After Clare

by Marjorie Eccles

  Novak had come to a decision. ‘Do they have rooms at the Drum and Monkey, Constable?’

  Pickles scratched his head, ‘A couple, maybe, but I don’t rightly know if they’d be available. Mrs Gaunt, the landlady, only has herself to run the place since she lost her husband over in France. You thinking of putting up there?’

  ‘It’s time we were here on the spot, I think.’ So far, there had been no justification for it, though it had meant a good deal of to-ing and fro-ing between here and the city in an official motor – justified because of the infrequency of trains to Kingsworth Halt, and thence by that village’s only taxi to Netherley, with the inconvenience of doing the same on the return journey.

  ‘We’ll have a word with her and book the rooms from tomorrow if we can.’

  ‘Brownlow ain’t going to like that,’ Willard remarked.

  ‘Superintendent Brownlow doesn’t have to waste hours a day getting here and back. Besides, think how chuffed he’ll be at not having to authorize a motor. That should square it with him.’

  Eighteen

  ‘Now, look here,’ said Gerald. ‘Let’s get one thing clear.’

  Val, summoned to Steadings, stood in front of Rosie’s father, feeling like a schoolboy brought before the Head for some misdemeanour. He had never heard, or imagined he would hear, that tone from Gerald Markham.

  ‘I don’t care – or not much,’ went on Gerald, more mildly, ‘if you break your neck on that contraption you’ve bought, but I won’t have you breaking my daughter’s as well.’

  ‘It has a sidecar,’ Val ventured after a moment. ‘The three wheels give it stability,’ he added, without much conviction, because he had not intended to test that, only to drive with extreme care with Rosie as a passenger, even in a sidecar. He’d known she would never be allowed to ride pillion. Or anywhere else, it seemed now.

  ‘It matters not to me, young man, if you tell me it’s as stable as the Rock of Gibraltar. My daughter is not to ride on that motorcycle. I hope that’s clear.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry. Only she was so keen.’ In case this should be seen as trying to shift the blame, he added hastily, ‘But I shouldn’t have agreed, sir, and we’ll do as you say.’

  ‘I sincerely hope you will.’ Gerald gave him a long, considering look. ‘Rosie can be very . . . persuasive. But at the moment she doesn’t know where she is, you know. Lost without her sister, in the mood to try anything once. But I know my Rosie, she’ll find her feet – and meanwhile, keep an eye on her for me, there’s a good chap, and we’ll say no more – but no motorcycles. Now, sit down. Drink?’

  ‘Er – thank you.’ Disconcerted by having to climb down about the motorcycle and by having to admit that her father was probably right about Rosie’s present mood – though he didn’t think the assumption about missing Dee was at all near the mark – Val sat and accepted the drink. Scotch, in heavy crystal glasses. He rather wished Gerald hadn’t said that about keeping an eye on her. The implication being that there could never be anything more than a chummy boy and girl friendship between them, which was only too patently true. He was no Hamish Erskine, heir to all that money, he reflected bitterly, no catch for someone as spiffing as Rosie Markham, even though Gerald was unlikely to be as set upon such things as her mother, Stella. He took a sip of the excellent whisky, sat back and tried to seem at ease.

  This was Gerald’s private sanctum, a small room that mirrored Hugh’s den on the other side of the front door, another masculine room, though unlike Hugh’s this one displayed sporting prints and photographs of cricket teams. Did they all have their separate hideaways in this house? If so, Rosie’s must be the tack room where she had nailed up her gymkhana certificates and rosettes. He wanted to smile at the thought.

  Gerald settled back in his chair, glass in hand, relaxed now in his rumpled weekend tweeds and with an air of having got something unpleasant off his chest. It suited him better to play the genial host than the heavy father.

  Val had always found Gerald good-humoured and easy going, and he knew Rosie adored her father. He suspected he was a countryman at heart, more at home when he was riding to hounds, fishing or shooting, and that he had fallen into publishing by default, following family tradition. He knew the Peregrine Press was a much respected publishing house – Gerald himself was also well respected in the profession. He left every morning at eight and didn’t return until six. He obviously worked hard and gave a lot to his work, though he didn’t love books as old Hugh did.

