by Hazel Holt
‘Good idea,’ Rosemary said, picking up the tea-tray. ‘You pour them while I get rid of this lot.’
‘Well now, Sheila,’ Jack said, handing me a brimming glass, ‘and how’s the world treating you? Are you all right after that nasty tumble you took?’
‘Oh yes, that’s fine. But still very shocked, like everyone, that such a thing could have happened.’
‘Good God, yes,’ he said forcefully. ‘I was at the CPRE meeting when the thing went off. Thought it was a bomb. I said to George Prior, “That sounds like a bomb! Don’t say the bloody IRA have hit Taviscombe!” ’
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘the meeting was at Brunswick Lodge, wasnck /font><’t it? That’s quite near the recreation ground—you’d have heard it! Had the meeting started when you heard the explosion?’
‘Only just,’ Jack replied with disapproval. ‘Charlie Benson rang up and said he’d be late, damned car wouldn’t start or something, and he was waiting for the AA, so we were all kicking our heels for the best part of half an hour before the meeting started! Downright ridiculous having a chairman who lives at the back of beyond like that!’
‘Was Ronnie Graham at the meeting?’ I asked.
‘Yes, poor chap, he was sitting opposite me. Of course, we’d no idea, when that thing went off, just what had happened. I mean, I’ve really not got much time for the fellow—a bit of a wet fish—but to have such a thing happen to your wife, well!’
‘What did you all do,’ I asked casually, ‘while you were waiting for Charlie Benson?’
‘Do? I don’t know. People were all over the place, you know what a rabbit warren of a place Brunswick Lodge is! I was having a cup of coffee in the big room where they’d got the refreshments laid out, when I got buttonholed by Joan Meadows about that cycle path scheme. Blasted woman! Seems to think she only has to say a thing over and over enough times and people’ll change their minds!’
‘Was Ronnie Graham having coffee too?’
‘Ronnie Graham? I don’t know. As I told you, I had my hands full with that Meadows woman!’
‘What about Joan Meadows?’ Rosemary asked, coming back into the room. ‘Is that my sherry, Jack?’
‘She was on again about that cycle path—a lot of damned nonsense! Nobody’ll use it. Look at the one from Dunster, always empty! No, all it’ll do is hold up the traffic for weeks with the road works and cost the ratepayers the bloody earth!’
‘Oh, bicycles are a menace!’ I said. ‘They go about in packs now, all over the road, and glare at you if you try to creep past in the car! A bit different from when we used to cycle to school!’
‘And those ridiculous helmets they wear!’ Rosemary interrupted. ‘I know they’re supposed to make everything se efonafer, but I’m sure they just encourage people to think they’re in the Tour de France or something and make things more dangerous than ever!’
I wondered if Roger had got the full story of the committee meeting. After all, if nobody could be sure where everyone was for that spare half-hour, then Ronnie might have slipped out, mingled with the crowd, put the fatal rocket into Carol’s box when she was with Dick Mabey, and have been back in time before the meeting started. I didn’t quite like to telephone Roger and ask him because it might sound as if I didn’t think he’d done his job properly. Still, it was a possibility, and, as such, should be looked into.
I had a word with Anthea when we were checking over the contributions for the fancy-work stall for the Help the Aged Christmas Fayre. No matter what the tragedy—flood, fire, murder—the Christmas Fayre must go on ...
‘Anthea,’ I said, ‘you knew Carol pretty well. Did she have any family?’
‘Family?’ Anthea looked up from folding a pink knitted bedjacket. ‘I don’t think so. There was an aged aunt of some kind in Stoke-on-Trent, but she died a couple of years ago, I remember Carol going up for the funeral.’
‘And that’s all?’ I asked.
Anthea looked at me curiously. ‘Why all this sudden interest?’
‘Well,’ I said cautiously, ‘I just wondered. I mean, there’s all that money—you heard about that?—and I wondered if she might have left something to a relative or anything, or if it’ll all go to Ronnie.’
Anthea snorted. ‘It really does seem ridiculous, someone like Ronnie Graham, of all people, having a lot of money! What on earth will he do with it?’
