Mask of Innocence

by Roger Ormerod

  ‘On my honeymoon, alone? Oh no. It wouldn’t be the same.’

  ‘That’s so. Never thought of that.’ Then he laughed, and leaned sideways to kiss her cheek. ‘We’d put ‘em in kennels. I’ve got a mate, Leominster way, he breeds Dobermanns. How’d that be? And I’d screw his neck if he breeds from my sires. How’s that?’

  ‘Apart,’ said Jennie, ‘from the neck screwing, simply super.’

  ‘That’s settled, then,’ said Joe placidly. ‘When’re you free for the wedding, Nan?’

  She was his nan, too, I realised. ‘Any time,’ she repeated softly. Now she’d got somebody else to cherish.

  I filled my pipe, then remembered where we were, and put it away again. ‘A month, you said?’ I asked Jennie. ‘Not your honeymoon, love, but Paul’s painting trip, I mean.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So he wasn’t here when your father died?’

  ‘No. And oh, I did miss him!’

  Yet Geoffrey Russell had said he’d been told that Paul and Jeremy had been fighting. It had distracted their father on his way down the curved stairway. But Paul hadn’t been there. So how had the doctor come to accept this story? And why, if it had been accepted, had Jeremy said nothing at the time?

  I realised then, my thoughts switching to the two brothers, that it had gone very quiet in the gallery, and they had not come in for lunch. Excusing myself, giving no explanation, I got up quickly and went from one door to the other, entering in a rush.

  Jeremy was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, Paul bending over him and slapping his face. ‘Come on! Come on!’ he was whispering.

  I pushed him out of the way and bent over Jeremy, reaching for the pulse in his neck. It was weak but steady. I straightened. ‘What happened?’

  ‘The damn fool threw a punch at me. I hit him back and he went down, and banged his head.’

  ‘You’re both acting like stupid children.’

  ‘And he’d got no reason. He owes me, and I owe him nothing. I even offered him the masks. But he said I’d gotta have the masks, because they’re mine. Said he’d carry them up with his own hands.’

  ‘Up?’

  ‘Up to the lodge. He’s a fool. Says he wants the watercolours. He can see the value there. Even he’s heard of Turner and Cotman. Not Cox, perhaps. But he’s a stubborn idiot. Always has been. Got himself in a right mess, he has.’

  Jeremy groaned, and moved his head.

  ‘Water?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve got some. He’s been out for ten minutes. More.’

  I was silent for a few moments. Then I asked, ‘What sort of trouble?’

  ‘The deep and murky sort, that’s what. He’s an accountant. Posh offices in Shrewsbury. Investments, he’s in. Stocks and shares. He’s a sharebroker, or something deadly dull like that. Trusts. Only he’s been playing around with other people’s money. And along comes this recession — and he’s caught. They all need their money — and he can’t raise it. Or something like that. It’s way above my head.’

  ‘The young fool.’

  Young, I thought. I wasn’t all that much older than Jeremy, but his personality was years younger than his age. Or his morality was. But it’s childish to take such risks, I’ve always thought. The ‘last across’ syndrome, where the danger is the lure. A children’s game. Or at least, it used to be when I was a kid. This time, Jeremy had tripped, and the trailer wagon was almost on him.

  ‘I offered him the masks,’ Paul repeated numbly.

  ‘They’re not yet yours to offer,’ I reminded him shortly. ‘He’s coming round now. When he can think a straight thought, try offering them again, but as a security for a loan, or something like that. If he can hold on. If he can’t, then nobody can help him.’

  Paul was shaking his head, trying to clear it, trying to think logically. ‘It’s how he’s always been. Stubborn pride. Decided he doesn’t want the masks, because they’re mine, so he won’t touch ‘em. Damn fool, playing at being a martyr.’

  I nodded. Yes, as a policeman I’d met them, had separated them when they’d been close to killing each other, and over paltry boundary arguments. Not give an inch, not take an inch, that was always the attitude. It had to be right. Nothing less would do. Right and proper and fair.

