In the Family

by Christina James

  “And this girl was a friend of Kathryn’s?”

  She nodded happily. “Yes. She was a very pretty girl. Kathryn was a pretty girl, too.”

  “And you’re quite sure that you don’t remember her with Hedley?”

  “Hedley will have known her, of course. She came to the house. She must have done, otherwise I wouldn’t have seen her. I don’t go out much, you know. But Hedley doesn’t like girls, does he?” She sniggered harshly.

  “Hedley says that she was his girlfriend.”

  “Hedley would say that, wouldn’t he? He doesn’t want to get found out!”

  “Found out about what, Mrs. Atkins?”

  “Not found out about anything, found out for what he is.”

  “What is he?”

  “Oh, you know!” She rolled her eyes and gave Tim’s arm a playful little push. “I didn’t much mind myself, but his father couldn’t stand the idea. Neither could she.”

  “She? Do you mean Kathryn, Mrs. Atkins?”

  “No, of course not. I mean her. Doris. Hedley’s grandmother. I had thought you’d come about her, you know. Whenever people talk to me, sooner or later they get on to her. I’d rather you didn’t call me ‘Mrs. Atkins’, by the way. Atkins was her name, though she was always a ‘Miss’. I’m Tirzah.”

  “Do you want to talk about Doris?” Tim butted in.

  “If you like. But I don’t really have anything to say. She shouldn’t have liked gardening so much. Then it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “We haven’t come to upset you . . .” Tim began, aware that Mrs. Meredith had returned and was hovering in the background.

  “Oh, I’m not upset. Doris made me famous. I can’t think why. She was such an insignificant person herself. There was such a fuss about it all. And the irony of it was, I quite liked her. I had no reason not to get on with her. She was very clear-sighted about Ronald, for one thing.”

  Tim was aware of some movement behind Tirzah. He looked up to see Mrs. Meredith signalling to him quite energetically.

  “Change the subject,” she mouthed. He nodded.

  “So you have no specific memories of Kathryn Sheppard that might help us, Mrs. . . . Tirzah?”

  “I’m afraid not. Just another pretty girl. There are so many pretty girls, don’t you find, Inspector?”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Tim, bewildered once more. He felt frustrated. It seemed impossible to lead this disjointed conversation into coherence. There was a prolonged silence. Then Dorothy spoke again. Her voice was harder now, her tone venomous.

  “There is something you can do for me, if you would be so kind,” she said.

  “Of course, if we are able. What is it that you would like?”

  “Since you are clearly in touch with him, you can tell that scapegrace son of mine to come and see me. He owes it to me. He knows that he does. He can’t get away with hiding forever.”

  “What is he hiding from, Tirzah?”

  “The same thing. The thing that I told you about before. But hiding doesn’t work. He has to face up to it.”

  Once again Mrs. Meredith signalled frantically. She was shaking her head. This time Tim felt irritated. He supposed he must bow to her superior understanding of what Dorothy Atkins could take, and he certainly didn’t wish to provoke an outburst of some kind; but if he were to be steered away from asking any really pertinent questions, the interview would simply be a waste of time.

  “Such a ninny isn’t she?” said Tirzah sardonically in a low, confidential voice.

  “Who?” asked Tim, startled and a little disorientated. Was she speaking of the past as if it were the present? Did she mean Juliet? Or was she harking back to Doris Atkins, or even Kathryn Sheppard?

  “That Meredith woman,” said Tirzah, jerking her thumb behind her without looking round. “Always hanging around, trying to wrap us in cotton wool.” She raised her voice. “It was a bit late for cotton wool, my dear, by the time I got myself in here.”

  Mrs. Meredith looked uncomfortable. Despite himself, Tim had to suppress a grin.

  He thought it unlikely that he would manage to extract any more from Dorothy Atkins today.

  “Well thank you very much, Tirzah,” he said, rising and touching her hand, which was once again clutching a balled-up piece of her cardigan. “You’ve been very helpful. Perhaps you will not mind if I come to see you again?”

  “You can if you like. I’m not sure what use it was, either to you or to me. But it is quite nice to have visitors.” She nodded at Juliet, who had also got to her feet. “She doesn’t say much, does she? What’s the matter, dear, cat got your tongue?”

  Mrs. Meredith had already slipped out of the room. Tim and Juliet followed her quietly, so they did not make the same spectacle of themselves as when they had entered it. When they reached the swing doors, Tim looked back at Dorothy. She had folded her newspaper neatly into four, and was looking at the crossword. She appeared to be absorbed, but he sensed that she was still acutely aware of their presence. He thought that a slight smile hovered on her thin lips, but he might have imagined it. The interview had left him feeling that he might have imagined anything – that anyone, in fact, might have imagined anything – about this woman, and would have had an equal chance of either getting close to the truth or straying a million miles from it.

  He repeated this thought a couple of minutes later, when he and Juliet were back with Mrs. Meredith in her office.

  “Well,” he said, “what did you make of that? I’m absolutely none the wiser!”

  She looked at him guardedly.

  “What did you make of it?” she asked.