‘Buy antiques, I shouldn’t wonder. He seems to have a taste for such things.’
‘Well, it does seem unfair, when you think how hard Carol worked—with no help at all from him—and just when she jusace="Ticould have had an easier life this dreadful thing had to happen!’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, moving a tray of pink satin lavender bags to one side to make room on the trestle table for a knitted tea cosy and a heavily belaced and beribboned cushion. ‘From what I can gather it seems to be a great deal of money.’
Anthea looked thoughtful. ‘Of course,’ she said slowly, ‘there was the daughter.’
‘What?’
‘Carol’s daughter.’
I looked at her in amazement. ‘But they didn’t have any children,’ I said.
‘No, I know that,’ Anthea said impatiently. ‘No, this was Carol’s child. She was born before Carol married Ronnie. I mean, she wasn’t married at the time.’
‘Good heavens!’ I exclaimed. ‘I never knew that!’
‘No, nobody did,’ Anthea replied, ‘and I don’t suppose Carol would have told me, but she was feeling pretty low, she’d just had a bad bout of flu—oh, it must have been two years ago—and we were talking and she just came out with it.’
‘Carol!’ I said. ‘Of all people!’
‘Well, she’s dead now, poor soul, so I don’t suppose it matters you knowing now.’
‘Did Ronnie know?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes, she told him before they got married. I will say this for him—he never made an issue of it in any way.’
‘Who was the father, I wonder?’
‘She didn’t say. I gather it all happened when she was quite a young girl, living in Stafford. Nowadays people wouldn’t think anything of it, but then it was a great scandal. I think she had it adopted. Anyway, she had to leave home.’
‘And it was a girl?’
‘Yes, she sounded quite sentimental when she told me—wondering how she’d grown up, what she looked like—not a bit like Carol usually was. I suppose the girl would be in her twenties heimes New by now.’
‘Carol never kept in touch then?’
‘Well, no. She wouldn’t, I suppose, if it was adopted.’
‘How absolutely extraordinary!’ I said. ‘Carol Graham, of all people! Still,’ I continued, ‘she might have left the girl something in her will. I mean, Ronnie hasn’t any close relations, now Miss Graham’s gone, so Carol might have thought her daughter could inherit the shop and whatever else they had—before she knew about the money, of course.’
‘Well, I don’t know anything about that,’ Anthea said. ‘It all sounds a bit complicated to me.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed meekly, ‘I suppose it does. So where shall I put these nightdress cases and the tissue-box covers?’
But it did provide a whole new line of thinking about Carol’s death, I decided, as I opened up a tin of sardines for my lunch. Foss, attracted by the smell of sardines, materialized from nowhere and began to weave round my feet as I wrestled with the tin opener (thank goodness they’ve stopped putting those little keys that always broke off on the tins now, so that I’m not tempted to try using them) and tried to sort out my thoughts.
If Carol had had a daughter, and still felt strongly enough to talk to Anthea about her, she might very well have left her something in her will. She might even have got in touch with her. It seems to be fashionable for adopted children and their real parents to seek each other out nowadays; television plays seem to be about nothing else! I suppose now that illegitimate births no longer have the stigma they once had, natural curiosity can flourish uncheck
ed by any social or moral prohibitions. So, if Carol had been in touch with her daughter, the girl might somehow have heard about the money and have come to see her mother. Mind you, I don’t think Carol would have been keen to acknowledge her daughter in Taviscombe, even though the social climate might make it possible in most places. But here there’d still have been gossip and sideways glances, something that a person like Carol, well known for her forthright opinions and moral judgements, would have found intolerable. No, if the girl had come at all, no one (except, presumably, Ronnie) would have known.