  Quietly, I made a suggestion. ‘Then offer him the watercolours. He claims they’re his. He could possibly raise money on their value.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Offer him the watercolours. He thinks he’s got a right to them, anyway.’

  ‘Not those. Not on your life. I want ‘em to look at. And I told you, I don’t owe him anything. It’s him who owes me.’

  ‘I think you possibly do, you know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Owe him. For the watercolours and the stone masks. Work it out, Paul. Work it out.’

  I turned and went out.

  But his voice followed me into the hall. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  4

  I could have bitten off my stupid tongue. It’s one thing to juggle various thoughts around in your own mind, but quite different to bring them out into the open and flaunt them.

  But I was becoming exasperated with all this wrangling, and Paul had managed to impress on me the fact that Jeremy was urgently in need of money. And the sudden end to Sir Rowland’s life was very far from being satisfactorily explained. Fell down the stairs, indeed!

  Ridiculous, I thought. They weren’t steep enough, and besides — the story of that death, as explained by Russell, was quite unacceptable. He had heard shouting — and his head had swung from side to side! As though that would have caused a fatal fall!

  And that shouting had been attributed to Paul and Jeremy when Paul had been in the south of France! At the very least, there had been some sort of cover-up, and it seemed that Jeremy had to have been involved in that aspect of it. Certainly, from what I’d heard, Jeremy wouldn’t have been bereft at his father’s death.

  It seemed to me, thinking about it, that Jeremy had been involved in some sort of conspiracy of silence, and Paul did have his father’s death to thank for his own inheritance.

  ‘What did you mean?’ Paul asked again, and I had to give him some sort of explanation. He’d followed me into the hall.

  ‘Perhaps Mr Russell’s got it all wrong,’ I assured him. ‘He had some idea that your father’s fall was caused by the sound of quarrelling, fighting, or something like that. Shouting, in any event. The doctor seems to have accepted that, but the implication was that it was Jeremy and yourself doing the shouting.’

  ‘I wasn’t here.’

  ‘I know you weren’t. But Jeremy doesn’t seem to have denied it — and he’s obviously not told you about it. But what does it matter now? Your father was distracted, and he fell. Leave it at that.’

  He was staring at me, baffled. He shook his head. ‘If it doesn’t matter, why say...what you did say?’

  I shrugged. ‘Just a retired copper’s twisted mind. Forget I said it.’

  ‘How can I—’

  ‘Your mother,’ I said gently, ‘doesn’t seem to have disputed the facts, and she, apparently, saw it happen.’

  ‘You implied something, damn you. You as good as said that Jerry...’ He didn’t manage to finish it.

  ‘It’s a damned lie!’ shouted Jeremy from the gallery doorway.

  He was still white and unsteady, clinging to the door frame. ‘There wasn’t a bloody quarrel. Somebody shouting. I heard that. I don’t know who....Oh Christ — my head!’

  ‘See to him,’ I said quickly. ‘I was probably all wrong, in which case you owe him nothing. Except for the fact that he’s your brother. Go to him.’

  I turned away, cursing myself, but aware that there had to be deeper emotional issues involved than I could yet imagine. Sir Rowland’s motivations for the framing of his will were certainly too complex to sort out with the information I had. But certainly, the photographs in his room indicated that he had been Jennie’s fa
ther, and he had treated Mary generously in his will. An honourable man? It would explain his distaste for the basis of Jeremy’s personal troubles, and his rejection of any sympathy in that direction.

  It would, after all, be an honourable man who would have adopted his own illegitimate child, in order to free Mary from the burden Jennie would present.

  But Mary wouldn’t have thought of it in that way. She would not have parted with her child unless she’d been desperate. I was seeing Mary, now, with every passing minute, in a different light from the Mary whom Amelia and I had known more recently.

  But I had no opportunity to explore these ideas, as the door to the library burst open, and the hall became full of movement and bustle.

  ‘We’re going to have a look at the lodge,’ said Amelia. It was she now who had the dogs on their leads.

  ‘Do you mind, Paul?’ called out Jennie.

