Untimely Graves

by Marjorie Eccles

  The one bright spot on the horizon was that she hadn’t committed herself to anything long term. Meanwhile, she was to be fitted in when any team was short of an extra body, which at the moment seemed to be most of every day. Tone, who worked for Maids on an ad hoc basis, had made himself unavailable to them for the time being, presumably to concentrate on her decorating. She felt guilty about that, too.

  It wasn’t the hard work that she objected to so much as the mind-numbing boredom. Mostly, it wasn’t hard work anyway, just repetitive, tedious chores. The clients fell into two distinct types: those who tidied up before the cleaners arrived, so that you wondered what could possibly need to be done; and those whose houses looked as though a bomb had struck and, defeated by the mess they’d created around themselves, called in other people to sort them out. On the whole it was the latter category who used Maid to Order; the tidiers usually had their own regular cleaning women. Cleo couldn’t yet expect to be sent to the more covetable jobs such as office or surgery cleaning.

  Mrs Osborne had told Val that the team she’d sent had done such a good job at Wych Cottage there would be no need for another visit to finish off, so there’d be no opportunity to take another peep into that drawer – though fat chance remained of the gun still being there. After telling her father of the incident, which had seemed to her the best thing she could do, she’d tried to forget it. She’d had enough of looking into the grubby corners of other people’s lives. But obscurely, it worried her. Just as the newspaper item of that woman who had been found dead in the Kyne haunted her. Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of the two things: the dead woman, who’d turned out to have been shot, found so near Wych Cottage, and that rather horrifying glimpse of what she was sure had been a gun, the last object one would have expected Mrs Osborne to possess. She was glad she’d mentioned it to her dad, she knew she ought to tell someone but she’d have felt embarrassed approaching the police over something which might be put down to her imagination. But George hadn’t pooh-poohed her concern. It was possible, he pointed out, that the gun was owned quite legitimately by Mrs Osborne, but this in itself seemed unlikely, especially in view of the old lady’s consternation when it had been exposed. She could understand Mrs O being persuaded that she might be safer with a weapon in the house against intruders, but unless she knew how to handle it, wasn’t it terribly dangerous? Anyway, George had promised to see it was looked into, and she’d had to be satisfied with that.

  She was due down at MO at nine. She’d been up since five, eager to write. For days, she’d felt the creative spirit was not so much stirring again as clamouring to be heard. And now, she could hardly wait to start, get her thoughts on paper, get the book up and running. But this morning, she’d worked on it for three hours and the more she did, the less clearly defined her ideas seemed to become, refusing to be transferred from what she saw so clearly in her mind into words on paper. At eight, defeated, she gave it up, wondering despondently if she really had the stamina to be a writer, or if she only liked the idea of being one. With a sigh, she switched off her PC and slipped down to the corner shop for bread and milk for her breakfast.

  Walking home, she decided it was time to see how Michelangelo was getting on with painting her ceiling. She hadn’t actually seen Tone since the day she’d agreed to let him do the job, though there was evidence of his activities in the smell of paint issuing from under her front room doors – both of which were kept locked, on Tone’s insistence. After gaining her approval of the colour he’d suggested for the paint, he’d said he preferred her not to see the intermediate stages, and she’d agreed to his artistic needs. She never wanted anyone to see anything but the finished product, either. But she was getting fed up with living in the kitchen. Not to mention having to leave by the back door and re-enter via the front whenever she wanted to go upstairs.

  She found him in the kitchen, making himself a coffee when she returned. ‘Finished, apart from the woodwork,’ he remarked laconically. ‘Want to come and look?’

  Finished? Already? Crikey, that was quick! What sort of a cowboy job had he made of it? She followed him and he threw open the front room door. ‘Ta-da!’

  She was speechless for a while, then finally found her voice. ‘Tone, it’s brilliant!’

  ‘Glad you appreciate it, ma’am.’ His tone was throwaway, but his ears glowed red and his lips twitched at the corners in the effort not to grin like a Cheshire cat.

