by Alex Pavesi
Lily said nothing. It scared her when he was like this. The boat rocked, gently.
‘I can’t abide you in this mood.’ She was trying hard to talk like an adult again. ‘I’ll leave you alone and you can sit here until your anger goes away. The ocean is very calming.’
William looked at her, his chin in his hands. ‘Can I have a bite of your apple?’
She considered the question, then shook her head. ‘I’m afraid there’s very little left. It wouldn’t be practical.’
‘So,’ the older Lily said to Dr Lamb, six years later, ‘William and I were not actually together at the time it happened. We were separated for about an hour. I went into the house and found Violet in a sombre mood, sitting with Agnes’s breakfast tray balanced on her knees and staying very still, like it was some kind of penance. My sister was like that sometimes. I said something to her and she didn’t reply, so I took a book outside with me and read under a tree.’
‘And William?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t see him again until he came out and found me. I’d been reading for forty minutes or so. He had calmed down by that time. In fact, he seemed excited.’
William and Lily had spent the last few minutes playing in one of the many unused rooms upstairs. The Grange had always been too big for its few inhabitants and nothing had ever needed to be thrown away, so there were fifty years’ worth of memories pushed into forgotten corners or, in some cases, separate rooms full of curiosities. Agnes had lived in the house for decades, so long that it felt like one of the family. Haughty and withdrawn on the outside, but full of character and clutter within, there to comfort and chide them. To the two children it was a source of never-ending wonder.
Lily looked at the assortment of chairs that were scattered across the floor and selected one made of delicate, dark wood, shiny with varnish, and handed it to William. He positioned it carefully on top of a large, flat desk. Then they placed two small tables to the left and right of it, as makeshift armrests, and found an ornament to go on top of each. A brass lion doorstop and a porcelain dog. They were trying to build a throne.
‘Let me go first,’ said William, climbing onto the desk.
As William sat down, one of the chair legs slid off the desk and he tilted back towards the wall. His legs swung sideways into one of the tables and knocked it to the floor, the brass lion landing with a thump.
William climbed down to retrieve the lion. Lily took his hand.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘I’m bored of that game.’
‘What should we do instead?’
‘We could draw pictures.’
The idea didn’t inspire him. She was better at it than he was and he knew that was why she’d suggested it. Then the taste of childish cruelty lit up his face. ‘I know. I can show you something.’
‘What is it?’
‘Follow me.’ He took her elbow and turned her towards the door.
The house had two staircases, so it was easy to sneak around without being noticed. They went up one floor and stopped on the landing, where the two staircases merged into one. Slim and rickety, this final staircase led up to what they called the attic bedroom, where Agnes slept.
William pushed Lily towards it.
‘But what if she’s angry?’ Lily whispered.
‘She’s asleep.’ William crept up the stairs to the tall wooden door and turned the handle. ‘It’s all right.’
The door swung open. The room was almost empty, with only a window and the white bed in front of it. There was nothing on the bed except for a pile of old blankets and pillows. Lily wondered if her grandmother – not quite herself since the incident several weeks ago – had spent the morning building a fort with these sheets, as she stepped tentatively around the pile. William walked behind her.
Lily reached the window and stopped. Her grandmother’s old, twisted feet were sticking out from the bottom of the bundle of bedding. They were grey and yellowish and not moving at all. William walked into the back of Lily. She turned around to face him, her eyes flattened with fright. Together they took hold of the blankets and pulled. The whole lot of them fell to the floor.
Lily screamed at the sight of her grandmother, lying on the sheets like something washed up from the sea. William stared with disbelief at her dead, distorted face and started to cry. This wasn’t what he’d imagined at all.
The local doctor, Dr Lamb, was sent for and arrived at the house fifteen minutes later. He had been there many times in the last two months, since that afternoon when Agnes had collapsed and been carried up to bed. She’d had a minor stroke, and he had come to check on her several times a week since then.
Lily’s sister Violet accompanied him to the top of the house, hoping to find some comfort in his presence. She waited on the landing at the bottom of the single staircase, while he went in to examine the body. He opened the door and knew at once what had happened. ‘Suffocated, in her own bed.’
