by Granger, Ann
Monty turned back to the first line of trees and the mass of bramble bushes that fringed the track. He hunted around to see if he could find one of Jed Colley’s expelled shotgun cartridges. He was rewarded with just one and put it in his pocket to take back to Penny as a peace offering. Then he plunged into the trees and felt the shock of the change in temperature. After the heat of the hillside, he shivered in the cool air. It was creepy in here. He wouldn’t stay long; just long enough to show Penny she couldn’t be boss all the time. He followed a narrow track probably made by deer. The wood closed around him shutting out all but its own noises: the rustles and fluttering in the branches above; the sudden crack of a twig as something living moved unseen by him. A dip in the track, filled with rain a week ago, had still not drained and he skirted the smelly green sludge. He picked up a nice undamaged magpie’s feather and added it to the collection he was making to take back to Penny.
It was then, as he was thinking he could now return without loss of face, that he heard the other voices. At first he feared it might be Jed Colley who, though an amiable fellow, was likely to fire off his shotgun at pretty well any sound. He opened his mouth to call out and let Jed know he was there. But before he could, he realised that one of the voices was female. Jed would never take a woman along with him shooting. The Colley women all busied themselves around their smallholding and rarely went anywhere. They were always pegging out washing or scrubbing pots or feeding chickens.
A man’s voice joined in the conversation. Curiosity led Monty to make his way quietly towards it. He made a game of it, imagining he was a hunter tracking a prey. The conversational sounds changed and it was as if no humans made them, as if there really was some animal ahead of him. The invisible pair were making strange, disturbing noises, the like of which he’d never heard before. Someone was grunting and panting. He heard the woman give an excited little cry and then there was silence.
Without warning, he came upon them. They were in a small clearing and he almost walked right into them. He drew back in the nick of time; although they were not paying attention to anything but each other. As he and Penny had done, they’d put down something on the ground to lie on. It looked like an old raincoat. What shocked Monty most deeply at first was their nakedness. They’d taken off all their clothes and lay on the flattened raincoat still entwined in each other’s arms. It was like coming upon Adam and Eve, as illustrated in the stained-glass window of their local church.
Then realisation struck him. This, then, was the sexual act! He was both appalled and thrilled. His heart thumped and he broke into a sweat. This was it: the subject of the whispered conjectures and imaginative boasts made among the boys at school. For accounts of this they avidly devoured the occasional ‘dirty book’; smuggled in (or purloined from an older boy at great risk) to be passed around the dorm. Before him now wasn’t myth or invention, this was the real thing and he, Monty, had seen it. What a tale he’d have to tell next term! How his stock would rise among his contemporaries. Excitement gripped him and made his head spin. It found its way down into his shorts in a way both disturbing and pleasurable. He could hardly breathe.
Then they sat up and he saw their faces. This was not Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This wasn’t a badly printed Continental magazine or postcard. This was Shooter’s Wood and the couple consisted of his own father and Penny’s mother.
It was as if a cold shower had drenched him. It was all he could do not to cry out. He pressed his hand over his mouth to stop the sound. He wanted to run away, crashing through the undergrowth, but he had to be silent; they must not know he was there. They must never know he’d seen them. No one must ever know of it. He crept back the way he’d come, hardly daring to breathe, avoiding the smallest twig lest it snap and betray him. Then he ran, far enough away at last, bursting out of the trees into the bright sunshine as if he’d been pursued by a band of cannibals.
Penny was still up there, waiting for his return. He climbed laboriously up the steep slope towards her and she watched him draw nearer, stony-faced and silent.
He threw himself down on the rug and put the shotgun cartridge and magpie’s feather down on the rug between them.
She glanced down at his peace offering disdainfully. There was the dried track of a tear on her cheek.
‘I’ve drunk the last of the fizz,’ she said. ‘So if you’re thirsty, too bad. Serves you right!’
