by Ann Granger
‘Stupid, stupid, stupid!’ she whispered.
Not stupid, not back then. Just naive and in love and wanting something so much she’d convinced herself it was real. For a long time now she’d read these words for what they really were, spur of the moment declarations inspired by hormones, not love. A young man’s words, a young man at heart still a boy, wanting to be in a man’s world but loath to quit the freedoms of youth, to accept the responsiblities a man’s world brought with it. In addition, a young man deeply flawed, selfish and spoiled.
There were takers and givers in this life, so her mother had once told her. There’d been a streak of cynicism in the late Mrs Pattinson, perhaps derived from long years with an unworldly husband for ever trying to see the best in his unpromising flock. Ruth knew her mother had been right in this. Ruth had been a giver but he – oh, he had been a taker, all right.
Ruth shoved the letter back in its envelope and gathered it up with the others. She couldn’t burn them in the house, Hester might walk in and see her doing it. Hester would understand but she didn’t want Hester to know. She’d burn them in the garden. It was wet underfoot out there, but that didn’t matter, a few papers needed only a match put to them.
She slipped past the kitchen. From within came the sound of a wooden spoon being scraped round a bowl and Hester humming to herself. Out the front door Ruth went, round the side of the house, scurrying down the garden path, behaving like a sneakthief on her own property. Behind the privet hedge she set to work. It wasn’t as easy as she’d thought it would be. Just putting a match to an envelope and its contents resulted in the corner smouldering, turning brown, going out. She had to take each letter from its envelope. The first single sheet she set match to, floated up into the air to her alarm and still burning, fluttered across the sky towards the house.
‘Damn!’ said Ruth aloud.
Each sheet had to be separated, screwed into a twist. She piled them up and finally managed to set light to the lot. They burned satisfactorily, though blackened wisps still floated away, betraying her presence and activity. She just hoped Hester didn’t look out of the kitchen window.
Hester hadn’t, but someone else had. Someone she’d quite forgotten.
‘What are you doing there?’
The voice came from close behind her. Ruth jumped, squeaked, and spun round.
A solid figure in a quilted nylon coat and Crimplene trousers stood watching her. Dilys Twelvetrees, a middle-aged female version of Old Billy. Her broad face, normally devoid of any expression, was alive with curiosity.
‘Burning rubbish,’ said Ruth firmly.
The expression on Dilys’s face turned to one of cunning. ‘Burning old letters,’ she said.
Ruth wanted to snap that it was none of her business. Instead she muttered, ‘Old receipts and business stuff.’
Dilys rightly dismissed this pathetic invention. She put her head on one side and contemplated Ruth. ‘You got left, didn’t you?’ she said.
‘What on earth do you mean?’ Ruth heard herself ask.
‘You got left,’ repeated Dilys patiently. ‘Like me. Your feller left you, too.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Ruth. ‘You knew my husband. He died.’
‘Not him,’ said Dilys scornfully. ‘Before him. A young feller.’ She glanced at the patch of blackened scraps and feathery pale ash. ‘Surprised you kept ’em so long,’ she said.
With that, as if she knew she’d uttered an unanswerable statement, Dilys turned and plodded off on her way home.
How could she know? How could the woman know? Was it just by some instinct or – Ruth’s heart pounded at the thought – had Dilys found the key, worked out that it opened the box and read the letters? She hadn’t thought Dilys had that much curiosity in her. Now she wasn’t sure.
Drat the woman, thought Ruth. Drat the whole Twelvetrees, clan.
Dilys was employed by them as a cleaner for the ‘rough work’, the scrubbing of the ancient flags on the kitchen floor, the cleaning of windows, the taking up of rugs and beating the living daylights out of them in the backyard. In winter, Dilys cleaned out the log-burning stove in the sitting room. Dilys was good at peeling spuds and carrots, releasing Hester for the making of her complicated sauces.
Of course, Ruth and Hester could easily have managed all these things between them. But what other work would Dilys have found in Lower Stovey? Employing Dilys was what the Reverend Pattinson, Ruth’s father, would have called an act of Christian charity. What was more, the link between their two families covered two generations.
