by Lorna Gray
I suppose I should be glad to have been able to lend a bit of cheer to all my fellow invalids, but you know … well, I won’t call it betrayal because I know she saw this story as an act of leadership for all the real women whose husbands have come home damaged from war. She also thought she’d found the ideal means of fixing herself firmly in the public eye if I might shortly be pensioned out of the army. But I’m like you. Lamed or not, I won’t slide into meek complacency and I certainly won’t buy a new career by seeing my recent deeds dressed up as the stuff of glory.
Truly, I can’t help wondering what glory she imagined would be found anyway, in trading on the actions of an angry youth from Battersea who will now have to spend a portion of his life behind bars?
I’m sorry about this mess, though, for Father’s sake. I won’t mention wealth or social standing because I know that for all the lectures he and Uncle William have given us over the years, that won’t be the part he’ll be disappointed about. He liked her, I know.
I found that I was sitting on the edge of the bed, clutching the disgusting skirt – which I dropped just as soon as I realised – and staring at the letter. I was thinking that I understood now why the Colonel should have believed that his encounter with a journalist would hurt Richard more than him. And I was thinking that I shouldn’t be surprised any more that Richard had always seemed faintly uncertain as he accepted each quiet proof of my care from me.
This Lady Sarah, who was like Mrs Abbey and the dead brother and sometimes even the father, despite his better intentions; they all tried to claim whatever Richard had to give, as if it were debt he should pay purely because he was strong enough to bear it.
But not me. I wanted to burn this letter. Ruin it, so that it couldn’t hurt him again. This ought to have been his own past and his own story to tell if he had wished to, not a weapon for Mrs Abbey to use in a fresh assault in a bad battle. I didn’t burn the letter, though. I read the part that came afterwards that was like an introduction to the real, living John Langton and proved his core to be possessed by a horrible, selfish man.
The last of the paragraphs that had been penned by Richard indicated the true purpose of his letter. It revealed that a request had been made in the course of John’s visit – and forgotten until a note from John had prompted him. Now Richard detailed, as promised, the name of a local family contact who had helped to source some of their mother’s choice artworks. There was a hope this person would prove useful to John in the disposal of a painting. I thought for a moment this was going to turn into an astounding declaration that the myth about a missing treasure was true after all, but it didn’t.
The scrawl on the reverse was the part that was written by John and it told the reader that he was forwarding the long-awaited details now that Richard had ‘finally recovered his wits enough after that ruinous conquest to remember to send the name’. It also offered his services if the reader wanted some support during the ensuing negotiations over the sale of their particularly foul and muddy painting and that was that. It didn’t even bear John’s name.
I could identify the man’s hand by his flamboyant way of handling his Fs. That initial, taking the form of a ‘Dear F’, was all there was on this note to indicate that this had been addressed to Mrs Florence Abbey. It occurred to me to wonder if this letter was supposed to incriminate Duckett – based solely on the fact that it had been Duckett himself who had given me Mrs Abbey’s full name. But a simple handwriting test would eliminate that theory and on that same principle, I barely spared even a moment to worry that Abbey might have thought the untidiness of the scrawl would allow the ‘Dear F’ to be mistaken for a ‘Dear E’. No one would believe I’d ever met John. And no one would imagine I would stain my own clothes with blood and then thrust them here with an old letter, as if to hide them.
The alternative was that this note had been placed here as a final attempt to add weight to the rumour of a love affair between John Langton and his neighbour Florence Abbey, but even that wasn’t particularly successful. John’s cruel, unsympathetic handling of Richard’s letter wasn’t lightened by expressions of undying love for the reader, or mild affection or even dignified friendship. The abbreviation of her name to an F as an introduction was as intimate as it came. And there were certainly no messages from a doting father to his beloved little boy.
It was a very peculiar piece of the bribe. It left me tense, trapped. Particularly when the whole experience evaporated into a sudden and horrible sensation of being watched again.
