Nine Lessons

by Nicola Upson

  There was no outburst this time, just a flicker of the fear that Penrose had seen earlier. ‘No, Chief Inspector, I can’t think of anyone at all,’ Moorcroft said, looking him directly in the eye. ‘I’ll say this once more, and I’ll ask you to accept my word. I had no connection with Stephen Laxborough other than the ones I’ve already mentioned, and, to my knowledge, I don’t have any enemies. I’m sorry that Laxborough is dead, but it can have nothing whatsoever to do with me.’

  ‘And yet we have the photograph,’ Penrose insisted. ‘At its most innocent, it testifies to the connection between you, which is what brought me here. Looked at more seriously, it could be a warning—’

  ‘A warning?’ The voice came from behind him, soft with a distinctive American inflection, and he turned to see an attractive young woman who had entered from the other door. She was carrying a baby, and looked anxiously at her husband. ‘What’s this about, Robert?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing, darling. Go back upstairs and wait for me. Detective Chief Inspector Penrose has nearly finished.’

  ‘Is this to do with the intruder? He said something was a warning and if we’re in any danger—’

  ‘I said go upstairs, Virginia,’ Moorcroft snapped. ‘It’s nothing to concern you. Please don’t worry—you’ll upset the baby.’

  She looked unconvinced but did as he asked, and Penrose returned to his line of thought. ‘As I was saying, whoever killed Stephen Laxborough might have meant this photograph as a threat. Coupled with the incident here the other night, I would urge you very strongly now to tell me if you can think of anyone who might want to harm you and your family, no matter how unlikely it seems.’

  ‘There’s no one, Penrose, but thank you for your concern and if anything occurs to me I’ll be sure to let you know.’

  He stood up, effectively dismissing his visitor. ‘Do you have a photograph of the choir?’ Penrose asked, certain that Moorcroft would set enough store by his college days to keep a record of them and wrong-footing him with the question.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. It’ll be upstairs somewhere. I’m happy to send it on to you if I can find one.’

  ‘I don’t mind waiting, if it’s not too much trouble.’

  His tone gave Moorcroft little choice but to oblige. He left the room and returned after only a few minutes, carrying a framed photograph of a group of choristers. ‘Here you are.’

  Penrose looked with interest at the image, taken on the lawn behind King’s College with the chapel in the background. The boy choristers sat cross-legged at the front, some as young as eight or nine, while the tenors and basses stood behind. ‘Which is you?’ he asked.

  ‘Second from the left at the back.’ He moved closer and stood at Penrose’s shoulder, staring down at his younger, fitter self. ‘And that’s Laxborough.’

  He pointed to an ascetic-looking figure at the other end of the row. It was the first time that Penrose had seen a clear photograph of the dead man, but he found himself unable to look at his face without replacing it with another, more terrible, image. ‘Would you mind giving me some names for the other people in this picture?’ he asked.

  ‘Christ, Penrose—it’s all so long ago. I really can’t remember.’

  ‘Haven’t you kept in touch with any of them?’

  ‘No. As I said, compared to the war it was a very brief and insignificant part of my life. I could give you a list of all the men I served with, but I could name very few of those boys now.’

  ‘Any you could offer would be a start,’ Penrose reiterated. ‘You said a few of them had gone to Dr James’s funeral, so perhaps you could bring those to mind? I can check with the college, of course,’ he added, as Moorcroft still hesitated, ‘but it would save time if you could write down the ones you know.’

  Defeated by his earlier admission, Moorcroft went over to the bureau and scribbled down five names on a piece of notepaper which carried the Angerhale coat of arms. ‘There—that really is all I can give you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Penrose said, and finally allowed himself to be led back to the front door. Moorcroft accompanied him to his car, as if he didn’t entirely trust him to leave, but Penrose paused before getting inside. ‘Just one more thing, sir—there was a quotation found with Dr Laxborough’s body, too. “What is this that I have done?”’ He spoke the phrase slowly, making sure that it was understood. ‘Can you shed any light on where it might come from or what it might mean?’

