Death at Dawn

by Noreen Wainwright

  Edith remained silent. No doubt there would be many speculative conversations between them before Giles’s killer was found.

  The kettle sang; the sound comforting and then grating as it grew shrill. Archie went to warm the brown teapot, and Julia looked at him.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yes, why do you ask?”

  “No reason, I suppose, I’m all over the place at the moment. The shock of Giles…you know, poor Julia and Bea, well you saw her…goodness knows how Julia is going to cope with her, help her to come to terms with this, especially as the child won’t even speak.”

  But, she’d lied about asking if he was all right. As her brother began to spoon out the tea, tension tightened the muscles in her stomach.

  Just at the moment he had turned to the stove and she had looked at him, it seemed as though he had aged ten years. He looked like he could do with a shave but it wasn’t just that. There was a pallor, an almost greyish-blue tinge to his skin she didn’t like.

  But, she wasn’t going to say anything. It was the worst thing, being told you look tired or drawn or whatever unhelpful phrase flashed into someone’s mind. It had been like that for a while after she had come out of hospital. It was as though people had felt the need to say something, but were far too embarrassed to refer to her “mental troubles” so they felt a perfect right to comment on her appearance. She’d grown heartily sick of it, so she wasn’t going to comment on Archie’s appearance no, she just resolved to keep an eye on him.

  Chapter 4

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  John’s voice was chilly and Daphne couldn’t miss the sharp interrogatory tone. She’d have to watch her step.

  This cat and mouse situation between them had crept up on them to the point where it now constituted a large part of their behaviour to each other.

  She watched his every move, was conscious of every inflection in his voice. If she looked up from her magazine in the evening, it was often to find his eyes on her with what she could only think of as a sly look in his face. They didn’t trust each other. Daphne told herself it would be better if her complaints were like other women, that he spent too much time at his work, or on the golf course. That would be a stroke of luck. If she were a neglected wife, she’d have an excuse to escape. But, just like her blasted mother, John was determined to smother her. So her marriage had turned into a silent war, one she’d a horrible feeling that she wasn’t going to win. Well, maybe she wouldn’t win, but she would go one better; she would escape.

  The seeds of the war had probably always been there. What could you expect when there was such a mismatch?

  “Nothing’s the matter, darling. Why should there be?”

  Her tone was cool and her hand was steady as she spread Cooper’s marmalade onto her toast. A sick feeling struck the back of her throat and chest and water sprang into her mouth. She gulped.

  John’s eyes were still on her, the stare hiding, it seemed, a multitude of thoughts and suspicions.

  She’d have to say something–head him off. If she could speak, that is. A rush of heat flooded her face.

  Another married woman might suspect pregnancy was causing this nausea, which was now subsiding slightly, but Daphne made damn sure that wasn’t the case. It may be what John wanted, but she was not going to be caught in the oldest trap there was. She was going to escape and nothing would stand in the way of her plan.

  “I’m not feeling particularly well,”

  It was true; now the heat subsided and she felt the cold shiver of sweat on her forehead and upper lip. Blotches appeared and disappeared before her eyes.

  “Well, maybe you should have a lie-down then.”

  She looked at his face, searching out the expression.

  Was this a caring side? Was he being sarcastic, or humouring the little woman. Hardly likely.

  But whatever his motives, she was going to take up his suggestion. She was desperate to get back to bed. Not just the sick feeling, but having to keep up this act, was a strain. A morning in bed would buy her a little respite, and she could think about Giles.

  It was like being a child and thinking about future treats and happiness, like the circus or the fair or the seaside. She remembered golden light coming through light summer curtains–a little breeze lifting the corner, a dash to the window, eager to let the day in, the sweet smell of honeysuckle, growing on the wall of the house in Lizard in Cornwall that her parents used to take for the month of August. There would be just a moment of ecstasy when she woke up and realised where she was and that the day ahead held treats; ice cream, sand, paddling and best of all being with her cousins. She’d hated being an only child; all her happiest memories had been with her cousins.

