The Company She Kept

by Marjorie Eccles

  It was not signed.

  ‘See what I mean?’ asked Kite as Mayo came to the end of this missive, turned the page over to see if there was anything more, but found nothing. ‘Dido, Elissa – babies’ cremation urns! What in the name of God are we expected to make of that?’

  ‘Dido as in Dido and Aeneas’ Mayo was able to inform them modestly, enlightenment having gradually dawned on him as he read.

  Kite, however, looked blank and Abigail, who might have known what Mayo meant but had learned to be careful of appearing too clever, said nothing.

  ‘It’s an opera. Maybe somebody saw it in London like I did, the other week. Over-stimulating to the imagination – that particular production at any rate.’

  ‘Oh, an opera,’ said Kite.

  ‘Based on the legend of Dido, a queen of ancient Carthage, who ended up flinging herself into the flames when her lover Aeneas deserted her.’

  Abigail couldn’t resist that. ‘What man on earth’s worth that, I ask myself. Her laugh almost took the acid out of it.

  ‘She was also known as Elissa,’ Mayo said, tapping the letter. And Tanit was the moon-goddess of Carthage who demanded sacrifices of babies and small children.’

  ‘Sounds like a real fun evening!’ Kite said.

  ‘Disappointing.’

  Mayo had gone alone and was glad he had. Purcell wasn’t much in Sergeant Jones’s line. Alex and he shared their intimate moments when their off-duty coincided and would, if he had his way, share the rest of their lives, but the one area where their tastes didn’t coincide was music. She liked hers soft and easy and could take it or leave it, whereas for him it was serious and at the centre of his life. The tragic opera had been memorable for more than the felicitous marriage of words and the most glorious musical instrument of all, the human voice. It had been a clever, arty production, a combination of opera and dance, and a horrifying subtext which had underlined the dark themes of superstition and betrayal and sacrifice. With its dramatic background of flames and fire, and frenzied, naked dancers, he had found it ultimately deeply depressing. It had haunted him, if that wasn’t too strong. At any rate, made the hairs rise on the back of his neck ... just as this letter did.

  He read it again and could make nothing of it. He decided it was probably from some poor soul who wasn’t quite right in the head, or from someone who was having them on, with long odds on the latter. He’d learned to be cynical about these things.

  Abigail said, ‘What shall we do about following it up, sir?’

  ‘What can we do, where do we start, without anything more specific to go on? There’s no way this can be taken as material evidence of a murder. Even if we’re expected, as I assume we are, to believe that years ago some old woman was murdered?’

  She didn’t appear to be too convinced, obviously believing there was some mileage in pursuing the idea. Her mouth was stubborn even though she knew he was watching her, judging her with the steady dark look that was capable of making potential suspects buckle at the knees. His gut feeling where Abigail was concerned was that she was good, and going to be better. She was young and as far as he knew had no ties or encumbrances, which was all to the good as far as her career was concerned. Tough going stimulated her; throw down a challenge in front of her and she’d pick it up and run with it – more than some of her male colleagues were prepared to do. But he thought briefly of last month’s crime figures, this month’s budget, his permanently overstretched team, shook his head and then dismissed the letter from his mind.

  He flicked the pink paper back on to the desk. ‘Nasty overtones – but why stop there? If she really has something to tell, she’ll write again. I doubt it, though, now that she’s got it off her chest.’

  Abigail looked enigmatic at his choice of pronoun, but it hadn’t only been the pink scented paper and its matching envelope, lined with deepest rose, that was suggestive of a woman writer. There was also – he had to say it – the hysterical tone. And the handwriting, which was loopy and irregular, increasingly illegible towards the end, with backward-curling down-loops and sentences only half-completed. And the erratic syntax and punctuation, which could, of course, apply to either sex. But the general tone of the letter struck him as unquestionably female.

  He went on his way at last, certain they had heard the end of the whole thing. A prediction which could hardly have been more wrong.

