by Nicola Upson
‘You have only got Slaughter’s description to go on, though.’
‘I can check to make sure. My mother talks about what happened in her letters to Hester. I can easily find out what the fiancé’s name was.’
‘All right, so assuming it is her, it doesn’t necessarily follow that she had anything more to do with Hester after the scene at the theatre. Yes, she was hacked off with her lot and wanted to humiliate Hester in front of all her famous friends. I’m not sure I blame her. But there’s no proof that she was ever in Suffolk, and certainly nothing to link her to Hester’s death.’
‘So why did she never tell me that they were connected in that way?’
‘Why should she? Perhaps she was ashamed of what she did and wanted to forget it, or perhaps she was just being professional and separating her personal life from her job.’
‘And she lied about the funeral. She told me she’d had a friendly conversation with Tod Slaughter when she hadn’t and invented this other woman, and I’m sure she was the one who sold Lucy Kyte’s diary to John Moore.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘Of course I do. He said the woman was like me – he meant she was Scottish. Then there was the business with my father. She implied on the telephone that he was at death’s door, but it was only a sprained wrist. Why would she do that, if it wasn’t to get me home and give me something other than Hester to worry about?’
‘Jealousy, probably. I imagine she feels the same way about you as she did about Hester. A successful, attractive woman, able to come and go as she pleases, achieving things in her life that the Jane Pecks of this world could never do, invalid brother or not. It could just be spite, Josephine – taking the high and mighty Miss Tey down a peg or two, reminding you that life isn’t all glamour and glory. It’s vicious, I agree, but it’s a long way short of what you’re branding her with.’
Marta’s level-headedness was beginning to get on Josephine’s nerves, mainly because it was so convincing. Everything had seemed very clear to her in the heat of the moment, but now, away from the theatre and from the living, breathing Hester whom Slaughter had conjured up so beautifully for her, the conclusions she had drawn seemed less obvious. Even so, her determination to get justice for Hester did not allow her to give up easily. ‘The money from Hester’s treasures would have come in handy,’ she continued defiantly. ‘Her brother’s treatment left her practically destitute. Everyone says so. She had to sell the house.’
Marta gave the point the scorn it merited. ‘You of all people can’t judge someone on the basis of idle gossip in Inverness. You haven’t got a shred of evidence to link her with that.’
‘Then I’ll get some.’
‘How?’
‘I’ll go and see her, ask her outright.’
‘Jesus, Josephine, you can’t go round accusing people of killing old ladies, especially when you don’t even know that an old lady has been killed.’
‘Then what do you suggest I do? She’s a solicitor’s secretary, for God’s sake. She’s got everybody’s business in the palm of her hand. Who knows what else she might be planning?’
‘So now she’s a criminal mastermind? You’re getting this completely out of proportion. If this is anything – and I do mean if – it’s personal to Hester. You said so yourself.’
‘You wouldn’t think I was exaggerating if you’d been there when Bert Willis was describing Hester’s body, or when Rose was talking about how frightened she was.’
‘All right, I’m sorry, but how . . .’
‘I don’t know, Marta.’ She put her glass down and took Marta’s hands in her own, as if that might make her argument more convincing. ‘I have no idea how any of this happened, but I know deep down that Jane Peck is in some way responsible for the way that Hester died, and I can’t ignore it. Please try and understand that.’
Marta nodded reluctantly. ‘Of course I understand. I’d be exactly the same. But I still say you need to be careful. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.’
A car pulled up in the street outside, and Josephine heard the sound of a key in the lock and laughter in the hallway. ‘That’s all we bloody need,’ she said impatiently, giving Marta a look which suggested that the whole day was her fault. ‘I thought Lydia was going straight to the cottage.’
‘So did I.’
Marta stood up to get another drink and Josephine braced herself for the loss of peace and privacy. ‘Change of plan,’ Lydia announced, giving Josephine a hug and blowing a kiss to Marta. ‘The damned car wouldn’t start, so we had no choice but to get a taxi back here.’
‘You could have stayed in town,’ Marta said ungraciously, and Lydia’s companions – two men and a woman, all of whom Josephine knew vaguely from past productions of her plays – looked uncomfortable.
