‘Like hell I will!’ He turned to face me. ‘You’re being funny,’ he accused me. ‘They could hunt around till their eyes dropped out, and still find nothing.’
‘Nobody can say that, Mr Thomas.’
‘Glenn, damn it, Glenn. Nobody calls me mister.’
So perhaps I was wrong about his pretensions. ‘Glenn it is, then.’
‘That’s my property, over there,’ he said, as though he hadn’t made his point. He waved towards the hedge. ‘I farm over five hundred acres. Dairy and grain crops. A good portion of the village works for me, one way or another, but nobody calls me mister. So I don’t want anybody to be upset. Understand?’
‘Precisely, Mr Thomas.’
He turned to face me, anger in his eyes, then he saw my demure expression, and surprisingly grinned. ‘I see you do.’
‘So—if you wish it—I’ll pass on your message to Madame Acarti. She is not welcome.’
‘I don’t understand you.’ He shook his head violently, and his hair flew wildly, catching the sun. ‘D’you still want to consult her?’
‘I’m told she may want to consult me.’
‘What about?’ There was immediate suspicion.
‘I shan’t know until I see her, shall I?’
I saw then that she had emerged from her tent. Perhaps our words had reached her, carried on the light breeze. Or at least, the indefinite sound of voices.
‘She wouldn’t have dared put her nose in here, if Harris had been alive,’ said Glenn.
‘I can understand that he wouldn’t have dared to consult her himself. It’d take all day to list his misdemeanours.’
He laughed. ‘It certainly would.’
‘It is Harris, I suppose?’
‘Pardon? What is?’
‘His name.’
‘Of course. What else?’
‘An unusual Christian name,’ I observed. ‘I thought it had to be a shortening of Harrison.’
He didn’t reply. I glanced up at him. He was gazing directly into the far distance, his jaw set.
‘Am I wrong?’ I asked.
‘Where did you get that from?’ he asked gently, with the menacing softness of a hunting cat on a feather quilt.
I managed a casual shrug, wishing I hadn’t mentioned it. ‘No more than a passing thought. It doesn’t matter.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Yet clearly, it did.
‘So I’ll go and get it over with,’ I said.
‘You’re a persistent…’ He didn’t allow himself to be specific.
‘I’ve been told that. I’m working on it. I’ll leave you now, Glenn. Don’t throw her out on her neck until I’ve finished with her.’
He shrugged. His eyes went beyond me and he scanned the higher slopes. ‘I’ll go and find Josie.’
I watched him walk away, and was reluctant, now, to approach the tent. She was clearly waiting for me, looking very lonely and very bored. I walked slowly uphill towards her. She seemed to be a tall, slim woman, dark-skinned, but I couldn’t detect the colour of her hair. From somewhere she had obtained a brightly coloured caftan, which most certainly didn’t suit her, and had over her hair a silk scarf, blue shot through with gold thread, which was tied beneath her chin.
‘I’ve been waiting ages for you,’ she told me severely. ‘Where’ve you been?’ Almost as though she hadn’t seen exactly where.
Her voice was soft and melodious, not the voice you would expect from a detective sergeant, nor yet the voice of a gypsy seer. ‘Around and about,’ I told her.
‘Asking questions, I’ve no doubt.’ She nodded her head in confirmation, then she extended her arm in invitation and stood aside for me to enter.
It was a pitch-roofed tent, not large, its side walls barely two feet tall. I had to slide round the ridge pole support to get inside, the light suddenly dim after the sunlight outside. It was barely possible to see that there was nothing inside but a small round table with a chair each side. I shuffled around one of the chairs, having to duck my head as it brushed against the sloping wall. I sat.
‘That’s my chair,’ she claimed.
It didn’t seem to matter; they were identical. ‘Sorry…I’ll just…’
‘It signifies nothing.’
Then she took her seat opposite me. Her voice had changed. What she had said were the words of a soothsayer. Now it was all business. ‘Ralphie told you I wanted to see you,’ she went on. ‘So why haven’t you come earlier?’
