by Yaba Badoe
The two of them had gone to the Lake District on holiday. They had quarrelled. Edith had lingered. She had tried to sever contact with Miss Fielding but failed. And when Olivia had welcomed her back to Graylings, she had taken her over completely. But not without a struggle.
Miss Edith recalled an argument over breakfast seven months after their reunion. Olivia had handed her a letter and, recognising the writing, Edith had looked away, leaving it unopened. This, apparently, had been the third and final letter from the mystery man we had seen in the photo seven years ago. His name, said Miss Edith, was Arthur Grey. The arrival of the other two had caused dissension.
‘Olivia jumped to conclusions as she always did,’ Miss Edith said. ‘She assumed I was still in touch with him, that I’d told him everything, which, of course, I hadn’t. We had decided not to tell anyone, Ajuba. She made me promise not to, and at the time it seemed for the best. You have no idea what people would have said back then.’
Miss Edith turned away, shaking her head. When she was able to look at me again, a bleak smile played on her lips. ‘I thought she was going to help me, Ajuba. She’d sent the Bramleys and Mr Furzey away, and we were on our own. Then that letter arrived and she was furious. She made me open it in front of her and read it out loud. We were to have no more secrets from each other, Olivia said. We were to be as one. I should have known better,’ Miss Edith confessed. ‘I should have walked away, but I left it too late. And in the end, I couldn’t. I failed miserably.’
We were sitting in Miss Edith’s patio garden, which was now overgrown with clematis and honeysuckle, tendrils of summer jasmine clambering over the french windows. The air was heavy with the overpowering stench of rioting climbers in bloom. Miss Edith stroked a Persian cat on her lap, a gift from Beth and me when the last of her boxers died.
‘You never failed me,’ I said.
I took her hand, rubbing her gnarled fingers until her regret seemed to subside and I tasted the sweetness of her nursery-pudding smile. It was the smile that had reassured me as a child that whatever calamities befell us – the unsolved mysteries of life and death, and the cloud of shame that hovered over her after the inquest on the babies in the trunk – Miss Edith was my friend. Somehow, the smile of a wayward English woman had managed to convince me that I too was loved.
Wiping tears from my eyes as I began to take leave of her, I sensed Polly’s shadow settling between us. Perhaps Polly, overhearing us, understood that after all these years our journey had come to an end and I was letting her go. Perhaps Polly was setting me free.
‘Are you thinking of her?’ Miss Edith enquired, as she always does when my tears fall unbidden.
I nodded, believing that she had sensed Polly as well.
‘Do you remember the weeks after Peter went, dear? The two of you spent every single day with me. The poor child was lost without her father around. I’m sure Isobel did her best but with a child like Polly, a daughter love-struck with her father, she just couldn’t cope. No one could. Not even you. And you were her best friend, Ajuba.’
I nodded again, incapable of speech. I didn’t need reminding that after failing my mother when my father left, in the end I failed Polly as well.
18
WHEN I THINK of my old school, I remember it with fondness. It was clean and orderly and the Derbys had created a safe, happy atmosphere. I remember the shadows of the front hall, the old wooden furnishings smelling faintly of polish, suggesting stability and longevity. It was a place that, although conscious of pain and respectful of it, was somehow able to absorb it. At school I slept easily in my bed, and the knot of anxiety deep in my chest was soothed by wind and rain lashing the leaded windows of Exe.
At the start of the autumn term, Polly was adamant that our investigation of Miss Edith over the summer holidays had drawn a blank, and that being Crimebusters was ‘so passé, so last term’, that we should throw away our badges and think of something else to do. We were gathered around her bed after Lights Out, our True Murder scrapbook in the middle and Maria pouring sherbet into our palms. She had ingratiated her way back into the gang with gifts, though Polly was still disdainful of her. Some of the sherbet spilt on the scrapbook and Polly shook it out. Maria apologised, offering her some more.
‘I hate sherbet,’ Polly replied.
‘I’ve got some chocolate, if you want.’
‘Forget it.’ Then, speaking to Beth and me, Polly continued: ‘So we drop the case, right?’