  Without another word, Moorcroft turned on his heel and went back into the house. As Penrose got into his car and drove away, he didn’t need a rear-view mirror to tell him that he was being watched.

  6

  No one would ever guess that she made her living from a skill with words, Josephine thought as she sat at the desk in what would eventually be Marta’s study, trying to write a letter to Bridget that didn’t sound threatening or sanctimonious. She read back through her most recent attempt, assessing the tone and predicting Bridget’s response: at worst, indignation; at best, a polite enquiry as to why exactly she thought any of this was her business. With a sigh, she confined the sheaf of Basildon Bond to the wastepaper basket and wrote Bridget a simple postcard, asking her to telephone as a matter of urgency as soon as she returned from Devon. By then, she might have decided what she wanted to say.

  The house felt empty and strange without Marta. Other than the room they had chosen as a bedroom, which was at the top of the house overlooking the church, there had been no time to put a personal stamp on anything, and Josephine found herself rattling round the hallways like a lodger who had forgotten which door she had the key to. The central staircase, onto which every room opened, reminded her of the Noel Street boarding house she had stayed in while working in Nottingham after the war; the building itself was very different, of course, but there was something in the way that her footsteps echoed on the bare boards as she climbed the stairs, in the old-fashioned bathroom and makeshift kitchen, which recalled the awkward intimacies of communal living. Even now, she could remember her fellow boarders with no effort whatsoever: the amiable Indian student from the university; a raw youth called Ted who was a trade apprentice in the town; the man who knew Inverness inside out and assumed at breakfast each day that she was as interested in Donald MacKay as he was, just because they shared an accent. The house had been run by a woman and her widowed sister, whose daughter’s fiancé was a sweet, smashed-up boy recently returned from the war, and in sharing mealtimes and a sitting room, the lodgers had inevitably been woven into the cheerless fabric of the family’s life.

  Now, as she had then, she lay in bed at night listening to the sounds outside her window, trying to get used to the rhythms of a new town—the faintly tinny cough of the church clock whenever it struck the hour, the rustle of students and bicycles at the beginning of lectures each morning, the comings and goings of lodgers on either side. During the day, she kept herself busy with an undemanding list of practical tasks that kept a threatening sense of loneliness at bay: she made arrangements with a firm of painters and decorators to work their way through the house, wheedling a half-hearted promise from them to start immediately and be done within a fortnight; she put Marta’s name down with a domestic agency in Green Street, whose advertisement promised ‘good jobs for good maids’ and who could hopefully be relied upon to apply the same principles in reverse; and she made what sense she could of the remaining boxes, leaving anything precious or breakable until the work was complete, but making sure that Marta would at least have somewhere comfortable and functional to come home to.

  Whenever she ran out of things to do or tired of domesticity, she simply walked the streets, glorying in the beauty of the architecture and the novelty of the shops and cafes. Perhaps it was the unstructured nature of her days, free from all appointments and responsibilities, or perhaps it was something inherent in Cambridge itself, but for the first time in months Josephine felt inspired to sit down and work. Her early books and plays had been sufficiently successful to g
ive her the right to pick and choose what she did, but while there was something luxurious in a lack of obligation, she suddenly found herself craving a new achievement, measured not by reviews or sales or by the amount of money which a theatrical producer was willing to invest, but by her own satisfaction. Her latest book, a biography of Claverhouse, was soon to be published, but months of researching and writing it—wrestling with a genre that was new to her and longing for the life and breath of fiction—had nearly put her off altogether. Now, though, she was ready to settle to something which would bring her more joy, and she was inclined to think that Cambridge might just give her the ideas she was looking for.