He didn’t say anything because she was correct again. He ought to have stayed here with her and then he wouldn’t have seen what he had seen. He wouldn’t have to carry this awful secret inside his head; carry it for ever.
‘Uncle Monty?’
Monty opened his eyes with a start. Someone was standing in front of him. The sun dazzled him and at first he couldn’t make out who it was. His mind was confused, too, still half back there in Shooter’s Wood.
Seeing his bewildered expression, she said: ‘It’s Tansy.’
‘Oh, Tansy, my dear,’ said Monty. ‘So it is. I was having a little nap.’
‘I’m sorry to wake you up.’ She sat down on the garden seat beside him.
Monty thought the kid looked wretched. She had always been slim but now looked skinny, all bones and angles. Her face was drained of colour except for the dark blue patches under her eyes.
‘What’s up?’ he asked.
‘That police inspector woman has just rung up. She wants to come out here and speak to you again. Or else, she says, you can go in and speak to her at the police station or headquarters or whatever it is. She wants to come today. Mum’s annoyed.’
‘What’s new?’ muttered Monty.
‘Mum says, they’re harassing you. She wants to have a solicitor here when the inspector comes. She suggests Mike Heston.’
‘Lawyers?’ said Monty fiercely. ‘Bloodsuckers!’
‘Or, Mum says, we can ask Dr Simmons to write a letter saying you are suffering from shock and can’t answer questions. Mum thinks that would be a good idea for you to have a little time to recover and consider what you are going to say.’
‘What on earth have I to consider? Tell your mama,’ said Monty loftily, ‘that I am certainly capable of talking to Inspector Campbell and I don’t need a solicitor there. Let the woman come. I’ll see her here. I don’t want to get back into that midget’s car and be driven miles to see her.’
‘I’ll tell Mum, but she won’t be happy.’
Tansy didn’t look very happy, either. She brushed back a strand of long, fair hair. ‘This is a rotten business, Uncle Monty.’
‘Unexpected, certainly,’ said Monty, ‘and inconvenient. Oh, I am grateful to your mother for bringing me here, and so on. She means well. But I want to go home.’
‘When you can do that will depend on the police, won’t it?’ The strand of hair fell forward again and she began to twist it round her forefinger. ‘When I said rotten business, I meant it was horrible for you to find that – to find it – and in your house.’
‘Fortunately I had that mobile phone you made me buy. Anyway, it’s not the first horrible thing I’ve ever found,’ said Monty.
‘Not – not someone else dead, surely?’ She gazed at him with appalled blue eyes.
‘There are other horrors,’ said Monty. ‘Death isn’t the worst of them.’
‘I’ve never had anything to do with death before,’ said Tansy almost inaudibly.
Monty glanced at her and then patted her arm. ‘Cheer up, young lady. You can go back and tell Bridget what I told you to tell her. Don’t worry about me. I’m tough. But there is one thing . . .’
‘Yes?’ Tansy looked up quickly with the finger still entwined in her hair.
‘Be a little love and smuggle me a glass of whisky out here?’ Monty gave her a pathetic look. ‘Please?’
A smile broke the strained expression on her face. ‘OK, Uncle Monty.’
He watched her hurry back to the house. Poor kid, only a child, really. She couldn’t be more than eighteen or nineteen and
that, to Monty, seemed unbelievably young. She was coming to the end of what she and her mother called ‘a gap year’ before going to university somewhere to study some subject he’d never heard of. He couldn’t say Tansy had had an uneventful life, not with Bridget’s habit of serial marriages. But Tansy had been packed off to some girls’ boarding school for most of the time. The job of those establishments, as far as Monty could make out, was to shelter the young ladies from bad influences, unsuitable friends and the wicked ways of the world. All the things, in fact, that made existence interesting. Now, for the first time in her young life, real unpleasantness and the outside world with all its grubby nastiness had burst in.
