by Ann Cleeves
The birthday bash for Olivia Fulwell’s youngest child was a cross between a church fête and an old-fashioned street party. As Jeremy had suspected, everyone and his dog was there. Anne wasn’t sure of the age of the child or even whether it was a boy or a girl. Whenever she’d seen it, it had been wrapped up in androgynous jumpsuits.
As they prepared to set off for the party Jeremy worked himself into quite a state. Through his antique dealer friend in Morpeth he thought he had found the perfect gift – a jack-in-the-box with a grotesque carved head which sprang out of the box with a squeal. ‘Not terribly expensive,’ he told Anne, looking up from the floor where he squatted amidst wrapping paper, ribbon and sellotape. ‘But classy, don’t you think? Better than the modern tat kids get given. Something that’ll stand out. But what’ll I put on the label? Are you sure you can’t remember the brat’s name?’
‘Positive.’ As if she cared anyway. The last thing she wanted to do was to put on a frock and make small talk to the in-bred representatives of the local aristocracy. And it had occurred to her that Barbara and Godrey might have been invited. She wasn’t sure how she’d handle that. ‘Just put from Jeremy and Anne.’
‘I suppose I’ll have to,’ he said. Then, wistfully, ‘Do you think love from Jeremy and Anne would be a bit OTT?’ He loved dressing up on occasions like these. His clothes, immaculately pressed, had been laid out on his bed hours before.
The whole event was set up outside. Even the toilets – discreetly signposted – were in the stable block so none of the local riff-raff would actually have to set foot in the house. Anne thought that Olivia had been lucky with the weather. Soon it would break. Pale, sulphurous clouds drifted occasionally across the sun. It was very hot and humid. The forecast had mentioned thunder.
The children sat at a long trestle-table covered with a paper cloth. They wore party hats. There must have been crackers because they all had blowers and whistles which made a noise. All the playgroup were there which seemed terribly democratic, though as far as Anne could tell only two of the parents had been invited. One was a teacher and the other the wife of a tenant farmer. The children ate sausages, crisps and vivid orange jellies made in waxed paper dishes. The parent who was a teacher, a dowdy woman with hair already grey and flat shoes, hovered behind her offspring, muttering occasionally to no one in particular about BSE and E numbers. The child, apparently unused to such unlimited amounts of chemicals and sugar, ate ravenously, oblivious to her mother and the friends who tried to talk to her.
In the middle of the table was the cake, made in the shape of a character from the latest children’s cult TV show and covered in violet icing. The name LIZZY had been picked out in Smarties. So, Anne thought, that solved the mystery of the child’s gender.
For the adults there were other trestles with a buffet and a bar. The food was standard catering fare – no doubt Jeremy would be sniffy about it later. Around the park were dotted sideshows which would keep the children entertained so the adults could continue to chat and drink in peace – an inflatable bouncy castle, a roundabout of galloping horses powered by its own generator, a man who swallowed swords and ate fire.
Despite the food Jeremy was enjoying himself enormously. He seemed to know instinctively which guests had money or titles. He homed in on them and camped up shamelessly for their benefit. The jack-in-the-box had been a great success. Lizzy, it was true, had burst into tears when the lid sprang open, but then she had seemed overwrought by the whole proceedings. Olivia had loved it. She had even taken him inside to ask his opinion of a painting which had recently taken her fancy at an auction. He seemed in seventh heaven.
When Olivia was inside with Jeremy, Anne found herself standing next to Robert Fulwell. He was a big man in his fifties. Broken veins in his cheeks gave him a florid appearance as if he spent most of the time in the open air or habitually drank too much. He could have stepped out of a nineteenth-century hunting print. Now though, he stood sipping orange juice, watching the proceedings with a baffled detachment.
‘What a lovely party,’ Anne said.
He looked her up and down. It was as if he were making up his mind whether she was worth expending words on. It seemed she was, but not many. ‘Livvy’s idea.’
He wasn’t bad looking in a muscular, heavy sort of way. Perhaps he sensed her appreciation and reciprocated it, because he added, in a more friendly fashion, ‘I’d have been happy just to have the family. Livvy brought the boys home from school for the weekend again.’
