by Yaba Badoe
Getting down from her bike, Beth opened the satchel in which she kept her mother’s camera and brought out two photographs. The first was of a tall, lanky man in civilian clothes entering the Gatehouse with a uniformed policewoman beside him. The second was of the same pair leaving through the side door. Miss Edith was nowhere to be seen.
‘Didn’t they take her with them? You mean she’s still there?’ Polly protested.
‘Of course. She’s only a suspect at this stage,’ I replied.
‘Yeah,’ Beth confirmed. ‘And they won’t get the results of her test for yonks. Mummy says the final inquest won’t happen until around February at the earliest, and we’re only in August, you know.’
Our instinct to investigate quickening, Polly and I followed Beth on her bicycle towards the Gatehouse and the Bag Lady.
Our absorption with Miss Edith was not entirely ghoulish. Even when Beth and I realised that Polly was right in supposing Miss Edith knew more about the contents of Miss Fielding’s trunk than she was telling us, when I browse through the pages of our True Murder scrapbook, what stands out above everything else is what excellent friends we were back then. And in the end, Miss Edith became our friend as well. In addition to newspaper cuttings from the Gazette and the Guardian, a carefully drawn map of Graylings with the names of the rooms and where the staff and Miss Fielding slept; along with photographs of Miss Edith at the Co-Op, Mr Furzey in the garden, and Detective Inspector Roberts at the Gatehouse, the book contains more or less anything that caught our attention that summer: a crow’s feather picked up on the drive, a leaf from the copper beech at Ford Abbey, a mass of dog hairs brushed off Candy and Fudge, and a series of portraits of ourselves. There are pictures of Polly dressed in fluorescent t-shirt and a tight black skirt, attempting to bump and grind to our favourite song that summer, Shaggy’s ‘O Carolina’. There’s a photo of us wearing our Crimebuster badges and then the three of us draped in Miss Fielding’s clothes. Beth is in her riding jacket, I am in her shawl and Polly, her face half-hidden by a pink silk hat, smiles coquettishly at the camera.
‘It was your Summer of Love,’ Belinda Bradshaw told me years later. ‘While the Venuses were breaking up, you girls were completely absorbed in each other’s lives. I’d never seen anything like it. You seemed oblivious to what was going on.’
To this day, I don’t think Belinda is aware of how deeply involved we became with Miss Edith. She assumed, as did the other adults around us, that we were only interested in walking Candy and Fudge. They didn’t realise what our interrogation was doing to Miss Edith and to what extent our persistent extraction of details of her past life, compounded by the police investigation, was beginning to upset her.
That afternoon we found Miss Edith still in her dressing-gown. She was outside, sitting in a garden chair, sorting boxes of photographs on a table. The day was humid, the air prickly with the promise of rain. The garden needed water, as did the potted plants on the patio, but Miss Edith, immersed in the past, seemed unaware of the weather.
‘You’re not ill, are you?’ Beth asked. Miss Edith must have been still undressed when the police came to call, I thought. I noticed a half-eaten digestive biscuit and a glass of water beside a stack of photographs. Her face was flushed, and her deeply wrinkled skin looked like the skeleton of a leaf, the sun shining behind it.
‘I’m fit as a fiddle,’ she snarled.
I stared at her while Polly, dipping into the carrier bag, produced the remainder of the goat’s cheese she’d fought over at lunch. ‘Shall I put this in the kitchen?’
‘You realise you don’t have to keep on bringing me things, don’t you? You can come visiting without bearing gifts, you know.’
‘I know that.’
Avid to learn more about Miss Edith’s former life from her photographs, Polly and I inched closer to her. We both thought, with the absurd optimism of the very young, that by the end of the afternoon, we’d have all our questions answered.
As if understanding our interest in her affairs, Miss Edith said: ‘Come along, girls, I want to show you something.’
We clustered around her, Beth and I leaning over an arm of the rattan chair, Polly on the other arm, as Miss Edith turned the pages of her album.
She pointed out a photograph of Medea to Beth, who was immediately smitten: ‘I’d die for a horse like that!’