‘I waited until the necessity arose.’ I thought I put that well, hiding my annoyance that she had expected me to come running.
She didn’t react. ‘Well, you’re here now. Give me your hand.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Your hand. How can I explore your future unless I see your hand?’
I offered her my right hand, palm upwards. She took it, turned it over, and stared at the back.
‘Your nails are short, Philipa,’ she said quietly, close to crooning.
‘I keep them short.’
‘No use for scratching eyes out, are they?’
‘I had no such intention,’ I assured her.
She turned it over and stared in the general direction of my lifeline, though she couldn’t possibly have seen it. Although that wouldn’t matter.
‘I see danger ahead, Miss Philipa Lowe. Deep danger. You have been asking too many questions. There is a chill wind blowing over my shoulders. I feel it reaching for you.’
‘Have you any advice to offer, Madame Acarti?’ I asked, trying to sound terrified.
‘The obvious. Go home.’
‘But I don’t want to miss the fireworks.’
She ignored that, peering closely at my palm, then leaning back.
‘You are a stubborn, stupid woman, d’you know that?’ Now it was Alice Carter speaking. ‘Why do you persist in this?’
‘In what?’
‘Pursuing this ridiculous idea that Clare Steadman could be innocent.’
I snatched back my hand. ‘I know she is.’
‘Know, know! Who knows, except Clare herself—and has she asked for your help? Are you qualified in any way to give it?’
‘Perhaps I was born with a logical mind—and I don’t see much logic in what was assumed to have happened. Or I’m stubborn. Or I like truth.’
‘You won’t get much of that from Clare.’
‘I’ve discovered that. But a few details strike me as true.’
We thus batted it to and fro. Getting nowhere. Then we were silent for a few moments, until I ventured: ‘Why would you warn me, unless you felt I was in danger? And that couldn’t come from anybody but the real murderer of Harris Steadman.’
I could just detect the slight acknowledging smile she gave me.
‘Your logic, Miss Lowe?’
‘It sounds logical. Is that all you had for me, Sergeant?’
‘Perhaps not.’
I waited for her to offer more, but she was silent again, no doubt considering how far she dared to go.
‘You don’t seem to be very busy,’ I commented. ‘No queue.’
‘I was busy earlier. But when they realised what I was after they backed off, and the word went around.’
‘Ah yes.’ I could guess whose word had gone around. ‘And what was the word in question?’
She seemed to avoid answering. ‘They will confide in Madame Acarti what they will not to Sergeant Carter. I suppose they persuade themselves I’m not a policewoman, but a special creature who will treasure their confidences.’
‘You’re certainly talking like one,’ I assured her. ‘It’s a suspension of disbelief. And what did they balk at?’
‘The word must have flashed round like a forest fire.’
‘But what?’
‘I was trying to discover, Miss Lowe, whether there’d been any pregnancy at around that time, September 1986, one that didn’t produce something in the due course of time.’
‘Ah!’ I said, suddenly more alert. It see
med that I was not the only one who believed there were unexplained facts involved in the death of Harris Steadman. The uncertainty still haunted other people than me…but unofficially. Such individual thinking in the force would not be encouraged. ‘And was there?’
Her voice suddenly resumed its pretentious all-knowing tone. ‘All is not revealed, even to the most expert visionary. The picture is blurred.’ Her voice changed again. ‘Of course there were pregnancies. When are there not? Whether the fathers were the expectant husbands, it has never been revealed. But others there were, the fathers unknown. The truth, though, need not be in the pregnancies, but in their termination. The truth you seek—the truth others would so dearly love to glimpse, even only as a passing shade of truth —’
‘Can’t you talk ordinary English?’
‘Hush. I’m practising. The life of a visionary is fraught with untruths. Sometimes the truth is negative.’
‘Oh…get on with it.’ She had taken back my hand. I assumed she didn’t realise. Perhaps she was in a trance. ‘How many terminated pregnancies can you produce at that time?’
‘Pregnancies are always being terminated. Then and now.’
‘Oh?’
