After Clare

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘You’ve lost me. Which lane is that?’

  ‘The one we call Courting Lane. It runs off the Kingsworth Road, round the back of Steadings and Leysmorton, nothing more than an old cart track and more bumps and holes than a tinker’s kettle. You’d break a leg soon as look at it and nobody with any sense uses it – except some of the young ’uns, for obvious reasons.’

  ‘And he saw . . .?’ Novak asked patiently.

  She sighed. ‘He reckons he saw lights on in the house.’

  ‘Just a minute, hold on, Mrs Dobson. Are you telling me this because you think Mr Stronglove and his sister could have been down here on the seventeenth of March?’

  She stared. ‘No. I know they weren’t. Miss Heeren had been here, but it was a few days before. I know that because I was there helping. The house was still topsy-turvy and we made a list of things that needed to be done, what to buy to restock the larder and so on. I left them and went home and I heard the motor go past my house about an hour later.’ She stopped uncertainly.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Wilf reckons he saw something else. He says it was a motor car, under the trees, by the Leysmorton wall. But it was black as your hat that night, and the state he was in, could have been anything, one of Farmer Beale’s stray cows, anything. In any case, it wasn’t their motor. It was black or some dark colour, which was why Wilf couldn’t hardly see it.’

  The light colour of that Lanchester in the garage would certainly have stood out, even in the darkness.

  She said, ‘It’s not often I lay much store by anything Wilf tells me, but this time – I think he did see it, or something just as queer – but you’d best try and talk to him yourself, if you can get any sense out of him, that is.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Dobson – you and St Patrick. I think he’s smiling on us. That’s twice he’s given us a lead.’

  After she’d left him, he watched a swan as it glided by, possibly the same one who had disdained his biscuit offering, followed by its mate and their grey-brown brood, changing course and gliding across a golden path made by the setting sun, towards the other side, to where the willows dipped into the water. Ripples followed them until they disappeared. The evening was very still.

  He suddenly became aware of a heron, perching on a low branch, silent and immobile as if carved from stone. How long had it been there? He knew they could wait patiently for hours, and could eat just about anything. He hoped this one was not waiting for a chance to get one of those cygnets, but he was afraid it was.

  Twenty

  Hugh had chosen the time carefully: early morning, when Rosie would be safely out of the way, exercising her horse. Ten to one he would find Emily out here alone, even so early – here, or in the neglected hothouses she was trying to get back up to scratch with the aim of once more producing peaches, figs and grapes for the table. It was as though she felt she had to make up for the lost years

  She was there, kneeling on the path, doing something to a lavender bush. ‘Nearly finished this. I’ll be with you in a few minutes, Hugh,’ she said over her shoulder.

  He stood watching her capable fingers move among the purple blooms, deftly selecting shoots, taking cuttings with a sharp knife and putting them into a small, lidded glass jar she pulled out of the pocket of the loose smock she wore. ‘Why are you doing that? Putting them in the jar, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t want them to wilt before I can pot them up.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Hugh, from the depths of his ignorance. He stood there watching, thin, upright, spruce and feeling too well brushed. How many other women did he know who would dispense with gardening gloves so as not to hamper their efforts? None, but then he knew few women interested in poking about in the earth at all.

  After a while she straightened and secured the lid of the jar. ‘There, that’s enough, I think,’ she said, dusting her hands off on her smock and then removing it, revealing to his amusement a tailored skirt and soft silk blouse. She looked immaculate as ever.

  ‘Come and sit down.’ She stood up nimbly and he took her arm and she let him walk her past that crumbling little fountain that never failed to irritate him mildly – damn thing, always in the way, smack in the middle of the path – and into one of the so-called sentry boxes, where they seemed doomed to have all their significant conversations. She sat expectantly, waiting for him to begin.

  ‘Well, Hugh,’ she prompted at last. ‘What’s all this?’

  He still hesitated. It was one of the few times when he didn’t know what to say. Untrue – he knew well enough, but he didn’t mean to speak at the wrong moment and appear an old fool. Caution, the watchword for the elderly, was the word.

