by Nicola Upson
She waited hopefully, in case he recalled some lost fragment of gossip that had passed across his counter, but he just shook his head sadly. ‘The poor bloke. You never know what some people have to carry, do you? Give them my regards when you see them.’
‘I will.’ She left the shop with more than she had hoped for, and, instead of turning right towards the library, retraced her footsteps and headed for Round Church Street, named after the distinctive Norman building on the corner. Park Street was at the bottom of the road, and she could already see the row of Victorian houses which bordered the grounds of Jesus College—uniform brick and slate cottages with sash windows and dormer attics, pleasant to look at but neat rather than memorable. Number ten was identical to its neighbours except for its front garden; whereas the houses on either side had attempted nothing more ambitious than a tidy square of lawn and a privet hedge, the Cleevers had transformed their small patch with a number of carefully planted flower borders which must have looked glorious in spring and summer. Even now, there was a flash of startling colour here and there in the acid-yellow of the winter jasmine and a clutch of red dahlias by the door.
Josephine lingered on the other side of the road, torn between a curiosity to know more and a reluctance to force her way into a family’s grief under false pretences. In the end, the decision was taken out of her hands: the Cleevers’ front door opened and a frail, grey-haired woman peered curiously out at her from the shadows of the hallway. She was dressed entirely in black and Josephine guessed that the clothes she wore were the uniform of her college work, but the length of the skirt and the fullness of the sleeves seemed to belong to a different age. She smiled awkwardly, guessing that the woman had been watching her for some time from inside the house, and Maud Cleever half-raised her hand in a gesture of recognition, then let it fall to her side.
Knowing that any more hesitation on her part would look suspicious, Josephine walked briskly across the road and opened the gate. ‘Mrs Cleever?’ she called brightly, in what she hoped was the manner of someone about to fulfil an agreeable obligation.
‘That’s right.’
‘My name is Josephine Tey. We’ve never met, but my brother was at college here over twenty years ago and you were once very kind to him. He’s never forgotten you, and he asked me to look you up while I was in Cambridge.’ The look of joy and gratitude which suddenly transformed Maud Cleever’s face tugged at Josephine’s conscience as much as it moved her, but she was committed to the lie now whether she liked it or not. ‘Homesickness is a terrible thing,’ she continued, ‘but not everyone is as sympathetic as you were. You helped him settle in here and make friends, and he’s always been grateful for that.’
‘How lovely. I do miss those boys, dear. I’m not at the college any more, you see. It’s hard work, up and down those stairs a hundred times a day, and arthritis got the better of me in the end. My husband’s still there and he keeps me up to date with things, but it’s not the same.’ Her voice was gentle, with the softest hint of a West Country accent, and Josephine realised that she could not have chosen a more credible scenario if she had had all the time in the world to think of it; Maud Cleever might never have made her brother feel at home in this strange new world, but there were surely scores of men all over the country who had found comfort in her kindness. ‘What was your brother’s name?’ Mrs Cleever asked.
‘Colin,’ Josephine said quickly. She had taken her own name from her mother, so it seemed reasonable to assume that her fictional elder brother—had he ever existed—would have been named after her father. ‘He came up to Cambridge to read history—1913, it must have been. I always remember that because it was the last Christmas before the war.’
Mrs Cleever’s face clouded over, and when she spoke again her interest in the conversation was more forced. ‘And he was from Scotland, obviously.’
‘That’s right. From Inverness.’
‘Ah, yes. I remember him now. A sweet boy he was, always so polite.’
The words were bland and unspecific, and Josephine knew that she was trying not to cause offence by admitting that the name meant nothing to her; Mrs Cleever didn’t remember young Colin from Inverness, and why should she? ‘These are for you,’ she said, holding out the chocolates, but the woman surprised her by ignoring the box and instead raising her hand to touch Josephine’s cheek.
‘You look a little like her, you know. For a minute there, when you were standing across the street, I thought . . .’ She left the sentence unfinished, but shrugged the moment off before Josephine could press her on it. ‘You mustn’t take any notice of an old woman, dear. I’m just talking nonsense. Come in and have some tea.’
