by Rack, Ruin
Dave and Gary stood in frozen horror above the sprawled motionless form of Bridget Harwell. The remaining members of the Colley family were running from their cottage towards the spot. The oldest woman was waving her arms above her head. The youngest, overweight, lumbered beside her, mouth gaping and badly dyed scarlet hair flying. Between the two extremes of age came a middle-aged third who must be Maggie Colley. She was shouting a string of obscenities. The words tumbling from her lips were not, Jess was able to realise despite her own shock, aimed specifically at her. They were Maggie’s automatic reaction to the horror of the moment; the only vocabulary at her disposal in which to express her dismay. At the same time, in her ear, Jess could hear Tansy screaming, ‘Mummy, Mummy!’
The dogs were loose and milled about excitedly. That’s where Gary went, to let the dogs out! The realisation flashed through Jess’s mind. What did the idiot think? That the animals would keep me penned in while the women made some kind of escape? The dogs crept closer and began to circle the inert form. Gary moved at last, swearing and kicking out at them to drive them back. Into Jess’s head leaped the image from the stained-glass window at Balaclava House. Jezebel: the treacherous woman…
* * *
‘I’ve spoken to the hospital this morning,’ Ian Carter told Jess the following day. ‘Bridget has been very fortunate. The recent heavy rain helped. It turned the Colleys’ yard into a sea of soft mud and she landed on that rather than on hard ground. She has a broken leg and broken pelvis, concussion and of course considerable bruising. But she’s escaped internal injury. She will recover and eventually, we trust, be fit enough to stand trial. Her fiancé is on his way from America. We don’t know what the outcome of that will be but I doubt she’ll be getting married to him now, not if he wants to see his wife other than on visiting days.’
‘I feel responsible,’ Jess said dully. ‘She was being interviewed by me when she fell out of that opening. I saw she was in danger. When I couldn’t get her to move away from it and sit on that old sofa to talk, I should have made a grab for her and dragged her away.’
‘There will have to be an inquiry, of course,’ Carter told her. ‘But I am quite confident you’ll be cleared of any responsibility, Jess. It wasn’t your fault she fell. She was in a highly excitable frame of mind. You tried to persuade her to move away from the open window and she wouldn’t. She wanted to keep your attention on her so that you wouldn’t realise her daughter was hiding up there in that loft. You were quite right not to move towards her. She might have stepped backwards automatically and then fallen. That’s a hundred-and-fifty-year-old floor up there and it’s not been well maintained. It gave way under her weight. If you and she had both been standing on it, you’d both have fallen. No one can be surprised at what happened; or put it down to anything you did or didn’t do.’
‘I still feel I screwed up somehow,’ Jess argued. ‘If I’d got a search warrant for the Colleys’ pig farm on the day of the murder, we’d have found Taylor’s car, complete with his fingerprints and DNA and Bridget’s.’
He interrupted her briskly. ‘On what grounds would you have requested a search warrant then? As far as we were concerned, the Colleys were neighbours of Balaclava House and that was all. There was no indication at that time they’d been involved.’
Jess was still unconvinced. ‘Phil and I both realised at the scene that at least two people had carried the dead man into the house; and that they’d come through the shrubbery. That means they came from the general direction of the pig farm. At least one of those two people must have known that Monty would be absent in town and would have left the door unsecured.’
‘Not necessarily. Given the state of the place, anyone could be excused thinking it was empty, and decided to dump the body there for that reason. It’s easy to be wise after the event, Jess. Come on, let it go . . . I wouldn’t have put you down as someone given to wallowing in self-reproach!’ was the severe reproof.
‘I’m not!’ said Jess indignantly.
Carter grinned. ‘Good. That’s more like it. Now, let’s go and get the rest of the story from Miss Peterson. It should be very interesting listening.’
* * *
‘I always thought,’ said Tansy with muted fury, ‘that Jay and I met for the first time by accident at that party. But it wasn’t like that. He had been seeking me out. He got me to talk about myself. I was such a fool, prattling away to him about my family… I should have realised he was pumping me for information. The more he learned, the more his big idea grew. He thought he could get Balaclava House through me and he had a crackpot belief that he was somehow entitled to get his hands on it!’
