The Devil`s Feather

by Minette Walters

  “But it’s a good name, Jess. Your grandmother, father and mother were happy with it…your brother and sister, too, presumably. I don’t understand why you’re so unwilling to fight for it.”

  She rubbed her head in confusion. “I am. That’s why I don’t want any of this to get out.”

  “It won’t,” I said, “not if you keep it between you and Madeleine.”

  Her unhappiness grew. “You mean blackmail her?”

  “Why not? It worked for the Derbyshires last time.”

  21

  I HAD TO admire Madeleine’s flair for duplicity. She appeared with a concerned smile at eleven o’clock the next morning and said she’d just come from Peter, who’d been telling her about the awful events of the previous weekend. She looked cool and pretty in a white cotton shirtwaist, and I thought how well she confirmed my mother’s advice that no one should judge a book by its cover.

  “I had no idea you and Barton House were involved until I spoke to Peter,” she said with convincing sincerity. “The papers talked about Dorset, but didn’t specify where. You must have been terrified, Connie. This man sounds appallingly violent.”

  She used my name with casual ease, even though it was only a few days since she’d left a message calling me Marianne. “Come in,” I invited, pulling the door open. “How nice to see you.” She had no monopoly on duplicity.

  Her eyes darted about, looking for anything unusual, and she found it immediately. Despite the efforts of a professional cleaner, brought in by the police, and further attempts by me and Jess the previous evening, the bloodstains on the unsealed flagstones and porous fifties wallpaper refused to come out. They were more the colour of mud than freshly spilt haemoglobin, but it didn’t take much imagination to work out what they were.

  Madeleine clapped her hands to her mouth and gave a little cry. “Oh, my goodness!” she squeaked. “Whatever’s happened here?”

  It was a girly response—the sort of thing clichéd actresses do—but it was genuine enough to persuade me that Peter hadn’t told her much. If anything at all. Jess had been certain the previous evening that, when it came to taking sides, he’d pick me and her over Madeleine, but I wasn’t so easily convinced. In my experience he had verbal diarrhoea where Madeleine was concerned.

  I led her towards the green baize door. “Didn’t Peter tell you?” I asked in surprise. “How very strange of him.”

  “Is it blood?” she demanded, her heels pecking across the flagstones behind me. “Did someone die?”

  I shook my head, pushing open the door and ushering her through. “Nothing so dramatic. Jess’s dogs had a fight and one of them was wounded. It looks worse than it is.” I shepherded her down the corridor. “Would you like a coffee?” I asked, pulling out a chair for her. “Or are you caffeined out on Peter’s espressos?”

  She ignored me to wave her hand rather wildly towards the hall. “It can’t stay like that,” she protested. “What will prospective tenants think?”

  I retreated to the worktop. “I’m told the flagstones will come up good as new if the top layer is sanded off,” I said, ostentatiously lighting a cigarette. “I’ll have it done before I leave.”

  “What about the walls?”

  “Those, too.”

  She looked suspiciously around the kitchen and I wondered if she’d noticed the faint hum that was coming from the scullery, or the two loops of fabric tape at either end of the Aga rail. “What were the dogs fighting about?”

  I shrugged. “Whatever dogs usually fight about. I’m not much of an expert, I’m afraid. Should I stick to the same colour scheme, or would your mother’s solicitor prefer something different?”

  “I don’t—” she stopped abruptly. “Did it happen while this man was here?”

  “Didn’t Peter tell you?”

  She folded herself on to the chair, placing her bag on the floor beside her feet. “Not every detail. I think he wanted to shield me from the worst.”

  “Why?”

  “Presumably because he didn’t want to worry me.”

  “I see.”

  She had trouble with short answers. In her world everyone played the game and readily divulged their scrubby little pieces of gossip. She forced a smile. “Peter’s so sweet. He kept it as low-key as possible to avoid upsetting me but the truth is, I’d rather have had the details. It is my house, after all.”