‘By birth. My own second child was born around that time. But other ways are open for exploration.’
‘For heaven’s sake! So you’ve explored. And have you had any success? Any hint…’
She sighed. ‘To Madame Acarti, no secrets were entrusted.’
‘You asked?’
She inclined her head. ‘But got no answers.’
‘Not even negative ones?’
‘Stubborn, shaken heads.’
I had Glenn to thank for this. ‘Which, to you, as a policewoman, would mean that there was something?’
She tilted her head at me, weighing me up. ‘The interesting thing’, she said at last, ‘is that you’re also on the same tack. Obviously.’
‘Shall we say I’ve been talking to Clare—we’ve been talking to her, Oliver and I. An interesting pregnancy at that time, provided that Harris was the father, would have given Clare a very strong motive.’
‘She didn’t need one, did she? There was his action with her guns. That infuriated her past breaking-point.’
‘So why…’ I asked softly, leaning forward. ‘Why are we discussing pregnancies?’ She didn’t seem inclined to reply, so I went on, ‘Why, unless you believe it’s relevant—which has to mean that you don’t think Clare killed her husband?’
‘Ralph’s always thought that.’
‘But now you seem to think in terms of pregnancies.’
‘That has to be considered.’
She hadn’t sounded convinced. ‘But you’d rather accept it was based on money,’ I suggested.
‘What money?’
‘You know what. Harris was in financial trouble. He’d had his fingers in the funds of the company he had shares in, Shades Of Knight Ltd. If Clare refused to let him have any, that could have sparked off their final battle.’
‘That…is…true.’ She was very cautious.
‘But as against that,’ I went on, ‘she might well have agreed to pay up. She did pay up, afterwards, I heard.’
‘And where did you hear that?’ She was interested again.
‘I don’t remember. Oliver, I think. Or Clare herself.’
‘Because it isn’t true. Glenn Thomas paid it. It was he who got the company out of trouble. The rumour was that he bought Harris’s shares from Clare, and as a shareholder he put in the necessary cash.’
She peered at me, her head on one side. Make something of that if you can. I was getting pressures from all directions: go home, and let the guilt lie where it had already fallen.
‘So go home, Philipa Lowe,’ she said in a kindly voice. ‘There’s nothing here for you.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ I said firmly. ‘I think you’ve picked up something, you and your fine husband. You hope to put it together and produce another murderer…and promotions all round.’
‘Now listen here—‘
I didn’t intend to. ‘But now I know that there’s something…oh, you can’t expect me to drop it now.’
She seemed to make a gesture towards me. In an instant her face changed, her eyes wide and startled. She made a choking sound, like a grunt, her mouth wide open, and now she was clutching for me, reaching. I put out my free hand to catch hers, and my fingers were nearly crushed as she pitched forward, choking, then there was blood from her open mouth all over my arm, and I couldn’t release my hand. The fingers of her other hand scrabbled at the table top, and I heard a screaming sound. It wasn’t until I finally managed to force my hand free that I realised it was I who was screaming. I tried to stop, but it went on and on.
Then I fell over backwards as my legs became tangled with my chair. Whimpering now, I crawled on hands and knees to the opening and out into the field. Then I forced myself to my feet with one hand, the other, bloodied, being held out in front of me, as far away as possible in my disgust and revulsion.
I stood and turned, looking back, unable to restrain myself. The pitch of the tent was held inwards, like the mouth of a funnel, by the haft of a knife.
A marginal awareness registered the fact that there was a rustle through the hedge, ten feet back, and just a glimpse of something beyond it moving away. Running away.
Then I was screaming again, for help, for assistance, until I must have passed out.
9
I thought at first that I was in heaven. The hot blue sky was directly ahead of me, so reason dictated that I had to be lying on my back. And I was surrounded by roses. Their perfume was a heavy mist around me.
‘Just lie still,’ said a quiet voice.
A face, upside-down, but I could detect that it flourished a large moustache, was leaning closer and closer.
