Bleeding Heart Square

by Andrew Taylor

  ‘There’s so much we need to talk about,’ Lydia said quietly to Rory as they were walking towards the gate to Bleeding Heart Square.

  ‘I know. And I’ve got a favour to ask. Are you busy this evening?’

  ‘Not particularly. Why?’

  ‘Because I wondered if you’d be kind enough to—’ He broke off as the wicket gate opened, revealing Malcolm Fimberry framed in the doorway between Rosington Place and Bleeding Heart Square.

  ‘Mrs Langstone! Good evening.’ Fimberry beamed at her and then added with less enthusiasm, ‘Hello, Wentwood.’

  Rory nodded to him.

  Fimberry stayed where he was, blocking their way. ‘I promised to show you something of the chapel, Mrs Lang-stone. If you’ve got five minutes to spare, I can promise you won’t regret it.’

  ‘Some other time, perhaps – I have one or two things to do.’

  ‘Just for a couple of minutes? You see, because of the meeting tomorrow, Father Bertram has entrusted me with the key of the Ossuary. He can’t be there tomorrow himself, you see – there’s a diocesan committee at Westminster, so he’s asked me to liaise with Sir Rex in his place.’ He took off his rain-flecked pince-nez and polished them on his tie. ‘It’s a very good opportunity to see the encaustic tiles. I probably won’t have a chance to show you tomorrow – these meetings can be a little hectic, and I shall have to be on hand to help.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you, Mr Fimberry, but I’m—’

  ‘We’d love to,’ Rory interrupted. ‘Thank you so much.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Fimberry, disconcerted. He added gloomily, ‘Well, yes, I suppose the more the merrier.’

  Lydia glanced at Rory’s face. She felt his touch on her arm and wondered why this was important to him. ‘All right. If it really won’t take long.’

  ‘Follow me.’

  He set off towards the chapel. Rory mouthed ‘Thank you’ to Lydia. Fimberry held open the door in the little forecourt in front of the east wall of the chapel. It led into a flagged corridor running the length of the building and sparsely lit with electric wall lights.

  ‘This way,’ Fimberry said. ‘This is all that remains of the cloister, by the way. Sadly altered, of course.’

  On the left was a row of windows looking out into darkness; on the right was the south wall of the chapel, a patchwork of masonry studded with blocked openings. The place smelled damp. Lydia watched Fimberry’s shadow flickering first in front and then behind him, along the wall and along the floor, but never in one place for long and never quite where you expected it to be. In the gloom at the end of the corridor a flight of stone steps rose up to the entrance of St Tumwulf’s Chapel.

  Fimberry glanced back at them. ‘We’ll save the chapel itself for another day, Mrs Langstone. There is so much to see, and so little time!’

  ‘Sorry about this,’ Rory murmured behind her. ‘I’ll explain.’

  ‘This is the undercroft,’ Fimberry said, waving to a door set three steps down from the floor level of the cloister.

  ‘May we see in there too?’ Rory said, darting down the steps and trying the latch. The latch lifted and the door opened.

  ‘Very well. But mind the steps, Mrs Langstone, they can be treacherous. Just a moment – I’ll turn on the lights.’

  A line of bare light bulbs came to life, revealing the stark outlines of a long, low whitewashed room bisected on its east–west axis by a row of wooden posts.

  ‘Victorian,’ Fimberry said dismissively. ‘The interior had to be almost entirely refurbished when the Church bought St Tumwulf’s in the eighteen seventies.’

  Lydia looked around. Rows of chairs and benches had been set out. Near the door were tables holding crockery and urns. At the east end, five high-backed chairs stood behind a table on a low platform.

  ‘It looks as if the Inquisition will soon be in session,’ Rory said.

  ‘Sir Rex and his people made the arrangements. Well, there’s not much to see here. Shall we move on to the Ossuary?’

  ‘Does Father Bertram let the undercroft to anyone who asks?’

  ‘Oh no.’ Fimberry looked shocked. ‘That wouldn’t be appropriate. One couldn’t have atheists here, for example, or communists or people of that sort.’

  ‘But Fascists are all right?’

  ‘Father Bertram was actually presented to Signor Mussolini when he last visited Rome. He was most impressed. One can’t deny Il Duce gets results.’

