by Wendy Holden
Rachel nudged her. ‘You know what I mean. I looked online and they had some great things. I saw a kitchen table and chairs that would be perfect. Mix up your supermarket stuff with a few vintage pieces and it’ll look wonderful.’
The vintage furniture shop stood in the centre of town. Nell could not imagine how she had missed it. It was the most conspicuous in the street: a double-fronted emporium whose windows were filled with pictures, hat stands, bowls, chairs and all manner of bric-a-brac.
‘Yippee,’ said Rachel. ‘This is my absolute favourite sort of place.’
Nell felt less certain, and could not work out why. She knew about shabby chic of course. Even 19a Gardiner Road had sported a stack of Cath Kidston cake tins, a crocheted throw on the sofa and a couple of distressed storm lanterns. Perhaps this shop’s sheer convolution of random objects made her feel claustrophobic. All those guitars, post horns, clocks, barometers, milk churns and carved wooden chairs shoved haphazardly together behind the glass.
‘What’s up?’ Rachel, as ever, had recognised something was wrong.
‘I don’t know where to start.’ Which was true. But even as she said it Nell knew that it wasn’t just that.
‘Leave it to me,’ Rachel declared. ‘Inside this frustrated lawyer lurks a frustrated interior designer.’
She dived through the doors of the shop, Juno at her heels. Nell followed and found Rachel excitedly examining sewing machines and milking stools. She was lifting up painted plates and staring assessingly at pictures that had slipped sideways in their frames. She was clearly in her element.
Nell stood awkwardly and uselessly as Rachel picked up carpets and candlesticks and old chapel collection boxes. She watched her peering at patchwork quilts and rocking chairs and walking sticks and fur coats. Some of these things she gave to Juno and told her to take them to the front desk.
‘Hang on,’ Nell said, seeing a standard lamp with an outlandish fringed shade being selected.
Rachel turned to her. ‘Trust me. We can change the shade. But look at this lovely woodwork.’ The base of the lamp was slender and graceful. ‘It’s oak,’ Rachel added. ‘It will polish up beautifully. And it’s so cheap!’
Before Nell could argue, Rachel sent Juno off with the lamp and hurried to examine a corner full of chairs and tables. She looked at them, and back at the notes she had taken in the cottage. She had a plan, Nell realised. Somehow Rachel could see past the clutter to pick out exactly what would work in Beggar’s Roost.
Nell followed her past radios and handbags with rusty clasps. Royal mugs by the dozen stood on shelves beside lines of dusty glassware. One corner had a collection of gloomily slow-ticking grandfather clocks. Another had oak furniture and smelt pleasantly of beeswax. ‘Perfect!’ Rachel said, lifting the lid of a dark oak carved chest big enough for a man to hide in. ‘That will look brilliant at the back of your sitting room. Ooh, and so will these!’
Nell watched her friend swoop on a couple of small armchairs. ‘Look! Distressed leather! You’d pay a fortune for these in London!’
And in the catalogues she used to work on, Nell thought. An Englishman’s Castle had charged infinitely more for chairs that were inferior to the ones Rachel was now poking and prodding. ‘We’ll have these,’ she told a passing assistant, whilst whipping a pile of framed prints from beneath the very noses of a couple stooping to examine them. Then she disappeared, only to reappear with an armful of antique jugs of different shapes, colours and sizes. ‘For your kitchen shelves!’ Next she materialised with a box of assorted crockery: flower-print cups and saucers with gilt rims and tiny, delicate handles. ‘For your cupboards!’
Nell lost her again, until a familiar purple-clad, pink-faced figure hoved into view waving a couple of lamps and saying that she had spotted the perfect bookcase. Then she returned with a small desk. Another table appeared, then a bench. Then a chest and another standard lamp. The pile beside the front desk was growing.
The women behind it, a purse-lipped pair, eyed the heap of purchases. ‘Going to need a removal van to carry this lot.’
Nell was feeling distinctly anxious now. There was a limit to the Land Rover’s capacity, not to mention that of her own funds. ‘We’ve probably got enough stuff,’ she said, discovering Rachel flicking through a box of Edwardian postcards.