‘Oh no, I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble.’
‘It’s no trouble. You’d be doing me a kindness. We don’t get much company these days, and I miss having young people around me. Sit yourself down in there. I won’t be long.’
Josephine did as she was invited, the gift suddenly hollow in her hands. She tried to tell herself that she was merely trying to right an injustice, but, as she took a seat in the Cleevers’ sitting room, the deception felt shabby and unnecessary, and she wished in hindsight that she had been honest from the start. The room was at the back of the house and looked out over a small courtyard garden and then—through an arched gateway—to the playing fields of Jesus College. The roses which were Alfred Cleever’s pride and joy took up every inch of growing space and she noticed how meticulously tended they were, their stems neatly cut back for the winter and straw scattered around the roots to protect the plants from frost. Somehow, the care and attention suggested more than a professional habit, and she wondered if she was reading too much into the Cleevers’ need to surround themselves with beauty and colour.
Inside, the house spoke of a quiet, companionable marriage. This was obviously the room where the couple spent most of their time, and Josephine warmed to the fact that Mrs Cleever had felt no need to show her unexpected visitor into the formal, little-used room that they had passed on their way down the hall. There was an armchair on either side of the fire, with a Woman’s Weekly on her cushion and a seed catalogue on his, and small patches of long, dark fur on the sofa where Josephine was sitting testified to the presence of a cat. A wireless stood on the mantelpiece, and someone had obviously been looking through the Radio Times: the magazine lay open on the sofa, marked up with programmes not to miss, and Josephine noticed that the couple had a preference for dance music and comedy. Otherwise, the room was unusually free of clutter: there were no books, very few ornaments, and—most annoyingly of all—not a single photograph anywhere to be seen.
Mrs Cleever came in with a plate of biscuits, a little short of breath and obviously in pain. ‘Can I bring something through for you?’ Josephine asked, standing to help her.
‘You’re very kind, dear. The tea’s ready but you’ll need to put the milk and sugar on the tray—if you’re sure you don’t mind?’
‘Of course not.’ She went through to the kitchen and was rewarded with more than the promised cup of tea. The dresser was dotted with photographs and Josephine’s eye was immediately drawn to an attractive, dark-haired girl who appeared in several of the pictures at different stages of her life, and who must surely be Ellen Cleever. In one of them—taken shortly before her death, Josephine guessed, because she looked to be sixteen or seventeen—she was surrounded by a group of small boys dressed in top hats and Eton suits. The boys were far too young to be the choral scholars Archie was interested in, but the building in the background was unmistakably King’s College Chapel.
‘Can you find everything you need?’ Mrs Cleever called.
Josephine hurriedly picked up a jug from the dresser and filled it with milk. ‘Just coming,’ she replied, adding two cups and taking the tray through to the sitting room. ‘Sorry to be so long. I was looking everywhere for the sugar, then I found it right in front of me.’
‘Don’t worry, dear. Set it down there and have a
biscuit. I’ll pour for us.’ The shortbread was delicious, even though Josephine had very little appetite for it, and her obvious enjoyment seemed to please Mrs Cleever. ‘The college boys always appreciated my cooking, but I expect you know that already. Colin loved his chocolate if I remember rightly?’ Josephine nodded, playing her part in the mutual charade that they had both settled into. ‘Ah, yes—it’s all coming back to me now,’ Mrs Cleever added, encouraged by her success so far, ‘and he can’t have lost his thoughtfulness if he asked you to come and see me. What’s he doing with his life?’
‘He’s a teacher at a school in Edinburgh,’ Josephine said, and spent the next half an hour giving Colin the sort of life that she thought a history graduate with a background like hers might have. She told Mrs Cleever about his war service and the long battle with a shoulder injury that had marred his return to England; about the joy he eventually found in his work and the chance meeting with the woman from Ireland who would become his wife; about the twins who had come along soon afterwards, giving her own parents the grandchildren they had always longed for. She took her inspiration from Archie’s life or from the anecdotes passed down within her family, occasionally adding traits from the characters who peopled her books, and in the end the picture was so convincing that she began to long for the brother she had never had. It was strange, but she found herself desperately wanting to repay this kind, generous woman with a story which would please her and make her proud of all the lives she had touched, but, when she finally ran out of ideas, Maud Cleever’s expression was a complex muddle of satisfaction and sorrow.