  In the meantime, the debt she owed to her friendship with Archie niggled at the back of her mind. It was frustrating not to be able to do something about it immediately, while the shock and anger of Marta’s revelation still lingered, but the request to talk was at least a start. She found the address that Marta had given her for Bridget and looked it up on a street map, deciding to deliver the postcard by hand; it was a short walk across town and the knowledge that Josephine had been to her house might just make Bridget more inclined to respond quickly—someone who knew your secret and lived on your doorstep was hard to ignore.

  Little St Mary’s Lane was a quiet, gentrified side street which ran from the bustle of the main road to the river, and was obviously used as a shortcut between the two. At first glance, it appeared to be a narrower, more ancient version of St Clement’s Passage, with a church and churchyard on one side and a line of houses on the other whose front doors opened straight onto the street. The buildings here were more varied, though—a haphazard mix of two- and three-storey cottages with attic rooms and basements, distinguished further by an attractive assortment of colour-washed walls and red brick. The lane was mostly residential, except for a striking black-and-white building halfway down; a silver crescent swung on a chain over the door, representing the half moon which gave the inn its name, and this together with the old gas lamps that hung over the pavement brought to the street an atmospheric, Victorian feel which Josephine warmed to immediately.

  Bridget’s house was opposite the gate to the church. Before she could think too much about it, Josephine took the postcard from her bag and pushed it through the letterbox, listening as it clattered onto the hallway’s tiled floor. Even if she hadn’t known the number, a closer glance at the house would have given Bridget away. The curtains at the windows downstairs were pulled right back, and Josephine could see into the tiny sitting room beyond. A dramatic landscape painting hung over the fireplace, vast mountains under an angry sky, and she instantly recognised Bridget’s style from the pictures in Archie’s London flat. She would dearly have loved to press her nose to the glass and take in every other detail of the room, but a group of men turned into the lane from the Trumpington Street end and she moved on, wary of seeming suspicious. Further down, where the churchyard gave way to another row of houses, the road became narrow and tunnel-like, but here it was open to the sky. The clear, nostalgic song of a robin—more conspicuous now that its springtime competitors were absent—drew her over to the railings; she could never resist a graveyard, especially one as tranquil and rambling as this, and she opened the gate and took the path that led round the church. A man in an old corduroy jacket was tidying one of the graves with a pair of shears, adding a regular, percussive click to the birdsong, and a wheelbarrow with a Thermos flask and various other tools stood nearby. He smiled and raised his cap to her, then stood up to stretch his legs. ‘Lovely day,’ he said, shielding his eyes from the sun with a hand covered in soil and grass stains, a true gardener’s hand. ‘Have you come to pay your respects?’

  ‘No, not really,’ Josephine admitted. ‘I’m afraid I’m more of a sightseer. Cambridge is new to me, and I don’t think I’ve ever been to a place with as many churches.’

  ‘There’s a fair few, I’ll give you that. People talk about King’s and the chapel, and they’re famous for a reason, but I reckon God’s just as fond of the others.’

  Josephine smiled. ‘I’m sure you’re right, although I’m not much of a church-goer. This, though . . .’ She gestured towards the winding paths and clumps of autumn crocus, the tombs and headstones decorated with tiny yellow lichen rosettes. ‘I can see why people find peace here. Is this a labour of love or are you a gardener by trade?’

  ‘Bit of both, really. I look after this and a few of the other churchyards, then fill in with odd jobs here and there.’ His skin had been aged by the sun, she noticed, but his eyes and voice were much younger. ‘You’re right about the peace, though. Doesn’t feel much like work sometimes. Not on a day like this, anyway.’