She had now, also, realised that disturbed her about the place. With its vintage radiograms, Utility furniture, faded cushions, cabinets of ornaments and black-and-white photographs in thin wooden frames – especially those – it reminded her powerfully of George’s cottage. It was like an extended, rambling, much less tidy version of his home.
The things that she was looking at, the things that, Rachel had piled up by the counter, had belonged to old people like him. They had been bought in particular circumstances, for particular reasons. A lot of them – the old dolls, say – had been bought with love and other items – the vintage dresses, the worn-heeled shoes – with hope.
It seemed to Nell both possible and unbearable that the home George had shared with Edwina, all the things in it that they had bought together and loved, should end up somewhere like this. Edwina’s silver brushes. George’s shaving mirror. Being picked over by strangers, commented on, rejected. All these treasured, personal, dignified things.
‘Listen to this!’ Rachel, still rummaging in the postcards, pulled out a black-and-white view of ‘The Valley Gardens, Mablethorpe’. ‘“Mother sends her best regards and hopes that you received the parcel.”’
‘Sounds like code.’ Juno admiring herself in a top hat in front of a long mirror. ‘Mother is obviously the mastermind of an evil gang. The parcel is probably drugs. Or a dead body.’
Rachel laughed. She looked at Nell, who had sunk down on to a stool and was sitting there silently.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ Rachel’s lively dark eyes were full of concern. She called to Juno. ‘We’d better go.’
Outside, Nell tried to explain about George. But it was difficult to give the full picture without bringing Adam Greenleaf into it. She finished with the feeling that her hasty, broad-brush version of events had failed to convince the others.
‘But everything we’ve bought is going to a good home,’ Juno pointed out. ‘We’re not treating any of it with disrespect.’
‘She’s right,’ Rachel said. ‘I think you’re being a bit mawkish, to be honest. It’s people that matter, not the things they leave behind.’
This was, of course, unarguable. Especially coming from Rachel. ‘You can’t stop time,’ she counselled. ‘And you shouldn’t get upset about places like this.’ She waved a hand towards the cluttered shop. ‘They do everyone a service. The stuff all gets mixed up and moved on and people like us buy it and give it a new home.’
‘But George,’ Nell wailed. ‘What if he can’t go back home?’
‘George sounds like he’s moving into a different part of his life now. He needs a lot of care. And he’ll get it, I’m sure.’
Nell glanced back through the windows to their pile of purchases by the till. Rachel had arranged to come back with the Land Rover to pick it all up. She knew Juno was right. Every item, once in Beggar’s Roost, would be cherished.
‘You’re being very kind to him by the sound of it,’ Rachel assured her. ‘But you’re worrying about him too much.’
‘But where will he go if they throw him out of the hospital?’
‘They won’t throw him out. He’ll be well looked after.’
‘But where?’ Nell’s tone was almost fierce now. She could not let it go.
‘I don’t know. Ask the doctors. Look, Nell. You’re not responsible for everything that happens to him.’ She paused. ‘I have to say, this all seems a bit disproportionate. Don’t you think you might be dragging a few other issues in here as well?’
Nell could see this was a possibility. The antiques ce
ntre was, in its way, a temple of rejection, a storehouse of discarded things deemed no longer useful by their owners. Perhaps she was projecting some of her own buried feelings of abandonment, her anger at being deserted by Joey. Or was it all to do with a tall man with dark eyes she couldn’t make up her mind about and who made her feel nervous and out of control?
Maybe this was all a bit deep for a Saturday morning. ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered. She was being self-indulgent, and the weekend was Rachel and Juno’s treat.
‘You are forgiven,’ Rachel said. ‘Now do you mind if I go back in because I haven’t quite finished.’
‘Nor me,’ Juno said quickly. ‘I’d just found a Ladybird Book of Spies.’
