Baby Drop

by Jennie Melville

  She walked down the stairs, feeling more tired than she had ever been, weights seemed fixed to her legs. I must have been tightening every muscle in there.

  She guessed she ought to telephone Dan Feather, her mobile phone was in the car, but at the foot of the stair, Peter Loomis was waiting. ‘ My mother would be glad if you would come and see her before you go.’

  Charmian followed him into the large room furnished comfortably with the chintz and elegant pieces suited to a wealthy spoilt woman. There were long windows on two walls from which much the same view of the grounds could be had as in Biddy’s room on the upper floor.

  ‘She’s just above,’ she told herself. ‘ They can probably hear if she moves around.’ Not that Biddy had shown much sign of it.

  Emily Grahamden was standing at the window, staring out at the rain-sodden grounds. Charmian followed her eyes. ‘What’s that row of buildings over there?’

  ‘The old stables,’ said Peter. ‘Used as garages now, of course. We don’t keep any horses.’

  ‘And that building over there?’ She pointed to a little gothic structure.

  He looked at his mother, who was still staring out. ‘A folly,’ he said briefly. ‘ Mama, Miss Daniels is here.’

  ‘It’s hard on creatures when they are rained on,’ his mother said. ‘I am always so glad to keep warm and dry … I want her to go.’

  ‘Lady Emily,’ began Charmian.

  ‘You can call me Emily, or Lady Grahamden, but Lady Emily I am not.’ Her voice was austere. ‘I am a baroness in my own right, the barony being one of the few that can descend to an heiress, but the daughter of an earl or a duke I am not.’

  ‘I must see Mrs Moucher.’

  ‘Why should I take any notice of you?’

  ‘I can order her down to the police station. You too, if I must.’

  Peter went to the door. ‘ I’m getting her. Be quiet, Mother.’

  Lady Grahamden went back to the window to continue her study of the grounds. She seemed to be shrugging off any responsibility.

  She heard Peter shouting: ‘Mousie, we want you in Mama’s boudoir.’

  They both came into the room together, Peter poker-faced, but the woman was red eyed; she had been crying.

  ‘I’m sorry about Amy, Mrs Moucher,’ said Charmian.

  The woman looked at her, looked at Lady Grahamden, and said: ‘I’m not Mrs Moucher, the name’s Morgan. Her ladyship gave me that name as a joke, she said I reminded her of something out of Charles Dickens, and she kept on with it. Even Mr Peter probably thinks it’s my real name, but it isn’t. I used not to mind.’

  ‘But now you do? I understand.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes, I believe I do.’ I hate this house, Charmian said to herself, all her professional shell cracking away. I want to get home to Humphrey and Kate, but I’m on to something here and I’m going to hang on.

  She produced the photograph of the locket from her bag. ‘Will you look at that … do you know it?’

  Peter could see it, and she saw from his expression that he recognized it, but his mouth closed.

  ‘I thought it might have been yours.’

  ‘I don’t know why you should think so.’ What a fierce, wild, angry face she had. She was a character out of Dickens all right, and one of his more violent ones.

  ‘Mr Madge told me that six or more of them were ordered and given as presents to senior servants in this house.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t one, I’m not so old.’

  ‘I don’t suggest that … but your mother?’

  ‘The photograph might be Mother,’ Mrs Morgan said grudgingly. ‘It has her look, but I couldn’t say.’

  ‘There are initials on it … they were paid for by a Betty Crisp.’

  Mrs Morgan said: ‘My mother’s great-aunt, she left it to my mother. She never had any children herself. It’s Mother’s photograph.’

  ‘So the locket is yours?’

  Mrs Morgan turned away without answering.

  Charmian took back the photograph. ‘The locket itself was found near the dead boy, Joe.’ She saw Peter make a quick movement with his hand, instantly controlled. He didn’t like hearing that, she decided.

  ‘So that’s what all this is about,’ said Emily Grahamden, swinging round and facing the room.

  ‘In part.’

  The room was silent, she could see through the window that the rain was falling more heavily now.