  “She was much more confused than I had expected. Vague, somehow. As if she wasn’t quite in control. I’m sure that you’re right when you say that she can be very manipulative. It just didn’t show itself today, that’s all. Perhaps she has off days. She’s quite old now, after all.”

  Mrs. Meredith looked amused.

  “If that’s what you think, Inspector. Personally I am convinced that she was stringing you along. Ars est celare artem where Tirzah is concerned. You might find it useful not to forget that.”

  “You think she was putting it on?” said Tim. “The confused little old lady act? If you’re right, she was amazing.”

  “She is amazing, in her own way. Besides, she’s a good observer. She has plenty of role models to show her how to play the confused elderly female. She’ll do it again next time you see her now. You’ll have to trick her into giving herself away.”

  “How will we do that?”

  “The best way is to make her angry. But not so angry that she either loses her temper or withdraws into herself.”

  As Tim and Juliet were walking back to his car, he suddenly paused and turned to face her.

  “She’s given us one lead, anyway,” he said. “Hedley Atkins. He’s been co-operative so far, but no-one’s put him under any pressure. He’s simply been asked some routine stuff about Kathryn Sheppard. I think we need to press him a bit more about the past – and about his sister in particular. And we need to find out more about her, too.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I know that I cannot put it off any longer. We have eaten an excellent lunch in the buffet car – tomato soup, sea bass with fennel and chocolate torte – and drunk a bottle of claret. Peter has drunk much less than usual – normally he would have been quite capable of downing a whole bottle of wine on his own, as well as a couple of gin-and-tonics – and it is clear that he wishes to remain sober. I understand that this is because he wants to be entirely alert when he is listening to my story; also that he will insist on hearing it now. I can tell by the businesslike way in which he is paying the bill that he will brook no further delays. We return to our seats. I note with relief that we seem to have almost the whole carriage to ourselves. The elderly lady and the woman with two small
children have vanished, presumably absorbed back into their communities in the Scottish borders. The only other occupant of the carriage is a middle-aged man who is lying sprawled in one of the airline seats, his mouth open, his snores prodigious.

  Peter hands me in to my seat as solicitously as if I were a girl on her first date, then settles in beside me. I have never really felt intimidated by him before – on the face of it, his slight figure and damson-fly personality hardly inspire fear, even when he is being spiteful – but now I find him threatening. There is a sternness about him, an implacable determination to be told all of the truth without nonsense, that I find very alarming. He takes my hand and I flinch.

  “Do stop being so jumpy, Hedley,” he says, still unsmilingly. “There is no need to be afraid. It is just an anecdote that I want – well, perhaps something a little longer – but nothing that should cause you distress. I’m sure that you recollect the events of that day and I want to hear you recite your memories. Nothing more nor less than that. No embroideries, no false amnesia. If you have genuinely forgotten some of the details, of course, you must say so. And rest assured that this is between you and me: no-one else will hear any version of your account, at least not from me.”

  I nod miserably.

  “Let’s start then, shall we? A bit of background first, I think. You got up that morning. Were you sleeping at the house in Westlode Street, or did you go there later on?”

  “We were all sleeping there. I can’t altogether remember why. I think that my father had been staying there off and on for some time, helping to look after my great-grandmother as she became more frail. Also Uncle Colin was not in the best of health. He had always had a hunchback, and the long pale face that seems to go with it. He had been born with his deformity and as far as I know no doctor had ever been asked to diagnose the cause of it. I suspect that he had a weak heart – perhaps had always had one. He had fallen in his room a couple of times, and my grandmother – Doris – no longer had the strength to get him into bed. Colin wasn’t very tall, but he was quite solid and very unco-operative, I seem to remember.”

  “So why did your father want the rest of the family to stay there as well?”

  “I honestly can’t remember. More to the point, I can’t remember why Tirzah agreed to it. As I’ve said, my father had been sleeping there for some weeks before we joined him. It wasn’t like Tirzah to do what he wanted, especially when it involved her having to take on extra work. There was probably a reason for her having given in. A financial one, I’d say.”

  “You mean, your father bribed her?”

  “Not necessarily my father. Colin was quite close to Tirzah. He may have offered to pay her to help with his mother.”

  “You were already working at the time, weren’t you? Yet still living at home. Why was that?”

  “I hadn’t been working for very long. I didn’t want to live with them. I was actually quite desperate to get away, although the terrible rows that they’d had in my childhood weren’t happening as often by then. I just didn’t have the funds to be able to move out.”

  I feel defensive about this. Peter nods, conciliatory.

  “And Bryony? She was there, too?”

  I have almost forgotten that he knows about Bryony.

  “Yes. It was the summer before she was due to go to university.”

  “Tell me about the sleeping arrangements.”