  Paul had reached his brother, and had his hand on his arm. He turned. ‘Help yourself.’ He reached into his tight back pocket, and tossed her a key, one of those large, old-fashioned deadlock keys. ‘But don’t touch the paintings.’

  ‘As though I would.’

  ‘We’ll need something, in case it rains,’ I said.

  ‘The sun’s shining, Richard,’ Amelia told me. ‘Haven’t you noticed?’

  I hadn’t. As Paul had said, the windows were so small that very little of the outside weather made any impact.

  Paul had taken his brother back inside the gallery and shut the door. I could hear their voices, though now they were not raised.

  Outside, it was so. The sun shone. It wasn’t a very encouraging sunlight, and clouds still lurked towards the west. I viewed it with suspicion, though it was a little comforting to recall that I was now wearing another man’s clothes. Amelia, I could see, might have difficulty walking far. Already that skirt hem was creeping downwards, as the rolled waistband began to shed its load. Much lower, and she would be tripping over it. Mary, Jennie and Joe seemed unperturbed by either the terrain or the unpredictable weather.

  Joe had left the Granada’s door open. I went and shut it, retrieving the keys I’d left in the ignition lock. Then I caught them up. Sheba and Jake were now running free, madly excited.

  ‘It must be quite a walk,’ I said, catching up with the group, and remembering the length of the drive.

  ‘There’s a shortcut,’ Jennie told us, striding free, a certain jauntiness in her steps. ‘Nothing to it.’

  ‘Then don’t go too fast,’ Mary told her, as Joe was clearly eager to inspect the lodge, and Jennie eager to display it.

  First, we had to cross the stream, busy and noisy now. The wooden bridge we had driven over was strongly built, with a low railing each side. Then, at once, we turned away from the drive we had driven down, swinging right with the surface level here.

  ‘There used to be a sunken garden up ahead,’ Jennie called out. ‘But father let it go. He said he couldn’t afford a full-time gardener. It’s gone a bit wild.’

  We were walking a firm path, but with an uneven surface, pools of water lying in it. In single file, Jennie leading, we circled the puddles. A full-width stretch of water almost barred the way to the four stone steps we were approaching, five feet wide but encroached by a rough, unclipped hedge. We had to push through, backs to the hedge, to get past with reasonably dry feet.

  At the bottom of the steps another pool, wider, awaited us. But now the hedges fell back. Having circled the water, we were again on a path, which was grass now, and at least somebody had run a mower along there.

  Ahead of us, I could see that dense woodland closed in on the path from both sides.

  I paused and looked back. The hedging we’d had to push past, and which had soaked my back, now almost hid the house. Only the roof and chimneys were visible. The path ahead turned to the left a little, then straight ahead again, and plunged into a tunnel of trees.

  ‘It’s only a little way,’ Jennie called out.

  It seemed to me that we had already covered a reasonable distance. I glanced at Amelia, who pouted. We could not have imagined when we left home that we would need waterproof trousers and anoraks and hiking boots.

  ‘Are you going to manage, love?’ I asked.

  ‘Just about. I’ll be able to tidy up at the lodge — perhaps.’

  ‘Maybe we can borrow some jeans from Paul, if there’re any up there.’

  She looked at me with raised eyebrows. The others were well in front now, Mary matching them stride for stride.

  But now, though the surface was becoming firmer, it was in that condition only because it had been protected by the trees, which loomed heavily and closely each side. They had lost most of their leaves, but if the sun was still shining, somewhere out there, it certainly wasn’t forcing its way through the branches, or doing much to guide our feet.

  ‘It’s not far now,’ called out Jennie.

  Yet it was a steady climb, not too steep but winding, and, as far as I could guess, unending. The dogs were loving it, racing around, wet through and mud-spattered, barking furiously at the imagined wildlife that might be hiding behind each tree. Not far, Jennie had said. Already, I reckoned, we’d been plodding along for a good quarter of an hour, and I could detect no end to it.

