The Property of Lies

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘We had our moments, I confess, but I was actually quite fond of the old boy.’ Which was a direct contradiction to what Jocasta had said. ‘And look, if that’s all you have to say, I’d like to be on my way. I have appointments, in Bradford, actually.’ He shot his cuff to consult the big silver watch on his wrist.

  ‘I don’t think so, Mr Liptrott. We need to keep in touch, so you’d better stay around.’

  ‘I’ve already checked out and I can’t stay any longer; this place isn’t cheap, you know.’

  ‘Then perhaps you can go back to Melia Street. I’m sure Mr Shefford would be delighted to have you back as a tenant. And he’d like his keys back.’

  ‘Ah. Shefford.’ He didn’t let it show that he’d been taken aback, but clearly he was, and evidently had forgotten all about returning the keys.

  The ashtray was in the middle of the table and, in reaching out towards it, he’d already scattered ash over the clean white tablecloth. He reached to stub out his present half-smoked cigarette, dropping more. Gilmour had been fidgeting with the knives and forks as they spoke. The waiters would not be pleased at having to strip everything down and start again.

  Reardon studied the man as he took several drags on his cigarette, squinted narrowly through the smoke and finally stubbed it out half-smoked. He was not quite the fool he’d been presented as. Clever in his own way, a journalist used to twisting words – and he was wily.

  ‘You admit to living in Melia Street, then?’

  He shrugged. ‘For a while. I rented the house when I was hoping for that article on Maxstead Court from Edith Hillyard. And then I decided maybe I could do a few others as well, after she refused. Folbury’s an interesting town. A lot of history. Someone had once approached me with the idea of collaborating on a book about the place and I thought it might be worth pursuing. There’s a demand for that sort of thing.’

  ‘So how did you come to know Isabelle Blanchard?’

  ‘I’ve already told you. I didn’t know her.’

  ‘And Phoebe Catherall?’

  He pulled out his cigarette case and popped another one, giving himself time. The flame of the match quivered as he waved it out, leaving a smell of brimstone. ‘That woman. That stupid creature!’ Reardon blinked, surprised by the malice. He had not so far been over-impressed by Phoebe Catherall’s basic intelligence himself, but that was coming a bit strong. ‘She came looking for that other woman, Blanchard, as if I knew where she was. I’d read about the accident in the paper, but when I told her about it she wouldn’t believe me, not at first, said it must be someone else. She made a bloody nuisance of herself, but she was upset. I felt sorry for her and, like a fool, I let her stay there. Where she still is, as far as I know.’

  The papers – by which he must mean Folbury’s local, the Herald – hadn’t been slow to latch on to the fact that the police were regarding Isabelle Blanchard’s death as suspicious, and Reardon said, ‘You must know what happened to Isabelle Blanchard was no accident.’

  His hand shook, very slightly, as he reached in a nervous habit for his fancy cigarette case. Realizing the last one was still only half smoked, he put the case back and began to push his chair back. ‘Look here,’ he said truculently, ‘I don’t know what you want with me. I had nothing to do with all that. And I really do have to go.’

  ‘Don’t go anywhere just yet. Here, or Melia Street, it doesn’t matter, as long as we know where to find you.’

  They left, still wondering if, for all his superficial, flashy appearance and cocky manner, there wasn’t something deeper – nasty, even perhaps dangerous – about Liptrott.

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘But I told you everything in that letter I sent,’ Phoebe Catherall protested.

  ‘Not quite.’ She might feel the explanations she had given in her letter were sufficient, but there were still many gaps that only she could fill; questions to which she alone had the answers. ‘I’m afraid we need to ask you a few more things,’ Reardon said. ‘So I’m glad to see you’re feeling better now, Miss Catherall.’

  She had come into Mrs Longton’s front parlour to meet them, neat and tidy, smiling, smelling of 4711, ‘earphones’ in place, wearing a hideous apple-green knitted silk jumper with a band of orange at the yoke, and a slightly baggy brown skirt that reached nearly to her ankles.

