She pushed her fingers through her thick, tawny hair and lifted her chin. That hard, driven look I’d seen before was back on her face. ‘But when the first shocks were over, I decided I wouldn’t give in. I’d start again, somehow, though I was desperate for cash. I remembered Jacquetta’s insistence that she’d been cheated, that William Brereton had obtained Sophie’s money under false pretences.’
‘That’s not true!’ I protested. ‘She—’
But Baines cut me short. ‘Isn’t it? How do you think your grandfather was able to set his business up here in the first place, in a house this size?’ He spoke fast, as if making up for his taciturnity the last time we’d met. ‘When he came from a working-class family, down in the valley, without a penny to bless themselves? Because he borrowed the money from Sophie, of course!’
‘What? How do you know that?’ He’d managed to find out more about my grandfather than I ever had.
‘It’s common knowledge round here. Some people still remember how he was able to set up, through that rich aunt of his wife’s who thought so much of him. A crazy old woman,’ he added contemptuously, ‘who left her fortune to a man just because he was canny enough to pay back a loan that could have meant very little to her!’
‘I don’t think that’s so crazy,’ said Daniel. ‘A lot of people wouldn’t have bothered. Repaying the loan, I mean.’
Baines laughed shortly. ‘No, they wouldn’t, would they? But he did. Nice one, that, William!’
I was furious. ‘Sophie’s money,’ I said, ‘was left for Jacquetta’s daughter—my mother. Sophie couldn’t have known she was already dead. That’s why Grandpa kept it for me.’
I was thinking at the same time—how could Baines have known why Sophie had left William Brereton her money? Yet who better than a lawyer to find out about the wills people left behind? ‘So,’ I said to Cluny, ‘what did you think to gain by coming over here?’
‘It wasn’t like that, or not quite. After—after Stuart was killed, I decided I’d nothing to lose, so—’ She swallowed. ‘So I came over to England to put a business proposition to William Brereton, to remind him that at least some of the money should rightly have come to Stuart, and to ask him to invest money with me in a new venture. But when I met him, and saw the sort of straight down-the-middle man he was, I knew that sort of pressure would cut no ice. Maybe I was Stuart’s widow, but I really had no valid claim.’
Daniel said, ‘If you’d been honest with him, he’d have been fair with you. Better than getting him to marry you as a roundabout way of getting your hands on the money.’
‘I married him when he asked me,’ she flashed, with a return of her habitual sharpness, ‘because I’d become fond of him. No matter what anybody thought, we had a good relationship. I gave him companionship, and he—he was someone I could lean on in a world gone mad. He knew my first husband had been killed, but he respected my need for silence about the details. I think he gave me back my sanity.’
No one had anything to say to that. ‘So what went wrong?’ I asked eventually.
‘I’m afraid he might have—suspected something. Stephen and I first met during the business handover to you, Daniel, and we began to see each other. But our meetings were purely business, never mind what William thought. No, Stephen, I mean to go on.’
Baines spread his hands, abrogating responsibility. If she was determined to talk, the gesture said, he couldn’t stop her. But he was clearly on edge.
‘Somewhere, there was a lot of money from Sophie’s legacy. We made a bargain—Stephen would try to trace it in return for a share of whatever I might get. It was inconceivable William had spent it, money never meant much to him, did it? But we knew there was no will deposited at Brownrigg’s. He was constantly urged to make one, but he kept putting it off. We suspected he’d drawn one up himself . . . perfectly legal, as long as it’s properly witnessed . . . but though I searched the house from top to bottom, I found nothing. When he died and one still didn’t turn up, I decided he’d already passed the actual money over to you, Zoe. He’d have known that if he died intestate, everything else he had—the house and so on—would automatically come to me. I suppose he thought that was fair enough.’
She must also have thought that was why I’d made no fuss when it looked to everyone else as though William had all but disowned me.
