A Snapshot of Murder

by Frances Brody

  That seemed to me deliberate, a deliberate slight.

  Carine made no attempt to move. She looked at him in confusion but did not ask why he had set up his camera opposite her if he wanted a view of the scene. Derek came to her rescue, offering a hand onto the bank.

  Guffawed is not a word I use lightly but that was what Tobias did. He guffawed and said, ‘There’s a shot! Gallant newspaper boy comes to his lady’s aid.’

  It must be a trial to Derek that he blushes so easily. He and Carine moved away.

  Tobias clicked the shutter.

  Rita whispered, ‘I hope he drops his camera down a deep ravine. If there’s any justice, he’ll topple down after it.’

  Edward was staring at Tobias. Because of the tightness of the skin on Edward’s face, it was difficult to read an expression, yet watching him gave me a cold shiver. I felt as if I had looked into his soul. He loved Tobias because they had a shared history, had been comrades. He also loathed him.

  Derek, reasserting himself, insisted the waterfall was tuneful but lacked visual interest. He can be a silly boy, never knowing when to say nothing.

  Harriet had taken off her shoes and socks and splashed her way between the rocks until the water reached her calves. ‘Anyone who doesn’t paddle is a sissy!’

  Derek and Rita accepted the challenge.

  Rita squealed at the freezing temperature. ‘If the Brontë kids went in for this, I’m not surprised they all died young.’

  And then Edward chimed in, with a quote that he half whispered to Carine. ‘ “Why am I so changed? Why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills”.’ He took her hand.

  For a mad moment, the pair of them looked ready to run. Go on, I willed them. Just run, just go, be together.

  They released each other’s hands.

  Harriet and Derek went on paddling, moving away downstream.

  Carine clasped her arms around her chest. She stared at Edward. ‘Don’t!’ She swayed slightly. ‘I can’t.’

  Rita clambered from the stream and would have put her arm around Carine, but Carine moved away.

  All this while, Tobias had been taking photographs.

  Carine turned her back to us and picked up her camera bag. ‘I’ll go back now. I don’t feel well.’

  ‘Nonsense, darling.’ Tobias folded his tripod back into a walking stick. He slid the Noiram into the canvas bag. ‘We must press on. We three old friends have things to discuss.’ He turned his head to look at Derek. He and Harriet were making their way back towards us and the bridge. ‘Your water nymph and his friend won’t lose their way. It’s a well-trodden path to Haworth. I don’t suppose you’ve told Teddy that you have a young swain ready to do your bidding.’

  The three of them stood close to each other, Tobias and Edward on either side of Carine.

  It was Carine who spoke first. ‘Come on then. Let’s hear what you have to say to each other.’

  They set off walking uphill, on the path to Haworth.

  Rita sat on the ground, drying between her toes with her woven stole.

  Harriet and Derek put on their socks and shoes. The four of us set off along the path, walking briskly, shortening the distance between ourselves and Carine, Tobias and Edward who moved like sleepwalkers.

  The path towards Haworth became steep, yet it was not that sending me dizzy. Suddenly I was in a story, not real life. Perhaps two stories, or a thousand. Carine’s. Mine. Everything and everyone who had never really gone away, and yet came back.

  People do come back, like ghosts. People come back from the dead. They are always hovering, waiting. Some return in flesh and blood. Others tantalise.

  Rita walked beside me. As she walked, her bag bounced against her back. She pretends never to be cold but I saw the goose bumps on her arm in spite of the sun’s warmth. We were keeping a reasonable pace, although it felt as if I dragged my feet through a swamp.

  The altitude, or the bracken or heather, caused Rita to snuffle. She took out a hanky. ‘Kate, are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘I’m thinking that round the next bend there’ll be a rather steep drop, there’ll be a big shove and then instead of three people walking ahead of us, there will be two.’

  ‘In that case I’d better take out my binoculars, in case I’m required to give evidence.’

  ‘Do you have binoculars?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m short-sighted. It would be up to you.’