  ‘How’s your next book going?’ he was asked suddenly.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You are still writing?’

  ‘Not much.’ Not even to Gerald – shrewder than he’d estimated – would Val admit that he was writing at a furious pace, often well into the night. The climate of Leysmorton, as quiet and peaceful as if half-asleep or under a spell, its whole air of a faded past, suited his mood very well. This was a very different book, his anger purged by the writing of that first one, Mars in Scorpio, and sometimes he dared to hope it might turn out to be a better and more balanced one, too.

  ‘Well, don’t be discouraged by one rejection.’

  Cautious words, non-committal, but Val’s spirits rose. Maybe there had, after all, been something worthwhile in his first attempt at authorship, even though Gerald had not felt able to publish it.

  Later, in one of the unused Leysmorton stables – unlike Steadings, nobody living in this house rode horses now – he stood next to Rosie as they both gazed at his recent acquisition. Next to the showy two-tone black and cream Lanchester that Dirk owned and Marta drove, the motorcycle looked like a poor relation, which indeed it was. It had passed through the hands of many owners, had seen war service in Flanders and bore the scars – of that and of its myriad encounters with rough roads and other unsympathetic surfaces. Its sidecar was battered and its paintwork had been retouched and overpainted until its skin was as thick as that of a rhinoceros. Val put away his oily rag, wiped his hands and patted the saddle. He loved it like a brother.

  ‘I’m sorry, Rosie, he won’t hear of it.’

  Despite the open door, it was very close in the stable, and the smell of motor oil and petrol was strong. Rosie pushed back her hair. ‘I expected he wouldn’t, but it doesn’t matter. I hope he wasn’t too rotten to you.’ She spoke with less than her usual cheerfulness and Val looked at her more closely.

  ‘Of course he wasn’t. But I was looking forward to taking you for a spin or two. We could have gone up to the Downs and seen that famous view you’re always talking about.’

  Her expression took on more animation. ‘If you want to see it, we could still go there. Mother hardly ever rides Blanche lately and she needs the exercise.’

  ‘Except that I couldn’t ride Blanche – or any horse if it comes to that.’

  Rosie looked at him incredulously. ‘You mean you don’t ride?’

  ‘I mean I can’t. Horses never featured much in my upbringing. Couldn’t afford it.’

  A tide of colour suffused her face. ‘Oh, Val, how could I? I’m so awfully sorry. Please take no notice of me, I’m always putting my foot in it. I speak without thinking. I’m afraid I’m never going to be a woman of poise and sophistication, like Dee, or Mother.’

  ‘Don’t change, Rosie. I wouldn’t like you if you were poised and sophisticated.’ Especially if you were like Dee or your mother, he thought, as he looked into her candid eyes. She was nearly as tall as he was. He searched her pale face and saw the band of freckles across her nose, and worried at the absence of the sweetest smile in the world. ‘What’s bothering you, Rosie?’

  ‘Nothing. Why should there be?’

  ‘Come on, that’s prevaricating.’

  She laughed shakily. ‘If you mean I’m telling lies, you’re wrong.’ She pushed a strand of wayward hair back, copper-gold where a beam of sunlight coming through the stable door caught it. ‘It’s just that – oh, everything’s so beastly!’

  ‘You’re still upse
t by that wretched skull you found?’

  ‘No – yes, well, partly . . .’

  ‘Come on, buck up, you’ll see the other side of it soon enough. “Alas, poor Yo—”’

  ‘Don’t you dare!’

  Val looked contrite. Normally she would have laughed with him. ‘I’m sorry, you’re right, it’s not a subject for joking. It was tasteless.’

  ‘Yes. That skull was – once it was Peter.’

  Silence fell. He wiped his forearm across his face. ‘Jehosophat, it’s hot in here!’ With sudden decision he took her arm and propelled her outside into an atmosphere scarcely less oppressive. The heat had built up over the last week and the day was humid and heavy. He had to brush the dust off the seat set against the wall with his handkerchief before they sat. The paint on the stable doors had blistered in the heat. Even the weeds in the cobbled yard were wilting.