Her mouth was open shapelessly, like a loop of string draped across a table. The rest of her face was subsumed by that cavity. Her long, fragile neck was covered in bruises. He shuddered, looking at it. Somebody had leaned their entire weight on that mouth. Had they actually pushed the jaw out of its socket, or was that just the vacant expression of death?
He left the room, slightly shaken. He sat down on the top step of the narrow, wood-lined staircase that led up to it and lit his pipe. Violet stood at the bottom, her body pressed flat against the wall for support and her face twisted to look at him. He stared down at her like a king sitting on a throne. ‘There’s nothing for me to do here.’ He smoked. ‘We shall wait for the police, that’s all.’
‘The police?’ Violet whispered.
‘Your grandmother died of asphyxiation.’ That was Dr Lamb’s verdict. ‘Smothering. It seems that someone covered her in all those blankets and pillows while she slept, then put their weight on top of them. She never woke up.’
The young woman started to cry.
‘And is that still your opinion, six years later?’
Dr Lamb had offered Lily a drink, getting up and pouring himself a whiskey. She’d never had whiskey before, but it was a day of new experiences.
To underline the question she took a sip of her drink, unprepared for how much it would hurt. Her throat flushed red. The doctor smiled.
‘That she was smothered? Yes, there’s no doubt about that. There were no other marks on her, she hadn’t been hit or scratched. Just smothered under those blankets.’
Lily held her glass very tightly as she spoke. ‘Would that have been painful?’
‘Yes,’ said Dr Lamb, glancing down at the floor. ‘I’m afraid it would have been terrible. Like a cat being drowned in a bag. But in her own bed.’
‘And although someone did that to her, an innocent old lady, no one was ever caught; her killer just carried on with their life.’
‘I know, it seems rather unreal when you put it like that. We thought your grand-aunt Dorothea might solve the crime, at first. She certainly tried. But if she succeeded, she kept it to herself.’
‘That’s the thing I remember least clearly: those few days following the crime, when Dorothea was around. I was so afraid, I couldn’t pay attention to any of what she was saying. To me, it was just a lot of adults talking.’
The doctor tried to lighten the mood. ‘I’ve read some detective novels you could describe the same way.’
Lily didn’t respond. She was concentrating very hard on each sip of whiskey, worried that if she didn’t she might be sick from the pain of it. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘tell me what you remember.’
Dorothea Dickson, the victim’s sister, approached the front door of The Grange, her shoes crunching rhythmically on the gravel. She was about to ring the doorbell when she noticed Lauren pacing among the flower beds; a willowy thing, almost a flower herself. Lauren was Matthew’s wife and Agnes’s daughter-in-law. Her long blonde hair was as smooth as glass.
‘You’ll make honey if you
keep that up. Or spin yourself a web.’
Lauren turned to her with two startled blue eyes. ‘Oh Dot,’ she said. ‘We were expecting you, of course. But I’d forgotten you were coming.’
The two women went to each other and the older took the younger’s hands. ‘What is the matter, darling? It must be my sister,’ she said, knowing that Lauren would never come to this house or garden to indulge any other kind of grief.
‘Yes, I’m afraid so. How can I say this? Oh, Dorothea.’ The blonde head bobbed. ‘She’s dead. Agnes is dead. I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you.’
The older woman kept her composure. ‘There, now. It’s what we’ve all been preparing for. Since she had that fall.’
Lauren put a handkerchief up to her eyes; it turned muddy with her tears. ‘No, I’m afraid you don’t understand. It wasn’t that at all. She was murdered, this morning.’
‘Murdered?’ Dorothea let go of the other woman’s hands and took a step backwards. She looked up at the house, as tall and thin as a spike. A policeman looked down at her from a second-storey window.
‘At least the doctor thinks so. He said she was – oh, I can hardly say the word.’ Dorothea took her hand again and gave it a squeeze. ‘Smothered,’ said Lauren, without too much difficulty.
‘Where is Matthew?’
