If When

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  Ruby was lying in bed with a hot toddy on the bedside table, feeling utterly wretched and wondering when everyone would realise she’d been the tittle-tattle.

  Fletcher had grabbed his suitcase and departed The Crooked Wager. On leaving the pub and chucking his case in the boot of his car, he had looked back over his shoulder, peering carefully across to the low field and its ploughed strips. There was smoke. Not so much, and not so thick, but a rising spiral dark enough to whisper of flames growing and travelling. It had been at least twenty minutes since he had lit the fire and it was still smoking. A good deal more than smouldering ashes, then. His groin tingled, and he felt a sense of heat through his stomach. Power.

  He drove in the opposite direction, grinning and chanting to himself. “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, start a fire and let it grow. If it splutters, let it go, Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” Fletcher had the giggles. “Daddy dearest, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? Piss, shit and puke, and pretty flames all in a row.”

  It wasn’t far until he passed The Hog’s Head, a small hotel out on the boundary of the next village. He parked, booked in and was given a smart little room with a minute bathroom attached, and dumped his suitcase on the floor. There was no time to get to the bank before it closed, but he’d seen the shiny blue of Barclay’s just a shop or two previously, and could plunder his father’s account in the morning, as well as depositing Sylvia’s generous cheque.

  Crystal Larkin was following up her scoop, reading the documents she’d managed to unearth, and generally exaggerating whatever just narrowly missed the possible claim of slander. Her desk was littered with old sandwiches and empty paper cups of coffee, but it was the laptop, central which took her main concentration. Other reporters walked by, and yelled congratulations. She was the belle of the ball.

  Lavender had locked the door of her office and was not answering the phone.

  Isabel was visiting Sylvia.

  “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “That rather depends,” said Sylvia without much attempt at being polite, “what you want to discuss. If you have a problem with Tony, then I’ll help all I can. If you have some problem with Harry, then I won’t.”

  Privacy, once again, had taken Sylvia to the garden. She was wearing her usual navy and grey, but was wrapped in a cashmere shawl large enough to smother all of her from neck to knees. They sat on the little garden chairs within a lattice archway overgrown with thick magnolia, now simply a mass of twigs. The seats were slightly damp. Sylvia offered no cushion.

  “Harry wants rid of me,” said Isabel somewhat abruptly. “I’d like to stay at his house. It’s comfy, I have my own room, Tony can’t just push in but he’s nearby, Harry talks sense and I can pay him back by doing the cooking and cleaning. But it’s you he wants. If you say you aren’t jealous or anything, then Harry might let me stay.”

  Sylvia stared. It wasn’t what she had expected to hear. “Harry and I are just friends. Who stays in his house isn’t any of my business.”

  “I don’t want to marry him or anything.” Isabel nodded her dyed brown perm. “But I don’t think I want Tony either. So I want time, and talk to people who can be objective. So where do I go? What do I do? Do I have to go back to Tony just to get a bed??Are you going to marry Harry? Has he asked you?”

  With a slight lurch, Sylvia considered telling Isabel that this was none of her business, but she resisted the inclination. “Harry hasn’t asked me. I don’t expect him to ask me. Besides, we’re too old and set in our ways. As for Tony, have you read the Post this morning?”

  “Certainly not,” Isabel sniffed, “it’s a shocking rag. I read the Herald. But I was coming here, so I haven’t bothered yet. Why?”

  “It’s spread across the Herald too. You should read it.”

  Isabel had gone pink. “Well, now you’d better tell me, or I shall start imagining the worst.”

  Without attempting empathy, Sylvia said, “The papers claim your Tony is the main suspect. It’s not spelled out. No names. But they’re saying he’s the Welsh Ripper.”

  More confused than shocked, Isabel wrinkled her small nose. “He’s not Welsh. And if they don’t give his name – besides, that’s just silly.” The clouds lifted and the facts began to take shape. “You really mean it? It’s what the police think? Or just some screwy reporter?”

  “The police don’t tell me what they’re thinking.” Sylvia wished they did. “But I know he’s a suspect. Not the main one, of course. The newspapers are exaggerating. You know – find an acorn and then write about an oak tree.”