  “Oh dear,” I murmured, tapping ash into the sink, which brought an immediate scowl to her face, “that means I’ve given the wrong information to the police. I told them it belonged to your mother. I believe Peter did as well. He even supplied them with the solicitor’s address…the one who has power of attorney.”

  She kept the smile in place. Just. “It’s the family home.”

  I nodded. “You told me last time.”

  She opened her mouth as if to say, “Well then,” but seemed to think better of it. “The papers said this man—MacKenzie—held three people captive then escaped before the police arrived. Was Jess one of the three? You said her dogs were here.”

  “I said they had a fight,” I corrected mildly.

  “While MacKenzie was here?”

  “Jess’s mastiffs are better guard dogs than that.”

  Her impatience got the better of her. “Then who was here? You must see how worrying it is for me to know that a man broke in so easily with three people on the premises. Did one of them let him in? What did he want? Was he after something in the house?”

  “Why don’t you ask your mother’s solicitor?” I suggested. “I’m sure he’ll be able to set your mind at rest. Or even the police. I can give you the name of the detective leading the inquiry.”

  “I already know it,” she snapped. “I’ve asked to see him this afternoon.”

  “Then there isn’t a problem,” I pointed out reasonably. “He’ll tell you as much as he can.”

  She stared at me for a moment, trying to assess if there was any mileage in continuing, then with a shrug reached for her bag. “You’d think the crown jewels had been stolen the way everyone’s behaving.”

  “Well, you can be reassured on that front at least,” I said with a small laugh. “MacKenzie didn’t think there was anything worth stealing…so your husband’s paintings are still here.”

  She threw me a look of dislike. “Perhaps he was targeting my mother’s antiques. Perhaps he didn’t know she’d left.”

  “That was Inspector Bagley’s first idea,” I agreed, “which is why he wanted a list of anything that had struck me as unusual since I took over the tenancy. I said there were several things…but I didn’t think they were connected with Saturday’s events.”

  Madeleine froze. Only briefly, but enough for me to notice. “Like what?”

  I blew a ring of smoke towards the ceiling. “The water had been turned off.”

  It was a guess, much like the guesses I’d made about MacKenzie’s mother, but as I’d said to Jess the previous evening, why stop at turning off the Aga? Why not the water? I couldn’t get it out of my head that Jess had found Lily beside the fishpond. Or that memory might have told her there was a well under the logs in the woodshed. What was she doing outside at eleven o’clock at night? And why did she go to other people’s houses to clean her teeth and have a cup of tea?

  “That wasn’t me,” Madeleine said abruptly, searching through her bag so that she wouldn’t have to look at me. “It must have been the agent. The stopcock’s under the sink. All you had to do was turn it back on again.”

  “I didn’t mean it was off when I arrived,” I told her. “The taps in the kitchen were fine. The problem was upstairs. There was so much air in the water pipes to the bathroom taps that they all started banging. It scared the living daylights out of me.”

  “It’s an old house,” she said carefully. “Mummy was always complaining about the pipes.”

  “I called in a plumber because I was so worried, and the first thing he did was check the stopcock. According to him, air gets into a
system when the main supply is interrupted and people keep trying the taps because they don’t understand why nothing’s coming out. Water runs out downstairs and air fills the void upstairs. He said it could only have happened while someone was living here…and that must have been your mother because the house was empty till I took it on.”

  She took a tissue from her bag and touched it to the end of her nose. “I don’t know anything about the water system. All I know is that Mummy said the pipes were always banging.”

  I was relying very heavily on the fact that she knew nothing about the water system. Or any other system. My “oddities” were courtesy of Jess. “Try Madeleine with the electricity as well,” she had said. “The night I found Lily, the house was in darkness and I couldn’t get the outside lights to work. That’s the main reason I took her back to the farm. I didn’t want to waste time trying to find out which of her fuses had blown. Everything was working fine the next day, and I rather forgot about it.”

