A Study in Gold

by Annie Dalton

  Anjali’s company, High Table, had supplied them with vintage evening clothes as well as daywear. Anna was secretly thrilled with her dress. It was a flattering shade of green that reminded her of willows in spring. The bodice, draped and fitted above a cinched in waist, had short, split sleeves and a skirt that fell to the floor in a swirl of pleats – as though designed for dancing.

  ‘Things obviously looked up for Evelyn by the war’s end!’ Anna joked to Tansy.

  The moment she stepped into her dress, Anna felt, possibly for the first time in her life, utterly and confidently feminine. It must have shown in her face, because Tansy said,‘You’re feeling it now, aren’t you? You’re channelling the sassy, 1940s spirit!’

  Anna had hoped to ignore the gauzy little piece of nonsense which she was supposed to pin on to her hair, but Tansy and Isadora insisted.

  They made their way down to the ballroom, which was decked out like a glitzy 1940s movie. Anjali’s company might have scrimped on accommodation, but they’d gone overboard on this VE Night ball, Anna thought, as she took in the crystal chandeliers and the stage, where a Glenn Miller-type tribute band was playing an old wartime favourite. The dance floor was already crowded and Anna felt a pang of nostalgia for a time she’d never actually known. They looked so real. The women with their glossy rolled up hair and slinky satin gowns. A few men wore period suits and black ties, but the majority wore the dress uniforms of the British or American services. Isadora was gazing at the patriotic banners hanging from the walls.

  ‘Oh, dear, Peace in our Time,’ she said, a little wistfully, ‘if only that were true.’ Then the band launched into ‘Little Brown Jug’ and her face lit up. ‘Oh, how heavenly! Do either of you know how to jitterbug? No? Then I’ll show you!’

  They quickly attracted a crowd of admirers, some of whom attempted to copy Isadora’s moves with varying degrees of success.

  ‘Did your parents teach you?’ Tansy said, when they eventually stopped to catch their breath. Like Anna, she’d thought of Isadora as a strictly 1960s girl.

  Isadora shook her head. ‘My parents weren’t the dancing kind. One of our lodgers taught me. Every Sunday evening, we’d roll back the rug and dance to Victor Sylvester on the wireless. Dorothy taught me the waltz, the quickstep, the fox trot and how to jitter bug. I was six years old and, for the few months that she was living with us, Sunday was the happiest night of my week!’

  The band switched to an old Cole Porter number. The RAF officer from their group came up to ask Isadora to dance. Freshly shaved and showered, he was as handsome in his dress uniform – with its medals and festoons of gold braid – as he had been in his flying jacket.

  Tansy whipped out her phone to take a photo of them, to the annoyance of Rory who came striding towards them, red-faced.

  ‘Mobile phones are against the rules! This kind of thing ruins the mood!’

  ‘She’s not ruining my mood, darling,’ Isadora called over her partner’s shoulder. ‘This moment will never come again! I intend to seize the day and I advise you to do the same!’

  Later people drifted out on to the terrace to watch the fireworks. It seemed that Tansy had started a trend and Anna spotted discreet flashes as guests snapped photos of their friends. The band struck up with ‘String of Pearls’, a tune which Anna’s grandmother had especially loved. She had secretly dreaded this weekend but, at that moment, Anna realized that she was perfectly content to be here with her friends, letting the evening unfold.

  When they eventually returned to the old matron’s quarters in the small hours, Anna brushed her teeth, tried in vain to get comfortable on her lumpy mattress and decided there was no way she’d get a wink of sleep. Then, suddenly, rooks and wood pigeons were performing deafening bird karaoke in the trees outside their window and it was morning.

  Anna and Tansy had hoped to miss out the communal buffet breakfast, but Isadora, visibly hung-over, said she couldn’t function without several cups of coffee. When they walked into the dining hall, Anna was thrown to see everyone wearing their normal 21st century clothes, even though she, Tansy and Isadora had made the same transition.

  For some reason, all of their group had opted to sit together. It seemed a peculiarly British kind of solidarity, everyone grimly working their way through pallid fried eggs and limp rashers of bacon, making strained conversation with people they hoped fervently never to meet again. Judging from the way that they avoided eye contact, ‘Daisy’ and ‘Rory’ had fallen out.