‘It’s lovely to know the whole story,’ she said quietly, ‘and it means a great deal to me that you bothered to come here today. When you do the sort of work that I did, you watch your boys go off into the world but you never find out what they made of themselves—for good or bad. Sometimes I can’t help wondering what might have been. I shouldn’t, perhaps, but I do.’
Josephine knew that she was thinking about her daughter and the life that would—for a very different reason—always remain a blank page, a series of unanswered and unanswerable questions. The older woman stared into the fire, lost in her own thoughts and oblivious now to her visitor. ‘Who did you think I was when you came to the door?’ Josephine asked gently. ‘Was it your daughter? Was it Ellen?’ Maud looked at her, brought back to the present by the name. ‘Colin was so shocked by what had happened,’ Josephine explained. ‘He wrote home about it when he came back here in January for the new term, and I remember him telling me later that you’d never got over it—but why would you?’
‘I didn’t see her, dear—not after she died. They wouldn’t let me. Alf identified her, and I know in my heart that she’s gone, but that’s not enough somehow. It never has been.’ Josephine moved to the other end of the sofa and took her hand. ‘They didn’t have to protect me like that. Nothing could have been worse than the moment when they came to the door on Christmas morning and we’d been up all night worrying about her—but they said it would be better if I didn’t go to her. They said it wasn’t for a woman to see. Men don’t understand, though, do they? Not even Alf. They meant well, I know they did, but they don’t understand what’s here between a mother and her daughter.’ She touched her heart and Josephine listened sadly, wondering what sort of injuries Ellen had sustained to make her body unfit for her mother to see. ‘It’s the same with fathers and sons, don’t you think? I expect you’re closer to your mother and Colin’s his father’s boy?’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s true.’
‘But I didn’t go to her when she needed me, and I let her down.’
‘No, you didn’t. They let you down. As far as Ellen was concerned, you’d cared for her since the moment she was born and yours was the love she’d always known. Her suffering was over by then, but someone should have thought more about yours.’
Maud Cleever smiled gratefully and squeezed her hand, but Josephine knew that nothing anyone could say now would numb her pain or her sense of guilt. ‘It’s kind of you to say so, but I still wonder what Ellen would have made of her life—who she would have loved, where she might have gone. And I was hoping for grandchildren, of course, like your parents. Sometimes . . .’ She hesitated, and Josephine waited patiently for her to continue. ‘Sometimes I miss her so much that I can’t believe she’s gone. I think she’ll come back, and I start to imagine how it might be—Ellen standing across the road, just like you were this morning.’ Plagued with remorse now for all the suffering she had resurrected, Josephine wondered if she should think of ways to divert the conversation, but Mrs Cleever—who obviously didn’t have much opportunity to talk about the daughter she had lost—seemed to find comfort in voicing her grief. ‘Did Colin come to Ellen’s funeral?’ she asked suddenly.
For the first time, Josephine was thrown. ‘I’m not sure,’ she admitted. ‘He was probably still at home for the Christmas holidays.’
‘Oh no—we had to wait to bury her because there was a heavy fall of snow shortly after she died. Term had started again before the thaw, and lots of the boys came to pay their respects to the family—from Jesus and from King’s.’
Had Archie’s murder victims been among them, Josephine wondered? Had those young choral scholars had the nerve to join the mourners for the girl whose death she was now convinced they had been involved in? ‘That must be why I don’t remember Colin mentioning it,’ she said. ‘The weather was terrible in the Highlands that winter and he couldn’t travel in time for the start of term.’ She pictured the gravestone with its unconvincingly hopeful inscription, and imagined how desperately bleak that January funeral must have been. ‘Where is Ellen buried?’ she asked.
‘Over at the cemetery in Mill Road. We go as often as we can, but it’s harder to get to the other side of town now we’re older.’
