Broken Music

by Marjorie Eccles

  When he reached the spot where Naylor was crouched on the rock, he introduced himself and said, ‘I take it you knew this poor young lady. What do you think she was doing in the woods last night?’

  The gamekeeper threw a sardonic glance towards the constable. ‘Ted Bracey been talking? Coming to see me, of course. But she never turned up.’

  ‘Weren’t you worried?’

  ‘Not specially. Edith was a law unto herself. Anyway, she could never be sure whether she could get away or not.’

  There was shock over what had happened, a natural sadness, something like despair, perhaps, but not, Reardon thought, grief.

  ‘What was she to you?’ he asked bluntly.

  He thought Naylor was going to refuse to answer. An unwavering glance from steady brown eyes was directed at him but then the gamekeeper shrugged. ‘All right, she sometimes…visited me. When she could. Look, I’ve been a widower fifteen years and more. I loved my wife, none better, God knows, but—’ The dog whimpered and he bent down to soothe her. ‘All right, Fern, my girl, it’s all right.’ His big hands were gentle on her head, stroking the silky fur, until presently her trembling ceased and she became quiet. ‘Edith was willing enough. She knew what she was doing.’

  ‘Not enough to realise the danger of being out alone in the woods at night, apparently.’

  ‘There is no danger – not normally. Nobody comes round here.’

  Suddenly, Naylor stood up, took a few rapid strides towards some bushes and retched violently several times. After a while he moved towards a little, clear stream trickling down through the red sandstone rocks, cupped his hands and drank, wiped his hands over his face. He came back, his face even greyer. ‘Sorry. It’s just…she was beautiful, you know. Not just pretty. I didn’t hardly recognise her when I found her. I…’ He passed a hand over his face again.

  ‘Take your time.’

  ‘I’m right enough, now.’ After a moment, he said, ‘She wanted us to get married and go away from here, you know. She was sick of being a lady’s maid. But Edith could never see the difference between what she wanted and what was possible. For one thing, I told her I’d never go away from here, never, and nor would I. I know no other job, and I asked her what she thought we’d live on. She said she had some money coming.’

  ‘Money? Where was she expecting that from?’

  ‘She said she had an old aunt who wasn’t badly off. I suppose she meant some sort of legacy but…’ He shook his head. ‘She didn’t come from rich folks, not Edith, she was an orphan, convent raised since she was a child. I think it was just another of her imaginings. She read too many daft books.’

  ‘You mean the sort she lent to Marianne Wentworth – the girl from the rectory?’ Naylor stared, uncomprehending, until Reardon explained, ‘I was here on that case, before the war, when she drowned.’

  The gamekeeper shook his head. Evidently word of Reardon’s previous activities in the village had not reached him in the lonely, secluded life he led in his cottage up in the woods.

  ‘I don’t know about her lending books to Miss Marianne. Why should she do that? And if she did, what’s it got to do with now?’

  Reardon let that pass. ‘Did you stay in, all last night?’

  ‘As I said. I was waiting for her.’

  ‘And you never went out at all?’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Ben Naylor. ‘And I didn’t kill Edith, neither.’

  ‘Where on earth can she have got to?’

  Lady Sybil drummed her fingers on the gleaming, dark-red bonnet of her husband’s Daimler Marlborough as it stood on the drive, engine idling, waiting, as she was herself. Eunice could see she was doing her best to curb her impatience, although her mother was not a patient woman. There they were, standing outside the front door of the house, ready to be driven to Birmingham by Garbutt, Father’s chauffeur, to catch the London train. Ready as they had been for ten minutes, and still no sign of Edith. Nor had there been all morning. It had been an extraordinary few hours, with no Edith to help Sybil dress and do her hair and oversee the last-minute packing. Eunice had done her best to help her mother, who was unusually quiet, saying she hadn’t slept much because of the storm.