  ‘Better? Oh, oh, yes, I’m feeling much better, thank you. Mrs Longton has been so kind, looking after me.’

  Looking after me?

  Well, it was fortunate that she felt grateful. It wouldn’t be a penance for her to have to stay here longer. She had announced yesterday that she would be returning to stay with Mrs Cooper, and though Gilmour was certain her old landlady was sure to have welcomed her, Reardon had no wish for her to slip away just yet. She had been politely asked to stay where she was for the time being.

  They had driven straight from the meeting with Liptrott, prepared for a difficult half-hour. Normally stoical when it came to dealing with witnesses, Reardon knew he was going to have to suppress the irritation Phoebe Catherall roused in him, but, after Liptrott, he was in no mood for evasions, and he prayed not to be faced with more floods of tears. There was no sign of them at the moment, though her eyes were suspiciously bright behind the huge glasses. ‘We need some answers, Miss Catherall.’

  She contrived to look hurt and innocently bewildered. ‘What more is it you want to know?’

  ‘We could start with the truth of why you agreed to let Isabelle Blanchard step in and take a job that obviously meant a good deal to you. Because I know, in spite of what you said to me, that you were well aware of why she asked you to do it.’

  There was a lengthy pause. The curtains, closed against the possibility of the sun fading the furniture, had been drawn apart a little while they talked. Dust motes danced in a narrow shaft of sunlight, directed from the space between them, and came to rest on Mrs Longton’s best Axminster. Phoebe’s foot traced a cabbage rose. Her fingers twisted a silver ring around on her fingers, allowing it to catch the light. It took some time before she spoke. ‘You have to understand that neither Isabelle nor I would ever do anything to hurt Miss Hillyard. She was our friend. We’d known her ever since the war. We only did what we did to protect her.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘Well, from that man, Liptrott.’

  ‘What reason did you have for thinking he was any threat to her?’

  He could almost see the calculation, wondering how much he knew, and how little she could get away with. She couldn’t answer. Or wouldn’t, and went on twisting that ring around, reminding him once more of a stubborn child.

  Then, quite suddenly, without warning, she said, ‘If I hadn’t agreed to let her take my place, she would have told Mathilde.’ She stopped abruptly, as if she’d gone too far.

  ‘What? Told her what?’ he prompted when she didn’t go on.

  ‘That I – that I burnt Father’s manuscript.’

  For a moment, he wondered what she was talking about. Until he recalled the book about Napoleon that her father, Hugh Catherall, had supposedly been writing. A lifetime’s work that he had never expected to finish, or be published.

  A silence drifted between them all. He saw that Gilmour was about to break it and signalled him not to with his eyes. At length, Phoebe sighed and began again, and this time the words came rapidly, as if she was afraid she might otherwise not say them. ‘Father was ill. Not as ill as he became later, but he’d lost the will to summon up the energy to do any more work on his book, so Isabelle, without telling him, took it on herself to send the manuscript away, just as it was, to his academic friend, Henri Joubert. The two of them had been corresponding for years about the book and he knew almost as much about it as my father did. He read it and returned it, saying it was good – more than good; it was outstanding. It should be completed and sent to a publisher he knew, at once. He knew Father wasn’t well enough to do the necessary work to finish it, of course, but he also knew how he had intended it shou
ld go, and he offered to complete it. Father was livid. He became so upset he refused to speak about it.’

  She abandoned the ring and clutched her fingers together. ‘It may sound ridiculous to anyone else, but I don’t believe he’d ever wanted it to be published, and I understood that, though Isabelle couldn’t. It was his creation, for his eyes alone; he’d given it everything and had no more to give. It was finished as far as he was concerned, over and done with. But she thought this was all nonsense, that he didn’t really mean it. She was going to pack it off again to M. Joubert, regardless. So before she could, I burnt it. It meant nothing to me.’ Her chin lifted, daring anyone to be shocked. ‘Father knew what I’d done, but he told everyone he’d destroyed it himself. There were the most frightful scenes. Isabelle was furious. I expect she thought it would have made a lot of money. And Mathilde was not well herself, and looking after my father was a real strain. She thought he must be losing his mind, doing something like that. But Father knew if he told her the truth, if she ever knew that it was me and not him who’d destroyed his life’s work, she would never have forgiven me.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Isabelle knew who’d really destroyed that wretched manuscript, of course. It was just possible that Father might have found the physical strength, at that time, to take it outside and burn it, but she knew he hadn’t. She never said anything, she kept it to herself, to use when she could, as she always did. Which happened when I got the position with Miss Hillyard.’

