by Ann Purser
Then the professor, Malcolm Barratt, was clearly looking for another chair to inhabit. Organizing departments was his speciality, he reminded the doctor every time they met in the pub. A quick half pint was the doctor’s usual, but if buttonholed by Malcolm Barratt he stood no chance of a swift escape. The professor had time on his hands, Andrew Rix reckoned, and now Malcolm had been elected to the council he had already begun to suggest radical plans for village reorganization.
The vicar, of course, came to parish council meetings as a traditional courtesy, though he was not a member, but Nurse Surfleet was a legitimate contender, a capable woman and not without ambition. Andrew Rix was well aware of the respect she commanded in the village. She had no family of her own to care for, but regarded the whole of Farnden as hers to cherish and protect. A splendid woman, but had she the necessary experience of handling the outside world: the planners, speculative builders, social engineers with bright ideas and very little practical knowledge?
Anyway, the chair was not in his gift. He would resign, and there would be a democratic election amongst the parish councillors. Dr Rix folded his morning paper, took his hat from the hall, and shouted his usual farewell to Mary in the kitchen. As he shut the door, he heard her shout a reminder that she would be out that evening, and he carried on. It was Open Minds, and he’d not forgotten. Now he was late, and still had to call in to see Gloria Hathaway. Peter White had said Gloria was still not completely right, and he wanted to check on her. So many bugs about…He coughed deeply as the cold air caught him.
The village street was empty, except for one car slowing down, and he saw it was Lois, turning into the gallery. She waved, and he raised his hat. Charming girl, he thought. What would we all do without her? She looks after us all so well. Perhaps it is time for Gloria to have a bit of help in the house? Maybe Lois has a free hour or two.
♦
Lois had waved at the doctor, but her thoughts had nothing at all to do with her responsibilities in Farnden. She was thinking about Christmas. Only eight weeks to go, and the pressure was on. She pulled on the handbrake with a rasp. Derek was forever yelling at her to release it first, but she liked the ratchety sound and ignored him. It was a small revolt, but one in which she persisted.
Eight weeks only, and nothing done. She did all the shopping for the family and her mother cooked the Christmas dinner. The cake and the pudding were made weeks before. One day she won’t be there, and I shall have to do it all myself, Lois thought, as she parked her car outside the gallery. Evangeline never minded that. In fact, she encouraged it. People will think we have customers, and that encourages more to come in, she’d said. Lois, still thinking of her mother, reminded herself that she always shopped for all the presents, including from her mother to the family, and that would save Mother’s feet. The thought of all that shopping depressed Lois further, and she began to wonder if that smug policewoman hadn’t had a point.
♦
“Morning, Lois,” said Evangeline Baer. “I’m sure you remembered to wipe your feet. Dreadfully muddy in the village…muck-spreading everywhere and not just in the fields!” Evangeline laughed heartily, and Lois bridled. She had already taken off her outside shoes and put on slippers, something she did every week at the Baers’, knowing Evangeline’s obsession with cleanliness.
“Look at my feet, Mrs Baer,” she said, holding up one leg. “Slippers on and not a speck, as you can plainly see.” On the whole, Lois and Evangeline rubbed along. Lois respected her foibles, as she did those of her other clients, and also recognised that Mrs Baer had a lot to put up with with that husband of hers.
Evangeline would have been surprised that Lois thought this of Dallas. She was sourly aware that everyone else they knew looked on him as the perfect husband, regular in his habits, faithful, as far as they knew, and fully in tune with his wife’s neat and tidy preoccupations.
Lois had observed that perfection was not always a good thing. Her Derek left stubble shavings on the bathroom basin, drawers half-open, stumped through the house in boots covered in oil from the car. She yelled at him, of course. But when he’d gone on his own to visit his sick mother in Ireland, his absence had struck her forcibly. She had missed him, stubble, grease and all. “It’s all part of him, isn’t it?” she had said to her mother. “That’s my Derek.”
Her mother had surprisingly agreed. “What I missed most about your Dad, when he went,” she had said, “was suddenly having clean ashtrays everywhere.” Lois had nodded.
