False Step

by Veronica Heley

  Well, Piers didn’t know about the hospital appointments on Matthew’s appointments schedule. The big C and all that. With one hand, Bea pulled down the zip on her skirt. ‘I’ll be in a better position to talk to you about this tomorrow. I’m having supper with the widow tonight.’

  ‘Not Goldie?’

  ‘No, not Goldie.’ She put the phone down. Was this another piece of the jigsaw, and if so, what did it mean?

  Eighteen

  Friday evening

  Gail got to the restaurant before Bea, who’d been held up in traffic.

  ‘Do you mind if we eat before we talk?’ Gail pressed her hand to her waist. ‘I don’t seem to have eaten properly for ages, and I know I’ll start crying when … do you mind?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  So they talked of holidays abroad and books they’d read and television programmes they either liked or hated.

  ‘No coffee,’ said Gail. ‘I’ll make some back at my place, if it’s all right with you?

  Back at Gail’s flat, coffee made, curtains drawn, comfortably seated, Bea waited.

  Gail made a curiously helpless motion with her hands. ‘Of course you’ve realized that Matthew and I, quite recently …’ She stopped, pressed her lips firmly together. ‘To begin at the beginning, if there is one. Matthew had a weakness for Gilbert and Sullivan and he was an enthusiastic supporter of the local amateur light opera group. He’d even take the alto part, if his engagements permitted. He was tremendous.

  ‘A couple of years back some friends asked me to make up a party to see one of their productions and after that I went to every one. It seemed so silly not to when they were so enjoyable. I mean, it wasn’t as if Matthew and I were ever going to meet. He wasn’t in the last one so, as we went to the bar in the interval, I asked my friends if they knew why. They said to ask him myself so I turned around, and he was standing right behind us. He’d been in the audience, not on stage.

  ‘We said the usual things; how are you, how’ve you been doing, what would you like to drink – only he couldn’t have alcohol because he was on antibiotics. I said I’d retired, and he said likewise, that he’d been under the weather, they’d thought he’d got cancer but they’d operated and taken out a kidney with this tumour round it, but he’d just heard it wasn’t cancer …’

  What? Bea did a double take and almost missed Gail’s next words.

  ‘And we knew, both of us, that we’d been given a second chance. At least,’ Gail said, with care, ‘I thought we knew. I knew. Definitely. From the moment he looked at me and smiled. I thought he knew, too. The bell rang for the end of the interval, and he hesitated, and I did, too. Then he said, “Seize the moment,” and took my hand and we went to sit in the foyer, because he was pretty weak still after the operation. He joked about it, saying he really needed a stick to lean on at the moment, and I said would he like to borrow my father’s old stick with the silver knob. He said that would be good, fend off muggers and help him get a seat on the Tube. We talked about how I felt, being retired. Which was quite good, actually, if a bit boring, though I was doing all these community support things. He said he’d had a pretty bad few months thinking he was going to die, and his old accompanist was failing fast, going into a home, but that he, Matthew, had been encouraged to write some stuff for the telly and he was looking forward to doing that.

  ‘It was a surprise when the audience came out. The time had gone so quickly. He said he’d get a taxi and take me home and I said no, that I had my car nearby. I wanted to say, “Come home with me.” I wanted … I didn’t know what to say. It was too quick, I needed to think. It was so wonderful, and yet so unexpected. He said could he take me out for a meal, if it were local, as he wasn’t up to much at the moment, and I remembered that the next day I was booked to go away with friends for a week, visiting gardens in France.

  ‘I thought of cancelling it, but then I thought I was being stupid and that if he really meant he wanted to see me again, a week wouldn’t matter. I said I’d drop my father’s stick around to him early next morning before I left for the airport, and he said that would be good, and to shove it through the letterbox if he wasn’t up, because he was taking his time getting up and down stairs at the moment.

  ‘He took my mobile phone number and gave me his card. I could see he was getting tired, but he was happy, he was! I wasn’t wrong about that, was I? He said he’d phone me when I got back and we’d have a quiet dinner together. I said that he must hurry up and get strong again, and he said he would.’

