Quick off the Mark

by Moody, Susan

  ‘How very kind of her.’

  ‘I’ll say. Can’t get over it, really. Mind you, she didn’t have anyone else to leave things to, I suppose, what with one thing and another. Adopting Marlowe was a small price to pay for her generosity. Went out and bought the creature a new leather lead and collar especially for the interment, bright scarlet, to cheer things up.’

  ‘I think I read about her death in the local paper. Wasn’t she once the Head of English at the High School?’

  ‘That’s right. Sad, really. There were only five mourners, me and that woman from the shoe shop – Mrs Drummond, a former pupil, I believe – and Mr Vine, the man from the wine shop, who came every now and then to deliver the booze she ordered from him and to have a cup of tea and chat with her. Plus a couple of teachers from the school. And, of course, the dog Marlowe.’ He held up a hand. ‘No, tell a lie: there was someone else, came late and left early, the sister of – gawd, at the time, I never gave it a second thought! – the poor man who was murdered.’

  ‘Why would she have come to Ms Roscoe’s funeral?’

  ‘Mark of respect, I suppose. Nell had one of them – can’t remember if it was the brother or the sister – in to do up her sitting room. The former owners had made a right dog’s dinner of it, ruined the spirit of the place, if you know what I mean.’

  I didn’t, but nodded anyway.

  ‘Just going into that room before they got to work was enough to give me nightmares for a week. Don’t know how she stood it for so long. No wonder she drank a bit more than was good for her. Anyway, I thought more of her former pupils might attend, but it’s been a long time since Nell’s schoolmistress days, and I suppose generations of girls have passed through the school since then. Sic transit gloria mundi and all that …’ The Major seemed downcast.

  ‘I expect you’ll miss her.’

  ‘Indeed I will. Not that I’ll have much of a chance, with Marlowe to look after.’ He drank some of his tea. ‘Can’t help feeling that Lil’s husband could have made an effort to attend, considering how often his wife had come to stay with Nell, and how Nell had looked after her in her hours of grief.’

  ‘Lil?’

  ‘The one in the photo. Lilian Harkness. Nell’s niece. Such a nice person, she was, though I couldn’t say the same about the husband. Only seen him a couple of times in the distance, mind you, helping his wife into the car to take her back home. Surly sort of fellow, dirty great black beard, made him look like Captain Haddock or something. Dear Lil, I got to know her well over the years, felt really sorry for her. Nell told me she wasn’t very keen on her husband, his attitude to her, the way he kept her on a tight rein, didn’t like her doing things without him. It’s a miracle that he ever allowed her to come to stay with Nell from time to time, if you ask me.’

  ‘But he didn’t come to see Nell off?’

  ‘Disgraceful. No manners. You’d have thought he’d have learned some in the Service, if nowhere else.’

  ‘So what’s the story with Lilian?’

  ‘Apparently she and the husband had been trying for years to have children. He’s completely obsessed with having an heir to hand on the family business to, him being the fourth generation to run it. Or so I gather.’

  ‘And what’s the family business?’

  ‘Mobile phones? Furniture? Disposable nappies? I can’t remember exactly which.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘Harkness & Company, I believe. Saw an ad for it once in some magazine or other. Practical Mechanics or some such.’

  ‘So probably not disposable nappies, then!’

  ‘Doesn’t sound likely, does it?’ The Major guffawed.

  ‘And where’s that located?’

  ‘Cambridge? Bedford? Somewhere round there. I believe he even has a warehouse somewhere local. Anyway, poor Lil kept having miscarriages. And then a few years ago – five, six? – she managed to produce a little boy. A bit sickly, in and out of hospital quite a lot, but all right. And then about eight months ago, the poor kid was rushed to the emergency ward here in town and died of meningitis or sepsis – something horrible, anyway. Lilian was at his bedside for days on end, not sleeping, not eating. And shortly after the poor kid had finally died, she goes back home to wherever it is they live, and kills herself. Drinks down a bottle of Drano, if you please. What a way to go. Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?’

  ‘How absolutely terrible,’ I said.

