Mrs. Malory and Any Man's Death

by Hazel Holt

  “Parliament’s still in recess,” he said, “and I felt the need for a little rest and recuperation after a particularly tiring round of constituency affairs. Anyway, how can I help you, unless it’s Diana you want. I think she’s out with the horses.”

  “No, actually, it’s you I really wanted to see.”

  “Oh, right, come on in, then.” He led me through the dark-paneled hall. “Do you mind coming into the study? I need to save some stuff on my computer. I was just trying to write something for the Telegraph—not my sort of thing at all, really, but you have to make the effort.” He pressed a few keys and turned to face me. “There; that’s it.”

  He waved me to a chair and sat down at his desk. “Now, then, what can I do for you?”

  I explained about the photographs. “And, actually,” I said, “I’ve got the first draft of the Book done and I left a space for them, so I’d be most grateful if you could let me have them—well, now, if possible. Diana was going to look them out, but I expect she forgot.”

  “Ah, the photos.”

  “They’d really contribute so much,” I said. “I think Diana said something about them being in a suitcase in the barn . . .”

  “No.” He got to his feet and went over to a cupboard. “They’re here. After you mentioned them I thought I’d like to look at them myself, so I went and rescued them. I thought I’d like to have a look at my younger self!” He gave an embarrassed grin. “It’s odd to think that forty years can turn your early life into actual history.” Toby took a cardboard shoe box out of the cupboard and tipped the contents out onto the desk. “Come and have a look.”

  He picked a photo out at random and looked at it. “Hardly Brideshead,” he said, “but it seems just as unreal.”

  It was a picture of a group of young people on a tennis court. The young men wore long white flannels and the girls knee-length white tennis frocks. It wasn’t only the old-fashioned hairstyles and tennis racquets that spoke of time past; it was the whole atmosphere. I remembered a scene in a repeat of an old black-and-white television program—a roomful of young people, most of the boys in jackets and ties, the girls with beehive hairdos, doing the twist. There were no flashing lights, no heavy beat, no obvious drink, even, only a gathering of youngsters enjoying themselves in a completely uncomplicated way.

  As if he had caught my thoughts, Toby said, “Life was simpler then. All right, we weren’t angels by any means, but things weren’t so—so full-on.” He picked up the photo and looked at it again. “The tennis court went years ago—I’d forgotten all about it. We used to have tennis parties—homemade lemonade, can you believe it . . .” His voice trailed away.

  “I remember tennis parties,” I said, “and the lemonade.”

  “I brought a couple of chaps down here for the Long Vac.” He indicated a tall, good-looking young man in the middle of the group. “That’s Evan Fraser. He was up at Trinity with me, went into the army, died in the Gulf War. I’d forgotten him too.” He bundled the photographs back into the box and pushed it towards me. “Here, you take them and sort out what you want. There’s a lot of really old ones you might be able to use.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll let you have them back as soon as I can.”

  “No hurry. I don’t particularly want to look at them again.” He put the lid back on the box and said, “Will you have a drink?”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s a bit early . . .”

  “Oh, come on, Sheila—I could do with one and I can’t drink alone. What’ll it be? Whiskey or sherry?”

  “A sherry would be nice,” I said.

  He poured a sherry for me and a large whiskey for himself.

  “Stupid to let things get to you,” he said.

  “Old photos will do it every time,” I said.

  This was a Toby I’d never seen before, perhaps the real Toby, shaken out of his public persona by a jolt into his past.

  “So you’ve nearly finished this book, then?” he said.

  “More or less. Mary Fletcher ’s been a great help and so has Father William, and lots of people in the village have looked out stuff. I really need to get it done as soon as possible because I’ve got quite a bit of my own work piling up. I only took it on because Annie more or less forced me into it.”

  “Oh Annie—she was very good at forcing people to do things.” His voice was harsh.

  “So I gather. It seemed to me that she had some kind of hold over several people in the village.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Over you?” I asked.

  He looked at me sharply. “What made you say that?”

  “She had a copy of Max Holtby’s memoirs beside her bed.”

  “There’s nothing in that.”

  “True, but she’d actually gone to the trouble of buying a copy . . .” I let my voice trail away.

  Toby got up abruptly and poured himself another whiskey. “You’ve been through her papers, haven’t you? Was there anything . . . anything about me?”

  “Not that I’ve found,” I said. “So far.”

  He put his glass down on the desk and leaned towards me. “Look, Sheila. I don’t know what the old hag heard or thought she heard—she was always about the house when Diana had that septic leg and I sometimes took phone calls in the hall when she was passing through. And yes, I had some calls from Max. Come to think of it, she once took a message for me from his secretary when Diana was laid up and couldn’t get to the phone. And, yes, I did tread a pretty fine line sometimes, but I swear I never did anything illegal.”

  “But there were things you wouldn’t have liked the press to know about, for instance.”

  He shook his head. “It’s a bloody minefield, politics, these days. I’m standing down at the next election—that’s confidential, mind. I’ve had enough. It’s a young man’s game nowadays, anyway.”

  “What will you do?” I asked. “Come down here?”