‘Don’t be silly. I’m not really in the mood for the cottage this weekend, and anyway, I was dying to see Josephine – it’s been ages.’
Lydia made drinks for everyone, and the evening descended rapidly into a round of theatre talk and bitchy speculation. Josephine tried to take part, if only for appearance’s sake, but her mind was still on Hester and eventually she could stand it no longer. ‘I have to go,’ she said, with an apologetic glance at Marta. ‘I need to get back to the club.’
‘Well, next time we’ll do it properly and have dinner,’ Lydia insisted. ‘And you must come to the cottage with us for Christmas.’ Josephine opened her mouth to make an excuse, but Lydia was adamant. ‘Marta said your father’s going to be away this year, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t come down, is there? Alec and Dodie will be there, and I’m hoping Caroline and Peggy will be able to make it, too.’ The prospect was so horrific that it took Josephine a few seconds to compose an answer that was both firm and polite, but her delay proved fatal. ‘Excellent. That’s settled then. And perhaps we can drive over to see this cottage of yours while we’re there. I’ve heard so much about it, and we’re practically neighbours now.’
‘Yes, I suppose we are.’
‘Let me call you a cab,’ Marta said, resigned to the end of the evening.
‘Don’t bother. I can pick one up in the high street.’
‘All right. I’ll walk you there.’ She fetched their coats and followed Josephine out into the street. ‘What a fucking disaster,’ she said when the door was firmly closed behind them. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault, but it does feel as though fate’s trying to tell us something. I thought you were going to throw them all out at one point. Poor Ben looked mortified.’
Marta caught her eye, and somehow managed to laugh. ‘Was I terribly rude?’
‘Quite rude, yes. But don’t think I wasn’t cheering you on.’ They stopped just before the end of the road, out of the glare of the street lamp, and Josephine pulled Marta close. ‘We’ll try again, I promise.’ The tenderness of their kiss made her crave the evening they had planned; she shivered in the darkness, reminded of what it was like to feel Marta’s skin against her own, to fall asleep to the smell and the taste of her. ‘I’ll even forgive you for Christmas,’ she whispered.
‘I just wanted to see you.’
‘Even if it is across a war zone? Dodie and Lydia scoring points over a turkey – that doesn’t quite work for me.’
‘It’s better than nothing.’
Josephine smiled. ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’
‘I’m coming with you, though. I’ve been thinking about it and I won’t have any argument.’
‘You want me to smuggle you through the back door of the Cowdray Club in the middle of the night?’ It was a tempting idea: the last thing Josephine wanted tonight was to be parted from Marta. ‘I suppose I could think of something.’
‘I meant to Inverness. I’m not letting you go up there and confront this woman on your own. If you’re right, God knows what might happen and I’d never forgive myself.’
Josephine drew back a little so that Marta could see her face. ‘I can�
�t be with you there,’ she said seriously. ‘We agreed. This has to be left behind when I go home.’
‘You’re going to see a woman who might have killed someone, and you’re worried about your reputation? That makes no sense at all.’
‘I know how silly it sounds, but I can’t front that one out, Marta. I’m simply not brave enough.’
‘But no one need know. You can have a friend, can’t you?’
‘You’re forgetting who’s the actress. I love you. I couldn’t hide that any longer with Lydia just now, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to hide it in Inverness.’ She bit her lip, wondering how to explain. ‘You’re always true to yourself, more so than anyone else I know. I wish I could be more like you, but I’m someone different there and you’d hate me for it. I don’t want you to see that. It would destroy us.’
To Josephine’s relief, Marta seemed to understand, but she wouldn’t give in. ‘Take Archie, then. Or at least talk to him about it, see if he can help.’
‘No, Marta – that would compromise him too much.’ She was also afraid that Archie might tell her she was wrong, and she didn’t want to hear that or even admit to Marta that she thought it was a possibility. ‘I’ve asked too many favours of Archie already, and this is something I need to do – for Hester, and for myself.’ She tried to look reassuring. ‘You’re right – this is personal.’
‘So when will you go home?’
‘Tomorrow. I need to face her while I’m still angry.’
