Echoes of Silence

by Marjorie Eccles

  Before waiting for an answer, he levered himself against the table with the heels of his hands, pushed his chair back and lumbered from the room. Sonia, with a distracted flapping of her hands, rushed after him. No one else followed.

  A moment later, Philip stood up unsteadily. He was white as lard, except for two hectic spots of colour high on his cheekbones. In a trembling voice he said, ‘I don’t feel well. I think I should be better in bed. Help me upstairs and send Dot to me, if you will. Ask her for my usual nightcap.’

  There had been no reason to stay on at Low Rigg. Once undressed and in bed, sipping the hot drink Dot had made for him, Philip seemed to have recovered himself and Polly had gone back again to Garth House with Ginny and Leon for the night. By half-past seven the next morning she had seen to it that Harriet was ready dressed for school in the new uniform which still gave her immense satisfaction, sent her down for breakfast and then showered and dressed herself. Judging the weather by a glance out of the window, she pulled on layers of warm woollen clothing, long boots. She was fastening her hair back with a big tortoiseshell slide when she heard the telephone ring downstairs. A couple of minutes later, Ginny put her head round the door. ‘It’s Tom Richmond, the chief inspector. He wants to see you down at the police station.’

  ‘Me?’ Polly’s heart plummeted. It was the summons she’d been expecting for nearly a week now, but hoping against all expectations would never come. ‘Wonder what he wants to see me about?’

  ‘I wonder.’ Ginny glanced at her curiously, but she obviously hadn’t slept well, either, and was now too occupied with the business of overseeing breakfast and school departures to probe too much, for which Polly was truly thankful. ‘At your convenience, he said, when I told him you were doing the school run. He seems quite nice, really, for a policeman. Hurry up, or the coffee will be cold.’

  In the usual scramble that accompanied preparations for work and school, Polly’s preoccupation remained unnoticed, or at any rate unremarked on. She didn’t think Ginny could have mentioned the call to Leon. Never a communicative man first thing, he buried his head in the newspaper while he drank his usual cup of tea and ate one slice of toast, shouted at Sheba, one of the boys’ mongrels, who’d illicitly insinuated herself into the kitchen and was shedding hairs all over his dark suit, deposited hasty kisses on his offspring and his wife and left. Ginny followed fifteen minutes later, miraculously transformed by several cups of coffee and make-up into her usual model of elegance.

  Polly drove the three children to school and then turned the car on to a side road, a quiet, tree-lined cul-de-sac of substantial houses behind long front gardens, where no one was around to remark on a woman sitting in a car at that time in the morning, staring out of the windscreen at nothing in particular. She wondered what on earth she was going to say to Tom Richmond that would sound convincing. He wasn’t a man to be fobbed off easily, that was already very clear.

  A dustbin lorry turned into the road ten minutes later, forcing her to move. The situation wasn’t going to get any better by sitting here worrying about it, anyway, she thought, letting in the clutch. There was only one possible answer – to tell the truth. But after Philip’s bombshell and the restless night which had followed, she felt ill equipped to deal with the consequences of her own impetuous action.

  ‘Please don’t worry about what I told you,’ Philip had said when she’d gone up to his room to convince herself he was all right before leaving him. ‘None of you will be deprived of your inheritances. Postponed, that’s all. When I’m gone, you’ll all receive equal shares of whatever I have to leave.’

  ‘Philip, let’s not think about that just now. You’re not going to go for a long time yet. More important is what Freya told us.’

  ‘Never mind that, either,’ he interrupted, and he’d looked so distressed that Polly obediently fell silent. ‘But I have to say that I think Leon was right. Best to keep it in the family. It’s all nonsense, just the sort of nonsense Freya was capable of.’

  But keeping quiet about it hadn’t been very sensible as far as Peter was concerned. And then, Leon’s telling it that way had been a mistake, Peter’s reaction was just what she’d feared, and what worried her. She’d rung him before she left Ginny’s house this morning, but there’d been no answer.