  ‘Thank you for the responsibility.’

  We were overtaken by Harriet and Derek, unaware of the recent drama.

  Harriet turned back and grinned. ‘Not that it’s a competition but we’ll be there first.’

  ‘If we don’t see you, be by the Co-op at five o’clock.’

  ‘Why the Co-op?’ Harriet called back.

  ‘There might be a need for chocolate.’

  The two of them strode out, as if intending to win a bet. They soon overtook the Murchisons and Edward.

  ‘It’s Carine I’m worried about,’ Rita said as we reached Haworth. ‘Those two were pals, comrades. They might find some way of turning this situation into her fault.’

  ‘You mean Edward will blame her for marrying someone else. Tobias will blame her for still holding the candle for Edward.’

  ‘Something like that. Tobias fell on his feet, meeting Carine. Her father welcomed him with open arms, another man about the place. Knowing his beloved daughter would not be left alone in his precious studio. He was always afraid she would give it up.’

  Only the pair of them, Tobias and Edward, knew what had really happened. Perhaps they were each telling their own version of the story to Carine as they walked.

  It was a marvel to me that Carine could stay upright, putting one foot before the other.

  The three of them went into the Black Bull.

  Rita read my mind. ‘At least they are in a public place. If they cause an affray, the landlord will call the police.’

  ‘Not if he is serving out of hours.’

  It’s often the case that one doesn’t like one’s friend’s friends, but I liked Rita.

  ‘Rita, has there been new advice from your solicitor friend regarding Carine’s father leaving everything to Tobias?’

  ‘He has been very discreet, pretending he’s seeking information for a case study. It’s hopeless, Kate. The will was properly drawn up and there are no grounds for contesting. All he could suggest – in a vulgar fashion that I won’t repeat – was that Carine ensured her husband undertook strenuous physical acts sufficient to give himself a heart attack.’

  After the warmth and the absurdities of the day, escaping the afternoon sunshine into the cool, hallowed atmosphere of the Church of St Michael and all Angels felt like a step back in time. Rita took a deep breath. ‘Can’t you just hear the echo of the Reverend Brontë preaching here, his children sitting in a row?’

  ‘It’s not the same church, Rita. The old church was demolished and this one rebuilt on the same site.’

  ‘No matter. There’s a trace in the air, a memory of prayer and hope and longing. I felt it on the banks of the Ganges and I feel it here. I must see the sisters’ tombs.’

  ‘There are no tombs. They weren’t royalty, simply geniuses.’

  Their resting place in the vault below was marked by a brass plate at the foot of a pillar. I had the odd thought that Anne Brontë would not mind being apart, in her grave in Scarborough. It’s strange the way we think of the dead. I imagined Anne Brontë resigned herself to dying far from the moors, and finding herself by the sea. ‘A change is as good as a rest. I’ll have both for all eternity.’

  Rita came to join me, speaking softly. ‘I wonder what the family would make of the fact that the parsonage has been bought for the nation?’

  ‘I imagine the sisters might laugh. Branwell would be thinking of the Black Bull, and should he have
had that last pint, or gone home sooner and created a masterpiece.’

  ‘Do you know I have a patron saint?’ she asked.

  ‘No I didn’t.’

  ‘Saint Rita is the patron of women in an unhappy marriage, women cruelly treated by their husbands. I wanted to light a candle for Carine, but it’s not that kind of church.’

  ‘Say a prayer instead.’

  ‘I shall. It’s interesting that there are bee boles at Ponden, because when my saint was an infant in her cradle, a swarm of bees flew into her mouth. They did her no harm, and that was how everyone knew that she was special.’

  ‘How extraordinary.’

  ‘Bees are regarded as messengers between our world and the world of the spirits, between the living and the dead.’

  ‘Now that you mention it, I do remember something about that.’

  ‘Kate, this may not be the place to tell you this, but I consulted my solicitor friend about divorce. Not for me, obviously, for Carine.’

  ‘Oh?’