She sat with her solicitor on one side of the table in the interview room. Carter and Jess faced them. Phil Morton lurked by the door. Above their heads the fluorescent strip emitted a faint hiss. Tansy’s fair skin looked bleached in this light. Her fair hair resembled a tangled sweep of drift weed. It all lent her the appearance of a marble angel above a Victorian tomb, albeit an avenging one.
‘OK, Tansy, take it easy,’ Jess advised. ‘Why don’t you explain to us why Taylor thought he was entitled to get hold of Balaclava House?’
Tansy stopped scowling down at the table top, sat up, pushed back her curtain of hair and turned to her solicitor. She fixed him with a minatory glare very like her mother’s and demanded, ‘I have to tell them all this or what?’
‘You’d better tell them about Taylor’s claim,’ said the unfortunate young man whose job it was to give this simmering time bomb of a client advice. ‘But that’s all you need to say at this moment.’
He clutched his briefcase against his chest with both hands as if were a shield. Tansy’s father, Peterson, had arranged his presence. He represented an old and well-respected legal partnership. However, they might have done better thought Jess, to give the job to a senior partner. Perhaps they had mistakenly reckoned there would be more empathy between legal adviser and client if there were less of an age difference.
‘Right, then.’ Tansy turned back to Carter and Jess. ‘This is the family dirty linen I’m going to flap in front of you now. Everything they got up to.’ She gave a wicked grin. ‘How they would all have hated to know I was telling anyone this and to think I’d be telling the police – they’d all have had fits!
‘It’s hard to know where to begin because it all goes back donkey’s years, to the late nineteen forties, just after the end of World War Two. Edward Bickerstaffe was living at Balaclava House with his wife and their son, Monty – that’s Uncle Monty, who was only a schoolboy then. They sent him away to boarding school so he was only there in the holidays. They didn’t have any other kids and I don’t know the name of Edward’s wife. Funny thing…’ Tansy frowned. ‘No one in the family ever uses it when talking of family history. She’s always referred to as “Edward’s wife” or as “Monty’s mother”. The poor wretched woman might never have had a name or any individual existence.
‘Anyhow, as I was saying, they were living at Balaclava, mostly just Edward and Mrs Edward, she-of-no-name, all on their own. A war widow called Elizabeth Henderson lived nearby in a cottage belonging to Sneddon’s Farm. That cottage is just a ruin now but then it was still habitable, if a bit primitive. I suppose it was the cheapest place she could find. She lived there with her young daughter, Penny, and supported the pair of them writing little stories for children’s magazines. There were a lot more mags of that sort around then, I believe. She educated Penny at home herself, no money for school fees. I know all this because Aunt Penny told me about her childhood. She said it had been very happy with a lot of freedom.’
‘Aunt Penny?’ interrupted Jess, surprised. ‘That wouldn’t be—’
‘Yes, it would!’ snapped Tansy. ‘That’s the real irony of the whole thing. Little Penny Henderson and young Monty Bickerstaffe grew up and got married. It was really unfortunate because long before that, Elizabeth and Edward had a fling, well, an affair, I suppose you’d call it, and a pretty hot-b
looded one. It must have gone on for quite a long time.’
Tansy paused and grew thoughtful. ‘They were all so bloody hypocritical in those days. They really were. They were dead set on respectability. That didn’t mean they behaved themselves, just that they buried any bad news, any scandal, as they saw it. It turned out later some of Elizabeth’s friends knew about it, but said nothing. If any of the Bickerstaffes got wind of it, they all kept quiet. No one ever spoke of it freely, the most they did was whisper together in corners, but everybody knew. That’s where the hypocrisy lay. They hoped that in time when their generation, the ones who knew, had gone, the whole thing would be written out of history. The younger generation wouldn’t ever have known about it and so couldn’t pass it on.’
Tansy’s gaze, as she spoke, had been fixed on the opposite wall. Now, unexpectedly, she turned her large pale blue eyes directly towards Carter and Jess.