Her wedding ring had become very loose, and she twisted it round and round on her finger as she said, ‘Our relationship became strained in the last few months. I think he’d begun to suspect something. All the same, he was very upset when I told him, the night before he died, that I’d decided to go back to Zimbabwe. I never dreamed it would distress him so much. He’—her voice faltered—‘he said if I left him, his life wouldn’t be worth living.’
Baines drained the second whisky ‘If that’s how he felt, it seems that fall of his down the stairs was—well, to put it kindly, a merciful accident.’
‘How dare you say that? Such a thing—to suggest he took his own life!’ cried Magda, in a passion. ‘And it was surely no accident!’
‘What rubbish is this?’ Cluny had that distant look she always had when addressing Magda, the one that infuriated her.
‘You call a booby trap rubbish, do you?’ Magda said. Cluny stared at her, still not connecting. ‘The trip-wire, which had been stretched across the staircase and fastened with tacks or drawing-pins. The holes are still there to prove it.’
Baines looked as astounded as Cluny, and for a moment they had me convinced. I had to remind myself that Cluny was a good actress—she had fooled William, not an easy man to be taken in. Maybe she’d fooled Baines, too. Or maybe he was as good as she was at acting.
Or . . .
All my doubts came back. Had we in fact been manufacturing some plot out of nothing? I myself had pooh-poohed Magda’s suspicions when I’d first seen those tiny holes in the skirting board. It was only gradually that I’d come to think that, randomly placed though they might appear, they were probably too conveniently placed to be there by accident.
‘Perhaps, Miss Lutz,’ said Baines, coldly polite, ‘you’d explain how you come to have worked this out?’
No one ever called her anything but Magda, and she took it as an insult. ‘Why don’t you ask her?’ She jerked her head in Cluny’s direction. ‘She came home before she was expected—no one knows how long before. She rigged up that trip-wire, or cotton, or whatever it was, and waited for him to come downstairs and fall over it. Then she raised the alarm, pretending she’d just come home.’
‘Trip-wires? Booby traps? Oh, come on! Has everybody in this house gone mad?’
‘Think about it,’ put in Daniel. ‘It could have happened like that. Or, just for the sake of argument, what about this? You for one were here on the day he died, when everyone else was out. You came up to see William around lunchtime. You knew he always took a nap for an hour between one and two, so—let’s say you came back while he was asleep and rigged up a booby trap. And then came back again and removed it after he’d fallen. How does that sound?’
‘Ridiculous.’ I hadn’t realized quite how good a disguise were those spectacles that made him look such a dork. He had taken them off and was polishing them with a spotless white handkerchief. I saw his eyes, very pale and very cold. I also recognized that glassy look—as anyone immediately would who has worked among media people: he was, if not drunk, rather the worse for wear. That whisky of William’s, into which he’d made such inroads certainly hadn’t been the start of his drinking that evening. ‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ he added, replacing the specs. ‘If I had killed him, I’d have damn sure chosen a less chancy way of doing it.’
‘A trip-wire as a murder weapon does leave something to be desired.’
‘Precisely. But let me say again: I came up to the house once that day. Once only’.
‘All right, Stephen,’ said Cluny suddenly. ‘I’ll tell you all what happened, but it wasn’t anything like that. The fact is, I did come hom
e before I was expected—’
Baines opened his mouth to speak, but she waved him down. ‘William was at the top of the stairs, bending over to pick up his stick, which he seemed to have dropped. He was swaying slightly, and I thought he was going to fall, so I rushed up to him and tried to steady him, but he gave me such a look, and—and pulled away. I tried to grab him, but I was too late.’ She looked down at her hands, fingers twisted together in her lap. ‘He fell, rather than take help from me.’
For the first time, Magda looked uncertain, but she stuck to her guns. ‘First you say you found him at the bottom of the stairs, now you say he fell!’
‘It seemed easier than trying to explain all that about being with him at the top of the stairs . . . I was afraid—I was afraid it might be thought I’d pushed him.’