  ‘All this, you know, it needn’t make any difference to anyone,’ Philip had continued. ‘Things will go on just the same … except that you’ll all take whatever furniture and so on your mother left to you, naturally, and – ’ he let his voice quaver, take on a pleading note, playing the old man now for all he was worth – ‘and I hope that you and Harriet might choose to live here, Polly.’

  Which had been an added reason for her sleepless night. As a child and a young woman growing up in Low Rigg, she’d taken the house for granted, accepted its cold and draughty corners, groaning pipes and creaking floorboards, it was just somewhere she lived, but after the years away – college and then marriage with Tony – she’d come to be uneasy with it, its remoteness, not just in terms of distance, but its separateness from the warmth and busyness of other people’s meaningful lives, down in the valley. Recently, this uneasiness had grown into distaste, as much for its associations as for itself. A tragedy had played itself out here and it had left its mark, had changed it for ever as far as she was concerned. The idea of committing herself to living here, with only the Nagles and Philip for company, was something she found difficult to contemplate without dread.

  But, consideration for Philip apart – and emotional blackmail from the old was hard to resist – she had to have somewhere to live. There were some nice new houses being built on a good location only a few miles out of the town, previously too expensive even to consider. It would be dishonest to deny that since her mother’s death the possibility of now being able to buy one of them had crossed her mind. Well, that was not to be, and she knew the young couple who owned the nice little house in Ingham’s Fold were anxious for her to make up her mind. Houses were selling with difficulty and it wasn’t fair to them to keep them in suspense.

  ‘It’s not bad,’ Ginny had said candidly, ‘but too cramped. You’d be fighting your way out in three months.’ Polly remained undecided, which probably said it all, she thought, joining the slow-moving queue of traffic through the town centre.

  It was a dark, raw, cheerless morning, the roads skaty from yesterday’s snowfall, which had quickly turned to slush, then frozen, following the miserable weather pattern of the last week. The sort of weather they might expect from now on. Polly hated winter. She drove carefully, progress was slow and she was able to see that the lighted windows of the shops were already decorated, stacked with presents, displaying Christmas fare. Piles of small fir trees lay on the pavements outside the greengrocers’ shops. Men employed by the council lighting department were working from a tower on a vehicle, stringing fairy lights and Santas between the lamp posts. She hadn’t dared to contemplate Christmas yet.

  While he waited for Polly Winslow, Richmond read through the notes of last night’s interview with Trevor Austwick. Apprehended last night, in pursuit of an armed robbery at a plumbers’ merchants near Sheffield. He and Manning had driven over there as soon as they heard. With the absolute certainty hanging over him that he would be going back to where he’d come from for some time, Trev, caught red-handed in one thing, was ready to co-operate in the next, in the hope of mitigating his sentence, though that wasn’t Richmond’s province and of no immediate concern to him.

  Swearing that the note he’d written had referred to the previous Friday, Trevor admitted that he’d gone to the bungalow then to try and get some money from the old bitch. All she’d stumped up had been a lousy fifty. Reminded him she’d filed for a divorce, that his days of getting easy money from her were numbered. Said she was going away and wouldn’t be back for some time, so it was no use pestering her. Thrown him out, with a promise that she’d call the police if he didn’t leave her alone.

  ‘She refu
sed you money then, so you went back to try your luck again the following week?’

  ‘No, I bloody didn’t!’

  ‘Maybe you got a bit rougher with her than you intended and she ended up dead.’

  ‘I never went back, I’ve told you!’ Trevor shouted. ‘I can prove where I was, Friday night.’

  He’d produced a list of several mates who swore he’d been playing cards with them on the evening of Friday the 13th, and a lady with whom he’d spent the night. An alibi so thin, with names such as he’d given to support it – it just had to be real.

  ‘All I wanted was a couple of thou’ till I got back on me feet, but not her! She was a right cow, I tell you, that one, for all she could write books. I want my head seeing to for ever getting tangled up with her.’ A thought occurred to him even in the midst of his troubles. ‘How much did she leave?’ he asked, his eyes lighting with greed.