  ‘You said “partly”. What’s the other part of what’s upsetting you, Rosie?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t tell you, it’s nothing, not really.’

  ‘Don’t be a juggins. You can tell me anything. I’m not easily shocked. Cough it up.’

  ‘No, I can’t, Val – I can’t tell anyone. Especially you.’ She was on the verge of tears.

  He sat patiently while she struggled with them. In the end, he said, ‘Just as a matter of interest, why does it happen to be especially me you can’t tell?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s too shaming.’ Then all of a sudden she gave in. ‘I – the truth is, I eavesdropped on a conversation and you know what they say about eavesdroppers. They never hear any good.’

  ‘About themselves, usually. When was this?’

  ‘Oh, when I was very young . . . years ago.’

  ‘Years ago. And you believe it still matters?’

  ‘I rather think it might, now. But it wasn’t about me – in fact I didn’t really understand what it was all about, not then. Not properly, anyway. But the inspector, Novak, he did say anything at all might be relevant, didn’t he?’

  ‘Then it was something about Peter Sholto you overheard? Peter himself was talking?’ She nodded. ‘And who was he talking to?’

  She poked with the toe of her shoe at a feathery weed growing between the cobbles and presently it broke off. A sweet smell of apples rose from the bruised stem.

  ‘Well?’

  As he spoke, she looked up. There was something about the set of his jaw she didn’t recognize.

  ‘It was Poppy, wasn’t it?’ he said.

  Novak was beginning to regret the decision which had made him smooth-talk Superintendent Brownlow into agreeing, albeit grudgingly, to him setting up a temporary headquarters at the Drum and Monkey. Last night, Mrs Gaunt had given them a stodgy rabbit pie and treacle sponge for supper. Breakfast, as cooked by his wife Hannah, had always been Novak’s favourite meal, one that kept him going for most of the day, but Mrs Gaunt, a well-built, bustling woman who belied her name, had no such skills. After spending a hot, airless night in a room whose window frame had been painted shut, and a bed with a lumpy mattress and pillows like rocks, the greasy breakfast she offered did nothing to improve his temper.

  He abandoned it and went a for walk, leaving the stoical Willard, who lived alone and seemed to notice nothing wrong with the fatty bacon and swimmy eggs, to finish without his company. Walking along the village street, the sun already hot and the houses throwing deep shadows across the road, he nearly missed the little shop that sold groceries – and almost everything else by the look of it. He went in and picked up a packet of Huntley & Palmer’s digestives and half a pound of Cheddar to keep hunger at bay, and walked further along the street until he found a grassy bank of the river where he slung off his jacket, mopped his brow and threw himself down. He ate some of what he’d bought, then began to pace about while he thought about his next move and about that letter Lady Fitzallan had given him to read, and why she was pushing him in directions he didn’t want to go. All this was an irrelevance he did not need. Emily Fitzallan seemed to him a sensible and intelligent person who had seen enough of the world to be sanguine about its failings, and he wondered exactly what she had expected from his perusal of the letter. After reading it, he had drawn his own conclusions, which seemed to him to be the ones most people would have drawn: that what had happened to that young woman, Clare Vavasour, was no different to what happened to thousands of young women, particularly those exposed to temptation when away from home and the parental eye. And even more particularly to one who had mixed with the sort of arty young crowd who had thought it a scream to kick over the traces and shock the older generation with a so-called Bohemian lifestyle, encompassing free love and all that nonsense – a world that had been unknown to her younger sister.

  He was surprised that Emily hadn’t been prepared to accept this obvious explanation, and puzzled that she really thought it possible the mystery of her sister’s disappearance could be solved after nearly half a century had elapsed. He would not have thought her so naïve. She had told him that Clare had been beset by doubts about her future as an artist, that many of her friends had tried to persuade her to keep on with her training at the Slade. She herself had never met any of these people her sister had associated with in her new world. It evidently comforted her to believe that the dilemma was about her return or otherwise to art school, rather than the result of a disastrous liaison with this young fellow from France.