  As it was, she made it easy for him – what was it about women and that sixth sense they seemed to have been born with? – by remarking, as though the lavender bush, and not his reluctance to speak, was still on her mind, that her gardener in Madeira, Domingo, had the greenest fingers she knew of when it came to cuttings. ‘But then, everything grows in Madeira. Push a pea stick into the ground and it roots.’

  Though this was going faster than he intended, for he hadn’t meant to embark on this particular point until he’d got the other thing out of the way, he couldn’t miss the opportunity. ‘Just as well. I shan’t be much help, as you’ve no doubt noticed. Never been my line, gardening. Don’t know a dandelion from a dahlia, I’m afraid. But I’m willing to learn.’

  She suddenly became very still. ‘Does that mean what I think it means, Hugh? You and I, in Madeira?’

  ‘If you’re still of the same mind. Not too much of an old dodderer, am I? Too late to make such a change?’

  ‘Of course it’s not too late, we can both dodder together. Oh, Hugh!’ Her face alight, she put out a hand towards him and then drew it back, remembering she’d been grubbing amongst the plants. He caught it and held it just the same, and raised it – to the devil with grubbiness! – to his lips. Not grubby at all, in fact. It smelled of the flower-scented sachets his mother used to put with her linen. For several moments they sat in a bemused silence while he tried to marshal his thoughts on what else he had to speak of, which might well cause that smile lifting the corners of her mouth to disappear for ever – for him, at any rate.

  ‘You have thought about this long enough? Are you sure? You won’t miss – everything?’ she said seriously then, waving towards Steadings, his home for all of his life. ‘Your family, and everything else?’

  ‘No. That is yes, of course I’m sure. I shall miss them all, naturally, but not as much as I would miss you if you went alone. By now, it’s us who matter, Emily. But what of you? You and your Leysmorton, hmm?’

  ‘My Leysmorton,’ she repeated. ‘My dream. Hugh, I sometimes think the Leysmorton I knew was in another life. I can’t live in a dream, I want the reality.’

  ‘And you think the reality is Madeira?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, rather too quickly, he thought. She took his hand, wrapped his fingers around her own. Was she being just a little evasive?

  ‘There’ll be rather a lot of arrangements to make before we can leave,’ she reminded him eventually. ‘For you, at least. You’ll have things to see to, people to tell—’

  ‘Oh, fiddlesticks! Nobody to please but myself. I can leave tomorrow – or next week, at least.’

  ‘Not quite as soon as that! Actually, I don’t want to leave until Poppy has finished whatever else needs doing in the house – and I would like to see this awful business settled, too,’ she finished soberly.

  He didn’t need to ask what awful business she meant. Peter Sholto’s murder was still upsetting everyone. He didn’t feel it would be politic to mention what had occurred to him more than once: that it might never be settled. The police weren’t magicians. ‘I saw Inspector Novak and that big sergeant of his as I came in. They seemed to be making their towards the clearing. I thought they’d finished with all that.’

  She frowned. ‘They don’t have to ask permission every time they want another
look at their crime scene or whatever they call it, if that’s what they’re doing. I suppose they know their own business.’

  ‘Not getting very far, are they?’

  ‘Probably not. But Novak, the inspector, he’ll chug on like a machine until he finds what he wants.’ After a moment she said, ‘I showed them that letter I found, Hugh. From Christian Gautier. They – the inspector – seemed to think Peter Sholto had found it before me and had deliberately hidden it.’

  He hardly registered the last part of what she said, after that mention of the letter. He hadn’t needed to make a confession since he was a schoolboy admitting to smoking behind the cycle shed at school, and it was proving more difficult than he’d thought, but they couldn’t start a new life together with this still unsaid. Choosing his words, he said carefully, ‘The other day, when you showed me that letter, you said you had known Clare wasn’t dead. I suppose you meant to say you were convinced in your mind she wasn’t?’

  She fixed her wide brown eyes on him. ‘Yes, that too. But it was only when the birthday cards stopped that I really knew.’

  ‘Birthday cards?’ he harrumphed.

  ‘Yes, Hugh. The ones you posted.’