  ‘I thought the Pope didn’t like him much,’ Rory said. ‘Mussolini, I mean, not Father Bertram.’ Lydia punched him lightly on the arm in an attempt to shut him up.

  ‘Father Bertram says that the Holy Father and the Italian government have had one or two differences but they will soon be sorted out. After all, Mussolini’s a son of the Church.’

  Fimberry shooed them back to the cloister and led them to another, much smaller sunken doorway set in the wall just before the flight of steps leading up to the chapel itself. He took out a bunch of keys from his raincoat pocket, unlocked the door and pulled it open. He switched on another light.

  ‘Here we are. Come and stand by me, Mrs Langstone, and you’ll be able to see properly. This is a good time to come because the chairs are usually stored in here. We’re directly under the ante-chapel.’

  The high, windowless room was long and thin. It smelled mysteriously of cats. In the far corner was a heavy table with bulbous legs.

  ‘They say that this is where the bodies of the faithful lay before they were secretly interred beneath the undercroft. Do look at the ceiling: the rib vaulting is original.’

  ‘How nice,’ Lydia said, feeling she should contribute something to the conversation. ‘Is it very old?’

  ‘Late fourteenth century at a guess.’ Fimberry squeezed past the table and stabbed an index finger at the far wall. ‘Now you see the tiles? They were covered with layers of whitewash but I scraped it off. No doubt they were used to patch the mortar by some long-forgotten builder. Almost certainly they came originally from the floor. This tile’s nearly complete – look, it’s the arms of the See of Rosington. That one is probably a scallop shell, the pilgrim badge of the shrine of St James of Compostela. Isn’t it interesting?’ He turned back to Rory and Lydia in the doorway of the Ossuary. ‘The past seems so close to us here, so close that one can actually touch it. Quite literally in this case.’ Smiling, he leant across the little room and ran the middle finger of his right hand over the putative scallop shell. ‘Don’t you feel it sometimes, Mrs Langstone? The touch of the past?’

  ‘Mr Fimberry,’ Lydia said suddenly. ‘What’s that in the corner?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Down there.’ She pointed. ‘On the floor between the table and the wall.’

  The shadow of a table leg ran across something pale and jagged half-covered by a rag. A trickof the light, Lydia thought; it can’t be anything else. Rory stirred beside her. She heard him sucking in his breath.

  A trickof the light?

  21

  Sometimes you think it’s a game to him. He has luck on his side too. Even Jacko was his ally in the end. You can’t trust anyone.

  Friday, 18 April 1930

  Jacko bit his mistress last night when I tried to make him jump down from the sofa. Not hard, but even so I was VERY cross. I shut him in the scullery. Unfortunately he howled so much that Joseph let him out.

  I did not come down for breakfast today but stayed in my room. At lunch, Joseph said he had talked to Rebecca this morning and she had told him that there was another reason why she needed to hand in her notice. Her sister has been very ill with influenza, and so has her little boy, Rebecca’s nephew, and Rebecca wants to be able to spend more time looking after them during their convalescence. They live on the other side of the village, quite a distance from here.

  Joseph has decided not to insist on her working out her month’s notice. He has told her she may leave after supper tomorrow, and he will run her over to her sister’s in the car. He thought it w
ould be kinder to her and her family, and also better for us in the long run because servants are never very satisfactory when they are working out their notice, and it will be better for us to find her successor sooner rather than later. He will pay her up to the end of the week.

  I put the best face on it I could. I was tempted to remind him that it is usually the mistress of the house who has the management of the indoor servants. But it didn’t seem quite the right moment. What is done is done.

  After this, you know there will be no more daffodils from her sweet Joey. All that’s over and done with now. Rebecca will soon be gone. Poor, foolish Amy doesn’t count.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘The thing is, there’s a lot we need to talk about.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Rory closed the cover of the typewriter. ‘I know. But I haven’t much time. I have to go out in three quarters of an hour.’

  ‘Why do you suddenly want to practise your shorthand?’

  ‘Julian Dawlish – Fenella’s friend – he knows the editor of Berkeley’s.’

  ‘The weekly?’