  He hadn’t, in the end, had time to strip off all the paper, and it had to be admitted that he’d slapped the paint on, but why worry when the total effect was so amazing? The walls were a subtle apricot, and the whole room was suffused with a golden light, transforming it. But that wasn’t all – most of his time had been spent painting, right into one fireplace alcove, a mock window with a view of sky and the tops of trees visible through it. At right angles to this, on either side, he’d screwed to the walls two large pieces of mirror glass he said he’d acquired – no, don’t ask! – which trebled the effect of looking out into a garden, pushing out the walls of the little room and adding even more light. It didn’t seem to matter now that the other, real window, looked out on to the high rise flats.

  When the furniture was back in place, the silver-paper Spanish tango dancers on their black velvet swaying together above the fireplace, and Phoebe’s skein of ducks flying ever-optimistically upwards on the opposite wall … well, at a stretch, you could nearly imagine it was meant to be like that. She might almost come to believe it in time.

  Meanwhile, a table for her word processor, provision to play the sort of music she liked without being nagged … Belatedly, she thought of what Daphne called ‘the finishing touches’. A trip down to the market for material for new curtains, cushions for the chairs and settee? ‘What colours should I choose, Tone?’ she asked humbly, wondering how on earth she’d live up to all this, keep it neat and tidy. ‘I’d be afraid of spoiling anything, getting the wrong thing.’

  ‘I’ll come with you and make sure you don’t.’ The livid scar twisted his face up as he grinned, but she could sense his jubilation at her appreciation and once more she wondered about Tone. That trompe l’oeil window was the work of someone with more to give to life than cleaning people’s houses – or even doing a quick-fix decorating job on them.

  And there was something else she’d noticed about Tone. His broad Black Country accent occasionally slipped. It was almost as though he were – not putting it on, it was too natural for that – but as though he’d once been accustomed to using received pronunciation as well, and now wasn’t quite sure of himself in either form.

  Cleo found she was working with Sue again, and she’d no complaints about that. She liked Sue, who always had a smile on her pretty, dimpled face, never got into a flap, and managed to get through incredible amounts of work. Cleo thought she might even be learning something from her.

  Val had today fitted in number 16 Kelsey Road, at short notice, in place of Mrs Osborne and as a special favour to the owner, whose cleaning lady was in hospital.

  While Sue rang the bell, Cleo peered over a hedge and saw a totally unexpected sight: a sunken area running the length of the house, back to front, secret and enclosed. Clouds reflected in a pool bubbling with frogspawn, at its verge reeds and last year’s prickly teasel that had persisted through the winter. The flickering sunlight revealed a splash of gold, a corner studded with aconites, the emerging spears of bluebell leaves, a kind of greening over of the whole plot. Beside the rocky steps were hellebores – bell-shaped lime-green flowers tipped with plum-purple – and here and there the broad arrow leaves of lords and ladies were pushing through. A spiky blackthorn hedge was just about to burst into flower, and a cherry plum grew in one corner.

  Cleo was enchanted. A wild flower garden, here in Kelsey Road, where in every other garden, not even a buttercup was allowed to flourish! It couldn’t just have happened, it must have been planted. She looked with quickened interest at the house, a faded Victorian charmer
with a neglected air, its paintwork peeling and the Virginia creeper on the façade grown out of hand: the bare tendrils clung tenaciously to the brickwork, you could see them curling over the spouting, ready to thrust under the roof tiles and prise them off. She couldn’t help wondering what the owner would be like, not to mention the interior.