  ‘Nell was pretty cut up about it. Blamed the husband. So do I. Poor Lil couldn’t stand the pressure, according to Nell. One pregnancy after another. Getting her hopes up each time, only for them to be dashed again. The husband – what was his name? Brian? Peter? I’m not sure what – refused to adopt, wanted to try again, and after losing the boy, I imagine she’d just had enough.’

  ‘That’s so sad.’ I wasn’t about to launch into the story of my own miscarriage: the Major would have been mortified at his lack of tact, not that he could have known. ‘It must have been a terrible shock for you, too.’ Did this tale have any bearing at all on the death of Tristan Huber? It seemed unlikely.

  ‘You can say that again. Spent my working life in the Army, theatres of war and all that, but it doesn’t make death – especially violent death – any easier to cope with.’

  Changing the subject, I nodded at the photo of him in his black-belted kimono. ‘I see you’re a judoku.’

  ‘Fourth dan. Army champion in my day, my dear. Don’t keep it up nowadays, of course, though it does give me an incentive to maintain my fitness levels.’

  ‘Major Horrocks, is there anything further you can tell me about your discovery of the body?’

  He frowned. Shook his head. Chewed at his moustache. ‘Nothing, my dear. I’ve been over and over it in my head, and absolutely nothing springs to mind. I’m sorry, Alex.’

  ‘Well, if anything comes up later …’

  ‘You’ll be the first to know.’

  ‘Thank you.’ As I stood up, I added, ‘Your lemon cookies are totally delicious. You’ll have to give me the recipe.’

  No amount of lemon cookies was going to dispel my sadness at the loss of lovely Tristan Huber.

  Back home, I went on to the Internet and typed in Harkness & Company, near Bedford. It didn’t seem likely that the husband of the Major’s next-door neighbour’s niece could be connected to Tristan, as yet, but too much information is way better than too little. I learned almost nothing about either the company or the managing director, apart from the fact that he was called Brian Roger Harkness.

  FOUR

  Back in town, I parked outside Dimsie’s shop and went in. The receptionist, a bimbo who looked as though she might score forty-five per cent if she was asked to fill in her name, told me Dimsie was out to lunch. The receptionist looked pretty much out to lunch herself. ‘I’ll come back,’ I said.

  On my way home, I drove past Sam’s bookshop and saw him staring out of the window. I turned the next corner, parked against the pavement on double yellow lines, and thumbed in his number on my mobile. ‘I really need to talk to you,’ I said. I could feel grim tears at the back of my throat, a torrent of them, and I wanted to shed every last one of them.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked gently.

  ‘Nothing.’ I half-laughed. ‘Everything.’

  ‘I’m in the bookshop.’

  ‘I saw you.’

  ‘Park in the space behind my garden and come through the back gate. How long before you get here?’

  ‘Four minutes max.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting.’

  Four minutes later, I was stumbling out of my car. I walked up the weed-filled alley which ran along the backs of the High Street shops and houses. I lifted the latch of the gate set into the shabby overlap fence panelling which marked the boundary of Sam’s garden. Inside, a path led to the back door of the bookshop. Through a screen of flowering shrubs – viburnum, philadelphus, spirea – planted against the wooden boundary between Sam’s garden and that o
f the wine shop next door, I could see the peaked roof of a small conservatory attached to the rear of the Vine house.

  Sam was waiting for me at his back door. Despite Milo Stanton, my heart gave an involuntary flip at the sight of his kind face. Why? He was a big man with a gentle soul. And a good friend. But he was most definitely not that sort of a friend. Not that Milo was, either. Not yet. If ever. He held out his arms and I moved into them.

  ‘Oh Sam,’ I said. My voice was full of tears. My whole body was full of tears. I told him about Tristan’s hideous death. Even if he had already heard, he was kind enough to let me repeat the ugly facts. ‘It’s so cruel, so horribly sad,’ I said. ‘Why? How can anyone do that to a fellow human being?’

  ‘Man’s inhumanity to man,’ Sam said softly against my hair. ‘It never ends. It never will.’

