Bleeding Heart Square
Page 20
Serridge’s hand released its grip. Narton stayed where he was, rubbing his neck. Serridge took a step back and smiled.
‘No one knows I’m here,’ he went on. ‘That’s the beauty of a motor car. You’re free as air, aren’t you? I parked up a lane the other side of Mavering and walked over the fields. So it’s just you and me, old man.’
‘You can bugger off. That’s what you can do.’
Serridge didn’t move. ‘How’s Margaret, by the way? Still like to ride on top? Used to be quite a goer in the old days. And the way she squeals, eh? Like a stuck pig, she was. Had to cover her mouth. But maybe she’s a bit quieter now.’
Narton said nothing.
‘Been nice to have a chat,’ Serridge said. ‘But all good things must end.’ He was still smiling.
There was another parcel for Mr Serridge in the afternoon post. But this one was different. It was oblong in shape and about the size of a shoebox. It was wrapped as usual in brown paper and fastened with string. The name and address were printed.
When Lydia came back from work, she found Mrs Renton examining the parcel.
‘It’s bigger.’ Frowning, she picked it up and shook it gently. ‘But lighter.’
‘Do you think it’s from the same person?’ Lydia asked in not much more than a whisper.
‘How do I know?’ She put it down on the hall table. ‘You look like you need a tonic. Are you eating properly?’
‘Yes. It’s this beastly weather. It’s enough to make anyone feel a little blue round the edges.’
Mrs Renton sniffed. ‘Your father’s upstairs. Mr Fimberry’s with him. They were in the Crozier at dinnertime.’
‘I didn’t think that was really Mr Fimberry’s sort of thing.’
Mrs Renton lowered her voice. ‘He can be sly, that one.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Ask me no questions, dear, and I’ll tell you no lies.’ The old woman shuffled down the hallway to the door of her own room. ‘Men, eh? You watch out.’
Lydia went upstairs to her bedroom, where she took off her hat and coat. If only it were Rory Wentwood with her father, not Malcolm Fimberry. In the sitting room she found the two men sitting by the fire. Her father was sprawling like a discarded rug over the sofa, snoring quietly. Glass in hand, Fimberry leapt out of his chair as soon as he saw her, his pince-nez tumbling from his nose. Drops of beer spattered the arm of his chair. A smile like a nervous twitch cut his pink face in two.
Oh dear God, Lydia thought, I do believe the blasted man’s in love with me.
‘Mrs Langstone!’ he exclaimed. ‘I just popped in. I remembered your father saying that you found the nights a little cold.I – I have a spare hot-water bottle, and I wondered whether you might find it useful.’ He gestured towards the table where six empty pale ale bottles stood in a row. Beside them was a hot-water bottle made of stoneware. ‘Old-fashioned, I know. But so much safer than rubber.’
‘I’m sure it is. But I couldn’t possibly—’
‘It’s no trouble, really. As I said, I’ve got two.’
‘In that case, thank you, Mr Fimberry. I had one of those when I was a child. My nurse used to call it a stone pig.’
‘Stone as in stoneware, of course,’ he said eagerly. ‘Pig in the sense of an oblong mass of something, I suppose. It’s a difficult word to get hold of.’
‘Do sit down, Mr Fimberry.’ She wondered how much beer he had managed to consume.
He smiled at her again, and dabbed his face with a handkerchief. ‘Don’t mind me, Mrs Langstone.’
‘Actually, there are one or two things I need to do.’
He sat down rather suddenly in his chair. ‘You carry on. I’ll be perfectly all right. I just need to catch my breath if you don’t mind.’
‘Would you like some tea?’
‘Eh? No, thank you.’
Fimberry was still there, still nursing his beer, when Lydia returned a quarter of an hour later with a cup of tea. He started up again like a jack-in-the-box when he saw her. She told him to sit down. No sooner had she herself sat down at the table, than he leapt up again to offer her a cigarette. Meanwhile Captain Ingleby-Lewis continued to doze, his snoring modulating to a noisy breathing with a squeak in it that reminded Lydia of the creaking stable weathervane at Monkshill.