  But despite its size, the house wasn’t going to pose any problems, even Cleo could see that immediately. The small, plump, eccentric-looking person who in fact turned out to be Miss Lockett herself told them vaguely that many of the rooms were shut off, and the few in use were kept clean and in good order by her regular lady, at present in hospital for a hip replacement. It was soon obvious that she spoke the truth. As Sue pointed out, it wasn’t going to take the time allocated to have the place spick and span. Miss Lockett merely smiled very sweetly and said good, then that would give them time for a cup of coffee before they started, perhaps a slice of chocolate cake and a chat, so that they could get to know one another. She liked to know all about people she met, she said, who they were and where they came from, and within minutes had managed to obtain this information, despite appearing, not to put too fine a point on it, like a woozy-minded Miss Havisham on a bad day, her hair falling down, and dressed as she was in a collection of garments which would have been more at home heaped on a church jumble sale stall. She smiled vaguely and showed them into the warm, comfortable kitchen and when the coffee was made, asked Cleo if she’d mind slipping outside to ask Sam, who was working in the garden, if he’d like one, too.

  Cleo walked up the path in a back garden that made the unstructured wild garden at the side of the house seem organised, though there seemed to have been recent attempts to tidy it up. She approached the gardener, a large young man in corduroys and stout boots who had seemingly been digging over a patch of ground elder. A pile of the thick fleshy roots sat obscenely on the path beside him.

  Sam swore luridly as yet another root he was tracing back to its source snapped off. He stamped his fork down into the moist earth, his boot shoving it down so hard the tines disappeared. He leaned on the handle, breathing hard. He’d picked the wrong job on which to vent his worry and frustration. Should have had more sense – rooting out ground elder was a slow, fiddling job, requiring the patience of a saint, and patience was something in short supply with him this morning. Not when the events of yesterday were tumbling over and over in his mind, any clear thought about the situation obscured by doubts, like frost smoke above the Antarctic ice.

  Could he ever be sure of Hannah?

  He was sure of nothing since his return, and meeting her again.

  In his book, you played it straight. Life, or whatever. If it didn’t work out, you either put up with it, or packed it in, or did something decisive, even ruthless, if necessary, and refused to have regrets. As he had done, when it became obvious their ill-matched affair was going nowhere. He had wanted to rescue her then, the young Lochinvar riding out of the west, and he had an uncomfortable feeling now that she had never really wanted to be rescued. And that bothered him.

  There was something dark about it that Sam didn’t understand, or want to understand. She could have escaped, if she had wanted. That she hadn’t even tried, had stayed with the bastard until somebody had removed him for her, disturbed him more than Wetherby’s murder, which seemed almost incidental. At the back of his mind, unacknowledged because Sam was Sam, and not in any sort of way imaginative, was the thought that this sort of attitude was – well, sick … Oh, screw it!

  ‘Are you Sam?’

  He turned to see a small girl of about seventeen with a scarlet MO emblazoned on the front of her black sweatshirt standing beside him, little and dark and quick, her hair raggedly cut like a street urchin’s, apparently with a knife and fork. Big, greenishblue eyes in a small, serious face. She was frowning and momentarily he wondered if she’d overheard him cussing and was offended. If so, she was the first girl he’d come across of that age who was likely to be shocked at bad language – most of them could teach drunken sailors a thing or two about swearing. He apologised with as much grace as he could muster all the same.

  ‘That’s OK,’ Cleo said, passing on the message from Miss Lockett.

  ‘You’re from the agency.’

  ‘Right. And you’d better take your wellies off before you come into the kitchen, otherwise Miss Lockett’ll be paying for us to be here all day. Does she always invite the hired help to share coffee and chocolate cake?’

  ‘My Aunt Dorrie,’ he said solemnly, ‘never does what you expect.’

  Aunt!

  ‘Whoops, sorry – I just assumed …’

  ‘Sam Leadbetter. Sorry I can’t shake hands, mine are filthy.’

  ‘Cleo Atkins.’

  Her glance took in the cashmere sweater Hannah had once bought him as a present, motheaten in places though it now was, the rather nice gold watch on his wrist. ‘I should’ve known. You don’t look much like a gardener.’

  ‘What’s a gardener supposed to look like? You don’t look much like a charlady, either.’

  ‘Neither do I act like one, I’m afraid. I’m only a temp, thank heaven fasting, as my mother would say. Which is probably what everyone else feels too.’

  ‘Why are you doing it then?’ he asked, amused.