I twisted sharply to the door. There was no one there. Of course there wasn’t. The house was muted and empty. In a way, that was probably why this place was feeling quietly hostile again, as it had on that very first walk through to the telephone. Because it made me very aware of the distant whisper of conversation that was drifting up the stairs from the front door. I believe there were two or three bored policemen outside by the cars who were acting as a kind of guard. They were probably smoking because after these past few days of worrying about fire, my nose was sensitive enough to detect the faint tinge of sulphur from a match.
Disputing my idea of quiet isolation, their voices were rivalled by the equally distant rumble of the Colonel’s interview with Detective Fleece. The brief rattle of temper that drifted along the gallery from the other direction seemed to me to belong to the bullying squire that the old man might have been had John not died. Presumably they had got to the part where the Colonel was learning precisely how Richard had come by his injury at the pump house.
It wasn’t the most encouraging note on which to turn my footsteps to the door that concealed the servants’ stairs. But the discovery of this letter had to be shared, whether I loathed the idea of Richard knowing how his brother had handled his private cares or not, so I eased my way through into the landing with all the bathrooms and downwards into the gloom. I knocked lightly on the servants’ door into the kitchen for the sake of politeness, and put my hand on the panel.
And then stopped because something about the pitch of the Colonel’s voice in that room had me turning on the spot and hurrying back up the steps again.
Instinct had me thinking very clearly about those idle policemen standing on the front step. It also had me thinking about how the Colonel’s temper was strangely constrained when he had never thought to moderate his tone before.
I was already running back up through the gloom – already thinking of raising the alarm – when the door was snatched open behind. Comprehension had come too late for me. A sweaty hand reached. It claimed my right arm at the elbow. It wrenched me off the stairs and into daylight. Excruciatingly. Vision was confused, but I heard the clatter and felt the collision when I met the dresser. It was used as a prison and I was jammed there without a thought for the pain of it. My left side must have struck because it was agony, but at least it was the opposite side from the hip that had met the sun-baked ground above the pump house. The paper in my hand met the smooth wood of the dresser with a crisp clack. It all occurred at the same moment that I saw that the Colonel was on his feet by the table near the policeman. Duckett stood quite a long way beyond them. He threw out a lazy order. ‘Don’t let her scream.’
And then, while the hand took a better hold to keep me from getting into a position where I might fight him and in the process rattled my teeth, a breathy instruction was hissed into my ear. This was a voice I barely recognised from the single time I had it heard before and he didn’t issue a curse or a threat or anything to match the grip he had on my upper arm.
Abbey said in a desperate undertone while he shut the door, ‘Help me.’
Chapter 29
Of the two instructions, I obeyed Duckett’s first. I didn’t make a sound. Duckett was standing with his back to the window by the kitchen door, besuited and wearing that ugly yellow tie. The gun was in his hand this time. I thought he must have taken it. And perhaps, for our sake, it was a good thing. He was probably better trusted with it. He was wearing neat black driving
gloves while Abbey was bare-fisted and his hands had the job of bustling me into a vacant chair by the kitchen table. He flung me there, really, for all that I was relatively willing to go. And even without Duckett’s caution, grim sense would have kept me silent had those hands not tried to ensure it as Abbey thrust me into my chair by giving me a short, sharp slap across the cheek. The shock of the blow dragged a cry from me as the seat caught me and kept me from falling. It also made willingness evaporate. It made the other two men start forwards as Abbey’s grip righted me in my chair and hovered on the cusp of hitting me again, this time with real force. The detective’s voice was loud. He was checked by Duckett’s comm3and. We all were.
I had my hand up to fend off another strike. As I lowered my guard and shaking fingertips moved instead to lightly probe the heat that consumed my left cheek, I saw the detective subside grudgingly into his chair on the far side of the table. Abbey released his grip on my clothes and settled for taking the letter from me as he stepped away. He was watching me as though I fascinated him. I suppose he saw me as his salvation. His posture was that of a man unhinged, but that brief hushed break of his voice had told a different story. It wasn’t madness, or recklessness, or pure coincidence that had brought him to a house occupied by the policemen who hunted him. He’d come here knowing he would find them. And just now he’d tried to trip me into sound for the sake of calling Richard.