  “Something else that was unusual,” I went on, “was that several of the fuse cartridges had been removed from the electricity box. If Jess hadn’t been here, I’d have spent my first night in darkness because none of the lights in the bedrooms worked. It was only when she checked the box that we discovered why. They were laid in a row on the top of the case…and as soon as they were plugged back in the lights came on.”

  Madeleine played with her tissue.

  “Do you know who might have done that? The police are wondering if an electrician did some work. If so, how did he get in? They’re very keen to find anyone who’s had access to the house in the last six to nine months. They’re wondering if your mother let him in…but why would he leave her in darkness?”

  She shook her head.

  “The really strange thing,” I said, reaching into the sink to turn on the tap and drown my fag end, “is that the valve on the oil tank was turned off but the gauge was reading full. And that doesn’t make any sense, because Burton’s last delivery was at the end of November…and your mother didn’t go into a nursing-home until the third week in January. It meant she had no hot water or cooking facilities for the last two months she was here.” I paused. “But how could that have happened without you knowing? Did you not visit her during that time?”

  Madeleine found her voice at last. “I couldn’t,” she said rather curtly as if it was a criticism she’d faced before. “My son was ill and I was helping Nathaniel prepare for an exhibition. In any case, Peter came in regularly so I would have expected to hear from him if anything was wrong.”

  “But not from Jess,” I said matter-of-factly. “She’d already written to tell you that she’d withdrawn her support from Lily.”

  “I don’t recall that.”

  “I’m sure you do,” I said, taking a copy of Jess’s letter from my pocket. “Do you want to remind yourself of what she said. No? Then I’ll do the honours.” I isolated a passage. “ ‘Whatever’s gone before, your mother needs your help now, Madeleine. Please do not go on ignoring her. For a number of reasons, I can no longer visit, but it’s in your interests to come down and organize some care for her. Without support, she cannot stay at Barton House alone. She’s more confused than Peter realizes but if you allow him or anyone else to decide on her competence you might regret it.’ ” I looked up. “All of which was true, wasn’t it?”

  She abandoned denial in favour of protest. “And why should I believe it when Mummy’s GP was saying the opposite? If you knew Jess better, you’d know that stirring up trouble is her favourite pastime…particularly between me and my mother. I wasn’t going to take her word against Peter’s.”

  I showed surprise. “But you and Nathaniel drove down as soon as you received this letter…so you must have given it some credence.”

  There was a brief hesitation. “That’s not true.”

  I went on as if she hadn’t spoken: “You sent Nathaniel to find out from Jess what ‘regret’ meant while you stayed here and tried to prise it out of your mother. Did she tell you? Or did you have to wait for Nathaniel to come back with the bad news about the power of attorney?”

  I watched her mouth thin to a narrow line. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. The first I heard about the solicitor being in charge was when Mummy was taken into care.”

  “That’s good,” I said encouragingly, “because when I told Inspector Bagley about the utilities being turned off, he said it sounded as if Lily had been subjected to a terror campaign. He’s wondering if it had something to do with MacKenzie.” I paused. “I told him it couldn’t have done—MacKenzie was in Iraq between November and January—but, as Bagley said, if not MacKenzie, who? What kind of person deprives a confused old lady of water, light, heat and food?”

  Perhaps I should have predicted her answer—Jess certainly did—but I honestly hadn’t realized how slow-witted Madeleine was. The old adage about tangled webs might have been written for her. She was so caught up in the knowledge of what she and Nathaniel had done that the obvious answer—“There was nothing wrong with this house when I prepared it for let”—escaped her.

  The intelligent response would have been surprised disbelief—“a terror campaign?”—and a finger pointed straight at Lily and her Alzheimer’s: “It must have been Mummy who did it. You know what old people are like. They’re always worrying about the cost of living.” Instead, she offered me her pre-prepared “culprit.” In some ways it was laughable. I could almost hear her brain whirring as she produced the “line” that she and Nathaniel had rehearsed.

