“I don’t suppose you have any idea what they did with it?” he ventured.
She looked up, worried and a little annoyed now.
“Of course not,” she replied sharply. “That’s not the sort of thing one asks.”
She flushed again.
“I had rather a heated discussion about my will with Andrew Fenton last weekend. Apparently coming back from the dead can cause no end of legal trouble.”
She picked up the spoon again, this time tapping it on the table by her unfinished plate.
“I don’t mean anything in particular by it, Juliana. Only by asking can I get the information I need.”
“I suppose so,” she said tightly, then sighed. “Of course, you are right. Forgive me. It just all feels a little sordid and I’m afraid my nerves are frayed.”
“No need to apologise. I am just sorry that I have to put you through this, but attempted murder calls for any means necessary, I am afraid,” he replied.
He got to his feet, laying his napkin by his empty plate.
“I will leave you to finish your coffee and toast. Do try to eat properly. You will feel better for it.”
“I will try. What are you going to do?”
“I thought I might walk round the gardens for a while. I have a lot to think about.”
She waved him off with a tired smile, determinedly buttering another slice of toast. Leaving the dining room, he headed first to the alcove where the coats were hung. He noticed that Juliana’s coat and mackintosh hung towards the front, then came garments belonging to Jamie and then Adrien, with Damaris and Fancy towards the back wall. He took down his own coat and left the house via the front door, avoiding Ada, who was grimly scrubbing up what looked like spilled blacklead on the floor further along the side passage.
A chocolate-brown Morris Cowley, black dickey flapping at the near side, swung into the circle with a great crashing of gears. The doors of the car swung open, and the passenger immediately swung herself out and stood square on the gravel, surveying her surroundings with a pleased expression.
Helena Clevedon, for it had to be she, stood on the gravel like a Valkyrie landed from battle. She was like no woman Alistair had ever seen before, a goddess from the topmost coil of her ash-pale hair to the shining polished toes of her boots. The lines of her face were exquisite. Her height rendered other women puny, her form so perfect that any other would be misaligned. Alistair could only look.
Then Helena noticed him, and the spell was broken. He had expected honeyed silk from her rose petal lips; instead came the most practical and down-to-earth tones he had ever heard. She might have been addressing the WI on the importance of inner-city sanitation in the fight against disease. The goddess vanished, the Valkyrie fled, and in their place stood just another lovely woman.
“You must be Alistair Carr,” she said, and wrung his hand firmly. He was aware of a tremendous latent strength in her and realised as she stood there that she topped him by several inches. “I am Helena Clevedon.”
She turned to the driver, who had unloaded a trunk and a couple of suitcases onto the gravel beside her.
“Thank you, Mr Gordon.”
She handed over a good handful of coins, and the little man gave her a half-bow.
“Get those gears seen to,” she called after him as he scuttled away.
She thumped hard on the corner of the roof that had come loose.
“That too. Bit draughty in there.”
Mr Gordon nodded vigorously, looking a little alarmed, then bowed again as he jumped in, and the car shot off back down the drive with another cacophonous rally of the gears.
She looked around again, as serene as a duchess at a garden party. She looked like she had stepped straight out of a bandbox. Alistair struggled for conversation, turning gratefully towards the door as he heard someone in the doorway.
“Helena! I thought I heard a commotion. You are early!” said Juliana.
Helena beamed down at the smaller woman. “Have you ever known me anything but?” she asked, and laughed, an oddly discordant noise like bathwater being sucked down a drain. “Oh, Juliana, it is good to see you again.”
She caught Juliana up in a vigorous hug. Juliana returned it willingly.
“We missed you so much,” said Helena. “You have no idea how awful it was here—well, I suppose it was equally terrible for you. Ignore me, I never run out of feet to jam into my mouth.”
Juliana was looking perkier than she had done over their meal, and Alistair was glad to see it. The arrival of Helena would be a good distraction for her.