  He broke a biscuit and threw the bits to a passing swan, who inspected it, found it not to its liking and glided disdainfully away. ‘Please yourself,’ he said to the retreating back. Wrapping the rest of the cheese in its greaseproof paper, and screwing up the top of the biscuit packet, he went back to the Drum and Monkey to collect Willard and receive a reproachful look from the landlady. The woman had two children and, like so many other women whose husbands hadn’t returned from the war, she was making the best of a difficult situation on her own. He felt sorry for the barely touched plate of food he’d left, and gave one of her children sixpence to run along to Leysmorton with a note, informing Lady Fitzallan that he and Willard would be along within the hour.

  After telling her the conclusions he’d reached, he left her in no doubt that the police would never consent to reopen any enquiry, certainly not on the flimsy evidence of that letter – which was no evidence of anything, if it came to that. And that any further private enquiry would almost certainly be unproductive.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she replied, almost absently.

  He exchanged a look with Willard, the same thought occurring to both. If she’d anticipated the outcome, why had she brought the letter to his attention? He couldn’t make out what she wanted him to say.

  ‘Where did you find the letter?’ Willard asked.

  She explained that it had been among some old drawings of Clare’s, and Novak asked if they could see the place.

  Showing no surprise at the request, she led the way upstairs, along a corridor and down some steps into a small, airless room tucked away between floors, set up as an artist’s studio. She waved towards a large chest of drawers, a heavy piece of old furniture in dark oak. ‘This was where Clare kept her work. I’d been looking through some drawings and after I put them back, I found the letter on the floor and thought it had probably fallen out of one of the sketchbooks where she’d put it.’

  There were four small drawers, two each side, surmounting two larger, deeper drawers. Willard lifted out the smaller ones. They were all tidily stacked with sketchbooks, but it wasn’t their contents that interested Novak. After emptying each of them in turn, he upended them, while Lady Fitzallan looked on without speaking. It wasn’t until the fourth and last of the smaller drawers that he came upon what he had expected to find. He nodded and pointed to the small dab of hardened, resinous substance on its undersurface, and then took out the folded letter from his wallet, with the yellow smear that appeared to correspond with it.

  ‘Looks as though someone glued the letter underneath the dr
awer, and the glue eventually became brittle and perished, so that when it was opened, the letter shook loose and fell into the one beneath.’

  For a time she didn’t say anything. ‘Yes. It does look like that,’ she agreed. ‘All the drawers were heavy and I had to jerk them to open them. But why should Clare have wanted to hide it there?’

  He didn’t reply, waiting until she put forward the suggestion he was waiting for, the one he thought she had wanted him to make. ‘Though perhaps Clare didn’t, perhaps it was someone else,’ she said at last.

  ‘Why should anyone else be in possession of your sister’s letter?’

  ‘Well, they say Peter Sholto used to poke around. Maybe he found it.’

  ‘And why should he want to hide it, if he did?’

  ‘That’s the question, of course, isn’t it?’

  She had been a step ahead of him. She had known all along the police would never agree to concern themselves with the long ago disappearance of her sister – but if it should appear in any way to be concerned with Peter Sholto’s murder, that might put a different complexion on things. He mentally saluted her. But at the same time, he was grateful that the letter and the presence of the glue had been brought to his notice. Because he was asking himself the same question she had asked. He scraped the blob of hardened glue from the drawer and put it into the envelope he’d brought with him, asking if they might keep the letter a little longer.

  Willard took the envelope from him and left. If this was cabinet-makers’ glue, it wouldn’t exactly prove that young Sholto had put it there, but it would go a long way towards it.

  Nineteen

  The day had grown steadily hotter and even the short walk from the claustrophobic room that had been Clare Vavasour’s studio had caused Novak to break out in a sweat. He looked forward to another night in his room at the Drum and Monkey without enthusiasm. No need to return just yet, he told himself, not unwilling to take a moment off on one of the seats below the terrace, while he thought over the last half hour and got things straight in his mind. Automatically feeling in his pocket for his cigarettes, tapping one out of the packet, the scent of roses wafted deliciously towards him just as he was about to light it. For a moment he breathed in the perfume and for some reason the urge to smoke left him. He looked at the cigarette, speculated, but finally abandoned it.