“Forty a day…bound to make a mess,” she agreed.
Dallas smoked, which was his one transgression. Lois dusted the big sitting room and emptied last night’s ashtray. Apart from this, she sometimes wondered why they wanted her at all. A slight film of dust each week, a few screwed up pieces of paper in the waste bins, the floors to wash and polish; all could have been done by Evangeline in a couple of hours.
Still, Mrs Baer was a businesswoman, Lois reminded herself, as she watched Evangeline walking swiftly across the yard to greet customers in the gallery. Business was good lately, Lois had noticed, and she’d thought of looking in herself for Christmas presents, though she suspected everything would be too arty-crafty and expensive for her lot.
Just as she reached out to dust the telephone, it began to ring, startling her. Evangeline had forgotten to switch it through to the gallery so Lois lifted the receiver. “The Baers’ residence,” she said smoothly. “Can I help you?” Not just any old cleaning woman, see. A woman’s thin voice said she was sorry – she had dialled the wrong number – and the line went dead. Funny…sounded like Miss Hathaway, thought Lois. Still, she probably wanted the doctor or the vicar. Poorly again, I expect.
When Evangeline came back into the house, grinning with triumph at having sold a pricey painting, Lois told her about the call. “Silly creature,” said Evangeline dismissively. “Needs a man, that Gloria.”
“Hasn’t she got one?” said Lois, not really concentrating.
Mrs Baer’s reaction was swift. “Of course not, Lois!” she snapped. “And I’d be glad if you would refrain from spreading rumours of that sort. Extremely dangerous and stupid!…and for goodness sake sit down and eat that biscuit if you must – crumbs everywhere!” Before Lois could recover from this onslaught, Evangeline had gone upstairs, and could be heard stamping about on the polished boards of her bedroom above.
Lois finished her work, washed her hands and pulled on her coat. “I’m off now, then,” she shouted up the stairs, picking up the envelope with her money. She hesitated, and then as she heard Evangeline making her way out of her bedroom, she continued, “I’d just like to say, Mrs Baer,” she added with emphasis, “that I’m not used to being spoken to like you did, nor accused of dangerous gossip. I don’t know anything about Miss Hathaway, and what I said was a perfectly innocent question. There was no cause for you to react like you did.”
She waited and watched as Evangeline turned to face her and all her anger evaporated. “I’m sorry, Lois,” she said, sighing. “My fault. Apology accepted?” Lois nodded but did not smile. As she left, she looked back and was mortified to see Evangeline wiping her hand across her eyes.
♦
The weekend was always the gallery’s busiest time, and the following Monday saw Evangeline sitting there in the half darkness, the lamp on her desk the only source of light, counting the takings and doing her weekly accounts. She enjoyed this. After the tension of persuading customers to buy things in no way essential to their lives, playing them like wriggling fish on the end of a line and occasionally landing a really difficult one, Evangeline loved to sit in the silence of the gallery totting up columns, calculating percentages and writing neatly in small columns. The total was more than satisfactory on the sales side, and she shut her account book with a snap. Excellent, she thought. It is all going very well, and if Dallas should ever leave me, I shall have a nice little business to support me. Heavens! What on earth had put that into her mind? She locked the gallery door an
d walked back to the house. Nothing on the calendar for the rest of the day. She decided to go into Tresham and spend a modest amount of her profits on new shoes. Perhaps she was looking a bit shabby these days, never thinking of anything but art and artists and not enough about her husband and her marriage. New make-up too, she thought. All the old stuff had hardened and dried up with lack of use. With this resolve, she changed into a smart skirt and jacket, and set off for town.
♦
“Last Open Minds meeting before Christmas,” said Evangeline to Dallas, as they finished supper that evening. “Shame I have to go out, with that new arts programme starting.” She had put on the new shoes and made up her face with care. Dallas appeared not to have noticed.
“I’ll record it for you.” Dallas got up from the table and sorted through a pile of videos. “Nine o’clock, is it? Better set the timer.”
“But you’ll be here, won’t you,” said Evangeline sharply.