Many years ago, Dilys’s mother had been employed by Ruth’s mother to scrub the vicarage floors. Dilys’s brother, Young Billy, had mown the vicarage lawns before he left the village to make his way in the outside world. When Ruth and her late husband had returned to Lower Stovey to set up home in the Old Forge, Dilys had turned up on the doorstep on their first morning there, stolidly announcing, ‘You’ll want me to do for you, will you?’ Not a question, just a statement.
So why was it, then, that the sight of Dilys’s shapeless form and work-worn hands added to that sense of guilt which Ruth seemed to have been destined from birth to carry around with her, weighing down her shoulders and unable to be shed. Sinbad had the Old Man of the Sea and she, Ruth, had Dilys.
Ruth could remember, as clearly as if it had happened yesterday, the very first time she’d set eyes on Dilys Twelvetrees. They’d both been five years old and it had been their joint first day at school.
The school, of course, had been Lower Stovey Church Primary School. It no longer existed as a school. Dwindling numbers had led to its closure some years back, followed by sale and redevelopment. The buildings had been converted into a close of maisonettes, done rather cleverly. The people who lived in School Close were not villagers, although they were residents. They commuted to jobs in Bamford or elsewhere. They might show their faces occasionally of an evening in the Fitzroy Arms, but otherwise they were invisible, taking no part in village life. Or, as Ruth phrased it to herself, what passed for life in Lower Stovey these days.
The Reverend Pattinson had believed it right and proper that his daughter should attend primary school with the other village children. The inevitable boarding school would come later. This wasn’t because her parents couldn’t bear to send her miles away. It would be nice to think that, but untrue. Had they considered it the right thing to do, they’d have ferried her back and forth to some private school. But they had considered it right she should attend Lower Stovey Church Primary. Possibly they’d also been happy to save on fees for a few years and the chore of the daily school run. But chiefly the vicar (more than his wife who knew the village rather better than he did) believed that Ruth would learn from mixing with the village children and they from association with her. Moreover, the parents of the children would see that the vicar and his family were approachable, human, one of them.
Which they weren’t and couldn’t ever be, thought Ruth crossly. Her four years at Lower Stovey Church Primary had been wretched. Good intentions don’t always result in good outcomes. From the start she’d been an outsider and an oddity, held by the other children in contempt. She talked posh. Her father didn’t work with his hands at a proper job. He was a Holy Joe who sat in his study among books. In Ruth’s hearing at school, the children, quoting their parents and finding the words hilarious, referred to their spiritual leader as a bit of an old woman.
But his wife, now, that had been a different matter. Ruth’s mother, prior to her marriage, had been Miss Fitzroy, last of that line. She’d grown up at the Manor, (nowadays a retirement home for the well-heeled elderly). Older villagers, ignoring her marriage, had continued to address her as ‘Miss Mary’. The vicar’s wife drove a car, which none of the village women did fifty years ago. She drove it once a week to Bamford to have her hair washed and set at a proper hairdresser’s, and twice a year made an expedition by train to London where, villagers whispered in awe, she had her hair cut in Harrods’
hairdressing department. The village women gave each other home perms which, in damp weather, frizzed and made the wearer look as if she’d had an electric shock.
On her first day at school Ruth had been confused at midday by being told it was now dinner-time and if she wasn’t having her dinner at school, she could go home, returning by two o’clock. At the vicarage they ate dinner in the evening. She caused hilarity by saying, ‘Oh, you mean lunch.’ Only she’d probably said ‘luncheon’ because the vicar was fussy about details like that. It was one of many faux pas Ruth was never allowed to forget.