Then she showed us Miss Fielding’s photographs of summer parties at Graylings and holidays in Europe: Miss Fielding with her Brownie Pack, Miss Fielding dressed as Brown Owl, in the uniform of a Queen’s Guide, in a bathing costume diving into a Norwegian fjord. There were snowcapped mountains in the background, so I asked Miss Edith if Norway was cold.
She shivered, remembering just how chilly it had been: ‘The water was freezing, my dear, like a knife slicing my skin.’
She brought out photographs of a holiday in Orkney and then another taken in the Highlands of Scotland.
‘Where’s a whiff of the Mediterranean?’ I wanted to know. ‘The Promenade des Anglais and that piazza in Florence?’
Surprised that I had remembered our first conversation, Miss Edith smiled wistfully: a nursery-pudding smile, which darkened her eyes with a sprinkling of nutmeg. ‘Olivia wasn’t like you and me, Ajuba. She insisted on travelling north, never south, because she loathed the heat. She thought the Latin temperament vulgar; excessive. And, oh, how she hated garlic!’
‘Mummy doesn’t like garlic either,’ said Beth. ‘She says it makes your breath stink.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Miss Edith. ‘We weren’t allowed to have it in the house in case I was tempted to use it.’
‘Weren’t you allowed to use it to frighten off vampires and werewolves?’ I asked.
‘Not even for that, my dear.’
Rummaging through a cardboard box at Miss Edith’s feet, Beth discovered a photograph in an envelope and brought it out. It was of a man leaning against a gate, an arm around a bashful Miss Edith. ‘Who’s he?’ she asked.
‘Yes, who is he?’ Polly reiterated. ‘He’s kinda cute, ain’t he?’
The man was of medium height and stocky build with black hair and a warm smile. Miss Edith gazed at him. ‘The Lake District,’ she said slowly. ‘It must have been the Lake District. I can’t remember when it was, but I remember we walked for miles that summer.’
‘You mean you took him on holiday with you?’
‘No, we met him up there.’
I stared at the old woman intently. ‘What’s his name?’
We were full of questions about the man’s name and his age, where he came from and what he did. With our inquisitive eyes appraising her past life, our questions tumbling out one after the other, Miss Edith soon protested. She claimed she was exhausted.
‘Look, if you girls want to be helpful, take the dogs out for me, will you? Candy, Fudge. Walkies!’ The dogs started barking, eager to be running outside.
‘But we want to help you with this.’
‘You’ll find their leashes in the hall,’ Miss Edith called as Beth and I slipped back inside with the dogs. Polly, of course, hung back.
‘I don’t want to go. I want to help you sort out your photographs.’
‘Well, I don’t need your help! I’m old and decrepit and I need my afternoon zizz. So go on, off with you.’
Polly left the house with us.
Within the hour, the humidity in the air had swelled into a summer squall that brought us running back to the Gatehouse. We found Miss Edith still on the patio, crying in the rain, with several photographs at her feet. The silk-covered album, now sodden, had stained her fingers a putrid green.
We didn’t know what to do. We had never seen her like this before. While the dogs whined, nuzzling against her knees, we glanced at one another, unsure of ourselves. Eventually, Beth took her by the hand. ‘You can’t cry in the rain,’ she said firmly. ‘You’ll catch your death.’
Miss Edith moaned. She allowed us to help her out of the chair and into th
e house. I got her a towel. She told us to go; she didn’t want us around; at least not for the time being.
‘What’s wrong?’ Polly asked. ‘What’s bothering you?’
The tears started again. All the questions we’d been planning to ask about the man in the photograph were forgotten in the face of her distress. Suddenly Miss Edith looked very old: small and shrivelled up like a tiger nut someone had forgotten to eat.
‘I’m going to run you a bath,’ I told her, speaking louder than was necessary. Baths seemed to help Isobel, so perhaps a hot bath would help Miss Edith as well. We only called her the Bag Lady in our fantasies. She was strange, yet we liked her. And when she wasn’t overly distracted, she seemed to enjoy our company. So why was she crying? Had we asked too many questions? Had the Inspector’s visit unnerved her?
