by Rebecca Tope
Her thoughts rambled along these lines while the meal came to an end and Drew hurried back to his office. She began to sort everybody she knew into one category or the other, until at some point she drew the surprising analogy between burial and cremation. Her father was a burial person – wanting to stay snug and secure in the same grave for ever. Thea, on the other hand, would want her ashes scattered to the four winds, free to float away in all directions. Not surprising, then, that Dad had become an undertaker specialising in burials. He probably had the site for his own grave already secretly decided. But Stephanie, once she gave it some serious thought, rather imagined she might prefer the other option.
‘I suppose I’d better think about what we’re going to feed Damien,’ said Thea. ‘They’ll be here tomorrow. We’ll have to put the cot up, and tidy away anything that Kim might break or hurt herself with.’
‘What time are they due?’ asked Jessica. ‘I could stay and see them if it’s not too late.’
‘Mid-afternoon. You won’t get home till after dark if you do that.’
‘So? I’m not scared of the dark. It’s motorway practically the whole way back. I’ve never even seen Kim. She’s my cousin – she should know who I am.’
The prospect of suddenly exchanging Jessica for a new set of step-relatives gave Stephanie pause. The house would become full and noisy, and she would have to spend two more nights sharing her room with Timmy. She wondered how her father was feeling about it. He had never met these people, either. It seemed a rather rude intrusion to turn up right after Christmas and expect food and hospitality. From things Thea had said, she wasn’t even sure that Damien was very nice.
‘Please yourself,’ Thea said. ‘For myself, I can’t help thinking – roll on Friday.’
‘You’re awful,’ Jessica told her. ‘I guess I should think myself lucky you let me come and stay.’
‘Don’t give me that,’ said Thea, who never let a remark like that pass unchallenged. ‘You can come any time you like.’
‘She’ll want to come quite often, so she can see her new friend Finch,’ said Stephanie, instantly feeling that it wasn’t a very tactful thing to say. Jessica gave her a playful smack, but said nothing to contradict her.
‘That’ll be nice,’ said Thea placidly. She looked at the clock. ‘Don’t the days go fast at this time of year? It feels as though it’s only light for five minutes.’
‘Horrible,’ agreed Jessica.
‘Can we play games after lunch?’ asked Timmy, who had been sitting quietly assembling a jigsaw on one corner of the table.
‘I thought we were all going to walk over to Crossfield,’ said Jessica, with a face that made no secret of the fact that she found the idea of playing games a fairly unappealing prospect.
‘I should phone them first,’ said Thea.
‘Blimey!’ called Digby from just outside the front door. ‘Come and listen to this. Is it what I think it is?’ Female shrieks could be clearly heard, emanating from the big house. ‘Are they killing each other, or what?’
Ant had no answer; fights between women were entirely outside his experience. Or any fights, come to that. In this particular corner of the Cotswolds, disputes were almost never settled by physical combat.
‘Wouldn’t mind if they did, come to think of it,’ his father went on with a sardonic grin. ‘Serve them right.’ In spite of his sense that it was beneath them both, Ant had joined his father outside and both were listening intently. The shrieks were getting louder, if anything. ‘Am I right in thinking they’re coming this way?’ Digby wondered, looking suddenly less amused. ‘Bar the door, son. We don’t want them in here again, do we? They might break things.’
Ant made no move to obey, rightly assuming the remark was not meant seriously. ‘They won’t come here,’ he said.
‘You can’t be sure. Why would they take their battle outside?’ He cocked an ear. ‘You’re right, though. They’re not getting any closer. I think it’s only two of them – Bronya must have had the sense to stay out of it.’
‘It’s her fault for stirring everything up and landing her sister in trouble,’ Ant reminded him. ‘Are there any servants around, I wonder? They’ll probably call the police, if so.’
‘Don’t call them servants,’ Digby objected. ‘They’re staff.’ It was an exchange they’d had before. Digby insisted that servants was a derogatory word, which Ant couldn’t see at all. ‘I expect one or two have stayed on over the holiday. Somebody has to make the beds.’
‘One of them could have killed Rufus, then.’ Ant wondered why he hadn’t thought of that sooner.
‘Very likely,’ said Digby abstractedly. ‘I always thought that woman who does the cooking looked a bit dubious.’ The team of employees whose purpose was to ensure the smooth running of the house were shadowy figures to the Frowse family. None of them ever engaged in conversation, and there were regular new faces seen in the distance, arriving or departing. Digby had focused on the cook because she had been there a long time, and was sometimes to be observed in the kitchen garden that was visible from his bedroom window.
After another minute or two Ant went into the kitchen, deliberately clattering crockery to cover the female voices. He found it increasingly unsettling that grown women should so forget themselves as to make such a noise. The sounds he heard were not screams of pain, but of rage. There were words, shouted at full pitch. There were oh, oh, ohs as if to indicate grief, betrayal, disbelief.
Digby came back in soon afterwards. ‘I think they’re chasing each other round the yard out there, yelling and screaming. That Carla is like a grizzly bear. She’s off her head, if you ask me.’
‘They can’t go on much longer, surely? We might have to do something,’ Ant said, with a worried frown.