‘I don’t know whether Edward and Elizabeth were in love. Perhaps they were just bored to tears out there in the sticks; Elizabeth in that tiny cottage with a little child for company and Edward rattling around Balaclava with a dull wife whose name no one could remember.’
The frown briefly puckered her brow again. ‘When you think about it, it’s quite possible Edward’s nameless wife knew her husband was fooling around. I’d have realised it, if I’d been her. Not that anyone seems to have cared what she thought about it. They would just have wanted to be sure she’d shut up and not make waves.’
‘Perhaps she had little choice,’ Carter said quietly. ‘It wasn’t easy to get a divorce back then. She could have cited adultery on her husband’s part, but would have had to prove it; and there would have been a lot of unwanted publicity. Edward’s wife would have feared that, as much as the rest of the family. Divorced women, even if they were the injured party, still faced a mountain of criticism. They risked being social outcasts. It took guts to go through divorce.’
Tansy shrugged. ‘Well, whatever the reason, no one spoke about it. It was a big secret, one they all shared in their tight little circle, but still a secret from public knowledge. Of course, the children, Penny and Monty, wouldn’t have known anything. No one would tell a child a thing like that and little kids were innocent back then. They wouldn’t have twigged what was going on. It seems to me, from what my mother’s told me, that no one told children anything on principle. They drummed it into them that their parents represented the ultimate authority and were never to be questioned. Our great-grandparents were a pretty mouldy lot, if you ask me.’
‘So where does Jay Taylor come in?’ asked Jess, dragging Tansy back to the story. ‘How do you know so much about it and how do you know it really happened at all, if everyone was so secretive and never spoke of it?’
Tansy tossed her hair. ‘Finding it all out was down to Jay. A generation had passed away. No one knew the truth. Our ancestors had got what they wanted: an event just written out of history. It took Jay and his decision to research his family tree to dig it all up.’
‘Quite an achievement on his part, too,’ Carter remarked.
‘He was very good at research,’ Tansy told them. ‘It was part and parcel of what he had to do to write his books. You know, look up people’s family trees and try and ferret out any scandal, because scandal helps sell those sorts of books. The people in whose name he was ghosting them generally didn’t mind. The idea is to sell books, as many books as possible, and if a connection with a well-known name of any kind turns up so much the better. They don’t worry about skeletons in cupboards, not nearly so much, anyway. It would have to be something really bad to make them want to hide it. A love affair, well, they’d see that as sad and romantic. People don’t try and hide that now, and a good thing, too!’ Tansy opined fiercely.
‘So, Jay?’ prompted Jess.
‘Oh, yes… Jay had a quiet period work-wise, a window between jobs. He’d turned in one completed manuscript. Happy celebrity, happy publisher. Another commission was on the cards but only at discussion stage. So he had a bit of time on his hands. He decided to research his own ancestry. He’d been wanting to do it for ages because he only had one living relative he knew of. She’s an oldish woman, retired and unmarried, who lives in Bristol.’
‘Miss Bryant. We’ve spoken to her,’ Jess told Tansy.
Tansy looked startled. ‘How on earth did you get on to her? Jay told me she was a miserable old biddy who’d never liked him; but she was all Jay had or knew about. His mother was dead. He’d no siblings. His father bunked off when he was a baby and no one had heard of him since. He wanted to try and find some other relatives, anyone at all. He thought there must be some. He began by visiting the aunt about a year ago, and quizzing her. She came out with a real bombshell. Jay’s father, Lionel Taylor, had been adopted as a baby. Taylor was the name of the people who had adopted him. Jay said that when the aunt told him about it, she had a really spiteful look on her face. ‘You wanted to know, so now you do!’ she’d said.
‘Well, he was glad she’d told him because otherwise he’d have wasted time researching the Taylor family tree; and they were nothing to do with him, not blood kin, anyway. But he really had something to go for in finding Lionel’s birth mother. He managed to get hold of a copy of his father’s original birth certificate; the one issued when his birth was first registered. Not long after that he was adopted and got a new birth certificate. But on the original one Lionel’s mother’s name was Elizabeth Henderson. She lived at Sneddon Farm Cottage. In the column headed “Father” was only the one word, “unknown”. It was an illegitimate birth. But the informant on the certificate, the person who’d actually gone to the registry and registered the birth was Edward Bickerstaffe of Balaclava House.