On that first day she’d been seated next to Dilys Twelvetrees and been distressed by the strange odour emanating from the other child. Later she was able to identify this odour as being compounded of rancid chip fat and cabbage water, the smells of which clung to Dilys’s clothes which were seldom washed. As was Dilys, come to that. To be fair, the majority of village parents wouldn’t have dreamed of sending their offspring to school other than clean and tidy, the boys with hair cut to military shortness and girls with tightly-braided pigtails. But the Twelvetrees family, Ruth had soon discovered, was not as other families. They were regarded by other villagers with mistrust and unease. They, too, were outsiders of a kind and Ruth sometimes wondered if the class teacher had seated the two little girls together for that reason, calculating that individual isolation might cause them to strike up a friendship. If so, it hadn’t worked. Dilys might be one of ‘them Twelvetrees lot’ but she joined in the general contempt of Ruth.
Also at the school, but older and in senior grades, were Sandra and Young Billy (already so-called) Twelvetrees. Ruth had little to do with Young Billy who was an amiable, unteachable ten-year-old, given to ‘skiving off’. Sandra and Dilys were poorly nourished and badly dressed. Dilys was the worse dressed because she had to wear Sandra’s cast-offs and they’d already been cast off by someone else. On one terrible day, Dilys had appeared in a last year’s cotton dress of Ruth’s, bought for a few pence at a church jumble sale. It was too tight in the bodice and where the hem had been let down it was a different colour. Ruth had been embarrassed by this, but Dilys had hated her for it and contrived to spill green poster paint over Ruth’s laboriously just-finished painting of the Queen in her Coronation Coach. In winter, the Twelvetrees sisters wore knitted pixie hoods. Their shoes were never cleaned, neither were their teeth. Which is why, thought Ruth sadly, I’ve got my own teeth now and poor Dilys has got a false set.
Moreover, there was one thing about both Dilys and Sandra which secretly fascinated and frightened the infant Ruth. From time to time their arms and legs sported unexplained bruises, not the sort caused by falling down and scraping your knees in the playground. These were long narrow bruises and appeared in clusters. She never dared to ask Dilys about them.
How on earth did my father ever imagine I’d fit in at Lower Stovey Primary? wondered Ruth now, not for the first time. The teachers had been kind but it had made matters worse, causing her to be dubbed ‘teacher’s pet’ and to have ‘goody-goody’ chanted at her. It was true she never misbehaved. She couldn’t. She was the vicar’s daughter and he had told her, as had her mother, that she must set an example. An example of what? At five you really don’t understand. Ruth had interpreted it as meaning you always did as you were told and never opened your mouth without permission.
Originally she was to have suffered at Lower Stovey Church Primary until she was eleven. But one day, when she was nine, she had come home and innocently repeated some new words learned that morning in the playground. These words (she had no idea what they meant) were apparently so wicked as to necessitate her being taken away from the school almost at once. The day she’d walked out of the gates for the last time had been one of the happiest of her life.
After that she’d been dispatched, despite her tender years, to boarding school, a wind-swept institution on Dartmoor which might have shared much of its regime with the celebrated prison there.
From then on, Lower Stovey had only been visited at holiday times and later, in university vacations. Her mother’s letters would occasionally mention some village event which would update Ruth on her former schoolmates. Sandra married a soldier and went off to foreign climes with him, something it was hard to imagine. Dilys got married too, but was abandoned by her husband within a year. She’d returned home to her parents, which suited them as Mrs Twelvetrees (who also, from time to time, had sported odd bruises), had been rendered housebound by an affliction of her legs. She died not long afterwards and Dilys stayed on to keep house for her ageing father. Her married name was abandoned by common consent and she’d become Dilys Twelvetrees again, as if her marriage had been a sort of blip and could be ignored.
So it had been until Ruth’s return to Lower Stovey with her husband some twelve years earlier. Both her parents were dead by then. The vicarage was a private residence inhabited by Muriel Scott and Roger, then a boisterous pup of whom his mistress would blithely assure everyone that ‘he’d quieten down as he got older’. If only! Age, in Roger’s case, seemed to have disposed of what little canine reason he’d ever possessed. The school was on the verge of closing. Somehow, seeing Dilys on the doorstep that first morning, far from being unwelcome, had been almost a comfort. Something at least was the same. Probably exactly the same. Ruth wondered whether, in secret, Dilys still despised her.