“Might go down the pub,” he replied. “Half promised old Malcolm I’d see him there, though the prospect doesn’t fill me with total ecstasy. In training for champ BOF, our Malcolm.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” replied Evangeline irritably. He might have made a comment about the lipstick, surely. She hadn’t worn any for such a long time and he must have noticed.
“Boring Old Fart,” said Dallas, beginning to laugh nastily. “Thought everyone knew that, especially you and your arty farty friends. Just their sort of patronising code.”
Evangeline flushed. In the beginning, she’d known very little about art of any kind, but was curious and friendly, and had soon enlisted the help of an experienced watercolour painter, a successful potter, and several jewellery designers, just out of college and only too pleased to show off their newly-acquired knowledge. She’d delighted in their friendship and had tried having them to dinner. Not all at once, of course, but mixed up with locals. It had been a dismal failure, not least because of Dallas’s persistent mockery of everything ‘hand-bodged’.
“No need to be unpleasant,” said Evangeline. “You may very well be glad of my success with the gallery one day. No job is safe now, not even yours…and don’t forget to empty that ashtray before you go out,” she added. Always a winner, she thought, as she saw Dallas’s furious face.
But he had the last word, as usual. “Has the cold wind made your lips sore, dear?” he said with thinly-disguised malice. “Better put some Nivea on before you go out.”
In the coolness generated by this conversation, she went upstairs to get her coat, wishing she could stay at home and dissuade Dallas from going to the pub. Oh well, Open Minds had been her own idea. She’d thought it would be a useful adjunct to the gallery, bringing in the new villagers with wider interests than the old rural families. It had started out well. They’d tried to avoid speakers of the flower-arranging and icing-your-Christmas-cake variety, but gradually the emphasis had changed, and she’d grudgingly given in to home-grown holiday slides from Marbella and a man who’d devoted his life to growing ever-fancier fuchsias.
♦
The raw wind sent shivers through Evangeline as she hurried down the street to the village hall. Her ears hurt, and she thought longingly of the soft, hand-woven scarves she had for sale in the gallery. She had decided early on not to buy everything she fancied just because she’d get it at cost. “There go the profits,” she’d said to Dallas, who’d tried to persuade her to have a bracelet she coveted.
Evangeline turned into the village hall porch, festooned with Christmas paintings from the playgroup, and saw Miss Hathaway standing precariously on a chair. Gloria Hathaway was the Open Minds treasurer, in charge of all things financial, and now here she was furiously pushing fifty-pence pieces into the electricity meter. She rapped out that she’d meant to be down earlier to warm up the hall, but a telephone call had delayed her.
“We’ll just keep our coats on for a bit,” said Evangeline. It was time the village began to think about a new community hall. She knew Malcolm Barratt had suggested it, but had so far come up against a brick wall of old guard resistance. She turned, hoping the temperature would improve by the time the speaker arrived, when the door opened and a sturdy elderly lady with short silver-grey hair and a tanned, outdoor face, marched in.
“Evening,” she said briskly. “I’m Joan Page – Land Girl,” she added.
“Ah yes, I’m Mrs Baer,” replied Evangeline, stretching out a welcoming hand. “So you were a Land Girl during the War? We are all very much looking forward to hearing of your experiences…seems so long ago now, doesn’t it?”
“Only yesterday to me, Mrs Baer,” said Miss Page, who’d been polishing up her memory for the benefit of such gatherings for years now. “Very cold in here, isn’t it?” she added critically.
Evangeline bridled. “Yes it is, I’m afraid. Still, you must have grown used to the cold, digging cabbages in frozen fields and things,” she said brightly as she led her speaker to her seat.
∨ Murder on Monday ∧
Nine
Rachel Barratt’s scream rilled the steamy kitchen and echoed back into the hall. She went on screaming and terror spread rapidly around the women. With a scraping of chairs and gasps of horror, the Open Minds group rushed towards the kitchen door. “Wait,” shouted Mary Rix, who had learned from her husband that hysteria could be catching. “Quiet, everybody,” she said. “It’s probably a dead mouse…you know our Rachel…”
But it wasn’t a dead mouse. It was a dead Gloria Hathaway, and her slim, neatly-dressed body lay propped up against the sink unit, her head lolling like a rag doll. Her skirt had been pulled down discreetly over her knees and her hands were lapped carefully one over the other.