But it hadn’t been enough. Later I would be desperately grateful that my cry really hadn’t been enough.
Duckett was staring too. He was gazing at me from across the room like I was a gift; a surprise and his own dear prize. I thought I knew now in what form the two men were here together – captor and hostage – but this emphasis on silence told me what my mind didn’t want to imagine. For Duckett, at least, there was no thought for Richard except to keep away from his attention. He had no intention of using me to bend Richard to his will. I was Duckett’s target here.
That hungry stare made me feel sick. I wasn’t badly hurt. Just shaken in my chair and feeling that brief relief of burgeoning anger slipping helplessly away. Because, in all the time that I’d been fighting against being the Abbeys’ lure as they drove Richard to act, it had never really occurred to me to consider the depth of the enmity that was motivating them to behave like this in the first place.
I was unimaginably relieved when finally the policeman gave me the excuse to break away from that gaze.
When Detective Fleece spoke, he was sitting quietly but braced in his chair about two yards from me on the other side of the round kitchen table. I hadn’t quite appreciated before what a big man the detective was. He had an elbow resting upon the tabletop, which was inexplicably cluttered with household objects that someone had placed there and his hand was idly rearranging a collection of pepper pots into various alignments. It meant nothing. It was just a symptom of his mind’s preoccupation. His glance towards me behind the screen of this lazy act was designed to assure himself, through an unspoken question, that I was unharmed. It also told me what he wished me to do, which was nothing. I knew why. It was because, while one of us might take the initiative of raising the alarm, there was absolutely no way of ensuring that it might not fall upon another to bear the wrath of Duckett’s instinctive response with that gun. In a way, our united caution gave a sense of control; it underlined the normal civilised concern that each of us felt for the lives of everyone else in this room. But, in truth, Duckett was leaving us with only the power of doing nothing to hasten the inevitable, which was no control at all.
Apparently we were permitted to speak though. I expected Duckett to demand silence but the detective was calmly telling me, ‘You’ve found us like this because the man who was recording my interview with Colonel Langton was called out to take a message from the other team. They’d sent the driver back to us to carry the news that Mr Duckett’s battered old Ford has been found by your cousin’s cottage. Unfortunately, having taken that message, my man hasn’t come back. I expect he’s gone to relay the information to the men at the tithe barn. It goes without saying that we hadn’t any real idea that the Ford’s owner would calmly walk in through the kitchen door.’
‘The tithe barn is empty, policeman.’ It was Abbey speaking. His voice was high and scolding. ‘Your man’s at that barn higher up on the lane. The watershed. And it’s your man’s fault we had to step inside here. Brian brought me here to clean up my little roost in the tithe barn – with more fire, you know? And the girl—’
He was interrupted by Brian Duckett. The man holding the weapon explained on a considerably less confrontational note, ‘Paul wanted to leave a clearer mark that he’d been here. We thought the place was its usual deserted self. Only that stray man popped into view around the corner of the house and we had to dive for the first cover we found, which was this great cavern of a kitchen. We weren’t expecting the place to be overrun with men and policemen.’
Duckett was thoroughly unruffled. Which was odd because he’d never been relaxed before, even when quietly enjoying the opportunity to bully me. He was also turning to lift an oil lamp from the window ledge beside him. It was one of a pair set out in anticipation of the Colonel’s dinner party tonight. And it was as Duckett returned it to its place again that Abbey retreated abruptly to the dresser in the corner. I caught the change in Abbey’s face. He’d been glowering furtively while Duckett examined the lamp. Now white-rimmed eyes swam in a gaunt face. He didn’t look very much like John Langton’s ghost. He was tall and dark-haired, true, and his eyes were blue, but they lacked the steel of the Langton gaze and he was older too. He was perhaps in his forties and had the nervous energy of a man who hadn’t slept well in years. I suppose that was what prison did. He was certainly tense now. He was fidgeting restlessly, fingers toying with a jacket pocket. I thought it was the pocket that until recently had held the gun.