‘He’s inside, with the police. Here, I’ll take you to him.’
Lauren guided her around the flower bed, to the two French doors that opened out from one of the lounges. As they turned the corner, Dorothea noticed Raymond – the gardener at The Grange – walking with Violet through the rows of apple trees in one of the neighbouring fields. He was comforting her, with an arm across her shoulder; Dorothea wondered if there was something romantic between them.
She entered the house and found Matthew leaning hopelessly in the corner of the lounge, requiring the support of both walls at once. His leafy moustache was wet with tears. Dorothea prised him from his position and gave him a hug. ‘Poor Mummy.’ He trembled on her shoulder. ‘Auntie Dot, I’m so sorry.’
‘Now, now.’ She patted him gently, then held him out before her. ‘Matthew, you look like a bottle of milk. Do you know who did this?’
‘No.’ He shook his head, competitiveness rising inside him. ‘I’ve given the police my theories, but no, not for certain.’
‘When did it happen?’
‘Lauren was the last one to see her alive, I think.’ The last to admit to seeing her alive, thought Dorothea. She turned around but Lauren was no longer there; she’d delivered Dorothea to her husband and then drifted away. ‘She’s been coming here to help Violet, since Mummy’s stroke the other month. She took up her breakfast and found her alive and well. That was at ten this morning. We think it must have happened around eleven.’
‘Where are the children?’
‘They’re both with the doctor.’
‘And where is Agnes, now?’
‘In her bed.’ Dorothea looked towards the staircase. ‘There are police up there, Auntie. They won’t let you see her.’
‘Well, there’s no use in not trying.’
Fifteen minutes later, Dorothea had said a tearful goodbye to her dead sister’s body and was coming back down the stairs. She found Dr Lamb in the library, occupying Lily and William with the gory details of human frailty.
‘There’s something called oxygen. It’s like food for your blood. And the air is full of it. So when you breathe, it’s like your blood is eating. That’s why if you hold your breath you feel something a bit like hunger. And you drown if you don’t get enough of it. That’s like starving.’
William looked horrified. ‘What about strangling?’ he asked in a whisper.
‘Yes, that’s a very similar thing, only then it’s because someone is blocking the blood flow to your head. So your brain doesn’t get any food.’ He put a warm hand on the child’s neck. ‘You see?’
Lily, standing silently to one side, watched Dorothea come into the room. She gave a little wave. Dorothea bent down and kissed her.
‘Dr Lamb,’ said Dorothea, ‘may I have a word with you?’ He looked up and nodded solemnly, then guided the children out through the door.
The doctor had been living in the village almost as long as Agnes herself and he was still as good-looking as ever, though his hair was now entirely grey. But his mouth was boyish and there was a wisdom to his eyes that suited him. ‘Miss Dickson, isn’t it?’ He smiled, sympathetically. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’
‘I don’t remember that,’ said Lily, seventeen again, the empty whiskey glass on the table beside her.
‘There’s no reason you should,’ said Dr Lamb, loosening his collar. ‘It’s hot in here, isn’t it? Should I open a window?’
‘I’m cold,’ said Lily, slightly embarrassed.
He parted his hands in a gesture of resignation. ‘Well, anyway, your grand-aunt, as you call her, wanted to know everything I could tell her about the crime. She was a very inquisitive old lady.’
‘That’s what I remember most about her. She always wanted to know what I was learning in school, details and everything.’
‘A natural detective.’ Dr Lamb nodded. ‘Well, she asked me if I would attend a family meeting later that day. After sunset, she said, making it sound rather dramatic. She’d questioned the police already and thought the family had a better chance of working it out among themselves.’ Dr Lamb looked out of the window, with a shadow of amusement on his face. ‘Of course, I thought I was being invited there as an expert witness. Not as a suspect.’
The relatives of Agnes Mortimer stood along one side of the lounge, with their two guests as bookends. Her son Matthew and his wife Lauren stood in the centre, with Violet and Dr Lamb to their left and the two children – Lily and William – and Raymond, the gardener, on their right. Dorothea faced them and began to pace back and forth.
