Death in Disguise

by Caroline Graham

  Barnaby was reading over his sergeant’s notes when he sensed Troy approach and stand in front of him. After a moment, irritated by all this silent looming, he looked up. Troy, pale with triumph, laid the shots on the desk then slowly straightened up. The movement reminded Barnaby of a successful athlete bending to receive his medal. Barnaby didn’t look at the pictures. He didn’t have to. Troy’s face said it all.

  ‘You were right, then?’

  That would be his lot Troy knew, but it was enough. Balm to the soul. And no one could take it from him. He had had a hunch, cold water had been thrown on it, he had persisted. And it had paid off. Who said nice guys finished last?

  Barnaby finally took in the mug-shots of Albert Cranleigh. Prison-cropped hair, stubbled chin, lips pressed defiantly together. Eyes hardened into dark pebbles from the flash or perhaps by years of chicanery. A very long way from the pious smile and silvery flowing locks of the sage of the Golden Windhorse. Yet the two men were undoubtedly one and the same.

  Janet had slept in Trixie’s room last night. Burrowing down in Trixie’s bed, inhaling traces of unsubtle perfume. Deceiving herself that an imprecise hollow in the pillow and creased outline on the bottom sheet were shadowy imprints of her departed favourite: her mignonne.

  She woke into a cloud of unfocused dread. She had been walking along a narrow country lane when she came across an old churchyard. Drawn in, much against her will, she stumbled over a tiny mottled gravestone embedded in the grass. Bending down, she saw engraved the date of her birth and beneath this a second date partially obscured by moss. She started to scratch at the velvety green stuff when the stone changed its shape and texture, becoming red and slippy and rather soft. It started to move beneath her fingers, pulsing gently, and she backed away in horror.

  Now, climbing stiffly out of bed and into the clothes she had thrown over the green flock velvet armchair the night before, Janet strove to shake off this grisly fantasy. Drawing on navy, strap-footed trousers, she caught sight of her lardy thighs dimpled with cellulite beneath seersuckered skin. Cover up quickly. Pulling the zip she remembered how Trixie had teased her about the trousers. Saying they were all the latest rage and poor old Janet was in fashion at last.

  She buckled on a strap of watered silk threaded through a wafer-thin watch that had belonged to her great aunt. Then she went back to her own room, splashed her face with cold water and punished it dry with a huckaback towel. She dragged a brush through her tangled hair without looking again into the glass. She could not think of food (she had hardly eaten since Trixie disappeared), but her mouth was unpleasantly dry and she craved a cup of tea.

  There was a smell of burnt toast in the kitchen. Heather sat at the table eating muesli, engrossed in The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. She closed the book when company arrived and got up, an intensity of sympathetic understanding flaking her features.

  ‘Aloha Jan—go in peace.’

  ‘I’ve only just got here.’

  ‘Let me get you some tea.’

  She spoke in what Janet always thought of as her ‘Little Sisters of the Syrup Pudding’ voice. The way people did when filling the God slot on Radio Four.

  ‘I’m perfectly capable of getting my own tea.’

  ‘Of course.’ Unoffended, Heather backed away, showing her lack of umbrage by a loving smile. ‘Some toast perhaps?’

  ‘No thanks.’ The very notion filled Janet’s mouth with bile. She thought she might be sick.

  ‘You could have some butter—as a special treat.’

  ‘No thanks, Heather.’

  ‘Right.’ But Heather’s finely tuned antennae had picked up a shiver of despair. She rubbed the palms of her hands together, conjuring all her therapeutic powers, then drew them slowly apart, knowing that a powerful current of restorative energy now sprang between the two. She crept up behind Janet and started moving her hands about just above the other woman’s shoulders. Janet leapt round, cup in one hand, tea bag in the other, and shouted, ‘Don’t do that!’

  Heather stepped back. ‘I was only trying to help.’

  ‘Help what for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘…well…’

  ‘You don’t know do you?’ A dignified and compassionate silence. ‘Has it never occurred to you Heather that you have absolutely no diagnostic gifts whatsoever?’

  Heather, red-faced, mumbled, ‘I can see that you’re unhappy.’