  He took a packet of tobacco from his pocket and she left him to smoke his cigarette in peace, wandering at random through the graves, reading the names which the years had not yet erased and inventing lives for those who had been laid to rest there. A movement in the lane caught her eye, and she stared in surprise as a young woman came out of Bridget’s house, carrying what looked like a canvas wrapped in brown paper. Her hair was cut short in a bob, but otherwise she fitted Marta’s description to a tee and Josephine wondered why it had never occurred to her that Phyllis might live with her mother. Thankful now that she hadn’t put anything more explanatory in her card, she imagined the girl picking it up from the mat and placing it on a hall table with the rest of her mother’s post, oblivious to how deeply it concerned her. She moved a few steps closer and watched as the young woman locked the door behind her and walked over to a bicycle by the church railings. Impatiently, she tried to fit the canvas into the basket or balance it on top, but the task defeated her and she set out on foot instead, raising her hand to the gardener, who had begun to hoe a flower bed nearer the main road. She turned left towards the town centre, and Josephine—too curious now not to follow—tried to justify her behaviour by interpreting the abandoned bicycle as an invitation from fate.

  Phyllis—if indeed this was Phyllis—crossed the road and took the street opposite, walking with all the energy of youth; Josephine struggled to keep up, reminded suddenly of how many years it had been since she made physical training her profession. By the time they had bypassed the town centre in favour of another, smaller clutch of shops, then cut through a side street to a wide road bordering a park, she was hopelessly lost and regretting her rashness. Even if the girl was Bridget’s daughter rather than a friend or housemate, she wasn’t quite sure what she hoped to achieve by getting into conversation with her; it would only antagonise Bridget if she ever found out, and no doubt it would hurt Archie to know that Josephine had spoken to Phyllis before he even knew of her existence. Worse still, if Phyllis herself were to be harmed by anyone else’s meddling, she would never forgive herself. Since Marta had confided in her, Josephine had been so busy debating the abstract rights and wrongs of Bridget’s choices that she had almost forgotten the real person who lay at the heart of them—the young woman whose life could so easily be damaged by a careless word or a rash declaration. The thought made her hesitate, but then her new friend fate intervened again: Phyllis left the main road and headed for a building set back on the right-hand side; it was a theatre, the one thing guaranteed to give them something in common.

  According to the posters outside, the play for the week was Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall, scheduled to open the following evening. Josephine knew the piece well from its original production in the West End—a psychological thriller in which a number of unsuspecting women fall victim to the charms of a psychopath. It was, she thought, an unfortunate choice for a town under siege to a serial rapist, but at least it had the advantage of being topical. She tried the public entrance to the foyer but it was locked, so she followed in Phyllis’s footsteps down an alleyway at the side of the building to a rear entrance which presumably functioned as a stage door. Inside, she was offered two choices—a second door, heading for the pit steps and stage, or a corridor which ran round the back of the auditorium; she chose t
he latter, unable to think of an excuse which would justify her presence backstage, and cautiously opened one of the pale green doors that led to the boxes. Other than some striking art deco glass panels at the front, the theatre’s unassuming facade had in no way prepared her for the character of its interior; she looked round in delight at an exquisite Georgian playhouse. The horseshoe auditorium, split over three levels and decorated in a traditional, rich colour scheme of reds and creams, had all the atmosphere of the original Theatre Royal, and a coat of arms on the proscenium arch suggested that this building, too, had once laid claim to royal title. It captivated Josephine instantly, as historic theatres always did, and she longed suddenly to see a performance there.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  Phyllis had come out from the wings and stood on the stage, looking curiously at her unexpected visitor. ‘I’m so sorry,’ Josephine said, ‘but I was just walking past the theatre and I saw the posters. It’s a play I like very much so I thought I’d pop in and buy a ticket.’

  ‘We only sell them from here on the night, I’m afraid. The theatre runs on a shoestring, and we can’t afford the staff to open the box office during the day.’

  ‘I should have left as soon as I realised you were closed, but once I was inside I couldn’t pull myself away. I had no idea that it would be this beautiful. It’s a real gem.’

  ‘It is lovely, isn’t it?’ Phyllis said, visibly pleased by Josephine’s admiration. ‘It gets most people that way the first time they see it. It’s not the sort of thing you expect to find on a dreary stretch of road leading out of town.’

  ‘Well, it was definitely worth getting lost for.’

  ‘You don’t know Cambridge very well, then?’