  ‘I see,’ Reardon said, though he didn’t. At least, he saw how it had been, but he still didn’t understand why Isabelle had wanted that job so badly. Or even, perhaps, why it had been offered to Phoebe in the first place. But Phoebe still wasn’t saying.

  ‘Miss Hillyard agreed to all the subterfuge because you were blackmailing her,’ he said.

  ‘Edith?’ The facile tears that flowed so easily were now caught in her throat, as if she had a tight, hard knot there, as she struggled against giving way. ‘Don’t use that word! I wouldn’t have done that to Edith,’ she said at last. ‘Ever! She didn’t see it as subterfuge – Isabelle must have left Edith with no choice but to accept the idea that I was ill. I expect she was very concerned and it worried me that she might have wondered, later perhaps. But by then it was too late.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have put pressure on her, but Mlle Blanchard would?’

  She spread her hands in a Gallic shrug. ‘That was the way Isabelle was. I told you before – you didn’t know her. She enjoyed seeing people suffer. Watching, like she always did. She would have made a good spy.’

  And there it was. The pent-up jealousy of years, boiling up and erupting on to the surface.

  ‘Something happened, out there in France, that would have given her a hold over Miss Hillyard, if she could prove it?’

  He thought she wasn’t going to tell them, but then she did.

  ‘How did Isabelle and Liptrott get into contact?’ he asked when she’d finished.

  ‘I told you: when she came over to see me, she disappeared on her own concerns. I found out later where she’d been. Edith had told me her mother had inherited money from a rich man called Pryde, in a town called Burslem, where she used to live. And, like a fool, I told Belle. She went there, found Pryde’s factory was being taken over, talked to all sorts of people, and in the course of it heard about Liptrott. She sought him out and, when she discovered he was already trying to get money from Edith, she told him she had a weapon against Edith – though she hadn’t, not really, not without proof. But she made him believe she could help him, if she could wheedle her way into Maxstead somehow. Which in fact she did, through me. Edith had no suspicions about my supposed illness and accepted the idea without question.’

  Twenty years after that first letter from Thomas Pryde’s solicitor, which had changed my life, came another one, this time to say he had died. For my own sake, as well as my mother’s, I had long since settled what we both regarded as my monetary obligations to him, beginning as soon as I got my first teaching job and was earning. There was correspondence between Mr Pryde and myself over this. I wrote to him through his solicitor, each time I sent a payment, because I wanted him to understand there was no rejection of his kindness, but rather an acknowledgement of it by the fact that I was now in a position to be able to repay honourably. He had not taken offence, and always replied with rather stiff notes, pleased but tinged with a shyness which touched me. They had revealed him to be an upright man who had lived a life of the utmost probity, and I was sorry I had never known him.

  But it was only after Mother died that the whole truth was revealed, in a letter she left me. She was not an educated woman by any means, and it was a long letter. I guessed she had written it slowly, over time, correcting and rewriting until she was satisfied. I was stunned at what it revealed. I had always felt we had no secrets from each other, she and I, but now I learnt of that other life she had lived before I was born. And even more amazing were the details of Thomas Pryde’s will.