  CHAPTER 3

  When Sophie first came to Flowerdew in 1978, a sepia photograph had stood on the walnut lowboy in the drawing-room: a snapshot of Kitty Wilbraham when young, a small but gallant figure in a safari jacket and divided skirt, wearing a pith helmet with a wealth of richly curling hair tumbling from under it. Around her were the stone ruins of Carthage, beside her a monumental fallen column, its mighty head in the dust. Two men were pictured with her. One of them was her husband, Alfred, a stout, bearded, elderly figure reminiscent of King George the Fifth, and clad – inexplicably under that bright harsh sun – in tweed plus fours and a stiff collar. The other man was Milralav Bron, another archaeologist who had been working with the Wilbrahams on the same dig. He was taller than Alfred, and very dark, sporting a bold moustache, a regrettable shirt and a louche smile. But then he was, after all, a foreigner.

  The departed Alfred Wilbraham seemed to have been an unimpeachably virtuous figure whose integrity, erudition and wisdom Kitty never ceased to extol. He had died in Tunisia from a fall of rock upon his unprotected head after an inexplicable failure to keep to his own rules and wear a helmet when working. He left no issue but to Kitty he had willed Flowerdew, a largeish house about a dozen miles from Lavenstock, named for the Elizabethan adventurer who had built it. The place had belonged to Alfred’s family for generations and was shabby through a continued lack of interest in spending money on its maintenance. It was also extremely inconvenient by modern standards, but he hoped she would continue to use it as a retreat in the intervals of grubbing about in the sand.

  Kitty, Sophie gathered when she began to piece the bits of her life together, had done as Alfred wished and kept the house as her base whenever she was in England with the exception of the war years, when she had enlisted in the ATS in the hope of being sent abroad. In view of her intimate knowledge of the Middle East, however, she was immediately put on to secret work at the War Office, where she was kept for the duration. Obliged to make the best of it, she worked off her ferocious energy in the little spare time she had by writing books about her work on the excavations of Carthage, which were published with some success after the war. Not even the publicity this brought her (which she was not slow to play up to by adopting a flamboyant style of dressing) could keep her permanently from her life’s work in Tunisia, however. When the flush of fame had died down she returned there, until age and arthritis forced her to retire permanently to Flowerdew. She put on weight, grew more bizarre than ever, drank quantities of sweet mint tea all day long and became obsessed with the idea that she was about to die and that she must write her memoirs before she did.

  It would give her something to occupy herself with, she announced and besides, the money would come in useful. Flowerdew had never recovered from its sad neglect before and during the war; it had now reached the age where it was threatening to fall into complete ruin if it were not propitiated by having vast sums of money spent on it. Money didn’t have the same value as it had when Alfred died; she was growing poor. Nobody believed this. Alfred had left her what was a comfortable fortune by any standards but, open-handed in other directions, she was certainly canny with money.

  Writing had always come easily to Kitty and despite her belief in her imminent demise the flow was unstemmed. She had a trained mind well-honed by her days at Girton, her notes had always been meticulously kept and arranged, she had an excellent memory and she was blessed with a prose style that was sharp and entertaining and not at all what might have been expected from her dusty subject. Her lightness of touch was frowned upon by other academics – Funerary Customs and Sacrif
icial Rites in Phoenician Carthage, the title of her latest book, and the Punic Wars, in which field she was an acknowledged expert, were after all no laughing matter – although no fault could be found with her scholarship. They were only jealous, Kitty retorted, because her books continued to sell well. And not only as textbooks for serious students but to armchair archaeologists who preferred to take their doses of culture sweetened by a little lightness and humour.

  When it came to her memoirs, however, it became apparent that Kitty’s normal exuberance and enthusiasm would need to be leavened with circumspection. Her personal life had been enlivened by encounters and friendships with all sorts and conditions of people; she had met princes and potentates and what she had to tell was quite often scandalous, sometimes libellous, and would certainly not be well received in the touchy climate of Middle Eastern politics. Even she began to realize that she must cut and prune and omit where necessary, something that went so much against the grain of her own nature that she began to lose interest in the idea.

