The Devil's Feather

by Minette Walters

  He knew I wasn’t Marianne Curran, I thought, but did he know I was Connie Burns? My bureau chief, Dan Fry, had told me he’d released a photograph to the international press, but he’d promised it was an old one, taken when I first joined Reuters. Shorter hair, rounder face, and ten years younger. I folded the card into my palm. “Thank you.”

  Peter nodded. “I’m leaving you in good hands. Jess’s only weakness is that she assumes everyone is as capable as she is.” He turned towards her so that I couldn’t see his expression or his hands, and I wondered what he was signalling. “Take it gently, eh? You know where to find me if you need me.”

  I LEARNT LATER that it was my mention of Zimbabwe that had jogged Peter’s memory. The Times had run a piece the day after my abduction which gave details of my childhood in Africa and my parents’ enforced decision to quit the farm. He felt it was too much of a coincidence that an author with the same background, and roughly corresponding to Connie Burns’s description, should turn up in Winterbourne Barton showing signs of acute anxiety. He confirmed it by searching archive coverage on the Internet when he got home, where he learnt that my mother’s name was Marianne.

  Jess had no such recognition. All she could see was a similarity in looks between me and Madeleine. Tall, blue-eyed, blonde and pushing forty. Even my name-Marianne-was similar. When she felt more comfortable with me, she said my only saving grace was that I didn’t appear to have Madeleine’s vanity about my appearance. Even in extremis, Madeleine would have been at the face powder long before she reached the boiled lobster stage. She would certainly never have allowed Peter to see her looking less than perfect.

  “She was all over him like a rash when he first came to Winterbourne Barton. My mother said it was embarrassing. Madeleine was twenty-five and desperate to get married, and she wouldn’t leave Peter alone.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Twenty-eight. It was fifteen years ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “He conjured a fiancée out of a hat.” She smiled slightly. “Madeleine threw a few tantrums, but it was Lily who was the most upset. She adored Peter, said he reminded her of the family doctor when she was a child.”

  “In what way?”

  “Breeding. She said doctors were a better class in those days. I told her it was a pretty stupid criterion-all I’m interested in is whether Peter knows what he’s doing-but Lily trusted him because he’s a ‘gent.’ ”

  It was part of Peter’s charm, I thought, secretly sympathizing with Lily. “He gives a good impression of knowing what he’s doing,” I said cautiously, waiting to have my head bitten off. Jess’s ambivalence about Peter meant I had no idea what she really thought of him. Any more than I knew what he thought of her. She’d hinted several times that she didn’t trust him over Lily’s Alzheimer’s, suspecting Madeleine’s hand behind his willingness to leave Lily to cope alone.

  “He bloody well ought to know what he’s doing,” she said sarcastically. “He’s a qualified doctor.”

  “Why are you so hard on him?”

  She shrugged.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Nothing…apart from fancying himself something chronic.”

  I smiled. “He is quite attractive, Jess.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Don’t you like him?”

  “Sometimes,” she admitted, “but Winterbourne Barton’s stuffed with women who find him irresistible. They’re all in their seventies and their favourite pastime is massaging his ego. You’ll be at the back of a very long queue if you want to join in.”

  “Is he married?”

  “Was.”

  “Kids?”

  “Two…a boy and girl…they live with their mother in Dorchester.”

  “What’s she like?”

  Jess had a way of looking at me that was unnerving, a little like having a scalpel slicing into my brain. “Weepy, clingy and wet,” she said, as if that were also her description of me. “He wouldn’t have strayed if she’d beaten him up a bit more, or found herself a job. She’s the fiancée he produced to get rid of Madeleine…and she took him to the cleaners when she discovered he was rogering a couple of nurses behind her back.”

  “You mean two in a bed?” I asked in surprise.

  It was the first time I saw Jess laugh. “God! That would have been funny! He’s a gent, for Christ’s sake. He took them one at a time and sent them flowers if he couldn’t make it…and now all three of them feel abused. I feel marginally sorry for the wife-except she brought it on herself-but the nurses haven’t got a leg to stand on. They knew they were sharing him with one woman so why make waves about another?”

  I thought rather guiltily of the married men I’d bedded. Particularly Dan. What kind of relationship was that? “It’s easier to compete with a wife. You know what you’re dealing with. Another lover suggests you’re as boring as the woman you’re trying to depose.”

  IT WAS A GOOD FEW MINUTES after we heard Peter’s car drive away before either Jess or I spoke. I couldn’t think of anything to say, other than “Go,” but she was staring at the floor as if looking for inspiration in the quarry tiles. When she finally opened her mouth, it was to express disapproval of Peter. “I don’t know why he did that. If you phone his private line you’ll have to pay for treatment. I’ll give you directions to the clinic so that you can get it for free.”

  “Perhaps I’m not entitled.”

  She frowned. “I thought you said you and your parents had been given asylum.”

  I reached for my keys from the other side of the table so that I didn’t have to look at her. “Ja, well, I still hold a Zimbabwean passport so I don’t know what my status is. I think Dr. Coleman was just trying to be helpful.” Over the years I’ve developed a mid-Atlantic accent that doesn’t specify where I come from, but under stress my South African intonation takes over. I heard the “Zim” of “Zimbabwean” come out as “Zeem,” the “think” as “thunk,” and the “C” of Coleman as a hard “G.”

  Jess picked up on it immediately. “Is it me that’s worrying you? Do you want me to go?”

  “I’m sure I can manage on my own.”

  She shrugged. “Are you planning on staying?”

  I nodded.

  “Then you’d better let me light the Aga first because you won’t be able to cook without it.” She jerked her chin towards the door to the corridor. “You might as well have a wander while I’m doing it…see if there’s anything else you need help with. It’ll be your last chance. I’m even less keen to be here than you are to have me.”

  Looking back, it’s odd that neither of us took these remarks personally. They were simple statements of fact: we preferred our own company. It hadn’t always been so for me but for Jess it was natural. “I get it from my father. He could go days sometimes without speaking a word. He used to say we were born into the wrong century. If we’d been around before the industrial revolution our skills would have counted for something and our reticence would have been taken for wisdom.”

  Her mother had tried to teach her to be more forthcoming. “While she was alive, she could always get me to smile-my brother and sister, too-but I reverted to type after they died…or forgot how to do it. I don’t know which. It’s a learnt skill. The more you do it, the easier it comes.”

  “I thought smiling was an automatic response.”

  “It can’t be,” said Jess bluntly, “otherwise Madeleine wouldn’t be able to do it. Her smile’s about as genuine as a crocodile’s…and she shows more teeth.”

  ALL THIS TOOK TIME to make sense. That day, I was just an explorer. I remember standing in front of a poster-size photograph on the wall at the end of the upstairs landing with “Madeleine” printed underneath it. The name registered because Jess had asked me if she and I were related, but still I didn’t know who she was. It was a black-and-white shot of a young woman leaning into the wind with a turbulent sea behind her, and, but for the name, I’d have assumed it was a
n Athena print. It was striking, both for the girl’s looks and the way the photograph was lit.

  Madeleine was stunning. She was dressed in a long coat and trousers with a black cloche hat pulled over her head. Her face was turned towards the camera and the definition of every feature was extraordinary. Her perfect teeth showed in the sort of triangular smile that American pageant queens practise for hours, but to me it looked genuine, reaching to eyes that danced with mischief. I came to understand why Jess didn’t like her-there was no contest between Madeleine’s Venus and Jess’s Mars-but it was a mystery why Peter Coleman had turned her down.

  I had no idea at that stage that Madeleine had been responsible for preparing Barton House for letting, but I do remember thinking that whoever owned the place had a very low opinion of tenants. It could have been so imposing-commanding ten times what I was paying-but instead it was hideously tacky. Every room showed evidence of cheaper, smaller furniture taking the place of something grander. Mean, narrow wardrobes had the imprint of a larger brother on the wall behind them, and indentations in the carpets showed where great beds and heavy dressing-tables had stood before their flimsier replacements had been imported.

  To anyone with an ounce of creativity, the house screamed for a makeover. Given freedom, I’d have taken it back to its eighteenth-century origins, stripping the walls of their twentieth-century coverings and removing the fussy curtains to show, and use, the panelled shutters. Simplicity would have suited it, where frills, furbelows and vulgar furniture made it look like an ageing tart with thick make-up covering the blemishes. I discovered later that it was as it was because Madeleine refused to allow Lily’s solicitor to squander her inheritance on improvements, but it did set me wondering about the owner. It seemed so obvious to me that any money spent now would pay for itself again and again through higher rent.

  I was most puzzled by the sketches and oil paintings that hung in every room. They were a mish-mash of styles-abstracts, life drawings, eccentric representations of buildings with roots anchoring them to the ground and foliage growing from their windows-but they were all signed by the same artist, Nathaniel Harrison. Some were originals and some-the sketches-were prints, but I couldn’t understand why anyone would collect so much of a single artist’s work simply to hang it in a rented house.

  When I asked Jess about it, her mouth twisted into a cynical smile. “I expect they’re only there to hide the damp.”

  “But who’s Nathaniel Harrison? How come Lily bought so much of his work?”

  “She didn’t. Madeleine must have imported them after she stripped the house of her mother’s paintings. It would have been cheaper than having the house redecorated.”

  “How did Madeleine get them?”

  “The way she gets everything,” she said caustically. “Sex.”

  Extracts from notes, filed as “CB16-19/05/04”

  …I can’t separate specific events anymore. I’m not sure if I’ve shut my memory down or if I was too disorientated for it to function properly. Everything’s fused into time inside the cage and time out of it. I described the cage to Dan and the police, and I said it was in a cellar, but the rest…

  …The police thought I was being deliberately evasive when I said I couldn’t tell them anything else. But it was the truth. When Dan asked me what happened, I couldn’t tell him either. It wouldn’t have helped, anyway. The police weren’t going to arrest a man on the evidence of smell. What sort of identification is that?

  …The artist Paul Gauguin once said, “Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.” I dream of revenge. All the time.

  7

  THE ONLY INFORMATION Jess gave me about the Aga was that the oil tank was outside and needed to be kept at least a quarter full. She took me to the back door and pointed to a wooden lean-to at the side of the garage. “The tank’s in there and there’s a glass gauge that shows the level. There’s also a valve that controls the flow, but I’ve turned it on and you shouldn’t need to touch it. If you allow the oil to drop too low, you could run into trouble. The supplier’s phone number is stuck to the side of the tank but if they’re busy they may not come for a few days. It’s better to order a refill early rather than later.”

  “How full is it at the moment?”

  “Up to the top. It should last a good three to four months.”

  “Do I have to close the valve if I want to turn off the Aga?”

  “You’ll have cold baths if you do,” she warned. “There’s no immersion heater in this place. It means the kitchen’s fairly unbearable in the summer but the Aga’s the only way to heat the water. The house is pretty antiquated. There’s no central heating and no boiler, and if you’re cold at night you have to light a fire.” She indicated a wood store to the left of the outhouse. “You’ll find the number for the log supplier on the tank under the oil company.”

  I think Jess was disappointed that I took all this in my stride, but it wasn’t so different from the way I’d grown up in Zimbabwe. Wood was our primary fuel rather than oil, but we didn’t have central heating, and hot water had been at a premium until a day’s sunshine had heated the tank on the roof. Our cook, Gamada, had coaxed wonderful meals out of the wood-burning stove, and, having learnt from her, I’d never been comfortable with electric ovens that offered more touch controls than the flight deck of the Concorde.

