Jess said bluntly, ‘You were relieved when I referred to the fact that Fiona had been stabbed, not bludgeoned to death or drowned.’
‘Yes,’ Alison admitted calmly. ‘What happened to her was unforgivable. Jeremy will never come to terms with it. For me it was horrible not only because Fiona had died, but because someone tried to make it look like the death of my aunt. Ashamed as I am now for feeling it, it was a relief to hear Fiona hadn’t died that way. Oh, yes, I am selfish enough to be glad poor Fiona didn’t die in the same way as Aunt Freda.’ Alison gave Jess another of those knowing looks. ‘Perhaps you haven’t had the experience, Inspector, but I’ve found that when one hears of a death, so often one of the emotions one feels is guilt because one feels one ought to have been able to prevent it. When I believed Fiona had died as Aunt Freda did, I thought it must be my fault because it must be connected with me.The stabbing is something new, something outside my experience. It allowed me to think perhaps this hasn’t happened because of something involving me, years ago.’
‘Your husband thinks there’s a connection.’
Alison’s face clouded. ‘Yes, Jeremy still thinks the writer of those wretched letters did it. The blow to the head, the placing of the body in the lake, all that window-dressing, can any of that be coincidence?’ Her eyes searched Jess’s face.
‘We don’t know,’ Jess replied cautiously. ‘At this stage it would be a mistake to assume we know anything.’
Alison considered this and nodded. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to say anything else. Do you know what’s so wonderful about Jeremy? Even though he’s sure the letter-writer did this, he doesn’t blame me. I love my husband, Inspector Campbell, he’s a special man. He’s honourable and fair.’
She turned away before Jess could reply and walked down the corridor. Like the walls of the staircase, it was lined with small dark oil paintings of trees and meadows, with the occasional child picking flowers or wooden-looking domestic animal. The sort of views young Victorian ladies turned out by the dozen, Jess thought, and wondered if they had been handed down through Jenner’s family or bought at a country house auction.
Fiona’s room was at the back of the house. It was painted entirely throughout in white and the curtains and duvet cover were lilac. On the windowsill was a vase of fresh flowers and beyond them, through the panes, could be seen a narrow path leading across a lawn to an area surrounded by an ornamental wall. Jess guessed that behind that was the family’s swimming pool. In a house this size it would be strange if they didn’t have one.
She turned her attention back to the bed. It had been made up, the duvet smooth, the pillows plumped up, Fiona’s expensive-looking nightgown neatly folded. Not just the bed had suffered the attentions of a careful hand. Everything had been tidied away. She sighed. She’d slipped up. Pride went before a fall, and she had been so determined that Markby should see how efficient she was that she had made a basic mistake. She should have asked to see this room on Saturday, immediately the body was discovered. If there had been anything of interest here, by now it might well have been removed. Families, she knew, were keen to protect their good name, and no one wanted to do that more than a father to protect the reputation of his daughter. Not even a book with a raunchy cover would be left. The only reading matter in this room was on the bedside table. It was a copy of Country Life. Do me a favour! thought Jess in exasperation.You might at least have found a copy of Cosmopolitan or Marie-Claire.
Alison had gone to the far side of the room and opened a cupboard. She turned towards Jess holding out a bag made of multicoloured leather patchwork. It was the pear-shaped sort with a wide band, designed to be worn fitting snugly against the spine, an upmarket backpack. It did not pass Jess by that Alison had known immediately where to go for it. They had been through this room, probably both Jenners together.
‘This is the bag Fiona brought with her.’ Alison put it down on the bed. ‘I expect you want to look round. I’ll leave you to it. I dare say the coffee’s arrived by now downstairs. You’ll join us when you’ve finished?’
‘Mrs Jenner!’ Jess called out as the woman reached the door. Alison turned towards her, eyebrows raised. ‘May I ask, did you get along well with your stepdaughter?’