‘If you’re leaving as soon as that, then you are going to have to smuggle me into the Cowdray Club.’
Josephine looked at her in disbelief, but she was serious. ‘What will you tell Lydia?’
‘The truth. That the last thing I need is a night with the West End. It’s nothing she hasn’t heard before.’
Something in her tone made Josephine stop walking. She waited for Marta to turn back, and studied her face for a moment. ‘Lydia knows, doesn’t she?’
‘We’ve never talked about it.’
‘That’s not what I asked.’ The thought that Marta and Lydia might have reached even an unspoken agreement about her – the freedom which that offered and the betrayal it laid bare – both elated and horrified Josephine.
‘She would have said something if she were unhappy.’
It was the first naive thing that she had ever heard Marta say. ‘I know how much you’d like that to be true, but I don’t think there was anything wrong with Lydia’s car tonight, do you?’ She put her hand gently on Marta’s cheek. ‘You have no idea how badly I want to be with you now, but we can’t do it – not like this, not in front of her friends. If you don’t go back to the house now, Lydia will be utterly humiliated and that’s not fair. You don’t want that any more than I do.’
Marta sighed. ‘No, of course I don’t.’
A taxi drew up at the next junction, apparently summoned by their resolve. Reluctantly, Josephine waved it over. ‘If I took the sleeper tomorrow night, I wouldn’t have to be at Euston until six. We could spend the day together.’
She heard Marta’s smile in her voice. ‘I’d like that.’
‘Yes, so would I.’ The cab pulled in to the kerb and Josephine opened the door. ‘I’ll wait for you at the club. Come whenever you can.’
23
The Inverness air was thick with fog and gossip. Reports of the imminent abdication had broken in the press a few days earlier, and the story was well and truly out across Britain and the Empire. The news-stands were cleared in minutes and the papers were at war: The Times, the Morning Post and the Telegraph stood against the King; the Mail, the Mirror and the Daily Sketch adamantly for him – but all were united in packing their pages with as many photographs as possible, taken over a period of months and stored away until the embargo collapsed and it was decent to use them. At breakfast each morning, Josephine pored over pictures of Wallis Simpson – on yachts, in restaurants, at Ascot; the image that lingered in her mind, though, was of a woman on Felixstowe Promenade, anonymous and untroubled by anyone; a stranger to herself, no doubt, now that the peace of those last few weeks was lost and irretrievable.
Marta telephoned every day, still advocating caution where Jane Peck was concerned, and Josephine was at last able to admit that she had been in Felixstowe while Mrs Simpson was living there to fulfil the terms of her divorce – and that somewhere in the corner of an American newspaper there was probably a photograph of the wrong woman. Marta’s descriptions of the atmosphere in London were dramatic and vivid: the silence on the Underground as everyone read their newspapers; bookshops and department stores eerily empty in the run-up to Christmas; crowds outside Buckingham Palace, waiting through the night, their eyes fixed on two or three lights burning in the upper windows. Whatever the bishops and politicians were doing behind the scenes, the people had come out to support their King: there were demonstrations at Marble Arch, Marta said, and the national anthem was not simply observed in theatres and cinemas, but applauded. Lydia, a staunch royalist, was practically in mourning. It wasn’t an absurd reaction, Josephine thought; even in Inverness, further away from events and in a country where attitudes towards the British monarchy were more complex, there was a sense of shock among the townsfolk, a numbness and a disbelief that were not unlike the early stages of grief. She shared their astonishment: in Felixstowe, she had seen with her own eyes how seriously Wallis Simpson was treated, but she had never truly believed that it would come to this.
Marta’s concern, coupled with a heavy cold that made Josephine listless and irritable, gave Jane Peck a few days’ reprieve. By Thursday, she was feeling better and had had time to consider the most sensible way to approach the situation. There was no point in going to the office; she needed Miss Peck to be on her own and preferably off-guard, so she decided to call unannounced at her house that evening. They would be able to talk privately there, and if – God forbid – Josephine was wrong, she would not have humiliated anyone in public. The small matter of exactly what she was going to say was still unresolved by the time she left Crown Cottage and walked the short distance to Greenhill Terrace. It was probably best to play it by ear, and let the other woman set the tone of the conversation by her reaction to the unexpected visit.