  ‘Money,’ she said succinctly. ‘I’m writing a book, but I can’t live on air …’ She stopped and looked down at her feet. Why had she told him that? She could count on the fingers of one hand the people who knew of her ambition. All the same, she noted that she had said ‘I am writing’, not ‘I’m hoping to write’ and felt cheered.

  ‘A writer?’ Sam’s interest was kindled, and he looked at her with more interest, though he realised immediately she couldn’t mean his sort of writing – dull, factual stuff. She was, he saw now, older than he’d thought by about five years. ‘Well, there must be other jobs than cleaning —’

  She groaned. ‘Oh, don’t! You sound just like my mother. She works in the Bursar’s office over there –’ she waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the school – ‘and thinks everyone should have the same sort of well-defined job, even though it’s a terrible office to work in and the Bursar’s a ratbag.’

  He didn’t smile. A stiff silence had taken hold of him. He looked suddenly years older. They had reached the stone seat by the corner of the house, where a pair of size twelve sneakers rested. He sat down and began to remove his gumboots.

  ‘Have I said something I shouldn’t?’

  He put the boots neatly side by side, slipped on the sneakers and stood up. ‘Haven’t you heard the Bursar was shot dead yesterday? Didn’t your mother tell you?’

  He was sorry he’d been so blunt when he saw her face crumple, her eyes widen. ‘No, I didn’t know. I don’t live at home now, I didn’t see Mum yesterday. And I haven’t seen the papers, either. Was she – was she there?’

  ‘Not when it happened. But I’m afraid she was the one who found him.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Questions raced through her mind, all beginning with the word why. Why hadn’t they let her know? Why hadn’t she rung home the previous night, as she’d intended to do? Why hadn’t she heard about the murder?

  The answers were all there, take your choice. Because they didn’t want to worry her. Because she hadn’t yet had Phoebe’s phone reconnected and she hadn’t had change for a phone box on the way to the cinema last night and they wouldn’t have had a clue where to get hold of her: she’d been to see a supposedly significant Japanese film about recently dead souls, the subtitles of which had turned out to be even more obscure than the plot. Afterwards she still hadn’t known what all the fuss was about. And also because she’d had to rush through her breakfast after spending so much time admiring her newly decorated front room and hadn’t even switched on the radio.

  ‘I shall have to go and see if she’s OK.’ Poor Mum, even she would have a hard time coping with something like that.

  ‘Of course. Would you like me to run you over
there?’

  Yes, she would, was her first thought. Brilliant. He’d be a wonderful man in a crisis, like having a seven-foot baseball player just behind you if you fell over. But no, even at a time like this, Daphne wouldn’t appreciate anyone feeling she needed a shoulder to cry on, just because she’d found a dead body. Even though – especially as – it was someone she hadn’t much liked.

  ‘That’s really nice of you,’ she told Sam, ‘but if I could just use your phone …’

  ‘Sure.’

  A passage led off the kitchen into the echoing, Victorian tiled hallway at the end. He indicated the telephone, a heavy, ancient black one where you had to dial instead of pressing buttons, and left her to it.

  She let it ring twenty times, though after the fourth or fifth ring she knew there’d be no answer. Daphne was always prompt at answering the phone. She rang her father’s office and it was Muriel who picked up the call.

  ‘Oh, Cleo! Have you heard? You have? Well, your dad’s had to go out, but he’s been trying to get you. You should have your phone reconnected, or get a mobile, you know, he says he’s going to buy you one, first thing he does.’

  ‘I know, I’ve been thinking the same thing. Is Mum all right, Muriel?’

  ‘She’s gone in to work, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘She’s what?’

  ‘Well, you know Daphne. She wouldn’t let a little thing like murder stop her – nor would she listen to your father, though I know he doesn’t approve of her going in today,’ Muriel said, the hint of malice in her voice showing she didn’t either. The two women were not by nature designed to feel affinity. ‘He said he’d be back here around ten for a few minutes, if you want to see him. He’s very busy. We’ve suddenly had a whole stack of work come in.’