  ‘So I’m unhappy. Why shouldn’t I be? Or you—or anyone else come to that. It’s a condition of life. What makes you think it can be instantly erased? Or that we’d be any better for it if it were.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. No one develops a radiant holistic soul by being miserable.’

  ‘How on earth would you know? You’ve got about as much chance of developing a radiant holistic soul as I have of becoming Miss World.’

  ‘I’m really glad you shared that with me.’

  ‘God—’ Janet flung the tea bag back into the box. ‘Talking to you is like wrestling with a vat of marshmallow.’

  ‘I can see you’re pretty stressed out right now, Jan.’

  ‘Shall I tell you what really stresses me out, Heather? Almost more than anything else in this depressing, loveless mouldy old universe. This vale of tears. Shall I share it with you?’

  ‘I wish you would, dear.’ Heather’s face was cheesily transformed by pleasure.

  ‘It’s being called bloody Jan.’

  ‘Right. Fine. Now we have a scenario to talk through. Just remember, whatever comes out, that at the psychic edge I’m OK and you’re OK.’

  ‘Well actually, Heather, you have always struck me as being very much not OK. In fact I’d go as far as to describe you as fat for your age and a pain in the bottom.’

  ‘You’re missing Trixie—’

  ‘Oh shut up. Shut up!’

  Janet ran away. Through the side door, across the smashed flagstone, down the terrace steps and across the lawn. She didn’t stop running till she reached the orchard where, amidst a drift of ox-eye daisies, she flung herself down. Early little green and red striped windfalls bumped under her back. The spirit of the place, the warm air, mocked her misery. The very words ‘love, light and peace’ were like stabbing swords.

  She thought, I can’t stay here. I must move on. Not to another community, I’m obviously no good at living en masse. She had tried it many times (sometimes her life seemed nothing more than one long vagrancy), and it had never worked. Some places had been better than others. All, like the Windhorse, offered ‘love’—demanding in return merely a posture of credulous submissiveness. Mostly they seemed to see the spiritual life as just constantly pretending to be nicer than you actually are. Janet felt there must be more to it than that.

  She had exposed herself to all the orthodox religions in turn, hoping to catch faith rather as one caught a tropical disease, but had proved to be immune. Occasionally though, deeply moved by a poem or some music, or when meeting someone who seemed to have got it shiningly right, everything that she had read and thought or otherwise absorbed seemed to click into an immensely satisfactory whole. Briefly, the mysterious arid muddle in her head would be resolved, taking on a brilliantly clear and finished shape. But it didn’t last. By nightfall, like Penelope with her shroud, Janet had undone her certainties of the day and gone to rest as confused and lonely as before.

  She had been made aware that such vacillation was far from healthy (Heather said negativity made warts on the mind), but did not really see what she could do about it. Whoever called religion the science of anxiety had known his stuff. It was apparently impossible to negotiate with God—whoever he, she, it or that was.

  She was unhappily rambling thus when she noticed the carrier. Fawn and orange today, pushed under the little wooden door. The post! Janet scrambled to her feet and hurried to pick it up.

  The bag was quite full. She tipped the letters out and straightaway saw the long blue envelope. She knew, even before turning it over, that it wou
ld be addressed to Trixie. Checking the rest—nothing for her—Janet bundled the letters away and hurried back to the house. She dumped the carrier on the hall table and ran up to her room.

  In the kitchen Heather, having tilted Ken’s leg up on to the unlit range so that the blood could flow, was pouring tea all round. The company had stopped gathering in the dining room, even for dinner, once the formal highlight of the day.

  The Windhorse routine, which used to be of such worshipful importance, seemed to have quite disintegrated. Members got up (or didn’t) when they liked and snacked on the hoof. The news letter hadn’t been sent out, neither was the roster of tasks attended to with anything like the usual diligence. It was either glanced at and forgotten, or ignored altogether. The laundry room was full of washing that awaited pegging out, and the frequent sad tonk of Calypso’s bell indicated that even the goat was at the end of her tether. The centre had not held and there was no doubt that things were rapidly falling apart.