  Eunice perched on the stone balustrade that stretched either side of the steps and lit a cigarette. Quietly composed, slender legs crossed, she looked exceeding pretty in a blue tweed travelling costume, her thick, honey-blonde hair arranged in a new wavy bob under a dark-blue velour-felt hat, becomingly turned up at one side and ornamented with a diamanté arrow. ‘I’m sure Edith will be here soon, Mother – and we really do have plenty of time. There’s a porter waiting to help us on the train, and our seats are booked.’ She knew this because she had arranged it all herself, one of the things she had taken to doing lately, quite enjoying the experience and finding that her mother made no objections, since it did, after all, make life so much easier. ‘Please don’t let it upset you, you’ll bring on one of your headaches.’

  ‘My dear child, what do you mean – one of my headaches? You make me sound like one of those tiresome women who are permanently on the verge of a migraine, rather than just having the occasional bad head lately!’ Eunice was relieved to hear her sounding more like her usual self. ‘And it’s not likely we shall have any time to spare at all, with Garbutt at the wheel,’ she added, with a lifted eyebrow and a glance towards the chauffeur, who was fortunately out of earshot. Eunice knew her mother would actually have preferred to drive herself, as she’d become accustomed to doing; she enjoyed being in control of such a powerful beast as a motor car, and the feeling of speed as she drove along the roads around Broughton. Garbutt, on the other hand, could not be persuaded, no matter how he was urged on, to exceed what he considered a racy twenty miles an hour, so that there was always a slight feeling of tension in the motor car when he drove her mother.

  However, there would have been no one to bring her car back from Birmingham had Sybil driven herself, and in any case, there was more room in the Daimler, considering the amount of luggage they were taking, plus all the extra she fully intended to bring back. Having searched her extensive and long-unworn wardrobe for something suitable to wear at this forthcoming party, she had immediately rejected the idea of wearing any single one of the dresses hanging there. In the mysterious way that fashion had of creeping up on one, especially when there were more important things to occupy oneself with, it was borne in on her that sweeping skirts and tightly corseted waists were as dead as the dodo, that those enormous hats – ‘but so delicious, darling…and so becoming!’ – were gone for ever and that the skirts women had shortened during the war would never go down again. She had looked at her daughter and acknowledged that she was better dressed than she was herself. A visit to her dressmaker in town, immediately, with Eunice to help her choose, was suddenly a necessity. They could catch up with some visiting, perhaps take in a theatre or two. That new Diaghilev production, perhaps, or Chu Chin Chow.

  For the tenth time, she looked at the little jewelled wristwatch she wore. Garbutt stood to one side, unaware of, or ignoring, her growing impatience. The maid who had been sent to look for Edith yet again ran down the steps and said Miss Huckaby still couldn’t be found anywhere.

  ‘How tiresome of her! She knows what time we are to leave. Very well, we’ll go without her. When she deigns to turn up, she can follow as best she may, take the next train and join us in London. She knows where to find us. I trust she will have a satisfactory explanation to offer when she does arrive.’

  As far as Eunice was aware, Edith, to do her justice, had never before, in all the years she had been employed as her mother’s maid, neglected her duties in the slightest, and simply to disappear like this was…extraordinary, to say the least. A little stab of unease made her wonder if something was really wrong, though her mother appeared to have no such qualms, which was unlike her. She was always concerned with the welfare of any of the servants, especially someone as important to her as Edith was.

&nbs
p; ‘Eunice, we’re going to miss that train if we don’t go immediately. And Garbutt…please try to remember we have a train to catch.’

  Finally, they were bowling down between the straight double row of yews and out into the long drive which led to the main gates and the road.

  Sybil settled back in the spring-cushioned interior and endeavoured to concentrate on her plans for the next few days, until she became aware that the vehicle, rather than gathering speed, was actually slowing down. She made an exclamation and leant forward impatiently to prod Garbutt with her umbrella. This was really becoming beyond a joke. Then she saw that two men were standing in the road, waving the motor down. One of them was a helmeted policeman.

  There was no question now, of course, of going up to town.