  Isabel burst into tears. “I’ll have to go back to him.”

  “There are many, I expect, who would say the opposite. In such a situation” Sylvia smiled. “Most wouldn’t go running back to someone accused of being a brutal serial killer.”

  “Well of course he’s no killer,” said Isabel with a sniff and a squeak. “I shall phone all these horrid papers and go home to protect Tony.”

  “Well, that solves that problem,” decided Sylvia.

  It was as she shut the door behind the departing Isabel that Lavender called a general meeting.

  Most of the folk of Rochester Manor, muttering to each other and wondering what had happened now, trundled into the larger living room, squashed up together on the several huge armchairs and ample Chinx couches, clutching their various copies of the morning newspapers. Sunshine still oozed through the large polished windows, but it had grown increasingly cold and before calling the meeting, Lavender had lit the fire in the large hearth, and turned on the rather old and clunky central heating.

  Norman Syrett banged his rolled up newspaper on the arm of his chair, exclaiming, “It was that miserable man who came here once. Sylvia invited him. Disgraceful. We’ve harboured a murderer.”

  Ruby flinched. “I’ve met the man. Quite ordinary, you know. And I presume there’s no proof.”

  “No proof either of who spoke to the reporters,” said Sylvia, eyeing her friend. “But a suspicious perfume of bluebells, I’m afraid.”

  “Bluebells don’t smell of anything really,” Rebecca Brook objected. “A very pretty flower, of course, but no perfume worth the vase I put them in once.”

  “I think,” said Lavender, standing with her back to the hearth, “we are losing track of the point here. These papers mention Rochester Manor, and I object strongly to that. Such untrue smears will start to spoil our superior reputation.”

  “The press don’t say the killer lives here,” said Mr. Fryer, clutching his wife’s hand. “And they never get their damned stories accurate. We might as well ignore it all.”

  “Besides,” Amy interrupted her husband, “it wasn’t that Tony man. It was the bus driver.”

  “I’d like to say,” Sylvia interrupted the interrupters, “that Tony Allen is an acquaintance of mine. He’s a friend of my friend Harry, who comes here often at my invitation. But there’s really no proof of anything. I do know the police consider him a suspect, but not, I imagine, a major one. He’s just been in the right place at the right time. But that’s even more vague than circumstantial.”

  “But –,” managed Lavender.

  “No ruined reputation in that,” said Matthew Carson, shouting down everyone else. “If the damned masses of ignorant people out there really thought we had a killer living here, they’d be rushing over to take selfies with him.”

  ‘That’s very rude, Matt,” sniffed Lavender.

  “And quite silly, since nobody said he actually lives here,” said someone else. Which started Matthew off again.

  “Let the buggers say what they want,” he yelled over other voices. “I’ll add a few corpses myself, if they start pointing the finger. I’ve no objection to murdering a few reporters. I’ve never trusted the BBC.”

  “Oh dear,” sighed Lavender.

  “But we won’t permit that nasty Tony person to visit here anymore, just in case,” said Rebecca. “I hope you’ll remember that, Sylvia.”

  “Unf
ortunately I have a shocking memory,” said Sylvia, stretching her legs. “Indeed, it seems I’ve just been talking Tony’s wife into going back to him.”

  Lavender gasped. Yvonne Noriss squeaked in horror, and Rebecca said, half hiss, “To go back to such a brutal and violent creature? Are you mad?”

  “Probably,” Sylvia admitted. “But she’s convinced he’s innocent and in need of protection. Her choice.”

  The sun went out and it started to rain. The gentle patter of a silvery drizzle clouded the window panes.

  Lavender clapped her hands. “I just want to remind everybody not to talk to reporters,” she said with considerable impatience. “And that means don’t talk to anyone at all unless you know who they are.”

  “And that includes Tony Allen,” giggled Harriet Anderson. “Or at least, not alone.”

  “The Welsh Ripper likes ‘em young and pretty,” grunted Andrew Rochwell-Smith. “Wouldn’t touch any of us with a barge-pole.”

  “I really don’t see why such a man would carry around a barge-pole,” complained Sheila Stokes. “This isn’t Oxford, after all. No punts and no river to punt on.”

