress party?’
‘Ellie’s school play.’
‘And on that basis, you’ve decided they’re murderers?’
‘I think it’s possible.’
Cumnor was asleep in the noonday sun. He parked the car and they sat on a bench on a small patch of green, where Gina unveiled the picnic. It was stylish, as he could have predicted. French bread, pâté, good cheeses, sticks of celery, grapes and plums, a piece of fruit cake. There was also just a half bottle of red wine “because of the driving and you being a policeman.”
He wondered what people would make of the two of them as passers-by glanced their way. Did they look like a couple? Probably not. Probably they were making too much effort for that – too polite, trying too hard to be entertaining. It was a pleasure though, this companionship, a shared meal. It reminded him again that he had resolved to get a grip on his life and stop living like a hermit. Involuntarily, he said, ‘I can’t remember the last time I had a picnic.’
She put a hand on his arm and said, quite seriously, ‘You really should get out more.’
At the church, he pushed open the heavy oak door and a figure seemed to loom at them from the darkness. To the right, behind the door, a sizeable statue stood on a three or four foot pedestal and the sun streaming in through the stained glass window behind turned it into a lowering shadow. Up close, it was instantly recognisable as Elizabeth I. All the iconography was there: the piled hair, the semi-circular ruff, the stiff, richly embroidered folds of the farthingale. The face was blander than usual, though, without its usual beaky watchfulness.
‘Not much character in the face, is there?’ he said.
Gina pointed to the inscription on the statue’s base. ‘Erected by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in compliment to his Royal Mistress,’ she read. ‘Perhaps the compliment extended to getting the sculptor to shorten her nose. Oh look, there are the Amy Dudley memorabilia, just beside the statue. That’s a bit ironic, isn’t it?’
It was a pathetically small collection; testimony to a life not much celebrated and a death not much mourned, he thought. There was no contemporary picture of her, only a Victorian artist’s impression, all bows, ringlets and frills, and an expressio
n of patient melancholy. Near it, the curator of this little collection had placed a picture of the queen, quite unlike the vapid statue. Here she was an ageing tyrant, grim and wilful. There were also a few letters in an impossibly cramped 16th century hand. Gina stopped suddenly and pointed to one of them. ‘Oh look,’ she said. ‘Look at this one here.’
He looked. It was an earnest little note, written by Amy Dudley to a Mr Flowerdew about the sale of some wool from the sheep on the estate, and thought to be the last letter written by her before her death. There was a typewritten version of the letter beside it, and he read there Amy Dudley’s apology for the delay in coming to a decision about the wool, explaining that she had not been able to discuss it with her husband, “he being troubled with weighty affairs and I not being altogether in quiet for his sudden departing.”
‘Isn’t that the saddest picture?’ Gina said. ‘There she is, only twenty-eight. She’s the Countess of Leicester but she hasn’t got any status. She’s trying to do her duty and run a household and an estate but she knows that her husband’s attention is somewhere else entirely – knows that he’s engaged in a desperate struggle to maintain his power and his favour with the queen. If Walter Scott’s to be believed, his “sudden departing” would have been to his castle at Kenilworth, where he was planning to entertain the queen with such splendour that his favour with her would be assured. No wonder he hadn’t got time to worry about the sheep!’ She stopped, looked up at him and said, ‘I have a certain fellow feeling. I used to be married to a man like that.’
‘Really?’ he asked cautiously. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to take this seriously.
‘Yes. Did I tell you, he’s a human rights lawyer? He was always away, defending people on death row, prosecuting villains at The Hague, standing up for the rights of the downtrodden generally, and when he came home, he wasn’t at all interested in the sheep – or the state of the gutters in our case.’
‘But you must have been proud of him, weren’t you? It’s a worthwhile thing to be doing.’
She looked away from him. ‘The thing about Andrew is,’ she said, ‘he’s all for humanity in general but he doesn’t actually like people very much.’ She laughed. ‘But I don’t think he ever wanted to kill me. And I had the children, which poor Amy didn’t. And anyway I was a tough old bird, even when I was young.’
He decided to take a scenic route home and they stopped in Windsor for tea at a hotel. ‘I fancy cakes on a tiered plate,’ Gina said.
They didn’t get the tiered plate, but they did get warm scones and clotted cream. After her second scone, Gina sat back with a little ‘hah’ of contentment and said, ‘I wonder what the rooms are like here.’
Scott, engaged in loading the last of the strawberry jam onto his scone, looked up, startled, and felt the blood rush into his face. He stared at her and saw her begin to colour too – he’d never seen her blush before.
‘Oh, no,’ she said, covering her mouth in confusion. ‘I didn’t mean – no, no, no. Sorry – just idle speculation.’ She waved a hand around, as though batting his thoughts away. Then she smiled. ‘I’ve got to go to work tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you?’
When he dropped her off at home, she said, ‘Thank you for this, David. I’m afraid it won’t have advanced your case but it saved me from a miserable day. I’m really grateful.’ She leant over and he thought she was about to kiss him, but she put her hand on his and said, ‘Good luck with the case. And do have a look at those two at the Aphra Behn.’