  ‘But the finding of the locket near Joe’s body points to this house, and less directly to Sarah and Amy. I want to know how the locket got where it did. At first I connected it with the bones of a long-dead baby. I think I was wrong, it was dropped when Joe was buried.’

  ‘And what about William Madge?’ asked Emily Grahamden.

  Charmian was taken aback. ‘How do you know about that?’

  Lady Grahamden laughed. ‘Windsor may be a royal town, but it is also a small town. Stories get told.’ She did not go on.

  ‘I shall need to see the yellow car,’ Charmian said. ‘A yellow car was seen parked in the road near where the boy was buried.’

  ‘It’s my car,’ said Mrs Moucher. She shrugged. ‘Look if you must.’

  I wonder if I will get out of this house, thought Charmian. Someone here would like to kill me but I’m not sure who. Possibly all three.

  ‘I’m going out to see the car, will you unlock the outer gate?’

  Peter Loomis stood up. ‘I will …’

  He led the way out through a side door. ‘As a matter of fact, it’s not locked on this side, you can get through.’ He walked out with her, then turned back. ‘You may find this hard to believe, but I can’t comprehend all you are saying. Mousie couldn’t have killed the boy and would never have killed her niece, she was fond of Amy.’

  ‘They had quarrelled.’ Charmian was already walking towards the garage with the yellow car.

  ‘That didn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Amy was a threat.’

  He stood with her while she opened the door of the yellow car and looked inside. The interior smelt of cigarette smoke.

  ‘Mousie sits inside to smoke, so do I sometimes, Mother doesn’t care for smoking in the house.’

  In the depths of the garage, hard to see, was another vehicle. A white van.

  ‘Go back to the house,’ said Charmian. ‘And stay there. Don’t go away any of you. I shall be outside.’

  She walked to her own car, where she had a telephone.

  As she sat in the car, she got through to Feather in person. He was grouchy. ‘I can’t get that bugger Madge to confess to anything. God knows I’ve tried.’

  She ignored this sally. ‘I’m at Chantrey House. Get out here, will you? Bring the full complement, a woman, a calm, kind one.’

  ‘Are you all right? You sound sick.’

  ‘No, just a bit frightened. Although I don’t think anyone here will kill me.’

  ‘What have you turned up?’

  ‘I’m not sure what I’ve turned up,’ she said wearily. ‘ But we’ll see when you get here.’

  She sat for a while, thinking. Biddy was still visible at the window, her eyes focused on the distance.

  ‘Not so,’ Charmian saw. ‘Not so far distant.’

  She got out of the car and tried to follow the line of vision that Biddy was staring at.

  The Folly. But it was not a so-called folly, it was a chapel. The door opened at a push. She walked inside a square dark building with one window above a small altar on which were flowers. Behind an iron grille was the ornate marble tomb of a woman with delicate carved features. Across the way was another similar tomb with a man carrying a sword.

  Although it was cold, and it felt damp, the air was sweet with flowers arranged around both tombs, lilies and carnations, freshly done.

  In hollowed recesses of the chapel or mausoleum were stone seats covered in velvet cushions. An antique Persian rug lay before the altar. Charmian thought it was a family god that was wor
shipped here.

  A small silver gleam attracted her attention to one cushion. A piece of chocolate paper. She moved the cushion, more chocolate papers underneath, even one unopened packet.

  Surely the child Sarah had not been imprisoned here? She picked over the papers. Joe, she thought, he was here. Perhaps he lived here, secretly for a while, she could visualize it. He might have liked it here once he had crept in. Who had told him about it? William Madge.

  Charmian stood there, her feet on the cold, flagged floor. The door behind her closed, and something tight came round her neck. She pulled against it, half turning round in her struggle.

  A woman cloaked and hooded was behind her. ‘Mrs Moucher, for God’s sake,’ she managed to gasp, ‘don’t be a fool.’

  ‘We bury our dead here,’ said the woman as her grip tightened.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘The greater part of the house is shut up, and it is a show house no longer … with so much of itself abandoned to darkness and vacancy … no rows of lights sparkling by night … no family to come and go, passion and pride have died away.’