Perhaps it wouldn’t do her any harm. She’d have to face it sooner or later. She’d get over it, lucky if life threw no worse at her. She’d make a career eventually, or meet a nice young man or . . . just do whatever young people did nowadays. Blowed if he knew anything about it.
He couldn’t worry about Tansy. The police inspector, Jessica Campbell, was coming to see him here. The idea made him uneasy, though not because he had any hidden information. He’d told her all he could about the dead man. He wished he could tell her something else, something useful. Then the whole business could be sorted out and settled and he wouldn’t be troubled by it any more. Until then, he’d be getting continual visits from Inspector Campbell. As a person, he’d nothing against her at all. But she did bear a remarkable resemblance to dear old Penny. No wonder he’d dreamed about his childhood and Penny sitting up there on the hillside alone, brave, angry, determined and terrified.
‘Sorry, Pen,’ he whispered now. ‘Sorry for all the times I let you down. You’re always lurking at the back of my mind, you know. That’s why I got such a helluva shock when the police female walked in.’
And later on this afternoon she was going to walk in again. ‘Damn, damn, damn . . .’ muttered Monty. ‘Are you having a laugh at my expense, Penny, wherever you are?’
Chapter 7
Jess climbed out of her car before the Harwell home and stood for a moment assessing the scene before setting off towards the front gate. The house, she’d been warned by its owner, was located ‘rather in the middle of nowhere’ and it did stand alone on a country road. It was called, so the wooden engraved sign on the gate told visitors, The Old Lodge. From the look of the place it might once have been exactly that, a gatekeeper’s lodge standing at the entrance to a substantial estate. Both the drive and the gates it had guarded were long gone. Any great mansion to which they had led had also been pulled down or lay out of sight sinking into ruin. But, if the land beyond had been sold off, it remained as yet undeveloped.
Trees formed an untidy backdrop to the lodge. They looked like the remnant of native woodland, left to its own devices. Perhaps Bridget didn’t own that scrap of land, or perhaps she did and had let the trees stand, not only to shield the house from the wind, but also to reduce the appearance of it having been left behind when the world moved on. The house itself had a curious Grimm’s fairy-tale look. Its eaves were fringed with carved wooden boards. It had little casement windows and wooden shutters, painted dark green. The path that wound its tortuous way to the front door was paved with mossy stones. The property was surrounded by a dry stone wall.
Lonely at any time of year and I wouldn’t like to be shut up out here in winter, thought Jess. She frowned. The house did not seem to match the sophisticated woman she’d met. She imagined Bridget Harwell liked company, the bustle of city life, shops and bright lights.
She entered through the gate and set off towards the front door. It opened as she got to it, before she could knock, and a very young woman faced her. It must be Bridget’s daughter. She was pretty in a wan sort of way. With the exception of her large, pale blue eyes, she resembled her mother, having the same sharpness of feature but without the worldliness. A waterfall of long straight fair hair framed her face and the blue eyes were reddened and dark-circled, as if she’d been crying. She was dressed casually in jeans and sweatshirt emblazoned with a sportswear logo. She held, in her hand, a tumbler of whisky.
‘You’ve come to see Uncle Monty,’ she said, ignoring Jess’s proffered ID. ‘I was just going to take him his whisky. Keep Mum talking for five minutes, will you? So that I can smuggle it out to him. He’s in the back garden.’
‘Tansy?’ a woman’s voice called.
Tansy slipped past Jess and disappeared round the corner of the house, carefully shielding the whisky from view.
A second later, Bridget appeared. Seeing Jess, she heaved a theatrical sigh. ‘It’s you, then. I know you said you’d be coming. You had better come in. I should tell you that my uncle is a bit confused. I think all this has rattled him badly. I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to talk to him today. Must it be now?’
‘Yes,’ said Jess simply. ‘I understood from your daughter that Mr Bickerstaffe is in the back garden. Perhaps I could just walk round there?