  ‘I’m doing a piece on spec for them about tomorrow’s meeting.’

  ‘That’s marvellous.’

  ‘If they use it.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. Damn it, it could make all the difference. It’s the first sniff of real work I’ve had, work that could lead somewhere, since I came back to England. That’s why I was keen to see the undercroft, to get an idea of the layout.’

  ‘Of course. Poor Mr Fimberry.’

  A trick of the light.

  ‘Beggars belief, doesn’t it? I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that goat’s skull under the table in the Ossuary. Why didn’t he just leave it in the dustbin? Why put it in the Ossuary? And why did he want to show it to Father Bertram?’

  ‘Because he thinks it might be the devil,’ Lydia said. ‘That’s my theory. So it’s safer on consecrated ground until Father Bertram can see it. There’s a sort of logic to it.’

  ‘Mad as a hatter, in my opinion.’

  ‘He’s ill,’ Lydia said, thinking of Colonel Alforde. No more war. ‘You can’t blame him for that.’

  Rory glanced at his wristwatch. ‘Would you mind if we start? I promised to meet Dawlish for a drink, and I haven’t used my shorthand for months, not properly. And it’s like speaking a language, you see. If you don’t use it for a while you have to get your ear in again.’

  ‘Does it matter what I talk about?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ve got it all worked out. I think it will be best to start with something completely unseen, completely unexpected. And then try something political from the paper – something with the same sort of vocabulary as they’re likely to be using tomorrow. Afterwards I’ll try and read it back to you.’ He smiled at her. ‘Are you sure you don’t mind? I know it’s an awful lot to ask.’

  ‘It’s all right. We’ve had supper – there’s nothing else I need to do.’ That was untrue. If you didn’t have servants, Lydia had discovered, there was always something you needed to do. ‘I’ll just talk away then. Are you ready?’

  He picked up his newly sharpened pencil and turned over a page in his shorthand pad. ‘Fire away, Lydia – oh damn. Sorry. Mrs Langstone, I mean.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You can call me Lydia if you want.’

  ‘As long as you call me Rory. Right, Lydia. I’m as ready as I ever will be.’

  ‘I talked to Mrs Renton,’ Lydia began, her cheeks a little pinker than before. ‘I showed her the skirt and the note. She used to do sewing for Miss Penhow. Mr Serridge introduced them. She even made some clothes for her.’ Lydia watched Rory’s pencil travelling across the paper. ‘Then Miss Penhow moved to the country, and she lost touch.’ She paused again. ‘As a matter of fact I went to Rawling yesterday.’

  The point of the pencil snapped. ‘What were you doing in Rawling, for God’s sake?’

  ‘My godfather used to live there. His wife had to go down for a funeral. I went with her.’

  Rory pushed the pad away from him, abandoning the shorthand. ‘I don’t understand. I don’t even begin to understand.’

  She smiled at him. ‘It’s much less complicated than it seems.’

  ‘Just a whacking great big coincidence. Yet another.’

  ‘Not really. Serridge only bought Morthams Farm because my father sold it to him. My father only owned it because he was left it by old Mrs Alforde. My godfather is another Alforde – so he’s a sort of cousin by marriage to my father. That’s why he’s my godfather – he and Father used to know each other long before I was on the scene. The Alfordes know my mother too – they came to my wedding, actually. My mother asked Mrs Alforde to talk to me. To try to persuade me to go back to Marcus.’

  Rory looked consideringly at her. ‘And did she?’

  ‘Yes and no.’ The colour rose in her cheeks. ‘She tried but she didn’t succeed.’ She rushed on, stumbling a little over her words. ‘My mother and father met at Rawling. In a way the Alfordes connect everything, you see. Mrs Narton worked at the Hall when they were there. And so did Rebecca at the Vicarage.’

  ‘You met her?’

  ‘When we had lunch with Mr Gladwyn. It didn’t end there, either. I went to have a look at that little barn you mentioned, the one with the skulls. Robbie shut me in. He thought I was trying to steal his skulls.’

  He whistled. ‘As the goat’s skull was stolen?’

  ‘According to Rebecca, he’s convinced Narton took it.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Probably a few days before he died.’