  It would have given both police officers a great deal of pleasure to tell him that she’d left it all to the cats’ home, but life was never so obliging. However it stuck in the gullet to admit it, it was quite likely that this lowlife would find a substantial sum waiting for him when he came out. Nevertheless, Manning extracted what satisfaction he could from giving Trev a few nasty moments. ‘Forget it, sunshine. The way you’re carrying on, you’re never going out be outside for long enough at a time to worry about that.’

  13

  Polly was shown immediately into Richmond’s office, which wasn’t what she would have expected for a chief inspector. A dismal sort of room, painted an unfortunate shade of yellow in a failed attempt at cheerfulness, the fluorescent lights turning the colour to margarine. Chairs with wooden arms were covered in grey and beige tweed which fell short of giving either pleasure to the eye or comfort to the body. A row of dark green metal filing cabinets was lined up against one wall. On Richmond’s desk a small modern computer sat surrounded by a mass of paperwork, a three-inch-thick file and the coffee she’d been offered and declined. She could feel against her leg, right through her long skirt and her boot, the heat from a radiator going full blast, yet one of the windows was opened several inches at the top, making the room stuffy and draughty at the same time.

  A young woman detective who was introduced as DC Jenner sat disconcertingly just out of her range of vision, presumably ready to take notes. Richmond himself looked less awkward, more at home in these official surroundings, totally absorbed with the task in hand, but even grimmer. He had a foolscap pad ready to make notes, and a silver biro in his hand. When she thought of the ways in which she’d imagined them meeting, she could feel the heat in her face. She studied the uninspired pattern of the carpet tiles on the floor.

  He’d pushed a pile of papers he was working on to one side as she came in, and wasted no time in getting to the point, to her relief plunging straight into the matter, without polite preliminaries or prevarications. ‘Mrs Winslow,’ he began formally, ‘it’s come to our notice that you visited Mrs Wyn Austwick on the day of her death. That is, Friday, 13th November. Is that correct?’

  Half of her would have liked to deny it, but obviously someone had seen her, or her new Ka. That stroppy ambulance driver who’d bawled her out for parking badly had taken her number, she’d bet her life on it. She’d no alternative but to agree.

  ‘I asked you previously when you’d last seen her and you denied ever having met her. Why didn’t you say you’d been to her house?’

  She forbore to say it was Leon who’d denied any meeting between them and Mrs Austwick, because she’d gone along with it after all, and she’d no wish to antagonise him with what he might see as smart-alec remarks, but she didn’t welcome feeling like a schoolgirl caught out in a fib. She wouldn’t have refused to give an account of her movements if she’d been asked to, it was just that she’d hoped to avoid her idiocy coming to light – though it had seemed right at the time, and perhaps it hadn’t been so daft to try and do something. Stupid, though, to blame yourself, to be unable to swallow this illogical feeling of guilt. She tried to relax her body, feeling its rigidity must be apparent.

  ‘I thought it would only confuse matters.’

  ‘The only confusion that arises is when people don’t see fit to tell us the truth,’ he said austerely. ‘What time did you get there?’

  She’d met the three children out of school and left them with Ginny at the shop, then driven up to the Clough Head Estate. ‘Just after four, I think.’

  ‘And what was the purpose of your visit?’

  This was more difficult. She shifted her position while she thought how to put it. Behind her, the policewoman sniffed and blew her nose. ‘Well, we told you on the morning after my mother’s death what the situation had been with that woman. I began to think, we don’t have to put up with her abusing my mother like this!’ Suddenly, the same red-hot anger she’d felt when she’d first learned what had been going on, the rush of adrenalin that had carried her along then, was now beginning to make it easier. ‘After all, Freya had a perfect right to stop that wretched book, if that was what she wanted to do. She’d honoured the contract between them and already paid Mrs Austwick what she owed her, so that was no problem. By the time it got to Friday, I decided to go and see her and have it out with her, and tell her that if she persisted in annoying my mother, I’d make a complaint to the police.’

  ‘What was her reaction?’