  It was Madeleine Freeman who suggested she employ a secretary. Madeleine was Kitty’s doctor, a sensible and dedicated young woman whose advice was always sound, but it was only because arthritis was beginning to make it difficult to hold a pen or bang away on her typewriter without a good deal of pain that Kitty finally gave in.

  Irena immediately came to mind as a candidate for the job: she was reasonably intelligent, had time on her hands – and she also owed Kitty a great deal. Intimating that she had been one of the political dissidents who had fled Czechoslovakia in the disillusioned years following the Prague Spring, she had descended without warning on Flowerdew six months previously. Her foot once in the door, she stayed, infuriating Jessie Crowther by invading her kitchen to cook heavy Slovak dishes, and upsetting the peaceful tenor of Kitty’s life with all the Central European drama and temperament brought into it. She appeared to have settled in permanently, with no desire to find herself paid employment.

  Why didn’t Kitty send her packing?

  ‘But she’s Milo’s daughter!’ she said, when asked. ‘I owe him that, at least. And –’ clinching it – ‘Alfred would have wished it.’ Besides, anyone could see that mixed with her exasperation was a reluctant affection for the gauche, clumsy, unattractive woman Irena was.

  But whatever she felt about her, Kitty was adamant that she wouldn’t do as a secretary: she was too excitable and unreliable, and just as likely to put down her own wild interpretation of events if such a thing happened to occur to her. A woman of her age, pushing forty, should be capable of keeping her mouth shut, but Irena was not. And there were some things, Kitty hinted, it was better she shouldn’t know about yet, possibly never.

  Felix she wouldn’t consider, either, though he too was hanging around the house at present with nothing to do but help Tommo in the garden while waiting to go up to his university, a refugee from his parents’ broken marriage to whom she had given temporary lodging. For one thing, Felix was a young man of no imagination and would be shocked at some of the things she had to tell; his self-protective good manners would prevent him remarking on what he learned – but possibly not from trying to make capital of it later. He was clever and already had a definite eye to the main chance, though you couldn’t altogether blame him for that, poor boy. It came of having that dreadful pushy mother.

  The one person Kitty would really have liked to work with her was Madeleine, but as a recently qualified and newly-appointed junior partner in the local medical practice, she was much too busy to ask.

  ‘You’ll have to advertise,’ said Jessie Crowther, putting her practical Yorkshire finger right on the button, as usual.

  ‘I’ll do no such thing!’ declared Kitty. ‘I want no strangers poking their noses into my affairs.’ Jessie, who’d been Kitty’s housekeeper for thirty years, said nothing, and waited. A few days later Kitty inserted her advert in the local paper.

  What she wanted, she had decided, was someone who would enter into the spirit of the thing, yet know where to draw the line. Someone decisive and perhaps even a little bossy, who wouldn’t let her go too far. Someone ruthless where she was overflowing.

  What she got was Sophie Amhurst.

  ‘What a beautifully limpid creature you are!’ were almost her first words to Sophie, when Jessie had conducted the girl through the rather spooky house towards the hooded basket chair in the garden where Kitty sat enthroned like an empress. And Sophie at eighteen, though not at all sure what this fat, bizarrely-dressed old woman with the lively dark eyes meant, decided to take it as a compliment – though how much better it would have been if the words had been juxtaposed: if she’d said ‘limpidly beautiful’ rather than the other way round.

  ‘I just happened to see your ad and thought it might be fun,’ she replied naively when Kitty asked what had made her apply, and indeed it could easily have happened that way. But the truth was that it had been Roz who had seen the advert and thought the job would be good experience for Sophie. Sophie had just left school and had decided she was never, ever, ever going to make plans, she was sick of being pushed around and was henceforth going to live spontaneously, be a truly free spirit. To which Roz retorted that was an assumption that depended on leaving other people to do the planning, otherwise the world would be in chaos. Roz, filled with practical common sense, liked her life to be ordered and disciplined; she’d taken responsibility for Sophie ever since their parents died. Despite her degree, she was engaged to be married to a policeman.