Polly recovered the last of the photographs from the patio and handed them to Miss Edith, who let them fall on her lap. She didn’t want to look at them again. Beth had made a cup of sweet tea, and, sipping it, Miss Edith recovered somewhat. She had painted such an idyllic picture of life at Graylings during Miss Fielding’s time that we assumed her tears were shed for the past: her life with Miss Fielding. The three of us believed that Miss Edith was simply missing her friend. We had no idea how wrong we were.
12
TWO WEEKS LATER, Isobel’s listlessness had crept through the beams of the house and dimmed the brightness of the walls, cracking the plaster beneath. Her mood created a cloud of cobwebs around her, so when I touched her, I felt compelled to shake spiders off my fingers, wiping my hands clean. What had seemed beautiful had lost its lustre. As her sadness deepened, I noticed she no longer ate solids, subsisting instead on a diet of yoghurt and liquidised fruit: soothing, baby foods for a woman unable to stomach what was happening. Peter, unwilling to taste the chocolate mousse she had made for him, had returned to London the day of his visit. It was no big deal, Polly insisted. Everyone divorced nowadays and if everyone else could handle it, she sure as hell knew that she could. Divorce was of no consequence whatsoever. I didn’t believe her. My parents had taught me otherwise.
It was one of our rituals that every evening Polly and I took a bath together. It was our favourite time of day, a time of intimacy and complicity when, indulging our mutual passion, we read snippets of True Murder to each other and plotted the progress of our investigation. Polly had just finished running a bath and was dribbling some of Isobel’s herbal essence in the tub, swirling it with her hand, when I heard the sound of Isobel weeping.
Even though the bath was full, Polly turned the tap on again. I turned it off. ‘Can’t you hear her?’
Isobel’s muffled sobbing rose and fell like the lilt of a willow in a breeze. ‘She’s always crying,’ Polly replied.
I suppose she had enough to contend with without being swept away by her mother’s despair. None the less, Polly’s behaviour seemed extraordinary, and I went into the corridor to listen. Hearing Isobel’s sobs grow louder, I said: ‘Go to her, Polly. That’s what daughters are for.’
‘And what are best friends for?’ she asked, responding to my challenge with one of her own.
I took a step towards the bathroom, and it was then that Isobel’s weeping ceased. I stood still, alert to danger. Experience had taught me that it is when mothers stop crying that harm befalls them. It is when there is silence that danger is imminent. Sensing my hesitation, and taking it as a sign of disloyalty, Polly slammed the bathroom door in my face.
Waiting outside Isobel’s door, I strained to hear her voice inviting me in. I had knocked several times already and there had been no reply. I knocked once again and hearing nothing but an ominous silence, I gripped the door knob and turned it.
Isobel Venus was at her dressing-table staring at a reflection devoid of make-up. She looked wretched: her eyes sunken, her cheekbones prominent. I believed that what she glimpsed in the mirror was the face of a stranger; several strangers perhaps. As I entered the room, she swept a silk scarf over the glass.
She has been talking to her enemies, I decided, the scarf reminding me of another mirror: a scarf covered with prints of African parrots and turquoise cooking pots. She had been talking to Emily Richardson, and everyone who’d cheated her of her husband, forcing her to hear his confession. She saw them. She talked to them. They were in the mirror.
‘I expect you to knock before you come in here,’ Isobel said, clasping her towelling bathrobe around the neck.
‘I’m sorry but I did knock. I thought I heard you crying.’
‘It wasn’t me, pet.’
I stood awkwardly in the middle of the room. I wanted to step closer, to insinuate myself between her legs, purring good luck and keeping her warm. Her lie confounded me. Isobel had been crying. I had heard her. I’d been listening to her tears for weeks.
Assuming the same nonchalance that I’d often seen in Polly, Isobel removed the scarf from the mirror, examining her reflection intently.
‘Don’t! Don’t look in the mirror!’ I screamed.
My terror must have resonated with something within her, unleashing her feelings once again. She covered her face with her hands and gave vent to her frustration and pain.
I crept closer. I had heard such crying before, and many a time I’d witnessed that same look of utter desolation. I’d suffered its vacillations, the cut of its scythe. Having endured it once, I welcomed it a second time.
Touching Isobel’s cheek in the certainty that I’d found my way home at last, I murmured: ‘Don’t cry, Mama. Don’t cry. Please don’t cry,’ as she clutched me to her shrunken breasts.