  Isadora helped herself to coffee. Tansy, a former vegan, looked queasily at the food on offer. ‘I’ll just stick with some of that anaemic fruit salad,’ she started to say, when a harrowing scream came from outside. Everyone looked up with identically uncertain expressions. After a weekend of pretence, no one quite believed that raw, animal-like sound could be for real.

  It was Tansy who moved first, wrenching open a side door. Anna followed. They raced out into the dew-wet grounds and down uneven stone steps to where a young woman stood beside a large, ornamental pond. She was just a teenager really, in a green overall, clutching her unlit cigarette, her round unformed face blank with shock.

  A woman’s lifeless body floated in the water, her limbs blue-white in the sunshine, her eyes staring emptily at the sky, her red silk dress darkened almost to black.

  TWO

  Needing something normal to do while they waited for the police, Anna and her friends packed their overnight bags, carried them downstairs and stowed them in the back of Anna’s car.

  ‘If I’d stayed a minute longer, I’d have smacked that Daisy around the face,’ Tansy said, when they were out of earshot. ‘Did you hear her phoning all her mates? Boasting that her and Rory’s murder mystery weekend ended with someone actually dying? Obviously it’s the most thrilling thing that’s happened to her in years.’

  Having disposed of their luggage, they went to sit out on the terrace with fresh cups of coffee. It was a beautiful May morning. Anna could smell the faint scent of wallflowers wafting from the garden. Most of the guests had opted to remain indoors, instinctively keeping their distance from the corpse. But Anna couldn’t have borne to go back into that dining room, with its breakfast smells and everyone feverishly speculating about what had happened. Fortunately, Isadora and Tansy felt the same.

  Anna had phoned Tim at once. She’d heard him hastily relay the news and Anjali yelling, ‘if this is a joke, it’s bloody bad taste!’ Then she’d phoned Jake to explain why she’d be home late. Tansy had already called Liam; her boyfriend was with the Thames Valley Police and he’d said he and Inspector Chaudhari were on their way.

  Wincing from the bright, spring sunlight, Isadora ripped into a third – or possibly fourth – sachet of bone-white sugar, turning her coffee into black syrup. Shock, combined with a fierce hangover, made her look haggard and old, hardly recognisable as the vibrant woman who had taught them to jitterbug the night before.

  ‘What is it with us?’ she said in an undertone. ‘People go their whole lives without seeing a corpse, but we trip over dead bodies almost every time we turn around.’

  ‘This isn’t like those other times though.’ Tansy said.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Isadora said.

  ‘No! There was some serious drinking going on last night. When we left at two or whenever it was, there was a woman throwing up her heart in the bushes and a guy was passed out on the terrace. There’s no proper, security lighting in the garden if you noticed, and Anna, those steps are lethal, aren’t they?’

  Anna nodded, privately thinking how much Tansy suddenly sounded like her police sergeant boyfriend.

  ‘And that was in daylight,’ Tansy said earnestly, ‘but in pitch darkness, for anyone who wasn’t one hundred percent sober, it was basically an accident waiting to happen.’

  Isadora didn’t seem to be listening.

  ‘It’s just so awful,’ she said almost to herself. ‘That poor woman. Last night she put on her dress and did her makeup and now … it’s the r
andomness I can’t bear.’

  Anna nodded. ‘Sometimes it feels like the Angel of Death flew over, crooked his bony finger and decided, “I’m taking so and so tonight,” and you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out why it was them and not you.’

  Isadora gave a tight nod. ‘Exactly that,’ she said tersely and Anna guessed she was thinking of her unknown half-siblings, who’d died in a concentration camp before Isadora was born.

  Anna knew all about survivors’ guilt. For years, she’d believed that she was somehow to blame for her family’s murders; if she had not been such a selfish little bitch, if she’d come home in time for her sister Lottie’s sixth birthday party like her mother had asked, somehow, Anna could have miraculously prevented the carnage.

  Anna’s emotional scars had now healed sufficiently that she no longer felt personally responsible for each and every misfortune that happened in her vicinity. But the image of some impervious angel brushing her yet again with its icy wings was hard to shake off. Anna couldn’t help feeling that this inexplicable new death must mean something, that it was significant in some way she couldn’t yet understand.