  There had been an implication in something Mary had said. What had it been? Something about the lodge being spooky, but not always. I was able to guess that Mary could have led us there, and knew that path as well as Jennie did; guess that it was at the lodge that Sir Rowland had contrived their clandestine meetings. These would surely have had to be accomplished well away from the house, where they were master and maid. I could clearly visualise him marching out of the house in one direction, toting a shotgun — why else but for the game birds had there been a gamekeeper? — and Mary in another direction, ostensibly to collect flowers for the house from the now-barren sunken garden. She would have needed to walk only a few yards before becoming invisible from any window in the house. Then later she would return, flushed, bearing armfuls of flowers, and the grouse would live a little longer.

  I was tired, that was why I couldn’t control my imagination, tired and worried. Worried about the dogs. We would have to leave as soon as we returned to the house, as Tessa, clearly not an animal lover, would not be prepared to have them indoors, and Joe wouldn’t let me shut them in the car, and if I had to show him a fist in order to persuade him on this point I would still have Amelia protesting about wet dogs clambering all over the seat upholstery.

  The others had now disappeared from our sight. Amelia paused for a moment, panting. Then I heard Jennie up ahead. ‘There it is,’ she cried, with blissful enthusiasm.

  It had taken us, I reckoned, all of twenty minutes.

  We walked out from beneath the trees on to a level surface, which had been paved, long ago, with blue bricks, now uneven and sunken in places. This, though it hadn’t been apparent when we had driven past it, was the front of the lodge. There was a walkway round one side of the building. Walkways round both sides, I realised, at the same time becoming aware that these were two semi-detached cottages, now with only one in use. There were two front doors, side by side, with about a yard between them. The cottages were half-timbered, in that wood had been used liberally, the spaces in between being blocked in with housebricks. Yet this was not black, preserved wood, but scarred and partly rotted wood, the bricks now doing most of the work of holding up the roof, which was plain slating. One or two of the slates were slipping out of place, the roofs sagging a little in the middle.

  The windows were small, and the impression was that it would be inadvisable to open them too abruptly or too far, or they might drop off, or crumble into dust and shards of glass. At the two opposing gable ends there were disproportionally high chimneys, one surmounted by a tall chimney pot, one without. This would have been necessary because of the back-draught caused by the proximity of the trees.

  It was barely conceivable that, far in the past, families had lived
in each house, children had played outside on the blue bricks, and no doubt huddled for warmth in the chill bedrooms at night, and that they had not considered they were in any way unhappy. Whereas the lord of the manor, down at the big house, had miserably contemplated his rolling acres and worried himself silly about upkeep, wondering whether he might dispense with the services of the gamekeeper and his head gardener, or the last desperate measure — part with his foxhounds and resign as the local MFH.

  The cottages now were sad, senile and sagging.

  ‘So this is what you call the lodge,’ said Joe, in a neutral voice.

  He would, if he had visited Jennie often, if secretly, have driven past it, because this was the building we had seen, set back from the drive, when we had arrived.

  ‘Isn’t it lovely!’ cried Jennie.

  Joe put his arm round her. ‘We’ll soon put it to rights, precious.’

  It seemed to me that Jennie would need all her £10,000 simply to make it liveable. Mary was standing, staring at it, and, unless my guess had been completely wrong, lost in a memory of those past, ecstatic years. To her, it probably glowed, bathed in warm memories.

  Paul had said he didn’t live here, only used it for his painting. I didn’t suppose anybody had lived in it — them — for thirty or so years. Two families, at that time.

  Jennie and Joe would have at least twice as much living space all to themselves, and room for a dozen or so Dobermanns around the fire.

  I realised that he had wandered away from the group. I’d already decided that Joe was something of an individualist, pursuing his own personal plans. He had no doubt gone to check what I had guessed, that the driveway formed the rear of the property. Three acres, the will had quoted. Quite a decent bit of land.

  Jennie had produced Paul’s key. This was to the door to the left, as we faced the cottages. The keyhole had worn to a funnelled gap.

  ‘The other door’s nailed shut,’ she told us. ‘No way in there.’

  Not for humans, perhaps, but I knew that the neat, smooth-edged holes in its bottom edge were evidence of the presence of rats. They would scatter into the woods when the Dobermanns took over, resenting their eviction.