  “But, you have nothing to compare it with!” John had said to her in the early days, half exasperated, half- affectionate.

  Well, she had, she had seen how different life was for her cousins and her school friends. All that attention from her parents; her mother in particular. It had been like being one of those bugs on a slide in a laboratory. She didn’t need experience to tell her that having brothers and sisters would have diluted that.

  Sometimes, she wanted attention, even now, of course. That was natural, but at other times she wanted to fade away into the wallpaper, except when she was with Giles. When she was with Giles everything fitted, all was right. She didn’t feel like she had to be any way, to watch her step or to play her part. She could, probably for the only time in her life, be completely herself.

  There was something that always worked when she felt like this, sick and anxious. She thought about the early days with Giles. She could close her eyes and re-play their meeting. It had been at a party at a house belonging to friends of John’s parents. Dull, dull, dull, had been her thought as she had dressed. Dull, stuffy, boring people.

  “Don’t get squiffy, darling,” John had told her as he did up the tiny buttons on the back of her blue evening gown.

  She met his eyes in the mirror–as usual, she couldn’t read what was there. Cat and mouse. A sick feeling had gripped her stomach–it felt like bile, black bile. Why had she married him? Why had she been so weak and keen to please her mother and so easily influenced. She felt as though she were was in prison.

  Now, she lay on the bed and let the fantasy sweep through her mind. She watched it like a film and she heard the dialogue–well, maybe just odd sentences, like.

  “It’s no use, Daphne. I can’t be without you. I won’t be without you. We’ll do whatever it takes.”

  That’s what was going to happen. She would just have to wait.

  The nausea was easing and John would have left for his chambers now. She could phone one of her friends, Pat maybe or Clarissa. They could meet for lunch. Then they could go shopping and that would cheer her up, take her mind off all this damn waiting.

  Where was her maid? That was another thing. Elsie was good. In fact, she was probably now, pressing an outfit for Daphne to wear out, but sometimes Daphne found her too watchful. She had taken the girl on but could John be getting her to spy on her mistress? Daphne rang the bell to summon her.

  Chapter 5

  They were getting louder and it would be only a matter of time before their corner would be getting some looks from the other customers. The landlord had already vetoed the game of poker.

  “No boys, no gambling in this public house–could be more than my license is worth.” That had left a taint in the atmosphere. Davey looked at the others, at Ben and Stephen and Michael and wondered. Were their lives as much of a mess as his? No. They were getting on with things. Only he was stuck back in that bloody place, all those years ago–stuck in his head. They only ever talked about what had happened when they were drunk and it was never good.

  “Keep your effing voices down,” Michael had said once when it had started with politics and ended up talking about France, some of the things that had happened to them there.

  It was better f
orgotten or at least it was better to pretend you’d forgotten. He tried, really tried to forget, but then things happened to bring it all back

  “Changes, sweet fanny Adams,” Michael said once. “What’s done is done.”

  So they started talking about nothing, pub talk, women, the football and the problems with the country.

  “Going to the ruddy wall,” Michael said about the country–as always, he was the most vocal. Somehow, none of them could stomach having a proper argument with him. It was easier to go along.

  There was a bit of bravado at closing time, when the landlord looked like he was glad to see the back of them. A half-hearted attempt at a song, Roses of Picardy. A burst of laughter,” a “shut, the hell up, you tone-deaf wanker,” from Michael.

  Then, he was on his own, again, almost taking the two sides of the lane home as the ale hit his bloodstream. He lit a fag and that made the nausea rise up in him. He threw it in the ditch and continued walking back to his parents’ house.

  Chapter 6

  Daphne closed her eyes and replayed their meeting, the very first meeting. The meeting she’d been born to have, the one she’d been waiting for always, even though she hadn’t realised it.