  “There’s the Torr,” insisted Derek Major.

  “I give up,” Lavender sighed. “I’ll put the television on and see what they make of it.”

  The news on the television was a little more cautious, but still reported that a prime suspect, resident in a small village in Gloucestershire, had been questioned but not yet charged. The elderly residents of Rochester Manor sat very close to the large wall-mounted screen, since few had perfect eyesight or hearing anymore. Some fiddled with hearing aids. Sylvia, content with contact lenses, sat nearer the back and smiled. She wasn’t thinking of Tony at all. She was wondering what had happened to Fletcher, and whether he was lingering in the area, or had gained the sense to go back to his father. She had made her cheque out to a new account in her step-father’s name alone, which Fletcher would be unable to plunder. But of course, he wouldn’t know that yet.

  It was Lavender who whispered in her ear, “Harry’s here, dear. I asked him to wait. Do you want to see him?”

  They went to the small salon. No television. But Harry had seen it on the earlier programme and had also read the papers. “We’re slipping behind,” he said, half sigh. “I thought I could investigate as well as anybody, no detective experience of course, but every other experience in a long life. But I’m way behind. I know I’ve half suspected Tony, but it’s so unlikely and the others on our list are unlikely too. Only Stoker really stands out. And only because of last time, when he was found totally innocent.”

  “We don’t have access to any existing documentation for these recent cases,” Sylvia said, also keeping her voice low. “But we can get pretty much everything about the last lot. Twelve years ago. That’s not so long.”

  “So we really dig into that bloody past,” Harry said, “and see just how similar the cases are?”

  “And just what the evidence was against Stoker.”

  “I’ll Google him. Wikipedia. But that stuff isn’t a hundred percent reliable, you know.”

  “I know.” Sylvia tapped her fingertips together. “But it’s a start. Then we go down to the newspaper offices, pretending that we want to put the record straight about Tony, and meanwhile we look up everything they have in their back-files. On Stoker.”

  Harry scratched his ear lobe. “Yes, First thing in the morning. Meanwhile, Isabel tells me she has to go back to Tony because he’s about to be arrested.”

  “About as reliable as Google.”

  But it was Detective Inspector Morrison who visited the manor before Sylvia and Harry had any chance of visiting the newspaper offices. Harry had arrived earlier, and was sharing Sylvia’s breakfast, well aware that quite a number of the residents were glaring at him with concentrated malevolence across the dining room. Although Morrison wore no uniform, his rather shabby suit, brown lace-up shoes and unironed shirt labelled him as policeman anyway. He stood, bending over as if to smell the plates of fried bacon, hands clasped behind his back.

  “I wonder if I might have a word?” he said with more genuine politeness than usual. “My car’s outside. A lift to the station, perhaps? Just a quick chat in private.”

  Harry swallowed his bacon and eggs. “About Tony?”

  “Partially. But not entirely.”

  Sylvia went on eating but looked up briefly. “Sit down and have some tea, detective. I’ll happily come for a talk, but I’m not missing my breakfast for anyone. It’s the best thing Francesco produces.”

  With some hesitation, Morrison sat. There were two spare chairs, and a teapot that still steamed, Harry’s empty cup not yet used. Morrison reached over and helped himself. Harry didn’t bother telling the detective that he’d pinched his cup. Morrison said, “I appreciate the tea, Mrs. Greene. But it’s going to be a busy day. I haven’t much time.”

  “But I’ll need to get my coat. It’s freezing.”

  Morrison sighed but within ten minutes they all sat in the disguised police car, no siren to spoil the village cobbles, and arrived at the station fifteen minutes later. Now it was pouring with rain. They all stumbled from car to shelter, and finally got offered more tea in Morrison’s office.

  “Yes,” said Harry. “I missed my breakfast cup.”

  Morrison was unperturbed. Tea was called for, but before its arrival, he pulled out a large file, sat it before him on the desk, but did not open it. “I seem to remember,” he said, hands now clasped over the file, which bulged, “asking you not to mention to anyone the business of Mr. Allen, and of any suspicions we had in that direction.”

  “We didn’t tell,” said Sylvia at once. “Clearly someone else did.”