Jane Peck still lived in her old family home, renting it now from the man she had sold it to after her brother’s death. A wave of complex emotions washed over Josephine the minute she set foot in the street, and they had nothing to do with Hester – at least, not directly. She could not remember exactly what age she was when her family had moved here, but her youngest sister was not yet born, so she must have been six or seven. The house was bigger than the one they left behind in Crown Terrace, a reflection of her father’s hard work and good fortunes, and she had loved it. She paused outside, allowing the memories to play in her head without effort or censor. Moments like this had ambushed her more often recently, and she put it down entirely to Red Barn Cottage. It was strange, but in a house full of other people’s lives – Lucy’s and Maria’s and especially Hester’s – the past she had returned to most often was her own.
The number Josephine wanted was at the other end of the terrace. She wondered if she had left the secretary enough time to get home from work, but there was a light on in the front room and the door was answered before the chime of the bell had had time to die away. Miss Peck seemed different out of her customary environment – younger, somehow, and less severe, although most people would struggle to intimidate in a housecoat whose colour was best described as a dowdy salmon. She invited Josephine in without comment or question, and the absence of any flicker of guilt or suspicion was the first blow to Josephine’s confidence: if she had expected Miss Peck to panic and confess at the very sight of her, she was obviously going to be disappointed. The house was identical in structure to the one she had grown up in and the thought disarmed her for a moment, but the decor was sufficiently different for her to recover quickly. It did not take her long to realise that these rooms were
designed entirely for appearance’s sake. The curtains at the front windows were good and the one solid piece of furniture – a round oak table, crowned by a vase of cheap flowers – stood at the head of the sitting room, where it could be seen from the road; further in, away from the judgemental glance of passers-by, the house was sparse and shabby, with everything either grey or beige. Even the chrysanthemums could only aspire to cream, and the lack of colour in the room – while it made the housecoat seem quite daring – depressed Josephine instantly.
Two cheap, oddly matched armchairs were huddled round the single bar of an electric fire, and the only other comfort was the low murmur of a wireless, soft and insistent in the background. A film magazine lay open on the floor – more economical, perhaps, than actually going to the cinema – and a plate with a half-eaten sandwich rested on the arm of the better chair. The scene reminded Josephine of how she had found Hester’s room when she first walked into the cottage, the shrinking of a world to the most basic human necessities of food and warmth and another voice; what it did not suggest was a woman who had recently found fortune in the cruellest of ways, and she began to think that Marta was right. If Jane Peck was guilty of nothing more than screaming against the injustice of her life, then she, Josephine, shouldn’t even be here: exposing pride as a lie was the unkindest thing she could have done. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, aware that her thoughts were probably written all over her face. ‘I’ve obviously interrupted your meal.’
The grandiose description of her supper brought the shadow of a smile to the other woman’s lips. ‘It will keep,’ she said. ‘Can I get you something, Miss Tey?’
‘No, thank you.’
The answer obviously came as a relief, either because there was nothing much to get or because it implied that Josephine would not be staying. Miss Peck gestured to the chair opposite, and there was an awkward pause as she waited in vain for her guest to state her purpose. Josephine struggled to find a non-committal way to open the conversation, but it was in fact a news announcement that broke the silence and her host leaned forward to turn the wireless up. ‘This is what we’ve all been waiting for, I suppose.’ The voice was Stanley Baldwin’s, speaking in the House of Commons, but the words he read were the King’s: ‘After long and anxious consideration I have determined to renounce the throne to which I succeeded on the death of my father, and I am now communicating this, my final and irrevocable decision.’ It seemed strange to be listening to something so momentous in the company of a stranger, and it made the situation more surreal than ever. Josephine watched Jane Peck as she listened intently, but her face was inscrutable. Baldwin followed the King’s declaration with a speech of his own, but the wireless was snapped off abruptly before he could get very far. ‘There we are,’ Miss Peck said, apparently satisfied that her own fears had been proved correct. ‘We can’t expect a sense of duty from anyone these days – not even, it seems, from our King. You and I are a dying breed, Miss Tey.’
