The Death of Lucy Kyte

by Nicola Upson

  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.’

  It was hard to say if the final comment was a compliment or a curse, but again Josephine found the fellowship that it implied disturbing. ‘I imagine that even kings feel a duty to the women they love,’ she said.

  ‘Duty and love are rarely connected, in my experience.’ Deliberate or not, her response gave Josephine the perfect opportunity to raise the subject of Hester’s broken engagement, but the moment was snatched from her before she opened her mouth. ‘Did you resent it at first?’

  The question wrong-footed her. ‘Resent what?’

  ‘The assumption that you would come running back and do your duty when your mother died.’

  ‘I didn’t come running back,’ Josephine said, a little too quickly. ‘I worked in England for three more years, finished what I wanted to do and came back when I was ready. So it wasn’t really like that.’

  ‘Oh, it’s always like that, whether you admit it to yourself or not. Preferring not to marry, putting your work first – it’s a dangerous choice, and you pay for it in the end.’ She turned the fire off, although the room was anything but warm. ‘I went away to college, just like you. Mine was secretarial, of course. I had hoped that I might go to Edinburgh after that, or even to London, work for a busy chambers, perhaps. Then Cameron had his stroke and my parents were too old to look after him, and my sister . . .’ She laughed to herself, thinking back. ‘Well, my sister couldn’t get up the aisle quick enough. So it was all down to me. It’s a shame, really. I was good at what I did. I’ve always been good at managing other people’s lives. If I’d known it was at the expense of having one of my own, I might have chosen a different path.’

  ‘They say it’s never too late to make a fresh start.’ Good God, Josephine thought, listening to herself; where on earth had that come from? She deserved the derisive sneer that came her way.

  ‘I expect better than that from you, Miss Tey. I won’t be patronised, and you of all people should know how it feels to be pitied.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I intended.’

  ‘Good. Because it’s all a sham. People are always saying how good we are to stay at home, aren’t they? I get that all the time from my sister. I expect yours are the same – they treat you as a race apart, fill you with saintly qualities that make it easy to do what you do, when they never could. It’s gratifying at first, isn’t it? It gives you a sense of worth for a while, until you realise why they do it – to make sure you’ll carry on. But I’m not a saint, are you, Miss Tey?’

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nbsp; ‘No.’ Josephine did not trust herself to say any more. Everything that Jane Peck had said was true, and it frightened her that this woman should see so easily into her darkest soul, laying bare the anger and despair that she thought she had kept hidden, even from herself.

  ‘No, you’re not a saint. And yet people will look back at your life when you’re gone and talk about the sacrifice you’ve made. They’ll pity you for it, and what a blow that will be to your pride! You’ll look down from wherever you are – or up, of course – and you’ll want to scream at them to stop, but it will be too late by then. If you think they talk about you now, just wait until you’re dead.’ Something in the controlled calm of this speech told Josephine how carefully it had all been prepared; there was no doubt in her mind now that Jane Peck had known she would come, that she had waited here for days for the chance to bring Josephine face to face with her own demons; the only question was whether she had done it before with Hester, and how much she would admit. ‘Still, at least that sacrifice will be recognised, because you’re famous. Others make it, and just fade quietly away. Faded. That’s how I’ve always felt.’ Josephine’s blush gave her away, and Jane Peck acknowledged it. ‘I see that’s how you think of me, too. And what was it all for? I wonder. Cameron wasn’t even a war hero, for God’s sake, just an invalid. Sometimes I used to think that would have been so much easier. I watched those women, caring for their heroic sick, united by some sort of collective tragedy, and I envied them that solidarity.’

  ‘I’m not sure they would give it the nobility you seem to think it should have. A wasted life is a wasted life, no matter how worthwhile you’re told the cause is.’

  She refused to rise to the bait. ‘But at least they knew they weren’t alone. That’s the point. I’ve always been alone. And it should never have been me, should it? We may as well get round to why you’re here. It should have been Hester Larkspur.’

  In the end, the question came easily to Josephine, and she matched Jane Peck’s composure word for deadly word. ‘Did you kill Hester?’

  It was as though she had never spoken. ‘She made a fool of Cameron from the very beginning. It wasn’t hard to do, not to a man like him, but she achieved it with a certain panache, I must say. She came home less often from those theatre tours and it was obvious that she’d met someone else, but he wouldn’t have it. Not his precious Hester. Even when she left him, he wouldn’t have a word said against her. Is that love or foolishness, do you think? I could never tell, being a stranger to both.’

  ‘I’m sure Hester didn’t mean to humiliate your brother. She told my mother that . . .’

  ‘Oh, I’m not saying she meant to humiliate him; I’m saying she was too selfish to care whether she did or not, or even to notice.’ Hand on heart, from what she knew of Hester, Josephine would have found it hard to disagree. ‘Let me tell you what Cameron said to me one day . . . well, not said exactly; slurred would be more accurate. His speech never really came back, thank God, but you know what I mean. He said that Hester had had a lucky escape, that she would never have wanted to be burdened with him, not a woman like her. It was fine for a woman like me, though. How do you think that made me feel, Josephine? Did I deserve that? Could he not understand that it was he who had turned me into that sort of woman?’

  For the first time, Jane Peck seemed to be genuinely seeking some sort of reassurance from Josephine, rather than using their common situation as a weapon. ‘I’m not surprised you were angry,’ she said cautiously.