Alison came back inside the room a few steps. ‘Yes. That is, I didn’t get along badly with her. The truth is, I never really felt I knew her. She was brought up by her mother, largely in France, except for the time she spent at boarding school in this country. Chantal – Fiona’s mother and Jeremy’s first wife – is French. Fiona occasionally spent a school holiday with us. But it’s only this last year or so that she’d taken to coming down to Overvale for a few days at a time. It’s not because I didn’t invite her. I thought it was important that Jeremy should have close contact with her. She’s – she was – his flesh and blood, after all.’ Alison paused. ‘How difficult it is,’ she mused, ‘to remember to use the past tense. It seems so wrong that a young person should die like that. I can hardly take it in, even though I saw her myself, lying there by the lake.’
‘Mr Jenner has no other children?’
‘No.’ Alison folded her arms as if she were cold and the room was a little chilly. ‘Jeremy’s taken this very hard, as I told you. He keeps up a brave front but he’s devastated.’
Without waiting to find out if Jess wanted to ask her anything more, Alison turned and left.
A quick search through drawers and cupboards revealed nothing and confirmed her first impression of the room. Every item of clothing was carefully folded or hung up. Twenty-year-olds are not normally so tidy. At twenty-nine, Jess herself wasn’t. She thought about her own bedroom back at the Bamford flat with its clothes tossed over the back of a chair and jumble of make-up items on the dressing table. This dressing table was dusted and neat. Not a bottle of nail polish out of place.
As for the contents of the leather bag, they were also disappointing. There was a bunch of keys. Good, Jess tossed them up in the air and caught them. But apart from two crumpled Kleenex tissues, a purse with a little loose change in it, a credit card holder with an impressive selection of plastic and a lipstick, there was nothing which gave any clue to the dead girl’s interests or contacts. No notebook or diary. No personal organizer. No contraceptives either in pill or barrier form. Had Fiona had a sex life?
Jess rummaged through the pockets of a jacket in the wardrobe and found Fiona’s car keys and a crumpled scrap of paper bearing the legend ‘buy milk’. Somehow this creased snippet of domestic ephemera was the most poignant thing of all. Yet it told her nothing.
Jess stared round the room with dissatisfaction. The only thing apart from her clothes that could be said to be personal to Fiona was her electric toothbrush plugged into a socket. There wasn’t even the stuffed toy mascot beloved of many young people. The wicker waste-paper basket by the dressing table was empty and freshly lined with a plastic sack. There was no ensuite bathroom but instead an individual washbasin. That sparkled with cleanliness. Even the piece of soap lying on it was new. It was like a hotel room. Was that just because Mrs Whittle had cleaned it so thoroughly and the Jenners had removed anything they deemed embarrassing? Or had Fiona not wished to leave any clues to her personality? Jess recalled Alison’s words. ‘I never really felt I knew her.’
‘I’m not going to get to know her either,’ Jess muttered. ‘Unless someone opens up.’
She went back downstairs. An enticing aroma of good hot coffee seeped from the drawing room and when she opened the door she saw the tray with the coffee things on a low table. Alison and her husband were seated close together on the sofa and appeared to have been having some kind of disagreement. Not of the acrimonious kind, thought Jess, just the difference-of-opinion sort argued out with affectionate obstinacy. As soon as she saw Jess, however, Alison picked up the coffee pot and poured out a fresh cup.
‘Thank you,’ said Jess, accepting it. ‘I have the keys, Mr Jenner, and I’ll give you a receipt for them. Now I need your daugh
ter’s London address:
Jenner picked up a small piece of paper from the coffee table and handed it to her. ‘I’ve written it out ready for you.’
As Jess’s fingers closed on it, Jenner added, ‘You have to understand. I’ve lost my daughter. I know her death has to be investigated. But I feel as though everything about her is being violated. The autopsy, her room searched, her personal effects, now her flat …’ His voice trailed away.
‘We’ll leave everything neat, sir. Can I ask, did Mrs Whittle tidy the room upstairs?’ She didn’t ask them directly if they had been through the room, but waited to see their reaction.
Alison put her fingers to her mouth in a gesture of dismay. ‘Yes, I didn’t think to stop her. Of course, everything should have been left as it was … But Fiona was a tidy person. I don’t suppose Mrs Whittle did very much.’
The gesture looked convincing. That meant Alison might be a good actress or it might be genuine regret. In any case, it might be unfair to blame her. She had been sleeping most of the weekend and any search through Fiona’s effects might have been instigated by Jenner himself. If so, he wasn’t the sort of man to admit he’d done anything improper.