Foss, impatient at my slowness with the tin, jumped up on to the worktop and butted my hand with his head. I tipped out the sardines on to a dish (fending Foss off with one hand) and divided them between us. Actually, it occurred to me in a flash of inspiration that if Carol had been in correspondence with her daughter, the girl could hat"+0" face="Times New Roman">have come to Taviscombe (for whatever reason) without Carol even knowing. After all, if she’d had no contact with her, Carol would have no idea what her now grownup daughter looked like. So, say they’d been in touch and the girl had somehow discovered that Carol was going to leave her something in her will (something very substantial now, though neither of them would have known that when they first started to write to each other) then she might have decided to come down, unknown to her mother, to see how the land lay. Then, when Ronnie and Carol suddenly became immensely rich, she might have murdered the mother she had never known for the sake of the money. Though, no, that wasn’t any good, because the money was actually Ronnie’s, so Carol couldn’t leave her any of it ...
I sighed. It was all too complicated and I wasn’t really getting anywhere. Still, I was reluctant to abandon my adopted daughter theory entirely, so I pushed it to the back of my mind to worry over another day and concentrated on eating my share of the sardines before Foss (now looking up expectantly from an empty dish) commandeered them as well.
Chapter Sixteen
‘Oh, good!’ Michael looked up from the letter he was reading. ‘You remember Chris Portman, don’t you? He was up at Oxford when I was, reading history too, though he was at Corpus. Decent bloke.’
‘Chris Portman? Oh yes, I remember. An enormous black beard and an ear-ring, looked like a pirate, only needed a parrot on his shoulder! A nice boy. What about him?’
‘Well, you know he’s written several books—sort of sci-fi—and made a bit of a name for himself? Anyway, he’s been invited to give a library talk here, this Saturday. I can’t think why I haven’t seen any publicity about it.’
‘Oh, yes, I remember now, there were several posters and a sort of display in the library the last time I was in there. I thought the name rang a bell.’
‘Do you mind if I ask him to stay overnight?’ Michael asked. ‘We can go out for a meal if it’s a nuisance.’
‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘It’ll be nice seeing him again.’
‘You will come to the talk, won’t you?’ Michael looked at the letter again. ‘He says he doesn’t expect there’le="+0"l be many people there and he needs all the audience he can get!’
‘It’s not exactly my cup of tea,’ I said doubtfully, ‘but yes, of course, I’ll come and lend support.’
‘Great!’ Michael said. ‘I’ll go and phone him now before I go to work.’
‘He may not be up,’ I suggested. ‘Unless he’s one of those tremendously disciplined writers who are always at their desks by eight-thirty.’
It turned out that Michael’s friend Chris had shaved off his beard and the ear-ring was nowhere in evidence. In fact, in a good tweed jacket and cavalry twill trousers, with neatly brushed hair and horn-rimmed glasses, he looked rather more like a country solicitor than Michael did.
‘It’s very good of you to put me up for the night,’ he said, shaking hands politely, when Michael brought him back from the station.
‘Guess what,’ Michael said, ‘the library committee, or whoever arranges the thing, had booked him into the Sandringham!’
The Sandringham is a notoriously uncomfortable hotel with vile food and surly staff.
‘Goodness!’ I exclaimed. ‘Well, we should be able to make you more comfortable than that. But it’s so nice to see you again, Chris. And how splendid that you’ve done so well!’
‘I don’t know about well,’ Chris said with a little laugh. ‘I still can’t give up the day job!’
‘Chris teaches in a prep school,’ Michael said.
‘Oh well, at least you get reasonable holidays to write in,’ I said.
‘When I’m not guiding the little brutes through the delights of Dutch art galleries or building their characters by camping halfway up Snowdon in the pouring rain.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘we’re looking forward to your talk very much.’
‘I expect you and the library staff will be the only people there,’ Chris said gloomily. ‘That’s how it usually is.’ He turned to Michael. ‘I’m relying on you to ask the first question afterwards. There’s always this ghastly embarrassed silence when they ask for questions from the audience and they all look down at their feet and no one says a word. It’s almost the worst bit of doing these wretched things.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said sympathetically. ‘It does sound a bit of a strain. I do know how you feel; wow h="34" riting the sort of semi-academic books that I do, I don’t get called upon to do the public address bit very often, but when I have to I do loathe it.’