  ‘Angry doesn’t even begin to describe it. It’s funny, isn’t it, but not even a writer like you can find a word for what I was.’ The scorn was already back in her voice. ‘Cameron kept a photograph of Hester Larkspur by his bed until the day he died. I would have let it go then, you know – that’s the truth. But when I was clearing out his things, ready to sell the house, I found a newspaper that he’d kept. It was just a small piece, but it said that Hester was about to star in a film. That was more than I could bear, I’m afraid. I suppose I’d felt better about it all since Walter died and she gave up what she loved. It seemed like justice of a sort. When things were bad with Cameron, I’d think of Hester growing old in that cottage and what utter loneliness would do to someone like her, someone who’d always been adored; how she’d cope when the fan letters began to dwindle and fewer people came to call, when she looked in the mirror and realised it was ridiculous to suppose that she would ever know passion again, that she would ever be needed. I knew how bitter she would become, and one of the worst things about bitterness is that it makes you paranoid. You stop trusting, and you see something tainted in even the purest friendship. You turn against everyone, and you end up being your own worst enemy.’

  She had described Hester’s gradual isolation so perfectly that it took Josephine’s breath away. ‘I thought she might finally have learned that she couldn’t just take what she wanted. But no. Hester was making a comeback, the centre of attention all over again, because Hester had to be loved, damn it. Hester’s God-given right on this planet was to be loved.’ Her anger had got the better of her at last, and Josephine noticed how tightly she gripped the arm of her chair, how the colour had drained from her face; for the first time, she was afraid of more than what she might hear. ‘And the casualty of that was never Cameron – he fooled himself right to the end. It was my life that Hester destroyed – my dreams, my independence, my right to love. I even had to give up my job in the end. Oh, I know you don’t think it’s much – I can see that in your face when you come into the office. But it’s been everything to me – sanity, respite, money, and most important of all, self-respect. You see, I’ve never had much of that, Josephine. I’ve never turned heads. When Cameron was alive, I’d undress every night and look at my body in the mirror, touch myself just to imagine what it would be like to be loved. And in the end, I accepted that was all I would ever know.’

  She ran her fingers over her breast, and Josephine could stand it no longer. ‘This is sick,’ she said, getting up to go. ‘I don’t have to listen to it.’

  ‘Of course you don’t – but you will, because you want to find out what I’ve done.’ She was right, of course, and Josephine returned to her chair, despising her own meekness. ‘I’ll never forget that first visit to your cottage,’ she said sarcastically. ‘I’d gone for some money, that’s all. A one-off payment for everything I’d given up. When I knocked on the door, I expected to be greeted by the same old Hester, the one who thought she had me eating out of her hand whenever she came to the office; the one who so generously forgave me for my little outburst at the theatre. I suppose you know about that?’

  Josephine nodded. ‘I went to see Tod Slaughter. He told me he recognised you at the funeral.’

  ‘Quite the little sleuth. Good practice for your books, I suppose. But anyway, this Hester was very different – frail, and all but blind. It shocked me, I have to say. She didn’t know who I was until I opened my mouth, and then she tried to bluff her way through it, but I could see how vulnerable she was. There was no fight when I asked her for money, you know. I took it and left, never imagining I’d see her again – but then I thought about how easy it had been, and how little I’d actually got for all those years, so I went back, supposedly to apologise and to make sure that we parted on good terms. I knew by then that the money wasn’t enough, though. I wanted Hester to suffer like I had. I wanted to make her life a misery.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Josephine asked, dreading the answer but needing to know.

  ‘Oh, made her home a little less comfortable. Moved things around so that she fell over them – furniture in the house, statues on the paths in her precious garden, the rope to the outhouse. I took the lid from the kettle so that the steam would burn her. Small things, really – all easy and quick to do while I was using her toilet or making her a cup of tea. It’s not as though she was watching me.’

  ‘Small things like taking the lid off the hotplate?’ Josephine asked, remembering Rose’s te
stimony to the burns on Hester’s arms and allowing herself to imagine the agony they must have caused.

  ‘Exactly. And changing things round in the cupboard so that her food would be disgusting – salt for sugar, that sort of thing. It never occurred to me that she’d stop eating because of it.’

  Josephine recalled the chaos of those cupboards when she had first moved in, the bleach and the ant powder next to the food. ‘It’s a wonder she didn’t poison herself.’

  ‘Isn’t it? And it was such a shame about the dog.’ She smiled, and Josephine longed to wipe it from her face. ‘But they were all things that could be put down to an old woman on her own, unable to cope. Hester needed someone to look after her, really, but I’d had enough of that.’

  ‘How long were you there, for God’s sake?’

  ‘I came and went a few times – after all, Hester was effectively paying my rail fare and I had no responsibilities up here any more. It was nice to get out and see the countryside. But she went downhill so quickly. Too quickly, really.’

  ‘Did she know what you were doing?’

  ‘No, of course not. She blamed the girl who charred for her, or some children from the village. And this is going to sound ridiculous, perhaps, but she was convinced that the cottage was haunted.’

  ‘So you started on her mind, as well. She’d hear you moving about the cottage and it terrified her. Were you there the day Rose went round to see her?’

  ‘Yes, I was. She did me a favour, really, that girl. I was shocked when she just walked in. It made me realise that I’d been pushing my luck, that Hester wasn’t quite as isolated as I thought. She was half out of her mind by then anyway, so I stepped things up a bit.’ Josephine had no doubt that Jane Peck would be only too happy to be more specific, but she couldn’t bear to hear the details. ‘In the end, the mighty Miss Larkspur was so frightened that she crawled into a hole like an animal. All I had to do was wait to make sure that she never came out. I didn’t lay a finger on her.’