  “Doris had the room that had until recently been her mother’s – the master bedroom, I suppose you would call it. My great-grandmother could no longer climb the stairs. She now had a single bed in a tiny room off the kitchen which everyone still called the scullery. Colin’s room was the same one that he had occupied as a child, next door to Doris’s, I suppose because as a boy he had been cosseted by his mother, so she had put him in a room next to hers. It was a bleak little room. It didn’t contain much more than a narrow single bed, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe. Tirzah and Bryony had the room that my grandmother called the ‘guest room’ – like her own, the bed had a deep homemade feather mattress – and my father was sleeping on the sofa in the upstairs sitting room that was never used for sitting in. It was a real Victorian ‘best parlour’, and much of the furniture in it was swathed in dust-sheets.”

  “What about you?”

  “I had a camp-bed made up on the landing.”

  “Rather a curious set of arrangements, wasn’t it? I could think of more congenial ways of exploiting the facilities. For example, why didn’t your parents occupy the guest room together and Bryony share a bed with your grandmother, thus leaving the sitting-room sofa free for you and removing the need for makeshift billets on the landing? Bedding outside the bedroom is always quite sordid, don’t you think?” He wrinkles his nose.

  I shrug. The sleeping arrangements had not bothered me then, and I have no intention of exercising myself over them now. I imagine that my father and Tirzah had been quite happy to sleep apart. They will have just made me fit in with whatever they preferred.

  “So,” continues Peter, “you all got up at the usual time?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “When was that?”

  “My father will have been up first. He was obsessive about his bathroom routine. He will have made sure that he got his fifteen minutes in before anyone else. I don’t know exactly when he got up on that day; when we were at home it was at 6.45 a.m. on the dot.”

  Peter nods again.

  “Let us assume that this day was no different. Who was next? You, presumably, if you were working?”

  “I honestly can’t remember, but I doubt it. Uncle Colin opened the shop every day at 8 a.m. My guess is that he will have claimed the bathroom after my father, and my grandmother will have got up with him. She still had a basin and ewer in her room from the days before the fourth bedroom was converted into a bathroom. She normally bathed the night before, then washed quickly in her room in the morning.”

  “So your father and his uncle and mother were almost certainly up before the rest of you. That left you, your mother and Bryony, and the old lady, of course, of whom only you and your father had to leave the house by a certain time because you each had a job to go to. Is that correct?”

  “I’m not sure. Tirzah did have a job at that time, as a school secretary, but she didn’t work in the school holidays. Bryony was about to go to university. She certainly worked that summer, in the canning factory, but I think she may have given the job up by then.”

  “What was your job? The same as it is now?”

  “No. It was the same company, but I’ve changed jobs several times since. I was the shipping clerk for Maschler’s, where I still work. Now, as you know, we produce precision implements of all kinds; but then it was just farming equipment. And I’m a director now.”

  “So you don’t remember getting up on that day, or going to work?”

  “No. I remember coming home for lunch. We were all there for lunch. I remember what we ate: it was chipolatas and mash, which was probably cooked by my grandmother, and for dessert we had treacle tart and custard, which was one of my mother’s stock puddings. My grandmother and my mother seemed to be doing the work between them. I can’t remember there being any friction. Uncle Colin wasn’t there: he had decided to eat with my great-grandmother, and had taken his own lunch as well as hers into her room to be with her.”

  “What about Bryony?”

  “I suppose that she must have been there, though I don’t remember it specifically. I can’t remember what she was wearing, or what she said. I don’t think that any of us said very much, because there was a Test match on the television, and cricket was my father’s passion. He won’t have taken kindly to having the commentary interrupted by conversation.”

  “What sort of relationship did he have with your grandmother?”

  “I think that it was OK. Doris was a very pragmatic person: she did
n’t expect too much of anyone. I suppose that the way her life had turned out had taught her to be tolerant. She always seemed pleased to see him – but she was always pleased to see any of us – and they shared similar tastes in books. She would get the Sergeanne Golon Angelique books from the library and let him read them on her ticket before she took them back. She talked about her garden to him. She liked gardening.”

  “So your mother said, rather memorably.”

  I shrug. Peter is looking at me beadily again. My defences are raised, which he notices.

  “So – then what?” he continues, “you and your father returned to work?”

  “I suppose so – I really can’t remember.”

  “Well, let us suppose that is what happened. So that lunchtime will have been the last time that you saw your grandmother alive. She was dead by the time you returned to the house. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.” I look down at my hands, resting on the train’s table. My fingers are interlinked. I am clenching them until my knuckles are pale blue.

  “Did you come home especially?”

  “What?”

  “Did you come home because you were summoned – did someone tell you that Doris was dead, or did you receive a message of some kind that you should return home because something had happened?”

  “No. I just left work as usual. When I arrived at the house, the police were already there. My mother and father were in separate rooms. She was taken away by the police just after I arrived. They didn’t let me speak to her. My father was giving a statement of some kind. My grandmother’s body was lying in the corridor that ran the length of the shop, which Uncle Colin used as a storeroom. I wasn’t allowed to look at it. It was covered over with a blanket.”

  “Did you ask to see it?”

  “ I – No. Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious. People often do pay their respects to the dead by taking a last look at them, don’t they? But not necessarily when they are murder victims, I should imagine.” He looks reflective for a minute, and then shoots out swiftly: