The Property of Lies

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘I need to have a think about this.’ Reardon stared out of the window at that east wing, grey and inimical and, now that the sun had moved, casting its shadow across the quadrangle. He almost shivered. After a while, meeting Gilmour’s speculative look, he said, ‘There’s something not right here, Joe. And not only Isabelle Blanchard being killed. Something’s not ringing true about this place. Dunno what it is, but I feel it in my water. Gives me the creeps.’

  ‘What, the headless ghost wandering the corridors at the midnight hour?’ Gilmour laughed, but the sentiments were unlike Reardon and, following his glance, he sobered, as if he too felt the shadow.

  ‘I’d give a lot to know what’s been going on here – something has, or I’ll eat my hat. But something’s warning me to tread softly. Very softly. On tiptoe, in fact.’

  Gilmour thought about that. ‘I get what you mean,’ he said eventually. ‘You’re thinking anybody who can afford to send their kids to a school like this must be somebody. If you see what I mean.’

  ‘That as well,’ Reardon said, happy to go with that rather than his almost superstitious moment of unease. ‘One false step and we could upset the applecart. The chief constable’s daughter is a prefect.’

  Gilmour rolled his eyes.

  That wasn’t the only thing, however. It was also a matter of not stirring up any more unnecessary trouble for Miss Hillyard. He didn’t think she was being straight with him on several matters, but she probably had reasons which were unconnected with his enquiry, and he couldn’t entirely hold it against her. She was driven with a purpose you had to respect; she was trying to hold the school together, and what she’d done to turn the dismal old Maxstead Court he remembered into what it was today was something of a miracle.

  ‘All the same, I reckon we need to go strictly by the book here – but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do a spot of digging. On everybody – what their background is, if any of them had anything at all against Mam’selle. And whatever we feel, we can’t discount the head from that.’

  ‘Dig the dirt on Miss Hillyard?’ Gilmour looked distinctly alarmed. He was still in awe of teachers, who all wrote pretty much the same thing on his reports: There is much potential in Joseph. Unfortunately that’s where it stays.

  ‘I didn’t say that. The mind boggles, I know, but we shan’t let her know what we’re doing. We can start by making some discreet enquiries about her, at any rate.’

  ‘How do you suggest we do that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Reardon cogitated, chewing his thumb. Then suddenly he grinned, ‘But I can think of someone who might.’

  DC Jim Gargrave was on his way to check the two taxi firms and the one bus company in Folbury. No abandoned bicycle or car had been found anywhere near Maxstead, and Sergeant Gilmour declared that common sense said that walking eleven miles on a dark night, especially if you were a woman, wasn’t on, so unless the French teacher had flown there like Peter Pan, she had to have used either bus or taxi. Personally, Gargrave didn’t believe either line of enquiry would be productive. He agreed with the DI, that she must have been taken there in a car and whoever had killed her had left after the deed was done, and this errand was a waste of time.

  He’d been smart enough not to complain when the task of checking was allocated to him. He wasn’t best pleased though. It was a boring job, but at least it was one step up from door-knocking – and he was ready to show willing and do anything to make his mark with the sergeant, and therefore Reardon, who’d given him his chance as a detective and on whom promotion, however far in the future, depended. He was a Yorkshire lad who had transferred from Bradford to marry a Folbury girl he’d met on holiday in Scarborough. When she’d changed her mind about getting spliced, Yorkshire bloody-mindedness was enough to make him stay on, devoting himself to furthering his career as a detective instead. Show her what she was missing – though by now he’d decided she wasn’t up to much, anyway.

  He was ambitious, and full of bright ideas which sometimes worked, eager to show he wasn’t your usual plod, but this didn’t altogether chime with his inclination to laziness, which might shipwreck his hopes if he didn’t overcome it, and which to do him justice he sometimes tried to do. He went out of his way to please, not even objecting to his nickname, Gravy, accepting its inevitability. It had started in school, followed him here and would surely follow him into the … oh, God, there he went; you couldn’t help it, with a name like his.