  She let the tears fall and didn’t try to check them. ‘I thought of him all the time we were away. I imagined how it would be when we got back. I thought that Damaris might be jealous, and I was sorry about that, but for me … it was just great. He phoned me every night to ask how I was getting on, and to report on his own progress. We just chatted, about this and that, nothing important. He said he was using my father’s stick and it was a great help, that on my last day there he’d even managed a walk in the park.

  ‘When I got back, there was a message on the answerphone saying “Welcome home” and that he’d ring me the next night when I’d recovered from the journey. Only, of course, he didn’t. I waited in. I rang his number the next morning, but he didn’t pick up. I didn’t know what to think. The following evening I rang my friends to see if they had any news of him, but they hadn’t. I thought he might have had a relapse, been taken to hospital. The third day I actually rang around the hospitals, can you believe? The fourth day, Sylvester rang and told me he’d committed suicide. And I still can’t believe it.’

  Neither could his doctor, because the operation had been a success. The doctor had known it, and so had Matthew. Presumably Damaris had known about the cancer because she’d arranged for him to make a will. So when had Matthew told Damaris that he was in the clear and not going to die soon? And what had Damaris’s reaction been to the good/bad news? Blind rage? What about that blood on the carpet? Had that been Damaris lashing out? But … no, if she’d killed him that way, surely the pathologist would have spotted it?

  Bea tried to assess how much more Gail could take. Her behaviour recently had indicated a woman on the verge of a breakdown, but she’d been a teacher in the state school system, had risen to be head. There was a backbone somewhere in there. If they were going to solve this mystery, then Gail had to prove that she still had that backbone.

  Gail sniffed, got out a handkerchief, blew her nose, wiped her eyes, straightened her back. ‘I seem to have done nothing but cry and throw up for days. Enough! Matthew’s gone and so is Damaris. I tell myself that worse things happen at sea, I’m the fortunate owner of a nice flat, I have plenty of friends, and enough interests, helping in the community and so on, to pass the time till I die. I’ll survive.’

  She took out a make-up bag, and attended to her hair and lipstick.

  Bea waited, watching, assessing.

  Gail took a deep breath. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  Bea was cautious. ‘Tell me, did Bert Cunningham smoke?’

  ‘Like the proverbial. Awful man. I could always tell when Matthew had been with him, because his clothes stank of nicotine. Why?’

  ‘Matthew kept a list of his appointments on his computer. He was due to see Bert the night he died. I found an ashtray under a chair by the fireplace and a trail of cigarette ash on the carpet on the morning I first went to the house, but it was cleared away by the time I returned the next day. I wondered who’d been there. I thought it might have been Bert.’

  Gail frowned. ‘I wondered why he wasn’t at the funeral, but Matthew told me Bert was cracking up, going into a home somewhere.’

  ‘I’m sorry to touch a sore spot, but have you been told the exact circumstances surrounding Matthew’s death?’

  Gail shuddered. ‘I asked Damaris and she said it had been painless and he’d left a note. She said I didn’t need to know any more than that, and of course I don’t.’ She grimaced. ‘He must have heard f
rom his doctor that it really was cancer after all. It’s the only thing that makes sense. I suppose he put his affairs in order, paid all his bills, left instructions for his funeral, a donation to the church, I expect. Then he’d leave notes for the coroner and some of his friends – for Bert, I suppose; Sylvester, of course. I’d have thought he’d have left one for me but … no, I am not going to cry again. He didn’t, and so I have to accept that he didn’t feel as deeply towards me as I did towards him.

  ‘I can see him taking one last walk around the house – he loved that house, you know; it had belonged to his parents and still had a lot of their furniture in it – and then he’d make sure he wasn’t disturbed, take the pills, perhaps play some music? Would he have gone to sleep in his bed? Yes, I think he would. Wearing his best silk pyjamas. He loved the feeling of silk. Yes, that is how he would have done it.’

  It was a shame to disabuse her. Bea wondered if it wouldn’t be kinder to leave things as they were. Yes, why not leave things as they were? It would only hurt Gail more to learn of his bizarre end.