  He couldn’t keep his eyes off her. Right from the start, she felt herself the object of his intensity and became supremely conscious of how she moved and the way she held her head and smiled. Every move she made and every glance she gave had him and his awareness of her at its heart.

  Her body was aware of his approach before her eyes. It was such a cliché, but her heart thudded and her throat became restricted. In a heady second, she was all powerful, beautiful too. She imagined she was seeing herself through his eyes and moved and held herself and smiled as she knew he would appreciate. It was instinct—she just knew how to do it.

  She deliberately edged herself away from the others, looked like she was lost in thought, while all the time she was aware of his whereabouts in the drawing room which had been turned into a ballroom.

  And of course, inevitably, he approached her.

  “Daphne, I believe,” he said.

  He laughed, looked embarrassed at his obviousness and she was, of course, lost. He was one of the best-looking men she’d ever seen, and he was imprinted in her mind forever. The world she knew, the world where she’d been an indulged and smothered child and then wife had been tipped over forever.

  She wasn’t so lost, though, as to forget to be careful with John. She kept him in sight out of the corner of the eye. She’d already had a glimpse, more than once, of how jealous he could be.

  * * *

  Peter Taylor was devastated when he heard about Giles. Giles Etherington, brave, unique, capable of unbelievable stupidity and worse than that, was dead. It was the talk of the club, but the talk made him sick and he’d left, walking in the sticky heat, up Whitehall, through the mall, to Trafalgar Square.

  It wouldn’t have been suicide; he was sure of that. Giles might have been reckless, but never suicidal. It had shocked him, yet there was something, almost inevitable…no, that was stupid. It hadn’t been inevitable. He needed to get in touch with Julia, He needed…he didn’t know what he needed. He’d been the worse worst person for Giles to have confided in. He’d judged Giles and made no bones about it.

  He had called him every sort of fool and had told him Daphne Sheridan was a dangerous woman. He still believed that; he knew the type, surrounded by drama and sucking people into her sick orbit. He was going to miss Giles. He couldn’t even describe how much he was going to miss his old crony.

  Chapter 7

  Edith and Julia sat in her room–the sitting room that she’d created for herself upstairs when she and Archie had started living together–when the arrangement between them had been tentative and new, and they’d been trying to create some sort of structure. It had later made them both laugh–as if it was possible to divide your lives up like lodgers in the same boarding house.

  Julia had telephoned and insisted that rather than Edith coming up, she would drive down to the village and see her. Edith protested, but then fell silent. She could understand, really, Julia’s desperation to escape the house for a while.

  “Do you feel more settled here in Ellbeck these days?” Julia must have read her mind.

  Or else, she was desperate to change the subject. For ages now, they’d mulled over and dissected the possible ways and reasons for Giles’s death.

  “No,” Edith answered, startling herself with her reply. She amended it. “I’m more settled. But I’m settled in an impermanent way. I was just drifting before the…breakdown. No more drifting now. I was all for upping and leaving more or less straightaway after coming out of hospital, after the business of Mrs. Butler…well, I couldn’t just go, not straight away. I think anything I’d done then, any decisions I’d taken, would have been the wrong ones.

  Julia raised her eyebrows, “But, now? she asked.

  “Honestly, Julia, I don’t know what I’m going to do yet, but next spring I am going to make a change. Maybe a big change or maybe just study something, I don’t know, maybe just a night-class.

  She laughed. “Yes, I know I am far too ancient to think of doing such a thing; but I wouldn’t be the first. Things are changing for us women, you know. Quite a few are going to university–able to get a proper degree at last. I hear some of those women-hating old professors even accept them now, women students and graduates. ”

  She tailed off. What was she doing being so flippant? That was what came from trying to fill the gaps in conversation all the time.

  Julia’s complexion changed before Edith’s eyes. She became white and her eyes widened and Edith saw that the loss of Giles had hit her anew. She looked even more distraught than she had when Edith had come round the other morning–the morning Giles had been shot. “We were trying, you know, trying to make things better between us,” she said.