Well—had she? Even more bizarrely, had she rigged up that trap? Or had it really been the work of Baines, and his assertion just now that he would have been more careful, nothing but a double bluff? Or even . . . there suddenly occurred to me a nasty, unwelcome thought: could it have been neither of them? Stairs are notoriously difficult to negotiate, using a walking-stick. Was the true explanation what it appeared to be—a simple fall? With those holes, in fact, put there after the event by a spiteful woman simply wanting to stir up trouble for the bereaved wife?
Magda was not a subtle woman, and had made no secret of her antipathy towards Cluny—and William had been the very centre of her life. I had known her for ever, she was so open, so on the surface. But was it possible there were depths to her we’d none of us been allowed to see? She had never spoken of her life before she fled to England, or of the family she had been forced to leave behind, what terrors of war she’d encountered which had left her alone, dispossessed, and what mark they’d made upon her. I knew how persistent she could be, once she’d got an idea into her head, but—was she capable of such malice?
I was suddenly fed up. This wasn’t an abstract problem we were discussing, but my grandfather, William Brereton. I said loudly, ‘I don’t actually care very much which of you did it, what nasty little plots you made up. As far as I’m concerned, it was an accident, and how it happened is best forgotten.’ Leave it, Daniel had said to me, and I knew now he was right. If anyone was responsible for it, they would have to live with it for the rest of their lives.
Suddenly, Baines stood up and walked out of the room without another word. No one tried to stop him, whether we thought his departure was an admission of guilt, or not. None of us wanted further confrontation over something we knew could be proved only with difficulty—if ever. I watched him through the window as he reached his car, wrenched open the door and flung himself into the driver’s seat. The engine roared into life and he screeched the car into a reverse turn.
The headlights lit up the salukis, who had heard the sound of the engine and raced round the side of the house, expecting to be able to jump into Cluny’s car as usual. For a second it looked as though Baines wasn’t going to be able to avoid them, but they skeetered away to one side, almost falling over one another, their silky ears laid back, eyes rolling in fright, uttering shrill yelps of fear. The manoeuvre had made Baines lose control of the steering-wheel, and the car was careering at an odd angle down the drive towards the busy main road. But he would never negotiate the curve through those narrow gates anyway at that speed, and the drive was too short to allow him to straighten up in time.
The car hit the stone slabs of the retaining wall along the drive with a teeth-grinding shriek.
For several moments, there was that deathly silence that comes after shock. Then there came the sound of a car noisily manoeuvring, and driving off. Everyone sagged with relief.
In the aftermath, I felt incapable of movement. I stared at Sophie’s portrait. She had left me with a problem, she and William between them. I’d known from the first what I would do with the house, of course. But the money? I heard my grandfather’s voice. She’ll know the right thing to do, he’d said to Magda. And suddenly, I did.
I was sure Magda wouldn’t approve. I didn’t think Sophie would have, either. Well, you started all this, I told her silently, as she stared primly and accusingly out of her frame, from under the brim of her velvet hat.
The salukis were barking at the door. I smiled at Cluny as she rose to let them in.
THE EGYPTIAN GARDEN
‘But what has happened to the garden?’ asked Mrs Palmer.
‘There doesn’t appear to be one, I’m afraid, dear,’ replied Moira Ledgerwood, who felt obliged to take the old lady under her wing, as she’d frequently let it be known over the last two weeks. ‘Just a big courtyard.’
‘Well. I can see that!’
‘No garden in Cairo housses,’ the guide, Hassan, asserted sibilantly, with the fine disregard for truth which had characterized all his explanations so far.
‘But there used to be one here. With a fountain in the middle.’
Hassan shrugged. The other twenty members of the cultural tour smiled tolerantly. They were accustomed to Mrs Palmer by now, after ten days together in Upper Egypt. You had to admire her spirit, and the way she kept up with the best of them, despite her age. A widow, refusing to let the fact that she was alone limit her choice of holiday to Eastbourne, or perhaps a Mediterranean cruise. Intrepid old girl, eighty if she was a day. They were always the toughest, that sort. But her younger travelling companions sensed that this trip had turned out to be something of a disappointment. Egypt was not apparently living up to expectations, it wasn’t as it had been when she’d lived here, though that would have been asking a lot, since it had been in the Dark Ages, before the war.