“Come and feed with me. Everyone else is still abed. And kedgeree this morning, your favourite!” she said.
“Wonderful. I’m ravenous. I’ll pop my luggage here and get someone to take it down later. Joining us, Mr Carr?”
The two paused by the door and looked round at him. Helena discarded her scarf and gloves, folding them neatly. He shook his head.
“No, thank you,” he replied. “I am adequately fed and watered already.”
“Will you join us at church, Alistair? Service is at eleven. And we have been invited to dine at the Island tonight, so luncheon will be fairly simply, a bit of a moveable feast. No need to worry about timing.”
“I have to go to Mawnaccan this morning, Juliana. I will look forward to seeing you both at dinner,” he replied, and watched them walk arm in arm into the house, talking nineteen to the dozen. Such a feeling of friendship was warming even to those excluded from it.
He walked into the garden. There was no one else there, not at that time on a Sunday morning. Sitting himself on the bench by the fountain, he allowed himself a moment to appreciate the twin delights of solitude and peace. The soughing of the wind overhead did not count, nor the noises of the birds, nor the crash of waves upon rock. They were part of the solitude, adding to the peace, not detracting from it.
The clatter of a window opening brought him back to himself and he began to sift again through the events of the last days. He thought of Juliana herself and remembered the look on her face that first afternoon. There had been fear there, and confusion, but also an inner strength that had impressed him. She had been scared, but determined. If she was lying, if she had run off of her own volition and faked amnesia for three long years, then she was a superb actress.
It was also not inconceivable that she had imagined the whole thing. With the shock along with such a bad head injury, she might simply have recast an ordinary accident into attempted murder. But he was becoming more certain that this was not the case with Juliana. She did not strike him as the overexcitable type. Her recollections of life before her disappearance had been remarkably similar to those of her husband. She had not embroidered or exaggerated.
But if it had been neither a hallucination nor an accident, then someone had crept up behind her with malice in mind. That person had deliberately pushed her over the edge of a cliff that was high enough above the cruel rocks below to ensure in almost every case that death would have followed. But who?
Juliana’s only real problems at the time had seemed to be her increasingly strained relations with her husband, and both she and Adrien had admitted to this. Her cool relations with Fancy Alistair had been deemed unlikely to lead to attempted murder, and Juliana seemed to have been on good terms with all the other inhabitants of Trevennen and its environs.
From what Juliana had said, her walk outside had been unplanned. In fact, everything about the situation had been unplanned. The Evans family ought not have been there at all. The day had been filled with arguments and bad feeling, but that could not have been planned, any of it. The storm had blown up after a drop in the barometer, but no one had been expecting it so early; the forecast had been for the storm to hit in the early morning of the next day.
The quarrels of the day had scattered the house and its occupants far and wide. Jamie had gone home in a rage before the drama had unfolded. However much he had later regretted leaving, it had at least p
rovided him with an alibi. Adrien had left the house before even Juliana, had met David Roskelly, and then driven up to the moor to drown his pain with a bottle of whisky. Even if he had verified that she was in bed before falling asleep, it would have made no difference. By the time Adrien reckoned he had got back to the house, Juliana had been walking in tattered stockings up over the moor to the Gallows Tree.
There remained Fancy, and Damaris, in the house itself. He would have to talk to them, and the Clevedons too. He thought suddenly of the file that Joe Vercoe was retrieving for him. Perhaps it would hold interviews with everyone who had been present, although given how keen everyone else had seemed to be for it to have been an accidental death, he was not sure.
Leaving the garden, he decided that the original police file was his most pressing requirement, followed by a chat with Inspector Willett over the results of the exhumation and examination of the previous day. As he set off for Mawnaccan, he drove carefully through Sancreed itself, which was still cloaked in the somnolent peace of the Sabbath morning, and made his first stop at the police station. The door was ajar, an ancient boot scraper wedged in the gap to keep the heavy wood in place, and he could hear sounds of travail inside.
