by Nicola Upson
‘Is there nothing I can say to change your mind?’ Penrose asked, although in his heart he had already conceded defeat.
‘No. Silence is the one small power I have left on this earth, you see, and I’m clinging to it. And that shows how little I’ve learned.’
His voice had grown weaker than ever, and now he struggled to breathe. Penrose fetched the nurse from outside and watched as she hurried over to the bed, noticing how desperately Frost’s eyes were fixed on her, pleading with her not to abandon him to the terror of an unknown darkness. He turned to the door, an intruder now in these final, most private of moments, but the nurse called him back. ‘Excuse me, sir, but I think Dr Frost wants you.’
He returned to the bed and bent low over the dying man, breathing in the nauseating smell of sickness. ‘One more thing,’ Frost said, his words barely perceptible. ‘There’s an order to everything in this world. Swayne will be next.’
‘How do you know that?’
But Frost sank back on his pillow, exhausted by the effort, and Penrose left the room. He walked back to the main house, too disturbed by the emotional impact of what he had just experienced to make much sense of what Frost had and hadn’t told him. He would have to have another look at the notes that Josephine had sent him on the news stories she had found, but nothing sprang readily to mind as being relevant; whatever ‘shame’ Frost had been referring to must have remained secret, now and at the time.
There was a police car parked next to his own and he was surprised to see Tom Webster coming out of the house, deep in conversation with Miss Cacroft. She broke off when she saw him, quickly noticing his troubled expression. ‘Is everything all right with Dr Frost, Chief Inspector?’
‘Yes, but I don’t think he has long now.’
‘And a nurse is with him?’ Penrose nodded. ‘Good. I’ll go over myself in a moment. Do you know Inspector Webster? He’s very kindly come here to talk to my girls about these terrible assaults.’
‘Yes, we met when I was in town recently,’ Penrose said, nodding to the officer.
‘Good to see you again, sir.’
‘Apparently, the last victim was a nurse from Addenbrooke’s,’ Miss Cacroft continued, ‘and although we’re a bit out of the way here, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Thank you for taking the trouble to come out to us personally, Inspector—it’s much appreciated, and I’ll make sure that all your advice is followed to the letter. Now—if you’ll both excuse me?’
She hurried across to the nursing block and Penrose watched her go, wondering if she was already too late.
‘Difficult morning, sir?’ Webster asked as they walked over to their cars.
‘Interrogating a dying man, Inspector. Sometimes I really love my job.’
‘That must have been hard. Was he able to help, though?’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t make me feel any better about taking up the time he has so very little of.’
‘Of course not. Is he really that bad?’
‘Yes. Right now, I’d happily swap cases with you.’
‘Be my guest.’
Penrose smiled, then spoke more seriously. ‘I heard about your latest. A friend of mine lives in St Clement’s Passage, and the girl went to her for help.’
‘Oh, the lady next door? Yes, she was very kind.’
‘And are you any further on this time?’
‘Honestly? Not really.’ He rubbed a hand across his eyes and Penrose noticed how exhausted he looked. ‘We’ve questioned nigh on a thousand men now, and it’s got us nowhere. We’ve pulled in all the petty criminals we know about—the assaults started as burglaries, so that seemed to make sense—and we’re doing spot-checks on the street if we see anything suspicious, but still he’s eluding us.’
‘It sounds more like the scale of a murder hunt. The public must appreciate that, at least.’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you, but it feels like we can’t win. The women are angry because we’re not doing enough and the men are beginning to resent us because they’re constantly under suspicion. One of our boys was knocked about in a pub the other day just for asking a few questions. Still, if we’re looking on the bright side . . .’
‘There is one?’
Webster grinned. ‘Sort of. General crime rates have never been so low. All the usual villains are afraid to leave the house in case they get caught by the extra night patrols.’
‘That sort of manpower must be putting a strain on everyone, though.’
‘Yes, but several of the lads are putting in extra time now without pay. We’re all doing our bit, even the top brass.’
‘Can’t you get someone else to take charge of things like this?’ Penrose asked. ‘I know it’s important to get people to take their safety seriously and it saves time in the long run, but anyone could do that.’