  ‘Hold up, Mother, you mustn’t faint.’ Eunice was waving the little cut-glass bottle of salts under her nose. With her other hand she supported Sybil and looked anxiously into her face, which had drained of all colour.

  Sybil sat up and waved away the smelling salts, a sovereign remedy for headaches, swoons and fits of the vapours which, like most women, she carried around in her bag as a matter of course but normally scorned. She dried away the tears the ammoniac crystals had brought to her eyes and adjusted her hat. ‘I have no intention, Eunice dear, of fainting. It was only a moment of shock. Good God, what a thing! Who would not feel queer? I shall do very well now. But I think we must consider the London visit postponed. I’m afraid you’ll be very disappointed.’

  ‘Disappointed! What does that matter with Edith—’

  Dead. She was dead. Pretty, silly, clever Edith. Attacked and hit on the head, they said, by some maniac, by the lake, last night. It was Ben Naylor who had found her, just as he’d found Marianne. Eunice’s thoughts whirled in her head.

  Garbutt had already turned the car round and they were heading back to the house, where the policemen, who were following on foot, wished to have a few words, as they put it. ‘We must find your father and tell him before the police do,’ Sybil said anxiously. ‘The shock of hearing the news, put as baldly as they have put it to us, might be too much for him.’

  The motor stopped. Garbutt had made the journey back to the front door in a record three minutes.

  Chapter Twenty

  Reardon stood at the doorway of Edith Huckaby’s bedroom, taking in a general impression before he entered.

  It was a little, inconveniently situated room at the top of the house, reached by the back stairs, but he realised immediately that, although plain and without frills, it was still a great deal better than the usual servants’ quarters, presumably because ladies’ maids were regarded as a cut above the other servants, and occupied a privileged position in the households of those who employed such women. It was in fact a comfortable bed-sitting room, with white starched curtains at the windows, discreetly patterned wallpaper and a white counterpane stretched tautly over the bed. Anonymous, except for the corner where a couple of well-filled bookshelves spanned one of the fireplace alcoves. It was as neat and orderly as a nun’s cell, with no pictures, no ornaments and little evidence of its occupant left lying around, except for a wooden crucifix hanging over the bed. He stepped forward.

  The dressing table was bare but for a swing mirror, a china hairpin holder, a fat red velvet pincushion in the shape of a huge strawberry, a little porcelain tray containing a rosary of blue beads and a half-full bottle of what, after a sniff, he decided was expensive scent. Cupboards and drawers were immaculately tidy, the latter containing the same sort of delicate underwear she had been wearing when she died. The garments hanging in the cupboard, though few, were good: skirts, blouses and two coats, all made from excellent-quality materials, such as could hardly have been afforded by a servant, however elevated. Like the clothes she had been wearing when she was found, and presumably the scent, too, he assumed they were all hand-me-downs from her mistress.

  He had saved the bookshelves until last. The top one supported an electric reading lamp, and there was an easy chair nearby, drawn up in front of the small fireplace, where a fire was already laid with paper and sticks. Quite a cosy corner it would make, with the fire lit and the lamp burning.

  On examination, most of the books seemed to be the sort of women’s fiction Reardon never bothered to read, though the lettering on the spines showed household names that even he had heard of: Marie Corelli, Elinor Glyn, Ethel M Dell. He pulled up the armchair and reached out.

  A flick through revealed most of them to be the sort of syrupy, pulsating romances he had expected, full of strong, silent heroes and breathless women, beating hearts and racing pulses, palpitating with words like ‘passion’, ‘desire’, ‘throb’…Featuring torrid love affairs, often among the desert sands and oases of some Eastern but unspecified land. In the case of Marie Corelli, there were overtones of the supernatural and the occult; no mean feat, this, considering her books managed at the same time to be highly moralistic and religious. He recalled that she was reputed to have been Queen Victoria’s favourite author – and was still writing.