  Bleak House

  At last the sun was shining in the living-room in the house in Maid of Honour Row. It was the evening sun, full of golden light.

  ‘She didn’t want to kill me,’ said Charmian to Humphrey. ‘Just to stop me seeing. She said – it was quite mad, as she is, I think – “Our dead must not be unburied.” ’

  ‘What made you believe it was Mrs Moucher or Morgan or whatever she was?’

  ‘The smell of the cloak, I’d noticed she was a smoker and I could smell it on the cloak. And the locket, I thought she owned it, but it wasn’t her, of course. She didn’t own it, and it wasn’t her.’

  But Emily Grahamden herself.

  He had had a meal ready, and was feeding her soup and omelette and wine by the fire. And the first thing he had said, after greeting her with relief, was that Rewley had telephoned but there was no news yet of Kate.

  ‘This is so cosy.’

  ‘I thought you needed comfort, sheer physical comfort.’ She had looked driven, spent when she had come into the house. But she was reviving, she had marvellous resilience.

  ‘How did you know? Because you did know a great deal, even before you went to Chantrey House?’

  ‘No, not know just had a feeling, I was guessing … But they told me really, William Madge told me a bit, Amy Mercer, she must have guessed or even known, Biddy, by her very lies, what she’d forgotten. She knew, you see, helped the grandmother, and the terrible thing she had done blacked out her memory … I could feel the gaps in what she said and fill in the pieces like a jigsaw. But I didn’t know until we opened the tomb and there was the child.’

  Charmian reached out to take her lover’s hand. ‘She was on top, shrouded but not in a coffin and her face was uncovered.’

  Dan Feather had helped raise the stone lid of the vault himself. It had moved easily enough. It was heavy but it could be done by two careful people. You needed two, and there had been two.

  ‘The father, Peter Loomis, was there, Feather insisted, and he fainted as he saw the child’s face.’

  ‘Did he know about it?’

  ‘He says not and I believe him, but only because he kept his eyes shut, as I guess he always did. Afterwards, he must have guessed about Joe and about Amy. Mrs Morgan, Moucher, may not have been the killer, but knew, and helped in the buryings. She’ll never admit to it and I’m not sure we will ever get her for it. She says she helped Emily Grahamden inter the child, but she did not kill her.’ She added, ‘The locket was Emily’s, it was she who dropped it. I didn’t know that Great-Aunt Crisp had been Emily’s nurse.’ – Childless herself, that lady, so Mrs Morgan had said, but had this been true? A speculation remained.

  ‘Isn’t is strange that they buried Joe where they did? Why not at Chantrey House?’

  ‘That was holy ground to Emily and she certainly wouldn’t want him near the dead Sarah … and then, it was Baby Drop territory where they did bury him. I guess Moucher knew that name, and …’ She hesitated. ‘Perhaps she had a childish memory of hearing talk about a great-aunt or great-great-aunt who had put away a child there.’ She thought of her own memories. ‘I remembered a snatch of my own grandmother’s talk.’ Perhaps there would be no more nightmares now the memory had worked to the surface of her mind. ‘Amy, of course, was another matter, she was not a candidate for Baby Drop territory. I think I’m lucky they didn’t kill her and leave her in this house. She was certainly captured here … Yes, I do use that word, the two women together must have been like a hostile army.’

  ‘Why did Amy tell that strange story about the child running up and down Peascod Street?’

  ‘I’ve wondered about that, we shan’t ever know, but she was very angry with her aunt for hitting her in the face, and yet at the same time there was a great tug of loyalty. Even when I did not believe her, yet I felt she had convinced herself that she had seen the child in the street. And of course, she probably had seen Sarah running and laughing and crying too at Chantrey House, she just transferred the story. I think she wanted to attract attention to the Chantrey and her aunt and Lady Grahamden and yet she didn’t want to accuse them openly of what she guessed had happened.’ Speculation, they might never know, but Amy’s very death was a mute testimony to the truth of it.