17
MONDAY 4th OCTOBER
’Tis not that time of moon with me to make one
in so skipping a dialogue
Yesterday was an odd day and I’ve woken this morning still feeling a bit bouleversée. The French do have some good words, and this is one of them. You couldn’t say in English that you felt overturned, but bouleversée gives me a vision of myself as a stranded beetle, on my back and waving my little legs about.
Anyway, yesterday. It was my choice to leave before Annie did. I don’t think I was sulking; I just didn’t want to participate in all the hubbub of her departure when I didn’t have a role to play. So, I asked David to pick me up at ten, and he did, looking really rather gorgeous in a beautiful soft suede jacket and shades. I hoped someone in the street was noticing as I sashayed out to the car. I wasn’t so sure about my own outfit. I did actually buy a new jacket for the occasion – ridiculous, I know – and in the shop I thought its shade of turquoise was cheerful and optimistic, but when I put it on yesterday it looked a bit brash and I nearly lost my nerve and rummaged in my wardrobe for something else, except that I know that leads to a downward spiral of panicky indecision, so I stuck with the turquoise.
When I went in to Annie’s room to say goodbye, she was still in bed, so kissing her felt like it did when she was little and got a good night kiss. I had dithered over a present for her. When Ellie went off to Manchester, I gave her a wad of cash and a tin of home-made flapjacks, but I was afraid Annie would laugh at the flapjacks and Andrew was bound to outgun me with quantities of cash, so I bought her a bag of rather fine undies – two bras, four pairs of pants, a nightie and several pairs of socks. ‘An emergency store,’ I said, ‘for when you don’t get round to doing your washing.’
I’m not sure, really, what the trip to Cumnor was about. It was a distraction for me and saved me from feeling humiliated, but I’m not sure what David thought it was. I think he enjoyed it, and he was good company, but it didn’t advance his investigation one bit, I’m afraid. And then there was that stupid remark of mine about rooms at the hotel. What was I thinking of? I do like watching him blush, though. I would have kissed him goodbye when he dropped me off at home, but I thought after the rooms thing I’d better not. The question now is, was yesterday’s outing a date? Does he think it was a date? If so, I asked him out, so now it’s his turn to ask me. Will he? Watch this space.
Today, we are paying for yesterday’s warmth with a misty morning and I cycle with caution into college. There I spend a pleasant enough morning. I move on to Entertaining Mr Sloane with my literature class and they are delightedly shocked at its irreverence and cynicism. Then I start one of the Chinese groups on short presentations and though their articulation makes them painfully hard to follow, they have compensated by producing impressive PowerPoint visuals. Finally, I have an open tutorial hour, which produces nothing much except one poor Chinese girl, new this term, who feels she’s floundering. The one child policy puts such pressure on these students: everything is invested in them and there’s the expectation that they’ll support not only their parents, but both sets of grandparents in old age. Lili weeps a bit and tells me she rang her mother to tell her the work was too hard and she was afraid she was going to fail.
‘What did she say?’ I ask.
‘She said, “Well, daughter, you’ll just have to work harder.”
I tell her I’ll talk to her other teachers and see if we can identify her specific problems. ‘And then we’ll put them right,’ I say cheerfully. ‘That’s our job.’
I’ve just despatched her and I’m thinking about lunch when the phone rings. It’s Janet, the principal’s secretary. Can I “pop in” and see the principal, she asks, as soon as possible.
‘Give me twenty minutes,’ I say.
I nip over to the SCR and eat a quick sandwich. You never know what you’ll get when you’re summoned to Norman Street’s office: on one occasion, I was treated to deli sandwiches; on another I got the sack. In fact, the time he sacked me was the last interview I had with him. That was two and a half years ago, and you’ll realise that he changed his mind later because obviously I’m still here, but I am wary of this encounter, especially as I have no idea what it can be about.
I put on some lipstick and tame my hair a bit. I’m glad I decided to wear the turquoise jacket again; I feel it gives me added bounce. I go into Janet’s office and she looks at me warily. Last time I was here, there was a lot of shouting and
she may be worried that it’s going to happen again, so I smile warmly at her and say in my sweetest voice, ‘Reporting for duty, Janet.’
She looks even more alarmed, but she buzzes through to the principal and I am ushered in. Our principal is a red-faced man with sharp little eyes and a wide, sharky smile. He used to get red-faced only when angry, but lots of being angry plus a good deal of eating and drinking in the interests of the college seem to have made him permanently scarlet. Bets are being laid on how long it will take before he keels over. From this you will gather that I am not the only member of his staff who loathes him.
He ushers me in and asks how the Chinese students are doing. The deal I secured with a Chinese university for several dozen students was the reason why the principal unsacked me a couple of years ago. Since then they have kept my department – and the college, actually – afloat.
‘They’re fine,’ I say. ‘They get better each year because they’re more prepared. Those who are here already warn the new ones what to expect, so they’re not so shocked.’
‘Why? What is there to shock them?’ He’s on the offensive already.
‘Oh, the relative informality of the teaching for one thing. But more the fact that they’re expected to have opinions or work out problems for themselves. One student said to me the thing she dreaded most was a seminar leader turning to her and saying, “And what do you think?” They’re really not used to it.’
All the Daughters Page 15