‘Was Tansy here? I thought she was on her computer.’ Bridget frowned. ‘This has upset her. She has a vivid imagination. She always liked Balaclava House when I used to take her over there, when she was a little kid. Aunt Penny still lived there then and made a fuss of her.’
Bridget paused and squinted at Jess. ‘Funny thing, you look a bit like Penny – in photos I’ve seen of her when she was young. I suppose it’s the red hair. Monty was kind to Tansy in the old days, too, letting her rampage around the place. Aunt Penny eventually walked out on him, with every good reason to do so. She should have gone years earlier but she stuck it out like a heroine. Finally even she had had enough. It gave Monty a helluva shock,’ Bridget added with grim satisfaction. ‘He’d never believed she’d do it. After that, he decided to shut us all out. I have tried to maintain contact, over the years. Tansy has, too, but . . .’
Bridget shrugged in despair and shook her head. ‘Well, go and talk to him if you must. But honestly, we could all of us do without this hassle. None of us can help you. I know you can’t say how long this investigation will last, but at least, perhaps you could tell us – give me some idea – how long Uncle Monty will be involved. He wasn’t there, after all, when the – the dead chap found his way into Balaclava. He doesn’t know who he is – was.’
‘He may still be able to tell us something of interest,’ Jess persisted calmly. ‘Often people don’t realise that some small fact may be very important to us. They judge something trivial. We see it as an important link.’
Bridget folded her arms and studied Jess. The movement brought the large diamond on her ring finger into view, sparkling in the sunshine. ‘This is very inconvenient for me, you know,’ she said with sudden energy. ‘I’ll be putting the house in mothballs at the end of the month when Tansy goes off to university. I’m going over to the States.’
‘To live?’ Jess asked, surprised.
‘I’m getting married again. I’ll be living in New York.’
Oh, yes, Monty had said Bridget was remarrying; for the fourth time, if Jess remembered rightly. ‘So Tansy will be left all alone here in the UK, except for Mr Bickerstaffe?’ Jess raised her eyebrows.
‘There are other family members dotted around,’ Bridget said irritably. ‘I’m not abandoning her. She is just coming up to her nineteenth birthday. She’s not a child. If you must know, Max – my fiancé – and I tried to persuade her to go to college in the States. But she wanted to stay here in the UK.’ She shrugged. ‘The problem is more with my uncle than with my daughter. I can’t alter my plans because of him. He can’t stay here in this house alone. He can’t go back to Balaclava. It’s out of the question. He won’t accept it, but he’s got to sell the old museum piece, if he can find a buyer for it, and move into sheltered accommodation. The old boy could live the rest of his days in relative comfort. But you try telling him that!’
She shrugged. ‘You’ll find him in the far corner of the garden. There’s a seat.’ She walked back indoors and Jess was left to find her own way.
Jess was pleased Bridget hadn’t accompanied her into the garden. She didn’t want Monty annoyed when she, Jess, was trying to start a conversation. She was irritated herself by Bridget’s selfabsorption and lack of sympathy for the old man.
She turned the corner of the house and the afternoon sun struck her face, blinding her for a moment. She put up her hand to shield her eyes.
There was no sign of Tansy. She must have slipped back into the house through the rear. The garden had been carefully laid out for low maintenance, mainly lawn with a surrounding border of shrubs. In a far corner, there appeared to be a flagged patio and a sort of bower with a seat. A pair of legs stuck out into view past intervening shrubbery. She walked towards it. ‘Monty?’
Monty was sipping his whisky. He was almost unrecognisably well scrubbed and his hair had been trimmed professionally in a ‘short back and sides’ style. This had spruced him up but had the unintended effect of making him look both older and frailer. His previous well-worn and begrimed appearance had been both a kind of disguise and an armour. Now, stripped of it, it was as if he was sitting inside the wrong skin. When Jess’s shadow fell across him, he sat up with a start and placed a protective hand round the glass.