Webster flushed. ‘To tell you the truth, sir, I’ve got an ulterior motive.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’ve been out a couple of times with one of the nurses here, but she’s hardly seen me over the last few weeks so I thought I’d come out myself and speak to them. Besides, I want her to be safe, and you don’t trust anyone else with someone you care about, do you?’
‘No, I don’t suppose you do.’
‘Especially now we’ve got undergraduates offering to watch out for girls living on their own.’
Penrose smiled. ‘Isn’t that a good idea?’
‘I’m not sure about that. Since when has the honour of a student to be trusted? They all think they can do as they like.’ He seemed to be genuinely angry and Penrose said nothing, knowing from experience that the resentment between the town and the university was strongly felt on both sides. ‘Are you coming in to the station today?’ Webster asked.
‘I wasn’t planning to. I’m needed back in London for the Armistice Day briefing. Why?’
‘The Super’s been trying to contact you about this.’
He opened his car door and took a newspaper off the dashboard. The headline on the front page read: ‘Scotland Yard called in to help floundering local force’. ‘I’m sorry, Webster,’ Penrose said sincerely. ‘I have no idea how they know I’ve been in Cambridge or why they would think that I’m here to teach you your job.’
‘The usual thing, I suppose—putting two and two together and coming up with five.’
‘But they mustn’t get away with it. Can I take this paper?’ Webster nodded. ‘I’ll telephone the editor as soon as I’m back in London and make sure that he understands the situation.’
‘Thank you, sir, but don’t jeopardise your own investigation. If it suits you to make them think that’s why you’re here, leave it as it is.’
Penrose looked at him with respect, but knew how demoralised he would feel if his own efforts were being undermined so publicly without good reason. ‘No, I’ll make sure they publish a correction as soon as possible—and please give Superintendent Clough my apologies. If it’s any consolation, even if the Yard had been called in to help, we wouldn’t be coping any better than you are with a spate of crimes as unprecedented as this. Call me at any time if there’s something I can do to help. I’m bound to be back here soon, so we’ll catch up then.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ He hesitated, then said: ‘What are you working on, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘I don’t mind at all, but there’s not much I can tell you at the moment,’ Penrose said, feeling a little churlish. ‘It’s a series of murders—three so far—and I’m making about as much headway as you are.’
Webster smiled and got into his car. ‘I suppose that’s all I’m getting,’ he said, winding down the window, ‘but if you do want to trade those cases, just say the word.’
16
The museum was quiet, and Bridget breathed a sigh of relief to find herself alone in the familiar first-floor gallery. The canvas—a rare landscape by Renoir—hung in the middle of a crowded wall, and yet, as she walked towards it, everything else in the room seemed to disappea
r until only she and the painting existed. At first, as she always did, she marvelled at Renoir’s extraordinary technical skill: rapid, unerring brush strokes to convey the wind in the trees and the movement of the clouds across the sky; a palette of cool greens and blues which gave life to the freshness of the day; blurred edges in the foreground, hinting at a lazy warmth to come. The artist was believed to have completed the picture in a single session. To Bridget, its very existence was nothing short of a miracle.
But that wasn’t why she loved it. There was something far less tangible about the painting which always spoke to her: to look at it was to feel the air on her face, to stroll in the landscape it depicted, to be free. The gentle slopes seemed to stretch out indefinitely on either side and the clouds were ever scurrying towards a new horizon, not imprisoned by a canvas but fleeting and transient. Renoir’s inspiration had been a hill near Saint-Cloud, to the west of Paris, but the scene reminded her of something much closer to home—the meadows in Grantchester where she had played as a child, where she had lain on the grass with Archie, listening to the dull thud of the guns in France.
From the moment she first stood here, Bridget knew that the freedom and ambition of Renoir’s painting would define her life. She had come here when she discovered she was pregnant, hoping that its strange, enduring power would give her the courage to make a decision which she knew in her heart was wrong, and she returned to it now to give herself strength. As she turned away, holding the image in her mind’s eye for as long as she could, she was pleased to find that it had not let her down.