  “I had a small discussion with Mrs. Allen on the subject,’ said Harry. “But only after the newspapers had shouted about it first.”

  Sylvia did not mention having told Ruby. She said, “It would seem you have a mole amongst your ranks, detective inspector.”

  “Umm,” murmured Morrison, with his usual gaze of direct suspicion for all and sundry. “But there’s something else I want to discuss. It would seem now that both Mr. and Mrs. Allen have disappeared.”

  The tea came. But Harry was staring at the detective. “What do you mean, disappeared?”

  “Precisely that, Mr. Joyce.” Grabbing his own mug of stewed steam, Morrison gulped, then said, “The house is locked up and both Tony Allen and his wife are nowhere to be found. They have left no information with the Post Office, nor with their neighbours. However, I imagine your friend has left some information with you, Mr. Joyce.”

  “Well, he hasn’t.” Harry’s mug of piping hot tea, which was just how he liked it, was now clasped between his hands. He began to tell the story of Isabel’s problems and discussions, and how the newspapers’ sudden and disturbing revelations had sent Isabel running back to her wrongly accused husband. “But,” Harry continued, “no one mentioned going anywhere. Of course, Tony’s retired, he can go where he likes. But I expect it’s to get away from reporters. I bet there were ten at his door yesterday morning.”

  Morrison nodded. “Very likely. It always happens. Now we can’t keep him under observation, which is why we didn’t want you to mention his name to anyone. But there’s something else, I’m afraid, even more unpleasant.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  He had waited more than two hours in the lane leading off from the park, and was both impatient and jittery. Expectation and need jostled together in his belly, making strange griping noises, as if he was hungry. In one way, he was. It was hunger of a sort. A desperate hunger. His car was carefully parked off road and under the sweeping branches of a weeping Mulberry. It was out of sight, although not completely hidden. He remained on foot, pretending a limp, and hobbling up – and then down – the country lane.

  But no young women came near. No one passed. The sun was unusually pleasant for a late autumn day, but rain had been forecast for the rest of the week. This migh
t be his last opportunity. He waited.

  Having decided to go back to the barn for the night, to dream what solitary dreams he might, and fire up the optimism and determination for the following day, he turned and headed back towards his car. The girl arrived almost immediately.

  She was younger, prettier, slim and quite alone. He breathed deeply. It was a dream only visualised, and now materialised. She walked fast, head down, shoulders hunched. Cold then, and might appreciate the offer of a lift. He called, “You look frozen, young lady. And you shouldn’t walk here without company. Where are you heading?” he called, voice gentle.

  “That’s my business.”

  “You’re right, of course.” He smiled, though her remark had annoyed him. “I just wondered if you had far to go. But no matter. I simply hope you get home safe.” She didn’t answer, but strode on into the first early shadows as the sun sank behind the distant hills, and the first glimmer of twilight blossomed. “But I’d be no gentleman if I didn’t point out it’ll be night soon, and walking in the dark – well, I’d not recommend it. So I feel I have to offer, whether it’s a sensible offer or not. And I know you’ll say no, but I still have to offer. Offer a lift, that is.” He caught her up, emphasising the limp. “To wherever your home is, long as it’s not Scotland. Don’t wish to sound ungracious, but my wife’s expecting me in fifteen minutes or so.”

  Now they stood face to face. He could grab her. But the little bitch could scream. Sound travelled far over such open valleys.

  She stared, half tempted. Then she shook her head. “No. Thank you, but no. Go home to your wife. I haven’t much further to go anyway.”

  And so he had to grab, or she would be gone, and he’d be sleeping in the barn alone, a knife clutched in one hand and a box of pins in the other. Pathetic. Instead, here was strength and joy and control within his grasp.

  Taking one deep breath and firing his determination, he reached out, and grabbed. Although much older, he expected easy success, for he was strong, experienced and powerful. She was little and slight. But she kicked. The toes of her heavy soled leather boots reached his knees, then his groin. Furious, he swung her around, and releasing her with one hand, using it instead to punch her first in the breast, then the stomach, and finally the nose. Even in the dark he could see her nose bleed. But she kicked again and clawed at his face with her nails. His lip split and he tasted his own blood.