He paused in the doorway and allowed himself a grin. Joe was poking away at a typewriter, one short, fat finger at a time, scowling at the keys as if he feared they might bite him. The noise from the exercise was excruciating, like each letter was being torn from the machine’s mortal soul. At the sound of Alistair’s shoes, Joe looked up and his face flooded with relief.
“Thank the Lord!” he breathed. “Not to be profane, Mr Carr, but this thing would drive a saint to drink.”
“Having a bad time of it?” enquired Alistair, walking over to the desk and peering down at the machine. It was an old piece, the black enamel chipped and scratched, the keys having lost their shine, although it did have a brand-new ribbon, the ink of which was clear on the constable’s fingers. “This is new since yesterday, isn’t it?”
The jaw of the police constable squared—Alistair could almost hear the sound of his teeth grinding in exasperation.
“Wretched thing, so it is! Inspector Willett wants me to start using it. Thinks it is more efficient. Neater, he said. Not with fingers like these it’s not!”
He held up his hands—they were very large indeed, with short round fingers, covered with ink marks all over and a couple of broken nails.
“Perhaps a little oil,” suggested Alistair, suppressing a smile. “They can be sticky sometimes, and you have to be gentle, you know. They don’t like being thumped. Here, I’ll show you.”
Joe gladly gave up his seat and produced an oil can from a cupboard in the corner of the room. Alistair carefully dropped oil on various points, then ran his hands over the keys and typed out the first lines to Jerusalem. His touch was light but fast; the machine sounded better already, the action much smoother, and Joe looked surprised. He walked over and, despite his deplorable habit of stabbing at the keys, made a much better fist of this attempt.
“Try a little more oil again later, but not too much, or you’ll be back to square one,” suggested his guest. “They have a tendency to gum up somewhat.”
“Thank you, Mr Carr. I was about to start cursing the thing, and that wouldn’t have made Mrs Vercoe happy at all. Oh, and I know why you are here. Look, I have the file for you, all ready. Found it first thing this morning. The… um, undergarment, is still in there, too. I checked for you. I wasn’t sure that it would have been kept, but there it is.”
He handed over a stout cardboard case, tied neatly with faded red tape. Slipped underneath the knot was a square manila envelope, dusty about the edges.
“The date Gwenna disappeared, it was Saturday 8th,” he continued. “Day before Palm Sunday. I was thinking about it last night. Strange how things come back to you. Uncle Jago and Auntie Mabyn came for dinner on the Sunday at my mam’s house, like every year. We had roasted lamb, and fig pudding, and I remember them refusing to talk about her. She never had gone overnight before. We all knew what they were thinking.”
He sighed. “I know you’ll take good care of it, sir, but please remember to bring it back to me. I like my files in order.”
Alistair nodded in agreement. “I will take the very best care, Vercoe. Thank you for being so prompt. Are the letters—the ones from London from your cousin—are they in here too?”
Joe looked downcast for a moment. “They are. In the envelope. Uncle Jago refused to take them, so I kept them here. They are all there. I… I read them over again. First time I’ve allowed myself to think on her for years.”
He paused, then coughed loudly and sat back, his ruddy face saddened by his memories. Alistair bid him farewell and left him to get on with his typing practice, at least a little easier now thanks to the oil. Sitting on the cold seat of his car, he looked out for a moment over the harbour. The sea was not that dark malachite green today, but a frothy pearl grey, covered in row upon row of tiny, choppy waves, like the organdie frills whipped for his sister’s party frocks when she was a child.
Alistair drove up through the town with the box tucked snugly at his feet. Early worship had finished, the attendees had scattered quickly back to their homes, and there was no movement as yet towards the mid-morning services. The streets were empty, apart from a large white cat outside the Lugger, crouching over a struggling rodent of some sort. Alistair passed the forecourt of the garage, for once clear of machinery, the gravel raked flat. The blacksmith’s door was closed, and there was only a small trail of smoke coming out of the chimney, hinting at a banked fire. He drove onwards, turning right onto the main road, then stopped at a farm gate, deciding to read the files before he spoke to Willett. Parking closely by the hedge, he began to go through the file.