‘All the same, I’d like a word with Mrs Whittle.’ Jess put her cup down. ‘That was lovely coffee. Will I find her in the kitchen? No, don’t get up. I can find my way.’
‘Intrusion,’ muttered Jeremy Jenner. ‘Wandering all over the damn house. None of us is going to have a bit of privacy left!’
Mrs Whittle was sitting in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee of her own and reading the Daily Mail.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ Jess said, taking the seat across the table from her. ‘I just wanted to ask, when you tidied Fiona Jenner’s room, did you throw anything away?’
Mrs Whittle stared at her in bewilderment. ‘No, miss, why should I?’
‘I saw there was a waste-paper basket in there and it was empty.’
Understanding dawned on the housekeeper’s face. ‘Oh, I emptied that but it wasn’t anything much, some tissues with lipstick on them I think. Oh, and a pair of tights that she’d put her toe through.’ Mrs Whittle flushed guiltily. ‘I kept the tights. I mended them. It was only a little hole but young people nowadays, they don’t mend anything, do they? They throw anything like that away and buy new. They were good tights and I couldn’t bring myself to put them in the bin. When I sewed up the hole you could hardly see it but I knew she wouldn’t wear darned tights so, well, I just kept them.’
‘I’m not worried about the tights,’ Jess assured her. ‘If I could take you back to Saturday morning, the morning Miss Jenner died.’
Mrs Whittle looked distressed and said, ‘Poor young woman. She was such a lovely girl, just like one of those fashion models. To think of her lying dead like that.’
‘Yes. Did you see Fiona leave the house on Saturday morning?’
‘Now,’ said Mrs Whittle, suddenly confidential. ‘As a matter of fact, I did and I didn’t. I’d taken a tray of breakfast things into the dining room and she ran past the window. I suppose you’d say I didn’t exactly see her leave. But she was outside the house. She was running, jogging, like they do to keep fit.’
‘Can you describe her?’ Jess asked. ‘What was she wearing?’
‘It was Miss Fiona, I recognized her. I saw her clearly. She had on a red top. It had long sleeves and a little hood at the back. She’d got her hair tied back with a red band round it and as she ran the ponytail of hair bobbed up and down just like a real pony’s tail. It amused me at the time.’ Mrs Whittle paused to sniff, take out a handkerchief and rub the end of her nose with it.
‘What time was this?’ The picture the woman had drawn of Fiona Jenner running past the window was a good one and yet there was something wrong with it.
‘It would have been around, oh, a quarter past eight? I couldn’t swear to the time, not to the minute. But about that.’ Mrs Whittle nodded as if agreeing with herself.
The feeling of something wrong still niggled at Jess. Before her inner vision swam another picture. In it, Fiona lay dead on the edge of the lake, her long blond hair spread out. That was what was different! Where was the red scrunchy which had secured the ponytail?
‘The red band, as you called it,’ Jess said. ‘Was it a small thing?’
‘On her hair? It was an elasticized red satin ring, quite a pretty thing. I’d seen her wear it before. She’d pull her hair into a ponytail and twist this ring thing round it two or three times until it was tight.’
‘Right,’ Jess said briskly. ‘Thank you, Mrs Whittle. Oh, I was hoping to talk to Mr Smythe but he doesn’t seem to be about. Has he gone back to London?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Whittle decidedly. ‘But he won’t be in for lunch. He’s gone out to have lunch with a friend.’
‘Why on earth did you choose the Feathers?’ whispered Meredith across the table.
‘It looked all right from the outside,’ Toby defended himself, gazing round him.
The Feathers was an old pub and had the necessary quaint features to make it picturesque but they were spoiled by ancient tobacco-stained anaglypta wallpaper, a lot of dark wood and an array of faded photographs which provided the decoration. It wasn’t a popular hostelry but it had a core of doggedly loyal patrons, themselves of a dauntingly uncommunicative nature. The entry of Meredith and Toby had been met with surly stares.
‘I should have warned you,’ she said. ‘My fault.’
‘We’ll go somewhere else,’ he said. ‘Drink up.’
‘Too late. Dolores is coming over. We can’t slip out now.’