The probability that the jacket was another item of clothing that had once been John’s made me find the temper to turn my head and say tartly to Duckett, ‘You might not have thought the police would be here, but I should have thought Abbey might. After this morning, he would have known that they’d either be here or at Eddington, and he would never have dared take you to his wife’s home. Richard wouldn’t have been neatly within earshot and what would be the use of presenting you to the policemen there as the arsonist who has been destroying a few outhouses? They’d be far more interested in arresting him.’
Abbey’s sudden move towards me silenced me sharply. He didn’t want me to mention the pump house nor his wife. Nor the idea of calling Richard. And perhaps not even the chain of fires by Duckett’s hand.
Then my chair creaked. The Colonel had been on his feet all along. He had moved to fix a hand on the back of my chair. Now he was standing guard as if it would be a deterrent if Abbey really did mean to hit me again. He looked awful and I could hear his breathing. A greasy film stood out upon his skin. Beneath the ruddy tinge, he was desperately pale and I wondered if anyone had ever thought to check the state of his heart.
It was a surprise when from his place some way to my right, the policeman’s voice calmly directed a question to Duckett. ‘Am I to understand that you brought Mr Abbey here to set alight to the last of his lairs? Did you intend to leave Mr Abbey stranded for Captain Langton to catch him in the act?’
Abbey was snatching his eyes from me to peer almost owlishly at Duckett’s face. It was the reference to the fire that was bothering him now.
I added in a voice that was a distracted whisper, ‘And why not? After all, everyone here is trying to incriminate someone.’
And it was that last statement that tightened my hands upon the rim of my seat on either side of my skirt. Because everyone really was trying to incriminate someone here and, for all the madness of the act, it was suddenly occurring to me to wonder if I had just discovered that Abbey had deliberately given Duckett the gun.
After all, a few burned outhouses really were nothing compared to Abbey’s
own crimes so far. And what trap might Abbey be trying to weave into this scene now that it was Duckett’s fist that was clenched around the butt of that Webley?
My heart was beating. My fingers were adjusting their grip on the chair when the policeman cast me a questioning look. I knew I was looking disbelieving. I couldn’t explain. I didn’t really know myself beyond the doubt of how far Abbey could still be depending now upon the concept of harnessing Richard, when surely Abbey must know, as the rest of us did, how little even a soldier could do against the pure uncompromising speed of a bullet.
I found that Abbey had returned to his dresser and was reading my face in a way that wasn’t quite so ready to provoke me into a fight any more. He was looking, in fact, like he was reading my thoughts, almost enjoying them, and that, in itself, was deeply unnerving. Because, on Abbey’s face was a shadow of the same kind of daring that Richard had described facing in the aftermath of my intervention at the pump house.
It made every nerve scream caution when the policeman remarked to Duckett, ‘I suppose you do know you’re already free from Abbey, don’t you? You do know a man was lately shot with that stolen Webley?’
I hoped the policeman had understood my alarm; that he was taking charge. But my chair creaked again. The Colonel was leaning heavily. His own mistake had armed this scene after all. And with his ebbing pride, the rest of my meagre hope failed too. Duckett didn’t seem at all relieved by the news that the revolver in his hand had a different history from the one he had imagined. I had believed Detective Fleece’s comments might render this entire exercise redundant now that Duckett knew that the weapon was actually already part of a police investigation. Instead, Duckett was blindingly, humblingly, indifferent. And no words from a policeman could remove the bullets from that gun.
All Detective Fleece had succeeded in doing, if anything, was remind Duckett of his control. Duckett was barking at Abbey, ‘Get back to your job, Paul. Stop looking like you’re about to harass the girl. Bring me that paper in your hand. Show me what she had.’