I didn’t agree. I was aware that something fundamental was at stake. Moreover, as a dedicated follower of Malone and Leboeuf, I believed that a true detective never gives up. ‘A case is never lost,’ they wrote in their column. ‘It unravels at its own pace. Remember, a time will surely come when facts fall into place. Persistence, the Third Principle of Detection, is the key to success.’ So I stated categorically to the rest of the gang: ‘We can’t drop the case. We haven’t found the murderer yet.’
Beth pulled a face. ‘We want to play something else, Aj.’
‘Yeah, we’ve got to move on,’ Polly reiterated.
‘This isn’t a game,’ I reminded them.
Beth pulled another face. ‘It is too!’
I looked from one to the other, saying firmly: ‘Polly, you said it’s not a game! That’s what you said, isn’t it?’
She was taken aback. Apart from the time I’d kicked her on the shins, Polly wasn’t used to me challenging her. But the way I saw things, I had to. The babies in Miss Fielding’s trunk were a clue to the weight crushing my chest. The babies were faces in the mirror, and they were telling me something I needed to comprehend but wasn’t yet able to, even with the assistance of Malone and Leboeuf.
‘What about Jacinth?’ I reminded them.
‘What about her?’
I could see Polly had taken my question the wrong way. She thought I was playing her game of blackmail to get my own back on her, which wasn’t my intention.
‘Well, she was murdered, wasn’t she?’
‘Sure she was.’ Polly’s face was grim.
‘Well, the babies were murdered too,’ I muttered, folding my arms defiantly.
‘So?’
‘So it could happen to anybody. Anybody at all. We can’t drop the case until we find out what happened.’
Closing the scrapbook, Polly tossed it over to me. ‘OK, hotshot. You want to solve the case? Then you solve it.’
It hadn’t been my intention to shoulder the responsibility on my own, but Polly and Beth didn’t want to play any more, and as Maria was merely a hanger on, I didn’t have much choice in the matter. In any case, I was a keeper of secrets, so I was used to perusing thoughts I was unable to reveal. I hadn’t told anyone about the faces in my mother’s mirror, and I wasn’t going to tell anyone about Jacinth. But what about Mrs Venus? Should I tell about her?
As the school timetable sucked me into its routine, I did my work but with half my mind on Mrs Venus. I no longer called her Isobel. When she came to mind, I remembered the contents of Miss Fielding’s trunk: the ghosts in Graylings and the babies in the attic. And somewhere in the middle of it all was my mother. My father’s periodic calls, which resumed at the start of the new term, brought me little relief. Our halting, brief conversations, in which I told him what he wanted to hear, were no longer enough. I wanted to know where my mother was. Someone had to answer my questions before the pain in my chest broke me apart. ‘What should I do, Mama? Who should I tell?’ I asked, as the weight I was carrying grew heavier and heavier.
I talked to Malone and Leboeuf about my predicament. They told me to take things one step at a time: to separate the various elements, the main players in the drama, so I could see the case as a whole. Then, murmuring in my ear, they asked me to consider the facts. If the police weren’t going to dig up Miss Fielding’s coffin after all, where did that leave Miss Edith? ‘All you need, kid, is one solid piece of evidence,’ they advised me. ‘The missing piece from the jigsaw . . .’ I listened to th
em, only to discover that the ache inside me, burrowing through my chest, was forcing its way to my throat to voice the unspeakable.
While I struggled with my burden, Polly professed indifference to the loss of her pearl necklace. However, she used her conviction that Isobel had taken it to persuade Peter that she should spend alternate weekends with him on his houseboat. He promised to discuss the matter with Isobel. And when she agreed, Polly decided the pearls were a fair exchange for her father.