Without much enthusiasm, she tried to turn her mind towards the subject of what she should cook for supper. Her mind, on the other hand, seemed to have a will of its own: it wanted to think about that hateful scene at Frogmore Place yesterday or, failing that, to wonder whether Rory Wentwood was upstairs and to speculate about what he had been doing during the day. She heard Mr Fimberry laboriously clearing his throat.
‘I – I did enjoy our conversation the other day, Mrs Langstone, about the old legends. You remember? The ambassador’s dance and all those Catholics who are secretly buried here. Of course that story about the devil must be a folk tale of some sort. But it got me thinking about where the name might have come from. Bleeding Heart Square, I mean. I’ve done a little research. There was a story in the last century that the square took its name from the bishop’s slaughterhouse on this site.’
‘It doesn’t sound very romantic.’
‘No. But there are other possibilities. In the old days there were a number of public houses called the Bleeding Heart. So is the name a medieval survival? Perhaps it was originally attached to pilgrim stories, and the heart in question was the bleeding heart of Jesus.’
‘Or I suppose they might have got the spelling wrong,’ Lydia said. ‘They weren’t very good at spelling in the old days, were they? Even Shakespeare couldn’t spell his own name.’
Fimberry blinked but a moment later he followed her train of thought. ‘Yes. I see what you mean. Hart meaning a stag.’ He frowned. ‘A hart is an immature stag, I fancy, to be absolutely precise. Let me see – a hart of grease meant a fat hart and a hart royal of course signified a hart that had been chased by a king. So perhaps a bleeding hart would be a hart that had been run down by the hounds, and torn apart.’ He leant forward, his face pinker than ever, and the muscles of his mouth working as though endowed with independent life. ‘And perhaps the heart of the hart was bleeding, if you see what I mean … It all comes back to the bleeding heart, Mrs Langstone. I saw a bleeding heart once.’ He stared blankly at Lydia. ‘Did you know that?’
‘Really?’ Lydia kept her voice calm and quiet, sensing that the conversation had shifted abruptly into another direction.
‘A man’s heart, that is.’
‘How interesting, Mr Fimberry. And where was that?’
‘In France,’ he said, as though stating the obvious.
‘In the army?’
He nodded. ‘I still dream about it, you know. Not just the heart, all of it.’ His eyes were imploring, asking for something that it was not in anyone’s power to give. ‘I was only out there for three months. Passchendaele. They sent me home after that. Invalided out. My nerves have never been quite right since then.’
Lydia said that she was sorry to hear that too. It was a shockingly inadequate thing to say but it seemed to satisfy Mr Fimberry, who nodded and smiled greedily at her, which made her feel even worse. It was almost with relief that she heard a car drawing up outside the house.
‘I wonder if that’s Mr Serridge,’ she said.
‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ Fimberry said in a normal tone of voice as though nothing had happened. ‘He spends a lot of time driving about, doesn’t he?’
Neither of them spoke. They listened to the sighing and whistling of Ingleby-Lewis’s breathing, to the slam of the front door and to movements in the house below. Lydia finished her tea.
There were heavy footsteps on the stairs. Serridge came into the room without knocking. He was still wearing his hat and overcoat, and he had the parcel under his arm.
‘When did this come?’ he demanded.
‘Mrs Renton said it was this afternoon,’ Lydia said.
He grunted and swe
pt off his hat. ‘Sorry to barge in, Mrs Langstone. I’m just wondering if this is another of those damned pranks. Somebody’s idea of a practical joke.’
Ingleby-Lewis sneezed. His eyes opened and focused on Serridge. ‘Ah – there you are, old man. Got your parcel, I see.’
‘I’ve a good mind to throw it in the dustbin.’
‘Can’t be sure it’s one of those,’ Ingleby-Lewis pointed out. ‘No reason why it should be.’
‘I’ll take it away.’ Serridge glanced at Lydia. ‘In case it’s something not fit for a lady’s eyes.’