  But whatever Roz thought, Sophie knew it was her own decision to apply for the job. Flowerdew, or something like it, though she had never seen the house until she went along for the interview with Mrs Wilbraham, had always been there on the edges of her imagination, something like it had always featured in the distant landscape of her romantic mind. It's very name conjured up for her a kind of enchantment. Camelot’s faery mythic towers, Avalon, Morte d’Arthur ... the heady stuff of legend and romance.

  What had clinched the decision to apply, however, had been the fact that the Mrs Wilbraham who needed a secretary was a writer. A little disappointing to find, on inquiry at the library, that she was a writer of archaeological textbooks, but no matter. Sophie had decided some time ago that writing was to be her metier. She didn’t need the money, their parents had left her and Roz dangerously free of the necessity to work for their living, but all her friends were deciding on careers and it seemed to her that being a writer sounded interestingly different and was just the thing to give her the untramelled lifestyle she so longed for. Without, of course, too many restrictions on her time or too much hard work. She’d learned to type, though somewhat erratically, and although she didn’t yet know what she wanted to write about, this opportunity to pick up a few hints was too good to miss. Something must surely rub off on her!

  If Kitty was thrillingly like Sophie’s conception of a writer, with a rich silk scarf wound low on her forehead, her exotic jewellery and her rather grubby rubbed silk caftan embroidered with tarnished silver thread, Sophie was not at all what Kitty had envisaged. Thin, brown-haired and lightly-boned, she sat poised on the edge of her chair as if about to take wing, her clear hazel eyes filled with a gentle dreaminess, large and intelligent as the eyes of a deer. Following that bright expressive gaze, Kitty saw it fixed on the not too distant figure of Tommo, clearing pondweed from between the waterlilies at the edges of the lake – Tommo, dark and secretive, inscrutably keeping his own counsel, who had come to live in the cottage in the grounds under his own terms: handyman work around the house and garden in exchange for accommodation, a small wage and no questions asked about his personal life. Yet Kitty envisaged no trouble to come. True, the girl was young and doubtless impressionable and there were two presentable young men around the place, but Tommo was Tommo, and Felix – well, pooh, he wouldn’t be the type to appeal to Sophie! Kitty had conceived an immediate liking for the girl and felt an empathy between them strong enough to decide to set her on, without even bo
thering to ask her about her qualifications.

  ‘That’s it, then. I hope you like mint tea.’

  ‘I’ve never had it,’ said Sophie honestly, thinking it sounded gruesome, ‘but I’ll try anything once.’

  ‘That’s the spirit! I can see you’re a person after my own heart. We’re going to get on splendidly!’ Kitty beamed, and was rewarded by an answering smile that Sophie herself felt to spring from her very heart. She took all this to mean she was engaged, and hoped her typing would be up to it.

  As for Kitty, she had no qualms. She knew instinctively that Sophie would fit in very well with the rest of the bright young people who had come in various ways to surround her and who made her feel as she had when she, too, was young, in her twenties, at Cambridge, a most luminous star in all that brilliant firmament. Before she had met and married Alfred Wilbraham. Or before her beloved Alfred had met, married and made her what she was.

  CHAPTER 4

  The second Tuesday in March began for Mayo, after a mere three hours’ sleep, with a puncture. As a consequence, he arrived late and in a bad temper at his desk at Milford Road Divisional Headquarters only to find that a material witness in the squalid child-pornography case he and Kite had been winding up had done a disappearing act. From then on, it was downhill all the way.

  It was a foul day. Dark and rainy, the lights on all day. At ten p.m, having just finished interrogating another of the witnesses in the case with Kite – one who’d been acting like the three wise monkeys for three hours and who’d then suddenly decided to break his omertà – and having read the man’s statement and filed his own report, Mayo sent Kite off home.

  ‘Call it a day, Martin.’ He stretched, walked to the window and peered out into the rainy darkness. ‘Sheila will be wondering whether she has a husband at all.’