‘That must be nice.’
‘Mmm.’ He seemed unsure.
‘What about the rest of the family?’
He set down his glass and picked up a chicken leg from the paper plate he was holding awkwardly in his other hand. When he bit into it Anne saw that his teeth were surprisingly small and sharp, like a fox’s.
‘What family?’
‘Doesn’t Livvy have any aunts or uncles?’
‘No one lives locally.’
‘What about Edmund?’ She wasn’t sure, even then, why she provoked the confrontation. Out of boredom perhaps. To make mischief. To spite Jeremy who seemed to find nothing demeaning in playing court jester to a load of nobs.
He returned the chicken to the plate, set it deliberately on the table. For a moment she thought he intended to throw her out physically. He said calmly, ‘Who are you?’
‘Anne Preece. I live at the Priory. We have met a few times.’
‘Do you know Edmund?’
‘I knew his daughter.’
‘Ah, you’re one of the Environmental Impact Assessment team. I remember Livvy mentioned it.’
‘You’ve nothing to worry about,’ Anne said. ‘We didn’t find anything of any significance.’
‘I never for a moment thought you would.’ He stared out across the park, beyond the chasing children, to the hills. ‘I don’t care for the idea of the quarry myself, but needs must.’ He looked back at her. ‘What was she like, the girl?’
‘Hardly a girl.’
He shrugged impatiently. ‘Time passes, one forgets.’
‘She was screwed up,’ Anne said. ‘She needed help.’
‘Like her father then.’
‘Did he need help?’
‘All the time, but not the sort, I think, that we could give him.’
‘Has he come to you for help recently?’
‘We’d be the last people he’d come to.’
But Anne heard the note of regret in Robert’s voice and she wasn’t so sure. Livvy wouldn’t have stood for it of course but perhaps Livvy hadn’t known. After the violent death of Edmund’s daughter, would Robert have been able to turn his brother away?
‘The police are looking for him.’
‘I know. They’ve been here. Some woman with a face like a sow. Turning up whenever she feels like it. In the middle of dinner once. As if a man would harm his own daughter. Edmund might have had problems but he’d never do that.’
He was distracted by Arabella, the nanny. She walked past wearing a white silk dress with a lace trim. It looked like a petticoat. There seemed to be no purpose in her movement apart from attracting his attention.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I ought to go. Must circulate.’
Bloody fool, Anne thought.
To entertain herself, as a sort of game, she began to wonder where Robert might have Edmund holed up. Not in the house. It was big enough to hide an army of younger brothers fleeing from justice, but Robert was frightened of Livvy and wouldn’t want her finding out. He could have paid for his brother to stay in a guest house or hotel but recently Vera had gone public about looking for Edmund. His face had appeared on the television news and the front page of national newspapers. Wouldn’t one of the other residents have recognized him? Where then?
She considered the accommodation on the estate, discounting immediately the mill house at the mine. Despite the fuss Vera had made Anne couldn’t really imagine Edmund camping out there. So far as she knew all the farmers were
struggling to maintain their tenancies, so it was unlikely that there was an isolated and empty farmhouse where Edmund was lying low. Perhaps Robert had chosen somewhere closer to home?
At the end of the Avenue was a pair of semidetached houses. Anne had first realized Grace was loopy when she’d caught her staring at one of them. In one of the houses lived the keeper and his family. Janet, the keeper’s wife, was a keen gardener and Anne knew her well enough to exchange a few words in the post office, to borrow the odd seed catalogue. There were two teenage children, the bane of Janet’s life, with their loud music and unpleasant friends. But Anne thought the other semi had been empty since Neville Furness’s departure. The new agent was rather grand and had his own place. The houses were ugly but solidly built and there was no reason why Janet and her husband would hear a new neighbour, especially over the perpetual background noise generated in their own place.
Jeremy was in the middle of a circle of elaborately dressed elderly women. They were listening, entranced, to his stories. Occasionally one of them gave a peel of genteel laughter. Anne ignored them.
‘Jem, I’m going back. I’m knackered.’ The women tittered as if she were part of a double act.
‘But you’ll miss the fireworks. You don’t want me to come?’