  At many times in his life Hugh had felt like Atlas, holding the world on his shoulders. People had always depended on him, and he had not objected to that because he had always genuinely wished to help and liked the world to sail on an even keel. Now he, the experienced, respected head of the Peregrine Press, who had shared so many burdens, shelled out money, calmed down stormy board meetings, soothed difficult authors when their latest book was not selling well, had rarely felt more helpless or foolish in his life. ‘I should have credited you with more intelligence.’

  ‘There was no one else who always knew where I was living,’ she reminded him gently. ‘Aunt Lottie swore she hadn’t sent them on, and Papa certainly wouldn’t have.’

  ‘Well. You will at least let me tell you how it happened? I don’t want you to get upset but – hear me out, and then you can judge. Will you do that?’

  When he had received that letter from Clare Vavasour, out of the blue, his first reaction had been one of anger.

  He had never taken to Clare. It was in the nature of elder sisters to be bossy and overbearing, as he knew very well, but he always felt that Clare managed to get Emily to do what she wanted in a way that was manipulative. In fairness, his connection with the two girls had been slight. He had been away at school, and in the holidays he had been more interested in following manly pursuits – or those that were open to him as a young boy – and had scorned the company of girls, his sisters included. Later, when they had all grown up and he had fallen in love with, and then lost, Emily, and when Clare had done her disappearing act, he had, like everyone else, assumed the worst, and was sorry for the negative feelings he had had towards her. At that time, though, so soon after Emily’s marriage, he was still too raw from her rejection for it to be uppermost in his mind, and as the months went by Clare was relegated to the back of it. The letter had completely discountenanced him. Posted in London but with no return address, she had asked him to forward to her sister the birthday card she enclosed. She knew that he, Hugh, would have her address, and was certain that he would for Emily’s sake do as she asked. It was an impassioned and rather dramatic letter, begging him not to reveal that the card had come from her, or his part in the deception. She wrote that she had gone away for reasons she would never be at liberty to reveal, she was sorry for the upset it must have caused everyone, but she wanted her dearest sister to know she was alive and well.

  For a while he cursed her and the certainty with which she had assumed he would do exactly as she asked him to. Why couldn’t she have the decency either to let them know, openly, that she was alive – or at least to let them forget her? Had she no idea of the pain and anguish her thoughtless action had caused? At first he had been inclined to throw away the letter and forget all about it. But it nagged him. Who was he to decide, he asked himself, knowing how devoted Emily had been to her sister, that she would not be comforted to have even this hint that Clare was still alive? After a long argument with himself, and against all his inclinations, he had posted the card. And the other cards, which came every year, slotted into ready-to-be-addressed blank envelopes, enclosed in one sent to him at Peregrine Press, without any further word from Clare. When they had ceased to arrive he had assumed she must have died, and it had seemed too late, too futile, to explain his motivations to Emily. In view of what he had learnt later he was glad he hadn’t. By then, he had more than an inkling of what her life with Paddy Fitzallan had been.

  She listened to what he had to say without interruption and didn’t answer for some time after he had finished. ‘Thank you for telling me that, Hugh,’ she said at last.

  He detected no condemnation in her face. She only looked pale, and sad, and somehow exhausted. But then he recognized the glint in her eyes that betokened the beginnings of a smile, and saw the tiredness disappear. ‘Really,’ she said softly, ‘how could you have imagined I couldn’t work something like that out for myself? I knew you’d sent them from the first, or at least after I’d thought about it for a while. I don’t blame you, I never have – I suppose you thought you’d done what was best for me, as you’ve always done, dear Hugh. And after all, it doesn’t matter now.’

  He felt as though the weight of the world had rolled off his shoulders and crashed into the nothingness below. Before he could say anything else, heavy footsteps on the path caused them both to turn their heads, towards the two policemen who were approaching.

  To reach the dead hollow in the very centre of the great yew tree, it was necessary to duck under the branches, some of them sweeping right to the ground, before wriggling a way between the secondary growths that had formed around the parent trunk and then, by the tree’s strange alchemy, become fused and twisted together as they grew to form a whole. Now its outer circumference, Novak estimated, must measure as much as thirty feet, probably more.