  Heather passed round the giant jar of honey from more than one country and continued her report of Janet’s unkindness, being careful to avoid the slightest hint of criticism.

  ‘I could see she was upset and all I did was try to trace the cause-initiating agent—you know? So I could offer a positive seed-thought. And she just turned on me.’ Heather’s gooseberry eyes moistened as she dissolved Ken’s honey and took the mug over. Ken nodded his thanks and gave his wife’s hand a comforting squeeze. This morning his nose, though still smashy, had lost its angry, blood-engorged appearance and was now a brownish yellow. The little cuts in the skin were healing up quite nicely.

  ‘I expect,’ May said, ‘she’s worried about Trixie.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Heather. ‘I do understand that. At least I try to. Trouble is I’ve always been so boringly normal.’ She sighed as at some capricious miscarriage of genetic justice. She and Ken exchanged normal and excessively boring smiles. ‘But when she said I wasn’t a healer—’

  ‘Not a healer?’ The leg nearly slipped from its iron support.

  ‘I know.’ Heather managed a light laugh. ‘I nearly threw that withered ovary from Putney in her face.’

  ‘I’m sure Janet didn’t mean to be unkind,’ said Arno. ‘We’re all under a great deal of strain at the moment. I personally am extremely worried about Tim.’

  A terrible change had come over the boy. Only Arno was permitted in his room, the door was locked against all others. Tim refused to have the curtains opened but enough daylight filtered through for Arno to discern, and be dreadfully shocked by, his rapid deterioration. Sleep and weeping had puffed out his normally taut, unblemished skin. His cheeks, hummocks of scarlet flesh, were criss-crossed with tear tracks and enseamed where he had pressed his face in the mattress. Crusts of yellow glued up his eyelids.

  When Arno had tried to change the pillowcase, which was stiff with sweat, he had to ease Tim’s fingers from the edge one at a time, gently coaxing the fabric free. Then the fingers, so bony and strong, had gripped his arm in terror. Arno had sat patiently, speaking words of consolation and reassurance.

  ‘It’s all right…you’ll be all right. You’re safe, Tim. Do you understand me?’ He paused and Tim’s eyes rolled wildly as if searching every shadowy, reeking corner of the room. ‘There’s no one here. No one will hurt you. Can’t you tell me what you’re frightened of?’ This time he paused for much longer, stroking Tim’s burning forehead with his free hand. ‘He wouldn’t like to see you like this.’

  At these words, gently spoken though they were, Tim gave forth a series of desolate strangled hiccups. Arno, full of concern for the boy and paralysed at his own inability to comfort, despaired. ‘You’re not worried about the future, are you? I tried to explain yesterday that May and I have the house now. We’ll always look after you. The Master left you in our care. He loved you Tim…’

  ‘Do you not think, Arno,’ May’s voice recalled him to the present, ‘that we should perhaps talk to someone at the hospital?’

  Ken and Heather looked at each other in open-mouthed consternation. Never did they expect to hear such a renegade phrase beneath the Windhorse roof. Every allopathic remedy from the mildest analgesic to major life-sustaining surgery was regarded with equal and grave suspicion. They had both been devastated yesterday when news of the Master’s terminal illness and the treatment he had been receiving was revealed. Even now they could hardly believe that he had deliberately turned his back on the embarrassment of restoratives available in his own home.

  ‘I feel if we do that, May,’ replied Arno, pained that for the first time ever he was about to disagree with his heart’s delight, ‘he will feel betrayed. And might never trust us again.’

  ‘I understand,’ said May. ‘And I hate to ask for professional help. But we can’t just leave him up there. Oh—if only the Master were here.’

  ‘He will earth again, May,’ called Ken from his home on the range.

  But the words seemed to shrivel on the air and offer no comfort.

  Meanwhile, directly above their heads, Janet was curled up on the padded window-seat. She had withdrawn the blue envelope from her pocket and turned it face upwards with trembling fingers. A second-class stamp. A Slough postmark. Masculine writing (of course it would be), yet not an especially strong hand. Why, then, was she so sure? Was she simply projecting her own jealousy and resentment?