‘Not us. I did wonder whether they’re in view of any of the cameras. It’d make a very entertaining film, if so.’
‘They’ve stopped,’ Ant realised. Everything outside had gone suddenly quiet. ‘And I need you to stop, as well. You’re treating it all as a joke, when it seems to me we should probably be feeling seriously scared.’
‘It won’t be long now, son. Once your mother gets back we’ll get a better idea of what comes next.’
‘You think?’
‘I do,’ the man nodded with a certainty that Ant felt wholly unjustified.
Chapter Seventeen
What came next was another visit from the police, who issued a request that the two men refrain from leaving the house until further notice. There had been fresh developments, and formal interviews were imminent. ‘On Boxing Day?’ queried Ant in disbelief. ‘I thought nothing was going to happen before tomorrow?’
‘There’s a fresh forensic team examining the scene,’ they were told. ‘Please stay well away from the area.’
‘You’ll be telling the Blackwood people the same thing, I assume?’ said Digby.
The policeman looked severely down his nose and gave no reply to this.
‘Bound to be,’ said Ant quickly, fearful that his father was intent on alienating the forces of the law – which could do no good whatsoever.
When the officer had gone, Digby blew out his cheeks. ‘Bloody nuisance. Your mother’s going to walk right into the middle of all this, just when we thought we had the day to ourselves.’
There it was again – the implication that his parents understood a whole lot more than he did. ‘What does that mean?’ Ant shouted. ‘Why does it feel as if everything’s been happening behind my back?’
‘Calm down, there’s a good chap. Shouting doesn’t help anything.’ Digby gave a rueful snort. ‘I wonder what they’ll find over at the mansion. For all we know, Carla’s run off leaving both daughters dead on the floor.’
‘Not Bronya. She’s kept out of it. She might even have called the police herself, for all we know.’
‘Don’t talk rubbish. She’s got more sense than that. Still – I don’t like it, not knowing what this fresh evidence might be. Best thing we
can do is keep our heads down and co-operate for all we’re worth. Salt of the earth, remember – that’s us. Hard done by, but bearing it meekly, because they’re the lords and we’re the peasants. They’ve only got to look at that bloody fence to understand how we’ve been expected to live. That’s our line – best you remember that. Looks to me as if they’ve worked out that our friend Rufus did not die accidentally. That’s shocking news – right? Got to be some Mafia-style character got the wrong side of the man. All that wheeler-dealing he did, making money hand over fist, bound to upset some people along the way. Isn’t that right?’ Digby looked hard at his bewildered son. ‘Isn’t it?’ he repeated with some force.
‘Er … I guess so, yes. But they never said it was murder, did they? Aren’t you jumping the gun a bit?’
‘Could be,’ Digby acknowledged. ‘Trust me to make two and two equal five, eh? Silly old sausage, getting all ahead of myself. So, we just sit tight and wait and see, that’s the best thing. And if your mother shows up, don’t you rush in with a whole lot of half-baked ideas. Let’s just give her time to settle down again first.’
‘You think she intends to settle down? That’s not how she sounded to me.’
Digby wriggled his shoulders. ‘We’ll have to see, won’t we? She’ll be surprised we made such a fine job of that goose.’
There was something rather pathetic in this, to Ant’s eyes. His father was clutching at straws, trying to salvage something that Ant had not until then understood was probably beyond repair. Something had happened over recent days, right under his nose, and he had been blissfully unaware of it. There had to have been clues he had missed, comments he had overlooked. But perhaps it had all been so gradual that the final straw had been some tiny word or event that nobody could be expected to notice. And perhaps it was all entirely separate from the death of Rufus Blackwood. Perhaps there was absolutely no connection at all.
Still he had two burning questions to ask his mother, and nothing was going to stop him confronting her with them, the moment she came home.
‘She has a bit of explaining to do,’ he said mildly. ‘Assuming she really does come back.’
‘Oh, she’ll come back. She won’t be able to help herself. Never was much good on her own, you know. Talks a blue streak about being her own woman and wanting her independence, but mostly she lets other people make the running. She’s broken all records this time, staying out all this long while.’ The bravado was evidently boosting Digby’s self-esteem, as he convinced himself of the truth of his own words. He was not going to lie down without a struggle.
Again, Ant found himself wondering about his parents’ marriage in more detail than he had done for years. Maybe he never had thought about it as he did now, when it might be too late. Digby was not speaking fondly of his wife – more like sarcastically, and definitely critically. Ant could not remember any real demonstrations of affection in either direction, since he was about ten. When Digby had given up the farm work, Beverley had made some rules concerning the running of the house. Obvious things like making him do some of the shopping and cleaning, and learning how to work the washing machine. As far as Ant could see, there had been very little friction as a result. ‘You do want her back, don’t you?’ he asked, rather shakily. It felt like a moment in which most of his lifelong assumptions could find themselves shaken and even destroyed.
