by Lorna Gray
My hands were empty. I hadn’t thought before this moment, but I’d still been clutching the note when her husband had dragged me from my chair. It was certainly gone now. I’d probably dropped it when Richard’s father had fallen to the floor. It made me think, in a fiercely intense burst of something like revenge, that at least one piece of Duckett’s trespass would remain there for Richard to identify, once Duckett’s fire had claimed all the rest.
It gave me the resolve to settle my hands quite steadily upon the partition while Duckett dithered beside me. I thought Duckett must act now and swiftly, but he was too busy building imaginary imposters out of the hay. I thought it was with a conscious effort on his part that he curbed the impulse to go on jabbing at the nearest stack and instead set the pitchfork handle down against the end of my partition. He still didn’t seem to fully count Mrs Abbey as one of the hostages. It didn’t do her much good though.
In the act of placing the lamp upon the post at the end of my partition, he asked her with the hoarse kindliness of excitement, ‘Where are the children, Florence?’
I saw her flinch. She was fidgeting about in the heart of the gable end, where timbers that would have amazed my father met in a point at the apex of the roof. Dramatically framed by their harsh lines in the lamplight, she told Duckett quickly, ‘With Mrs Winstone. They’d had enough walking by the time we’d left the shop and made it back to the village.’
This wasn’t another lie. I thought she must have left them with Mrs Winstone before approaching the Manor kitchen. She would never have dared leave them alone after nearly losing them to Duckett’s car the other day and I could guess how strongly she was feeling the luck of the instinct that had made her refrain from bringing them here.
My hands were gripping the coarse rail that topped the partition. Clutching the wood was how I managed to remain still while Duckett passed behind me and my skin crawled. He was checking the dark void of collapsed hay that ran to the point where the floorboards met the rafters. The space was utterly silent, naturally. No help was conveniently waiting there.
I didn’t know what the delay was. I’d understood that escape for Duckett depended on swift action before anyone conducted a thorough search. Perhaps Duckett was simply enjoying himself. Duckett had returned to his position just beyond the post at the end of my partition. The lamp was lighting his job of counting the rounds left in the chamber of his revolver. There were four from a possible six. He reached into a pocket and drew out some spare rounds. Abbey had given him the ammunition too. He really was a fool.
I wondered if Duckett was a fool too. The detective was right; the man’s power began and ended with that gun, but its hold on us would be superseded by a greater threat at the moment he tried to light his fire. A bullet might account for one of us, but that fire would claim us all, so we would have to act, and there was every reason to think that all natural sense must unite us to act against him. All the same, though, the thought was hovering unpleasantly at the back of my mind that at the moment we all lunged for Duckett, it was possible that I might find myself having to fight off Abbey. That his terror might lead him to seize the chance to hurt me when anything that befell me in the confusion might easily be attributed to his enemy.
The thought made me notice the pitchfork handle. It was still propped against the post, barely a yard from my right hand, and I wasn’t one of three old firemen climbing blind into a trap. My eyes sought the policeman’s, but he had his jacket off and was gingerly peering beneath the rag at his wound, testing to see whether it was still bleeding.
It was.
Mrs Abbey’s voice cracked through my wince like a whip. I was burning already. It was suffocating up here and my own blood was running in thickened beats. She said, ‘I heard at the shop that you’ve been collecting their groceries. I suppose the Captain’s got you cooking their meals?’
I blinked. I believe I’d been waiting all this time for her to begin a coded conversation between two determined women. I’d imagined that she had been preparing me for it when she’d made that comment about my feelings for Richard and his letter. This didn’t feel like that sort of speech though. This felt like the beginnings of a fresh allusion to John Langton. It was hard not to automatically perceive it as a threat. Particularly when she added condescendingly, ‘Do you think it’s attractive to crawl about like a slave for them? Do you honestly think he’ll like you for it?’