‘Taking a trip down Memory Lane then, are you, Ursula, is that why you’ve come?’ Moira had asked kindly, when Mrs Palmer had let slip this fact on the first day, utterly dismayed at the tarmac road that now ran towards the once remote, silent and awesome Valley of the Kings, at the noisome phalanxes of waiting coaches with their engines kept running for the air-conditioning, the throngs of people from the cruise ships queuing up for tickets to visit the tombs of the Pharaohs, which were lit by electric light. Before the war, when her husband had taken her to view the antiquities, they had sailed across the Nile in a felucca from Luxor, and traversed the rocky descent and on to the Valley of the Queens and the Temple of Hatshepsut by donkey, accompanied only by a dragoman. The silence had been complete. Now, they might just as well be visiting a theme park, she said tartly.
‘They’re a poor people. The tourist industry’s important to them, Ursula,’ Moira reminded her gently.
Mrs Palmer had so far managed to bear Moira’s goodness with admirable fortitude, but she was beginning to be afraid it might not last.
Strangers ten days ago, the tour group members were on Christian-name terms within a few hours, something it had taken Mrs Palmer a little time to get used to. But nothing fazed her for long, not even the touts who pestered with their tatty souvenirs, and craftily pressed worthless little scarabs into your palm, or even slipped them into your pocket, and then held out their own palms for payment. Moira had asked her advice on what to say to get rid of them, but when she repeated what Mrs Palmer had told her: ‘Imshi! Mefish filouse!’, the touts had doubled up with laughter and Moira was afraid that Ursula had been rather unkind and led her to say something indelicate. Ursula, however, said no, it was only the prospect of a middle-aged English lady using Arabic, telling them to go away because she had no money, that amused them, when they knew that all such ladies were rich, and only addressed the natives loudly, in English. But then, they were easily amused—childlike, kindly people, who were nevertheless rogues to a man.
The group advanced through the courtyard and made an orderly queue at the door of the tall old Mameluke house near the bazaar, now a small privately owned museum with a café for light refreshments on the ground floor, buying their tickets from the doorkeeper, an enormously fat, grizzled old man who wore a sparkling white galabeya and smiled charmingly at them w
ith perfect teeth. He kept his eye on Mrs Palmer, gradually losing his smile as she lagged behind. He noticed her casting quick glances over her shoulder at the benches set in the raised alcove of perforated stonework, at the many doors opening off the large dusty inner courtyard, which itself held nothing but a couple of dilapidated pots haphazardly filled with a few dispirited, unEnglish-looking flowers. But after a while she turned and resolutely followed the rest of the party.
Inside the house, little had changed, except that it had been recently restored, and consequently looked a little too good to be true. Wide panelled wooden doors, wrought iron, and coloured-glass hanging lamps depending from ceilings elaborately carved with geometric designs; inlaid furniture and wide couches in balconies that jutted out over the once poverty-stricken squalor of the narrow street below. Mrs Palmer was so overcome she was obliged to rest on one of these couches to try and catch a breath of air through the carved trellis screening, leaving the rest of the group to be shown around the house. She had no need to go with them, she knew every corner and every item in it, intimately. She had lived here once, she had been the mistress of this house.
And there had been a garden here. She had made it.
* * *
Impossible to count the number of times she’d sat here behind the mushrabiyeh lattice-work, a device originally intended to screen women of the seraglio from passers-by. Listening to the traffic that never stopped, the blaring horns, police whistles, the muezzins’ calls to prayer, the shouts and sounds from the bazaar, to Cairo’s never-ceasing noise, noise, noise! Longing for the soft, earthy smell of an English spring, to hear a blackbird or the call of the cuckoo, and the whisper of rain on the roof.
‘Rain? What rain?’ her husband had repeated when he had brought her here from England as a bride, dewy-fresh, hopeful and twenty years old. ‘It never rains.’ She had assumed he was exaggerating, but she quickly realized it was almost the literal truth. He rarely spoke anything else.
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