One damp, autumn Saturday while Polly was in London, Miss Edith invited me to the Gatehouse for tea. I took the opportunity to look through her photographs again. I had already done her shopping for her, but because I was too young to purchase alcohol on her behalf, she had left me alone to go and stock up on sherry. She was gone five minutes before I dared look around; and then it took some time to locate the boxes containing her albums. When I found them, in a cupboard filled with musty coats and umbrellas beneath the staircase, I rooted inside, searching for the picture of the man from the Lakes: the man with his arm around Miss Edith. I couldn’t find it; almost all the photographs were of Miss Fielding. There were sheaves of photographs of her, and in the few that I flipped through which included Miss Edith, she was invariably in attendance on her mistress: in the background, slightly out of focus. Then suddenly, just as I was about to give up and was certain that Miss Edith would be home soon, I had it in my hand. Tucked in the back of an album of holiday snaps, in a battered, brown envelope, was the photograph I was looking for. On the back, in Miss Edith’s writing, was the name of the man and the location. Arthur Grey, Windermere, 1954. With the photograph were three letters.
They were written in an old-fashioned hand, in ink so badly faded that the script looked as delicate as a broken spider’s web. I read what I could quickly, scarcely understanding the text and the emotions within it. It was only when I heard Candy and Fudge barking at the door that I stuffed them back in the envelope and shoved the boxes in place. Having read what had been written so many years previously, I felt strangely emboldened, and somehow, later that afternoon, I managed to express what I was feeling to Miss Edith.
She was settling down to a cup of tea and chocolate éclairs and invited me to join her. I had already taken the dogs for a walk and she was surprised when I offered to clear her patio of leaves. Taking a mouthful of éclair, she said: ‘You haven’t become a Brownie, have you, Ajuba?’
‘What if I have?’ I hadn’t of course, but I wanted to see what she would say. I took a large bite from the pastry that she passed to me.
‘Well, it’s not exactly Polly’s cup of tea, is it?’
‘Polly and I aren’t Siamese twins, you know.’
She looked at me closely. ‘Have you two fallen out?’
‘Not exactly, but I’m worried about her.’ I had finished my éclair and was licking remnants of cream from my fingers while I tried to phrase the question that I wanted to ask. At last I had it. ‘Why do adults hate children?’
‘Whatever gave you that idea?’
‘I’m not talking about you. I mean the others. Sometimes adults kill children. They do, don’t they?’
She had gone pale. She put down what she was eating to give me her full attention. She conceded, reluctantly, that very occasionally adults transgressed the bounds of decency. But this happened rarely, she said; extremely rarely.
‘It happened to the babies in Miss Fielding’s trunk, didn’t it? She hurt them, and she still makes you cry.’
‘What on earth are you talking about, child?’ She was sitting very straight on the sofa and she was looking at me sternly. She wanted me to shut up. But I couldn’t. Not now. I had to know what had happened.
‘I hear you in Polly’s room, Miss Edith. In the rose room. You’re crying. You can’t stop crying.’
Her hazel eyes were suddenly fierce and a tic at the side of her mouth set her bottom lip trembling. ‘If this is your idea of a joke, Ajuba, I don’t think very much of it.’
I wasn’t joking. I was in earnest. I ran over to her, grabbing her gnarled fingers. ‘I heard you, Miss Edith. I promise I did. You couldn’t stop. Because she killed them, didn’t she? Then she hid them.’
The effort of my deliberations with Malone and Leboeuf was hitting home. And the letters had confirmed my suspicions. Day after day, I had picked over the contents of my waking dream, separating my emotions from the sounds I had heard, scraping my terror away from the bones till I pieced together the elements of a scene. A child had been born in the rose room and the child had been murdered. And she had had a twin.
Miss Edith placed her hand over her left arm to stop her body shaking. She was rocking back and forth, as she had done in the summer rain. But this time, she struggled to control her emotions.
‘Listen, Ajuba,’ she said in a whisper. ‘Sometimes, when it’s dark, we imagine all sorts of strange things. Sometimes –’
I interrupted her. I hadn’t imagined it. It had happened. She couldn’t fob me off as Isobel had done. Isobel had said I was dreaming when I’d seen her in the rose room. She said I was dreaming or imagining things. I wanted the truth. I was determined to find out one way or the other. I was convinced that the babies belonged to Miss Edith. The man in the photograph had given us a clue, but we had ignored him, casting Miss Edith as the villain of the piece, when in fact she had been its victim.
‘Why did she do it?’ I asked. ‘Why?’ Then I remembered what Miss Edith had told us after our game of Racing Demon. ‘Did Miss Fielding lock you up and throw the key away? Did she want you to herself?’