‘No, of course not. Stay as long as you like.’
‘Have you said goodbye to Olivia?’
‘She’s busy. I thought you could do that for me.’
‘Sure.’ He was delighted to have the excuse to speak to Livvy again. ‘Sure.’
Anne slipped away from the crowd without being noticed. The children had finished tea and were running from one stall to another with a purposeless frenzy. They had become fractious and overexcited. On the bouncy castle boys were fighting, entangled together in a rolling ball of arms and legs, the smallest in tears. Still the adults took no notice, only shouting to make themselves heard above the noise.
Anne walked down the Avenue between the line of trees. The voices and the fairground organ faded. It was very still. Tiny thunderflies settled on her shoulders and her hair.
For once the keeper’s house was quiet. Presumably the family had been invited to the party. Anne looked both ways down the Avenue. There were no cars, no people. She opened the gate of the empty house and went into the garden. There were drawn curtains at the windows so she couldn’t see in. She tried to remember if they’d been like that when she’d been standing here with Grace. She knocked on the front door. There was no answer and when she pushed it, it was locked. She walked round to the back of the house, to the kitchen door.
There were blinds at the kitchen window. Outside the kitchen door was a black plastic dustbin. She lifted the lid and saw empty cans of soup and beans, squashed cartons of orange and milk, beer tins. They smelled, but not as if they’d been there for months.
At the Hall they had started to let off fireworks. A rocket cracked and exploded above her head. She turned the handle of the door and pushed. It opened and she went in.
Chapter Fifty-One
Rachael could hear the fireworks from Baikie’s. Although it was still light she could see the coloured stars exploding above the horizon. She had taken a mug of tea outside because the cottage seemed so hot and airless and there was something unsettling about the boxes and bags stacked in piles in the living room.
Once Constance Baikie had held state there. As cut off from the rest of the world as a ship in the middle of the ocean, she had looked on as people, dressed up in smart clothes, laughed and danced to the wind-up gramophone. Many of the players in the present drama had been present at those parties – Robert Fulwell, Neville Furness, Vera Stanhope. Now the room looked like a transit camp. The next day the cottage would be locked up, the key replaced under the stone urn and it would remain damp and empty until a group of undergraduates turned up in the summer.
Edie was restless too. She would have gone back to Kimmerston that night, but Vera and Joe Ashworth had invited themselves to the cottage for a farewell drink and she didn’t want to miss out. And then she wanted to have things out with Rachael. She’d kept her word and written down the story of Rachael’s father.
‘It’ll be an anticlimax,’ she said again as she handed over the sheets of paper, covered with round, even writing. It had become her justification for not passing on the information earlier – that it was a story so uninteresting that it hardly merited telling. ‘If you imagine your father as an Edmund Fulwell, a drunken adventurer travelling the world in search of sensation, you’ll be disappointed.’ The last line, of course, had been rehearsed.
Rachael refused to read it while Edie was there, hovering, waiting for a reaction, so she set it on the grass next to her mug and lay back in the deckchair to watch the fireworks, pale flares in an increasingly overcast sky. As soon as Edie went inside she picked the paper up.
She only had time to read the first line – I met your father on April Fool’s Day – when she was interrupted by Vera Stanhope and Joe Ashworth. Vera was wearing a dress of the sort of material turned into stretch settee covers and advertised in the Sunday papers. Joe looked as if he were there on sufferance. He followed behind and carried a wicker picnic basket. They had come round the outside of the cottage straight into the garden.
Inside the basket was a plaid rug which Joe spread on the grass for Vera to sit on, a number of plates covered in tin foil and bottle of champagne.
‘Is there something to celebrate?’ Rachael asked. Vera was in a peculiarly jolly mood and Rachael wondered even if there had been an arrest, if Vera had met the deadline she had set herself. She returned the sheets of paper, face down, on the grass. She didn’t resent the interruption, realizing with surprise that she even felt relieved.
‘Connie always drank champagne,’ Vera said. ‘It seems right to honour the tradition.’ She added wickedly, ‘And Joe’s wife has made us a cake. Not quite the same, but a nice thought.’