  A brief wail of sirens floated across the grounds from the main road, then cut off in a kind of electronic chirp, as the first police cars turned in through the gates of Mortmead Hall.

  ‘Liam said he’ll come to find us,’ Tansy said. ‘He’s not allowed to interview us, obviously, but he’ll try to get us processed quickly so we can go home ASAP.’

  ‘What a thoughtful soul he is,’ said Isadora.

  ‘He is incredibly thoughtful,’ Tansy agreed. ‘Though …’ she let her sentence tail off, then realized Anna and Isadora were looking at her expectantly. ‘… Oh, he’s not quite his normal self, that’s all.’ She gave an unhappy little shrug. ‘I think it’s just stress.’

  Isadora downed the last of her coffee. ‘He’s picked a stressful profession.’

  Tansy nodded. ‘Once he gets made Inspector that will only get worse.’

  A few minutes later, Liam Goodhart emerged from the house with his boss, Inspector Chaudhari, plus a tubby, tired-looking man in a boiler suit, who Anna presumed to be the duty medical examiner, and an agitated woman from Housekeeping.

  Liam spotted them and came over, looking concerned.

  ‘Tans are you OK?’

  She nodded. ‘Just a bit shocked.’

  ‘Not surprised,’ Liam said, with feeling. ‘They’re setting up an interview room in the old ballroom. I’ve asked Sergeant Mellors if he’ll interview you guys. He’s a decent bloke, even if he did go to the wrong university.’ He flashed Isadora a grin. ‘Hopefully he won’t keep you too long.’ He hurried to catch up with his boss.

  Anna was the first of the three of them to be interviewed. The ballroom had been set up for multiple interviews, since there were so many guests to question. Anna took a seat opposite Sergeant Mellors. He had flame red-hair, sharp Slavic cheekbones under almost luminously pale skin and if he knew her family history, he was far too diplomatic to let it show.

  ‘I understand you and Ms Lavelle found the body?’

  ‘One of the staff actually found her,’ Anna said. ‘She screamed and Tansy and I rushed out to see what was wrong.’

  ‘And you were attending this murder mystery weekend?’

  ‘Yes. My sister-in-law runs the events company. They had some people drop out, so I asked two of my friends to help make up the numbers.’

  ‘Did you see the deceased woman at any point during the weekend?’

  Anna shook her head. ‘Not sure. She wasn’t in my group. I might have passed her without knowing when we were sent off to hunt for clues.’

  She saw Sergeant Mellors trying to keep a straight face.

  ‘I know it’s embarrassingly Famous Five,’ she said apologetically. ‘I suppose she could have been at the ball.’

  ‘Was there anything about the weekend that stands out for you? Anything that could help us to identify her?’

  From a nearby table, Anna heard a frustrated male voice grumble ‘I keep telling you, the ball was open to outsiders. You didn’t have to sign up for the murder mystery weekend to attend. For instance, there was one big, beefy guy wandering around like Braveheart. He definitely wasn’t in any of the groups.’

  A memory tickled the back of Anna’s mind, a stocky man dressed in the full regalia of some Scottish army regiment. She didn’t recall him as big and beefy, but in his kilt, knee-high socks and cap, with its jaunty regimental feather, he’d had a definite presence. She had a vague impression of him waylaying a young woman in a red dress.

  ‘I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I might have seen her,’ she said tentatively. She gave him as many physical details as she could remember: black hair striking against her white skin, dark eyes, possibly mid-thirties and that clinging, red, silk dress.

  ‘And you think she wasn’t keen on this man’s attentions?’ Sergeant Mellors asked.

  ‘No, definitely not,’ Anna said.

  ‘Did she seem scared of him?’

  Anna shook her head. ‘It was more like he was an irritant, just getting in her way. I don’t want to make too much of it. I don’t really know what I saw. It was all over in a flash.’

  Somewhere close by, Rory was being taken through the same questions.

  ‘A rather foreign looking woman, I would describe her as,’ he said in the strident tone that had become unpleasantly familiar over the weekend. ‘I noticed her because she was on the dance floor, but she seemed to be on her own. I thought she must be looking for someone.’