17
Josephine woke to the clatter of bottles in the hallway. She sat up in bed, her heart racing, and peered at the clock: it was five past seven, and just beginning to get light. Trying not to panic, she pulled her dressing gown around her and took Marta’s dancing statuette from its new home under the bed, a handy storage space which seemed to suit both the ornament’s aesthetic appeal and its more practical role as a weapon of self-defence. Feeling braver with the weight of the bronze in her hand, she tiptoed to the top of the stairs and looked over the banisters to the ground floor. ‘Hello?’ she called out. ‘Who’s down there?’
‘Who do you think it is at this time of the morning?’ grumbled Mrs Thompson, rubbing her foot. ‘What on earth are these bottles doing here? Frightened me half to death, they did. I could have broken my neck.’ Josephine bit her tongue and resisted the obvious retort. ‘In future, I’ll ask you to leave them in the kitchen and I’ll get rid of them when I leave.’
Mrs Thompson was still looking disapprovingly at the bottles when Josephine joined her in the hallway, and she had to agree that the ratio of wine to milk was unfortunate. ‘I’m sorry they startled you, but that was rather the point. Not to frighten you specifically,’ she clarified. ‘They’re supposed to warn me if I have an intruder. It was a tip they gave in the newspaper the other day and I thought I’d try it out.’
‘Well, you can’t be too careful when you haven’t got a man in the house,’ Mrs Thompson said, looking pointedly at Josephine. ‘All sorts of things can happen.’
‘Quite. Anyway, I was planning to move them before you arrived this morning. I’m sure you told me your hours were nine until twelve.’
‘That’s right, but I’m early today because I want to get to the market square in good time for the Armistice service. You’re not expecting me to vacuum through the two minutes’ silence, I hope?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Good. Now would you like me to bring you up some tea?’
It was the first time that Josephine had felt in charge of the help situation since Mrs Thompson appeared on her doorstep, but she shook her head. ‘Thank you, but no. I might as well get dressed now I’m up. I’ve got a busy day ahead.’
‘All the more reason to have a nice cup of tea before you get started.’ She filled the kettle and put it on the hob. ‘Now, where do you keep your cups?’ Josephine told her, watching as she took two down from the cupboard above the drainer and set them together on a tray. ‘And what have you got planned that’s keeping you so busy?’
‘I’m meeting a friend for coffee at the Dorothy,’ Josephine said, struck by how deceptively civilised her meeting with Bridget must sound to anyone who wasn’t aware of the tensions involved. ‘Then to the market square, obviously.’
‘Ay, it’s the most important day of the year, I always think, and you can rely on a good turnout. It’s not been the same since they knocked the old Guildhall down, of course,’ she added, warming the pot. ‘It was much more dignified, standing there under the clock when the silence came. Now we all shuffle round in front of those terrible modern buildings on the other side.’ She sighed and put the tray down on the table between them, then poured milk into the cups. ‘Still, I don’t suppose it matters where we do it, as long as we do. Will you be remembering anyone special today, Miss Tey?’
‘Of course,’ Josephine said quickly. ‘None of us escaped unscathed, did we?’
‘No, we most certainly did not.’ She paused, and then—when it became obvious that Josephine wasn’t going to engage any further of her own accord—filled the silence herself. ‘I gather there was a young man you were quite fond of, but no one seems entirely sure who it was—not even your family.’
The telephone wires must have been red-hot between Mrs Thompson and her aunt in Inverness, Josephine thought, taken aback by the brazenness of the thinly veiled question. ‘His name was Jack and he was killed at the Battle of the Somme,’ she said. The words sounded cold and matter-of-fact, even to her, but she knew exactly where the conversation was heading and she was determined to nip the speculation in the bud once and for all.
Mrs Thompson was not to be deterred so easily. ‘And there’s been no one since?’ she asked with a practised casualness. ‘He must have been very special.’