‘Sal makes a lovely chocolate sponge,’ Joe said, seeming not to realize that he was being got at. Or too laid back to care.
‘She’ll be glad to have you home a bit more often.’ Edie came out through the French windows with glasses, another bottle of wine and bags of crisps on a wonky tin tray.
‘She’ll be lucky,’ Vera said. ‘Just because you lot aren’t here doesn’t mean we won’t be. She’ll still have plenty of time for her baking.’
‘I wonder what Miss Baikie would make of all this.’ Rachael got up to move the deckchair to a more upright position.
‘The murder? She’d have loved every minute. She loved a drama.’ Vera seemed lost in thought. Rachael expected another reminiscence of visits with her father but none came. ‘Where’s Mrs Preece?’
‘There’s a party at the Hall.’
‘Hardly decent.’ Joe was shocked. ‘The lass hasn’t long been buried.’
‘The upper classes don’t go in much for decency,’ Vera said. ‘Well, we’ll not wait for her or this bottle’ll get warm. You do the honours.’ She winked at the other two. ‘Being as you’re the only man.’
But he seemed dubious. ‘I’ve never opened champagne before. Not the real stuff.’
‘Give it here then. Don’t want you spilling it.’ She had the bottle between her legs, had begun to turn it carefully, when her mobile phone rang.
‘Bugger it,’ she said. ‘Get that for me, Joe.’
He took the phone from her cardigan pocket and flipped it open. After the first words he stood up and took it inside. Vera apparently felt no curiosity. She opened the champagne with a dull pop and poured it into the glasses. ‘Just a splash for Joe,’ she said. ‘He’ll be driving.’
Rachael, sipping, looked at the sergeant inside the house, talking earnestly. She had no intimation of tragedy as she had before Grace’s death. She thought he was probably talking to his wife. They were discussing what time he could reasonably expect to get home. She was passing on news of the little boy. He snapped the phone shut and came to the French windows.
>
‘Can I have a word, ma’am?’
‘What’s up with you?’ Vera was sitting on the rug, legs apart, skirt pulled above her knees. The glass was already empty. ‘Relax, man, I’m not ready to go yet.’
‘It’s not that.’
‘Well, what is it? Spit it out.’
He hesitated, looked at Rachael and Edie. ‘There was a 999 call from Holme Park.’
‘And?’ She saw him looking at the other women. ‘For God’s sake, man, whatever it is they’ll find out sooner or later.’
‘A body.’
‘Who?’
‘No positive ID.’
She was on her feet looking down at Rachael. ‘You’ll have to wait,’ she said. ‘That’s the hardest thing of all. As soon as I find out what’s going on I’ll send someone tell you. I promise. I’ll leave Joe here until someone can relieve him. Or do you want to go back to Kimmerston?’
‘No,’ Rachael said. ‘We’ll wait.’
‘Inside then. Just in case.’
Rachael sat in Constance Baikie’s chair, surrounded by black bin bags and read about her father. At one time she would have thought it the most important thing in her life. Now it was a distraction and she had to force herself to concentrate. It began to rain – large heavy drops which rattled like shingle against the window. She saw that they’d left the rug on the grass but Joe wouldn’t let her outside to bring it in.
PART THREE
Vera
Chapter Fifty-Two
Vera Stanhope sat on the plaid rug on the grass in front of Baikie’s, gulped champagne and remembered quite clearly the last time she had seen Constance Baikie alive. She was tempted to recount the event to Rachael and Edie because she knew they liked to hear her stories. Perhaps the taste in her mouth brought the scene back so vividly because they had been drinking champagne that day too. Though Constance was so ill that they had had to hold the glass for her. They had propped her up on the sofa with pillows but by then she was so large that her flesh spread, jelly-like, over the edge of it and she looked in danger of overbalancing and falling off. Vera had come to the cottage with her father. She had driven him in her car because by that time he was getting on too. The week before she had been working nights and she was exhausted. A day with her father always sapped her energy but he had been determined to make the trip and even then, towards the end of his life, he could impose his will on her. Besides, she didn’t want him to visit Connie on his own. It wasn’t only that she was concerned for his safety, she was worried about what he might get up to.