  ‘I saw him on Saturday,’ Rory said. ‘He could have posted it then. So Robbie thought you were another skull thief? How did you get out?’

  ‘I banged on the door. Mr Serridge rescued me in the end.’

  ‘Serridge? What was he up to? Was he following you?’

  Lydia shivered. ‘I’m not sure. He was very strange – in one way he was as nice as pie to me. But he was also rather terrifying. I’m sure he’s up to something. And there was another thing – I found something else on the shelf with the skulls, a cigar box. Rebecca told me that when she worked at Morthams Farm, Miss Penhow kept her diary in it. She thinks Miss Penhow was hiding it from Serridge.’

  ‘When did you manage to talk to Rebecca?’

  ‘Afterwards, at the Vicarage. I felt rather sorry for her. I imagine Robbie’s hers, don’t you?’

  ‘What? Why do you think that?’ Rory felt, as he often did when talking to his sisters, that where relationships were concerned they were equipped with a form of perception that he lacked. ‘I thought he was her nephew.’

  ‘He may be, I suppose. But she dotes on him. It’s far more likely he was Rebecca’s little accident, and her sister unofficially adopted him.’

  ‘Anything else?’ he asked with a trace of sarcasm in his voice. ‘Or have you pulled the last rabbit out of the hat for the time being?’

  ‘There’s the heart this morning,’ she said, smiling back at him.

  ‘I know about that. Serridge and Byrne were having a row about it when I went out this morning. Howlett came and calmed them down.’

  ‘It was nasty,’ she said soberly.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said perfunctorily. ‘I’ve got a couple of scraps of information of my own,’ he went on. ‘Nothing to compare with yours but better than nothing. I saw a photograph of Miss Penhow at Fenella’s. She looked quite pretty, but Fenella said she was older than she looked.’

  ‘According to Rebecca, she spent a lot of time and effort trying to make herself look youthful. It was rather pathetic, actually – she was trying to make herself attractive to Serridge, and he only had an eye for the girls.’

  Rory looked at his watch again. ‘I’d better go. Are you coming tomorrow?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘My husband will be there. Not to mention my future brother-in-law.’

  Rory saw her out of the flat. At the head of the stairs he said, ‘By the way,
talking of photographs, you remember the one Rebecca showed me?’ He lowered his voice. ‘Amy Narton in the altogether on Serridge’s bike? There was a little dog in it. There was also a dog in that photograph of Miss Penhow. It could have been the same one. Yesterday I was standing outside by the pub and someone went by on a bicycle. Nipper was there. And that was when it clicked: the dog in both photos looks just like Nipper.’

  Fenella was a bitch. In fact, she was a bloody bitch. And if one were to be absolutely precise about it, as Virginia Woolf would no doubt wish one to be, Fenella was a bloody, calculating bitch.

  Lydia huddled over the fire in the big cold sitting room of her father’s flat with A Room of One’s Own open but unread on the arm of her chair. It was a short book but was proving very hard to finish.

  She was pleased for Rory – of course she was: she hadn’t seen him so happy and excited since she had met him. But she couldn’t help suspecting that Fenella had an ulterior motive. Perhaps she was one of those women who are constitutionally incapable of releasing old lovers: they want to retain the advantages of the relationship without the romantic drawbacks. Fenella was keeping Rory dangling and she was probably doing the same with the unfortunate but well-connected Julian Dawlish.

  She had to face facts, Lydia told herself: one reason she felt unsettled was that if Rory became a regular contributor to magazines like Berkeley’s, he would no longer have to live at Bleeding Heart Square. The only things that connected them were the accident of their being under the same roof and this disturbing business about Miss Penhow. And it was all so humiliating too – she really didn’t want to be so interested in an unemployed journalist who had been to a grammar school and had holes in his socks. She wasn’t in love with him – it was simply a morbid fascination that had nothing to do with Rory but everything to do with Marcus.

  If she didn’t soon find a more effective distraction than Virginia Woolf, she would drown in her own thoughts. There was no one to talk to – she was alone in the house; even Mrs Renton’s room was in darkness. She could hardly swagger into the saloon bar of the Crozier and order a large whisky. Without warning, she had an acute sense of her own isolation and, before she knew what was happening, she felt tears in her eyes.