  “I need to for Diana’s sake. What’s it they usually say?—’spend more time with my family’—well, in my case it’s true. You know how Diana’s been. Ever since that bloody woman started . . . It’s been a bit better since she died, thank God, but Diana does need me around to keep her steady. We can make out all right. I’ll have my pension, Diana’s got some money of her own and I’ve got a bit put by.” He glanced at me sharply. “All perfectly legal.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “It’d have been different if we’d had children,” he said. “Horses aren’t really a substitute.”

  “No.”

  He picked up his empty glass, looked at it and put it down again. “All this is in confidence,” he said.“ Isn’t it?”

  “Of course,” I said again.

  “Thank you, Sheila. And you’ll let me know if anything turns up in her papers?” he asked.

  “I don’t think there’s likely to be anything,” I said. “Not in the stuff I have. I don’t think she was one for putting things down on paper.” I thought of the list and how I’d found it. “Nothing specific, anyway.” I got up and went over to the desk and picked up the cardboard box. “Well, I’d better be going—I really must sort out these photos. Thank you so much for looking them out.”

  “Glad to have been of help. Good luck with the Book. I’m sure it will be a splendid thing for the village—just the sort of thing to bring a community together . . .” He was back in his MP mode again and kept up his usual meaningless chat as he showed me out.

  I was quite glad to be outside. There had been a sort of intensity about our conversation that had left me tired and glad of the fresh air and the open space around me.

  But of course I couldn’t walk the length of the village street without meeting somebody. Just as I was passing her cottage, Judith came out.

  “Oh, Sheila, lovely to see you. Were you looking for Mary? I think she and Jim have gone to Taunton for the day. She said they might go and look at some stair carpet now the sales are on—”

  “No,�
� I said, “it’s fine. I’ve just been to collect these old photos from Toby.”

  “Oh, how exciting. It must be thrilling to go through all those things. You never know what you might find!”

  “Well, I don’t expect anything special. Just family photos of several generations.”

  “And you had all those things of Annie’s. Was there anything there?”

  “Just photos and a few letters—those from her grandfather in the First World War. I think I told you about them. Oh, and a few old newspaper cuttings.”

  “Newspaper cuttings?”

  “About her grandfather, mostly—when he got back from the war.”

  “Oh, I see. All so interesting. We’re all longing to see the Book.”

  “Well, there’s still a bit to do—Mary’s been wonderful, so helpful—but it won’t appear overnight. There’s all the actual publishing stuff to do, so you may have to wait a little while . . .”

  I finally managed to reach my car and get away, and all the way home I wondered about Toby and just how important it was for him that Annie kept quiet about Max Holtby.

  Chapter Seventeen

  When I got home I found Annie’s list, smoothed it out and looked at it again. Most of the villagers, represented by these initials, I’d already considered. All that remained were the Tuckers and Captain Prosser. I didn’t count Phyll because she wasn’t in the village when Annie was taken ill. It struck me that one person whose name wasn’t on the list was Judith, and yet she’d been most assiduous, indeed enthusiastic, in her support for Annie. It looked as though Annie hadn’t needed any special hold over Judith; Judith just wanted to be her friend. I wondered what the late Mr. Lamb had thought of Annie and if the friendship had blossomed only when he died and Judith was lonely and needed someone with whom to continue her endless conversation.

  Obviously the person who had most to gain by Annie’s death was Toby. It was all very well to say that he was giving up at the next election; while Annie was alive he was very much a sitting MP who’d have had a great deal to lose if she’d given even the slightest hint of what she’d overheard. It takes so little to ruin the reputation of even a minor public figure. And because of that threat Diana was not only destroying herself but was fast becoming a loose cannon. Toby must have been fearful of what she might say when she’d had too much to drink, especially if she’d been the one who’d done the actual deed. I thought about my meetings with Diana since Annie’s death. I’d seen her only a couple of times, but it seemed to me that she was noticeably more relaxed and certainly perfectly sober.

  I didn’t believe that any secret the Tuckers had could have provided a greater motive for Annie’s murder than Toby’s. Still, just to finish things off neatly, as it were, I thought I might as well go and see Ellen.

  “I just called on the off chance,” I said, “to give you back these photos. I’ve kept the ones we’re using, of course, but I wanted to return the others.”

  “You shouldn’t have bothered,” Ellen said, removing a pile of ironing from a chair so that I could sit down opposite her at the kitchen table. “To tell you the truth, we never look at them from one year’s end to the other. You don’t, really, unless there’s a special occasion.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m always nervous about looking after other people’s photographs, especially these old ones that are irreplaceable.”

  “Fred’s uncle Bert was a great one for taking photos. He’d been given this camera—a box Brownie, I suppose it was—one birthday when he was a lad and he went round the farm taking pictures of everything. They all laughed at him, of course—who’d want to look at pictures of old carts and things? Well, I suppose you don’t think at the time, do you?”

  “Well, I’m very grateful to Fred’s uncle Bert,” I said. “And what about the groups? They’re wonderful.”