  ‘I know what Emily Grahamden was like: God and her family were what she lived by and she was inclined to identify with God. I can see she dominated the lot of them, but even so it’s hard to think of Biddy agreeing to the killing of her own child.’

  ‘A mercy killing, you see, that’s what Emily called it, was still calling it to Dan Feather. And you have to remember that Biddy had seen the other child.’

  Peter’s first child by his first wife, his cousin, as Biddy was too.

  ‘She knew what Batten’s Disease can do … she saw that first child lose first her sight and then die from renal failure. When she saw that one of Sarah’s eyes was swivelling, so that she was becoming what people call cross-eyed, she couldn’t bear the terrible future she thought she saw for the child. She knew that she and Peter had the same genetic relationship, it’s what’s called autosomal recessive. The tragedy is that she let Emily Grahamden take control. Emily said it couldn’t go on, they couldn’t let this child suffer, it was up to them.’

  ‘Biddy always let someone else take control.’

  ‘She let Emily take the child away and told the story that we know she told …’ Charmian shook her head. ‘I think the shock blacked out what really happened so that she truly hardly knew herself.’

  But she had sat at the window looking towards where the child was buried, and had wanted her back.

  ‘Quite likely there could have been a cure, but the real desperate thing is that the police doctor who first looked at Sarah, the dead child, says he thinks it’s quite likely all she had was this eye problem which could have been operated on, that she was a perfectly normal child.’

  Dan Feather had had tears in his eyes, that tough, experienced man, as he had walked out of the tomb.

  Charmian said: ‘You have to ask who killed Peter’s wife and why. Feather thinks Emily did it, so no other child would be born of that marriage.’

  ‘If she did that, then I suppose it’s easier to accept that she killed Joe and killed Amy.’

  ‘Yes, Joe had been hiding in the chapel … the stone and dust on his clothes came from there … There were traces of him. He may have been hiding there when the child’s body first rested on the tomb, perhaps unburied for some hours there, and that was how her hair and other traces got on to his clothes. He probably picked up the little doll then and put it in his pocket.’

  ‘I wonder they didn’t see him.’

  ‘You could crawl behind the other big tomb and not be seen … And then Emily Grahamden came back and found him, she admits as much. She says he was looking at Sarah. Well, we know from William Madge that he wasn’t the sort of boy to
walk away without getting something for himself.’

  ‘You’ll have to trace his path out there.’

  ‘I think William Madge may have had something to do with that. He told us that he drove the boy into the country and dropped him there. He didn’t want Joe in his own place.’ – Hide out there, William could have said, I’ll come and get you. ‘ I don’t suppose he will be charged, although Totty will go down for something if Feather gets his way, but I think Madge will be advised to quietly retire and let a nephew – I believe there is one – run the shop.’

  Humphrey put his arms round her. ‘The gene pool is very dangerous, isn’t it? At least we haven’t got any children.’

  Charmian said: ‘Oh God, my mother, I was to have telephoned, I forgot.’

  ‘Do it later. Drink the wine.’ He put another log on the fire and Muff rolled towards the blaze luxuriously.

  ‘I did have a pregnancy once, and I had an abortion … it seemed right at the time.’

  He smoothed her hair. ‘I know, you’ve told me … But I think it worries you and this case has stirred things up.’

  ‘I’ll never know now who that skeletal baby was …’ But perhaps Mrs Morgan could guess. A relation of long ago who had worked at Chantrey House? A family story handed down so that when the burying of Joe was necessary, that was where she went.

  She didn’t admit it, but she had driven the yellow car and Emily the white van. Each time to a burying.

  ‘It’s such a sad terrible story.’ Charmian put her head on his shoulder. ‘What people those two women were … Do you know, I think they were related way back … One of those servant-master seductions. And do you know, I believe Mrs Moucher is related somehow to the skeleton … the baby had an extra finger, and I noticed that on Mrs Moucher-Morgan’s left hand there was a kind of stump by the little finger where another finger might have been … they were kin, those two. The locket was Emily’s, it was she who dropped it, did I tell you that? It had been given her by her old nanny who was the girl in the picture.’