It was beyond me now to feel compelled to explain that I wasn’t weak, or conniving, or whatever else I was judged to be these days. That, at least, was a lesson I had learned and learned well. I might have had to wonder how Mrs Abbey’s criticism balanced in the woman’s mind with her own dedicated efforts for the sake of her husband in recent weeks. I also had to wonder if she was ever going to be capable of simply telling me plainly what she was really thinking.
Naively, I tried to find the truth by answering her questions. With uneasy honesty, while every other part of my mind watched Duckett as he closed the chamber on his gun, I told her, ‘Actually, it was my choice to do the cooking. Richard’s father needed feeding and Richard himself was already managing all the old man’s letter-writing and telephoning and every other duty imaginable that he’s been performing without a murmur ever since his arrival here.’
It clearly wasn’t the reply she wanted. Particularly when I conceded rather less generously, ‘I suppose, Mrs Abbey, it could be considered rather too typical that the kitchen work should have fallen to the first available woman. And I suppose on that first night I could have taken myself home to make my own dinner and left them to sort themselves out between chores while I ate in splendid and dignified isolation. But it wouldn’t exactly have been nice, would it?’
I actually made Duckett give a little laugh, which hadn’t been my plan at all. He thought I was a lovesick girl advocating servility. But I wasn’t speaking for him; I didn’t imagine he could understand the difference between exploitation and giving help where it was truly needed. And it had been a foolish thing to say anyway because speaking sympathetically of the Colonel didn’t disarm Duckett; it didn’t convey friendship to the woman who believed she had been a friend to his son. It all just served to remind me of the man we’d left in the kitchen and the way he had looked that first night after Richard had asked me to cook his dinner. And how Richard had only asked me to stay at all because it had been a way of managing the threat to me without adding to my strain after what had amounted to a very stressful day. At that time we hadn’t even known just how dangerous these people were.
Mrs Abbey was drifting away from her place against the end wall behind her husband’s shoulders. It brought her a little closer to me. I didn’t trust her at all when she said, ‘You mention that the Captain’s been doing the letter-writing for his father since his return. The Langtons do seem to like their letter-writing, don’t they?’
We were there at last. We were back to mentions of John Langton. And I knew now that, for her, his name counted as disguise.
She said, ‘That letter of mine you were waving about in the kitchen just now was left to give your soldier a little hint about everything else I have from John. I can tell you what John said about the purchase of my house, and the account he gave of the financial ruin your foolish old Colonel accelerated with his excesses in London. Since you’re so friendly with the family now, I suppose you know what the Colonel did, don’t you?’
She wasn’t, of course, talking about the tireless hours and weeks spent in London hectoring Richard out of his fevered exhaustion and onto his feet. The repulsiveness of her question made me forget Duckett and his lamp long enough to find a retort. ‘No,’ I said tartly, ‘I don’t know what the Colonel did. And you don’t, either, because despite all your efforts to pry, Matthew Croft won’t tell you, will he?’
For some unfathomable reason, I’d made her smile.
She shook her head to ward off my temper. She had her hand out to appease it. I had to wonder if she meant to goad me into cr
eating a scene, as a brutal parody of the trick her husband had lately worked upon my mind.
Duckett was working on my mind too. He had the lamp in his hands again now and was tilting it so that he could examine something that was etched upon the glass shade that spread the light. When my attention strayed, Mrs Abbey told me quite unnecessarily, ‘That picture John mentioned in his letter is still in my kitchen, by the way. I never did sell it.’
‘I know,’ I said, without withdrawing my eyes from Duckett. He was turning the little key that adjusted the wick. ‘You need to hang it further away from your smoking stove.’