  Maybe she was wrong. Perhaps the letter (perhaps all the letters) came from Trixie’s mother or sister. Or a girlfriend. But whoever it was must be quite close otherwise why write so frequently? And given this closeness, there was surely a pretty good chance that they knew where she had gone. Janet began to pick at the flap then stopped.

  What if—being such a regular correspondent—no need had been felt to include an address. In that case she would have violated Trixie’s privacy for nothing. Because of course that could be the only legitimate reason for opening the envelope. To contact Trixie and persuade her to return. She must know that, as witness to a murder, she’d be in trouble running away. For all Janet knew, the police had already sent out a description. Surely it was her duty as a friend to find Trixie and persuade her to return? Naturally she would not read the letter. She tore at the flap and pulled out a single sheet of paper.

  Dearest Trix, You won’t believe this—I can hardly believe it myself—but Hedda’s gone. It’s true. Ring or just come. Love oh! love V.

  Janet slammed the sheet of paper writing-side down upon her knee. She felt cold with shock. And a terrible concentrated desolation.

  So that’s why Trixie had run away. To be with this man—this V—who had ill-treated her before and was no doubt at this very moment doing so again. Janet had read about women who kept returning to husbands who knocked them about. Such behaviour had always seemed to her totally incomprehensible. No one had ever hit Janet and she was sure if they did she would walk right away and never look back.

  She recalled the day Trixie arrived, she’d had terrible bruises on the side of her jaw and, on her neck, fierce red nail-marks. Thinking of it, Janet gave a shudder, a single involuntary jerking of trunk and limbs, after which she sat quietly for a long time.

  But eventually, with great reluctance, as if forcing her gaze upon some unpleasant scene of despoilment, she looked again at the sheet of paper. There was a brief address. Seventeen Waterhouse. Presumably in Slough to match the postmark. If it isn’t, thought Janet, I’m lost. And even if it is there’s not a lot to go on. No street, road, drive or crescent. No villa, avenue or close. The post office might be able to help.

  Janet made herself read the note over and over again, working on the principle that any word or series of words if studied, or spoken aloud for long enough, loses all meaning. And thus the power to wound. She couldn’t honestly say this was entirely the case here. Sharp pinpoints of distress still penetrated and a single thrill of jealousy but, eventually, although her hand had not quite stopped quivering, she began to feel a little calmer. And, with the slow curlin
g away of that first swamping pain, rationality returned.

  For instance—why should she take it for granted that ‘V’ was male? True, Trixie (or, more vulgarly, Trix) was the writer’s ‘dearest’ but what did that signify? Strong affection was all. No reason to assume a romantic interest. Same with the concluding form. Who didn’t sign their letters ‘love’ these days. Even to mere acquaintances. Of course there was that rather fervid repetition, but that could simply mean the writer had an enthusiastic nature.

  The more Janet thought about this, the more likely it seemed. As for the obviously foreign Hedda, she was probably an au pair living in the house—with whom Trixie had not got on. Now she had left, it was OK to go home.

  It was not until that moment, after all her angst-ridden reasoning, that Janet saw how stupid she was being. For of course Trixie had gone before the letter arrived. The two things could not possibly be connected.

  About to scrunch up the paper, she checked herself. Nothing had changed in one important respect. V, even if not actually sheltering Trixie, would probably know where she might be found. So the next step must be to ring Slough Post Office and seek out a more detailed address.

  Janet got up. Doing something, she immediately felt better. To her surprise she also felt hungry. She took an orange from her fruit bowl and set out to find an unattended phone.

  ‘Where’s the Indy?’

  ‘I’m sitting on it.’

  ‘God, you’re mean!’

  ‘That’s right.’

  In the corner of the Barnabys’ kitchen the washing machine clicked and swooshed and swirled. When Cully was home it was on, and usually full, every day. A smell of frying bacon and coffee mingled with the scent of summer jasmine, a great swag of which hung over the open window. It had been a close night and the air was oppressive and still.

  ‘It’s not as if you’re going to read it. You’re just thinking about the case. Isn’t he, Ma?’