  Picking up next a book by Elinor Glyn, she who scandalised society with her sensational novels, his eyebrows lifted as he read. Yes indeed, decidedly risqué. Scenes of illicit and forbidden love. Passion on a tiger skin. It was perhaps as well Glyn had arrived on the writing scene later than Mrs Corelli. Queen Victoria would not have been amused. He began to see what Mrs Rafferty had been driving at, if Marianne Wentworth had based her style on any one of these writers. As examples, they must have been touchpaper to one of her temperament. And what of the as yet unknown Miss Huckaby herself? What sort of wild emotions had these books stirred up in her?

  Returning the books to the shelves where he had found them, he took a final glance round the room before leaving. Other than the books, the room did not seem to offer much help in revealing what sort of character the dead woman had really been. Then, not because he expected to find anything, but because it was second nature for him to leave no stone unturned, he felt under the mattress before he left, and there, between the mattress and the bed frame, he struck gold. Literally, he thought, when he tipped out onto the dressing table the contents of the small wooden box and was confronted with a virtual cascade of jewellery. Rings, brooches, a necklace or two, earrings. Real jewellery too, although none of the pieces, he suspected, would be of enormous value. Taken together, however, they must surely have represented a tidy sum to a woman like Edith Huckaby. Thoughtfully, he returned them to the box and put it in his pocket, regardless of the conspicuous bulge it made, and went to interview the family.

  He was shown into a small sitting room and found Lady Sybil standing with her elbow on the marble mantelpiece, looking into the fire, her hand supporting her head…and her daughter, Eunice, sitting quietly in the corner. The shock of that horrible and brutal murder seemed to have laid its silence over this small and elegant room. He looked about him. He was not used to grand country houses and Oaklands did not have the faded grandeur he had partly expected, this room in particular being simply but rather beautifully furnished, and tastefully decorated in subtle colours and soft materials, with only a few gilt-framed watercolours on the fashionably pale walls. One of the few rooms, he supposed, which had been set aside for the family’s use when the rest of the house had been generously given over as a convalescent hospital for the wounded.

  An array of photographs stood on a circular table. One in particular drew his attention: a large group which must have been taken before the war, in which he recognised the Wentworth girls, including Marianne, and the rector standing next to a dark young man whose arm was linked in Lady Sybil’s: her son Greville, presumably.

  He turned his gaze away as she spoke his name. She was seemingly quite in command of herself now as she sat down opposite to him. He had said that he wanted to see all the family, and she told him now that her husband, Arthur Foley, had not yet returned from the brisk walk he took every day, on doctor’s orders. ‘But I’m sure I can help you
more than he can, Inspector.’ She was still rather white, but even as she spoke, she drew herself up and summoned her social aplomb, almost visibly pushing whatever she was feeling into the back of her mind. She took a seat, indicated one for him and looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘For a start, then, did Miss Huckaby have any family, any relatives we are obliged to inform, Lady Sybil?’ he began.

  ‘I believe not. In fact, I know she had no one. Poor Edith, she came to me from an orphanage run by nuns, recommended by a friend who had also obtained a maid through them.’

  ‘An orphanage? How old was she at the time?’

  ‘Oh, she was grown up. She had been there since a very young child, and continued to work there as a layperson, helping with the sewing they took in from outside, making lingerie and so on, earning a little money for herself. It was a safe, protected life for a girl with no prospects, but I know she had begun to chafe at the limitations.’ As she spoke, she grew more relaxed, and even smiled a little. ‘I suppose that’s what you would call them, limitations, if you are not intending to take vows, and that was why she left.’

  ‘How long had she been with you, Lady Sybil?’

  ‘Seven years. She came to me when she was eighteen – only a girl, and inexperienced, of course, but she learnt fast.’

  ‘You must have got to know her very well over that time,’ he hazarded, not knowing whether to expect an answer in the affirmative. Not all employers were kindly and paternalistic, taking an interest in their servants’ lives, though he imagined Lady Sybil must be, if what Mattie Noakes had told him about the people at Oaklands was still true.