She didn’t hear. ‘I told you this morning that I had to find the money to pay for Paul’s lawyer. The man was John’s contact and John came up with the idea of buying my house to work a little benefit for both our sakes. It didn’t matter to him that the estate couldn’t really afford the purchase. If the Manor had been solvent, he’d have lost the lot to death duties just as soon as the old man died anyway. But John was set to come into a little windfall of his own that would at last give him a little independence. He was going to buy my house on the proceeds and, when I had the money, I was going to buy the services of this lawyer. I was supposed to return the rest by buying back the house. Only then John died and I had to start all over again in a less convenient way with the meagre substitute Danny Hannis could offer.’
Now I looked at her. I remarked slowly, ‘John Langton was hoping to conceal the origins of his sudden wealth by running it back and forth through the sale of that house, and the lawyer was the equivalent of your handling fee. Well, well.’ I added dryly, ‘At least this plainly criminal undertaking makes more sense than the rumour that this painting of yours was proof he’d left you custodian of his lost hoard of treasure.’
She was suddenly possessed by the sort of stillness that went with the intense realisation that she’d made an error. The lamplight was casting strange shadows across her staring eyes. She thought that I was going add the other rumour – the one where John was paying off his guilt for a lovechild – for the very simple pleasure of doing it with her husband sitting there. As it was, I couldn’t help wondering who had the better idea of John’s real motives – her for believing he would share his spoils and perhaps even his future life with her, or me for believing the lure had been John’s means of ensuring he got his way.
I came very close to saying it. The unpleasantness of the temptation set my jaw. Then it fixed an ache on my soul. It was all a part of this manipulation upon manipulation, where talking about John Langton became, in this instance, a means of confronting me with my feelings for his older brother and I had to stop in case this claimed me before Duckett could even begin to try.
I had to ask her with the sort of incomprehension that runs close to grief, ‘Have you no empathy? You’re forcing me to fight for Richard’s nature when I believe you’re really still waiting for him to save you, and it’s inhumane.’
I saw something peculiar twist in her face. A misunderstanding that blazed like exhilaration. She had her hand out to me again. She agreed with me desperately, ‘Yes! Brian is inhumane. I can’t escape this without help.’
I thought this was the moment she would explain. I thought she was about to give me a hint of what hope really lay here for her because I thought she certainly still didn’t agree with her husband’s view. But she didn’t say a word. And Duckett was just beside me and so was that pitchfork handle, solid and tempting. Yet all the time it was also whispering warnings because if I were to reach for it, it was inescapable that someone would be hurt.
Or rather, I was afraid that I didn’t have the commitment to make sure that the particular man in question would be hurt enough to be stopped.
Then I noticed that Duckett was moving again by the post at the end of the partition. The lamp seemed to be fascinating him. He was turned slightly away from me, strangely vulnerable with the Webley juggling in his hands, and at that moment it struck me, with a sudden bolt of sheer terror, that there was another manipulation being worked upon me here.
He wanted me to reach for that pitchfork handle. Because then he could turn with that gun and finish me and tell himself quite honestly that he had only acted in self-defence.
That was what he’d been waiting for here. This was the cause of the delay. Deceit worked hard and ran headlong into agony because no one here felt they had the power to escalate this to its conclusion without harnessing my help. I really had been right to blame myself for the Colonel’s collapse when Duckett had thought to put the old man down in the kitchen. Duckett really didn’t like to think of himself as a killer, even though this was the path he was setting himself on. So he’d tried to incite a more desperate impulse in me.
And while fear blazed like fire through every nerve with the force of needles, the policeman caught my eye and seemed to be trying to caution me of another great danger here. Then Mrs Abbey swept in to apply a little more pressure of her own upon my mind.
She abandoned John Langton for something that seemed painfully like the truth.
‘I’m not the criminal here, you know,’ she told me almost pleadingly. ‘I’ve shown you the scale of the burden I’ve been living under for years, without even one word of help from anyone. I’ve described the pressure that stalked me while we were waiting for Paul’s trial and we still lived in Gloucester. You can imagine the burns on my husband’s shoulder and his lungs and the lucky escape that took the form of his arrest in his hospital bed and carried him straight from there into court, but what good does it do?’