‘Who is—’
‘Miss Mitchell, isn’t it?’ A voice cut across Toby’s question. He looked up and his expression became startled. A woman of Amazonian build wearing a tight purple sweater over an impressive bust, black leggings and stiletto heels had arrived at the table, clearly ready to take their order. She had long bottle-blond hair and a great deal of make-up. She also had a glint in her eye and a no-nonsense manner which would have done credit to the matron of a nineteenth-century workhouse.
‘Hello, Dolores,’ said Meredith. ‘How are you? This is Mrs Forbes, the licensee, Toby.’
‘Nothing wrong with me,’ said Mrs Forbes briskly as if Meredith’s enquiry had suggested the possibility of weakness. ‘Mr Markby well? Not with you today?’ She raised her plucked eyebrows and gave Toby a look intended to quell. It did. Toby gulped and picked up his glass, burying his nose in it.
‘Alan’s working,’ Meredith explained. ‘This is a friend, just down for a couple of days.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Clearly Mrs Forbes didn’t believe in innocent friendships. ‘That’ll be the murder, I dare say, over at Overvale House?’
‘What?’ Meredith made the necessary mental leap. ‘Yes.’ She couldn’t deny it but it was a nuisance to have Mrs Forbes take an interest in the reason for Alan’s absence. She wasn’t prepared for it to throw up a nugget of curious information.
‘She came in here one night,’ said Mrs Forbes unexpectedly.
‘She?’
‘The dead girl. Mr Jenner’s daughter, was it? We had a visiting darts team here at the time and you never saw so many blokes with their eyes out on stalks. The darts were going all over the place. We’ve got lasagne today.’
‘Was she on her own?’ Meredith disregarded the offer of lasagne.
Mrs Forbes frowned and tapped a menu card against her teeth. ‘It was that crowded in here, with the darts match, that I couldn’t say. I suppose she must have been with someone. A girl like that doesn’t go into pubs on her own. Funny thing, I can’t remember anyone with her exactly, at least, not anyone I didn’t know. Of course with the visiting darts team and their girlfriends, the bar was full of strangers. She might have come with them. If you don’t want the lasagne, I’ve got a Thai green curry. That’s new on the menu.’
Dolores’ manner indicated that she’d spent enough time on chit-chat and they should make up their minds, sharpish. Th
ey settled for lasagne.
‘I don’t suppose,’ ventured Toby, ‘that you’ve got a wine list?’
The landlady gave him a fierce stare. ‘No, we’re a pub, not a restaurant. We’ve got wine, red or white. Which do you want?’
They ordered the red.
‘What a ghastly battleaxe,’ whispered Toby in awe when Mrs Forbes had marched away to deliver their order to the kitchen. ‘Is she the cook?’
‘I don’t think so. She’s got a partner, a little chap who never speaks and is hardly ever let out of the kitchen, so I guess he does it. You do realize, she thinks that you and I are engaging in illicit shenanigans behind Alan’s back?’
‘Then she’ll have to think it, won’t she?’ Toby frowned. ‘What on earth was Fiona doing in here? It’s not her sort of place at all.’
‘Toby,’ Meredith hesitated. ‘Were you very keen on her?’
‘I liked her a lot,’ he said. ‘I suppose you mean, was I in love? I don’t know.’
‘Then you weren’t,’ she said firmly. ‘I have to say, I’m a bit relieved. I thought you might be heart-broken, although you don’t look it. I don’t mean that unkindly.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Toby said with unaccustomed sharpness. ‘People think I’m superficial. Generally it’s people who don’t know me very well. You do know me pretty well and even you think it.’
‘No …’ she protested. ‘I didn’t mean it to sound …’
He leaned forward. ‘It’s a protective disguise. I developed it when I was a kid. At boys’ schools it doesn’t do to be sensitive. We all worked hard at seeming tough and cool. What you see now is my adult version of it, I suppose. I’m really upset about Fiona. I did like her a lot, even if I didn’t – I wasn’t what people would call in love with her. I think she liked me in the same way. We were both oddities, if you like. That’s why we got on so well. We always were good mates, even as kids, although I saw little of her after the age of about ten when Jeremy and Chantal divorced. Fiona was abroad with her mother.You know how it is when you spend most of your time abroad? You lose touch with daily life in your own country.’
Ann Granger Page 11