  For a moment they passed before me: a vile nightmarish procession of the tortured, the torturers, the starving and mistreated, bewildered children hurt and abused, neglected, vulnerable, trafficked women, the fraudulent and the defrauded, cheaters and cheated, the lost and the persecuted, pain, misery and needless pitiless deaths.

  Who would be a human? And where did the idea of an all-merciful Supreme Being come from? After a while, he patted me gently on the back and indicated the garden next door. ‘Why don’t you go round to Edward’s place? He invited me to join him for a post-work drink anyway. Let me lock up here and I’ll be with you both.’

  I did as he suggested. Edward Vine had been a good friend during my married days. When the Love Rat took off, he remained one. He was also Sam’s closest friend, which said a lot. Edward was clever, with a starred First from Cambridge, and a wide-ranging intellect. I knew he’d been offered a Fellowship at his college and I never understood why he had preferred to run an off-licence in some seaside town, miles from dreaming spires and gothic towers. He kissed me on both cheeks and ushered me to a garden bench beside a tiny lily pond with a fountain burbling gently into it before leaving to return to his wine shop. I sat in the green peace, waiting for him to come back, and felt an easing, however temporary it might prove, of my grief over Tristan’s death.

  Edward came back with an opened bottle of wine, and three glasses.

  ‘Sam told me recently that the wine shop’s lease is coming up shortly for renewal,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘At which time you’re going to hang up your corkscrew.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘So if you go, where are we going to buy our wine?’

  ‘Haven’t you noticed that new boutique wine shop, Grand Cru, just off the High Street?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’re good. Really know their stuff,’ Edward said. ‘If I wasn’t going, that might have become a problem. Despite the uni students, there’s too much competition these days for a smallish town like this. It’s certainly one of the reasons for my decision to retire from the wine trade. Plus, of course, my political ambitions. I come up before the committee for selection as a prospective parliamentary candidate in a couple of weeks’ time.’

  ‘It’ll be a shoe-in,’ I said. ‘You’ve worked so hard for the community. Been on the council for years. Served as the town Mayor three times. No hint of scandal. No dodgy bottles on your shelves.’

  ‘I should hope not.’

  ‘You’ll be selected without any problem.’

  ‘Not necessarily. I’m not the only person wanting to be chosen, by any means,’ Edward said cautiously. ‘If there are two candidates with equally good CVs, then the slightest thing can sway the balance one way or another.’ He clenched his fists together. ‘God, how I long to be where the real political power is. Where I can really do some good, make a difference.’

  ‘Isn’t that what they all say, when they first go into politics? And don’t they all find that the only way to get anything done is to make compromises? Shave their principles here and there?’

  ‘Inevitably there’d be a bit of that. You wouldn’t believe some of the inducements I was offered when I was on the Council. I managed to maintain my integrity, but I made some enemies.’

  Looking back into the shop, I could see three or four customers scanning the shelves, picking up bottles and examining their labels, checking out prices. ‘I’d better go,’ Edward said. ‘Help yourself. I’ll be back shortly.’

  When he’d gone, I read the label on the bottle he’d brought out. Something rather special, I fancied. Lovely. I poured myself just a minuscule refill and leaned back in my chair.

  Edward’s garden was charming, leafy and overgrown. Water trickled. Birds chirruped. Sylvan was the word which sprang to mind. Had it not been for the distant sound of traffic, you might have expected a deer to leap from a clearing, or a fox to peer through the carefully maintained undergrowth. There was a gate set into the rustic fence between Sam’s property and Edward’s, and over the past year, Sam had spoken of expanding the bookshop by buying the lease to Edward’s place when it came up for grabs. It would be very easy to knock down the fence and amalgamate the two gardens. I envisaged small round tables, checked tablecloths, thin white china, summer sunlight dappling the scene, people reading as they munched home-made cakes and scones. Sam’s notion of a teashop-cum-bookstore could be a winner. Presumably they’d have to buy the book first, in case of buttery fingers on the covers or crumbs between the pages.

  Eventually, business over for the day, Sam joined me. Then Edward reappeared, though since off-licences didn’t keep normal business hours, he continued to keep one ear out for the sound of new customers.