The policeman’s reply was so sharp and so unexpected that it made Mrs Abbey jump. ‘Don’t talk about those days here. And don’t move any closer to Miss Sutton.’
I couldn’t quite define how the policeman was doing it, but he suddenly seemed taller against his patch of rough stone wall and yet without ever actually moving an inch. He also awoke Duckett to the failure of the pitchfork handle and I watched as the man with the gun took up his heavy bar and set it down against the partition on the other side, well away from me.
Mrs Abbey watched him do it. She was distracted, but determined to speak in a grim little voice made breathless by her nearness to letting Duckett understand that the terrible betrayal he dreaded was already here. She told me, ‘There are no words to describe the threat that man held over me in Gloucester, with his little visits and his little offers of friendship. He was never going to let Paul go. He wouldn’t believe—’
‘Did you try?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘Did you even try to explain that your husband wasn’t a threat?’
‘Of course I did.’ She actually looked appalled. ‘I’ve been trying to stop this. All along, all I’ve tried to do is give Brian enough time to leave sufficient traces of himself to give us a chance to satisfy the police that he’s been hounding us. That’s all I’ve done. I’m not responsible for any of this. There was nothing I could do to stop him. And Paul was always going to come to me when he got out.’
Confirmation came in the form of an unexpected croak from her husband. He had lifted his head. That was all the energy he had. His hands were slack on his knees. His eyes were hollow. His hoarse voice told the policeman, ‘Brian would never have believed me if I’d told him I only wanted to be free. He won’t believe I can admit what I did and that I’m sorry for it. I just want to be free to be a father to my children.’
‘Don’t mention them.’ His wife’s correction was sharp. Mrs Abbey was barely a yard or more from the partition and her pinched mouth was suddenly hardening to real agitation. Her eyes were for Duckett and the way he was watching her. We could all see the calculations running behind his eyes. I thought she desperately didn’t want to experience that moment when his mind strayed from his contemplation of the worth of my life in this play for escape to the usefulness of Abbey’s children.
She was almost too late. His eyes followed her as she crept a little closer to me and whispered, ‘Brian’s been in a high
state of panic ever since that lawyer of mine got Paul’s sentence reduced to time served. They did it by raising doubt about the severity of the fraud, but Brian thinks my husband got out because he’s leading the police into rethinking their conclusions about that fire. Brian was going to come after Paul and get him, and we had nothing to prove Brian’s guilt. The only thing we could do to stop him was kill him, and we couldn’t do that.’
She might have been confessing that she and her husband had been inhibited by the worry that no one would believe the innocence of their motives. But this wasn’t a justification for trying to draw violence from Richard instead. She was trying to explain that my accusations had been wrong, they’d been an invention of my imagination, because she was like me and murder wasn’t a solution that belonged to her.
‘Miss Sutton!’ This was a caution from the policeman. I blinked at him rapidly. I thought for a moment that he had been alarmed by Mrs Abbey’s bald reference to that warehouse fire but I couldn’t quite see what he was warning me about. Duckett was distracted by a change in the air that had been enough to make the lamp dim and then glow again.
I was waiting for the policeman to explain his alarm but Mrs Abbey’s hand was out again. The bruise and her bandage about her wrist were just visible against all the other strange shadows that the lamplight was casting across her skin. I knew then that this was the real lie she’d told. Neither mark had come from the difficulty of reclaiming Mrs Cooke’s keys. She’d been hurt when she’d been forced to surprise a frightened man in his lair for the sake of explaining that I hadn’t caught the bus after all.
I thought it was no wonder, in a way, that it had occurred to her to try to control Richard. Because she was a woman who had been failed by every one of the men who had been supposed to be on her side – her husband with his fraud and his insistence on leaning on her for support; Duckett with this hateful pursuit when he ought, simply, to have remembered that he was her friend; and John Langton for dying when she had probably loved him.