‘Jay scented he was on to something, but he needed a lot more to put it all together. He tried tracing Elizabeth Henderson but she was long dead, sadly, and information scarce. So he turned to her war hero husband’s family. It was a shot in the dark, but it turned up trumps. He actually found a Mrs Edmonton, née Henderson, a much younger cousin of Elizabeth’s husband, and still alive. Jay went to see her. She was really ancient, terribly upper crust and very frosty. He explained who he was and why he was searching for information. Elizabeth Henderson was his grandmother. At first Mrs Edmonton wouldn’t admit a thing; said it was all too long ago and she didn’t remember. Luckily he persevered. Eventually she said she’d no knowledge of Elizabeth having any baby other than Penny, who had unquestionably been legitimate. He wondered if she’d said that just to get rid of him because any scandal would’ve touched all the Hendersons. At any rate, he was afraid he’d reached a dead end. But then, quite unexpectedly, Mrs Edmonton phoned him a few days later. She’d been spending sleepless nights over his visit; and had decided he had a right to know the truth. She invited him back to see her and Jay went like a shot.
‘She confessed that she knew Elizabeth had had another baby when she’d been a war widow for several years. All Elizabeth’s friends, and even her late husband’s family, had conspired to “protect” her and prevent the news getting public. The old lady had been one of those who had known all about it, but had kept quiet. “Not just for her sake,” she said, “but for poor dear Penny’s, too. Her childhood would have been blighted. She’d have lost all her little friends.’ A case of the sins of the fathers, or in this case, of the mothers, you know. Miserable bunch. As if it could have been the child Penny’s fault in any way!
‘Jay’s informant told him she only knew for sure that the father of Elizabeth’s baby had been a married man, a neighbour with whom she’d been conducting a long affair, an “unfortunate entanglement” as she called it. Otherwise, the neighbour was rumoured to be one of the Bickerstaffe biscuit family, but the old lady had no firm knowledge of that. She kept insisting that Elizabeth and her lover would have married, had he been free. “I don’t want you to have the wrong idea about your grandmother,” she told Jay. “She was a thoroughly decent but unlucky young woman. Her husband had been
killed and she was all alone and vulnerable. She wasn’t a floozy.”
‘Jay liked that word, “floozy”. He said it made him think of girls wearing black-market nylons, jitterbugging in smoky cellars. He’d quite have liked to have had a grandmother like that; but the old lady was most anxious he didn’t have that impression of Elizabeth. Anyway, whatever the truth, Elizabeth found she was pregnant and couldn’t have been too pleased about it. It must have given Edward a bad moment, too.’
Tansy scowled. ‘It was dealt with very efficiently. She was whisked away to a very private nursing home that specialised in unmarried mothers like her, and gave birth there to a boy. She called him Lionel. The Taylors, who were childless, adopted the baby. The nursing home ran a profitable little sideline as an adoption agency. It was all very informal, as it was back then. He was handed over at only a few weeks old. Elizabeth had already returned home, her reputation intact, and that was that.
‘Jay had smelt a rat when he saw the name of Bickerstaffe on the birth certificate as informant; now he had his suspicions confirmed. Edward had avoided having to own up to being the father, but he’d gone along to register the birth – protecting Elizabeth from some clerk’s disapproval, I suppose – and he must have paid the nursing home fees. Elizabeth was scraping along on a tiny war widow’s pension and what she could earn from her books. She couldn’t have afforded it. But it was neatly managed. Everyone carried on as before, secret well and truly buried! But Jay had successfully dug it up. His father, Lionel, was that baby. Randy old Edward Bickerstaffe was his grandfather.’
From the doorway Morton gave a long low whistle that earned him a glare from Carter.
Quietly but in a voice trembling with remembered rage, Tansy added, ‘I can’t describe Jay’s manner when he told me all this. Every sentence was – flung at me. It was as if he really was lobbing rocks at me. When he finished he looked so – so triumphant! I had no answer to any of it and he knew it.’