  He cheered himself up with the thought that this job he was on shouldn’t take him long, anyway. Midland Red’s extensive fleet of buses didn’t run out to Maxstead – that was left to the small local company which serviced both that village and the surrounding ones. And there were only two taxi firms in Folbury, the largest one catering mainly for weddings and funerals, the other which had started out as a one-man band, but now employed three or four drivers. The trouble was, bus drivers hardly ever noticed their passengers – and would taxi drivers be likely to remember a fare from as far back as around Easter-time, when the victim had last been seen? It was possible, Gargrave told himself, if the fare in question had been a well-dressed redhead and the destination Maxstead Court school.

  He happened to have chosen a slack period, so his luck was in and he managed to speak to most of the drivers concerned at each taxi firm, both of which operated from garages near the railway station. But luck ran out when it turned out that no one at either place had ever had a fare resembling the woman he described. The drivers shook their heads. Maxstead Court was a familiar destination. It was a regular thing for parents who had arrived at Folbury by train to visit their children to take a taxi out there and arrange to be picked up later for the return journey. And of course they’d have remembered if any of the mothers they’d recently driven there had been either glamorous or red-haired.

  He legged it half-heartedly over to Arms Green, in Folbury’s industrial area, to the bus garage of Countrywide Buses (a gross misnomer, as their service was limited to the villages within fifteen miles or so of Folbury town centre). He had no expectations, so he wasn’t disappointed. It was usual, on these rural bus routes, to oblige passengers’ requests to alight at unscheduled stops near to their destination. The buses passed the gates of Maxstead, but few people asked to be put down there. And none had done so lately.

  Even during the periods when she was not feeling depressed, my mother lived in the past. I now believe it was at the same time both a regret for what she’d so lightly abandoned and a solace, remembering the long-lost times when she had been happy, young and carefree. But when you’ve been at school all day, come home, and then delivered to the factory the buttons she’d made, and waited for them to be checked for any sloppy work; when you have a pile of homework that is really important to you and books you must read – well, it’s hard to summon up too much interest in a distant place and a time which existed long before you were born. But if this escaping into the past helped to prevent the depression that descended on her from time to time, who was I to try and prevent it? She liked to talk as she made the cloth-covered shirt buttons, which then had to be stitched on to a card. She was very good with her needle and sometimes she got better work, silk buttons she had to cover with intricate fancy stitching. But that was harder, and often her fingers were raw.

  Some of my teachers at school, one in particular, were pushing for me to stay on until I was sixteen, to matriculate and then perhaps go on to a teacher-training college. Did they not realize just how much of a fantasy this was, how cruel? If a fairy godmother had waved her wand to make such a thing remotely possible, I would have been delirious with joy. But fairy godmothers did not feature in the Hillyard family. And for another thing, Mother needed me to work. I knew the best I could hope for – her biggest aspiration for me – was for a future as a shop-girl in one of the big department stores in the West End.

  And then came the miracle that one prays for, but never expects, that never happens in real life, by way of a letter.

&nbs
p; And now, twenty-five years later, more letters.

  Ever since that man first wrote to me with those increasing demands, despising my original offer, which was generous by any standards, I’ve been unable to get it out of my head. Letter after letter, and then, when he saw I would go no further, attempts to invade my personal space, my school. Maxstead. How dare he? How dare any of them?

  SEVEN

  Congreve Park is one of those little green London oases, small delights set amongst the great sprawl of the city when you come across them unexpectedly. Ellen, having taken the tube to Elephant and Castle, is further pleasantly surprised to find that the street where her friend Kate Ramsey lives isn’t too far from this park, especially as it’s absurdly called Green Street, when there is a distinct absence of greenery, not a tree in the pavement or a front garden in sight. After the quiet Shropshire countryside she used to love so much, and being basically an outdoor sort of person, Kate will appreciate living so near the park – even if it’s scarcely big enough to qualify for the name. Most of the houses in the street, built of ubiquitous yellow, soot-streaked London brick, are large enough to have been converted into flats. This, too, is a compromise for Kate, but she is used to compromises. She had to leave her cottage when she changed her career path from teacher to her present job here in the city, but it’s soon evident she has cheerfully accommodated the change.