  ‘Now, Alexandra,’ he said, leaning a little towards me. ‘What is this terrible news I’ve been hearing about with regard to my good friend Tristan Huber?’

  The concern in his voice brought my tears back again. I let them fall. I gave him a quick rundown on the facts as I knew them, while he nodded sympathetically. ‘And the worst of it is,’ I hiccuped, ‘that he was still alive when he was dumped in that field. If there’d been someone to help him, he needn’t have died.’

  ‘Effing bastards.’ Edward took a hard swallow of his wine.

  ‘You’re friendly with the ex-wife, aren’t you, Edward?’ Sam said.

  I knew from Dimsie that Tristan’s wife, Christie, had parted from him fairly acrimoniously, and had married some kind of Spanish nobleman and wine grower. ‘She’s got about a dozen names now,’ Dimsie had told me. ‘Condesa of this and Duquesa of that, plus God knows how many other honorifics and titles belonging to the new husband.’

  Edward nodded. ‘We’re in the same line of business now, so yes, I know her. She comes over to England two or three times a year to see family and hype her husband’s products.’

  ‘Are they any good?’

  ‘Getting better all the time. And definitely not appreciated enough. They need to launch a really eye-catching campaign, raise awareness. Trouble is, some of the wines currently being produced in the south Mediterranean are superb, but because we associate them with cheap and cheerful, student parties and the like, people simply aren’t prepared to pay a proper price for them. So she’s had a hard time breaking into the market here, despite a heavy advertising budget.’

  Sam refilled our glasses. Something chirped from a bush. A ladybug landed on my arm. ‘Nothing to do with what we’ve been talking about, but I’m seriously thinking of taking a few months off,’ he said. ‘My brother’s been suggesting for some time that I visit him in New Zealand.’

  ‘What about the shop?’ asked Edward. ‘The expanded shop, that is, if you’re still on to buy my place?’

  ‘I could supervise the necessary building works needed to turn the two places into one. Or even appoint a manager to oversee the project while I was gone. Knocking through and so on, fitting the new place out, buying the necessary equipment.’

  ‘I like your idea of adding a café,’ I said. ‘I really enjoy those places where they provide the daily papers for you to read.’

  ‘Me too,’ s
aid Edward.

  ‘Shelves all round the walls to create a bookish sort of ambience,’ Sam said, eyes dreamy. ‘The bookshop’s crammed with second-hand books I could fill them with.’

  ‘I’ve got a bust of Shakespeare you can have,’ I said.

  ‘Well, that’s certainly a start.’

  ‘And I’ve got one of Plato,’ added Edward. ‘Used to be my mother’s until she threw it out. I rescued it literally from the recycling box, felt the old boy didn’t deserve such ignominy.’

  ‘Will you chuck it in with the shop, or do I have to buy it from you?’ asked Sam.

  ‘I’ll make you a gift.’

  ‘Or I could wait until I’ve got the place up and running, then appoint a manager. My assistant would love to take it on, so I could easily take some weeks off. Fly to New Zealand. Visit some of the places I’ve never been. Spend time with brother Harry and his brood. I haven’t seen them for ages.’ Sam looked across at me. ‘Want to come along, Alex?’

  My world had recently been much churned up by hurt and death, and I sometimes wondered if I would be staying in the town for much longer. I would come back eventually, but I needed fresh breezes to blow about my head. I needed to get away from a place where so much loss had occurred. Losses now added to by Tristan’s death. Sam’s question chimed exactly with my thoughts.

  ‘Hmm.’ Fresh breezes was one thing, New Zealand quite another. Did I know Sam well enough to want to go to the other side of the world with him? Did I want to know him well enough?

  Inside the house, the telephone pealed. At the same time, Edward’s cell phone buzzed on the garden bench beside him. He picked it up. ‘Please God that’s not my dreadful Ma,’ he said. ‘Or my poor sister, currently putting up with the old dragon’s tyranny in Canada.’ He pressed it to his ear and said, ‘Vine here.’ On the other end of the line someone talked for a few minutes. I saw his face collapse. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What? But that’s terrible, that’s …’ He pressed a hand against his mouth. ‘I simply can’t believe it. Are you sure?’