‘Everything you say sounds either fatuous or the worst kind of self-advertisement,’ Chris said ruefully. ‘I mean, if I could talk about things I wouldn’t write about them! And sometimes I catch myself saying the most God-awful crap! Just out of nervousness. Still, you have to do it nowadays, if you want to sell a book, especially in my line. There’s these appalling conventions, too, when all the sci-fi writers and fans are herded together for three days and nights in some hotel (in the Midlands, usually) and you find yourself giving talks or sitting on panels at eleven o’clock at night in rooms so smoke-filled you can’t see the audience—which is just as well, because the amber liquid’s been flowing pretty well non-stop all day, so that by then they’re mostly smashed out of their minds. Come to that, so are you, but you’ve reached the stage when all you want to do is go and lie down somewhere ...’
‘I can promise you,’ I said comfortingly, ‘there won’t be anything at all like that in Taviscombe Library.’
In fact, there were quite a respectable number of people there when Michael and I made our way into the library (Chris having entered by a side door as befitted the Speaker), some of whom I knew, old faithfuls who turned up at every so-called literary event, though there were a fair number of young people as well, not surprisingly, since it was much more their ‘thing’ and in view of the fact that the title of the talk was ‘Science Fiction: 2002’.
We sat in the second row (a precaution, on my part, in case poor Chris was one of those literary speakers who hunch forward and swallow their words) and we had barely been settled for more than a few minutes when, to my surprise, Anthea came and sat beside me.
‘Good heavens!’ I said. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
Anthea is well known for never reading anything other than the Daily Telegraph, Good Housekeeping, and, at the dentist’s, Country Life.
She grimaced and said, ‘Liz insisted on coming. Apparently she’s a mad fan of this writer person and she’s come home specially for the weekend to hear him. So she made me drive her in.’
Liz was Anthea’s daughter, training to be a nurse in Bristol, and Br>
‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘he’s a friend of Michael’s (that’s why I’m here, out of politeness) and he’s staying with us, so she can meet him if she likes. I’m sure’—I turned to Michael—‘Chris would be delighted to meet a fan, don’t you think?’
‘Oh, is Liz here?’ Michael asked. ‘Would she like to come and have a drink with us after? Hi, Liz,’ he went on as she joined us, ‘come and sit next to me and I can fi
ll you in on the real Chris Portman!’
As I moved up to make room for Liz, Anthea said, ‘By the way, you know we were talking about Ronnie Graham the other day? Well, there was something I meant to tell you, but I got sidetracked. A bit odd.’
‘What was that?’ I asked curiously.
‘Well, I had to go to Evesham a few weeks ago, to see Jean Webster—you remember her? Used to be Father’s secretary; such a nice woman. Anyway, she’s in a nursing home down there and Celia and I felt we really ought to go and see her. I’ve been rather putting it off—you know how difficult it is to get Celia to go anywhere now.’ Anthea’s sister is notorious for refusing to leave her garden at any time of the year. ‘But I said to her, “You know perfectly well there’s nothing you can do in that blessed garden of yours in this awful wet weather,” so she finally agreed and off we went.’ Anthea settled herself more comfortably in the metal library chair and continued. ‘We’d stopped at that service station on the M5—you know, the second one you come to, with the funny name—and were just having a cup of coffee—I must say, the price they charge for everything in those places is a disgrace! Anyway, there we were having our coffee and who should I see but Ronnie Graham!’
‘That must have been when he went to that conference in Birmingham,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘I expect he was on his way there or back from it. So?’
‘So,’ Anthea said, ‘he was with a woman!’
‘Goodness!’ I exclaimed. ‘Who was it?’
‘That I can’t say,’ Anthea said regretfully. ‘She had her back to me. It certainly wasn’t Carol, though.’
‘What was she like?’ I asked. ‘Was she old or young?’
‘Oh, young, I’m sure. I couldn’t see her face and she was muffled up in a coat, sort of greyish, but she had a great mass of fair hair. Quite definitely young. Anyway, Ronnie was behaving really furtively, leaning across the table as if he was afraid of someone hearing what they were talking about.’
‘How extraordinary. Did he see you?’