  “I know,” said Edith. She hesitated. This was difficult. “Were you able to, you know, forgive him?”

  Julia knelt in front of the fire, lit earlier by Hannah. Already sometimes, though the days were warm, the evenings were cool.

  “I don’t know. I was making a monumental effort. To be honest, so was Giles. It was all a bit unreal–the way we were with each other. Polite, careful…you know.”

  She put her hands on her knees to help herself stand and rubbed them together and then down the side of her skirt.

  “Time would have made that clear, whether or not it would have been successful. I’m no saint, you know, Edith. There were times in the past year that I’ve hated him and times when I have wanted to get my own back–to hurt him a fraction of what he hurt me.”

  She looked straight at Edith, and her eyes in the light from the fire and the lamp looked glittering and strange.

  Edith had drawn the curtains. It wasn’t yet dark, but the day had been dull and she needed to shut it out. She was uneasy at Julia’s words. As always with her, the discomfort was physical, almost indistinguishable from nausea. She needed to change the subject.

  Giles’s funeral was going to be next week. The boys were home and from what Edith had seen, were forming a protective shield around their mother. Inspector Green seemed to be always there, with Sergeant Brown though she knew that was an exaggeration. Of course he wasn’t always there.

  Giles had owned an estate–there would be an enormous amount of sorting out to be done; and impossible as it seemed to even be thinking about such prosaic matters, they would have to be thought about. The estate wasn’t in the same league as the Arbuthnot’s, but it comprised a substantial farm, some of which was let out to tenant farmers. According to the word in the village shop, the tenants and the farm manager had been visited by the inspector and his sergeant.

  Edith knew too that people in the area had wondered why Giles had really needed a farm manager. Why hadn’t he taken on the role himself? He’d been a fit man and surely that was what he had been brought up to do? She and Julia had never r
eally discussed it. But, it seemed Yorkshire had not been enough for Giles since the war. He had needed to be in London at least for a substantial part of the time. What Edith knew of his business interests were hazy, the only thing she was sure about was that he’d developed a keen interest in the aviation industry after the war.

  “Is Inspector Greene still giving you trouble,” Edith asked now.

  Julia looked down and played with the spoon in the sugar bowl, lifting it up and staring as she let the sugar fall back into the bowl.

  “Well, I don’t think he likes me, that’s for sure. And he trusts me as far as he could throw me.”

  Edith moved the sugar bowl out of her friend’s way, and Julia half-smiled at her.

  “I don’t think that’s personal, you know,” she said. “I don’t think he likes me either, he certainly made no friends in this house when he suspected Archie of Mrs. Butler’s murder. It’s tempting to say he doesn’t like women, but Archie couldn’t stand him either at the time, and that can’t be because of his not liking women.”

  Julia stood up. “I think it’s time I went home, Edith. You know I don’t think he’s too bad. He was so good with Bea. He’s a policeman first and he’s one of those people able to put things in separate compartments, I think. He’s very single-minded and doesn’t set much store in making friends of the general public.”

  Edith knew as she went to bed that it would be a sleepless night but at least, that didn’t send her into a downward spin as it would have in the days before she’d learnt–the hard way–a bit more about how the mind worked and how it could trick you.

  Get up, that was the best answer.

  She made cocoa and sat in the sitting room. What had started out as an irritating niggle in the back of her mind, disturbing her rest now became clearer. She’d had a conversation with Julia, early in the spring. They’d met in Ripon, a planned restful day out, but somehow the mood had been off-key from the beginning. Still ready to look at herself first, when fault was to be found, it had taken a while for Edith to recognise it was Julia who was quieter and more preoccupied than usual. There was usually never an awkward silence between them, but something was different as they sat with cups of coffee in a hushed, moribund tearoom. The silence was such that you couldn’t even talk and have a laugh about the place.