They remained another entire hour. Rachel had by then added to the pile a silver tray, the entire leather-bound works of Dickens, a Venetian mirror intended for the bathroom, some apparently unused embroidered linen napkins and a set of champagne glasses. Juno, meanwhile, had bought the code postcard from Mablethorpe, the Book of Spies and a fob watch that had one of its hands missing. She wore this proudly tucked round one of the belt loops of her jeans.
Everything Rachel had chosen was perfect for the cottage. Nell could see this even as they unpacked the back of the Land Rover. She was already sorting the items out into piles for different rooms.
With what seemed amazing speed, the armchairs were positioned, the pictures hung, the chest pushed against the wall, the jugs and glasses arranged on the shelves, the rugs put down and the Venetian mirror placed in the bathroom. In the course of a morning, the formerly empty-feeling Beggar’s Roost had taken on the aspect of a home.
There was plenty more to do; beds, for example. But as starts went, it was a good one. The cottage already felt more welcoming than Gardiner Road ever had.
‘Next week, when you come up, it will be ready,’ Nell promised the others.
That afternoon, Rachel drove her to the hospital in the Red Baron, warning her not to get too upset or too involved.
Nell went alone to George’s private room. Rachel claimed she had some coursework reading to do but Nell sensed she wanted to avoid the situation. She felt she had done George a disfavour somehow with her half-description of what had happened; the harmless old man was now cast as the villain of the piece.
There were no stories from George today. He was asleep. Nell went over to Jasjit. She was behind the nurses’ station frowning into a computer.
‘How are things?’ Nell crossed her fingers behind her back.
Jasjit looked up and smiled. ‘We’re moving him from his room on to the main ward.’
Nell’s face lit up. ‘But isn’t that great news?’
The nurse pulled a face. ‘It doesn’t mean much, to be honest. Just that he can survive without the machines now.’
Nell, nonetheless determined to see this as a positive development, went back to George’s bedside and softly pressed the vein-roped hand. ‘See you later,’ she whispered.
‘Dive, Nobby,’ George muttered. ‘Dive right down into the master searchlight. It’s the only way. Get below the level of Messerschmitts. Then they’ll leave us alone.’
CHAPTER 44
It was the interval, and Nell, Rachel and Juno stood in the bar of the Pavilion Theatre, Chestlock.
Juno, resplendent in her Marple costume, was sipping a Coke and expounding her theories as to who’d dunnit. ‘It’s never who you think. And almost always it’s a crime of passion.’
‘My money’s on Bertie Spiffing,’ Rachel declared. ‘He’s definitely got something to hide. No one could be quite that stupid.’
Juno consulted her copious notes. ‘It could be Curate Segg. That business with the coffee cups was suspicious. But I’m pretty certain it’s Signora Stiletto.’ She glanced up at Nell. ‘What do you think?’
Nell, hand clamped round a large glass of chilled rosé, shrugged. All she thought was that things, finally, seemed to be going well.
Beggar’s Roost, with all its new-old furniture, felt so homely now that in their usual impetuous fashion Rachel and Juno had insisted on staying there tonight rather than the honeymoon suite. Jason had willingly lent them the put-up bed for Juno, plus two others. It would be basic, but fun. They had even bought logs and coal for the fire.
‘Strangle the gamekeeper’s a definite possibility too,’ Juno was musing. ‘I wish they’d murder Pierrot, though; he’s the worst actor I’ve ever seen.’
Nell was surprised how busy the place was; Agatha Christie-type murder mysteries were clearly very popular. She’d never heard of any of the actors, although Juno had. According to her, Gilly Davenport, the actress playing Miss Mandrake, had been in lots of similar productions, as had Pete Leather, who played Major Wilderbeest and had been shot in the first act.
Nell had to agree with Juno’s assessment of Caradoc Turner. He was hopelessly miscast as a sleuth, having none of the requisite calm and calculation. Rather, he seemed to radiate agitation with his insanely staring eyes, glistening bared teeth and manic walk. The ends of his fingers twitched ominously.
Elsewhere in the bar, Angela Highwater swigged the rest of her sweet white wine. She felt like a fish out of water; this was emphatically not her scene. She hadn’t thought the audience for murder would be so ancient. When you were that close to the grave, you might want to avoid so many references to it.