He could see his father wavering between a careless dismissal of such a question, and a rare moment of honest reply. ‘That’s a bit of a facer,’ he said, putting on a mock accent, as he so often did. ‘As they used to say,’ he added. But then, when Ant said nothing, he gave a defeated sort of sigh and said, ‘She went off me years ago, you know. Never forgave me for something I said in about nineteen ninety-one, and since then everything’s been pretty much my fault. I should have earned more money, so we could have bought a place to live before it was too late. I should have listened to her better, and understood her feelings without having to be told everything twenty times. All the usual stuff that comes with being married, in a nutshell. The thing is – your mother cares about everything a lot more than I do. It doesn’t bother me so much that we’ve got a dirty great fence all round us. At least …’ He tailed off, shaking his head.
‘You care every bit as much as Mum does,’ Ant corrected him. ‘It’s probably more humiliating for you than it is for any of us. You used to work here. You were the manager, for God’s sake. Then a new bloke moves in, who never knew you in those days, and who thinks you’re just a poverty-stricken tinker who’s determined to embarrass him. On top of that, he does his best to make our lives difficult in any number of nasty little ways. And the final straw is when he marries some Russian psychopath who gets him to turn the whole property into Fort Knox.’
‘All right. But I never got into direct battles with him, unlike your mother. It’s still a pretty good place to live, compared to what we’d have ever managed to find somewhere else. The rent here is laughable, thanks to the decrepit state of the house. We’ve got space, fresh air, good friends. I don’t care what you say, I think I’ve been a lot more contented than your mother has – until now.’
‘So what changed?’
‘No single thing, that I can see. Just attitudes hardening, the state of the house getting to the point when it’s going to fall down if something isn’t done soon. Next time the rent’s assessed, we’re going to have to put in a proper report, and push for some serious repairs. Or we would have had to. That’s all changed now, as well, of course.’
‘Probably for the worse.’
‘That remains to be seen,’ said Digby, looking at the floor, as if searching for some sign of the future.
‘I don’t think you’ve got out of that chair more than four times in three days,’ said Ant suddenly losing patience. ‘You’ve even stayed there to eat. You’ll get old before your time if you go on like that.’
‘Can’t see there’s much to get up for. Time enough for action when the police come bothering us again. I’ve got all I need right here.’ Digby had one of his massive American Civil War histories on the floor beside him, as well as two smaller ones. He dipped into them in some sort of rotation that Ant found incomprehensible.
‘Don’t you think we ought to be trying to work out what it’ll mean for us, that Blackwood’s dead? Carla’s going to be the owner of the estate now, presumably. She’ll pull every string she can to get us thrown out. I wouldn’t put it past her to set us on fire one dark night. For a start, I bet she’ll try and poison poor old Percy.’ He was thinking aloud, letting himself get more and more agitated as the implications got darker. ‘She’s got to be the one who killed Rufus, don’t you think?’ he went on, visualising Carla’s volatile behaviour, not just that day but ever since she’d come to live at Crossfield. ‘She seems completely unhinged to me.’
Digby merely nodded slowly and said, ‘Could be. If they lock her up, the place’ll most likely be sold.’
This was such a leap into the unknown that Ant shuddered. ‘Are we sure Rufus hasn’t got some offspring somewhere? Would they inherit if Carla was in gaol?’
Digby roused himself slightly. ‘He was married before Carla, wasn’t he?’
‘Don’t ask me. You’re the one who spends half his time on the Internet.’
‘I never saw a sign of any other Blackwoods. But I wasn’t looking very hard. I’m more interested in where his money comes from. Mind you, if there were sons or daughters, they’d probably be shareholders or directors or something, and their names would pop up automatically. Which they didn’t.’
‘The police’ll be having a rummage for all that. They always think the family’s top of the suspect list when there’s a murder.’
‘Except when there’s a tenant family who clearly hates the landlord’s guts,’ said Digby.
‘And who’ve got some mystery of their own, concerning their missing wife and mother.’
‘Could be,’ said Digby again.
‘Don’t you ca
re?’ his son burst out angrily. ‘Why are you being so limp about it? Lethargic, even. It’s not like you.’
‘Just keeping my head down, son, same as you should be doing. Don’t rock any boats or attract any attention. It’s generally the best way when things get a bit unnecessary.’
‘But I haven’t played a single game all Christmas,’ Timmy was whining. ‘Why can’t we do it now? It says it only takes an hour and a bit. There’ll be time to do other things as well.’
So the train game was finally being set up, and everybody but Thea was valiantly trying to follow the convoluted rules. Timmy was winning, and Jessica was finding the whole thing exasperating. ‘This tunnel business is insane,’ she grumbled. ‘And I don’t see how anybody could ever get to Scotland or Ireland.’
‘It probably gets clearer after a few times,’ said Drew. ‘It’s always confusing the first time you play something new.’
‘Don’t tell me I’ve got to go through this again,’ Jessica pleaded.
‘Not if you don’t want to. It’s not compulsory.’ This was a line Drew used quite often, and it always made Stephanie smile. There was something so elegantly reproachful in it, putting the emphasis on the other person’s unreasonable objections to doing something. In recent months she had come to appreciate nuances in the English language that gave her real pleasure. At the same time, it made her realise how near impossible it would be to properly master another language. The classes they had been given in French in their first term were so basic as to be infantile. But, as the teacher insisted, you had to start somewhere.