  The flat lay quietly about them, the double-glazing cutting out the sound of traffic below. A plane droned overhead.

  Gail got up and switched on all the lights. ‘Out with it, Bea Abbot. A teacher can always tell when a pupil’s hiding something.’

  ‘Do you really want to turn over stones? There may be some nasty creepy-crawlies under them.’

  ‘No, I don’t. Not at all. But I don’t like unanswered questions, either. All right, let’s look under some stones. I’ve given you my fantasy version of how Matthew died. What really happened?’

  So Bea told her. Sparing her nothing. The dress, the painted face, the wig, the note next to the empty bottle of wine, the painkillers. Kasia, running away, terrified. Bea drawn on to the premises by Kasia’s defection.

  Gail sat still, eyes never leaving Bea’s face. Growing paler by the second. Was she going to throw up again? Weep?

  Bea finished her tale.

  Gail blinked. ‘I don’t believe it. None of it. Oh, of course I believe you, but … he wasn’t one for histrionics in real life. If he’d wanted to use one of his own costumes, well, I suppose I could just about understand that, but to use a hired one that would need cleaning before it could be worn again? No! And he wouldn’t have let that poor girl Kasia find him like that, scaring the life out of her. He was fond of her. He told me how she’d been helping him out with extra time while he was convalescing, getting in shopping for him.’

  ‘Yes, the fridge was well-stocked.’

  ‘Suicides don’t do that,’ said Gail. ‘Stock the fridge, I mean.’

  ‘And the red dress and shoes? They were hired for a part in The Gondoliers? A part he had to decline because he fell ill?’

  ‘That’s right. They’d gone ahead and hired a costume for him, hoping he’d be all right. I think he’d wondered if he might be able to tread the boards one last time but of course he couldn’t and they had to get someone else in at the last minute, a woman, she wasn’t bad. When he was on the phone to me in France, he said he was worried about getting the costume back because the box was heavy and he couldn’t lift anything yet, and I said I’d get it back for him and he said no, he’d get a cab to take it back and that I wasn’t to bother. I’d forgotten about that.’

  She stood up, walking around, hands kneading the back of her neck. ‘He wouldn’t have done what you said he did, Bea. He was a most thoughtful man. And a believer. He really was, you know. All this that you’re telling me … the fact that he had such a strong belief in God, that he was recovering so well from the operation, that he had work to look forward to … I just can’t reconcile the facts with what I know of the man.’

  ‘Nor what you know of Damaris’s death?’

  ‘What! What was that? Oh, you mean why she was on that platform?’

  ‘I mean, why did she leave Matthew’s house to Lily, and how has Lily managed to acquire a set of keys to the house if she didn’t get them off Damaris before Damaris was killed?’

  Gail turned a greenish colour, but didn’t collapse.

  Bea waited.

  Gail whispered, ‘I saw it, and refused to see it. I’m not sure I can cope. What in heaven’s name is going on?’

  ‘I think Matthew’s death has more suspicious circumstances around it than a fatal “accident” to a cheating wife.’ For a moment Bea thought Gail was going to collapse, but she didn’t. Instead, her head went up and back.

  ‘My daughter did not kill Matthew. Believe me, she loved him, in so far as she was capable of loving anyone. Lily? Well, she was always the odd one out. But … no, no, no! That can’t be right.’

  Bea waited some more.

  Gail closed her eyes, breathed deeply. In and out. Finally she opened her eyes again and sat down, composing herself neatly, ankles and knees together. ‘You have no proof. He’s been cremated. End of story. There’s nothing we can do about it.’

  ‘Well, we could ask some questions.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Where’s the silver-knobbed cane you lent Matthew? That’s what you came looking for that first day, wasn’t it?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I’d forgotten all about it. I wasn’t thinking straight. I’d just heard and couldn’t believe it. There you all were acting as if it were a normal day and all I could think about was that I couldn’t throw up in front of you all. You must have thought me mad. I remember taking the photograph but the stick … I suppose it’s in the hall there. I’ll have to ask Lily if I can have it back, because it was my father’s.’

  ‘It’s not in the hall. It’s not anywhere in his house. Look.’ Bea laid out the pages of the inventory for Gail to see.