‘And did you ever find out how she died, Mrs Cleever?’
‘Not to my satisfaction, no. The police didn’t put themselves out, I must say. I suppose it was very inconsiderate of Ellen to get herself killed at Christmas, when everyone was off enjoying themselves.’
Remarkably, it was the first hint of bitterness that she had shown. ‘So she was killed?’ Josephine said. ‘Her drowning wasn’t an accident?’
‘No, it wasn’t an accident. I was too ill to go to the inquest, but the verdict was murder by person or persons unknown. Alf told me that Ellen had been hit on the head and knocked into the water, but that was only half the story, I’m sure, and I didn’t force him to tell me what else he’d heard—for his sake, and for mine. There were a lot of beggars in town that Christmas—they come up from London every year—and the police put it down to them. They decided that whoever had done it would have moved on to another town.’ How convenient, Josephine thought. She would have liked to tell Mrs Cleever that times had changed, that someone now cared enough about her daughter’s death to look again—but that would have given her away and, in any case, it was only partly true; she had heard enough of Archie’s monologues on the shortcomings of Scotland Yard to know that his dedication to justice was by no means universal. And of course there was another reason for discretion on her part; if it turned out that someone did care enough about Ellen’s death to kill several times, then the escalation of violence would, she knew, bring very cold comfort to someone as gentle as Maud Cleever.
‘I went to Hodson’s Folly after she died,’ the woman said. ‘I thought that if I couldn’t see Ellen I could at least see where she’d died, but I wish I hadn’t. Godforsaken, it was. I’ve never been back since.’
‘Why was she there?’ Josephine asked. ‘Was it somewhere she often went?’
‘In summer, perhaps, but not on a winter’s night.’ She shrugged, like any mother whose adult child has become a mystery to her. ‘I’ve thought and thought about it over the years, but I don’t know why she was there. The police asked me if I thought she’d gone with some boys but I soon put them right about that—Ellen wasn’t that sort of girl. No,
dear—I can’t explain it. The last time I saw her was on the morning of Christmas Eve. She was excited about the carol service in the afternoon, and she told me that she was going out to the pictures with a friend afterwards. She promised her father and me that she’d be home by eight, in time to dress the tree, and we waited up all night for her. Then that poor couple found her the next morning.’
‘Was Ellen your only child?’ Josephine asked, remembering what Archie had said about finding the killer among Ellen’s relatives or friends.
Mrs Cleever shook her head. ‘No, we’ve got a son. Ernest is six years younger than Ellen and he was always a good boy, but he went off the rails when we lost her. Hit him hard, it did, because he worshipped the ground she walked on. He drank a lot and got into fights, and then he started to steal from us so Alfred had to tell him to go. It broke his heart—and mine—but we didn’t know what else to do. That was towards the end of the war and we haven’t seen him since.’
So one way and another, the Cleevers had lost two children in those terrible days of 1913, Josephine thought. ‘Is that Ellen in the photograph on your dresser?’ she asked. ‘The one with the little boys?’
‘Oh, you saw that, did you? Yes, she was a maid at King’s College School. She could have come to work at Jesus with me, but she wanted to go her own way and have her independence, and I was just the same at her age. She made a good job of it, too. She was kind, you see, and all the boys at that school loved her.’
‘Kindness must run in the family.’
Maud Cleever smiled. ‘It was even more important there. At least by the time they got to college most of my lads could look out for themselves if they had to, but those little ones were so young. A lot of them had parents abroad and they hardly ever went home. Ellen used to spend a lot of time with them—far more than she was paid for, but she’d had plenty of practice with Ernest and she was always good with children. It’s such a shame . . .’ The regret ran too deep to be spoken aloud, but Josephine knew how the sentence would have finished. ‘I’ve talked far too much, dear,’ Mrs Cleever said, leaning forward to pick up the box of chocolates. ‘You’ll have to forgive me, but I don’t see many people these days and I miss the company. Now—let’s have one of these as Colin has been kind enough to send them. Do thank him for me, won’t you? And for the tobacco—Alf does love his pipe.’