  “Oh, that was Miss Percy. Fred’s grandfather used to tell him all about her—she ran everything. She was the rector ’s sister. His wife was delicate, as they used to say, and didn’t do much in the village. She spent a lot of time abroad at those spas in Germany with her old governess—there was no shortage of money—so Miss Percy took charge. She did a lot for the village; wood-carving lessons for the boys (there’s a beautiful lectern in the church that they made) and sewing classes for the girls—she paid for all the wood and the material. And outings for the villagers.”

  “Oh yes, that wonderful photo of everyone crowded into a wagonette!”

  “Fred’s grandfather said they went to a church festival at Sampford Brett; a lot of them had never been so far from home before!”

  “Amazing, isn’t it!”

  “Well, you forget, don’t you, how comparatively recent everything is.”

  “I must certainly add a bit about Miss Percy in the book. She left a trust, you know, some money for the village, but it’s being wound up now.”

  I told her what Michael had told me and how Annie had held out against it.

  “Good for her!” Ellen said. “Whatever else you might say about her, she did care about the village. I suppose it’s because she was born and brought up here. There aren’t many of us left now.”

  “And you don’t have any relations left in the village?”

  “Not since my parents died. My brother ’s in Bristol and I’ve got a cousin who’s the keeper on the estate at Barton Regis, but that’s it.”

  “That is sad, isn’t it?”

  “Well, what do you expect—there’s nothing for the young people here and I suppose, whatever I think of them, the off-comers keep the village going.”

  “Annie certainly had them organized,” I said, “though I get the feeling that people didn’t really like her.”

  “She wasn’t one who cared about being liked,” Ellen said with a short laugh.“But she certainly got things done.”

  “Because she had a hold over some people?” I suggested tentatively.

  Ellen looked at me sharply. “What sort of hold?”

  “A different one for each person, I believe. Most of us have something, however trivial, that we would prefer the world not to know about.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Ellen got up. “I’ll put the kettle on—you’ll have a cup of tea?”

  “That would be nice.”

  Neither of us spoke while she made the tea and got out a tin and put some small cakes onto a plate.

  “Bought cake,” she said. “My mother would have had a fit.”

  I smiled. “We all come to it sooner or later, and you’re busier than most.”

  She poured the tea and I took a small almond slice.

  “You’re right, of course,” she said. “She did have something on us, Fred and me. It was never out in the open, nothing you could really get hold of, just implied. But that was enough. I never supposed we were the only ones, but, of course, she never said anything. I think we all knew—the whole village—but no one had the nerve to stand up to her.”

  “One person did,” I said.

  “Really? That was brave. No, I won’t ask you who it was because you wouldn’t tell me.”

  “No.”

  Ellen put some sugar in her tea and stirred it thoughtfully.

  “When you get right down to it, our secret wasn’t really so dreadful. Most people would think nothing of it. I suppose it was the way Annie put things, those remarks that made you think that everyone would—well, I don’t know—would think less of you, I suppose.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “And really these days no one would think anything of it—it was just the boys. Fred didn’t want them to feel bad, though they both knew, of course.” She looked at me and laughed. “You haven’t the faintest idea what I’m talking about!”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s the old story, really. Mark isn’t Fred’s child. I was pregnant when he married me.”

  “Look, please,” I said, “don’t feel you have to tell me anything.”

  “No, I want to—just to p
rove to myself what an unimportant thing it was and how stupid we were to let Annie get at us like that!”

  “It’s understandable; she was very insidious.”

  “That’s just about it,” Ellen said. “Insidious—a nasty word for a nasty person. Well, what happened was that when I was eighteen I went up to Bristol to look after my auntie May. She was my mother ’s older sister, never married, stayed at home to look after their parents so they left her the little money they had and she managed on that. Anyway, she had this bad go of pneumonia and my mother sent me up to nurse her. Before I went, Fred and I had come to a sort of understanding—not an engagement; both our parents said we were too young. Fred was only a year older than me. So I think my mother was quite glad of an excuse to get me away from the village for a bit.”

  She picked up the teapot. “Do you want another cup?”

  I shook my head.

  “Auntie May had a very good next door neighbor, you know, popping in and out to see if everything was okay. Mrs. Philips she was, Edna. She was very helpful to me and used to bring in meals for us both to save me cooking. Her son Trevor used to bring them round sometimes (he was on leave from the army) and stayed chatting. Then, when Auntie May was getting better, Mrs. Philips used to say, ‘You young people go out and enjoy yourselves—I’ll sit with May.’ So we went to the cinema, for walks on the Downs, or just for a drink. He was very lively, full of fun—older than me, knew his way around. I thought he was wonderful. Well, one thing led to another, as they say, and a little while after I got back home I realized how stupid I’d been.”

  “Did you tell Fred?”

  “Yes, I told him first of all, even before I told my mother. He was very upset, of course, and I felt terrible because I knew it was him I wanted—Trevor was only a bit of madness. I thought I’d ruined everything.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, I had to tell my mother and she and my father were furious—you remember how it was, such a disgrace. But Fred said he still wanted to marry me and we should do it right away. I must say, his father was very good about it (his mother had died when he was quite young) and we had the banns called straightaway and Fred’s father let us have the farm cottage.”