  Gail ran her finger swiftly down the pages of the inventory. An experienced checker of children’s homework, she didn’t miss anything. Bea half expected her to produce a red pen and correct a misspelling. She finished reading. ‘I expect it fell down at the side of the bed, rolled under.’

  ‘We looked under the bed, because that’s where the box from the costumier’s landed up.’

  ‘Matthew told me he’d left the costume in the hall, because it needed to go back. I don’t understand.’

  ‘Here’s another question that’s going to be difficult for you to answer. How did Lily get hold of Damaris’s keys? Damaris definitely handed them over to Lily, didn’t she? Which means they must have met somewhere early that morning before Damaris jumped in front of a train. Did they meet at Ealing Broadway station, perhaps? The only person reportedly standing near Damaris before she jumped was a Muslim woman dressed all in black. Lily was wearing a long black coat for the funeral, wasn’t she? Suppose she’d tied a black scarf closely round her head to hide her hair. Wouldn’t she look like a Muslim woman then?’

  Gail did some more deep breathing. In a small voice, she said, ‘You think there was a conspiracy, that Lily and Bert were scheming all along to get hold of Matthew’s house? No, Bert wouldn’t, would he?’

  ‘I think it might be a good idea to ask him a few questions though, don’t you?’

  Gail shivered, clutching her shoulders. ‘I’m trying to picture Lily pushing Damaris under that train. My gut reaction says that yes, she’s capable of it. If only I didn’t feel so tired!’

  ‘Emotional trauma. Can you also picture Lily dressing Matthew’s body up the way I saw it?’

  Gail closed her eyes. ‘Ouch.’ Nodded.

  Bea stood up. ‘Have you had enough for today?’

  Gail nodded again.

  Bea picked up her jacket and handbag. ‘I’ll see myself out. Ring you in the morning, see if you feel up to paying Bert a visit. You don’t know where he’s gone, do you?’

  Gail shook her head. ‘We’ll have to ask Lily. Only, if there was a conspiracy, she won’t want us descending on him with a lot of questions, will she? Is there any other way we can find out?’

  ‘There might be. Let’s try her first. Do you have their address?’

  ‘I can
get it from Derek. He’ll have it.’ She went to the phone, and in a moment was through. ‘Derek, Gail here. How are you …? Yes, I’m sure, but … Yes, Trixie is very kind to move in and … Yes, yes. But what I wanted to ask you is, do you know Lily’s address? It was some place out near Gunnersbury Park, I think, but they might have moved, I suppose … No? Still there? … Well, could you look in Damaris’s address book, as I think they may have been in touch lately … yes, I’ll hang on.’

  A pause, during which she nodded to Bea. ‘They’re still there.’ Then Derek’s voice could be heard to which she replied, ‘Ah, yes, I remember. Chartwell Avenue? Yes, I went there once with Matthew to pick up some music. Have you a phone number?’ She listened and wrote it down. ‘That’s most helpful, Derek. Thank you. Is Tom’s arm all right? Oh, good. Well, I’ll try to ring you again tomorrow, see what Trixie’s arranged. Love to … yes, yes.’

  She put the phone down. ‘They’re still there. I seem to remember it’s an old house, a bit of a tip, which Bert bought way back when he’d got some money, orchestrated some music for the theatre, something like that. Three storeys, with a holly hedge in front. He used the back room as a studio, devising and recording jingles for adverts, that sort of thing. Not sure what Lily does.’

  ‘I’ll pick you up at ten and we’ll pay them a visit.’

  Later Friday evening

  Bea was restless. She parked the car and decided to go for a walk, pound the pavements, try to make sense of the questions endlessly circling in her head. She found herself at St Mary Abbots church at the bottom of the hill, pushed open one of the heavy doors and went inside.

  Dusk was settling early, but there was still enough light coming through the stained-glass windows to guide her to the small chapel to the right of the main altar. There were usually one or two people sitting there, quietly. Either resting or praying. Or perhaps doing both.

  She slid into a chair at the back of the chapel, and let herself relax. She’d been tense for a long time. Too long.