  ‘She … I’m afraid she just laughed. She told me to get on with it.’ Polly tried not to show the rush of humiliation as she relived that put-down. He was bound to misinterpret the subsequent anger she still felt.

  He didn’t say anything for a while, just watched her coolly. The silver biro flashed as he twirled it round. ‘Didn’t it occur to you that there might be more to it? That your mother was being subjected to something other than abuse?’

  He knew. Of course he knew. How could she have believed he wouldn’t, somehow, have found out? Instinctively, she drew herself together, crossing her arms across her chest and rubbing them. Richmond stood up and shut the window. ‘Sorry if you feel a draught. We get a lot of smokers in here,’ he said, the first natural remark he’d made since she entered the room, and his tone was one shade warmer, the look he sent her as he came back to his seat might even have been interpreted as sympathetic. ‘I’ll tell you what I think … I think that when your mother spoke to you before she died, she told you the real reason for what must have struck you as Mrs Austwick’s rather strange behaviour. Am I right?’

  After a moment, Polly agreed that he was. She realised her voice was shaking. Take deep breaths. Several deep breaths. ‘She’d hinted that she’d found, among my mother’s papers, something extremely damaging to her. She was threatening to go to the police with it.’

  He didn’t, as she expected and feared, ask her what this was. ‘So what did you do? When Mrs Austwick refused to take you seriously?’

  ‘What could I do? I just left. To be honest, I felt shaken, incapable of arguing with her. I’m not used to dealing with people like her, I didn’t really know what to do.’ He must think that feeble, she thought it pretty feeble herself.

  He went on watching her, tapping his fingers on the desk. He appeared to come to a decision. ‘I know this is difficult for you, so I’ll help you out. You told me your mother had posted a letter on the day she died – ’

  Her stomach lurched. ‘Has it turned up?’

  ‘Yes, it was sent to her solicitor, Mrs Marshall, and she felt it necessary to inform us of the contents. I’d like you to look at this photocopy and tell me if that was substantially what your mother said to you.’

  She reluctantly did as he asked, read the document he handed to her. Recognised Freya’s large, loopy handwriting and felt an enormous sense of relief that she wasn’t going to have to repeat her mother’s dying words, which had grown less and less credible to her as time went on. ‘Yes, that’s what she told us, more or less word for word. Do you believe it?’

  ‘Do I believe your moth
er wrote it? Yes. But do I believe she was telling the truth? Not as it stands. It’s not possible that this was the way it happened.’

  He began to explain how a post-mortem examination could, by revealing on which side of the head brain damage had occurred, demonstrate whether a head injury had been caused by the head meeting an irresistible object, as in a fall, or conversely by the head being hit with a hard object. However –

  He stopped and unnecessarily squared up the papers on his desk, so that she couldn’t see his face. She thought of the implications of that ‘however’: that perhaps such deductions hadn’t been possible in Beth’s case, for obvious reasons. The child had been dead, after all, for four months. Polly closed her eyes for a moment against a picture she’d never been able to bear contemplating either, ever since Beth’s little body had been found.

  - however, he continued, looking up, expressionless, the autopsy had also revealed not one single skull fracture caused by a fall, but several injuries consistent with being hit, repeatedly, by some heavy object with a blunt, rounded end. ‘Your mother, of course, would not necessarily have known about the autopsy’s findings, but events could not possibly have happened as she said.’

  This was what Leon had already explained to her and Ginny, and it had been insupportable to think what this inevitably implied. She tried to steady herself, not to let her imagination run away with her. If this was hard for her, think of Richmond himself – it was this man’s child, his and Isobel’s, they were talking about. His child who’d been murdered. She felt him watching her and knew then for certain that it wasn’t primarily Wyn Austwick’s murder he was concerned with, not first and foremost, not in his mind and his heart, and she was suddenly afraid. But, though she didn’t have much idea about police rules and procedures, it seemed unlikely to her that he’d be allowed to delve too deeply into a case – and a closed one at that – in which he’d had such a strong personal interest.