  ‘In you go, George.’

  ‘Me?’ Willard patted his girth. He was not built for wriggling.

  ‘You suggested it.’ And one of them had to try it. He wasn’t, Novak thought, going to find anything anyway.

  With a grunt, Willard took off his bowler and his jacket, drew in as much of his stomach as he could, and began to ease his bulk through the twisting configurations. He swore picturesquely as his braces caught on a snag and twanged, and again as he dropped his flashlight. Further grunts and oaths accompanied his progress until at last Novak heard a muffled shout. ‘Something here – aargh!’

  A minute later, the sergeant emerged backwards, his tweed rear-end covered in twiggy debris, his hair dragged forwards from his bald patch, his face red. He held a limp bundle of fur between his thick fingers, like something contaminated, then chucked it into the clearing and stood up, rubbed his hands down his trousers and mopped his face.

  ‘Well done, George.’

  ‘Well done, my eye. It’s nothing but a bloody dead animal.’

  Novak peered closely. Gingerly, he picked it up, feeling the bones beneath the disintegrating animal skin. But why should a dead animal carcass have a leather thong tied around it? The leather had hardened and he used his penknife to cut through it. The fur fell open, exposing the tattered scarlet silk lining of what appeared to have once been a wide fur collar.

  The two men stood gazing down at what lay inside: the collection of tiny limbs, a naked torso, and a head with dull, matted blonde hair. Even Willard looked shaken.

  Novak picked up an arm, to which a hook was attached at the shoulder end, pushed his finger inside the armhole of the small bisque torso and felt around. But the doll’s interior workings, which enabled the articulation of arms, legs and head by means of stringing between the hooks, could not be located. He recalled the trouble he’d had when the elastic in Evie’s celluloid doll had similarly snapped or perished.

  Willard, as usual, had little to
say. But he had smoothed his hair back to its usual strategic position, and his colour was returning. ‘Well, well,’ Novak said. ‘Only this – no notebook?’

  ‘No notebook,’ said Willard, mortified.

  ‘It’s Hildegarde,’ Emily said, recoiling from the thing in Willard’s hands. ‘I called her that after our horrid governess, Miss Jennett.’

  ‘Is that why you dismembered her?’

  ‘Goodness, I didn’t do that! Though I didn’t like her very much.’

  ‘The doll, or Miss Jennett?’

  ‘Well, both. Hildegarde wasn’t my favourite doll. The mechanism inside never worked very well, so the head would come lose. Clare didn’t like dolls at all and she used to push her into the toy cupboard out of sight. And when I opened the door the head would roll out.’ She pulled a face.

  ‘And you didn’t hide it in that big old yew tree?’

  She stared. ‘The Hecate tree? That was what we used to call it. Heavens, no, why should I? When I got married, I gave all my dolls to our old nanny and asked her to give them away. Is that where you found it – inside the tree? What on earth were you looking for in there?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now, we didn’t find it.’

  ‘It has something to do with the murder, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Probably not. It’s been there a long time.’

  Emily tore her glance away from the macabre remains. She had been so preoccupied that she hadn’t noticed, until she heard Marta asking, ‘What have you got there?’, that she and Dirk had joined them.

  But Marta lost interest, as usual, in anything that didn’t concern her. ‘Oh, a doll,’ she said, peering at what Willard was holding. It didn’t seem to occur to either of them to enquire why a policeman should be holding a dismembered doll in his hands. ‘Well, if you’ll excuse me, I have things to do.’ She retreated and Stronglove, tipping his hat, followed, using his cane more like a fashionable accessory than an aid to walking.

  Emily looked at the remains of the doll again. The unblinking eyes stared unnervingly. Why hadn’t Nanny Kate, as she promised, got rid of all the dolls? But perhaps she had – all except Hildegarde, left unnoticed in the cupboard. Or was it possible that Clare had already taken it, and left it in the Hecate tree to cast some sort of spell? Like the one she had cast on Miss Jennett, long gone, long forgotten by then, surely?