‘Yes, he was. I’ve never wanted to share my life with any other man since Jack died.’ Josephine looked her inquisitor squarely in the eye, falling back on a convenient truth which she often used if a conversation became too personal. She watched Mrs Thompson wrestle with the ambiguities of the phrase, enjoying her uncertainty perhaps a little more than she should have. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go and get ready.’ Josephine took her tea and went back upstairs; the skirmish had gone her way, but still she was furious that a stranger with no understanding of a love that wasn’t black and white should feel justified in making judgements on her life. She dressed carefully, choosing a smart navy blue suit which was appropriately sober for the day and which also gave her the self-assurance she would need for her meeting with Bridget. It was obviously going to be a day of confrontation rather than peace, and she could have done without such an awkward start to the morning: she was happy to take full responsibility for a row at the Dorothy Cafe, but Mrs Thompson wasn’t even her daily.
She pinned a poppy to her jacket, replacing the brooch of her mother’s which she usually wore there, then removed some of the photographs from the bedside table and locked anything else that was personal away in Marta’s desk. ‘The decorators will be here at nine,’ she said on her way through the hallway. ‘Perhaps you’d be kind enough to make them some tea.’
It was far too early to go to the cafe, so she took a circuitous route into town and browsed some of her favourite shops, all the while rehearsing different versions of what she wanted to say to Bridget. She wandered into Petty Cury, a part of town she was particularly fond of, which earned a sort of contrary distinction in Cambridge by being one of the few streets not to offer anything architecturally remarkable; instead, the busy thoroughfare was characterised by solid, Victorian buildings with one or two remnants from an earlier age, most notably a grand old coaching inn. The businesses in this street alone could supply everything that Josephine ever needed, and she had already spent enough time in W. Heffer and Sons to be on nodding terms with several of the booksellers. It was a fascinating shop, obviously expanded over time into the premises on eith
er side, and each of the rooms now devoted to books retained a memento of its former identity—old wallpaper and an apothecary’s bottles, a chandelier from a hotel bedroom.
Intrigued by the hints that Archie had dropped over his new case, she picked up a collected edition of M. R. James’s ghost stories, then found a book called The Secrets of Handwriting among the newly published titles. She took her selection to the counter to pay but was distracted in the history section by a familiar dust jacket decked in an understated green tartan; it was the first time that she had seen her new book, Claverhouse—a biography of the soldier and Jacobite hero John Graham—on sale in a bookshop, and the unexpected sight of it on the shelves alongside works by famous historians gave her a thrill every bit as intense as the first time she had ever seen her name in lights above a theatre. She picked up the book and read the publisher’s notes, which celebrated her success as a playwright and the powerful battle scenes which she had recreated in the book, comparing the final, bloody days of a seventeenth-century hero to the more recent conflict which had taken so many lives. It seemed an appropriate day to see Claverhouse honoured as she felt he should be and she put the volume proudly back on the shelf, amused as she always was to find that—once a book was out—all the pain and frustration of its creation disappeared as thoroughly as if it had never been.
Petty Cury was just a stone’s throw from the Dorothy Cafe and Ballroom, and Josephine made her way reluctantly along Sidney Street, cursing the day that Marta had ever walked into the buffet at Cambridge Station and inadvertently discovered Bridget’s secret. The Dorothy was obviously a popular venue, with a dance hall on the first floor and a bustling cafe below, and Josephine arrived just in time to take the last free table. She looked round at the other customers, but there was no sign yet of Bridget. ‘Are you always this busy in the mornings?’ she asked one of the waitresses, who looked run off her feet already.
‘Not usually, no—not in the week, anyway. Blame it on that lot over there.’ She gestured to the corner of the room, where three men in brown overalls were fiddling with wires and a television set beneath a sign that said ‘Courtesy of Miller & Son’, and Josephine remembered that the Armistice Day commemorations were being televised for the very first time. ‘They’re relaying the service from London,’ her waitress confirmed. ‘That’s if they can ever get that blessed thing to work.’ She rolled her eyes and moved on to the next table, and Josephine was struck by how ironic it seemed that she and Bridget should be having this conversation with Archie—on duty at the Cenotaph—somehow in the room with them.