“She’s holding something,” whispered Rachel Barratt, trying very hard to pull herself together after a brisk shake from Mary Rix. She looked more closely, stepping forward tentatively as though Gloria might suddenly awake and castigate them all. “It’s a teaspoon,” she said, beginning to sob again.
“It’s a village hall teaspoon,” added Evangeline, as if this made it far worse.
“Don’t touch it,” said Mary Rix. No one moved. “Now then, Rachel,” she continued, “perhaps you’d use that mobile phone of yours and dial 999. Best coming from you, as you found her.” She pushed the women back into the hall, and nodded to Evangeline. “Better wind up the meeting,” she said, “though everyone must stay here until the police arrive.”
It was then they realized that Joan Page, heroine of the wartime farmyard, had gone. “Huh!” said Evangeline. “Doesn’t surprise me. Anyway, I’ve got her particulars, so she needn’t have panicked. Now,” she added firmly, “if you could all sit down we have a wait on our hands, so perhaps someone would volunteer to make the tea?” The urn was still bubbling ferociously, but amidst fearful looks towards the kitchen, no one volunteered.
♦
“It was horrible,” said Mary Rix to Andrew, much later, as they sat in front of a dying fire in the sitting room. “And worst of all was having to be cool and take charge. Usual thing, doctor’s wife, she’ll know what to do. Well, I did my best, but felt very tempted to run off like that tedious Land Girl.” She looked at Andrew and wondered if he had heard a word she’d said. He could have been a bit more supportive, she thought, looking at him closely. After all, unlike many doctors’ wives, she was not a nurse, and was now feeling cold and shaky. But Andrew had slumped in his chair, eyes vacant and fixed on a spot somewhere around the middle of the hearthrug. He seemed deaf to all that Mary had to say.
She had tried calling him earlier from the village hall on Rachel’s mobile, but there had been no answer. Still, he’d said something about going to the pub to talk parish council business ahead of the meeting tomorrow. When he finally turned up, long after the police and ambulance, and after poor Gloria’s stiffening body had been taken away, he had the same absent look, as if he’d been in a land of ice and snow and hadn’t thawed out yet. It was a raw night, of course. Mary�
��s thoughts were not coherent and to her own amazement, she began to giggle. “It’ll be very cold for Gloria Hathaway in that mortuary,” she spluttered, and then laughed louder.
At last Andrew looked at her, properly looked, directly into her wild eyes. “Stop it!” he said sharply. “Stop it at once, Mary.” And in just the same way that she had curbed Rachel’s screams with a shake, Andrew slapped her across the cheek. She was sober at once, enough to register that the slap seemed unnecessarily hard. How dare he? “You’d better go to bed, try to get some sleep,” he said, without apology. “I expect there’ll be more questions tomorrow.” The police had concentrated on getting down the facts – names, addresses, times and so on. Tomorrow and the next day, and the next, and for many more days, they would be interviewing the entire village. In a place as small as Farnden, almost everyone would have some connection with Miss Gloria Hathaway.
Andrew was still sitting stiffly on the sofa, and Mary got up and walked towards the door. She hesitated, and turned to look at him. Hardly a rock to lean on. “How can I sleep, Andrew?” she said bitterly. “How can any of us sleep?”
His answer was shocking to her. “Oh, God forgive me…” he muttered. “Oh, poor little Gloria…” And he began to cry silently, his broad shoulders shaking as dreadful, racking sobs consumed him.
♦
In the Barratt house, Rachel lay silent and very wide awake next to Malcolm, listening to his steady breathing. “You awake?” she said softly.
“Yep,” said Malcolm. “And so is most of the village, I expect,” he added. He turned and took Rachel into his arms. “What on earth’s been going on?” he said. “Why should anyone wish to harm that woman?” Rachel moved closer to him, trying to gain comfort from his warm body.