  It soon became obvious that Anna had nothing else to tell Sergeant Mellors. As she left the ballroom, she heard a woman saying, ‘I think I saw the young woman you mean! She was dancing the conga, having the time of her life! Oh my God, is that who they found in the pond?’

  It was late afternoon by the time they got back to Oxford. Anna dropped Tansy and Isadora off in Summertown. She’d offered to run Tansy home, but she said she’d get the bus back to St Clements, where she and Liam had rented a small garden flat.

  ‘I need to get some shopping,’ she said. ‘I want to cook Liam something nice for when he gets home. Cheer him up.’

  This was the second reference Tansy had made to her boyfriend’s state of mind. They’d only just moved in together. Could that be part of what was stressing Liam? Had it happened too fast? Was he feeling suffocated now that the two of them were living in that tiny little flat? Anna wasn’t sure if these were questions she was entitled to ask. She watched Tansy set off towards the bus stop, carrying her overnight bag and had to fight the impulse to call her back, so she could do or say something comforting.

  Anna had intended to go straight home to Jake, but as she drove off down the Banbury Road, she spotted the familiar left turn for Bramley Lodge. It was the retirement home where her grandfather lived and the urge to check on him overpowered every other thought.

  Though George Ottaway seemed happy and enviably at peace with himself, he had recently had his ninetieth birthday and she couldn’t expect him to live for ever. Anna didn’t believe in God or karma, yet she had felt the icy brush of those impervious wings and she needed to see him, to hug him and make sure he was still OK.

  As always, her grandfather’s room smelled of oil paints, turpentine and his favourite blend of Darjeeling and Lapsang. For once, he was not painting when she arrived, but sitting in his armchair, listening to Billie Holiday singing ‘The Very Thought of You’. He wore one of his beloved, old, checked shirts and his white hair was sticking up at odd angles, as if he’d taken a nap since the last time he’d combed it.

  ‘What a wonderful surprise!’ he said warmly. ‘I was just thinking about making a pot of tea. Will you join me?’

  ‘I’ll make it.’ Anna hugged him, inhaling his familiar Penhaligon aftershave. Her grandfather had never been a man to put on weight, but these days he felt disturbingly slight in her arms. ‘I remember Granny singing this when she was washing up,’
she said, releasing him.

  ‘It was her favourite song,’ he said.

  She went into the tiny, galley kitchen and filled the kettle.

  ‘How funny that you should be playing it just now. The band played this exact song last night at the ball!’

  ‘Was the singer as good as Billie?’

  ‘Obviously not, but he wasn’t bad,’ Anna said, spooning tea leaves into the old brown pot, one of the few things he’d brought from the house in Park Town. By the time she had everything arranged on the tray, the song had finished and her grandfather had turned the music down to a bluesy murmur.

  She set the tray down between them and made herself comfortable on the old sofa, mentally noting a new still life propped against a wooden chest. A tumble of cool blue crockery and a white jug, with blood-red tulips, was on a dazzling sunlit cloth. He must have painted this one since her last visit. George Ottaway had been a soldier, a businessman, a devoted husband, father and grandfather. Then, widowed in his eighties, he had discovered that he was also an artist, though he refused to dignify himself with that title. ‘I’m just a dabbler, my dear,’ he’d said to Tansy, when she tried to persuade him to exhibit his paintings at the gallery where she worked. ‘I should only embarrass us both.’

  Anna looked up from pouring his tea to see her grandfather watching her expectantly.

  ‘So you went to your murder mystery weekend despite your misgivings,’ he prompted. ‘Was it worth the effort?’

  Anna had taken great care over the years, or so she’d imagined, to conceal the grimmer details of her life from her grandfather. But it was very slowly dawning on her that he possibly understood her better than she knew herself. She remembered how he’d applauded each tentative step out of her self-made prison: deciding to get a dog, allowing Tansy and Isadora into her life. When she’d finally introduced him to Jake he couldn’t disguise his delight. Had he pictured Anna turning into an old woman, her hair in greasy elf locks, eating cold beans from the can, as she obsessively trawled the dark net for clues? All this time, she thought, her grandfather had been secretly desperate for her to be happy, to have a life, fun and friends.