  Kate is the best type of friend – the sort you can meet after any amount of absence and take up with just where you left off. They had taught at the same school at the beginning of their careers as language teachers – German in Kate’s case, which had turned out unfortunately for her during the war, since no one could countenance the enemy’s language being taught. She now works for an organization dedicated to gaining equality for women in all walks of life.

  Ellen has been looking forward to this weekend visit, planned some months ago. They embrace and soon catch up with their news and what has been happening to them in the twelve months since they last met. Kate is eager to hear about both Ellen’s and Reardon’s new jobs, the house in Folbury and her favourite canine friend, Tolly. Ellen is shown around the flat, which is actually dauntingly small, but is able to give genuine approval at how Kate has made the most of it.

  ‘So, Edith Hillyard and all!’ Kate says when they are sitting over what she calls a scratch lunch. She has never shown much interest in cooking, but it’s never stopped her from eating well and the lunch is in fact quite a small feast. French bread and garlicky pâté, accompanied by interesting bits and pieces and unusual salads from a delicatessen round the corner, as well as eggs and tomatoes, and a bottle of good wine. ‘Who would ever have predicted you’d be working for her?’

  ‘It was good of you to put in a word for me. Your recommendation went down well.’

  ‘What are friends for?’ Kate spears a pimento-stuffed olive, watching as Ellen slowly picks at a hard-boiled egg which is refusing to be parted from its shell. ‘Come on, Ellen, spit it out. Do I sense all is not well in the hallowed precincts of Maxstead Court?’

  ‘Oh, it’s fine.’ Kate raises her eyebrows. ‘It is, really; it’s a nice school and Edith Hillyard is a … a good headmistress.’ She had been going to say ‘nice woman’, but she isn’t sure that would be right. ‘Nice’ is an anodyne word that implies neither one thing nor the other, and doesn’t go anywhere to describing Miss Hillyard, certainly. She wonders if ‘nice’ is applicable to the school, either, at the moment. But she says, ‘It’s too early to make judgements, but as far as I can tell, she’s doing a wonderful job. I know she’s hoping to educate at least some of the girls to do something useful with their lives when they leave, rather than what most of them seem destined for.’

  Kate smiles and raises her glass. ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  She is one of the legion of widows left high and dry after the war. Being the sort of woman most men look for in a wife – not a beauty, but with bright eyes and a ready smile, energetic and, moreover, sensibly down to earth – she has not been short of offers of marriage, without ever having shown any inclination to take them up. She copes better than most with what life throws at her, and although it took her a long time to accept the fact that her husband wasn’t ever coming home again, she isn’t prepared to settle for second best, after losing the only man who could ever mean anything to her. She seems content with the work she does on women’s behalf.

  Ellen at last gets around to telling her about the horrible event that has recently happened at Maxstead. As she had expected, Kate is suitably shocked – and obviously intrigued, though sanguine. ‘Not a good start for the school, but at any rate the Edith Hillyards of this world are more than able to cope with that or any other sort of trouble. Goes without saying.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure she is.’ The last bits of shell have at last succumbed and Ellen disposes of them and cuts the egg in half. ‘How well did you know her, Kate?’

  Kate reflects. ‘She was a year or two above me at Agatha’s, but being a small college, we all mixed pretty well. She was popular, and one of the high-flyers, but I hadn’t all that much to do with her. To be honest, I couldn’t say I ever really knew her.’ She refills their glasses.

  Ellen senses reservations. She thinks for a bit, then says, ‘Kate, rescuing Maxstead Court and making it over to what it is now must have cost tons. Where would that kind of money have come from?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Edith never had money to throw around when I knew her. The only thing I do know is that her mother died, and the next thing I heard on the grapevine, she had bought Maxstead Court and was looking for staff. Years after we’d all left college, of course.’

  ‘So her mother was rich. Or perhaps she inherited money from a wealthy family?’

  Kate makes a wry face. ‘I didn’t have that impression, but either’s possible, I suppose. Edith’s never married, has she? So it couldn’t have been a rich husband.’