  “There’s only one person in Winterbourne Barton who’s that disturbed,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. “I tried to warn you but you wouldn’t listen.”

  Her eagerness to implicate Jess was faintly disgusting. She looked pleased, as if I’d finally asked a question that she knew the answer to. “Jess?” I suggested.

  “Of course. She was obsessed with my mother. She was always creating problems so that Mummy would have to call her up. Her favourite trick was to put the Aga out because she was the only one who knew how to relight it.” She leaned forward. “It’s not her fault—a psychiatrist friend says she probably has Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy—but it never occurred to me she’d go as far as turning off the water and the electricity.”

  I smiled doubtfully. “So why didn’t she follow through?”

  “On what?”

  “Milking the benefits. Munchausen by proxy is an attention-seeking syndrome. It needs an audience. Sufferers make other people ill so that they can present themselves in a caring light.”

  “That’s exactly what she did. She wanted Mummy to be grateful to her.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not the victim who’s the audience—victims tend to be babies and toddlers who can’t speak for themselves—it’s the sympathy and admiration of neighbours and doctors that sufferers want.”

  Annoyance hardened her eyes. “I’m not an expert. I’m merely repeating what a psychiatrist told me.”

  “Who’s never met Jess, and doesn’t know that she’s so reluctant to attract attention to herself that hardly anyone in Winterbourne Barton knows her.”

  “You don’t know her either,” she snapped. “It was Mummy’s attention she wanted—her undivided attention—and she lost interest as soon as the Alzheimer’s took over. She was happy being the constant companion but she wasn’t going to play nursemaid. That’s what that letter was about—” she jerked her chin towards the piece of paper—“shuffling off the responsibility as soon as it became arduous.”

  “What’s wrong with that? She wasn’t even related to Lily.”

  There was the shortest of hesitations. “Then she had no business to insist on Mummy being sectioned. Why was it done in such a hurry? What was Jess trying to hide?”

  “Peter told me it was social services who ordered it, and they did it for her own safety. It was a temporary measure while they tried to locate you and her solicitor. Jess wasn’t involved…except to give them your ph
one number and the name of the solicitor.”

  “That’s Jess’s story. It doesn’t mean it’s true. You should ask yourself why Mummy had to be silenced so abruptly…and why Jess was so keen to accuse everyone else of neglecting her. If that’s not attention-seeking, I don’t what is.”

  If you repeat a lie often enough people start to believe it—it’s a truism that’s seared into the brains of tyrants and spin doctors—but of all Madeleine’s lies, the most pernicious was her use of “Mummy.” She used it to paint a picture of innocent love that didn’t exist, and I was amazed at how many people found it charming. Most of those who condemned Jess as unnatural for hanging pictures of her dead family on her walls never questioned whether Madeleine’s relationship with Lily was healthy and close.

  “But Lily was neglected, Madeleine. As far as I can make out, she lived here for seven weeks in the most appalling conditions until Jess found her half-dead beside the fishpond. Peter went away…the surgery safety net didn’t work…the neighbours weren’t interested…and you stayed as far away as possible.” I took out another cigarette and rolled it between my fingers. “Or claim you did.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded.

  “Only that I find it hard to believe you didn’t keep tabs on what was going on.” I tucked the cigarette in my mouth and lit it. “Weren’t you and Lily close? You always call her ‘Mummy.’ The only other middle-aged woman I know who does that phones her mother every day and visits at least once a week.”

  Her eyes narrowed to unattractive slits at being called middle-aged but she chose to ignore it. “Of course I phoned her. She told me everything was fine. I realize now it wasn’t true, but I didn’t at the time.”

  I smiled doubtfully. “It must upset you, though. I’d be mortified if my mother didn’t feel able to tell me she was in trouble. I can just about understand why she wouldn’t ask strangers for help…although she seems to have tried by going to the village. But her daughter? Wouldn’t she have been straight on the phone to you as soon as the water failed?”