‘She’s coming round.’ That was Oliver’s voice. He was somewhere. I struggled to look round, but then my head swam from the movement.
‘You’ll be all right in a minute,’ the quiet voice went on. ‘You fainted.’
I was utterly ashamed. I had screamed, too, hadn’t I? Screamed and fainted. I had always considered that screaming was a silly reaction to danger or shock. I had thought swooning was a Victorian fad, not fit behaviour for a modern woman. Yet I’d done both. Yes, I had. I remembered the screams, though not the fainting.
But Oliver would be pleased with me, I thought. I clung to the idea, and tried to express it, but found I couldn’t.
‘You’re all right now,’ said the calm voice. ‘Try to sit up. But slowly.’
Of course I could sit up. What did he think I was, some empty-headed flibbertigibbet…
I tried. My head swam, but I persisted, and Oliver’s good arm was round my shoulders, and his face was smiling, close, warm and comforting.
‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ I whispered.
I now perceived that I was lying on a stretcher. Had been lying, but was now sitting up, on a stretcher in what must have been Clare’s rose garden. From such a low position I was able to see only my immediate surroundings, but clearly, if the rest of it was anything like what I could see…
‘Help me up, Oliver, please.’
‘You’ve had a nasty shock.’
‘Don’t treat me like a delicate flower,’ I said, being surrounded by flowers and my imagination not working fully at that time.
He helped me to my feet. My legs were like jelly, but I concentrated. Oliver took most of the strain. The man with the moustache was replacing various items into his black case, smiling I thought at his success. ‘Thank you,’ I murmured, and he smiled and nodded. ‘You’re not the only one today. It’s the heat.’ I agreed that it must be, and he went away.
Clare was standing on the path, facing me with her feet spread wide, as though she too wasn’t certain of her legs, and frowning, frowning and worried—and just a little annoyed.
‘They brought you up here,’ said Oliver softly. ‘It was the nearest…away fr
om the gawping crowd.’
‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ I repeated. It was something I had to know.
‘Yes, Phil. She’s dead. I’m sorry.’
I heard myself moan. ‘Poor Ralph…’
Clare had not said a word. Now she turned round and headed back towards the house.
‘Yes,’ said Oliver. ‘Poor Ralph. He’s down there with them. Nobody’s got the heart to send him away. He’s just standing there. The full team’s here now. You’ve been out of touch for nearly half an hour, Phil.’
‘What! I don’t believe it.’
‘You heard the doctor. We were worried.’
I refused to believe it. ‘But I couldn’t…’
‘You did. The heat. That and the fact that you haven’t eaten since that snack we had. Oh…a hundred reasons.’
Bless him, he had to find reasons. No, they were excuses for me, for my having behaved like a weak female. Women don’t faint, these days. Surely not.
‘And Ralph’s down there?’
‘He’s there, but not with them. The Scene Of Crime team’s taken over. They can’t move her till all the…the details have been covered. The super wants to speak to you.’
I had just remembered why I’d screamed. ‘Not there!’
‘No. No, my sweet. Clare wants you to come inside the house, and you can relax in the sitting-room. She’ll get you a cup of tea, and sandwiches. Whatever. And there’s brandy.’
‘Oh yes, there’s brandy.’
With his arm around me, he began to walk me slowly towards the house. I was feeling stronger now and didn’t need his help, but there was no hurry to tell him that.
‘The knife?’ I asked.
‘An ordinary kitchen knife. Nothing special about it.’
‘I saw it, Oliver. Don’t walk so fast.’
‘We’re not walking fast, Phillie. Hardly moving at all.’
I stopped.
‘You’re tired,’ he said. ‘There’s a bench just along here.’
The roses marched in shaped beds on both sides of us, each bed neatly outlined by low, square-cut box hedges. It was almost painful to be blinded by the flaming colours. Whether or not Glenn Thomas had been instructed to arrange payment for it, an expert gardener must have worked stolidly for nearly six years in order to maintain this scented paradise at a peak of perfection. Whenever Clare returned, it would be there to welcome her, to relax her, to tell her she was home.
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