  ‘Then someone else must have put money into starting the school.’

  ‘That seems a more likely answer, I agree – either way, she’s doing something really necessary, so what’s the difference? If it really matters, why don’t you ask Eve Draper? They were always very thick.’

  ‘Well, of course. I remember Eve Draper mentioning that.’

  ‘She was at Agatha’s, same year. And I think they were over in France together as well, driving ambulances.’

  ‘That explains why she and Miss Hillyard are so friendly. She’s deputy head, very efficient and energetic. You’d never guess she has a health problem – her heart. Not that she lets it stop her in any way. She didn’t say she knew you when we spoke.’

  Kate shrugged. ‘We didn’t move in the same set; she was above me and I only remember her because of Edith. I think they might have gone on to teach at the same school, too. Anyway, she’ll be able to tell you more than I can.’ She smiled. ‘Meanwhile, pass your glass, I don’t want to have to drink all this myself.’

  The letter came when I was fourteen, from a solicitor who represented Thomas Pryde, a man I had never heard of.

  It was a name from my mother’s home town, in the Potteries. Thomas Pryde, owner of one of the largest of the hundreds of small, and some not so small manufactories that littered the landscape, which I had learnt, from listening to her ramblings about her past, were called ‘pot banks’.

  Pryde’s was a family concern that had been handed down from father to son. It was Thomas who had made the name famous, though, due to the introduction of a range of bone-china tea services in simple, elegant white, decorated with three fine rings of gold around the rims, stamped with the Prydeware brand name on the base of every item made. It became hugely popular, and still is. No household that aspires to any sort of gentility is without it.

  Mother had often mentioned this in her ramblings about her old home. What she had never said was that she had once worked at Pryde’s. She had apparently been a skilled worker, expertly painting, hour after hour, day after day, without any
degree of error, those three fine gold bands around the rims of teacups, plates and saucers, and so on, that made the Prydeware range.

  According to Mr Gringold, the solicitor, Thomas Pryde in his old age had turned into something of a philanthropist. He had only married late in life and since it was now unlikely he would ever have children of his own, it pleased him to interest himself in helping any children he could find who seemed worthy. He had heard in some way – no doubt through my Aunt Louisa, Mother’s sister, who attended the same chapel as he did, that I was now approaching the age to leave school, that I was clever and would benefit from further education, and I was to be one of the recipients of his good intentions.

  My joy was not initially shared by my mother. At first, through an inborn unwillingness to accept charity, however well meant, she strongly objected to what was proposed in the lawyer’s letter. Long, angry screeds arrived from my aunt. What was she thinking of? Thomas Pryde was a good man, his motives were of the highest. Underneath the hard-headed exterior he kept for business purposes, there beat a kind heart and a Christian goodwill which it would be wicked to turn down. Moreover, I was by no means the only recipient of his generosity, which took the edge off the idea that it was charity. In the end my mother succumbed, persuaded that refusal would have been un-Christian.

  In fact, she roused herself so far as to write and thank Thomas herself, who instructed Mr Gringold to make money available to be used as deemed necessary and to include enough to provide for my mother while I was away at college, which pleased me greatly, though I was determined to pay it back as soon as I was earning.

  Good fortune wasn’t something I easily believed in, however. Something was sure to happen to prevent my dream actually coming true. I held on with bated breath, but nothing bad happened, and at last off I went to the Agatha Dean Teacher Training College to fulfil my dreams.

  At the police station in Market Street, Reardon was pondering over the case file, impatient at any lack of progress. He found himself turning back, yet again, to the notes he and Gilmour had made at the crime scene. What had they gathered about Isabelle Blanchard’s last movements? Depressingly little. Almost nothing, in fact. He was still trying to get a grasp on the sort of person she might have been. At the moment, he didn’t have a clue what she had even looked like, never mind what sort of personality she had had. What he had learnt was not in fact building up to a particularly appealing picture of her which, paradoxically, was making him more sympathetic towards her. It was a melancholy thought that no one, so far, seemed to be shedding any tears for Mlle Blanchard.