‘Agnes was an opinionated old woman,’ said Dorothea, ‘and a secretive one. And at times she was as tough as digging in winter. But I know she was loved by everyone here.’
Raymond looked around the room to see if anyone would object to that. Loved like a rainy day, he thought. But nobody spoke. Only Lauren turned to look at him and he dropped his eyes as if caught doing something shameful.
‘Nonetheless,’ Dorothea continued, ‘she was murdered earlier today, cruelly and coldly, in her bed upstairs. My younger sister.’
The police had taken the body away with them, in the back of a miserable little car. They had spent the afternoon questioning the household – lingering longest on Raymond, the outsider – but they’d made no arrests and had abandoned the house before sunset, like a swarm of insects moving as one.
‘The police believe she was killed by someone she knew.’ Dorothea looked at each of them in turn. ‘The motive is not yet clear, though I have my own suspicions.’ She held her hand up, a finger raised in the air, and shook it at the gathering in an undirected gesture of accusation; her solid bracelets clattered against one another, making her arm a musical instrument. ‘I have gathered in this room everyone that was in the vicinity of the house at the time she was killed, have I not?’
Raymond cleared his throat. ‘Not quite, ma’am. Ben Crake has been hanging around the house today. I’ve seen him.’
Matthew stepped forward; the sense of someone being under suspicion stirred him to action, like a hopeful wolf sensing its prey. ‘Ben Crake, that’s right. I saw him too. Did anybody tell the police about him?’
Dorothea looked confused and a little annoyed at the interruption. ‘Who is Ben Crake?’
Violet took a handkerchief from her pocket and twirled it compulsively around her fingers.
‘A young man,’ said Matthew, ‘who lives in the village. He was at school with Violet. He’s often here on some pretext or another.’
‘He’s my friend,’ said Violet, softly.
‘The wrong kind of friend.’
‘You know, he’s actually rather pleasant,’ said Lauren,
dismissing her husband’s hopeful tone. ‘Not the type to commit murder at all.’
‘Impressions can be deceptive,’ said Dorothea. She turned to her nephew. ‘Where did you see him?’
Matthew had been walking through the fields on his way to the station, when a figure in a brown coat seemed to leap out at him. Though he knew the landscape well and knew that it was just a trick of perspective, it still gave him a shock.
‘You made me jump,’ he said to the apparition.
Ben didn’t answer.
‘Oh,’ said Matthew. ‘It’s you. What are you doing here?’
Ben stroked his jaw. ‘It’s Matthew, isn’t it? You’re Violet’s uncle. I’m watching for birds.’ And he raised his binoculars, as if in a toast.
‘I see.’ Matthew nodded. ‘You gave me a terrible fright.’
‘I was keeping very still, trying not to frighten the sparrows.’
Matthew, who had spent his whole life in the countryside but still considered it an inconvenience, stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘Well, I must be on my way.’
Ben put the binoculars up to his eyes and looked at a tree. A few shapes flew from it; an autumnal Morse code. ‘Say hello to Violet for me.’
When Matthew was out of sight he turned back to the house and raised his binoculars again. The side facing him had a single window, right at the top.
‘Was he watching the house?’ asked Dorothea.
‘Sort of,’ said Matthew.
Violet touched the handkerchief to her eyes.
‘He seemed to be,’ said Raymond.
‘That is most intriguing.’
Dr Lamb interrupted them. He had the breathy, exhausted tone of somebody sapped by impatience. ‘Listen, Ben is perfectly fine. He’s just a young man, smitten with a young woman.’ Violet’s heart was hammering; she almost fainted. ‘I’ve known his family for years; his father owns an antiques shop in town. They’re very pleasant people, binoculars or not.’
‘And yet if he was watching the house he must have seen something. Why didn’t he speak to the police?’ The sky outside was tepid and growing dark, but when Dorothea spoke she gave the impression that a storm was raging, that a crack of thunder or flash of lightning was about to follow each of her pronouncements. ‘Did anyone else see anything suspicious?’