  I was a great deal less complacent about the single telephone point in the kitchen. “That can’t be right,” I said when Jess showed me the wall-mounted contraption beside the fridge. “There must be phones somewhere else. What happens if I’m at the other end of the house and need to call someone?”

  “It’s cordless. You carry it with you.”

  “Won’t the battery run down?”

  “Not if you hook it up at the end of the day and recharge it overnight.”

  “I can’t sleep without a phone beside my bed.”

  She shrugged. “Then you’ll have to buy an extension cable,” she told me. “There are places in Dorchester that sell them, but you’ll need several if you want to operate a phone upstairs. I think thirty metres is the longest DIY cable they make but, at a rough guess, it’s a good hundred metres to the main bedroom. You’ll have to link them in series…which means adaptors…plus another handset, of course.”

  “Is it a broadband connection?” I asked, dry-mouthed with anxiety as I wondered how I was going to be able to work. “Can I access the Internet and make phone calls at the same time?”

  “No.”

  “Then what am I going to do? Normally I’d be able to use my mobile as well as a landline.”

  “You should have gone for a modern house. Didn’t the agent tell you what this one was going to be like? Send you any details?”

  “A few. I didn’t read them.”

  I must have looked and sounded deeply inept because she said scathingly: “Christ! Why the hell do people like you come to Dorset? You’re frightened of dogs, you can’t live without a phone-” she broke off abruptly. “It’s not the end of the world. I presume you have a laptop because I didn’t see a computer in the car?” I nodded. “What sort of mobile do you have? Do you have an Internet contract with your server?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But it’s not going to work without a signal, is it?”

  “How do you connect? By cable or Bluetooth?”

  “Bluetooth.”

  “OK. That gives you a range of ten metres between the two devices. All you have to do is raise the mobile high enough-” she broke off abruptly in face of my scepticism. “Forget it. I’ll do it myself. Just give me your bloody phone and bring your laptop upstairs.”

  She refused to speak for the next half hour because I hadn’t shown enough enthusiasm for groping around the attic every time I wanted to send an email. I squatted on the landing beside a loft ladder, with my laptop beside me, listening to her stomping about the attic before she came down the steps and repeated the exercise in the bedrooms. After a while she started shifting furniture ar
ound, angrily banging and scraping it across the floors. She sounded like an adolescent in a sulk and I’d have asked her to go if I hadn’t been so desperate for Internet contact.

  She finally emerged from a bedroom at the end of the landing. “OK, I’ve got a signal. Do you want to try for the connection?”

  It was a Heath Robinson set-up-a stepped pyramid built out of a dressing-table, a chest of drawers and some chairs-but it worked. It meant crouching under the ceiling to make the link but, once established, I was able to operate the computer at floor level.

  “The signal’s stronger in the attic,” said Jess, “but it’ll mean climbing up there every time the battery runs down or you want to log off. I didn’t think you’d want to do that…and you’d probably get lost, anyway. It’s not very obvious which room you’re above.”

  “How can I thank you?” I asked her warmly. “Perhaps you’d like a glass of wine or a beer? I have both in the car.”

  She showed immediate disapproval. “I don’t drink.” And neither should you, was the firm rebuke that I took from her expression. She was even more disapproving when I lit a cigarette as we went back downstairs. “That’s about the worst thing you can do. If you get bronchitis on top of a panic attack, you’ll really be struggling.”

  Delayed maturity and pointy-hat puritanism made a lethal combination, I thought, wondering if she’d cast me as dissolute Edwina from Absolutely Fabulous with herself as Saffy, the high-minded daughter. I was tempted to make a joke about it, but suspected that television was a focus of disapproval as well. I had no sense that there was room for fun in Jess’s life or, if there was, that it was the sort of fun anyone else would recognize.

  Before she left, I asked her how I could contact her. “Why would you want to?” she asked.

  For help… “To thank you.”

  “There’s no need. I’ll take it as read.”

  I decided to be honest. “I don’t know who to call if something goes wrong,” I said with a tentative smile. “I doubt the agent could have lit the Aga.”