He checked the slip that Adrien had talked about. It was a thin piece of evidence, yet he had seen how fervently Adrien believed in its importance. He shook the silk out carefully, noting the wear and tear that had occurred during its immersion. The hem had been badly torn, the neckline too. And yet the rest of the item was in reasonable condition, albeit stained, apart from the tear that Adrien had told him about. It was a jagged tear, whatever had made it had snagged several of the silk threads and puckered them right across the skirt breadth. Exactly the sort of tear that might occur from a wood splinter. Adrien had shown him the garment that Juliana had been wearing only a few days ago on the morning she had been injured, and he was correct; it did look very similar. Alistair didn’t like it.
He took out the case report. It was not a substantial piece of writing. Skimming through, it became obvious that the police had been keen to write off the whole incident quickly as an accident. There were short statements from those in residence; he read them with interest. Fancy had claimed a headache after her argument with her son and had apparently been in her room from late afternoon onwards. Damaris had taken her mother a tray at six-thirty and, after eating her own supper alone, had also retired early. Jamie had been on the train to Plymouth by six-thirty, and back at his digs by just past nine. Adrien had gone out in his car around seven also, meeting David Roskelly and sitting in the Lugger with him for a couple of hours. He did not mention to the police that he had spent more time on his own, sitting in the car on the moor and drinking alone. He had only told them that when he got home, he had thought his wife asleep and had not wanted to awaken her.
The servants had been out all afternoon, at the wedding party in Falmouth. They had returned together just before nine o’clock, tidied away the remains of supper, and drunk a last cup of tea together in the kitchen before retiring.
The Clevedons had spent the late afternoon and evening apart. Margaret had worked with her mother in the garden on the Island. Geoffrey had been very ill and had not been out of his room at all. Helena had spent the afternoon at Vickery House, sorting through donations for the upcoming Parish Jumble Sale. None of them had known of Juliana’s disappearance until the following morni
ng.
Finally he came to the letters from Gwenna, and he opened them with some sadness. He had seen the emotion in Joe Vercoe. Despite his bluff nature, the policeman had been deeply distressed by his cousin’s behaviour, and yet Joe still missed her, and that told him something of the girl herself.
Holding them carefully, gently, he read them over. They had been tied together in chronological order. First, a couple of postcards. There was a scene of Marble Arch, the next a view of Hyde Park, with the Serpentine in the background. They had been franked at Mount Pleasant, the largest sorting office in London. They could have been posted anywhere within a wide radius.
There was little to be gleaned from them. Traditional phrases written in a round, girlish hand, meant to calm parental fears while giving nothing away, and none with a return address. A wise move if Joe’s words about his uncle Jago and his temper were to be believed. The last had a touch of fatality about it. Hoping for the best, but accepting that her fate was in the hands of the gods. There was one phrase that he found especially poignant:
“I must hope to be like Mother, and at least to have my child with me, even if there are no more.”
Unable to shake for the moment the image of Gwenna Black both looking forward to, and dreading, the impending arrival of her baby, he made sure that he had replaced all the parts of the investigation into the file and pushed it under the seat. He drove slowly to Mawnaccan, stopping a couple of times; once for a small flock of sheep that had escaped from their field and huddled together in the middle of the road, staring balefully at him as he waited patiently for one to break away and trail the rest behind it like a thread from an unravelling sweater; and again at a railway crossing.
He had passed the station itself, a short distance from the town; a small rectangle of reddish brick that, from its size, clearly contained a ticket office and little else. The beds around the building itself were gay with spring flowers. Whoever was in charge had a green thumb; as he drove by he could see the care that had been taken, and smell the fresh scent of wallflowers in full bloom. The colours were clean and pure in the spring light, blending gently like a Luce watercolour.
The Dead Woman Who Lived Page 26