She took another swig and yawned. She was wearing a tight lemon dress teamed with a clinging leather jacket in dusty pink. Her heels were their usual skyscraper height and her hair wound wildly around her head. Her latest handbag, encrusted with diamanté, swung from her manicured hand on twisted silk cords. She looked fabulous, she knew, but she was aware of dressing at least fifty years younger than everyone else present. There were an awful lot of white Crimplene pleats and sandals that put bunions before beauty. And that was just the men.
Everywhere Angela looked, bespectacled eyes were narrowed in her direction. Pursed, wrinkled lips muttered to each other behind programmes. The old bats were staring at her as if she had designs on the husbands who stood or slumped beside them like wrecked ships. Dream on, Angela thought.
Even the women behind the bar – maternal types who seemed to know their customers by name (‘of course I’ll pop some ice in that for you, Doris’), were looking at her disapprovingly as they dispensed large plastic bags of boiled sweets in advance of the second half. The deafening volume of her neighbour working his way through some chocolate limes had made it hard, at times, for Angela to hear the first couple of acts.
The prospect of yet more crackling plastic in the second half, not to mention the chomping and grinding of dentures mere inches from her ears, made Angela briefly consider getting the whole business over with now. Was there time to rush round to the stage door and deliver the message she had come with?
Possibly not, she was forced to accept. The interval was only fifteen minutes and she’d spent half of that trying to get served. The stage door, moreover, was round the other side of the building.
As soon as the play ended, she’d be round there like a shot, as it were, ha ha. Until then, there was the whole of the second act to endure. She’d lost the plot ages ago; there were at least ten possible murderers although she couldn’t remember their motives. Only the Major had bitten the dust by the interval, which meant nine to go. Would it ever end?
She avoided the condemning gazes by pretending to study the programme again. In his photograph, Caradoc Turner looked defeated. Having to stick on a moustache every night and drive the length and breadth of Britain probably got you that way.
She pictured Caradoc in his dressing room now, reapplying his make-up in a mirror framed with blazing bulbs. What a shock he had coming to him! But what would he do with the information that his young wife had been unfaithful to him with the local Lothario – or Lawn-thario, given Dan’s occupation?
Physical reprisals looked unlikely. Angela had scrutinised Pierrot in the first half and concluded that, while his Belgian accent was touch and go, it was typecasting on the shortness front.
As Caradoc was hardly a size to tackle a man-mountain like Dan, he’d have to come up with something more ingenious than mere violence. But that was his problem. Angela didn’t care. She would have got her revenge by then.
The front of house manager, his white shirt straining across his belly, now came through ringing his bell. ‘Layzandgennelmen, please take your seats, the second act of Murderous Death is about to begin . . .’
Shuffling back down the corridor from the bar with the rest of the elderly crowd, Angela was surprised when her gaze fell on three people whose hair was not the permed white frizz of most other attendees.
There was a tall blonde, a small brunette and a child. She recognised the blonde, but who were these other people? Angela, for whom knowledge was power, had to find out.
She darted forward, skewering several elderly bunions on the way. Plastering on her sweetest smile, she tapped Nell on the back, summoning her best friendly manner. ‘Nell! How are you? How’s it going?’
Nell jumped, turned and found herself looking at the Director of Human Resources. This was the first time she had seen Angela since the transformation of Beggar’s Roost. Nell was still not certain that she shared Julie’s trenchant views as to her motives – why would Angela dislike her so much? But she was certainly more suspicious now.
As Angela was gazing expectantly at her, Nell waved cautiously at her two companions. ‘This is my friend Rachel and her daughter Juno.’
Angela nodded curtly. They looked frankly bizarre to her. The woman had strange purple hair and what was that child wearing? She returned her attention to Nell. ‘So how’s the local heroine? And the local heroes? The lovely Mr Greenleaf?’
Angela was fishing. She hadn’t seen Adam Greenleaf for some days now. Had he been with this wretched woman?
Seeing that Nell did not reply, Rachel seized on the name. ‘Mr Greenleaf?’