  She interlaced her fingers and stretched her hands until her bones made a cracking sound. ‘Carine could obtain a separation on the grounds of adultery, and not forgo her rights to support from her husband. It might be the only way she will have a small income from what should rightfully be hers.’

  ‘Has Tobias been unfaithful?’

  ‘Yes, regularly, once a week with a cook called Molly. She’s buxom and fair, works at the Leeds Club and serves him pancakes.’

  An elderly woman came into the church and hobbled towards the front.

  ‘Rita, I think we should go outside.’

  ‘I’ll just say my prayer.’

  Moments later, we walked out, turning our back on the churchyard, making our way to the garden. A gardener was clipping several untidy leaves from a shrub in the parsonage garden. We asked his permission to sit on the garden bench.

  ‘Make most of it,’ he said. ‘It’ll be trampled to billio tomorrow when hordes descend.’

  The day had stayed warm. In the late afternoon sun, the flowers seemed to shimmer. There were hollyhocks, wallflowers, geraniums, nasturtiums and a lavender bush that gave off the most perfect scent.

  Rita reached out and touched the lavender. ‘I love Carine, you know.’

  ‘We all do.’

  ‘No, I mean I really love her.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Yes, “ah”. What else is to be said?’

  ‘Does she know?’

  ‘How could she not? I’ve told her. It’s not the same for her, and now that Edward has turned up I expect she’ll go away with him.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. We might have something looming that we dread, and it turns out not to be so terrible. Perhaps the reverse is true. We build up something romantic and astonishing, and it turns out to be commonplace.’

  ‘Oh no, not for Carine. That bloomin’ poet, he’s the love of her life, I’m sure. Just as she is the love of mine.’

  ‘Will she leave her studio?’

  She made a dismissive sound. ‘Tobias’s studio now, with Carine’s name on the place. He’ll fall apart in no time.’

  ‘This solicitor friend of yours –’

  ‘Andrew.’

  ‘Is he in love with you?’

  ‘Oh no. He and I are kindred spirits. He is what they call a confirmed bachelor, disinclined towards ladies except as friends. He would invite me to legal functions, but I don’t dress properly for that sort of thing.’

  ‘Has he met Carine?’

  ‘Of course, and he finds her fascinating but –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He says she will do me no good, and something else I probably shouldn’t repeat.’

  ‘Well you must, now you’ve said that.’

  ‘It’s not something Andrew knows about directly, but from the senior partner in his practice. At the time Mrs Whitaker – Carine’s mother – disappeared, it was suspected that Mr Whitaker had murdered her, but there was no proof. I have never said this to Carine, it would be too cruel and especially now. As if her life wasn’t bad enough with Tobias, and then that ghost from the past turns up. I could kill those two.’

  ‘Goodness, both of them?’

  ‘Don’t joke, Kate. I’m deadly serious.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t have told me.’

  ‘I wish I could be a fly on the wall in the Black Bull.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Black Bull

  All this will pass, Carine told herself as she gazed into her glass of stout. I’m the filling in the sandwich, the fob on a watch chain, the glue on the envelope that cuts the tongue when you lick. And I’m not feeling well. She tried to remember a time when she did feel well but it was so long ago. Apart from the Sundays, apart from the Sundays when she began to meet Edward again.

  After he came to the photographic society meeting, they both knew when and where to meet again, without needing to make arrangements. He was waiting for her, on Ilkley Moor, by the rock where he had carved their initials on that long ago day, when they were young.

  They did not talk about the past, or the future, they simply loved one another. Enchantment took away words. Now that was changing.

  She sat in the Black Bull, with her back to the wall. Tobias and Edward sat opposite her. Edward had lacked the courage to come back and claim her, but she forgave him. To sit opposite him was to be in the field of a magnet. He was disfigured. One eye was blind, but he was still her Edward. How could she go on thinking this, while knowing it was over? Perhaps it was not over. She was mistaken. She could have him for her own.