Chapter Five
I
Dave Pearce stood before the bathroom mirror, his mouth opened as wide as was physically possible, and performed a series of stretches and contortions in an effort to inspect one of his own teeth. The mirror was inconveniently placed, not high enough for him. Tessa insisted that fixed any higher, it would be too high for her. It meant he had to half-crouch in an attitude hard to maintain. The light wasn’t good enough. If he approached the mirror any closer, his breath steamed it up and he couldn’t see at all. He hooked a finger into his lower lip, pulling it down, and wrenched his head sideways producing one more face which would have won him any girning competition. The tooth looked all right to him. So why, then, when he ate anything on that side, or drank anything very hot or cold, did it suddenly feel as if someone had jabbed a redhot needle in his jaw?
He gave up the attempt and finished shaving. He supposed he could stop off at a dentist’s surgery on the way to work and make an appointment. He clattered down the stairs. As he reached the hall, the front door opened and Tessa appeared, flushed of face, hauling a reluctant brindled lurcher in her wake.
‘I’ve walked Henry,’ she said in a voice which held layers of meaning.
‘I said I’d do it,’ offered Pearce lamely.
‘Saying’s not much good, is it? I didn’t think you were ever coming out of that bathroom. I’ve just run round the playing field with him. But tonight you can walk him. It’s your turn!’
‘All right, I’ll walk him!’ Pearce’s temper began to fray. Henry collapsed on the floor, put his head on his paws and rolled his eyes upward, watching his owners with interest.
‘I know why you were so long up there!’ announced Tessa, arms akimbo. ‘It’s that flipping tooth. I told you to make a dental appointment.’
‘I will, I’ll make one,’ he promised.
‘Yeah, like you promised to walk Henry. You put everything off, David.’
He knew he was in trouble when she called him David.
‘I promise you,’ he said, ‘that some time today, if I’m not too busy, I’ll ring the dentist’s and fix an appointment. And when I get home the first thing I’ll do is walk Henry.’
‘I’m going to be late for work,’ she swept on effortlessly to a new grievance. ‘You’ll have to drop me off.’
‘It means going out—’ Pearce began but didn’t finish. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Get your skates on or we’ll both be late.’
‘Get my skates on? You know, Dave, for someone with such a responsible job as you’ve got, you’re not very good at taking responsibilities at home. You can’t just switch o
ff, you know, like a – a telly. One life inside the box, another out. I mean,’ Tessa became aware that her simile was leading down a complicated path. ‘Of course, I don’t want you to bring your work home. I don’t bring my work home, do I? I get loads of hassle at the building society. But I don’t leave my sense of responsibility behind when I leave at the end of the day, either. Now you—’
‘For crying out loud, get in the car!’ exploded Pearce.
‘There’s no need to shout. You’re not arresting me, you know. I’ve not some yobbo with a skinful of lager. If you’ll just hang on a moment, I’ve got to change my shoes.’
‘Can’t you change them in the car?’
‘I wouldn’t have to change them at all if I hadn’t had to walk Henry. And I wouldn’t have had to walk Henry if you hadn’t been stuck in the bathroom messing with that tooth. If we’re running late this morning, David Pearce,’ Tessa finished this tour de force of logic, ‘it’s because you’re scared of going to the dentist. So there,’ she added.
Sometimes, thought Pearce, police work was a doddle compared with domestic life. He sighed.
Henry groaned in sympathy from the carpet.
II
Alan Markby sat at his desk. He’d been there since early morning, arriving while the cleaners were still at work. Yet when he’d picked up the phone he’d found that someone had arrived in Records, though the off-hand tone with which the phone was answered suggested whoever it was had just got in and was taking off his coat.
‘What is it?’ asked the voice curtly. It added loudly to someone else, ‘Yeah, you can bring me a cup of coffee and a bacon sarnie.’
Markby identified himself and was mildly amused by the change in attitude and tone.
‘Yes, sir. Sorry, Mr Markby, didn’t know it was you. I just got in. What can we do for you?’