To Polly’s annoyance, I spent the next morning looking after Isobel, feeding her a bowl of yoghurt and honey and cups of herbal tea. I would have spent the whole day fretting over her if I’d had my way, but in the afternoon when Belinda Bradshaw dropped by for a visit, I followed my fellow Crimebusters on to the kitchen lawn.
We were trying to decide how we should proceed with our case. We’d resolved, after witnessing Miss Edith’s distress, to back off, giving our suspect space to recover before interrogating her again: a strategy that had often proved effective for Malone and Leboeuf. We were weighing up the advantages of a more subtle, nuanced approach, the benefits of tactical kindness as opposed to probing aggression. But our imaginations got the better of us and we started speculating again. The way we saw it, Miss Edith was responsible for the babies in the attic. The man in the photograph had most probably fallen in love with Miss Fielding, the more attractive of the friends.
‘He could have fallen in love with Miss Edith,’ Beth suggested.
I disagreed. ‘She couldn’t remember his name.’
‘Aj, you should never believe what a suspect tells you.’
The three of us were sitting on the lawn making a daisy chain, while Polly, pretending to be more hard-nosed than Beth and me, added flesh to our theories.
‘OK, the Queen of Hearts falls in love with him and they have a baby.’ The Queen of Hearts was the name we had given Miss Fielding.
‘They have twins,’ I reminded her.
‘Fine, they have twins. Then he wants to marry her. So the Bag Lady flips. First she poisons him, then she strangles the babies.’ She looked at us for approval. I nodded while Beth shook her head.
We were grappling with events beyond our comprehension, attempting to make them safe by putting a shape to them and providing our characters with motives. It was like going over the details of a story day after day; one in which the innocent and vulnerable are consumed by a predatory adult. Even then, we made the culprit someone we liked, for somehow that made it safer. We knew Miss Edith would never intentionally hurt us, so we made her the villain of our piece. Beth, however, was too much of an animal lover to cast Miss Edith as a murderess.
‘As if!’ she exclaimed. ‘She worships Candy and Fudge! Anyone who worships dogs couldn’t hurt a fly. Could they, Aj?’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure. My pa says Hitler loved Alsatians.’
‘As if!’
‘He did too. And he was worse than a serial killer. He murdered tons and tons of people.’
‘He couldn’t have liked dogs then.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ Polly sneered.
‘Look, if Miss Edith whacked him, where’s the body?’ Beth pointed out.
‘Am I a clairvoyant? I’m a detective!’ Polly exclaimed.
Beth laughed and, bringing us down to earth again, she said, ‘Well, if you’re a detective then I’m Mr Blobby and Malone and Leboeuf all rolled up together.’
But Polly wouldn’t let the subject drop. In fact, having witnessed Miss Edith’s tears, she was drawn to it with renewed fervour. And the babies hidden in the trunk led us to another macabre game: another version of True Murder in which one of us pretended to be a murderer or a victim of murder, assuming their stillness in death, while the others had to guess who we were.
I rather liked being Ruth Ellis while Beth relished playing the Yorkshire Ripper. Oddly enough, I can’t remember the roles Polly opted for. But that afternoon our speculation about Miss Edith led me to ask a question to which I already knew the answer.
‘She wouldn’t hurt us, would she, Polly?’
She thought for a moment, looking from Beth to me. Then, because the purpose of our game was contradictory – it was as much to do with making us fearful as easing our fear – Polly opted to give us a frisson.
‘With a sicko like that,’ she whispered, ‘you can never tell.’
Placing the daisies around Polly’s neck, I noticed Isobel staring at us from the kitchen window. Belinda Bradshaw had gone and the look of unquenchable hopelessness that I had come to know well was stamped on Isobel’s face again.
Curious about what had caught my attention, Polly and Beth turned to gaze at Mrs Venus. She was like a ghost at the window. A pale, voracious, keening ghost.
‘It’s Peter,’ Polly announced. ‘She wants him back. But he doesn’t want her any more. He told me. She’s trying to get used to it, but life sure as hell sucks when you’re going through the menopause. And when it sucks as much as it does right now, it’s not surprising she’s miserable.’