‘Lydia won’t mind,’ Ingleby-Lewis said. ‘Will you, my dear?’
She smiled at him. ‘If you say so.’
‘Chip off the old block, eh? Tough as old boots.’
Serridge said, ‘If you’re sure, Mrs Langstone,’ and put the parcel on the table. He took out a pocket knife and cut the tightly knotted string. He tugged the paper impatiently and it glided away to the floor. Lydia, who was sitting across the table from Serridge, saw that the parcel contained a cardboard box marked City Superfine Laundries Ltd. He eased off the lid, revealing yellowing newspaper roughly crumpled into balls. She leant forward. There was something white beneath the yellow. Serridge poked it gently with his fore-finger.
‘Christ,’ he muttered. ‘Sorry, Mrs Langstone.’
‘What have you got there?’ Ingleby-Lewis said, his hand groping blindly for the glass on the table beside the sofa.
‘It looks like bone,’ Lydia said.
Serridge’s hand plunged into the box. ‘It’s a bloody goat,’ he said in a flat voice. ‘Pardon me, Mrs Langstone. An old billy goat by the look of it. Look at that forehead. Must have been a real bruiser in its prime.’
Lydia stared at the long skull with its curving horns. The lower jaw was missing. It wasn’t like the head of an animal, she thought, more like a weapon. She heard the creak of Fimberry’s chair and his uncertain footsteps coming towards the table.
‘A goat’s skull,’ he said. ‘A billy goat. Yes, most interesting. I suppose it fits perfectly, doesn’t it?’
Serridge said in a very gentle voice, ‘What does it fit, Mr Fimberry? Come on, tell us.’
Fimberry gave a nervous little laugh. ‘With Bleeding Heart Square, Mr Serridge. With the legend of the lady dancing away with the devil. The goat is a symbol of Satan.’
On Tuesday morning Rory walked to Southampton Row, where a former colleague on the South Madras Times now had a position as a copywriter with the marketing department of a firm manufacturing sanitaryware. The colleague was unfortunately too busy to see him. Rory returned to Bleeding Heart Square, making a detour via Farringdon Road to buy tobacco.
His route took him past Howlett’s lodge at the bottom of Rosington Place. The Beadle was in the act of opening the gate to let in a large silver-grey car, a Derby Bentley sports saloon with a uniformed chauffeur at the wheel. The nearside window at the back of the car glided down. A man threw out a cigarette end. He had a smooth, pale face with rounded features; he was clean-shaven except for a small moustache, and his black hair was swept back from his forehead, exposing a neat little widow’s peak at the centre.
Rory had never seen him before. But he recognized the man sitting beyond him on the other side of the car. He had only a glimpse of the profile but it was enough. It was the younger of the two men he had seen coming out of Lord Cassington’s house in Upper Mount Street. In other words, it was almost certainly Marcus Langstone.
In the few seconds that Rory was waiting on the pavement, he had time to notice that Howlett was all smiles. He actually saluted as the car slid past him into Rosington Place. The impression of a loyal retainer welcoming the young masters home was only spoiled by Nipper’s behaviour. The dog had been shut inside the lodge but he had scrambled up to the window ledge and was making his feelings felt with a piercing yapping.
Something to do with Lydia Langstone, Rory supposed – perhaps they were going to call on her at Shires and Trimble. The poor kid. Her family wouldn’t leave her alone. Not that she was a kid, of course. She was as old as he was, and a married woman.
On Tuesday Lydia had a day off. She had only learned about it the previous evening. Mr Shires was proving infuriatingly vague about when he wanted her at the office, which made it difficult to plan anything.
After breakfast she tidied away and made the beds, her father’s as well as her own. He had gone out, and she was alone in the flat. She found the brown paper from Mr Serridge’s parcel under the table. She smoothed it out, folded it up and put it in the kitchen drawer. Waste not, want not, as Nanny used to say. These days she had no choice in the matter.
As she was sweeping the hearth, she heard a car drawing up outside the house. The doorbell rang. Mrs Renton’s footsteps dragged along the hall.