  Tobias, flabby, awkward, a man with little talent, a man on the make, treacherous to his friend, had taken advantage of her when she was too tired to resist the blandishments of both him and her father. If Edward had lacked courage, so had she.

  Tobias had fetched up at the door ten years ago, when she was out. Her father, recognising a fellow spirit, invited him in. By the time she came home, the story was off pat. ‘I am sorry to tell you that your fiancé did not make it through.’ She had asked Tobias what happened. He spun some yarn. If she remembered correctly, the story included Edward’s ‘last words’.

  I’m a perfectly nice woman, she told herself. A perfectly reasonable woman. How did this happen to me, and today it is happening in such a public way.

  ‘You are both to blame. Edward, you should have come to me.’

  Edward scratched his neck. ‘I was at low ebb. The way I looked, you wouldn’t have wanted to see me.’ He turned and glared at Tobias. ‘He knew that. He should have told me to wait, to write to you, to explain.’

  Tobias held his pint with both hands. ‘It was kinder to tell her you were dead than say you needed to break the engagement because you looked a monster.’

  ‘And I suppose you thought it kinder to tell me Carine had married, than to tell me that you jumped in yourself. I’ve watched. I’ve seen. I’ve asked questions. Carine does all the work, you drink. You parade. You come up with schemes. I came back because I wanted to make sure Carine was all right. She’s not.’

  ‘Stop talking about me as if I’m not here.’ Carine watched the landlord polish a glass. He was pretending not to look at them.

  ‘She is all right. We have a life that suits us, isn’t that right Carine? We have an arrangement.’

  It was not an arrangement. An arrangement was something that people entered into, agreed, came to a conclusion. Her life was simply something that happened. She wanted to go on believing that she and Edward had a love that would last forever. A growing feeling warned her against that hope. She had seen him looking at Elisa Varey, as if she might be his new muse.

  She stared at the two men opposite her, picturing them on a field thirty yards apart, holding pistols, prepared to fight a duel. It would be dawn, the sun just rising. They would each have a friend acting as their ‘second’. That was how it was done. Tobias’s second would be someone from the darts team at the Oak. Edward’s second would be an old pal fr
om the teacher training college, if any were still alive. When they both simultaneously shot each other through the heart, the seconds would cart them off. Or the seconds might run away. There would be some criminal charge for being a second in a duel, aiding and abetting, something of that sort. Yes, they would run away. ‘Nothing to do with me, sergeant. I was just walking by and saw these dodgy geezers pointing revolvers at one another.’ That would be Tobias’s second. Edward’s would be more eloquent. If the two men lay dead, it was Edward she would cradle in her arms, and stride across Tobias’s body to get to him.

  Edward swivelled on the bar stool. ‘You’re vainglorious and selfish, Toby. I should have known what you would do. You should have told her the truth, or my stupid lie that was meant to be kind, and you should have stepped away, like a friend and a gentleman. Instead, you looked at Carine, and that studio, and you wormed your way in. You saw a woman with a business coming to her, and you stepped in, began drinking the profits, and waited for her father to die.’ He raised his eyes from his glass and gazed at Carine, his eyes as dark and lustrous as always, but only one that could see. ‘I’m right aren’t I, that’s what he does?’

  Carine couldn’t help the small sound that came from her throat, the sound of a cornered animal. He should not be firing arrows at Tobias. He should take her in his arms, sweep her off, leave this place and never turn back. She was wrong to think it was over. They would always be together.

  That was what he had pleaded for in Ilkley, for her simply never to go back. Leave everything. But how could she? Her name was on the window, her name that was also her grandmother’s. The photograph of her mammy was on the wall. She was locked to that place, locked into it, yet she wanted to be free, to soar. She couldn’t leave it for Tobias to spoil, to trample over.

  Carine finished her drink. She looked at the sign on the wall that said Pork Pies and at the jar of Scotch eggs on the counter. If she did not eat something, she would not have the strength to go from this place. It wouldn’t be acceptable to begin eating Mrs Varey’s sandwiches in here. ‘Would one of you get me a Scotch egg?’