  Between the letter, and long talks with my Aunt Louisa when she journeyed down for the funeral, I pieced the story together. Thomas, it appeared, had once courted my mother, and a strange courtship it must have been. He was a bachelor who was deemed a prize catch by every marriageable woman in the district, yet he had managed to escape the net until, at the age of forty-four, he declared his intentions to my mother. He was not only Addie’s employer, but a man she had known as a stern and devout chapel-goer, whom she saw every Sunday from her seat in the choir, one who raised his hat to her and occasionally sat next to her at Bible class. He began to court her and asked her to be his wife, but she’d hesitated. Hesitated? Out of her mind, everyone thought she was, said Aunt Louisa; anyone with a grain of sense would have jumped at it. None of the other girls at the factory, Louisa especially, could understand her, and neither could Addie herself at times, she had once confessed to her sister in a rare moment. She couldn’t have been unaware of the secure future a man like him could provide, the freedom from day-to-day drudgery in the factory, and everything else that went with marriage to him, but as no one knew better than I, she was also a romantic, and Thomas Pryde, though he was such a good man, was not only twenty-five years older than she was, but also a quiet, teetotal, dyed-in-the-wool Methodist lay preacher, kind and shrewd but with little sense of humour.

  A man of business, unaccustomed to taking no for an answer, however, he’d even offered to build and furnish a new house for her when they married, rather than take her home to the old one fifty yards from his factory, which had been in his family for generations. And he went so far as to take advice, putting his lifelong thriftiness aside and investing in some expensive jewellery which, if he had understood my mother, he would have known she would never accept. She was not avaricious and had no interest in brash new houses and furniture, and certainly not in the emeralds he bought, which she considered gaudy.

  No wonder she had fallen in love with Jamie when he appeared on the scene.

  It was years after she had married him, after I was born and they had moved to London, that Thomas himself had taken a wife, a woman called Jane Liptrott, a widow with an adolescent son. The marriage had not been happy: the widow was only interested in spending his money, and her spoilt son hadn’t the wit to see that if he had been more receptive to Thomas’s wishes, he might have followed him into the business and inherited it.

  The widow had died early, and Thomas and her son could agree over nothing. He considered the boy a spendthrift, an idler and a bit of a gambler. And, worse than any of that, a non-believer. And that was why he had not left him a penny in his will. A large amount of what he had amassed was to be distributed between various charities and his church. And the rest, which was still a staggering amount, had been left to my mother.

  No one could have been more astounded than she was. Except perhaps Thomas’s solicitor, when she announced that she did not want and would not accept the legacy she had been left.
She wouldn’t have the first idea to know what to do with all that money, she said. In the end, they persuaded her to accept, Aunt Louisa and Mr Gringold between them. Gringold because he told her she would be insulting Thomas’s memory by refusing, my aunt because she saw every reason not to. If I had been told about it, which I was not, I would have tried to persuade her as they did, and I make no excuses for it. I would have known, even then, how Thomas Pryde’s hard-earned money should be used, in a way far better than some ne’er-do-well who would no doubt let it slip through his fingers like water.

  Mother died not long after the money had been made over to her. She had never touched a single penny.

  NINETEEN

  It had been another sticky night, making sleep difficult, except in snatches. Reardon gave it up just before five and slipped out of bed so as not to wake Ellen, who had managed to drop off uneasily. He made tea and wandered out into the garden, mug in hand. It was no fresher outside, the atmosphere thick and heavy, airless. He watched a few desultory flashes of lightning, somewhere towards Kidderminster, and waited for the thunder, then the rain and the storm that had been hanging on for the last couple of days. Neither happened. Rather as nothing more was happening in the Blanchard case.

  Nearly two weeks since it had begun. Sunday morning, and the church bells ringing. He stared across the hoped-for, still-weedy garden, stirring to life with birdsong. Even that sounded muted, as if the birds had had a weary night of it, too.

  As he made breakfast, the local wireless crackled with electricity and told an unsurprised world they were having a heatwave. Reservoirs were dangerously low and people should not waste water. A carthorse had died of heatstroke while dragging a coal-cart up Emscott Hill.

  The newspaper landed on the mat, headlines uppermost. ‘What a sizzler!’

  At Market Street, the day was getting under way. All the doors were propped open and Longton, in shirtsleeves and to hell with protocol, was reading the occurrence book. Nothing more exciting had happened than the usual Saturday-night pub brawl at the George and Dragon, two drunk and disorderlies brought in. ‘Bloody hot, sir, isn’t it?’ he offered as Reardon came in.’