Miss Edith brushed a tear from her cheek.
‘Isobel cries too,’ I told her. ‘At least she used to. But she’s not like you. She’s like your friend, the Queen of Hearts. Isobel hates us too.’
‘Olivia loved children!’ Miss Edith exclaimed.
‘Polly says you’ve got to hate someone to kill them.’ I had to tell her about the expression I had seen on Isobel’s face. ‘Miss Edith, I saw Mrs Venus eating Polly’s pearls.’
She looked horrified as I enacted the scene I had witnessed: Isobel stuffing Polly’s necklace in her mouth.
‘I think she’s going to hurt her,’ I whispered. ‘What should I do, Miss Edith?’
The old woman’s fingers clutched mine in a commanding grip. ‘You’re wrong about Olivia,’ she insisted, her face so close to mine that I could count the wrinkles around her eyes. ‘She was like Othello,’ she said vehemently. ‘She loved not wisely but too well. Ajuba, listen to me. I want you to do something for me.’
I thought she was about to ask me not to tell anyone about our discussion. I was wrong. She wanted me to talk to someone at school about Polly. She wanted me to talk to Mrs Derby.
‘But you didn’t tell anyone,’ I reminded her.
She sighed and stroked my hand gently. ‘Believe me, Ajuba, there was nothing to tell.’
19
LATER THAT AFTERNOON I waited for Mrs Derby outside the drawing-room. She had brought me back to school and was parking her car. The drawing-room was where the Derbys relaxed between lessons and after meals. In the holidays it was where they invited me to watch television with them, the place where we ate supper on our laps. It was where they entertained parents, and, every once in a while, admonished the most persistent of the school’s miscreants. So to us, it was a hallowed place scented with wood smoke. There were photographs of Major Derby’s old regiment displayed on the mantelpiece, a faded Axminster carpet on the floor and, either side of the fireplace, two stone lions glared at each other.
Not surprisingly, when Mrs Derby ushered me in I was trembling. I had never before sought the Derbys’ confidence, and the enormity of what I was about to say made me nervous.
‘Sit down, Ajuba.’
I remained standing, a hand on the sofa. Sarah Derby attempted to reassure me with a smile as she sat down. Nervous though I was, I looked straight at her.
‘What can I do for you?’ she asked.
‘I’v
e got something to tell you, Mrs Derby.’
‘About your holidays?’
I knew Isobel had been to see the headmistress several times since bringing Polly and me back to school. I assumed she had told Mrs Derby what she’d implied to Polly: that I had taken the pearl necklace. So I said: ‘I didn’t take it.’
‘What didn’t you take?’
‘Isobel says I took Polly’s pearls, but I didn’t, Mrs Derby. I didn’t.’
‘No one’s accusing you of anything, Ajuba,’ she said gently. She was peering at me through metal-rimmed glasses that made her eyes look bigger than they were.
‘I saw Isobel taking them, and I saw a picture she drew of Polly. She hates her, Mrs Derby. She hates her.’
‘What makes you think that?’
As best as I could, I explained what had happened over the summer holidays: the Venuses’ separation, the burning of Peter’s possessions, Isobel’s distress, her visit to the rose room that awful night. As I spoke, Sarah Derby gazed at me calmly, prompting me with sympathetic nods and enquiries. She encouraged me in the telling of my tale, so that, gaining confidence, I told her things I hadn’t meant to. I told her about our investigation of the babies in Miss Fielding’s trunk. That I had heard one of the babies crying and I’d tasted Miss Edith’s tears. Before that, Isobel’s crying had kept me awake. When I had come full circle, I repeated the statement I began with: ‘So she hates her, Mrs Derby. Isobel hates her.’
‘Nobody hates Polly, Ajuba.’ She straightened her glasses. Then, seeing that I was deeply concerned for my friend, she chose her words carefully: ‘Look, Ajuba, divorce is very distressing. That’s the way it is. It’s painful for Polly, and it’s painful for Mrs Venus too.’ She paused and looked at me earnestly. ‘Was it dreadful when your parents divorced?’