‘Mrs Langstone?’ she called upstairs a moment later. ‘A visitor for you.’
Lydia ripped off her apron, glanced at her reflection in the mirror by the door and went to the head of the stairs. It might be Marcus or possibly her mother, and in either case she was ready for a fight. There was no going back now in any sense, not after what she’d seen on Sunday at Frogmore Place.
‘Lydia! Darling!’
Standing in the hall was her sister Pamela. As soon as she saw Lydia, she ran upstairs with her arms outstretched.
‘Sweetie! So this is where you’ve been hiding yourself. It’s lovely to see you.’ She flung her arms around Lydia and enfolded her in an embrace that drove the breath out of her. Pamela drew back and looked at her. ‘Darling – you feel so thin. Have you been on a diet?’
‘No – well, yes, in a way.’
‘And your hands! When did you last have them manicured?’
Mrs Renton was still looking up at them. There were voices outside, growing nearer, and one of them was Serridge’s.
‘You’d better come in,’ Lydia said, opening the door to the sitting room of the flat.
Pamela followed her in. For a moment she stood in the doorway, looking around. Her eyes lingered on the ruined armchair in the corner. ‘Good Lord. I say, this is jolly. So … so Bohemian.’
‘No, it’s not,’ Lydia said. ‘There’s no need to be tactful. But it’ll do for the time being.’
Pamela’s eyes widened as they lingered on the pipe in the ashtray on the table. ‘Is it – is it all yours?’
‘Hasn’t Mother told you? This is my father’s flat.’
Pamela blinked. ‘Your father? But I thought he lived abroad.’
‘Not now. He came back.’
‘I see.’ Pamela smiled. ‘Anyway, I’m glad I’m here at last. It’s been horrible without you.’
Lydia turned aside to pick up yesterday’s evening paper from the sofa. ‘Won’t you sit down?’
Her sister fluttered onto the sofa, where she perched like an expensive bird. She opened her handbag and took out a cigarette case with a diamanté clasp, rather dressy for a morning call.
‘I’m afraid I can’t offer you coffee,’ Lydia said. ‘Would you like tea instead?’
‘Not for me, darling.’ She held out the cigarette case.
Lydia shook her head. ‘How did you get the address?’
‘I asked Mother.’ Pamela lit a cigarette. ‘I do think you’re a beast not to write.’
‘Sorry,’ Lydia said.
‘Did you get my note with the invitation?’
Lydia nodded.
‘I wish you’d sent me a postcard or something. Or rung me up. I’ve been worried about you. Why did you do a bunk?’
‘Marcus and I haven’t been getting on very well.’
Pamela pursed her lips. ‘Are you sure it’s not just one of those things that marriages go through? You know, one of those things they warn you about in the instruction manuals: for better or worse, richer or poorer, all that sort of thing.’
Lydia shook her head.
‘He’s always been as nice as pie to me.’
‘You’re not married to him, Pammy.’
‘With difficulty,’ Lydia said. ‘Like most people, I suppose.’
‘Mother says you’ve got a job.’
‘I work in a solicitor’s office.’
‘How amusing.’
‘I’m one down from the office boy. Part-time. Ten bob a day.’
‘But that’s frightful. Do you actually need some money? It never occurred to me. But I’ve got—’ She broke off and reached for her handbag.
‘No,’ Lydia said. ‘Thank you, but no. It’s very kind of you, but I’m managing very well.’
Pamela subsided. She stubbed out her cigarette and leant forward. ‘Actually, it was Mother who suggested I come and see you.’
Lydia said warily, ‘What does she want you to do?’
‘Just to see if you’re all right. She is awfully upset, you know.’
Lydia nodded. There had never been much wrong with Lady Cassington’s intelligence. Their mother had calculated not only that Lydia might refuse to see her but that she would want to see Pammy; and also that, for Pammy’s sake, Lydia would keep quiet about what she had seen on Sunday morning. That, of course, assumed that Lady Cassington had realized that Lydia had seen her in flagrante with Lydia’s husband.